I found out about these hilarious short clips edited together from episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Did I mention they are hilarious?

Watch them all here.

Comments

I found out about this neat website called Wordle that will make a word cloud for you based on content from your website. This the one for my site:

I guess I talk about albums a lot. I'll make another one in a year and see what it looks like then.

Comments

Keith pointed out to me today that my last few posts on Twitter have been nothing but complaints about Microsoft products. It started off with a red-ringed Xbox, followed up shortly by disappointment resulting from an upgrade to MSN messenger (it is really ugly, please don't upgrade). I've complained heavily about my Zune before, but my frustration with their software resurfaces whenever I try to sync a large amount of songs. To my surprise, my complaint about the Zune software on Twitter today was somehow received automatically by the ZuneFAQ Twitter account. It was surprsing because requests to any kind of Microsoft support system usually result in a series of automated replies. The last one I recieved denied support to me because it somehow assumed I lived in the UK, where Zunes are not sold. I think the guy (or gal) behind the ZuneFAQ twitter account expected me to reply with a fairly trivial support problem, because after replying with 4 major flaws that I've found in the Zune software, I did not receive a single reply in return. Nice.

In the past, I've attempted to register my Zune online in order to request it be sent in to fix a battery problem, but I was unable, due to a horribly broken request form. It asked me to fill in my name and address, but the address fields were both disabled and required. Submitting the form just brought me back to the same page, telling me that I needed to fill out the entire form. Maybe if you would let me, I would. I ran into a similar problem when I tried to register my recently broken Xbox online to see if it was still eligible for warranty. I went to the registration page where I was told to fill out a form, but there was no form. Just a header saying "Register Your Console" and a blank page. I guess they figure the harder they make it for customers to request repairs, the less they'll have to spend fixing their own mistakes.

Microsoft, if you are reading this, I am going to pirate Windows 7 just like I pirated Windows XP and Windows Vista. I am going to pirate it and send it to my friends so they can use it for free, too. You don't deserve my money.

Comments

I read an article today in one of my feeds about a new material developed that will bring "printable circuitry" closer to a reality. In a nutshell, printable circuitry means you could literally print out circuits using some kind of magical "circuit printer", resulting in much smaller electronics. The advantages of this would be that Apple can now make the iPhone even smaller and more expensive.

Anyway the point of me writing about this is how most of the article went entirely over my head. Here are a few quotes from the intro paragraphs:

The n-type semiconducting polymers have proven to be one of the biggest challenges, and some have raised the prospect that matching current p-type polymer performance wasn't even possible due to the nature of how polymer bonding influences the formation of electron holes and free electrons. A new paper, however, describes an n-type polymer with excellent electrical and processing characteristics and its use to form fully functional polymer transistors, produced entirely by printing.

Okay.

The polymer being used is the dauntingly-named poly{[N,N9-bis(2-octyldodecyl)-naphthalene-1,4,5,8-bis(dicarboximide)-2,6-diyl]-alt-5,59-(2,29-bithiophene)}, which, naturally, one gets from reacting N,N9-dialkyl-2,6-dibromonaphthalene-1,4,5,8-bis(dicarboximide) with 5,59-bis(trimethylstannyl)-2,29-dithiophene.

Naturally.

I am glad there are people out there who figure this stuff out and can understand it, because I don't.

Comments

I remember my brother and I downloading the Quake 3 Arena demo in 1999. It was a whopping 80 MB, and took a total of 3 days to finish on our family's dial-up connection. We had to pause the download when we went to bed at night, and continued it in the morning, but it was worth it. That was the largest single thing that I had ever downloaded on dial-up. It felt like such an achievement. Today, though, I was presented with an even greater challenge.

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails was unable to release an official DVD of their previous tour due to a disagreement with his former record label, so he decided to put the raw high-definition footage from three separate shows online for free. The only problem is that the entire package is just over 400 GB. I really have no actual need for 400 GB of uncut concert footage, but the obsessed, OCD driven fan inside of me demands that I am able to see it all. This may be the single largest thing that I've ever attempted to download, or ever will download in the near future. Given the 60 GB/month bandwidth cap that Shaw enforces on my current internet subscription, I'll have to split the download into monthly intervals. Best case scenario, it won't be until July that I am able to say I downloaded something that was 400 GB. I don't even have more than 150 GB of free hard drive space right now, but with the incredibly low prices on hard drives these days, I think I'll be able to afford to upgrade within the next 7 months.

Wish me luck.

Comments