blog.LucasQualls.com

I was going to buy Avatar on DVD today. I worked the midnight release “event” (which nobody came to, by the way). I wanted to buy the special edition DVD with the special features and everything. I wanted some reason to buy this movie on DVD. I haven’t bought a DVD in forever.

I am not going to buy this DVD. The reason being — there are NO special features at all on the disc. Nothing. To quote the director:

There’s zero extras! There’s so few extras that you put it in, you push play, and the movie starts. There are no trailers, there’s no shit at the beginning that you have to endlessly go through. I have a deal with the studio and it goes like this: Any movie I make that makes over a billion dollars goes out without a bunch of crap trailers for your other movies.

I think its great that there are no trailers that have to play before you can get to the menus or whatever. But I want some special features. The whole reason I would buy a DVD and not just rent it or watch it online or whatever else is for the special features that you can’t get anywhere else. I think there are going to be a lot of people who buy this DVD and are upset because there are no special features at all on it. I’ve also read that there will be another edition of the DVD coming out later this year that has special features. That is annoying to me. The people that bought it now are not going to want to buy it again in a few months to get the special features. And those of us that want to buy the DVD to get the special features are missing out for the time being. It seems like they did this on purpose to try to make more money. “Here, have just the movie now, and we’ll get you for $20 again in a few months when the special edition comes out. Hell, maybe we’ll charge $25 or $30 cuz its SPECIAL…”

Alright…. I think my rant is done for now. Feel free to hit me up on twitter @lukenova with your comments, or throw them in the disqus comments below.

Today, I installed Google Analytics into all pages that this wordpress loads. In a few days, I should have more accurate information as to just how many people read (or don’t read) this blog. I’m not sure whether to be excited that I get an accurate count, or to be worried that I don’t actually get any traffic at all.

I honestly doubt I get much traffic these days. I haven’t posted anything with actual content in months. The only thing that has been posting on here are the twitter digest posts. I’ve changed that to where it only posts weekly, so I hope that works out. Last time I changed that setting, I had an issue where twitter tools made about 250 posts for one weekly twitter digest. I’m hoping I don’t have to go manually delete 250 posts like I did last time.

Such is life when you’re always trying new things. I own a hosting account from 1&1 that gives me more webspace than I think I will ever need. I have this, and pay for it, because I just like to mess around with all the new things I hear about. I listen to (and/or watch, depending on the format) several technology podcasts, including most of the TWiT.tv shows (This Week in Tech, Windows Weekly, MacBreak Weekly, Security Now, Daily Giz Wiz, Net at Night), several from cNET (Buzz Out Loud, The Real Deal, Gadgettes, PrizeFight), and a few from other networks (Tekzilla from Rev3 for example). As such, I hear about a lot of new technology. That is how I heard about Google Analytics in the first place.

I own several domain names, a few of which I’ve accumulated over time and haven’t actually done anything with. I’ve installed countless things that involve PHP and MySQL, including PHPBB2 several times and most recently, PHPBB3 (which can be seen at my current general purpose forums site, Late Night Computing). I’ve installed a version of WikiMedia software (currently visable at http://lukenova.com), Joomla, Druple, and of course, this WordPress blog. I’m always trying new things. For example, I found a personal twitter analytics software that is in Pre-Alpha code from listening to net at night a few days ago. I did download this code and play with it a bit, however I never got it working. I think I found that the problem was that it is written for php5 and 1&1′s hosting that I have uses php4. I’m always looking for new things to play with.

As I mentioned earlier, I do have a personal general purpose forums site at http://forums.latenightcomputing.com. The original purpose of the latenightcomputing.com domain name was for a podcast I did with me and an old friend of mine. The 14 episodes we did are still available at http://latenightcomputing.com (Please note, these episodes are NSFW! Don’t listen if you get offended easily or if you don’t do well with cursing.) The last episode of the podcast was recorded over a year ago as of this typing, but I would like to start it up again. I had a lot of fun recording and getting to play around with audio hardware and software. I recently had to restart the forums site because the database of the old site became corrupted. I know, I know. I should have been making regular backups of the database so I could have recovered. But since all these things are just my personal projects and are not business critical, I haven’t taken the time to do backups.

So what’s next? What’s going to be the new big thing? What will be the next thing I spend a night, or a week of nights, or a month of nights….or say on an off for seven years (in the case of my forums – I’ve had a forums site running since I was a junior in high school)… What will be the next thing that grabs my attention? Who knows. As the title of this post says, there’s always something new.

I listen to a podcast called Security Now! with Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte. They do the show weekly and they offer security advice for computers and technology. Every other show is a listener feedback episode, where they take questions or feedback from the listeners and discuss them. My feedback was featured as one of the 12 questions in this week’s show.

If you want to download the show to listen to it, go to http://twit.tv/sn196 and download the mp3 from there. Note: the show is 2 hours long this episode. My part starts at around 1hr 20mins in.

Here is the transcript of my part:

LEO: Oh, here you go. This is one from, let’s see, Lucas Qualls in Jonesboro, Arkansas. You started something.

STEVE: Yeah.

LEO: He says: I work at WalMart while I’m attending college, where I’m hoping to graduate with a degree in computer information technology this summer. That’s great, Lucas. We need more smart people listening to Security Now!. I’m writing because over the past few episodes I’ve heard you and Leo talk about Windows being the underlying technology in kiosks. Well, I just wanted to let you know that, if you have ever seen the self-checkouts at a WalMart, they’re running Windows XP. My store doesn’t have them anymore, thank god. They were a total pain. But when we did, I saw them reboot several times. And it’s, yeah, sure, it’s Windows XP booting up. And then a program loads at boot time to run the kiosk. You just drag it into the Start menu. An interesting side note is that they run a terminal emulation program that allows them to access the proprietary system that the other WalMart cash registers connect to. Yeah, it’s often you see kludges like that where it’s kind of a text-based system.

Also recently they took out the reliable, quote, “old-timey” ATM that we had in the store – you know, the kind that has the green text and a screen and no graphics, the kind that just works – and replaced it with the WalMart Money Center Express. We got word that it was supposed to be the most amazing thing in the world. That’s how this new technology is always sold.

STEVE: Uh-huh.

LEO: It has an ATM built in, but it also allows customers to buy money orders, purchase and reload gift cards and so on. I’ve seen them that sell stamps. Well, it’d be a great thing if it actually worked. However, you guessed it, the new system runs, when it does, on Windows XP as well. And not only that, the thing doesn’t work at all half the time. Things on it are constantly breaking. It’s always needing somebody to come out and fix it. It has to be serviced by NCR at least once a week. I personally never used it because I just don’t feel comfortable using my ATM card at a terminal I know is running on Windows, and not even running well. So this is just another example of how stupid some people can be when designing things. Feel free to use this on the podcast. I don’t even care if you mention my name or location. He’s in, like, the home office practically. They could come out and get you.

STEVE: Well, again, I’m at the point I understand I’m beating a dead horse. I want to get this out of my system. Our listeners need to know that we won’t keep this up. But mark my words, this issue of Windows being used in mission-critical embedded applications where it absolutely should not be used is going to be something we’re reading about in the future. This is bad behavior. There are fundamentally sound places where Windows should be used, like on all of our laptops, and absolutely places where the ease of use is, like, the first concern. Because sometimes you ought to have a certain minimal level of expertise before you’re allowed to implement important systems that can affect all kinds of people. And anyway, I’m – good thing I don’t have a cuff hooked up to my arm measuring my blood pressure when I talk about this stuff. Ugh.