4/28/2006top

4:00 PM
This weekend I'm going to a wedding on the Queen Mary! I've been there before, but not for a wedding. I'm excited!

Which reminds me! I have to pick up my one-and-only suit at the cleaners today!

-Brett #

9:04 AM
If you can get past the reporter's sappiness in this local news story, what you have is some pretty amazing video of an autistic kid scoring SIX three-pointers in the last four minutes of his high school basketball game.

He's already got a movie deal!

-Brett #

4/27/2006top

12:56 PM
I don't really like iTunes and I only use it for two things: to rarely copy music to my iPod and to manage podcasts for me.

It copies music well enough, but it does a pretty lousy job of managing podcasts.

Every week I sync my iPod on Monday morning right after iTunes has downloaded new podcasts from the last seven days.

When I do this, the 'blue dot' indicator that goes away when you listen to a podcast GETS RESET and applied to every podcast in my library, so I have no idea what I've listened to and what I haven't. That's magical.

Other times iTunes will transfer over all but like two or three of the new podcasts for no good reason. It doesn't throw up an error message or anything so I usually find out mid-week when I'm stuck listening to an episode of Car Talk that I just heard the week before. Syncing again fixes this, but what the christ!

My theory is that iTunes sees Winamp running in the background and it's jealous. It can't stand that its competition gets to play all of my SWEET TUNES and it's protesting by making my iPod as difficult to use as possible.

Thanks!

-Brett #

10:49 AM
Nintendo's Revolution project has a new official name.

It's Wii.

I'm not making that up!

It really is Wii!

It rhymes with pee.

-Brett #

4/26/2006top

12:57 PM
One of these days I'll hang up my web hosting hat and become a mechanical engineer. I will do this for the sole purpose of inventing the ultimate massage machine thing.

My vision is simple! This device will attach to the top of any high-backed office chair. It will then have two kneady mechanisms that may resemble human hands, but may also just appear to be small metal appendages. These robot hands will rest on the shoulders of whoever's seated in the chair, and they will deliver the most intense and ergonomically-correct shoulder and neck massage humanity has ever seen. It will be glorious. I get goosebumps just thinking about it.


I am amazed that the year is now 2006 and nobody has yet thought to invent or sell this product.

I could probably just hire some Thai lady to come in and stand behind my chair all day long, but her hands would probably get tired after a while and I bet she'd want to take bathroom breaks. Unacceptable.

That's the beauty of my invention! It'll never get tired, it won't fart in my office, and you won't have to pay it an hourly wage! And the massages it gives will be out of this world.

I'm just puttin' this idea out there in case, you know, someone reading this is like "Hot damn! What a great idea! I've got the skills and I like your moxie, Brett. Let's make this happen." I will be an exclusive beta tester, and my new mechanical engineer friend will help me to live my dream of automated, high quality shoulder and neck massages.

-Brett #

9:32 AM
Yahoo! Go is free DVR software from Yahoo!

After all these years, Yahoo has finally released something useful. Yes, I know, it's crazy. I'm just as shocked as you.

edit: This is actually a free, rebranded version of Medio's DVR technology which Yahoo bought a few days ago.

-Brett #

4/25/2006top

2:04 PM
HDL_Dump now available for OSX! Good news for Mac-using softmodders.

If you haven't softmodded your ps2 yet, get on the ball! You've only got a few months left before God of War II ships. Check out the trailer!

-Brett #

9:00 AM
On my way in to work this morning I actually saw a guy driving a Segway to work. I was so shocked that my monocle popped out!

-Brett #

4/24/2006top

11:31 AM
Life throws you curves sometimes! Nothing eventful has really happened to me lately, but I've been thinking back to how I was a kid and there were some things in my life now that I just never saw coming back in the 80s.

As a child I pretty much thought I'd be a kid forever. I didn't give much thought to growing up. I never ever thought that I would drive a car, own a house, get married, not go to school anymore, be able to buy anything in the grocery store that I want, go to Disneyland every day of the year if I feel like it, buy any video game or console system whenever, see a vagina, cook things on a grill, watch enough television to make my eyeballs turn to jelly, take naps all Saturday long, take naps all Sunday long, buy things at Home Depot, be responsible for the care and maintenance of one fish two cats and a horse, drink to the point of violent regurgitation, rub Tabasco into my eyes, look at my parents as peers more than parents, buy my own clothes, buy a tree, fly on an airplane by myself, and oh hell the list could go on forever.

The point is that nobody really knows what'll happen tomorrow, and anyone who says they do is either crazy or doing some insider trading.

-Brett #

4/20/2006top

9:51 AM
Stargate SG-1 is now in its 10th season and has already been renewed for an 11th.

Next month you'll be able to buy seasons 1 through 8 in a box set - that's 174 hour-long episodes - for $49.95. Yes, $49.95. That is CRAZY cheap. In fact, I'm not even sure that's right. But they claim it's to celebrate the show's 10th anniversary, so I guess it's real!

A single season goes for $39.96 at Amazon, so jump on this when it ships on June 13th.

-Brett #

4/17/2006top

10:15 AM
Wow. When did the demoscene go cross-platform? Ante Dominum has been ported to Windows, Linux, and OSX.

It's probably the greatest 64k demo I've ever seen ever. Ever! It's got a catchy little soundtrack and the particle effects are some of the best I've seen. It'll download in half a second and it takes less than five minutes to run, so quit being a stick in the mud and start watching!

-Brett #

9:38 AM
We've all seen 'secret' safes that look like common household objects. A shaving cream can that unscrews to reveal a storage space inside, for example, or the ol' hollowed-out book trick.

How about some fake skid-marked underpants? I wish I had thought of this first.

-Brett #

4/14/2006top

1:53 PM
The "customer review" for this five foot speaker cable from Monster Cable makes me wonder.

Whs the reviewer crying because the sound was SO AWESOME or because he just realized that he spent $1250 on five feet of goddamn speaker cable?

-Brett #

9:13 AM
The first few HD-DVD releases are coming out soon, and their packaging indicates that they do indeed support 1080p.

The first HD-DVD players will only output at 1080i though, so Blu-Ray is still more attractive for early adopters.

-Brett #

4/13/2006top

9:23 AM
Last night on Southpark Comedy Central caved to terrorists by refusing to allow Mohammed to appear on the show. Of course he was already on it five years ago, but that was before there were international riots.

It made me irritated enough to waste time writing a letter to spineless Comedy Central! And I never write letters! Next thing you know I'll be protesting economic summits and listening to Phish. Oh Christ.

-Brett #

4/12/2006top

9:25 AM
Rube Goldberg has been beaten at his own game by Japanese nerds!

I wish I was a Japanese nerd. :(

-Brett #

4/11/2006top

9:13 AM
This is a good story.

Last night we were all excited to play old-school Gauntlet over Xbox Live with our friends Stacy and Steve. They had just gotten their 360 up and running and we were ready to go.

So Tammy puts on the Xbox headset and it's not working. Turns out one of our goddamn cats (the smart money's on Conan) chewed through the cord. So I did what any responsible pet owner would do. I picked him up and yelled at him in the face, squeezed him until his eyeballs popped out, and threw him across the room.

I was afraid that wouldn't be enough to teach him a lesson though, so I hatched a little scheme.

Observe the cat trap:

I took what was left of the headset and completely coated the wires with Tabasco sauce and left it on the floor of the kitchen overnight. Wires don't taste good, and people need to know that. Especially when those people are cats.

So I'm feeling pretty smart and smug and stuff and I'm laying in bed half asleep, laughing to myself, trying to imagine what Conan's reaction will be when he discovers his new toy in the middle of the night. Ha-ha! "He's gonna shit himself when he tastes that Tabasco and he'll never chew through wires again. Brett you're a friggin genius when it comes to pets."

I chuckle a little and rub my eyes, roll over in bed and then it hits me - My eyes are on fire. I sit up straight in bed and yell "EYES ON FIRE!"

I run screaming over to the bathroom sink and shove my face under the faucet and start rubbing my eyes, trying to wash them out. This does a great job at getting the remaining Tabasco on my fingertips evenly distributed across my eyeballs. By this point I can barely open my eyes and things are only getting worse! I start to think that hey, even though Tammy's on the toilet maybe I should break down the door so that she's the last thing I ever see. In a crisis situation you don't really have time to stop and think.

But then I remember that I have eye drops, so I open up the cupboard under my sink and start knocking things over until I find the little plastic bottle of soothing, cooling relief. I squirt half the bottle into my eyes and it works, mostly. After about 10 minutes I'm good. And actually my eyes feel really good when all is said and done.

Now I'm not a moron. I washed my hands after I set the trap. With soap. And yet somehow I still managed to pepper-spray myself.

It was an eye-opening experience!

Also, the cat-trap appeared to be untouched this morning.

-Brett #

4/10/2006top

4:03 PM
Up until now I was pretty indifferent on the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD battle.

Today I'm joining the Blu-Ray fans. The HD-DVD format tops out at 1080i, while Blu-Ray has native support for 1080p/60!

I had no idea! And I'm pretty amazed that nobody's made a bigger deal about this. With a much higher resolution than HD-DVD and a larger storage capacity...what's not to like about Blu-Ray?

-Brett #

4/06/2006top

11:20 AM
Bejeweled 2 is a simple game, but it's a hard game to be really good at. There are times when I think I like it even more than Tetris, and that's saying a lot.


I've been playing in Classic mode and I always have a hell of a time breaking past level 11 before running out of moves. I have yet to unlock a single achievement for this game, and I'm making that my goal for April!

Last night I started experimenting with a new strategy. Instead of using a hypercube as soon as I get it for mega points, I save it until there's absolutely no other moves left. Last night this strategy took me from 11,000th place on the Xbox Live leaderboards all the way up to somewhere in the 6,000s!

Two things to keep in mind if you use this strategy!

1- If hypercubes aren't used, they DO transfer over to the next level. Gem distribution remains the same from level to level, but their placement is jumbled.

2- If you take too long to make a move and you have a hypercube on the field, the game will usually suggest that you use it. Ignore this suggestion! There often ARE other moves available, but the game is trying to trick you into giving up your magic bullet!

If you don't have a 360, fear not! You can play a free demo of Bejeweled 2 in your browser.

-Brett #

9:33 AM
Why dual-boot when you can virtualize? Hot on the heels of Boot Camp comes Parallels, a Windows emulator for Intel Macs. It claims to offer "near-native performance" of emulated OSs, of which Windows is merely one of many!

-Brett #

4/05/2006top

9:13 AM
Boot Camp! Wow! That's the last thing I'd expect from Apple. It's still not as cool as OSX running on generic Intel hardware, but it's something!

John C. Dvorak might have been right! I'm pretty sure Apple won't ditch OSX ever (nor should they), but this could be viewed as a step in that direction.

-Brett #

4/04/2006top

4:21 PM
"Darwin Awards", "This guy's a moron", etc, etc.

No more hand.

-Brett #

11:40 AM
Jeff just let me know that tonight it'll be 01:02:03 04/05/06!

So get ready!

For what, I don't know.

But you can bet some strange shit's gonna go down somewhere.

-Brett #

4/03/2006top

9:16 AM
My aunt, uncle, and cousin were in town over the weekend. My cousin was playing in a soccer tournament in Temecula, so I drove out there to watch the games and spent the night with my parents, brother, and his fiancee. (Tammy's in Baltimore on business - rubbing elbows with Dana Carvey!)

It rained on and off all day Saturday, which made for some muddy soccer matches, but we all came equipped with warm clothes and umbrellas so we were fine.

We had some free time in between games so we spent a few hours wine tasting on Saturday. We were in Temecula, after all!



The Temecula wine tasting circuit has a much different vibe than it does up in say, Napa. When you go wine tasting up north you mostly see hoity-toity white people who talk in hushed tones about tannins and bouquets, periodically pausing to smell their own farts. Temecula wineries have limos and party busses pulling up every five minutes and the people who stumble out represent a pretty good cross section of America. I counted three bachelorette parties!

Here's some vines with a storm in the distance.

-Brett #


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