caprice's glob: 12/31/06

Saturday, January 06, 2007

When in Florida, wear a bra

Bra Slows Bullet Fired Into Air in Fla.
Last May I advised everyone to wear a bra when in Tampa. In light of this story coming out of St. Petersburg, I am now extending this advice to the entire state of Florida.

Friday, January 05, 2007

High definition video disc format war becoming irrelevent?

It's time for the huge, annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and there have been a couple of announcements coming out of it indicating that the format war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray may turn out to be a non-event, at least as far as we consumers are concerned. LG has announced a player that can handle both formats, and Warner Brothers has announced it will produce discs containing both formats.

The LG machine is coming out a lot sooner than I anticipated (assuming this really does come out--it wouldn't be the first time an electronics manufacturer has announced "vaporware," something that is never actually produced). I would certainly go for a dual format player--though LG (formerly Goldstar) is not exactly a high-end manufacturer. I'd wait a few more months to get a player made by a higher quality company.

But I suspect it might be a while, if ever, before I can find a single machine that plays HD-DVDs, Blu-rays, my DVD-Audios and my SACDs--not that I have all that many discs in the latter two formats. But I do have some, so I may have to keep my current machine, a Samsung 941, in my system. I got it as an interim player, waiting for the high definition formats to come out and perhaps stabilize.

Spam onslaught over?

I'm probably tempting fate by saying this, but the spam deluge that started last month seems to be over. It's been under 50 every day for the last week.

EDIT: Even more interestingly, the spams that have been going out with forged sending addresses in the CDI domain have ended--not a single one got returned to the "sender" today.