Random thoughts, organized and categorized for your consumption.
mstroud
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Posts by mstroud
Goodbye 2009, and good riddance
Dec 31st
Just by reading the headline you can see that I have no problems leaving 2009 in the dust. It was a crappy year in just about every sense. But rather than drone on and on about what really sucked about the ‘09, because really, I could, I will instead pull the old “look back” list trick from my friends in commercial journalism. It works for them so it ought to for me.
- The economy – I really should not have to explain this one. If you had stocks, bonds, a retirement account or any kind of savings you know it sucked this More >
PC Building Fun
Nov 26th
Over the Thanksgiving holiday I spent more than my fair share of quality time building and rebuilding PCs. Although it was all for a good cause, it was pretty painful. These PCs are supposed to work when you put them together, and yet these new boxes just didn’t run. As each build stretched on into the early morning hours it became clear that this was just a futile effort. In the end, I gave up my own (and a friend’s) working PCs to get the job done but I’m left with a puzzling thought:
Why is it that technology gets faster/better/cheaper More >
Video Disc Tools for Happy Streaming
Nov 14th
I was asked recently to document the things that a person would need to use in order to take an optical disc with video content on it and turn it into something that streams reliably to the PS3. Rather than write a long email on the topic I’ve decided to chronicle the information here so that I can make it available to anyone who asks, now and in the future.
First off, this guide is for Windows users, so folks using OS X or any of the Linux flavors need to find some way to live temporarily in the Microsoft world. More >
Attempting to break the surly bonds of Voicemail
Sep 11th
Now that I’ve become more of a nomadic worker, without a full-time office location, I’ve been looking for ways to make my phone presence consistent and available no matter how a client might reach me. Switching to AT&T U-verse was one step in that direction, as they offered custom options for forwarding calls and personalize rings. Using Google Voice (formerly Grand Central) was another, as it allowed a “call one number and reach me anywhere” capability.
Until today I was unsure of how to loop my mobile phone into this world. That did make things a bit difficult as many contacts More >
If At First You Don't Succeed, Fail, Fail Again
Jun 21st
I’ve had a tough week, technology-wise. Over the course of the last three days I’ve had two relatively new hard drives fail, a gigabit switch started having some ports go slow and a servo that controls the throttle on an RC airplane went nuts. I think it may be time for some time away from the keyboard.
I believe my new saying for hard disks should go something like this:
“There are no such things as good, dependable or safe disks. There are just disks that have failed and those that will fail.”
On the recommendation of some people on the Internet, I More >
All About Scams and ID Theft
May 19th
Two different events conspired to make today suck: an email purporting to be from the FBI and US Mail from a former employer telling me that my identity may have been stolen.
The FBI mail is the typical Internet scam, but this time with more legit looking information and 50% less bad grammar. It tells me that:
your e-mail address was among the e-mails that won this year promo award of UK National Lottery, that is the fund that was transferred to Africa , and it has been recovered.
Of course, I completely forgot about that lotto ticket I picked up when I More >
Windows 7 makes networked media work
Apr 30th
I readily admit that I am hard on computers, I really do break them on a regular basis while seeming to find the absolute limits of what they are capable of. So with more than a little trepidation I installed the Release Candidate build (7100) of Windows 7 and set it to work scanning my overly large and complicated media library.
As a primer, it should be noted that my music library alone is somewhere over 30,000 songs and many of them have horribly broken tags that I refuse to fix, left over from many, many sessions of ripping the original CDs More >
Worst Service Nominees
Apr 1st
I have recently had the great displeasure of participating in three different levels of grief and suffering with three different technology companies. All three were so terrible that I felt compelled to write about it and post the results here, in the unlikely hope that someone might learn from my pain. So here it goes…
Adobe: decided that it is OK to hang up on my calls twice for support to activate a product that I had purchased, transfer me between two different call centers and different support staffs in India, force me to repeat the same trouble-shooting steps no less More >
A track day at Laguna Seca
Mar 11th
On March 9 I was fortunate enough to get some track time at the famed Laguna Seca Raceway in Salinas, CA. It was an interesting experience to say the least, and very different from driving at Thunderhill for past events. As a key point, it was remarkably cold at the track, never getting warmer than about 55 F, making the car develop as close to full horsepower as I’ve experienced but also making the tires a bit slippery for the first few laps.
As for the actual track, it seemed, well, small. At Thunderhill there are over 3 miles of ground to More >
My Latest Vista Test: Network Throttling
Dec 14th
Over the past couple of weeks I have been copying large amounts of data back and forth from my desktop PCs and my ReadyNAS in order to facilitate clearing some local hard disk space and to really, honestly begin scheduled backups. Today while copying a particularly large file (greater than 2GB if you must know) I found that the transfer rate to the ReadyNAS was a measly 10 MB/s. I have a gigabit network setup and this represents less than 10% of the available capacity. Obviously something is up.
I have my full-time, every-day PC running Vista with SP1 and for More >