Pepe sent me this article! Man…I wish we had stuff like that here. I’d take that from here to Al-ba-coy-kee!

Super fast train!

Looks like the guy who broke the DVD security code by writing DeCSS is at it again. This time, he wrote software that strips the copy protection used in Apple’s MPEG-4 AAC format. The program opens copy-protected music in QuickTime and then strips the music, digitally.

Read more…

Oh yeah, Michelle and I are buying that laptop! After two nights of WiFi grief, I got it solved! Guess what my problems were? I had to unplug my router/wap from the wall and plug it back in. Go figure! Well, the machine is great. I ordered the proper ac adapter from my favorite computer company, Gateway, as well as ordering a 512MB soDIMM from Newegg.com. It’ll give the machine a total of 768MB of ram. Should be fine. Now I just have to see if I can find a Radeon Mobility 9000 that I can swap INTO this thing.

Rhymes with Desmond Tutu!

“Did ya hear about da turty pointer?” What a frickin’ H00T!!! Pepe just called me, I’m smilin’ from ear to ear. That kid makes me laugh. It’s a balmy 15 degrees on his way in to work. He’s enjoying being a homeowner these days…Sarah, like most ladies, is expecting Dave to be Bob Villa or the dude on the New Yankee Workshop. Wouldn’t that be fun? BEH! consider myself more like Leo Laporte, or one of those other dweebs on The Screen Savers. Actually, I could have that job.

Laundry Room
Still not done. Hung the two cabinets last night. Hooked up the washer and the dryer. With the new dryer elbow, the dryer gets a lot closer to wall. Now the room looks “normal”. Only thing left to do is put the cabinet shelves in and the doors on, and finish connecting the washtub up. I broke the plastic drain pipe last night while trying to saw about 1/2" off with a Milwauke Sawzall. So… hopefully, tonight, the laundry room will be done. I’ll be sure to take pictures of the finished project!

Back to school this week
We have to watch our 2nd from last lecture starting tonight. The good thing about going to school online for this class is that with our “busy” schedules, we can watch the lectures as we deem necessary!

I think Michelle and I are getting an upgrade for our home laptop. Well, it’s my developer laptop, too! We are selling our Latitude C810 and are replacing it with a Gateway 450ROG with a 1.3GHz, Centrino, 256MB Ram (upgrading to 768MB), 20GB HD, CD Burner/DVD Player, 15" 1400x1050 display, and an ultra thin chassis at 1.3". I know, there are some others out there toting less than 1", but I just can’t handle a 12" screen and 1024x768 resolution…although, it sure makes for a nice kitchen computer at that size! I had to order myself an AC Adapter, as it came with a Compaq adapter that wasn’t made for this Gateway! More to come…maybe I’ll post a picture of it in coming days!

Laundry Room
We’re getting there. Hung the blinds, changed the light switch and electrical socket, built the two cabinets. Today, we finish the cabinets by hanging them, with my father-in-law’s help, as well as hooking back up the washer and dryer! I can’t wait until it’s over!

What a great weekend! It’s definitely a major plus that Michelle and I have the same holidays off at work, for the most part. Not having to go to work on Thursday and Friday was a very nice treat. It’s going to be even sweeter over the Christmas/New Year Holiday!!! I won’t have to go to work for about two weeks! We spent the weekend visiting family, partially, and doing our first home improvement project, redoing the laundry room.

Laundry Room
We painted the room a darker brown with white trim on windows and baseboards. It looks awesome!
Here I am getting the painting under way!

The contrast is striking, in my opinion!

The “messy” stuff. The wash tub will cover all that “crap” anyway!

I can’t wait to put up the white cabinets tonight, and hopefully finalize the room by hooking the washer and dryer back up! We even found an offset elbow for the dryer vent so that we won’t have to have the dryer away from the wall as much!

Dinner
We had dinner at Michelle’s mom and dad’s house. It was very nice. Kim and Matt came to visit for a few hours before they had to head off to Matt’s family’s house. We got there fairly early while Michelle helped her mom prepare the meal. During that time, I upgraded their computer by putting their stuff into a brand new case, and by upgrading their memory from 128MB to 224MB and giving them Windows XP Pro. It’s MUCH nicer than Windows 98 that was on there for over 4 years! I just have to get them a new soundcard, as the Diamond MX300 doesn’t work (have drivers) in Windows XP. They are going to be very happy with it. I also have to fix their e-mail. My mother-in-law still can’t e-mail out.

The Last Samurai
What an amazing movie. I am so glad we gave ourselves a break from spackling/sanding/priming on Friday night. We went to AMC Forum 30 to see a sneak preview of The Last Samurai, with Tom Cruise. Amazing, stunning, stupdendous. 9.75/10. 3h 24m of nonstop excitement, good storytelling, excellent acting, and downright good entertainment!

I just love what these people do for computing!

Google’s Deskbar

Further research yields this: Google Labs. These cats are always up to something!

Check this out!!! It looks like the wheels are moving. Now…stare at just ONE of the circles, you’ll notice that it stops!

What can be more exciting that spending time with your moms, dads, brothers, and sisters? NOT HAVING TO GO TO WORK FOR TWO DAYS!!! That’s about how I can sum it up. The older I get, the more I would like to just stay home and rest, and do my own thing, galavanting around town, having a dandy old time. Possible? Sure. Probable? Not really. Gotta work for the man. It’s okay though, builds character! Yeah, right!

Duck Computer
So, tomorrow, Michelle and I are going to go over to the Duck house for Thanksgiving Dinner. Michelle is going to learn how to prepare the “traditional” meal, while I’m going to rehab their family computer, which is actually the SAME computer I built Michelle for Christmas about 4 years ago! Can you believe it? Those people are so low-usage on their computer that it’s never broken down, or anything. All I’ve done is upgraded the processor from a Celeron 400 to a Pentium III 450 (I think). I’ve run virus scans and spyware checkers, but besides that, it’s been churning away with Windows 98 (in due need of XP) for all these years. Heck, I even threw a DVD drive in it that I had laying around, hoping they’d watch a movie on their PC, since they don’t have a DVD player for their family room (at least not hooked up). They never did. Who actually watches DVDs on their desktop computers? Nobody I know. I think, sometimes, people watch DVDs on laptops, mainly for the sheer portability factor, but that’s about it.

Computer Lifing
I’ve been computer lifing the past few nights until about 1 am. Although I pay for it the next day, and night, it has been quite fun. I MISS my computer. I’ve been using the laptop during the evening hours if I’ve got some things to do, but I haven’t actually used my Shuttle this much in a very long time, not since we moved to the house at the end of May, at least. I’m looking forward to having a good Winter with the Shuttle. It’s got a new (now external) DVD Burner, and it’s ready to rock and roll!

Stony Creek
Did I mention that Michelle and I ran six miles this weekend at Stony Creek? It’s been quite some time since we ran outdoors, since Oct. 5. It felt great, too. I was a LITTLE out of shape, but not so much. I almost wish I lived close enough to Stony so that I could just jog in, do 3-6 miles, and jog back home. Maybe one day!

This rocks!

Dan and I like to talk, sometimes debate, about varying topics, usually to do with technology and computers. I always try to share the things I run across with Dan, and others, and my latest push has been to tabbed browsing. Although the following quote is about pop-up ads, it stemmed from my push to use Mozilla or Firebird, which comes with a built-in popup blocker. Read below!

Dan: I know you hate em, and I hate em too (pop-ups) but tabbed browsing, pop-up blockers, etc. aren’t a plus to our career field. If the blockers were completely successful to get rid of a large portion of ads (a portion will still occur directly on the page itself) the internet would slowly start to dwindle away from it’s free nature, it already has. Just as in a similar but extreme example of taking away commercials on TV would lead to all paid prgramming. Instead of free shows, Like ER, Friends, and Smallville, your left only with HBO type shows, which are good, even great, but in terms of dollars to quantity there’s no comparison. Which leads to less content, which leads to less content providers (us the developers in the Internet version of this example). Therefore I’ll always support pop-up ads, and even click on them once in a while, not because I’m interested in the Ad but because of what it stands for and perpetuates. Just like TV commecials, I’ve never bought anything because of one and only like the ones that are funny, and even then I don’t know or care what they are peddling I just like the creative humor behind it. And that sir is my Diatribe for the Day. If I was geeky enough I’d put it a blog,but that’s just gross :-)

An Article about ads from Ars Technica, one of OUR favorite sites!

I keep looking for an alternative to Mozilla and Firebird, as those seem to have slight problems with SOME websites, still. Mainly, my bank. They seem to have problems with submitting certain forms. I can’t log into my bank, I can’t “Show me more like this” when I search for FedEx locations, and the list goes on and on. IE is a great browser. It’s fast, and it works on ALL sites, at least all of the ones I’ve ever thrown its way. The only thing it doesn’t do is tabbed browsing. Well, I tried AvantBrowser, but that was a memory hog. Now, I’m trying SlimBrowser, which was recommended on The Screen Savers. I hope it works out!

Michelle and I had such a fun weekend! We had fun every single day!

Saturday
The best day had to be Saturday. We started the day by doing homework and watching a lecture for our Operations Management class, but then we went to our planned date. We went and saw Forbidden Christmas at the Century Theatre! What an amazing show. We laughed the entire time. It was four singers/actors that were spoofing Christmas songs and Broadway-style shows. They made fun of Whoopi Goldberg, Barbara Streisand, Frank Sinatra, Les Miserables, Michael Jackson, and others. The best one had to be Ricky Martin! HILARIOUS! After the show, we had dinner reservations at Sweet Georgia Brown! What an excellent restaurant. It’s fine dining at its best. The staff was friendly and courteous, ready to serve you at the drop of a dime! The food was splendid, the scenery was splendid, and the entire experience was superb! I’m so glad we chose to eat there. After that, we mosied into the Greektown Casino and quickly lost $40 at a $1 slot machine. We then went to Casino War where we almost instantaneously lost another $100. On the way out, I decided to take our last $8 we had and throw it into a $.25 slot machine…lucky lucky. Michelle had an amazing winning pull and we walked away with $80. So, we only lost $60 at the casino instead of $140. Not a bad night. To end the night, we stopped at Blockbuster and rented Finding Nemo. I fell asleep!

Sunday
The best weather of the entire weekend. While himmin’ and hawin’ about going to the gym to run and workout we last-minute decided to go to Stony Creek and run around the loop! It was 65 degrees…on November 23rd! How could we NOT go outdoors to run. I wore a cut-off t-shirt and shorts, it was so warm. We ended up running INTO the interior of the park, doing some nice hill training before we came back out onto the asphalt. In the end, I still think we did close to the 6 miles that we’d normally do by running only on the asphalt path! We got home and pretty much studied the entire afternoon until watching American Dreams (one of “our” shows) at 8PM on NBC. I also watched football the entire day. Like usual, the Lions lost (well, they DID win 2 in a row!) to the Vikings, the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Oakland Raiders (but didn’t cover the spread…neither did the Vikings…DAMN IT!), and other fun games transpired throughout the day. Today’s game between the NY Giants and the TB Bucs should be exciting…and of course, in High Def! That, of course, after the midterm in our Operations Management class tonight. Man, I can’t wait until THAT’S over…then we have a “mentally easy” week ahead of us! Michelle’s got the whole week off. She had a bunch of vacation days, so she took M-W off, before our Th-F Thanksgiving holiday! Man, it’s awesome to work for a car company!

DVD copying success!
I finally had my first successful DVD backup. I backed up Finding Nemo. This time, I had the burner in my external 5.25" power chassis. This might have been the issue I had with the 2nd attempt I made a few days back. It failed near the end either due to heat or due to lack of power. I don’t think the Shuttle SN41G2 has enough power of its own with the 150watt power supply it has to power the Plextor 708 burner. I have to do a bit more research on this.

Need to get some slippers for your wife and you don’t have that much money? You can use Maxi Pads and make these: