Look familiar?
Take a look at this video. This is a super old commercial from the 90′s, but might remind you of an ad campaign you’ve seen recently.
It’s ALIVE!
Andrea just finished building Mom a new computer. I had nothing to do with it. She ordered all the parts, and assembled the whole thing. She did a perfect job too from what I can tell!
Prepping the empty case.
There's something so clean an pure about building a new computer. It's like a blank canvas to paint on. And no one has mucked it up for you with stuff you'll never use.
The mother-to-be installing the motherboard.
Installing dual DVD burners, baby!
While Andrea was working on Mom's computer, Sydney knocked the the coolest coffee mug off the counter. It was so cool we never used it, just displayed it. Turns out one of our previous visitors stashed $40 in there. I'm guessing it was one of the moms. No one has fessed up yet though!
Fully built! Time to install and setup! Worked perfectly of course! I think this computer might be better than ours now!
First post of July. Randomness to follow
Aye carrumba. What a crazy few weeks it’s been. I haven’t posted, and really I haven’t been online much at all. The biggest factor has been the promotion I got at work. Our Operations Manager took a new job so I had the opportunity to move up to that position. It’s going to be a new challenge, and one I think I’m definitely ready for. But right now, I’m still carrying a lot of my old duties while we get people trained and it’s a lot of extra hours for now. Eventually though it won’t be too bad.
A family friend, Dave Boyce died this past week and I was hoping we could make it up for the funeral in Woodlawn. I was hoping we could make it up, but our Camaro giveaway and the extra workload would have made it real crazy. I wasn’t that close to him personally, but he’s one of those guys that I just remember always being around when I was a kid and always there whenever I went back to Sabetha. It just goes to show ya that we could all take our last ride any day.
I’ve been walking to work alot lately. It’s only about 5 blocks from the house so 10 minutes is about my daily commute by foot. I don’t know if it’s really contributed, but I’ve lost about 5 pounds in the last month. The last few days have been so damn hot though, 100+ and if I walk home for lunch, I’m just a stinky sweaty mess by the time I get back to work. And nobody wants that.
I finally broke down and got a smart phone. The HTC Hero. Andrea has been dead-set on an Android phone since Nextech Wireless got them in. And I’ll admit, I’ve been sorta itching to jump on the smartphone bandwagon. Having my gmail and calendar with me all the time is REALLY attractive. So I’ve been messing with it for a while so far and really been liking it. The typing on the touchscreen is going to take some getting used to though.
So I think I’m just laying low this weekend. Kinda re-grouping. I have tons around here that needs done, but none of it right away. So for now, back to piddling with this damn phone!
Web Nostalgia of the Day: excite.com
Current excite.com homepage.
Back when Internet Explorer and Netscape were duking it out, so were search sites like Excite, Lycos, and Altavista. I remember much debate over which search site was the best. Of course I always preferred the one that ranked my Helen Hunt website the highest at the time. Ha ha!
Search sites were truly awful back then. If you don’t believe me, head over to the current Excite.com website and search for anything you might search for today. Excite has updated their search algorithms as much as they’ve updated their homepage in the last 10 years is seems.
1999 Excite homepage from archive.org.
Of course in addition to searching, Excite was a mish-mash of all sorts of information and services. I used to have an Excite e-mail address, custom Excite homepage, and even used good old Excite Chat, also known as Virtual Places (VP).
VP was basically just a chat program that used webpages as the chat rooms. They had a bunch of specific Excite Super Chat pages with themed backgrounds for whatever your interest happened to be (though any URL on the internet could be a chatroom). And upon entering any of these rooms you were thrown into the jungle of random immaturity, heated arguments, and suggestive (or sometimes just plain explicit) chatting. I suppose the internet hasn’t changed much in that regard.
The part that makes it memorable for me though are all the little avatars folks would use. Tiny little images there were about half the size of a postage stamp that you could create and little speech bubbles would pop out of them as you chatted. You could move them around the screen. Usually to harass other users as you changed your avatar to something like “LOSER” with an arrow pointing at the avatar next to you. Then watch as they try to move away from you.
Of course Excite.com was a casualty of the “Dot Com Bust”. And once Google picked up steam, I know I for one left those old search engines behind and never looked back. But it’s interesting to look back and see how the online landscape has changed in such a short amount of time. Then we all pretty much consumed content that was created and placed in front of us. And now-a-days it’s all about user generated stuff like YouTube and Facebook. Stuff like the dancing baby and fart soundboards are relegated to e-mail forwards and internet obscurity.
But don’t forget those simpler times. When sites like Excite had EVERYTHING you’d EVER need!
Purely for nostalgia.
Well I’ve been wanting to build a nostalgia machine for a while. I don’t really have all the pieces I need, so I created a virtual install of Windows 98. (I wanted to install Windows 95, but I couldn’t find an install disc anywhere!) It’s not QUITE the same. I mean with the LCD monitor and the laser mouse and all. Nothing really is ever going to bring back the experience of chatting in ICQ or the Excite chat rooms. Or seeing “This site is best viewed in Internet Explorer 4. 600×800 resolution.” Those days are long lost, left only to my somewhat blurry memory.
The Wayback Machine has been helpful to some extent, but I wish there was a way to route all traffic through archived sites. That sounds like more work than I’m willing to put forth.
Sweet! I can get 40 free hours of AOL!
It has been fairly nostalgic though flipping through all the old built in wallpaper patterns. Enjoying the retro screen savers like 3-D maze, and 3-D pipes. If it was 3-D it was friggin’ awesome! I might have to install my copy of Unreal Tournament to really relive the experience. Software rendering FTW!
A freakin’ podcast!
Here’s a new one! Believe it or don’t. If you don’t believe it click the link below. This is a special collaboration between biebsworld.com and this place. It’s hosted on a new server, so if you have trouble accessing it please comment and I’ll see what is up.
Topics:
- Piratebay.org trial
- Net Nutrality
- Content Providers
- Randomness
Pixlr
Quite a few of the pictures here are run through a Photoshop wringer before they get uploaded. Most of the time it’s just cropping something, or making adjustments to try to make up for my crappy picture taking. Now there’s a great website out there that has all the basic functionality of Photoshop. It’s free. And you don’t need to install anything, so you can use it on any computer with internet access.
Here’s a quick example of some editing that took just a couple minutes.
First pick the image you want to edit. You can either load a picture off your hard drive, or use the URL of any image on the web. I used a picture from my Picasa gallery, but you could also use an image you found in a Google image search as well.
Here's what you see once your image is loaded.
You can easily crop images, or adjust levels to make up for bad lighting.
Cell phones don't take the best pictures.
While not as powerful as Photoshop by any means, there are a few more advanced tools you can have fun with!
Now she looks more psycho than she actually is.
So there ya go. Head over to the site and piddle around with it, and have some fun!
Haven’t posted lately…
So I decided it’s about time to post about SOMETHING!
Honestly, there’s really not much to report on. Things are plugging along as usual, and to be honest that’s how I like it. No news is good news right?
I built a little directional Wi-Fi antenna that was posted on Lifehacker.com For some paper and tin foil that I already had laying around the house the return on investment is well worth it. We ditched our old router for this one a while back and it made a big improvement. But we’d still lose the connection once in a while. But since I added this, I’m getting 95% – 100% signal strength to our server in the living room! Not bad!
I’m plugging along on my next N64 re-review. I don’t really want to say what game I’m working on, but to at least half the folks that read my blog here, probably know. I will say that so far after all these years, the game has been compelling enough for me to want to beat it again before posting about it. A true testament to how great the game is.
I remember being a kid and loving and living for winter. All the snow, it was so pretty and so fun. But I’ll be honest, I’m ready for spring. And this has been quite the mild winter even! I’m excited to get out and work on the cars. We’re looking to repaint Andrea’s car next month, and I need to get my front end rebuilt on mine. I am looking forward to getting some flowers planted out front. And maybe even some grass to grow in the back yard! But I’m trying to stay realistic here!
I think Andrea and I have found ourselves a nice church that we both like. An interesting story… The first day we went apparently they had a “guest pastor”. All well and good, except the guy ended up SCREAMING at the congregation for the whole sermon. Truly one of those “fire and brimstone” preachers. It was an…. intersting experience. For example, part of his sermon included talking about a young guy he wittnessed to and later that week got in a car crash with (and I quote) “brains all over the car” and he sure hoped that boy had taken Jesus as his savior. Now don’t get me wrong. I agree with him in message…. but that’s a little more graphic than I go for on my Sunday mornings. The regular preacher seems like a real nice guy. He’s a little charasmatic at times too, but he seems a lot more sincere about it. Make it more tolerable I suppose. For now we’re going to keep attending, and someday soon we might chat with them about membership.
I do know it’s nice to be going again though. I was really involved in church back when I was in school in Ingalls. But I think I got in over my head. I was leading the youth group there, and even preaching sermons when the pastor was gone one Sundays. Shoot I was only 16 or 17 at the time. And it seemed like the church always kept asking me to do more and more. To be honest my memory is kinda vague as to how it happened, but over a short time, I just sort of got frustrated, burned out, and fell away. Getting back into it has been harder than I ever imagined. But now that we’re going, it’s so much easier! I don’t know about Andrea, but it’s a refreshing feeling.
That’s about it.
My new toy
I finally got my laptop. Actually, they call it a netbook. They’re not made to do stuff that involves a lot of memory or graphics, just the normal checking your emails and stuff like that. Unless you want to try to get it to do all of that stuff.
It went down in price, so I broke down and bought it. Heck, when you’ve been watching something for a month and notice that the price dropped $100, you’re gonna get it right? Here’s a few pics of it.
Isn't she purrrdy!
Now, this pic might show the beauty of it, but not exactly the size.
And this isn't a mini bottle!
Yup, she’s only got a 10″ screen. Not too bad, I actually really like it. I just mostly wanted it to be able to sit in the living room, watch tv and chat/surf at the same time.
Cox Kansas throttles internet service
This story popped up on my Google Reader the other day claiming that Cox will be trying to control their network traffic by slowing down “non-time sensitive” content during peak congestion times. They state things like file-transfers aren’t as critical as on-demand content like loading web pages, online games, and streaming videos.
At home, I really don’t have a problem with this. A majority of my time is spent surfing the net, or playing Guild Wars. But at work the core of what I do relies heavily on file transfers. I have over 10 hours of audio content that I have to transfer to our on-air computer in Hays, and a majority of that has to first be downloaded from another source. At the present rate it takes about 20 minutes to transfer one hour of mp3 audio to Hays at a measly 40 k/s. That’s ALREADY a P.I.T.A. I certainly don’t need it to take even longer.
Lifehacker also recently published a link to a set of tools to test what (if anything) is being throttled by your provider. I’m anxious to put this to the test and see what protocols exactly are being throttled and by how much. And if it significantly impacts my work, you can bet they’ll hear from me…as futile as my cry may be.
Reformatted
Well, I botched my Ubuntu install when I attempted to upgrade to 8.10. So I got a bit discourage and haven’t repaired it yet. And lately my XP installation has been doing some funky things. It’s been almost three years since I last reformatted, and for me I think that might be a record. I was usually wiping everything clean once or twice a year.
So since I was in the market for a fresh install, and the Windows 7 Beta is available free to the public, I figured why not. So here I am posting from it. Installing it wasn’t exactly smooth sailing, but that wasn’t Microsoft’s fault. Since my hardware is so ancient (a couple years old) the company that made my motherboard decided that surely NO ONE would be running Vista on this hardware. So after I got Win7 installed, I realized there’s no drivers available. Luckily I was able to rob a driver from a newer revision of my board to get the ethernet working, and Windows Update took care of the rest!
It’s a bit slower than XP was, but considering my RAM barely meets the minimum requirements I’m not too suprised. I’ll experiment with it for a while and decide whether I’ll stick with it. Too soon to tell now.
Tidied up a bit.
Andrea’s been in cleaning mode all day, and I caught it a little bit. Decided to clean up the computer room a bit. Moved my tower up onto the desk so it’s easier to get to. And cleaned up all the junk on my desk. Decided to take a picture while it’s actually looking decent! Yeah, I have my Windows OS running…I just got done playing some Guild Wars.
My uber geek station.
Huh?
21.1 Megapixel 5D Mark II by Canon
I noticed a link under the Anandtech tab on bgwillers about a 21.1 mp camera from Canon. The first thought was…
What the hell do you need a 21.1 mp camera for?
Then I read on and it said something about being able to record in HD. The second thought was…
I thought this was a camera, not a camcorder! Why do you need to record in HD on the same camera you’re getting 21.1 mp with? Wouldn’t that just eat up your memory?
Oh well, I guess I’m just weird like that. It would be cool to have, but wouldn’t know what to use it on in Kansas. Plus, I never got to the price, which I probably wouldn’t want to know in the first place. I know that 7.1 mp cameras are going for $100 or so at walmart. So, that gives you a little idea of what it MIGHT be.
Who needs Windows?
Here’s my new desktop. It’s nothing fancy, just a pretty much plain installation of Ubuntu Linux. It’s been working out great so far though! Biebs donated a hard drive, and I installed Ubuntu on it a few days ago. And since then, I haven’t even had the need to fire up Windows XP!
It does have a few issues, it won’t run Windows games without a whole lot of convincing, but I have got Guild Wars running almost as good as it does on XP. For surfing the web, photo editing, music, and just about everything else Ubuntu does just as good a job, if not better, than XP! Did I mention it’s FREE?
Lots of fun times…for a geek like me.
Well as posted earlier, we got the Wii this weekend. Andrea has already worked up some mighty sore muscles from hitting home runs in Wii Sports. I’ve been sitting around for hours creating Miis of everyone I can think of. I’ve been really enjoying the new Mario Kart, though I’m a little dissapointed they dumbed down the powerslides this time around. But still a blast none-the-less. I am still favoring the old controller over the tilt method you can use with the Wiimote. Started a little bit on Mario Galaxy, but haven’t gotten very far yet.
Biebs hooked me up with an old 160GB hard drive he had laying around, so installed Ubuntu on it and have been having great success so far. Still have a little bit of work to do getting Guild Wars to run in Linux, but I’m confident I’ll get there. It’s my first step to shedding Windows completely on my next computer I build, hopefully sometime next year!
So lots of geeky stuff to play around with, and as always not enough time for it all. If only I could get by on like 2 hours of sleep!
Last night’s LAN party.
Well with Andrea out of town, and no reason not to, I tagged along with Biebs to go to a LAN party with a few of his friends. It was a good time, though I was getting my butt handed to me most of the time! Though I did discover a game called Homeworld 2 that looks pretty fun, but I’m going to have to get into it more before I reach a verdict on that.
I ended up staying out way too late though. Didn’t get home until about 3AM. Ugh. I hit the bed and fell to sleep immediately. But I was at least up this morning before 10:00, got some coffee in me and all is good!
Head over to biebsworld.com to check out some videos of the gaming action!
Quick FYI.
I’m doing some changes to the technical side of the site here. If bgwillers.com dissapears in the next day or two for some reason, try to refresh. If that doesn’t work, it could be 24 to 48 hours before bgwillers.com works correctly again.
Alternatively, you can always reach this site by going to http://buthard.wordpress.com .
HP Bloatware
Seriously. Can you not hook a printer up just to print? Do you really need ink monitoring levels, a photo processing center, newsletter, and automatic updates? All I want to do is print a document once in a while.
Maybe I’ve been out of the old school hardware scene for a while, but it took a good 30 minutes to install the driver and all the damn software for an old HP3900 here at work. Surely there’s some third party drivers out there that you can install to give you basic printing functions, that don’t bog down this already bogged down hardware!
Net nutrality gaining significance.
“I am pleased that a majority has agreed that the commission both has the authority to, and in fact will, stop broadband service providers when they block or interfere with subscribers’ access”
-Kevin Martin, FCC Chairman
The FCC appears to be taking steps to convince Comcast to stop throttling people’s internet connection speed based on what software they are using, or how big of files they are transferring. It’s still shaky ground though, as even though there’s net neutrality principles from the FCC, they aren’t legally enforceable. Comcast can just give the FCC the finger and keep doing what they’re doing if they want to.
For those who aren’t quite up on the issue. Comcast (which is an internet provider) has been intentionally slowing down people’s internet who use BitTorrent. BT is primarily used for file sharing, and I’m not going to sit here and drabble on about how many LEGAL torrents there are. I whole heartedly admit that a clear majority of torrents, probably are illegal. But the issue is, if you let ISPs control this activity, where does it stop?
Right now Comcast is claiming that it is slowing people down to help ease network congestion. (I.E. All these people downloading huge files, would keep many other paying customers from getting the speed they paid for.) Well if we allow that. What’s to say Yahoo couldn’t write Comcast a check, and with so many people going to Google.com, they slow down (or even restrict) ALL connections to that website, (of course claiming Google creates too much network traffic), and eliminating Yahoo’s main competition for an extremely large group of people.
Imagine not being able to visit your favorite sites, because they haven’t entered into an agreement with your Internet Service Provider.
Imagine having to pay a basic connection fee, then pay for an entertainment teir, that gives you access to YouTube.com. A sports tier that gives you access to ESPN.com.
Imagine not being able to chat with your friends because your ISP only allows Yahoo Messenger, and your friend’s ISP only allows MSN Messenger.
Of course all these are extreme scenarios, and admittedly a bit far fetched. I would like to believe that as time goes on, the choices in portals to connect to the internet will increase profoundly, and those with rigid, overpriced business models will be left behind by those that offer more flexable and affordable alternatives. In this regard, I’m somewhat on the fence. However, in the more immediate future, I truely hope that pure uncensored internet continues to be a reality.
I can haz interwebs!
I knew I couldn’t trust the cable company. They said they had to send somebody by. I don’t think anybody came by. The feable piece of wire that held the cable box shut was still very much like I last left it. I came home from work and Andrea was on the phone with Cox customer support. She chats with him for what seems like forever, unplugs the modem. Plugs it in, does a bunch of stuff, blah blah blah. Keeps saying our account isn’t “Authorized”. So he tells her they’ll send a guy out. Friday at the earliest. WTF.
So we trouble shoot some stuff on our end. Make sure all the connections are good. And finally I went as far as to hook the cable modem straight up to the cable that’s coming off the pole outside. Still no change. So the problem was DEFINITELY on there end. I’m convinced that there’s just a problem with our account and that they don’t have the right modem MAC address on there. So I convince Andrea to give ‘em a call back, and she asks them to double check the modem on the account. Sure enough, it hasn’t been transferred yet. So after about 15 minutes of her sitting on hold, they FINALLY get it all straightened out and we have the internet again.
Seriously though. Why can’t people just get things straight? We’ve had issues setting up every single utility at this place so far. All of it just because people can’t seem to figure out how to transfer information from one address to another. Don’t even get me started on our water bill. Let’s just say there was one night last week we could only flush the toilet once. All because somebody can’t get numbers straight.
Anyway. It’s nice to have internet again. My computer isn’t anything great, but it’s sure a lot better than the ones we have at work! So much smoother and faster. And the chair here is more comfortable to boot!
Sweet, sweet digital information!
Well, I finally broke. We called to get the internet set up at the house. So come Wednesday, I should be back! I can’t wait! It’ll be like Christmas in July!
So I got this Twitter
From what I can tell it’s kinda like the Facebook feature that displays what you’re doing at the moment. Although twitter is intended to be used all the time, I guess. You can hook it up to your cell phone too and text your twitter, so that even if you aren’t near a computer you can still share with the world all of your impressively interesting exploits. I don’t have a text message plan, so that counts me out of that feature. Luckily I’m never more than 100 ft. from internet access.
I’ve added my Twitter feed to the blog as you see to the right. I don’t really like the layout, but I’m not springing for the editable CSS code so that’s as good as it gets I suppose.
It seems like a great stalker tool and I know there’s a few people out there that would like an easier way to keep tabs on me. I figure Twitter is probably the best way to do that.
I look forwarding to clogging my friends Twitter feeds with the most trivial observations you can imagine.
Enjoy!
