Not Much New

I've been reading a lot of old Dungeons and Dragons material from the 1970's lately. I haven't posted much on the blog recently because I'm contemplating whether or not to just keep it to the random personal posts or if I should attempt a more serious undertaking by blogging about something "professionally" in an attempt to reach a bigger audience. I'd poll my readers, but at this point I think it's just my wife. lol

Goodwill was a Bust

I have been reading through various rpg message forums and one poster had reported finding some 1970's rpg material at a Goodwill store. So I set out to find some old school material and visited the local Goodwill stores here in Columbus. Unfortunately, I didn't find a single rpg item, much less some lost treasure. However, we did pick up a dress shirt and some dockers for our teenage son for less than $7 plus tax.

Prince Valiant RPG Session

Five months after I initially had the idea to run a Prince Valiant session for my son, I got around to doing it. The Actual Play thread can be seen over on RPG.net's forums.

The Mist

I watched The Mist last night and I must say that the entire time I was watching the movie all I could think about was how it was a perfect example of how a Call of Cthulhu adventure should go. The characters reacted in believable ways including fear, disbelief, religious conversion, desperation, hopelessness, and ultimately extreme remorse. I recommend that fans of Cthulhu watch this movie.

4E D&D Campaign Settings

So the news coming out indicates that each setting is going to have three books: Campaign Guide, Player's Guide, and an Adventure book. This is excellent news as it allows someone to pick up multiple settings without having to worry about later getting an extra dozen supplements. This makes me much more interested in the 4th edition books.

Maybe should have started sooner

So with my new immune boosting diet in effect, I settle into a 103.9 feverish state, fits of coughing, and most likely pneumonia. After the third day of doctor prescribed medications I'm feeling a lot better. However, I think maybe I should have held off from going back to work as it was a rough going today.

New Healthy Diet

So far eating a more healthy and nutritious diet hasn't been too hard. I started at 258 pounds and yesterday I was at 245 pounds. Not too bad for a short time. The more interesting thing is that I'm actually more alert and less tired by not drinking caffeine all day. I guess the sugar content was just affecting me more than I was aware.

Where is my guild?

So, I belong to an online guild called The Wanderers that I played numerous MMO games with including Shadowbane, DAoC, WoW, and Guild Wars to name a few. However, last friday the website went down and as of this writing I still can't get it to load. I wonder what the heck is going on with the site. I might have to actually log into a game to find out. :-)

Canceled Time Warner Cable and Phone Service

So in an effort to reduce the monthly payout I've dropped my cable and phone service through the cable company. I kept the internet services though. The phone service has been replaced with Skype Pro which reduces the cost from $30 a month to $60 a year for essentially the same service. The only downside is that friends and relatives now have to learn a new home phone number. But, for $300 less a year, they can deal. :-) I also think that cable will not be missed too much. The cartoons that P.J. watched are mostly online for free and a lot of television shows can be found online for free too. Right now I think that Hulu, AOL Video, and Turbonick will satisfy our needs. I've still got over the air HDTV for the broadcast stations too.

Sick All the Time

Basically, since Christmas I've been sick the majority of the weeks. It could be due to poor diet, lack of exercise, or lack of quality sleep. The wife thinks that maybe I should make some changes to improve my health and quite frankly, I'm tired of being sick, tired, and sluggish all the time. So in the next few months I'll be making changes to improve these areas.

DRM Issues

So, I built my new HTPC, but not all the features that I thought would work smoothly do. The sad part is that the problems that I have had are due to the stupidity of DRM schemes that Netflix, Microsoft, and the movie studios are using. My plan was to replace my cable television by:

1. Renting DVD movies from Netflix/Blockbuster
2. Streaming movies using Netflix "Watch Now"
3. Streaming television shows using AOL Video (which includes Hulu and IN2TV and others)
4. Using Media Center as my DVR for network television
5. Using Media Center extras such as Turbonick
   

The first problem that I ran into is that my DVD rentals from Blockbuster and Netflix won't play in Vista. The problem? I have my computer hooked up to my television using component Y-Pb-Pr cables. Windows does not allow the use of component cables to watch encrypted movies. It will only allow an HDMI cable to be used. I can use Windows Vista and run other programs with the component cables, it just doesn't allow encrypted movies to be watched. Thank you HDCP and PMP.

The second problem is that I've been trying out lots of different Media Center plugins, software programs, and drivers to see what provides the most optimal experience. Sometimes this experimentation "breaks" Windows. Since I don't have any saved files or work on the new computer, the easy fix is just to do a reinstall of Windows. Well, it turns out that each reinstall of Windows caused Netflix to believe that it was a different computer each time so it reported that I was using it on more than the allowed 4 computers. I called customer service and they "graciously" gave me a free extension to 5 computers so that I could use it. However, I couldn't get Netflix to work again because it kept giving me DRM issues. Even after I uninstalled and reinstalled Netflix it kept reporting the error. So much for the customer support fix. I followed the steps to clear the DRM given by Netflix website, but it still had DRM errors. It kindly offered me the customer service line for me to call a 2nd time. Did I call them a 2nd time? No, I logged on to my account and hit the cancel button.

So here I am a user trying to enjoy movies legally instead of downloading them from file sharing sites or using decryption software and Microsoft and Netflix won't let me. The irony of it all is that if you search the internet you can find hacks to break the Netflix DRM and programs to break the encryption on the DVD movies. So the DRM protection does nothing to stop piracy, but instead makes it impossible for legitimate users to legally watch movies.

Goodbye Ubuntu, Hello Snowfall

Well, the wife growing weary of my Ubuntu experiment led me to reinstall Windows MCE 2005 on our main computer. As I had planned on using Ubuntu on the main desktop and MCE 2005 on the new HTPC this caused me to order a new copy of Windows. I went ahead and bought Vista Home Premium 64 Bit Edition to use on the HTPC. I know that drivers and software options are somewhat rough going, but it will allow for hardware and software growth in the next 2-3 years on the HTPC which should be enough to make up for the shortcomings of early adoption.

In unrelated news, we had quite the snow storm this weekend. Officially it came in at around 20 inches of snowfall. Sure, not much to write about for people in Buffalo or other snow heavy areas, but around this part of the country that is enough to beat the last record which was set way back in the early 1900's. Next weekend the predicted temperatures are to be in the 60's. :-)

Warhammer Online Newsletter

The most recent newsletter for Warhammer Online showed up in my e-mail. The most interesting part was the notice that purchasing a comic book in April will give consumers a 1 in 5 (20%) chance to get into the beta. I'm tempted to buy 5 or 6 copies of the comic just to get into the beta. I've been pretty bored lately and looking for some online game to play. The beta would give me a new game to try out. The other interesting part was some information on keeps and sieges that will be in the game. It largely looks like the DAoC system and further cements that the game is going to be more of a DAoC 2 than a game of it's own design.

HTPC

So, I decided to build a Home Theater PC (HTPC). I ordered some parts online and bought a new hard drive at the local Microcenter. The items that I chose are:

Case: In Win BT610T
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H
Processor: Athlon 64 LE-1620
Memory: Kingston 1GB ValueRAM Kit (2 512 MB modules) of DDR2 800
Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar SE16 250 GB SATA-300
DVD Burner: Samsung SH-S202J
HDTV Tuner: Dvico FusionHDTV5 Gold RT

With all the parts in hand, I sat down today to put it all together. After I finished, I hit the power button and see and hear the fans start, but nothing else happens. Take it all apart, recheck everything, do this a couple more times and then give up. Joy of joy, the brand new motherboard was DOA. I checked Newegg's site and it looks like I have to pay the return postage, but they'll replace it and ship it back free of charge. Guess I'll have to do that Monday. Hopefully the next one actually works. What a dissapointing start to my new HTPC.

Better Weekend

This weekend seems to be a pretty normal one after two bad weekends in a row. Two weekends ago I found out that my grandfather died and then the following day I was struck with the stomach flu. Last weekend I went to the funeral for my grandfather and then two days later I was struck with the stomach flu again. So far this weekend is shaping up to be a typical weekend of just watching t.v., reading, and surfing the internet. Let's hope that it stays that way.

Ubuntu/Linux

I haven't renewed my alumni membership which means that I'm currently unable to access books from Ohio State's library. In turn, this means that I have to put my research on hold until February when I can afford to renew my alumni membership. So, a hard drive problem on the spare computer led me to make a live CD of Ubuntu. This in turn led me to use the local library to check out PC Magazine Linux Solutions and Moving from Windows to Linux. I've never checked any of the Linux distributions out before, so we'll see how things go. :-)

What decade is it?

So I'm sitting here watching American Gladiators and during the commercial break there was an ad for Knight Rider. Ah, get out the hot air popcorn popper and get ready for childhood part 2.