A new Transformers series called Transformers Animated is coming next year to Cartoon Network. Both the toys and the show looks really refined and well designed. So far I love all the prototype toys. This site has a nice rundown of the toys including a preview of the show.
Ordered aluminum shifter bushings for my car. I've heard these things do wonders for the squishy feel of the stock bushings and give the throws a more solid feel. I'm slowly getting into tuning my ricer. =]
I purchased some much needed new tires for my Si today. I first opted for the Yokohama YK520 tire. I drove around a little to test them, but really didn't get a good, full experience with them before going home. After reading some bad performance reviews online, I decided to go for a more thorough drive. I took them out to an underutilized road with some good curves and punched it up to 90 or so. My tiny little Civic handled like a huge boat! The Yokohamas performed like I was riding on squish balls.
I drove back up to Discount Tire and upgraded to the Bridgestone Potenza RE960 Pole Position. These tires are incredible! They're stickier than the stock tires were and they perform extremely well in acceleration, curves and braking. Acceleration from a stop no longer involves having to ease up on the gas to keep the tires from spinning in place. If it ever rains again here I hope to get a good feel of what these things can do in wet conditions.
This is my first experience with buying performance tires. I learned a lesson spouted many times before: tires are the most important and neglected component on your vehicle. If you are looking for performance, the tires you choose can make or break the deal.
After about 4 years with Sprint and their perfectly tuned network, I am leaving the giant for Verizon. I was a huge fan of Sprint's network. No lost calls (at least that were my fault) and perfect signal strength nearly everywhere. I never thought anything of it when folks would complain and talk down upon Sprint's customer service... until I actually had to call customer service. I was actually told by a Sprint lackey AND his, *ehem*, 'supervisor' that Sprint could do nothing about the questions I had about my bill. They basically told me to just pay the bill and don't ask questions. Well, I paid it, and now I warn everyone against Sprint.
So, here I am with Verizon. I bought the snazzy LG VX9900 enV and it is pretty cool. It's a great phone with a 2 megapixel camera with autofocus. Very nice. Plus, Verizon's support seems to actually WANT to help me. Hmmm... promising...
Microsoft has just released its latest bug ridden, horrendously bloated Vista which no one wants. Now, it has been found out that their next OS is [rumored] slated for release in about 3 years! Good lord! I can't speak for most people (but I can bet most feel the same) but I don't see even upgrading to Vista for another 2 years at the least when it, hopefully, has matured and is usable.
Wow!!! New clips from the Transformers movie. ILM has done some major kickassery with these robots. The second link is an extended clip of Bonecrusher attacking Prime on the freeway in the open, crashing into cars and destroying a freeway overpass. TF FTW!!!
Click on the 'Exclusive Footage' link at autobotsrollout.com.
Angela bought me a Wii for my birthday. As excited as I was to get it and for all my expectations, I have to admit it is more than I could have
hoped. I've brought it to my parent's and sister's houses and had more fun with it than I could have hoped. At only $250 compared with $400 and
up for other consoles, it is the most fun if you're looking for a good all around gaming system. The virtual console is great and offers an
expanding library of TurboGrafx 16, Nintendo, Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis games downloadable from the internet via built-in 802.11g/b.
The only thing I can't get over is the cost of the virtual console games. The cheapest are the Nintendo games which are priced at $5 each. The most expensive I've seen is $8 for the Sega Genesis games. Kinda pricey for a game that's 20 years old or more.
Comcast is working on a simultaneous movie release service which would charge $30-$50 for a viewer to watch a movie in the comfort of their living room the same day a movie is released to theaters. Aside from the price, it is great to see someone in the U.S. who has their consumers in mind and not just the understandably panicked theater industry who's fears that simultaneous theater/DVD/cable release schedules would undermine their business model are valid.
My view is that theaters, along with the old media (read: print), are quickly becoming obsolete due to the increasing reliability and speed-of-content that is the internet. Theater owners are feeling the bite of services like Bittorrent and are ramping up their offensive against new entertainment business models instead of rolling with the changes. In my mind, there will still be money to be had via outlets like movie theaters, but that revenue will be extremely low compared to past grosses if the chains continue to rely solely on concession sales.
I have a large HDTV, HD up-converting DVD player and surround sound and while it's not exactly the experience of a theater, I still prefer a quiet night at home on the couch with my girl to a stinky, noisy, kid infested, steamy/frozen, lice ridden movie theater. I am quite sure a good deal of the moviegoing populace are of the same mind. I would be perfectly fine paying $35 or $40 for a film, say the Transformers movie, on opening night to enjoy at home and later receive the DVD in the mail or a voucher to pick it up in the store once it's released. That being said, not everyone has the income for a home theater system and therefore would still prefer the good ol' popcorn stadium.
I have defended Microsoft for years against my friends and peers who are quick to bash the uber company for their many flaws. I've always been of the mind that supporting a product like Windows is an extremely complex and noble endeavor and anyone is almost guaranteed to have inherent flaws and problems due to the vast amount of different hardware and software configuration options.
However, I can no longer defend Microsoft after having lived (read: suffered) with Vista for the past 4 months. I installed a copy of Vista Ultimate with our MSDN license at the company I work for. We realize that XP, like 98 before it, will not be sustainable forever, so I decided to take the plunge and evaluate, first hand, the efficacy of Vista as an enterprise level OS.
Vista Ultimate is a bit of overkill for any organization's choice for a workstation OS, but I wanted to get the full Vista experience. My workstation, while not top of the line by any stretch, was barely adequate to run Vista at its lowest level of graphical glory. My HP XW4100 packed with a 2.6GHz P4, 3GB of RAM and 2x 80GB harddisks was not enough to even allow me the OPTION of enabling the Aero Glass theme. That was my first disappointment. Not being able to enable Aero basically relegates you to a Windows Media Center-esque theme. Not a great start considering this configuration makes up a great deal of consumers' desktops.
Another thing to note is that even if you enable the Vista Classic theme, which looks exactly like the bare bones XP/2000 theme, Vista's absolute smallest memory footprint is about 720MB! That's right. If you have 1GB of physical RAM, simply booting Vista takes up 75% of your memory. Forget even thinking about running Vista with less than 2GB of RAM, as merely doing so will begin eating up memory on the system you are using right now.
Used to XP's Explorer and configuration options? Too bad. You'll require hours of looking around to simply find your system's resource or network options. Trying to get on your network on a domain? Good luck. Expect to do some heavy Google research to find that, in Microsoft's infinite wisdom, Vista is installed with IPv6 enabled which simply does not allow you to join that domain on your IPv4 network. That's right! Go disable IPv6 before connecting to the internet. Once you're connected to your domain you might want to copy a 1KB text file to your backup share. Yeah. You'll have a great time tapping your fingers for up to 20 seconds for that 1KB file to transfer across your 100MB network. I kid you not. Transferring 1GB to that share? No, you're not, actually.
After 4 months of using Vista on a Windows 2003 domain along with Office 2007 I am back to good ol' XP and Office 2003. Vista, in my opinion, is absolutely not ready for primetime. Period. I think it is Microsoft's slowest, most inefficient and worthless OS since ME. Granted, Vista may be usable once SP1 is released, hopefully. I seriously think it has potential, especially when you consider DirectX 10 and the completely different way the OS handles RAM. I seriously went into Vista excited about the new features and have certainly learned a great deal about the OS, but am extremely disappointed to have to go back to XP simply to get my work done on a daily basis.
