idallassleeping less and reading more

If you’re wondering whether you should buy an HD DVD player soon, a Blu-ray Disc player in a little while, or a dual-format player in a little while longer, I recommend you just wait a year or three and see how things pan out. Toshiba’s HD DVD and Sony’s Blu-ray are competing formats vying to be the one that replaces DVD. They both hold a lot more data than current DVDs allowing for movies encoded in higher quality High Definition. From a technical perspective Blu-ray is generally considered superior, but the technically superior format doesn’t always win and there are significant benefits to HD DVD that may prove to be enough to beat out Blu-ray in the short term. Unless you have a very nice HD television you likely won’t notice much of an improvement over standard DVDs with either format, and if you do have a very nice HD television you can probably afford to waste a little money on a losing format so knock yourself out! In another few years every television sold will be fully HD-capable and that’s when this whole game will really start to play out.

“They killed him, you know? They killed Janice, too.” That was said by a middle-aged man with long greasy greyish hair carrying a guitar to a 30-ish woman wearing a lot of loose fabric wrapped around her. I overheard it as they walked by me on Harrison Street in San Francisco.

After dealing with the problems caused by the big power outage today, I left my office to discover my bike had been stolen from the entryway of my office building. There was a painting crew there painting the outside today and I suspect one of them left the door open at some point. I was dumb and had not locked my bike. I figured inside would be safe enough. Silly me!

DreamHost’s network and all of our servers were taken down for about 4 hours this afternoon due to a major power outage in the Los Angeles area. The building housing our data center has redundant battery and diesel generator backed up power, but it didn’t work as expected. When we moved into this data center space we were reassured several times that the power supplied by the building was fault tolerant and would stay up even in a major power outage. We haven’t yet heard their side of things but I’m sure it will be interesting.