jason's weblog

jason's weblog

	About jason's weblog, jason typing stuff Jason Haslup jason at haslup dot com Subscribe RSS: Subscribe Links These are a few of my favorite links. my girls what i read my links			Mon, 30 Jun 2003 Songs from the past blog Funny how music can take you back to the past... I usually listen to music at work while coding and today the 10,000 Maniacs happened to come up. It was as if something washed over me and I was transported back to Tucson, listening to the same music, studying for a calculus final. It was more than just remembering, but nothing I can describe (should have studied more English, apparently). Anyhow, it was a nice feeling, and a reminder of how fortunate I am in my life. Quite frankly, most of that is thanks to all of you who happen to read this blog (and those that don't) and have popped into my life at one time or another. Thanks! jason Sun, 29 Jun 2003 I love the Internet blog Right now I'm watching the Arizona Diamondbacks game over the internet via MLB.com. Very cool! It's a 350kb stream using the RealOne player... quality is pretty good, even when I have it in full-screen mode. Without any motion (not often in a baseball game) it looks almost as good as normal TV on my monitor. Every now and then I get some jumpiness & the screen freezes, but overall it's pretty darn cool. Especially since this is about the only way I can watch the baseball games without paying for MLB Extra Innings ($160 for the season). I guess another bad part is that I get to listen to only the home team's audio when I'm watching MLB.tv... since the dbacks are in Detroit, now, I'm learning a lot about the players on the Tigers. No matter... I managed to run more temperature sensors today, as well, so I'll be updating my weather pages once again. I've got a sensor outside, one in my office, and one in our crawlspace, aka "the wine cellar." Should be interesting to see how the temperature moves (or doesn't move) in the crawlspace below our house... I'll give out a URL once it's all ready to go. Ok, it should be ready to go: click here for weather. Not much data yet, but it's a start! Fri, 27 Jun 2003 Changed my mind blog Look at that... less than 12 hours later I changed my mind. Now on the front page you'll see all stories through all categories. They all kind of blur, anyhow, so hopefully it won't be too distracting. Got a load of nice people visiting us for a while so the haslup house (bozeman branch) no longer has vacancy. Looking forward to showing the folks around the great town of Bozeman... Thu, 26 Jun 2003 New Setup blog I've upgraded my blosxom installation to the new 2.0 beta version... kinda cool because it has plugin support which I'm already using to hack up this page. You'll notice some new categories up at the top, as well... I'm not quite sure if I'm going to keep everything separated or not, but for now that's the way it is. I have the ability to show entries from all categories on this main page, but I don't know how much I like that idea. It does seem rather bothersome to have to click each of the categories to see if something's new, though... might have to write a plugin for that. High Definition blog :: hdtv Being the TV and tech junkie that I am, I figured I'd start up a category where I could talk about high definition television. So here we go! Big news this month, of course, is DirecTV's announcement of a high definition package that starts up on July 1. They're adding ESPN-HD, Discovery Theater HD, and HDNet Movies to their current high definition programming which consists of HDNet, HBO-HD, and Showtime-HD, as well as a high definition pay-per-view channel. While not a stunning list of channels, they are, pretty much, all of the high definition channels available that aren't local broadcasts. ESPN-HD is the best addition, of course... ESPN seems to be quite committed to high definition and it's only going to get better as the year progresses. I've checked the schedule and the Diamondbacks are on ESPN-HD twice in July. Fantastic! On the local front, I've tried emailing our local network affiliates to no avail... doesn't seem like email is an accepted form of communication for them yet. So today I called a few of the stations and found out some good information: CBS (local channel 7) will start broadcasting in high definition sometime around September, according to Ted in engineering. That's great news because we watch a few shows on CBS, including the CSI's and Without a Trace. I'm sure the CSI shows are HD, I'm not sure about Without a Trace. An added bonus is that the Masters tournament is on CBS and will probably be in high definition. The PBS affiliate actually called me back when I left a message, which was pretty cool. Jack told me that they're planning on broadcasting a full high definition signal in the next coming months. They're in the process of building their new facility on some mountain between here and Livingston -- the same place that CBS is locating their tower. He said all the equipment is ordered and they're all set to go, they're just waiting for construction. I also left a message at NBC but I had to call the Missoula office because our local outfit isn't all that big. I think I talked to one of the anchors when I called, actually... I don't really expect to hear back from them, though... their current tower sucks as it is, and I doubt if they're moving to HD anytime soon. And finally, I called our ABC station but was a bit leary of the message I got... I could call the station manager by pressing one, but I didn't hear any options for the engineering group or anyone else other than account executives. So I'll probably call back later today and see if an actual person answers. Just to round out the networks -- we don't have a local FOX affiliate here, but that's actually not a big deal. FOX is pretty late on the high definition bandwagon and have only just recently announced that in the Fall of 2004 they expect to have high definition rolled out. Maybe by then we'll either have an affiliate or DirecTV will offer high definition local channels so we can pull in one from a big city. More info when I get it, of course! Six days until I can theoretically get ESPN-HD... not that I'm counting or anything... Tue, 24 Jun 2003 Good Squad blog :: planetside Spent a good two-plus hours last night playing Planetside... found myself in a good squad and it was a fun time. Our leader was a bit of a rookie, but he was in an Outfit so we pretty much went where the other squads went for support. We were able to actually hack a base ourselves, which piled on our experience and pushed Rupert (my dude) up to battle rank 5. Not to geek out too much, but we even had the voice stuff going... it worked out pretty nicely. Some folks were choppy, but some others came in crystal clear. I didn't do much talking, but it was nice that our commander could speak orders or call for support rather than typing everything. I was impressed with our internet connection, as well... for a while I was playing Planetside while listening to the diamondbacks game without any problems. Not a huge bandwidth hog, but stuff where the latency is important. Our connection handled it fine, but I'm still debating on whether to switch from a two year to a one year contract with my provider. I'm not sure that anything faster will come along between now and 2005, but it just seems like there should be. But then again, guaranteeing my price for 512k up and down for two years isn't such a bad thing, either. Besides... if fiber to the curb comes between now and then, I could always have a redundant backup with the wireless... (Mystique will love that idea). That's about it for the Planetside activities... I just need to get up to BR6 so I can get another certification point... I might spend that on Galaxy (troop transport) or Reaver (fighter) piloting. Gal pilots are quite popular, I've found out. We'll see... Fri, 20 Jun 2003 Still not sure blog :: planetside Now that the internet is fixed I'm able to play Planetside some more... last night I logged in and joined up with a squad pretty quickly, which was cool. I'm an advanced medic which actually isn't in too much demand. Most people don't bother with being healed or being revived if they die -- they figure they'll respawn in 30 seconds or less, so why wait around. Anyhow, last night our squad formed up and hacked a couple of empty bases... no enemy in sight at all. That wasn't all that exciting, really... I like to shoot folks. By the time we walked to an area that had some fighting, our squad was down to five people scattered about the continent, not really fighting as a unit. Being a medic, I need backup... I'm still fairly low-level, too, so I didn't have much going for me. I tried taking out a few of the bad guys but kept getting mowed down. So I quit for the evening... at least I got some experience (almost up to battle rank 5), but overall it was a busted hour's worth of play. I've been thinking about whether or not it's just not a fun game, or if there's stuff I could do to make it more fun. I think one thing I'll try is switching from a medic to a pilot... I'll either pilot a Galaxy (troop transport) or a mosquito (fast fighter). The Galaxy is more useful to other people, but the mosquito looked like it'd be fun to zip in and out of a battlefield annoying the ground troops. I've also thought about joining an official Outfit... that way I could have a group of folks who always work together and work as a team. I think that would help things... plus they might appreciate a medic more and use it to their advantage. The final thing to think about is that Star Wars Galaxies is released next week... I've been going back and forth on whether or not to fire that up... from what I've heard, it's barely out of beta. A lot of the beta testers say that you should wait a few months before signing up... that actually might work out nicely if I do that. I'll keep playing Planetside for the summer, then once it starts snowing outside I'll be able to hunker down and work my wookie up the ranks. That's it for now... hopefully I'll have a few good battle reports to post once I get more into Planetside... Wed, 18 Jun 2003 We're Up! blog Our high-speed internet is all fixed up and ready to roll... yahoo! I think Mystique's partly sad because now the not-so-good-looking dish will have to stay on the front of our house. I'll have to upload a picture of it... if I weren't such a high-speed 'net junkie I'd take it down and go back to dial-up. But I don't think we want that... Too Early? blog :: planetside Testing out my new Planetside blog... Just wondering if Planetside is too new... there have been lag issues, server stability problems, etc... should I wait a while before actually paying a monthly fee? HDTV blog If you're trying to track down high definition stations, check out this site . It seems pretty nice. And if you live in the Bozeman area and know what's going on with our high definition, please let me know. That site lists our NBC stations has broadcasting in digital, but that stations happens to have the smallest re-transmitter so I haven't been able to verify that fact. I've got a radio shack omni-directional antenna up on our roof (on a mast, even), but still get crappy quality. I'm tempted to put a big ol' ugly antenna up there, but I think I'll wait a bit for that. Tue, 17 Jun 2003 Three and Oh blog Well, the Bucks have a 3-0 record whenever the Haslups are in the stands... you'd think they'd give us a discount on the six bucks (hah) it takes to get in the game. Too bad we didn't notice the "Season Pass" sign at our first game... So we did that on Sunday evening and it was fun... the rest of the weekend consisted of a few busted home projects and some movies courtesy of NetFlix. Busted home project number one was clearing some ground in front for a new patio-type thing. The previous owners of our home had decided that they love privacy so much that they'll plant trees and bushes in front of all the windows. So the front of our house had a section that was a jungle and blocked most of the house. All you could really see was our garage... not good. We had a guy come out and take most of that brush out (and saved a cool tree), but now we've got a bunch of dirt, river rock, and some roots welcoming visitors to our front door. Better than the brush, but not by much. So on Saturday I was all set to get down and dirty... level that ground and make room for the flagstone. Three minutes into it I bailed out and declared "too much rock." Hey, the thought was there, at least. Mystique and I mutually agreed that the front patio would be next year's project. Whew. Busted project number two would probably be quite comical using time-lapse photography. It involved replacing the door to our downstairs bathroom which Mystique had recently completed. We bought ourselves a nice paneled door at Home Depot, proud of ourselves for buying the pre-bored variety so we didn't have to worry about where the knob would go. Unfortunately, we didn't think about the fact that we had to figure out where the hinges would go on the door. And to make matters even more "fun", we had to figure out how to get the hinges so that they're flush with the door. Well, we did our best, and it almost worked out. We carefully marked where the hinges should go, then we used the handy-dandy dremel tool as a psuedo-router and managed to get the hinges flush. It wasn't as pretty as the other door, but it was flush. Didn't matter, though, since the door wouldn't close once we put it up. Bummer. Apparently the hinges were not flush enough. Back to the sawhorses and the dremel... back to the bathroom... too high, now. Back to the sawhorses... back to the bathroom... back to the sawhorses... back to the bathroom. Still not a perfect fit. So then I took the dremel to the door frame... and almost got it to fit. By this time the project had overrun two adult patience limits, so we called a timeout and got ready for the game. Next time we're getting a whole new door and frame and putting it in... that should be fun. Overall, a nice weekend... quick DVD rental report: I Spy Owen Wilson and Eddie Murphy are funny... the plot and everything else isn't all that spectacular, but we laughed. Two Weeks Notice Predictable comedy, but again, we laughed. Certainly nothing that invokes deep thoughts or scintillating movie discussions. O Brother Where Art Thou Goofy and probably something I should say was a stunning film experience, but left me wondering about what I enjoy in a movie. I would have been more impressed if George Clooney had actually his own singing. Or did he? That's it! Have a good one... jason Fri, 13 Jun 2003 Crawling Packets blog Well, we're getting there... we've got a very nice looking dish on the front of our house that is supposed to be giving us a 512k internet connection. Unfortunately it seems like the packets feel like taking their time to get to their ultimate destination. My latency is worse than sneaker-net -- ping times to my default gateway of up to 10 seconds. Not milliseconds... seconds. Ergh. Hopefully that will get resolved soon... it's nice to not have to dial-up anymore to read email, but it'd also be nice to actually be able to play a game or something on the connection... That's pretty much been the excitement here... that and a week-old dead skunk thats on the road out to our house. Man that thing stinks... Last weekend we put up a length of field fence so that Buster and a neighbor dog don't say hello to each other quite so often. The other dog's really nice, but he has the tendency to bring toys over to the corner of our yard and either drop them in our yard, or put them on the ground between him and the fence. That's usually when Buster decides he either wants the toy or just wants to protect his territory. The other dog, of course, doesn't appreciate that, so they bark and growl, bark and growl, etc... So now we have 25 feet (or so) of five-foot high field fence, anchored by five six-foot posts that we put in the ground. That was actually the fun part... we got a post-thingie that just pounds those bad boys into the ground with hardly any effort. The ground is really nice here. So thirty minutes after stringing up the fence, Buster decided to test it's strength and ran head-first into it, even after we had shown him that it's a fence. Of course Buster was fine (he's virtually indestructbile, as we've found out), but the fence took a beating... a big ol' dent in that section, and he loosened up a post pretty nicely. We tied it up some more and stuck some warning logs in front of, which seems to have done the trick. Heck, maybe we'll do the same thing around some other sides of the house... other neighbor dogs kind of get annoying, as well. And finally, a few weekends ago Mystique and I picked up a badminton set... hey, that's fun! I remember playing badminton when I was a kid, but haven't hit the birdie in a while. We've played a few times and I think we're getting pretty good... we have to be fast in order to save the birdie from Rupert, but so far that hasn't been a problem. We seem to do better at badminton than throwing the aerobie (a super-duper frisbee, in case you don't know what that is). Mystique seems to run around a lot when we play catch with that aerobie... she seems to think it's because of my throws. I think she's just not in the right position... I mean, doesn't she realize I'm going to throw it 40 feet over her heard? Geez. I'm out... have a great weekend! jason Tue, 10 Jun 2003 Big Hail, Little Pipe blog Well, with our high-speed internet install has been pushed back a day because the threat of golf ball-sized hail has reared its ugly head. Somebody doesn't want me to have high-speed internet... it was actually a nice day from 9am to 2pm. I hope 4pm tomorrow is nice. jason Rain rain, go away... blog It's raining. Hard. Sad. Here's a cool site for the web-desigin-impaired (aka, me): Open Source Web Designs. jason Mon, 09 Jun 2003 Little Apple, Big Pipe blog Well, <insert higher power here>-willing, we should have high-speed internet tomorrow (tuesday). After one rain delay, the new towers are up and I might be getting an install appointment tomorrow. The nice person said to call at 8:30am to try and get it scheduled... I think I'll interrupt her coffee at 8:15. High speed will be nice, but it's actually been kind of nice not having it. (It's really easy to say such things when I can almost taste the high-speed). At least I'll get to watch the Diamondbacks some on MLB.com's internet streaming. I've never actually tried it out, but I've heard it works well enough. Over the weekend I re-installed Windows XP on a new drive and installed it in my main computer... it's nice to do a full reset every now and then... I mainly did it to improve my PlanetSide performance, but also just to clear the cruft. I've got the old drive mounted as well, so it's real easy to get to our old documents without having to go through any migration. I think it's actually improved my computer's gaming performance, so I'll consider the re-install a success. Ever since I installed a new video card I had been getting poor performance during games when a lot of sound was playing and a lot of visual action was going on. I read somewhere that it's best to do this kind of re-install after changing video cards... that no matter how much you clean up, some remnant of the old video driver still mucks with your system. I have no idea if that's true or not, but it did seem to work... as someone who writes code and is supposed to understand computers, though, it doesn't sit right. Well, more tomorrow if the cool internet guy comes over... hopefully I'll be up and running and it'll be easier to spruce the site up a bit. Big plans for haslup.com... not really, but I do want to add at least a few more sections. The first thing will be the emacs section, of course... Ever since moving to Bozeman and my new job I've been re-invigorated with the emacs way of life... the world's best editor is a blast to use and I just need to spread the gospel! See ya, jason Fri, 06 Jun 2003 Go Bucks blog :: bozeman Mystique and I have been to two of the Bozeman Bucks games so far and have had a pretty darn good time. The Bucks are a local team made up of high school players (Bozeman Baseball). They play a schedule of around 30 to 40 games against some other towns around the area. They've got a nice field at the fair grounds, complete with a tasty snack bar serving up the 'dogs. Sometimes their games are even on a local AM radio station. We enjoy baseball, but we're not huge, diehard fans. But there's just something about going to the ballpark... especially this one which has the Bridger mountains as a backdrop. It's also neat to see (and hear) the parents of the players, the locals who have been supporting the Bucks for a while, and the other kids that come to watch their friends play. There aren't all that many people who come to the game, but it's nice to see folks coming out to support a local team made up of their kids. Both of the games that we've been to came down to the bottom of the ninth with the Bucks either behind or tied up. Both times the kids put their rally caps on and got some clutch hits to pull out a win. Pretty cool... their next home game is June 14th for anyone interested, and they play through July 27th. jason Lots of Meg, Little Pipe blog I installed PlanetSide last night and prepared to login to start my traning, even though I'm still on dial-up (sue me, I got anxious). Unfortunately, Sony has already released a patch that was required before I could dive in and start training. Even worse was the fact that the patch was estimated to take six hours to download. Bummer. So I left the modem on all night, checked in this morning, and the patch was complete. That means tonight I'll start my PlaentSide experience... which, of course, means yet another blog, so stay tuned for that... Not much else new... lately I've been thinking about getting XM Radio for either the car, home, work, or all three. The radio situation in Bozeman isn't all that exciting... they have half of an ESPN Radio AM station, but they don't seem to carry any of their good shows. Music is hit or miss... Mystique hates commercials, so I though XM's no-commercial channels, plus the fact that they carry ESPN Radio, might be worth the $10/month. They also have a cool device that hooks up to your PC (via usb) and receives XM radio (still via satellite) and plays it through your computer. That device is much cheaper than the in-home or in-car ($80 vs $200+), but you still have to have a nice view of the sky with the antenna. So I dunno... That's it... off to work I go... jason Wed, 04 Jun 2003 New Style blog Welcome to revision 8 of haslup.com... this one follows the style of my bozeman blog in that it's boring and basic, but easy to maintain. I liked geeklog but got tired of using the web interface to write stuff... so while blosxom doesn't have all the features of GL, it's easy to maintain via emacs and nice for quick updates. Plus I didn't really use many of GL's features. Anyhow... I'll still update the bozeman side with new bozeman stuff... somehow I'll link the two of these together. Someday. But on to the news... Good news on the TV and internet front... DirecTV has finally announced their HDTV package which includes ESPN-HD, Discovery HD, and HDNet Movies. That's good news for me since my HD options up here are fairly limited... the new package starts up on July 1st. And next week we'll finally get online to the internet without a modem... some new towers are going up around the area and we can finally get wireless internet. We'll get 512k up and down over a line-of-sight connection. Cool technology... it sounds like it works well and I'm looking forward to it. The internet news is great because PlanetSide was recently released by Sony Online (Everquest makers), and I'm still trying to get online in the Star Wars Galaxies beta. PlanetSide looks cool because it seems to take the nice elements of Tribes (team play) and expand it by 50 times the number of players. 100-person assaults on a base sounds like fun... And finally, today I should be getting an ethernet card for one of our Tivo units... I thought it'd be fun to see if I could get web access to our Tivo and maybe see if I can pull of shows to my computer. I think a lot of the code for the menus and stuff is tcl... that makes me shudder a bit, but it might be interesting to see what kind of problems I can cause once I get access to them... That's it for now... jason Archives 2008 : January (2) February (2) March (5) April (1) June (1) July (2) October (1) November (3) 2007 : January (3) February (1) March (1) June (2) December (1) 2006 : February (4) March (4) April (11) May (5) July (7) August (5) September (4) October (3) November (6) December (2) 2005 : January (1) February (6) April (2) May (4) June (3) July (8) August (5) September (3) October (3) November (1) December (1) 2004 : January (9) February (5) March (6) April (3) May (2) June (1) July (6) August (10) September (1) October (4) November (3) 2003 : March (6) April (3) May (1) June (18) July (9) August (4) September (5) October (2) November (7) December (2)