News Archive - March 2007
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3-31-2007
Texas Justice
You come home to find your wife with another man, she cries rape and you shoot the guy dead. Sounds good right? Not so fast; apparently the broad was having an affair with the guy and was not being raped.
Does the shooter go to jail? Nope, the wife does.
You're damn right she does. Not only is she a cheating bitch, she's a liar too. Too bad the guy doesn't get to shoot her too.
Ridiculous
This is ridiculous, Google is in trouble with the government because it's using pre-Katrina photos of New Orleans on their maps site instead of post-Katrina maps.
First of all, what makes it the governments business? I'm sure there are some versions of Streets and Maps out there that are pre-Katrina also and could possibly show incorrect streets that may have been abandoned due to damage.
Plus, free service. Really, what power should the governement have over this anyway?
Not only that, but they have more important things to worry about like high taxes, the housing market bubble, health care, the war in Iraq, genocide in Darfur, oil prices, the Iran and North Korea nuclear research, and did I mention the WAR WE'RE IN? I don't want my tax money paying to find out why Google is using old photos on their web site.
Fucking government.
3-30-2007
Random Porn
Let's wrap up the week of Random Porn with a cute blonde named Nikky Case. Next week I'll be back with maybe something more wordy and probably less interesting.
Nikky | Nikky | Nikky | Nikky | Nikky | Nikky
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3-29-2007
Random Porn
Remember when we had the Iron Curtain and that Communism in Eastern Europe thing? Yeah, glad that's over so we can get a glimpse of girls like Irina!
Irina | Irina | Irina | Irina | Irina | Irina |
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3-28-2007
Random Porn
I've posted this chick before but she's hot enough that when I run across a new photo spread it's worth putting it up.
Nella | Nella | Nella | Nella | Nella | Nella
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3-27-2007
Random Porn
Yesterday, smokin' brunette. Today, sensuous blonde.
Kira | Kira | Kira | Kira | Kira
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3-26-2007
Random Porn
Welcome to the first installment of a week long Random Porn feature. I'm kicking it off with that rare breed of hottness; the farmer's daughter, Belicia.
Belicia| Belicia| Belicia| Belicia| Belicia
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3-17-2007
I'm Gonna Get Drunk
Happy St. Patrick's Day 2007! I hope everyone has plans to get their drink on today.
3-14-2007
This is SPARTA!
Do you like a movie that kicks your ass from the word go? Do you like a film with hot, naked broads? How about a movie that, literally, stacks up the bodies?
If you answered "yes" to any of those questions then you need to run and see 300.
Director Zack Snyder adapted Frank Miller's 1998 comic book series about the battle of Thermopylae into a gorgeous, well acted and fast paced film that will keep you on the edge of your seat for the full 120 minutes. Although Miller based his comic on the true story of 300 Spartans that fought off a huge Persian army in 480 BC, neither the book or the film claim to be a historical reenactment.
And that's good for all of us. If you want history, watch the History channel, if you want an action film with larger than life heroes, you've come to the right place. Spoilers may apply from here on in.
King Leonidas, played by Gerard Butler, is the king of Sparta. Faced with an overwhelming army of Persians, led by Rodrigo Santoro as Xerxes, Leonidas has to choose between laying down arms and taking table scraps or standing up and confronting the invaders.
Apparently, Spartans never surrender. Xerxes should have though of that. Going against the Senate, led by Dominic West's traitorous Theron, Leonidas takes 300 of his warriors to a pass on the coast near where Xerxes is landing his forces. From a superior fighting position he proceeds to hold off wave after wave of the most brutal slaves and warriors as well as the faceless Immortals. And when the Persians blot out the sun with their arrows, the Spartans "fight in the shade."
Shot almost entirely on blue and green screen in a studio in Canada, Snyder was still able to create a huge and lush environment to represent ancient Greece. Following what Robert Rodriguez did with Miller's Sin City, Snyder basically used Miller's comic as his storyboard. The cinematography was perfect, using high speed film to capture the action allowed the film to be slowed down at points so you get to see all the brutal, yet beautiful, fight sequences in the film.
Vincent Regan is Leonidas' loyal captain who, along with his son Astinos (Tom Wisdom) and fellow Spartan Stelios (Michael Fassbender), provides some of the more memorable scenes in the film. David Wenham plays the loyal warrior Dilios who also narrates the film and tells us the story of Leonidas and the 300.
Lena Heady as Queen Gorgo is just as strong as her husband and fights her own battles with Theron while the king is away. Ultimately her strength and will defeat Theron and wins the confidence of the Senate, pushing them to support the war against Xerxes and ensuring that the sacrifice of the 300 is not wasted.
Butler was perfect as King Leonidas showing both the loving husband and father as well as the brutal, yet determined warrior. Santoro's creepy Xerxes made you root for Leonidas even more. I think not really having any American household names in the film was a good choice. There was no off-screen crap that detracted from the story. The visuals of the film were also so well done that, at no point, did I sit there and think gee, this CGI is really good.
Again, the visuals in the film were stunning. The pacing was perfect, the action sequences were well choreographed and interesting and the acting was dead on. There were a few pieces of the film, acting wise, that were over the top but the subject of the film allows you to forgive it. It's about heroes, determination and honor. That's what allows me to pass out my first 5 out of 5 wheels of cheddar for this film. I'm probably going to spring for a second helping at the theater before lining up for the DVD release later this year. Go see this film.
3-9-2007
Read a book
Doc, have you been hanging out in Borders again? I'd have guessed Randy but he's got a job now
3-8-2007
MyTube
The last couple of episodes of "Lost" have actually been pretty good. Once they finally got away from the Kate/Jack/Sawyer three-way and back to the rest of the beach I became much more interested in the story this show has to tell.
I'm glad. I hated watching it every week only to be disappointed. There were some great plot points made in last night's episode. I hope they keep up the momentum for the rest of the season.
Jumping over to the Monday night Fox shows, I have to comment on just how brilliant I think "Prison Break" is. It totally sucks that their season is only a couple episodes away from being over, but it's still a must-see show.
While "Prison Break" has been surging, "24" has been in kind of a holding pattern for the last 2 weeks. I'm sure Jack will torture the writers into more action packed episodes soon, though.
3-7-2007
This just in...
I did not win last night's Mega Millions jackpot of $370 million.
Guilty
Four out of five counts and Libby is now a convicted felon. It'll be interesting to see if Bush pardons him and, if he does, will he do it now or wait till January 2009 to do it right before turning over the keys to the White House.
Panic
This weekend is the new Daylight Savings day which got moved up by about 3 weeks so that we can all conserve energy.
The news media would have you believe that this is a Y2K-sized event that could shake the very foundation of civilization. You know, just like when everything melted down on 1/1/2000.
Wait, you mean nothing melted down 7 years ago? Hmm....
Ah, don't worry about it. Here, distract yourself with a couple photos of Kelly Hu. See, it's all better now.
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3-6-2007
Vista
One of the things I mentioned Monday that I didn't like about Vista is the new Start Menu. I discovered something else I don't like about it yesterday. Sunday night was the first time I actually shut Vista down rather than just doing a reboot and I had a bunch of problems getting my system to power up on Monday night.
I hit the power button and walked away only to come back to both monitors flashing their power lights which means that they weren't receiving signals even though the computer had power. I shut it off and powered it on again only to have the computer freeze with corrupted graphics on one monitor and the other in sleep mode again.
That's when I guessed that I hadn't actually shut down Sunday night but rather put the computer in sleep mode.
That was confirmed when, on the third boot, I was able to get into Windows and look at the Start Menu. The button (1) looks like the standard power off icon but if you look at the description (2) you'll see that it says:
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"Saves your session and puts the computer in a low-power state so that you can quickly resume working."
Yeah, quickly resume working after 3 reboots and a lot of swearing.
Unfortunately I haven't yet found if you can adjust that button so that it has an actual power off function or not. If you want to turn your computer off instead of putting it in sleep mode then you need to click on the arrow to the right of the lock icon on the Start Menu.
That will fly out a menu that offers switch user, log off, lock, restart, sleep and shutdown. That shutdown option will get your computer to actually power off.
Pain in the ass.
3-5-2007
Vista
It's here, it's installed and I'm finally up and running on Windows Vista.
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There is a huge learning curve to it, as I knew there would be, and it's going to take a while to get used to it. I installed Vista Ultimate edition so it has all the bells and whistles possible.
If you have installed Internet Explorer 7 and Media Player 11 then you've already seen two of the popular tools in Vista. The two biggest updates, for me anyway, were Windows Explorer the move from Outlook Express to Windows Mail.
I've always been a fan of Outlook Express as it's very straight forward to use, the filtering rules are easy to set up and it's light and fast. The Address book was always pretty light on function but still tracked all the info you really needed. The only thing that OE lacked that I wished it had was a calendar like Outlook.
Windows Mail keeps everything that I liked about OE and introduces some new things that really take it up a notch. First up is the spam filtering. Much like Outlook 2003, Windows Mail will automatically filter incoming mail for spam, sending it to the Junk E-mail folder. You can also whitelist and blacklist email ids or domains.
As for that calendar, it's now included in Windows. You can access it directly or via a shortcut on the toolbar in Windows Mail. It's independent of Windows Mail so you don't have to use one to get the other if you don't want. Very cool!
Windows Explorer
Windows Explorer is one thing that I don't like so far. In previous versions of Windows the File Explorer was easy to use, it just displayed folder contents. Not in Vista. In Vista the toolbars customize themselves based on the contents of the folder you are browsing.
If you have a lot of photos you have options for a slide show, mostly documents you get email and share options while you almost always have access to the burn function to create a CD.
Folders have also been relocated. It used to be that you had a My Documents folder with My Pictures, My Webs and a few other folders living within it. Vista splits the My Documents, My Webs and My Pictures into their own folders that are no longer nested. It's not a huge deal but when you back up your files you have two or three extra spots to look. Also, it's no longer called My Documents, it's just Documents.
You can still redirect the Documents folder and I would recommend doing that, keeping all your stuff in one folder and backing that up periodically.
Sidebar
Sidebar is a new app that lets you display Gadgets on the desktop. It's sort of a nod to the MAC and Linux. There are a lot of things you can put in the Sidebar including clocks, calendars, RSS feeds and weather updates. It can be useful but also, potentially, just a screen hogging mess.
With dual monitors it's not as bad as you can move it off to the side of your second monitor and it gives you good info at a quick glance.
Aero
Aero is the new interface for Vista. It's what gives the folders their look and feel and it's really slick for the most part. If you hover over a program on the task bar it'll display a thumbnail of what's in that application. The ALT-TAB window switcher is updated to Windows Flip which also displays a thumbnail of what the various apps are doing at that moment.
The coolest feature is the Windows Flip 3D and that's what I showed in the picture link at the top. It'll display all the running programs, live, and let you click on them to bring them to the front. It's much easier to find one program when you might have four, five or, if you're like me, 10, running at the same time.
Start
One other area of Vista that has really updated is the Start button. Instead of the Programs menu flying out from Start it expands all within the initial pop-up menu. The up side of this is that you don't have a huge menu flying out every time you click Start. The down side is that it's harder to scroll through the list to find what you are looking for.
I'd recommend taking advantage of the Quick Launch toolbar to keep your most frequent apps close at hand.
System Settings
All of the basic system settings that we're used to are still in Vista...if you can find them. Where you once were able to control a lot of the computer by right-clicking on My Computer or the Desktop and choosing Properties, you now have to dig through the Control Panel. The names, panels and access methods are all new and for geeks that like to tinker it's going to take a while to get used to finding things.
And that brings me to User Account Controls. Even if you are logged in as an administrator you get prompted a lot by Vista checking to make sure you really want to adjust things. If you've seen the PC and MAC commercials where the body guard stands behind PC and asks to Allow or Deny every bit of communication to/from MAC then you'll know what I'm talking about. Vista actually does that.
We have come to a sad realization that Vista is babying us. Allow or Deny?
Security
As with XP, Vista has a lot of built in security features and, supposedly, you can pretty much run it without a third party antivirus tool. I'm doing it right now and so far, so good. I'll probably get nervous here before too long, though, and throw Symantec on it but we'll see.
The Windows Firewall is back and brings along a new program called Windows Defender. Defender is basically Microsoft's anti-spyware program.
Legacy
So far I haven't found any of my software or hardware that won't run on Vista. I have a Canon scanner that's a couple years old but they're good about updating drivers. My HP printer is only about 6 months old and the computer I installed it on was built in early 2006 so it's handling everything pretty well.
Office 2003 and Photoshop CS are both working well. I downloaded the newest drivers for my video card and motherboard sound while Vista recognized my network card. Winamp and Irfanview both have new versions that are working fine and later I'll be installing Nero 7 which has a Vista update available per their web site.
All in all, I haven't come across anything that's not working. I haven't tried to hook up my Dell handheld yet, though. You're mileage may vary depending on what you want to run. Oh, and I haven't tried to install any games yet...not sure how they'll do.
What's it all mean?
What does all this info mean to you? Probably not much. Ultimately you'll need to decide if you want Vista based on personal preference or a need to have the cutting edge in PC operating systems. If you are buying a brand new computer I'd recommend getting it with Vista. If you already have XP and you're only thinking about upgrading hardware or software, stick with XP.
Microsoft will be maintaining support for XP for several more years and, really, Vista doesn't seem to offer anything that's a must have for most people.
And, if you're really, really looking to get away from XP for some reason, check out Ubuntu Linux as an alternative. One CD includes the operating system, Firefox, OpenOffice which is nearly 100% compatible with Microsoft Office, and a PhotoShop-worthy graphics tool called The Gimp. Seriously, Ubuntu, look into it.
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