TGIF Stupid News Roundup - Issue #2

• Athletes are Not Role Models
  
• Linda Rondstadt is a whack job Of course, so is Barbara Streisand
• Wow, Ted Kennedy and I agree on something.
• Hunting for the outdoorsman, who, ummm, doesn't like going outdoors.
• The Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich?

Have a Konfabulous Thanksgiving!

Is it really Thanksgiving already? Hard to believe. It definitely feels like Thanksgiving today. Yesterday it was in the upper 60s but today looks like it's only going to manage the 40s. Not going to break 60 the rest of the week here.

So I recently stumbled across this nifty little program called Konfabulator. Apparently it used to be just for Macintosh but was recently ported to Windows. Basically, it's a platform for running all kinds of little mini-applications which they call "widgets". I think it's pretty cool. Right now I have a widget running at the top of my screen displaying a strand of blinking Christmas lights. Another widget is in the upper right corner which shows me the weather at a glance (much easier than getting up and looking out the window), and by clicking a drop-down arrow shows me the forecast for the next several days. I have a CPU meter in the lower-right, and a search tool in the lower left, which let's me search using one of several search engines. I have a nice looking analog clock which chimes on the hour. Finally, I think my favorite widget is the "picture" frame. Basically you point it at a directory containing photo images, and every few minutes (you can specify the frequency) it will randomly display one of those photos in a little picture frame. I have a _lot_ of digital photos on my hard drive so it's kinda neat to see what will pop up at random. If you like eye candy on your computer like I do, check it out.

Oh, while I'm thinking of it, I recently changed web hosting and e-mail providers. Looks like everything has pretty well made the transition intact, but let me know if you see any problems. You may also notice some ads on the right hand side. I'm giving "Google Ad Sense" a try. It generates a few cents for every visitor that clicks through. As far as ads go, I think they are not too bad since you can make them text-only (not a bunch of annoying flashing images) and they are generated to have some context pertinent to the content you are viewing. So if you see anything pop up there that looks interesting, clicking through to take a look will help me offset the hosting cost a little bit. :)

Hope you all have a great Thanksgiving holiday!

Weekend wrap-up

Sadly, my birthday extravaganza weekend is drawing to a close, and the work week approacheth. The good news is that this is the week of Thanksgiving which means its a short week. Yay for holidays!

It was a fun weekend. We started getting caught up on our movies, going to see National Treasure and The Grudge. National Treasure was a great movie! Nicholas Cage plays the most recent generation of the "Gates" family (no relation to Bill!) who is tasked by family obligation to seek a treasure once protected by the Knights Templar and subsequently hidden in America by the founding fathers. Turns out the map to the treasure is hidden on the back of the Declaration of Independence. (Not a spoiler -- that's in the previews!) Of course, just about everyone thinks he is crazy to believe it -- except of course for his evil nemisis who wants to plunder the treasure first! I have to say that the key to enjoying this movie is the suspension of disbelief. Many of the solutions to clues they find seem like they are solved just a little too easily and there many parts of the movie that seemed pretty unrealistic. But if you are just looking for a fun movie this one definitely fills the bill. I expected it to be an "OK" movie but it definitely exceeded my expectations. The audience in our theater actually clapped at the end.

The Grudge on the other hand was a big disappointment. It's based on the 2003 Japanese film "Ju-on: The Grudge". The plot was really disjointed. The creators decided to use a little gimmick of jumping around through the plot's timeline. This was not just the occasional flashback - the movie continuously jumps back and forth in time. Some people probably find this enjoyable and effective but I just found it to be distracting and annoying. I also didn't think the movie was particularly scary, surprising or creepy. It is not close to being in the same league as The Ring, which was also adapted from a Japanese horror movie, and which I enjoyed a lot more. Apparently The Grudge has been pretty succesful in the box office, however, as a sequel is already being planned. One that I will probably not be going to see.

While I'm reviewing movies, I guess I should also mention The Incredibles. We saw it a couple of weeks ago and it was pretty entertaining. I'm sure it's even better if you have kids -- but since I will always be a juvenile delinquent at heart I found it quite entertaining even without them.

I've also been spending quite a bit of time playing Half Life 2. It has definitely lived up to the hype IMHO and I've been having a lot of fun with it. It's been cutting into my Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas time, though. Too many diversions, not enough free time!

Finally, today marked the conclusion of the Nextel Cup season. I had pretty well written off Earnhardt Junior winning it since, though it was not impossible, he would not only have had to done extremely well, the other contenders would have had to done extremely poorly. So my second choice was Jimmy Johnson, mostly on account of the incredible comeback he's had during these final 10 races. As recently as a few weeks ago he had pretty much been written off and had come back to be a real threat. But that was not to be, although he did come within 8 points. Kurt Busch ended up being able to hold on to his lead.

That guy has some of the worst luck immediately followed by some of the best luck I've ever seen. He had a problem with his right front tire, and was having to slow down to go in the pits during green. Looked like he was going to be at least a lap down for sure. Then his wheel comes off completely -- he ever-so-narrowly misses running into the water barrels in front of the wall for pit lane. Then, the wheel that fell off proceeds to roll onto the track, bringing out a caution. He ends up being able to get his car taken care of and still stays on the lead lap -- ending up with a 5th place finish. A few spots back and Jimmy Johnson would be the new champ. Oh well, that's how it goes! No more NASCAR until February, when the Daytona 500 is run, which we will be attending!

TGIF Stupid News Roundup

So I decided to create a new feature to my blog called the "TGIF Stupid News Roundup". I surf all the stupid news so you don't have to. In these posts I will highlight what I found to be the stupidest news of the week. Exciting, don't you think?

• Cash for beavers!
• I'm a vegetarian now, but this is stupid.
• Kerry voters need therapy!
• This proves that there is such a thing as being too attached to your pets.
• Tivo rocks!!! But, soon it will officially suck!

OK, I cheated a little ... not all of these are from this week, but hey it's the first edition so it's special!

Oh, and if you want to be notified of postings just like this great little gem, click the link on the sidebar "Receive blog updates by email". This will allow you to sign up for a Yahoo groups mailing list which will be notified whenever I post a blog entry. Now you won't have to frantically hit the refresh button on your browser all day as you await the next pearls of wisdom from my blog!

Donna's family comes to visit ... and the MBNA 500

A few weeks ago (yeah, yeah, I'm behind on my blogging) Donna's aunt, uncle, cousins and one of her cousin's husband came to visit for several days. We all had a great time together, as we always do. Donna's cousin Michele and her husband Terri are big NASCAR fines like us, so we had been planning for a long time to go to the MBNA 500 (the fall race here in Atlanta). Here are some pictures from their visit. About half of the pictures are from Chateau Elan. Donna just wanted some scenic shots ... we didn't actually take a tour or anything -- we're too cheap for that. The rest of the pictures are from before and after the race.

Colorado Software Summit 2004

Here are some pictures from my recent trip to Colorado, where I attended the Colorado Software Summit. None of these pictures are too great ... I didn't take my digital camera with me, so these were taken with a disposable film camera. I took some shots of some of the scenery near the condo I stayed in as well as the conference center. I also took a few snaps inside the condo so I could show Donna what it looked like but those images turned out pretty crappy, as you can see.

As for the conference itself ... it was good but I was somewhat disappointed. I think I may have had impossibly high expectations, though. It has been a few years since my employer has had a training budget, and I've been wanting to go to this conference for a long time. Most other folks who have gone to this conference remind me a little bit of cult members. :) They rave about how wonderful it is and how they go every single year. Some of the presentations were pretty good, particularly the ones I attended by Mark Reinhold, the Chief Engineer for the JDK. I even got to meet him, which is a funny story in itself. I went to the welcoming reception with a co-worker, but we couldn't find two seats together. So I invited myself to the table where this guy happened to be seated. Trying to break the ice, I asked if this was his first time at the conference. He told me that he had been there several times and given talks each time. At that point, I realized he must be "somebody", but since he was being a non-conformist and not wearing a name tag, I had no idea who. It became increasingly clear that he was a big shot as person after person stopped by the table and said hello to him. It wasn't until after the reception when I had a chance to review the speaker's list that I figured out who he was. Really friendly down-to-earth guy though.

One thing that bugged me was the injection of politics. There was a Yahoo groups mailing list for the conference that I joined a month or two before the conference. Unfortunately, it contained very little information related to the conference. Mostly, it consisted of the left-wing paranoid rantings of a bunch of Bush-haters. The level of venom and conspiracy-theory paranoia amongst some of them was truly amazing. They put a little different spin on the typical "If-Bush-wins-I'm-moving-to-another-country" routine. It became "If Bush wins we should have the conference in Canada next year". But hey, it's a free country, they are entitled to their opinions (and entitled to move to Canada, I might add). So I just kept quiet and monitored the list for any actual useful info.

So now I'm headed to this conference feeling a bit like an outsider already, thinking that I better make sure I keep my political persuasions to myself. Then at the conference itself, the organizer (who is probably a really nice guy ... I never met him but most of the attendees seem to love him) introduced the keynote speaker by introducing him as being from Texas, the state where a "former one term president and a soon to be one term president" were also from. This got a resounding round of applause. Again, the guy is certainly entitled to his opinion, but as a paying customer, I am not interested in being subjected to it. Kinda felt like I was trapped behind enemy lines.

Oh well, at least Bush won. Nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah!

Red Rover, Red Rover, send my mouse pointer right over

I recently discovered a nifty little desktop app called Desktop Rover. It's an application I've wanted for a long time.

Basically, if you have a couple of PC's with their monitors sitting next to each other, this application allows you to treat the second PC as if it were an extension of the first PC's desktop. So, instead of having to use a KVM switch, or even worse, switch to a different keyboard and mouse, you just keep moving your mouse pointer off the edge of the first PC's monitor and on to the second PC. Now, you can do things on the second PC with the keyboard and mouse, as if you were using the keyboard and mouse attached to it. You can even cut and paste between the two PC's.

There are some drawbacks. First, it's not free. It's $48 for a two-license pack. I feel that price is a little bit high, but on the other hand, I'm not aware of any similar alternative solutions. For me, at least, it is worth the cost. You can also obtain a trial license so that you can try the software before making a final decision. Secondly, while you can cut and paste between the two systems, this does not work perfectly. Sometimes it just doesn't seem to pick up what I'm trying to cut.

Overall, I find it to be a very useful app that nicely fills its niche. Once configured, it works reliably and unobtrusively.