I was told to relay to potential dragoncon travelers that I-40 is backed up to the airport.

About a month ago a door to door att dsl salesperson hinted to me that Uverse might be coming soon to Raleigh. Of course the local people are really only guessing from what I have heard.

What I do know is the upload limit on TWC's premium service is really pathetic especially given all the technology companies in RTP. I've been reading up on the municipal FTTH project in Wilson city. They can get 20Mbps symmetric for the same price as TWC's 10M/512K.

This got me thinking once again on how difficult and expensive small scale neighborhood FTTH or 802.11n might cost. I found a link for verizon wholesale prices of around 6k a month for a 10Gbps(OC-192) fiber connection. At $40 per household, that is about 68Mbps symmetric with no contention. Of course this is a very naive figure, as I am sure there are other costs, + a huge install costs of setting up runs to individual homes or wifi towers, and customer support, etc.

Does anyone have a vague idea of what real word Sonet costs are as well as the equipment to interface with it?

Current Mood: curious

AC is broke, service people are backed up, and it is damn hot. Not so fun for me and Jules, kinda dangerous for an infant. Rather than spend 100-200 dollars for a wall unit we will hardly ever use, I spent 40 dollars (including ice) at home depot and made this stopgap till ac is repaired.


http://flickr.com/photos/ashutcheson/2553960649/</img>

Nothing like a cup o shotgun waved at your face to wake you up in the morning. Better than coffee! Apparently my neighbors chased off a small gang of teenagers who were casing my joint. The cops decided to give me a curtosity wake up. I wanted to hit snooze, but I think that button was broken. One ten year old had a prior weapons charge ... but nothing stolen that is obvious, and no one hurt. I'm thinking that webcam baby monitor, not such a bad idea ;) Though I kinda wish they had stolen soemthing(preferably cheap) ... would make it easier for charges to stick.

Does anyone have a firm grasp on the current state of directx9 emulation on linux? How compatible is it with new games releases? Is it a case of most recent releases are supported, hey! I can play quake!

I have projector envy no longer! I have my first ever projector, and a 720p model at that. Come help break it in next Friday, March 30th. We will be grilling around 6ish and showing Buckaroo Banzai around 8ish(or sunset). There will be some limited couchlike seating outside, but you are welcome to bring your own blankets/lawnchairs. And unlike the art museum, you are encouraged to bring wine.

I would very much like to make this a regular event. If this interests you, feel free to suggest movies you would like to see on the big screen.




Buckaroo IMDB link -> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086856/

anyone have some advice, preferably from past exp. on how to shop for an injury lawyer? this is my
first time needing one.

ouch

Once again I find myself ripping a cd collection for a friend. Having done this with about a 1000 cd collection years ago (several times actually), I'm come to appreciate how much of a pain in the arse it is, and how poor ripping techniques and bad metadata come to bite you back on the arse. Given my recent purchase of a monster SCSI raid server, I've decided to build several scsi CD towers(on the cheap ala ebay) to increase throughput and possibly write a few scripts to automate the various tools used in the process. The hope is to have it mostly automated and the ability to rip say 14-20 cd's at once as fast as the raid can keep up (say maybe 50-100MB/sec).


Before I embark on this, anyone(who has delved deeply into this) care to offer feedback on my process? My primary goal is first and foremost, no compromise clean rips and metadata, then
how well it can be automated. EAC is pretty much a given. Its horribly slow in secure mode, but it does the most accurate rips by far form what I've seen. The rest I'm not as sure on, but it has worked for me in previous ripping sessions.

Steps:

1) use EAC to rip to wav+cue sheet - I don't like freeCDDB servers, thus I don't want to uses EAC's built encoders. I've felt that the quality of metadata on freeCDDB to be quite poor/inconsistent.

2) Using DaemonTools, mount wav+cuesheet as virtual cdrom drive.

3) Rip/Encode virtual cdrom drive in itunes. - For being free, I've found the Gracenote DB that Itunes uses to have quite clean (not sure if I would say perfect) metadata. Now here I have the option to encode to Aiff or Apple Lossless. Both support tagging, though I'm not entirely sure Aiff supports as rich tagging. Both can be converted to FLAC if needed via dbPowerAmp, but I'm not entirely comfortable/sure that the free Apple Lossless codec does it's job correctly, and thus the reason for considering Aiff.

4) load encoded files into Tag&Rename (free app) to search amazon for artwork and embed artwork into tags + save to album directory. http://www.softpointer.com/



EAC - http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
DaemonTools - http://www.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/announcements.php
Tag&Rename - http://www.softpointer.com/
dbPowerAmp - http://www.dbpoweramp.com/




On another note, I'm curious how well this process compares with professional ripping service. I've once before toyed with the idea of attempting to commercialize with such a setup, at least on a small scale to pay for/ offset equipment costs (not that much). But I have no clue of the quality of rips+metadata the professional services offer. My guess is that the metadata
might be quite good, but the quality of their audio rips might not be. EAC can make good copies of some badly scratched CD's they might reject or rip with errors. However, it can be really really slow, (i.e. upto several hours if the CD is really bad) and I suspect professional services might not be willing to devote that much bandwidth to a single CD.

As of 2pm today, the first and only car I have ever owned has now been sold. To quote Dickens, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"... I will always miss her and think of her fondly, but it was best for the both of us that she found a new home.

Current Mood: nostalgic

Thanks to chuck and his knack to find good deals, I'll soon be the proud owner of a IBM x350 quad xeon(p3 700mhz 2MB cache) file server with 6 scsi hotswap bays, and all the hotswap/redundant goodness one could want, hell the 64bit 66mhz PCI slots are hotswap even. But wait there's more! As a bonus for calling right now, I'm getting a Compaq 14-bay hotswap SCSI 320 raid enclosure with 13 x 36gig SCSI 320 10k drives. How much you ask? all for a measly $575. Ebay all the drives and replace with 181Gb ($75) ones, and I'll have god's own ( or at least a minor deity's) 3TB Enterprise class media server! That is of course if my startup doesn't talk me out of it... Hmm I will have to find some way to acoustically shield it. I suspect 22 x 10k SCSI drives + fans are going to make an awful racket.

I don't know if a wake has been discussed, but the first thing that came to my mind was that Sean would appreciate a DJ send off. If there is any intrest in this, I would be happy to do what I could to help organize. I was thinking maybe at Kulture, since I saw him last Sunday there, but I dunno. Any thoughts?


*update* I just talked with Josh, apparently there is already some talk about this, I'll pass along info as soon as I get it.

*update* I heard from Carol Pierce that they were planning such an event to help pay for funeral costs. She should be at rose garden tommorrow, so you might want to ask her there.

Current Mood: melancholy

I was playing around with bootcamp for some .net dev, and got really irritated at having to be in windows all the time. So I downloaded Parallels which is virtualization software that utilizes the new Intel VT tech. It's fast. Real Fast. I love it. It lived up to it claim of running at 90+% native speed. That's awesome. Looks like the only reason to use bootcamp is for Windows only games :P I can live with rebooting only for that. I hope that new GB stick of ram gets here really soon.

Hurrah! Soon I will be a happy owner of a sexy new 20" intel iMac for below student discount price! Potentially might be doing some .Net development(but secretly wanted an intel mac anyhow). Now I just need to sell my powerbook. No sleep till I have it dual booting OS X, and XP. Linux triple boot wouldn't suck either. Anyone know if thats doable?

sorry about spelling/grammar, brain functions sub-optimal after unloading said 760 lbs of ginger ale

So I spent the better part of today on a pilgrimage to Pedroland, er um I mean the Blenheim factory located next to/on South of the Border. The I95 traffic was insane as usual. I passed this a truck w/ trailer hauling a john deer industrial mower. It had rocky and bullwinkle plush dolls strapped to the mower's steering column. It made me smile. The Honda Civic(know better as Balrog) struggled with the burden of 760 lbs of Ginger Ale nirvana, but made it home without incident. So for all you Blenheim fans, there current exists 20 cases (15 hot, 5 not so hot) in my downstairs kitchen. I'm going to try to refrain from drinking 20 cases myself, and will happily pass on factory direct savings to you my friends. Cost + gas comes out to 16 dollars per case of 24. There was an even better price break of $12/case for orders over 60 cases, but somehow I didn't think they would fit into balrog without some seriously advanced technology.

Current Mood: thirsty

Maybe I'm stupid. I hope so, because the alternative bothers me more. Why do professors spend lecture after lecture going over crap algorithms
that don't work. Case in point my graduate class Automated Data Analysis and Learning. We go over and over algorithms that work in some cases but not in others. What does this mean? after you run the algorithms, you have to go inspect the results to make sure it worked right. Ok, stop mee if you see this coming, but what's the first word in the course title? Whats worse, several of the algorithms (2 today) are NP. Ok so I'm spending 90 minutes going over algorithms that only work 1/2 the time at best, oh and for any large non trivial dataset they complete when our sun explodes. Lovely. Can I get a refund? It's fine when courses go over crap that doesn't work so you know what not to do, but why do many classes spend 75% of the time going over this crap and then tack on teasers of interesting stuff at the tail end of the semmester? Why am I spending more than 5 minutes going over algorithms I can tell are flawed and can tell you how to fix them before the professor can finish explaing the first example? I know most of you are now saying, well maybe am I just a little brighter than the average grad student, but I don't think so. I think I must be profoundly dumb not to see the forest through the trees. Someone help me make sense of this... please.