Wednesday, February 28, 2007

What's with the space

Why is there a gigantic space in between the text and my table?? If you know how to get rid of that, please let me know. I'm too tired to look in to it right now.

The Sprint Begins

My "sprint" actually started last Friday, but I've been too tired to write about it until now. Actually I'm still really tired, but now I'm tired and bored. The "sprint" I'm referring to is the rather large (for me at least) number of concerts I will be going to over the next month or so (and then a few more sporadically after that). Some I'll go to by myself, (which I've never done before), but I figured I'd rather see said band by myself than well, not at all. Most I'll see with friends though so it should be awesome. Let me know if you want to go to any !

Including the two from last weekend, I will attend no less than seven shows through the start of April. Why stop there though? Just because I know you want it; below is a list of all the shows I plan to attend including the ones from last weekend. I sure am going to spend a lot on train tickets...















BandVenueDate
My Chemical RomanceNassau Coliseum2/23/07
From Autumn to AshesCrazy Donkey2/24/07
Killswitch EngageIrving Plaza3/01/07
Anti-FlagIrving Plaza3/08/07
ClutchIrving Plaza3/20/07
LOG/Machine HeadRoseland3/22/07
DownRoseland3/31/07
ChevelleGramercy Theatre4/03/07
Stone SourStone Sour4/06/07
Peeping TomIrving Plaza4/09/07
From Autumn to AshesIrving Plaza4/20/07
The KooksIrving Plaza5/11/07


Wow, I'm also going on the big ski trip to Vermont this weekend. I've kept myself pretty busy as of late actually. Anyway, should be pretty freakin fun. Hopefully I don't break anything.

Sunday, February 18, 2007

That little red envelope

I'm not sure when they rolled it out, but I just realized today that netflix has their "watch now" tab up and running. There is no additional charge and you can view as many hours per month as your plan costs (my plan is $10/month so I can watch 10 hours). This is a tremendous boost especially to the lower pricing models. While I sometimes let my one movie sit around for a few days or a week before watching it, other times I watch it right away and am then movie-less. Now of course they don't have most of their movies available so far (only 6% of my queue was available), but they are constantly adding new ones.

I was so excited I decided to "test drive" the functionality and had no problem with the stream. The quality was good enough (I watched a movie from 1976 so it's hard to know where the limitations were) and I had no interruptions of sound or video whatsoever. My only knock against it is that I had to use IE to view the movie. Annoying, but nevertheless, two thumbs up !

Saturday, February 17, 2007

The Rage is Back

"The Audioslave split was not unexpected. His colleagues, guitarist Tom Morello, bassist Tim Commerford and drummer Brad Wilk, have reunited with singer Zack de la Rocha to resurrect their former band Rage Against the Machine, which will play its first show in seven years at California's Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on April 29. Rage's plans beyond this show are unknown."

So RATM is pretty much my favorite band of all time.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Conspiracy Theory

Everyone who is reading this should know the storyline behind the "Terminator" series. Man builds machine/computer, machine/computer becomes "aware", machine/computer attacks man. It's an age old science fiction story that goes at least as far back as Frankenstein if not farther. We are ever so quickly inching closer to that day.

Monday in the Wall Street Journal there were two articles that would seem unrelated except to a trained (and paranoid) eye. Below are the article titles along with a few excerpts.

Intel plans to unveil superchip
-"... they have developed the world's first programmable processor that can deliver so-called 'teraflop' performance. It uses less electricity than most home appliances."
-"The first teraflop computer was developed ... in 1996. ... supercomputer filling 104 cabinets, covering 2,500 square feet, using 10,000 processor chips and consuming 500,000 watts of power."
-" Intel expects it to be available in everyday computers by 2012."

Now the term "teraflop" doesn't mean much without any context, but suffice to say this is pretty freakin fast for a chip. It also makes a point how fast the speed of chips are still jumping ahead every ten years.


Nasa technology to help increase stem cell output
-"... the launch of technology to grow large numbers of stem cells ..."
-"It grows cartilage and muscle tissue very well."

Before the "machines" were able to make that x-files guy turn into liquid metal they had gotten pretty good at making "metal surrounded by living tissue", you know like say cartilage and muscles.


Now to top it all off "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" was on AMC that night. Coincidence? I'll let you decide; I'm personally looking into adopting a German Shepard.

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

My First Time

So Sunday I participated in my first ever winter sport (other than the occasional snowball fight and extreme snowman making). That is I went snowboarding, it was a lot of fun but I've been paying for it over the last couple days as my body refuses to stop hurting. My first three trips down the bunny hill I literally fell about 50 times combined. Leaving the mountain my knees looked like tomatoes and my hands were brown and yellow from bruises. None of that mattered though when I finally made it down the hill (at first falling only twice and later not at all), not to mention actually feeling like I was riding the board as opposed to being taken for a ride. It was the greatest feeling in the world. That feeling was only topped when we hit the beginner slope and I actually took a fairly tight curve at a fairly decent speed with Bo behind me cheering me on.
We snowboarded on and off from 8:30a-4:30p (I stopped at 2:30) and overall I'd rate my first time about an 8/10. I could go in to much more detail about the day as just about every moment is burned in to my head, but I won't. Although, I should mention that coming in from 3+ hours of snowboarding and smelling sweet perfume on a cute waitress was something you need to experience. Anyway, all the pain was worth it if next time I go I pick up where I left off.
On a final note I have to thank Bo and Lee who stayed with me on the bunny hill for most of the day and constantly gave me tips on what to do and how to figure out what I was doing wrong. I didn't know what to expect going in to the day (other than falling and getting hurt, as I was told this constantly), but even with the lack of expectations I didn't think I'd get home and honestly be able to say at least to a basic degree I learned how to snowboard.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

My Day With the MS

So I attended the Microsoft QPB (Quarterly Partner Briefing) at the MS office in the city on Wednesday for SMS&P (Small, Mid market Solutions and Partners). MS like the government has acronyms for everything. Before I went we sat through a brief overview of their most commonly used ones by one of the guys in my office, I kid you not. It was very interesting from my perspective because it wasn't a technical conference. It was almost solely devoted to sales and meeting other MS partners and networking with a few technical aspects thrown in here and there.
There were blocks of sessions that we each attended during the day, three in total. Since I had never been to one of these before I decided to attend two sales and marketing sessions. The first session was on the use of metaphors in advertising which was OK, but nothing too great. I consider myself a well rounded person when it comes to education so nothing that was said was too surprising.
The second session though I found to be outstanding. It was given by one of the keynotes at the conference; Larry Bailin who is the CEO of Single Throw Internet Marketing. He started off by telling everyone how he wasn't a "tech" guy which was driven home during his presentation when practically all the techniques he pointed out could have been applied to advertising for any type of company. There were no secrets or "magic bullets" here, most of the items he touched on were just common sense. Target your customer, "a specific message for a specific customer" was how one of the other people in the class put it. Make things easy for your customer; it sounds so simple! It's amazing how many examples there are out there where this is not the case though. The best one that stuck in my head which I see everywhere is that when filling out a form with my contact information on it, why do we have to put our city, state and zip code? The zip code determines the former so nothing more than that should be necessary. Simple, one less thing to fill out on a form. There were other examples as well, but that was the one that stuck out the most.

As an added note I saw the movie "Babel" later in the day (nominated for a best picture btw) and I thought it was really bad. I was generous and gave it 2/5 stars on netflix because it made some good points about language and different cultures and how they can be tied together by seemingly unconnected events. Due to the fact that there was practically no plot, non-existent character development, Brad Pitt being on screen for only like 20 minutes of a 140 minute movie and it's slow pacing and length, I whole heartily do NOT recommend this movie.

Friday, February 2, 2007

musings of a first time blogger

So I was just surfing the web and somehow the easy to remember link to my friends blog (which I only found out about recently) popped in to my head. Hence my blog is born! I find it a bit strange that I never got in to the whole "blog revolution" in that I work in the IT industry as well as previously sending out a monthly newsletter type email to a select group of friends. I stopped doing it though because I felt like I needed to have content to send out which I think is the same reason I never started a blog. Better late than never though.

So it didn't bother me that I had nothing particularly interesting to write in my first blog until about 10 minutes later while still surfing the web I came across this. Anyone who knows me personally and takes a few minutes to look at the comments will see what I found so interesting. Lots of strange initial thoughts racing through my head on that one. And all along I thought I was so unique...