"Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not."

Okay, Shannon tagged me to list my 6 favorite songs. I'm not sure if this is ever, or currently, but my mind can't possibly figure out how to do it for all-time. I will stick to current. These are in no particular order, and may change completely if you ask me again in a week.


1. Big and Rich - Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)
2. Toby Keith - HonkeyTonk U
3. Public Enemy - Give It Up (Dirty Drums in Memphis Remix)
4. Revis - Caught in the Rain
5. Wyclef and Eve - Your Love (L.O.V.E. Reggae Mix)
6. Del the Funky Homosapien - Mista Dobalina

Yeah, this is mainly a group of songs I have had on heavy rotation in iTunes while I do homework late at night.

Okay, tag you're it. List your favorite songs.

"Are you cool man? Like, how?"

I love when I find a new cool piece of technology. It is rare anymore, I have an RSS feed to engadget that you would expect to be chock full of this type of stuff, but it seems they mostly have a Treo and Hello Kitty fetish.

I was pleasantly surprised today to read the feed and see a device that is truly innovative and versatile. The product is the VR3 MP3 FM modulator. It is primarily sold through WalMart, although it is sold out right now so I had to find an alternate outlet.

The basic functionality of being an FM modulator is nothing interesting. Nor is the MP3 playback capability really. I'm pretty sure within a month new babies will be born with both of these features as prevalent as they have become.

Here's what is cool about this device. First, it is powered from your cigarette lighter. You know, that worthless thing used by morons killing themselves too slowly, but otherwise pointless for the most part. Next, it has USB host in it, and uses USB drives to hold the music. This is very flexible and very sweet. I have 1 or 2 flash drives that I no longer use, so this gives them new life. It also means you decide exactly how much space this player will have, depending on what form factor you wish to use. 1 GB flash drives are nearly free after rebate now, which would give the same capacity as the larger iPod shuffle. Otherwise, you could go all out and slap a USB hard drive on that bad boy.

Speaking of iPod shuffles, this is where we thought of a few more cool uses for this product. Why not stick the iPod shuffle in here, and have this be the FM modulator? Better yet, this is now essentially a car charger for the shuffle as well. Pop your music on, use this to listen in the car and recharge, and then take the shuffle with you and avoid human interaction the rest of the day.

My car just happens to have a lighter outlet in a spot where these controls will be very readily available, and is just out of the way enough not to be bumping it all the time. I'm anxious to get this and try it out.

I'm THX certified. I didn't even know you could do that in an alley...

Satan uses Intel processor, and now so does Apple. That's the idea you would get from some Apple fanboys after today's announcement that Apple will be transitioning away from IBM PowerPC processors to Intel x86 flavors.

I think this has gone much too far into a religious crusade. The POWER line, currently made by IBM for Apple, just hasn't been funded or focused enough to keep up. They have fallen behind in releasing new processor features, getting quantities ramped up, etc. With Motorola selling off their PowerPC business a few years ago, the writing was on the wall. Good for Apple hedging their bets all along by keeping OSX running on x86 as well as PPC. That's a great deal of extra work, but it paid off for them now.

I have had a love-hate relationship with Apple for a number of years. I started out on Apple's, and they really got me into computers. After the Apple IIGS though, I tried desperately not to touch an Apple for about the next 10 years. I chose to learn all the true nuts and bolts on everything from 8088's on up to the latest hyperthreaded Dell's. However, Apple snuck up on me and the rest of the world while we were distracted by something inefficient and shiny. Jobs came back with a vengeance and realized that people shouldn't care about what their computers were, or how they worked. They wanted them now to be an appliance, and one that just worked.

This is a perfect example of why they made this switch. Who really cares what processor the latest Powerbook will be running? As long as it does what the person needs. Heck, after an initial transition the developers don't really even care. It's just a different compiler, with some different flags. I've built on dozens of OS's and libraries, it's not all that difficult with semi-portable code. All of the lowest, non-portable code should be already done given that Apple has a version of the OS already running on these processors.

At this point I feel obliged to include a quote from Engadget. "So, i don't know a whole lot about the technical stuff.... but i own a powerbook...what does the switch mean to me?" Absolutely nothing you drooling idiot. You already bought your device, it's not going to quit working because they switched. When was the last time you compiled code...yeah I thought so. I hereby create a new term, derds. A derd is a wannabe-nerd who hangs out on tech sites voicing their opinion without the slightest bit of common-sense or knowledge.

Back to the matter at hand, several interesting possibilities come out of all of this. First, Apple has announced they will have tools to allow apps to run on either platform. That's really cool if they pull it off, processor emulation is always a sweet trick. I'm guessing it will not be optimal for one of the two platforms, and will probably not make use of processor extensions such as Altivec, SSE, etc. Still cool though.

Next, the dawn of a cheap Dell running OSX, or a slick mac mini running XP Media Center edition are upon us. Even if Apple tries to protect either of these interests in software, it is a simple mod chip or software patch away from working. Good for the consumer, questionable outcome for Apple.

Having thrown a bunch of stuff out here that will probably put non-techies to sleep, and may or may not be interesting, I will now throw my own opinion in. I definitely prefer PowerPC architecture. Lots of ooey, gooey registers, low power usage per performance, big-endian byte-ordering the way the programming gods intended, etc. However, I perfectly see the business reasons for Apple to switch. I can only hope now that they push Intel to become more power and heat-efficient in future designs. I will just have to deal with the pain that is little-endian some more.

Finally, just because I said I would, here is a direct quote from me: "I consider any motherboard not made by Apple or Dell to be a knock-off." I don't build computers anymore, and frankly just don't care. Suck it fanboys.

I've got a spaceship, fully equipped...

Sleaziness. It's pretty much ubiquitous in business. Usually I can let it slide, as just being how companies compete in a capitalistic marketplace. However, sometimes I see something that strikes me as maybe going to far (or at the very least just seems surprising).

I posted yesterday about Netflix's victory over WalMart. It appears that Blockbuster did not want to take this lying down. Check out this link for a current promotion being run by Blockbuster.

That's pretty hardcore. It's also interesting since I did in fact just cancel my Netflix account. However, the incentives offered by them aren't enough greater than the overall feeling of sleaziness I get to get me to bite on this offer.

The sound of world domination

Ask and ye shall receive. I have been asking for Google to begin consolidating their services. They aren't perfect yet, as they haven't absorbed Blogger or tied Adsense/Gmail/Google logins all together. However, they now allow for a personalized homepage.

Go to http://www.google.com/ig and try it out for yourself. The rearranging on the fly function is freakin' sweet. I'd take it off some sweet jumps.

Yahoo, it's a good thing you have your new music service. That might be the last saving grace keeping you from sliding further toward irrelevancy.

Speaking of irrelevancy, who would have thought that Netflix would outlast the 200-lb. T-Rex that is Wal Mart. Next up, Blockbuster.

Quoth the raven - or some other dude

This is pretty much a useless post. I've just found some quotes I found interesting or funny over the past few days and wanted to keep them somewhere. I says to myself, "Hey, self, you've got one of them blog things, post it there."

Here goes:

• "There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't." - (Original Author Unknown).
  
• "The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced. The arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be reduced, if the nation doesn't want to go bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance." (Marcus Tullius Cicero, 55 B.C.)
• And to tie in with the title quote, an old quote I have always liked: "Is all that we see or seem, But a dream within a dream?" (Edgar Allen Poe, 1827)

Okay, getting away from quotes. Did I ever mention that Subway sucks. I mean they hoover it. So much so, they've gone from suck to blow. Subway used to be one of my favorite quick and cheap places to eat. Over the years they became a bit less affordable. I let that slide. Strike 2 was when they decided to no longer carry milk as an option. This sucked because my son only drank milk at the time, not their freakin' juice boxes. Strike 3, as mentioned by someone, was when they made the switch from Pepsi to Coke. This really pissed me off, as they had the best fountain Dew on the planet. I suddenly ate there much less often, and never again ordered a combo. Why bother, when I would just get a glass full of ass Coke. After that, they also dropped my favorite bread, Parmesan Oregano. Eh, I barely cared because I was already annoyed with them.

However, today they really dropped the ball. I stopped in to get some sammiches for our lunch. After paying, I asked for my stamps (as I've been forced to do hundreds of other times.) Imagine my surprise when she states, "Oh, we stopped doing that." What??? That was one of the defining traits of Subway. Are you tired of taking my money? Apparently, as you now leave me very little reason to want to eat there. Famous Dave's, when will you get here???

The Torque converter's running low on Torque (UAB1)

Been busy with school so it has been a while since the last post here. Anybody still reading? Ah, that is the magic that is RSS. Time lapse is really irrelevant.

Anyway, this week off of school has allowed my brain to resume normal, free thinking rather than stuffy, pointless thinking. This led to me coming up with some new software/hardware that I need to create.

You'll see a new acronym in the title. Similar to the Ultimate Box (UB) topics that I have talked about and will continue to talk about in the future, but this one is actually the Ultimate Accessory Box. Specifically, a box that is going to sit on the nightstand/dresser in our bedroom.

This started one day with me wanting a few things early in the morning, and looking across my desk at work and seeing a small, simple touchscreen device not being utilized. This nifty device, made by my company about 6 years ago or so, runs a 32-bit flavor of Windows. Given that this piece of hardware is free, and that I can actually attempt to mangle together software for that platform, I thought I might give it a go.

Here are the current features I intend to have in this box:

1. Large Clock. This is the primary function of the device, as it will be replacing our alarm clock. This screen will be maximized whenever nothing else is occurring on the box. It needs to be large, and legible from across the room in the middle of the night. The colors should be such that they are readable, but not so bright they keep us awake all night.
2. The next obligatory feature, if this is replacing our alarm clock, would of course be alarm functionality. In addition to being able to set multiple alarm periods for each day, there should be a customizable alert for each one. This could be any audio file I feel like supporting. It should be a specified file, or a random selection. The choices of audio I have in mind currently would be MP3, AAC, iTunes playlist, xmradio.com stream.
   
   <Whine>It doesn't play ogg? I won't use it.</Whine> --> Me beating the hell out of the slashdotter saying that drivel.
   
3. Next, one of the first features I wanted to add is a weather forecast. I want to know what the current temperature is, as well as the daily inaccurately projected forecast. I plan to simply tap into the same interface to the Weather Channel used by forecast fox. Eventually, I would like to add a serial interface to a thermometer outside my house to give a more accurate temperature for my specific location.
4. Another important one to add, school cancellation notices. These are going to be scraped from web feeds produced by the local television channels. I had a system for this in place last year, but it required me coming downstairs to one of the other computers. The neighbors would probably appreciate if I stayed in the bedroom to check this, since I want to do it before I start getting ready in the morning. I would like to actually tie this into the wakeup sound, giving me instant notification. Something like this would be a good choice I feel.
5. Next, there needs to be a convenient little pop-up app listing important or useful phone numbers. This box is sitting right next to our phone, so it would be handy many times early in the morning/late at night to have this. It would be even cooler if this just interfaced to some central location with all of our contacts, talking some universal contact protocol, right guys?
   
6. Finally, to go with the last point, there needs to be a memo application for jotting down phone messages. Until I get Asterix setup in our house, we still translate phone messages the old fashioned way.
7. Later, if I can figure out how, it would be nice to make use of a microphone to implement voice activated features. Yell at the thing to tell you the time, snooze the alarm, etc. Nice and geeky, yeah.

Okay, that's my thoughts. What would you add?