TV Size Calculator and Comparator

I found this link while looking for a quick comparison of 16:9 TV surface areas. I found the output from this tool very useful, but haven't checked it for accuracy. For example, it told me that a 50" 16:9 TV (vs. a 32" 4:3 TV) is 63% larger when viewing 4:3 content (SD), and 190% larger when viewing 16:9 (HD) content.

Apparently I need $1,000 bail

It looks like an 'oil-man' has been running around committing larceny using the moniker that I've grown quite so fond of. But not just any larceny, grand larceny my friends.

I found this abstract on the NYT site, which was pretty cool. The link to the PDF of the actual article is far cooler however.

WTF is an oil-man anyway?

What you missed during your childhood..

If you were barely alive during the 80's, constantly stuck in a quandary between feasting on paste for lunch or hypnotically snapping and unsnapping your Members Only jacket, then this article may be for you.

Rebecca Kelley has written this little gem, known as The 8 Most Unintentionally Erotic Atari 2600 Games, over on Topless Robot. She is presumed hawt.

If you can make it through the drawing on top of the Bowling screenshot without cracking a smile, then your are very, very dead inside.

PoMaDiDe - Poor Man's Disk Defragmentation

As a long time user of Diskeeper, which I've always recommended as a product, I've never had to think about disk defragmentation and maintenance.

However when tweaking a new machine that I'll be using for a while at a friend's company, I decided to just automate the new (for XP), CLI disk defragmenter defrag.exe.

I simply setup a scheduled task to run daily at 4am.  It executes the following batch file:

DailyDiskDefrag.bat

@echo off
date /t >> %LogPath%\Misc\DailyDiskDefrag.log
time /t >> %LogPath%\Misc\DailyDiskDefrag.log
C:\WINDOWS\system32\defrag.exe c: -v >> %LogPath%\Misc\DailyDiskDefrag.log 2>&1

I have a system variable set for LogPath to "C:\Windows\system32\LogFiles", so this will append to a file in the 'Misc' directory called 'DailyDiskDefrag.log'.  For those of you windows n00bs that never had to experience the pain joy of old skool batch programming, '2>&1' just redirects stderr back to stdout.

I'm sure there is a much cooler way to do this in PowerShell, sadly I'm not l33t enough at this stage of my life to pull that off.  Perhaps one day I'll look into all this PowerShell goodness.

Also, FWIW, I changed the default log location for the Scheduled Tasks service using this post from the mvps.org site.

Me & Mop

So earlier this month I attended BarCampLA4, which was a blast.  If you haven't attended a BarCamp event and like any two of the following: tech, nerds, learning, sharing, or free beer - then you should definitely make it out to the next BarCamp in your area.

For this particular BarCamp we had a fantastic chap by the name of Mr. Dave Bullock of eecue.com fame snapping portraits of everyone there.  He was even kind enough to play along and take this American Gothic-esque photo of me and said mop, that by the way wreaked of death.

Anyway, I think it should be obvious that I've found my new avatar of choice until the next picture is snapped of me being a jackass.