Since almost day 1, Creative Labs products have been misrepresented, miss-advertised, and worst of all, broke.  I have owned many of the early Sound Blaster cards, and I am going to break down what issues I have had with each of them.

·         Sound Blaster Pro

o    Ok, I will admit, this card is awesome.  I still have mine in my “retro-486” computer, built to 1992 specs.

·         Sound Blaster 16

o    I was into MIDI at the time and it did not really work well, stuck notes, wrong notes, timing issues, and  other such errors.

·         Sound Blaster AWE32

o    I bought this because my SB16 died, but when you see things like SB16 being 16bit, you would think the AWE32 would be 32bit.  Nope, they just lied to us.  It was the same 16 bit card as the SB16, but with RAM this time…  Go figure.

·         SoundBlaster Live!

o    It had some sampling issues, and a good amount of noise when used with four speakers, but otherwise was a solid card.

o    If you want EAX support on Vista, you have to pay $9.99 to Creative.

·         Sound Blaster Audigy

o    Had static and pops from about day 90 of its life.

o    The drivers killed my computer on a weekly basis

o    CTHelper.exe would sit at 100% CPU when playing games or starting the computer. 

o    It would BSOD my computer (back when using XP) during shutdown (every time).

o    They advertised it as supporting 24bit sound, but it really only supported 16bit.  They were sued in a class action lawsuit and lost, if you bought one, they owe you $62.

o    Huge amounts of distortion due do the hardware re-sampling (unless the input was 48kHz, 16 bit).

o    If you want EAX support on Vista, you have to pay $9.99 to Creative.

·         Sound Blaster X-Fi Ti (PCI-E version)

o    The installation took me about five hours to complete.  The correct way to upgrade (I found out) is the following:

§  Uninstall old card software

§  Remove old card, restart computer

§  Find all references in the registry and delete them (you need to do this by hand)

§  Find all files on your computer and delete them

§  Install the new drivers

§  Restart

§  Shut down (don’t do this during the restart above)

§  Install new card

§  Restart

§  Re-install drivers (so it fixes the “High Definition Audio Device” issue)

§  Restart

§  Use the web update tool to get the newest version of the drivers

§  Restart (forced)

o    The computer will randomly change the speaker “positioning”.  For example, YouTube videos will play out of just the center speaker and then all of the sudden it starts playing on all of the speaker, but all of them are distorted.  Like if you have a home 5.1 setup and unplug the center speaker while watching a movie, but in this case the center is still working.

The company itself upsets me too:

·         In 1998, Creative sued Aureal because Creative believed they owned a patent on the idea of making a sound card for PCI slots.  Result, they lose, but then buy Aureal for $32,000,000

·         In 2008, Creative attacks Daniel_K for making their products work on Vista (yes, I am over-simplifying).

As a good note though, they do seem to be going out of business.  In 2006 they lost $188 million.  2007 was profitable, but only because Apple gave them $100 million.  In 2008, they sold their headquarters for $181.4 million.  For their FY2009, Q1, there revenues are down 24%, and they lost $32.2 million.  Sadly, it seems like they still have $600 million left, which means I will only have to put up with their products for another 5 years of so.

 I heard this on NPR the other day and just happened to come across it today:

Max Raabe - Tainted Love

I love this style of music that I can best describe as "old" sounding.  With that odd cadence of male singing that has fully died out it seems.  It is the same kind of voice you will see if you play games that are tying to highlight the 20-30s era, such as Fallout 3 and BioShock.  

 I got a YoYoJam Legacy for Christmas and was amazing at how non-responsive it was.  After playing with it for a half-hour or so, I was still unable to get it to bind without doing 3 or 4 loops in the bind.  I chalked it up to my lack of skill, but as it turns out, it is a error when they put it together.  They forgot to take the stickers off of the o-ring response.  If you look at your "o-ring" and it is white (and your yo-yo is not white), then yours has the same problem too.  I just took a pin, pried up the o-ring, took off the sticker and put it back together and all is good.  I can do a bind in one or two loops without an issue.

Here it is with the stickers removed so you can see how "not white" it is afterwards:

 EDIT (2/4/2009):

After a few days the binding was all messed up and it never really got a "tight" bind as you could always just unwind it buy pulling hard-ish on the string.  I later got some "Flowable Silicone" from YoYoNation and now it is perfect.  That being said, I also picked up a Dark Magic (thanks to seeing the videos on ExpertVillage) and perfer that a bit better.  It is a little lighter, or at least feels that way.

As a side note, I really enjoyed ordering from YoYoNation.  They even hand wrote a thank you on the packing slip.  It was a really nice touch.  On the down side, they website does not seem to like it (sometimes pulls up blank pages unless I manually refresh) and they need an option to hide stuff that is out of stock and will not be coming back in stock.

 So I ran the 2008 Reindeer Run 5K today at 8AM in the cold.  I had alot more fun then I thought I would.  Anyway while it was a "chip-timed" race, there was no start mat and so when the race started I did not really run for the first bit becase I was waiting for the mat.  Probolly only lost like 30 seconds off my time I guess.  I finished with a 30:52 which is a personal worst.  This is the first time I ran without timing myself or using GPS to push my pace and it really shows.  The course was pretty good and the weather was quite nice really (about 45 degress).  

The reason I (and my wife) ran that race was because one of my good friends, Jordan, was going to use it as his first 5K run to celebrate the finish of his "Couch to 5K" program.  He did not make it and so my wife, my co-worker Kevin (who finished with a 21:00 something), his girlfriend Christine, and I all laugh at him.

EDIT:  I guess he was there, so I am sorry for saying I will laugh at you Jordan.  To be fair, he did say he only go to the start like 30 seconds before it started.

So I strongly avoid talking about the 3 "off-limit" topics (religion, politics, and money) here because I cannot validate my message will come across cleanly and clearly.  Those who know me personally know I am willing to talk about almost any subject if asked, just only in one-on-one or small group discussions so that people can reach understanding with others, not just reaffirm their pervious beliefs.  

Anyway, Jon Stewart had a clip with the statement "semantics is a cold comfort when it comes to humanity", in reference to why the definition of a word (marriage) can/should be used to prevent people in love from sharing their love in the legal and structured methods that our society promotes (and I think we do actively promote marriage). 

Oddly enough, when I got married (to my wife Kelly), I was asked to find a poem to put on our wedding program that talked about love.  There is only one poem that comes to mind for me that explains the 'truest' essence of the connection that is love.  It is the poem, Full Moon by Alvin Lau, about two women getting married.  There are only two reasons that I did not book him to come (he lives in Chicago) and present his poem at my wedding.

1. It was too long to put on the program anyway.
2. My wife's mother is a fundamentalist (bible-based) Christian, and it is supposed to be our family's day as much as our own.

The last line of the poem is "Marriage is about love, nothing else matters."  And that is what it comes down to.  The people who fought and died to create our country said in the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to eb self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that amoung thease are [...] the pursuit of Happiness."  To me, I think the public and legal recognition of marriage is core to a couple's happiness and it is the responsibility of every self-described American to help every other human fight against 'semantics' interfering with their Rights.

Up until 1967 (Loving v. Virginia), states were allowed to (and did) prohibit marrage between members of different races via miscegenation laws.  In Lawrence v. Texas (a 2003 case overturning the 'Texas Homosexual Conduct Law'), the majority opinion (Kennedy, Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer) stated the following: 

"times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress."

I only hope that time will again prove that statement remains true.

Jason R. Shaver

Sidenote, for those who enjoy reading about Law topics, take some time to look at how substantive due process was applied in Lawrence V. Texas.  Substantive due process is (basically) a protection for rights and liberties not expressly defined in the constitution, such as:

• Use of contraceptives (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965)
• Right to marry (Loving v. Virginia, 1967)
• Freedom of contract (Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 1923)

And in Lawrence v. Texas, it was used to say that private actions (such as sexual activites) being outlawed are a violation of privacy and liberty, defined in the 14th Amendment, without due process.  It also defined that homosexual behavior can be covered under the 14th Amendment's equal protection of the laws (I.E. you can ban it for everyone, or no-one, but not just homosexuals), although only O'Connor chose to make that part of her decision. 

2nd Side note, I am not a lawyer, or have any training as a laywer.  It is only an interest of mine.  If I misspoke above, please let me know.

There are too many "lolcats" on the internet, but the ones we keep seeing are the "same old ones".  So... :

So, in doing some CSLA stuff, I wrote code something like the following:

MethodInfo ValidateMethod = type.GetMethod("ValidateType");
if (ValidateMethod != null)
{
	ValidationRules.AddRule(ValidateMethod, new RuleArgs(String.Empty));
}

and got the follow error: "Error 13 The best overloaded method match for 'CQSDKExtension.Csla.Validation.ValidationRules.AddRule(CQSDKExtension.Csla.Validation.RuleHandler, string)' has some invalid arguments"

Then I figured out that I could do the following:

if (ValidateMethod != null)
{
	ValidationRules.AddRule(Delegate.CreateDelegate(type, ValidateMethod), new RuleArgs(String.Empty));
}

but got this error: "Error 13 The best overloaded method match for 'CQSDKExtension.Csla.Validation.ValidationRules.AddRule(CQSDKExtension.Csla.Validation.RuleHandler, string)' has some invalid arguments"

So I did this:

MethodInfo ValidateMethod = type.GetMethod("ValidateType");
if (ValidateMethod != null)
{
	ValidationRules.AddRule((RuleHandler)Delegate.CreateDelegate(type, ValidateMethod), new RuleArgs(String.Empty));
}

Does anyone else find that recently Google Chrome does not open BitTorrent .torrent files without a minute or more delay.  It just sits at 1KB while downloading the file.  I have found that the general errors of Google Chrome (which is beta I admit) cause it to no longer be my "default" browser, but I expect to go back to it.  I used Windows 7 and I.E. 8 for a bit and was unimpressed (with I.E. 8, Win7 was awesome). 

Edit: I just figured out that it is any file downloaded via Google Chrome that has this issue.  it just sits there after the start for about 20-30 seconds.

 Some of my closer friends will know that I am a fan of Yo-Yoing (or however you are supposed to say that).  A much larger group of friends know that I am a fan of dance (Swing as my best from, but really dance in general).  This guy does a good job of both.