Author: Thom

Yes, my life can finally return to normal. My beloved Birds are heading to the Super Bowl! The Championship Game was a good one, but certainly didn’t feel like the domination it was for most of it. I told Lisa at one point, “I don’t want a good game, I just want the win.” I’ve seen enough good football games in my life, now I just want to see the Eagles play in the Super Bowl. And I will finally get that come February 6th.
Continue reading “Super Bowl, Baby!”

I forgot to mention earlier, but Hoboken Rocks (kind of an off-shoot of ArtKore) is running a show tomorrow night at Maxwell’s in Hoboken. Sure, it’s eight whole dollars, but I can assure you that five of the bands are awesome, and I’ve heard good things about the others. Lisa and I plan on being there for any who wish to join in the fun.

HOBOKEN ROCKS Maiden Voyage @ Maxwell’s
1039 Washington Street
Hoboken, NJ 201-653-1703

Marc Giannotti 8:00
Crewman Number Six 8:30
Butterspy 9:00
Motel Creeps 10:00
Karyn Kuhl 10:30
High Speed Chase 11:00
eugene 12:00

Doors 7:30 – $8.00

I forgot to mention the game today. I’ve been running on football overload the past two weeks thanks to the playoffs. But yesterday was exactly what I needed – a real game featuring the Eagles. Since they clinched home field advantage sometime in the preseason and have been resting starters October, I’ve been desperate for a game. And as much as I was certain all of their R&R would not render them rusty, you can’t help but be slightly affected by all of the negative media around you.

Fortunately, the Eagles shut up all of the doubters, and thoroughly dominated the Vikings in a game that was not nearly as close as the 27-14 final may indicate. And to make it even better, I discovered that my new DVR allows me to view HD channels. Which means I got to watch the game in the most glorious and pristine widescreen format that you can imagine. I wanted to cry… well, not really, but you get the idea.
Continue reading “Fourth time’s a charm”

Apparently Jets fans are not too happy with Doug Brien‘s two failed attempts at beating the Steelers this weekend. At least they’ve kept their sense of humor.

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.)