http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/news/cult/news/drwho/2005/11/30/27788.shtml
Doctor Who to get Stateside release.
BBC Video have announced plans to release all 13 episodes of the 2005 series in the United States.
Doctor Who: The Complete First Series will be released across America on 14 February and the content will be identical to the box set which was released in the UK last week.
WOOHOO! :-)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051130/tc_nm/rim_dc
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. (Toronto:RIM.TO – news)(Nasdaq:RIMM – news) was dealt another legal setback in a key patent infringement case on Wednesday, raising pressure to settle or face a possible shutdown of its U.S. mobile e-mail service.
U.S. District Judge James Spencer rejected RIM’s request to delay the case and refused to enforce a disputed, $450 million settlement with patent holder NTP Inc.
“Valid patents would be rendered meaningless if an infringing party were allowed to circumvent the patents’ enforcement by incessantly delaying and prolonging court proceedings, which have already resulted in a finding of infringement,” Spencer said in his ruling from Richmond, Va.
Spencer said he would request briefs and set a hearing date to deal with NTP’s request for damages against RIM and an injunction that would halt U.S. sales of the BlackBerry and shut its service.
This is just great. We use Blackberry devices fairly heavily at where I work, and this would be a huge pain in the ass. Hell, I just got a new Blackberry 7100g, too… *grumblemutter* Hopefully some kind of settlement can be reached soon.
Normally I wouldn’t post about a show I don’t watch, but this caught my eye…
http://chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/3489102.html
HI, Crab Man!
Over here, Rubberband Man!
Hey, Mr. Steeples!
Eddie Steeples has tackled many characters while making a name for himself.
TV fans know him as Darnell, aka Crab Man, who marries Earl’s ex on NBC’s breakout sitcom My Name Is Earl. His Rubberband Man for OfficeMax was nominated for an Emmy for outstanding commercial. As Mr. Steeples, he writes music for No Surrender, a hip-hop group he performs with in New York.
Steeples even was named one of People magazine’s up-and-coming Sexiest Men for 2004, along with Kanye West, Adam Brody and Joshua Payne.
Steeples, who writes, directs and acts in indie film and does the occasional stand-up gig, also is a Klein Oak High School graduate, class of 1992. After a trip to Brazil to shoot a documentary on world peace, he stopped by his mother’s home in Spring last week to catch up with family — he’s the oldest of eight children — and friends.
I also graduated from Klein Oak High School, class of 1992. I have no idea WTF this guy is; I had never even heard of him before this morning. Granted, the senior class was 500-something people, so I wouldn’t have known EVERYONE, but this just kinda threw me.
Meh… it’s just something I found really odd.
A couple of weeks ago, my old friend Sean went to the United Arab Emirates on a business trip for work. While he was originally apprehensive about going (as I found during a late evening coffee with him and his wife at Denny’s), it appears he found it to be a rather… hmm, I’m not sure enlightening is the right word, but it certainly seemed like an interesting experience. While he was there, he posted his observations and photos in his weblog; I showed it to a coworker earlier today, and she found it so interesting I figured I might as well share it with the rest of you.
The posts are all located at http://dianto.org/blog/index.php/category/travelogue/, and are posted in reverse order. (So, I do recommend scrolling to the bottom and reading upwards.)
(Hopefully he won’t mind me linking you all to it… heh.)
Well, I got myself a very nice surprise when I got back to work from lunch today. :-) When I got back from lunch, I found a box from Amazon waiting for me. I was at first happy, but then got a bit perturbed, as the small box wasn’t big enough to hold the three CDs I had bought using the gift certificate Missy had gotten me. Then, I happened to see a larger box that also had Amazon’s markings on it addressed to me. I took them back to my desk, and out of curiosity, opened the smaller box.
The smaller box turned out to have a DVD… specifically, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I looked at the packing slip, and it turned out it was Jesse’s and Rob’s Christmas gift to me. Thanks, guys! I’ll probably watch it tomorrow evening, as tonight will be stuck working late…
The bigger box did in fact have the three CDs… so, once again, thanks Missy! :-)
This is interesting…
Apparently some people at a company called Bytonic Software have put together a new port of Quake II. A couple of years ago, id Software released the game engine to Quake II under the GPL, which meant anyone now had access to the source code to make their own improvements/alterations. What Bytonic did was port Quake II over to Java. :-) This new port, called “Jake 2”, supposedly runs very well and works under Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. I’ll have to give it a try at some point…
If you want to take a look, check out screenshots, or even download it, you can find it at http://www.bytonic.de/html/jake2.html.
I just wanted to give a brief heads-up to anyone who might be considering buying me something for Christmas. (Note: this isn’t an obligation, of course, and I’m not asking; this is just going hand-in-hand with the request for the Amazon wishlist earlier…) If you want, I’m always happy to get iTunes Music Store gift certificates. I have a number of CDs and tracks already purchased from there, and don’t mind getting more. :-)
Again, this isn’t me specifically asking or anything… just consider it an extra option should someone decide they actually want to get me something. :-)
A lot of my friends know I happen to really like Blue Man Group. I have their album Audio and have seen their show in Vegas twice. Well, today I happened to be browsing around the iTunes Music Store, and saw that they have a celebrity playlist (link only viewable if you have iTunes). Out of curiosity, I went ahead and took a look.
The main thing that jumped out at me was the inclusion of the song “A Different Drum” by Peter Gabriel. “A Different Drum” is from an album called Passion, which is somewhat obscure. Enough so, in fact, that I’ve only come across two other people who have even heard of it; that doesn’t even include Missy, who I gather is a Peter Gabriel fan. The CD is in fact his soundtrack to the movie The Last Temptation of Christ, so it’s hardly a rock/pop album. It’s filled with world-type music and the like, and I rather enjoy it. In fact, “A Different Drum” is my favorite track off that album.
So, needless to say, I was rather surprised and impressed with the fact that they added it to their celebrity playlist.
If you have iTunes and you want to get an idea of what the album is like, you can find it on iTunes Music Store by clicking here.
Well, the main darquecathedral.org server is back up and almost completely operational. There were a few things that took more than a little while to try and get figured out, but all in all, the server is working again. The old server had a P-II 350 CPU, an old iWill motherboard with some kind of Intel chipset, and 384 MB RAM. In its place, I put in an Athlon XP 2000+ CPU, an Asus motherboard with a nVIDIA nForce chipset, and 1 GB of RAM. Of course, seeing as it had a UDMA 66 controller, an ethernet adapter, and a video adapter all on the motherboard, I was left scrambling for three slot covers to cover the holes left by unused cards.
Then, once I got the hardware installed, it was time to install the software. I went ahead and reformatted the OS hard drive and installed Slackware Linux 10.2 onto the machine. Actually, it took me two tries, as I quickly found out that the server’s CD-ROM drive doesn’t like to work when it’s on its side. Then, once that was done, it took me a while to get all of the software I generally use installed. I also had to remember some of the tweaks I put in here and there to actually get the software working nicely with one another.
In the end, I only had a couple of problem children. One was this website itself, as WordPress couldn’t connect to the MySQL database. I FINALLY was able to find out that PHP 4.4.1 (which I was using) doesn’t exactly like the new authentication that came about as of MySQL 4.1. (The old server used MySQL 3.23.58.) I got a fix in place, and everything should be good to go. The other was the Amanda backup system, but I narrowed that issue down to file permissions, a brief mail issue, and human stupidity (I forgot to actually enable the scheduled backup). That’s good to go now too.
Anyway, to summarize the whole long and boring post, the server’s back up and I have it back where I like it. More to the point, I’ve already been told by Mom and Dad (who I provide mail services for) that the server is a LOT faster than it used to be and they’re very happy with it. As for now, I’m just going to keep an eye on the server and make sure it’s working properly. That is, after lunch… heh.
Hmmm… Tygerlander seems to have a point in her LJ:
Concensus sez… That Thanksgiving sucked for the majority of my friends.
More often than not I’m seeing people complain about Thanksgiving, from people getting sick from what they DID eat for Thanksgiving to other people getting roped into doing tech support for their families. Ugh.
In my case, I can’t really complain too much about Thanksgiving, as it went okay. It wasn’t great, but it was okay. We had the standard Thanksgiving fare of turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, green beans, and gravy. For dessert, Mom picked up a Cheesecake Factory cheesecake with four different kinds of cheesecake in it. Then, after dinner, I lay down for a nap… only to be woken by my Blackberry going off. :-/ *sigh* I ended up being groggy and crabby for an hour or so afterwards, and spent the rest of the afternoon preparing for the Big Upgrade.
(The Big Upgrade, as it were, is simply an upgrade to the main darquecathedral.org server. I’ll be putting the old motherboard, CPU, and memory from my main PC into it, and upgrading the operating system to Slackware Linux 10.2. The preparation was just me backing up certain files from the operating system hard drive. I’ll start at 1 PM CST, so obviously the main site will be down for a good part of the afternoon…)
Anyway, all in all, it was a decent Thanksgiving all told. Now my plan is just to enjoy the rest of the four-day weekend, and avoid going out of the house if I can at all help it. No shopping for me… heh.