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Showing posts from July, 2008

My Thoughts on Mojave

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We all remember The Pepsi Challenge. Coke drinkers were challenged to test Pepsi and Coke in a blind taste test. The people that choose Pepsi were then paraded in their ads showing that their product tasted better than Coke. Being raised in a Coke household, those ads didn't go over well. How dare people deceive regular people? Put a blindfold on anyone, my Dad would say, and they'd prefer the crap with double the sugar. Again, another topic for another time. Zoom ahead to 2008, Microsoft is trying to get the word out that their new operating system, Vista, isn't so bad. We've all heard from the elites in geekland that have the microphones and the volumes and volumes of blog readers about how horrible the OS is. The result of that is regular users which would have no problem with Vista have avoided it altogether. You even hear similar responses. How dare Microsoft deceive regular people into showing them that Vista is a stable platform. How dare them! I'll a

Minimalists are from Mars?

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So I decide to read a little about minimalism. If anyone knows me well, they know that I like to live a clutter free life. I don't have a lot of possessions, I don't have a single solitary icon on my desktop, my car is completely clean (with the exception of dire need of vacuuming), and I only find myself grocery shopping on a very tight list and not going outside of it. I don't know why I am this way, I have been surrounded my entire life with people that live and love their clutter. My parents have clutter that's older than I am by decades, my friends and my most cherished love of all (I love you, Janine), all are radical clutterists. The geek lifestyle even demands clutter. The one with the most toys, wins! So I wanted to see why they were all baffled by someone who swears to be a minimalist. You would think that anyone that dons the title is a space alien. I look at the design, architecture, and art, and I think what a bunch of neo modern...or post modern freaks

Cool Musings

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Four Years!

When you sit back and evaluate your life and you try to reign in the past four years, you may come up with the same conclusion I did. That sounds like a long time, and it kind of feels like an eternity, but at the same time, it's become more and more of a drop in the bucket. I feel that way about my blog. I started this adventure 4 years ago this month and thinking back, I remember not being serious about keeping a blog, but then it became a part of my self expression, so today, more than at any point, this blog is a pure extension of where my focus lies. So at this point, I can only look back and thank any and everyone who's endured this journey with me and I hope I can continue to entertain and inform. I just know that I'm in brainstorming mode and with the changes to how we surf our interwebs, I'm going to try to be on that cutting edge, so stay tuned, it's going to be a lot of fun. I promise.

Mike's Happy Friday Metal Mess

No, I'm not floating another idea for my blog, there's just a few things I want to share, so here goes. Janine and I were discussing attending the Mayhem tour next month in DC. We very well could be going and that would be mind blowing. The link to the band lineup is here , I posted about it months ago not thinking I was going. The video above is new stuff from Slipknot, tour headliners. It'll be fun to get back to seeing some shows again. There's so much going on here, but I'm so busy at home, I never have time to go see anything. Also, who knew that twenty five years ago, Metallica released Kill Em All and launched them to rock stardom? Twenty five years ago! What do you get for something like that, a headbangers silver anniversary edition record? Talk about making me feel grandfatherly! Here's some really older than Moses footage of them playing. Shh, that's Dave Mustaine at guitar.

An Old Lesson Re-Learned

So websites have come a long way over the past couple years. Everywhere you go there's some kind of social network tied to something as traditional as picture taking or careers. Blogs are as common as cars. In this day of posting and posting to hosted services, it's become more and more clear that everyone should back up their posts as they prepare it. Not only that, but people should make sure they have their content safely stored because sure enough with these new services come some pretty fatal glitches. There can be nothing more frustrating than putting a long blog post together or gathering links for a post on another site and lose it all. So the lesson out of this, copy, paste, and rest easy that you won't lose your stuff!

This is Serious Business!

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So I posed a question to my friends at Pownce and as always they delivered . A lot of people have asked in light of the epic success of The Dark Knight, and the brilliance and immortality of Heath Ledger as the Joker, who's going to be the next bad guy? I pondered that for only a mere moment before my geekdar perked at the prospect of The Riddler being the next super villan. I even saw a suggest that Eddie Izzard would be perfect for that role. I couldn't agree more! But I posed the question on Pownce and here are the responses that I got (and I got them fast too) Alan suggested: Eddie Izzard would be incredible. Or Ricky Gervais. Eddie has better tempo/faster though. Paul Giamatti would rock it. He was a hilarious villan in Shoot 'Em Up. For that matter, Clive Owen would make for a great villan. I say bravo, those are awesome suggestions! Libby added: I'm ready for a really good female villian NOT played by a popular actress. I really love chris nolan'

It's a Random Attack!

You know what time it is I'm currently listening to In Flames - Drenched in Fear off their new album My day is just starting. The midnight movie really drained me. I got home yesterday afternoon and took a 2 hour nap. Then went to bed about midnight and slept until 9. I haven't gotten this much sleep since before I went to college I think. I won't make any more mentions of The Dark Knight....oops, too late. I'll be on Powncecast again tomorrow. I'm working on my material this morning, he won't know what hit him. Meeting went well with the Real Estate agent. I think we're going to settle for him, he knows what he's doing and specializes in first time buyers. The debate is now which house do we buy? There's one that's about 5 miles from here that's really nice in our price range and gives us a lot more space and yard than the other options, or do we pick somethin close to work in a great neighborhood but settle for a much, much smaller h

Go See TDK

They should have named the movie "The Joker" or "Just Give Heath an Oscar". The plot was gripping and kept me on the edge of my seat, the directing and editing of the movie was damn near flawless, but the acting brought everything together.I really don't like being part of the hype. I got burned by The Matrix and the like, but you have to see this movie as soon as you can..it's that good. Also I would recommend watching this in a regular theater before watching it in IMAX because I fear heads will explode if they do this backwards.

Batman/Pownce Musing

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The Batman

I am so excited. I just got tickets online for the midnight showing of The Dark Knight which debutes tomorrow. I am depriving myself of sleep so I can be one of the first to catch this film and I'll put a review up super fast. Woohoo!

And Then There's Maude

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Janine and I had an interesting night. One of the kittens..that we still have...was getting sick, I thought it was just a cold so we took her into our room to recover. Come to find out she had bigger problems than that, so we took her to the vet and got her all fixed up. She looks like she's still in a daze, but she's recovering just fine. After spending that kind of money on a cat, we are definitely going to keep her. We named her Maude I reached in to grab a soda the other morning and ended up grabbing another kitten. This is Mr. Soot and he likes hiding in small spaces. He also likes to impersonate soft drinks! Smooth move Mr. Soot, however you are not a tasty and refreshing Coca Cola, you are merely an undercooked kitten! Lastly I wanted to plug something that Janine and I find great value in as will many people that have a large record and/or Victrola collection. Recordsmith is a local collector and seller of old records. Walter also restores and has the tech

Plugging Twistori

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I figure if I have nothing to say, then I'll keep plugging sites. I love twistori . It was developed by Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs and it has a pretty simple premise. It takes a search feature from Summize to pull in six popular verbs associated with feelings and scrolls them in a story like format. People don't typically pour out their rawest emotions on something like Twitter, but by capturing terms such as Love and Hate, you can often times capture someone's true feelings about life, their friends, their job, technology..almost anything. So if you have a few minutes, it's worth checking out. Sometimes you can see both the best and the worst of humanity in the simplest of emotions.

George Carlin

I never mentioned the passing of one of a great comedian a couple weeks ago. I couldn't really find a clip of his that did him justice, but this one always cracks me up, so I will share it with you because in his own bitter old fart way, he's saying, "It'll all be ok".

Happy 4th, America

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Old Age and Wizardry

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It's stuff like this that makes me feel really, really old. At least I'm comforted knowing that with every month not only am I getting older, but November and the debut of the sixth Harry Potter movie hits theaters. They were just children! Sheesh!

Plug of the Week

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The writer's cramp is still killing me here! I wanted to at least plug one of the most important band in our times, Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor has always been a pioneer not only in the style of music he brings to mainstream, but he's also a pioneer in this new computer age. He has offered his last two albums for free on his site for download. He just asks that people come out to see his shows. Some would question where the success is in plugging a concert tour, but NIN takes things up a notch by posting rehearsal footage in lieu of their tour starting this month. The footage has created quite the buzz and I recommend people visiting the site and watching those videos for yourself. There's lots of extras there too, such as a news feed..yes a news feed! RSS! It's all right there too, I just love visiting the site to see what's new, so I figured I would plug it to all of you as well. Go enjoy the site, go enjoy the music that they share with you for free, but