The specifications for the Asus Eee 1215b are as follows.

• AMD Brazos E-350 dual-core processor running at 1.60Ghz
• 2 GB ram
• 350 GB hard drive
• 802.11/n wi-fi
• card reader slot
• 2 USB 2.0 1 USB 3.0
• web cam
• hdmi output
• Radeon 6310 with 512mb
• 10/100 GB ethernet
• 12.1 ” High definition backlit display

The case is quality black plastic with a patterned bottom. The laptop has a well built feel to it. The chiclet keyboard is almost full size and fairly easy to type one. The Synaptic touchpad is large and has a metal bar for right/left clicking. There are 5 Led’s on the front left edge of the laptop to indicate various status’s.

The laptop runs Windows 7 home premium edition. There is not too much bloat-ware loaded and some nice additional software in addition to what comes with Windows 7.  A trial copy of Trend Micro Titanium is provided for anti-virus software. In its capacity as a HTPC I have loaded Boxee software although I am very impressed with the latest version of Windows Media Center.

I have already hooked it up to my Home Theater HDTV and it works very well. I am able to run and stream full 1080p video with no buffering or stuttering. So it is mission successful for its ability to serve as both laptop and HTPC.

The only negatives I have have to do with the placement of a couple of keys and the fact that I have not found a way yet to disable the touchpad while typing. But these are not really flaws with the laptop, just something I will have to become used to.

Overall, I am extremely impressed with the Asus as well as Windows 7. I ran Ubuntu 10.10 on my old Dell and feel no need to replace Windows 7 with it. The laptop itself is a quantum leap over my old Dell. I have not been able to check the battery life but it is rated for a minimum of 6 hours. My research on available laptops in the price range I was looking at seems to have paid off. It is money well spent. I would highly recommend this laptop to anyone looking for a sub $500 laptop.

It all started with a discreet channel logo inconspicuously placed on the screen. When the networks saw that they could get away with that, they plotted their next move. How dare you record our shows and then fast forward past the commercials. We’ll show you!  How about a not so inconspicuous onscreen ad for upcoming shows that is onscreen during the entire show. Take that!

Still no outcry? Lets see if they notice animated ads for upcoming shows every five minutes or so during the show.  Ready to cry uncle yet? If not, we have more things planned. How about a transparent ad that cover the entire screen? He he he!

The worst culprits seem to be the network news channels. How many scrolling tickers, labels, titles, and inserts can you put on the screen before you go screaming back to the good old newspaper? Apparently not enough.

It seems to me that there is a heated contest between the networks to see who can come up with the next obnoxious, obtrusive gimmick to make viewers lives miserable. Sure, the networks have a right to make money from the content they provide. But I also have a right to enjoy the shows that I watch. There has to be a balance between the networks right to make a profit and my right to enjoy watching that content. I think the networks are  precariously close to upsetting that balance.

This may be a battle that neither side can win. A similar battle is being fought on the internet.  Advertisement has become increasingly annoying to the point that I avoid some sites altogether. Consumers are fighting back by installing ad blockers and other software to block some of the advertising. Is it possible that some technology will come along that will allow viewers to block on screen ads on television?

In the meantime, I will be watching networks that seem to be attempting to find that balance and avoiding those that obviously are not.

That is all.

H

“It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it anymore…[it] makes a noise worse than someone else’s crying baby on an airliner. It’s worse than the sound of your parachute failing to open. Really, to get an idea of how awful it is, you’d have to sit a dog on a ham slicer.”

“So you’re sitting there with the engine screaming its head off, and your ears bleeding, and you’re doing only 23 mph because that’s about the top speed… [it] feels as if it’s been made from steel so thin, you could read through it. And the seats … are designed specifically, it seems, to ruin your skeleton… the idiotic dashboard, which shows leaves growing on a tree when you ease off the throttle … built our of rice paper … poor ride, the woeful performance, the awful noise and the spine-bending seats.”

“Acceleration 0-62 mph: 12.5 seconds. One star (out of five) … Good only for parting the smug from their money.”

- From ‘Arguing with Idiots’, by Glenn Beck

Now that I have a Roku digital video player, I can stream movies from Netflix directly to my HDTV. For no additional fee I can choose from a library of over 12,000 movies and TV shows. If I had nothing better to do I could stream several movies every day in addition to watching the DVD’s that I receive by mail. The on demand movies do not count towards my monthly limit of only 1 movie at a time.

Now Roku has upgraded my player so that I can now stream movies or buy them directly from Amazon Video on Demand. Amazon offers about 10,000 movies and TV shows for streaming or to buy.  The one nice thing about Amazon is that you can select directly from the Roku menu while you have to first select Netflix movies from their web site before they are viewable from the Roku menu. But that nice feature is overshadowed by the cost of streaming videos from Amazon.

Unlike Netflix, where the streaming videos are available for no additional cost, Amazon charges from $3.99 to $0.99 for every movie or TV show you want to watch. If I streamed 8 movies a month from Amazon at an average price of $2.99 each it would cost me $23.92. That is much more than the $8.99 a month that I pay for my Netflix service. When you consider that I can also stream as many movies as I want per month from Netflix for no additional cost, you can see that Netflix is a much better deal than Amazon. The only advantage that Amazon may have is that they have more premium choices available for streaming than Netflix. But I can always watch the premium movies from Netflix on DVD.

I don’t see how Amazon can hope to compete against Netflix, especially for Netflix members like me that have the Roku player. Amazon will have to substantially reduce the costs for streaming their movies if they hope to get any of my money. Netflix and Roku are a winning combination that are unbeatable by anything else available. If you know of anything that offers what Netflix and Roku offer, please leave a comment as I would be very interested in it.

The Nielsen Co. estimates that more than 6.5 million U.S. households have not taken the steps necessary to ensure that they will be able to receive the digital broadcasts.  Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.VA., author of the bill to push back the deadline said.

Delaying the upcoming DTV switch is the right thing to do. I firmly believe that our nation is not yet ready to make this transition at this time.

The switch from analog to digital broadcast will free up a large chunk of wireless spectrum  that can be used for commercial wireless services and interoperable emergency response networks. The switchover has been scheduled since 2005, which means that Americans have had over 4 years to get ready for the change. I think that 4 years was more than adequate for Americans to have taken the steps necessary to be able to receive digital broadcasts. The government has made available for some time now free coupons that any person could request that would cover the estimated $40 – $80 cost of the converter that is necessary for people without cable or satellite to continue to receive free over-the-air broadcasts.

The NTIA, the arm of the Commerce Department administering the coupon program, is now sending out new coupons to replace the ones that went unredeemed. Apparently a significant portion of the 6.5 million U.S. households that are still not ready for the transition failed to take advantage of the availability of the coupons. Why should the transition be delayed until June when Americans have already had 4 years to prepare and even been offered free coupons to cover the cost of the needed converter box? You could probably delay the transition for a year and you would still have millions who are not ready. The wisest thing to do is go ahead with the original Feb. 17 changeover which would force the procrastinators to finally obtain the converter box they have had 4 years to obtain already.

But what really irritates me the most about this delay is the statement made by Gene Kimmeiman, vice president for federal policy at Consumers Union, who argues that millions of Americans, particularly low-income and elderly viewers, will pay the price because:

The government has failed to deliver the converter boxes these people deserve just to keep watching free, over-the-air broadcast signals.

I didn’t know that it was the governments responsibility in the first place to provide free converter boxes to anyone. Did the government provide these people with their televisions? Despite this the government did offer free converter boxes and these same people simply did not take the government up on the offer. Is it really possible that low income and elderly people could not have saved the $40 – $80 needed to purchase a converter box over a 4 year period? I am sure they spent far more than that on other non-essentials during those 4 years. Maybe President Obama should create a new government agency whose responsibilities include going to each of the 6.5 million households and installing a converter box free of charge. That would be one way to create some new jobs. Isn’t that ultimately what a lot of people envision the governments job to be? To take care of all our needs from birth to death. Why take any personal responsibility for anything when you can blame it all on the government?  Yeah, that’s the ticket.

The main thing I like about Live Writer is how much faster it is than WordPress. The auto-save feature in WordPress always slowed my writing down and there seems to be a latency in the WordPress editor that does not exist in Live Writer. Live Writer supports multiple blogs and it is very east to set it up to upload your posts to your blogs. You can choose to publish your post or simply post to draft. Live Writer also saves all your posts locally so it serves as a great backup for WordPress.

The toolbar has all the options that are available in WordPress such as insert hyperlink, insert picture, tables, fonts, numbering, bullets, etc. The insert picture allows for multiple borders, custom margins, text wrapping and effects. When you first setup Live Writer to work with your blog it downloads the current theme and uses it when you are editing and for previewing your post before publishing. You can add regular tags, Technorati tags and set the categories. There are three main work areas accessed by tabs; Edit, Preview, and Source.

Another great feature of Live Writer is the ability to add plug-ins to expand and enhance it’s capabilities. A few of the plug-ins I have installed include insert Book Details, Insert Website image and Insert Polaroid Picture. There are almost 100 plug-ins available online that can be added to Live Writer.

Using Windows Live Writer has made it much easier and faster to write posts for my WordPress blog. If it has any flaws or drawbacks I have yet to come across them. I use it exclusively for writing and editing for my WordPress blog. I guess if there is one drawback that is that it only works on the Windows platform. I do not think there is a Mac version and I am sure there is not a Linux version. So if you have a WordPress blog I would highly recommend using Windows Live Writer for all your writing and editing. It will make things much easier for you.

The player itself is a small, well constructed black box with no front panel displays other than a blue led. The back of the player has all the necessary connectors. The included remote control has the necessary controls to navigate the on-screen Roku menu as well as fast-forward, rewind, and pause/play buttons. The remote control comes with two AAA batteries. The Roku player has it’s own power cord. Installation was amazingly easy. I had the player connected and running in about 15 minutes. I connected the player to the power cord, attached the HDMI cable to the player and my HDTV’s HDMI input and then accessed the Roku setup program. After inputting my wireless networks SID and WEP values I was then given an activation code. You enter the activation code on Netflix’s web site and after a couple of minutes your Roku player is ready to begin streaming movies to your HDTV.

If you have added movies or TV shows to your instant queue on Netflix’s web site the selections will show up in a simple menu on the player. You can select the movie or TV show you want to watch, read a brief description of your selection and then begin to watch. It only takes a few seconds before your selection begins to play. Quality of the movie depends on what you have selected but generally the quality is as good as watching the movie from a DVD. What I really like is that you can watch as many movies or TV shows as you want without having to wait for them to be delivered via mail to your door. While the selections available for instant viewing are not as numerous as are available for delivery via mail, there are still thousands of movies and TV show to choose from.

My overall rating of the Roku Netflix player is very favorable. I have no real complaints and for only $99.99 it is a great value and really adds to your Netflix experience. If you have a Netflix subscription and love to watch movies and TV shows I strongly suggest that you ask Santa Clause for one under your Christmas tree. If Christmas is not a holiday you celebrate then I leave it to you to find another way to get your hands on one. Excuse me now, I have to go watch another movie on my Roku. Now if only I had some popcorn ready.

Higgs event

The $3.8 billion Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator/collider, successfully completed it’s first test Wednesday. The first test runs consisted of firing a photon beam clockwise around the 16.8 mile underground tunnel. The next series of tests will fire a photon beam counterclockwise around the tunnel. The tests are being done at low power with full power tests, where photon beams are fired in both directions to eventually collide with each other,  probably a year away.

The purpose of the collider is to further research in high energy physics and studies of the sub-atomic particles that will be created when the two photon beams collide with each other. The ultimate goal is to find the Higgs boson, a sub-atomic particle that is essential to the Standard Model of nuclear physics, but which has never been seen. Over 9,000 physicists and scientists from around the world are eagerly awaiting the huge amounts of data that will be generated with the first full power run of the LHC.

The huge amounts of data that will be generated by the LHC will require a grid of 60,000 computers to analyze what happens when the protons are hurled at each other. Even after sophisticated filters are applied to the raw data, there will still be some 15 petabytes of data to be analyzed. That’s enough to fill 2 million DVDs.

There are some detractors who say that the operation of the LHC might create tiny black holes that could destroy the earth. Others think that the LHC might create the worlds first time machine and that we could receive visitors from the future soon after the LHC goes into operation. One of these detractors made a similiar claim in 2000 with the opening of the smaller Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island, claiming it would destroy the world on startup.

While it is true that microscopic black holes might be created, these holes would almost instantly disappear. The likelihood of these black holes becoming the more well-know kind of black hole is nearly non-existent. A spokesperson for CERN, which operates the LHC, said the most dangerous thing that could happen would be if a beam of protons at full power were to go out of control, which would only damage the collider itself and burrow into the rock around the tunnel. Before the first hydrogen bomb was exploded in 1952 claims were made that the explosion would destroy the atmosphere and destroy all life on the planet.

Professor Stephen Hawking summed it up nicely when he said.

Whatever the LHC finds, or fails to find, the results will tell us a lot about the structure of the universe.

Nothing of worth has ever been gained without risk, but the risks that might arise from the operation of the LHC are far outweighed by the potential knowledge that is to be gained. I eagerly await the first full power run of the LHC and the secrets of the universe that its operation may reveal.

The only saving grace is that now it appears that many people are text messaging or surfing the web on their cell phones rather than talking on them. While not as bothersome as someone talking on their cell phone, it still bothers me that people choose to use their cell phones despite public admonitions that their cell phones not be used. Signs often appear at checkouts in stores asking that people not be talking on their cell phones while transacting with the clerk or sales person. Yet despite signs like this people still jabber away on their phones.

Even people that you would think would know better still refuse to turn off their cell phones or put them on vibrate in meetings, despite requests at the start of the meetings that they be turned off. It seems that a cell phone rings in almost every meeting I attend, even in church board meetings.

The fascination that some people exhibit with their cell phones is another interesting phenomenon. I have watched people who seem unable to not use their cell phone. I often will see people constantly check their cell phone, never putting it away or seeming to be unable to take their eyes off it. It is almost like smoking in that it seems to comfort them when it is in their hands and they become agitated and nervous whenever they are not using it.

I find cell phones very useful and I have one myself. But I have never come close to using my minutes up and do not have a data plan and do not text message. I often leave my cell phone in my truck when I go somewhere in public. And if I do have my cell phone and I am in a meeting I will turn it off. If I go somewhere and I am asked to turn off my cell phone I do it. I know that a lot of other people who have cell phones are as courteous with them as I am but for those who are not, to quote Macbeth:

Out, damned cell phone! out, I say!