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?

Boy, I autostick you where the sun don't shine

First, some background. We traded our 2 older kids and the Pontiac Montanta for a Chrysler Pacifica for the day (the day before Easter that is, although I also drove it again last week). The kids are spending the night and coming back for Easter. This allowed me to drive a Pacifica for the first time. I had ridden in it and thought it was a very roomy and versatile vehicle, that drove very well, but I had never driven it.

There are many interior things that I think Chrysler did right, and others where I think they flopped. One that they definately did right was finally having express-down feature on all windows, not just the driver's. How hard was that? They countered that though by having RDS on their radios, but no way to cycle through the RDS data. Lame. Much worse is their retarded lack of steering wheel radio controls, choosing to place cruise control there instead. Plus, their cruise must be turned on everytime you restart the car. Poor design all around on these fronts.

Anyway, the biggest thing I was interested in was the AutoStick feature. I had wanted to try this out since it was introduced back in the late 90's. It seemed like something fun to try, but I had my doubts about its usefulness. It seemed mostly like a gadget for middle-aged guys who bought an automatic for practicality, but wanted to pretend they had a manual transmission still. My dad himself said it was pretty much junk.

After driving it for a bit, I still think it is a bit silly. However, I cleared up a few misconceptions that I had, and now can see where it might be fun occaisionally. If it truly doesn't add much to the transmission cost, then it might not be bad to have around, especially since you never really have to use it.

The autostick definately gives you more get up and go quicker. As with a manual, there is no sitting around in too high of a gear, and having to mash the pedal to downshift. When I was in first, I could spool up the engine immediately. The AWD in the Pacifica would likely make this feature even more fun jumping off the line.

One misconception I had was that the autostick would actually shift for you if you revved it too high in a gear. Not true I found out as I blew up the engine (no, not really). Actually though, I didn find that it will not shift until redline. This seems like a perfectly adequate compromise. As Josh points out, really the only way to improve on that is to have user-settable shift points.

Downshifting is handled pretty slick, with the computer at some point shifting you down to a sane gear automatically. Nice for not having to shift down after slowing for a light. On the other hand, shifting down works as exactly as expected, providing passing power while on the highway, as well as very smooth engine breaking at a stop.

The shifting was very smooth and crisp in my opinion when driving spirited, and very sluggish when trolling around town. Perfectly acceptable, as I would expect the full automatic to be used while cruising town anyway.

Overall, I am very satisfied with autostick now, and find it quite enjoyable. I would not pay extra for it, but it is a nice addition for free by Chrysler. Coupled with 17" wheels on the Pacifica, a few quick mods to the suspension and possibly a supercharger, and you have a "crossover" vehicle that will cause a few surprises at the track or a stoplight.

Blogger sucks. It really, really sucks!

Had to vent. I'm sick, and tired of these failed posts and such. I noticed just a minute ago as I was attempting to post this and it kept saying "Document contains no data" that there is now a "Recover post" hyperlink in the JavaScript control for editing posts. Why would that be necessary? Maybe because their service is looking more like a fly-by-night, rather than somebody with a hand in Google's hefty pockets.

Anyway, I have 2 stupid things to post. The first is a stupid Microsoft error. I just found everything about this to be comical:

This error may be the result of trying to delete more than 4,000 messages at one time. Outlook can delete no more than 4,000 messages when it is working with a server message store.
To avoid this error, delete fewer than 4,000 messages in a single operation.
It is also possible you do not have the appropriate permissions to delete messages. If you need to delete content from a folder owned by someone else, contact the owner of the folder to obtain the necessary permissions, or have the owner delete the content for you.

Next, you have to check out this story that Ian sent to me. The idiots are winning.

Update: I have to apologize for the multiple posts, the subject of this post should have caused you not to be surprised by this though. I will fix it as soon as blogger is working right again. One note, I did find by reading http://status.blogger.com that clearing my cookies caused some of the problems to go away. Now, the only problem I am having is not all posts showing up on my edit page.

Update2: Fixed. All is now well.

FP

Well, not first post exactly, but early website. Ryan with his relaunch of the sadida.com site and his corresponding wayback machine link to an older version made me feel like shaking the dust off of some old sites of mine.

I can't find my original site from 1995 anymore, it was somewhere on tripod.com, but has now apparantly vanished into the ether. Instead, the wayback machine does have my site from when I was in college at U of I. Be very afraid, but remember the time period this is from. I DARE you to post a link to your first site. Go ahead. Do it.