What does it all mean?

What do the following have in common:
Edward Furlong
Apollonia
Peter O'Toole
Wes Craven
Colin Davis

Our birthday is today.

But it doesn't seem to be that much different than other days. Same spin class, watching TV in the basement, etc. Lame, I know.

Geek blitz.

FCC Surfing. Go to their search page and type in a company's name in "Applicant Name." For example, typing in "Sony Ericsson" shows the July 28th submission of their new phone 226. The interface is kinda ugly, but when you can come up with gems in the rough like this, it is pretty cool. In a geeky way.

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Jahnke sent this link about a PS2 cluster to me. Very schweet. Casey, just think of the gaming you could do! (wipe the drool off now)

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I am planning out my HDTV set up this winter. The critical piece will be HDTV TiVo. Then I will go whole hog, but there are all sorts of interesting gadgets to think about like turning my Mac into an HDTV recorder. (And to think, this is a sample app as part of the SDK)

With my new setup, I am thinking about going with a silent-pc that will have a digital video output so I can start playing HDTV off of computer files. [The recent edition of Terminator 2 has an Windows Media 9 HDTV (I would post links to the video clips so you can download for yourself, but Microsoft's site is down. D'Oh!) encoding in it; people share HDTV captures of programs like 24 ]

But I want to have an easy way to do it without too much trouble, and thus waiting for the HDTV TiVo. Oh yeah, and I need to save up some money too.

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I have decided to wait on the whole cell phone issue. I can hobble through with my v60. I want to dump AT&T wireless, but the cancellation fee is $175. The contract expires in Jan of 04, and I am hoping hoping hoping that the sexy, cool, Sony Ericsson P810 or 900 (that has a pretty good camera) is out by then. The extra cool thing is that there is an app that converts video so that you can play it on your phone -- with the new Sony Memory sticks coming in at up to 1 gb, this looks like a pretty cool distraction.

3000 down, 6000 to go.

Computers. Can't live with 'em, can't live without.

M. put all of his ripped MP3s on our server. That drive took a critical hardware failure. All music gone.

So in response, I rebuilt a new server, put in two new 160 gb drives, in RAID 1 (which means that if one drive fails there will be a completely mirrored back up of the same drive). That does nothing except help prevent the same disaster from happening again (and this time I will see to it that his music is also backed up).

M. took this opportunity to also get me to update all my music genres. If you aren't familiar with the intracasies of MP3s, there are ID3 tags which have all sorts of cool information like Title, Track Number, Disc Number, and other cool information. You can also classify your music: Vocal, Jazz, Electronic, etc. But that means that in order to make things consistent (so when M. says Enya is Vocal, I also put my music of hers in Vocal, not New Age where I had her) but also so when he selects Rock, he doesn't get my electronica (which happens now).

So I have been going through all my music. Which, if played end to end, would take over 29 days. I don't have to listen to it but it is a mentally tedious job. Pet Shop Boys: Pop, Retro, Electronic, or Alternative Pop? Depeche Mode: their early stuff is very clearly electronic, but their laterstuff isn't quite as blippy. U2: Rock or Alternative Rock? That Enya remix isn't Vocal anymore but is it Dance, Club or Electronica?

Any given song is not that difficult, but to get your entire music library consistent is a much harder challenge than I thought. I have much more respect for the shelvers at Virgin Mega Store now.

I am a flying buttress

Well, sorta.
The thing I remember about flying buttresses are that gravity plays an important role in keeping them together. Gravity pulls the buildings together so they can build higher. Counter-intuitive at first, but my college course in physics taught me something about force vectors makes it seem not so odd.

Working out is my gravity. When I was in Colorado, I did some exercise (like renting a Fuji Dual Suspension Mountain bike) but it seems that I fall apart unless I rigorously workout and stretch. By the end of the trip, my knees ached, I screwed up my right shoulder to the point that I woke up in the middle of the night to pop more ibuprofin. So sad actually.

In a weird way, I am glad. I know that working out will be the best I can possibly feel. My pops diabetes isn't that threatening anymore, because I know I will always be working out for the rest of my life. It is a sentence, but it confirms that working out is good for me.