The Daily Goob

Today is one of those days that is most definitely blog worthy. Read on and you’ll see why.

My life was all happy and calm throughout the morning. I went to my two morning classes, I ate lunch, and I had my afternoon all planned out. I was going to go to my afternoon class, go back to my apartment, and then do a mixture of preparing for my Discrete Math test tomorrow along with working on some Physics HW. During my class, however, I thought to myself, “Hmmm…I could go by the Registrar’s Office after class and pick up an official transcript for one of my internship application forms. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.” So I did.

While leaving the Registrar’s Office, I had another thought: “I wonder if Mr. Steele is free, and if I could drop by his office to have him answer a few questions about how I should answer a couple of questions on the forms?” Since I was walking by the ECS building, I decided to go ahead and do it. Inside the Advising Office they told me it would only be a couple seconds, but it ended up bring like 15 minutes that I waited. I went back to his office and began asking my questions. I then remarked, “I’m going home tomorrow to get the photos from my house, and I’ll be able to bring this back to you on Friday or Monday.” That’s when the trouble started. As I’ve mentioned previously, I can’t read minds. I’d like to, but I can’t. That’s why I’m curious how I was supposed to know that those forms were due today!!! Ahem…we had a predicament.

I then spent the next couple of minutes figuring out what else I needed, who I needed it from, and when I could get it. Photos (not hard to get), essay (which I’d already typed up), seal from Registrar’s Office (I was just there!), and letter of recommendation from dean. Riiiight. Well, the person who was pretty much my only option for getting the letter requirement had already left for the day, so I was supposed to go talk to his assistant. She wasn’t in her office, so I went over to the Registrar’s Office to get the seal part taken care of. They had me fill out a quick form, and then said I would be able to come pick it up Monday. Monday wasn’t going to cut it, dude in the blue shirt, I needed this by this evening or tomorrow morning. He said he’d see what he could do, so back over to the Advising Office. The assistant lady was there, and I explained to her my situation. She was extremely nice and friendly (unlike someone else’s secretary I’ve dealt with a couple of times), and gave me a pad to write down what I wanted my letter to say.

That’s where the title of this post comes in. Writing a letter of recommendation for yourself has to be one of the strangest things to do in the world. You know your accomplishments and want to make yourself look good, but you have to think about yourself from the viewpoint of a teacher and what they would know and say. Anyway, I got that done and was told to come back around 9:00 tomorrow morning to meet with the dean so he could talk to me a couple of minutes before signing this letter. I then went back to my apartment and starting figuring out how to rearrange my schedule for the rest of the day to involve preparing for my DM test, checking back at the Registrar’s Office for the form, and getting a photo of myself from my house. This whole process had taken about 1 and a half hours, so everything kinda went into overdrive mode from there. Basically, the Registrar’s Office didn;t have my form ready and said that it probably wouldn’t be ready until tomorrow at around the same time I gave it to them today. Seeing as how I need to turn the forms into Mr. Steele tomorrow morning, I’m not entirely certain exactly how this will work out, but for now, all I care about is sleep.

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Let’s look at what happened today:

1. I woke up (Ooohhh…interesting, and this should be a hint as to what else is on this list)
2. I tried to put “shock” in our pool but had no way of measuring the amount (1 pound for every 16,500 gallons of water, wtf??)
3. I drove to school (Kinda nice to live less than 10 minutes away now)
4. I went to my two morning classes (The first one put just about everyone to sleep)
5. I ate lunch (General Tso chicken, fried rice, and corn)
6. I read my two articles for my afternoon class (Ummmm….took me just under an hour?)
7. I went to my afternoon class (Where we actually only spent 20 minutes of the 75 discussing said articles)
8. I came back to the apartment (Played a little FFXI)
9. I went to go get dinner (Burger King, typical dinner for a Monday night)
10. I came back to the apartment again (Proceeded to eat said Burger King and played around on the computer some more)
11. I am making this blog post (Tense change, tense change!!)
12. I will go to sleep in about 15 minutes (See, I can even predict the future)

Trust me on this one: On days I don’t make posts, interesting stuff rarely happens.

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How could I forget to make a blog post yesterday?? I must beg for forgiveness from all my faithful readers and hope that no one shall hold this atrocity against me. It will never happen again for as long as I live!

Yeah, right…

Remember that list of stuff I made back in June? So far, I’ve bought only one of those things (the headphones). Yes, I still need a new phone (and my dad actually got a new one today which made me think of this). Yes, I have the money to get one. The big issue now is that the N80 has been released (but at a $600 price point). Do I really want to pay about twice what the 6682 would cost? Well, since I wouldn’t be signing a contract extension, I could theoretically get the 6682 now and then upgrade to the N80 in about a year once the “new factor” has worn off.

And as a note to anyone that might be reading this on Facebook, just FYI, but I don’t originally write these as Facebook notes. I write them on my blog and have Facebook set to import them into my notes. Not that you really needed to know that, but seeing as how one of my friends commented on my last entry, just thought it might be worthwhile to bring up.

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Last week we thought the game against Frisco would be an easy win. Being down 7-0 at the half showed that wasn’t right, but we still won 20-7. Everyone was tempted to think the same thing about Bishop Lynch, but no one wanted a repeat of last week either. By the half, it was 49-0. Don’t worry, the 49 was HP.

The final score ended up being 56-14. Once again, we weren’t able to break the 60 barrier. I wonder if fireworks or something will go off when we finally do. Probably not, but it would be cool and confuse everyone at the same time.  :)

Next week is a bye for HP, and district play starts the following week. Our new district has 2 more teams than last year, so that means we have to start two weeks earlier. My schedule might also get a little lighter now that there are 7 trainers, and I won’t be needed all the time on Thursday nights now. That’s fine with me; JV games were fun, but Fridays are where all the energy really is.

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Needless to say, I think this is the longest a single topic has ever remained the subject of my posts here. Aside from being a place where I can go back and see all these options written down for future reference, maybe some poor person doing a Google search will stumble across one of these posts when they are in the same predicament as me. Yes, I know the use of “they” in the previous sentence is wrong. No, I’m not going to change it.

As I’ve mentioned before, this whole “project” has two goals: 1) Be able to record multiple digital cable channels without needing multiple (or preferably any) set top boxes, and 2) Be able to stream live TV to (at the minimum) my dad’s study where there is no cable outlet. The first point has to be accomplished pretty much through hardware. A recording devide that utilizes CableCARDs will allow me to record the digital channels without needing a cable box, and if I desire an extra tuner, I can always run an IR blaster to a cable box. The options available now and in the near future are either a Series3 Tivo (~$800) or a Media Center PC running Vista. For the computer, apparently the CableCARD tuners are going to be strictly OEM, so I’d have to buy one from Dell, HP, etc. Point number two can be accomplished through both hardware and software, though my preference is for the hardware route. Media Center Extenders are really the only solution for this and have to work with the Media Center software in XP (and presumably Vista). The alternative is to have a separate computer acting like this and have it running the software that is being used to manage everything (MythTV, SageTV, etc.). With these software options there’s also just the option of controlling it all on a single computer, but then there is the potential for it to have issues with whatever else you’re trying to do.

For right now, I’m still in a holding pattern until a solution comes along that I’m content with. Then I’ll go to the phase of having my parents sign off on it (since they will the ones paying for it, after all). That might arguably be the even harder part.

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Yesterday I made a post outlining the numerous options I would have for a media center setup at our house if any company would implement the functionality I’m looking for (namely, the unique ability to take digital cable without using a cable box and stream it around the house over ethernet). After I published my post last night, I thought about it some more and came up with some good reasons for both why Apple will and won’t do what I said. Now, as would be expected, time to outline these things:

Why Apple Won’t Make the Mac Mini into a Media Center Computer:

1. Part of the iTunes Store is selling TV Shows for $2 each. If Apple let people have an official way to record these shows on their own, it would cut into their sales.
2. Anything recorded by Apple hardware/software is going to end up in an encrypted form (just as Tivos and XP Media Center does). Apple has Fairplay, but the desire to cut out commercials would strengthen the desire to crack the DRM. Since Apple wouldn’t want Fairplay to get cracked, they’d have to devise a new DRM system.
3. Adding in a tuner (and possible CableCARD slot) is going to both drive up the price and possibly make the Mac Mini larger. The computer is designed to be an “entry” level computer to get people to switch to Macs, and neither of these fit the primarytarget demographic of the computer.

Why Apple Will Make the Mac Mini into a Media Center Computer:

1. By making the Mac Mini into the computer that you’d have in your entertainment system, Apple would sell units to both PC and Mac owners. People with iMacs would be able to watch on their existing computers through Front Row, and PC owners would bite at the small form factor and cost (including one or two iTV units) compared to most XP Media Center PCs plus Media Center Extenders.
2. Apple will never get every TV show into the iTunes Store, so by allowing people to record their own shows they would fill this gap. Making them difficult to edit, however, would still keep people tied to purchasing their favorite shows with no commercials (and possible higher resolutions if video downloads went to HD quality).
3. Unless Apple debuts a “Mac” (a non-Pro tower that’s upgradeable), there’s no other computer in their lineup that lends itself to a media center computer. With Vista arriving with the TV recording functionality built into Home Premium (the version most consumers would get), Macs would be seen as being less functional in this regard.

Again, it’s probably never going to happen, but at least there is a solid argument for supporting it. Apple did claim that this was a “sneak peek” at the iTV unit, so maybe they’re already on top of this. Cound we even see a 2G iTV in another year with recording capabilities built in? With Apple, nothing is ever completely impossible…

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Anyone (including myself) who ever thought I’d be able to stick to a daily schedule was not only sadly mistaken but also needs a reality check. History has shown that it’s never going to happen, so any attempt that I make at it is only a sad temporary outburst before sinking back into the murky depths of non-posting that consumes my soul. How’s that for dark?

Apple’s event today was pretty interesting, even if there’s nothing in there that calls out to me as a must get. I’ve all but decided that my next music/video player has to be widescreen, so it looks as if the Gigabeat V (the S is still 4:3, or rather 3:4), Vision: W (announced elsewhere in the world, but hopefully coming to the US), or the rumored widescreen iPod (6G in January, maybe?) is my list. With the vast majority of my DVDs in a widescreen aspect ratio, I don’t want to have the size of black bars that a 4:3 screen would require. The video store is a cool idea, but my “impulse buy” price for a file I can’t even burn to a DVD is probably $5-7, not $10-$13.

The iTV product is an interesting situation to me for this reason: for $300 I can get essentially the functionality of a Media Center Extender (minus the live TV capability which actually is kinda nice) and not have to have a computer running XP MCE. A middle alternative pricewise between the two would then be the new Tivo Series3 which can record in HD and still do the archiving to computer thing. If Tivo will add the ability to their software to then allow watching live TV, that would then be a possible option. However, then for the same price as that, if Apple would update the Mac Mini with an integrated HD tuner and CableCARD support (not likely at the current price point, but still) and add live TV streaming to the iTV, a Mac Mini + an iTV would allow for the ideal setup I want (device to record/playback shows that could easily archive them to infinite HD space + ability to stream live TV to my dad’s study) at a price I could convince my parents to go for ($800-1000). I guess we’ll see how well the stars align in the next few months…

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Not to want to break the (short) streak I’m on here, a post needed to be made tonight. I still have nothing “new” to say, except for the fact that there are adult relatives at my house that I’m not entirely sure how they’re related to me. Oh well, all I have to do is smile, occasionally walk through the room, and carry suitcases wherever they need to go. I can handle that without a problem.

I started Phoenix Wright today (yes, no witty title), and so far it’s definitely entertaining. I don’t really know why it’s such a giant hit yet, but I’m also only through with the first case. Seeing as how the afore mentioned relatives are in the room right next to mine, my DS + headphones will probably be my entertainment tonight rather than one of my other consoles.

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Note to all football teams that will play us this year: if you’re leading at the half 7-0 (or even more, that’s not the important part), your fans might want to think twice about chanting “Overrated!!” as we walk off the field. All that does is make us come back out and score 20 unanswered points and make you look like idiots. So just save yourself the embarrassment, and don’t do it. That’s all I have to say on that.

So yeah, we won 20-7 tonight against Frisco if you didn’t follow that first paragraph. That puts us at 2-0 for the year, and starting with my senior year we have a total record of 26-2 (both losses happening my senior year also, the very first game and the very last). Next week I’ll work games on Thursday at Bishop Lynch and then we play them at home on Friday.

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Nothing happened in the past ~24 hours that’s title worthy (except for the fact that I hate physics). Kinda sad when you can’t come up with a good title for a blog entry. Oh well, the world continues on.

The primary reason I’m making this post is to try and get back into a daily update of this, since it is called The Daily Goob after all. Now, I fully aware that regardless of what I try it won’t be updated daily for all eternity, but I’d settle for maybe 3-5 posts a week on a regular basis. I don’t think that’s too much to ask of me…is it?

Tomorrow is HP’s second football game of the season; this week it’s against Frisco at Pizza Hut Park (a soccer stadium, soccer is big elsewhere in the world where its called football, so we really are playing in a “football” stadium). This is the first year of the 2 year cycles, so I don’t think anyone really knows what to expect since (to my knowledge) we’ve never played them before. I’m just going straight to where we’re eating and then onto the stadium from my house (like how I did with away game last year, but I was always leaving from UTD), so that has the benefits of not driving back from HP once the game is over and also not having to clean anything up.

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