Dark Side of the Carton

With an Xbox 360 that dated back to 6 months after launch, I figured it was only a matter of time before I got the Red Rings of Death that so many others have. Today was that time. Just before lunch, my wife called and asked what it meant when the rings around the power button on the 360 were red instead of green. I just let out a big *sigh* and told her that it finally happened. Our console had freezing issues for a long time and had just started to show some graphical artifacting on some games. I figured we were close to the end and I was right. The only saving grace is that maybe, just maybe, I’ll end up with one of the new HDMI enabled Falcon consoles. I’m not going to hold my breathe as almost everyone is getting back refurb units, and in some cases those aren’t working either. I’m not going to enjoy the next few weeks of waiting and fighting, but I’m not going to take anything laying down.

I’ve already done what anyone with some sort of connections would do and starting dropping emails all over about how I can get my console fixed as quickly as possible, but so far I haven’t made any progress. It seems that us journalists are just as down and out as the rest of the consumers out there. Hold on tight, things are going to get bumpy I think.

In my spare time I am an IT consultant for a remodeling company here in town. They don’t have a full time tech, so I do all the stuff they need with most of it happening remotely. They run SBS, but I’ve been putting off their upgrade for too long now. They are (were) on version 2000 up until today. Today went something like this for me:

2:15pm - Leave My Office for Client Office
2:35pm - Arrive at Client Office
3:00pm - Locate software and begin prep for in place upgrade
4:00pm - Wait for data copy/image to complete
5:00pm - Wait for data copy/image to complete
6:00pm - Wait for data copy/image to complete

See a pattern here?

6:50pm - Begin actual upgrade
10:45pm - Complete initial OS upgrade

There were a lot more steps involved in the actual upgrade process, but there was one thing that sticks in my mind in general and that happens to be the hour that we sat while the system failed to read a file from the CD… After an hour of waiting and no progress we checked the event logs to find out the file on the cd was corrupt or otherwise unreadable. We popped in another copy of the media and viola it zipped along. After 8 hours at the client site on top of my regular work day I got to come home to a very exhausted family that is not used to their dad being away at night.

In a nutshell there is no real tale hidden in this post, but I just wanted to tell anyone considering an SBS 2003 R2 upgrade to plan for 6-10 hours to get it done. When I do server work my wife refers to time as “Chris Time” as my estimate of 2-3 hours always turns into 8-10. That said, set aside 6-10 hours of real time or 2-3 hours of chris time.

P.S. I know I am going to re-read this post on Monday morning and think to myself, “What in the hell was the point of that post?” Mark my words.

Today was one of those days where you were busy all day and then all of a sudden it was 5pm and you feel like you didn’t get anything done. Not to mention I feel like I was run over by a truck.

I spent most of this week away from my comfort zone in web development and deeply immersed in the world of desktop application development. One of my main roles at work is to build and maintain an application for tracking our jobs. The details of which are unimportant at the present time.

One of the things I’ve been working on recently is ASP.NET code for automating the process of building job documents. In essence, the data exists in a SQL Server db and I want to dump it to where it goes in a Word Document. This really is not all that difficult with the use of “bookmarks” in Word. Where it becomes a problem is the setup of your IIS webserver and the execution of your ASP.NET code. I’ve tried and tried to get it working to no avail.

I’ve even tried the sample applications provided by Microsoft and they won’t run properly. I already knew how to do this in a Win32 world so I abandoned all hope of achieving this via the web and I am building a simple little tray application for generating these documents. Once I am done, I may turn it into some sort of tutorial as it really can be quite helpful to automate some of the redundant work that your employees are doing and it goes a long way to proving to people just how much time you are saving them.

As much as I enjoy coding for the web, there is something refreshing about a change of scenery. I need to come up with a short list of small desktop applications so I can work on them when I am really struggling with web work some days.

Most nights I stay up way later than I should working on freelance coding projects. Last night I opted to take a break from that and spend a little time relaxing with The Orange Box. The Orange Box is Valve’s newest release and comes packed with essentially 5 total games. 3 of those games are in the form of Half-Life 2 content, but that’s not important. What is important is the fact that the other 2 games happen to be Portal and Team Fortress 2.

I started Portal about a week ago and just hadn’t set aside some time to finish the game as I knew it was relatively short. I finished it last night and I am still having sweet dreams about the endeavor. I can’t remember the last time a game left me with such a splendid taste in my mouth. Even at $60 for the whole package, it could be argued that the price tag was worth Portal alone and that the rest of the content is just gravy. I decided to find out by jumping online and playing a little TF2. Let’s just say that I wasn’t very good and I racked up a whopping 2 kills. I played a few more rounds, each as unsuccessful as the one before it.

I’ll have to make it a point to keep playing TF2 as it was quite enjoyable, but I’ll need to do a little research on what exactly I am supposed to be doing as I kind of just wandered around until someone snuck up behind me and killed me.

At any rate, picking a Game of The Year for 2007 is going to be no small feat. With BioShock and Halo 3 preceeding it, things could get ugly. I think it’ll end up coming down to perceptions. There was no way that Halo 3 would ever live up to the expectations that had been set for it, so unfortunately it’s viewed as a disappointment. BioShock on the other hand had people describing it as interactive art so it’s easy to see how your expectations change how a game is viewed post release.

I think with The Orange Box everyone expected it to be awesome and then Portal was just so much better than anyone could have imagined that it really made the whole experience almost euphoric. For what it’s worth, I am calling the shot now. There will be a huge number of sites giving The Orange Box the Best Overall Game Award. I’m not saying I won’t do the same thing or that it won’t be warranted, but I am still calling it.

We live in a digital world and the conundrum of simplicity versus reliability is going to continue to be an issue. What I’m talking about will become a little more clear in a few minutes.

Friday night as we headed to my sister-in-law’s football game, she is on dance team, my son whipped the digital camera out of the diaper bag as he climbed into his chair in the back of the van. As we drove down our street we heard him say something to the effect of “I want to take video.” When we realized he had the camera and was furiously pushing every button he could, we managed to coax him to give the camera up by placing it next to the baby in the car seat as neither of us could reach him in the way back of the van. As the camera slid into the carseat, a horrifying screen became apparent on the camera. The screen was a blue screen and only showed these words “xD No Pictures”.

Panic quickly filled the car as my wife practically tried to dive into the middle row of seats to get her hands on the camera and confirm her worst nightmare. It seems that in his attempt to film a video, my son had managed to format the memory card. Our last recollection of copying pictures off that precious little device was sometime roughly 2 months ago. With a daughter that is just 5 months old, that meant roughly 40% of her recorded life had been quickly zinged away into the neverworld of file deletion.

As I work to diffuse the quickly escalating situation in the car, I thought to myself “I’ve worked in IT for 10 years now. I’ve recovered files from just about every situation. This should be easy.” As we pull back into the driveway 5 minutes later, a worn and tattered bunch quietly dreading the outcome of my attempt at data recovery, I can’t help but fear that I won’t be able to recover the data. These are pictures, arguably the only important thing besides home video that I own. It’s times like these that possessions really take a backseat and things come into perspective.

As I quietly got started on the data recovery attempt, my wife checked the main computer at home to find that we had in fact backed up more of the pictures than we remembered. We were down to roughly 4 weeks of pictures. So in the event that I failed at the task at hand, the loss would be minimal. Substantial, but minimal.

I spent the next 4 hours running programs that range in price from $40 solutions aimed at consumers on up to OnTrack’s Easy Recovery Professional that carries a price tag that most small businesses would scoff at. None of them able to recover the data despite claims of being able to recover files from formatted xD cards. In fact, many of these programs were written specifically for the task at hand and they failed one after another.

As I threw in the towel and explained the bad news to my wife, I began to wonder. Why was it so easy to wipe any trace of data off this card? My 3yr old managed to do it in just a few clicks. In all my years of IT, I’ve never run into such a massive roadblock. As digital cameras fully replace their film based counterparts, this issue is going to become more and more common. With storage at an all time low, it begs the question of why there is not more inherent data protection in these little consumer devices. I mean, a digital camera stores photos; memories. These memories are cherished by many over all their worldly possessions, yet they can be wiped away in a mere instant.

The thought crossed my mind that it would be so very simple to build a redundant flash memory device capable of protection data from accidental deletion. Furthermore, why would camera companies make it so easy to delete that much data and make that data completely unrecoverable?

In the past, I’ve lost important data due to lightning and various other hardware issues, but none as important as now. If you are reading this and wonder if there is light at the end of the tunnel, I have good news. SharpCast is here to help preserve your memories.

SharpCast is primarily a photo printing service much like Snapfish and Shutterfly, but they have an additional service that is amazing. The SharpCast photo organizing service has a built in synchronization function that allows you to backup all of your photos as soon as you add your images to the software. There are 2 levels of service, free and premium. The free service level backs up your photos at a lower resolution, but still high enough for printing, and backs up the full resolution image for 30 days. The premium version of the service permanently backs up the full size images and only sets you back about $65/yr.

So just how does SharpCast save you from a disaster like mine? Lose your laptop or computer in a disaster? No problem, just download SharpCast, reinstall the software on a new computer, login and all your photos come flying back down. You can even share your photos with other people. The software even auto-generates web based photo galleries for non-SharpCast users.

As great as SharpCast is, it doesn’t really protect you from camera issues or small children, but if you become routine with backing up your photos to your computer and immediately to SharpCast, there is no reason that you’ll have to wince and cry over lost digital photos ever again.

I’m pretty proud of myself today. After many failed attempts at this blogging thing I think I haven finally gotten the hang of it and stuck with it. Hopefully the continued writing drastically improves my writing skills. I have faith that it will considering the abomination that is my first written game review back from December of 2002. It’s not for the meek of heart and is as close as you can get to garbage.

That said, hopefully I can stick with this. I’ve got some really good ideas for PHP related content that I think will really benefit some of the younger PHP devs out there. After all, the PHP language is so easy to learn it’s getting to the point that we have far too many people that are doing some very bad things in code these days.

The RIAA has had a death grip on the music scene forever now. The antiquated business model they use was made obsolete when the internet became a mainstream reality, but they held on. They’ve held on and alienated their customers by suing first and asking questions later. It never occurred to them that the reason their customers were stealing from them was because of the way they were acting. I don’t condone stealing, but I also don’t condone being stolen from. That is what I equate buying music to, theft. It’s voluntary theft, but it’s theft all the same.

That said, Radiohead started offering music directly to fans a while back. This was the first step in eliminating the RIAA and it’s bullshit methods. The snowball is getting bigger now with Nine Inch Nails announcing on Monday that it has dropped it’s label and is moving to a direct to consumer model. Oasis and Jamiroquai are also on board and now the original Material Girl Madonna is on board. Madonna announced that she was dropping her lable and signing with Live Nation to deliver 3 studio albums, concerts, and merchandise. Live Nation is a promotion firm and not a record label so it’ll be interesting to see how that portion works out.

What I know is that I hope more and more artists are empowered to drop their labels and get the bigger piece of pie they deserve. Artists create the music, they deserve to be paid for it

They say that the first step is to admit you have a problem. I have a problem. My problem is not drugs or alcohol, but Chuck. I’m a Chuck-oholic. NBC has lured me in with this super spy computer geek combination and I can’t get away. I know that TV is largely trivial in the grand scheme of things, but Chuck is the best new show I’ve seen since The Office and that is saying quite a bit.

If you haven’t checked it out, you are missing out and you need to start watching it. Hit the Chuck website for some background on the show. I give my guarantee that you will enjoy the show. If you don’t, you must not be human.

The internet is a fascinating thing. It empowers us to feel connected to other people without actually talking to them. It’s the avenue with which most of us communicate with one another. It’s the lifeblood of the newer generations. That said, our friends at the Texas Department of Transportation took that away from me this weekend.

There is road construction on the major road near my house and midday on Friday our cable services went out. That meant no internet, no phone, and no TV. After 8 hours of downtime things finally came back up, but I don’t remember the last time I felt so “disconnected” and I can’t help but feel a little bit silly. I mean, its just the internet… right?

I have a feeling that this feeling of “connectivity” will only serve  to increase as the younger generations become more and more dependent upon the web for their communication and relationships. I have a feeling that this will not be a good thing moving forward.