James Chamberlin

I don’t know how if most people pay attention to the noises their computer makes when it starts up. I used to because I had problems with either a hard drive or a fan that was going bad, but that was a few years ago and with two relatively new machines going, I feel pretty secure with the idea that things are going to be fine for a while.

That changed this morning when I swear I heard two or three beeps when my newest Dell came to POST. POST codes vary from BIOS manufacturer, but I figured it would be a problem with either the RAM or video card… either something’s loose or something else is wrong.

However when the PC booted up fully, I didn’t see any problems at all. The display works and the correct amount of RAM shows up.

After a while, I shut it down and waited ten minutes before turning it back on. Just one beep at POST, just like normal…

Was it a problem with the computer or are my ears playing tricks on me? I don’t know.

I’m not sure if it’s the flu or salmonella (from the peanut butter outbreak). I was rough enough with the back problem, but I came down with something wicked yesterday or the day before. Anything in my stomach is gone one way or another. I haven’t been sick like this in years.

It was back in March of 2007 when I hurt my back the last time. Thursday morning was a rude awakening for me. I woke up to a sore back. It’s my sciatic nerve which is being pinched or is inflamed again. The only relief is lying down, but I can’t be very productive when I’m confined to a bed.

The last time I had this problem, it was for about two full weeks. It’s been a few days now and I’m really dreading two weeks of feeling like a crippled old man.

Well, here in the midwest, Charter or AT&T is dealing with another cut fiber or some other problem and it’s making Internet speeds a little slower than normal. I’m just glad there is an Internet right now. A lot of people have complained, with even a few big threads created on Blizzard’s World of Warcraft forum. Pings are all over the place. Everyone in Wisconsin, Michigan, and northern Illinois seems to be affected.

I’ve noticed routing to certain locations to be slow. Giganews is extremely slow for me, while I can connect to Astraweb just fine. :-/

Yesterday, I even had problems connecting to a certain website. It would always time out. Other locals couldn’t pull up the site either, though people I know in other parts of the country could find it just fine.

In other news, I burned a coaster. I burn a fair number of DVDs, but it’s been a long time since I burned a coaster. It seems to be a defective disc. At least, that’s what I’m hoping. I don’t want to have to replace a DVD burner if I can help it. It’s just not something I’m eager to bother with.

I’ve never had any huge routing problems with any of the shipping companies (USPS, UPS, DHL, FedEx, etc), but a recent package shipped via UPS has been completely misrouted.  I’ve had packages get shipped to the wrong state due to an error before, but not quite like this.  It was shipped from Ohio (get your maps out, folks) and I live in Illinois, just a couple states to Ohio’s west.  So the package gets to one of the Chicago suburbs and naturally gets shipped to… are you ready for it?  Los Angeles, California.  WTF?!!

For a delivery which was supposed to get here on the 19th, two days after leaving Ohio, I can’t expect it until January 2nd, two full weeks after it should have been here.  Nice going, UPS.

Alright, I finally opened my wallet and forked out a nice stack of cash for a Panasonic Plasma HDTV and Panasonic Blu-Ray player (along with a few movies), but I have a question about the BD-Live feature that many discs are coming with.

I presume all BD-Live content is stored on remote servers and is downloaded much like one would download a demo via Xbox Live.  So what happens when those servers go down?

This is one of my concerns with PC gaming authentification procedures.  If the authentification server(s) goes down in X number of years after the game is released, how do you get to play the game?

The same is true with these BD-Live options.  If I buy a Blu-Ray movie with BD-Live features and the servers containing the content go down, how will I get that bonus content that I am paying for?  It seems to me that there’s not going to be any way for me to get my bonus features once those servers go down.

Is all BD-Live content hosted by Sony or is that up to the individual publishers to host?  If it’s all hosted by Sony, then I have some level of assurance that the company won’t go out of business anytime soon and lose its servers, but if it’s up to smaller publishers, then I have concerns.  This is why I like all of my bonus features to come on the discs themselves.  I really don’t like the idea of relying on some sort of special downloading service for this.  Some BD-Live features don’t sound too special to be honest, but in the case of the first season of Dexter, well, almost every one of the features is on BD-Live and that really pisses me off.

I don’t have a whole lot to report these days. It’s a little slow right now. Charter (my ISP/Cable Provider/Phone Provider) had a problem with a line. It was damaged somewhere near Madison, WI apparently and affected everyone in the area. Here, we had problems with all three services though the Internet was in good shape for the most part. The phone was a little glitchy at times as was the cable. The sound and video would freeze for a second and come back to normal. It was like that for a few hours so the TV got turned off for most of the day. It’s hard to watch when that sort of thing is going on.

Damn, another one. I hate upgrading WordPress because there’s always a chance of me making a mistake that will screw something up. I have a history of user errors with this thing. 🙂

The Dashboard looks completely different. I’m looking forward to playing around with this a bit.

We got a little snow the other day, maybe two inches or so and another two inches today. It started at about 9-10am this morning and finished in the late afternoon. The flakes this time were quite small but heavy, bending some of the pine tree branches all the way down to the ground.

Before the snow hit this morning, I made it to the gym. I got in early enough to beat some of the morning crowd and put in a solid hour on the elliptical, going a whopping 5.83 miles. I was on pace for 6 miles, but I didn’t feel so good during those last few minutes so I backed off quite a bit. Normally, I go under 4.5 miles in an hour, so I was quite proud of myself with today’s effort. 🙂

In case you didn’t know, Back to the Future is my favorite movie of all-time. It wasn’t difficult to make the decision to buy the big trilogy set when it came out on DVD a few years ago:

It’s a great set of DVDs, but now a new set of DVDs has been announced for hitting the street in February 2009. This seems like another lame attempt at getting money if you ask me. They’re releasing all of the movies individually and giving the first Back to the Future film a second disc with bonus features.

I will give Universal credit for the DVD cover art. It looks fantastic. Still, I don’t intend to buy the new DVDs. I would consider BluRays though. 🙂