Smalltalk with James Robertson

In an article about audio formats - and why the convenience of mp3 has killed alternative formats (as mass consumption options), Engadget's Brad Hill asks a question that I hadn't really considered - is the home theatear on a long glideway towards doom?

And with the rise of movie-surfing on tablets (mobility rules again), what is the future of home theater? Is today's living room oasis the desktop computer of 2020?

If so, Microsoft is going to be very disappointed in the direction they've been taking the XBox....

Tags: home theather, entertainment

Sure, helmets are a good idea. However, if you mandate their use, don't be surprised if the actual usage of your system is low. Think about it - if you're a tourist in NYC, how likely are you to have a helmet on hand? If you don't, do you actually want to buy something you the have to cart around the rest of the day?

Tags: bike share

I'm shocked:

I've come to the conclusion that Flash's true purpose is to consume CPU cycles. The display of video is just an obscure bug, and I'm sure that Adobe will eventually figure out a fix....

Tags: flash

My daughter is in college now - so this gives you an idea as to how long ago this photo was taken:

Oh boy, the 17 year Cicada cycle is arriving again this May. I have to say, I haven't missed them :)

In places where they’re going to be present, it’s going to be spectacular. There could be as many as one billion cicadas emerging per square mile,” Michael Raupp, a professor of Entomology at the University of Maryland, told 1010 WINS

Tags: cicada

You have to love the way big companies operate (other than Apple - the kind of issue I had with MS this morning simply has not happened to me with Apple):

• My XBox Live automated charge failed - because it tried to use an expired card that I've never been able to remove from the account
• The email sent me to a billing page, which told me that my Hotmail address had been sending junk mail, so the account was suspended. Which is fascinating, since I don't have a Hotmail account.
• Then I spent 10 minutes trying to find a phone number on the MS website, after it told me I needed to call.
• I finally got customer service, and they were able to delete the bad card and get the bill dealt with

This chewed up 45 minutes of my day (most of it on hold). The part I really don't understand is the suspension message, since customer service told me that there was no account suspension. Nice to know that MS can build informative websites....

Tags: games, xbox

I got home tonight, set up the work laptop and... it failed to boot. Quite often when this kind of thing happens, it's the hard drive (in which case, I would have been off to the local NG shop to get the machine dealt with tomorrow).

Fortunately, you can always look up the diagnostic steps for these things. I found an HP forum with a hard power reset step, and that solved my problem. Which is far better than having to call Texas to make an appointment to visit the IT guys in Linthicum :)

This makes me happy - especially since I just had to re-download a bunch of large game files after a disk corruption problem