9/30/2004top

12:53 PM
An illustrated guide to the Seven Stages of Martini Madness, brought to you by Modern Drunkard Magazine.

-Brett #

11:01 AM
Sit home and watch TV Friday night.

The SciFi channel is airing all four seasons of Farscape (88 episodes) - leading up to the premiere of The Peacekeeper Wars on October 17th. The mega marathon starts tomorrow at 8AM ET/PT, so set your Tivos!

Also! The next season of Degrassi starts tomorrow night on The N! It's a special hour-long episode full of Canadian courtroom drama as Paige takes the guy who raped her to court. Pretty soon it'll be his turn to get raped. By a man. Hurr hurr hurr!

-Brett #

9/29/2004top

11:30 AM
When I first read about the TrafficGauge, they were only testing it in the Seattle area, and I longed for a southern California version. I guess the testing went well, because an LA/OC version is now available!

The device itself is $80 - I'd say that's a fair price. But the cool factor ends there. They expect you to pay a monthly subscription fee ($7) to use it!

What the crap! Seven bucks? No thank you! I will turn on the radio and find out what I need to know for free. AM radio does the traffic every 10 minutes, and Sirius does it every 4.

Or better yet, I'll check the traffic map at SigAlert.com before I leave.

Do they think people are idiots? CalTrans' traffic reporting system is 100% automated and all the work is done by sensors in the road. There is no reason they should have to charge a monthly fee for these things. Setting up and maintaining one or two antennas to send a signal to these things could (and should) be entirely subsidized by the mark-up on the devices themselves.

Honestly, seeing someone trying to charge money for this makes me want to hurt someone.

-Brett #

10:40 AM
FutureMark released 3DMark 05 today - the ultimate Windows benchmarking tool for hardcore gamers. It also looks and sounds beautiful.

-Brett #

9/28/2004top

12:55 PM
You know that shiny new DVD Star Wars Trilogy you bought a few days ago? Well apparently it was rushed to you just as quickly as you rushed to buy it.

The entire musical soundtrack is actually REVERSED in the two rear channels. Star Wars seems to be the only movie affected; Empire and Jedi are fine.

Doh!

-Brett #

9/27/2004top

11:21 AM
I spent the weekend in Palm Desert (Indian Wells, actually) at my buddy Steve's bachelor party. We all had a great time. Saturday we played golf, something I haven't done in...oh...about 10 years I'd say. I'm glad we didn't keep score.

Today I am lightly sunburned and so sore that it hurts to grip my steering wheel.

-Brett #

9/22/2004top

4:21 PM
When I first heard about Sony deliberately planning to not include MP3 support in its "iPod Killer" in favor of ATRAC3, I wanted to grab the closest available Sony employee and shake them until their arms fell off.

Finally someone in Japan has seen the light. Native mp3 playback is coming to the VGF-AP1 and most of Sony's other digital music players. I guess you can only deal with so much industry ridicule before you cave in and start providing what your customers actually want.

In related news, Emusic.com sells downloadable music - with no DRM! 192kb/sec MP3s are all you'll find! At $0.25 cents per track, that's a heck of a lot less than Wal-Mart's $0.88, and a hell of a lot less than Apple's $0.99.

-Brett #

9/21/2004top

11:01 AM
Just when Firefox was really getting awesome, Google has to come and screw everything up!

Firefox, the Mozilla Suite, Opera, and Safari. Do we really need another alternative browser? I say no! Firefox is hitting its stride now - don't you dare take that away, Google!

ARGH.

-Brett #

9/20/2004top

4:50 PM
The Team America trailer is now online!

-Brett #

3:47 PM
A new president, a fast-approaching 50th birthday, and a decade of neglect have all conspired to put Disneyland through one of the most extensive park-wide refurbishment efforts ever.

The latest photo tour at MiceAge tells the story. You can't go two steps without seeing painters and carpenters hard at work somewhere in the park; tarps are everywhere. It's sad to say, but TLC like that hasn't been poured on the park in a long, long time. And that doesn't even take into account the three new attractions that Tomorrowland's getting - a gutted and completely rebuilt Space Mountain, Buzz Lightyear's SpaceRanger Spin (imported from WDW,) and a return of the submarines. Anaheim's jewel will shine very brightly when its 50th birthday rolls around on July 17th.

With all that investment being made in the park, it makes sense that admission prices - and annual passes in particular - will soon shoot through the roof. A Premium annual pass sells for $279 right now, and the rumors I'm hearing have that jumping to $500 during or after this year's Christmas season. This is also an effort to 'thin the herd', as right now something like 600,000 people have passes and don't pay a dime to visit the park.

Fun times!

-Brett #

9/16/2004top

10:02 AM
If you're an XM subscriber, soon you'll be able to listen to XM radio streamed online - for an extra $4 each month. XM seems to prefer taking the 'nickel and dime' approach to pricing their programming. Their High Voltage channel is an extra $1.99 per month, and their Playboy channel is an extra $2.99 per month - and there are more premium channels planned.

Sirius doesn't mess around. They don't have any premium channels and everything's included in your monthly price - including online streaming.

Of course XM is $9.99/mo and Sirius is $12.95/mo, but as XM starts to add more and more premium channels at premium prices, Sirius will become an even better value.

-Brett #

9/15/2004top

10:27 AM
It took a long, long time, but Trillian finally has some competition!

Messenger 2 connects to the five major chat networks and is reskinnable - just like Trillian. Jabber support isn't there yet, but is planned for a future version.

Something to keep an eye on!

-Brett #

9/14/2004top

10:19 AM
Thunderbird 0.8 released today. If you have multiple pop3 accounts, you can now combine them into a single inbox. An RSS reader is also now part of Thunderbird!

-Brett #

9/13/2004top

12:37 PM
If you're like me you probably don't have a lot of friends, and you've probably run out of people to give gmail invites to.

You *could* try to barter for an invite over at GmailSwap.com, but that'd be a waste of resources. Gmail invites are so plentiful nowadays that people are now just giving them away!

-Brett #

10:10 AM
Overclocked Remix launched a few years ago as a home for downloadable fan-made video game music remixes. When they first opened their doors, they didn't have very many mp3s, and the ones they did have were very amateurish and not so good.

It appears that's changed! I'm amazed at how many tracks they've got now - and they're GREAT!

This remix of MegaMan 2's BubbleMan theme is just awesome. This two-part QuickMan mix is worth a listen too.

-Brett #

9:37 AM
The OC Register has an interview with Matt Ouiment - his first since becoming president of the Disneyland Resort nearly a year ago. It's brief, but it shows how much things are changing down in Anaheim. Matt's not afraid to spend the money needed to enhance the guest experience, and so far everything he has done for the park has been positive.

-Brett #

9/08/2004top

3:14 PM
Over the weekend Tammy and I stopped at a place called The Wine Exchange in Orange. We'd been looking for some Inniskillin icewine and the people at BevMo down the street had no idea what we were talking about.

Well.

Not only did Wine Exchange have Inniskillin, but they had a bunch of other ice wines on the shelves and one of their employees gave us a full-on ice wine education with a capital E. I think we walked out of there with four bottles of different stuff.

Myself, I'm not into wine. I've tried to get into it because the Wide World Of Wine seems like a fun place to hang out and try new things, but I just can't stand the stuff.

I like a lot of dessert wines though, so I'll be back to Wine Exchange in due time! I just wish they weren't so expensive.

-Brett #

10:16 AM
As theme parks go, WDW in 1980 was really a gorgeous place, as you can see in these photos. That was back in the early days before Epcot, when Disney had only two theme parks in the whole world, and thus had enough cash to really keep the place looking nice and fresh all the time.

Don't get me wrong - It still looks great today, but back in 1980 it was the flagship of the company's parks division, and it showed.

-Brett #

9/07/2004top

11:54 AM
Friday night I drank brandy while riding in a limo with a famous rock star to go see another famous rock star play music in Manhattan Beach.

For real!

My life has interesting moments from time to time.

-Brett #

10:15 AM
If you've got a Series2 Tivo and a NetFlix account, your life is about to get a lot easier!

Soon you'll be able to download movies from your Netflix account directly to your Tivo - no waiting for DVDs to arrive in the mail, and no sending the DVDs back!

-Brett #

9/03/2004top

3:18 PM
Did an airplane really hit the Pentagon on 9/11? Or...was it a missile?

Internet conspiracy freaks unite!

-Brett #

10:32 AM
Multi Theft Auto is a mod for Grand Theft Auto that lets you play the game online with other people!

Or at least I think that's what it's for.

Their site doesn't really explain what it does, actually!

-Brett #

9/02/2004top

10:33 AM
Hypothetical situation!

Let's say you enjoy falling asleep listening to music or the radio or whatever, but the person you share a bed with does not! What do you do?

You run down to RadioShack and pick up a pillow speaker for just $5.99. What a great invention!

-Brett #

9/01/2004top

9:41 AM
Mozilla.org is all-new today. It looks like they've smartly given Firefox top billing over Mozilla. Finally.

Looks nice!

-Brett #


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