Odds and Ends 11-28-2011

It is sale time across the USA and things are wrapping up with today being Cyber Monday. Sadly the one deal I was most looking forward to today was not as good as expected, so now joy for me. Especially since the back up deal I was eyeballing sold out by today. Instead I got a set of Ginsu knives at Newegg.

Wish I had the money to pony up for this refurbished Samsung 27” monitor. It is the single best deal I have found on Cyber Monday. Maybe somebody else will see it here and get themselves a nice deal.

I did score several Blu-ray deals from Amazon before Black Friday officially began, so I am not empty handed. 2001, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the 1990’s Gammera trilogy will be making their way here. It should be fun installing the Blu-ray drive when it arrives. While my monitor is only 1680 x 1050, it can handle the HDCP copy protection protocols and does better than 720p.

A friend of mine also gave me Fallout: New Vegas as a gift from a Steam sale, so that has been fun. Mad Max meets 50’s radioactive monster movies is how I would describe it. Taking out giant mutant ants is like being dropped into the movie Them, an old favorite of mine. You can even set them on fire like in the movie.

Watching the presidential primary for the GOP has been painful. Cain’s implosion isn’t as much from the false accusations but from the disastrous handling of nearly everything by his staff. He is badly damaged by this and it shows they are not remotely ready for taking on the well oiled Obama machine.

Meanwhile, delusional conservatives have convinced themselves that Newt Gingrich is a true conservative and electable. Both are false propositions and they need to deal with reality. I say that as a very conservative man. How they can rally around someone with the immense personal and political baggage that Newt has is beyond me.

“Anybody but Romney” is not sufficient to explain this madness. With Mitt you may not know what you are getting as far as worrying he’ll betray conservatives, but with Newt you are guaranteed that he will stab you in the back, front, sides, and then bite you on the ankles. Just because someone is good in debates does not mean you ignore his track record. We already have a raging narcissist in the White House and replacing him with another is not going to go well.

Yesterday was a lost day again. Being very ill I ended up sleeping through most of it. Having watched a bad movie for Turkey Day, I decided to start rewatching Stargate: Atlantis over from the beginning. Oddly enough it evoked a feeling of better times and that is somewhat discomfiting.

UPDATE on Herman Cain:

Put a fork in him, he is completely done. At this point it doesn’t matter whether or not he is guilty, there is only so much damage that can be taken. It is also a cautionary tale in regards to Gingrich. Once the media takes him seriously his multiple infidelities will get a lot of attention.

All Along the Watchtower

Time again to collect my thoughts for posterity since this blog was started to be a journal.

With the stock markets diving, it appears reality has finally caught up to investors. The new jobs report shows unemployment down slightly to 9.1% but is due to Americans leaving the employment game. Only 58.1% (or 63.9%, I’m running into varying figures) of the employable population are holding a job right now.

The attempt to decouple employment from economic health baffles me. It demonstrates just how out of touch the elites are. Apparently, they have no knowledge of history – if they did they’d be terrified right about now. The first warning sign is usually a populist political movements being born. If those fail to change things or are suppressed, structural failures in a society begin to be evident. That isn’t saying they weren’t already there, but that the masses begin to perceive them. Consider it noticing that the emperor is walking around stark naked.

I think we have entered that stage with “government” replacing “emperor.”

Should be an interesting day watching the stock markets again. 3% a day declines in US and Asian stock indexes have been the pattern the last few days. We’ll see if that changes.

At home, we now have much higher DSL speeds thanks to a change in modems and the new package from Ace. Speed tops out at 6.7M down, which is amazing after being used to 1M. Streaming is a new world, but tests of HD streams have been mixed. Since I don’t have many to compare, my conclusions are limited but it appears to be dependent on the technology used by the streaming services.

720P works just fine off of youTube, but an anime site I tried still stutters. Come to think of it, they don’t label as 720P, maybe they are trying to push 1080P. I should try out Hulu Plus for the free week and see how that works.

Will this skeptic of streaming movie services ever be fully converted? Time will tell.

Best thing about the increased speed is how software updates seem instantaneous now. There is also enough bandwidth to have two people browsing videos and music without stepping on each other’s virtual toes. VOIP is working better so far as well.

A Mormon Defense League? For all the talk of Latter-day Saints being so media savvy, the fact this only just launched demonstrates how questionable that assumption is. This organization is needed given the rampant bigotry and ignorance on display across the country.

I was checking the stats on the blog and noticed a lot of hits were on my Citizen Kane review. What is surprising is how many people have been looking for the No Trespassing sign still shot. Is there a meme out there I’m unaware of?

And by a lot of hits, I mean in double digits.

One of the nice things about having a small blog is seeing the strange intersections of what I post and what people are looking for. Part of it is nostalgia for when the Web was new and I’d surf to find whatever was out there. That feeling of finding the unexpected and different is no longer there for me. Maybe others aren’t as jaded and find something here to entertain or ponder. If so, I hope that feeling of discovery is aided a little by my meanderings.

Watched the new Clash of the Titans the other night. What a hollow experience that was. None of the charm or respect of the old myths in the original was present. The effects were decent and that is the only area in which it was superior. It simply isn’t a good movie.

Finally purchased and downloaded Planescape: Torment to play. It is a game I’d read about for years and had meant to get last year when it showed up at GOG.com. There are some issues of crashing, but I made sure to add the mod to allow quick saves. Sigil is one interesting place and the Planes always make for a good setting.

Hopefully, I can finish this game eventually. I haven’t gamed that much lately since writing has taken up more of my health induced down time. This is a good thing.

A Day in the Life

It looks like this post will be made up of bits and pieces of random thoughts, as I’m a bit fuzzy today.
Finally, a good night’s sleep indicates I’m finally getting over the respiratory infection. Still not recovered from it, but it is fading out and the coughing has subsided.

By making myself post regularly, it is helping with being able to write even when impaired by illness. So I’m pleased with the results of prioritizing writing and hope to get started on some fiction.

My sister, her husband and step kids are arriving tomorrow and the place is a wreck. The two weeks of being sicker than usual were supposed to be devoted to cleaning which isn’t going to happen. Irritating. And messy.

The weather is nice and I want to see if the new Hogue grips I put on my Ruger pistol will help with accuracy. It has helped other owners of the same model. But I’m way too shaky at the moment and need to use my energy for other tasks. If I don’t get the improvement I’m hoping for, I’ll probably have to do some trigger work to lighten the pull. While I love a military style pull on a rifle, it appears to give me problems on pistols.

Why does iTunes importing CD’s default to 128 bitrate AAC when their store doesn’t sell anything less than 256?  I’m glad I moved to Media Monkey Pro a long time ago. FLAC is the best way to go if you have decent speaker or headphones, but 256 AAC isn’t bad at all. I do most of my purchasing at Amazon MP3 these days and take advantage of the cloud storage.

Having become a fan of Jack Wall’s soundtracks for video games, I was happy to score the Jade Empire Soundtrack for $1 from a vendor on Amazon. I wish his soundtracks Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 had been put out on CD as well. But the CD is in trouble and digital delivery is the future.  And yes, I did buy them digitally and burned CD’s, but I’d like the higher quality.

I got a bicycle pump to modify for cleaning electronics. A spring around the hose base is needed to guarantee air flow and so far the basketball needle adapter has worked well. The setup will be a lot cheaper than buying duster cans.

Democrats arguing that having a debt ceiling violates the Constitution shows what amazing hypocrites they are. All of the talk coming out of them lately is how the Constitution isn’t really law, is out of date, and was only meant to be a rough guideline. Two faced doesn’t begin to describe them, especially since there was a default on federal bonds under Roosevelt in 1933. I have no faith in anyone dealing with the economic calamity that is upon us.

Was John Lennon a closet Republican?  Maybe, but I doubt Yoko was.

Mystery Science 3000 is an excellent medication when ill. Watched Werewolf and Laser Blast among other bad movies with Mike, Joel, and the Bots the last couple of weeks on Netflix streaming.  The new settings allowing lower quality streams has been very helpful on our measly 1 MB DSL.

Also saw John Wycliffe, the biography on John Wycliffe, the man who laid the foundation for the Protestant Reformation. Classic early 1980’s video quality but very good. Many Christians know who Martin Luther was, but how many know the man who first translated the Holy Bible into English in the late 1200’s?

Getting an Edge in Copyrights

I’m not happy with the way Intellectual Property (IP) rights are handled because I feel that the current laws are stunting creativity in a stagnant society.

An article at boingboing.net got my attention last week and highlights how trademark law can be abused. Edge Games hasn’t put out a real product in many years, but has terrorized anyone that dares to use the word “edge” in any videogame, movie, or comic book. They’ve been successful at this, gaining settlements with other companies for over a decade.

This is a truly bizarre story, especially if you read the full details over at ChaosEdge.  Mind you, it can be eye glazing but if you dig, you can find documented IP theft by Edge Games themselves! The strange sales (or lack of sales) by this company from their web store is an epic story by itself.

At least with EA’s involvement there is a chance these people will be shut down, but it shows how the current system can be gamed – no pun intended.  I’m wondering how this guy Langdell has made money from this.  He has to have to keep filing lawsuits, right?