Laptops, DVRs and Law Bloggers, Oh My!

A crazy week in daedalus land. People at work have suddenly decided we should do some things properly instead of just throwing things together half-assed the way the rest of the IT world does. This means that I get to be the Test Plan Monkey again. I end up doing this on every gig I do. Every. Damn. One. “Why do I always end up doing this?” I lament, but no one ever answers. Well, Bevan does, but all he said was “Because you know how,” so he gets to be ridiculed on my blog. Take that! That’ll learn ya!

In between writing test plans for the gazillionth time, I found time to take delivery of my shiny new Dell D810 laptop with Super Tiny Pixels. It goes up to something like 1980 pixels wide or something, and let me tell you, it is wiiiide. I wish I’d jumped on the widescreen bandwagon a lot earlier, because there’s a hell of a lot of elbow room to be quite honest. Acres of the stuff. I can stretch my wings out and almost never swap over to the next virtual desktop. And linux works just fine, network, sound, the lot! I’ve still got a few little tweaks to make so that everything is nicely synchronising between work and home, but all the important stuff is humming along nicely.

I also managed to pick up a PCI digital TV tuner card for a server at home so I can finally build a Digital Video Recorder of my very own. Bevan has a TiVo that he hacked to store more show, and it is very cool. Geeky cool, but still cool. Who wants to watch ads? Not me! Who wants to watch obscure cartoons and sci-fi shows that are only on at dark o’clock because the great unwashed want to watch some airhead get her boobs out on Big Brother for the seventieth time? I do! I want to spend an hour of an evening watching something I like without having to spend $400 a month on DVDs because 14 year old girls inexplicably like watching 20 year olds get their tackle out on national television.

But first I must run some coax down from the antenna to the study because the current connection goes to the TV at the other end of the house. My dinky little powered dish thingy that looks like it should be used by SETI to hunt for aliens who also want to watch 20 year old twig and berries at 21:45 unfortunately doesn’t pick up enough signal, or something. Since I actually own the place, I can just throw a hole into the wall wherever, and no one is going to charge me $1100 to get the whole wall replaced once I leave. Not that that ever happened. No sir. Soon I shall be watching digitally pirated commercial television whenever I damn well please instead of at the network determined optimal viewing hour. I shall defy their demographic surverys!

Finally, this little tirade has been inspired by a blog I found via MetaFilter called
Buffalo Wings & Vodka. He’s quite a good writer, and I obviously need the practice.

Well, I’m off for a few beers to celebrate a mate of mine quitting his job. Apparently it’s the done thing when someone throws off the yoke of corporate serfdom to pursue.. well.. I don’t really know, but I’m sure he has better things to do.

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