Trey’s Blog|brain spillage!

Ironically, I found myself at the Wal-Mart (in Copperfield near Cypress, TX) this morning to see how this would all turn out. What I found was close to 40 people waiting around the electronics section of the store knowing nothing more than “we have some $378 HP laptops and you can’t have them until 5:00 AM.” According to sources, there was only one palette of notebook computers which would surely cause mayhem when the 40+ people began rioting. After figuring I wouldn’t be one of the few to get one of these subpar laptops at a subpar price, I decided to leave. A friend of mine stuck around a store in San Antonio, TX and said they had about the same situation just before the manager said the laptops would be coming out of a specific door, which caused more havoc as the truck load of people crammed into this cramped doorway waiting for the stockboy to trigger the train wreck that would be. It was just that as people’s facads fell and the worst in people came out, throwing each other out of the way, pushing, shoving and behaving like savages. These are the parents, folks! How can we expect our children to grow up any different if this is the example they are getting from society? Unfortunately, Jason said he saw some children there at the store who got to witness this chaos firsthand. I too saw children at the Wal-Mart I was at and it was 3:00 AM!!! There is a time and place for children, and it is NOT Wal-Mart at 3:00 AM. I didn’t witness these children during the mad rush because I left around 4:00 AM. My own safety is worth another $200. For anyone who was injured, go after Wal-Mart. Their ridiculous attempt at organization was the main cause of this craziness. They could have given out numbers, used a lottery system, formed a line, or anything other than what they did.

I know Apple may have a large chunk of the marketshare on portable music players, but they are really the innovators when it comes to new and unique design. I think if they lowered to their price within reach of more average consumers, like myself, then they would most definitely dominate the market and possibly eliminate much of the competition. To be honest, I’d love to get an iPod, but they are priced just out of my budget, which says a lot since I probably dump a load of money on gadgets in general. Here is a for instance: I have a Philips HDD070 which does its job well, and only cost $80 for a refurbished unit. I think they sell for $160 new, but that is even too high. For the equivalent iPod, the Nano 2GB, the price is ~$200. If this pricing structure were set at $150/$200 instead of $200/$250, I think that would throw Apple over the top of the market. In fact, if it were priced as such, I’d likely pickup the 4GB for $200 just out of principle. The pricing I’m suggesting applies to all models, except the Shuffle. I don’t think the shuffle belongs in the iPod family. The best iPod out right now is the 60GB iPod Video for $400. That’s $400!! That is the price of a decent camcorder, or half the price of a decent TV. $350 may not make that much difference, but it would be the most expensive iPod on the market.

Side note:
If you didn’t see Saturday Night Live last night, the Weekend Report had a parody of Steve Jobs, and they poked fun at the short lifespan of each iPod, meaning newer and better is always around the corner. In the skit, he said the newest release was the iPod Micro, about the size of a miniSD card, which he then joked about it being obsolete by Thanksgiving. Then he pulled another out of his pocket called the iPod Pequeño, about the size of a Pez candy, that would hold 1 million songs and be obsolete by Christmas. After that he reached into his pocket one more time and pulled out nothing apparently, but he had his fingers pinched together and called it the iPod Invisa, which would hold 8 millions songs and float in the air when you dropped it. Anyway, the entire thing was poking fun at the iPod Nano, which was out for a week before the iPod Video came out to take away attention.

If you are running version 1.0.7 or 1.5 beta of Mozilla Firefox with the AdBlock extension (v0.5+), odds are you are not getting the Flash you deserve. Apparently, the new flash plugin (v8) perceives the Obj-Tabs of AdBlock as security threats and doesn’t allow the display of any presentations while those are present. The fix is quite easy, but you will lose a small fraction of AdBlocks usefulness. To fix, open Firefox, click on Tools–>AdBlock–>Preferences–>AdBlock Options and deselect Obj-Tabs. After this, you should be able to refresh the page and see all of the glorious Flash. Here are some before and after shots of the fix (macromedia.com).

Before

After

For those looking to keep track of what you are doing, but don’t have a PDA or a notebook, this is a free online solution for you. RememberTheMilk.com does a fantastic job of keeping things simple yet very very useful. You can organize your to-do list and even send items to your list via email. This application is still new, so just imagine how good it will be once it starts maturing. They are using the ever-so-popular AJAX combination to provide a seamless interface.

Check them out!

One thing to note here is that anything can be a scam, so trust no one.

Free iPods is something I just ran across last week and decided to take a look at for myself. What most people picture when seeing something like this is someone just taking your money or some sort of pyramid scam where the last one gets stuck out. This is actually quite different and ingenius on the part of whomever thought of it first. What is basically going on is commission based sales. Companies like RealNetworks, Citibank and other reputable companies are offering top dollar for marketing and referrals, so a company like freepremiumipods.com will receive commissions for each person they drive to these companies. In comes the iPod. The iPod is probably the most reputable, best designed, and most in demand gadget on the market today. FreePremiumIPods.com is giving people exactly what they want, something (free iPod) for nothing. In most cases, there is a Credit Application you’ll need to fill out and tell several of your friends about the whole deal and everyone can get something for nothing. FreePremiumIPods.com makes there money on the commissions (minus the iPods sent out to those who actually have 8 referrals complete the process as well — this is similar to mail-in rebates where not everyone will follow through).

In summary, the end user is really out nothing, but has the opportunity to gain a free ($400 valued) iPod assuming they can get 8 referrals to participate. That’s it!

I chose the RealNetworks offer for a 15-day trial of their SuperPass for online access to entertainment whatchas and whozits. I’ll post my findings in a couple of weeks to let everyone know how the process pans out.

Check it out for yourself.

If you have an HDTV Tuner Card in your PC, you might be wondering how you can backup this content to DVD. HDBeat has posted about this very topic, and they couldn’t make it look more easy.

Side note: When I had my ATI HDTV Wonder I was asking myself this very question. How in the world can I make use of the .ts file that was holding my recorded HDTV shows?

I just ran across this site (open source versus) and though they did an awesome job of comparing Open Source software with the closed-sourced alternative. They’ve compared Outlook Express with Mozilla’s Thunderbird, Windows with SuSE and Ubuntu. Check them out here.

I just read this on Newsforge and thought it was cool. An OpenDocument Fellowship. Very nice.

Read the article.

Read more about OpenDocument and OpenOffice here.

See the OpenDocument Fellowship Homepage.

This morning I received an email from Netflix regarding a class action law suit settlement. Apparently someone thought Netflix reneged on their deal of ‘Unlimited DVD Rentals’ and not keeping to their ’1 day turn around,’ which myself have experienced time and time again. Needless to say I took the deal with the option of one month free upgrade from 3-at-a-time to 4-at-a-time. I feel they’ve throttled my rentals too many times. Just a week ago, I turned in all 3 of my movies on a Monday. Tuesday morning they received them, and typically they would have sent the next set that afternoon for me to receive by Wednesday. This time, by noon (not the end of the day) I had 3 ‘Shipping Wednesday’ messages in my queue, which meant instead of receiving my movies on Wednesday, I would possibly receive them by Thursday, which pretty much eliminates all possibility for same week turn around.

Read more about the Settlement here.

In Ubuntu and many of the latest distros, syntax highlighting in Vim (Vi improved) is off by default. To enable syntax highlighting, edit /etc/vim/vimrc. In here you’ll find this line: " syntax on. Just remove the quote at the beginning of this line and save. That’s it!!

Because this was off by default, I thought I was running plain Vi, but I was wrong. Vim is pretty much the standard these days. Anyway… happy highlighting.

When I read this article, I wanted to leap into the air cheering. I think this is big news on a topic I’ve been supporting since I first heard of it. Essentially, Google sees the potential of OpenOffice in the productivity suite war against Microsoft, and decided to bring in some help for the OOo Team. Read the article.

See my previous entries about OpenOffice and OpenDocument:

OpenOffice version 2
OpenDocument (Part 1)
OpenDocument Part 2

NetFlix History Anazlyer – is your subscription worth it?
I just found this tool that will analyze your Netflix rental history and basically tell you if you are getting your money’s worth. Here are my results:

Your results
You’ve rented 276 DVDs over 21 months from January 27, 2004 to October 26, 2005.
Your plan costs $17.99/month so you’ve paid $377.79 total.
Your average price per rental was approximately $1.37 each.
Average rental costs elsewhere are $3.75 each (not including late fees).
You’ve saved approximately $657.21 over your membership lifetime or $31.30 per month.

Here’s some more about your renting habits…
You kept each rental for around 5 days on average.
The longest you kept a single DVD was 20 days: Enemy at the Gates (2001).
You rented about 13 DVDs each month.
You’re not taking full advantage of your current plan. You could be renting 19 DVDs each month.

Check out NetFlix History Analzyer here.

Rental Statistics from tallrock.net – detailed statistics showing your rental history in detail you’ve never imagined.
The initial summary is somewhat similar to the previous tool, but the tabs across the top of the page will show your true rental habits. Here is my summary as of now:

• You have rented 271 DVDs over 22 months. (That’s an average of 12 DVDs per month).
• On average, 22% of your rentals were delayed (i.e. ‘throttled’) by Netflix.
• In your most recent month of data (10/2005), your rentals were delayed 36% of the time.
• In processing the input data, the program found 3 problem rentals and 1 multiple rental.
• The direct link to your results is at ( link ). For fast access to your output, bookmark this link.

Check out this tool here.