Posts from — December 2002

Pam and I went to the premiere of The Two Towers last night. We saw the movie at 7pm, 5 hours before the rest of the world. It was cool that we had this short advance preview. They served dinner at the show and passed out copies of the first LOTR on DVD. Very nice. As we entered the theatre, we were frisked to check for video devices. They were being very careful to prevent anyone from recording the film before its official release, even if it was only 5 hours.

By the way, drop what you are doing right now and go see the movie. It was awesome.

I am almost at the point of giving up. I’m thinking about not using my blinkers, tailgating people, driving wildly on icy roads and being a general asshole on the road. I figure if I am one of them, it won’t stress me out so much while I’m driving. But I probably won’t do anything like that. I still take great comfort knowing that I’m better than the idiots allowed to drive because I’m a courteous and safe driver.

I’m also thinking of pluralizing names of places where I shouldn’t. I will tell people I work at Chryslers and I shop at Meijers and Farmer Jacks.

One more 1/2 day and I’m off for 2 whole weeks. We have a full itinerary planned. At the top of the list is catching up on all the movies we’ve missed. I’ll have a full report after we see them.

Author Dori Smith did a comparison of editors and how much code they produce. “The goal was to produce a simple Web page containing just a single linked image that rolled over to another image.” The summary of the results:
Macromedia Dreamweaer MX: 49 lines, 1,733 characters
Adobe GoLive 6: 55 lines, 1,453 characters
Microsoft FrontPage 2002: 730 lines, 16,380 characters
Hand-coding: 29 lines, 858 characters

Hey, help George Bush write his next speech.

Make a funny face.

It’s been a busy weekend. I was off last Friday but I had so much to do around the house that it would have been more relaxing going to work.

My new Canon Elura 40MC camcorder arrived and I’ve been having lots of fun learning and playing with it. To get the video on my computer, I had to purchase a firewire card. I had trouble getting the camera to connect to the computer and found it was the firewire card causing the trouble. I went out and got another card and everything is working great. I’ll return the original el-cheapo firewire card to CompUSA on Monday.

I also bought a copy of Red Hat’s new Linux 8.0. I decided to buy it pre-packaged instead of downloading it. The installation was trouble-free on my Dell 500 MHz computer. I’ve configured it to run as an apache server where I can store files and music and retrieve them from anywhere. Excellent.

One more week and we’re off for the holidays - a full 2 weeks. Yee Ha!

Tuesday we’re going to the premiere of Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers. It’s at the Paladium in Birmingham and I scored a couple of tickets from the people at work. We’ll be seeing the movie before its official release the next day. Oh boy aren’t we special? The cool thing is the movie will be free plus we get to see it in luxurious style. They will serve us food before the movie and bring popcorn and beverages right to our seats. I could really get used to that.

I’ll let you know how we liked the movie. My brother Jeffery is the biggest Hobbit fan around and he says the story really starts to get good. We have a long list of movies to see over the holiday break. That should keep us busy.

For Christmas, the boss took our group out to lunch. It was a nice getaway and the food always tastes a little better when its free. It’s a good thing he invited everyone weeks ago since my lunch schedule books up fast during the holidays. Thanks, Cal.

I’ve been assigned to go to Palm Springs for some super big meeting tomorrow. I hear the weather is great and I’ll have plenty of time off to play around. Yeeha! Then there will be the cool project at the auto show. I’ll be in charge of the wireless network Chrysler is installing for the people working down there. Very cool stuff. I love my job.

We all get spam. This guy finally had enough and decided to write back. His site is a super funny list of the letters to his spammers and their ridiculous reactions. Stop what you’re doing and visit this site, it’s great.

Watch a lot of TV? I watch more than I will usually admit. Here’s a fun site to let you know what’s coming on.

You Heard It Here is a great site with lots of fun links.

File sharing fanatics can now go to Zeropaid.com to find all the latest sites for getting files.

Our first snow arrived earlier this week. A few thoughts:
1. If there is snow on the road and it is slippery, DON’T TAILGATE ME.
2. When its dark, turn on your damn headlights. This is even more important in bad weather. The spray from the salty roads makes it even harder to see you. If you can’t remember to turn on your lights, YOU SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO DRIVE.
3. If you are too scared to drive any faster that 2 MPH, then STAY HOME.
4. When you are coming out of a side street, slow down. You don’t know how slippery the road will be. You may end up sliding right into me, MORON.

Do you have anything to add to the list? Click on Comment and let me know.

I bought a new Canon Elura 40MC mini-DV camcorder last Saturday. I checked online for the best price and found a good deal at Big Apple Photo. So I checked them out at epinions.com. They had a bunch of positive reviews so I decided to buy the camera from them. Now over a week later I still don’t have it. Their crappy website is never updated and when I called customer service I couldn’t get a straight answer.

Today I called again, got right through and they said the order should be sent out today. I get home tonight to find my credit card wasn’t billed, the website wasn’t updated and I never got email notification that my order had shipped. Losers. I’ll never buy anything from these people again.

An idiom is a “manner of speaking that is natural of the native speakers of the language.” IdiomSite.com has a huge list of popular idioms, their meanings and other fun information.

Related to Idiomsite is the Dialect Survey. This site gives you questions designed to see how you use certain words. Click on “maps” to see all the words in the survey and how they’re used around the country. This site is very interesting and worth a look.