Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in irrationalRobot's LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
1:03 pm	Waiting by the telephone... Waiting by the telephone... for MS customer service / tech support. Had my first bona-fide "Vista Sucks" experience, and I'm pretty confident that it wasn't actually Vista that caused the problem. As I mentioned a while ago, we set up a media center PC a couple of months ago, and it has been working quite well- I'd been using the DVR capabilities to record Curious George and Clifford for miniBot (as well as NOVA and syndicated South Park for myself), I'd set up the media center extender for the xbox, and was regularly using Netflix Watch Instantly so that wordknitter and I could watch Weeds, which has been pleasantly intriguing. This all started coming to a howling halt sometime between Saturday and Monday, I think. ( things break, I try fixing them, HEAVY tech details ) INTERJECTION: Just got that call I was waiting for, more on that at the bottom ( more tech details, my attempts to use customer support ) Lessons learned: 1. Don't install third party software unless you really have to. Sorry Hauppage, you're on the "poop" list. I got your driver off of the internet, A-holes. 2. Don't try installing Dev software on a machine you aren't prepared to reimage. I'm suspicious that trying to install Visual C# express edition (I'm a big dork and wanted to play with XNA) and its patches may have begun the slide into the abyss. 3. Restart the machine every so often. I was leaving it on so that Media Center could work its mojo when I was sleeping, but this left me unable to confidently answer the question, "when did you last have a successful reboot?" 4. Reinstalling is a lot easier than people let on. I'm sure my mac-friends out there (oldmangrumpus comes to mind) are doing a little dance at my vista woes, but this is really a lot of PC for the price I paid, and when it is all said and done I lost 36 hours of time, but no content. 5. Customer support doesn't necessarily come populated with real wizards out there. I'm sure Mohan is a fine individual in person, and I even put miniBot on the phone with him for a while (when I started getting bored with the whole scenario), but his inability to realize that he was actually dealing with a somewhat savvy customer sort of killed the day for both of us. The phone call that I'd been waiting for was going to be the "let's finally get this fixed" call from MS support, but I just told the guy, "yeah, I fixed the BIOS and it works now, oh, and I grabbed my DVR content out of Windows.old, pasted it into place and it is working fine." He asked for some customer support feedback, and I was unnecessarily diplomatic about my feedback. I'm imagining that MS-India's average feedback is something like this, pronounced with the angry twang of an offended southerner: "Why don chu get some AMERICANS who KNOW what they TALKIN' bout down thar?" The sad thing is, if you replace "americans" with "technicians," and change the rhetorical question to a suggestion, there is something to be said for this input. :( (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 19th, 2008
1:18 pm	Free Food and Fire Trucks RIGHT NOW in Roosevelt Copy of my post to the Seattle LJ community: Heads up: This year's Bull Moose Festival is taking place right now, and the following free food items are available: QFC (66th and Roosevelt, between Roosevelt and 12th): Johnsonville Brats and a Soda (Coke, Nestea, Sprite, others) Digiorno Pizza slices Ten Thousand Villages (65th and Roosevelt, South-west corner): Chocolate and coffee samples Big Bowl Noodle house / Juicy lounge (65th and Roosevelt, next to the Shell Station on 65th): Pad Thai Dry noodles Fried Rice Black sticky rice Black Tea smoothies Strawberry (last I checked) milk tea smoothies There are other events going on as well, free kids photos at Pop Tots (67th and roosevelt, on Roosevelt), kids crafty things and free open house at Moonpaper tent 64th and Roosevelt, one block west of Whole Foods, and a Custom Car show and live music at Cavalry Christian Assembly (68th and Roosevelt, on Roosevelt). The fire department will have some antique FIRE TRUCKS there, as well as some more modern trucks arriving a little later in the afternoon... Stop on by! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 17th, 2008
10:53 pm	WATCHMEN trailer up Holy Jesus Christ Crap Whoa! Medium resolution Okay, so seeing this trailer is yet another reason to sneak out of the house and go see the Dark Knight at the IMAX. How the hell do you manage to make Adrian Veidt look like a badass and not a prancing ninny? Scared to say it, but there are parts of this trailer that may be done better than Alan Moore's original comic work... (a fight scene that we get a brief glimpse of in the trailer, that is only covered in flashback in the book) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
7:12 am	Curious George to the rescue: yesterday we went a-hiking Last night was pretty rough from a sleeping standpoint (okay, the last couple of nights have been rough), as Gnat has been waking up hungry and then staying awake in the middle of the night. This morning, Curious George and the media center come to the rescue... miniBot wanted to play trains at quarter of seven AM, so I'm just hauling him upstairs where he can watch Curious George while I (apparently) blog. ( Thoughts on Curious George, the cartoon series ) Yesterday, the family (jeez, there's four of us now) went to Twin Falls to go on a hike. I am out out OUT of shape! It could've had something to do with the 30 poungs of toddler and gear I was carrying, or the fact that I was wearing jeans (instead of shorts), or the I'm just a creampuff, but I took a look at the last couple of inclines on the trail and threw in the towel. We then took a stop at the outlet shops (miniBot needed some pajamas, we all needed lunch) and started home around 2pm. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
10:43 pm	The wow-America politics of Schoolhouse Rock I'm not the most patriotic person I know, but despite the innacuracies here, I've got a certain fondness for No More Kings and the Shot Heard Round the World. Note to any Brits reading: Yeah, I know these aren't entirely accurate, but I don't really care that much. :) No More Kings Rockin and a rollin splishin and a splashin Over the horizon, what can it be? Highlights: Token appearance by Indians (0:27). Say, what happened to them? Animation of the growth of a state... from Corn! (0:53-1:00) King George as a Blue Meanie (1:10-1:13) Boston Tea Party (2:10-2:14) The Shot Heard Round the World Highlights: A mom arming her (young!) son and sending him off to war. You'd NEVER see that on TV today. ( ...and if you think I've gone off the rails, a retort/parody ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 7th, 2008
3:14 pm	M.A.S.K. really was that bad I've actually had a pretty productive morning: 1. Trip to the Burke Musuem 2. Arranged a meeting with a design/build firm for our Garage work 3. Sold another Bull Moose sponsorship But I'm currently horrified by how terrible the M.A.S.K. trailer from USA's cartoon express really was. I had remembered the theme as being pretty cool, and the cartoon pretty bad, but I hadn't realized how poorly the "glam rock plus robot voice" combo would age. muh muh muh MASK On the flipside, a helicopter that turns into a jet fighter was a pretty cool idea, but the cartoon implementation seemed a lot smoother than any of the real ones. (Comment on this)
Friday, July 4th, 2008
1:39 pm	Happy Independence Day! I have no shame in saying I got a little choked up listening to the cast of NPR reading the declaration of independence this morning. It helps that Carl Kassel remembers it like it was yesterday... Daniel Schorr didn't chip in this year, he was more interested in reminiscing about the signing of the Magna Carta. .yademos oot dlo eb ll'I wonk I ,sey (Comment on this)
1:20 pm	Paternity leave starts now THIS IS WHAT PATERNITY LOOKS LIKE (sadly, I don't have a picture of me walking around waving a baby) My last work week was sketchy- Monday: 1.5 hour meeting on things we'd like to be different about our imaging process, kicked off a bunch of SE (( Sustained engineering )) automated tests. Tuesday: Day off to hang with wordknitter, miniBot, and Natty Bumppo (the new one). Wednesday: All day (1000-1600) meeting to go over the rest of our deployment story and how we are going to fix it. I didn't prepare enough for that meeting, so I'm a little concerned that we dove into "let's make a solution" way before we are ready, and that this will bite us in the future. We'll see. Thursday: Took the morning off for a Natty Bumppo doctor's appointment, and then came in for the afternoon. Cleaned up some things for the applications team, tried to make sense of the re-org mail, and wrote a Big Long mail about how I do that SE testing voodoo that I do. Today: Slow morning with the family, and then brunch w/ oldmangrumpus. Currently, I'm the only awake one in the house (this is a Bad Thing, I should nap right now), but I'm taking the opportunity to go on an "internet shopping trip." ( Moose home furnishings ) Now I should try to take a nap. EDIT: What kind of nimrod puts doublequotes in a URL? HomeAnnex.com, that's who. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 26th, 2008
8:50 am	Signoff Mails I like signoff mails, kinda. The abuse of animated GIFs can really kill the mood (a birthday cake? Wha?), and the daisy chain of congratulations can get a bit tiresome. Picturing it as a daisy chain (as linked above) makes it a little easier to bear. :) (Comment on this)
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
4:08 pm	Webcomic- for Motomotoyama? The artist for WapsiSquare reccomended Menage a 3 as cute, racy fun (link goes to first comic) but I was going to keep it to myself until I saw a reference to the Dazzler comic Marvel put out in the 80s, and remembered motomotoyama (or was it someone else?) liking dazzler... so here you are: ( comic hyperlinked ) This post probably eclipses my all-time record for most tags per word (excluding "just a link" posts). (1 Comment |Comment on this)
1:58 pm	The Love Guru- sucks? Yes, apparently. I was pretty convinced when I saw the trailer that the Love Guru had a chance to be the worst movie of the new year, and it looks like that could be the case. Trailer of hatred: On Rotten tomatoes, it is currently pulling a healthy 17 percent, putting it somewhere between The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (16%) and Alien Vs Predator (22%). To make a fair comparison (Comedies from this decade), we are slightly below Dude, Where's My Car (19%) and... OOPS: Turns out he's at 15%, which means that if there was a movie theater showing "Dude, Where's my Car," LXG, AVP, and the Love Guru, the T-meter would tell you that the Love Guru was the WORST film at the theater. To get below Love Guru (in the comedy genre), you need to start thinking "Little Man" or "Garfield." Lowlights: 1. Ben Kingsley (Schindler's List, Ghandi) as the cross-eyed "Guru Tugginmahpudha" 2. Verne Troyer as coach Punch Chrkov 3. John Oliver (Daily Show) as agent Dick Pants Comments from selected reviews: From "Spirituality and Practice" (why were they reviewing this? Oh, the "guru" thing): The film reaches a low point when it depicts two elephants fornicating in front a crowd of stunned hockey fans. From the Seattle Times: ...on the movie goes, swiftly and mercilessly, to dimwitted gags about food that resembles genitalia, urine-soaked-mop fights, chastity belts and what elephants drop onto the people standing behind them at the end of a long day — which is, come to think of it, as good a metaphor as any for the experience of watching this movie. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 20th, 2008
1:22 pm	Hell yeah! (Iron man Slurpees) So I went crazy about the Iron man slurpees for the movie that came out this summer, but I missed on one of them, and figured I'd just learn to live with it. Then I went to a particular 7-11 in Redmond (for a Hulk "Radiation Rush" slurpee), and I found a secret stash. Now I have all four Iron man cups, three of the figures that come on the straws, and the first of my (soon-to-be) four Hulk slurpees. Sweet! ( Now, details on yesterday and the folks ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 19th, 2008
9:42 pm	Last day of guests So wKnitter's folks are headed back to NY tomorrow morning, aand it was a great visit. Today was Snoqualmie falls, The northwest railway museum, and lunch at the Snoqualmie brewery. Details tomorrow... (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 15th, 2008
8:00 pm	Hulk SMASH Dr Banner's alter ego will destroy the Metro theater in the U District at 9:30 pm. oldmangrumpus and I will be there to see it, please join us! (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 12th, 2008
2:54 pm	Surface hits vegas Several of you have probably heard about this, but Here's the Engadget version, complete with video and comments. So far, pretty positive for engadget! The old surface threads consisted of: Newsitem: something about surface Comments SteveJobsHo: hahahaha its a giant iphone BigDongDude: does it play PORN if you know what I mean WinDoesItRight: Can't all the apple guys stop talking about the iPhone, this is different! SteveJobsHo: Microsoft sucks! PickyTechy: Why does it need FIVE DAMN PROJECTORS? DruidDrama: Man, I'd love to play WoW on this! RaginMagin: lololol So far, this thread is a big step up. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 10th, 2008
12:43 pm	Ganked from Cambler I don't think this is what They were expecting... The "American society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property"'s poll on gay marriage. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 9th, 2008
11:00 pm	Last public baby update To avoid being "that guy," please respond if you want to be on the baby filter. Comments are screened, and I won't take it personally if you aren't interested. (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 8th, 2008
7:56 pm	Nathaniel James 'bot 7lbs, 8oz Mom & Kid are fine. No pics yet, I'll work on that tomorrow, when I pick them up. EDIT: whoops, 8lbs 7oz. I got it turned around, sorry! (3 Comments |Comment on this)
5:37 am	Still @ home Things petered off a bit, but probably leaving as soon as kiddo wakes up (He'll be spending the day accross the street). (Comment on this)
3:17 am	Right now? We're still @ home, but probably leaving w/in the hour. That sucks, I'm sleepy. (3 Comments |Comment on this)