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I knew DirecTV's HD switchover from MPEG2 to MPEG4 was coming, but I didn't expect it to happen so soon.  When I checked the listings this morning for the Sunday Ticket games I realized that none of them were listed in HD and I immediately knew what was going down.

I guess I need to call up Direct and have them swap out my old MPEG2 receiver for one of their new swanky receivers.  So I guess for the short term, I'll be forced to watch the Bucs in blurry SD.  Given how they're playing in the first quarter of today's game, I'm not missing much...

I was reading this blog post about the Bucs final cuts, and the combination of these two points made me shake my head:

• Obviously, in keeping rookie QB Josh Johnson, the Bucs have again decided to keep four quarterbacks, at least for now. Letting go of Johnson now would have exposed him to the rest of the league. Plus, practice squads won't be formed for a couple days.

• The Bucs will be particularly thin on the offensive line, where they kept just eight players. And that includes injured Davin Joseph (foot), who will miss at least several weeks after surgery. While he's out, the Bucs have just two offensive line backups: Anthony Davis and Dan Buenning.

I still don't understand Gruden's fascination with keeping four quarterbacks.  It seems like he knows that after Garcia, the rest are junk, so he'll just interchange them as they play depending on who looks the best moment.  I don't ever really remember that being successful.

And finally, good luck Michael Spurlock, you're still the man...

1. Female dog urine does not smell as pungent as male dog urine
2. The fabric covers on my couch can safely be placed in the washing machine and dryer

I didn't realize just how much I missed football until I watched the first score of the Gators' game today and cheered a bit when they punched it in.  Then I really got psyched, because I realized my one true love, Buccaneers football, kicks off next week!  That is, they should, barring a washout of New Orleans by Gustav...

Go Bucs!

By chance I was looking at my old Vanguard posts, and realized that the server mergers went down a year ago this week.  Has it really been that long?

As much angst as it caused what with people losing their names and houses, it turned out to be in the best interest of the PvE game.  There was a period of time between the mergers and the Age of Conan release (interestingly enough), where the servers had to be consolidated for the sake of the game.  Subscription numbers were pretty low near the time of the mergers, and to not take any action would have made the world seem even emptier and acquiring groups a difficult proposition, which would have caused more people to leave, thus sparking a nasty feedback loop.

The two US PVE servers, Seradon and Xeth are well populated, with lots of groups and chatter, and the community has really come together.  There's plenty activity on both servers, with several large guilds recruiting (cheers Safe Haven!), and events being organized and run weekly.  This bodes well for Vanguard, when you consider that it all occurring during the traditional summer doldrums of MMOs, when the number of players dips since everyone has other things to do than sit inside during the summer.

I have, however, read some posts by newer players complaining about the availability of groups under level 15, and yes that is still an issue, although not nearly as bad as it would have been back when there were 10+ servers.  This seems to be largely due to the fact that there are a wide variety of racial starting zones (somewhere between 6 and 8 I believe), which tends to spread players out until they start to find the more popular level spots around level 15.  Most everyone is hoping that the Isle of Dawn will help to relieve this spreading of lower characters, since it will offer new players a single zone in which to adventure.  This will hopefully make the lower levels of the game seem more populated as well as encourage lowbie grouping.

So, hindsight being 20/20, the folks on the Vanguard team made the smart choice by merging.  I'll always remember looking at the list of servers when creating Inara and Lunestra, and thinking to myself that Targonar and Woefeather sounded like interesting places to spread my roots.  So to you Targonar and Woefeather, I pour out a little!

Thirty-two minutes may not seem like a whole lot of time, but around a month ago when my new elliptical was delivered and I first jumped on, the default program was a 32 minute bellcurve that I thought I'd never hit.  Over the past few weeks I'd been bumping up the time by 2 or 4 minutes a week, and yesterday ran it for 22 minutes.  This morning I woke up decided to go for broke and give all 32 minutes a run for their money.  ~2 miles and 622 calories later, and I had made it through all 32 minutes and felt great.  Mission accomplished!

If you use amarok2/ubuntu via the neon nightly build service, you may have noticed that your collection shows up, but there are no tracks displayed.  A quick googling turned up this helpful post:

http://amarok.kde.org/forum/index.php?topic=15678.msg23480

Deleting ~.amarok-nightly and then re-scanning your collection should get you back up and running!

This is a Brett Favre jersey.  Notice how it is green and yellow and seems to resemble a Packers jersey?  It is not red, nor does it have pewter or black highlights.  There are no skull and crossbones, nor any ominous pirate ships.

Keep it that way!

If the Bucs pick up Brett Favre it will be a disastrous move for the organization.  They have already been less the stellar in working with Jeff Garcia with his desire to sign an extended agreement with the team, and signing Favre would effectively being giving Garcia a big thanks, but no thanks signal, as Favre would clearly be the de-facto starter, leaving Garcia in the lurch.  Additionally, you'd also be bringing the yearly mid-winter festival of "Retireous", where Brett Favre tearfully gathers his offensive line on the field after his last game, then retreats to BFE Mississippi to ponder his future, leaving the team in the lurch, then emerges two months later to render his decision to play yet another season.  And the Packers are talking trade as the only way to get Favre.  Are you seriously going to bank a first round pick and a few second rounders (as I can see this would be the only way they'd let him go), for a guy that'll play for another three years tops? 

Please please please please please go someplace else to finish your career, and don't wreck the team that I love!

"I'm a single woman with no children trying to pay my mortgage and grow my home-based business," she explained. "I was out there mowing one day and thought, 'Lord, what can I do to turn this grass into cash?' That's when I remembered that corn flake."

Reasons for her still being single are under investigation...

Last Thursday I decided to work from home, to avoid some traffic by my office, combined with Burton having a grooming appointment.  After dropping Burton off at the groomers, I popped open my laptop and went digging through my bag to find the AC adapter, only to realize that I had left it at work.  This posed a little bit of a problem, seeing that the battery would run for about 2 hours and then die--just a tad bit short of the full day I was planning on putting in.

On my desktop at home, I run Windows XP64, and in the past, I had attempted to install Cisco's VPN client, since that's how I connect remotely to work. After a little bit of research I realized that Cisco had no support for either XP64 or Vista64, so I was pretty much out of luck VPNing to work from my desktop at home. Now the problem on Thursday was that I had limited amount of battery time on my laptop and no way to connect to work outside of my laptop--at least on Windows. I rummaged around in my big box of parts and found an old hard-drive and external USB enclosure, plugged it into my desktop, and booted up a copy of kubuntu. In about 30 minutes, I had a brand new environment set up on a removable drive (so I didn't have to take my existing Windows drives and dual boot or repartition), was connected to work via VPN and coding away on a machine at the office remotely. Outside of kubuntu (which is a great distro), the other two key applications that were lifesavers were:

VPNC - This is a great VPN tool for anyone who needs to connect to a CISCO VPN concentrator, but who wants to avoid all the hassles of the official Cisco vpn client. In the past, I've struggled with the Cisco VPN client, most notably when updating kernels, because when doing so the client insists that it needs to be rebuilt, and then it will invariably have compilation errors. This either locks you into an out of date kernel, or you need to go scouring the Internet for an updated copy of the code. With VPNC, all those problems seem to go away. You no longer have to compile anything to connect to work via VPN, as VPNC is readily available in most distributions already packaged and ready, and is also therefore guaranteed to work with whatever the latest kernel version tends to be.

rdesktop - This is the definitive way to connect remotely to Windows machines from a Linux environment. I've been using rdesktop for quite a few years now, and it is epitome of the *nix tool--it does one thing, it does it very well, and it's highly specialized. The most basic usage from the command line accepts the name of the machine that you want to connect to, and to add additional connection parameters, you just need to append command line switches. It's lightweight, fast, and has near complete RDP support, so those times when you do have to connect to Windows, it's a great experience.

The nice thing about both of these tools is that if you're a command line warrior, you will be right at home out of the box, and if you are more comfortable in a GUI environment, there are assorted tools that will put a nice looking frontend up for you.

I've been running Linux daily at work for nearly three years now, and with every day that passes, it is becoming more and more viable in a professional Windows/MS Office environment, thanks in large part to software like VPNC and rdesktop.