TimesOnline: Microsoft poised to announce job losses
Cheers for not fact checking. I mean, it’s not all bunk – yes, the Zune 30 had a Leap Year related bug and yes, Microsoft is going to be at CES… the rest? Various levels of bunk – someone can’t even handle simple date math.
Let’s look at it one section at a time…
Continue reading Modern News: Facts Are Not Required
Thought I’d do a quick recap of my week-long, multi-state travel experiment with a MacBook in place of a PC.
Bottom line: I almost didn’t notice a difference.
Continue reading MacBook Update
Seattle Times: Seattle refuses to use salt; roads “snow packed” by design […] To hear the city’s spin, Seattle’s road crews are making “great progress” in clearing the ice-caked streets.
But it turns out “plowed streets” in Seattle actually means “snow-packed,” as in there’s snow and ice left on major arterials by design.
“We’re trying to create a hard-packed surface,” said Alex Wiggins, chief of staff for the Seattle Department of Transportation. “It doesn’t look like anything you’d find in Chicago or New York.”
The city’s approach means crews clear the roads enough for all-wheel and four-wheel-drive vehicles, or those with front-wheel drive cars as long as they are using chains, Wiggins said.
The icy streets are the result of Seattle’s refusal to use salt, an effective ice-buster used by the state Department of Transportation and cities accustomed to dealing with heavy winter snows.
“If we were using salt, you’d see patches of bare road because salt is very effective,” Wiggins said. “We decided not to utilize salt because it’s not a healthy addition to Puget Sound.”
Did someone tell them that the city’s busses can’t get up the hills? That Denny Way [shown at right] is still shut down? That the cop cars are rear wheel drive (and can’t make hills with chains?)
Full of loss.
Apple posted a new update for the Multi-Touch trackpad on Vista and I have to say: it’s better. Much better. I’m using it right now in Windows 7 (the PDC build) and it’s pretty solid. The main gripe I had was scrolling being erratic, right clicking being just plain unresponsive, and drag/select was flat out broken. You still need two fingers on the trackpad if you click with your thumb, but that makes sense in a way. Drag/select works really well now – it’s a very nice fix. Scrolling is only slightly better and still weird – at least it’s more spastic than erratic… what makes me smile is that they were able to fix other bugs; this one is fixable as well.
Over all, tho, I might not even pack an external mouse this weekend… oh yeah, I shoulda mentioned that: I’ll be travelling to see family this coming week and I’m taking the MacBook, instead of the Lenovo. The caveats to that were: a) Outlook via XP and VMWare works and is usable, b) said VM uses an external card reader and VPN if I have work issues, c) Boot Camp is running the PDC version of Windows 7 very well (although it could use better heat control,) and d) I was able to uninstall Entourage and it’s reminders.
Best thing of all: Live Mesh continues to impress me with how well it sync’s files – just added the Windows 7 and OSX machines to my account and *bam* – all of my “must have” files were there for me.
Good stuffs!
I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker!
The WBCOOP is an online Poker tournament open to all Bloggers.
Registration code: 955613
MTV.ca: ‘Halo’ Wedding Planned By Two Video Game Fans; Master Chief Will Officiate ‘I love ‘Halo’; I love her,’ the groom says of his bride’s idea (seriously!) for the theme wedding. […] They met playing “Halo” in 2004, and in January they’ll get married by a guy wearing Master Chief armor. Desirai Labrada, 29, and John Henry, 26, are having a “Halo” wedding. And it was her idea.
Wow.
Just… Wow.
SharpKeys is a Registry hack that is used to make certain keys on a keyboard act like other keys. For example, if you accidentally hit Caps Lock often, you could use this utility to map Caps Lock to a Shift key or even turn it off completely. This official release includes support for up to 104 mappings, an extensive list of available keys, and a “Type Key” option to help when managing mappings. As it relies on internal support within Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, or Windows 7, you must be running one of these OS’s for this Registry hack to work.
With the move to version 3, I’ve decided to release the source code to the public via Codeplex, so that the developer community can actively enhance and support SharpKeys – if I decide to work on future versions, it will be along side anyone else that has dipped into the source code. My hope is that the list of available keys will grow to include more international options and that other random asked-for features get added as people require them. I will continue to host a copy of 3.0, as that’s the most current copy, but I’m going to ask that all support requests go through Codeplex – this will allow other people to help with new features, going forward.
The source code can be found at http://www.codeplex.com/sharpkeys – enjoy!
Download SharpKeys 3.0: MSI | ZIP
Read: SharpKeys FAQ [updated!]
GameDaily: Home Sweet Home: Nine Reasons Home Beats NXE
Or as I like to think of it: what happens when someone that’s never played a game online thinks when s/he reads marketing materials… lets take it one page at a time, shall we?
Continue reading T3h Fail: NXE vs PS3@Home
In what started with the small task of adding a hard drive to my PC, I’ve been through a fairly lengthy media-managing saga.
From this I have three Zune tips involving library management, sharing media with a 360, and syncing with a physical device.
Continue reading Zune Tips: Connections Afar and Away
When Starbucks bought Seattle’s Best Coffee (SBC) I sobbed a little bit. SBC had a great mocha syrup, an excellent matcha latte, and a killer Cold Brew vanilla latte but I figured Starbucks would stamp their mermaid logo all over the place and kill off all of the things that made SBC a worthy competitor.
I was wrong. Starbucks opted to keep SBC as a separate brand and allowed them to carry on in their already established ways. All three drinks survived the buy out and all was right in the world.
Well, almost everything was right – they shit canned the lids.
Continue reading New Starbucks Lids? OMGOMGOMGOMGOMG
Been a strange couple of weeks and, well, yeah, I’ve been offline for a bit.
Continue reading Shipping | Hard Drives | Zune | Dash | iPhone | Turkeys | Cookies | Mice
Culmination.
It’s a word. A fitting word. At least for the last 36 hours… over the last day and a half, I’ve been re-org’d, launched, re-launched, partied, liquored up, and chatted up. Not too bad, considering that today’s Xbox 360 Dashboard update is our biggest. …so far.
Want a look behind the curtain? I expect that Major Nelson will have something Inside Xbox before the end of the week… true, there’s almost always following him in the cafeteria, but he usually doesn’t wear a velvet smoking jacket while filming. At least not on camera… Anyway, until his clip is released, I can tell you what the NXE experience has meant to me…
Continue reading Xbox LIVE: New Xbox Experience
Over the last five months Jolene and I have been fostering kittens. As someone that has alergic reactions to cats (and dogs) and yet can’t stay away from them, this sounded like an awesome idea. You go to the shelter, you take home some kittens, feed’m up, hold on to them until they can get spade or neutered, and then put them up for adoption. It’s a limited time thing – you don’t have to worry about longer term care because, well, you don’t get to keep them. Along those same lines, when you get attached to one of the little buggers, it can be hard to let them go but then you remind yourself that “Hey, you can’t keep them anyway so at least you can send them off to a good home.”
That’s what stings the most about Espresso Chococat. We got her when she was mere weeks old. Got her spade after she got over two pounds. Took her to an adoption fair with two other kittens; she was the last to go and she went to a guy that looked like he’d be good with her. Life was good. Last Friday, Jolene got a call from the shelter asking us we were the ppl that had a black kitten named “Espresso”; the guy that took her home brought her back to the shelter because she wasn’t eating and he couldn’t afford the cost of the vet. The shelter took her in and ran some tests on her… it wasn’t clear why she wasn’t eating but she had a sizable tumor in her stomach. Chemotherapy was an option for her but a) they didn’t think she’d survive because she was already bone thin and b) it would be several thousands just for the initial treatment. Left with no other option, the shelter put her down this week…
*sigh*
MSNBC: Connecticut on Wednesday became the second state to legalize gay marriage after a judge ruled that same-sex couples may pick up marriage license forms at town and city clerks’ offices statewide.
And yet you still can’t buy any alcohol from a store after 8pm at night or all day on Sunday.
Amazing.
Grandmother: “Oh… why is [my grandson] Billy on the floor again?”
Mother: “Randy killed him again.”
Grandmother: “Again? Oh, oh.”
Billy: “OK, that’s enough grandma!”
Classic.