drewmckinney.net » Random Blah Blah

Digital television – go fuck yourself

drew — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 23:09:20 +0000

I no longer get NBC because of the stupid digital box thingy. Now I can’t watch the SuperBowl. I am, as they say, extremely stabby. Extremely.

GodDamnFuckingLinux

drew — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 08:01:22 +0000

I have been wrestling with getting a wireless card to work under Ubuntu. We’re not talking about some weird card that nobody has heard of, this is a card that actually has drivers built into the latest version of Hardy Heron…

After five hours (no, I’m not exaggerating) of beating my head against a wall I’m giving up for the night. I’m talking about right now having eighteen tabs open in Firefox, dealing with the OS and the card and who knows how many tabs I’ve closed trying to narrow the issue down, so you can’t say that I haven’t RTFM. I have, indeed, RTFM. Several times. I DID manage to finally get the OS to recognize the thing, so there’s that.

I’m sure most people are familiar with iwconfig, lsmod, modprobe, wpasupplicant, lshw, iwlist, ifconfig, lspci, dhclient, and the like so you know what I’m talking about. Yep, Linux is definitely not just for geeks anymore…

Consoles

drew — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 07:58:54 +0000

My Playstation is the original. So original it was just a Playstation, not a “PS One” or whatever the kids call them now. My Playstation is a second-generation model though. The cd drive was relocated to fix some technical difficulties that the first generation suffered from. Let this be a lesson to never buy the first generation of anything. Regardless, the thing is old. Oh yeah, it’s also “chipped.” See, a buddy and I went in halves for the thing because it was something like three hundred bucks. The games were expensive also and we only had a couple. I got tired of playing Tekken 3 all the time so I took the unit (without first consulting my buddy) to a sketchy alley in Garden Grove and had a guy install a chip to break the copy protection on it. This made it possible to not only play games from other regions (Japan, etc.) but to play copies of games as well. Took the thing home and it wouldn’t boot. Crap. Said buddy was a bit peeved thinking he had just wasted 150 bucks. Took the unit back to sketchy alley and had another chip put in. Tested unit before leaving and all was good. It still runs like a doped-up racehorse and although I never got my original discs back from various buddies I do still have my backups that work perfectly. So I think it would be hard to get rid of this beast if only for the historical value of it, most consoles these days aren’t so easily hacked and extended.

I also have a Nintendo 64. Picked this up for the sole reason of finishing Mario 64, a game that a roommate had and I’d started playing. Picked up Mario Kart along the way and that’s all the games I have for it. I’ve beaten Mario 64 a few times now and I’m not sure if I’ll actually play it anymore. Mario Kart is still fun for me but the real fun of it comes when there are a bunch of drunk people playing together. I rarely have drunk people over at my house these days so I’ll probably never again experience the laughter and good times a real Mario Kart tournament provides. Still, MK is like an old friend to me and I’m not sure I can kick it to the curb just yet.

There’s also the Atari 2600. Took me forever to locate the right kind of RF adapter to be able to plug it in to a modern television. I’ve played this thing maybe twice in the past year. It sits over in the corner like an old grandfather, dusty and waiting to be thrown away with the rats. One of the controllers has a sticky button so it’s kind of useless but the other works just fine. I have plenty of games for it as well:

So you see, there’s sort of a commitment to the Atari even though it will probably not be played again. Just knowing that I have all those game waiting to be played gives me more comfort than actually playing them.

My last console probably shouldn’t be called a console because it’s a handheld. The Nintendo Gameboy Color. Don’t know whatever happened to my original pea-green screen Gameboy but I have this color one now. It’s purple. Shut up, I like purple. Got a few games for it, the best of which are Bionic Commando and Bomber Man. I picked this up years ago because I wanted something to entertain me for the long Greyhound ride I was going to be taking. Nowdays I would of course fly but back then flying was a luxury that only Sultans and televangelists could afford. This thing runs for a shockingly long time on batteries and has a pretty good screen, although that seems to have dimmed a bit over the years. What I like about this guy is all of the third-party peripherals that were made for the little, I dunno, usb-like connector. The most useful add-on is probably the light but even that is sort of janky. I still pack this thing sometimes for traveling but I never use it and it will probably sit in the hall cabinet until the archaeologists dig it up one day.

As far as modern consoles, well, I don’t find them that interesting. Maybe because they’re so expensive and proprietary. The Wii being the exception for me. Man, that thing is friggin awesome. I have been coveting one lately but I think I’ll hold off pulling the trigger for a couple of years because there’s a NES out there somewhere, bundled with The Adventure of Link, and I have a game to finish.

Thanks Netflix

drew — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:58:37 +0000

So I uh, got a little steamed at Netflix for wanting to improve their service by doing away with profiles. I may have sent them some words to that effect. Instead of pointing fingers though the important thing is that profiles are going to stay. Yay us.

Some things I’ve learned

drew — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:50:47 +0000

There’s no real point to this post. I was basically sitting around warming my thumb and had the urge to type a little bit. For the sake of brevity I have not included everything I’ve learned, I sort of went with the very first things off the top of my head.

Things people have taught me:

Things i’ve taught myself:

Things i’ve been taught but never learned:

Browser dork

drew — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 07:32:54 +0000

Firefox 3 beta 4 is rawkin. Get it in yer preferred language at the download page.

I’ve wrestled with many browsers on my iBook G4 and this version of Firefox is the best yet. It’s very fast and I can open 15-20 tabs without a slowdown or crash. I may be able to open more tabs but so far I haven’t needed to.

The UI seems very Mac-ish and the address bar seems to have gotten smarter. Two thumbs up in Zorro fashion.

spambino

drew — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 09:52:34 +0000

According to Akismet, over 82 thousand spam comments have been caught for me since installing the software on my site. That’s a lot of spam. I’m a small site with a following of one (1), that one being Me, so I can’t imagine what real sites go through to eliminate the spam and promote the ham.

Spam-bashing aside, the following spamment (? has that been used before?? if not, it’s mine. if so, cool yo, I dig yer style) appeared in my queue and it made me laugh:

“Frankly, the way things are right now, I’m not sure I’d want to play myself in my very own movie of the week.”

Hol.ey.Crap. Same here brotha.

Fieldy

drew — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 14:34:06 +0000

When I was around 11 or 12 years of age I couldn’t get enough Garfield. That cat was witty and irreverent and had the same outlook on life that I did. He hated Mondays and I hated Mondays. He liked lasagna and I liked lasagna. He was a badass.

I was being home-schooled at the time of my Garfield infatuation and Fridays were my favorite school day by far. Friday was library day. Dropped off at the Thousand Oaks Public Library in the morning and picked up in the late afternoon. It was glorious. I could sit and read piles of Garfield for hours without interruption.

And then I grew up. I stopped liking Garfield. He just wasn’t funny anymore. In fact, I couldn’t figure out what I ever liked about Garfield. Garfield was stupid. The internet came along, like it does, and solved that problem. Check out Garfield Minus Garfield. Wow, creepy.

Forty

drew — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 08:49:05 +0000

Gary Coleman is forty years old. Born in ‘68. Yep. Yesterday, February 8, Gary Coleman turned forty-fucking-years-old.

Jesus, he’s not that much older than I am. I am so fucked. He doesn’t look a day over fifteen and I don’t look a day younger than fifty. A pair of the Gary’s pants hang on the set of Jimmy Kimmel’s show. The last place I saw my pants? Spinning at sixty-seven revolutions per minute in a dryer at some public clothes-washing place. On “low” because heat shrinks jeans. And you can only throw them in the dryer for about ten minutes before it’s time to take them out and hang them on a wire. Sixty-seven RPM’s? Yes, I counted.

Adult life is very different than what I imagined when I was seven.

We’ll miss you Brian McElhatton

drew — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 19:35:56 +0000

Brian passed away after battling brain cancer (the same thing that killed my dad) for the past year and a half. He was reserved yet hilarious, often delivering one-liners with such a straight face that you didn’t know he was kidding around with you. Brian was the type of guy that didn’t take shit from anybody and he feared nothing.

I feel very fortunate to have known Brian. He invited me into his home on several occasions, where BBQ and beer would flow with a never-ending supply. My fondest memories though will be sitting with him in his poker room after the BBQs had winded down, with 5 or 6 of his other friends. We’d shoot the shit and have drinks and play poker for hours on end.

My thoughts go out to Meghan, Elvis, Julie, and everyone else affected by this lousy situation.

You can read a little about Brian over at the SFGate site.

Like Bob Dylan said, Just remember that death is not the end.