October 2006 Entries
This is one of those store it on the intarweb so someone else can benefit deals. Nothing but tech follows.
I upgraded my primary work PC to Vista (RC2).
Notes:
My upgrade from XP failed twice before I uninstalled enough stuff to get it working. I believe the culprit was Virtual PC, but I can't confirm this.
I really really didn't want to have to reformat, but I was going down that road, fortunately I didn't have to (this time). Here's where syncronization tools can really help. 1) Foldershare 2) Google...
Here are four songs from Erin and her Cello. I mentioned Erin once before here on CoreyH, but it deserves to be repeated. Erin is a new friend from the neighborhood and it just so happens, she is really talented and put on a fantastically entertaining show. She sang and played the cello (mostly picking/plucking whatever it’s called), while a xylophone player, percussionist (bongo + shakers and clackers n’stuff) and beat-boxer/mouth hornist backed her up. The songs are: Breakdancin' Man (about the breakdancing guys on the subway), Tiny Buns (about Chinese food, specifically tiny pork buns), Subway...
Emily was out of town on this beautiful New York Sunday; I had a host of neighborhood errands to run, so I decided to borrow her longboard skateboard to make them on. I had ridden it once or twice in the last year, but only up to the park, which is a short trip. Before that I hadn't really ridden since I lived in California and would ride to third grade from our house. According to Map My Run, I traveled 9.73 miles today. It really is like riding a bike I guess, I was pretty comfortable most of the time....
I was not-at-all surprised by this report by The PC Spy called "What Really Slows Windows Down" that chronicles common applications and the performance impact they have in Windows. The top offender is Norton Internet Security 2006, with a whopping 46% boot delay and 20% cpu delay and 2369% File IO delay. The top thirteen (worst) are all antivirus packages. A developer I used to work with always said that the McAfee enterprise AntiVirus software was in itself a virus.
I'm turning off my realtime virus scanner. Permanently.
I haven't had a legitimate virus blocked or alerted in this century....
http://www.personal-kyoto.org/energy_usage/share/61 You enter your ConEd account number and they go grab your power usage history and map it to your own Kyoto Goal, plus compare you with people in your zip code. In my case Manhattan vs Queens, Brooklyn, and the national average. It is pretty clear that big spike is the air conditioner and that in the winter time I'm doing pretty well. I bet I could knock a 100 kWh off if I had a more efficient PC and fewer harddrives. At what point does it make sense to dump my P4 3.4...
I listen to about three hours of radio per year, so while driving around around trying to find a parking spot the other night we heard this song on 90.7, which aparently is WFUV, a public radio station from Fordham U. Nouvelle Vague doing Blondie's Heart of Glass. I had a "blink" moment and liked it just by the beat alone, before I had heard any lyrics. It has a nice, complex sound, including some non-real-instruments from the sound of it (bird chirps, something being crunched, etc). A pop version of something Matthew Herbert did to extremes on Plat du Jour. ...