The gate has finally been installed. That’s right, I now have a fully fenced in backyard for the dog to run and jump and play in.

However, I’m a little concerned. That gap under the gate looks huge to me. I measured it, though, it’s only 5 1/2 inches. Still, what do we do if we get a smaller dog?

The best part of the whole thing is that I’ve got solar power, baby!

It seems I was a bit optimistic in my last fence update. The fence is essentially done, but the crew decided the posts for the gate need a week to set. The posts are dug 3 ft down and will be holding the entire weight of a 10ft. wooden gate. Better be safe, right?

A bit of bad news, though. They realized that the gate will be opening against the slope of the driveway (you can see the degree of the slope in pic 2). This means there is a potential for there to be a large gap (6 inches or more) when the gate is closed to clear the slope. This is obviously not a good thing if you’re trying to keep a dog in. There are some alternative if the gap is too much, so we’ll just to see what they come up with. The options range from mounting the gate on the curb side (which has it’s own problems) to floating hinges so the gate will rise up as the gate opens.

Oh, and while I’m thinking of it. Happy Birthday to my little Princess, Chloe. She turned 3 on Friday.

Tags: fence project, update, gate

I know the comparison between this movie and podcasting has been made before, but I remembered enjoying the movie the first time so I grabbed it from Netflix. I was not disappointed. It’s every bit as edgy and a commentary on the ansty life of teenagers as I remember it. I see where the comparison to podcasting comes in, though.

Just like podcasting, the pirate radio station in the movie was more of a means to the end. Broadcast communications, or the ability to reach vast numbers of audiences, is a powerful thing. I suppose that since the advent of the Internet we’re a little more sensitive (mature?) to the fact that the things we say can be heard by many thousands of people. Just like in the movie, things people have said over the Internet have had very real consequences (suicides, abductions, sexual assults, and other equally bad stuff). I think the next step in that maturity, though, it so also realize that the things we say will never go away and we are never really anonymous.

Given what I discovered about searchable public records in the past week or so, I would bet that any halfway competent Internet-literature dweeb could tell me my name and the last 3 or 4 addresses I have lived at. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were able to find out much more than that for just a small fee. So just in case you’re thinking that you can do anything anonymously on the Internet, don’t. Just don’t. Your future employer, girlfriend/boyfriend, father-in-law, or correctional officer may just be able to read what you wrote.
What does this have to do with podcasting? Nothing, really. The only thing that changes with podcasting as compared to blogging, e-mail, online forums, bulletin board systems, and pirate radio is the medium and the audience. The goal is still the same: to reach as many people as possible and hopefully touch their lives in a positive way…

…or maybe it’s being able to drop the F-bomb and knowing the FCC can’t do a thing about it.

Talk Hard.

Tags: internet, blogging, pirate radio, podcasting, broadcasting, anonymously, pump up the volume

I couldn’t get my hands on a chipper/shredder to take care of the leaves without some way to tow the ones the rental yards have. So, instead I got out my trusty new chainsaw and cut them into 4 ft. lengths. The city garbage men took them away this morning.

The contractor will be here Thursday morning to finalize the plans, but it’s going to take 3 to 4 more weeks to complete. I was hoping to have the fence done by my daughter’s 3rd birthday but her party is this weekend so that’s not going to happen.

The puppy is getting bigger and harder to control, he’s now taken to running around the house full speed nipping at biting at anyone to tries to stop him. He needs a place to go outside and run off some energy.

UPDATE: Got a call from the contractor this morning and he told me that a crew will be out tomorrow to start the fence but the solar-powered automatic gate wouldn’t be ready until Friday. This is totally different than what we were expecting, we both thought it would take 3-4 weeks from the time they started to finish. Apparantly, that was 3-4 weeks from the time we signed the contract. That is awesome, because my daughter’s birthday party is on Saturday which was the original goal for having the fence built.

Tags: fence project, update, puppy, limbs, chainsaw, birthday

I’ve always had a kind of morbid curiosity about the video game genre that includes hacking simulators such as Uplink, Bluesky, Digital Hazard, and others. I’m positive this stems from my love of cyberpunk fiction.

However, most of these are awful shareware games which go no deeper into “hacking” than clicking a fake looking interface that has a button which says “run password cracker”.

There is, of course, www.hackthissite.org if I want to experience real life hacking scenarios. I’m really more interested in hacking as a culture similar to how it’s experienced in the movies with more realism than today’s hacking simulators can provide.

I have only found one multiplayer hacking game, Domain Knights, and while I had a fun time playing for a while it is really just a well done web-based Real-Time Strategy games that involve turns and managing resources. It gets really boring after a while.

I have an idea for the ultimate cyberpunk/hacking game. Imagine sitting down and firing up your processing unit which gives the ultimate futuristic HUD. With your processing unit, you can reach out onto the ‘net and touch other computing nodes. Write your own programs or buy them through the martketplace. Attack or defend. Work for a mega-corporation or the cyber-rebels. Your choice.

The only difference is that instead of the computers you interact with being made up resources in some game engine loop or the success and failure of the programs you’re running be the result of a digital die being rolled, you will actually be reaching out and touching virtual machines being run by other players. Your life and death struggle with other players has real stakes: the death of your virtual machine. If you lose, reboot it and you’re ready for the next round.

The technology exists to put all of this together and create my vision of a realisitic (yet completely safe) cyberpunk/hacking RPG. I just need to start putting together a team of people who’d like to work on something like this with not only game design, graphic design, and 3D modeling experience, but knowledge of P2P technology, virtual machines, and extension languages like LUA.

I’d love to get this idea of the ground. Do you have an idea on what the first steps would be? Where do I go to find the people I need for a project like this? Craig’s List maybe?

Tags: hacking simultator, hacking game, uplink, bluesky, digital hazard, cyberpunk, hackthissite.org, domain knights, P2P, virtual machine, LUA, team, resources, wanted

I woke up this morning and an invite for Vox awaited me! Yippee! I’m not sure how much I’ll use it over wordpress yet, but it’s definitely very cool and still needs a lot of work at the same time. Come and visit me in my neighborhood. Now I just need to decide who deserves an invite.

To top all of that off, guess what came in the mail!

That’s right, my very own Podzinger schwag. The iPod cover turned out to be for a slimmer video iPod, but I still managed to make it fit my 4th gen.

If you’ve been living under a rock, Podzinger is an awesome way to search audio content (ahem.. podcasts). That’s right, they actually index the spoken word from the audio using some very cool text-to-speech technology.

Bits of Silicon Hell has been sporting a podzinger search box for quite a while now and the schwag was a thank you gift. Thanks guys!

Tags: podzinger, schwag, vox, bits of silicon hell, luggage tag, iPod

There has been a growing trend over the past several years which has resulted in companies creating criminals out of their own consumers. The two largest examples of this that comes to mind is the MPAA and the RIAA. The popular culture creates fans of music and movies and then the MPAA and RIAA turn around and sue them. Why? What does it accomplish?

The DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) makes it illegal to reverse engineer or break the protection/encryption on any media. That means that while it’s legal to make a copy of the content of a DVD (fair use), it is illegal to break the encryption on the DVD to make the copy. I’m talking about legitimate fair use here, not DVD pirates. The RIAA wants it to be made illegal to rip CDs you own to MP3s so you can’t transfer them to your portable music player.

Maybe these organizations (which claim they only do what they are told to do by their constituent companies) really believe that their hold on the popular culture is so strong that not only will we put up with the lawsuits, but we’ll pay their outragous “settlement” offers and still continue to buy their products. A few things will have to occur before these guys will start to get it: people will have to stand up to these lawsuits, people will have to stop buying their products, and we have to create our own popular culture that doesn’t revolve around Hollywood. Yeah, I’m holding my breath for that one.

It’s not just these guys that are getting in on the act. Microsoft’s Genuine Advantage program was released as a patch a few weeks ago. It’s supposed to notify you when your copy of Windows is not legitimate. There have also been many complaints that the software is also erroneously claiming that copies are pirated. There’s no appeals process for this. You get the ‘opportunity’ to buy a legitimate copy, possibly at a discounted rate. If I got this after already buying a legitimate copy, I’d be pissed! As of yet, Microsoft hasn’t used this information to either prosecute or shut off illegal copies. However, who’s to say after a grace period (maybe to coincide with the launch of Vista) that they won’t decide to make WGA the standard for enforcing that everyone has a legimitimate copy, similar to Valve’s Steam.

Where are the days when companies dealt with their consumers and assumed that they were honest? Sure, sometimes people aren’t honest and you have to prosecute shoplifters. We’ve gone beyond prosecuting the thiefs and we’re punishing the honest patrons who just want to get the most from the product they purchased.

Tags: criminal, consumers, RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, Windows Genuine Advantage, WGA, DMCA, DVD, CD, ripping, lawsuits

On Friday morning, I enlisted some help and managed to get the trees along the fence line, the house, and most of the groundcover in the southeast corner removed. See my earlier post for the before pictures.

I was supposed to have a chipper to turn that pile of fallen trees into mulch, but it didn’t work out. Plus, I came down with a nasty cold Saturday morning and I didn’t feel like doing much. The contractors are starting on the 17th so I have next weekend to rent a chipper and get all of that taken care of. At the very least, I need to cut it into 4 ft. sections and let the garbage men take it.

Tags: fence, project, chipper, tree removal, photos

My wife owns a Dell laptop and it worries more than a little that so many have caught fire or exploded.

Come on Dell, where’s official word on this? Where’s the recall? We should at least be able to check our serials numbers and feel better. Forget terrorists, let’s hope one of these things doesn’t explode on a plane.

Update: Dell has finally recalled these suckers. Go here to see if your Dell’s gonna explode.

Tags: Dell, laptop, battery, fire, explode, recall, serial numbers