FeralBlog

Not really a new trend, but still one that I find disturbing. Hot on the heels of SBC’s merger with AT&T comes news today that Verizon is going to snap up MCI. They needed to do something to prove that they were a player, and although some people thought they might go after one of the bigger companies (i.e. Cingular or Nextel), this merger makes headlines without making a huge dent in Verizon’s cash. I wonder if this is just a merger for merger’s sake, tho. MCI is a troubled company, and they are inheriting a bureaucratic nightmare (60 billing systems?) Also, I wonder why Verizon’s bid which was $.5 billion less than Qwest’s was accepted… not like MCI is going to care about Qwest’s financial scruples, right?

Consolidation, especially with telcos, makes me nervous. I have enough trouble as it is with phone companies, and I still technically have choices for my provider. Wasn’t the Ma Bell breakup done specifically to avoid the type of consolidation and lack of choice that we’re heading towards?

In other merger news, Blockbuster is again making a hostile takeover play for Hollywood Video. While I’ve been a satisfied Netflix customer for years, the thought that there would only be Netflix, Blockbuster and Wal-Mart (both of which are gunning for Netflix in the worst way) as the 3 major players makes me worry about their future.

Man, there are so many cool games either coming out or already out for PS2 this holiday season. There’s possible Game of the Year GTA: San Andreas. There’s Gran Turismo 4. There’s NHL 2005. NFSU2. Tony Hawk. All this is making me think about getting a totally cheap-o (read: $100) tv to put in my room so I can hook up the PS2. That will let me both play games AND watch DVDs. It’s a win-win!

I have 6 0 more now. There’s got to be someone who’s uncle’s brother’s cousin’s grandmother doesn’t have one… post a comment and get one.

Update 10/8/04: I don’t have any invites right now, and if I did they would all go here. Go on over there and get yourself in the queue. You’ll get one much faster that way.

I have another Gmail invite, apparently. If there’s anyone out there who actually doesn’t have one and wants one, leave me a comment. First one gets it.

Update: Mine’s gone. Dan still has a few, so post if you want one.

Got a chance to play a little bit of the Doom 3 Interactive Slideshow last night.

I need a new video card.

Based on the emails that David and I have been swapping back and forth, I think that snagging “choice” Gmail addresses will be the new domain squatting.

Ok, so I’ve been getting Gmail invites like they were candy. I have 6(!) right now… why should I give you one?

Thanks to David, I now have a GMail account! Now I can stop making random posts to our defunct climbing co-op page in the hopes that being a more active Blogger user would get me an invite. So far it seems pretty cool. I like the way that email threads are shown as “conversations”, and I can’t get over the 1GB of storage.

Anyway, as I get some invites (and based on this Wired story they’re being handed out much more freely these days), I’ll be passing them along to whoever. Joshua totally gets one, because he’s a big nerd like me, but if anyone else wants one, just let me know.

Oh, and my address is mattcomroe (and you can figure out the rest).

This morning when I get into work there was a Critical Update waiting for me. I installed it on my XP machine at home, no problem, so I figured it would be the same thing here. Nope. After the reboot it said that my boot.ini file was invalid, and then there was a problem with NTOSKRNL.EXE. After some head-scratching I fired up the bootable Win2k CD and went to the recovery console to look at what was in boot.ini. That’s funny, it’s just not there! Lemme go look on a co-worker machine… hey, it’s not there either! The fix wound up being creating a new boot.ini from scratch, and making an educated guess about which disk/partition my installation was on.

I was half-tempted to just wipe and reformat, then put XP on, but I’ve got so much configuring that I would need to do (mail, Visual Studio, little apps, etc.) that it would probably take most of the damn day. Hey, I figure 2 hours lost isn’t really all that bad, so I just made a fresh Emergency Repair Disk and chalked it up to experience.

Matt got it right this is a horrible idea.

Why the fuck would I pay $250 for an iPod that holds 1000 songs, when I can get one that holds almost 5000 songs for $50 more? Oh, because it comes in some pretty colors? Bollocks.