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Check out the interview over on DrunkenBlog. My favorite quote of the interview:

Every line of code is a liability. – Jonathan Rentzsch

Just a reminder to keep your code small, tight and simple. The rest of the interview is great, highly recommended reading.

Do not go to this site. Do not play blokus. It is not an addictive game. That is all.

The original plan was to purchase the Mac mini along with a capture card and one of these for the digital audio output to my receiver and use this setup for all of my home theater needs.

My mind was overwhelmed with all of the fantastic tv shows I could record and watch at my leisure… well, ok perhaps overwhelmed is a little strong. Alright, I admit it, I can’t think of a single show that I would want to record. The only thing I watch with any regularity is SportsCenter and it is repeated all night. I do admit to enjoying the Daily Show when I watch it, but it doesn’t really bother me if I do miss a show. Bottom line, I just don’t think tv is worth recording.

I am still interested in seeing what kind of interface and applications can be developed for use on large displays(like my rear projection HD set). An interesting project to watch is CenterStage. The first public alpha should be available by tomorrow.

Instead of going to SXSW or etech I’m stuck in Lubbock where the weather is crazy. Saturday it was a beautiful 83 degrees outside. Today it is snowing! Ya gotta love that West Texas weather.

Watch these PubSub feeds or these delicious feeds to keep up with what’s going on at both of these conferences.

If you can stand the wait ITConversations will have the keynotes from both conferences posted starting April 1st. You can read the post from Doug Kaye. I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to Doug. ITConversations is an invaluable resource and has exposed me to a great wealth of information that I might not have come across otherwise.

I’m weak. I admit it. I caved in to my own peer pressure. Yup, I bought a Mac Mini.

So, what do I think?

Well, it’s not exactly fast, but you knew that right. I picked up the low end model, which means 256 MB of ram. I see a putty knife and a 1GB stick in my future. Take a look at the video on how to open the thing up.

Just out of curiosity I installed a copy of Ubuntu linux. I’m normally more of a slackware guy, but I had heard decent things about Ubuntu and decided to give it a try. The install was remarkably easy. Everything worked out of the box except for sound. From what I’ve heard there is a patch available to get sound at least partially working. For now OSX goes back on the mini.

The mini is remarkably quiet. You can just barely hear the hard drive spin up every once in a while. Well, it’s quiet if you don’t try to use the optical drive. Wow! That thing is loud, and it vibrates like crazy. My entire desk was vibrating while burning a cd. This was probably my biggest disappointment.

I hooked the mini up to my HD set via the DVI input on my TV. The picture was very crisp as expected, but there was still quite a bit of overscan. I’m gonna have to do some research and testing to try and get this fixed. There are a couple of utilities to do this here and here.

Overall, I’m happy with the purchase(especially at the price I paid).

When I try to resize or move a Windows Media player window from one display to the other it freezes my machine instantly. No error messages or warnings, just a complete lock. Nothing is responsive. The event log shows nothing to indicate what would cause this. This is slightly frustrating to say the least.

Wired has an interesting article up entitled Revenge of the Right Brain. Read the article, then go listen to Richard Florida’s PopTech talk at IT Conversations. I find myself going back and forth agreeing and disagreeing with Florida, depending on how I feel that particular day. I keep meaning to actually pick up his book so I can dive in and make up my mind. Needless to say, it is an interesting talk.

One of the reasons outsourcing does not concern me is that you can’t oursource creativity and innovation. The left sides of our brains can go overseas – or better yet, they can just be done by a computer – I for one will be just fine doing more interesting creative work.

It has been a long time since I have done any 3d modeling. I think it’s about time I fire up blender again and get started. What better way to get back into it than the annual F1 Challenge. Some of the entries from previous years are amazing. I can’t wait to see what people come up with this year. Hopefully by making this public it will motivate me to actually finish an image and get something submitted to the contest. It looks like some people already have a pretty good start over on the Elysiun forums.

I’ve been listening to the KCRW audio stream this morning. They have been running ads for their podcast. Very cool! Check out their podcasting site here.