Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Waterless Router Project
July 30, 2004

Berta and I tried to watch the Bourne Supremacy on the XBox last night after Abby went to bed. I moved the MPEGs to a shared folder on the server, and started up XBox Media Center.

The XBox is hooked to the network wirelessly using the Netgear router that Pat got me for Christmas and a separate Netgear dongle thingie on the XBox side. Because of where the router is, the reception is blocked by power cables and other network wires. As a result, the movie was stuttering quite often.

Gramps
July 29, 2004

Mom wrote an entry about her dad, my grandfather, aka “Gramps”, on her weblog recently.

As she says, there is a great deal of construction on 322 near West Chester, and the major intersection there, which used to have zero traffic lights will now have at least three. Maybe if they were there when Gramps was driving that day, he’d still be with us. I don’t know. Like my mom, I often wonder about him whenever I pass through this area.

Stardust
July 29, 2004

Last night, in the middle of watching Amish in the City, I read the last of Stardust, by Neil Gaiman. I had started this book a long time ago, but at the time I was so stinking sick of fairies and the fae that I couldn’t get past the second chapter. Honestly, the word “fae” invokes such distaste for me and yet does not jibe with how I feel about the actual topic. It’s absurd.

Anyway, the book is not about the guy that you meet in the first chapter, but rather about his son, who was born to a cat-person (another thing I find distastefully commonly desirable - plushie folk) and promised that he would fetch a fallen star for the woman that he loves.

I, Robot
July 28, 2004

Over the weekend instead of playing our usual D&D with too many missing players, we checked out the new movie, I, Robot, starring Will Smith. Maybe I was in the right frame of mind for this movie, because it met my expectations well.

In the film, Will Smith stars as Detective Del Spooner, a cop whose bad memories of robots in his past has left him bitter toward them. The movie centers around Spooner’s investigation of the death of Alfred Lanning, played by James Cromwell (The Green Mile), who was thrown out the window of his locked room, the contents of which seem to be devoid of human life. Of course, there are robots involved, and Spooner is put in the cliche position of working against his own personality and placing trust (warranted or not) in the ability of robots.

Mozilla Firefox 1.0 Release
July 28, 2004

I’m sure that I’m the last tech-savvy person to notice that there is a date set for the FireFox 1.0 release.

If you’re not using FireFox now, the only reason you shouldn’t is if you’re so tied to Microsoft’s web development platform that you can’t escape.