FiveMinute.net: Five-minute summary parodies of various sci-fi episodes and movies. (Note that there are spoilers in there for episodes and series that aired later than the one that you’re reading, so you may want to not read them if you haven’t completed watching everything produced under a brand and intend to some day.)

Apparently, I work for the 3,987th fastest-growing private company in the U.S..

As a followup to my prior post about in-home electricity distribution, it has occurred to me (as we’re implementing it at work) that the standard method for transmitting DC for electronic devices may be Power over Ethernet.

As asked last night by my wife…

Why are some food items used as terms of endearment, while others are not?

Pumpkin? Yes. Potato? No.
Honey? Yes. Syrup? No.
Etc.

Apparently, Smart Shopper has chosen to ignore my prohibitory order, as I received mail from them yesterday. (This is really exactly what I expected, since the type of discounted mailing permit they’re using requires mailing to all addresses in the town.) So, I forwarded the mailpiece off to the Prohibitory Order Processing Center, where if all goes well they’ll get a court order requiring compliance, and if they continue to mail me they’ll be in contempt of court. (39 USC 3008 (d), (e))

Tonight is the monthly Scrabble night at the Charlton Public Library (6:00 to 7:45 p.m), if anyone else is interested in coming.

I find it interesting that while all the electrical wiring in my home is typical AC at home-use voltages, the very first thing that almost everything plugged into it does is concert it to DC. I wonder if it would be feasible/logical/more efficient to have just one AC-to-DC converter per house, and distribute DC throughout the house (in addition to the couple places where things actually want AC), with a different connector and standardized voltage (9V?) and so forth.

A few weeks ago, I placed an order with MCM Electronics for several things, mainly related to upgrading my wife’s computer as our DVR setup, including a 500GB hard drive, a cable distribution amplifier, a gigabit network card for my computer (which had an on-board gigabit NIC that broke), some cables to wire everything together, and 2 GB of memory for my wife’s computer (to add to the 1GB it came with). (They were having a 20% off sale at the time, so they seemed like pretty decent deals.)

In the DCI ratings database, your rating for a game no longer shows up in rankings if you haven’t played that game within the past year. (You still have your rating, and if you later play in another game, you show back up in the rankings.)

Since Dreamblade is for almost all intents and purposes dead, very few people have played a game in the past year. So, Jessi and I are on top in the Massachusetts Dreamblade rankings.

My wife’s computer (which is now our DVR system) has a (Dell OEM version of the) Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS, which includes a port labeled “Digital Out”. I wanted to connect it to the surround sound system I have, which only has a single digital input, labeled “Digital Coax”. I thought that I might need to get the Digital I/O Module and a digital coax cable, but I wasn’t sure that would work, since the sound card model isn’t explicitly listed there, although I suspect that it would. The digital out itself is kind of odd, since it’s really three separate stereo SPDIF outputs, to get 6 channels out, and the sound card didn’t support the normal AC3 encoding over one output to a receiver, although it could pass through an original AC3 source (like a DVD, or, I hoped, a HD recording) on one channel.