Clapboard - Full Frontal Nerdity

I generally shy away from posting this stuff on Clapboard because politics bore me and large industries freaking out because no one needs them anymore bore me and having discussions with the brainwashed bores me, but hey!  I love graphs!

This graphic was posted at the often-awesome Techdirt and I wanted to repost it here because it illustrates with real numbers that what the content distribution industries have been saying for years is a total lie.  THe sky isn't falling, fuckers.  The world isn't ending.  The entertainment industry isn't dying, it's growing, and now's a great time to be a creator.  Fuck the liars in the suits.

That's all.  Graphic is 4x bigger after el break-o.

With the decommissioning of my old computer, I really took notice for the first time of a strange limitation in WHS - there's no way to export an image of one of your computer's backups to a compressed folder.

I'm officially retiring Tombstone, as you already know, and I'll want to remove it from the "Computers & Backup" tab in the not-too-distant future because I'm a neat freak and because I hate having yellow things in my Home Network Status screen, even if I can check "ignore this issue" to get my thing back to green.

So, with some google-fu and a lot of time, I managed to mount, export and compress Tombstone's final backup, which now sits on my desktop as a 275GB .wim file.  That seems a little small, but it'll have to do until I can take a few days and try to restore it.  I'm sure I'll learn something interesting during that process, but at the moment, I feel as if the peace of mind I've gained by having the data there is good enough.  Even if it's not restorable, I'm sure I can mount the image as a drive to get at anything I may need.

Anyway, this post isn't a how-to, just a note on the fact that it's do-able, and probably worth it.

I'm looking into leaving Time Warner for our Cable internet, and decided to check on my speeds over at speedtest.net.  Turns out not to have sucked too much, really.  Faster than 72% of the US using "Road Runner Turbo" is okay.  I'd like to be in the 90th percentile, though.

It's January 2012, and that seems like a really good time to upgrade my workstation.

It's been a long time since I've done a real overhaul on my computer system.  Although I did replace my video cards about 6 months ago, the rest of the system has been plugging along for a year and a half or more.  Because of some end-of-the-year corporate spending requirements, I found myself looking at computer components on the 29th of December, and a few days later some boxes showed up at my door.  Go figure.

Anyway, what follows is a list of hardware because last time I wrote a post like this it was supremely helpful in terms of remembering what was in the box that sits next to me all day long when I needed to download drivers, troubleshoot problems or generally do something useful.   Sometimes posts like this are purely for me, and for that, I apologize. Tombstone, my old system, is still mostly running, although in a semi-gutted state, waiting to be re-purposed as something awesome, either a system in Andrew's growing empire or the hub of my still-theoretical porn empire. Dunno which yet. Maybe something yet different from that.

Anyway, after the break you'll find the components, names and some reasoning behind each piece of the puzzle.

So I made Broccoli Cheese Soup.  It was yummy!

Last night's Red Kidney Bean soup was pretty aces as well.

Taking recommendations for tomorrow's soup as we speak.  Might go to the Betty Crocker cookbook for suggestions, too.

After the break, there's a bigger picture of tonight's soup as well as a couple of musings about the start of this cooking theme project.

Welcome to 2012, the home of culinary experimentation.

I'm going to play with themes-by-week this year, and I'm starting with soups.  After the break, I'll post my current thoughts on soups that I may make and I'll solicit ideas for other soups and other weeks.

It's Christmas again - we're reveling in holiday cheer here in beautiful, sunny Las Vegas.

I'm stuck in a bit of a debate with myself about whether to go home or stay here once the holiday is over, and I think you can help me with this decision.  Do I stay and start my New Years' resolution of shooting more for BRANDED here and now, thereby committing myself to the process for real and for serious?  Do I go home and relax (not that here will be anything but relaxing) and work on the photos I've already taken?  Do I leave and do something else entirely?

Anyway, mostly I just want to wish you guys all a merry, happy and joyful christmas time with people you love (and make love to).

I was supposed to be skiing Wednesday, Thursday and today, but after 3 hours of rainy skiing Wednesday and no skiing (or break from the rain) on Thursday, I awoke today to gray-but-dry-skies, a fresh inch of snow on the ground (the only inch we have here) and the slopes opening for business as usual.  I only skied for about 5.5 hours today, but that's okay - I'm fat and out of shape and committed to getting more skiing in this winter, both with Casey AND with Drew.  I'm even considering looking into doing a group ski thing up to Big Bear or Mountain High or whatever - we'll see.

Anyway, I just wanted to check in - it's been another long-ass time.  Ann Arbor again tomorrow, then Cleveland.  Back to Detroit (where I'd like to buy a house) on Monday, then to LA and business for the week before Christmas.