July 2007 Archives

I recently bought a t-shirt from an online retailer. Their chosen method of shipping the shirt to me is a new service from FedEx called "SmartPost," which uses FedEx facilities/transportation part of the journey and then hands off to the US Postal Service for final in-home delivery.

A large number of this retailer's customers have noticed that SmartPost takes a really long time to get from the origin to the destination and often follows some rather peculiar, if not nonsensical, routes. As an example, here's the route my own package is following:

And just for fun, here's a map showing the rather circuitous path my t-shirt has taken so far (the purple envelope is the origin in Carrollton and the golden house icon is my home in Cincinnati):

Needless to say, I don't think it's going to be making it to my house by the estimated delivery date.

Update (8/2/08): My second item sent SmartPost took only 5 days to get from Texas to my home in Ohio, so maybe they're improving things. One can only hope.

Parenting while drunk is bad.

Beating your kids is worse.

Being drunk and beating your children while on a commercial airplane, and then threatening the flight attendant who asks you to stop beating your children is just a terrible idea.

Mom charged with beating kids on plane

A California mother was charged with beating her children, ages 2 and 4, on a commercial aircraft and interfering with the flight crew.

Tamera Freeman, 38, who appeared in court on Wednesday, was arrested on Monday at Denver International Airport upon her arrival on a Frontier Airlines flight from San Francisco, California.

An FBI affidavit quotes passengers as saying Freeman appeared intoxicated, was abusive with her children before she boarded the plane and repeatedly hit and yelled at them during the flight.

The affidavit also alleges Freeman threw a drink at the feet of a flight attendant and followed her into an aisle yelling and pointing her finger, causing the attendant, who had intervened on the children's behalf, to feel threatened.

Read the whole story (CNN)

I do NOT want to know what happens in the final book until I read it myself, thank you very much.

From CNN Video comes a wonderful story of a family trying to work out its dispute over the family car...at 55 MPH:

KARE's Boyd Huppert reports on a mother who reportedly rode with her baby on the hood of a car her boyfriend was driving.

Watch the video...it's too ridiculous to try to explain.

A few days ago, I posted about the recently demonstrated Wii Balance Board hardware accessory for the Wii Fit game forthcoming for Nintendo's Wii gaming console. In a nutshell, it's a small step-board (shown to the left) that detects foot pressure and wirelessly conveys that data back to the Wii.

Today, it occurred to me how Nintendo (or any third-party developer) could combine the Wii's standard handheld controllers -- the Wiimote and the Nunchuk (shown to the right) -- with the Wii Balance Board to offer a very interactive, full-body gaming experience.

Imagine a first-person shooter where, to walk or run forward, the user walks or runs in place on the Balance Board. Or, perhaps if that's too much effort, leaning forward or backward could control movement in those directions. Jumping, a common activity in FPS games, would be accomplished by doing the physical analog (bunny-hopping becomes much less of an issue, then). The two handheld controllers could then be used for more precision-oriented input, such as view direction, weapon selection, and firing.

Or, alternately, think about how many sports-oriented games require foot/leg-based movement that could be handled instead via the Wii Balance Board. Snowboarding and skiing would be natural treatments.

What about side-scrollers? Imagine Super Mario Brothers where you need to walk on the Balance Board to move Mario left and right. Would it be more fun? I dunno, but it would certainly be more work (and a better workout) than simply pressing a button with your thumb.

Anyway, I'm sure this is just the tip of the virtual iceberg. I look forward to Nintendo and its development partners coming out with even more innovative uses for all these nifty, wireless controllers. I hope gaming in 10 years looks little like the sedentary, sit-on-the-couch-and-stare-at-the-TV activity that it has for 20-some years now.

The good ideas just keep rolling out of Nintendo.

Check it out!

There has been a lot in the news about the rise of religious fundamentalism around the world. It is blamed on inspiring extremists of all stripes to do and say things many consider shocking.

Well, add one more to the pile. Today, a large religious institution claimed it was the only true church and that others are, in fact, lesser pursuits.

The Vatican on Tuesday said Christian denominations outside the Roman Catholic Church were not full churches of Jesus Christ.

The Vatican said other churches are "wounded" since they do not recognize the primacy of the pope.

A 16-page document, prepared by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which Pope Benedict used to head, described Christian Orthodox churches as true churches, but suffering from a "wound" since they do not recognize the primacy of the Pope.

But the document said the "wound is still more profound" in the Protestant denominations -- a view likely to further complicate relations with Protestants.

"Despite the fact that this teaching has created no little distress ... it is nevertheless difficult to see how the title of 'Church' could possibly be attributed to them," it said.

Read the full story (CNN.com)

That kind of in-your-face, my-faith-is-better-than-your-faith chutzpah is good to hear, because Christianity just isn't keeping up its reputation as the ass-kicking, witch-burning, proselytizing, pagan-killing religion it worked so hard to earn back during The Crusades. Tolerance, schmolerance!

Back in late 2005, I predicted that Blu-Ray would win the high-def DVD format war, eventually besting HD-DVD. Well, some folks now seem to agree...and some even have data!

Pixel Perfect Productions blog has some interesting graphs that show how soundly Blu-Ray is whupping up on HD-DVD in terms of $ sales of movies (you know, the raison d'etre for these formats).

OK, so when it comes to "new releases", things are weighted pretty heavily toward Blu-Ray. Of the top 300 films released from January 1 2005 to present, 147 of them are from studios that are exclusively supporting Blu-Ray currently, and they represent 53.60% of the total grosses. Add in the numbers from the studios that currently support both formats, and you have 248 out of the top 300 films coming out at some point on Blu-Ray, and they represent 89.07% of the total theatrical grosses.

Adults who routinely abuse children deserve nothing less...or more.

Man accused of biting off 3-year-old's lip, ear

NEW BEDFORD, Massachusetts (AP) -- A man accused of biting off the lip and ear of his girlfriend's 3-year-old daughter pleaded not guilty Thursday and was ordered held without bail.

Bryan James, 34, was charged with assault and battery upon a child causing substantial bodily injuries. Police said the attack left the girl so mutilated doctors could not fully repair the damage.

The child's mother, Jessica Silveria, 26, pleaded not guilty to permitting substantial injuries to a child under 14 and intimidation of a witness. She was also ordered held without bail.

The girl lost the upper part of her lip and her ear was so mutilated that surgery could not return it to its natural state. The child also suffered other human bites on her body, New Bedford police Capt. Richard Spirlet said.

Read the whole story (CNN)

For the past four years, I've relied on 802.11g Wi-Fi to get our router's Internet connection up to the second floor office where this web-server and our main PC both live. When we first moved into this house, I had come to the conclusion that there was no way I could route Ethernet cable from the first to the second floor (and across the width of the house) without doing something that She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed would find objectionable.

So, after trying out three routers and countless Wi-Fi adapters looking for adequate range, reliability, and speed, I sunk into the belief that I was destined to put up with wildly fluctuating network speeds (often bouncing between 1 and 8 mbps realized throughput), intermittent connectivity loss (e.g., temporary wireless interference), and a generally unsatisfactory level of network performance.

Then, for no good reason, last week I revisited the idea of having an electrician run Cat-6 from where our router is to the upstairs office. I had always assumed it was prohibitively expensive, but figured getting an estimate couldn't hurt.

Wow! I was simply amazed when the job was done and I was no poorer than had I bought a new 802.11n router and PCI adapter for one computer. For a couple hundred dollars, we now have Gigabit Ethernet connecting our entire network. Granted, the Internet connection still trundles along at 3 mbps, but file transfers within the network (e.g., LAN backups and media copying) are blindingly fast.

So, if you're sick of mucking around with Wi-Fi for networking desktop PCs and other devices that don't move around a lot within your home, consider having an electrician give you an estimate on running some Ethernet cable. You may be surprised at how cheap it actually is (might be less expensive than buying some faster Wi-Fi gear and it's a LOT faster, reliable, and more secure). Make sure to get Cat-6 cable installed so you can be sure to take advantage of the new networking standards coming down the pike in a few years. You don't want to have to go about replacing wire inside your walls, and the better cable is only a few cents a foot more expensive (ours was 30 cents a foot).

As most any avid fan knows, the Transformers movie is opening today.

I was a huge fan of the toys and cartoons when I was a kid. That fact was reinforced when I happened upon this old Polaroid of me on my 14th birthday.

My buddy Greg also has a kick-ass Transformers collection, so I know where to go when I need a fix. But until I can visit, the movie will have to sate my appetite. If you see it, leave a comment and let me know what you think.

New Dangers of Secondhand Smoke (Time.com) is an interesting story about a new study that measured the immediate effects of second-hand smoke on nonsmokers:

...the researchers found that waitstaff and bartenders working a typical night shift gradually accumulated higher levels of NNK, a carcinogen in cigarette smoke, at the rate of 6% each hour they worked. NNK is known to be involved in inducing lung cancer in both lab rats and smokers.