AlexHopmann.com

Once again this year Whistler was blessed with the best early season snow in the continent, although it wasn’t anything close to last year. They opened a week before Thanksgiving (US) and we decided to make a quick trip the weekend after Thanksgiving.

On Saturday they opened the Harmony lift and we got to take advantage of some really good snow. It was really exciting for me that Kat was enjoying boarding some of the powder and her feet were not killing her.

Saturday was sunny and we headed over to Blackcomb where the coverage was quite a bit worse. At least it was sunny and beautiful-

Dell has a new “All In One” Printer, the “Dell 948 AIO Printer”. The big news is that apparently it does two-sided printing, which is pretty huge. If it could also scan two sided I’d replace my existing Dell AIO 962 right away. Overall I’ve been very happy with the 962 except that the software doesn’t appear to work with Vista and they don’t appear to be updating it. I’d also be very interested in knowing if the same ink cartridges work with the newer Dell printer.

Funny clip from the writers of the Colbert Report on the viewpoint of the studio execs.

In general I’m very sympathetic with the views of the writers here. If the pay structure for their jobs is supposed to involve getting paid when the studios make more money off a given work, the Internet and all other media should be included. Now, I’ve heard some suggestions that the writers want some form of fixed payments which seems like a bad idea since it would constrain how the programming can be used in this modern environment. But it seems easy to solve that by doing it as a percentage of revenue and then it should apply to anything.

I got Guitar Hero a week ago and I have to admit that its very addictive. I play a real guitar, but while the game can be frustrating when the rhythm is off or too artificial, its still very fun to crank through the songs. I’ve found that its also good exercise for my hands- I probably get really lazy playing the real guitar, especial with my little finger and it forces me to work them all pretty hard.

The one other complaint is the controller seems flaky and cuts out when you try to hold longer notes, especially on the middle (yellow) button.

In any case the other similar game, RockBand looks awesome too. Guess I’m going to have to put that one on order. The catch is its very expensive since it includes a controller, drums and a microphone.

I’m getting increasingly annoyed by all the crap Facebook apps that constantly spam me. But the most egregious abuse is that most of these apps are more focused on spamming invitations rather than providing useful features.

Why do half the actions not provide any useful information in the news feed, instead making me click on it? Because then they make my add their stupid application, and invite other people just to see what someone actually did. Facebook authors are more busy being viral than providing useful service which is a bad trajectory.

To be fair, its not a new thing. Evite is a example of the worst of this. When you receive Evite messages they typically don’t have the useful information in the email, like when and where the invitation is for. They are stuck in a business model where they are so focused on driving traffic to their web site and to their ads that they annoy you to death.

My buddies at Jackson Fish Market have introduced Invitatistc which takes this problem head on. Its simple, doesn’t do wacky stuff, but its useful and doesn’t have to beat you over the head. I’m hoping they are right with their bet and that people will realize that you want to use a service more if it focuses on adding value rather than scamming you. I’m assuming Facebook apps will realize this too- I just noticed several things in my feed that were more useful- for example in the past it always said “John Doe has asked a question” and now it appears to be including the question in the news feed which is a big improvement.

The Penryn 45nm QX9750 is out and available although for psycho expensive prices for now. I see reports that the 3.2ghz / 1600mhz FSB QX9770 is due next week along with the newer X48 chipset (just weeks after the X38 came out.. how odd).

In any case early benchmarks suggest that the X48 is hardly better than the X38 at least with current CPUs and video cards. Meanwhile the new Radeon 3xxxx series is due tomorrow so it seems like it might be a busy couple of weeks to watch the new announcements and pick our parts for a system.

DDR3 RAM continues to drop its price rapidly- looks like $239 for the 1333mhz 2×1gb kits. Of course I ideally want a 2×2gb which is still running in the $900 ballpark, compared to $225 for fast (1066mhz) DDR2 sticks. All in all it leaves me still tempted to stick with a less expensive P35 and DDR2 for now, any maybe I’ll upgrade the motherboard later (although it seems like it will hardly be worth it).

1TB hard drive prices appear to be falling quickly as competition heats up. Western Digital came out with their “green” drive that can spin down from 7200 to 5400rpm to save energy and Fry’s is already selling them for $265. This represents a price drop of 25% in the past month. I suppose its not surprsing given that the market has gone from a single vendor to three. In any case, it looks like good news for building big storage arrays.

My buddy Chris recently left Microsoft and went to join a new startup Deep Rock Drive which is doing online “live” music shows. Overall seems like a really cool concept and while they have the usual startup things to overcome, they already are up and running and it sounds like they have some cool deals on the way.

The one difficult thing for me to get my head around from the “consumer” viewpoint is that the experience is inevitably going to be different than the in-person “live” experience. So much about what I enjoy about going to see a live show is in the venue, the physical presence. Of course from my discussions with Chris they have all kinds of cool ideas coming that go way beyond the kind of ways you can interact with a band at an in-person event. Its one of those things where the Internet thing is just going to be different. The trick is to set expectations and understand how that different character will influence who becomes your audience and their usage patterns.

Anyway, this will be a fun one to watch- I’m hoping Chris will hook me up with a tour of their studios in Vegas soon.

Toshiba has introduced a 22-inch LCD that sports a 3840×2400 pixel resolution or I’d estimate about 220dpi. Nice! The bad news is they cost about $17,500 initially so this is clearly only for specialized applications, and I suspect you need a custom video card to drive the thing. Still, it makes me hopeful again that we will see high resolution come to the mainstream in a few years. I’ve seen some examples and its just hard to describe how much better computing is when the fonts and all the UI are rendered with so much more accuracy.

Very funny, from the Onion of course.