Category: Tech

Old and fresh!

Oh boy! I’ve done a factory-restore of Windows XP on my desktop system. Windows is all the way back to SP2, and IE is at version 6. A zillion updates are downloading, and they’ll probably take an hour to run. I’m planning to update to Windows 7, so I figured it would be nice to start off with a nice, clean installation.

Follow-up: Well, this is fun. I’m entering this using Firefox, installed on Ubuntu Linux, within a VMware Player virtual machine, running on Windows XP.

Further follow-up: I am very impressed with how this all works. Windows has locked up a couple of times while I was mucking around with the virtual machine settings, but that doesn’t phase me, and I’m tempted to go virtual underneath the covers with this setup.

That blogged down feeling

I’m not writing much because I’m spending a lot of time looking into behind-the-scenes changes to this site, including a different look, a different video player and, most of all, a much bigger and better bucket to hold all of my multimedia files. Since being forced to make an emergency switch from iPower to Bluehost way back in March — what a terrible weekend that was — I have restored only a small percentage of the sound and movie files that I had posted, out of concern that I will once again use too much of my “unlimited” storage. By using Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), my hope is I will be soon able to put the old MP3, FLV and MP4 files back online, but before I can do that there are some technical considerations to work through.

Mistah Magloo returns

Last year I posted an unauthorized YouTube copy of Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol, the first of the classic 60’s animated Christmas specials. That copy has been pulled, but this year Hulu has it.

I wanted to watch Magoo on regular TV, and thanks to my friend tastewar, who had an Amazon video-on-demand $5 promotional credit to spare, I got it for free. However, mere minutes later, the same program was available for purchase for only three dollars.

I know there’s a lot of dynamic pricing based on cookie scanning, but I’ve never seen it happen so abruptly. I wonder if I’d not purchased it on first viewing, and gone back to the listing a second time to buy it, would I have seen the lower price, leaving me with a couple of extra bucks to rent something else?