rennaB delgnapS-ratS ehT

Apparently no tricks were used to make this just careful memorization.

Turn Table / Violin Mashup

Hip Hip Violin And DJ - video powered by Metacafe

Rabbit Got Skills

This video is ridiculous, check out the end when the rabbit jumps over the hawk... SKILLS!

Joe's Goals

I have decided to try out this web application called Joe's Goals. So you can check out how im doing in the widget on the right side of this page. I get a positive point for doing something good from my list and a negative for something bad (obviously). Right now I have the following things on my list: Bring Lunch (+), Exercise (+), Cook Dinner (+), Update Blog (+), and Fast Food (-). If you can think of something I need to add please leave a comment cause I need more goals both positive and negative. But since I only have one negative right now I'm trying to think of other stuff I do that I probably shouldn't. I don't smoke or drink. Well, I drink on very rare occasions (maybe once a month) so maybe I should add that as a negative?

Aye Matey it be Talk Like a Pirate Day!

Arrrrrgggg!!! Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day :-)

Feist in Ann Arbor

If your like me and saw the new iPod nano commercial (embedded below) and kind of liked the song so you googled "1234" (don't tell anyone). She will be performing this weekend in Ann Arbor, MI at two locations. Here is a link to her MySpace page if your interested.

Upcoming Shows

( view all )

Sep 15 2007 12:30P	Borders Books and Music	Ann Arbor, Michigan
Sep 15 2007 8:00P	Michigan Theatre	Ann Arbor

Precision Passing

Pictures I took of a play I ran during my Colts franchise on Madden 08 for the Xbox 360. Peyton really threaded the needle on that one :-)

Office Product Review (#2)

Ahh the Swingline stapler. A legend in its own right that probably should have won an award for best supporting actor for its role in the movie Office Space.

I didn't always have it this good though. Less than a year ago the only stapler I had was made by a company named Ace. That stapler was made from plastic (the Swingline is metal) and rather flimsy in comparison. Try and staple more than 3 or 4 pages at once and the Ace would (rather embarrassingly) fail. Back then I was of the mindset that a stapler, is a stapler. It wasn't until recently that I saw how wrong I was.

I inherited the Swingline about a year ago when my boss left the company. But I only recently decided to try it. I was trying to staple a larger stack of papers and knowing that my Ace would fail I picked up the Swingline. My first thought was that this thing weighs a ton (1.3 lbs to be exact). To my surprise it cut through the stack of papers like a hot knife thro... you get the idea, needless to say I was impressed.

My Swingline appears to be model # 747 (and appropriately so). This thing is the champ of the stapler world and I will never under estimate the power of a Swingline again. When matched with a package of Swingline staples there is little this stapler can't do (outside of wash my car and things of that nature).

The Good:
- Everything

The Bad:
- The weight might bother some people

Score: A+
Usage: Often

Office Product Review (#1)

Out of pure boredom I have decided to write a review on every office product in my office at work. The opening review will be on the Aurora Dual Power Calculator (DT210M).

Right away I noticed that my office spared no expense when it comes to buying calculators. Springing for the revolutionary "Dual Power" model (it has both a battery and a solar cell). Insuring that you get a constant stream of calculating power whether your battery is dead or not. Except, now you won't really know if the battery is dead or not. Assuming your somewhere that has a light source.

As far as calculators go this one isn't exactly feature rich. You won't be doing any graphing or advanced scientific calculations on the Aurora DT210M. It does have your basic list of functions however. Such as memory and percent calculations. My model appears to have an advanced toggle mode for the add button (+). On occasion when pressed this key will stay depressed causing the display to blink incessantly and locking out the rest of the keypad.

Overall the Aurora DT210M seems to work as one would expect from such a product. This reviewer did experience some frustration with the product randomly shutting off during longer calculations.

The Good:
- Dual power capabilities
- No missing buttons

The Bad:
- Sticking keys
- Seemingly random shutdowns
- Keys easily catch food particles (this could seen as either a plus or a minus)

Score: C
Usage: Often

What a weekend I had...

Well, to be honest it didn't end all that badly but it sure didn't start off very well.

I left work early on Friday after finding out that the person who was going to buy my car (06 Honda Civic) had backed out. Now, in a normal situation this wouldn't have been such a horrible thing but in this case, it was. My next payment on the thing was in 4 days and well, I just didn't have the money. So, one way or another the car had to go.

I ended up having to drive an hour and a half to a Honda dealer in Indianapolis who I had previously gotten a quote from. My local dealer was offering $200 less so I figured it was worth the drive. We get there (me and my mother) and get the process started. Here is where it gets... Fun. I owe a little less than $1,300 more on the car than the dealer is offering me. I figure I can just refinance my current vehicle to include the extra amount owed. Not possible said the dealer. You see they aren't about to payoff a car that they don't have the title to (the car was being financed).

So now I have to give the dealer the $1,300 up front before they payoff my loan. Seeing as how I wasn't able to afford my payment on the thing you can probably see my problem with this. We leave the car at the dealer and make plans to stay at a friends house while we decide how to come up with the money. I end up borrowing the money from said friend after failed attempts to secure a personal loan because I needed a check stub from work to prove I had a job. I wasn't about to drive 2 hours home and 2 hours back just for a check stub.

We return to the dealer the next morning and start the process all over again. This is Labor Day weekend mind you so the dealership was crazy busy. Yet somehow they had absolutely no way to make change for the cash I had brought. After digging around we finally find the exact change needed for the transaction to complete.

When it was all said and done we finally got the car sold. Though it feels more like I payed the dealer $1,300 to take my car. All that is left to do is get a personal loan to payback my friends and I will finally be done with this ordeal.

I hope the girl that backed our of our agreement reads this so she knows how much shit she put me through. I went from having an extra $200 in my pocket to owing $1,300 in 24 hours.

Awesome...

iPhone Observation

I have quickly come to realize that I need to write myself a guide, a how-to guide... for demonstrating the features of my iPhone. It seems that every time I show it to someone, after I think I am done explaining everything, I remember one more cool thing that I forgot to mention to the interested party. It happens nearly every time someone asks to see it. Now granted this may very well be the fault of my own brain but I think it also has something to do with the fact that there is just way too many cool features on the iPhone.

For example I just finished showing it to some more people at work, sat back down at my desk and realized I didn't even mention the movie playback. Not only is movie's on your phone a cool concept it also demonstrates very well just how beautiful the screen on the iPhone is. That is what inspired this impromptu blog post, because I seem to always forget something. Be it the cover flow feature or the nice way it zooms into articles on web pages. Whatever it is it's always something. Anyone else out there do the same?

Joost Invites

Well i managed to get my hands on a Joost invite thanks to Kevin @ Teckh.com. If anyone is interested and still doesnt have an invite leave a comment below and I will hook you up. So far I am really liking the service. The channel selection (while somewhat limited) is really quite large. I am hoping to see some larger networks jump on board in the near future. It works alot better than I imagined. Only had one or two hickups while streaming, nothing severe at all. While it is basically free tv there are ads placed within the shows but they are few and far between. The only issue I saw with the ads is that they tend to pop in at awkward times. All in all it is definately worth a download, i mean what do you have to lose? Its free.

Twitter...

Well, I figured that I might as well jump on the twitter bandwagon while my prefered username is still available. You will now find all my twitter updates on a nice little box on the top right side of this blog. I have moved my shared items to the top of the blog since between twitter and the shared item boxes I doubt I will most likely only be posting actual blog entries when I have something rather long winded to say.

SPEEDcluster

Stumbled upon this very entertaining web game while browsing around various RSS feeds. The game is really rather simple but that doesn't mean it's boring. Heres how to play.

Across the bottom you will see some cards. You'll want to pick these up with your cursor and place them into one of the four columns, building combinations of cards (in ascending or descending order; e.g., 5,4,3,2, or 7,8,7,8,9 etc...) based on the cards that are falling. (Note: you can go 'around the corner,' for example, K-A-2, or 3,2,A,K etc.).

Good Luck and Have Fun.

http://www.game-pure.com/flash/speedcluster/

Wallstrip Dating Game!!!

This web video log just keeps getting better and better. Check out todays episode:

Ultra Fly Drive and ReadyBoost

I found a great deal the other day via Woot.com for a 2gig USB 2.0 Flash Drive. I have been looking for such a device ever since upgrading to Windows Vista and hearing about the ReadyBoost feature that Vista introduces. The drive advertised, clearly said that it was optimized for use with the ReadyBoost feature in Vista. So I purchased one and received it today.

After fiddling with the blister package for awhile I finally grabbed some scissors and just cut the packaging all to hell. I got it out and plugged it in. There was some crappy virus scan software already on the drive so I formatted it and then tested its compatibility with ReadyBoost. No go... Windows was telling me that the drive I had was too slow and wouldn't work with ReadyBoost. Upon hearing this I quickly jumped on the net to try and find a solution.

My searches led me to the Ultra website and their forums. There was already a thread started about this very issue but unfortunately no answers had been posted yet. One of the forum administrators was looking into the situation. So I decided to see what I could do to fix the problem on my own and low and behold. After some messing around with settings I did manage to get my drive to work with ReadyBoost. Below is instruction on what to do if your in this situation as well.

Note: this is only confirmed to work on the 2gb Fly Drive model ULT40004.

===

Format the Drive with the following settings in place.

Capacity:
1.92 GB

File System:
NTFS

Allocation Unit Size:
4096

[x] Quick Format

Then go to the the General tab under the drives properties. And put a check by the following.

[x] Compress this drive to save disk space
[x] Index this drive for faster searching

test the device for ReadyBoost. Also make sure that you have the "Optimize for Performance" setting applied in the properties for the device under the Hardware tab.

This method worked for me, hope it works for you as well.

Cheers

Wallstrip On: McDonalds (MCD)