Homemade Wii component cables
I still haven't been able to get real Wii component cables in order to display in progressive scan (Nintendo seems to be thumbing their nose at their most loyal fans with the Wii), so I found a guide online for making your own homebrew cables. It works, but the main problem is that you have to destroy your composite A/V cable to do it.
Wiring like this is the moral equivalent of goto statements and spaghetti code. My E.E. professors would be ashamed..
Paperclips to the rescue! Obviously not a long-term solution, but it works.
Yay for finally being able to select 480p! I just noticed in this picture that my camera has no IR filter, so you can see all the LEDs in the Wii 'sensor bar.' I am surprised that it has 4 on each side..
Power!
I came home from work today and my power came on. Wooo!! I thought it might get fixed tonight, because earlier in the day I noticed that they had some of the streetlights on my street working again and were making their way up towards me.
So I was out of power for a total of 5 days and 5 nights, which was longer than I have ever seen for a power outage. I have a flight to Denver tomorrow morning, so it's nice that it's on so that I can do a laundry and get all ready to go without freezing to death in the dark (again).
When I turned on my computer, the first email I got was "You have a new bill from Puget Sound Energy!" Weird coincidence? Hrmm... 😐
Angel of Death gets some holiday spirit
At work I have a leftover Halloween decoration in my office:
I haven't thrown it away because I love how corny it is. "Pre-assembled, ready to scare!" and "Straight from the grave.." It's a no-name Made-in-China decoration that is obviously not made by a big company (i.e. "ScareCorp Inc. Angel of Death GXR 2006 Edition"). There's no company name or contact info at all, so they don't have to include any 'instructions' which are really just lists of warnings to avoid lawsuits ("Do not eat Angel of Death", "Do not set Angel of Death on fire").
Reactions from co-workers range from people who find the humor in it ("That's funny", "Hillarious"), to people who don't get it at all ("You're deranged", "That's sick").
This week, in the spirit of the times, I dressed it up with a hollyhat and some jingle bells:
Windy
On Thursday night Seattle had the worst windstorm in recorded history, and millions of people are out of power for "days" (including me).
Supposedly about half of the customers have had their power reconnected as of Saturday afternoon, but my neighborhood is still out. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not fixed until Monday or later.
Yesterday I hung out with friends who were also stranded without power, but today my hot water was all gone so I had to come in to work to take a shower and get internet access.
Trees and fences are down all over the place. A car across from me in the parking lot got smashed.
Finally, an answer to the question, "Redmond rush-hour traffic: could it possibly be any worse?" Answer: "Yes, the power to all the streetlights could always go out."
Cooking dinner by the light of a car battery at Dave's house.
Ah, the joys of filesystem corruption
Weird places to split an encyclopedia
I'm sure they do it just by page count, but some of these make me wonder if the editors weren't having a little fun:
Say it real fast, it sounds like 'ménage-à-trois'
Well, they do have the highest per-capita murder rate..
"Ooh, what lovely little Edisons you have around the tree"
We could use a little more of this..
Cylinders, perhaps?
I don't think they had those...
The avowed enemies of the Zoroastrian Alliance, I'm sure
Dead bulb
My projector's bulb died this week after 600 hours, when it was rated for 2000 hours. Grr! Nobody seems to have them in stock right now, and I'm not going to pay Sony the full retail price for a new one ($350!?), so it looks like I'll be stuck for a couple of weeks unable to play Wii or watch Netflix movies. Oh well.. It's a good thing I just canceled my cable TV.
The actual bulb looks pretty weird - here's a pic:
Shameless plugs
Recently I've been a "guest writer" on Jensen Harris' popular Office UI Blog (popular in the HCI and MVP communities, at least :P).
If you're curious about what I work on all day, check out my posts:
They're pretty targeted to 3rd-party ISVs that leverage Office 2007 as a platform, so if you aren't one of those then the articles probably won't make much sense (and will probably sound like complete gibberish if you aren't a programmer).
There probably won't be any new posts on that blog for a while (due to the holidays), but in a few weeks there should be more.
I also just finished up writing an article on RibbonX for MSDN Magazine, so if you're a subscriber make sure to check out the upcoming issues! Once it's published I'll grab a copy and get a pic up here.