Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Deciding my wallet was too heavy I decided I needed to buy some new music. I was tempted by Kelly Clarkson’s new album :P. On a more serious note, I went down the list of punk bands I had from an Offspring article and got albums from The Vandals, The Misfits, The Exploited and Hawthorne Heights. All good, especially the last, check out their debut album, The Silence of Black and White which is awesome.

I’ve just finished overhauling Jessica Simpson Planet with loads of new content and pages. It’s amazing how many page views you clock up when working on a site. It moved up two places on the Celeb State Topsites list lol.

Point one: while watching the movie special on ITV1 of Dukes of Hazzard I noticed they were holding the premiere of Dukes at Vue. Ok, it’s only half interesting ;).

Secondly, Johnny Knoxville. I didn’t realise he actually came from a place called Knoxville (you see, we have non-stupid names for places in the UK :P). That and he does a show like Jackass. You learn something useless every day.

BTW Seann William Scott has his head shaved. It looks crap.

I was reading this article, which says Google has become an ICANN accredited domain registrar for .com, .net and .org. There were some interesting thoughts on why.

My first thought was them simply managing their own domain registrations. Although suggestions from Digg.com included them selling domains (ok that one was obviously) or even giving them away with free hosting supported by AdSense. That’s crazy but then 2.5 GB inboxes is crazy too and it seems to be working.

That’s different, though, all they need there is plenty of space which they can all do internally. With domains, they need to pay ICANN $6 per domain which would soon rack up huge costs which they won’t make back on most of the websites hosted.

Take a look at this. You know the hierarchical menus that Apple created for iPod. Well they didn’t file a patent in time and now Microsoft have. Interesting situation. Although of course Apple are appealing.

Now we just sit back and wait for Microsoft to file patent for 0, 1 ;). The Onion reference for those who missed it.

I don’t like auctions. Ok, I do, I love them! But they aren’t faultless. I find myself constantly monitoring them, sitting around waiting for them. It doesn’t end for another 48 hours at the minimum, probably a lot longer! Why can’t I turn away? :P.

Ok, there are multi-billion dollar corporations working on streaming video why can nobody work out how to produce software that will buffer correctly? Quicktime isn’t bad but in a video that lasts 5 minutes your likely to have it stop to buffer 3-4 times even though it waits to load enough in. It’s not like it does it sometimes, it does it religiously. You’re clearly not leaving enough buffer time!

It’s not rocket science working out that if you are pre-loading something and it doesn’t load enough you need to pre-load for longer. Worst part is, Quicktime is one of the best, it’s all down hill from here.

The worst offender is probably Windows Media. Quicktime you can get 75% through it without problems. Windows Media, you can get around 10% of the way through it. I was just watching a four minute documentary. It started buffering 10 seconds in. How slack is that? Who writes software that predicts how much buffering is needed that badly? It’s not even like it was close. 10 seconds!

Check this out. Maybe the rumours are true. Girls really can use computers ;).

Ok, in a follow up to my previous posts, I decided to clarify the timezones, mainly for myself as a reference but I will also include other relevant ones so if anyone else is reading this it might be useful. It’s gone 12:30 but I’m going to use that as a reference anyway.

CET / BST (Central European Time / British Summer Time) : +1 : 12:30
GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) : n/a : 11:30

EDT (Eastern Daylight Time) : -4 : 7:30
EST (Eastern Standard Time) : -5 : 6:30

CDT (Central Daylight Time) : -5 : 6:30
CST (Central Standard Time) : -6 : 5:30

MDT (Mountain Daylight Time) : -6 : 5:30
MST (Mountain Standard Time) : -7 : 4:30

PDT (Pacific Daylight Time) : -7 : 4:30
PST (Pacific Standard Time) : -8 : 3:30

So, in relation to UK time (either GMT or BST depending what we are on):

Eastern time is 5 hours behind
Central time is 6 hours behind
Mountain time is 7 hours behind
Pacific time is 8 hours behind

US TV is wierd. The network and affiliate thing for a start, here in the UK we have real channels. But also it is such a bitch to get TV listings. NBC have it almost right, you can just pick your timezone and it will give you the listings of stuff on tonight. But that’s just NBC and only covers like a two hour period.

Any of the listings sites require a postcode (thank you Beverly Hills 90210, people needing generic US post codes accross the world are forever in your debt) although I managed to strumble accross some kind of listings thing on Yahoo TV where you can pick a timezone.

Stuff seems to go out at the same time on different timezones. So what, do they delay transmission depending on what timezone it is? IE, places in pacific time get programming broadcast a few hours after places on eastern time so that it all goes out at the same clock time, eg, 7pm, etc?

That’s what seems to be happening. And then when prime time shows are quoted they seem to have different times for different timezones. It really makes you appreciate the UK system, one timezone, channels that actually are channels (I know we have “regional variations” but nobody cares and nobody watches them), it’s simple.

The whole timezone thing is pretty stupid anyway as you are having to work out the variations between the timezones constantly. That is just about managable but throw in the fact that random timezones switch to daylight saving time and it’s just a joke. How can people in the UK leaving west of Greenwich be an hour ahead of it? Daylight saving needs to go.