Year: 2005

How did we ever get around without DVR? I mean you had your Must See TV and the Sunday night line-up and who knows what might premiere on a Tuesday. There was barely enough time to eat, let alone get in all of that idiot box gawking.

Seriously, I’m not as bad as I used to be with TV watching. There are only a few shows that I watch regularly, and I know that if I miss them I can just download them on eMule later. But Lisa and I have an ever-growing affection for shows of the TLC variety. “In a Fix” tops our list, but we’re also big on “What Not to Wear” and “Clean Sweep”, with Lisa jumping to the Home Garden channel for the latest in “10 Years Younger” and “Designer Finals” when I turn my head. This bizarre fixation requires an entry all its own, for now let’s just concentrate on the subject at hand.
Continue reading “My life on pause”

I’m sure by now you all know about the whole Free iPods thing. No, it is not a scam. But you do take the risk of not getting anything but some spam out of the whole deal. I decided to take a look at some of the offers around to see if anything looked worthwhile (no really interested in an iPod). Well, I would like an XBox, but Lisa would probably be really pissed if I bought one. So I found Smart Conga Line (a site that tries to pool people referrals together to make it as efficient as possible) and signed up at Prize Cube because it only required 3 referrals. I signed up for a Real Rhapsody account, which I will cancel within 14 days.

I’m not gonna beg here or anything. If you guys are interested, you can give me a referral directly or sign up at the conga line to help out a stranger (and possibly me). Don’t worry, I won’t be offended if no one does it. But I figured I’d give it a try.

Jess at Apropros of Something has been rewriting old comics. I cannot stress this enough: DO NOT DRINK ANYTHING BEFORE READING THESE. Seriously, this is some of the funniest stuff I’ve ever read.

What happened to all the cute philosophical snippets that came with links to cheap v|@ge rA? Where are the random quotes that pointed me to online gambling sites? Lately the spammers have just gotten lazy, and are posting comments with 20-30 links and no real text to try to hide it. I don’t really understand that, as I have a low limit on the links allowed so not a single one has made it past the moderation queue.

More and more this comment spam is becoming like e-mail spam. Aside from the “Night of a Thousand Comments” at the beginning of December, I tend to get a couple every other day. They trickle into my moderation queue (much like a junk folder), I double check for anything legitimate, and then delete them all. Annoying, but as long as it stays at this level I don’t really care that much. Although it bugs me that I’m writing about it again.

I’m sorting through a lot of my old computer crap that has followed me through the years in an effort to clean up the home office front. While rebuilding my server and dumping old cases will help a great deal, there’s still tons of old CDs and floppies lying around for no particular reason. This clutter is just killing my desk, and it’s got to go. And we’re talking a lot of unredeemable crap, too. These aren’t backups of old projects and creative endeavors (ok, maybe a few are). Instead, this is a repository of outdated programs and irrelevant drivers. I mean, do I really still need the installation disk for my original 2x DVD drive that required a separate decoder card? What about the 8 disks that comprised Adobe PhotoShop 3.05? Perhaps it is time that I moved the few remaining backups from those days onto CD.

In the meantime, I thought I might share some of the gems that have been found scattered throughout this mess. While there are many interesting bootleg copies of outdated software (hey, PFS: First Choice was an awesome wordprocessing program for its time), there’s a bizarre assortment of honest-to-goodness original disks that have cropped up, including the following drivers:

• Gateway Solo 5100 – my first laptop from a college internship
• Multiple Adaptec cards, as well as several versions of MaxBlast Plus (from Maxtor)
• Lexmark 5700 – my first inkjet (back when the cheap ones were a couple hundred dollars)
• Diamond Stealth64 (DRAM) – one of the first video cards I ever bought that listed how much memory it included.
• Three different Sound Blaster cards and the above mentioned Dxr2 DVD drive
• Various joysticks and mouses for Windows 3.11
• EtherDisk versions 3.1, 4.1, and 5.3, not to mention a disk for the Netgear FA310TX (famous for the fact that Windows NT 4.0 actually detected it during installation)

Speaking of Windows NT 4.0, I also found the ever-elusive 3 startup disks. Beyond that we have a paper airplane program from who-knows-when, and a photo library on 4 floppies (that’s right – 200 pictures in about 4 megs). The greatest find, however, is a tossup between an AOL 3.0 Program Disk, and all 8 disks (1 startup and 7 game) for the 256 color version of King’s Quest V.

Okay, so obviously I’m not getting rid of some of those prizes, but I think I can finally let go of the 4 year old ABIT drivers. Next up is going through the pirated copies of such treasures as Print Shop Deluxe and WordPerfect (version 5.1, of course).

P.S.(If you recognized half of what I was talking about, you should probably add a good 15-20 points to your nerd score.)

Not very surprising. As much of a nerd/geek I’ve been most of my life, I break a lot of the stereotypes.

(thanks to Sandy)

So I told you that things got all fudged up on Tuesday, but gave nary a detail. Now I’ll try to recount my stupidity.

For starters, I absolutely LOVE the way WordPress has been progressing. And due to my impatience, I became a fairly early adopter of using the more “cutting edge” builds. I just couldn’t wait to sink my teeth into static pages (see the “About” page), themes (ok, I’m still using Kubrick, but at least it’s handled as a bundled theme), and the various admin improvements. Now that the Dashboard is a truly functional page (it displays the 5 latest posts and comments, as well as drafts, stats, and the latest from the Dev Blog)… well I’m just giddy. The point of all this is that I’m running the beta version here and often lose my head in the “excitement” of upgrades.
Continue reading “Wha’ppen?”

Apparently I’m suing Apple. That’s right, I’ve grown tired of not being able to use other stores with my iPod… Wait a second, I don’t own an iPod. And I’m not from California. Is this some sort of evil twin? With the same name? Who probably doesn’t even look like me?!?!

I found it amusing. Especially since I hate Apple. So I like the idea that somewhere there will be a court case against them with my name on it.

If you happened to be poking around the site the last few hours, I’m sure you noticed that it… well, it wasn’t there. A simple upgrade and permalink adjustment turned into a huge fiasco that brought the whole site offline. That’s what you get for insisting on running off nightly builds. I’m too tired to talk about it now, or clear up the remaining issues. That will all have to wait until the morning.

Does any song come even close to rockin’ as hard as The Edgar Winter Group’s “Frankenstein”? The radio can tune in at any point during that song, and I can’t help but smile. Why are today’s listeners so obsessed with lyrics?