According to a guy in Afghanistan, the reason they were trying to attack a US military base was b/c the United States “is the leader of Europe and the leading infidel in the world.” See, I’d thought someone was going to bring up that South Park episode, but they just up and moved us into Europe. Without asking. On a Thursday. Now North America’s just Canada and Mexico. How boring is that? I mean, I’ve never been to Mexico and, I’ll grant you that Montreal was really beautiful when I was there this past summer, but how great can a continent really be without Choc’lit N’awleansor the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?!?
And with regard to the last sentence in the first article, does that mean the boycott is going to expand to include France?
I wonder how many of the Danish flags that are getting burned were actually produced in Denmark? They should really look into that. If I were Denmark, I’d be flooding the market with flags. I mean, let’s face it: they’re gonna get burned anyway (the flags, I mean). Some merchants saw it coming. Too bad the Danish couldn’t have at least cornered the market on their own flags. Of course, this definitely makes me think that, in today’s world, a flag company might not be a bad thing to invest a lil’ green in.
Oh and the, quite possibly, funniest part from the article above:
Abu Dayya sources some of his flags from suppliers in Taiwan, but he buys Israeli flags from a merchant in Israel, even though he sells them to be burnt at anti-Israeli rallies.
*emphasis mine.
See, if Denmark could be like that, they’d be making money off people who hate ‘em. That’s just crazy.
Apple’s offering a 1GB Nano, now, for $149. They’ve also lowered the prices of their 512KB and 1GB iPod Shuffles to $69 and $99 respectively. Since this probably means that they’re soon going to stop offering the Shuffle completely, if you’ve thought about getting one, and would prefer it to a Nano, this might be the best (and last) chance to do so.
Looks like the Sony-Ericsson P990 isn’t going to be released until sometime during Q2 2006. Whether it’s the cause or not, I don’t know, but the blow was softened by the announcement that, when it does ship, it’ll be shipping with MS ActiveSync support. That’s awesome b/c it means I could sync it with my (or Beck’s) PDA and our Exchange server here at work. It’ll also have support for RIM’s Blackberry, but I don’t use that and it may not even be around by the time the phone’s out.
Damn the legos. Has anything happened to the Ecco shoe store at the mall?
Spoke too soon, I guess.
…7 minutes later.
“Now if only I could track down the winning jackpot numbers….”
_>
I don’t know how many times I’ve said (or heard someone say) that they wished there was a way to be notified of replies to their comments (on another blog) the way they are blog posts. If only there were some way to subscribe to a comment thread and be notified when someone replies to your comments. Forums have this capability, but it’s been (noticeably) missing from blogs for some time.
Well now there’s (or will be, once it’s out of beta) CoComment. It’s basically an external tracker for all the comment threads that you’re currently a part of. You don’t even have to have a blog. It keeps them separated into “conversations” that you can track and reply to right from the web site’s interface. You can even get an RSS feed of your current conversations, if that’s your thing. They mention the future possibility of SMS/IM/email alerts for conversation updates as well. Now if only I could track down an invitation code…
So I’ve mentioned before about all the shows I’m watching. I don’t know that I’ve picked anything else up, but I’ve got a pretty full line-up as it is.
Mondays: Surface. This show is really amazing. It starts off grabbing you with the story at the beginning and doesn’t leave you with the same slow, drawn-out feeling that Invasion does. There’s only one episode left in the season, but there hasn’t yet been an announcement as to whether it’s getting picked up for a second season.
Tuesdays: Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Wednesdays: Lost, Invasion and Veronica Mars. If you don’t know what Lost is about, then you should stop reading this page right now. Really. Stop. Stop, go somewhere else, and stare at your television until you start to imagine it’s ambulatory. You obviously haven’t been using it for anything else. Invasion, just as Surface, is a show that was spawned from network television’s need to exploit the market they saw with the popularity of Lost. I was lucky enough to have started watching Invasion before I started watching Surface. I’m not sure why this happened but, because it did, I was able to get into (and enjoy) it without comparing it to Surface. See, they’re both good in their own ways. They’re trying to fit perfectly into this pseudo-genre that’s emerged from Lost, but they’re different enough in the way they tackle the story and build suspense that comparing them to each other is like comparing James Bond and latex condoms. (…) In any event, they need to be appreciated separately and I was better able to do that having watched several episodes of Invasion before I began Surface. Anyway. The third one, Veronica Mars, is probably the singularity among all my viewing pleasures. Even Smallville has it’s SciFi qualities, while Veronica Mars doesn’t even come close. I’m not even sure how to describe it without making myself seem like a teenage girl, but it’s up there with my favorite shows of all time. Jaimie got me hooked on it after I’d lent her Firefly and Smallville. Veronica Mars and Wonderfalls were both shows that had been recommended to me after I’d purchased Smallville and Firefly from Amazon. I’d looked at them, but had never quite made it to the “I’m buying this” stage b/c this was also around the time that Beck and I were getting back together. Yada yada, she loaned them to me and I think they’re awesome.
Thursdays: Smallville. This is my favorite show on television. It has been for a few years now. I’m pretty sure that Clark could decide he was in love with Lex and Lois could have a sex change and I’d probably keep watching it. I’d cry during every episode, but I’d keep watching it. Though, to be honest, I’d much rather Lois and Lana fell in love. Tears, just the same, but different. Much different. Anyway, Smallville rocks even without that unlikely hotness.
Friday: Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis and Battlestar Galactica. I’ve been a Stargate since the movie first hit the ground and I’ve fallen more in love with the Stargate universe with every year and exponentially so with the addition of Stargate Atlantis. For some reason, Stargate Atlantis’ Torrents are available from Canada weeks before the episodes even air in the US. I’m not quite sure how that works out, but I’m like 8 episodes ahead. Meh. Battlestar Galactica is actually more of a recent addition. I’d seen the SciFi channel miniseries when it came on a couple of years ago, but hadn’t really fallen in love with it. I saw that they’d made it into a series and put it on my Amazon wishlist as something to remember some day if I wanted something new to watch. Well, as luck would have it, my mother saw it on my wishlist and bought it for me as a Christmas present. It’s much the same as it was as a miniseries, but for some reason I like it exponentially more. Once I started watching it, I did nothing else until I was done and I’m now caught up with season 2.
Saturday and Sunday… Nothing comes on TV these days. But considering the massive amounts of downloading I have to accomplish to have the 7 hours of television from the previous 3 nights (I download Surface on Tuesday), it works out well. I get them downloaded and watch them before I have to go back to work. It’s almost as if there were a god and he/she had a direct concern with my television viewing pleasure.
Others… There are others. There’s the above-mentioned Wonderfalls.
Wonderfalls was a short-lived series about a young woman who, one day and “out of the blue” starts experiencing inanimate objects talking to her and telling her to do things (but in a good, “not-telling-her-to-kill-people” way). Only 4 episodes ever made it to primetime but the fans were so passionate about it and were so adamant about it’s release that it was sold on DVD with all 13 of the recorded episodes. I really, really like this show and hate that it was cancelled. Just like Firefly, though, I’m glad that I found it after it was on and was cancelled; I’d have lost my mind if I loved a show as much as I have those two and then lost it to corporate ignorance and greed.
Another show that I’m watching these days is The Boondocks.
Matt was the first one to bring Boondocks to my attention, though I didn’t actually watch it for some time. It’s on Adult Swim on Cartoon Network and, as such, doesn’t have a weekly schedule that I’ve been able to decode yet. I mean, it’s supposed to come on every Sunday night at 11PM, but new episodes aren’t released every week. I dunno. So far there’s been 10 episodes and I’ve enjoyed them all.
…it’s an digital entertainment experience.
I suppose it goes without saying that I’ve spent a good bit of time on my 360 since I got back from the US with it. At first, all I really had to play was Madden ‘06, Kameo:EoP and Need For Speed: Most Wanted.
Kameo is the game that I got so that there would be something for Chullain to play while I was in the US. It’s a fun game, no doubt, but it’s just not the type that I tend to sit down to. I’ll most likely play it again at some point, but I haven’t really touched it since I got back.
Madden ‘06 was an unusual purchase for me. I haven’t owned a “sports” title since Mike Tyson’s Punchout. There were two main factors that led directly to its purchase. The bundle I pre-ordered came with 3 game choices. At the time, there wasn’t any information available as to what games were actually going to be released on “launch day.” As a result, two of the games I selected weren’t available at launch and weren’t going to ship until after I’d already left for Kuwait. As this meant the only game that I’d have to play was Kameo, I needed at least one more game purchase. Of the available games, there was Call of Duty 2, Madden ‘06, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Perfect Dark: Zero and, I think, Project Gotham Racing 3. Well, one of the games I’d pre-ordered was Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, so I didn’t want to order another “war game.” I also didn’t want a first-person shooter, so that cut out CoD2 and PDZ. I got Madden ‘06 b/c I really hadn’t given sports games a chance and b/c I thought it might give me another multiplayer game (most of my games tend to be single-player). NFS was the choice for the racing game mostly b/c there was more media available and b/c it seemed to be more “fun” and “arcade-like” than PGR3. Madden’s a decent game. I guess I’m not a huge sports fan, b/c I’ve really only picked it up a couple of times. I don’t really follow football anyway, so maybe that should have been a sign. I should have gotten Call of Duty 2.
Need for Speed, though? Naw, man. That’s the pimp juice, right there. It may be based solely on my comparing it to the other two games I had at the time, but NFS:MW is definitely my favorite 360 title. There were many a night that I had trouble sleeping b/c my adrenaline was still pumping from that game.
I’ve also been playing a lot of the arcade games that are available for download from the Xbox Live Marketplace. Hexic and Bejeweled 2 are both addictive as hell. Geometry Wars: Evolved is probably the best arcade game available out there. The only thing that sucks about it is me. I was actually feeling pretty good about my constant improvement. I got my score over 200,000 once. And then I saw someone with a score of 12,000,000 or some such nonsense. BAH!
I do think that one of the coolest things about the 360 is the marketplace, though. Being able to download game and system patches, game demos and movie trailers is fantastic. That’s how I was able to decide that I wanted Full Auto and most certainly did not want PGR3. Speaking of which, I just got Call of Duty 2 in the mail the other day (that’s how I know I should have chosen it over Madden). It’s unbelievable. I’ve only had a little bit of time to it, but I’m already blown away. It’s just too bad that I’m about to be devoting so much free time to getting a place to live and all that; otherwise, I’d be losing my time in World War II. Oh, and Ghost Recon… that other “war game” that I pre-ordered along with my 360? Yeah… it’s getting released in March. Bastards.
That’s the first thing I thought of when I read the URL, but www.stuffonmycat.com is some funny, funny shit. Not so much that the content of the photos is amusing as the fact that people are consistently submitting them, they’re being posted and people are looking… at… them. Like me, I guess. But I’m not a LOSER. I just LAUGH at losers. See the difference? Good. B/c I don’t even HAVE a cat.
I was exploring that new internet thing tonight, when I came across this cool little thingamajiggy. For those click-impaired among us:
PCI MAX 2005 is a computer card that will change the way you listen to your MP3’s or other audio via PC. It will effectively change your PC into a FM radio station. You will be able to play your audio files (CD, wav, MP3, real audio etc.) from your PC through radio waves directly to your household radio receiver in the next room, …
I was all “So this thing is like my iCarPlay Plus, but for my PC and with a much larger range. That’s pretty cool. I could use this to stream my MP3/AAC to any stereo in…” and that’s when it hit me: I don’t own a stereo. I don’t even think I own a little battery-powered radio. I think the closest I’ve got is… well, I don’t have anything close. So this thing, while really interesting, does me absolutely no good. As it stands, I have much better sound available through my PC than anything else. That may change, as I’m thinking of throwing Windows MCE on my desktop and streaming audio/video to my Xbox 360 when they’re no longer in the same room (when I move out of the apartment and into a “place”), but I doubt it. It’ll be a while before I’ll invest any real money into my home entertainment system. Even then, however, I’m feeling pretty confident that “FM transmissions” won’t be one of those things I’m concerned with. I can’t even remember the last time I listened to the “Radio” in the car. It’s like getting an email from an excite or aol address or something like that and you’re all “whoa… people still use that?”
I know I haven’t posted in a while and, while I’d like to say I’m going to get back to a more frequent posting schedule, I don’t know when it’s going to happen again after this one but I just had to post this link. It’s an article written by a teacher who used the Socratic Method to teach a third-grade class binary math.
It’s crazy. Like a ninja.
Rea’meh
I seem to remember last winter being a lot colder than this…
I almost wanna buy these b/c they’re funny…
What are L33T Tiles? L33T Tiles are a replacement tile set for Scrabble® and other word games, based on internet slang known as leetspeak.
www.LeetTiles.com
Are Newspapers Doomed? That’s the title of an interesting article that describes the rise of the age where fewer people (daily, it seems) are relying on printed media for their information. I can’t even remember the last time I bought a newspaper, but I can almost garauntee that I bought it for the novelty of buying a newspaper and, well, b/c sometimes I like to seem adultish by doing adultish things. Anyway, the article is rather long, but it’s interesting. But I’ve already said that…
Along those same lines, here’s an interesting article about the trend of not wearing watches and opting to use your mobile phone or ipod to tell time. Most people I know only wear watches as a fasion accessory and even then, still use their mobile to tell time. Unless I’m going out somewhere (other than work), I don’t even wear mine. Between work and home, if I’m not in front of a computer, I’ve got my phone.
Speaking of which, it looks like Apple’s not going to do anything to interfere with your ability to install/dual-boot Windows on their new Intel-based Macs. Of course, since the machines use EFI, you’re not going to be able to run XP and will have to wait for Vista.
And that’s about the closest I’m gonna get to segueing into the fact that the US Patent Office awarded Microsoft’s patent on the FAT file system. While FAT’s nothing spectacular, it does happen to be the file system that Linux uses, which means that if Microsoft decides it wants to require royalties (no matter how insignificant), Linux would be in violation of the GPL that made it so famous.
And now for a few short things that I’m not even going to try and associate with anything else:
Thunderbird 1.5 is out of beta and available for download. This has been my mail client of choice for some months now. If you’ve tried out Firefox and realized how superior it is to IE, give Thunderbird a try. The only thing I missed when going from Outlook to Thunderbird was the lack of portable mail file (e.g. Outlook’s PST) that I could throw on a portable HDD or flashdrive, but I’ve quickly moved past that with the help of Portable Thunderbird. There’s also a Portable Firefox which is awesome as well (while you’re there, grab FireFTP and Portable Sunbird). We’ve pretty much got Firefox on all the machines here and I’ve installed it just about anywhere I’ve been staying (my Mom’s, etc.) but it’s nice to have my plugins, extensions and favorites everywhere I go. And if you’re going balls-to-the-wall-portable-apps, grab PStart and make an autorun.inf on the root of the portable device. It sits in your systray and gives you easier access than having to use Windows Explorer to track it all down (assuming your at someone else’s machine and don’t have shortcuts already 
).
Despite it popping up in new venues, there’s still no word on anything happening with Firefly/Serenity. FOX bastards.
Is it strange to use the word “cool” to describe light bulbs?
And this is, quite possibly, the most realistic CG woman I’ve ever seen…
I had a really good trip back to the states. It seemed like a really short trip (don’t they always?) but I hope I made the best of it. Beck had the time off of work with the exception of one day and Chullain was already out for Christmas break. No lie, I spent almost the entire time inside the house. We went to see my family in SC for a few days after Christmas and DD and Sue made Beck and I reservations at a restaurant on St. Simon’s Island as part of our Christmas present, but other than that… I only got dressed if I felt like showing Beck I still remembered how. The funniest thing about that is that it’s always been one of those little differences between she and I; she always thought that you should get dressed you got up and it would aggravate her when she’d come back from a morning of shopping and the kids and I would be eating lunch in our pajamas. Now that she’s been a part of the “9-5″ workforce for the last year or two, I think she’s commented once or twice when it was early afternoon and she was still in her pajamas. Or not. Who knows. My point is that I was damn lazy for over a week. And it was cream-filled heaven.
The kids made out like bandits. I’ll try to post pictures over the course of, well let’s be realistic… I’ll just try to post them sometime. But in the interim, a couple of the cooler toys they got were Chullain’s RoboRaptor and Victoria’s Amazing Amanda (and I base “cooler” solely on some obscure tech-factor that only I’m capable of judging). I actually started typing this entry at: 2006-01-09 22:50:29. 6 hours later, I’ve got to either save it or start over tomorrow, so this is what you get for now.
Happy new year and all that.
Flight leaves in a few hours. Be back in ‘06.
Enjoy the holiday season, whether you celebrate it or not.
Speaking of wallpapers, I was going through one of my external drives last night and came across this. The reason the quality is so poor (and that Victoria’s not in it) is b/c I made it towards the end of ‘99 (Monday, November 01, 1999, 9:49:50 PM according to Explorer). Those photos were all current at the time.
why not. (besides.. i haven’t updated the “current desktop” over there in a bit):
Current Desktop…Desktop:
Current Laptop Desktop:
Actually, this is just the wallpaper b/c I’m too lazy to unpack the laptop right now.
Any of you that are Meebo users might have missed a couple of changes they made (unless you read the little blurbs that pop up when you login). They’ve made a few improvements/additions to the service.
One of the more obvious is that you now have the ability to sign on “Invisible,” which was previously not an available option. They’ve also made significant strides towards disconnect notification and now will even give you the option of reconnecting without refreshing the webpage and logging into all services again. Other fixes/changes are detailed in the blog entry I linked to above. And, um, right there.
