I can’t imaging why I expected anything else from Microsoft. They are, after all, the reason I took a huge pay cut and ditched a very high paying “career” to start at ground zero with Ruby and open source. Dealing with MS had become so miserable that I was seriously considering dish washer jobs instead.
It’s been a while. I’ve been developing on Macs for years now. In the same way you forgot how much that hike sucked that made you puke and left you with a 3rd degree sunburn, I’d forgotten just how much MS sucks.
The guys I work with all have XBOX’s and (sad or not) it’s what they generally do after work “together”. I figured I’d finally get one… besides – Red Dead Redemption looked pretty juvenile. How could I resist?
XBOX 360’s are not cheap. Being MS they, of course, have to come in 3+ confusing varieties. All of which are not really explained anywhere. On top of these “choices” there are different online plans to chose from, again, you have to Google this (as if anyone uses Bing) – they couldn’t be bothered to explain it to you.
So – this is how my XBOX experience went today:
go to store
buy xbox
go back to office
try to hook up xbox. they don’t include a hdmi cable.
go to friend’s house to get cable
try to hook up xbox
no sound
spend almost an hour in “setup” – connecting this thing to the internet without the $99 wifi adapter requires serious google skills and fairly low level knowledge of your network.
still no sound – games aren’t playable without sound
back to store
get $60 headphones that supposedly solve this problem because MS is SO behind the times that they assume everyone has 1) a hard line internet connection and 2) a fairly modern TV. That describes almost no one I know.
still no sound
i supposedly need a xbox hd av cable now
I mean, seriously. A bunch of above average smart people came up with this bullshit? If you’re going to nickel-and-dime someone at least make it obvious. What, they think the attention deficit diorder generation is going to enjoy this?
Well – anyway – I’ve now remembered why I won’t touch anything tied to MS with a 10′ pole. It’s not money – it’s user experience. They consistently offer up the worst user experience on earth. I’d rather go back to a rotary phone and dish washing.
Finally got SSL working on my dev box. This is pretty nice for testing anything SSL – we’ve been getting a lot of surprises lately with SSL… it’s pretty hard to test.
First – you can install Passenger following Robby’s guide. Just take the Passenger steps – skip the ports, etc. unless you don’t have rails: http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles…
Then – create a SSL cert. Follow this guys instructions but ignore the apache steps. And substitute whatever passenger name you gave your app (like myapp.local) for the common name 127.0.0.1 name instructions. Just do Step 1: http://www.silverchairsolutions.com/blog…
There are 250 more photos of this trip in this Flickr set.
My long time friend Bill (aka The Great Goober) and his wife Jen threw a Matanza party this year down on their off-the-grid, all organic, completely self-sufficient farm in Anton Chico (outside of Las Vegas, New Mexico).
Matanza (Spanish for “killing” or “slaughter”) is a traditional harvest type festival:
As matanza researcher Cynthia Martin explains “A traditional Matanza is a family and community-gathering event, with friends and neighbors helping in the labor-intensive job of processing a large pig, goat or sheep”.
“Taking at least an entire day, the process goes from the slaughtering the animal and butchering the meat to cooking the various meat products and preparing what is left for distribution and storage. Of course all those helpers also need to be fed, so the women in the family plan and prepare large amounts of food for the event.”
This was a real eye-opener for me. As you’ve no doubt heard getting your meat in shrink wrapped, “couldn’t possibly have been an animal” form really discounts the value of meat and what goes into (raising something for years and killing it). When you watch a slaughter you realize that meat is murder – it’s brutal. I’m guessing the majority of Americans would be vegetarian if they had to butcher their own animals. I’d for sure be a vegan farmer.
Killing, skinning/plucking, and butchering one goat and three chickens took most of the day. We started a large fire in a deep pit and let it burn down to a deep bed of coals. We place the meat, wrapped in tin foil and wet burlap bags into the coals, covered with dirt and eventually crashed. About half the people at the party camped out and the next day people from all over New Mexico showed up for the party.
I was there for around a week and was interesting to see how much work goes into a farm. Bill and Jen work their asses off from sun up to sun down. The reward is that they’re almost 100% self sufficient.
Recently they’ve been getting help from WWOOFers (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms). Winston and Caitlin were staying with them in Bill and Jen’s yurt. If you have romantic dreams of farming I’d HIGHLY recommend doing this for a while – you’ll like decide that your white collar job and grocery shopping are much more attractive afterwords.
Bill and Jen also have two kids Aldo (4) and Cloe (2). It was nice to see kids not raised on TV. They had fun running around outside (Aldo literally ran all day long) and playing with simple toys. They’re a handful though!
Overall it was a great trip. I look forward to spending more time down there in the future.
There are 250 more photos of this trip in this Flickr set.
Well – late afternoon (I hate you day light savings time!). Due to the rain there is a lot of glare on the streets… I’ll have to try again when it’s not raining (heh, as if).
With 25-30′ seas being predicted my friend Julie from work and I decided to take off to the Olympic coast yesterday. It was a very long 13.5 hour drive round trip from here, to Edmonds/Kingston, out to Neah Bay and Cape Flattery and then south along the Olympic National Park beaches, through Aberdeen and back home via Olympia on I-5.
Cape Flattery was wet, windy and cold. Seas couldn’t have been more than 10-15 (if that). Kind of a disappointment but, Cape Flattery is spectacular no matter what the weather is like.
We then headed south to La Push (photo above are waves breaking just off La Push), home of the Quileute Nation. The waves were much more impressive at La Push.
On the way to La Push we stopped at the “treaty line” – No Vampires Beyond This Point for a spot of lunch. Good fucking grief! Forks, and everything surrounding it has been completely taken over by this Twilight silliness. There were tons of teenage girls everywhere. People taking pictures in front of the Forks sign. Twilight menus, tours, etc. As Julie told me – the movie wasn’t even filmed in Forks, but in Oregon – but that’s not stopping the girls. I can’t help but think they’re let down when they get there. These definitely aren’t the types that have been to National Parks and thus, Forks. Forks is getting better than it was 10 years ago, but remains a very sorry excuse for a town mostly filled with people who think logging is patriotic or some such nonsense. Well – at least they’ve finally found a revenue stream other than clear cutting and meth labs.
I don’t believe I’ve missed these great cabins at La Push. I’ve been searching and searching for nice places to stay on the coast… there aren’t many of them but, the Quileute Resort has some really sweet beach front cabins ranging from $135 – $280. There’s a convenience store near by and easy access to Olympic beaches via bike trails. There are a few restaurants in La Push that you could easily walk to as well. They also run one of the nicest RV parks I’ve seen. I’d definitely recommend this place and will definitely be back. And, of course, there’s a Twilight package.
La Push also has a marina and the worlds scariest harbor entrance. I’ve never seen it calm on the west coast… this entrance looked terrifying (photo above).
From La Push we drove south to Ruby Beach. I love this beach. Here are some pics…
And then we drove down to the imaginatively named Beach 4 for the sunset before heading home.
Interesting (not necessarily new though) talk on the Freemium model.
In long tail model – the head of the curve is ad driven and free, the tail is paid content and very niche.
Newspapers: Not “free vs paid” but ad-driven free vs freemium
1. The best model is a mix of paid and free content
2. You can’t charge for exclusives that will just be repeated elsewhere
3. Don’t charge for the most popular content on your site
4. Content behind a pay wall should appeal to niches
5. The narrower the niche the better
A combination of working way too much, getting black listed as an unsafe site and hosting issues is my excuse for not posting here since March.
The black listed issue was a pain. This site has 1,000’s of posts and 1,000’s of comments. Google, unhelpfully, tells you your site is blocked buy not the offending URL. While porting this site (and westsail28.com and shilsholed.com) over to BlueHost.com I found 18,000 spam comments on this blog… sigh. I don’t know what people do who don’t know SQL – that would have taken forever to clean up with out SQL.
Anyway – back on line. Please adjust your RSS readers since the sub folder /aietc no longer exists.
