9:49 AM
Christmas is right around the corner, folks!
If you're tired of listening to of Christmas Cocktails volumes One and Two over and over, Basic Hip is where you need to be right now.
Starting today through Christmas, they'll be posting new (old) Christmas albums for your listening pleasure. The guy usually rotates the featured downloadable album each week, but due to the huge amount of swell vintage Christmas music on hand, they'll be changed up every few days. If you don't want to miss any, the first rotation happens Monday, so get downloadin'!
12:40 PM
The Warp Pipe project aims to let you play multiplayer networkable GameCube games online. They claim to have Mario Kart: Double Dash working nearly perfectly. A beta is forthcoming.
1:39 PM
What ever happened to Kai Krause? He was the internet celebrity who came up with the infamous set of PhotoShop plugins known as "Kai's Power Tools." That guy used to be mentioned everywhere. People wrote articles about him and he would do all these interviews. It was crazy. He worked on a couple of other programs, but KPT was by far the most popular (and arguably the most useless!)
He founded a company called MetaCreations which was later sold to a company called Viewpoint. I did a quick Google search for him, but he appears to have completely disappeared from the spotlight somewhere around 1999.
11:04 PM
That free Zelda promo disc? You can only get it if you own two of the following three games:
1080 Avalanche
Mario Party 5
Mario Kart: Double Dash
And since those three games are all brand new, nobody has them, and that means that nobody can get this Zelda disc without spending crazy amounts of money on two games. Thanks, Nintendo!
My problem is that I only have two GameCube games - Super Mario Sunshine and Zelda Wind Waker. I figured that since Nintendo makes them both, they'd have the stupid little registration code inside that I'd need to register them online. Nope!
12:05 PM
Nintendo's got a new promo disc available that includes the two NES Zelda games and the two N64 Zelda games. (The best one - the SNES version - is unfortunately missing!)
I *thought* that the only way to get this disc is to purchase a GameCube bundle or subscribe to Nintendo Power magazine.
JeffC just brightened my morning by telling me that if you register your GameCube and at least two game titles online with Nintendo, you can get it too!
11:07 AM Cell phone number portability is kind of dumb. I don't think it's that hard to give people a new phone number when you switch carriers. I hear people complain about long term contracts all the time, but I've never heard any of my friends complain about not being able to keep their phone numbers when they switch providers. But whatever, it's a law now.
I think the phone companies are being pretty lame about the whole thing. It might be more work for them initially, sure. Their main concern seems to be that a lot of their customers will leave them and jump to a different carrier. Well, so what? You're one of those carriers, right? You'll get some of your competitors' customers, and they'll get some of yours. In the end it'll be a wash, and everybody will be right back where they started.
10:23 AM
Our friends Stacy and Steve got engaged this weekend. They bought the ring together just a few weeks before - not unlike another couple I know - so it wasn't entirely unexpected. They're good people.
Friday night Tammy and I went out for sushi and I went a little crazy with the gin and tonics later that evening. Saturday was rough.
I'm at a point in my life where I'm ready to buy nice things for myself, my wife, and my house, but I unfortunately don't have any money to do so. Raises are an infrequent event at my company and Tammy's company is about the same. I don't think that either one of us have gotten raises since we bought the house last year, so we're still dangerously low on funds. At least I've got my health, and I'm pretty happy with how my life is going.
11:57 AM
I think the Wachowski brothers realize that The Matrix phenomenon might just be their one-hit-wonder, and it seems like they sure are doing a lot to extend the franchise beyond a simple three movies... They've actually written everything you see below, with the exception of five of the Animatrix stories.
Matrix Timeline:
The Animatrix was sort of a prequel to the Matrix series.
The Matrix
The Matrix Reloaded
Enter The Matrix was loaded with over an hour of live action footage shot specifically to fill in some backstory for Reloaded.
This chat transcript with Jason Hall from Monolith says it all:
"The Matrix Online is the true continuing story of the Matrix franchise. Larry and Andy oversee it personally and the story will continuously evolve. We have a whole team here that will be doing nothing but adding to the game on a monthly basis. We are not messing around with this. This game is going to be like no other."
12:30 PM
The latest Disneyland rumor is that this year's Christmas Lighting Ceremony will be hosted by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He will be flipping the switch on November 24th (Monday,) however that is subject to change based on his schedule.
11:09 AM
An Al-Qaida member is claiming that a large strike on Americans will happen during Ramadan. That's this month.
I highly doubt that will happen, but the guy sure talks like he's convinced it will.
If you wanted to kill a bunch of people at once - and at the same time make sure that nobody saw it coming - you have to admit that flying planes into skyscrapers was a pretty creative way of doing it. Nobody suspects something like that. Well they do now, I guess.
But Al-Qaida is boasting that they'll kill as many as 100,000 people in their next attack. What could they possibly do that would kill a hundred thousand people? Whatever they do, they'll probably do it to a densely populated area like Los Angeles or Chicago.
A dirty nuke maybe? Poisioning the water supply? Who knows. They could do anything. I'm just glad that I'm not one of the hard-workin' law enforcement people whose job it is to think of ways that terrorists could launch large scale attacks, because I'm just not that creative.
10:47 AM
Have you seen the new teaser trailer for Harry Potter & The Prisoner of Azkaban? You should. It almost made me pee my pants, and I'm not even one of those psycho HP fans.
10:38 AM
Farscape might be returning for a final four to six episodes that would hopefully give the series some closure.
Cinescape is reporting some strange happenings at Farscape's former production studio...
Henson had scheduled a Farscape-related press conference yesterday, but postponed it "indefinitely" the day before. So whatever was supposed to happen might not be happening after all.
There's a Farscape convention in Burbank this weekend, so maybe that'll help clear some of this up!
7:43 PM
iTunes lets you listen to music sitting on the hard drives of other iTunes users on your LAN. It doesn't let you copy those mp3 files locally though - you can only listen to them.
MyTunes allows you to obtain the exact original file, unlike "stream capturers", which record music that's streaming and save the recorded audio to disk.
2:47 PM
The earth has been under attack from some big time solar flares lately. They're supposed to screw up satellites, cell phones, and other electronic devices.
Every time a new one is about to hit us, I see all these articles and news stories about how we're "in for a doozy" and how stuff's going to break down all over the place.
So far I haven't seen that happen. One day the compass in my car kept telling me that I was driving north, no matter which way I was headed. Other than that one incident, it's been business as usual.
8:25 PM
Nokia's N-Gage was recently hacked. That's got to be record time. I think it only took a month or two.
What this means is that N-Gage games can be dumped to a flash memory card. Not only that, but it appears that if you put that memory card into another phone like the Nokia 6600, you actually play them with no loss in quality or anything. That's awesome.
The LA Times just ran a great article about how Paul Pressler did everything he possibly could to cut costs at DLR when he was in charge of parks. It's a great look back at how the entire culture of Disneyland changed between 1997 and 2003 - from the suits at Team Disney Anaheim out back to the hourly cast members at the gates - none were spared!
This quote sort of sums it all up-
Why, the consultant asked, do you inspect the lap bars daily? The records show they never fail.
'Klostriech called him an idiot,' said Goodwin, who witnessed the exchange. Klostriech, he said, told the consultant: 'The reason they don't fail is because we check them every night.
2:46 PM
I've got every Ultra-Lounge album, and today I decided that Bossa Novaville (Vol. 14) is the best of the bunch. The whole series is great, don't get me wrong, but as retro music goes you just can't beat the bossa nova.
4:54 PM
If you're looking for a Windows XP visual style that doesn't look like it was designed by a 10 year old (and most do...have you seen the crap that gets posted at themexp.org lately?) then I've found the style for you!
I just re-discovered Classix, and it looks like there's been a few variations made on the theme since I checked it out last. It's very clean looking and I like it a lot!
We actually host the guy's website too so that is super duper.
That's right! Proceeds from one of the world's largest corporations are now funding NPR. Where is your god now, hippies!?
In other news, I saw the third Matrix last night. It was a really good movie I thought. It wasn't as good as the first one, but it was leagues beyond the second one. In fact, they could have probably never made the second movie at all and just gone right into the third one and saved everyone a lot of time.
A lot of it reminded me of Aliens. A few lines of dialog were totally cheeseball, but at least they weren't having a clothes-optional dance party right before the invasion of Zion like they did in the last movie. Man that was stupid.
I have two thumbs, and I am pointing them up for the Matrix Revolutions!
10:11 AM
A week or so ago I installed a wall-mounted TV stand in our master bedroom. It was without a doubt one of the hardest things I've ever done around the house.
AVF Vector also has some of the worst documentation you'll ever find in the home improvement arena. There are a few things I learned the hard way that the manual never bothered to mention:
- Use a level
- Pre-drill the holes as deep as you possibly can into the stud.
- Spray WD40 into the drilled holes and rub it all over the screw threads before you try screwing them in
- Don't use an electric screwdriver or a hand screwdriver to put the screws in. Use a ratchet with a screwdriver head. Expect to bruise your palms from the constant pressure that you must exert on the ratchet.
- If you wear down the heads on the screws, don't buy identical screws at Home Depot because they are weak and will snap off inside the wall while you're screwing them in.
- The plastic wire covers are 100% crap and will keep popping off no matter how long you mess with them. The best you can do is play with them until they look passable.
Anyway, now that the whole project is done it looks really good, but don't underestimate its difficulty!
Strong and passionate, I tend to be misunderstood, sometimes even feared. I don't want to fight, I don't want to cause trouble, all I ask is a little love, and a little peace. If I don't get what I want, I get angry, and throw barrels and flaming oil at whatever's stopping me. What Video Game Character Are You?
11:21 AM
Well Halloween was great. We had a ton of kids come by the house Friday night. Stacy and Steve came over to hang out with us, and we made burgers on the grill. We had such a great time, in fact, that we were too sauced to drive to my office in LA for our company Halloween party later that night. While my three buds were mixing up margaritas, I was sucking down gin and juices. Seagrams actually makes a drink called "Gin and Juice" and man that stuff goes down fast and easy.
I hear the band at the party was great, and judging by the carnage of empty bottles, balloons, and barf smell all through our building, I'd say the party went pretty well. I spent a pretty big chunk of my time at work last week helping to build the dance floor from sheets of colored acrylic and a reel of rope light, so I'm glad it was used!
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