Saturday
12Dec2009

Men are just Happier People

NICKNAMES:

  • If Laura, Kate and Sarah go out for lunch, they will call each other Laura, Kate and  Sarah.
  • If Mike, Dave and John go out, they will affectionately refer to each other as Fat Boy, Godzilla and Four-eyes.

EATING OUT:

  • When the bill arrives, Mike, Dave and John will each throw in $20, even though it's only for $32.50.  None of them will have anything smaller and none will actually admit they want change back.
  • When the girls get their bill, out come the pocket calculators.


MONEY:

  • A man will pay $2 for a $1 item he needs.
  • A woman will pay $1 for a $2 item that she  doesn't need but it's on sale.


BATHROOMS:

  • A man has six items in his bathroom: toothbrush and toothpaste, shaving cream, razor, a bar of soap, and a  towel .
  • The average number of items in the typical woman's bathroom is 337.  A man would not be able to identify more than 20 of these  items.


ARGUMENTS:

  • A woman has the last word in any argument.
  • Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument.


FUTURE:

  • A woman worries about the future until she gets a husband.
  • A man never worries about the future until he gets a wife.


SUCCESS:

  • A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend.
  • A successful woman is one who can find such a man.


MARRIAGE:

  • A woman marries a man expecting he will change, but he doesn't.
  • A man marries a woman expecting that she won't change, but she does.


DRESSING UP:

  • A woman will dress up to go shopping, water the plants, empty the trash, answer the phone, read a book, and get the mail.
  • A man will dress up for weddings and funerals.


NATURAL:

  • Men wake up as good-looking as they went to bed.
  • Women somehow deteriorate during the night.


OFFSPRING:

  • Ah, children. A woman knows all about her children. She knows about dentist appointments and romances, best friends, favorite foods, secret fears and hopes and dreams.
  • A man is vaguely aware of some short people living in the house.


THOUGHT FOR THE  DAY
A married man should forget his mistakes. There's no use in two people remembering the same thing!

Sunday
23Aug2009

Windows Media Center (Part 1- Introduction)

What is Windows Media Center? Well that is what I am going to try to explain in this post. Don't get me wrong, this will not be the only post on WMC (Windows Media Center) but this will be a starting point. Let me first tell you that I have been living with WMC for about year to a year and a half. I first started using WMC on windows Vista then moving to install the TV-Pack, and now on Windows 7. I use it on a daily basis to watch OTA (Over the Air) TV and downloaded internet videos from such sources as Revision3. Let's first start with a brief understanding of what WMC is. Put simply WMC is a computer based DVR (Digital Video Recorder). WMC first came about in Windows XP Media Center Edition. I believe, in my opinion when WMC came out in XP people didn’t exactly understand what it was or did. Also around that time there weren’t many TV tuner cards available. As time progressed more tuner cards became available and more people began to see the potential of WMC. In my opinion, WMC did not really hit its stride till Vista Media Center came out and provided the ability to use the new OTA standard ATSC (ATSC is the standard for OTA HDTV). This is when I began to use WMC. When Vista was still in beta I started to buy ATSC tuner cards to use with WMC and at that time they were about $120.00 a piece for a single tuner card. Fast forward to today and you can purchase a duel tuner ATSC tuner card for about $70.00 from Newegg. So as you can see WMC has evolved very quickly over a fairly short period of time. When I did start to use it I compared it to the DVR I was using at that time from our cable company. The software my cable company was using at that time on their DVR’s was Moxi. Now Moxi is a very user friendly interface compared to current DVR software my cable company using.

Cable Company Recorded TV Interface


Media Center Recorded TV Interface

Anyway, when I started to compare the Moxi software against WMC I found that WMC is way more useful. The first and most important way in which WMC is more useful is WMC’s multi-room viewing capability. You might ask what multi-room viewing is because very few if any cable company offers this service. AT&T U-verse does offer multi-room. What multi-room allows you to do is pause or stop a show in one room and pick up where you left off in another. I must clarify that this only works on recorded TV or currently recording TV. On a side note, as of right now it does not work with live TV. Also WMC does not allow recording of the live TV buffer as of right now. Hopefully this will be fixed in a later version. The second useful capability of WMC is being able to have more than two TV tuners for watching and recording TV. An example of this is the current setup I use, which is 3 ATSC HDTV tuner cards. So I am able to ether record 3 TV shows and watch an already recorded show, or I can watch one live channel and record two other channels. And at any time I can add more tuners as needed. At this point I will let you soak all this information in and think how / if WMC could work for you. Please check back for Part2 – How it all Works Together.

Sunday
28Jun2009

Join Our Folding@home Team

Team#166722

Welcome to the Tech1080 folding@home page. If you would like to participatewith the Tech1080 team, our team number 166722. Please help to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases. For more information and to download folding@home please click here.

Tuesday
09Jun2009

I bought a iPhone 3G-S 

So yesterday after the keynote I decided to update my original iPhone edge with a new iPhone 3G-S. At first, a couple of months ago when Palm released the information on the Palm Pre' I thought I might switch. Don't get me wrong the Pre' looks like an awesome device, but I just couldn't bring myself to switch to Sprint after yesterdays announcement. The reasons are not that complicated, but I just couldn't live with Sprint. The Pre' looks to be good hardware but the real magic is in the WEB OS software. Put simply WEB OS is a multi-tasking OS. Even with a brand new awesome looking OS, it just wasn't enough to swing me to Sprint. I think the one thing, well lets make it two things that made me stay was the video recording/updated camera and turn by turn navigation by TomTom. That being said I still have issues with at&t from time to time. Thank you for taking the time to stop by, and stay tuned for more.