Sean’s Mental Walkabout

NBC Edits SNL Bailout Skit Following Legal Concerns Over “People Who Should Be Shot” Chyron
Interesting. This is one of the reasons you should be watching SNL live, because the archives have this editted out. Revisionist history wins the day.

Dynamic Periodic Table
Just because it’s awesome.

Dutchess Wine Trail - Discover the Premium Wineries of the Hudson Valley
Our local wine trail

Storm King Art Center
Giant Art on 1000 acres of beautiful land

Viscount Wines & Liquor
Wine tastings every saturday. It’s like an amusement park for adults.

Dutchess County Tourism
dutchess county tourism page

Stanford CS Ed Library
If you or a friend are trying to cut or re-cut your teeth on basic C stuff, I found this site years ago that’s actually quite good. Especially as they don’t seem to teach pointers in college any more.

Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool: Table of Contents
For whatever reason the GNU.org docs here suck, and this has always been my reference page for this.

Quick Reference Cards
A bunch of great quick reference cards for various technical tasks.

Advanced Search—The Tree Guide at Arborday.org
In case you are looking to plant a tree, and want to find the right one for your area

Giles Bowkett: Lightbulb Joke: Bad Ruby Programmers
If you follow things in the community, it’s pretty funny. It doesn’t change that I love ruby and ruby on rails, but it’s still funny.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Verizon bets big on network infrastructure | News - Wireless - CNET News
I like that while the cable guys are trying to clamp down on bandwidth and cable and satelite keep compressing the hell out of their TV signals, Verizon is going the other direction. While I like dishnetwork, I’ll flip to verizon tv as soon as it gets here because of the picture quality issue. And I definitely love my fios.

Popularity: 3% [?]

AMC plans Mars mission
Red Mars coming as a mini series. F’ing awesome!

Popularity: 3% [?]

Amazon.com: Sports Night: The Complete Series 10th Anniversary Edition: Peter Krause, Felicity Huffman, Thomas Schlamme: Movies & TV
If you haven’t seen this show, you are missing out big time. Buy this and correct it.

freshmeat.net: Project details for ProcessMaker OSS
ProcessMaker is workflow and business process management software that allows small to medium-sized organizations to automate document intensive, approval-based processes across various systems including finance, HR, and operations. An entirely Web-based, AJAX-enabled application built on the popular open source WAMP/LAMP stacks, it includes tools to design forms, create documents, assign roles and users, create routing rules, and send alerts. A full service-orientated architecture (SOA) and Web Services interface allows the software to directly connect with popular business intelligence, content management, and enterprise resource planning systems.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Java Tips - How to make phone vibrate in J2ME
how to make a phone vibrate with j2me

Neuros OSD 2.0 HD Developer Kits on Sale | OdNT - open.neurostechnology.com
Interesting tv platform

Popularity: 1% [?]

I nearly lost it when I saw that Charlie Jade is coming to SciFi channel next week. This was a south african production a few years ago, and is one of the most innovative shows I’ve seen in a long time. The series has a bit of a slow start, but stick with it. Then run up to the end is incredible.

What I wouldn’t give if this generated enough interest for SciFi to restart this series. It was incredible.

Popularity: 13% [?]

John came over prior to the game bringing his HD-DVD Video Essentials, and given that we had some time prior to the game, we spent some time tuning the set.  Honestly, most things were pretty good, though we had to tune down the color and up the brightness just a bit.  There was one adjustment we made that I can tell immediately made a difference, which was tuning the sharpness down to nothing.  One thing that had always bothered me was how Jack’s beard in lost seemed to shimmer in odd ways, though I was never really sure what caused it.  It turns out that sharpness on digital TVs pretty much just takes the digital artifacting and makes it 10 times worse.  The image looks a little softer now, but there are no annoying random artifacts on thin lines throughout the picture.

Thanks to John for bringing that over.  I still have the kit as I’m going to do audio balancing this week (as we didn’t quite have the time to do it before people showed up).  While my living room is only so tunable, I’m still looking forward to actually trying to balance in the sub woofer in a reasonable way.  I think it will be amusing to see how off my course grained adjustments are.

Popularity: 16% [?]

That line is used twice in Futurama (in two consecutive episodes), uttered by Professor Farnsworth.  When Futurama was on Cartoon Network for the last 4 years, that line was blanked out on every airing of either episode.  Why that line was deemed too “something” to air, when nothing else was cut, always seemed odd to me.

Futurama is now on Comedy Central, and as of last night, is airing Futurama un-censored.

Popularity: 62% [?]

While looking for a solution to my VMWare / USB issue, I came across a Linux.com article:
Developer crafts Linux support for Logitech Harmony remote controls.

Instead of using the Windows GUI to program the remote, you use the Logitech website (the windows gui is basically a fancy version of that). When you are done, you download a .EZHex file which you can then sync in Linux to your remote.

I haven’t tried it yet, though it is on my list of things to do. For those who have stayed away from the Logitech Harmony remotes because they required Windows, you need no longer live in the dark ages of remote controls.

Popularity: 11% [?]

With the writers strike on full bore, and the clock counting down on scripted television going off the air, I thought this morning’s Ctrl Alt Delete comic was very apropos.

Popularity: 8% [?]