James Chamberlin

Thanks to my Tivo, I haven’t had to watch nearly as many commercials as I used to. The Super Bowl is another story however. While there were only a couple of decent ones, there’s one that I can’t get out of my head lately. It’s from Old Spice and I love it.

I haven’t used a piece of Apple hardware since I was a child and the local school had Apple IIe computers. I’ve yet to shell out cash for an iPod, iPhone, or any of their computers. I was holding out some hope that Apple’s tablet would be something that would make me run out to buy.

As news trickled in this afternoon, my heart sank in disappointment. The iPad is merely a supersized iPod Touch with the iPhone OS.

I saw some of the video demos and everything looked sharp. It was very responsive, but one of the glaring issues I saw was the fact that you couldn’t do much with it. There’s no multitasking. It immediately reminded me of Windows netbooks which restrict you on the number of programs you can run at once.

I had hoped the iPad was going to be a full-fledged laptop, shoved into a tablet form, but the functionality just doesn’t appear to be there and I therefore will remain Apple-free on the hardware side of thing. The only Apple on my PC is iTunes.

It was nice to have some time away from writing for IGN. It’s always good to get together with family around Christmas. Now I’m fighting off a little cold which I came down with a few days ago. I don’t get sick very often. I’m usually pretty good about eating a lot of nutritious foods, but I’ve gotten lazy about that lately and it caught up with me.

There’s not much else to report. I’ve stopped updating TV-Reviewed and am trying to find work outside of the house. It’s not easy. I’ve applied to a few jobs and I haven’t heard back. It’s rough finding a job when there are so many others trying to do the same thing. There are a lot of people competing for just a handful of jobs right now.

The U.S. is covered with a big weather system this week. For me, it’s resulted in a fair amount of snow. I’d guestimate our accumulation to be about 5 inches so far and we’ve got another day to go, so I’m guessing that amount will be almost doubled when all is said and done.

The only thing that might keep the number low is the rain. The forecast for tonight is mainly drizzle, so I’d imagine we’ll have a nice layer of ice on top of the snow come morning, followed by a few more inches of fresh powder tomorrow.

I haven’t been out of the house tonight, but I haven’t heard a snowplow yet. I imagine that if any are being run, it’s only on the main road downtown and the side streets are being left untouched until the storm has passed. This is how South Beloit typically handles it… really poorly, if you ask me.

One of my last entries before disappearing without a trace for a while was about SPAM and when I decided to return to my lolely little blog, I was greeted with some four hundred SPAM alerts.

Once hesitant about Akismet, I have nothing but good things to say about it. It’s turned out to be a lifesaver. I no longer need to babysit the AdminCP of WordPress. Akismet takes care of it all for me.

There’s not much going on these days. The weather is about the most interesting subject to discuss, strangely enough. After a couple of days near 50 degrees, we’ve dipped back to 30 or below. This means any precipitation is going to be in the form of snow.

Although I love snow, I’m not a fan of it when I’m on the road for the simple reason that people don’t take precautions when driving. It’s too bad we can’t limit drivers licenses by requiring IQ tests. We allow far too many idiots to drive.

I’m afraid there isn’t much to report right now. I’m just busy working.

Regarding the title of this new entry, I had an old post about blog spam which is suddenly attracting you guessed it: blog spam. It’s getting 5-10 spams a day right now. It’s hardly a big problem thanks to Akismet, but I just found it to be ironic that that specific post was getting 95% of my blog spam.

In the last few weeks I’ve briefly read over several articles about a possible solar power station being built in space by the Japanese. The proposed 1-gigawatt power station will cost an estimated $21 billion, a huge expense for such little power. The station would only be able to power ~300,000 Japanese homes. The last time I checked, there were many millions of Japanese homes and businesses.

Why would you want to invest this kind of money in a space project to begin with? Think of all the space debris out there… not just the stuff we put out there like satellites and whatnot, but all of the comets, asteroids, etc. I’d hate to be the pilot(s) trying to adjust the enormous panel to avoid such debris.

All of this brings me to one question I’ve always had regarding solar panels: how much would it cost to put panels on every house and business in any one country? The price would be enormous, but very few countries are actually doing anything about their power needs. It’s infuriating sometimes to see that my own country still has no plan for this. We’re be stuck on Saudi (and other) oil for ages before we get our act together. I don’t like the “putting all of our eggs in one basket” approach when it comes to solving energy independence. And it’s these solar power stations that make me cringe. 100 and 200 megawatt stations are popping up across the world, but if they get damaged, that’s a big loss.

To top it off, there is the fact that our electrical grid is woefully outdated. We don’t have nearly enough of the unsightly high voltage towers and wires to meet future demand. The way I see it, the future of energy starts with us and our very own roofs. If we can generate our own power, there would be no need for those ugly, dangerous, loud high voltage towers and wires. I would love to see a world where we generated enough energy to meet our own demand and be completely off the grid, insusceptible to those wishing to hack our electrical grid.

Every once in a while I feel like watching something an older movie or tv show and last week I popped the first two DVDs of season one of MacGyver in my DVD player and was instantly taken back to the 80s, a time which looks makes things so much more simple than they are today. I was born in the eighties so I likely didn’t see the first few seasons when they originally aired, but I do remember watching this show as a kid, waiting for Mondays to come around.

It’s unclear what it was exactly that I liked about the show… probably the action because as a kid, I also enjoyed Dukes of Hazzard and professional wrestling, so it goes hand in hand with the action on those shows.

However, as I grew up, I think one of the attractive things about the show is the fact that one man can use his mind to overcome just about any obstacle. Sure, it can be said that many of Mac’s creations were completely fake or greatly exaggerated as to their effectiveness, but many of his creations were real.

The show is quite tame to today’s standards. The blood and gore was much more family friendly.

And then there’s the simplicity of life. Imagine a time when having an unlisted number actually meant you wouldn’t be called all day by the robo-telemarketers. MacGyver show does a great job of showing how far we’ve come with the advancements in computing power.

I hope MacGyver creator Lee David Zlotoff doesn’t go through with his plan for a movie if Richard Dean Anderson isn’t involved. RDA was everything to this show. I can’t imagine watching Mac being played by anyone else. Burn Notice is darn close to a modern successor. There’s no need for a “MacGyver II” series featuring his son or something silly like that.

On a side note, can we not let the “MacGruber” finish filming. It’s ridiculous that SNL has allowed that sketch to go beyond the first two or three. They aren’t funny anymore and I can’t imagine what they’re doing turning MacGruber into a feature film. Keep them as terrible SNL sketches, not a bad feature film.

My workout at the gym was pretty exhausting this morning. Although I was only there for 50-55 minutes, I managed to wear myself out with those exercises I mentioned earlier.

My arms are tired, my legs are tired, and when I left the gym, my clothes looked like they were just taken out of the washing machine. There wasn’t a dry spot, from head to toe. I think this is going to be a new favorite workout in the future. I know it’s burning calories. Checking my heartrate after each set of exercises tells me how much it’s making me work.

Finding something new that works is always exciting.

Update: As the day wore on, a muscle in my leg started hurting a bit. I don’t know if it’s technically my groin muscle or something right next to it. Whatever it is, it’s hurting in my right leg.