not syncing

The resemblance is uncanny!

Man... that's one scary chick. If I ran into her in a dark alley I'd totally freak out. *shivers*

I just spent the last 20 minutes switching from cable internet to DSL. Relatively painless process. I have a faster upload speed now (512K vs 256K) and a solid 3MB download. Seems a little snappier than my cable connection. We'll see how it fares over the next week or so. Alas, I am now two updates behind on my network home network diagram...

The LG enV²:

Email, web (including google calendar, which is super helpful), IM... oh, and it's a phone too. It will due until the iPhone is available on a carrier that actually has good coverage in the area.

It's actually cooler looking in person, IMO.

From Wikipedia:

Folding@home (sometimes abbreviated as FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing (DC) project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics (MD). It was launched on October 1, 2000, and is currently managed by the Pande Group, within Stanford University's chemistry department, under the supervision of Professor Vijay Pande. Folding@home is the most powerful distributed computing cluster in the world, according to Guinness^[1], and one of the world's largest distributed computing projects.^[2] The goal of the project is "to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases."^[3]

And... the PlayStation 3 ships with a Folding@home client. I fired mine up a few days ago. It runs whenever I'm not otherwise using my PS3. The visualization capabilities are awesome.

Hooray for geeks!

Jumper - Entertaining. Helps to come in with really low expectations. Hayden Christensen acts as well in this as in Star Wars. Yep, that bad. This one bombed in the US but did well globally. There are at least two other movies (sequels - and talk of a prequel) waiting in the wings if this one was successful enough.

Rambo - Better than I was expecting. My favorite Rambo film after First Blood. Interesting extras on the disc.

Missionaries: we need a ride up the river.
Rambo: it's a war zone.
Missionaries: we want to help change things.
Rambo: do you have weapons?
Missionaries: of course not.
Rambo: you're not changing anything...

Rocky Balboa - Not was good as I was hoping. I'd have to watch the first 5 films again to see how it fits in context.

Misc updates:

• Spent Wednesday, Thursday and Friday in Chicago with the whole family. Wednesday: went to the pool at the hotel (Embassy Suites on State & Ohio), had food from the in-hotel restaurant delivered to the room, watched a movie (Kung-Fu Panda). Thursday: Brookfield Zoo, misc carryout meals from a variety of downtown Chicago establishments, hotel pool. Friday: American Girl store, Whole Foods Market, journey home.

  Overall I'm glad we took the trip, and the girls had fun for the most part. However, doing things like this with Jaiden are becoming increasingly difficult, stressful and depressing. He enjoyed very little if anything about the whole trip.

• Watched The Fifth Element last night. I think the first time I saw this movie was on MTU's movie channel. I'm not sure. This time I downloaded/rented the Standard Definition version from the Sony Playstation store. The PS3 then upscaled it. It looked better than I expected. (You can download HD movies for rent/purchase too - but this one was only available in SD.)
• Over the past two days I've downloaded about a dozen (free) game demos from the Playstation Store. It's a very nice way to 'try before you buy'. In geek heaven, I am.
• School starts for the kids in 8 days. Egads.
• Joe Biden? Really? Underwhelming.

Today could be your last.

A guy I work with (in his mid 20s, married, no kids) was killed in a motorcycle accident last night.

Sigh.

Man oh man... am I ever in geek heaven. I sold one of my guitars and my humongous amplifier (Marshall half stack) today and picked up a PlayStation 3, 2 games (their greatest hits games are finally out and relatively cheap - I picked up MotorStorm and Assassin's Creed), 1 dual shock sixaxis wireless controller and one Blu-Ray movie (Ratatouille). There was a sizable chunk of money left over that will be put to more responsible uses. So... thanks mom and dad for the PlayStation 3. ;-) I still have one electric and one acoustic guitar. I'd like to get a small amp for my office as well. I have zero intention of offloading the two remaining guitars.

Anyway, back to geekville. First of all, yes, I know there is a PlayStation 3 price drop coming any day now. However, all it would get me is another 40GB of hard drive space. Since I'm going to upgrade the HD to like 320GB anyway (from 40GB) the price drop doesn't do anything for me.

So I spend maybe 30-45 minutes re-arranging my various components and associated web of cables - neat cable arrangement has never been my strong suit - and I turn the thing on. After configuring the WiFi connection I had so much fun playing around with all the non-gaming features (integrated web browser, PlayStation store with movies available for preview, purchase or rental, etc. etc.) that I didn't play a game until a couple hours later. Of course, I also had to download the latest version of the firmware.

My wife was sitting on the couch adjacent to me looking at me and shaking her head. Why? Because I'm sitting there like a kid in the biggest candy store in the world with a grin I can't wipe off my face as I play MotorStorm in 1080p goodness. Awesome. Alas, this necessitates an update of the recently updated home network diagram.

[ click diagram to embiggen ]

The Say Yes to Sunday group has collected enough signatures to allow voters to decide this fall whether to repeal Ottawa County’s current Sunday beer and wine sales ban.

Full article.

w00t!

I signed the petition this past Sunday. I was planning to sign it on Monday but they went door to door in my neighborhood on Sunday. Bless their hearts.