Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…
I opened an account on MotionBox this morning so I can start uploading and sharing more videos here. Here’s one I just put up from yesterday, David laughing and having a good time playing with Ana.
http://www.motionbox.com/external/hd_player/type%3Dsd%2Cvideo_uid%3D069bdebb1117e88f
As most have probably already heard, Comcast has announced offical bandwidth limits for residential accounts. 250GB per month – go over it chronically and the big bad bandwidth police are going to shut your connection down!
Yet they won’t provide access to bandwidth reports so you know if you should cut back for a while or not. Nope, they’ll just be nice and let you know once you go over the limit. Comcast – that’s like a car without a spedometer going through a speed trap. Pathetic.
Sure, they mention installing software on your PC. Oh, but if you’ve got more than one PC hooked up, you need to install something on each of them and add it up! This is rediculous, because they aren’t going to care what number you come up with; if they say you’re over their limit, that’s it. Back to the spedometer argument – No officer, my car says I was only going 65! Comcast – open the system up and let us see what you think our usage is.
I particularly dislike how the limit is presented:
The company said 250 GB equals downloading about 62,500 songs, 125 standard-definition movies or 25,000 high-resolution photos.
All of this to elicit the response Oh my! nobody can possibly use all of that bandwidth, legally! Shut those thieves down!
Put like that, 250 GB sounds like a lot. Well Comcast, at last check I have 190GB of backups. Now that my private wireless link to Jay’s house is no longer possible, I had planned on sending it over the internet to his house (and his data to mine). 190GB + Jay’s data is going to put me well over the limit. Wonderful – now automated offsite backups aren’t possible. Thanks guys, you rock.
And now on to some of the more broad aspects.
So, Comcast. What can you do? I have a few suggestions (other than ditching the limit, because we know that isn’t happening, now is it?)
We really need viable alternatives to Comcast.
My next non-computer project is to design and build a toybox for David. I’ve put off actually thinking about the plans because I didn’t feel like finding graph paper and a pencil, and I hadn’t really looked for software to assist in the design.
But this afternoon was going a little slow and I ran across Google SketchUp again. I say again, because I recall hearing about its initial release and trying it out. I didn’t thing much of it at the time, and promptly forgot all about it.
Little did I know cool and easy to use it is. I watched a few short tutorial videos and I was up and running. If you’ve got a need to make to-scale models, you should check it out (it’s free).
Here are a couple initial views of the toybox I’m going to try building, stay tuned!
We went to see the WWII B-17 that’s in town this weekend. I got lots of photos, and took them all in RAW for the first time. We’ve gotta run now, but here’s a sample. I’ll elaborate on some of the differences I’ve noticed with RAW versus JPEG in a future post.
Update: A few more photos are up now.
Make it stop!
We don’t see or feel any incoming teeth, but his screams are evidence enough that they’re on their way.
Last week I purchased Adobe Lightroom 2, the new version of the software I use to manage and edit my photos. Ever since trying out version 1.0 of the product, I have been thrilled. It’s easy to use, lets me get great results from my photos, and helps manage the ever-growing stack of images (20,000+ right now).
I’ve been testing out several of the new features and must say that I’m quite impressed, it’s a great upgrade to one of the most fun pieces of software I use.
To get up to speed on using the new stuff (and some things I didn’t know about 1.x), I’ve been watching lots of videos from Lightroom Killer Tips. A couple days ago I downloaded beta camera profiles which can be used from inside Lightroom 2 to assist in the processing of RAW images, and there’s a nice video posted today about them. I’ve always just shot JPEGs because I found RAW to be a bit too much work to deal with (did it look like this? or this? or this? or this?…). But with these camera profiles and the power of Lightroom, I may reconsider and give RAW another shot. Is it worth it? Anyone?
There’s one feature I was hoping Adobe would have added to Lightroom, and that’s the ability to fix barrel distortion. I know some cheap 3rd party apps do it well, but I’m too addicted to the non-destructive edits that Lightroom provides. Oh well, maybe in another version 🙂
David thought he could lick his way through the newly installed gate. Didn’t work so well.
Now that David is quite proficient in crawling all over the place we decided it was time to put up one of the baby shower gifts – the Supergate V.
What makes the Supergate V so unique is its extra wide spanning capabilities, up to 5 feet. Too bad we have a 6′ doorway! Upon discovering the gap, I ran out to Baby’s R Us and purchased a second one to cannibilize for parts.
I present the 6′ wide Supergate!
Notice the 5 panels instead of the stock 4. Nice.
Installation took a while because it is designed to be attached to the wall instead of being held by pressure and friction. Since this opening isn’t a traditional “doorway”, I had a small problem of baseboard trim to deal with. To compensate, I had to rip a couple pieces of wood to be 1/2″ thick and attach them to the wall first.
It took a bit longer than I expected when I opened the box up tonight, but it’s done and looks as good as a big gate can look. No more crawling right into the office!
Johann wrote a post this morning that caught my interest so I thought I’d reply here:
First, let me be clear that I don’t care if you speak ill of the Olympics 🙂 But I did find your post interesting.
On Rooting for U.S.A.
I think that most Americans are able to separate their love of country from the decisions their policy-makers have made in the past. Otherwise there would be nobody rooting because everyone would have disagreed with some decisions made sometime in our past.
International politics and the Olympics will always be heavily intertwined, but setting aside domestic politics to enjoy good competition is pretty easy to do – for most.
On Competition
Since when has any sport not been about competition, and therefore beating your opponents? If this weren’t the case, I suppose they should only show the first 4 seconds of a sprint. Hell, why even get on the track then? You even mention remembering when Olympics showcased the world’s best amateur athletes. If winning doesn’t matter, how do you define Best? Winning implies beating others, you can’t have it both ways. If you want to win, you want to beat others.
It’s Sport. It’s about watching amazing athletic feats and seeing the joy of years of hard work paying off. And in the end, if it’s your country’s athlete atop the podium, all the better.
On Professional Athletes
I agree that putting professional athletes out there takes something away from the games. However, it seems the professional/amateur line is getting more and more blurred. For example, do you take into account endorsements? I just read that after the ’04 Olympics, Phelps received some $5Million in endorsements, should that matter? I don’t think so, but it does muddy the waters doesn’t it?
On Cheating
Agreed that doping is cheating. I think that the athletes should be tested aggressively, and have some blood stored so it can be tested using better testing capabilities in the future. I’d think that would provide a real deterrent – sure you probably won’t get caught today, but I bet they’ll be able to find that substance in your blood a few years from now.
On Phelps
I don’t think I’ve heard anyone mention that if Phelps hadn’t won every single gold, that he would have been considered a failure. That’s just laughable to me. It’s amazing to be so good at so many events, simple as that. I can’t recall ever watching the games with someone that got upset that the USA lost an event – it’s usually just a “Darn!”, and we move on.
Go USA!
Tonight I fired up Axialis Icon Workshop and thought I’d check for updates since I haven’t run it in a while. After installing the latest version, I looked for any new object packs which are just sets of icon building blocks their software allows you to quickly piece together. There were two new ones out, so what’s so interesting about that?
I copied the installers out to the network and noticed the timestamps on the other object packs I have downloaded:
If I had waited until tomorrow night, it would have been a year to the minute of when I downloaded the first several packs.
The Johnson Blog 