The new video store is one of the reasons I want a new iPod, and apparently it’s fairly successful already, generating $1 million in revenue thus far by selling 125,000 movies in the first week. The ability to quickly purchase and download a movie, have a storage medium, and then even have the ability to play it on the TV is so slick and enticing. I personally have my media setup wired to be able to stream movies straight from my computer as well as music. I’ve always had all my media on my computer and this ability to push it into the living room is very sexy. Apple is cashing in on the “I want it and I want it whenever I damn well please” mentality of todays consumers of TV and video. Want to watch Lost? Why bother taking a specific chunk out of your day that you have to set aside and miss other things - just download it and watch it whenever…and wherever you want to. Way to go Apple - it will be interesting to see how well others can play catch-up.

The only problem now is the iPod needs way more capacity if it is going to hold not only my music, but also my pictures and multi-gigabyte video files.

Seems like one of the handlers has been cooped up for too long over at the SANS Internet Storm Center. From the latest post on some more 0-day, there’s this little gem:

1	0day it to the front, uh-uh-uh

1	0day it to the back, uh-uh-uh

1	0day to the right, 0day to the left

1	0day it up, up all night, uh-uh-uh

Wow - That is beautiful and touching. ;)

It was kind of neat to see this post about rootkits and virtualization.

They’re reasoning, correctly, that if they’re on a virtual pc, they’re being studied and won’t play nicely.

As the author mentions, I’m not surprised but it’s kind of slick to see the author’s detecting the virtualization software and glibly do nothing.  So now the question is, what needs to be done or what can be done to prevent that?  Sounds like a nice project for a rainy Sunday afternoon in a coffee shop somewhere…

I must look really helpful or something, lately.  Today alone, I got asked for directions three times.  Once while I was walking down the street to the tunes on my iPod (I reallllllly want a new one), once while just about to walk into my place, and once at a red light while driving around.  I don’t know what it is…but I hope I was able to steer them all in the right direction!  It’s been so long since I’ve been home, I’m a little rusty!  Speaking of which…there goes my phone, I think it’s Seattle calling! ;)

In other news of the stupid… people are idiots. Some 23-year old is suing Starbucks to the tune of $114 million because of a coupon for a free drink that they had to cancel because it got distributed across the net.  I’ll admit Starbucks wasn’t smart to email a coupon to their employees and only expect it to get emailed to close friends and family, but come on…a class-action lawsuit?!  Grow up and get a real job to support yourself instead of abusing some frivolous lawsuit.

Have I mentioned before how much I hate United? Oh yes, I HAVE! Well I had another wonderful experience recently. I showed up at the airport only to find my flight delayed 4 hours. 4 HOURS! That and nearly every other flight on United’s boards were delayed. There were people getting on an 8pm flight that had been in the airport since 9am that morning. I’m sure most of Southwest’s flights were on time… I don’t know what it is about United that they can’t operate their airline in Chicago without having major delays nearly every time I fly them.

Let me also take this opportunity to berate the TSA. Look, I know that there was that big scheme with liquids, but your ridiculous restrictions are only accomplishing what the terrorists have set out to do - make air travel completely impractical for the normal person. Whereas I used to be able to walk into the airport and just carry-on all my bags with my toiletry bag, I now have to check my lip balm. sigh So now, instead of being able to arrive at the airport at a convenient time, I have to arrive two hours early to make it through the lines, that I otherwise happily avoided by being a good passenger and packing light. Then, instead of just hopping off the flight and grabbing my rental car, I have to go down to the baggage claim and wait another 40 minutes for your slow-ass employees to get the bags off the plane. You’re really making this inconvenient. And Bruce Schneier agrees the restrictions are ridiculous as well. And when will this silly restriction end? Doesn’t look like anytime soon… And today, a United airlines jet was diverted because somebody found a blackberry onboard. Excuse me? Somebody leaves a blackberry in the seat pocket (that would never happen) and the jet gets diverted!? This is a bad path we’re going down. All the better when I finally get my teleportation machine working and stop frying those poor rat’s brains…reconstructing brain matter is just SO difficult.

Update: p.s. One little way to get your liquids or gels through if you desperately need them and they’re not too big…put them in your pocket. Most liquids come in plastic containers and won’t be picked up as you walk through the x-ray machine. Wow…that restriction sure is effective.

I’ve been watching with anticipation as Windows PowerShell has gone from its infancy (which was pretty weak, in my opinion) to a tool that could really change how I use Windows.  Many of you know that I am a command-line junkie.   If there is a way to do something via the command-line, I will find it and I will script it.  That’s just how I am.  One thing that’s always frustrated me about Windows, however, is the shoddy access to the event viewer.  The GUI is just unbearably slow when you have thousands of events and you’re trying to scroll to a particular day’s log.  So I was really happy today to see this post about DateTime Utility Functions over on the Powershell blog that, with a little one-line function, makes getting recent events as simple as a little

PS> get-eventlog application -newest 2048 |where {isWithin -2 $_.TimeWritten}

Not bad…not bad at all.  This could become quite useful.  I applaud thee, Microsoft, for realizing that the command-line is still an important aspect of system administration and working towards a utility that can make life even easier then good ‘ol .bat files. My only problem with PowerShell now - function names are too verbose.  With UNIX, it is fairly easy to remember ‘ls’ and ‘cut’ and ‘sort’ and stuff like that.  But PowerShell has all this random stuff like “Copy-Item” and “[DateTime]::Now.AddDays” that make PowerShell more of a “programming” language than a “scripting” language, but perhaps I just need to work with it more…

Oh, and by the way, there is finally an OTR Plugin for Trillian.  Thank you, kittyfox!  I have been waiting so long for this as a lot of friends use Trillian and Secure-IM but my co-workers use OTR and the Windows OTR Proxy can’t proxy through another proxy (did that make sense?).  So finally, I can use my home proxy for all my network traffic and use OTR. w00t.

I came across some documentation for my car and realized that in the past year, I have only driven my car 1,000 miles. Talk about retaining value. It’s a 1999, and it doesn’t even have 40,000 miles on it yet. Of course, it helps that when I acquired it in 2002, it only had 800 miles on it (thanks Uncle C!). I guess traveling for life does have its benefits to some degree…

It’s also scary when you have more “airline miles” in one year than you do miles on your car. Heck, I’ve got more airline miles in one week than I do on my car!

I was watching the travel channel today and there was already a touching commercial celebrating Steve Irwin’s life.  What a bummer…I even just recently dressed up as him at a costume party a couple months back.  Kudos for how he lived his life with enthusiasm and pursued his dreams and love.