Curses! New Shuttle XPC is Dead on Arrival

I’ve been waiting to build a “super computer” for months, and now that I finally had enough parts to get started, when I put it all together into the ultra-sweet chassis of the Shuttle SD39P2 XPC…the damn thing wouldn’t boot! I had a kick-ass Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme X6800 running at 2.96 Ghz (courtesy of Intel Canada), 4 GB of 800mhz RAM (courtesy of Kingston), 1150 GB of storage (courtesy of Western Digital) – what I didn’t have was an optical drive since Plextor said they’d send me a Blu-Ray burner but never did, and I never did end up sending that email to ATI asking for a card…

At any rate, I cannibalized a few parts from another PC and put it all in the SD39P2. I felt a rush of excitement booting up such a powerful machine, pressed the power button, and nothing happened. @&*$%&^@#!! I spent the next couple of hours trouble shooting it, swapping out the RAM and video card, all with no positive results. @&*$%&^@#!! Then I got in my car and spent 90 minutes driving to and from Memory Express, having bought a ghetto 2.8 Ghz Celeron CPU ($60!) just for testing purposes (I didn’t have a spare Socket 775 CPU sitting around). It was a grim scenario: either the $1300 CPU from Intel was bad, or the Shuttle motherboard was bad…both scenarios sucked for me. Turns out the new CPU didn’t change anything, so it looks like the Shuttle XPC is bad. Damn. Damn. Damn. They’re sending me a new one and I’ll send this one back. That’s going to take at least a week though, meaning this project is on hold.

I guess on the bright side though by the time the new Shuttle arrives I’ll have the new video card I ordered and the new optical drive as well. I just hope that XFX video card fits in the XPC (gulp).

Every time I build a computer and it doesn’t go quite right, I think to myself “Jason, just go buy a Dell…” – but once I fight my way through the problems and I end up with a sweet-ass rig, I know it was worth the effort. I really hope this is one of those scenarios…

Scientists Identify Dinosaur Proteins

“In a retrieval once thought unattainable, scientists have recovered and identified proteins in a bone of a well-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex that lived, died and was fossilized 68 million years ago. The scientists say the success, attained with advanced research techniques, opens the door for the first time to exploration of the molecular-level relationships of ancient, extinct animals, instead of just relying on their skeletal remains. Dinosaur fossil hunters are planning nine expeditions this summer to search wide and deep for more specimens as promising candidates for similar tests. A few large dinosaur bones already in laboratories might be examined for surviving traces of organic matter.”
– International Herald Tribune

Jurassic Park here we come! You guys go first though, ok? I’ll take the second helicopter over. No, really.

The Jump Cut Comes Back With a Vengeance

I’m not a professional video guy, but I’ve done enough video work over the years to pick up some of the basics. One guideline in shooting video, and subsequently editing it, is that shooting the same scene back with cuts is a visually jarring experience for the viewer because the head (and sometimes body) of the person jumps from one place to another with each cut. Anyone remember Max Hedroom? What’s interesting to me is how the emergence of sites like YouTube have taken jump cuts to a whole new level – and in the case of comedy or a monologue written in a broken up style, it actually works quite well. Here’s a great example of what I’m talking about…

Advertising 101: Make Sure It’s Your Domain

I was watching a UFC show called “All Access” the other day – it’s a behind the scenes show that covers how UFC fighters train – and I noticed that the show had “Blue Chip” branding all over it.  I didn’t know what Blue Chip was, but later in the show they showed an URL for Blue Chip, evidently a sports collectible company.

ufc-all-access-blue-chip.JPG

Now here’s the funny part: www.bluechip.com loads a empty Web page related to something called the “Telamon Project Tracking System”. There’s no mention of Blue Chip anywhere. A first I thought I had made a typo in the URL, but that wasn’t the case. Next I thought “Ok, maybe it’s .net or something else” but a Google search for Blue Chip Sports failed to turn up any likely candidate that would have sponsored this UFC TV show. Was this some sort of typo in the domain? Or did BlueChip.com at one point have a sports collectible store, but they went out of business before the UFC show aired? Did they also have zero Google juice? That’s a bit hard to believe unless they started up this company last month.

At any rate, the lesson here is clear: if you’re going to sponsor a TV show, make sure they get your domain right, and that your company will last long enough to see some benefits from it.

There Are Bad Ideas, Then There Are B*A*D Ideas

karaoke-tunes.JPG

That’s a banner in a booth I saw at CTIA 2007. So the idea here is that you use their software client to sing along with Karaoke tune, then whenever your phone rings you get to hear yourself singing. I’m a vocalist myself, so I have a bit of a narcissistic streak when it comes to hearing what my own singing voice sounds like, but this is completely ridiculous. And sharing it with others? “Hey, here’s a ring tone for you – what it is? Why, it’s yours truly singing Bootylicious…no, wait, why are you walking away?”. Some business plans deserve to fail.

It’s Just One of Those Days

Upgrading WordPress is a Pain in the Ass: I just finished updating WordPress from 2.1.1 to 2.1.3, and for this particular version they strongly suggested that people delete most of the WordPress files and re-upload them from scratch. What a slow, frustrating process that was – I can’t believe that with all the users WordPress has, they wouldn’t have come up with a smoother, more automated process by now. I’m keeping my eye on Habari to see if it evolves into a smarter solution.

Someone Hacked My Church’s Web Site: What kind of a degenerate hacks a church Web site? Evidently a degenerate that lives in Turkey. He got in through a Joomla exploit and didn’t seem to do much damage other than putting up a “You’ve been hacked” front page display. Thanks to Jorj and Janak, who did the investigating, it seems that only that one account was compromised and everything else on the server is ok. Yet I still remain a big nervous because you just never know…

Buy a Fresh, Whole Rabbit from Amazon.com

I don’t know if this is an April Fool’s joke or what, but my sick and twisted sense of humour found the “buyer” reviews to be extremely amusing. Here are some of the more amusing ones (thanks to Todd for the heads up).

“A lot of my friends like to shop online, so I added this to my baby registry. My best friend received one at her shower and she loves it! So when I got TWO at my shower, it wasn’t the disaster other duplicate gifts can be! My little girl is now three months old and we are still getting a lot of use out of the Fresh Whole Rabbits.”

“Thought it would make a cute Easter gift, no one else thought so, kids are in counselling now. Apparently I’m the only one with a sense of humor in this family. At least it’s a hit with the dog, one extra star for that. I’m way too scared to even try to take it away from him, he loves it so much. ‘Heh, OK SirFluffles,’ I say to him, ‘it’s YOUR fresh whole rabbit.'”

“How many weekends have I spent, in the loincloth, knife clenched in my teeth, running through the fields trying to find a rabbit? (A bunch, trust me on this, a bunch.) All so I can have something to sacrifice on the altar once I get to the cave. Now, with this, home, fix a cocktail, go through the day’s mail, finish my drink and drive over to the cave, yank this carcass out of the box and offer this at the feet of my dark lord and master, boom, done. I’m happy, my dark lord and master is happy, everybody wins. What a time saver.”

Gears of War Quandry: Surely This Can’t Be Right?

I picked up Gears of War a couple of months ago, but have only recently started to start playing it more seriously. Some friends were over a few weeks ago and we played in co-op mode for a bit, and got to a certain checkpoint. Then this last Saturday I fired it up again to play with a buddy of mine who’s in Ontario. I wanted to start over a new game from scratch with him, but I also wanted to keep my previously saved game. The game wouldn’t let me do that – it said that if wanted to start a new campaign I would lose my previous campaign and checkpoints. That can’t be right – am I missing something? How do you play a solo game and also do online campaigning with your friends? Or what if you have more than one group of friends you want to play with?

Video Woes & Wishing For More Laptop Firepower

I took a several videos today at CTIA, all of Windows Mobile applications being demoed. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but in hindsight I really didn’t have the right hardware or software to get the job done properly. I thought that YouTube was limited to videos 10 minutes long, but they also have a 100 MB file size limit. My Canon SD800 doesn’t have any sort of video compression beyond basic MJPEG, so the file sizes are huge. An 8 minute 44 second video clip at 320 x 240 resolution weighs in at 325 MB. That means I’m having to compress them to get the file size under 100 MB before I can upload the videos to have YouTube compress them all over again. It’s not like you can see the double-compression though with the crappy bitrates YouTube uses.

Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but my Fujitsu P7010D doesn’t have the graphics power to run Windows Movie Maker (which is incredibly stupid that it requires hardware acceleration and won’t run at all), and I didn’t install Premiere Elements before leaving, so I was left without any ability to edit video files. I tried Movavi, but it turned out to be highly problematic – it locked up on me several times, complained about missing codecs even when Windows Media Player could play back the file without trouble, and generally wouldn’t do a damn thing properly. I really wanted to like Movavi – it seems to have a great set of features, but I’ve tried it on two PCs now (one Vista, one XP Pro) and it was unstable and dysfunctional at editing video, splitting video, and ripping a DVD. Next I installed Nero 7 because I happened to already have the 175 MB “upgrade” downloaded – it’s ridiculous how Nero releases a trial version of the entire suite as an upgrade for customers, but in this case it happened to be helpful to me. A quick phone call to Ashley got me the serial number I needed. I installed it and rebooted, but bizarrely enough Nero Vision (the video editing application) won’t work with the Canon AVI files properly – when I add one to the timeline it only recognizes the first ten seconds. No errors, it just won’t work properly.

I started to get a bit desperate at this point, so I did a search for a freeware video editing application and tried AviTricks. I didn’t work and puked on codec errors. At this point I was loudly cursing Canon for making their video format so difficult to deal with. As a last-ditch effort, I tried the crusty old Windows Media Encoder 9, and it actually worked! The problem is this 1.2 Ghz Pentium M CPU is exactly made for fast video encoding – it’s taking me forever to encode each clip, especially when I encode a file only to discover it ends up being more than 100 MB in size.

I actually spent some time researching what laptops a local Best Buy here had because I was convinced I’d need a new laptop in order to get all this video transcoding finished before I left Orlando – selecting a new laptop is a topic for another post though, because it’s proving to be a frustrating trying to find the right one. At any rate, the closest Best Buy was out of stock on all six of the HP laptops I was looking at. What are the odds? 🙁 The nearest Circuit City only had one HP laptop, not the one I wanted, and no one at the store would pick up the phone. I gave up and decided to rough it with my little Fujitsu, and while it’s slow, I’m getting the videos transcoded and uploaded. Back to the grind…