It’s awesome. I can’t wait to hear what the rest of the album, named “Combinations”, is like. You can tell they’ve spent a lot of time and crafted their sound, just based on this one single. And I can tell too, that the production value is a lot higher. On their first album, they had a number of producers doing different tracks, and it kind of showed. Some of the tracks were even engineered poorly (in my opinion.) For this album, they got Richard Gibbs, who was in the amazing band Oingo Boingo, and like his former bandmate Danny Elfman, currently writes scores/music for television shows (Battlestar Galactica!) and movies. Richard’s experience shows in this single.

It’s called “Invasion”, and from what I’ve heard, is based on the movie/book “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, which seems to be a cool concept to write about, something you can really read into (or hey, aliens taking over other peoples bodies if you want to stay literal.)

Download the MP3 for “Invasions” here, and check out the lyrics:

the colorless words are burning our heels as the bright lights
of the city fade
taking the chase to curb our fear as the bloodless moon
cast's it's face

oh something's not right, i can feel it inside

you would take the breath from my throat
and you would take the cherished people that i hold

all in time you will be one of us painless, us blameless
go to sleep, this wont hurt a bit
shifting your shape to our shells

and they will try to make us forget ourselves
one by one one by one
call me crazy but they are after us
one by one one by one
you don't have to know the truth
if you believe it, i believe it too

oh something's not right, i can feel it inside

you would take the breath from my throat
and you would take the cherished people that i hold

P.S.: Visit Nicole’s excellent Eisley pix site if you want to see more pictures of the band, etc.

Of course Microsoft does this, right after I sell my XBox 360 on eBay. Well, the bidder hasn’t paid me yet, and might not. So maybe I haven’t officially sold it yet.

But yeah, a few weeks ago I got the dreaded three red rings of death on my XBox 360, while watching an HD-DVD with Heather. If you know me, you know I hardly touch my XBox 360, except to watch DVDs or play arcade games. And I keep it flat (not standing), and not locked inside some entertainment center. For all intents and purposes, the game console should’ve lasted me years. The fact that it just failed watching a movie was unacceptable, but there wasn’t much I could do.

Before calling Microsoft’s support line, I found a forum post online from someone who had fixed the problem by just blowing out the dust with a can of air. I took it outside and did that, and quite a bit of dust was released from the box. Brought it back in and turned it on, and I was up and running again. Heather and I watched half of King Kong, and then shut it off. Looks like the problem was fixed for now. Well, it’s not my problem anymore technically, since it’s sold on eBay, but yeah.

Before today, if I had kept my XBox 360, the next time the red rings came up, I would’ve had to shell out like $150 to get my console fixed. But now, Microsoft’s extended the warranty to the consoles from the past three years. There’s even an “apology” letter of sorts from Peter Moore.

But in my opinion, it’s far overdue. When the console launched, I didn’t want to listen to all the people having problems. I just assumed they were being dumb, and using the console without ventilation, etc… but then I started to hear about friends having the problem, and then myself… it’s obvious there is a core hardware problem with the XBox 360 itself, either involving cooling or the placement of components inside. It’d be great if Microsoft went the extra mile and gave full disclosure about their findings. It’s ridiculous that retailers and the public were both complaining about the return rate of the console, and Microsoft kept saying that the returns/etc. were well under the industry standard. Riiight.

Okay, if you were even remotely a fan of Transformers growing up, you need to see this movie. Michael Bay did a great job. Yes, lots of stuff blows up. Lots of giant robots fight all over. Yes, they talk. They got Peter Cullen (who did the Optimus Prime voice on the original cartoons) to do this film. Just awesome all around.

Of course, if you’re a “realistic” film type of guy/gal, you’ll think this movie sucks. In that case, stay away. And give me back my action figure!

Shia LeBeouf did an outstanding job of acting in a role that could’ve easily stooped to cheap humor and bland acting. I got hooked watching Even Stevens (yes, I admit it) because of him.

And dude, Agent Smith aka V aka Elrond does the voice of Megatron! Hah!

In closing, as my friends put it.. my favorite part of the film was when they TRANSFORMED.

Man I’m a geek.

P.S. – Pacific Theatres, you really need to work on your:

• Sticky floors
• Broken seats
• Terrible sound system

If you could do that, that’d just be super-duper. K thx bye.

Just awesome. Combining my favorite movie of all time with Pirates of the Caribbean.. genius!

Visit the website, GooniesVSPirates.com to read up on the editor (he works for G4.) I’m loving it.

He e-mailed me again with two fake e-mails. These are awesome! First, he sent me a fake letter from eBay, saying that his account has been “approved”, and that I need to ship the item ASAP:

And secondly, he asks “WHAT IS GOING ON??????”:

This guy/gal is great. Maybe I should play along, say I shipped it? Hah.

Woohoo! Adsense, gimme free monies. A whopping $113 is mine!

*dances a jig*

You know I listed my XBox 360 Premium console on eBay about seven days ago… last night, it sold on eBay for around $320. I was pretty excited, since that’s way more than I was expecting to get for it. So I went to bed, hoping the payment would come in that night or this morning.

I awoke to find an e-mail in my mailbox from eBay, explaining that the auction had been cancelled:

Uhm, what? If I’m reading that right, the entire auction is now deleted because someone let their account get comprimised, and illegal bids were placed via that account? Why not just BLOCK THE ACCOUNT, then? Why did you have to remove my entire auction? It literally doesn’t show up on the site anymore. I have no way of knowing who else might have bid on it, to do a “second chance” offer. Now I have to re-list it and wait yet another seven days to see the results.

To top it off, I got e-mails from the scammer(s) themselves, the first one faking a Paypal receipt:

Yeah, that looks legit, buddy. And look, it’s our friends from NIGERIA. I like how it says that it must be on it’s way to Nigeria “under 24 hrs”. Looking at the message header, it’s coming from belider1@gmail.com. And here’s the other e-mail they sent me, apparently from a Yahoo account this time, belider_w1@yahoo.com:

*sigh* Whoever you are, scammer, you need to get a life. Or maybe first, get a job. No, no, wait. First, find Christ. Then a job. Then the life will follow it. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

I noticed this morning that some of my older posts were getting crazy out of hand with their referrer lists. Some of them, even compressed with GZIP, were spitting out over 300k of content. That’s stupid!

So, in order to speed things up for regular browsers of my blog, I hacked a bit of the just-released version of DasBlog, specifically in the newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core project, the Macros.cs file… adding this code around line 3130:

   1:  if (requestPage.Request.UserAgent != null)

   2:  {

   3:      if ((trk.PermaLink.IndexOf("q=") > -1 | trk.PermaLink.IndexOf("p=") > -1) &

   4:          (requestPage.Request.UserAgent.Contains("Googlebot") |

   5:          requestPage.Request.UserAgent.Contains("Yahoo! Slurp") |

   6:          requestPage.Request.UserAgent.Contains("Yahoo-Blogs") |

   7:          requestPage.Request.UserAgent.Contains("Ask Jeeves") |

   8:          requestPage.Request.UserAgent.Contains("BecomeBot") |

   9:          requestPage.Request.UserAgent.Contains("msnbot")))

  10:      {

  11:          // Let it happen.

  12:      }

  13:      else

  14:      {

  15:          continue;

  16:      }

  17:  }

This will see if the user-agent matches a common bot’s, and if it does, allows the code to continue building up the referrals list. Otherwise, it skips through them all and is completely empty.

But at the end of the loop, you need to check for the item count to be 0. If it’s zero, we know that we have no referrers to show, so we need to clear out the placeholder’s content (since it will contain an empty “Referred By:“ literal control:

   1:  if (count == 0)

   2:  {

   3:      placeHolder.Controls.Clear();

   4:  }

And there you have it, you’ve hacked DasBlog.

Update: Don’t listen to me. This is what Google calls “cloaking” and it’s a sure fire way to kill your pages (and get them thrown into Google’s “supplemental index”.) This is really lame. Yet Google themselves does “cloaking”. Seems a bit hipocritical.

As it stands right now, a majority of my blog’s search results are in the supplemental index now, probably because of my hack. And there’s no way I’m turning referrers back on (the pirates of the caribbean 3 blog entry I wrote is almost 600K gzip’d to the client because of all the referrers) — so I’ve turned referrers off completely. My loss, I guess.

I can't get to sleep
I think about the implications
Of diving in too deep
And possibly the complications
Especially at night
I worry over situations
I know will be alright
Perhaps it's just imagination

Day after day it reappears
Night after night my heartbeat shows the fear
Ghosts appear and fade away

I can't get get to sleep
It only beings exasperation
It's time to walk the streets
Smell the desperation
At least there's pretty lights
And though there's little variation
It nullifies the night
From overkill

I can't get to sleep
I think about the implications
Of diving in too deep
And possibly the complications
Especially at night
I worry over situations
That I know will be alright
It's just overkill

Been feeling a lot like this lately. Overwhelmed, worried about the future and finances. But today I’m strangely at peace with it all. Just thought I’d share.

Maybe I’m just in a weird mood, but the above comment I found on The Consumerist blog is hilarious. The article is about how Comcast/DirectTV/etc. installers are usually hackjobs who really cause damage to your home.

NinjaCast indeed!

I’m selling my XBox 360 Premium kit. Here’s the Craigslist post, or if you’re too lazy to look there, here’s the specs:

I have an XBox360 premium console, won from the Mountain Dew contest (came out before people could officially buy the XBox360!) Works great, hardly played, and in excellent condition. I've added onto the system over the years. Here is a complete breakdown:

1 XBox360 Premium Console
1 Wireless Controller
2 Play & Charge Kits (lets you recharge your controllers)
1 Wireless Network Adapter
1 HD-DVD Player/Drive
1 XBox 360 VGA Cable
1 Game, Halo
1 Game, Halo 2
1 Game, Gears of War
1 Game, Kameo
1 Game, Perfect Dark Zero
1 Game, Need for Speed: Most Wanted
1 Game, Fable
1 HDDVD, Phantom of the Opera
1 HDDVD, King Kong
1 HDDVD, Serenity
1 HDDVD, The Last Samurai

If you bought all of these things brand new, you'd easily be spending around $1100. I'm selling it for $800, or best offer.

If you purchase the system, you are buying it as-is. I don't believe that Microsoft's warranty covers it now, since it's a launch unit. I haven't had any problems, though. Make sure you have adequate cooling!

If you need photos, I can provide. I will only accept cash, no checks.

I'm asking for $800, or whatever the best offer is. If you know anyone interested, please have them send me an e-mail at iransofaraway AT gmail DOT com. Thanks!

Update: I actually decided to put it all up on eBay. Click here to check out the listings.

I was dumb many moons ago and purchased my laptop and a desktop computer from Dell. My main monitor at the time also died, so I decided to purchase another one. Long story short, I spent around $4k on equipment, and like a dummy, signed up for Dell’s Preferred Account. It’s Dell’s line of credit, like a credit card, except you can’t put anything but Dell stuff on it. Insanely high interest rate, but since I had a good credit score, they offered 18 months no interest. I took it.

Fast forward to June 7^th of this year. I finally have the money to pay off my Dell bill in full, so I call the automated phone system. No operators available, so I use the phone system to pay my bill. There’s a $9.95 convienience fee to do this. Why, I have no idea. Just another way to stiff you of money. Whatever, I want it done, so I pay it off completely.

I get an invoice today, saying I still owe $592.19. Looking at it, I see my promotion (interest-free) ended on 06/01/07. A whole six days before I paid my account in full (and paid what the automated phone system was saying as the payoff amount.) So since the promotion ended, they charged me all the back-interest.

I wasn’t very happy. True, I was late, but not THAT late, and the fact that I going from near-minimum payments to finally paying off the bill should’ve been good enough for them, right? I called up Dell, got an Indian* with a clearly fake American-sounding name. He explained that he couldn’t do anything, it was late, etc… I told him I wasn’t sastisfied, and wanted him to check further. He put me on hold and came back about a minute later, saying his supervisor would allow him to take $30 off of the total bill. Whoopie.

Lessons learned:

1. Don’t fall for interest-free enticements unless you’re going to for-sure be able to fufill the requirements before the due date.
2. Don’t sign up for credit lines with insane interest rates to begin with.
3. Save up money to pay for computers. They depreciate so fast, it’s not worth placing them on a credit account/card.

* I am not racist. I just hate hate hate speaking to someone who can’t clearly speak the English language. That goes for any race, color, nationality. If you’re in the business of speaking with someone on the phone all day, you should have a good and clear voice.

Found this over on TVSquad— all of the LOST “plane crash” events spliced together to run semi-cohesively. Pretty sweet, and gets me all excited for next season. If you’ve never watched LOST, this will either be a really interesting clip to you, or really boring. Whatever!

This is hilarious. But the Bobba Fett / Han Solo scene is a little disturbing

Worth Watching - June 16: First 3:10 to Yuma Trailer « FirstShowing.net.

Worth Watching has a great trailer up for “3:10 to Yuma” (a remake of the 1957 film.) Looks like a pretty interesting Western, and with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale as leading actors, how can it go wrong?

Bill Gates Goes to College

The Microsoft bigwig teamed up with Napoleon Dynamite in this spoof video from PDC 2005. The camera's a little shaky, but you get the idea.

This is embarassing. I like Amy Winehouse’s CD… I’m guessing she wasn’t drunk when she recorded it, unlike this clip from the Charlotte Church show.

Via Gizmodo. ‘nuff said.

Lots of people are trolling Microsoft lately, after their announcement and demo of their new Surface platform. I don’t get it, really. It’s pretty darn slick. But people are saying it’s a rip-off of this, a rip-off of that, and naming Michael Bay’s film, “The Island” as one of the precursors. Turns out, this actually was the “Surface” device, in a very early state!

There’s a follow-up post at the same IStartedSomething blog with a video clip of the scene in question. Worth checking out if you’ve never seen The Island. Yes, I know, they obviously jazzed up the interface and did some art work to it, but you have to admit it’s pretty cool that they used an actual prototype for the film, and we’ve been oblivious this whole time.

I was actually thinking about him the other day, wondering whatever happened to him. Turns out, he kept doing what he loved until the very end.

Mr. Wizard (Don Herbert) was probably the main driving force behind me getting interested in science and technology. I’m sure he also touched countless others. He will be greatly missed.

David at The Hot Blog has written two articles recently about the movie “Hostel 2” that came out this past Friday. His first one was a direct shot at “horror porn” as he so effectively puts it. After reading that entire article, I wanted to e-mail him and tell him how much I agree, and that we sometimes go too far. I just never got around to it. But last Friday he posted a followed up message, regarding feedback he’s received on his original post. Both articles are well worth your time to read.

I’ve never seen Hostel or Hostel 2, but I have no desire to. The concept and the execution of that concept are enough to keep me away. However, I’m game for most any “horror” flick. For example, I think Saw is brilliant, and it’s got a little gore in it, but I am able to rationalize/deal with that as part of the storyline. The gore isn’t there just to take the story “over the top”. The story is what’s totally messing with you. Hostel, it seems (and perhaps Eli Roth) is trying to use the gore element to make the audience happy. This is one thing that majorly turned me off about Saw 2 and Saw 3. There was just too much gore for the sake of gore, too much nudity for the sake of nudity, etc… and the story sucked for it.

I’m all for the first amendment, but there’s obviously a line/filter that each of us determine in our own minds as to what’s “okay” and what’s “crossing the line”. Christians would call it the Holy Spirit. Others can call it morality or humanity. But it does exist in most people. Do we really want this sort of entertainment advertised and pushed to thousands of movie theatres across the country? I sure don’t. I cringe at the thought of teens seeing this film. And it doesn’t matter if you’re not 18. You and I know it’s easy to get into rated R movies at an early age, thanks to movie theatres who don’t voluntarily enforce the MPAA ratings. It isn’t required by law, after all.

But this is garbage that shouldn’t be viewed at any age. I can’t imagine someone who would actually enjoy or defend watching something like that. Ugh.

This just pisses me off.

I recently had to reinstall Vista on my work machine. Upon finishing the reinstallation, I went to activate Vista online (with Dell’s OEM key.) Vista claims the key is invalid. So I have to call Microsoft’s automated activation line.

If you’ve never had to call this line, consider yourself lucky. Granted, it’s as simple as they could make it, but it’s just a pain. You have to read off six or so groups of numbers, each group containing six numbers themselves. In return, you get the same amount of numbers back to type in and verify the installation. If the automated process fails, you get transferred to Microsoft’s Indian tech. support center (apparently) to manually get the return codes.

Anyhow, after the call, and speaking to a live person, I was activated and ready to go. Until the next day, at least, when a dialog popped up and said my copy of Vista was no longer activated, and I had three days to re-activate. Yet another call to Microsoft’s automated activation line. Yet another group of numbers to type in. Valid again, yay.

I thought that would be the end of it, but today on my home machine, I got the dialog in the middle of programming. What? I purchased an OEM copy of Vista Ultimate for my home machine months ago, and have been running it without fail since then (activated it online originally.) Whatever. I try the online activation, but get a different dialog back, saying that my product key is in use on another computer. No, dummy, it’s not. Yet another call to Microsoft’s activation line. More numbers read off and returned, and finally I’m activated again.

I never had this problem under XP. Ugh. Methinks they clamped down on the product activation a bit too much. Meanwhile, I’m sure pirates and such are enjoying Vista for free regardless.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Vista, and recommend it for everyone. But this is just silly.

Okay, I totally knew about this, but forgot until recently. In HTML/CSS, you can actually specify more than one class name inside of the “class” tag. For example:

Go ahead, try it yourself.