Wayne D's Blog

Yahoo 360 is getting a reprieve, I looked at the default Wordpress blog format that my website hosting company offers and I decided I wanted to tweak the look a bit so it may be a while before I switch over. This is yesterday's lost posting recreated to the best of my recollection. I may lose this one too, my router keeps power cycling because someone jammed the cable leading from the power brick to the router around the edge of the computer desk and it's probably got an intermittent power connection now.

Yesterday on my Saturday chore trip I stopped in at FutureShop to see what CD's they had on sale. While I was there I dropped by the TV department to look at the new big LCD screens they had on display. They had two big HD displays going one with a movie and the other with a Bluray demo disk. I was disappointed with the picture quality, the pictures looked sharp but there was a noticeable amount of noise in the background. There were also noticeable compression artifacts visible around the text on the Bluray demo screen. This was a new 1080p set with a digital connection to the Bluray player. At times the picture looked no better than I get on my video iPod. I did a quick search on the Internet and found that what I was seeing was not unique. High Definition blog has a good article on HDTV artifacts. The sorry state of HD television also discusses how the promise of HDTV isn't always evident in the implementation. If you want to be snowed under with numbers DTV bandwidths explains why these problems occur. The crux if the matter is that all of the digital TV and HD formats use compression. The idea behind compression is that you can reduce the size of a digital file by removing things that people can't see. The MP3 format is an example of comrepssion used on music files, jpg files are also compressed to reduce their size. The problem with compression is that it's more of an art than a science. The amount of compression you can get away without people noticing depends on the content of the image. Unfortunately the pipe for HDTV and high definition DVD's is only so big so sometimes it may be necessary to compress to fit the pipe irrespective of the quality.

Compression means that 7-12 regular definition digital channels can be squeezed in the same space as one regular analog channel. That's why the cable companies are so interested in getting us all to switch over to digital cable.

The upshot is that before you plunk down big bucks for a monster HDTV and HD DVD or Bluray player take a good look at the picture and make sure that your expectations haven't been skewed too much by the hype.

The question now is whether I should explain the Kristin Chenoweth website reference in yesterdays posting. A the time I was writing the blog entry I was listening to Prairie Home Companion and Kristin Chenoweth was singing. I recognized her name from her time on The West Wing but I didn't know she was a singer. It turns out that she it a Tony Award winning stage actress with classical voice training. I would post a picture of her but I've been getting complaints that 4 pictures of women in 57 blog postings is too much. The insinuation was that I did it to increase my traffic. The truth is that the blog posting that offer solutions to Linux problems I encounter are the ones that really drive traffic to my blog.

I think I spoke too soon, my router just reset itself again, I better save this posting before it craps out entirely.

I just got back from the woods, I still smell of wood smoke. The weather was perfect, below freezing so things didn't get too mucky, not too much wind and generally sunny. Camping in the winter time is easier than you think as long as you have appropriate gear. I was going to take my camera but didn't want to share my sleeping bag with it. Instead the picture at the top of this posting is the remainder of the ice that formed in my water bottle overnight. It was frozen solid this morning and 4 hours after coming home is almost completely thawed. The hardest part in rolling over in the sleeping bag, it's a bit of a tight fit but not so tight that it rolls with you. I don't really have a sleeping bag that's good enough for a night at -15 so I took two and put one inside the other. The problem with that is that I have two zippers to do up and undo when I have inevitably have to get up in the middle of the night to pee. For some reason the cold weather seems to have that effect on me. I even cut way back on the tea this time but no matter, I was still out in the middle of the night turning the snow yellow. We sleep in teepee's made from long poles covered by large blue tarps which makes setting up much faster. We also have a couple of prebuilt lean-to's available and firewood that we cut and stacked last year.

My goodness, I am watching Celebrity Poker while I write this one and Gina Gershon keeps getting bleeped. She just flopped an Ace on the river and managed to win the hand against the odds. I decided to include a picture of Gina because those who read my blog on www.wdawe.com don't get to see the pictures at the top of many postings and the page needs some colour.

Picture from Teddy and Moo's

This is the blog entry for this week that you get to see. I made a posting yesterday that I marked as mature content to comply with Yahoo's adult content restrictions. The problem with marking an entry is mature is that only people who are logged into Yahoo and have asserted their adulthood to Yahoo can see it. It doesn't show up in the RSS feed of my blog either. If you want to see it anyways here is a link but be prepared to convince Yahoo you are an adult.

A couple more tidbits I wanted to blog yesterday but ran out of time to do. After hearing about it over and over again I finally got a chance to read Peter Gutmann's excellent article A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection. This article is must reading for any computer geeks. Microsoft's response can be found here. I feel a bit sorry for Microsoft and their driver vendors, after they put so much effort into trying to protect the content the encryption has been cracked. It just goes to show, information want to be free. I've always said "No matter how big the safe is, if you put it in someones living room they'll eventually find a way to get it open."

One of the downsides of listening to the iPod in the car is that I don't here the news very often. This resulted in me being completely blindsided by the gasoline "shortage" last night. With barely a wisp of fumes in the tank I drove to three gas stations because there was no way I was going to line up to pay 91.5 cents a litre for gas. That's one of the reasons for last nights short posting.

A big thank you to 1and1.com Internet. They host my website www.wdawe.com and didn't even laugh at me when I inadvertently locked myself out because of a malfunctioning ftp client that managed to screw up the permission on my root directory. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. I called their toll free support line at 11:30 p.m. at night, waited on hold a reasonable amount of time and had my problem addressed by their very competent support staff.

No posting this weekend as I am off to the woods for some more winter camping. That's it for now, I may come back if I think of something else.

If you couldn't convince Yahoo that you were an adult here is the text of yesterday's posting.

Imagine my surprise when this morning I took my customary trip to the Yahoo Most Viewed News page and found that the Most Viewed Photos on the right side of the page contained topless images from the Mardi Gras parade in Rio. At least I think it was Rio because when I went to the same page later in the day the pictures had been replaced by pictures from of JFK related to the new footage that had been discovered. There were one or two other Brazilian Carnival pictures that weren't quite as revealing. Did the denizens of Yahoo really find JFK more interesting? I dug into my browser history and tried to head back to the pictures. They returned error messages.


So like a good reporter I dug into my browser cache and retrieved the images which are shown below for editorial purposes only. What do you think, are they too hot for Yahoo? Should they have been removed?


Just got the call, bowling is done so I can leave for my trivia game early. The pictures and the rest of this entry will have to wait until later. I'm back, here are the pictures. You be the judge.

Getting old is a bitch. When breaking up the ice last week I managed to twist the wrong way or something and then suffered with a sore back until Thursday. Between the back and the knees some days I feel like I'm 70 years old. Enough about my aches and pains, I'm sure you're not interested.

I'm going camping next week so I went to Walmart today to buy a new pair of winter boots as my suitable for camping boots seem to have disappeared. I was ging to buy a new pair last year because I thought my old boots were too heavy and hard on my knees but I waited too long and there were no more winter boots available. As it was there were only two styles to choose from in my size. Who would steal a 20 year old pair of Kaufman steel toed winter boots? I may take a picture of my new boots to illustrate this posting.

Is it my imagination or has the general level of driver competence decreased? Frequently as I drive around I see people who clearly have no clue on the route they need to follow. On Saturday I got caught behind a driver who at a stale red light decided he needed to turn right. The problem was that he was in the leftmost lane of through traffic and needed to get across another lane of stopped traffic to to get to the right turn lane.

It looks like Studio 60 is dead. NBC has decided to pull it off the schedule on week early to let the Black Donnelleys into it's time slot. The speculation is that NBC will burn off the remaining shows later, sometime in the summer. Bye, bye Studio 60, I'll watch the last episode tonight with a tinge of sadness and longing.

Summer is coming, the Toronto Argonauts released their 2007 schedule this week. The Argonotes are already planning our big Grey Cup week for November when Toronto hosts the CFL championships. Hotel rooms are being booked so that we won't be distracted by family or work commitments during the Grey Cup debauchery.

Yahoo 360 still seems to think that I'd be interested in non-English Yahoo 360 pages. Someone should tell them that a guy who posts in English probably doesn't want to see non-English blogs in on the Interesting Pages on Yahoo! 360° section of his home page.

I've come to the conclusion that social networking is the "next big thing" on the Internet that will implode. It seems that every week that there is a new hot social networking site. MySpace, Facebook and then Bebo. The strange thing that I have noticed is that most of these sites cater to youths and that most of their social networking friends are people they have already met at school. This is why I have no cyber social networking friends I'm too old and most of the people I know don't belong to social networking sites. Maybe I should start a social networking site for old farts and fartettes.

Tuesday wasn't blog day because the son who bowls wasn't feeling well so he and my wife stayed home and I got to bail early and head off to my Tuesday night trivia game on time. Tuesday night is usually drive the kids to stuff night and I blog in the gap between drop off and pick up. Nothing like writing to deadline to get the words on the page.

I still love Studio 60. In addition to being a good show they usually have a musical guest on the show within a show. Last week the show had Natalie Cole on singing Say a Little Prayer for Me in support of her savemylife.org initiative. Savemylife.org links to charities that are working to help the AIDS epidemic in Africa. If you live in the United States and donate any amount you get a free download of the song. I bought my copy on iTunes and made my donation to CLWR who are combating AIDS in both India and Mozambique.

What else was I going to write about? The boys and I took advantage of the slightly warmer weather to clear the ice off of the driveway. The minus 10 to 20 weather we have had over the past week broke for a couple of days. The extremely cold weather has resulted in me going through podcast withdrawal because the cassette deck in my care really doesn't like the cold weather and ejects my iPod to cassette adaptor every 3-5 minutes. We built up a pretty good layer from driving over the snow instead of shovelling it. It's all gone now, I think I'll take a picture of the ice pile and use it to illustrate this article.

My sister had her surprise birthday party on Friday night but you probably aren't interested in that. If you are the pictures are on Flickr. I could complain about all the single drivers driving around in SUV's but that's old and nobody cares. I could whine about Yahoo again. The other day two of the three highlighted interesting pages they offered were in German. I could complain about Rogers trying to sell me their home phone service that would cost more than I pay for my Bell service but nobody would care about that either.

OK it's official, I'm dry. I'm going to head outside to take a picture for this entry but for now I'm out of here. Almost forgot to mention the movie I watched last night. Amelie I nice sweet French movie. Sweet for adults, not for kids by the way. Subtitled but there isn't much talking.