The Dalai Lama has a website and he reminds me of Buddy Christ. Piked my curiosity and I found Muhammad and Jesus Christ but Sadly Buddha.com is just a squatter. I did find About Buddha though.
On their websites alone I would have to say the Dalai Lama is the coolest.
Last week at bowling The Zone was giving away prizes for strikes in the 9th and 4th frames. We didn’t get either but figured we’d try our luck with The Zone anyway. As luck would have it they weren’t checking and we walked away with a book (Gone Baby Gone) and free movie tickets for The Mist. I had wanted to see it anyway and this was the preview showing. Great!
I haven’t read any of Stephen King writings yet, but thus far every movie has been awesome. The Mist did not disappoint. I particularly loved the ending. I will have to read the short story now though to find out if it ends the same. I have a hunch it’s at least slightly different. That being said if you like scary movies I’d recommend it.
The only thing left for me to say is “man that bitch was crazy!”
Trailer below.
We’d been trying to rent ratatouille from redbox for a few days but it was out literally everywhere in Rochester. Finally I found one available at the Perinton wegmans on Wednesday so I rented it online. Yep Redbox now allows you to rent movies online. Well, not streaming or anything unfortunately, but you can reserve it at a Redbox location online.
Ratatouille was a great movie. There was more humor in it than usually is found in the new animated movies. I found myself thoroughly enjoying it. The trailer is below.
[metacafe]http://www.metacafe.com/watch/663432/ratatouille_trailer_tv_spot/[/metacafe]
A few days ago a new webapp hit the streets. FeedCrier claims to keep you instantly alerted to any news from any feed you subscribe to using their service. It’s essentially a new feed reader that sends new items directly to your instant messenger account.
If you subscribe to a lot of feeds like I do I wouldn’t suggest putting all of them into FeedCrier but it is great for those few that you want to get immediate updates for.
A great thing about the site is there’s no account required. Simply provide your Messenger account (MSN, Jabber and AIM are all currently supported) and the feed’s URL.
Initially I was very cautious because I saw no mechanism for unsubscribing or maintaining your subscriptions. Luckily they explain it all here.
Eugene de Salignac was the official photographer for the NYC Department of Bridges from 1906 to 1934. His collection of photographs was recently uncovered and, as it turns out, de Salignac was a great photographer and his photographs charted the progress of New York growing into a big city. The New Yorker has a slideshow of some of his photos and there was recently an exhibit of his work at the Museum of the City of New York.
I wonder if there was a photographer that charted the progress of Rochester growing into a great city? I wonder if he also charted the progress of Rochester dying into the crime infested nothing it is today?
It was raining last Sunday and we figured we’d go see a matinee of Into the Wild. I’ve wanted to see this movie since it came out and was glad we were finally seeing it.
The movie was great. It made me want to travel the country and find my own magic bus. It’s amazing the kind of perspective Chris McCandless had on life at such an early age. If everyone thought the way he did at 21 we’d be living in a much better world. Trailer below.
Edit: if you’re reading this in the feed the video may or may not appear. Please visit the article to view the trailer.
The trip to London happened long before this blog existed. However; Since the photos still exist I figured It wouldn’t be a bad idea to share it, so here you are.
http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=70717
I finally upgraded my home PC to Vista Ultimate. I was originally worried about compatibility issues and performance. It’s an older PC, approximately 5-6 years old, built by me. It’s a testament to home built PC’s everywhere that it’s still running at all.
From the point of its conception my Home PC has only been upgraded three times. The first was by necessity when the motherboard failed after a year of building it. The second was when I went from the ATI Radeon 9000 to the ATI Radeon 9600xt graphics card. The third upgrade was the combination of my Server and Home PC. In that case the only upgrade was moving the dual 250Gb SATA Raid 1 array and the Antec NeoPower 480 PSU from the server. I guess that makes it more of a migration than an upgrade.
My PC has now been running vista good and strong for over a week. I haven’t yet run the vista experience test yet, I’m worried it’ll flunk with flying colors.
I’ve only had two small problems thus far.
The first is my sound card a SoundBlaster Live! is no longer supported. Apparently there won’t ever be drivers released either, although I find that hard to believe because its a fairly common sound card. For me this wasn’t a huge issue as i’ve been using my onboard sound for years now. The only reason I still have the card in my machine is for voice communication (ie: TeamSpeak or Ventrillo) and I haven’t used that in over a year. I guess it’s time to take it out?
The second issue I ran into was my RAID controller was unsupported. My motherboard is a Soyo Dragon KT600 Plus v2.0. The RAID controller wasn’t detected by the Windows Update Advisor as an issue and so I knew nothing about it beforehand. The first place I checked was naturally Soyo’s site which had plenty of drivers just none for vista.
Luckily the Raid Controller is still at least semi popular and after doing some searching (and asking a friend who has used vista for a few months now) I happened across drivers for the via vt8237 Raid Controller. And now my computer is all set and running pretty. Can’t believe it but the thing is running smoother than it did on XP Pro for the past 5 years. I even have Aero enabled and the machine only has 1Gb of RAM. We’ll see how long this lasts.
Something reminded me today of a story from when Rachel and I were at the Grand Canyon. Well, actually this particular story is from the Hoover Dam.
The parking at the Dam sucks. If you want to visit you need to park along the east side of the canyon. I’m sure you’re aware that the Dam is pretty large and as such, getting to the entrance (which happens to be on the west side of the canyon) is quite a hike from the parking lot(s).
We’d been camping in Williams Arizona for roughly a week at this point. I’d been faithfully (like the good ol’ boyscout I am) carrying my knife the whole trip. This particular day was no exception. As we walked up to the entrance there was a sign that stated, among other things:
No Knifes Allowed
Well crap. As I shuffled my way back to the walkway to take my knife back to the car, one of the many vendors setup outside the entrance called me over. She darted her eyes around to check if anyone was looking and said:
Act cool, just hand me your knife. When you come out give me 5 bucks and it’s yours again.
Thoroughly puzzled (and entirely not cool) I said “you mean you can’t just hold it for me.” After some more quick glances around she told me that this is government property and they’ll fine you if they catch you with them. She could get fined simply for holding them if they find out. “Ok, $5 is worth saving the walk” and I handed it over.
It’s a good thing I did. There are metal detectors right inside the entrance and we would have been up a creek. A gentleman got pulled aside ahead of us and shown a knife he had placed in the bucket before going through the machine. I’m not sure what happened (they were still there talking with the security guards as we left the room) but I’m sure it wasn’t good.
I paid my 5 bucks when we got out and the government was non the wiser.
Originally I was writing this thinking about the helpful actions of the woman vender. After writing it though I also realize that I’m also thankful for the actions of the security guard and their no knife policies.
If you’re like me you use One E-mail address. I used to be a fan of two. One for junk forms, another for real use. Since spam filtering is so good now, and custom filters are so easy to customize, it became much easier to just get it down to one.
A very long time ago I created a Windows Live ID using an E-mail address from Time Warner. Actually, I created an MSN Messenger account. Later it was turned into a Live ID once Microsoft came up with the idea.
I have long since abandoned the Time Warner E-mail address but I have been stuck with the Windows Live ID that uses it. A short time ago I decided I’d switch. It was about time to combine accounts and utilize my one E-mail address as my Live ID account as well.
I never realized it would be so difficult to create a Gmail Windows Live ID. The first thing I did of course was to attempt to register using the normal windows live registration methods. Of course it instructed me that my account already existed. I thought this was strange but who knows, maybe I did create one already. I started the forgot my password procedure but was quickly told the account didn’t exist. Strange. After a bit of research, I learned that after a year of inactivity windows live accounts are disabled. No matter so I set out on the task of reactivating it. After several weeks of E-mails and live chats with microsoft I finally arrived upon the following E-mail:
Hello Randy,
Thank you for writing back to Windows Live ID Technical Support. I have read your messages with us and understand how inconvenient it can be when you are unable to access your account. This is Don and I look forward to providing you with the necessary assistance.
You can register your own e-mail account (Non-Hotmail or Non-MSN account) as your Windows Live ID if the e-mail address you are using is not part of a reserved domain. I would like to inform you that a company that controls the registration of all e-mail addresses within that domain manages a reserved domain. Recently, Gmail has reserved the creation of Gmail.com Windows Live IDs.
As of this time, users cannot register Gmail.com as their Windows Live ID using our registration Web site. I suggest that you contact Gmail support team for further assistance.
For the meantime, you can sign up for a Windows Live Hotmail which is automatically a Windows Live ID.
To create a new Windows Live Hotmail account, please visit:
Please note that you will be directed to Windows Live ID Help Pane. If you encounter any issues, kindly verify which of the steps did not work for you as we want to make sure the instructions are easy to follow.
We appreciate your continued support as we strive to provide you with the highest quality service available. Thank you for using Windows Live ID.
Sincerely,
Don
Windows Live ID Technical Support
I had no desire to create a new hotmail account since I was on a mission to reduce my accounts down to using a single E-mail address. I’m quite positive that my Microsoft Live ID is the very last account remaining not using my gmail address.
So I was trapped. Or so I thought, until I stumbled upon this little gem. I’m not sure how or where I found this, but at some point I happened across a link that was supposed to work for Gmail address registration. I’m not sure whats different with the link, I haven’t examined it closely. I will, however, tell you that the following link does work to register a Gmail Windows Live ID.
Randy Aldrich 