My second Z has just arrived at my office. I am checking it for dead pixels….more in a little bit. If it’s good then I’m calling Sony today to return the other….or both (if this one also turns out bad).
More info coming soon.
[EDIT]
New Z. Dead pixel free! Yay!
I’ve been hiding in my cave for a while now. The funny thing is that I have acquired a lot of new stuff to install but life and work sort of got into the way of me actually writing about what I’ve been up to. While I love my job, the last month has been kind of intense with me averaging nearly 50 hours a week. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t starting to burn me out but I’m working through it.
One of the things I’ve been playing around with over the last year is Microsoft’s Windows Home Server. I was a beta tester from day one and I absolutely loved the product. I re-purposed an old Athlon 64 system and build a little server which held about 1.5TB of storage. Over the months, I accumulated a lot of backed up data including a lot of multimedia type files.
When the product was finally launched last fall, I knew I would have to eventually purchase it; however, I was on the fence of building a custom system or going with HP’s Media Smart Server which I thought was really cool looking and well designed. Early this year, my beta version of the software timed out putting me in a bind. My systems were no longer being updated and accessing my existing data was difficult (the system times out after one hour). So, I had some added pressure to hurry up and get a new system up. Due to my increasing workload, I didn’t think I was going to have time to put together a new system and I was still really intrigued by the HP MSS which would likely be quicker to setup. With that in mind (and the discovery of an added discount), I took the plunge and purchased the HP MSS EX-470 which includes a 500GB HDD. There’s also a EX-475 version which comes with a 1TB drive but it’s not worth the dramatic price increase.
I bought this thing more than a month ago but didn’t have time to set it up and transfer data. That’s pretty sad.
This weekend, I finally unboxed it and started the painful transfer process. I’ve had to restart the old beta server numerous times just to get the data off and even with a gigabit network, terabytes of data takes forever to move. Once, I get everything transferred, I’ll give out some impressions on this thing and try to get back on track.
As usual, life caught up with me and kept me from updating the site again. Of course, it’s sort of a good thing since I changed jobs and have some stability now. Of course, the gadget hunting hasn’t ceased but I’ve been bad about updating all of the changes that are going on.
As the holidays near and my schedule begins to lighten up, I’m planning out reviews and topics of interesting things to discuss. I’ll likely discuss Sony Ericsson’s new W910i Quad-band GSM phone which I got to replace my W850i which unfortunately had a short lifespan (I’ll get into that later). Also, I’ll discuss my attempt to use the iPhone as my main phone which obviously didn’t work out (another long story) and random thoughts on the crookedness that is the mobile phone industry (at least in the US).
Finally, as my birthday passed recently I decided to do a major system upgrade as a present to myself. I had a pretty decent and workable system before but as I’ve been doing much more content creation, I felt I needed to get something more substantial. I re-used at least half of my components so that kept the costs down. I ended up with the following:
Intel Core 2 Q6600 Quad-Core 2.4GHz (4 CPU)
8GB of DDR2 PC6400 (800Mhz) RAM
New Lian-Li PC-V300 mATX case
Added to existing parts of:
Gigabyte ATI Radeon 2600HD Pro 512MB Video Card PCI-E
500GB Seagate SATA HDD 7200RPM
SoundBlaster X-Fi Audio
I have some thoughts on this system now that I’ve been playing with it for about month. I actually “only” had 4GB to start but recently decided to splurge on the final 4GB after some research on Photoshop and it’s use of the extra memory. I’ll have thoughts on this later today perhaps but first it’s time for dim sum!
The line continues to grow although quite slowly. I’d guess that only 25…maybe 30 people have joined the line. I’m guesstimating about 80 people in line so far so there’s still hope….allegedly. Morning came without a lot of fanfare. Fox 11 News continued to hound the scene and KTLA 5 had a chopper overhead filming the action. I’m told that Kurt “The Cyberguy” got his grubby little hands on a unit at 8am this morning so that he could discuss it on the news this morning. He’s pretty Apple-friendly so it makes sense he would get special treatment. :-p
At least I got some special treatment of my own as my lady stopped by to bring me a healthy McDonald’s breakfast. Yes, the evil Sausage McMuffin and Hash Browns. Yummy…but deadly.
It’s going to be a scorching hot day already as it’s 9am and it’s hovering around 78-80 degrees Fahrenheit. There’s a guy next to me who’s already sunbathing. He’s going to be extra crispy by 6pm since it looks like he’s already had too much sun. It’s a good thing I brought sunblock (oh wait, I left that in the car) and some man grooming products to keep “fresh”.
There’s a guy named Will who’s live vlogging the event here at Santa Monica. You should check out his coverage at http://intoiphone.com. I’ll likely keep updating every hour assuming my batteries cooperate.
I was attempting to take a nap but was roused by the sound of activity. There’s an interesting crowd that’s hanging out in the line. In addition to group of people actually waiting for the iPhone, we’ve been joined by some of the colorful homeless people. Most of them are pretty nice if not eclectic with lots of vivid stories…sometimes too vivid.
Santa Monica’s finest has been out and about making sure we’re all behaving and not causing any trouble.
The local media companies have started to come out en masse. The first to show up was Fox 11’s Amy Murphy and her crew. Once she showed up, all hell broke loose with a lot of people in line acting like madmen trying to get their 15 seconds of fame. As you would expect in show business, you can’t compete with kids and animals…..unless you’re doing live streaming from the webcam of your MacBook! So, some of the fanboys got on TV…as well as the guy with the bulldog behind me.
It’s now dawn…
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