Red Recondite

TiVo recently announced the discontinuation of their TiVo Rewards program. I had amassed 10,000 of these mystical TiVo Rewards points while participating in some odd rituals that I do not understand and cannot adequately explain. Clearly, I had some spending to do. Read the rest of this entry »

I read about it on the gaming blogs, but I didn’t believe it in my heart.

I just experienced my second red-ring-of-death… jeez. I got my first 360 back in May of 2006, and it died a good 13 months later in June 2007. Yesterday, the new one died, a scant 9 months later. Thankfully, I purchased the Best Buy replacement plan both times, so I replaced it without any hassle.

I still prefer the 360 to the other current-generation consoles, but this high failure rate is very ridiculous.

I have been working on a WPF (Windows Presentation Framework) application using Visual C# 2008 Express. Even though I am at the Initial Optimism phase of Software Development, and my imagination is running wild, I know that nothing will probably become of this work.

The basic goal is to play videos encoded with a number of different codecs (i.e. h.264, Xvid, and DivX). So, I thought, before I went into all of the other features that this application will do, I’ll keep things simple and just play a video with the filename hard-coded.

It’s the year 2008. I have the latest Microsoft tools available. Playing a video can’t be that difficult, can it? Read the rest of this entry »

1. WhoLockMe – Have you ever tried to delete a file or directory, and Windows tells you that it cannot allow you to do that, Dave? Dr. Hoiby created WhoLockMe to tell you which process has placed a lock on that file. Once the process is dead, you can delete the file.
2. TrayIt! – Some commonly used applications will insist on consuming an entry in the Windows taskbar, and do not have the ability to be minimized to the system tray. With TrayIt!, simply hold Ctrl or Shift down while minimizing a window, and it appears in the tray next to the clock. Hooray.
3. TeraCopy – Windows hates your freedom… to copy a large number of files from place-to-place. Sometimes, a file will be locked, and the file copy process will be aborted. TeraCopy replaces the standard Windows copy function, and displays error messages for each file that failed to copy, and it will actually continue to copy the rest of the files. Amazing!

You see her, and you can’t stop thinking about her. She seems dark and intelligent. You ask her out, and, to your surprise, you find yourself on a date that night. She mentions that she likes butterflies. As the weeks go by, you get to know her better. There are a few things that feel a little off (her dog seems a little bit too human), but you start looking at rings. You invite her to a fancy dinner, and when she steps in, everyone goes quiet. She has a tattoo of a butterfly on her entire face. The butterfly wings go from her lips, out to her cheeks, and right up to her eyebrows. A black body with spindly arms sits down the spine of her nose. You run out the back entrance, and buy a new phone.