Mike’s Blog

Yes, it’s true… my wife and I are expecting a baby at the end of November. Now that we’ve told most everyone in person, I figured it was time to announce it here.

It’s hard to know what to say about this, other than “wow”.  We’ve been planning this for quite some time, but it still seems hard to believe that it’s actually happening.  I just hope that I’ll be as good of a dad as my wife seems to think I’ll be.  At least I know we’ll have plenty of support, since we’ll be living very close to her parents soon.

It’s weird knowing that the entire focus of your life is about to change.  Yet, at the same time, it’s pretty darn cool.

Instead of “I haven’t”, using “I’ve not”.  For example: “I’ve not seen Spiderman 3 yet.”

I guess it’s still a technically correct thing to say, so I don’t know why this bugs me so much.  Maybe it’s because it makes me feel like the writer/speaker is trying to sound pretentious.

This very nicely sums up my feelings about nerds who whine and cry about every little “inaccuracy” in movies like the rest of the world is supposed to care. Just shut up and enjoy the movie!

I was especially amused to read this after the experience I went through with Dell back in January. I’ll sum up my post from the comment thread here:

I’m glad to see these crooks get slapped around a bit after the experience I had when I decided to order a new laptop back in January. I’m especially pleased that it’s happening in my home state.

I didn’t qualify for Dell’s “interest-free” line of credit. I’d love to know what one actually has to do to qualify for this mythical interest-free credit, because my credit score is outstanding - but that’s just a minor annoyance compared to what I went through to cancel the unwanted line of credit for which I *was* approved, the one that offered the low, low rate of 22.74% APR. (Yeah, can’t imagine why I didn’t want to keep that line of credit - what a deal.) It took three phone calls to finally get this done, including one with a liar who assured me that the account would never be activated because I didn’t make a purchase. (The card arrived in the mail a couple days after that conversation.)

Then they refused to send me confirmation that the account was closed because I didn’t accept the terms and conditions. So…. you won’t tell me you’ve closed an account unless I accept the terms, which would in fact mean I want the account open. Um, OK. My brain still hurts over that one. Anyway, once I started using initials such as “BBB” I got the confirmation letter I was looking for.

Buy a Dell if you must, but stay far, far away from their credit department unless you consider sanity to be overrated. Dell lost my business with this BS.

Oh, and I still don’t have a new laptop.

I’ll be keeping a close eye on this situation. I wonder if I might potentially be involved in a settlement. I’d consider that a fair trade for the slight hit my credit score likely took as a result of this fiasco.

Since buying a new router the other day, I decided to muck around with streaming video from my PC to my Xbox 360. It used to be that you needed a PC running Windows Media Center for this, but as of last fall you could use a Windows XP-based PC with the right software - for example, Windows Media Player 11 or Microsoft’s Zune software. In theory, one could download various TV shows and video clips from the Internet and enjoy playback on a 360.

Except there’s a bit of a drawback: the 360 only understands the Windows Media Video (WMV) file format and codecs. Occasionally, I find myself needing to download a show from the Internet when my somewhat buggy DirecTV DVR messes up, and those aren’t WMV. Furthermore, video conversion is generally a pain.

Enter TVersity. It’s an Xbox 360-compatible media server with the ability to transcode video from almost any format to WMV on the fly. No need to pre-convert anything - I just call up a video via the 360, wait a few seconds, and bam, I’m sitting on my couch and enjoying it on my TV instead of trying to watch it while uncomfortably huddled around my computer monitor.

Combined with this handy DirecTV-Xbox 360 remote hack, watching video files just got a whole lot more painless for me. Huzzah!