Weekly Update #4 already.

Finished another Honor Harrington book, The Short Victorious War. This time though I read the actual hardcover book borrowed from the library. This book builds upon the previous two books and maintains the page turning story, but it seems that it wasn’t completely centered around Honor and having her be the leader like in the others. Also, there were so many named people mentioned in this book that I was having trouble remembering who was who. All in all, another good book to read if you liked the first books in this series.

Wanted to do a quick review of my headphones, Philips SHQ4000/28 Neckband Headphones Tuned for Sports, but haven’t gone around to it. Simply though, I love them and only wish the single cable ran down the right side and not the left side since I usually put my iPod in my right front pocket.

Sadly, my home built computer from 6 years ago has finally gone to the electronic waste. There was too many issues with the hardware and I didn’t have time or the desire to fix it. It was a p4 computer that ate a lot of power and did not run very well while crashing at least once every session.

I was watching Happy Endings on Hulu and was prompted with the option of doing a Professor Layton and the Last Specter puzzle as the preroll. Naturally, I jumped at the chance since I enjoyed doing puzzles. The puzzle was fun and I had a great satisfaction in earning my right to watch my show. This is how all ads should be like!

Lastly, the Ellen show had Sophia Grace and Rosie singing/rapping Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass” with some other fun scenes from her show on her youtube channel. Their shopping spree at Toys ‘R Us is a good video to watch nonetheless.

Weekly update number #3, surprisingly I am still doing this. Let’s start with some of the sad things that happened.

Dennis Ritche, a definitive influence in technology,  passed away this week. His contributions affect me greatly because it’s things that I use day and day out practically. I use open source software all the time and most of that stuff derives from the C programming language that he originally designed and helped created. Now myself don’t program in C, but do take part in C++ and all the other languages that are compiled from C or at least influenced by it. The other thing that dmr was known for was his work on the UNIX operating system. I’ve only used Solaris and BSD as far as unix operating systems and I mainly sit on top of the linux o/s, but I don’t believe it would be as good and great as it is today without dmr. These multiuser and network aware systems really made sense back then as they do today. It’s just awesome that there are so many smart people who can think ahead of the times so much.

Steve Jobs also passed away this week. My real introduction to the world of Apple was via an iPod Nano 2nd gen and got me listening to more podcasts than I was doing before. It’s hard to believe, but I would listen to one podcast at a time on my cell phone on my bus commute. The iPod made podcasts much easier to listen to thanks to the fact that I could pause and resume at anytime. On the phone when I had to stop the music player, I would have to remember the time I left off at and then fast forward to that exact spot when I wanted to resume again. I’m glad those days are over and I can still use the iPod nano without too much problems, it only crashes after every other sync. Aside from that, I believed I used an Apple IIe of some sort when I was a kid. It had a green and black monitor and used some hefty floppy disks.

Speaking of podcasts, the folks at Ignition Six have decided to end their podcast production due to lack of interest. It’s too bad because I enjoyed listening to their comments, whether I agreed or disagreed with them, on the varying things going on in the world of tech. I guess that frees up more podcast time to listen to other shows that I may pick up like Frame Rate or Triangulation.

This week I also finished the Honor Harrington book #2, The Honor of the Queen, via the mobi format. This book went by really fast and once again was another page turner. I think so far I like the first book better, but this one explored Honor and her much more emotional than On Basilisk Station. Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading it and can’t wait to start the next book in the series. Since Buzz Out Loud has stopped being a daily show and I haven’t had any new DS games, I find it quite easily to fit in a book here and there.

Down at the Irvine Civic Center, we got a 99% protest going on. We noticed it when we drove by to get sushi at the delicious Kula Revolving Sushi restaurant.Not much to say about this, but I do like what the folks at The 53 are doing in contrast.

In preparing for recycling my old computer equipment, I discovered freecycle.org from the Irvine website. It pretty much just has free stuff requests or offers by people and you can join a group in your local area to do it. I like this better than putting up stuff for free on craigslist.org, but I should judge without actually using freecycle first. I may try to unload my P3 and see if anyone wants it.

Something that Dan Lynch has done for awhile is a weekly rewind on his blog about his doings. I thought I might give something like this a try and see if it sticks.

This entry is for 9/25/2011 to 10/1/2011.

I saw Battle Los Angeles (2011) from our local redbox and it was definitely worth the $1 to rent. Aaron Eckhart was excellent in this movie and I was enveloped into the story and action.

The Irvine Global Village Festival was this week as well and was quite busy like usual. Armed with 20 tickets, Boba Smoothie, Thai papaya salad, 1/4 roasted chicken, lemonade, somasas, BBQ pork buns, fried seaweed shrimp things, shaved ice, and chicken tacos were acquired. Can we say yum?

One thing I got up in arms about is that Cox, our local ISP, now has data usage amounts. So for our plan of 3Mpbs down, our limit is 50GB of both up and down data. I made more of a comment on Google+ that I will quote:

Cox now has “data usage amounts.” Only 50G on our plan. Although they aren’t charging overages at the moment, they will work with us and get us on the “correct” usage plan. All we do is watch streaming video, download podcasts, do backups, upload pictures, and download linux o/s. So far this month we are at 35G but I’m getting some Centos 6.0 live dvds to pump it up ~3G more. I will give Cox props for giving us what looks like an accurate website view with our usage. Looks like they’ve been tracking us for awhile:
August = 65G.
July = 25G
June = 45G.
….

Unfortunately, the only other Internet service option for us is AT&T DSL which I will never switch to. Cox has always been great in customer service, quality of service, lack of a contract, and no problems in general. Localized internet duopolies are lame.

Chose Irvine if you want to see the FAQ: http://ww2.cox.com/residential/support/internet/article.cox?articleId={2fd6ccb0-b13a-11df-4be3-000000000000}

Someone parked in our carport on Tuesday which was uncool. They “didn’t know” they couldn’t park in any covered spot. In conjunction with that, our apartment parking was resurfaced and now the carport say “RESERVED” instead of “RESIDENT” so hopefully that will prevent cars from parking our spots again.

Going to tackle if the environment modules yum package is worth using by testing on my Fedora 15 netbook. Perhaps there’ll be a blog post about that over on my tech blog source.kohlerville.com one day.

Due to Steve Gibson, I’m now reading the first Honor Harrington book On Basilisk Station, free from the publisher in e-book form or website form. I’m on chapter 6 right now and it was hard to put it down to write this post. I put it on the Touchpad and using pReader to read the mobi format I downloaded. As far as I know, there’s no way to add it to the Kindle reader unless you actually own an Amazon Kindle and can e-mail it to it. So far it’s a nice experience reading on the Touchpad, but unfortunately my eyes get tired when trying to read at night time.