Double Blind

For the longest time, this site has been hosted on my cable modem. Now that there are some dirt cheap web hosting providers that give you hosting services for multiple domains for a cheap price (US$6.95/month), I think it’s time to port over my web services to this. Eventually I will move my mail service as well, but I have to figure a clean transition plan as my @rdix.com mail is quite important.

In addition, this is a good opportunity for me to learn Moveable Type and switch from Greymatter.

I guess what I’m saying is that if you see the site down, it probably means that I’m fiddling around with DNS or something else. I want to be able to disconnect my server system.

On a total side note, if my computer takes 100W to be running, and electricity prices are $0.0605 per kWh, it means that it costs $4.32 + taxes to keep it running just in terms of electricity. So the marginal cost of using a dedicated web host is about CAD$4, plus the fact that I don’t have to provide bandwidth or the capital costs of providing computer hardware. Web hosting has gotten fairly cheap.

I’ve been watching this hurricane form and its development over the last week, and suffice to say, this hurricane will be the hurricane of 2005 that will do a mind-boggling amount of damage to New Orleans. It’s approaching Category 5, which is the highest category possible. Only three hurricanes have struck US land at category 5 – the most recent was Hurricane Andrew, which struck in 1992.

Hurricane Katrina will hit the US coast around 4am Monday (Pacific Time) and will cause severe damage.

The reason why this is going to be exceptionally bad is because New Orleans is below sea level – any water that gets within the city limits has to be pumped out. There is a system of dykes around the city, kind of like Richmond, to prevent water from the local bodies of water from getting in, but a hurricane at Category 5 is of sufficient strength to propel the water above these dykes and pour into the city. It would take months to dredge the water out, which is why I don’t envy their situation at present.

I bought my first MP3 player, a 512MB variety. I’ve been holding back for ages for flash memory prices to drop low enough so that I could pick up a half gig player. Well, that time has finally come. It cost me US$99 plus 7.75% California state taxes. There is also a US$20 mail-in rebate which may or may not arrive, but if it does I will consider it a bonus.

I didn’t consider an IPod or a hard-drive based unit since they are too heavy and expensive.

The MuVo came with a CD (which was loaded with useless Creative Labs software which just spams your desktop with registration crap), ear-bud headphones (which fall out when your head moves two nanometers), and belt-clip (which is quite a handy unit).

Installation was painless. Just slap the thing into your USB port and copy file folders. Take the thing out of the USB port and plug it into the player unit.

The whole thing has as much volume and weights just as much as a couple cigarette lighters. Very light, you could take it hiking or jogging without worries. On a side note, this is an amazing accomplishment. 10 years ago, it took the ENTIRE processing power of a 486 to decompress an MP3 stream in real time. The standard sized HDD then was 120MB. Now you can fit an MP3 decompressor, digital-to-analog converter, a mixer, FM tuner, 512MB on something weighing an ounce for the price of a hundred bucks?

The screen is backlit with blue. There is a settings menu where you can adjust the contrast, time of the backlight, and other miscellaneous parameters.

There is an FM tuner and a microphone/recorder feature. I haven’t tried the microphone feature yet, but it’s there.

There is a built-in mixer with four pre-sets and a custom setting.

Navigating through songs and folders is done through a push-button (similar to a mouse wheel, except you flick it instead of turning it). Volume is controlled by two buttons, from a setting of 0 to 40. 40 was very loud.

It takes one AAA battery which alledges to last 14 hours, I have not had a chance to test this out.

Although I haven’t used any other MP3 players before (so take this review with a grain of salt), the product appears good. I’ll recommend it.

A couple months ago, I was on a trip on Vancouver Island, sampling the wines of the Saanich-Duncan area. The friend that was with me and I got into a friendly debate on road sign billboards next to the highway. He debated that they should be legislated as illegal since you are forced to look at them. I debated that you can look at it, but it’s your choice whether to think about it. We then both talked about the advertisement in question that got us to discuss this – Interactive Male, which is a phone dating service for a specific male audience (I’ll leave it up to the readers to figure out which audience).

I wasn’t convinced by his arguments, but I could see the merits of it. Personally, when I’m traveling along the Interstate freeways in the USA, there’s not much to do except look at the landscape and the occasional sign. I also do like it when there are signs telling you what gas stations and fast food joints are at the next town. But Interactive Male? What possibly could somebody need for that when on the freeway? Maybe it’s something to do when going from town to town… but still, you can always decide to forget about it and go on with your business.

So the new story is that there is apparently a barge in Burrard Inlet that has a huge poster up advertising some Nike thing. This is wrong. When people go to a beach in Vancouver, they want to see the horizon, they want to see the sky, the water, the sandy beaches, and the tankers that are lined up to pick up their cargo at the port facilities, but they don’t want to see advertising. It spoils the intrinsic beauty of having a beach in the first place, which would ultimately hurt the city economically by ruining its image. It would be the equivalent of putting corporate advertising on ambulances.

Would the city lose out economically if the Burrard Inlet was swamped by barges advertising everything from shoes to phone dating services? You bet. Thus, the barge should go away and stick to the billboards on the highway or the television set instead.