December 2004 Archives

I recently bought a game called Half Life 2. I have become quite addicted. The graphics are unbelievable and the playability is too! Maximum PC rated it an 11 out of 10, and I must agree. I could write a LONG review of the game, but I don't have time because I spent it all PLAYING the game :)

We use Sabine SWM7000 wireless microphone systems for an annual conference that we host. I was trying to flash the firmware and was having problems where it was reporting the firmware as corrupted. So I thought I would call Sabine and get some tech support. Well, to my surprise, the message stated "We are closed until January 3". Now, I understand people taking vacation over the holidays, but who shuts down the ENTIRE company???? What kind of crap is that?
Luckily, I finally found the answer on their web site. I don't know why I couldn't find it the other night or why I didn't find it when I *SEARCHED* their documentation, but it's in BOLD on their web site.

MSNBC - Kids on a mission to help soldiers phone home
A 14 year old girl and her 12 year old brother decided to take the $14 they had in their piggy bank and help soldiers call home. They have no parlayed that into over $250,000 worth of pre-paid calling cards. And, just recently, the IRS has now granted their "Cell Phones for Soldiers" campaign Non Profit status so all donations are tax deductible. What they are doing is taking old cell phones and selling them to a company that refurbishes them, then using that money to buy phone cards to send to the troops. They also accept cash of course. :)
It seems to me that these are two smart kids with good hearts. They have given of themselves and even missed out on things like cheerleading competitions and soccer games to pursue this.
If you have an old cell phone you'd like to get rid of, check their website for places you can drop it off or where to mail it to. Certain phone models can even be mailed in with pre-paid shipping.
I'm glad to see there are some good kids left in this world AND that the news actually reported something good! In a world full of war and tsunamis, it's nice to find good hearted news out there.

I went for the follow up appt with the allergist today. Basically, there's nothing he can do for me. Now it's off the ENT.

Luckily, it came out well! I'm very happy. As I said before, I had no clue as to what was going on when the flash went off. It all happened so fast!

I'm not sure how this happened, or how long it will last, but if you do a search for Alienware Review on MSN, my site is the #1 hit! According to my web logs, that page gets quite a bit of traffic from search engines. I also recently received an email from someone stating that they would not being buying an Alienware machine due to my review. It's nice to know that I can hurt their sales, even if just a little, after being mistreated.

My blog also finally got Blogmarked! I guess I finally found someone out there who appreciates my ramblings. It's nice to be appreciated.

Help our troops talk to their families this holiday season (or anytime, for that matter)! Donate to the USO Operation Phone Home. They take the donations and buy phone cards to give to the service men and women who are far away from their families.
I spent 9 years in the Air Force. I've spent the holidays alone in a dorm room, too broke to afford to call home (especially at $2 a minute!). I wish they had this program back then! I can say from personal experience that the USO (United Service Organizations) helps the troops. When I was 18 years old traveling alone into a foreign country, they were there to give a guiding hand in the right direction. No matter where I was traveling, their offices in the airports gave me a place I could fall asleep without worrying about my luggage being stolen.
I see almost every car on the road these days with a "Support Our Troops" yellow ribbon. That's great! But Talk is cheap. Show them that you appreciate what their doing by giving them a little piece of home.
I just donated $50. I challenge you to give what you can. If that's $5 or $500, anything helps.

Also, I'd like to send a special Thank You to another group of people who SHOW their support to the troops. The Maine Troop Greeters at the Bangor International Airport. They meet EVERY plane of troops that comes through BIA. It doesn't matter if they are heading to training, to war or coming home. They are there to show their support and to say Thank You for all that the troops do for us. My Mother and Step-Father are a couple of the greeters there. My friend Julie and I have joined them while in Maine on vacation. They started doing this during the FIRST Gulf War and they continue on today. My hats off to all of them.
The USO office at BIA offers free cell phone use to the troops passing through so they can call home.

Of course, I’d also like to thank the Troops. They arrive in Bangor after a long trip (I KNOW what those trips are like) and still smile, shake hands, give hugs, sign autographs and show general kindness to all who greet them.

I was surfing along on BlogExplosion and won 25 Credits! Yeah! Then, I apparently misinterpreted one of those stupid pictures and failed to collect the credits! How irritating! I guess there are no second chances :-(

There are some Strange News Photos found at WFTV.

While some are funny:

Others kind of freak me out:

I haven't got through all 99 of them yet, but there are some cool photos to check out!

Teen Accused Of Shooting Santa With Pellet Gun
I'm guessing this kid is now on the "naughty" list. No need to check that name twice. When you shoot Santa Claus, I'm willing to bet he remembers it. And this kid better hope his house doesn't catch on fire, because the one he shot was a fireman dressed as Santa.

There is a really funny entry over on ihaveacrazewife.com called If Women Ruled the world. The pictures gave me a good laugh for the day. Go check it out!

Judge awards ISP $1 billion in spam damages

There are federal and state laws against SPAM. Other countries, such as the UK have anti-spam laws. Lawsuits are being filed. Microsoft, AOL and EarthLink have many of them in the hopper at any given time. Recently, a spammer was given a fine AND jail time. Now, an ISP has been awarded $1 BILLION in damages from a SPAM lawsuit. Why is it then, that even after ALL of the fines AND jail time, I still get the same or MORE spam than ever? I get somewhere in the vicinity of 400 spam emails a day. I realize that my spam problem comes no where near the almost 4 million spam emails that Bill Gates receives in a day. However, it's still VERY irritating to have to sort through all that crap to find REAL email. I have that mail account setup such that anything not on my "white list" is automatically junk, but sometimes I need to get to something I haven't white listed yet and have to go through all those SPAM mails to find the one I actually wanted.

How many SPAM mails do you receive a day? Have you found that the lawsuits or SPAM filtering technology are helping at all?

Sony music has decided to take another stab at copy protecting their music CDs. You'd think they'd learn. If I can't rip a CD that I PURCHASED to my computer AND copy it over onto my MP3 player so I can listen to it while I'm travelling, I won't buy it! New CD copy-lock technology nears market | CNET News.com

Along the same news trail, Downhill Battle has pledged to send a lump of coal to the RIAA and the MPAA for every $100 donted to the EFF, Public Knowledge or IPac organizations. I already support the EFF. Read the news story on CNET or just go and donate!

I was on my way home from the White House Christmas party on Monday with every intention of coming home and writing a blog entry about the evening. However, on my way home, I received a phone call with the news that my Great Aunt Maude had passed away. Needless to say, things got hectic quickly while I made travel plans back to NH for the funeral. The blog just took a back seat. I'm back now, and I'll bring everyone back up to date soon.
For those of you that I normally send a Christmas card, if you haven’t received one yet you now know why. I may not get to the rest of them at all this year.

Everyone keeps asking me what I want for Christmas and I keep telling them I don't know because I have most everything I want. Well, I've come up with some things that would be nice...

• Richard Petty Driving Experience - I've done the ride along, now I want to DRIVE!
  
• Skip Barber Racing School - Even just the most basic one day driving school would be a blast!
  
• A 2005 Mustang GT - I'll even trade in my 97 Mustang GT to help offset the cost! :)
  

Ok, Ok... I know these things are expensive. For something cheaper, you can check out the few items on my Amazon.com wish list.

A friend of mine from my High School days, Bob Lampen, is in town this weekend. I went out to see him tonight. We went to a place in Towson called The Still. It's an irish restaurant/pub. The food was good and so was the music. It was great to see Bob and his wife as well as his brother Chuck and his girlfriend. However, it's really hard to catch up in that atmosphere. I can't hear a damn thing over the music and my throat hurts from trying to yell answers back.
Well, I'm off to take a shower. I smell like smoke.

Google released a new tool in beta called Google Suggest. I think it's really cool. As you type, it drops down a box with known search terms and the number of results for that search term.

I have started playing around with the templates and cascading style sheets (CSS) for the site. I made it wider and added a little color. I'm not sure what I think of it at the moment, but it's far from done. Let me know what you think.

Well, congress has passed the Intelligence Reform bill. All that is left now is for the President to sign it. I'm wondering how this will affect my little world (I'm a Govt. Contractor).
You should read the article to see what other things are included in the bill besides just creating the position of Director of National Intelligence. I especially found this one interesting:

Creates a Privacy and Civil Liberties Board of private citizens, with access to all government agencies, to oversee privacy protections

Adds 2,000 Border Patrol agents and 800 immigration and customs agents every year for the next five years

That's a lot of new Federal Employees! That's great for the job market and bad for our taxes I'm sure.

What's YOUR opinion of the new bill?

What politician is responsible for making laws that make things like this possible???? "Homeowner Can't Get Man Out Of Her House". Yes Mam, I know you own the house and he doesn't have a lease and he doesn't belong there but you can't make him leave and if you change the locks without a court order YOU will be in trouble. That sounds insane to me, so what politician said "Hey! That sounds GREAT! Let me vote for THAT!"
And then we have "Deputy Fired For Urinating In Parking Garage Elevator". He did this at least 5 times before getting caught. At least they fired him. That's the only thing I can find "RIGHT" about this story.

I went and picked up my new suit today. I guess I can look presentable now. I decided that while I was in there I should pick up a new White dress shirt. I mean, I have several but they haven't been out of the closet in FIVE YEARS. So I was afraid they may now be yellow (from sitting unused) or just completely out of date. So without thinking I just asked for a white dress shirt, preferably "wrinkle free" (I hate ironing) in size 15 1/2 x 33. They rang it up and I about choked. I walked out of the store thinking "I must be on crack! I just paid $50 for ONE plain white dress shirt!". It better turn out to be a nice shirt! I could have bought two or three at JC Penney for the same price.

Most everyone on the net knows that ROFL means "Rolling on the floor laughing". But do you know what ROTFLMAOWPIMPSLAGJTTWFDLAMSUASL means?

I think it's about time I get off my fat ass and start exercising or something too. My weight isn't getting much worse, but my gut sure is. Since I KNOW I have back problems, I guess I better do something before the Gut causes them to get worse.

Today's news: Dealers Report Stolen Marijuana To Authorities.
And I felt stupid for spending $50 on a shirt...HA!

Today was "Sunday Funday". That basically means that Jen, Heather and I laid around the house and watched movies while eating junk all day. It was fun to have some complete and total down time. And I still think Shrek 2 is better than the first one.

I was surfing blogs through BlogExplosion tonight and I found a link to a funny video on offred01s blog. I did find that it didn't play well by streaming, so you may want to download it to your computer and then watch it... it plays well into my "I don't want kids" theory.

According to Webster, BLOG is the #1 word of the year for 2004! This does not surprise me at all. There are thousands of people blogging now and many many sites that exist mainly for finding blogs. Some of these include

BlogExplosion
Technorati
weblogs.com
blo.gs
and many, many more...

Then there are the sites that host blogs...
Google owns Blogger
Microsoft just released the beta of it blogging service, called MSN Spaces
and Six Apart, the makers of Movabletype (the software THIS blog runs on), own Typepad

So, with hundreds of site and thousands of bloggers (probably understated), it's no wonder the Blog was the #1 word of the year!

I'm a fairly seasoned traveler. I have many thousands of frequent flyer miles spread across several airlines. I found an interesting article on msnbc.com that detailed some interesting travel tips that I had not heard before. The two I found most interesting were:

1) seatguru.com - a website that tells you everything you wanted to know about every seat available for most airlines. For instance, on a United Airlines 757-200 (757), "seat 16F has extra room due to the exit row and is often preferred over row 15 due to the full recline. Many flyers complain that the air that makes it past the door seal can make for a very cold flight." Anyone who travels a lot knows that a good seat makes a big difference.

2) The Knee Defender is a cool little invention that clips onto your tray table to keep the guy in front of you from reclining his seat into your lap. This is especially important if you use a laptop during flight!

If you plan on flying at all, you should check out the article!