cygweb

I like Arnold, but didn't like his speech last night. Turned it off after the "Arnold... I'll be back" quote. We'll always have T2...

Found out the hard way that photo-quality PNGs seem to be at least 10 times larger than equivalent JPGs. Graphics with a low color range seem to be about the same size.

One more week till the NFL season starts! And we got our ABC and Fox HD stations on cable today...

Two more days until we go to see Hailey. I'll be sure to share some pics.

MT 3.1 is out and I will probably upgrade in short order; perhaps tomorrow night.

Even with the ability to burn 4+ GBs of data onto a DVD-R, I'm finding it hard to sort out and archive data. It's almost like a part-time job.

Well, Deion is going to play nickel back with the Ravens. I don't expect him to still play like "Prime Time", but if he is looking good I'll call him "Rerun". ;) (Darn, when I wrote that I thought it might be original but I guess not.)

A new venture I've been working on will be revealed shortly. I think Don's the only one who knows what it is.

Good night, you princes of Maine, you kings of New England...

Mark Cuban has been interviewed over at PC World.

One nugget that I didn't know yet is that The Benefactor was produced in HD, which would make it the first reality show that's been done for.

I'm digging what FactCheck.org is writing. It helps put many of the claims and accusations of the collective presidential campaigning in perspective.

I urge you to check it out if you're planning on voting. And I urge you to vote if you're not planning on voting. I chose not to exercise my right to vote (or take much interest in politics) until I was 30, but looking back, I don't recommend doing that.

This site is now running MT 3.1, which was released on Tuesday. The upgrade process was painless.

Now that I have this running, I plan to implement Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist 2.0 and remove the mandatory Typekey registration I have in place. Hopefully that will continue to keep the site comment-spam-free.

We're in Cleveland visiting with Hailey & her parents & grandparents. What a cutie.

The top headline of The Plain Dealer's Sports section today:

They're not running on empty
Jackson, Brown among Browns' surprise survivors

I didn't watch many preseason games, so some of the cuts around the league surprised me. The Packers cut Tim Couch. The Bills cut Jason Gildon. And the release of Morten Andersen may trigger some minor fantasy waiver-wire activity.

Three more days...

I've created a "Fantasy Football" rightblock that summarizes my various NFL-related frivolity. Can't wait for Thursday.

Via Kicking Ass: Cheney Warns Against Vote for Kerry

"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States," Cheney told about 350 supporters at a town-hall meeting in this Iowa city.

Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards issued a statement, saying, "Dick Cheney's scare tactics crossed the line today, showing once again that he and George Bush will do anything and say anything to save their jobs. Protecting America from vicious terrorists is not a Democratic or Republican issue and Dick Cheney and George Bush should know that."

I guess attempting to use psychological terror to influence voters is OK these days. Sorry, I'm not buying it.

This tip just gave me back about 15-30 seconds of each work day. Thanks to John for the tip.

The referenced "Optional" folder is nearly empty by default, with only a readme.txt that declares:

Put unused plug-ins in the optional directory.

:)

I'm looking forward to the release of the SW trilogy - I'll be ordering my copy soon. There's an excellently detailed review of the set over at The Digital Bits.

I'm enjoying the game so far, but I have to say I'm surprised at the number of video and audio burps I'm seeing on WHTM-DT. They've been averaging one every minute or two; it's funny that the glitches don't seem to occur during commercials. ;)

I'm assuming the master ABC feed is without most of these problems based on this thread over on at AVSForum. I assume the fact that WHTM just brought up the digital station a few weeks ago might have something to do with it. Also, I'm not sure there are a lot of people watching it yet. Mark said he saw some breaking up on Drew Carey last night, and he's getting the station over an antenna (I'm watching it on Comcast). I don't see anything that makes me think it's our gear that's having problems.

Go Colts!

I've installed MT-Blacklist 2.01b (the one in the MT Plugin Pack). It integrates very nicely with the MT Admin interface and is much easier to use than the previous version I used on MT 2.xx. I've turned unregistered comments back on and we'll see how it goes. I've been getting a lot of Trackback spam lately and I'm hoping the plugin will help with that as well as it handles comment spam.

Thanks to Jay Allen for the plugin.

I didn't get much of a chance to watch the 1PM TB-WAS game on TV, but the part of it I saw on WPMT-DT looked nice. There were a few video and audio burps, but by about the second quarter of NYG-PHI game it seemed like many of the kinks were out. I liked the PQ of the PHI game better than the WAS game.

Watching ESPN's NFL PrimeTime in HD was great. ESPN's presentation was glitch-free and included HD clips of the games that were available in HD. Over 70% of the games this year are going to be covered in HD; the investment has paid off! The KC-DEN game looks great so far - although it looks like the officiating may be interesting.

Now, about the games - I picked a lot of the Vegas favorites (which I mostly agreed with). I was most surprised by the Browns' and Lions' victories. This is shaping up to be a great football season.

Shatner Beams Up Emmy

I'm looking forward to seeing if the upcoming Boston Legal series will be as entertaining as it's "preview" during the final season of The Practice.

I've just upgraded to the new Firefox release - grab it over at Mozilla.org. The most noticable thing so far (besides some component compatibility issues) is the display of an "RSS" button on the right of the status bar when the browser detects feed-related metadata on a page. Apparently, at least Atom, RSS1, and RSS2 feeds are supported, as that's what I'm seeing options for when I navigate to my home page. You can then select to subscribe to a particular feed by clicking on the RSS button. The bookmark for the feed is a folder of links to the feed's entries. Pretty cool stuff.

Update: Ross just posted an entry that points to a webpage that references the feed support I was describing, and he expounds upon the support that the new Thunderbird 0.8 has for feeds as well. Good show.

Contrary to what may be popular belief, I do work for a living. I haven't blogged much about work in the past, but when I have to really dig to find some nugget of info or experiment to find something out, I figure publishing the info might be useful in the future. (At least, to me. ;) ) That's why I'm posting this.

We've been using VMware GSX Server on two relatively large development/test systems for almost two years. We just bought an HP Proliant DL585 (the demo Opteron server I blogged about previously) to run VMware's ESX Server product. While I'm waiting for the additional hardware I need to productionize the server for ESX, I've installed the software to play with it. One of the things we're going to want to do with it is move some of our existing virutal machines (VMs) from our GSX servers to our ESX server. However, after I looked at the fine print, I found it wasn't going to be so easy.

Update (28-Jun-2006): In preparing for our implementation of ESX Server 3, I've been in the VMware Knowledge Base quite a bit. It looks like they've documented an IDE->SCSI virtual disk conversion process that obviates the need for these procedures.

We're finally taking the covers off our new venture, Manolas Handmade Soaps. My wife, Melissa, has put a lot of time and effort into crafting a large variety of soaps, as well as body scrubs and sachets, and I'm very glad she's gotten it to the point where she's ready to sell her product publicly.

We officially started public sale yesterday, when we participated in the Great Road Festival in Camp Hill. The remnants of Hurricane Ivan didn't help with our setup; we learned quite a few things about the logistics of selling crafts outdoors, I can assure you. ;) But we did well for our first show.

I'm the technical side of the business, handling website design and chores, and helping with document design and printing issues. We're currently making and packaging all the products at home. I'm also helpful when it comes to moving boxes around and setting up the tent when we're setting up outdoors. Melissa makes the products, but it has truly been a team effort getting them ready for this.

Please feel free to spread the word to anyone you think might be interested in purchasing some quality handmade soaps. Products can be ordered through our website and are shipped via Priority Mail.

Thanks!

We're taking our last vacation of the summer (or first vacation of the fall?) right now; we're heading to Disney World tomorrow and spending the week there. It should make a great (albeit late) fifth anniversary gift for my wife and I. (To ourselves, of course. ;) ) This site and ICYG are on autopilot for a while. See ya next week.

I've been reading FactCheck.org more lately to see how they digest the recent attack ads. They've pretty thoroughly picked apart the latest attempt by the Bush campaign to label Kerry as an indecisive "flip-flopper" on Iraq. Recommended reading, as it puts the quotes played in the ad in their original contexts.

I don't like the negative campaigning on either side, nor do I like hearing about either candidate's Vietnam-related history. I want to learn more about how invading Iraq has produced progress against those who would terror us. I also want to learn how tax cuts, rising defecits, and billions for Iraq is going to help us. Doubt I'll hear much on those things.

Getting us into a war as misguided as this one appears to me is enough of a reason for me to vote against Bush. Misguiding ads like this one certainly don't make me think the president's trustworthy.

What do you think?

There's been some buzz about Flickr, so I decided to check it out and uploaded a few photos from our Disney trip. If you think you'd like to sign up and check it out, please give me a chance to invite you to the service - they track referrals.

Stories interesting me today:

• Lawrence Lessig: Our Kids Are In Big Trouble
• Patriots Say They're Focused On Bills
• William Shatner "Punks" Iowa Town
• Fox Orders Pilot Starring Barenaked Ladies

In honor of tomorrow's debate I was going to try to publish a drinking game for it, but after a search I found this one to be adequately entertaining.

Thanks to some of my family and friends accepting my Flickr invites yesterday, my account was upgraded to a pro one for three months. I'll continue to test the service and post about my experience. I'll also try to integrate some of their features into this site.