Michael Creasy's blog : Other

What's in a name?

mcreasy — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 18:38:00 GMT

Quite a lot it seems. I own a few domain names. Most I've had for several years and they've always been with the same registrar. Three of them need to be renewed in a few days time and I thought I'd shop around for a better deal on renewing the registration. My current registrar (Dotster.com) wanted $14.95 a domain per year. I'd heard of GoDaddy.com and saw they would transfer the domains and renew them for a year for $7.95 which seemed like a good idea so I started the process...

I "unlocked" the domains at Dotster so I could move them, but the transfer kept failing saying there were still locked. I emailed Dotster and they insisted the domains were not locked so I tried again and indeed they were unlocked. The cynic in me would say they didn't get unlocked until I emailed complaining... Anyway the transfer process started and I just had to let it take it's time.

Yesterday I got a phone call from GoDaddy.com they just wanted to welcome me to their service and thank me for my business. That was nice of them, I was pretty impressed.

Today I got an email from Dotster saying they'd seen I was transferring my domains and they were willing to beat GoDaddy's prices to keep my business. Not only would they beat the price for the transfer and one year of service they'd continue to offer me that price for renewal of my domains for as long as I had them. How could I say no? My domains now won't be transferring, they'll be staying at Doster for less money with more included services.

Moral of the story? It pays to shop around.

AOL Spam stats

mcreasy — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 01:01:00 GMT

According to AOL's stats, they've blocked almost a billion bits of spam today. That's a lot of spam.

I've probably received between 30 to 40 spam messages today, all of which were blocked from hitting my inbox thanks to spamcop.net with no false positives. I've routed all my personal mail through their servers for almost two years now and it's easily worth the $30 a year I pay for the service. It makes email fun again; now if I get mail there's a very good chance it's something I want to read and not another ad for a fake Rolex (which seems to be the current big thing for spam).

Geek dinner

mcreasy — Sun, 26 Sep 2004 05:33:00 GMT

i just got back from the geek dinner. I met Robert Scoble and a whole load of other people. Interesting variety of conversation from "Is Google building a browser?" to portable media centers. I met a few people that I need to talk some more with, but I'm too lazy to look up names and write links right now. I'll have to go to these more often.

Geek dinner in San Francisco

mcreasy — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 18:06:00 GMT

Robert Scoble is going to be in San Francisco this weekend as well so we're having a geek dinner on Saturday (25th) at 7pm at Barney's Gourmet Hamburgers (4138 24th St.). If you're in the area come and join us.

Han does NOT shoot first!

mcreasy — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 02:18:00 GMT

My Star Wars DVDs have arrived a day early so I'm watching A New Hope right now. The picture quality is excellent, but the film is not the same as the Special Edition version... Greedo and Han now shoot at the same time! After Han shooting first and then Greedo, now they both shoot at the same time. I suppose when the HD versions are released they won't shoot at all, perhaps the guns will have become walkie talkies...

I haven't noticed any other differences yet. I'll update if I notice anyother changes.

Visting San Francisco this weekend

mcreasy — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 20:03:00 GMT

I decided last week to take a last minute trip to San Francisco this weekend thanks to a promotion from United Airlines which meant my ticket only cost me $5 :-)

While I'm in the area I though it might be fun to meet some local Media Center users / developers/ MVPs. Saturday (25th) afternoon is the best time for me I think, so if you live in the area and want to chat about Media Center / digital media / Microsoft / anything, comment here or email me and I'll work out a location (probably a Starbucks - I need my coffee) and a time that'll work for as many people as possible.

Stardust probe crashes to Earth

mcreasy — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 16:21:00 GMT

Oops.

That's a shame, I hope they can still salvage something from the project. Don Brownlee came to Microsoft a couple of months ago and mentioned the project and described how the probe was supposed to get back - parachutes and then caught be helicopter, which apparently is fairly normal and not as crazy as it might sound. Turns out that the parachute didn't open though. I bet the guy that designed the parachute isn't having a very good day.

iMovie removes Apple's FairPlay DRM from iTunes Music Store songs?

mcreasy — Wed, 04 Aug 2004 16:48:00 GMT

It's not the first time that Apple's FairPlay DRM has been circumvented, but it appears that by importing a song into iMovie and then exporting it the DRM gets removed. There's no word on whether a loss of quality is involved. Quite how Apple will get around this is anyone's guess. They could make a “critical-update” available to iMovie to block this, but anyone that's taking advantage of this is unlikely to install an update that might disable the functionality. Alternatively Apple could just sue themselves under the DMCA ;-)

Update: Turns out iMovie does a re-encode of the file, so it's not really stripping the DRM - it's little different than burning to a CD and ripping from the CD.

Cheaper internet access

mcreasy — Wed, 28 Jul 2004 17:26:00 GMT

I've been a Comcast customer for almost 18 months and I've generally been happy with the service. I know that DSL is cheaper, but as I don't have a land line it's not really an option. I've heard that many people have gotten deals from Comcast by calling them and saying they are thinking of getting DSL. I gave it a try this morning; I told them I'd been getting ads from Verizon about how cheap DSL was. I now have cable internet access for $19.99 a month for the next three months.

Back to school with Dell and Gateway?

mcreasy — Tue, 27 Jul 2004 17:40:00 GMT

In another example of companies using the same stock photos for their websites, Dell and Gateway are both using the same girl to promote their back to school deals.

Looking for a thermometer to connect to a PC

mcreasy — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 16:24:00 GMT

My officemate and I were talking about this this morning. We'd like to be able to use a PC to measure the temperature outside. Ideally this would be a serial connected device with a probe that could easily be placed outside. Google found us some, but there seem to be very complex and cost around $100! We want something much simpler, anybody know where we could find such a device?

Limitied DVD copying to be legal in the future?

mcreasy — Wed, 14 Jul 2004 14:09:00 GMT

There's a story that's light on details from Reuters that suggests that limited DVD copying will be ok in the future. Microsoft, Disney, IBM, Intel, Matsushita and Time Warner have agreed in principle to make legal backup copies of next-generation video disks and play the content on portable devices (Portable Media Centers?).

Sounds like a great idea to me, but it's only for next-generation DVDs, HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. Given the absence of Sony from this group I suspect it's HD-DVD that's being discussed. When this new format will actually arrive I have no idea, but the story mentions the technology being available to license later this year, which suggests we could see HD-DVDs by the end of the year or early next year?

Being able to backup copies of HD-DVDs and presumably play them on a computer would certainly encourage me to jump to the new format quicker. It's a shame I can't already easily and legaly do this with DVDs. One problem is going to be storage though, hard drives are going to have to get much bigger to store backups of HD-DVDs in any quantity.

No time to rip all your CD's?

mcreasy — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 17:07:00 GMT

LoadPod will do it for you! (Assuming you have an iPod and at least 50 CDs and are willing to pay $1.50 a CD and live in an area they service - which now includes Seattle).

I can certainly see the appeal, ripping a lot of CDs takes a long time. I've probably only got about half of my CD collection on my iPod because I don't have the patience to sit and feed by PC CDs every couple of minutes. When I get a new CD I feed it to my Media Center PC and let it rip it into WMA9 VBR for when I want to listen to it at home and then let iTunes rip it into AAC and upload it to the iPod. At the same time I'll grab a handful of unripped CDs and let iTunes do it's thing with those as well - everything is already in WMA9 and although I could transcode them into AAC, I'd rather go direct from the CD. Eventually I'll get everything on there, but I'm in no hurry, the good stuff is already on there.

Cool computer

mcreasy — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 16:54:00 GMT

Completely frozen solid!

More photos here

Long time without a post

mcreasy — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 19:32:00 GMT

Well I've been really busy and haven't had much time to write anything new.

I've added a new category to my blog - books, which if I get right won't be included in my main feed or on the blogs.msdn.com page. I'm going to post updates on what I'm currently reading and little reviews there from time to time, just for fun :-)

I got a chance to see Sony's new Media Center PC, the R Series over the weekend - really, really nice looking - they're water cooled, and to facilitate air flow there's a hole in the case about two thirds of the way up. You can put your hand (if you have a small hand) through the case! Pretty pricy though, I don't think I'll be replacing my HP Media Center any time soon, I just don't need to.

Also in the news was Microsoft joining the Digital Living Network Alliance, what will come out of it I don't know, but getting a bunch of tech companies to work together to make their devices work together and share content easily seems like a good thing to me.