something happening somewhere

Some heavy thunderstorms in the area knocked out our electricity for a few hours last night. Everything went dark except the glowing screen of my laptop. We used it to help us find a flashlight and a little battery-powered lantern. By the time I called KUB for an update, the automated voice told me there were still about 3,000 customers without power.

Rather than just sit there, we watched two old TV shows that had been saved on my computer for almost a year. When my TiVo starts to get full, I will transfer some shows to my laptop using the TiVo Desktop software. I don't always get around to watching them, although I did make a dent in my archived collection during the writers strike.

My son and I watched an episode of "The Loop." The single-camera comedy was a short-lived favorite of ours that was never given a chance to find an audience. In almost every episode, the airline employees are asked to find ways to cut costs. Maybe the show was ahead of its time.

Then my wife and I watched an episode of "Monk," a good show that I rarely see. I only recorded this episode because it was about a radio host suspected of murder. That idea has been used before, going back to "Matlock" and "Perry Mason." I thought that Steven Weber was very convincing as a modern-day shock jock. And I should know.

When the new fall schedules are announced at the upfronts next week, a couple of shows that I had picked last year will be gone. "Back to You" and "Aliens in America" got the bad news this weekend. I'm all caught up on "Back to You" but there are quite a few "Aliens in America" episodes on my TiVo. I'll move them over to my laptop in case the power goes out again.

lines of code of Harry

Video games have never been my thing. I was too cheap to ever put my quarters into an arcade game and too interested in other aspects of my TV and computer to get involved in gaming at home. The computer games I owned were titles like "Jeopardy" and "You Don't Know Jack." Even though I'm not a gamer, I still think I want to see the documentary "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters," which is about a champion Donkey Kong player. I've heard many good things about it.

Like any normal boy his age, my son enjoys video games. He plays "Madden '08" at home and is going to a "Mario Kart" party tomorrow night. Today I jokingly told him that there was a new game coming out that may finally get me interested in picking up a controller and exercising my thumbs. The game will be based on one of my favorite TV shows, "Dexter." I've previously written about the Showtime series, which is currently being shown on CBS. Are any of you watching it on regular TV? I wonder what a "Dexter" video game will be like. Maybe you'll control the main character as he goes to the store to stock up on cellophane, duct tape and syringes before going about his bloody business.

key club 2: welcome to the lockbox

The sequel arrived today. As I suspected, Fox sent me a promotional lockbox to generate interest in "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles."



The box came with a note from both Fox Affiliate Marketing in Los Angeles and WTNZ in Knoxville. They must not realize I'm one of the deejays who saved the key they sent yesterday. I was disappointed to see that they taped another one to the outside of the lockbox. C'mon! Where's the fun in that? Of course, I used yesterday's key to open the box, just on principle.



The lockbox contained a DVD with the first two episodes and a shiny 125 MB flash drive. The drive held an electronic press kit with some short MPG promos and PDF files of cast bios and other production notes. I'm still thinking that it would have been cool if they had sent the key a few weeks earlier and challenged me to find it in the clutter on my desk once the lockbox arrived.

infinibyte

The 512 megabyte miniSD card from my cell phone served as a conversation starter for my son and me the other day. I think our family's first computer had 512 kilobytes of RAM. As I held up the 512MB card, I told my son to picture 1000 desktop computers in our house, together totaling the same amount of RAM as I held on my fingertip. We were looking online at the price of a microSD card to go in the next generation of phone that I will get as part of the "new every two" upgrade. The micro chips look to be about half the size but with 8 times the capacity of the mini chip I got two years ago.

During his college career, my son will probably get to use computers with terabytes of memory. Naturally, he wanted to know what was bigger than a terabyte. We looked it up and found a list all the way from bit up to the most amusing of the names, brontobyte (unofficial).

1 Bit = Binary Digit
8 Bits = 1 Byte
1000 Bytes = 1 Kilobyte
1000 Kilobytes = 1 Megabyte
1000 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte
1000 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte
1000 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte
1000 Petabytes = 1 Exabyte
1000 Exabytes = 1 Zettabyte
1000 Zettabyte = 1 Yottabyte
1000 Yottabyte = 1 Brontobyte

Two days later I was skimming through the Knoxville Blog Network and saw something about bits and bytes that I might have overlooked if my son and I hadn't just been talking about it on Monday. An entry from Think Time had a link to a fascinating post by James S. Huggins that gives you an idea of how much memory it takes to hold various types of information.