Analog-Theater 2.0

Ok, so how are we for time? Good, well then the only question is where to start. One thing I have noticed is that it is never easy to take this ungainly mass of ideas, inspiration, and input and then forge from it a single cohesive stream of consciousness that anyone in their right mind would actually understand, much less actually want to read.

So, let us then start at the beginning, first, the gallery (And now the slide show as well) is not broken. The Sideshow over there on the left however, is. I was a bit surprised this morning to discover that not only was the gallery working but, well, that the pictures I put in it before moving the entire directory structure around where still there. This makes me really happy because I can now share with you, my happy reader, the wonderful picture I took of the three pound bag of coffee that greeted me upon my return from the great white north. I’ve never ordered $33.00 (including shipping) worth of coffee before, but after buying 1lbs at Safeway for about $10.45 I figured that it would really be worth my time to just go online and get the really, really good stuff available at Higher Grounds. I originally would have only ordered 1lbs, but first, with three pounds the shipping stays the same, and then the savings that come with buying bulk put the price within $0.12 of the stuff from Safeway after tax is figured into the local purchase.

Now, why would I, someone who is mostly in his right mind order $33.00 worth of gourmet coffee? Well, to be honest, because this is just really good coffee. Second, for only $0.12 per pound more then the local grocery store, I get to be all socially and environmentally conscious. This bag of coffee is Organic, Shade Grown, Fair Trade certified, Arabica bean, low acidity, damn good coffee. The key here is the low acidity, it has almost no bite at all, and it is amazingly not bitter. Very mellow and smooth. Now, I know some of you are sitting there thinking I can go down to Walmart and get some Green Mountain for a bit over $8.50 a pound, and they have the grinder right there. Ok, so you got me, the Walmart stuff comes out to about $0.33 per pound less before shipping and lot less after shipping, and I will admit it isn’t bad stuff, I have some Hazelnut left over from my trip north.

The problem, or one of the problems, as I see it, is that I won’t shop at Walmart if I can feasibly avoid it. Around here, Northern Virginia, that isn’t a problem, and is actually very easy. You see visiting a Walmart locally is like a crime against the human soul. They are crowded, dirty, noisy, filled with rude people, and the customers are even worse. This, by the way, is in striking contrast to the ones I have visited in New York and Florida, those are oddly clean, well lit, with polite and pleasant employees. My fiancée and I tried to buy a Christmas Tree stand at our local one a few years ago, for our first Christmas in our own place, and we where almost run down by woman who was literally twice as wide as her cart. And the evil perfume stand troll in her Pink Tutu is an entirely longer and more disturbing tale of Walmart at night. So, as you can probably guess, I have no problem staying out of there just for the shear enjoyment of staying sane, but once you leave this area, it is more a matter of choice and belief.

But, since I am talking about Walmart here, let us discuss my now two year old Theory of the Walmart Event Horizon. Ever since roughly half of my immediate family moved from the far southern extreme of the east coast to the far northern extreme, I’ve made a point of trekking up there by car and dog sled. On the first trip, one of the oddities I noticed was that all the stories about Walmart moving into a community and shutting down most of the local small retail shops are true. While driving the roughly 100 miles through small town after small town, what I witnessed was that on the edge of town would be a Super Wal(Ultra Mega Hyper)mart complex, and than when driving through the town proper I would see all of the shuttered private retail stores. Being an avid reader, I recalled the Douglas Adams theory of the Shoe Event Horizon in which shoe shops came to dominate a planets economy and it became impossible to build anything else, but in a real life parallel what I believe happens is that when Walmart moves into a region and the region is already depressed the smaller stores are rapidly shuttered as they can not compete with Walmart on price, the larger chains with the exception of K-Mart, which is already on the verge of a second bankruptcy, have no presence, and that means no one is left to compete. Now some might mention Target, but no, they are aimed at a market segment one step up, and in the regions we are looking at that market segment very limited. So, we are left with no one, this means economically, only another Walmart can really compete with Walmart, thus the Walmart Event Horizon. It is not economically viable to build anything except another Walmart. I fully expect that we will witness this in much of the North East, MI, and some parts of Southern Virginia, Pennsylvania, FL, and other areas that I have no personal knowledge of. It is kind of depressing.

One thing I did notice at Walmart, when I went in and wandered around, is that their electronics are way over priced. Stay away, if you want to save money, visit Newegg, they have much better deals. Although I do have to say the deals that Walmart offered on the open box desktops wasn’t bad, they where priced at roughly the same price I would pay to build it myself.

But speaking of computers, I had wanted to mention a few things, first, does anyone out there use VLC? The VideoLan Player? I’ve been using this little wonder for a couple years now and just realized it had replaced all of my other media player software, with one small exception (DVD player on my Mac), it plays everything that I have more or less thrown at it. It will play the .iso DVD Images I have stored on my little server, it plays my .mp4 files that I rip for my iPod, it plays my .mp3 and .acc files, it even plays standard DVD’s. And buried under the hood are some major features that I don’t even understand how to use. The one and only glaring issue with VLC is the interface. It is boring, it is skinable, but that took me 5 minutes on google and a lot of tinkering to figure out how to use.

When researching VLC before typing this up, I downloaded Winamp again, ahh, my first and former favorite audio player. But it seems that ever since AOL decided that employees at Nullsoft where no longer a requirement, Winamp has languished and now is just a great big cumbersome beast that doesn’t do anything new, but does so in a much more difficult way. Interestingly enough, while learning all of this, I was also trying to use the Mac browser Safari, but on my Windows Desktop (I wanted to play some Rome Total War last night before bed). Yes, my reader, Safari is available for your use on the Windows Desktop. Sadly however, it isn’t ready. I was impressed with the slick interface, and I love tabbed browsing (I have 6 open right now) but when I click to launch a Vocal Trance stream at my favorite online radio station, Digitally Imported, or something more mainstream (or even not so mainstream) at their sister station Sky.fm, I want my default application to launch, I don’t want to download the playlist and have nothing happen or even worst have iTunes launch. Don’t get me wrong, I like iTunes as much as the next Mac junkie with a 160gb iPod Classic, but I don’t want to use it to listen to online radio, I want to use it when I rip a CD or load my iPod. I want to use a nice small application, which is already listed as my default and launches automatically in like VLC when I listen to online radio. The other issue I had was that Safari kept stalling, freezing up for a few seconds, and just acting slow. This ontop of the fact that Safari looked like it was trying to display at a lower resolution and then had been blown up, i.e. it was all blurry and did not impress me.

Next up on our little list of things is Asus EeePC. I’ve been hauling mine around for a couple of months now and can still only think wow, this is small every time I pick it up. Weighing in at a total of 2lbs, with a screen size of around 7in, and a battery life right at or around 3 hours the EeePC is an amazing piece of engineering. All models come with a 900Mghz Celeron M and 512MB of Ram, wifi, ethernet, and 3 USB 2.0 ports, what differenciates the models is the amount of internal storage, the battery, and a internal web cam.

I chose to purchase an open box 4 Gigabyte Galaxy model in black. No web cam, and shorter battery life, but I could still upgrade RAM. Besides, I never use web cams, so why pay for one? Overall, I honestly think it was a good buy. I have upgraded the ram to 2 GB, installed an 8GB SDHC card in the internal reader (for a total of 12GB) reader, and installed EeeXubuntu on the little devil when I finally became frustrated with the installed version of Linux that it came with, but not all without sacrifice.

The original operating system(OS) will load in about 15 seconds, this means that you turn it on and can almost begin to work right away. Sleep, suspend, and everything else work flawlessly. And the original OS is simple to use. The top of the screen shows a number of tabs, simply click the tab for what you want, say internet, and there are icons for Firefox, email, IM, etc… Same for Office, System, and Edutainment. Simple, easy to use, but you know, I like to tinker. For some people this is the perfect system. All you have to do is plug an external monitor in, keyboard, and mouse, and off you could go.

What I use it for:

• Watching Movies
• Quick Email
• Web Browsing
• Playing Classic Nintendo, SNES, and Sega Genesis Games.

What I do not use it for:

• Typing Word Documents, you can, but the right shift key is the same size as all the others and I keep hitting the up arrow instead.
• Typing long emails, see above.
• Working on the site, or any site. The screen is too small, I can get around this a bit by using multiple desktops, but it messes with my perspective. I’m used to 19-21in screens. 7 is a bit tight.

They are currently available online starting at about $300 for the 2GB version, but I would recommend going with the 4GB for only $50 more as you could then upgrade the RAM to 1 or 2GB on these models and that does help offset the slower processor. One note, the originally installed operating system does not allow you to use more then 1GB of Ram regardless of what you install. So 2GB will only show as 1GB if you are using the Asus provided OS. 1GB is more then enough with the original OS.

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