I love watching ALL the events – Downhill skiing, X-Country skiing, bobsledding, luge, hockey, speed skating, even curling. Truthfully, I could probably do without most of the figure skating. Apparently I’m the only one – because if the past several Olympics are any indicator, we won’t see hardly any of that. We’ll get a tightly packaged bundle from 8-11 PM that has about 1 hour of competition, 1 hour of athlete biographies and human interest stories, and 1 hour of advertisements.
Want to see curling? Unless the US makes the Gold Medal round – no way in hell. Want to see bobsledding? Unless Michael Jordan decides to make a debut as a pusher, you’ve got as much chance as seeing Michael Moore fitting into Michelle Kwan’s fluffy pink tutu. Likewise the Biathalon – apparently that’s more boring than NASCAR – so they won’t show it either. Actually – the Biathalon is better than NASCAR – it’s going in a circle repeatedly AND shooting. (side note: they should add shooting to NASCAR).
Assuming your event is actually covered – like the Men’s Giant Slalom – you’ll see the top two US athletes, plus whoever won the gold and silver (if it wasn’t the US athletes). I like watching Bode Miller quite a bit – but dammit, I actually do want to see who he beat!
This point was driven home four years ago during the Salt Lake City Olympics. I went skiing in Whistler (that’s Canada, FYI) during the Olympics. I saw coverage from 9 AM until Midnight – with literally every event being shown start to finish. I became the hugest curling fan – because all the nutty Canucks went CRAZY over it – unbeknownst to me. When I got back home – *poof* – back to the 8-11PM “Friends” treatment. Why can’t we get good coverage like the Canadians do?
Only two weeks to wait until my 8-11 timeslot gets eaten up – and I’ll love every minute of it. Well, except the ads, the bios, and the figure skating.
I caught this last night on Digg.com and it absolutely amazed me. Apparently the frequency of the number ’1′ can be used with great reliability to detect fraud, embezzlers, tax evaders, sloppy accountants, and much more.
It’s all based around the fact that many things really aren’t random. The late Dr. Frank Benford noticed that books full of logarithms were a lot more worn on the pages that started with 1. According to Dr. Benford’s research:
In a huge assortment of number sequences — random samples from a day’s stock quotations, a tournament’s tennis scores, the numbers on the front page of The New York Times, the populations of towns, electricity bills in the Solomon Islands, the molecular weights of compounds the half-lives of radioactive atoms and much more — this is not so.
Given a string of at least four numbers sampled from one or more of these sets of data, the chance that the first digit will be 1 is not one in nine, as many people would imagine; according to Benford’s Law, it is 30.1 percent, or nearly one in three. The chance that the first number in the string will be 2 is only 17.6 percent, and the probabilities that successive numbers will be the first digit decline smoothly up to 9, which has only a 4.6 percent chance.
It’s a good read.. and with tax season coming up, it might be very useful information.
(reprinted from the Ganssle Report)
10. There are at least 10 types of capacitors.
9. Theory tells you how a circuit works, not why it does not work.
8. Not everything works according to the specs in the databook.
7. Anything practical you learn will be obsolete before you use it,
except the complex math, which you will never use.
6. Always try to fix the hardware with software.
5. Engineering is like having an 8 a.m. class and a late afternoon lab
every day for the rest of your life.
4. Overtime pay? What overtime pay?
3. Managers, not engineers, rule the world.
2. If you like junk food, caffeine and all-nighters, go into software.
1. Dilbert is not a comic strip, it’s a documentary.
It appears that TiVO will soon release ‘undelete’ functionality as part of a system software upgrade. This has been a much asked for feature by TiVO users for a very long time. Technically, it’s really simple – it just needed menu support.
The funny part is that what started as a serious technical post turned into the user community shredding the poor guy about his viewing tastes. His screen shot of recorded shows listed such manly classics as “Ellen, Beaches, Passions, Beverly Hills 90210″ and so forth. The forum is really funny with everybody commenting on his need for a taste transplant and how he shouldn’t be allowed to have an undelete with such bad taste.
Check it out here:
Of course, I’ll get none of this on my DirecTivo.. *sigh*
I’ve always wondered what the heck Chuck Norris would actually say if he saw the list of Chuck Norris Facts. Well, apparently he has..
IN RESPONSE TO THE “RANDOM FACTS” THAT ARE BEING GENERATED ON THE INTERNETI’m aware of the made up declarations about me that have recently begun to appear on the Internet and in emails as “Chuck Norris facts.” I’ve seen some of them. Some are funny. Some are pretty far out. Being more a student of the Wild West than the wild world of the Internet, I’m not quite sure what to make of it. It’s quite surprising. I do know that boys will be boys, and I neither take offense nor take these things too seriously. Who knows, maybe these made up one-liners will prompt young people to seek out the real facts as found in my recent autobiographical book, “Against All Odds?” They may even be interested enough to check out my novels set in the Old West, “The Justice Riders,” released this month. I’m very proud of these literary efforts.~ Chuck Norris
Apparently there’s some guy named Luecke near Austin, TX that decided to plant his name in trees. This is apparently big enough that it can be read from space and is used by NASA to calibrate imaging.
I’m thinking that T3SK3Y would look just as good.. hmm..
I really don’t like little scheduled appointments. I hate having to get my hair cut – it usually wait until it turns into something strikingly like – well, strikingly like the Bedhead collection from last April. I also really hate car service appointments – they always say that it’ll take an hour, it never does. I end up sitting in the dingy little waiting room, bored out of my mind, sucking down a pack of Starbursts, reading a well-thumbed copy of “Car and Driver”, shoving golf tees into my navel, throwing my legs behind my head and scraping the back of my thighs with a cheese grater.. well.. you get the idea.
That was before I discovered that there was a better waiting room.
One that had pinball – Lord of the Rings, Medieval Madness, Elvis and the Simpsons Pinball Party (really!)
One that had food – Pizza, Buffalo Wings, Burgers and Fries, etc.
and..
One that had BEER.
For the first time ever, I was sad when they called to tell me that my 4Runner was done with the oil change. *sigh*.
I might get my oil changed monthly now – come hell or high water.
(Note: The dealer in question is Rudy Luther’s Bloomington Toyota – I’ll let you figure out where the Waiting Room of the Gods is)
I just had the fun of reviving an interesting bit of computer history – with good results. I ‘inherited’ a very well used Silicon Graphics Workstation 320 – a very non-standard PC that was used in the late 90′s for high-end graphics work. They were used for Video editing, photo editing and for CAD applications. Our office had one for years – until the power supply on the flatscreen went out.
The 320 is a strange bird – for starters, there is no BIOS. Therefore, normal PC operating systems don’t work on it unless support is specially written. Thankfully, Microsoft fully supported the 320 in Windows 2000. No such luck in XP, however. Linux is also a no-go.. it’ll boot the kernel and will access the memory and hard drive – but there is no support for the Cobalt graphics system or the audio system.
Since it was used for multimedia work, the 320 has full video in/out capability – with the ability to capture Quicktime videos supported in hardware. It will also output to s-video and the wide flat screen simultaneously – also very cool.
The 320 is a multiprocessor machine as well – it’ll support up to dual 1GHz Pentium IIIs. This unit came with a lone 450 Mhz Pentium II and a surprising 512MB of RAM. It uses a single ATA33 10GB hard drive and slow CD-ROM drive.
After a little creative eBay searching and about $20, I had a new power supply and the SGI 320 was live. Now, it was time to do something about the anemic speed. With a P2/450 – I was only able to real-time capture 320×240. A little more eBaying got me a Powerleap Slotket adapter with a 1.4Ghz Celeron – all for about $70. This processor dropped right in place of the Pentium II and delivered a 4x performance boost.
I tried getting a Promise Ultra100 card to work to deliver better drive performance – but no dice. The 320 only allows 3.3v PCI – and it apparently doesn’t like the Ultra100. The odd part is that a CD-ROM drive works perfectly – and you can even see a hard drive but can’t format or use it. I finally gave up and attached an old Maxtor 20GB drive directly to the 320′s ATA33 controller.
The results? The systems now benchmarks favorably against low-end Pentium IVs. It’s able to capture video at 720×480 (D1 resolution) without a hiccup. It’s also able to run the Battlefield 1942 server at a solid 50FPS (not sure if it can do it at the same time – and I suspect not).
My plan is to use it as a media center in my game room. It’ll attach to the stereo and serve content. It’ll also capture video and re-broadcast it using VLC.
Does anybody else have good ideas for it? Drop me a line with your ideas..
The geniuses at Trojan Condoms have created a very nifty little applet called “The Trojan Organ” – no double meanings there, I’m sure. It allows you to generate “music” appropriate for the type of activities that Trojan is known for. *nudge*nudge*wink*wink*
If you come up with anything good.. mail it on over!
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