Category Archives: Stupidity

Happy New Years

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The last post of the year would normally be some sort of top ten list, or perhaps some new year’s resolutions.  Not here though.  Here’s the past year of the blog, highlights and lowlights.  Mostly it’s just the stuff that jumped out at me today scanning back through the year’s posts.

First off we have perfect hindsight.  This one really smarts.  Looking back at January I was excited about the new Apple TV and thought it was ready for prime time.  Flash forward to just this past week and it seems that I am as stupid as can be.

I debated my increasing maturity because I realize I am now capable of listening to cover songs without instantly rejecting them out of hand based on some sort of naive sense of purity.  I noted that the music industry continues to die without many other signs of life, in spite of some really excellent advice available for free.

Technology was still of great interest of course, as it always will be.  The ever increasing use of social networks to keep in touch with people led to greater and more intricate knowledge of your network of friends, ambient awareness was the term coined.  It’s continuing, and the Friendfeed sidebar is a good example of how that will grow even more.  This year led to even more robots designed to assist humans live every day lives, which I noted would inevitably lead to the death of us all.

I spent quite a bit of effort trash talking Mexico and Winnipeg for their attempts to make their mark on the skating world, even thought I didn’t have to defend Ottawa all that much.  We still win.  Similarly, the LimerickDB is still the best place on the web for rhyming jokes, and we sampled a few of my favourites.  Also, we were privy to the most private thoughts of a monster, disturbing stuff though it was.  I had lots of fun with rubber truck nuts, not directly however.  It doesn’t hurt that they are silly beyond belief in the first place, but then the legislation starts and things get really weird.

It seems that a series of gun-related events cause me to post about them far more often than I normally would.  One gun post even actually resulted in a series of (gasp!) comments from actual other people.  Most often it was just me complaining about them and the people who are clearly not wise enough to be holding them, especially in public.

Speaking of people not wise enough to protect anybody, how about those TSA airport screeners?  It spawned a whole new category of posts that will no doubt continue to grow.  Similarly I particularly enjoyed myself writing about a certain monkey-smuggler who succeeded and then failed in remarkable fashion.  Also we saw a family who was too stupid to protect their dog from a hungry snake, although they had several days to do something about it.

The financial crisis and subsequent auto bailout wasn’t funny, but that didn’t stop me.  It lasted a few days, but we aren’t done with it yet since there’s more to come.  Finally the strangest news story to hit here must have been the multiple feet washing ashore in B.C. I stopped mentioning it, but the story continues to this day.  Crazy.

Finally, some of the more personal posts that kept me amused over the year, I mentioned Nikki’s growing fresh laundry addiction, just one of the hazards of staying home to watch the kids.  Similarly, I revealed how she is a heat vampire bent on freezing me solid.  She also laughed heartily at me for this little escapade with the Stratus, where I learned to use the Force to drive the car.

So there you go, it’s the past year of the blog condensed for your convenience.  Hope you had a good year, I think we did.  All the best to you and yours, see you next year.

Neuros OSD

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Christmas shopping for a nerd is not easy.

Nikki has in recent years simply asked me what I wanted for Christmas, which works out well for me of course and makes her happy since she can give me what I actually want.  This year I asked her for a Neuros OSD (which I won’t link to, so that they won’t get any Google juice from this blog, har har), which lets you store movies on your home server and play them on your TV.  I was looking at this as basically a way to box up all of the DVDs that lie here and there around the house and still have them accessible when needed.  So, I did some research and found that the Neuros was a favourite device for the nerdy set.  Open source, DRM free, it had all of the right buzz to make it seem like the perfect device to get for my needs.

So needless to say I was more than a little disappointed when it arrived and it sucked.  It sucked hard in every way.  Let me explain:

1. Firmware updates.  This was one of the main reasons to get the thing; regular infusions of developer goodness to make the thing more useful all the time.  Well, the shipped device had an old firmware (to be expected) so I kicked off an update right away.  It failed spectacularly, resulted in a non-responsive hunk of plastic.  I had to go through an “emergency firmware upgrade” process.  That got the thing working again, but still it shouldn’t have been that hard to do, and that process would have been beyond most home users.

2. It was ugly.  The interface when I plugged it into my HDTV was blurry, pixelated crap.  Nikki suggested it looked like a Commodore 64, and she was right.  That was AFTER the update to the latest firmware, it was even worse out of the box.

3. Quality. The Neuros only plays Mpeg4 files, and only has RCA-type connections which means that in general, video looks like crap even when compared to a very cheap DVD player using the same type of cables.  We watched one movie on it and I kept noticing the pixels instead of the movie, which tells me that this thing is dead in the water for any real use.

4. Ease of use.  The firmware out of the box connected to my home server without any issue, but things quickly went downhill from there.  Once I updated to the newest firmware I could no longer browse to my server and connect.  In the end I had to telnet to the thing and edit up some files to mount the samba disk at boot up.  If the last sentence made any sense to you, congratulations you may be part of the target market for this device.  That got the thing back on the network, but even then the interface is clunky in the worst way, navigating files and folders on the disk instead of displaying any artwork, or even abstracting the Linux mount point in some useful way.  Instead, playing any file (video or audio) results in at least 6 (teeth-gnashing, laggy, frustratingly slow) remote button presses.  That’s far too many, if this thing really lets me “instantly access any of your videos with the push of a button on a remote”.  Um, no.  Fail.

It’s not what anyone would call user-friendly, and this especially became the deal-clincher.  I don’t have the time to be tech support for any other device in the house, I do that all day at work, and there’s more than enough to do already at home with all of the PCs, TVs and game consoles.  I don’t want a project to work on, I want something that works already.

I can’t believe how positive all of the reviews I read were.  I really couldn’t find a review that mentioned any of the bad stuff, but a closer troll through the company’s support forums would have revealed some cracks that would have kept me away if I had known.

Sigh.

This piece of crap is going back, and I’m buying an Apple TV.

Finally

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Bush finally announced the US auto deal, 17 billion to GM and Chrysler, who chortled and rubbed greasy chubby hands together and smacked lips in anticipation.  Ford declined, apparently watching it’s fiscal waistline this holiday season.

Bailout buffet

Now we wait until March to see what they are going to do with all of that taxpayer money.

Ottawa Bus Strike

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Haven’t written anything about this yet, I have been trying to stay objective and fair, but man if there is something I need to comment on, it’s the media image that the Transit Workers are delivering.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr9l8B-Z5Ms&NR=1

I’m not even going to get into what I think about the terms of these negotiations, but instead let’s discuss having Andre Cornellier represent the drivers in the media.  Clearly he has very little experience in front of the camera, that much is obvious.  He is basically trying to have an argument with each interviewer.  His demeanor should be carefully controlled so that public opinion might sway in their favour, but instead he generates very little sympathy.  His quote from this video is the most telling:  “Inconveniencing people.  What’s wrong with that?”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN9U9lSOpMo

That is exactly the wrong approach to take, in my opinion.  In the mind of the average commuter it’s pretty hard to imagine that it’s the city’s fault that the buses aren’t running.  It’s obvious that the bus drivers are striking, not the city.  So it’s the union’s job to make sure that they come across as the reasonable side of this argument, hopefully generating goodwill and some support from the average person.  We all know the strike is about money, despite Andre’s feeble efforts in the next video to convince Micheal O’Byrne it’s not.  The opportunity to select their shifts is the oldest trick in the book, allowing senior members to maximize their overtime, working in teams to call in sick at just the right moment to let their buddies get maximum pay.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkBIsGTlUT8

I would be really concerned if I was a union member that this guy was representing me.  Making the bus drivers to be the bad guys in the eyes of the city will only hurt them in the long run.

**More posts on this topic here and here and here and here.

Monkey Gitmo

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My apologies for missing my publishing deadline today, but with Mother Nature grabbing us firmly by the toque and giving us a good shake, all things are still out of whack.

By way of recompense, I give you the strange story of a young woman who fell in love with a monkey in Thailand and just HAD to find a way to bring it home.  Like a souvenir, but you know, of the living indigenous species kind instead of the T-shirt kind that you and I buy.  She and her mother decided that the best thing to do would be to drug the monkey, hide it in her shirt, and pretend she was pregnant to get the thing through customs.  If this sounds like crazy talk, it is.  Even better?  While they were removing their shoes, surrendering their water bottles, and generally playing their role in the security theatre, somehow the security officers managed to miss the fact that she HAD A MONKEY SLEEPING IN HER SHIRT.  At least they didn’t have a monkey AND a water bottle, but wow.  She and her mom (who was smuggling live scorpions in her undies and pretending to have Tourettes) somehow made it through customs without incident.

Then the story takes a strange turn.  

Once they got home, monkey-encumbered, apparently they were able to live for a whole year in complete normalcy.  With a monkey.  Apparently after a year this master criminal was unable to contain herself any longer: 

They were arrested after Lawson boasted to a clothing store clerk about the airport escapade.

A clothing store clerk?  You just succeeded in pulling off the biggest monkey heist ever, have been sitting pretty for a year, and then you have to go and open your banana hole to the first teenager you see at the Gap?  Even better, that teenager then proceeds to drop a dime on your butt, and someone believes them?  

Gap Teenager – “Sir?  You don’t know me but I have important information about a smuggled monkey.”

SA Dorsmacker – “This is Special Agent Dorsmacker of the Illegal Primate division.  Don’t move a muscle, we’re sending the chopper.”

Did they need to spend their time on this sort of thing?  Is this really what “security” has been reduced to?

Sigh.

Oh, and never fear:

The monkey is now at a primate rescue facility in Oregon.

Primate rescue facility, huh?  That’s code for “Monkey Gitmo” just between you and me.

Detroit Three two-step

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Tomorrow the three Detroit car companies get to come back to Congress and try to ask even more politely for $25 billion in order to keep the lights on in some way or another.  While I had lots of fun the last time they came to town, they really need to get this right.  The impact of even one of these companies failing outright is massive and (for me at least) unmeasurable.  Whole towns will suffer if the local plant closes, as at least some surely will.  These guys have to show some real willingness to change everything about their companies, or they will be laughed out of the room again. 

I think that the right approach by the car companies will tip things even farther towards wise energy use, renewable technologies and a better environment.  Cars and transportation are big energy consumers of course, but I think that the sheer visibility of cars and trucks on the road will help to change the day to day thinking of people for the better.  

I think that later we will look back on events like this with a different perspective.  Like maybe we will look back in awe and say wow, those guys were in a tight spot and they really made the right decision and look at how much better things are now.  

Or you never know, they might take the frigging private jets again.  Actually it seems that at least the Ford CEO learned his lesson, and will be driving to Washington this time.  Probably in a huge honking special SUV that runs on baby seals and styrofoam.