WalkerPad

The gallery is down, things blew up on upgrading.

Update: Oof what a total pain. Anyway should be all better now, let me know if you see any issues.

Site might be gone for a little bit in the next day or so, going to try and upgrade to Wordpress 2.0 beta. Hopefully fix some taging issues.

 Update: All done. went suspiciously smoothly, drop a comment if you see something not working.

Kaily is still making pouting noises when we mention Ariana, she sure didn’t want her Aunt to go. I’ll get a couple snaps up this weekend along with the Christmas landslide. A short but fun visit.

  I finaly remembered to upload the Turkey Day shots. If you have any images from the party that you want to share drop me a note and I’ll tell how to upload, very easy.

Walker Clan Sunnyvale Amazon wish lists:

Kaily

Griffon

Charise

Walker-cleary:
Selina

Anyone else want to send in a amazon one for consolidation?

Grandma was nice enough to sit Kaily so Charise and I headed to the movies. Originally we where going to see Walk the Line but we noticed Aeon Flux was out. We had a nice dinner and hit the flick.

I don’t think either one of us had particularly high expectations, but the movie surprised a bit by being faster and funner then I thought it would be.
It’s a solid sci-fi action flick. Fast pacing, dorky impractical fleshy costumes glaring plot holes and of course pretty good special effects.

Unlike the TV series the plot was actually pretty followable and was more or less coherent. I still hope they do a full length Animated Aeon Flux some day, but this was fun a pretty good. A must see, no, but if your looking for something to take your mind off the real world for a bit this is a slam dunk as a discount show. The critics seem to really hate it, not sure what they where expecting…

Bottom line "B"ish.

I fired SBC yesterday, I simple was not getting nearly enough throughput and they seemed to keep raising the  prices every month by a few bucks.

So now we have Comcast again. They are claiming 6mb dl and 768k ul, will see but right now I’m sustaining 800-900kb on 256meg file from file planet. This is a lot better then I was getting from SBC (lucky to see 240kb).

None of it is enough though. I can’t believe I live in sunnyvale CA and nobody can drag fiber to my door step for next gen speeds. It’s simple a sad commentary on the American tech industry and the government (FCC in particular) that we allow this duopoly to continually hold true by directional high speed connectivity to all of our homes.

I also fired DIrect TV. I have been down on their politics and business philosophy for years but the service was ok. They wanted to charge me $300 for second HD Tivo. Comcast offered me 2 of (their admittedly less capable) Motorola boxes and a package that is about the same as the direct tv one with HD for a couple bucks less a month. I figured what the heck it’s worth trying out. Maybe when DTV gets their new MPEG4 HD DVR boxes deployed (they have none until some time next year) I will talk to them again, but the upfront costs they try and stick you with are pretty nutty.

Really though I hate all this. I want to be able to bring all this stuff into one big ass computer in the garage and have it send the HD and what not to all my other silent boxes through out the house. As well as serve all my other content like divx and mp3 etc.
None of the fatass incumbents are offering anything like this. Maybe we will get some of this with Vista MCE and cable cards late next year but that does nothing for me in the interim.

I’m actually going to try and get my MCE (might setup myth again, don’t know) box working with a HD OTA card. If I can get that working right and get good single from all the main networks, I might just fire comcast too. The Motorola boxes fail to impress, and I was pretty tired of Tivo’s awful UI and calculation performance (as well direct TV blocking all tivo enhancements to their customers).
All these things are symptoms of powerful monopoly’s colluding with IP owners to give us as little as possible while keeping as much control as possible for themselves over our content on our property. Sad.

Anyway, some good some bad and not yearly enough for all the trouble but Charise won’t let me cut all the cords so I have to eek what amusement out of the process that I can.

Oh yeah I canceled Akimbo before the trial expired. Nice ideas, but no content and the piece meal pay system is a joke IMO.