Back in January I posted a few articles about Windows 7 Beta and what it did to my laptop. It’s not Microsoft’s fault, it’s a combination of Dell and nVidia’s faults. It was the perfect storm: a known design flaw in the video card that affected a boatload of Dell, HP, Sony and Macintosh notebooks. On top of that was a poor design choice by Dell to not actually have contact between the overheating GPU chip and the copper heat pipe that’s supposed to cool it. On top of that was running a Beta OS. On top of that, using a pre-beta alpha-release of a driver for said beta os on a flawed laptop with a flawed GPU. A perfect storm.

While watching a video full-screen in Windows Media Player, the GPU overheated and blew up. Not only did it crash and blue screen and completely wipe out the running OS, but somehow it managed to overwrite the GPU BIOS! That shouldn’t be POSSIBLE, but it happened. The computer would boot up, just no screen. If I watched and waited for the hard drive to stop spinning away during bootup, typed my password and hit enter, it would log me in! I could HEAR the windows startup sound, but no video. No video on the external monitor or HDMI ports, either. Ultimately, because it was under warranty, Dell sent out a technician who replaced the whole motherboard, GPU included (although they replaced it with the same broke-ass GPU chip) so the story ended happily.

One of the things I noticed in the beta was the feedback system, which I used extensively (duh, that’s what betas are for) until I couldn’t. The big huge crash dump from the video card was never sent because after the motherboard was replaced, I was too scared to put the Windows 7 hard drive back in again. I figured I would wait until another beta (or RC) came out and hopefully there’d be a newer driver from nVidia available then, too.

On another note, there’s a way to use a clean, shiny penny to sandwich between the GPU and the heat pipe which drastically improves the transfer of heat to the heat pipe and can avoid just such an occurrence. (you can google nVidia GeForce 8400M GS Copper Mod to see for yourself). On the down side, doing so invalidates your warranty. I’ve refrained from doing it because of that, but when the warranty runs out, that’s on my to-do list for the very next day. Instead of doing a recall and replacing the bum chips (and the heat pipe while they were at it) Dell instead extended everyone’s warranty by 12 months, so if your laptop blows up (like mine did) you’re covered for an extra year.. but if it happens AGAIN after that period, you’ve got a dead laptop. No one else did anything better (HP, Sony, even Apple) so I don’t want to be TOO unfair and shit all over Dell only because they and their tech support have been very good to me over the years. No, really! :)

The Windows 7 RC is out today and will work (for free) until June 10th, 2010 or about 13 months. In the fine print is that starting 2 months before that, your computer will shut down every 2 hours as a warning sign that the expiration is imminent and that it’s time to get a properly licensed copy. Hopefully there’s an upgrade path so you can punch in a new product code and activate Windows without having to re-install with the release version. I can’t see myself NOT re-installing with 100% gold code, but I’m sure there will be people out there who have tweaked and modded their user profile and software set-up JUST SO and won’t relish the thought of starting over.

Happy Valentine’s Day, ladies. I hope you had a lovely day…

This Saturday it’s your turn to return the favor. That’s right, it’s been a month already! March 14th is Steak and BJ Day. It’s pretty simple… It’s steak… and a BJ!

www.steakandbjday.com for more details (pretty NSFW content)

We’ll be celebrating this year at Little Billy’s Steakhouse in Burnaby, but the jury is out on who’s picking up the tab! ;)

Just over two years ago I came across a link that said that Rip Curl was making a rechargeable, heated wetsuit. DAMN! I posted that I did not know if it was for scuba use or it was merely “splash-proof” for kayaking and surfing.

It took two years, but this morning I saw a post on The Uber-Review that they’ve finally brought it to market.

It’s only rated to 10m so it’s not designed for SCUBA diving at all. Surfing yes, kayaking yes, SCUBA, no. They were thoughtful enough to do a bunch of testing to make sure that the electric field generated by the lithium-ion batteries and the carbon fiber heating elements wouldn’t attract sharks. Thanks guys! Hopefully they didn’t get the batteries from Sony’s laptop battery division. :)

Rip Curl’s website has a cool interactive flash site set up with videos and a neat “thermal body scanner” that shows you where the elements are and how much heat they produce when you have it switched on low or high.

Now if I could find a battery-heated wooly-bear to wear under my drysuit, I’d be back in business diving up here in the Pacific Northwest… maybe next spring :)

PS: they're just over $1000 MSRP and doesn't really say what the thickness is, although I kinda think it's a 4/3mm.

One of the things I miss about back home was live music. Sure there’s live music down here, but you can only listen to the same songs being done on the steel pan, or the same cover bands doing the same cover songs so many times. Even the “big shows” that are imported are cover bands like Nearly Neil, Bjorn Again, Elevation or Innuendo. Once or twice a year there’s a big-name reggae or soca star that comes over from Jamaica or somewhere and just once in the ten years I’ve been here, there’s been a major North American band down here. Last year The Tragically Hip played in May, co-incidentally when I was in Italy so I missed it.

Compared to Vancouver, where there’s an entire grid of big and small acts performing every night at big and small venues it sometimes makes your head spin. I wanna go here, I wanna see them, I wanna go to that concert…

Back in the 90’s before I left for Cayman, I used to drag my friends around town (and sometimes all the way out to Chilliwack) to see a couple local bands: Rymes with Orange and The Odds. Shortly after I left Vancouver in 1998 (with all four of the Odds CDs) they broke up. Imagine my surprise when a couple days ago I see a status update from one of my friends that he’s setting up a fan page on Facebook for The New Odds. What the? I jumped on the fan page and found out that they released a new CD called Cheerleader just a few weeks ago. Sweet! Then this morning as I’m flicking through the news feed, I see that he posted it on his web site with the catchy riff on the Who’s lyrics from Won’t get fooled again (A GREAT song to rock out to on Rock Band, by the way :) for the title.

SO to recap: I leave for Cayman in 1998, the band breaks up shortly after. I move back to Vancouver in 2008 and the new band gets together and puts out a CD shortly before I arrive…

Co-incidence??? Perhaps…

From Slashfood this morning:

Recently, the AFA (American Family Association) launched a site announcing that it will boycott McDonald's for not remaining neutral on "culture wars," particularly the corporation's promotion of a homosexual agenda. The web site shows a television commercial from last year's San Francisco Gay Pride in which McDonald's announces its commitment of support to the gay and lesbian community.

Co-incidentally, from The Caymanian Compass… also this morning:

A simple change to Cayman Islands law which would officially ban homosexual marriages here has now been drafted by legislators.

The text of the Marriage (Amendment) Bill, 2008 was released on Wednesday. The amendment reads: “’Marriage’ means the union between a man and a woman as husband and wife.”

Co-incidence??? Perhaps…

PRESS RELEASE
5th May, 2008. For immediate release.

SIX BLUE IGUANAS MURDERED IN BOTANIC PARK

Six critically endangered Grand Cayman Blue Iguanas were killed by unknown persons late on Saturday evening, in the QE II Botanic Park. The crime was discovered by volunteers with the National Trust’s Blue Iguana Recovery Programme, shortly after 9am on Sunday morning.

The iguanas appeared to have massive internal injuries, as if they had been stamped on violently and repeatedly. Some were also cut and partially dismembered. Three were found dead inside their breeding pens, two had been carried out of their pens and left in the tour area outside. The body of the sixth is still missing, but entrails on the trail outside his pen are a grim sign of his fate.

Department of Environment enforcement officer Carl Edwards was on the scene almost immediately, fast followed by the Royal Cayman Islands Police who began forensic work and have commenced an investigation. Dr. Colin Wakelin from the Department of Agriculture closed a large gash in one of the surviving victims and began making arrangements for an autopsy to confirm the causes of death, which will probably take place later today.

Dead on Sunday morning were the adult breeding males “Yellow” (sponsored by Caribbean Publishers), “Pedro” (sponsored by Websters Tours), “Digger” (sponsored by Simon Hicks), and “Eldemire” (christened by Kent Eldemire). The grand matriarch of the captive facility, “Sara”, was also dead. “Jessica” had been thrown out of the neighboring pen and was in shock, but still moving. Both females had been preparing to lay eggs.

The effort to save Jessica’s life went on into the night, but despite specialist advice by telephone from the Wildlife Conservation Society and Dr. Wakelin’s resourceful and determined attempts to stabilize her, she passed away during the night.

The persons responsible may have broken into the Park after closing hours, and found a way into the fenced-in captive breeding facility. No motive is known for this act of extreme violence against these unique and much-loved symbols of Cayman’s natural heritage. Anyone with relevant information is asked to contact the Royal Cayman Islands Police.

You know the drill. Every 14th of February you get the chance to display your fondness for a significant other by showering her with gifts, flowers, dinner, shows and any other baubles that women find romantic. Every Valentines day you rack your brains for that one special, unique gift that will show your wife or girlfriend that you really do care for them more than any other. Now ladies, I'll let you in on a little secret; guys really don't enjoy this that much. Sure seeing that smile on your face when we get it right is priceless, but that smile is the result of weeks of blood, sweat and consideration. Another secret; guys feel left out. That's right, there's no special holiday for the ladies to show their appreciation for the men in their life. Men as a whole are either too proud or too embarrassed to admit it.

Which is why a new holiday has been created.

Vista's been out almost a year, and SP1 is right around the corner. I've been running it at work on my personal machine for about seven or eight months now, just to try and get used to it so when we don't have the option of getting new computers with XP anymore, I'll be able to answer the inevitable questions from the users "where did x y and z go?" Because technically you can install an OS license on two computers if you really read into the fine print, I took the Express Upgrade disc from my computer at work home and installed it on my desktop computer.

My work computer rolls right along with multiple applications open, Symantec Corporate Edition 10 in the background, WMP 11 in toolbar mode playing MP3s, Outlook 2007 open, Active Directory Users & Computers MMC snap-in open, Foldershare satellite in the taskbar and then whatever else I'm working on at the moment.

My home computer runs AVG Free version in the background, uTorrent in the background, Foldershare satellite and iTunes. Generally there's an explorer window or two open, as well as iTunes minimized when I'm not there and open and playing MP3s when  I am around. That's all.

My average processor usage is around 65%. 65% of my computer's resources are used up while it's sitting "idle" or doing something I consider extremely low-key, like playing MP3s through iTunes. It's so bad that iTunes actually starts "skipping" while trying to play MP3s. Doing anything, skipping forward to another song, opening a window, changing folders in Explorer, renaming a file, ANYTHING causes the processor usage to spike to 100% and slow everything down to a crawl. Heaven forbid I try to listen to music while doing anything file intensive.

Oddly enough, as resource intensive as it is, watching videos with Nero Showtime (I'm forcing myself to use it instead of VLC right now because I paid for Nero 7... right before Nero 8 was released and offered me the chance to upgrade for a low 39.99) doesn't seem to be a problem for the system at all.

I was watching the processor usage today while iTunes was skipping, trying to see WHAT was causing the processor usage and skipping. It didn't add up... I was using maybe 30% of the processor, but the reported usage was 65-70%. I checked "show processes from all users" box and there it was: Audiodg.exe was hogging up 30-65% of the processor cycles, iTunes went between 6% and 30%. What the hell is audiodg.exe? Is it something to do with the new Sound Blaster Audigy card I put in a few weeks ago?

I looked around online and found a pretty good description of it here. 

The short answer is that audiodg.exe hosts the audio engine for Vista.  All the DSP and other audio processing is done in audiodg.exe.  There are two reason it runs outside of the windows audio service.

The first is that there's 3rd party code that gets loaded into audiodg.exe.  Audio hardware vendors have the ability to install custom DSPs (called Audio Processing Objects or APOs) into the audio pipeline.  For a number of reasons (reliability, serviceability, others) we're not allowed to load 3rd party code into svchost processes (svchost.exe is a generic host process for services that's used inside Windows). So we need to move all the code that interacts with these 3rd party APOs outside the audio service (that way if an APO crashes, it won't take out some other critical part of the system with it).

The second reason for using a separate process for the audio engine is DRM.  The DRM system in Vista requires that the audio samples be processed in a protected process, and (for a number of technical reasons that are too obscure to go into) it's not possible for a svchost hosted service to run in a protected process.

 

UGH. So this piggy process was introduced in Vista to allow audio processing to run in a protected process because of DRM. Double-ugh. Everything in my iTunes library are plain-Jane VBR MP3s that I ripped from my own CDs. There is no DRM on them, there does not need to be any DRM on them, but they have to be processed through this audiodg process so they CAN. Lame. All it's doing is chewing up resources and making my audio playback skip. It's what the French call "Le Suck".

Vista's vaunted new User Account Control sucks, too. I left it all on to force myself to get used to it. I installed EAC to rip a couple new CDs that I bought, and it installed fine. I navigated to C:\Program Files\EAC and created a new folder called LAME and then unzipped the LAME_enc.dll and exe files into it and told EAC to use the external compressor... but it wouldn't. It would inexplicably fail. I dropped to a command line and tried it myself and got "Access Denied". Turns out that even with an administrator account, you can't execute an .exe file in the program files folder unless Windows/msiexec has put it there itself. If you have a program that didn't come in an .msi installation file, then it won't be able to run. On a whim, I went to Control Panel and turned off UAC. It warned me three times that it was a bad idea, and then asked me to reboot. After a reboot, EAC worked as expected, and I now have a red shield with an X over it in my system tray that periodically reminds me that I've left my system open to unauthorized use and click here to turn UAC back on. At work it's even worse. I had to disable UAC right off the bat in order for ScriptLogic to even run my logon script.

There's a whole laundry list of all small, niggling things that just don't work in Vista. My USB TV Tuner is unsupported in Vista and now has been discontinued. My Microsoft(!!) branded keyboard with the integrated UareU biometric fingerprint scanner doesn't work. The keyboard works, but the fingerprint scanner doesn't.

Probably my biggest gripe with Vista at work (aside from the UAC business described above) is the lack of adequate management tools. I'm a Network Administrator. I spend a lot of time in the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). Active Directory Users and Computers in particular just doesn't work very well. I don't have icons telling me if an object is a user, group, disabled, computer, contact or anything. EVERY icon looks like a text file. Exchange 2003 System Manager won't run, so I can't do anything mailbox-related without VNC'ing to the server or using Remote Desktop to one of the Domain Controllers. ISA management doesn't work (2004 OR 2006), Websense Manager won't run and ScriptLogic Desktop Authority sort of works, but is pointing at the wrong server (although that's not a Vista gripe)

I'm at the point now where I'm ready to declare my experimentation phase with Vista over and roll back my desktop computer at home to XP SP2. Fortunately when I installed Vista, I used an extra hard drive, and I can go back as easily as opening the case, pulling the drive and putting the old one back in. There will be a little work after that, Windows updates and a few driver changes for new hardware. At work it's a little more work to downgrade, but because they're new machines, I've been proactive and made a Ghost image of the new Optiplex with XP SP2. That's another post though :)

"Stan's Uncle Jimbo and his war buddy Ned take Stan, Kenny, Kyle, and Cartman on a hunting trip in the mountains. When they arrive in the wilderness (just outside of South Park), Jimbo gives each of the boys a gun (Kyle, Stan, and Kenny get shotguns while Cartman receives an assault rifle), a can of beer, and a pack of cigarettes, and the hunting festivities begin.

It soon becomes apparent that Jimbo and Ned's idea of hunting is to slaughter every living thing in sight via military weaponry. They get around the regulations by yelling "It's coming right for us!" in order to exploit the loophole that they can kill any animal in self-defense. Stan proves to not have the proper temperament to enjoy hunting (or at least Jimbo and Ned's idea of hunting), and finds himself unable to shoot a living target when provided the opportunity. While hunting the boys realize that one of the nearby mountains is rumbling, a fact Ned and Jimbo ignore until it is too late." from Wikipedia

This is EXACTLY the picture I was looking for to go along with the "it's coming right for us!" exclamation. Two days ago, TD#4 was renamed Tropical Storm Dean. That was when the phone started ringing. As of this morning it's "dipped" south a bit and is now forecast to come into the Caribbean Basin. We don't like dipping. That's what Ivan did to go around Jamaica in '04 and smack us upside the head.

Since this is the first threat (real or otherwise) of the year that's even remotely going to affect us, people are a bit jumpy and starting to breath down our necks to put our hurricane/disaster recovery plan into standby. The phrase 'two monkeys fucking a football' comes to mind.. a whole lot of action and not a lot of results. Of course I could be wrong, it HAS happened once or twice in the past 34 years so we're going to use this as a dry-run to test out some of the new things we've added this year and practice the things we've been doing for the last few years.

As usual, I'll be posting up progress and notes and things here, as I do. I've actually got around to adding all the bookmarks for weather sites that I reference on Del.icio.us and added the RSS feed to my OPML list over on the bottom right. If you subscribe to the list, you'll get new sites as I remember them and add them. The tag on Del.icio.us is hurricane weather and maps.

Back in the day, right after these Bud commercials came out, before YouTube when you had to go looking all over the place trying to find videos to show your friends when you're drinking we came across this magic little gem. There were all kinds of different versions that people did, I think there's an Office Space wazzzup video, too. It's funny how a beer commercial of all things can be so timeless... up until last week when he had to leave, Zac, Matty, John and I would see the caller-id and answer with Wazzzzuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup to each other, because we all spent so much time laughing together watching this over and over again back in the days of The Ranch. The best part is that they have Wonder Woman doing the voice of "dookie" with the lowest voice :)

The irony? None of us drink Bud or Bud Light and the ad didn't make us change our minds.

AP - A World War I veteran's watch lost nearly 90 years ago, has stood the test of time. William B. Gill lost his watch in France, where he served in the U.S. Army. Another man, Carl Grothaus, won it in a poker game and brought it back to South Dakota.

Awesome.

I Do...Now I Don't

These days, an estimated 50% of marriages end in divorce. So what happens after the divorce? What do you do with the ring? When you turn around and sell a ring, you are taking a big loss. The price you will get for the ring will be sharply discounted from what was originally paid. In most cases, you will only get 25-35% of the purchase price and that´s if you are lucky.

I Do...Now I Don't can help solve the "what do I do with the ring?" scenario. We will help you sell your ring at the price that it deserves!!

Ok I doubt it, but whatever. Shark fin soup is a delicacy in Japanese cuisine. There are some pretty scary things that are considered delicacies in Japanese cuisine. Then again, there's some pretty scary things in pretty much any ethnic cuisine. (Haggis anyone? how about some black pudding? Tripe? bleah to all of them!) The thing about shark fin soup is that they only use the cartilage of certain fins. The rest of the shark is bycatch. There are some pretty sick videos available on the net that show sharks being finned (ie their fins cut off) while they're still alive, and then chucked back overboard to die slowly and painfully. Add to that the bycatch when trawling for sharks includes dolphins, rays, mantas and just about everything but Jimmy Hoffa and it's all cast aside to get just the shark's fins.

If you're going to catch it, eat it. Eat it all. I have no problem with people hunting or fishing if it's going to become their food, or traded for food or whatever (sustenance fishing/hunting and I don't think you need a semi- or full-automatic rifle to do it). I don't subscribe to the "meat is murder" philosophy and I like my steak medium rare. I've been to a slaughterhouse before, when I was a teenaged line-cook who wasn't showing enough respect for what I was cooking. it was jarring but it didn't put me off meat.

Shark fin soup gets on my tits though. A couple days ago someone was searching around on Amazon and found a store that sold Shark Fin Soup. Wetpixel posted it up with directions on what to do to pressure Amazon to take it down. Divester picked up the story and ran with it, as did a few other scuba diving related websites and by the end of the day, it was offline. Congrats to the mob mentality of the internet! I thought I was seeing the old RSS feeds today when I clicked over to Divester and saw the same thing... but not! There's another store on Amazon selling a different brand of Shark Fin Soup, so the whole thing is starting up again. I wonder how long this one will take, what with the combined readership of Divester, Wetpixel and all the blogs that have linked to them.

I also wonder if Amazon will go through it's own stores looking for other stores carrying it and remove them as well, or will it be up to the eagle-eyed surfers to find it and direct a campaign against it.

If you only ever read my posts via RSS, and never actually come by the website, you wouldn't have noticed that I updated the navigation links over on the right. I updated the blogroll section as well. It's not my entire blogroll, that's about 125 feeds that I read through Newsgator Online and would overwhelm the template on this page. If you're interested in what I read, you can see it here.

A few months back, I signed up a myspace account. At the time, I did it just to make sure no one "cybersquats" my name and starts posting stuff or harassing people pretending to be me.

A couple friends of mine are big "MySpace"-ers and got on my back to update the page a little,and tonight I finally did.

I'm not going to post much stuff there, I don't want to take any effort away from here, since sometimes I struggle to find things to write about (although you probably couldn't tell from that last post about what I was looking for in a mobile phone) and the last thing I want to do is start posting "just to hear the sound of my own voice" and post garbage (this post notwithstanding :) )

SO, if you want to check it out, it's http://www.myspace.com/docjelly like that was going to be a surprise, right?

Wizmo is a neat little utility written by Steve Gibson, the guy who wrote Spinrite and Shields Up!. He's doing a podcast called Security Now! on the TWit network and while sometimes it's a bit dry, I'm usually able to listen to the whole thing through.

I'd heard about Wizmo before, read what it does and then moved along. It's a Swiss Army Knife for Windows. You run wizmo.exe either from the command line or as part of a desktop shortcut. After Wizmo.exe you put what they refer to in the notes as "action verbs". There are a bunch of action verbs available, and I believe that it's extensible, so you can write your own action verbs if you want. There's Wizmo Blackout which blacks out your screen (it doesn't turn it off, just blacks it out like a screensaver), wizmo blank starts your currently selected screen saver, wizmo standby to send your computer into standby mode (if it doesn't have a suspend button or it's not a laptop). Other commands are hibernate, logoff, exit, reboot, shutdown which are all self-explanatory, monoff which shuts your screen OFF into standby mode and gravitron, the GRC screensaver with all it's own settings.

The reason I was looking at it again was because my new monitor, my Acer AL2216WB 22" widescreen didn't always shut itself off. I don't know if it's something in the system tray, or maybe one of the Yahoo Desktop Widgets preventing it, but if I was laying in bed watching TV (either from my AverMedia Ultra300 USB tuner or uhh, recorded shows) I'd have to get up and push the button to shut off the monitor and go back to bed. How 1980...

I started searching Google for some way to programatically send a "standby" command to the monitor and two or three links down was Wizmo. WTF? Cool! I went back to GRC.com and downloaded it and configured a shortcut on my desktop to shut off the monitor. Now when I'm done, I fire up VNC, double click the Shutoff Monitor shortcut and close VNC and it's nice and dark and off I go to sleep.

Last night was the Taste of Cayman. Last year was canceled due to weather, so this year should have been even bigger. Nope.

The moved the venue to Boatswain's Beach, the new Turtle Farm which was a really dumb move. I realize that there's a huge push on to show off Boatswain's Beach to the public for many reasons, but the bottom line is that Boatswain's Beach/Turtle Farm/Cracked Conch area cannot handle the amount of traffic/cars that were going to show up. Boatswain's Beach parking lot was overfull, Tortuga Rum parking lot was triple-parked with people blocking other people in, because they could, Cracked Conch/Divetech's parking lot was a zoo, and cars were lined along both sides of the street almost from Sharon & Seb's old apartment through to nearly Coconut Bay.

For as long as I can remember, Taste of Cayman had been held at Safehaven. It kinda sucked if there was rain (and really, when does it ever rain in Cayman in the summer/fall?) but there was tons of parking, and a huge empty lot that people could park in behind the "grounds" plus all the parking at Sunshine Suites, Cayman Falls, the Westin and also the entire Safehaven (Now Regatta) office park.

Anyway, enough bitching about the venue, let's get on with the food. We entered and turned right. The Marriott Beach resort was right there, and they had a fruit punchy type drink, ginger-glazed beef, jerk chicken & some sort of fish dish. The jerk was good, not TOO hot, but still a good zing on the tongue. Their beef was pretty good, too. Just past then was Island Supply who had cheesecakes and whatnot, so we skipped over them (for now, we're not crazy) and headed to Chicken! Chicken!, Cimboco and Breezes. They had Conch chowder (I don't like conch, but I tried it and it was very VERY good) They also had some Chicken Chicken, uhh, chicken, caribbean cornbread and caesar salad. Yum, Yum and yum.

We realized then that we were at the end of the line, so we turned around and headed the other way (dumb booth setup, but I guess you gotta work with what you got, but I don't want to get back on the venue thing) Heading back the other way was the Cayman Sea Salt company with... wait for it... sea salt! The first thought was "how are they going to promote it?" but what they had was a selection of fruits and veggies and even chocolate, sprinkled with their salt. I made a beeline for the choccies, and everyone looked at me like "salt on chocolate?" but it was good. They also had tomatoes. mmmm tomatoes... moving along we made our way through the rest of the "booths".

Hemingway's at the Hyatt was pimping their new Thursday special, a Brazilian barbecue (the name escapes me at the mo, but those types of places are getting popular in the US these days) I tried the beef and chorizo, with black refried beans, and they were yummmmy. The Westin had tuna burgers with various dressings... wasabi mayo, fruit relish, etc. The Ritz-Carlton had quite a line-up for their offering: hand-cut french fries tossed in truffle oil and topped with parmesan cheese. Sounds great, but because of the demand, they couldn't keep up and the fries I got were undercooked and soggy. MJ said that she's had them at Periwinkle (one of the restaurants there) and that they were really good, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Sunshine Grill was there, they had marinated flank steak, but it was gone by the time I got there. I've had it there before though and it's good. It's in their Jamaican Chop House tacos. They also had their Chopped Salad which was good but reminded me of the last meal I had before I tried that detox regimen a few months back, so I didn't finish it.

We went back around towards the cheesecake booth and stopped in at the Cayman Sea Sense booth. Danny and Marnie from Off The Wall were manning the booth. I walked up with my plate in my hand, held it out and asked what kind of fish they were serving... Danny laughed and called me an asshole, but I don't think Marnie knew (at first) that I was just joking and gave me a dirty look :)

We made it back around to the cheesecake booth and got a little hunk of plain NY Style cheesecake, a hunk of Reese' peanut butter something, and a little square of chocolate chip cheesecake, and then they POURED BAILEY'S ALL OVER IT. Bliss. After that we grabbed some beverages and sat down at one of the tables and I started sliding into food coma.

We left around 10:30 and made our way down to Aqua Beach where Ratskyn was playing, and stuck around there til closing. (Midnight, because it was Saturday). Zac's family is in town, so they were all there, we were all there, Renee made an appearance all the way in from where she lives now (Cayman's equivalent of The Boonies) but overall it was kind of a quiet night at Aqua Beach. Between the Taste of Cayman going on and the Full Moon Beach Party at Calico Jack's, I guess everyone was elsewhere last night.

We got home about 12:20 or so and I crashed. Hard. Food Coma was waiting for me and as soon as I was horizontal, I was out like a light. I slept HARD right through, all the way up until nearly 11 this morning when I realized that the song in my head in my dream was actually the alarm clock. Just another Sunday in Cayman, everyone's coming over later to sit on the beach, drink beer and watch the bikinis parade by like one of those conveyor belt sushi restaurants. Life is good!

Chris sent this link through the ex-soto's Yahoo Group. It's an ad for a washing machine for clothes, but it's SO COOL. It actually makes you want to go diving! Fortunately for me, all I gotta do is go downstairs to do it, but for those of you who are landlocked (or temperature locked) it's the next best thing. Whoever envisioned this was a smart cookie, but whoever Made It Happen (tm) is a friggin GENIUS!

http://www.buf.fr/WORK/popup.php?kind=movie&id=759

The clip is in quicktime, and it takes a minute or two to load, but DAMN is it worth it!

I'm just sayin... Saw this on Digg this morning and couldn't resist passing it on.

#2: Be direct. Geek guys tend to be in a shell. They are generally defensive and aloof. They aren't cold in the least; they're just extremely polite. Geeks tend to live by "do unto others". A geek guy who doesn't kiss you is worried about forcing himself. Grab him and plant one. Let him stagger and shake it off, but if he shows signs of recovering too quickly, grab him and plant one again. Subtlety and coyness completely fails with geeks; they'll be confused and expect that you're not on Pon Farr or are a nun or something. Where other guys need no provocation, a geek guy has to be brained on the noggin a couple of times, then he'll get the idea.

You can read the rest of Penguin Pete's tips here.

If you haven't already checked it out, click over to www.FrenchMaidTV.com and check out their video podcast(s). If this is the future of the Internet, the future looks bright indeed.

Last April I watched all of season one of Lost over the Easter long weekend. I jumped right from season one to recorded episodes of season two. I got sucked in, big time.

After I started watching and became "in the know" of some of the various entities within the show, I started seeing and hearing references to a bunch of them in real life, having real/fake websites and actual books, commercials for the fictional companies on ABC, appearances on TV shows like Jimmy Kimmel's show, and that sort of thing.

I wrote about it at the time that like in A Christmas Story when Ralphie spends three months forcing himself to drink Ovaltine every morning to save up the Proof of Purchase labels so he could get a Little Orphan Annie Secret Decoder Ring. When it finally arrives and he decodes the secret message they read out at the end of the episode, it turns out to be an ad for Ovaltine, and the poor little guy is crushed.

I posited that The Lost Experience was going to be the exact same thing: one giant suck-in for their advertisers. I was right, of course and the big "winners" were Verizon, Sprite, Jeep and Monster.com. I saw a link to a TV blog this morning on Digg that spelled out the game in recap format and goes on to say "It could be argued that the word "sprite" was used more in the aggregate of game dialogue then the word "Dharma".

So there you go. People playing the "game" spent hundreds of hours on it, only to have a crappy ending that smacked of leaving the door open to a sequel, and the advertisers got hundreds of hours (per person, so that's gotta be a couple million hours in aggregate) of product placement.

I can sit all day and talk hockey. Less so with football (NFL or CFL... how many teams are left in the CFL anyway? 4 or 5? not much of a league if you ask me). I watch the last couple weeks of NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl, I watch the World Series, I'll watch the NBA finals but can't possibly follow a whole season (especially baseball). I even watched the NCAA basketball tournament this year (and won the pool!) and sort of keep track of who's beating who for the last five or six years. Then there's soccer/football. Down here with the British influence, Premiership coverage in the sports pages are fairly prevalent (as are cricket and rugby) so it's always there on my back burner

This year of course was a World Cup year, and in 2004 before the hurricane I was following the Euro because it was a championship. (see above) This weekend are the first matches of the Premiership over in the UK. I'm just saying, now, before the season starts, that I'm putting my support behind Tottenham. Say what you want, that's where my support is going. This just could be "their year" (of course as a Canucks fan, I've been saying THAT since I grew my first pube) and if I'm right, then next year everybody will be wearing Spurs jerseys and saying that they've been fans all along...

Speaking of soccer, what's up with the Vancouver Whitecaps?? I remember going to their games at Empire Stadium when I was a kid, and then they played some games at BC Place in the mid-80s but then they (and the whole NASL) just sort of faded away. Now they're back, they're trying to build a new stadium, and who's the manager of the team, the guy pulling all the strings and greasing all the skids? None other than Bobby fucking Lenarduzzi! My first thought was "well no doubt, who else would?" but the second was "You GO, boy!"

Just a couple months ago I was saying to someone that I was getting "sports'd out" with Stanley Cup, NBA finals AND the World Cup going on all at once, but I think that was just a warm-up. NFL is in preseason, NHL training camp starts soon, World Series is coming up and the EPL starts this weekend, too.

On a somewhat related note, I downloaded and tried out Sage TV V5 the other day and it's stunningly gorgeous. The only problem was that it didn't recognize my TV Tuner, the AverMedia UltraTV USB300 so it made the whole exercise pointless. What with weird channels and weird times, I may have to upgrade to a PCI dual-tuner card and time-shift games to catch them all... or just spend more time in Legendz than I already do.

There's an article in the New York Times this morning about scooters. One of the people they interviewed was a police officer who initially bought it strictly for commuting but after going on some Wednesday night rides with the New York Scooter Club, he's more into 'the scene' now. A common theme among people who had blurbs in the article was traffic and $3/gallon for gas.

So it seems that Cayman and NYC have something (else) in common: traffic! I pulled into Texaco on Seven Mile Beach the other day in my jeep and pumped in $20 which gave me less than half a tank. Fortunately that will last me 6-8 weeks. $4.43/gallon (In CI Dollars! that's over $5US) for the cheap stuff (jeep) and about $4.60/gallon for the good stuff (Vespa)

The New York Scooter Club rides on Wednesday nights, and down here, we the Scooterati used to ride on Saturday afternoons. One of our charter members, Sharon, has left the flock now, headed back to the US of A and her ET50 is for sale down at Auto Alternative (Lee's Vespa Cayman shop). It's a damn good price, too. Last time I was over at his website a few days ago I noticed that he added a Pre-Owned Scooters page to the site. For those of you who are a smarter than the average bear, he's also introduced an RSS feed to the news/announcements section of the site and you can read that in your favorite newsreader, IE7 or Firefox's built-in RSS reader.

If anyone is reading this IN Cayman, and wants to come for a scooter ride with us one of these Saturday's, just drop a line or leave a comment below and we'll let you know when the next ride is.

Wouldn't you be if The Hoff himself was singing to you and pumping your spirits up?

OK I don't think this has anything to do with The Turin Olympics, Hockey, national teams or otherwise, but come on, it's David Hasselhof. The guy is synonymous with “big in Germany”.. Michael Knight? Mitch something? who? OH you mean the German Pop Singer!

http://shrinkster.com/c2y

She's wandering around aimlessly, like an ex-girlfriend at the mall with the former boyfriend's credit card. SHe just doesnt know where she wants to go, just that she's taking her sweet-ass time with it. Nothing really happening here today, no shuttering or closures that I've seen. The storm is actually moving SOUTH which is really odd.

The Cayman National Hurricane Committee has their own website now, it's www.caymanprepared.ky and can be reached directly via that address, or probably a link from www.gov.ky as well.

I started using Firefox around 0.9.something. I had it installed “in addition” to IE, and as I got used to tabbed browsing, I slowly started using it more and more. Last time I did a re-install, I installed Firefox and set it as the default web browser. It crashed every now and then, usually on a PDF link, but no big deal.

Tonight, I left my laptop on with Firefox open. Two tabs: My Yahoo and Gmail inbox. Seb and I went down to Canton for dinner, gone for maybe an hour and a bit. I come home and come upstairs and can hear the fans going full-blast on my laptop. I checked th systray and i8kfangui reported my processor temperature at 62c. Not good. The processor was running at almost 100% for no good reason.

I popped open the Windows Task Manager, and there was the culprit: Firefox.exe was using up 80% of the CPU and chewing up more than 50mb of RAM. For what? it wasn't DOING anything...

I ran a spyware scan and came up clean, just a couple cookies. Then I Googled for an answer and found a few other people with the same issues, but no one had any idea why. Who knows...

For now, just make sure you don't leave firefox open when you're not actively using it, especially with a laptop. Running that fast chews up battery power and running that hot for a long period of time just isn't good for the cpu or other bits & pieces.

I was reading Divester the other day, and they had a poll going for “when was the last time you went diving?”. Fortunately for me, I live somewhere where it's nice to go diving pretty much anytime. UNfortunately, the last few weekends have been scrubbed by Hurricanes Dennis & Emily. Maybe this weekend I'll get out and get wet.

Shortly after that was another post, which was asking for ideas for another poll. I left a comment and said “How about name your favorite dive destination?” which ALWAYS gets a “lively discussion” going, kinda like the “my dojo is better than your dojo!” arguments back int he 80s when Martial Arts was huge (not that it isn't now, but...) Anyway, they seemed to have listened! Their latest post actually quoted my comment and linked back to here. Gotta love the linky lurrrrve.

Guess I'll have to go and stir up the pot a little and tell em why my favorite is better than anybody else's favorite :)

On another, sadder note, Divester also reported on some missing divers last seen off of Misali Island, off the coast of Zanzibar (Zanzibar is really a place, not JUST a multiplayer map on Halo 2). More news (in english) here. I was at a work function last night and got a phone call from a friend of mine, who sounded a bit “out of it” and she asked me if I had heard about the missing divers, and when I said yes, she informed me that it was her ex-boyfriend who was the Canadian Scuba Instructor who was missing. His name was Neil and he used to work for Seasports divers right here in Cayman on Seven Mile Beach. Apparently there's a lot of current around there, but there's also a whole bunch of little tiny islets. I didn't know Neil that well, but I'm keeping my fingers (and fins?) crossed that they turn up safe and sound with a week's beard growth on some little island.

So I slept in this morning, figuring I'll be up late tonight and I don't want to be groggy or anything. Emily has strengthened to a Cat4 hurricane and is packing winds as high as 145mph (official forecast) but according to the flight engineer on the hurricane hunter this morning, it SHOULD be higher than that, but the dropsondes they dropped don't support his hypothesis, so NOAA is sticking with 145mph and higher gusts.

Im off to work in a few minutes, we have to shut down all the systems and cover up all the computers, then get the data backup tapes on one plane and the hard drives on another. Cayman airways is spreading out the planes, 2 to Miami, 1 to Tampa, 1 to Houston and 1 to Chicago, so our data should be safe SOMEWHERE.  Though this storm isn't forecast to head to Miami or the Gulf Coast, our policy has always been to get the two separated as much as we can, “just in case”

Our home preps are almost done, there's just a couple windows left to board up. Unfortunately one of them is right next to where I'm sitting typing this, so I'm a bit apprehensive that they haven't done this one yet.

Im going to hitchhike in to work and back, because I got the sweetest parking spot for my jeep and I don't want to chance giving it up. It's between the other apt building and the trash dumpster, which is a concrete block wall. She's facing south and protected east and west, so that should keep the brunt of the wind off of any parts that are soft top and instead the forecast ESE winds will hit it obliquely on the windshield. I also put a 2x6 across the roll bars above the front seats so that the five to ten inches of rain we're expecting won't collect up and stretch the top right there and maybe contribute to roof failure. I found a piece of plywood that fits across the roll bars at the back, too to support the back flap of the roof. Now that it's all done and “put to bed” I'll probably disconnect the battery tonight (just in case, before it gets dark out) and I dont want to move it from it's spot now. :)

We're expecting the conditions to get crappy around 4pm leading up to an eye passage (97 miles south) around 2am this morning. All bets are off though, the way this storm has been wobbling and can't make up her mind (typical...)

I'll post more later, and tonight after the weather starts to crap out.

NOAA National Hurricane Center
Cayman Islands Government
VirtualBuoy
Naval Atlantic Meteorology and Oceanography Center
Crown Weather Service
*Storm Carib (Closest Point of Approach Application)
Weather Underground (computer models)

*Note: take things you read on Storm Carib with a grain of salt. The “reports” they tend to get from “the islands” tend to be a bit sensationalistic and repeat a lot of rumor and hearsay. They did provide a valuable service, in the form of message boards and a missing persons list last year, but the people who contribute to the site I wouldn't put 100% faith in for an accurate picture.

Well, there's really not much else to do right now. Preparations are being made, data is being backed up (I put last night's good backups in a ziplock before putting them back in the tape safe). I have some work to be done at home, but I can't do that til tonight, and hopefully our A/C is fixed so we're not busy bunnies in the heat.

Here's a link directly to the Cayman Government's National Hurricane Committee advisory log. There's an update from the NHC in Miami at 4pm local, and the Cayman NHC is meeting at 4:30pm local to discuss it. They'll issue a new advisory sometime after that, and then our plan of action will be derived from their advisory.

Steve-o has been working on a new website. It has the hideously long name of www.vancouverinternationalsalsacongress.com but luckily for you, you can just click it here instead of having to type it out. I don't know if it's “open to the public” yet but I guess he'll get a lot of free beta testing if it's not :D

Steve's been involved in organizing Salsa & latin dance parties for a few years now. He's the big pussycat at the front door collecting money and looking menacing in case anyone thinks they're gonna stir up some shit. I went to one of the parties nearly two years ago when I was back in Vancouver for a visit and it was pretty cool. They had the free lessons part of it early at 8:00 and 9:00 and then the lights went down and the music came up at 10:00 and there was dancing til 2am or something.

This looks to be a major step up in size and complexity from the regular dances and parties they organize. Steve does the web design for it and gets help from Jenn with the graphics side of it. This looks like it could be construed a real job, but who am I to talk? I jumped on a plane and headed for the Cayman Islands seven years ago (almost to the day, it was June 30th, 1998) to live on the beach and be a dive instructor by day and practicing to be an alcoholic at night. “It's only for a year” I told myself (and my parents) but after six years, I slid out of the water and into business clothes and took a job as a Network Administrator for one of the bigger companies down here.

If you're going to be in Vancouver in October (or you live there) click over and check out the schedule for the Salsa Congress and go get your groove on!

My laptop is in dire need of an OS refresh. It takes forever to do just about anything. It's a real pain in the ass. I keep putting it off because backing everything up, making a list of things to re-install, then actually doing it and then re-installing all the apps takes a long time.

My external hard drive was getting full, too. 155gb and I had something like 13mb free. Now that a lot of tv seasons are over, (which I was waiting for) I made preparations to start backing things up to DVD. I did that this morning and had a few folders with 4.3gb in each that would fit on a DVD. I fired up Nero and it crashed. I fired it up again, and it crashed. I tried to uninstall Nero and the control panel applet crashed. Things were a bit flakey, so I shut down and restarted the computer. This is a fairly fresh install, by the way. just a few weeks old. so when I restarted, it crashed out again. I started to do a little further investigation, and realized that my F: Drive (BigDog) was saying it was Local Disk (F:) Odd.... I tried to open it and windows crashed. uh-oh.

A few little tests and it was confirmed: Bigdog was toast. With 150gb of data on it. I went looking in my downloads folder for a recovery utility, and of course they all boot from DOS... which means I need a diskette. Who the hell has diskettes anymore? Computers arent even coming with them anymore, you have to buy it and pay extra.

SO, I'm trying something new, while I wait for some floppy diskettes (Johnny Rotten is in town and picking me up some so I should get em in a couple hours). Im downloading a disk image of Knoppix. Knoppix is a flavor of Linux that's designed to boot and run entirely from your CD drive. It comes with the Linux kernel, KDE and then a buttload of applications on it, including data recovery tools for other OSes. There was an article I read online last week (I cant remember where or I'd post a link) about using it for windows system recovery, so Im going to give it a shot. It can't hurt, the data is already lost, right?

I unthrottled my BitTorrent client so Im downloading it at 150KB/sec, to the detriment of everyone else trying to use my network. :)

I'll post up how it worked and any snags I run into here later... what a great way to spend a weekend! (not)

If you know me very well at all, you'll know that Octopi are my favoritest sea creatures. I just dig 'em. I came across an article in the Anchorage Press about octopi and it was a really good article, about how they had two giant pacific octopi and got them to mate in captivity, which hadn't produced any viable offspring before. It had some cool pictures, and the article was actually quite long. I read the whole thing on my lunch break and I just felt the need to share it with you.

“Looking at Layla's tank, it seems impossible. The screen is so fine you couldn't slip a pinky through it. The last time Layla was weighed she was about 16 pounds, and she's considerably bigger now. A mature female giant Pacific octopus can weigh as much as 50 pounds; a male, 100 pounds or more. Yet they can pass through any opening as wide as their beak, which is centered above their legs, at the base of their heads, and is about the size of a parrot's beak. An octopus beak is the hardest part of its body. It's the only thing that keeps Layla from squeezing through an opening as small as a napkin ring.”

I decided to get a new video card for my computer at home. I thought I could get away with the 'built-in' video, with it's whopping 8mb of (shared) memory, but it's just not cutting it. I decided to go for an ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 9600 with 128mb of RAM on (coincidentally, the same amount of system ram my first “killer gaming rig” had on it back in the day) I looked around online and decided to go with Newegg.com because I had purchased from them in the past and they had good prices.

I also didn't want to pay 20% customs duty on the purchase, and it wasn't a desperate need to have it within a few days, so I decided I would buy it and ship it to our Miami office and next time one of us was up there, they could pick it up and bring it back in under their customs allowance. I could also have shipped it to my US Link mailbox in Miami and they would have shipped it here in 48 hours from receiving it for the wee fee of $3/lb. The only problem with that is that I would pay 20% duty on the (pre-rebate) $249 for the card, the $5 super saver fedex shipping, and then the airfreight charge as well. 20% of $300 is $60, but the duty would be in Cayman Dollars, so it would be USD$72.50 on top of the $249. A bit too much.

My credit card billing address is my US Link mailbox: it's where my magazine subscriptions (”What am I going to do with 48 subscriptions to Vibe?”) credit card statements and credit card junkmail are delivered to. I even had my local debit card's address changed to that Miami address to facilitate online purchasing.

I went through the checkout routine at newegg, and they didn't have my name in their system anymore, so first I had to go through the “sign up for a new account” process, and validate that, and then go back, find my shopping cart again, and start the 'checkout' process again. I used my local debit card, who's billing address is in Miami, and specified “different shipping address” because I wanted shipped to my office rather than my mailbox. I clickety-clicked through it and thought it was done.

Fifteen minutes later I got an email response from newegg that my card was issued by a non-US bank, and my order was cancelled. OK, well I gave it a shot anyway, but in the back of my mind, I was thinking “There are 300 million potential customers in the US, but there are 6 BILLION potential customers outside the US and FedEx will deliver to every single one of them. What's the holdup?” so I went back, and found the video card again, put it in my shopping cart, went to checkout, logged in, changed my debit card to my US credit card which has the same Miami billing address and went through the whole thing again. I even used their newegg/fedex shipping address validator and made sure everything was filled out properly.

THIRTY minutes later this time, I get another email: unable to verify shipping address! Didn't I just click the validate address thing? The problem this time was that my shipping address and billing address didn't match up. DUH, I know that! I was the one who clicked “ship to another address”! so I contacted NewEgg's Customer Service number and they told me to have the shipping address assigned as a secondary address to my credit card. I called the credit card company, but due to high volume, their current estimated wait time on hold was 17 minutes. Have I mentioned that calling 800 numbers from the Cayman Islands results in regular overseas long-distance charges? plus the regular airtime charges for your mobile account? Thankfully I have ways around that. I didn't want to wait on hold for that long, so I put it off til the morning.

The next morning I called the credit card company and got through right away. I said I wanted to add a second address to my card because these jackasses wouldnt ship to anything other than the billing address. The nice lady told me that that wasn't possible. I could change my address, but I didn't want to do THAT. Then she told me I could make a temporary change of address which would “time out” and revert back to my normal address after X days. I decided to do that, gave her my “shipping” address and then that was done. I called Newegg back, but their call center is on the west coast (yet their order fulfillment warehouse is in New Jersey) so they were closed and please call back later. I was kinda pissed off at this point, it was a lot of running around just to order one simple little thing online. I waited until just after 9am local when the call center was to open and called them back. I gave them my order number, and said I had the address added to my credit card, so please go ahead and re-submit the order. At this time, I checked and there was a roughly $200 authorization on my card from newegg, so I thought everything was in order. Yeah, right.

Ten minutes later I get a NEW MAIL popup and I get the same goddamn form letter from Newegg telling me my shipping address could not be verified and to please have the address added to my credit card and call them to try again.

Nope. Fuck that noise. I DID log on to Newegg's site, but that was to cancel the order. I haven't gotten around to it yet, but they will be getting a nastier version of this website post in their customer service mailbox shortly. I clicked over to CompUSA's site, and five minutes later had an order confirmation in my mailbox, and then a quick check to FedEx this morning showed it was delivered on Friday. Then I got an email from someone I work with who was in the office in Miami this weekend and said she was bringing it back for me.

SO, Newegg, who suck donkey balls, can bite me. I won't be buying from them again.

OK I think I posted a link to www.gizoogle.com in the past, it's the Hip-Hop search engine, complete with spinners on it's O's, but I never actually did anything with it.

I sent it to a guy at work, and he started killing himself laughing... he said “punch a URL into the search box...” so I put in my own URL, www.docjelly.com and let it translate my blog posts into Snoop Dogg shizzle-speak.

Holy crap was it ever funny. Here's this main page translated. Read it and weep (with laughter)

I got up this morning and checked my desktop (our ADSL is set wrong at the mo and only set at 128kbps down and 64kbps up which is ridiculous, since we're paying KYD$199 a month) and the web page I had opened up had auto-refreshed and had this message:

Sorry, but TVTorrents is down. No, I will not return. Sorry for any hassles. Thanks for all the memories and good times we had together in #tvtorrents. As of now, the channel will remain open, but stay +m (no talking).

Again, sorry for having to leave, but it became necessary. If you can donate to help with the pending settlement, please do so!

That sucks so much ass. I can see how some people would think that posting torrents/hosting trackers for TV shows (sans commercials) would be illegal, but I tend to look at it a different way:

I have a cable box. It costs me $56/month for basic cable. ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, and then a bunch of other “basic” channels and then we also PAY each month for HBO, TMC, Showtime and Cinemax. WHAT is the “piracy” if I'm downloading shows that I'm ALREADY PAYING FOR? how is downloading tv shows any different from using a TiVo or other PVR? I'm time-shifting so I can watch the shows I want to watch when I want to watch them. I can see the illlegality of it if I didn't pay for any of it in the first place, but I AM paying for it. And since I'm PAYING for it, why should I have commercials shoved down my throat? That's a can of worms for another post, though. :)

Of course, the reason this site got shut down is because believe it or not, I'm not the only person in the world who uses the internet and there were bound to be people in other markets (overseas, etc) who otherwise would not see the shows, who are downloading the shows “illegally”.

I guess I'm going to have to go ahead and get a video card with video in and figure out some way to make Windows XP Media Center Edition work and pick up a copy (as in BUY, you maggots!) of Xbox Media Extender and use that to stream the downloaded content to the TV/Stereo.

So I'm off to Miami tomorrow. I started making a list of things I need to do (starting with DONT FORGET YOUR PASSPORT THIS TIME, SCHMEEB) with a reminder at 6:30am. It has things like “stop at Tiger Direct” pick up HD in it's details, stop at Circuit City and try and find a 1gb Shuffle for Seb, Fix so-and-so's machine, pick up time card blanks, check/set IP address on photocopier/printer, G's laptop IP address and “check on computers in Ft Lauderdale” with various reminder times to help keep me on-task and maybe get back here tomorrow night on the last flight. (im taking my toothbrush and an overnight bag, just in case though)

I then remembered that I'm a card-carrying übergeek and to put them into Outlook which (since it's connected to an Exchange Server), will be available to me via Outlook Web Access anywhere I happen to be) but that won't do me any good in the airplane, in immigration or in a rental car. Wait! I have a smartphone! I'll just sync the tasks to my phone (and since the phone is unlocked, I can use it with a Cingular SIM card in Miami and retain my contacts, emails, etc on one device). I went into the registry and turned off the “force guest mode” and then set up a new partnership to my phone so I could sync my tasks list to it when I plug it in for charging here at work.

Except that it didn't sync my tasks list to my phone in the Options screen, and there was no checkbox next to tasks as if it were unsupported or something. A quick Googling turned up that Activesync 3.7.0 did not quite support EVERYTHING in Outlook 2003/Exchange 2003, but that 3.7.1 did. Next stop: Microsoft Download Center. Right there, smack in the middle of the screen, without any searching: ActiveSync 3.8.0. I downloaded it, installed & upgraded my 3.7.0 installation, selected tasks and synced them over.

Good to go.

OK so it's not the WHOLE book, but rather a dramatisation based on the book, and acted out old-old-old-old-school radio style. I didn't even know it existed, but thanks to the wonder of the internet, I read about it on another site this morning, clicked over and alas, the direct download was gone due to bandwidth constrictions. There was a torrent file there though. Im currently downloading it and will give it a listen this weekend.

For those of you who don't know, Neuromancer is a book by William Gibson (who also happens to live in Vancouver) sometimes called “The Godfather of Cyberpunk” and the guy who's credited with coining the terms 'cyberpunk' 'The Matrix' and had visions of what the future would be like (that were pretty close to what's turned out so far) while being (reportedly) a bit of a cyber-luddite himself.

So click over to the page and download it. If you like it, consider reading the whole book. It's actually book one of a trilogy, along with Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

UPDATE: The torrent at the site I linked to is down. It was removed at the request of the BBC by the site's owner.

Came across this one today, already added it's XML address to my aggregator, and I'll add it to he blogroll down there on the right later on today.

Divester is it's name and it's a blog about: hold it now, Scuba Diving. Same company as Engadget and Hackaday, same software & commenting engine, too.

I happened to find it while the latest article was about tipping the boat crew.. something I know a lot about from both sides of it. It seems like they're trying to fill a desperately needed hole in the Scuba Diving media: all the big magazines are basically whores to their advertisers. They're honest about it, but they're still whores. :) These guys want to be a little more altruistic about their postings: the good, the bad and the ugly.

Only time will tell, but it should be a good read either way.

Website address: http://www.divester.com/

RSS Feed: http://www.divester.com/rss.xml

OK this has got to be the funniest friggin thing I've seen since... since... since the last funniest friggin thing I've ever seen.

Saw the link on BoingBoing from yesterday (I think) and clicked it because I HAD to, and now I'm sitting here at work with tears rolling down my cheeks from laughing so hard and trying to explain to everyone in the open-plan setting that no, I'm really working.

http://www.idiotwork.com/pages/tps.html

I could probably sit here and rattle off a couple pages of wishy-washy, back-and-forth bullshit and put a pox on both houses (the league and the union) but I'm at work for one, and second, I can't even begin to put into words what a bunch of HORSESHIT it all is.

Best to let someone else do the talking: Mike Ulmer, a columnist at Slam! Sports wrote this eulogy to the NHL season. He hits all the points I would have, but in a concise manner.

Saturday was the five month “anniversary” of Hurricane Ivan tearing through here. Last week I thought I would do a post about what's been fixed/bulldozed since then, and also what HASN'T been done in the last five months. It turned out to be a lot more involved than I thought. I started to go through some of the 2200 pictures I have from the aftermath of the storm, and identifying things that would make good “after and after-after” shots, and then carrying my camera around with me to take those shots, and what exactly to say. I took some shots this morning, and I've been making some notes about what to write. Hopefully I can get everything together in my head and “on paper” and get something out in time for March 12th, the six-month marker. I'm also trying out Microsoft OneNote for this, so I'll also post about that in the future, too.

Richard has a post on his website about his hardware racks. Yes, racks. Plural. If I'm the übergeek, then I don't think there's a word do describe the ultra-geekiness of having not one, but TWO data relay racks in your house. He found these double-sided rackmount power-strips and I've asked for a link or a name so I can find em myself (we're in the process of designing and putting together multiple cabinets/racks in various locations throughout the company) and in doing so remembered a product I heard about a few months ago and had to go looking for. They're called Liberators (no, not THAT Liberator) and they're six-inch “extensions” that allow you to plug in your transformer/wall-wart without blocking the other outlets on your power strip or UPS. It's one of those things that makes you think “Geeze, I should have thought of THAT! I could have made millions and be kicking back on a tropical island with a fruity drink in my hand” except I'm already here. Well except for the fruity drink in my hand. (it's gotta be 5 o'clock somewhere, but it's 10:15 am here, so I'll settle for a cup of tea)

Someone in the office was asking me this morning if I knew of a website that would allow you to “track” a flight, where it was, it's altitude, speed, etc and preferably show it on a map. I asked her if she also enjoyed watching paint dry, but she did find a site called Aeroseek which does exactly what she was asking me about. If you have friends who are travelling, or you're waiting for someone to arrive, it could come in pretty handy. You might also want to do screen-grabs every minute, save it, and turn it into a stop-motion animation and then play it back in a vacation video or something, and you can have a “travelling by red line” sequence just like $imdb(Indiana Jones)!

I still haven't processed the pictures from Monday's dive. I have one of the most beautiful pictures I think I've ever taken underwater in that batch. Considering I was shooting with a digital camera without any offboard strobe, this picture came out poster-quality. I'll probably post it on it's own tonight or something, as well as put it on Flickr.

The Kleptones were on The Rinse, a program on XFM London a couple weeks ago. While I didn't hear the show, or even know about it, they talked about it on their website and have posted two torrents on their homepage. One torrent is one long mp3 of their whole performance, with a cue sheet to break it into seamless tracks on a CD, and a second torrent to download them as separate tracks. I haven't listened to it yet, as Im just downloading it now but if it's anything like their other stuff, then it's worth the download.

Holy crap! it's downloaded already, just in the time it took me to write this. I guess our higher-speed connection has kicked in. I'll post more on this in the next day or two after I've listened to it.

The other night me, Johnny Rotten, Matty & Zac met up at the lobby bar at Treasure Island for Heather's birthday party for Karaoke. All the usual suspects were there: Brad, Rick & Fran, Wayne, and then Heather showed up with most of the Straight-outta-Cayman Pussy Posse and the party got started.

As usual at karaoke nights, there were some truly horrendous singers. People who make William Hung sound like Enrico Caruso. On the other side of the coin, there were some really good singers there, too. One guy got up and sang “Brian Wilson” by the Barenaked Ladies and as soon as the first syllable came out of his mouth, I swiveled my head around to the 'stage' cause I thought they put a CD on. This guy sounded REMARKABLY like the bigger guy in BNL. He then ruined it later by singing an Elton John song. Boo. Zac got up and sang Jeremy by Pearl Jam and totally upstaged that homo Elton-John-wannabe. :)

Brad's been busy downloading CD+G stuff to augment the Karaoke library, and got up and did a good cover of Secret Agent Man. I was shocked! Brad *DIDN'T* sing a Jimmy Buffet song?! Some girl got up there later and belted out a Britney Spears song, and probably spent as much time practicing singing it as she did practicing her moves in front of a mirror. It gave me a funny feeling, down in the bottom of my chest, down in the cockles of my heart... maybe in the sub-cockle area... maybe the liver... maybe the kidneys... maybe even in the colon, I just don't know.

Heather sang a few songs, and her and Tex reprised their “I Love Rock n Roll” duet that got them into the finals of the Karaoke competition last year at the Hard Rock Cafe in George Town. They also all got really drunk! A few of the pictures are over there on the right. If you're reading this from a search or an archive and they're not there anymore, click over to my Flickr page and they're hiding there. I think at this point I'm going to spring for a Flickr Pro account. It's 45 bucks for a year and you get something ridiulous like 1gb of upload traffic per month.

Treasure Island Resort is still closed to the public, and for good reason. We were just in the lobby around the lobby bar, and if you didn't look TOO closely, it looked like it did before (shitty). If you were to actually LOOK around, the whole hotel looks like it belongs in Vedado Beach in Old Havana. The ceiling is either A) Gone and you stare at the studs or B) the painted part is all stripped off and falling in. The men's bathroom always looked crappy, but you really get the feeling that you're in some abandoned derelict building that someone's decided to have a party in after being in there. Actually, that's pretty close to the truth. The restaurant is open, it's been renamed to the Montecristo Chop House, and they look like they're up and running in fine shape. I haven't eaten there yet, because it's also pretty expensive, but it's on the list of places to go (and of course, I'll post here what it's like afterwards)

Now in defense of Trailer Island, they went into receivership last september (15 months ago) and the previous owner let it tank even before then. Considering the lack of care that ownership put into the maintenance (ie a budget for it, no dig against the miracle workers who made up the maintenance staff to actually keep it open and functioning) and the headless functioning in receivership, and something else... Oh right. A friggin Category 5 Hurricane that beat the entire island to a pulp in September, the staff that are still around have done a pretty good job.

Before the Hurricane, Treasure Island was rated a 3-star hotel. I think that's being pretty charitable. If it were in a bigger city in North America, it would have old guys with nowhere else to go living in it, or it would be a halfway house.

Steve (see the blogroll to the right) and Rich (same) are involved in a charity auction to raise money for tsunami victims in Southeast Asia. Basically you're bidding on an hour of consulting time from one of the group. It's pretty much a who's-who of software development professionals. I haven't clicked on all their names in Steve's post, but I recognize a lot of the names from various posts at various sites over the last year or so. Rich posted about it on his blog yesterday as well, and there are references to it on Microsoft Watch as well.

I can count the number of things I know about software development on one hand and still have enough fingers left to bowl with, so the only thing I can do is try to help drive some traffic to their eBay auction. Go bid, even if you just want to chat with one of them for an hour. I know some of you have paid more than $100 to be someone's friend for less than an hour. Less than 20 minutes if I remember correctly... Lordy pants did Colin's 25th birthday present ever backfire on us. (smack forehead)

If you're reading this with an RSS reader, here's the link to my Flickr Photostream RSS feed. It's pretty cool, I clicked it at the bottom of the “my photos” page and it showed me an RSS entry for each photo I've posted, and uses the caption text as the description in the feed. Clicking an entry takes you right to that photo in the stream.

Pretty cool stuff, I just may have to buy a Pro account at Flickr and get the 1gb/month upload.

OK, check out the menu at the right. Just under the calendar are a bunch of photo thumbnails. Flickr makes it really easy to add that, just like adding a badge to your site. I think the toughest part of incorporating it was editing the template file because it uses all these newfangled HTML tags that my Hot Dog Pro V4.0 old-school ass didnt really understand, but I made it work.

Don't bother clicking over there just yet, I haven't uploaded anything other than those five pictures. Flickr is in beta still, and with a free account you can upload 10mb of pictures a month (which would be five if I upped the full-res ones from my new camera) or 1gb/month if you buy a “pro” account for $42 for the year or something like that. Once I play with it a bit more, I may do that and scrap the old busted hand-coded HTML table albums that I've been using in the past.

What's cool is that it always shows my five most recent photos that I've uploaded, so if I upload new pics as I take them, then you'll almost always see some fresh pics when you come here.

There's this neat utility that “looks into” an avi or mpg file and tells you all kinds of information including but not limited to WHICH FRIGGIN CODEC it's encoded in and if you have that one installed or not.

I guess in hindsight, it's pretty hard to see any detail in that picture.. the top left section has the path & size, below that is Stream Type and A/V Interleave, the 3rd window down is metadata. On the right hand side is the Video codec info and below that the Audio codec info. At the bottom is some DirectShow rendering information, but I haven't messed with that yet.

I was a bit hesitant to put “GSpot Video” in my Google toolbar, as it sounds rather... saucy and not safe for work. Everything here runs through a proxy, so there's a log of wherever I go on my work computer. I try to keep things on the up-and-up, just in case... Then again, very rarely does anyone “watch the watchers” I told the other sysadmins and we all had a good laugh about it.

Here's a link to the GSpot Appliance webpage. I like the program so far, and like you, I've never seen WMP of any version correctly identify a codec and auto-download it.

If you're curious, the video clip that I opened to take the screenshot is from Saturday Night Live a few weeks ago with Colin Farrel as Bono being interviewed on the spanish talk show “You know, quatorze is really fourteen in Spanish...”

Excerpt from Yahoo News

By KATA KERTESZ, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Bouquets of flowers lined the stairs and walkway leading to the Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia on Wednesday as groups of people signed a condolence book and mourned the tens of thousands of lives lost to an earthquake and flooding.

People in the affected areas don't need flowers or a fucking condolence book! Am I taking crazy pills or does anyone else see the idiocy in that? If someone sent me a condolence book on Sept 13th this year, I would have used it to start a fire from wood we scavenged to boil water. Food, Water, Shelter. Maybe not in that precise order, but decorating my destroyed home or stopping to take in the lush floral scent or smell the roses would be about 15,433rd on my list of things to do.

 Take that $20 and instead of giving it to FTD (No link on purpose) try sending it to one of the aid agencies. Today's editorial in the Caymanian Compass said something to the effect of “Everyone helped us out in September when Ivan hit, and now it's time to repay some of that kindness and generosity“

Derek has a link to a guy who's accepting donations via paypal and Peechie has gone to the trouble of finding contact info for all the major relief agencies to take your pick from.

Rich tweaked me to this article in the Vancouver Sun last week. It has a pic of Freya and Pammy from Legendz in it and also has some quotes from Brad (the owner of Legendz) and even one from Fede!

I've been in contact with them via email (I was at the airport working the week after the hurricane and saw em when they were waiting/leaving on a jet plane, not knowing when theyd be back again...) so hopefully I can round up my West Coast Crew (you know who you are) and go have a beverage or two when I get home for xmas (IF I get home for xmas)

For some, December 1st is the start of Christmas Season (or Channukah, or Kwanza, or whatever... whatever you want to celebrate, have a good celebration) For others, December 1st is when they start holiday shopping (preferring to avoid the crowds of Black Friday) For me, December 1st means the end of hurricane season.

This year especially, I'm glad to see the end of hurricane season. Every year that I've been down here, we've been affected to one extent or another. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch ripped out the dock and the tank-filling room from the Lobster Pot. 2000 brought Helene which managed to blow itself out and passed between the Cayman Islands as a tropical wave. In 2001, Chantal passed by Cayman right when I got back from Texas (where I had to deal with the rain/flooding from TS Allison) and then Iris was looking like it was coming right for us, but didn't have too much effect on us. Just when we thought we were all in the clear, Hurricane Michelle passed by to the west of us and the southwest corner of the island took a beating from waves. All that hard work we did rebuilding the dock & tank room after Mitch was removed and we had to do it all over again. Hurricane's Isidore and Lili came a-knocking in 2002 but left without doing any significant damage and last year, 2003, was fairly light with just Claudette to come into our area.

This year, however was another story. We started off with Charley, the storm that wasn't. Somehow it managed to pass by us by about 30 miles. 30 miles away from the eye of Charley, and we had nothin. Jenny went in to work an hour late and I went to work in the afternoon. Charley later gave Florida a serious ass-beating. Earl was headed for us but fizzled out into an open wave as it got into the Caribbean. Then came Ivan (pictures). Ivan was so big that the National Hurricane Center hasnt finalized and posted it's post-storm analysis and report yet.

This spring, we had a tropical storm in April, out of season. It didn't go anywhere, but it was classified as a tropical storm because of it's characteristics. Yesterday the NHC started issuing advisories on Tropical Storm Otto, but it was way out in the ocean and heading in the wrong direction (ie not west!). Otto is out-of-season as well.

I've been messing around for awhile trying to make my 1gb USB flash drive bootable. I found some instructions here and there, and I couldn;t get any of them to work very well. Too much jacking around making a disk image and then copying it and yadda yadda yadda.

I was Googling today for it because I need to go take a look at Renee's laptop tonight. The poor girl is still without power, running a fan and a few other necesseties off a generator (it's been like 12 weeks now since the storm!) and went and got a GPRS/EDGE wireless card for her laptop. Those things are $229CI and then $50 bucks a month for 40mb of traffic, and then you get charged per kb after that! Add to it the fact that GPRS top speed is 115kbps and you get a slow, expensive connection to the net.

To make matters worse, she jumped off a dock onto her boat and nearly broke her ankle. While she didnt actually BREAK it, she did enough damage that she's in a cast. Someone told me that it was exactly one year to the day that the same boat “bit” her and broke her hand. Sounds like two good reasons to sell the boat, to me.

Before I went over there, I sat down to finally put together my “portable toolkit” on my USB flash drive. Things I might need to fix a computer, especially one that can't get online. Spybot S&D and the latest signatures, F-PROT antivirus for DOS and it's latest signature files, Belarc Advisor, KILLDISK, GetDataBack, those sorts of things.

As I was searching around today, I came upon a message board post for a utility for making a bootable USB flash drive. From Hewlett Packard no less. I've attached it to the bottom of the post if you want to use it. One thing to keep in mind is that it's a FORMAT tool, so whatever is on your flash drive WILL BE ERASED when  you format it! I copied everything off of it first, just in case. :)

I read today on BoingBoing about a band called the Kleptones. They've gone and remixed Queen's A Night At The Opera with hip-hop. The result? Pretty friggin cool. 23 tracks, with various rappers (so far I've recognized ODB ,Biz Markie and Eminem rapping over Bicycle Race!) and also mixed in soundclips as filler between the tracks. It's one hour and 20 minutes long.

BoingBoing linked the story from waxy.org who have been slapped with a cease and desist letter and threat of lawsuit from Disney of all places, because Disney owns Hollywood Records, who own the rights to Queen's catalog) He points out that he isnt even hosting the files, just links to other servers, but he still got slapped with the order.

If you like it, apparently there's something else along the same vein called The Gray Album by DJ Dangermouse, who's remixed The Beatles White Album with Jay-Zs Black album. I haven't heard that one yet, though.

There's a great comment on the waxy.org post by Matt: “If no one makes any money on something, the record label considers it a loss” bunch of arse.

If you know what a torrent is, click the link below to get your hands on it before it disapears forever because of the RIAA. If you don't know what a torrent file is, DON'T click it, and DON'T ask me to explain it to you, that's what Google is for.

OK, now this is the funniest thing I've seen since that tragedy of an election earlier this week:

Marry An American

It might take a try or two to get through, as the site is getting HAMMERED with visitors and seem to be exceeding their capabilities. As satirical as it is, if you go to the View Pledges page, there are hundreds of pledges already, and don't forget to check out the Aboot page! Har Har Har!

On a side note, I'm available again now.

www.chimpymcflightsuit.com

Just made it back to The Rock again. I thought FOR SURE I was going to miss the flight! 60 mins out and I had to turn back from the terminal and go return the rental car. I thought it was like the Tampa Airport, where you return the car and walk about 50 feet to the ticket counter, but noooo Miami Int'l you have to backtrack a couple miles to the off-site depot and then catch the bus back to the terminal.

Once there I discovered that you can't take an Air Conditioning unit on the plane. Sucks! Jean volunteered to go to the terminal and rescue it for me and drop it off at Cargo, (Yay Jean!)  so I should get it in a few days. As far as I know we don't have power back yet anyway.

All my luggage arrived on the same flight as me this time, too. I didn't think any of it would make it because A) I was so late and B) they had tags on them that said STANDBY NR on them. Imagine my surprise when I got all three!

I added a bunch of links to the blogroll (lower right hand column) of places that I check out on a fairly frequent occasion. Check em if you feel like it, or don't.

Richard & Stephen are probably near the summit of Killimanjaro about now. They left nearly two weeks ago for their big trip. Im sure they'll have pictures up on their websites soon after they get back.

WISH YOU WERE HERE. Ivan from ISS via APOD

I have not heard gunfire at all in the last two weeks, and I live in West Bay which generally is the armpit of Grand Cayman. We've slept with machetes nearby, just in case, but haven't had anyone coming around the house at all at night. I HAVE seen police patrolling around at night with all their lights on, “showing the flag”.

I've been reading some of the accounts of people who have left and got quoted in newspapers and online and stuff. Some of it is accurate, and some of it is just complete and utter BS.

The only gang of men armed with machetes I saw was on the Monday after the storm, two of them also had axes, and one had a chainsaw.

They were not running around menacing anybody, they were walking through ankle deep water and trying to clear away fallen trees so the roads would be open, and in some instances, access could be granted to houses that were “blocked in” by limbs and trees.

The first day that they said the gas stations might be open, there were huge long lines. Today I drove right into On The Run Esso in Industrial park, went in and got some chicken strips and a cold Dr Pepper. Joanne was saying that the third day that the gas stations were open, she was in line, got in and out in about 20 mins.

The Tuesday after the storm was chaotic at the airport. the terminal was closed, and Cayman Airways was operating a medical evac flight, and then 2 or 3 other flights out of the maintenance hangar. Customs and Immigration had tables set up and were trying to function as normal for the few people that were inbound with supplies, and keeping track of who had left. By Friday they had the terminal cleaned up enough and got the emergency generator back online so that people could be processed through at the check-in counters and screened through the security checkpoint as per usual. As soon as there were no more free flights, the crowds all dispersed.

I have about 700 more pictures that I copied from Everton whom I work with. I might take some time tonight to pick some of them and post them to the photo albums page in the next day or so. I also have video that Brad took before and during the storm, and that I took when I went with him on the Monday after the storm, but that's a long ways off, editing-wise.

Courtenay Platt, a local photographer has some pictures posted at Blue Ocean Art.
David Wolfe, another local photographer has 350 or so pictures posted on his web site.
Arthur McTaggart, one of the SysAdmins at Cable & Wireless posted some photos from during the storm on one of C&Ws servers. This one may or may not still be up.
David Olson has nearly 1000 photos online on his site now, using Coppermine, a free PHP gallery available at Sourceforge. The cool thing about that site is each photo has a “comments” section that has turned into an impromptu discussion board

Today I sunburned my back while working on some cars. Out of 4 of them, Im hoping to have one working reliably in the next few days so I can turn in my rental which is going to start breaking the bank soon, even with the great rate they gave me(plug plug plug). I was supposed to go to Tampa today and delivery some data, but the flight was cancelled because Hurricane Jeanne is passing by Tampa right about.... now.

Man I'm going to need a vacation soon... somewhere with cold and snow... a place where the women flock like the salmon of Capistrano... a place where the beer flows like wine! Yes my friends, I'm talking about a little place called ASSSPEN. I hear California is beautiful this time of year.

We're under a Hurricane Alert for Hurricane Ivan. I called my parents and Jenny last night and said “I have a bad feeling about this one...” I've been through a few now, some close brushes, some false alarms and some pretty close ones over the years down here starting with Georges in '98 which was a false alarm, Mitch later that year that took out the Lobster Pot dock, Irene in '99 which missed us, Debby in '00 that dissipated and re-strengthened after it passed us, Allison (from Texas), Chantal & Iris which didn't do any damage and Michelle that did in 2001 and Isidore & Lili in 2002. 2003 was a quiet year, but this year is crazy. I'll post updates as I hear/get them from various sources.

Weather resources
Cayman Government Hurricane Committee
Weather Underground Computer Model Map
Weather.com projected path
NOAA National Hurricane Center
3-Day Closeup projected path map (refresh for current map)
Wunderground Strike Probability Map
El Tiempo Cuba Weather & Doppler Radar (in Spanish)
Reports from the Islands (Storm Carib)
Home Weather Station on the East End of Grand Cayman

And the only prescription is

Don't get it yet? click here.

Zac, you better not click it.

http://www.rednova.com/news/stories/1/2004/09/03/story003.html

It's late, I'm tired, I've been up all night wrestling with Frontpage 2003 to make some new photo galleries. I like the thought behind the Photo Gallery Web Component in FP, but it's execution sucks donkey balls. And it's not (very easily) modified. If you DO modify it, then next time you make a change within FrontPage, your changes get overwritten anyway. Sucks. Until I find a better solution, here's the link:

http://www.docjelly.com/htmldocs/albums.htm

Two teams had test flights this weekend that didn't quite work out for them. Armadillo Aerospace (the guys who made DOOM, DOOM2 and now DOOM3) had their rocket crash during a test flight on Saturday resulting in a “total loss” of the vehicle. Seems like they had some trouble with the warmup phase and then ran out of gas during the flight. “Oops.”

The other one was right in my (old) backyard in Washington State. According to the Seattle PI, this one (as well) could have been saved by a parachute (this rocket actually had one but it failed to deploy) but instead crashed and is a total write-off.

Steve sent me this link in an email with about 277 exclamataion points after it.

Sledge Hammer was a cop in Los Angeles in the 80s who was a narcissist and a complete DUMB-ASS. I don't remember the specifics because it was so long ago, but it was one of the funniest shows at the time. He even used his almost-trademarked “Trust me, I know what I'm doing” while trying to defuse a nuclear bomb in the season (show?) finale. After all these years, they've released Season 1 on DVD (well it'll be out at the end of the month) Every single Amazon review on the above link is 5 out of 5 stars.

In an interview last month in Entertainment Weekly (that you have to be a subscriber to log into their site and read) he said that if there was enough interest, that they were considering doing a Sledge Hammer movie. Why not? It wouldn't be any worse than half the shit that comes out of Holywood these days anyway.

Sledge Hammer's fans are called “Hammerheads” and they have their own website. Not to be confused with the DEMA Hammerheads thing.

I was all set to tear into a good rant today about traffic on the island. I had examples, such as when you get behind the wheel of a Honda Inspire (basically a RHD version of the Acura TL) you immediately become an asshole. I was going to pose the question “When is 'island-time' not 'island-time'” and the answer is whenever there's traffic.

I'll save that rant for another day.

Darlene sent me a link this morning to The Adventures of Seinfeld and Superman. It's basically a long commercial (or a short film) for American Express, but it's very entertaining. If more commercials were like this, there would be no need for the skip commercial button on your ReplayTV or TiVo.

Oops. apparently the link to the photo albums has been giving a Cannot Find Server DNS error all week. I looked at it just now, and what happened was the machine that the website is hosted on's IP address changed by one number, so even though the Dynamic DNS entries were correct, my router was forwarding the packets to the wrong address. My bad. I've updated it for now, and later on I'll change it to a fixed address to prevent it from happening again. For now, they're up and all the photos are there, everything from Xmas last year through to the Cuba Pictures from last month.