Category: Cool

UtterlyBoring.com at Wrigley Field

Remember for the dummy prize for the pick ’em? Fighting Yoopers won the prize, but never claimed it, and per the rules, I gave the prizes to the next people on the list (in this case, the second-to-last). The Dren was the next worst, and he was happy as heck to have the shirt, even wearing it proudly on a trip to Chicago (much to his wife’s dismay). He tells me that the folks at Wrigley got a kick out of it (when it was warm enough to take his coat off — Dren’s from Texas, so he needs a coat for anything less than 60 degrees). Here he is watching the game:

I seriously doubt I’ll get too many visitors from Chicago because of the shirt, but thanks Dren for wearing your inability to pick winners proudly.

May 12, 2008

Time Killer For The Day

Still slammed, but slowly catching up. Just need another 12 hours in the day, and a super power that allows me to function without sleep. And it’d be nice to have an evening off, but I still have one more concert tonight (hope to see some of you there).

Anywho, when I was able to take a breather today, this game killed off what time I had: How fast can you type in this little time-killer? I was averaging about 55 words-per-minute, though I could probably do better as I’m tired as heck. How’d you do?

May 5, 2008

Geekdom Link Dump

As per my usual every-couple-of-weeks routine, here are a bunch of geek links that are mostly for my reference but might be handy for somebody else.

Western Digital debuts a 300gb 10,000 SATA hard drive that’s stupidly fast.
So when do we get folders in Gmail?.
How to build a $188M submarine cable system.
Mount flickr storage space as a hard drive.
Fun little Physics toy.
How to make a sawed-off USB key.
Placing forced ads on your customers’ sites with .htaccess (for folks who are considering hosting sites for free).
What file system should I use?
Torrents of traffic and the Internet backbone (good article considering what’s been going on lately).
Downloading YouTube videos as MP4 files.
The WiFi Predator, a “modified wireless router connected to a high-powered antenna and running custom firmware to actively seek out open wireless connections. Once they are found, it will test them for internet connectivity and then join and repeat the one with the strongest signal to secured wireless connection that YOU control.” Totally illegal, but totally cool.
Dealing with Windows Vista Explorer screwing up auto-detection of folder types.
Move email to Gmail with Google Email Uploader.
What if Futurama was real?
Dropclock motion clock screensaver.
Linux remains unbeaten in pwn2own Hacking Contest.
Best Firewall Software of 2008.
Open Source classroom management with iTalc.
Push the Freakin’ Button (and Pro version).
Left Behind: A fond farewell to 209 once-common things that are either obsolete or well on the way.
Make your Windows XP start up screen look like Vista.
Comparison of how 10 popular web sites have (and have not) changed.
Where do email to “donotreply.com” go? They go to this guy.
10 Handy Numbers to Save In Your Cell Phone.
Speed up Network File Copying While Playing Audiot in Vista SP1.
ClamWin anti-virus for Windows.
Embed your to-do list on your desktop.
Run a management WiFi hotspot with a PayPal Payment gateway.
UltraDefrag is much better than the built-in defrag in Windows.
10 JavaScript/Ajax effects to boost your website’s fanciness factor.
101 Five-minute fixes to incrementally improve your Web site.
CSS media selections for various browser types.
85% of all spam comes from six botnets, with 40% of all spam coming from just one botnet. Good luck shutting that down.
How to find out where an exploit is running on cPanel.
A bunch of Single-serving-sites, web sites comprised of a single page with a dedicated domain name and do only one thing.
21 Awesome (but lesser known) open source applications for Windows.
50 ways your Web site is discouraging conversions — and how to fix it (Editor’s Note: Step 1: Find more time….).
Using CSS to do anything. 50+ creative examples.

Jeez that’s a bunch of stuff. Have fun!

April 23, 2008

My New Toy

I mentioned a couple years ago the new laptop I got. It’s a great little system, and I like the size and power in it. However, it came time to get some more laptops here at the office, and instead of getting a new one for the lady at the office who’s not really going to use it much, she’s going to get the old one, and I got myself a new one (along with another co-worker, who will be taking over some of my marketing and graphics duties here so I can hopefully focus on bigger-picture and more complicated projects for the companies I work for).

Once again, I went with Sager because of my reseller arrangement with them. I loved the 1920×1200 pixel resolution of my old laptop, but didn’t necessarily like it on such a small screen (it was fine most of the time, but sometimes when I was tired it was really hard to focus on things because they were so small). Since portability isn’t as much of a concern as power, I decided to go up to a 17″ screen with the same resolution, and got myself (and my co-worker) Sager NP5793s (I guess they’re not ours, they are the company’s, but we’ll be using them exclusively).

Our configurations are slightly different (I have the higher res on mine, plus a larger hard drive), but here are the basic specs:

17″ WUXGA (1920×1200) LCD.
Intel Core2 Duo Mobile Processor T8100 (2.1ghz with 800mhz bus and 3MB L2 cache). The thing will upgrade up to a Core 2 Extreme X9000 processor down the road, which I was looking at for future upgrades (I’ve maxed out my current laptop).
nVidia GeForce Go 8700M GT Video Card w/512mb of DDR3 RAM.
2GBs of dual channel DDR2 667
160GB 7200RPM Hard Drive
Windows XP Pro (will be setting up Vista Business edition, which I have a copy here, as a dual boot so I can start learning the OS, but can’t use it full time because of hardware and software issues here at the office).
DVD±R/RW Combo drive.
Intel 4965AGN 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi
Bluetooth 2.0 (which will help with my Blackberry — one less cable to carry around).
Gigabit ethernet, fingerprint scanner, media reader, 2MP video camera, serial port (yes, I still need one of these), firewire, USB 2.0, etc… .
I’ll also be moving my internal mini-PCI TV Tuner from my old laptop over to the new one, as it’ll work with Windows XP while the one that Sager sells now only works with Vista.

My one gripe is that I wish it had an external SATA port (not many do) so I could install Vista on an external drive and not have to take up space on my regular drive with a dual boot. And it weighs much more than my 15.4″ laptop. But beggars can’t be choosers.

It’s going to take me a while to get it all setup to my liking, getting all the various apps I use (won’t need all of them this time around) installed, and I’m tied up in other projects right now to really tackle it, but I’m looking forward to getting this thing fired up.

April 23, 2008