Shattered Reality

Ben Heck recently wrapped up his work on the first Playstaion 3 laptop (I’d link to his site but their new server seems to be down). This baby features a 17″ LCD screen, capable of 720p resolution with a HDMI-DVI connection; built-in keyboard and speakers; and weighs in at 16 pounds. I want one. (I wonder what kind of heat this behemoth will produce.)

Following the link above, Engadget will soon be auctioning off the one-on-a-kind model for charity. Ben Heck also created the Xbox 360 Laptop, and, something I just learned, a Wii Laptop! I’m always impressed by how clean and “natural” his creations come looking. He also has a book out titled Hacking Video Game Consoles that I’d like to pick up some day.

Forgive the lack of posts lately; since March I’ve been very tied up. At the beginning of last month I had all 4 wisdom teeth pulled; the surgery went well (local anesthetics) and the recovery went even smoother. After playing catch up from that, two weeks ago I came down with bronchitis, and I’m still suffering the remnants of the cough.

Busy things in store for this spring:

• Updates to my No Spam plugin (and one or two new ones, too!)
• Launch of wedding photography business
• Personal photography portfolio site
• Possible migration of this blog to Left Right Designs as posts lean more towards a technical nature
• …and much more!

Just updated to Wordpress version 2.3.3 due to a security vulnerability in Wordpress. You shouldn’t notice anything, but let me know if something broke in the process.

I wanted to make fun of the site and the people who take it waaaay too seriously, so I put up something that was different than most of the photos there. I get a kick out of the results. Turns out to be hot all you have to do is something different; women love rebels. Epic.

Just.. wow. Some of the rag-doll animations looked too “rag doll-ish”, but it’s still unfinished and everything else is beautiful.

Sorry about the extra downtime to anyone who was viewing Shattered Reality this afternoon. I was in the middle of updating Wordpress when my server’s FTP crapped out, leaving me S.O.L. I submitted a help ticket and they rebooted the FTP daemon on the server and all’s well again.

Let me know if anyone notices anything out of whack with the new update.

I forgot to close Firefox the other night before leaving for work. I came in the next morning and my PC was just crawling from the lack of memory. I’m really glad Firefox 3 is supposed to address a lot of the memory leak issues.

Me: “I have $150 in charges that shouldn’t be there and I need to find out why this keeps happening”
Them: …long pause… “So you want to know where they’re coming from?”

Of course I want to know! Seriously WTF?
On December 4th I paid November’s bill (Nov 3 - Dec 4). On December 14th I paid for December’s early because there was some shuffling of accounts. I get my bill today and it reads $190,when I really only owe $70. So I call them, get someone who seems to notice the problem, but then get disconnected after 15 minutes on hold (my fault).

So I call back, and I get someone who sounds like they’re still in high school and are failing every course dealing with logic and common sense. Now she tries telling me that payment on December 17th was for the previous month (November), and I’m telling her that no, it isn’t!

Speaking very slowly and deliberately, I ask her if she can see the payment I made on December 4th and state that payment covered November. Then I proceed to December 17th and confirm the second payment and state that one covered December. It’s at this point I really think I lost her as she put me back on hold and I’ve been waiting ever since.

Tired. Too often I refuse the body’s natural action of going to sleep, putting it off until exhaustion overtakes me and I succumb to the primitive hobby. The advent of mobile technology only reinforces this.

- Sent from my Helio

I just printed up a sheet of 9 blocks made in Word that say “You are a valued member of this company. :)” and randomly put them on people’s monitors over lunch. I think it will boost morale.