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Don_HH2K's Blog

Don tryeth, Don hacketh, and Don gaveth up.
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December 2007 Entries

Music from Amazon

Here are a few questions that I've recently found myself asking: in today's overprotected, overmanaged, overcompressed, over-portable world of music, where are the last holdouts of cheaply-available CDs? Where can I legally download music from a substantially large library in a format that can be played universally without rights management? Is there a such thing as a MP3 player that doesn't add DRM to all of the music I place on it? Users of Windows-powered handhelds have long been able to upload unprotected media to their devices and play them back using Pocket Windows Media Player. I own a Tungsten E,...

posted @ Thursday, December 27, 2007 1:54 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Movies and Music ]

Attack of the 700k E-Mail

Here are some raw numbers I've come up with while looking through my e-mail archives: Average size of a teacher's e-mail to a single class: 17kb Average size of a teacher's e-mail to all of his/her classes: 58kb Average size of a faculty e-mail to an entire grade: 287kb Average size of a faculty e-mail to everyone in the school: 682kb Average size of an IT department e-mail to everyone in the school: 7kb Total size of all e-mails received beginning July...

posted @ Sunday, December 23, 2007 3:16 PM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ School ]

Sorry for the delay.

The main part of the site is back online and functioning, even if it's only a shadow of its former self. After a quarter of a year I more or less wanted to have some content other than a static HTML page lingering around Sorry for the extremely short and ambiguous post as well.

posted @ Sunday, December 16, 2007 5:17 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ HH2K ]

Let's finish it sometime this year.

Last year on December 23rd around 3:30 PM I began playing Twilight Princess. I finished the main storyline sometine in the afternoon on December 29th. Of course, no Legend of Zelda is complete without working one's way through the numerous sidequests available: weapon upgrades, improved abilities, new items, and so forth. I'll be honest: while I've completed the storyline to five Zelda games, I've never once managed to finish every single sidequest. I figured that in my boredom, it might not be so bad an idea to actually finish an entire Zelda. That entailed obtaining every single item and weapon upgrade,...

posted @ Saturday, December 15, 2007 3:48 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Video Games ]

It's back!

I had an unusually good day today. School's ripping out its old "Tandberg Educational Language Lab" from the '70s to make way for a new computerized system. As such, anybody that wants the equipment (headsets, audio cassette decks, and a control unit) is free to take it with permission from the Modern Language department. Today I picked up a headset; it uses an RJ-11 head instead of a stereo or mini-stereo head, so provided the two use the same signal I should be able to create an adapter with ease. If not, another trip to Radio Shack. Tomorrow I'm going to...

posted @ Thursday, December 13, 2007 3:06 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ School Photo ]

Back from the dead? Not yet.

Despite the fact that my three previous phone calls to Hewlett-Packard ended in receiving a new case number and subsequently being sent to the back of the line, I went against my better judgment and gave their number another try. After spending the better part of my afternoon (5PM to 7PM) on hold, I finally received my first piece of information (other than, "We can't use your old case number."): I have a FedEx tracking number. You may expect that, after an entire month, I'd at least be happy to know that the thing's coming back. Unfortunately, that's not the case:...

posted @ Wednesday, December 12, 2007 11:10 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Blog-related ]

Fallen into disrepair...

As I've mentioned to a number of people, my nx6325 randomly quit working a few days ago. I'm not entirely sure what happened: the machine unexpectedly powered off while I was editing a photo in Photoshop. Two days of attempts to boot the machine gave the same result: the power light would come on and then fans would spin, but the unit wouldn't produce any video, wouldn't POST, wouldn't beep if I overloaded the key buffer, and for that matter wouldn't even heat up after half an hour. It came with a standard three-year warranty, so after a bit of...

posted @ Wednesday, December 05, 2007 2:58 PM | Feedback (2) | Filed Under [ Blog-related ]