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Off the Grid

I’ve been off the grid most of the weekend, as I took the family home to Wisconsin to visit the in-laws.

My father-in-law has a wireless broadband connection (supposed to be about 1 meg down, but feels much slower). It’s connect to a Linksys 802.11b router. I’ve been unable to to get my Toshiba laptop to connect to the net, though my work laptop running XP didn’t have a problem nor did my wife. My Toshiba gets an IP address and saw the nameservers on the wireless (eth1), but has horrendous packet loss. Pinging google.com resulted in 66% packet loss, and web pages wouldn’t pull up at all. I don’t know if it was a Linux thing, Foresight, or the ISP itself.

It has reminded me how much I loathe not being connected. So much for tackling learning docbook this weekend for the Foresight user guide or the blog theme on WordPress MU.

Having some time on my hands, I did do some shopping yesterday, stopping at a local bookstore, who hosted John Scalzi just over a week ago. I missed him in Minneapolis last week, and was able to pick up an autographed copy of his latest book, The Last Colony, which oddly isn’t featured on his Books page yet. The Last Colony is the third book in his Old Man’s War trilogy.

On a recommendation, I picked up You Suck by Christopher Moore, which was good and as funny as promised. I finished it yesterday, and I love books that make me laugh out loud, which this did a few times. An odd note about the book: One of the characters is from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, about an hour north of where I am visiting right now in Milwaukee. I was born in Fond du Lac, and most of my extended relatives live there. It’s fairly small with about 40,000 residents, and I was surprised to see it in a book. (But not as surprised when Oconomowoc, where I am right now, was featured in Cryptonomicon).

I also picked up a nice hardcover edition of four Philip K. Dick stories – The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ubik and The Man in the High Castle. I own a number of his short stories, and since it was featured on Boing Boing, the Total Dick-Head blog has been a favorite of mine to read, so it was good to pick up a couple of Dick’s classics.

I enjoy supporting local bookstores, it’s always worth the premium I pay in my mind. I enjoyed visiting Harry Schwartz Bookstores. They had a fairly good collection of books in all genres, and had recommendations for books by their employees all over the store, which I loved.

Now it’s off to lunch and a 6 – 7 hour drive home today.

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Viiv won't check for piracy

I’ve been following Intel’s new Viiv platform for a while, and Intel confirmed some details this week at a launch event. Viiv is Intel’s latest platform, specifically to enable Media Center functionality in the desktop and in homes. From transcoding ability built-in, automatic driver updates, and ability to transfer content to other devices, Intel is betting that’s it’s the cornerstone of the future home.

The good news is that the hardware won’t check for DRM and watermarks natively. From the CNet Australia article:

Interestingly, MacDonald also told CNET.com.au that Viiv won’t be testing to see if the content being played is pirated from networks such as BitTorrent. He believes that it’s not Intel’s job to be policing downloads and that it’s wrong to assume that “all consumers are criminals”. As such, Viiv won’t test for “watermarks” or other red flags that reveal pirated content, allowing any type of media to be played.

Ultimately, though, MacDonald is confident that piracy won’t be a significant issue for Viiv, as Intel promises to “make content easier to buy than it is to pirate”.

EA could lose exclusive NFL gaming rights

It’s a long shot at best, but if the current collective bargaining agreement were to expire, and anti-trust rules go into place, EA could lose their exclusivity to the NFL players and teams come 2008.

Gamersreports has the story.

I’ve meant to post a gigantic rant for some time on EA exclusive license to the NFL, as it relates to Madden for a long time. I wish I had when it was still relevant, and who knows, I still might.

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Soon

Blogging will resume soon. No, really.

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Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday to me. I feel… the same.

33, in case you were wondering.

ET: Quake Wars to have Linux Client

From the preview over at Planetquake4:

Other features include in game voice chat, absolute Linux support (though may not be 100% done at the time of shipping), Punkbuster for anti-cheating, and stopwatch mode for tournament play.

Sweet! Enemy Territory: Quake Wars will run on the Doom3 engine, and is being developed by Splash Damage, who did the original Enemy Territory. Quake Wars pits Strogg vs. Humans as the Strogg invades Earth, and will the two sides will have entirely different classes and vehicles.

I’ve been talking this game up for a while, and I’m very excited they officially announced Linux support.

Via linuxgames.com

More blogging

Turns out my wife has a blog. Who knew? She rarely posts, but her post today on Jack’s birth is fairly accurate.

Of course she didn’t tell me some of that until a day or two later. Well, probably for the best that way.