Well we got our DSL set up today — I’ve finally come circle and back to DSL with Qwest after my brief year long stint with Comcast. Their “comcastic” service was okay but nothing worth writing home about. Their 48 kbps upload speed was painfully slow and their download speed ONLY AVERAGE. It’s community-based speed…if all your neighbors are using, chances are your download speed will suffer. Everyone shares the burden.

Well, setting up the DSL modem was a pain in the ass — the setup CDRom that I was provided with didn’t work (I’m assuming it’s because I have Firefox as the default browser and not IE). So I ended up drilling through the CDRom to find the Start.htm file located in CDROM:\Manual Installation\Start.htm (and of course I ran it with IE to avoid any complications—complications that could have been avoided if Qwest developers were better at cross-browser compatability).

With that instruction guide, it gave me my username and password for the PPPoA authentication in the modem itself. What a pain in the butt.

Now I just have to figure out why I’m only getting 640 kbps up, when I was told I’d get 896 kbps. DSL Reports shows me at about 1.2 MBPS down and 512 KBPS up. Not as cool as I’d like it to be.

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This Tuesday we’re switching all of our services. I’m tired of Comcast’s Internet service (the upload speeds are just too friggin’ slow), their overly-priced local and long distance service and most of all, Cingular’s lousy mobile service.

Cingular has recently released an ad campaign about how people are switching to Cingular because they don’t drop calls. The commercial depicts a seemingly calm and collect guy explaining his frustration with his provider dropping his calls. Everytime he goes to shout his frustrations, his voice is muted out with the text showing at the bottom of the screen.

Heh, interesting considering that Cingular has consistently dropped my calls. I can’t get signal to save my life in my house or at work. About the only time I can get signal is in my car…and I try not to talk on my phone in the car if I can help it.

I called Cingular last Friday to find out when my contract ended. Conveniently it had ended that day. The call rep asked why I was inquiring about my contract, to which I gave him my answer—they drop my calls all the time. He seemed to blame it on still being on the converted AT&T Wireless network — I blame it on Cingular for not being able to maintain the network that I had belonged to.

The rep suggested that I switch to the Cingular network off the old AT&T network and said in not so many words, “we won’t be droppin’ your calls.” I basically said — “you’re right…I’m switching carriers.”

By bundling my entire services — local phone, long distance, high speed internet (3Mbps down / 896 kbps up), DirectTV and mobile phone service — and we’ll save around $70 a month. It will go up after a year by ten or twenty dollars, but we’ll still save money.

Edit:

HA!…. I can’t believe I didn’t include my new provider.  I’m going back to Qwest and bundling all my services through them.

Filed under: Awareness, General
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It’s just like American culture and Hollywood to bring historic events to film.  Sometimes it works and sometimes it’s just a flat-out bad idea.  United 93 is just that…a bad idea.  Beyond the fact that the “ending” is predictable and that we already know many of the facts surrounding the taking down of flight United 93, it’s perhaps one of the worst film ideas I’ve seen yet.  I don’t mean it to be a disservice to the memory of those that went down in that flight, but what I see is a film company [Universal Studios] capitalizing off the tragedy of thirty-some passengers and staffers and all of their family members.

I for one, will NOT see this movie.  I suggest the same for the rest of my fellow Americans.  We need not encourage Hollywood to profit off recent tragedies.  That’s just plain tacky.

Filed under: Awareness, Culture
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I’ve tried a couple applications locally on my machine for managing photos in a gallery style manner with options like commenting, syndication, etc. Two in particular that I’ve tried that are noteworty is Gallery (sourceforge) and Plogger. The thing with photo gallery apps, is that there are hundreds of them out there, all with various features.

My buddy Jamison is using Gallery, one that has a ton of possibilities — plenty of modules with various functions. It’s even capable of allowing you to sell photos, send them to shutterfly and loads of other features. However…it’s also a heavyweight. The basic application with a few modules stood at around 14 MB. With my lackluster bandwidth (courtesy of Comcast — blazing upload speeds of 45 kbps…zzzzz) it took forever to upload the app.

I tried plogger as well and that one was much easier to manage, not nearly as complicated and was relatively easy to customize the look (if you know a little PHP and how to edit stylesheets). It certainly doesn’t have the power and options that Gallery does, but it’s easy to use and quite lightweight. But knowing PHP and seeing how lightweight the code is, it shouldn’t be too hard to add some minor features to the app.

But the main function of compiling selective photos into a gallery is accomplished.

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After finishing up my taxes this morning, I took my Canon Digital Rebel XT out to the old Schmidt/Landmark Brewery down on the south end of Saint Paul, near the Mississippi River. That place, though run down, is piece of Minnesota’s history and has a lot of cool photographical opportunities. Check out the new galleries I’ve set up [buildings & structures -- abstract art] at my digital photo gallery. I’ve still got some customization work to do, but the application “Plogger” sure seemed like a cool PHP app for managing photos. It’d be cool if it stored more information about the photos, but it’ll do.

Filed under: Photoblography
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I saw a video of Prince at a Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame concert on YouTube. He performed this incredible guitar solo that was flawless.

Click here to watch the video.

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Yesterday I decided that I’d spend several hours taking photos today, getting used to the new camera and the various settings. When all was said and done, I took around 150 photos today — man, I love digital SLR’s. The thing I enjoy particularly the most about digital SLR’s is that you really don’t have to worry about using up your film and wondering how the photos will turn out. Granted, of the 150 some photos that I took today, it’s fair to say about a fourth of them turned out. Anyway, here’s a few of the photos.

(more…)

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I read an article this morning on the International Herald Tribune site about how motion picture studios (New Line Cinema in particular) that are trying to use new methods of getting people back to the box office to watch their movies.

The studio releasing the film, New Line Cinema, wants to find ways to market movies beyond traditional methods like advertising on television and in newspapers. It is a search that is also preoccupying the rest of Hollywood, which is eager to reverse a slump in ticket sales.

The unconventional marketing ideas…indicate how serious studios are about finding new methods to draw moviegoers back into theaters. 

My response?  How about make movies that don’t suck?

People won’t go see a movie if it doesn’t appeal to them, have some entertainment value in it and especially if it lacks originality.  Seriously.  How many times will a person go back to the theatre to see the same old storyline but packaged in a new setting.  You’d think Disney would have caught on by now…Shaggy Dog, Freaky Friday, Parent Trap, Herbie: Fully Loaded.  What a waste.  Try something original.

Filed under: Culture
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Well, if this isn’t the last straw to get me looking, I’m not sure what is.

The creative group that I work with is already stretched thin in terms of all the things we do — now the powers that be have let go both our project analyst and our Art Director! That’s the equivalent of decapatating a person and expecting them to perform at the same capacity…business as usual.

The more time that passes at this organization the more I can conclude that they’re dysfunctional, solely concerned about the stock value and have little regard for the consequence of letting go valuable people.

Filed under: Awareness, Uncategorized
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Filed under: General
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