Good read

Note: this was written on May 5th, but not uploaded until June 2nd
While browsing the infamous "Information Superhighway," I thought about visiting wilwheaton.net (one l, yes I know), so I did. Wil Wheaton is the guy that played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation if you didn't know. Anyways, I remember seeing him on an episode of The Screen Savers, and he was a really good host. So I've tried to visit his site more often since he seems pretty interesting. I've thought about sending him a fan mail, but I don't want to have him have to bother with yet another piece of it. Perhaps I should since I've started using Outlook Express instead of Eudora so that I could try out the encryption stuff, and he requests that you send signed mail so that it won't automagically get put in the spam bin along with the requests to give you larger and firmer breasts. I know I want some of those!

Back to the point. While I was at his site, I read about how he was publishing a new book and wanted to know what the best way to advertise. Anyways he mentioned about reading an article on kuro5hin entitled Tip Jar as a Revenue Model. I read the article and it seemed pretty interesting. I do agree that it doesn't seem like a good way to get a lot of money compared to actually getting books published in "dead-tree format" as he calls it, and that he probably got a lot more money than normally would be generated because of how many people gave him money simply for being one of the first people to try the method. I don't want to repeat the article, so just go ahead and read it yourself if you're interested.

He put up the article not to give a plug out to his book, but I was interested since he said that almost everyone that commented on the content of the book thought it was good. I don't think that he would be he would lie like that to generate revenue since you don't have to pay for anything if you don't like it, so I did a little bit of sniffing around to find out where it was and ended up reading the first three chapters before I went to bed and then read the rest in the morning. In my opinion it's a really good read, and I put $5 into his "tip jar" via paypal. I'll probably even buy a copy of the printed copy if it ever gets published on say amazon.

PVR Update: I got mythtv working again on my new mobo but I still can't get the on-board video card working properly (it's an s3 prosavage ddr). I ordered a new GeForce2 MX with tv-out and it should be here within the week and then I'll be able to watch the stuff I've recorded. I've mainly recorded stuff on commercial tv because I haven't made the IR Blaster to control the DirecTV receiver I have. Actually my dad will probably make it for me and ship it to me since he's much better at making things than I am. I don't want to fry my motherboard :). Also the other thing I'll need to get is an svideo to RCA adapter/cable since I don't have svideo on my tv or vcr which kind of sucks. Hopefully I'll have it done soon though.

I'm actually also thinking about swapping motherboards with the PVR box because it has 6 USB slots and my computer only has 4, but I don't know if the A7M266 board will support the Athlon XP 1800+ CPU, or if the PVR box even needs the extra oomph of it and can settle with my 1.333GHz Thunderbird processor. I really ought to put a comment box down here again so I can get feedback on the stuff I write.