Michael's Weblog: August 2005 Archives

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August 30, 2005

Palmetto Pointe

I'm sure everyone watched it last night because it's "One Of The Most Talked About New Teen TV Dramas..." The show is called Palmetto Pointe named after a fictional town in the Charleston, SC area. The show premiered last night on the newly renamed i network (better known as PAX TV). I watched it solely because it was filmed locally. For those of you that missed it, I can honestly say that it was one of the worst television shows I have ever seen. I do recommend watching the opening credits if you'd like to see the new and old bridges crossing the Cooper River. They also show a few other Lowcountry landmarks. The lead actor has about as much acting talent as I do--which is none. Most of the other 'actors' didn't seem to have much talent either.

The editing/mixing/producing/directing was the worst part of the show however. There was way too many slow motion sequences with music where it seems like they must not have been able to come up with dialog. The transitions were horrible. The music was often louder than the monotone dialog. I have little doubt that I could have mixed the audio better. The show could really use a set--or maybe better equipment. It appears all of the inside scenes were filmed on location and the sound suffers because of this.

It was hard to follow the story, partly because I kept cringing at the various production issues. Luckily I read a plot summary before the show aired so I understood the basic premise. The introduction of the show and the characters in it was not very well done. It was a bit hard to follow who was who and how they were all related. It seems like they may have a very poorly executed good idea. For those that continue to watch the show hopefully it will get better. Maybe they'll hand it over to a high school AV club. Personally I'll stick with the WB for my teen tv shows (which the producers of Palmetto Pointe should watch and take notes--not saying they are all good, just professionally done).

Posted by mhader at 12:01 AM | Comments (2)

August 29, 2005

Katrina

I've had CNN on all day trying to keep up with the hurricane coverage. It's going to take a long while to clean up the path of destruction. It sounds like Slidell, LA was hit very hard which worries me because I, and many of the people reading this, know the family of a PSA alumni that I assume still lives in the area. For those of you with better means of contact, please let me know if you hear anything. I uploaded pictures [link] from the 1998 PSA mission trip to Slidell this morning. This trip was possible because of the family.

Best of luck to everyone in the effected areas.

I had originally intended on posting my review of Palmetto Pointe, a new television show on the i network. Instead that will be posted at 12:01 am tonight/tomorrow.

Posted by mhader at 1:49 PM

August 27, 2005

Happy Birthday!

To Ben!! Sorry we didn't resurrect the traveling BEWB's for you! Maybe next year..

Posted by mhader at 6:53 AM | Comments (2)

August 26, 2005

Cell Phones are Evil

Ahh..another post I begin with nothing to talk about. I hate it when I do that.

Does anyone reading this use Skype, or tried using Google Talk yet? I need to look into these to hopefully control my sister's cell phone bill a bit. I signed up for Google Mail, but have yet to download GT. Between the IM and the cell I think I talk to my sister more now than I did when she lived here. She calls my mother several times throughout the day. I'm sure she'll get over it eventually, but in the meantime..

<soapbox>
Cell phones run most people's lives days. But--Do they ruin it or make it better? I like the free long distance and the fact that I can call a tow truck if my car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. That's about it though. I hate having to carry them around. My blackberry is just too big especially when it's paired with my personal cell phone (which may get ditched soon). They make it too easy for people like my sister, for example, to call home (although I like hearing from some of the people I currently know in college--darn double edged sword). When kids are at college (I guess they would prefer to be called young adults), vacation, retreats, or summer camp their life back home is only a button away. On a side note, I've done a few things with the church youth group here and they do a decent job of keeping the cell phone talk to a minimum--it's nice to be a chaperon because you can have one and flaunt it in front of them :) (not that I would do that). I feel like cell phones must take away from what you gain in these circumstances. It's time to get away and take a break from your comfort zone and experience something new. Make new friends..yada yada. Of course I guess it's also good that you don't lose the connection with your friends from home. I've only seen/talked to one of my close pre-college friends since I moved back..and that was for all of two seconds. Most of them don't live here anymore so that doesn't help.
</soapbox>

For those of you that care about computers: It was quite the experience, but I was able to to get the RAID set up, recognized by windows, and formatted. I actually had to find a floppy drive and install it to get the RAID working (although looking back I may not have needed it). BTW, in case you forgot, floppy drives are slow! Now I'm working on repartitioning all of my other drives into single partitions. I think the reason my hd failed the other day was because it was still using FAT32 and my pvr program was writing a lot of really big files to it. I was able to retrieve the data and convert it to NTFS for future use. In case your curious, my hd space is as follows: 60GB + 80GB + 120GB + RAID 320GB = 580GB - ~30GB (that I can't use) = 550GB of usable space.

Posted by mhader at 11:53 AM | Comments (1)

August 22, 2005

I'm Melting!

I'm very happy that there was no heat advisory today. It's actually been a couple degrees cooler outside than it has been inside. It's currently 92.9 degrees on top of my desk..which is unfortunatley fairly normal. The rest of the house is the same however. That's quite abnormal. Things in this house like to break. The AC went down sometime yesterday..which is a bad thing to happen in the Charleston summer. Hopefully it will be fixed relatively soon. The repairman stopped by this afternoon to check it out. It needed time to cool down and he had to go get the replacement part so he'll hopefully be back soon. I don't envy his job. There is no rest for the man that fixes air conditioners.

Posted by mhader at 6:52 PM | Comments (2)

August 21, 2005

It's Dead!

Well, Kira made it safely to college and seems to be doing well so far. My trip to Anderson went well. The trip back had a minor detour around a really bad accident on the back roads between Pelzer and Fountain Inn. The most annoying part of the detour is that by the time we made it around, they had started letting traffic go straight through.

Yesterday while fiddling around with my computer, one of my hard drives died. Luckily it was the older 60 GB drive which I've been using mostly for the tivo-like pvr functionality of my computer and storing lots of tv shows, most of which will be out next month on DVD. I've yet to try to recover the data. The most entertaining thing to come of the crash was the need to re-authenticate XP because my hardware had finally changed too much since I bought XP. Yes, I actually bought XP.

In the wake of the disk failure I immediately backed up all of my pictures to the laptop. Those and my years of web pages are really the only thing I care about on the computer that isn't already backed up somewhere. Next I went out to search for a new hard drive. I was already lacking in the space department, but I've been trying to hold off until I could buy SATA drives..which means upgrading the motherboard. Even though it was only 60GB of most likely lost files I needed to replace it with something. I ended up ordering a pair of WD 320GB drives which I intend to set up in a RAID 1 configuration (this will be my first venture into RAID.) The new drive will more than doubles my total amount of disk space pre-failure.

So now that I have a new hard drive duo, video card, 512MB more RAM (I went ahead and got that with the HDs), monitor, and tv card I don't see me upgrading the rest of the computer any time soon. Maybe I can start putting that money somewhere else..at least until the motherboard blows up.

Posted by mhader at 7:52 PM | Comments (2)

August 19, 2005

Almost on the Road Again

I'm sitting in the lounge waiting for my next case to start so I figured I'd post an entry (granted I don't currently have cell reception--I'll have to go outside to post). Kira headed off to college this morning. What a scary thought. Unfortunately I actually had to work today so I was unable to go up with them. I had to wake her up this morning just to say goodbye. I'm riding up to Anderson with a friend this afternoon and plan to meet up with my mother so we can drive back tonight. They actually kick out the families/friends of students at a certain time today to force the incoming freshman to start mingling. The whole weekend is planned out for them so they are ready to go when classes start next week.

I don't believe anything else exciting is going on right now so I guess I'll head outside for a connection.

Posted by mhader at 12:06 PM

August 17, 2005

Secure Your WAP!

It amazes (well..not really) me how many people leave their wireless routers wide open. If you are doing it on purpose for passersby to use, that's cool. If not, your unwittingly opening yourself up to some trouble. At the very least you need to change the password on your router so someone can't lock you out of it. Now that that's out of the way, I have to thank the neighbor of the house I've been staying at for not doing this. I've been using their broadband for many legal activities all week (like writing this blog and reading others). I've been watching a friends dog for the week who lives in the middle of nowhere, or so it seems to me. It's actually quite the booming area with lots of construction all around. It's only about 10 miles from my house, but with the gas prices soaring, it makes sense to hang out here with the dog, whom likes the company and the two hour walks.

I just bought a [Motorola m25] digital audio player from [woot!]. It's my first venture into the portable digital audio world. With my new job and my recent addiction to several podcasts I think it will come in handy. It only holds 256MB on board, but it takes SD memory cards up to 1GB. I think that 256MB is plenty for me however. I've had the same cd in my Jeep for months..I don't tend to change out what I listen to too often. No need for a 40GB iPod. I could probably put all of my mp3's and rip all of my cd's to it and still not even come close to filling it. On top of that, I'd have little desire to listen to most of it.

Posted by mhader at 12:41 PM | Comments (2)

August 8, 2005

Aggravating Lights

My mother and I had a bit of fun this weekend at my sister's expense. I got the idea by watching a videocast from [Hak.5]. In their premiere episode they set up a very simple code to allow you to control the lights in your house from anywhere you can get on the internet (which would include internet enabled cell phones) using the x10 po' man's home automation hardware. I acquired the x10 hardware needed while in college so I had to dig it out and test the code. I personally wouldn't put the code online because I'd say it's a big security risk, but on the internal network I couldn't resist.

Once I found all the necessary hardware (all three pieces were of course in three totally different places) and hooked up, I decided that it would be fun to bug Kira a bit. I set up a small webpage and hooked up my sister's bedroom lamp. That evening we were able to turn her light on and off remotely. It was obviously annoying her but she never said anything beyond mumbling under her breath. She simply thought the light was wigging out. I let my mother play with it for a whole nother day but had to show Kira today. I connected to the page on her laptop and showed her what I had done. The look of disbelief on her face was priceless.

Posted by mhader at 1:35 PM

August 3, 2005

Bye Bye AIW

I knew when I bought my new monitor it wouldn't be long until I had to upgrade the computer. Seemings how I opted for the 24" widescreen (which I've grown accustomed to and no longer get massive headaches from) I decided that I would go the cheap route for the time being and simply upgrade the oldest component, the video card. I really don't have much need for a cutting edge game system as I hardly ever play graphic intensive games (or games at all for that matter). I basically got the best version of the oldest video card made by a third party manufacturer that supports DirectX 9 on board.

I bought a Sapphire branded Radeon 9600xt (with 256 MB of DDR RAM) which uses ATI graphics and drivers. I leaned away from the all-in-wonder cards because I plan to use PCI-express rather than AGP when I next upgrade and don't want to keep paying for a tuner card. I bought a Hauppauge card which does the encoding/decoding on the board rather than through software. I'm not sure how I feel about the hardware just yet but I can say that the WinTV software is complete crap. I'm testing out SageTV right now which I mostly like so far.

One of the best parts of the new video card is that I can actually enjoy mostly smooth HD content such as the one for Serenity. It plays the 1080's (the biggest movie files) fairly well assuming no other programs are open and it's not a quicktime file..guess I could still use some RAM. I haven't tested to see if I'll get better performance from DVD's yet (the video card just went in today.) I'm hoping I do. Every once in a while DVD's seem to stutter. I'm hoping it's not my DVD drive which isn't but a year old.

The Explorer died a week or so ago. The transmission went out on it. Kira's been driving the protege around while the explorer now sits dead (even the battery is dead so we'll have to jump it just to get it back to the shop) in the garage. She's not allowed to take a vehicle to school her first semester so there isn't much reason to get it fixed right away.

Posted by mhader at 7:45 PM | Comments (1)


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mhader.com blog gallery jeep the list hrc shots links about	Michael's Weblog « July 2005 \| Main \| September 2005 » August 30, 2005 Palmetto Pointe I'm sure everyone watched it last night because it's "One Of The Most Talked About New Teen TV Dramas..." The show is called Palmetto Pointe named after a fictional town in the Charleston, SC area. The show premiered last night on the newly renamed i network (better known as PAX TV). I watched it solely because it was filmed locally. For those of you that missed it, I can honestly say that it was one of the worst television shows I have ever seen. I do recommend watching the opening credits if you'd like to see the new and old bridges crossing the Cooper River. They also show a few other Lowcountry landmarks. The lead actor has about as much acting talent as I do--which is none. Most of the other 'actors' didn't seem to have much talent either. The editing/mixing/producing/directing was the worst part of the show however. There was way too many slow motion sequences with music where it seems like they must not have been able to come up with dialog. The transitions were horrible. The music was often louder than the monotone dialog. I have little doubt that I could have mixed the audio better. The show could really use a set--or maybe better equipment. It appears all of the inside scenes were filmed on location and the sound suffers because of this. It was hard to follow the story, partly because I kept cringing at the various production issues. Luckily I read a plot summary before the show aired so I understood the basic premise. The introduction of the show and the characters in it was not very well done. It was a bit hard to follow who was who and how they were all related. It seems like they may have a very poorly executed good idea. For those that continue to watch the show hopefully it will get better. Maybe they'll hand it over to a high school AV club. Personally I'll stick with the WB for my teen tv shows (which the producers of Palmetto Pointe should watch and take notes--not saying they are all good, just professionally done). Posted by mhader at 12:01 AM \| Comments (2) August 29, 2005 Katrina I've had CNN on all day trying to keep up with the hurricane coverage. It's going to take a long while to clean up the path of destruction. It sounds like Slidell, LA was hit very hard which worries me because I, and many of the people reading this, know the family of a PSA alumni that I assume still lives in the area. For those of you with better means of contact, please let me know if you hear anything. I uploaded pictures [link] from the 1998 PSA mission trip to Slidell this morning. This trip was possible because of the family. Best of luck to everyone in the effected areas. I had originally intended on posting my review of Palmetto Pointe, a new television show on the i network. Instead that will be posted at 12:01 am tonight/tomorrow. Posted by mhader at 1:49 PM August 27, 2005 Happy Birthday! To Ben!! Sorry we didn't resurrect the traveling BEWB's for you! Maybe next year.. Posted by mhader at 6:53 AM \| Comments (2) August 26, 2005 Cell Phones are Evil Ahh..another post I begin with nothing to talk about. I hate it when I do that. Does anyone reading this use Skype, or tried using Google Talk yet? I need to look into these to hopefully control my sister's cell phone bill a bit. I signed up for Google Mail, but have yet to download GT. Between the IM and the cell I think I talk to my sister more now than I did when she lived here. She calls my mother several times throughout the day. I'm sure she'll get over it eventually, but in the meantime.. <!-- Warning - The following is a very spur of the moment, not at all thought out [like most (read all) things I write] tangent..so it probably won't make any sense or mean what I meant it to mean. --> <soapbox> Cell phones run most people's lives days. But--Do they ruin it or make it better? I like the free long distance and the fact that I can call a tow truck if my car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. That's about it though. I hate having to carry them around. My blackberry is just too big especially when it's paired with my personal cell phone (which may get ditched soon). They make it too easy for people like my sister, for example, to call home (although I like hearing from some of the people I currently know in college--darn double edged sword). When kids are at college (I guess they would prefer to be called young adults), vacation, retreats, or summer camp their life back home is only a button away. On a side note, I've done a few things with the church youth group here and they do a decent job of keeping the cell phone talk to a minimum--it's nice to be a chaperon because you can have one and flaunt it in front of them :) (not that I would do that). I feel like cell phones must take away from what you gain in these circumstances. It's time to get away and take a break from your comfort zone and experience something new. Make new friends..yada yada. Of course I guess it's also good that you don't lose the connection with your friends from home. I've only seen/talked to one of my close pre-college friends since I moved back..and that was for all of two seconds. Most of them don't live here anymore so that doesn't help. </soapbox> For those of you that care about computers: It was quite the experience, but I was able to to get the RAID set up, recognized by windows, and formatted. I actually had to find a floppy drive and install it to get the RAID working (although looking back I may not have needed it). BTW, in case you forgot, floppy drives are slow! Now I'm working on repartitioning all of my other drives into single partitions. I think the reason my hd failed the other day was because it was still using FAT32 and my pvr program was writing a lot of really big files to it. I was able to retrieve the data and convert it to NTFS for future use. In case your curious, my hd space is as follows: 60GB + 80GB + 120GB + RAID 320GB = 580GB - ~30GB (that I can't use) = 550GB of usable space. Posted by mhader at 11:53 AM \| Comments (1) August 22, 2005 I'm Melting! I'm very happy that there was no heat advisory today. It's actually been a couple degrees cooler outside than it has been inside. It's currently 92.9 degrees on top of my desk..which is unfortunatley fairly normal. The rest of the house is the same however. That's quite abnormal. Things in this house like to break. The AC went down sometime yesterday..which is a bad thing to happen in the Charleston summer. Hopefully it will be fixed relatively soon. The repairman stopped by this afternoon to check it out. It needed time to cool down and he had to go get the replacement part so he'll hopefully be back soon. I don't envy his job. There is no rest for the man that fixes air conditioners. Posted by mhader at 6:52 PM \| Comments (2) August 21, 2005 It's Dead! Well, Kira made it safely to college and seems to be doing well so far. My trip to Anderson went well. The trip back had a minor detour around a really bad accident on the back roads between Pelzer and Fountain Inn. The most annoying part of the detour is that by the time we made it around, they had started letting traffic go straight through. Yesterday while fiddling around with my computer, one of my hard drives died. Luckily it was the older 60 GB drive which I've been using mostly for the tivo-like pvr functionality of my computer and storing lots of tv shows, most of which will be out next month on DVD. I've yet to try to recover the data. The most entertaining thing to come of the crash was the need to re-authenticate XP because my hardware had finally changed too much since I bought XP. Yes, I actually bought XP. In the wake of the disk failure I immediately backed up all of my pictures to the laptop. Those and my years of web pages are really the only thing I care about on the computer that isn't already backed up somewhere. Next I went out to search for a new hard drive. I was already lacking in the space department, but I've been trying to hold off until I could buy SATA drives..which means upgrading the motherboard. Even though it was only 60GB of most likely lost files I needed to replace it with something. I ended up ordering a pair of WD 320GB drives which I intend to set up in a RAID 1 configuration (this will be my first venture into RAID.) The new drive will more than doubles my total amount of disk space pre-failure. So now that I have a new hard drive duo, video card, 512MB more RAM (I went ahead and got that with the HDs), monitor, and tv card I don't see me upgrading the rest of the computer any time soon. Maybe I can start putting that money somewhere else..at least until the motherboard blows up. Posted by mhader at 7:52 PM \| Comments (2) August 19, 2005 Almost on the Road Again I'm sitting in the lounge waiting for my next case to start so I figured I'd post an entry (granted I don't currently have cell reception--I'll have to go outside to post). Kira headed off to college this morning. What a scary thought. Unfortunately I actually had to work today so I was unable to go up with them. I had to wake her up this morning just to say goodbye. I'm riding up to Anderson with a friend this afternoon and plan to meet up with my mother so we can drive back tonight. They actually kick out the families/friends of students at a certain time today to force the incoming freshman to start mingling. The whole weekend is planned out for them so they are ready to go when classes start next week. I don't believe anything else exciting is going on right now so I guess I'll head outside for a connection. Posted by mhader at 12:06 PM August 17, 2005 Secure Your WAP! It amazes (well..not really) me how many people leave their wireless routers wide open. If you are doing it on purpose for passersby to use, that's cool. If not, your unwittingly opening yourself up to some trouble. At the very least you need to change the password on your router so someone can't lock you out of it. Now that that's out of the way, I have to thank the neighbor of the house I've been staying at for not doing this. I've been using their broadband for many legal activities all week (like writing this blog and reading others). I've been watching a friends dog for the week who lives in the middle of nowhere, or so it seems to me. It's actually quite the booming area with lots of construction all around. It's only about 10 miles from my house, but with the gas prices soaring, it makes sense to hang out here with the dog, whom likes the company and the two hour walks. I just bought a [Motorola m25] digital audio player from [woot!]. It's my first venture into the portable digital audio world. With my new job and my recent addiction to several podcasts I think it will come in handy. It only holds 256MB on board, but it takes SD memory cards up to 1GB. I think that 256MB is plenty for me however. I've had the same cd in my Jeep for months..I don't tend to change out what I listen to too often. No need for a 40GB iPod. I could probably put all of my mp3's and rip all of my cd's to it and still not even come close to filling it. On top of that, I'd have little desire to listen to most of it. Posted by mhader at 12:41 PM \| Comments (2) August 8, 2005 Aggravating Lights My mother and I had a bit of fun this weekend at my sister's expense. I got the idea by watching a videocast from [Hak.5]. In their premiere episode they set up a very simple code to allow you to control the lights in your house from anywhere you can get on the internet (which would include internet enabled cell phones) using the x10 po' man's home automation hardware. I acquired the x10 hardware needed while in college so I had to dig it out and test the code. I personally wouldn't put the code online because I'd say it's a big security risk, but on the internal network I couldn't resist. Once I found all the necessary hardware (all three pieces were of course in three totally different places) and hooked up, I decided that it would be fun to bug Kira a bit. I set up a small webpage and hooked up my sister's bedroom lamp. That evening we were able to turn her light on and off remotely. It was obviously annoying her but she never said anything beyond mumbling under her breath. She simply thought the light was wigging out. I let my mother play with it for a whole nother day but had to show Kira today. I connected to the page on her laptop and showed her what I had done. The look of disbelief on her face was priceless. Posted by mhader at 1:35 PM August 3, 2005 Bye Bye AIW I knew when I bought my new monitor it wouldn't be long until I had to upgrade the computer. Seemings how I opted for the 24" widescreen (which I've grown accustomed to and no longer get massive headaches from) I decided that I would go the cheap route for the time being and simply upgrade the oldest component, the video card. I really don't have much need for a cutting edge game system as I hardly ever play graphic intensive games (or games at all for that matter). I basically got the best version of the oldest video card made by a third party manufacturer that supports DirectX 9 on board. I bought a Sapphire branded Radeon 9600xt (with 256 MB of DDR RAM) which uses ATI graphics and drivers. I leaned away from the all-in-wonder cards because I plan to use PCI-express rather than AGP when I next upgrade and don't want to keep paying for a tuner card. I bought a Hauppauge card which does the encoding/decoding on the board rather than through software. I'm not sure how I feel about the hardware just yet but I can say that the WinTV software is complete crap. I'm testing out SageTV right now which I mostly like so far. One of the best parts of the new video card is that I can actually enjoy mostly smooth HD content such as the one for Serenity. It plays the 1080's (the biggest movie files) fairly well assuming no other programs are open and it's not a quicktime file..guess I could still use some RAM. I haven't tested to see if I'll get better performance from DVD's yet (the video card just went in today.) I'm hoping I do. Every once in a while DVD's seem to stutter. I'm hoping it's not my DVD drive which isn't but a year old. The Explorer died a week or so ago. The transmission went out on it. Kira's been driving the protege around while the explorer now sits dead (even the battery is dead so we'll have to jump it just to get it back to the shop) in the garage. She's not allowed to take a vehicle to school her first semester so there isn't much reason to get it fixed right away. Posted by mhader at 7:45 PM \| Comments (1)