The three of you who’ve stuck with me through my slow blogging period are probably noticing that the rate is starting to pick up.  I’m getting the itch to start blogging a lot more, so hopefully the pipeline won’t be quite as empty as it has been.

Tom’s Hardware has a very interesting article up about Microsoft’s recent decision to adopt HD DVD rather than Blu Ray.

 

I have kind of ignored the whole debate, but recently it has become clear that Blu Ray is truly dedicated to controlling content even more than DVD’s do today and to the complete exclusion of consumers interests.  For example, if a Blu Ray key is cracked so that a disc could be copied and played "illegally" (whatever that means in the world of Blu Ray), another disc released at a later date can update the key list to make that (bad) disc no longer play.  Yeah, you know what?  I don’t care for that.  I used to buy all my DVD’s (over 300 to date) and now I use Netflix,  but I’m not planning on letting *that* backdoor into my systems, even if I have to do without disc based movies.

 

There is an implicit contract between consumers of entertainment and the providers of it.  While some consumers have run off the rails "stealing" music, the providers are really going too far.  The next few years are going to be both fascinating and ugly.  The providers will inevitably lose the arms race with the ‘hackers’, but while they are fighting it, we consumers are going to have to deal with all sorts of stupidity and collateral damage.

 

Who is representing us?  Funny, based on the article above, it looks like Microsoft might be, at least a bit…

<EDIT>

Also see http://spaces.msn.com/members/kurtsh/Blog/cns!1px8gpfDYUj-F6GWlnyWRh1g!617.entry.

I woke up at about 2:45 this morning, and I haven’t been able to get back to sleep.  There are thunderstorms rolling through, which initially woke me up, but it gets much more complicated than that.

 

I recently returned from the Microsoft PDC (Professional Developers Conference) in Los Angeles.  After coming back from there, my sleep patterns have been a mess.  Before last night, I didn’t get to bed until 2am.  So last night I was asleep by about 9pm.  So far, so good.

 

However, also last night, we had our carpets cleaned.  While I was at work my girlfriend moved all the stuff in the house (relax, it’s a small house, and not much stuff) into various hidey holes so that it wouldn’t be on the carpet.  It will take another day or so before the carpets are really dry enough to move everything back to where it belongs.

 

Well, as it turns out, when I went to go take a shower at 3:15 this morning, I couldn’t make it to the shower without removing at least three chairs, one game table thingy and an ottoman from the main bathroom.  Not a big deal, but impossible to do without waking her up.  I then thought about just going to work without a shower (ugh), but then I figured out that I can’t make it to the closet either to get to a clean set of clothes.  Then I thought about just going into work in last nights clothes (it just keeps getting better, doesn’t it?), and remembered that we had dinner at Gators, our local dive bar in Wheeling, and my clothes smell like smoke – so no wearing those – I hate the smell of cigarrette smoke.

 

So here I sit, on the couch with the laptop on my, uh, lap, unable to sleep, shower or get dressed.  The alarm will go off at 5am, but until then, I guess I have to just wait. 

 

Today is going to suck.

http://www.angelflightamerica.org

Flying your own airplane for this sort of thing incurs a lot of costs beyond fuel.  By contributing to Angel Flight America, you can at least help them with their fuel costs.  They are still spending a lot of money (and their time naturally) shuttling food and supplies to the effected areas.

 

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The only thing their privacy policy does is tell you that you have none, and your information is as good as sold to the nearest spammer.

 

Nice safe neighborhood we have here on the Internet, eh?