cygweb

I posted an entry a few weeks back about Phil Mickelson picking the Bills to go to the Super Bowl this season. Well, he's been joined by Peter King. The link is to King's latest MMQB column. Check it out.

Just received this email from Rush.com:

It's official! The much-anticipated "Rush in Rio" live double-DVD and triple-CD set release is slated for Tuesday, October 21. This is the band's first DVD and contains footage from the Vapor Trails tour filmed in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The DVD set contains many special features and a behind-the-scenes documentary of the band shot in Brazil by Andrew MacNaughtan.

Also, the triple-CD set has two "official bootleg tracks" not available on the DVD.

OK, I promise, no more posts about the release date. Unless it changes. ;)

The EFF have published a form letter template that Linux users can use to communicate to their US Senators and Representative that SCO's threat to sue individual Linux users if they do not purchase SCO's Linux licenses is an abuse of the law. It asks them to urge the respective chambers' Commerce Committees to hold SCO accountable for this activity. I've used the form; will you?

I was all set to post a rant about our local ABC affiliate not broadcasting digitally yet on the eve of the opening of the regular season on Thursday. Then I read this thread on AVSForum. It cites an apparently legit press release from Comcast that states that they will carry the MNF games in HD for their HD customers. I'm waiting for more details. If this is true, it will do a lot to make up for WHTM's slowness in rolling out DTV.

Update: According to Ken H over at AVSForum, Comcast's carriage of any ABC HD programming, including MNF, is subject to the local ABC affiliate's DTV broadcasting status. This is the normal state of affairs; however, the press release didn't address the local carriage issue at all. I can only assume Comcast intended to deceive current and potential customers. This is pretty sleazy of Comcast. (A comment I've already shared in the AVSForum thread.)

Further in the AVSForum thread, a member living in Atlanta commented on how their ABC affiliate is broadcasting digitally but Comcast doesn't carry the station. So the implicit claim of universal ABC HD carriage contingent upon the local affiliate's DTV status is also bogus.

My Yahoo! Fantasy Football league draft was last night. Unfortunately, I was slated to pick 10th out of 10 teams. Good thing it was a snake draft! When I found that I was picking so late, I decided to shift my priorities. Instead of drafting RBs first, I picked (IMHO) the best WR and QB available with my consecutive first- and second-round picks. I even picked another top WR before getting my first RB in the fourth round. Here is my team, in the order they were drafted:

• WR Marvin Harrison
• QB Donovan McNabb (if he has a bad year, it will hurt me in both leagues)
• WR Plaxico Burress
• RB Eddie George
• QB Aaron Brooks
• RB Amos Zereoue
• WR Donte' Stallworth
• TE Shannon Sharpe (I can't believe he was still available)
• DT Baltimore
• K David Akers (ditto)
• WR Chris Chambers
• RB T.J. Duckett
• DT Jacksonville
• TE Michael Ricks (I ran out of time trying to find a TE and he was autopicked)
• K John Hall

Man, I've been ready for the regular season to start for weeks now. I think tonight's game will be good. I'm rooting for Vinny & The Jets.

My weekly Yahoo! Pro Pick'Em picks can be found here.

I heard this on NPR's Marketplace on the way in to work today and it was covered on Slashdot as well. Universal is saying that their suggested retail prices (SRPs) on single-CD albums will be reduced from as high as $18.98 to an average of $12.98. This is what the music distribution industry has needed to do for at least 3 years. I really don't know how much effect this will have on retailers who already sell CD's at aggressive prices (Amazon, Best Buy, Target, etc.) because the article has no info as to how much wholesale prices are going down. I suspect wholesale prices are going down by $1-$1.50 and this is a way for UMG (ed. from "UMD") to tell the more "boutique" retailers to cut their margins. I don't know about you, but I've never been tempted to buy a CD from a place like Borders, who apparently prices all their CDs at MSRP.

I'll believe things have changed when I can find new releases for $10 or less.

Update: A Wired article on the subject purports that UMG's average wholesale price is going from $12.02 to $9.09. So perhaps we will see CDs for $10 or less soon.

I've just activated a few changes to the look and content of the site. The new navbar is the result of some CSS research I've done, and I grabbed some inspiration from the method that Mark Pilgrim used to make his navbar. Thanks Mark! I've also begun to use MT's Template Modules to compartmentalize redundant code. They aren't used in the default MT sites.

I'll be adding some more pages in the next few weeks; when they're ready, they'll show up in the navbar. Please let me know if you find that anything's broken.

I'm watching the OAK-TEN game right now and I'm surprised the Raiders only have only mustered one field goal. I guess it's hard to sustain offense when so many penalties are being called. C'mon Garner! Hey, he just got a TD! It looks even better in HD; thank goodness Comcast added ESPN-HD on when they did.

The only game I really watched on TV today was the BAL-PIT one. What a show by the Steelers. I think they are going to be a real force this year. Maddox, Burress, and Ward were spectacular, and Zereoue had a decent day as well.

I watched the other 1PM games using Yahoo's excellent scoreboard; it lets you focus on a game's box score & stats while the other games are listed on the right. And it defaults to refreshing every 30 seconds. One game I kept my eye on was the HOU-MIA game - I can't believe the Texans won. About half of us playing in RotoGuru's Survival Football group were eliminated because we picked Miami this week. UGH.

Da Bills kicked ass today, what more is there to say? I think the free agent additions to the defense are going to help the Bills go far this year. I won't predict how far they'll go until I see a few more games.

I'm predicting a Philly win tomorrow night; I'll need McNabb to have a good night to help me in both my FF leagues.

Update: RotoGuru launched a second Survival Football group for those of us that got bitten by the Houston win. (Including himself!) Thanks, Guru.

Last night's stuffing of the Eagles didn't help me in my fantasy leagues, but I went 1-1. In the NSN FFL, Cyg's Calorie Outlets defeated the Nite Wolf Order. In my Yahoo! league, the PA Thunderbolts were soundly trounced by You Know It. I think McNabb will bounce back against the Pats next week, but I'm considering starting Aaron Brooks against Houston in my Yahoo! league. Opinions welcome.

I picked horribly this week. Less than .500 on Yahoo! Pro Pick'Em and -96 in RotoGuru's Football Pickoff. I'm glad the first week of the regular season is done - it will definitely help in assessing this week's games. And I'm definitely going to be more careful with my next Survival Football pick.

Sighted on Slashdot: When I read this article, I almost thought it was from The Onion. Then I remembered that it's about the RIAA. The RIAA's current legal tactics seen akin to a blindfolded guy with an Uzi trying to shoot a target.

Favorite quote: "We don't have any personal information on any of the individuals [we're suing]." - RIAA spokeswoman Amy Weiss

Update: The RIAA has settled with the girl mentioned in the article for $2000. What a load of crap.

After last week, it's extremely hard to make final decisions for FF and picks this week. I'm currently picking PIT, SF, NYJ, and SD to upset this week (at least against the latest Vegas lines); I'm tempted to pick TEN over IND, though. I think NO will have a bigger week against the HOU defense than PHI will have against the NE defense, but I also think PHI will rebound from last week's loss and win over the home fans. Decisions, decisions.

My elimination pick this week is definitely OAK at home over CIN. No contest. I want to see Garner rack up about 200 rushing yards on the Bungles...

We're having a few friends over to watch the PHI-NE game - it's CBS's HD game of the week. Hope it's a good one!

The "Rush In Rio" audio CD has been available for preorder on Amazon for a while, but now they've finally added the DVD. Items for both a regular and "jewel case" edition are out there; I assume the regular version comes in the normal DVD keepcase. If you're considering preordering the item, could you please do so through the links below? Thanks!

Rush In Rio DVD
Rush In Rio DVD (jewel case edition)

The word just came out today. The new Dream Theater CD is entitled Train Of Thought and will hit stores Tuesday, November 11th! Here's the official release from DreamTheater.net.

Update (16-Sep-2003): Amazon has the CD available for preorder, but incorrectly lists a release date of November 14th. What the heck, here's a link to it:

Dream Theater - "Train of Thought"

I don't think this is a double CD release, so I wouldn't preorder it until Amazon drops their price a bit. (It's currently listed at $18.98.)

I'm going to go ahead and post about yesterday's games since tonight's game doesn't have an impact on either of my fantasy games. I'll probably watch some of it, but I'm not much of a fan of either NYG or DAL.

I'm disappointed in the Eagles and Donovan McNabb. Even if they didn't have a bye next week, I would be benching McNabb in both my fantasy leagues. I was very close to starting Aaron Brooks in my Yahoo! league and if I had, I would have won the game. Next time I'll go with my instincts. Those same instincts are telling me that the Eagles will be 0-3 after their Week 4 game up in Buffalo. Luckily, McNabb's poor performance didn't hurt me in my NSN FFL game; I squeaked that one out, mainly due to luck.

The Steelers' loss yesterday seems to me to be due to poor special teams play. I was hoping they'd come out strong in the second half, but it didn't happen. Also, I'm amazed that offensive coordinators still call for so many on-the-sideline catches in the endzone (in reference to Burress' juggling act that was ruled a non-catch). Judging posession is subjective enough these days, even with the tool of replay, that I wouldn't want to take that chance.

Luckily the Bills played strong in Jacksonville and wrapped that game up before the 4th quarter. The play of Travis Henry and Eric Moulds really helped my NSN FFL team. I was proud to be wearing my Bledsoe jersey yesterday!

Games that surprised me:

• WAS may be the best of the middle of the pack after showing their stuff on the road yesterday.
• I really thought the Jets were going to pull it out yesterday. It looked like Ricky Williams poured it on and led MIA to the win.
• CAR beating TB - there's a reason those two defenses have been ranked so high. They're both really good.
• I also thought SD was going to beat DEN yesterday. I think they're going to have a tough ride in their division this year.

Overall, the favorites have won handily this week; only ATL, TB, and PHI were favored and lost. I'm still about .500 on my picks - maybe the Giants will get a win tonight and help me out there.

Author Orson Scott Card has weighed in on the topic of file sharing. He spells out the hypocrisy of the RIAA and MPAA's (ab)use of copyright laws using sound logic and examples. The more people that read this, the better.

Props to Slashdot for the pointer.

Update (23-Sep-2003): Part Two is online.

My wife and I watched Simon Cowell's Cupid on CBS this summer and I was pleasantly surprised at last night's finale. The premise of the show was for the bouncy-walking Lisa Shannon to select 10 bachelors through auditions (with the help of two of her friends) and then have public voting determine who stays on the show, based on televised capsules of the dates Lisa had with the guys. The gimmick was that if Lisa and the winner agreed to wed on the show's finale and remained married for a year, they would win $1 million.

The winner, Hank, was Lisa's favorite and shocked producers (and I gather many viewers, this one included) by asking her to marry him in a private ceremony instead of last night's show. She agreed and they forfeit the prize. That was a class act.

Back in April I said I was working on remastering Rush's Presto album. I've been meaning to get back to that project, and finally had a chance to do so yesterday. I'm currently auditioning my second full attempt on a few sources before declaring the project "done". By no means am I a mastering engineer, but I think the album sounds much better and meshes better sonically with the official Rush remasters and their new CDs.

Once I'm happy with the results, I'll post the recipe I used. I've used only Sound Forge and its included plugins to do the job.

Back from a weekend trip in the Cleveland area to visit my sister and her husband. One of the highlights of the weekend was going to the local Six Flags amusement park; we arrived just before it opened at noon and were able to ride most of the rides without a wait.

Tropical Storm Isabel came crashing into the area Thursday evening with high winds and showers. Winds gusted at up to 50MPH at one point, I believe. It was noisy when we went to bed, but we managed to get to sleep. However, at about 2AM it was so noisy that we were woken up and couldn't get back to sleep for at least an hour. I was sure that there would be at least some external damage to the house, but it doesn't appear that was the case. There's a lot of downed tree limbs and leaves in our yard that still need to be cleaned up. We planted some new fir trees on Tuesday and they held up OK (they're staked).

Isabel is definitely the strongest storm I've experience since moving to this area.

I found out from a buddy that Fuel is doing an in-store appearance at our local Best Buy tomorrow to promote the release of Natural Selection. I confirmed this on FuelWeb; they're actually appearing in stores in several cities the next few days. My family and I are planning to go check it out; I just hope it's not mobbed beyond belief. I don't listen to the local radio stations much, so I have no idea how heavily it's been promoted.

Ever notice how time flies when you don't need it? I've been needing time all week, both at work and at home. We're just about done prepping our basement for the new carpet install tomorrow. It's not much fun stuffing everything in your basement into a quarter of it. Luckily we've been pacing the moving so that there's just a few things left to do tonight. At work I've been building new servers, and now we have a data recovery job that will take weeks to do with the current request. Restoring entire server backups of tens of gigabytes to grab a few hundred megabytes of data is not terribly efficient.

I neglected to post about NFL Week 3; suffice it to say the Bills let me down. I have mixed feelings about the PHI-BUF game this week since I'd like McNabb to bounce back from his slump. I did get 10 out of 14 picks correct in Week 3, though, so there's some hope that my average will rebound.

Courtesy of K5: I'm a big fan of streaming music; WCYG is my streaming station and when it's online you can hear what I like to listen to. An article on a project called iRATE radio interested me. It's a cool implementation of targeted streaming.

Our basement got its new carpeting yesterday, and I was able to move my stuff back into its more cozy home today. I keep most of my tech toys (including this server) down there, as well as my bass gear. It's going to be a lot more habitable this winter since we insulated its exposed wall and had it drywalled earlier this summer. I actually had times last winter where the server wouldn't power back up after losing power because it was so cold. That shouldn't happen this winter.

I'll try to get the Presto article up soon. I need to finalize my SF plugin settings and take a few screenshots so it will be pretty.

Hoping to watch some good football tomorrow - I think we're getting the NE-WAS game in HD here. I won't know until kickoff. I may watch the IND-NWO game tomorow night, since it'll be the last full Sunday Night Game I get before the TV will be required to be tuned to Alias at 9 on Sundays. ;)

Update: I spoke too soon. The Alias premiere is tonight... ;)

Rush.com has published the cities where local Regal Theaters will be showing Rush In Rio starting October 21. Harrisburg isn't one of them, but it looks like a trip down to the Baltimore area might be a possibility. I think I'll be impressed enough by the DVD itself to avoid the 3-4 hours of driving required to see it in a theater.

One thing that I'm hoping the theater exhibition doesn't mean is that the DVD will be 24p and not 30i. I prefer live video vs. film for watching live music. A Show Of Hands holds up well as film, but does anyone remember the 12 fps nightmare that was Operation: Livecrime? I remember the video looking so jerky that it distracted me from the music. Good thing they included the CD in the boxed set. O:L is the only Queensryche title that I've ever resold.

I had a much better week in fantasy football than the previous three. Cyg's Calorie Outlets squeaked out a win over the Hanover Hellions in the NSN FFL, and the PA Thunderbolts won their first game of the season in my Yahoo! league. I picked 9 of 14 winners this week.

Those 1PM Sunday games were a wild bunch. I thought Philly would play tough against Buffalo, but I didn't think the Bills' offense would do so poorly against the Eagles' defense. I think Travis Henry was sorely missed. Minnesota is the real deal. Pittsburgh is having offensive problems similar to the Bills, but Maddox's two interceptions (and the ensuing returns) really lifted the Titans.