The Days of Clay

Inner Self

noreply@blogger.com (Clay) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:17:00 +0000

I was once told that if you truly knew who you are (your inner self) then you could write a list of 50 "I am"s. I think you were supposed to do it in like 10 minutes but mine took a bit longer.You aren't allowed to use things like titles, such as Atheist or Technologist, both I had to take off. Anyway I'm posting the list and I'm not sure why since most of it makes me seem like a terrible person. I do, however, suggest you try it.

1. I am a realist.
2. I am pessimistic.
3. I am selfish.
4. I am caring.
5. I am loyal.
6. I am a liar.
7. I am sarcastic.
8. I am self centered.
9. I am self deluding.
10. I am an asshole.
11. I am unmotivated.
12. I am reward driven.
13. I am forgetful.
14. I am vengeful.
15. I am a minimalist.
16. I am true to myself.
17. I am easily angered.
18. I am creative.
19. I am intelligent.
20. I am ever changing.
21. I am self reliant.
22. I am spontaneous.
23. I am lazy.
24. I am compassionate.
25. I am unorganized.
26. I am explorative.
27. I am often confused.
28. I am unique.
29. I am rebellious.
30. I am stubborn.
31. I am forgiving.
32. I am trusting.
33. I am aggressive.
34. I am confident.
35. I am anti-social.
36. I am worrisome.
37. I am geeky.
38. I am apathetic.
39. I am accident prone.
40. I am out-of-shape.
41. I am a procrastinator.
42. I am deep.
43. I am able to recognize bad decisions.
44. I am unable to stop myself from making bad decisions.
45. I am a listener.
46. I am an audible learner.
47. I am comical.
48. I am impressionable.
49. I am adaptable.
50. I am often content.

Oh Where Have You Gone, Decency?

noreply@blogger.com (Clay) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 06:33:00 +0000

I went to a movie tonight. Doomsday to be exact. It was good, but I'll get to that later. The thing that stood out the most was how terrible people can be. I arrived early and get a ticket and hand it to the ticket guy. He tears it and mumbles something presumably about where my movie is located. I ignore this and decide I can find it on my own since he seems to have no interest in it. I find my theater and discover that it is not ready yet. I'm early and can understand this. What I can't understand is why there is some form of supervisor in the hallway yelling for her employees to move faster and have this theater prepared. It continues, to my astonishment, and yet the move at the same snail pace. Eventually they arrive there and go inside. The supervisor looks at the few of us that have gathered here and says nothing. No apology for the display or for taking so long to prepare our screen. OK so maybe I shouldn't expect much here, after all these are just theater works that are probably not very interested in their jobs.

Well, eventually they come out and we are allowed to enter. You would think that my troubles are over and I could enjoy my show now, but no, it continues. Soon after I take a seat I am greeted by several younger guys that sit near me. They are talking and one even makes a phone call. He is calling to tell his friend how to get into this movie that he clearly is not of age for, of all things. I think to my self that this is not a big deal and surely they will stop when the movie starts. Boy was I wrong. They continue to talk through the movie and even keep operating cell phones. I don't guess I can blame them too much though, as it seemed to be common for my movie to be interrupted by a bright sudden light from a near by cell phone. I do not know what has happened, but I thought we all agreed a long time ago that this kind of behavior in a theater was rude and disrespectful to the people around you. Just consider the others around you that paid the same nine dollars to see this movie, and stop to think that maybe they would like to enjoy without scenes of your personal life spread throughout it.

Back to the movie. It was great! I really enjoyed it a lot. I went into it thinking that it might be a zombie movie. The preview reminded my of a zombie movie where they trap them inside a city and leave them to die so I thought it might be a spin off of that. Its not. Its just as twisted, but not about zombies. I don't want to give it away, I'm sure there are plenty of places on the web that you can ruin it for yourself if you so desire, but I do want to recommend it. 4/5

Weekend of Wonders

noreply@blogger.com (Clay) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 17:43:00 +0000

My girlfriend is gone now, and has been gone for several days. I'm sadly just getting around to posting about it though. There are a couple of things I want to talk about now that I have the chance.

We watched a good bit of content on Hulu and we enjoyed it. While we were watching shows it was still in beta, luckily I had a beta invite. The quality was good and the ads are minimal, but there was a lack of content. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of stuff there. Just not a lot of the same thing. For instance, we watched 3 episodes of House and that was the end of the list. Well Hulu has come out of beta and I went to check it out expecting to see many more shows uploaded. No luck, however, there are still only 3 episodes of House and nothing but clips of Scrubs. I'm disappointed since I truly believe that media on demand is where we are headed.

In other news, we also went to see several movies. We saw Jumper and I'd recommend it. It was a good movie, but the one thing I don't get about was the lack of someone teleporting behind an enemy to kick them in the back of the head. I mean any teleporter knows this is one of your best offenses. Oh well, they still come up with some creative things to do that make it worth while. Then the trouble came. My girlfriend saw part of 10,000 B.C. and wanted to go to it so she could see the rest. I pulled it up on Google and saw the reviews were terrible, and tried to talk her out of it. She insisted though, and we end up seeing it. The reviews have never been more spot on. This movie is awful. Do not waste your time on it, you will be disappointed.

I took her out to Fairhope as well. This trip went poorly. We had fun but only because we tried to make the best of it. I got lost, as I've never driven there before. Not the good kind of lost either, the kind were they make a TV show about it. No, this was the kind of lost where you say things like "didn't we pass that church twice already." Eventually we made it into Fairhope though. Lucky for us it was 5 o'clock when we got there, and apparently no one in Fairhope believes in work after 5. We managed to find one shop that was still open and it turned out that he was only open because he had forgot to turn the sign around. Still, Fairhope is an interesting place. They have a lot of pride in there city and we enjoyed just walking around looking at things and peering in windows as if we were going to rob them. Maybe next time we will get to go inside.

Things sometimes happen

noreply@blogger.com (Clay) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 06:48:00 +0000

Well I'd normally have the same schedule of events this weekend as usual. The weekend of WoW with a mix of beer or woodchuck is what I am speaking about. Not this weekend though. No this weekend my girlfriend is visiting. Earlier than she had planned might I add, which lead to me rushing to get things in order around here so that its at least some what presentable. Nonetheless, I'm excited to see her. I have to come up with something to do though and I'm not that good at this part. I've always felt like we had to be doing something. Unfortunately I'm out of ideas as I've already taken her to all the tourist attractions here.

I started a Twitter account, check the links section. Twitter is a lot of fun it seems, and I asked them what to do here in Mobile. Someone suggested the Festival of Flowers, but we can't make the times that its going on. Still its nice that someone gave me some input. I watch the site a lot, not that its good for me, but its amazing that you can basically see whats going on in the world just by what people are twittering.

Well maybe this weekend will be the first time we just have to be together and exist, or maybe I'll resort to going to the movies as usual. Either way I can't wait to see her again. She has talked about traveling within the past month or so and I told her to wait and we'd go together as soon as we could. Now I know a guy who really is packing up and traveling around the world with his girlfriend. When I said it I had a sense of "yeah that would be fun, but maybe it will just go away." Now that I think about it though, I'd really like to travel and see the things this planet has to offer. He is keeping a blog that I don't mind plugging here and I'm going to follow it to try to get an idea of what this would be like.

A Revolution of Content

noreply@blogger.com (Clay) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 21:04:00 +0000

Well it turns out I'm only a moderately good journalist at best. Since I was incapable of writing IT stories and getting people to read them, I am revising the blog. The IT Life has died, and born from it are The Days of Clay. Updates to follow.

Consumer Power

noreply@blogger.com (Clay) — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 05:15:00 +0000

People are going to get what they want in this day and age. There is no stopping a user from doing what he pleases with a product anymore. We've seen it with DRM and more recently with the iPhone. Well good ole Steve Jobs, head of Apple, has decided to get on board finally. Details aren't exactly flourishing, but it seems Apple will be releasing a SDK, software development kit(it lets coders write programs for the device), for the iPhone/iPod Touch.

This goes to show you that in the end, its the user that decides how a product is used. I hope this starts a trend for electronic devices, and that they are released with a SDK readily available. After all, who better to create the programs than the people who use them?

Health Vault

noreply@blogger.com (Clay) — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 18:56:00 +0000

Microsoft has announced a new service called Health Vault, in which they will be storing medical information in secure databases that can be accessed online. The service will supposedly have no personal information listed with the records for the public to see. Yet somehow you are going to be able to set up an account and view your information from the website. Many health companies and hospitals are getting on board for this and tout it as a good thing for patients.

Now, I like the idea of viewing my medical records online. Lets say for example I need to know what medication I was on last month and if it can be taken with a medication that I want to try now. I'd simply have to pull up my account and could get that information. But if I have an account, then somehow that information has to be tied to me, and no matter how secure they say the database will be, there is someone who can hack it. I'm not that concerned about that right now, but I'm sure there are plenty of people that have personal information in a medical file that they don't want shared. I generally support anything that allows me to use my computer to simplify my life, but I'm not sure where I stand on this one yet.

Oh but there is more to this. Google, who I strongly support, is also developing a medical database. Competition is good, but won't that be just one more place for hackers to attempt to get my "secured" information? This is only going to create a hassle for the medical industry to try and figure out who to list what information with, while at the same time making it easier to find flaws in the system.

Well I'm going to take a neutral stance on this for now, anyone out there got an opinion to share? Drop me a comment.

Kiwis Wikis

noreply@blogger.com (Clay) — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 19:27:00 +0000

Its being reported that New Zealand Police are allowing the citizens to make the laws now. Well thats not exactly how its working, but close. It seems that the Police feel that the citizens should know whats best for them and that the laws need to be updated. So they have set up a wiki for any around the world to edit, and supposedly this will guide the new laws.

This is just another example of governments moving to the Internet, and I like it. The Kiwis are right, the people do know whats best for them. What better way to govern a group of people then saying "Hey, what do you think should be fair?" and letting the people police themselves. Yeah there is the possibility of people attempting to add bogus laws, but wikis are self correcting for the most part. As soon as bad info goes up, someone is out there taking it back down.

I'd like to see more of this, but maybe we should watch New Zealand as a test case first. Luckily for us, they have decide to allow anyone anywhere to participate, so we can do just that. Hopefully this works well for them and the trend will catch on.

DRM Down

noreply@blogger.com (Clay) — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 20:19:00 +0000

An article at TorrentFreak is reporting that Demonoid has been taken down by the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association). Demonoid is a community site that host torrents. Torrents are like trackers that point out users hosting media for you to download. Most of these are illegal downloads, however, on occasion there are legal uses of this. This is not the first torrent site to be taken down lately, but it is the biggest.

At the same time, Amazon has launched a new service to download music in the popular mp3 format that will work on all portable music players. The service doesn't have all popular labels on board yet, but it is offering songs at cheaper prices than iTunes is. The big deal here is that Amazon is offering the songs DRM free. DRM is that pesky software that stops you from burning, sharing, and distributing songs you've downloaded.

Now I fall in between these two stories. I'm against DRM, but at the same time I feel like downloading music is unjust to the artist. I won't say I haven't downloaded any music but if I have it is only because I felt the work was overpriced and I wouldn't have heard any of it otherwise. Its a bit of a contradiction, but I want my media to be of high quality and still affordable. I'm perfectly OK with paying for an album or DVD that is relatively cheap and actually good. I'm not, however, going to pay top prices for content that is mostly just filler. Amazon is finding a good stand in the mix of all this, and I hope the other labels get on board.

Your Government Online

noreply@blogger.com (Clay) — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 16:49:00 +0000

Interestingly enough, Australia has decide to assemble a white paper on maintaining a blog. The paper details how the blog would work and what its function would be. Essentially, it seems like the blog is just a way for their government to get feed back from the people about how things should be run. The unfortunate part of this is that they assembled the paper. There was no need in wasting time and money on the white paper when it would have been just as easy and efficient to simply create the blog and announce it. If it failed, so what; if it was a hit, then job well done. The paper made me chuckle a few times so its worth a glance and can be found here.

I feel like this is a step in the right direction for the political world. More and more we are becoming dependent on our PCs and just expect to be able to access information from the Internet. I even registered to vote online, OK well technically I just filled out the form online and then dropped it by my local Office of Registrars. I hope this goes over well in Australia and that the US follows in their footsteps real soon. I'd be much more inclined to care about government if I could add it to my Google Homepage.

Blogging out of Boredom

noreply@blogger.com (Clay) — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 19:02:00 +0000

Not a a lot going on lately, but I was thinking about how the Internet is changing our lives. Well obviously blogging, since your here, but other things too. I've become interested in IPTV and podcasting over that last couple of months, and it amazes me that I can get quality content off the Internet for FREE!

I've been using a free program called Miro to get all my IPTV shows in one place and I love it. It still has bugs, as its in beta, but its functional and I'm expecting it to update again real soon. Its so simple that I don't want to go back to regular television anymore, well at least not for tech or news shows. My shows are downloaded automatically and I get to choose when I want to watch them. Most of them are ad supported but have relevant ads that aren't overly intrusive. Is this the way of the future for TV? I think so but its still got a ways to go before major networks move their content over. For now though, check out Revision3.com to get some great content.

I have been listening to podcast a lot too. Currently using iTunes to download my podcast automatically, but I don't like it. It just doesn't integrate well with windows, particularly Vista. I can't seem to find anything that would serve me much better though so I'm making do with it. Isn't it amazing, though, that we can download content as we want it and then take it with us almost anywhere? I get my podcast from TWiT.tv, but subscribe via iTunes. TWiT is being sponsored by an audio book company currently, and I'm thinking of trying that out too. Have a decent bit of down time between classes and in my car where I could knock out a few books if I had them on my mp3 player. The books aren't free like the other content, but they are reasonably priced, especially compared to physical copies. I'll update you on what I decide to do.

Satellite Internet

noreply@blogger.com (Clay) — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 21:41:00 +0000

So I'm heading back to visit the family this weekend. My parents live out in the country and have recently switched to satellite internet. I've used it briefly before and wasn't impressed, but I'm going to try it out a little more in depth now. I just talked my father through setting up a wireless router on it so that my sister and I can use laptops throughout the house. This is probably going to be the worst WoW experience I've ever had, but heres hoping.

Update: Well satellite internet wasn't bad over wireless. Its almost what you would expect from a wireless connection. Although, if you try to use it over hardwire it is lacking. You just expect a certain speed from a desktop computer and it leaves you feeling empty inside.

Getting Started

noreply@blogger.com (Clay) — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 18:34:00 +0000

Going to try my hand at blogging with the only thing I'm knowledgeable about, IT. I'll probably update this a couple times a week with my view on whats going on in IT. Spoiler: I'm a Google fanatic.

PS I'm also addicted to World of Warcraft and will have to try and squeeze this in around WoW.