Wayne D's Blog

A few weeks ago I thought it would be a good idea to buy the kids a Wii. I haven't been paying much attention to what has been going on in the video game world since the hype of last winter when the PS3 was released. I quickly found out that the Wii is pretty much unavailable even though it's been 6 months since the product launched. One Walmart I was in even had cardboard taped over the Wii display case probably so shoppers wouldn't bother to ask the staff if they had any Wii's. The same Walmart did has PS3's available. I can understand there being some product shortages around launch time but six months later? I checked a few Wii listing in the Facebook marketplace and people are selling used Wii's for almost $200 above the retail price. Talking to a few of my friends I found out that if you want a Wii you have to call around to stores, find out when the 2-6 units they get each week come in and then hustle on down there on the appointed time and day and buy one. I don't want a Wii that much. Doing a bit of browsing around the web revealed that Xbox 360's weren't readily available until a year after launch. Can't these companies properly plan product launches? What's the point of releasing a product that people can't buy? The buzz on the Wii has been good but a non-gamer is not going to act like a fanboy. Looks like Nintendo has dropped the ball on this one. Good idea, terrible execution.

Tonight was supposed to be blog night but it turned into plunger night when I had to plunge the downstairs toilet which was clogged by an unnamed son and the ensuite shower which was clogged by an unnamed wife. Her long hair is very cute and sexy but it plays havoc with the shower drain. She seems to lose more hair in the shower than I ever had. Got to pick up a boy from Timberwolves in a few minutes so I thought I'd give you a quick update on my transition to Centos 5. It's OK but has some features of the newer distros that I find particularly irritating. I know that most of these irritants can be fixed but I like an OS that works out of the box.

1. Give me back my DVD. When I push the button the the DVD drive that means I want my disk now! I don't want to have to su to root to get the eject command to work. I don't want to have to set the sticky bit on the eject command so it works from a user login. Give me my disk when I press the button or I may resort to the flat bladed screwdriver.
2. Why don't I get the option to go to a terminal prompt when I right click on the desktop in Gnome anymore? Unix without a command prompt is like a day without sunshine. Install nautilus-open-terminal to rectify this.
   
3. Autorun on CD's and DVD's doesn't work anymore, CD's and DVD's are mounted with noexec permissions by default. Grrrrr.
4. SELinux still sucks. Turn it off by default or you will regret it.
5. If I want the screensaver to lock my screen I'll set it. Why would anyone make that the default behaviour on a fresh install?
6. Give me a kernel with Firewire! It works on Linux so why not include it in the base kernel?
7. Can you make MP3 support any harder to install in Sound Juicer? It used to be one rpm and the greyed out button worked, now it's a couple of packages ( gstreamer-plugins-bad, gstreamer-plugins-ugly) that need to be installed plus a mysterious Gstreamer pipeline parameter ( audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc ! id3mux ) that needs to be entered right or else.
   

I just finished downloading my emusic.com tracks for this month so I thought I'd tell you all about them.

• First is vox humana by Mel Watson of Fruit. I saw Fruit in concert a few years ago and was really impressed with their high energy show. This album from one of the members of Fruit has a pop feel with some nice horn backing.
• Retriever by Ron Sexsmith was another of my choices. I heard him on this week's Vinyl Cafe with Stuart McLean and was impressed enough with his music to pick up some of his songs.
• Dances like Flames from Tanglefoot is also on the list for next month. I've seen Tanglefoot in concert a few times and always found them quite entertaining. Tanglefoot has added a female vocalist and fiddle player who adds a new dimension to their harmonies.
• I also picked up 5 tracks off of Hungry Ghosts by Doug Cox and Sam Hurrie. Some of the tracks on the album were a little too bluesies for my tastes so I didn't get the whole album but the more folk focused tracks I did download were quite satisfying.

If you want cheap, legal, DRM free, indie music emusic.com is the place to get it. If you want to sign up and get 50 free tracks send me a message and I'll send you a referral. That way I get 50 more free tracks too. Not from emusic.com but also new to my iPod this month is The Phenominal Ruthie Foster a new album from (surprise, surprise) Ruthie Foster. I bought this one from Amazon.ca using my Telus $10 off discount on purchases over $40. It works out to be less than buying on iTunes after the discount is taken into account.

I finally gave up on using the radio to cassette adapter in my car and switched back to the FM transmitter. It's gotten to the point that the cassette adaptor gets ejected by the cassette player ever 30 seconds or so. It works fine in my wife's car so I think it's the cassette deck in my car.

Now I'm off to rip more of my old CD's to add to my music library, on the pile is No Doubt - Tragic Kingdom, Exchange - Into the Night, Natalie MacMaster - In My Hands and Randy Newman - Faust.

After writing about Tiki Bar TV a few weeks ago I hear that Steve Jobs mentioned the show in a speech last year. So as always I am late to the bandwagon.

The weather is almost too nice to be cranky but I'm going to crank a little bit anyways. I have noticed a disturbing trend among people to be detached from their present physically reality. On Flickr's day of Flickr I went into the dollar store to buy some batteries for my digital camera. I got in line behind a woman who was talking on her cell phone. She paid for her purchase and left the store without ever making eye contact with the clerk. As I left the store I saw her going to her car still talking on the phone. I wished I had brought my camera because she passed another woman who was almost yelling in her phone and it would have made a great Day of Flickr photo. It illustrates how many people aren't mentally present where they are. That's why people are always talking on their cellphones in the cars. They really don't want to be there. The clerk in the dollar store was just another car on the road that had to be passed. It must be quite a dehumanizing experience to be serving someone in a store and they don't even look you in the eye. I prefer to engage with the people around me, I talk to store clerks. I ask the name of the wait staff at the bar.

An update on my inability to stream Global TV shows because they think I'm not in Canada. No response from Canada.com yet and it's still broken for me.

I was clicking around last night and made my way to the Global TV web page. Well actually I was checking to see if they were going to show Bones and noticed that they offered streaming episodes of Heroes. I have been pretty hard on Canadian rights holders because they were slow to offer streaming TV shows because the U.S. network websites block Canadian users. I clicked on one of the Heroes episodes to see what the quality was and received the message Sorry, this video is unavailable outside of Canada. When did they move Richmond Hill outside of Canada? What kind of idiot geolocation service are they using? My IP address is in the rogers.com domain, when did Rogers start offering cable service outside of Canada? I decided to complain, clicked on the contact us link and was presented with a list of Global locations across the country. There was no option to comment about the website. Sigh. I guess it's off to the bit torrent network for Global TV shows if you are a Rogers customer. I sent feedback to webmaster@canada.com but I'm not holding my breath.

Yahoo TV still sucks. I went to the Yahoo TV listings last night and saw that Global was showing a repeat of House so I clicked on the episode to see the synopsis to check whether I had seen the episode and here's what came up: House treats a teenage supermodel who gets into a catfight on the catwalk and then passes out. When her tox-screen shows heroin, she's treated for addiction. Unfortunately, her symptoms continue after she's weened off the drugs. It turns out that she's actually a "he" with undescended testes. House fights off increasingly bad leg pains. Cuddy helps him with what she later confesses was a placebo. They spoiled the whole episode, both story lines. House is about solving medical mysteries and Yahoo gave the mystery away. Compare Yahoo's synposis with the episode info from TV.com: House uncovers a startling secret when he treats a teenage supermodel for heroin addiction. Meanwhile, Wilson hopes the increased leg pain in House's leg is an indication his leg nerves are regenerating. I know the episode is over a year old but why spoil the show for someone who hasn't seen it?



I ran across a couple of new podcasts this week. Geekbrief.tv offers fast talking Cali Lewis in a three minute video podcast on the tech issues of the day. She's cute, funny and at more than three hundred words per minute packs a tonne of content into a short podcast. Even though the show often covers the same territory as Buzz Out Loud it worth watching for entertainment value alone or if you don't want to devote thirty minutes to listening to all of Buzz Out Loud. I'm also sampling Tiki Bar TV. Tiki Bar TV is too hard to explain, it's entertainment not information and the best thign to do is to go to the webiste and watch an episode and decide for yourself if you like it or not. Episodes are five minutes long so worst case is you lose five minutes. Geekbrief TV can also be viewed on the web, no iPod required.