right on bro!

Today is RSS Awareness Day.  If you’re aware of RSS you don’t need to visit the link.

I’m going to be using Twitter for the next few days…link is here.

I like this video…it’s like their other ones.

The Indian buffet closed at 3pm today, so I went here instead.

When I was younger, I was a big fan of R.E.M. My first album purchase was Document. I learned how to play guitar by playing along to R.E.M. songs. At some point, I owned the entire catalog plus a number of bootlegs and rarities, which are now all mostly gone since I lent somebody most of my collection and never got it back.

R.E.M. dropped off the radar for me, just after the release of Automatic for the People and somewhere around the release of “The Great Beyond.” I would periodically check in on what they were up to, but it just wasn’t that interesting anymore. I put them in the category of “sure I’ll check out their stuff, if it’s free to listen to on their site or on YouTube, but otherwise, meh.”

However, their new album (Accelerate) is really good…and check out the above video (and the rest of Vincent Moon’s Takeaways Shows videos with the band)…pretty amazing stuff.

Michele says I am worse than updating, so here’s one of the things I’ve been up to lately:

Wow, digital cameras have come a long way. I bought my first one from Fry’s Electronics back in 1999, an Olympus that did 640×480. Over the past few years I’ve carried around a Canon SD110 point-and-shoot, which was highly serviceable as well.

I decided a little while ago that I wanted to get back into photography, so I went and got a digital SLR a few weeks ago. Man this thing is awesome, and it’s only an entry-level camera. Toby and I went to Red Rock Canyon last week to shoot. It was super fun.

Just got a super-wide-angle lens today (the Sigma 10-22mm that Toby is using to produce some cool stuff) and I am looking forward to shooting even more. I have revived my Flickr photostream, so please subscribe to it if you’d like.

This is awesome….makes me want to visit Beijing again.

I upgraded my HTPC to Vista SP1 today.  Don’t really notice any difference.

Also, bought a digital SLR camera.  Always wanted a digital SLR.  It’s pretty nice.  I’m reviving my Flickr account and am going to start spending some time going out shooting photos, so feel free to check it out.  First test photos are already up.

Obama’s speech today was tremendous.  I highly encourage everyone to catch it online or read it somewhere.  Haven’t heard any politician talk like that in ages - it’s what this country needs.

I just upgraded over the weekend from Windows Media Center 2005 to Windows Vista. The reason for upgrading is that this guy wrote a plugin for Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” feature, so now I have an on-demand library of 7,000 movies in near-DVD quality.

By now you’ve all heard the stories and rumors about how Vista sucks. It actually doesn’t suck. The upgrade was a pain in the ass, no doubt. But overall it was definitely worth it.

Some notes and advice, hopefully this will save you some time if you’re doing the same.

1. I installed right on top of MCE2005 (not a clean install). All recorded TV shows were kept as well as my recording schedules and music collection. Install took about 1.5 hours. You don’t need to attend to the install for the first 3/4 of it, unlike how you had to do it in XP to enter keyboard and date and stuff. Once you install and you have Internet connectivity, before you do anything else, run Windows Update a few times. Downloading from WU is *extremely* slow (at least it was on Sunday). The first round took 1hr to download/install 44 patches, and then there are a few minor ones after that. Just keep updating ’til you can’t no more.

2. I had to re-install my Radeon video card drivers. In fact, you might try scanning for Vista-specific versions of your hardware first and stick them on a USB key or something. I also reinstalled the Avermedia A180 driver - they have a separate Vista version, but I am not sure what impact this had.

3. Upon install, the hard drive was *constantly* thrashing and Vista was frustratingly slow as hell. I freaked out for a little bit. After about 36 hours it went away.

4. If you don’t want to use the Microsoft decoder, get this utility to switch codecs:

http://mediacenterexpert.blogspot.com/2006/07/vista-media-center-decoder-utility.html

I bought Cyberlink Power DVD 7 Deluxe (downloadable version from Newegg is cheaper than buying it retail) and it seems to be better than the MS decoder.

5. Vista defaults its CPU management to 50%. Go to Power Options in the Control panel and set it for “Best Performance.”

6. Power management works just the same as in MCE2005 - my system goes to sleep and wakes up just fine.

7. If you want to customize the MCE menu, download this tool:

http://mediacenterexpert.blogspot.com/2006/07/vista-media-center-decoder-utility.html

8. Vista Home Premium does NOT have Remote Desktop, which I miss. You need Ultimate to use Remote Desktop. This is totally sucky on Microsoft’s part.

9. Video was very, very jerky and stuttery at first and I had to tweak the hell out of it: disable “all enhancements” under my soundcard, check some option on the hard drive to improve performance, switch my output to 720p.

10. If you have a Netflix account, get the My Netflix plugin from www.anpark.com that allows you to use the “watch instantly” feature.

11. Music navigation is much, much faster now. I wish Microsoft had fixed this in MCE2005.

Overall, this was worth it. The new Media Center user interface is nice. More complicated, but nice. I won’t be switching my laptop to Vista anytime soon though, unless I absolutely have to.