The Talking Head

This morning I stumbled upon this story of a student at UMass who is not succumbing to the collegiate norms. In a nutshell, Brian Marquis is bringing forth litigation against eight academic professionals because he believes his earned grade, an A-, was instead changed to a C based the results of a grading curve in one of his classes.

After reading the article, I felt that disgusting twist in my stomach that always resonates when speaking of the real world applications of college. Normally this is reserved for the professors whose beliefs deviate from the norm and their only way of being heard is to scream louder than anyone else in the room. Metaphorically speaking, I am referring to Ward Churchill.

Back to the story at hand, I feel that there is a growing discontent with rules of college compared to the rules of the real world. There is no reason that this man should be restrained from an earned grade because the TA thought his grade looked unfair in comparison to the rest in the class. This is absurd.

Another thing that bothers me here is the lack of forward thinking on the University's part when Mr. Marquis initially brought the issue to their attention. With an ounce of critical thinking they should have deduced that the TA had incorrectly graded the student, and this could have been resolved without incident. Instead, they chose to alienate a student and attempt to intimidate him into submission, some may be able to construe from the written responses to his initial pleas.

The bottom line here is that the collegiate systems need a wake up call to inform them that they are providing a service and that students are going to hold them accountable just like what happens in the real world.

I was greeted by a working PS3 when I arrived home yesterday. To celebrate the occasion I also picked up a copy of Warhawk. I must say that I am impressed with Sony's RMA process and the speed that they operate. I have only been without a PS3 for seven working days which I believe to be an acceptable turn around time. I watched 300 on Blu-ray last night and I must say that I am thoroughly impressed.

Warhawk is something I am going to have to get used to. I have never been able to get a FPS that uses a gaming controller. The vehicle controls are great with the controller it is just the character controls that I am having an issue with. Hopefully I can find a server that I want to frequent. That is what makes these games worthwhile. Wil Wheaton had an interesting keynote at PAX this year. If you have the chance, take a listen.

Dear MAKE crew,

I would like to make an appeal to you all concerning the inclusion of "pull-out" advertisements in the magazine. In particular is the emusic advertisement in the latest issue of the magazine. These types of advertisements are normally removed from the magazine by readers to make handling the publication easier. My removal of this advertisement did not go too smooth.

The way that it was pasted into the binding caused me to rip the facing pages, so now I have a hole in the magazine that I love to read. If this were any other magazine I would not care, but your publication possesses a need to be archived for future generations (my future children). I have been a charter subscriber to the magazine and have kept my volumes in pristine condition, awaiting the day that I could pass them on to a young mind in need of a creative outlet. I honestly felt more despair when I ripped the magazine trying to remove this advertisement than when my PS3's Blu-ray drive went tits up in the middle of watching 300 for the first time.

I guess I am getting a little dramatic, but I feel that for the subscription price we subscribers pay for a quarterly magazine, we deserve better than this type of advertising. Instead of the gimmicky ads like this one from emusic, could you keep things to just paper ads in the future? Thanks for the audience, and please keep supporting this great magazine.

So I sit down last night to watch The Lookout on Blu-ray and my PS3 decides it wants the night off. I thought maybe it was a problem with the disc so naturally I test a couple other discs of varying media. Nothing works. A sense of dread washes over me.

I believed that Sony still had the 90-day warranty on their products, which by my calculation according to the time I registered the system with them, would have been up exactly four days ago. Cue the beginning of a conspiracy theory developing in my brain. How in the hell is something that I haven't really used that much going to break a few days outside of its warranty? I soon found out that the warranty is actually a full year instead of 90-days. Whew!

I walked away for a few moments to grab a beer and settle down before I called Sony. I knew that they were going to have me do everything I had already done, plus something else that I have been unwilling to do up to this time. My system was shipped with a Firmware 1.50 and I have left it there in the hope that the homebrew scene would come alive soon.

At this point I knew I was going to have to send it in to be serviced and since I would be getting at least a FW 1.90 back, I decided to upgrade mine in the hopes that maybe it was a FW issue. This didn't work, so now I have a FW 1.90 PS3 sitting at home waiting for a box to show up from UPS so that I can ship it to Sony. I don't really like the idea of receiving a refurbished unit back from them, but the CSR assured me (LOL) that the unit I receive back will also be covered under that year warranty. I will post here with updates on how long this whole process is going to take.

I just came across a great blog post over at KitUp about the usefulness of modern day battery rechargers. About six months ago I was in the market for just such a device and came across the LaCrosse BC-900.

My main focus here was to be able to keep batteries charged and ready for use in the Olympus FL-36 that I had just purchased. Because of the flash's strenuous use of the batteries I wanted to make sure that the charger I picked up was going to preserve the health of whatever batteries I purchased. The BC-900 does just this with a refresh function that repeatedly charges and discharges a battery until it has determined that the battery is at optimal capacity.

Speed is also another feature that I had in mind when searching for a suitable charger. The BC-900 allows for variable charging speeds based on the amount of mA you decide to charge each battery with. This is variable between 200 and 1800 mA. The LCD is also a nice addition since you are able to glance and see where your batteries are in their recharging process.

Overall I have been more than happy with this charger and it has received more of a workout than I anticipated since I have been introduced to its versatility.

Wilco's recent release "Sky Blue Sky" has taken me all of three listens to finally appreciate it for what it is. The first time I went through, all I could think about was "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot". This made me compare the sounds to what I already knew this band for. The second time I listened to it as background music while I was working, and noticed some decent riffs that stood out from the din. The third listen was on a 2-hour drive over the weekend and I was able to give it my full attention. I can honestly say that this will be one of those albums that I can go back to time and time again in the midst of many different listening moods. This band will be on my concert radar from now on.

I just received this email in my registered podshow email account with them. I wonder what this could all mean? I believe that it definitely shows that the need to safeguard what data is supply to the web 2.0 sites deserves more attention. It also shows that there are some lacking security practices within these companies. I hope that there isn't any other damage done by this to the users of this site.

UPDATE

I just received an email from podshow.com and it seems that there was indeed an intrusion.

I just finished installing Ubuntu Server 7.04 on an old laptop. My plans for this machine were to setup an internal web development environment so that I could do some testing locally. I really only know the bare minimum about Apache and almost nothing about MySQL and PHP. My HTML skills would be rated as good enough to get by. I really enjoy MT as a blogging tool, but I am obviously just using the default settings when it comes to design.

My goal is to become more familiar with some of these technologies so that I can integrate some new things into this site. I get to start my trial of Safari hopefully sometime tomorrow and will be combing the LAMP books on there for as much information as possible. I started using twitter again tonight after a complete lack of attention being given to it for the past month. FOLLOW me if you get the notion: harrijs at gmail dot com.

My friend Nate drew this the other day and I thought I would share the sketch. --IHSV

I believe he is has some other sketches coming down the line. If he wants, I will post them here.

Being a big fan of open source projects I find myself constantly looking for alternatives to the closed source projects that so many of us use on a daily basis. One repository that I check often is at Open Source as Alternative. This is a nice place to browse when you have a few spare moments.

A project that I found about six months ago that I have been using religiously since then is Songbird. Up until this point I have been a user of Musicmatch, but my relationship with it has always been a love/hate with the emphasis on hate because it is an absolute resource hog and it doesn't relinquish those precious resources when I am finished using it. The reason I loved it was for the great way it handled my library. The sorting, tagging, and browsing all just worked.

Enough about the old and onto discussing the new. Songbird is based on the Mozilla runtime environment XULrunner and like the other apps using this, it is light and fast. The essence of songbird is threefold. It is a desktop jukebox, web browser, and online content player all in one. While still in its infancy, Songbird can be used by the forgiving as a daily media player. I have been installing the nightly builds for a number of months now, but can always revert back to their latest stable build if I run into something that just isn't cutting it. This will be an application that has a very bright future as it moves closer to its 1.0 release.