College life can drain 
the TV out of you. Well, it did out of me anyway, one of those monthly bills I neatly trimmed from my expenses in favor of traveling the cybertubes. Even now, I don’t think teevee is cost effective unless I have a lot of shows I want to watch, at my pace. (i.e., TiVo) It is nice, though, that more and more of those shows are available online.
Nonetheless, I miss that pleasantness of nothingness which comes from channel surfing, the same way one endures a favorite song on the radio, despite having played it to death on one’s iPod for two weeks straight. Nowadays, though, the only time I have access to cable television is when I’m at Sui’s (the programming tends to be Chinese-family-friendly), or when I travel, either on the plane or in the hotel room.
I had posted previously about that XBox 360 racing wheel I bought on a whim, and as fate would have it I needed a game to actually make use of the wheel, a game in the form of Forza Motorsport 2.
As I was messing around with the game tonight (my 450HP heavily modified Mazda Roadster is quite serious about outracing a Ferrari Enzo in all its hilarity), I found that the game has a fairly robust Photo mode which lets you take and tweak pictures of the game as you’re driving.
A few minutes of play produced these results; as you can see I got progressively better at it:
Just a quickie entry before I dive into the happy world of tax forms and W-2 crunching. This is a pretty good documentary on the state of credit cards in America and how the words “credit card nation” mean what they do today.
Frontline: Secret History of the Credit Card
It’s quite educational, and in this corporate-run-amok world of credit debt and revolving interest, it certainly pays to keep informed.
DRM is a pain in the ass; it’s that thing Microsoft and Apple and most hardware/software vendors are using to make sure their precious music and videos aren’t stolen and copied around in the computer age, and it works on the virtue of making everything non-DRM hard to do.
I don’t mind it so much on an intellectual rights protection level – people should be compensated for their work, and if you want to get around it you work harder – but it sucks on an implementation level. It has already been talked to death all over the web, but in summary: DRM lets hardware vendors force new hardware on consumers (stuff that’s “DRM compliant”, whereas old hardware conveniently isn’t), forces consumers to purchase the same work multiple times on multiple platforms, and can affect the quality of your system depending on how aggressive the vendor is pursuing protection (from Microsoft’s “check 30 times a second” DVD playback to Sony’s hidden rootkit…).
Just passing along the good news here. Looks like Berkeley’s experiment last semester with opening webcasts to the general public worked well for them, and they’re going to continue the free online lectures at http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php. On one hand this is a great refresher on material that’s a good 4-5 years old (for some of us anyway), an opportunity to check out a world-class university, or simply receive some high quality education; on the other hand, it feels more and more like the $8,000/year that students now pay in tuition is really for that nice piece of paper at the end.
Oh, and the lectures are, for some unfathomable reason, in Realplayer format. Since Realplayer is known to be cancerous and detrimental to your computer’s health, check out players like Real Player Alternative for your playback needs.
I just spent 3+ hours reorganizing my MP3 collection; it’s one of those things I like to do every few months to keep everything in order, and I think I’m already pretty anal with the metainfo tagging and filenames (I basically go through and tag all my files in a temporary folder before I officially add them to “the collection). I’d like to think Apple’s announcement of their iPhone prompted me to relook at my music, but admittedly it’s the looming Econ. paper that’s making me do stuff I wanted to get done…three months ago.
Incidentally, I’ve discovered that the MP3 player QCD (), now defunct and no longer in development, is a nice tool for retagging MP3′s and setting rules for filename formats (mine is simply [artist] – [title].mp3). Nothing irks me more than some funky Bach ~ (Allegro in g MINOR) ~ BWV1053 ~ [ripped by CDRipper] metainfo tagging mess.
