It looks like Time Warner is expanding their broadband bandwidth caps to new markets. One of those new markets is in Greensboro, NC, about 1 hour from where I live. To add insult to injury, it looks like prices are going up as well. The 40GB tier will cost $55, which is $5 more than what I pay today. As they say, this stuff is getting real.

Back in the spring of 2005, after having graduating from college, I went looking for a job. I got the chance to interview for Microsoft, though I'm not sure what I would have ended up doing had I gotten the job (they never really told me). My interview was conducted entirely over the phone, and consisted of the typical "brain teaser" type questions that Microsoft is famous for. Needless to say, I performed very poorly and was instantly rejected. The guy on the phone said he'd let me know and, 10 minutes later via email, I knew.

One of the questions they asked me stumped me beyond belief, and I butchered my answer terribly. Not only was I embarrassed for myself, I was embarrassed for the interviewer, having to patiently listen to me. :oops: Anyway, here's a retelling of the question I was asked:

Given a large NxN tic-tac-toe board (instead of the regular 3x3 board), design a function to determine whether any player is winning in the current round, given the current board state.

I realize now that I misinterpreted the question horribly. The interviewer stated the question quite differently than I have it written above; I believe he used something along the lines of "given a tic-tac-toe board of N dimensions ..." I assumed that the bit about dimensionality meant delving into the realm of 3 or more physical dimensions; essentially something like 3-D tic-tac-toe. Obviously, solving such a problem is much more difficult than solving on an NxN 2-D board.

Tonight, for whatever reason, I recalled this question and the fact that I never found an answer for myself. Happily, I subsequently stumbled upon someone else's answer (see question 4), which is quite clever. It's good to finally resolve this problem.

I know interviewing candidates for a job can be tricky, but asking these kinds of questions is silly. Does someone's ability to answer this kind of question really prove they are a better programmer than someone who can't? In the end, I'm eternally glad I didn't get hired for Microsoft; I now realize they are one of the companies I would least like to work for. My current employer seemed much more concerned with real-world problems, my previous employment experience, and the (increasingly rare) ability to program in C++. For that, I am oh-so-grateful.

If I ran the Academy Award ceremony:

• The host would be a news reporter, chosen specifically for their inability to make lame jokes.
• Said host would read the award category, the nominations, and the winner, without any pauses or cuts to montages of said nominations.
• Award presentations that no one cares about (best sound editing, best art direction, best makeup, etc) wouldn't be televised.
• Award winners would receive their award on a side stage with no podium or microphone, thereby removing their ability to give an acceptance speech.
• The entire award ceremony would be 30 minutes long.
• Nielsen ratings for the event would be at an all time high.

Hold your applause, please.

It appears that Microsoft is quietly slipping in a Firefox extension with updates to the .NET framework. The extension is named "Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant" and, based on the description, "Adds ClickOnce support and the ability to report installed .NET versions to the web server." According to reports, this extension:

• Cannot be uninstalled through Firefox
• Changes the Firefox user-agent string
• Does God knows what else

Happily, people have figured out how to uninstall the extension. This move seems pretty dirty to me, but Microsoft has been pointed in this direction for some time now. If you find yourself 'infected' with this piece of malware, do yourself a favor and remove it.

Here it is, one day after Thanksgiving and the official start of the Christmas season, and I'm already sick of Christmas songs. Earlier this week, while shopping in a local Bed, Bath, and Beyond, I was treated (or was it tortured?) to the sounds of 'contemporary' Christmas tunes. You know, classics like the hip-hop version of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" or a techno-influenced rendition of "Deck the Halls." I've never been 'in' to Christmas music per se, but I suppose I can consider myself 'out' of it at the moment. Apparently, everybody who's anybody in the music industry has recorded an album of Christmas songs. And there exists an unwritten convention amongst retailers that these songs are to be crammed into shoppers' ears. You know, so as to "get them in the spirit."

I'm all for celebrating Christmas. In fact, it's my favorite holiday of the year. But I think it's time that we, as a society, take things down a notch. Christmas displays went up at stores as soon as Halloween was over, and in some cases, days before. Holiday commercials are being aired on TV and radio every 5 minutes, each one with its own variation (nay, perversion) of a beloved Christmas tune. Like Andy Rooney says:

It ought to be against the law to start Christmas before December.

A while back, I noted how I was planning on watching my television over the air. I recently bought the Antennas Direct DB2 Multi Directional HDTV Antenna. I started out by placed the antenna next to the TV, pointed in the direction indicated by AntennaWeb.org. Reception was OK, but could have been better.

Thanks to the fact that my house is prewired for cable, I was able to move the antenna to an upstairs bedroom, and wire it directly to my television in the family room downstairs. This helped, but didn't fix things. My dad helped me mount the antenna outside on an old satellite dish mount. Again, the hope was that this would help my reception. And again, I've been disappointed.

Unfortunately, my antenna is 'looking' directly through a line of trees about 100 feet behind my house. When the weather is windy, my reception is really bad (and it's been very windy here recently). As such, I've been disappointed with the antenna.

Does anyone here get TV over the air? If so, how do you maximize your signal strength? I'm getting frustrated with my current setup, and I'm not sure how to proceed. Cable television is ridiculously expensive, and I like having stations in HD. But my options seem so limited. Anyone got any tips?

Slashdot is running a story on how Time-Warner is considering moving to a per-gigabyte service fee. According to them, 5 percent of their customers use over 50 percent of the network. So, because of these few "bad apples," they'll make everyone pay more. Steven Levy of the Washington Post has an interesting theory that Time-Warner is trying to hobble movie rentals via iTunes (trying to keep their pay-per-view stuff alive in the process).

I hope above anything else that this 'idea' of theirs never sees the light of day. Capping folks at 5-gigabytes (which is their current idea ... can you believe that?) is incredibly poor judgment. This kind of thing will single-handedly destroy the online viewing capabilities of Netflix, it will ruin online gaming, and it will make MSDN subscriptions irrelevant.

And that might just be Time-Warner's ultimate goal. Let's hope they fail in every way possible.

There are a few gripes I've got with iTunes, all of which revolve around my subscriptions to podcasts:

1. Large downloads freeze iTunes (and sometimes the entire system) upon completion.

When a large (~250 to 500 MB) video podcast file has completed downloading, iTunes will completely freeze up. It feels to me like this hang is related to copying the file from a temporary download location to the intended destination (which is undoubtedly what iTunes is doing). Seeing as iTunes is a multi-threaded application, this should not, under any circumstance, happen. It should spawn a child thread to do the copy operation in the background, so that I can still use the application. Every once in a while, I even see my entire system hang up during this operation, which is doubly bad.

2. Some video files cannot be recycled immediately after viewing them.

After completing a video podcast, I find that I cannot immediately recycle the corresponding file from within iTunes. If I try to do so, the entry in iTunes is removed, but the file does not get removed! To recycle the file properly, I have to shut down iTunes, start it back up, and delete the entry. Somewhere a handle isn't being released properly, and the file remains locked. Again, this is a bug that could easily be solved.

3. The Windows screen saver screws up video playback.

If you have iTunes installed on a Windows system, try this experiment. Get a video file through iTunes (a video podcast for example), and start it playing. Pause the video and walk away from your computer for a while. Allow the screen saver to turn on and, when it has, come back to your computer. When the screen saver is cleared, try to play the video again. What happens? No video! This particular bug has existed for years (I've seen forum references to this bug as far back as iTunes 5 and 6), and it's apparently a known bug at Apple. That they don't get around to fixing it is very intriguing to me.

I got an email this morning mentioning the following:

This is just a notice that your DreamHost Account #XXXXX has a balance of $71.34 (including any charges not due until 2009-01-23), with $71.34 due (since 2008-12-23).

What?!? I renewed my subscription about a year ago (if I remember correctly), and I got a 2 year renewal, meaning that I should still have about a year left. Furthermore, I completely used rewards money to pay my bill (since I had it available), so my credit card was never charged to begin with. Thankfully, the credit card they have on file for me had expired, but I've lost all of my referral rewards! Needless to say, I was pretty upset by this. Then I found this post over at their emergency status blog: "billing issues". It seems like something went wrong, they know about it, and are fixing it.

I have yet to get my money back, and I have no doubt they'll fix the problem, but it bothers me nonetheless. This problem, coupled with the DreamHost hack seen back in June, are starting to concern me. Not to mention the fact that the server this blog is hosted on has degraded in performance drastically over the past several months. It might be time for me to find another web host. I'll be sure to keep you posted.

Update: To their credit, DreamHost has corrected the issue.

There's currently a lot of buzz about the supposed firing of Jeff Gerstmann, a long-time editor at GameSpot (Penny Arcade! even has a comic about the incident). He was apparently fired based on a poor review he gave for "Kane & Lynch: Dead Men," a game for the xBox 360. Eidos, who publishes the game, currently has a large advertising partnership with GameSpot for the game. This move indicates to me that Eidos was attempting to buy a good review, which they didn't get. I have no trouble believing that they had a hand in getting Mr. Gerstmann fired.

It's really sad to see when professional reviewers are forced to say one thing or another, but it's not surprising. The almighty dollar seems to make most of the decisions these days. Years ago I subscribed to Computer Gaming World magazine, but I canceled my subscription after the quality took a nose dive. The "larger" gaming websites are starting to head in that direction as well, especially after shenanigans like these. I do most of my game review reading through Metacritic, checking out what reviewers as a whole have to say about various games. I also try to seek out independent reviews, from people like myself.

This kind of story is one reason that I decided to post my own reviews here on this website. Although I don't have as much readership or visibility as the big review websites, I try to provide an alternative to the paid endorsements that publishers try to shove down our throats. Hopefully you find my reviews to be useful and honest. If so, then I'm succeeding where the large sites are failing. And that's good enough for me.

I really hate how news outfits continually refer to Cyber Monday as 'the busiest online shopping day of the year.' If you take a look at the Wikipedia article, you'll see that the term "Cyber Monday" is actually a neologism, undoubtedly created to generate public interest (and therefore, boosted sales figures). A number of online retailers point out that early December is actually a busier time than today supposedly is.

That being said, I love shopping online, and I try to do most of my holiday shopping through online outfits (though some things just have to be bought locally). How about you? Do you do your holiday shopping online, or do you head to the brick and mortar stores?

So a guy goes into a Best Buy, purchases a Western Digital hard drive, and finds out later that the box is filled with bathroom tiles. He tries to return the hard drive (since it wasn't what he thought it was), and the manager says that they can't do that. Instead, he should take up the complaint with the manufacturer. How is this even legal?

I'll just add this story to the ever-growing list of reasons why I don't shop at Best Buy. Amazon.com FTW.

I am growing increasingly frustrated with Google Maps. In the past month, on two separate occasions, Google Maps failed to find my intended destination. What really gets under my skin is the fact that Google's competition found each place without any problems.

Example 1 My family checked out the Clarksville Station restaurant in Roxboro, NC for my sister's graduation. It's a steak-house built inside of an old train station and a couple of dining cars from an actual train. It's located at 4080 Durham Road, Roxboro, NC. Let's see what the mapping services show for this query:

• Google Maps: Only locates Durham Road, not the 4080 address.
• MapQuest: Shows the location as expected.
• Yahoo! Maps: Can't find the exact location, but interestingly enough, centers the map at the exact location. Weird.
• Microsoft Live Search: Gets it exactly right.

Example 2 My car needed service recently, so I took it to Jay's Automotive, a repair place not too far away from where I live. They are located at 3510 Highway 70 West, Efland, NC. Let's see how the various mapping services do with this one:

• Google Maps: Wow. This is so far off, it's not funny.
• MapQuest: Again, MapQuest gets the location exactly.
• Yahoo! Maps: Again, they cannot locate the address, but the map is centered at the correct location.
• Microsoft Live Search: Again, Microsoft got it exactly right.

What gets me even more steamed is the lack of aerial (or satellite) images for example number 2. Google Maps only has images beginning at zoom level 6 (levels 1 through 5 are all "unavailable"). MapQuest has color images down to zoom level 3 (1 and 2 aren't available), which is very close. Yahoo! Maps has color imagery at all zoom levels, while Microsoft Live Search has images to zoom level 3 (just like MapQuest, though the image quality is very poor).

Google needs to stop spending money and effort on cheap gimmicks like their recent Street View (is that thing worthless, or what?), and instead beef up their location database and aerial photographs. I can't even see my house on Google Maps! All the other mapping services have it, so it's certainly possible to do.

Get with the program, Google. Until then, I think I'll stick to your competition (at least when satellite photographs are involved).

We got hit with a "winter weather storm" here in North Carolina, and it was a colossal disappointment. A forecast 1 to 3 inches of snow (with a 1/4 inch of ice on top of that) turned out to be a light dusting, most of which melted in a few hours time. It seems like every state in the US has gotten tons of snow this winter; it even snowed in the Arizona desert! But does North Carolina get anything? Not around here. It's like we're cursed or something.

Some time ago, my family tried out digital cable. We were thoroughly unimpressed at the 'digital quality' and subsequently dropped the service. But strangely enough, the digital artifacts that annoyed us so greatly are now showing up in the analog signal. We routinely see compression issues and dropped areas in the picture, and it only seems to be getting worse. Is Time Warner digitally encoding the signal before they send it out on the analog line? It sure seems like they are, but I don't see the benefit in doing that. Maybe it's cheaper on their end? Does anyone else with cable see this problem?

I had the great fortune of being rear-ended tonight while coming home from work. What a wonderful Christmas present, delivered early for my enjoyment! I wanted more than anything to spend the next several days dealing with insurance, collision shops, and going without a car. Whee!

It turns out that DreamHost does not allow system() calls to be executed from PHP. This nugget of knowledge essentially throws a gigantic monkey wrench into my plans for the photo album software I'm writing. I was planning on allowing the large thumbnail creation process to run in the background, while the user continued to do whatever else they wanted. Since I can't spawn another process, these plans are shot. :-(

So here's what I plan to do for the time being: instead of using two thumbnails (100 x 100 and 640 x 480) and a base image (1024 x 768), I'm switching to one thumbnail (100 x 100) and a base image (800 x 600). It's not what I had planned, but it'll have to do for now. Thoughts? Suggestions? Sympathy?

I've been meaning for some time to comment on several fast food commercials that have been airing on TV. I find each one quite repulsive, and each motivates me to stay away from its respective establishment.

First up is a McDonald's ad. In it, a team of girl soccer players plays a game on an incredibly muddy field. I guess that the McDonald's folks are trying to appeal to those who have a thing for mud-covered young women. But what really gets me is what the narrator (one of the girls in the ad, presumably) says. She tells the viewer that she is someone. And not just someone, but someone like you. So, are they trying to say that if you work at McDonald's you're a nobody? Or some kind of freak? I've certainly never thought that way of McDonald's employees. While I do consider McDonald's among the lower echelons of the job pool, I don't go around each day making fun of those people. It's sad that McDonald's own self image is so poor. I guess it's somewhat deserved, however.

Next up, is any Hardee's ad that's aired in the past few years. Hardee's has tried vigorously to change its image, after suffering incredible setbacks a number of years ago. Their new image strives to be "tough" or "macho." But, at least to me, they end up being homoerotic. There's something about listening to two scruffy guys chew that's just not appealing. I get a major case of the jibblies any time I see one of these. Jibbly jibbly.

Finally are the recent Wendy's ads. What's up with the off key whistling that goes on? It's not musical and it's incredibly disturbing. I really miss Dave Thomas; his ads were simple and to the point.

I don't know what it is with ads these days, but the quality has really gone down the toilet. Not that ads were that good to begin with.

It's time for a rant that I've been saving for some time now.

I spend more time these days walking the virtual aisles of Amazon.com than I do the aisles of a brick and mortar store. And I couldn't be happier. No lines, no travel, and no hassles from the sales staff. But I have become startlingly desensitized to the actual shopping experience. I recently went into the local Best Buy in the hopes of looking at a Canon A620. Not only did they not have a Canon A620, their camera selection was literally worse than the Wal-Mart next door (I know because I drove over there to look).

Immediately upon entering the Best Buy camera department, one of the oh-so-helpful sales staff came up and, unsurprisingly, asked if I needed help. I said no, he said OK, then followed that with something which I have yet to fully understand (he said it all so fast). The only part I truly remember were the words "non-commission." After realizing they didn't have what I wanted, I began to wander around the store aimlessly, pondering the Best Buy shopping experience as a whole.

The particular store I happened to visit is surprisingly small. As a result, each aisle is, quite literally no more than 2 or 3 feet wide. Two people can barely pass each other on any given aisle, making it difficult to even browse their merchandise. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more obese shoppers occasionally get stuck, requiring the aid of the local rescue squad and the Jaws of Life to extract them from their predicament.

As I'm wandering around, I casually glance at their CD collection. They have absolutely nothing from my wish list. Which isn't too surprising, considering that I'm into some rather obscure music. But I've been to Best Buy stores in the past looking for the staples, stuff like Abbey Road and Pet Sounds, and they didn't have either. How shocking is that?

As I'm leaving the store, disappointed in my quest and vowing never to return, a Best Buy manager busily chased after another guy who was also leaving. This particular individual had a bag with what looked like both an item and a receipt, but the manager kept insisting on writing him a citation. If the local police force is turning to Best Buy employees for help, we're all doomed. Doomed I tells ya!

This final little charade a least brought a smile to my face. Something that the Best Buy shopping experience has never done. Or never will do. Why go to a store that doesn't have what I want, charges higher prices, is cramped, and has surly employees? Until I can find an answer to that question, I'll be doing my best to avoid all Best Buy outlet stores. I couldn't be happier.

This week, Circuit City is selling Half-Life 2: Episode 1 for $8. You read that right: eight dollars. I paid $17.95, thinking I was getting a "pre-order discount." Although I am aware that I recently said I'd gladly pay $19.95 again for another episode, I'm afraid that this revelation has changed my mind. Never again will I pre-order a game from Valve. It's highway robbery, plain and simple.

Another thing that I'm mildly annoyed with is that episodes 1 through 3 are Half-Life 3, according to Gabe Newell. What? So why aren't they being called Half-Life 3: Episode X? Well, it seems that the folks at Valve screwed up. Things seem to be getting a little sloppy over there. Could this be the beginning of the end? I certainly hope not.