Wayne D's Blog

I don't believe anything I read on the Internet and I blame that on the training I received as an undergrad. I was trained as a physicist and one of the few pieces of knowledge that has stuck with me is the scientific method, or at least my understanding of it. Create a hypothesis, design an experiment to test said hypothesis and then draw your conclusions. I remember doing a lab where the goal was to measure the speed of light using spinning mirrors and a laser. The point wasn't to measure the speed of light, the actual number was probably in most of my textbooks but was to help inculcate a healthy scepticism of what we read in books. This attitude has continued to this day.

Last week I challenged some people I work with to prove to me that Gimp was not as good as Photoshop. One person attempted to make the argument based on some things he had read on the internet. I was not impressed and told him so. I'm not competent to make an assessment because I am not familiar enough with what the requirements for this type of software is. What I was hoping for was for someone to try both of them and give me their studied opinion. A guy who's comments I read on the Internet has no credibility with me. I don't know what axes he has to grind or his biases. All he can offer me is directions on where to start my own evaluation. It's intellectual laziness to believe what you read and not to question the conclusions yourself.

If someday you run into me and get into what I consider a lively debate and you think is me being obnoxious and mean. don't blame me, blame my undergrad profs.

I didn't watch the Oscars tonight because I haven't seen any of the nominated movies. I think that the only movie I saw in a theatre in the past year was Beowulf. I guess that's why most of the movies made now are targetted at youngoer people. I have watched a few movies on DVD over the past year. There is one award show I watch every year and that's the Grammy's. New music is something that I do continue to buy. I'm not so interested in who wins the awards but I watch for the musical performances.

The TV writers strike seems to have also curtailed my TV watching and I really don't miss it that much. I think the writer's strike will be looked back on as the point where network TV became irrelevant. I have been watching a few TV shows like Big Love which is being shown on Global here in Ontario. There is also Mythbusters, Nova, Dirty Jobs and a few other non network shows. I will also be watching (or taping) the season premiere of Guinea Pig on Discovery. Their whole, "so shocking we are going to show it at 1 a.m." has completely sucked me in. I'm also still trying to determine if Yahoo Live will be the next big thing or an interesting flash in the pan. When you have more than one thousand people watching fifty to eighty people it appears to be more of a voyeuristic endevour than something more people will embrace as a communication medium.

I still love my eeepc, I'm writing this blog post on my lap right now as I watch Mythbusters. As long as I don't cut my nails too short I should be fine. One other TV show I watch Smash Lab, planes blowing over trailers and trains smashing into cars, what's not to like?

Yahoo live went down for a maintenance outage last night and when they came back it was magically working for me again. Well probably not so magically, what they broken Sunday they fixed again. I wonder how it will be before it gets broken yet again. I wonder if Yahoo will continue this grand experiment or will decide to pull the plug.

I have slowly been replacing the Ferrari concealed hinges that are installed on most of the cabinet doors throughout my house with Blum hinges. The Ferrari hinges wear out on door that are used frequently like the door on the cupboard with our glasses and plates or the door under the sink where our garbage can used to be stored. After a while the Ferrari hinges leave a black deposit and don't properly support the door. The Blum hinges have a lifetime gaurantee though I suspect that the hoops required to get them replaced when they do fail will be more cumbersome than just spending another $3 for a new hinge. When I went to Home Depot this time I wanted to buy a 10 pack of hinges. Unfortunately they sell them in two pieces and only on of the pieces still had 10 packs available. Sigh, why not either package them together or stock the two pieces in equal quantities. I did notice that Home Depot now has buttons scattered throughout the store to allow you to summon help. Looks like they can fell Rona's hot breath on their neck.

After waxing poetical about how neat I thought live.yahoo.com was over the weekend yahoo broke it. No matter what I do when I click on the GO LIVE button, it doesn't. No error message, no nothing, the big NOT BROADCASTING banner shows across my live video preview and in the main window. For the record I am using Firefox 1.5 on Centos 5. The worse thing is that since Yahoo broke live.yahoo.com is that if I try to navigate away from the page it hangs the browser. sigh.

After mentioning nekomimi_lisa she seems to have abandoned live.yahoo.com for justin.tv. The good news is that jusin.tv does work for me, I wonder if she is a linux user too. The two edged sword in this case it that people have reported to me that they couldn't get into justin.tv to see the video or comment in the chatroom. I guess these two cases show that personal streaming internet video still needs some work.

A quick one. I was having trouble getting the text chat to work correctly in live.yahoo.com. The text chat would start ok but would stop working after the camera became active. I was able to fix it by upgrading to the latest version of flash. It was the difference beween 1.0.48 and 1.0.115. The moral of the story, first thing to try is to download the latest version of flash.