Blog Jones

GAAH! I hate Sony’s obsession with proprietary formats. They started with the Betamax (the competitor to VHS for video tapes). Since then, they’ve tried to make a proprietary version of virtually every medium and every format. They’re trying it with the Blu-Ray disc, which is competing with HD-DVD as the successor to the DVD. I mean, even their original MP3-player devices couldn’t support MP3’s; you had to convert your music over to the proprietary ATRAC format that nobody uses!

The one place where their business incompetence most shines is in their Memory Stick formats–there’s the Memory Stick, the Memory Stick Pro, the Memory Stick Pro with Magicgate, the Memory Stick Duo, and so on and so on. Note that I can’t use my 512MB Memory Stick in, say, a Sony PlayStation Portable, because that only accepts the smaller Memory Stick Duo’s.

Well, now they’re adding another version to the pile: The extremely tiny Memory Stick Micro M2. It’s 15mm by 12mm by 1.2mm, which Engadget tells me is about a quarter of the Memory Stick Duo’s size. Not only is it another memory stick format, it’s so small that you’re likely going to lose it. In fact, you could probably inhale this Memory Stick if you weren’t careful.

In case a Sony exec is reading: This kind of fooling around is why I’m extremely skittish about buying Sony products. I know they’re great, high-quality products, but I get sick of getting stuck with overpriced ^* proprietary formats. Quit trying to mess with your customers and stick with standard formats that everyone uses. Like Secure Digital.

*Worse than the proliferation of the memory sticks formats is their cost. Right now a 512MB SD card costs $26. A 512MB Memory Stick Pro is $43–a 60% difference!)

I was using my laptop this morning in my Management Policies class to work on a group project. Just before the bell, I shut down my computer. As I closed the lid, I heard a sickening crunch of plastic.

The right hinge of my laptop’s screen is broken. It still opens and closes fine, but it’s so loose that it either closes on your hands or it folds back as far as it can physically open. I have to prop up the screen to use it.

It still displays fine and everything; except for this relatively minor mechanical difficulty, it works perfectly.

Unfortunately, no hardware repair for a laptop is minor. I beleive it’s out of warranty, so I did a little searching around; laptop screen repairs are in the neighborhood of $300. Just the part to replace hinge is about $70. Not counting the time I’ll be without it while it’s being repaired.

I need a working machine. *sigh* Guess I’ll have to slog on without it for a while somehow.

I think that this is hilarious.

Brought to you by Jeri Massi. If she made a BJU version of this shirt, I’d definitely buy one or two.

In the Falkan Islands, there’s a bunch of land mines left over from some war. Normally, that’s a bad thing, but for a bunch of penguins in mating season, it’s a great thing.

Since they’re too light to trigger the mines, they can run around freely, while predators, people, and sheep (which compete for resources) stay away.

That’s pretty cool.

Have you ever tried to copy something from a webpage into Word? It takes forever, and when it finally finishes, it’s a hideous nightmare of tables, photographs, and links, when what you usually want is just the text.

You can always paste as text (Edit > paste special > unformatted text > OK) of course, but that takes your hands off of the keyboard, slowing you down and interrupting your thoughts. The same goes for copying it into notepad first and from there into Word, and for clicking on the little paste options button that pops up.

The easier way to handle this situation is by keeping PureText running in the background. When you want to paste something, hit Windows Key-V, and it’ll spit it out nice, clean text.

(Bonus Productivity Tip: When you want to copy something, instead of going to the menu and hitting Edit > Copy, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-C. When you want to cut, use Ctrl-X, and when you want to paste, hit Ctrl-V. This saves you time and prevents you from losing your train of thought.)

(Via one of my favorite blogs, LifeHacker)

I love the Demotivators series of anti-inspirational posters from Despair.com. They’ve just come out with a new set of four posters; my personal favorite is Beauty. Go take a look.

How can I only be taking 12 credits and still feel busier than I ever did last semester, when I was taking 17?

You want to see something strange? Check out this photo of the controller for Nintendo’s upcoming video game console, the Nintendo Revolution:

That’s just crazy. A controller that looks like a TV remote? It’s much, much simpler than any of its predecessors, except for the original NES. Here’s the other bit o’ weirdness:

The controller for Nintendo’s upcoming Revolution home console system is a cordless remote-control-like device designed to be used with only one hand. Two small sensors placed near the TV and a chip inside the controller track its position and orientation, allowing the player to manipulate the action on screen by physically moving the controller itself. For example, you could slash an in-game sword by actually swinging the controller from side to side, turn a race car just by twisting your wrist, or aim your gun in a shooter by pointing the controller where you want to fire.

The story at 1UP.com describes how well it plays with some of the various demo games that members of the press got to play:

DEMO: BLOCK BUSTER
A firing-range-like contest where two players compete to see who can shoot randomly appearing squares first. Aiming is done by pointing the controller itself at different points on screen, pulling the B trigger to fire.
IMPRESSIONS: A great demonstration of how intuitive the controller can be-pointing it to aim felt perfectly natural, right from the very first second, just like with a light gun. It always shot exactly where it felt like I was aiming, and was incredibly responsive to even slight wrist movements-I barely had to move my hand at all.

So why has Nintendo decided to brazenly break with tradition and the conventions of every other modern console in creating the Revolution controller? According to Mr. Miyamoto, it was part of a conscious decision to make something simple and straightforward enough to reach out to a new audience. “We want a system that takes advantage of new technology for something that anyone, regardless of age or gender, can pick up and play. [Something with a] gameplay style that people who have never played games can pick up and not be intimidated by. We wanted a controller that somebody’s mother will look at and not be afraid of.”

This has potential… Nintendo has demonstrated some talent in the field of unconventional controllers–just look at the Nintendo DS!

I know I’m looking forward to playing with it.

There’s a post over at Bill Whittle’s site that I’ve been meaning to blog for some time called Tribes. This essay came soon after hurricane Katrina hit; unlike most of Bill’s posts, this one is angry and contains strong language. So, fair warning, if strong language offends you, don’t click on the link. Frankly, I think it’s worth wading through it, because I think Bill Whittle is one of the best writers of our time, and he says important stuff in here. I’ll quote and sanitize a small portion of the essay here (his emphasis throughout):

Only a few minutes ago, I had the delightful opportunity to read the comment of a fellow who said he wished that white, middle-class, racist, conservative **** like myself could have been herded into the Superdome Concentration Camp to see how much we like it. Absent, of course, was the fundamental truth of what he plainly does not have the eyes or the imagination to see, namely, that if the Superdome had been filled with white, middle-class, racist, conservative **** like myself, it would not have been a refinery of horror, but rather a citadel of hope and order and restraint and compassion.

That has nothing to do with me being white. If the blacks and Hispanics and Jews and gays that I work with and associate with were there with me, it would have been that much better. That’s because the people I associate with – my Tribe – consists not of blacks and whites and gays and Hispanics and Asians, but of individuals who do not rape, murder, or steal. My Tribe consists of people who know that sometimes bad things happen, and that these are an opportunity to show ourselves what we are made of. My people go into burning buildings. My Tribe consists of organizers and self-starters, proud and self-reliant people who do not need to be told what to do in a crisis. My Tribe is not fearless; they are something better. They are courageous. My Tribe is honorable, and decent, and kind, and inventive. My Tribe knows how to give orders, and how to follow them. My Tribe knows enough about how the world works to figure out ways to boil water, ration food, repair structures, build and maintain makeshift latrines, and care for the wounded and the dead with respect and compassion.

There are some things my Tribe is not good at at all. My Tribe doesn’t make excuses. My Tribe will analyze failure and assign blame, but that is to make sure that we do better next time, and we never, ever waste valuable energy and time doing so while people are still in danger. My Tribe says, and in their heart completely believes that it’s the other guy that’s the hero. My Tribe does not believe that a single Man can cause, prevent or steer Hurricanes, and my Tribe does not and has never made someone else responsible for their own safety, and that of their loved ones.

My Tribe doesn’t fire on people risking their lives, coming to help us. My Tribe doesn’t curse such people because they arrived on Day Four, when we felt they should have been here before breakfast on Day One. We are grateful, not to say indebted, that they have come at all. My Tribe can’t eat Nike’s and we don’t know how to feed seven by boiling a wide-screen TV. My Tribe doesn’t give a sweet **** about what color the looters are, or what color the rescuers are, because we can plainly see before our very eyes that both those Tribes have colors enough to cover everyone in glory or in shame. My Tribe doesn’t see black and white skins. My Tribe only sees black and white hats, and the hat we choose to wear is the most personal decision we can make.

That’s the other thing, too – the most important thing. My Tribe thinks that while you are born into a Tribe, you do not have to stay there. Good people can join bad Tribes, and bad people can choose good ones. My Tribe thinks you choose your Tribe. That, more than anything, is what makes my Tribe unique.

I am so utterly and unabashedly proud of my Tribe, that my words haunt and mock me for their pale weakness and shameful inadequacy.

There’s a lot more, and almost all of it is good. Such as:

In New York, we had a governor who got every available resource on the ground as fast as it could get there, and in Louisiana we have a governor who…cried. Governor, your job is to not cry. Your job is to be strong. We have plenty of civilians crying. You want to cry, cry in the car on the way home like everybody else did four years ago. Crying Governors, race-baiting mayors and looting police do not a Finest Hour make.

Again, if you can overlook the strong language (as students in college-level modern literature courses are expected to, even at BJU), it’s well worth the reading.

xBetas has a link to screenshots of the new version of MS Office. Shiny new interface, but they went and did something completely unexpected: There’s only one menu, the File menu. Everything else has been relegated to little tabs, as seen here:

(Click for larger image)

That took some guts on the part of some Microsoft software engineer. I really, really hope that there’s some “classic menus” option someplace, but hopefully this will help new users to think of it as less complicated.

It really does look slick and polished, and if it were a new product, instead of being the 12th iteration of an old product, I’d be cheering for it wholeheartedly. It does have the potential to be a lot easier to use than the old interface. I just worry that it’ll be difficult for people used to the old interface to adapt to it.

(click for a bigger picture)

It’s nice to see parents who care about their children.

(Via my Dad)

For starters, I’ve moved back to FireFox for my general-purpose browsing. Opera has a problem that I hoped getting the full version would fix: You’d click on a link and have to wait for a few seconds before it would start downloading the page. Very annoying.

So I’m back with Firefox, which is what everyone’s developing for anyway. The one thing I missed the most about FireFox was the extensions; I love having the adblock extension back, and the bugmenot extension, and a number of others. But there’s one extension that I’d love to have, but I don’t think anyone has written it yet.

I want to right click on a picture or a link to a file and have FireFox upload that picture to my FTP server here on Blog Jones. Right now, I have to download the picture, save it to my hard drive, and re-upload it with w.bloggar or FileZilla.

Is there something like that out there?

Ever wondered where you’d end up if you dug a hole through the center of the earth? Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, you can finally find the answer.

(Via Lifehacker)

Lawrence Simon at IMAO has created the Katrina Bingo scorecard:

Just print out this card and mark off each target of blame when you see them.

Get five in a row, and you can stop reading the hyperbolic, virtiolic press coverage for the day.

As always, there’s more stuff worth reading at the link.

Homework takes forever.

This afternoon I installed the Jerome’s Keywords Plugin into WordPress. It lets me tag posts with keywords, in much the same way that you can tag bookmarks with del.icio.us.

I’ll probably say more about it tonight after church.

You should read it.

You make arts and crafts.

Our first assignment at Harvard Law School was to make a collage. My journal from the time reflects my disgust with this absurd task:

For my First Year Lawyering class (where we learn writing and research methods), we have to make “a collage, a drawing, a crayon rendition, or any form of expression that depicts the qualities of the lawyer you most want to be.”

No joke, people. For my first assignment at Harvard Law School, I have to make a collage. Or bust out the crayons. Either way, it sounds **** silly.

(Follow the link to find a picture of her collage and for a link to a similar story about a high-school pre-calculus class)

Well, scratch Harvard off of the list of potential post-graduate institutions.

(Via Instapundit)

You ever read something that, although you hadn’t thought about it before, makes total sense? Boileryard Clarke did that for me today.

Ray Nagin is the mayor of New Orleans. In the past two or three days he has been the loudest (and most profane) voice in the country criticizing government agencies for their slow reaction to the disaster in his city. But a question is starting to pop up that kind of informs itself on what we all know about human nature; the best way to deflect blame is to blame somebody else.

So why didn’t the Mayor of New Orleans realize that tens of thousands of his citizens did not have transportation out of town, were essentially stranded, and do something to organize some kind of transportation for at least somebody?

Did he not understand the demographics of his own city?

After telling everyone to get out, serving people who had transportation of their own right nicely, he booked and left his “constituency” stranded. What, exactly, did he expect these people to do? Walk?

Well he’s not exactly Rudy Guliani is he? He sounds more like a street musician who just woke up from a drunk… man.

He is quoted as saying “Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get it here to New Orleans… I need reinforcements. I need troops, man. I need 500 buses, man. Now get off your ***** and fix this. Let’s do something and let’s fix the biggest ****** crisis in the history of this country.” A great idea - but where was it a week ago?

Aren’t there busses in New Orleans? Do trains come in and out of the city? With long lines of cars trailing out of the city before Katrina hit, did it ever occur to him to think about people who didn’t have cars and use his own resources to get people out before the hurricaine hit? Brains are resources too, don’t you think?

How is it that now he has this great idea about what the federal government is supposed to do to fix the mess he left his own city in, but when he was busy scrambling around trying to save his own neck he just plain forgot about the sick and the needy and the poor and the hospitals? Why didn’t the mayor figure out a way to evacuate the hospitals?

There’s more; go read it.

Everyone reading this knows that you can search for webpages on Google. But did you know about some of these other things you can do with Google:

• Find the weather: Search for “weather ” + the zip code/city
• Find out about a stock: Search for “stock ” + the ticker symbol
• Perform a currency conversion: Search for the amount ” in ” the desired currency, as in “10 dollars in Euros” or “5000 yen in pesos”
• Perform a calculation: Search for the equation, such as “(2+3) * 4″
• Find a word definition: Search for “Define ” + your word
• Find a movie from a movie quote: Search for “movie: ” + the quote, as in “movie:You can’t handle the truth”
• Find out the owner of a phone number: Put the phone number in the search box
• Find out the status of your UPS or FedEx package: Put the tracking number in the Google search box

All kinds of neat stuff.