Rui CarmoMy experiment has been somewhat successful in that I’ve spent a good while (but not quite enough yet) time watching movies and TV series of various descriptions, including the Stargate Universe premiere, which is already somewhat predictable in pace and character development but has a chance of actually being watchable.
I’ve also been trying to sort out a set of messes that I will be writing about later, such as:
- The untimely death of my PS3 thanks to the upgrade to firmware 3.01, just as I was about to sell it. Fortunately it’s still under warranty here (‘twas bought on 26th Oct 2007), so I’ve just sent it back via RMA, but it’s already a promising story since it’s an original, backwards compatible 60GB model and I very much want the replacement to be so (my RMA# is 091012-000598, in case you’re curious).
- A major cleanup of this site’s content. Less is not just more, it’s also a way to make sure it takes up less time to maintain, and Wiki pages regarding ancient interests like, say, Haskell simply have to go (it’s still there now, but not for long). There’s also stuff that’s still fun like keeping track of the Palm Pre, but
jwzhas probably killed it for the middle-aged geek generation in one fell swoop, so I need to re-assess whether or not I really want to keep track of that kind of stuff too. - Social networking on the phone has been a lot more fun (and a lot less bothersome) than on the PC, by a long shot, although I’m still not ecstatic about it on a lot of different (and not completely public) levels.
- Personal e-mail piled up to hitherto unseen levels, since stuff that I couldn’t deal with in under 2 minutes (typically on the phone and on the go) started piling up, further confirming that I need to sit down one day and actually start devoting a fixed amount of time to it out of sheer politeness.
- Finally, the retiring of my mini from its place as home server, which is causing me no end of trouble because:
- Some of the (seven to eight years’ worth of) photos I had stored there on an original Iomega MiniMax are damaged – glad I had a gazillion backups, but it’s going to take a long time to put everything back together.
- There still is no sensible way to stream my music (also somewhat scrambled, but re-rippable and less important) to the living room. Once you have iTunes, an Express and an iPod to act as remote, you’re hopelessly spoiled and there’s really no turning back.
If I had the cash, I’d just go out and buy a brand new mini and get rid of all the extra junk I piled around the old one to keep it functioning, but thanks to my having most emphatically not bought a TV from FNAC recently1 and rumors of an upcoming revamp of the line, it’s just not happening.
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1 In case you’re still curious about that, I went someplace else where they value customer service and got the LG 42LS8000, largely because I wanted something that was both affordable and spartan enough to match my mindset and our decor and that (by dint of not using DLNA or any kind of network connectivity) would actually work more like a TV than a PC. On the (oft-discussed offline) topic of Samsung’s frilly stuff, I think it’s useless to have widgets on a TV set (or most everything else, by that matter, that isn’t a completely personal device), and it’s bad enough to have a TV set include the “GPL”:Wikipedia:GNU_General_Public_License, let alone a short-sighted (and hopefully, short-lived) approach to putting more commercial junk on screen.