blog.erik.rainey.name

I got my Dell 2005FPW monitor in over the long weekend and I am gratified with it. It might not have the casing of the Apple Cinema Display but at half of the price tag (and I got it off Dell for nearly 40% off that price) it's probably the best money for an LCD I've spent. I would have monitored switched this with my game machine, an AMD64 3200 powered yellow monster, but the aspect ratio is not what most games use, so it would look odd. Although windowed games like Guild Wars would look really tight, since you can dynamically resize the window. This is not true for most games. Scott also turned me onto Sherlock, a understated little Mac OSX app that basically conglomerates many web services into a single, consistent interface which is highly integrated with the System. See Scott's glowing reviews for more details.

Behold my glorious new work space! Kneel before it's mighty 3 displays of ultimate power! Seriously though, I brought in an old LCD that I had laying around unused, and an old video card, a Matrox Mystique.
This is much like my old setup at Motorola where I had 2 CRT's in a multihead setup. As they laid people off I got more and better monitors. Eventually I had 3 monitors tied to a single machine. It was pure gluttony. I loved it. My desk though was completely crowd and my productivity plummeted and the office closed. :(

Oh, Dual Head, how I pine for thee. Let me count the ways...

1. Oh how you make coding easy... editor on the one, spec on the other.
2. Multi-page document view is divine.
3. 4+ terminal windows open at once, all visible, all spewing debug.
4. Dozens of IM sessions... wait, that's counter-productive.
5. Countless efficiency improvements over alt-tab.
6. Combine with Virtual Desktops for Super-OK Mutliplier! Pow!
7. The ladies really dig it....so i hear.

I just got my Verve Remixed 1 & 2 CD's in the mail today. Quite nice. I highly recommend them. It's a fusion of jazz/soul/electronica, but good. You can pick them up off Amazon.

Scott and I went to Tower Record on Friday to browse the CD collection. Now normally I would finish that statement with a glib remark or a jab at archaic business models but I found out something that I didn't know about. Dual Discs. Scott pointed them out to when he picked up the new Bens Fold CD, Songs for Silverman, which features the CD on one side (which may not play on all CD/CDROMs) and a DVD on the other side, which featured the enitre album in 5.1 sound along with a video! Now I like to think of myself as current in the scene but this caught me off guard. How did I miss something this startling in the CD store business? I mean, it's not like I read the trade journals or keep up with whatever the most recent vomit band out of LA is but I should have seen, no known that they were going to do this. It's quite a neat concept and a great way to keep me going back to the place that I thought was headed for the crapper, a retail store... that is, until amazon carries these. Also, I picked up a copy of Verve Remixes 3 which I really dug while listening to it at a listening station. We couldn't find the volumes 2 and 1 at the store, so of course I checked on line. Amazon carries both. We'll one less of each now :). Basically, the album is a series of old Verve label recordings by what would be considered "classical" (read 50's/60's/70's) artists which have been remixed by modern DJ's to be phat. While not fresh, per se they are still funky.

So it's time to pimp out the Mini and convert it to a full time machine. To do this I have purchased a wireless keyboard (Apple brand), a D-Link Bluetooth USB Adapter, and wireless mouse (logitech; I require more than 1 butan). I am comtemplating buying a new internal disc and as well as more memory and an external disc upon which my Media may be backed up.

I just have to say, Guild Wars looks really tight on my system. Full screen, 2x anti-aliased creamy goodness. I'd add some "color" to that statement but my mom might read this. :)

Just arrived back from my trip to the ATL from a party for my bud Justin who just graduated with a degree in Business from Georgia State. Congrats JDizzle! After being told about the lack of a monthly fee in Guild Wars, I went to CompUSA and picked up a copy, along with some wireless stuff I've been meaning to get for the Mac Mini. Oh, and welcome Scott into the fold of recent Mac Converts. I can't say that I'm responsible for it, but I'll take the credit.

Well I returned that expensive Terk HDTV antenna about 2 weeks ago. I just couldn't justify the price ($162 after taxes) for an antenna that could only pickup 2 or 3 stations of varyingly marginal signal strength which are only 20-30 miles away when a $20 antenna works just as well. Suprisingly the $20 dollar antenna is getting different channels, which I suppose may not suprise an Electrical Engineer with any antenna theory under their belt but it seemed odd to me that a standard rabbit ears and loop antenna could out-do a highly directional Terk HDTV antenna (which I assume has some sort of phased array configuration) on the second floor of an apartment 20-30 miles from the tower in an area which gets lots of ghosting and signal reflection. I guess the cheaper model can't pickup the lower power ghosts and as such has an effective "ghetto-filter" at work. I managed to get ALSA working with the AC'97 chip and outputting over Tosklink SPD/IF on the motherboard after figdetting with the alsa-mixer and alsa config files. The ATI Remote works as well, though I don't like the feel of the buttons. The only remaining thing left is the LCDproc integrated VFD driver (I have the standalone working) and the IR remote that came with the case. Oh, and MythTV. That thing still doesn't work, though I haven't messed with it much since I only get 2 HD channels in my apartment right now; CBS and PBS. I also haven't had success getting my brand new HITACHI 42HDT51 Plasma 16:9 HDTV (which I got on a really good sale at Circuit City) to output over the IEEE1394 firewire port in order to get DTV recording on the Mac Mini I have. The manual is very terse and uninformative on the operation of the IEEE1394 port and it's intricacies. Quite disappointing.

It seems that my kernel problems have not really been problems that are significant enough to stop me from receiving HD signal. I'm currently able to use the tools provided at pcHDTV.com to scan and get signal strength readings from the Terk HDTV antenna I got. The only problem is that I'm only picking up Univision (hablo Espanol?) and some "God" channel doing revivals. The picture looks great but I don't watch that sort of content. So, I'm kinda glad that I haven't sunk money into a HDTV yet.