Mid-Month Check-In

Movies
I finally got around to seeing both AVATAR and INCEPTION. I thought INCEPTION was alright, but I felt it tried a bit too hard to be complex. I thought AVATAR had some nice visuals in parts, but I don't see why it was such a big hit. I dozed off at one point, and I didn't bother to rewind.

I also borrowed RED on DVD, and gave that a watch. Nothing like the original comic whatsoever. In fact, they could've easily gotten away with calling it something else and saved themselves the money they used on getting the film rights to the original story.

Other than that I've mostly been watching old movies. (Even more now that we final got Turner Classic Movies when we upgraded our cable package recently.)

TV
I'm happy that COMMUNITY got renewed for a third season. It’s the only bubble show I was really worried about this year. Hopefully we’ll get another great season. I figure we've got at least one more good season before the statistical likelyhood of a decline in quality (I’ve come to expect a quality decline for any show that runs longer that 2-3 years, with a few exceptions.)

I suppose I'd like one more season of V, given that season finale. It's probably not very likely to happen though.

Internet
It seems that every few weeks I have a few days where my connection does a combo of having lots of packet loss or constantly dropping off completely. Even when my signal levels look fine. This is one of those weeks. It started late at night on Wednesday, where it went out for about 45 minutes. Then it was fine until Friday afternoon. Since then it's been spotty. Like it was fine all day on Saturday then between 9pm and now it's been dropping in and out like crazy. So frustrating.

Cable TV works fine. It happens at different times of day, so it doesn't seem like they're doing maintance or something (which I could see them doing at like 2-3 am or whatever). The signal level on the modem is fine, and the same as it is when everything's working fine. There's no bad weather, or downed lines or anything. It also never seems to last long enough to justify a service call. 2-3 days often.

I'd think that it was because on Friday we ugraded our cable package, and got a new Docsis 3 modem. But the problem started before the package and equipment switch. (Plus our internet supposedly isn't getting the upgrade until our phone service starts, which is next week once Verizon releases our old phone number to Comcast.)

Poker
I was doing pretty well, then on Friday things went bad. Within my first few orbits, I dropped around three buy-ins. Then the disconnects started, which just tilted me even more. Playing with an unreliable connection is pretty much impossible, since it sucks putting a bunch of money into a pot with a good hand and then losing because you get disconnected and somebody raises and you get timed out and they take it down.

Video Games
Only thing I've played in the last few days is the first SAINTS ROW. It's a good game, but the second one is better.

Packet Loss: How Comcastic!

This sort of thing...

... has been going on intermittently since late Wednesday night/Thursday morning (around 1 AM) and has been awful a good chunk of today (Friday). It makes browsing awful, and I'm afraid to even attempt to play poker while it's going on. Power-cycling the modem and router doesn't seem to help.

Finally Pulled The Trigger On 7

So I finally made the jump from XP to Windows 7. The process took a long time, since there's no direct upgrade path from XP to 7. So I had to backup all of my data to my 2TB external hard drive. Unfortunately, since I don't have an eSATA port on my motherboard, I had to do it via USB 2.0 which is really slow. (I definitely plan on looking into getting an eSATA card in the future.) Roughly 400 gigs of stuff had to be backed up. (All of my assorted media like images, videos, music, but also things like my poker databases, and various customizations to programs.)

Then I made a checklist of every program I planned to install once I got 7 up and running. Then for a majority of them I had to go through and take screenshots of all of the settings. (I love any program that has a built-in import/export system for their settings!) I used Lightscreen for this, because having to hit "Prt Scr" and save a picture in Photoshop would've taken 2-3 times as long.

Next I had to update my BIOS, and I guess it had been awhile, since the new version was quite a few numbers away from the version I had been using. So I lose some geek cred for that.

Once I had everything prepped and backed up (or so I thought, more on that later), it was time for the install. I chose to reformat, and began the install, which I had to restart because the first time it stalled early on. (Turns out I had to turn off my external drive, and make a small temporary change in the BIOS.) Once I got that fixed, I just had to wait. So I played with the dog for a bit and just screwed around until I had to enter the basics (timezone, user name, etc.) Then once I was in Windows itself, I started installing a few essentials like Firefox (which was super easy since I had my profile backed up).

Messed Around With Firefox 4.0 Beta For A Bit

I was updating some of the applications on my USB thumbdrive tonight, and decided to throw the Firefox 4.0 beta on there and screw around with it a bit.

The new interface has the tabs on top by default. (You can get this functionality in the current 3.x versions of Firefox with an extension or Stylish script.) I'm not sure how if I'd use it like that since I'm so used to tabs being just above the actual content in the browser. I do like how they finally combined the stop and reload buttons into one toolbar button. I've been using an extension to do that for years now.

It looks a little better if you hide the menu bar (the one with File, Edit, View, etc), and it gives you a compact replacement if you do that. Of course lots of options are missing in the compact menu, so you may or may not want to disable it.

I did wonder what would happen to the Bookmarks menu if I hid the menu bar, luckily what happens is it adds a menu to the bookmarks toolbar with your bookmarks.

I would've strongly considered just making the leap to 4.0 if it weren't for the fact that pretty much none of the extensions I use are compatible with it. In the case of Greasemonkey, if you make Firefox ignore compatibility and install it, it seems to load the Greasemonkey homepage in a zillion tabs. So I'll probably wait for a release candidate of Firefox 4, and for more extensions to become compatible before I even think about replacing Firefox 3.x

For The Three Of You On Here Who Use Twitter

Got Firefox? Use Greasemonkey? Get annoyed by posts on Twiter that are replies to other messages? Then you need Nested Twitter Replies for Greasemonkey. It's become one of my favorite Greasemonkey scripts lately. Here's an example of it in action...

The one thing I don't understand about Twitter are people that follow hundreds or thousands of people. I don't see how anybody can sift through all of that useless information to find things they care about. That's why I tend to only add and follow people I know in real life or from the net. (Anybody else, like writers or celebs I just bookmark and read their Twitters that way.)

Windows In Windows. Must Be Sorcery.

I was too chicken to install the Windows 7 beta as my main OS and didn't want to screw around with dual-booting. Instead, I went the virtual PC route to see how I liked it.

Unfortunately, you can't use the Aero theme features in a virtual machine. Still, that's just looks for the most part. Overall, 7 seems pretty cool. Essentially, and I'm probably repeating myself here, it's what Vista should've been. I didn't really use it extensively, just screwed around for a little bit on Friday night.

When the final version of 7 comes out, I'm definitely upgrading my main machine. Since the new taskbar is fairly similar to a dock, I imagine that I won't have a need for Rocketdock anymore. (Although, my older PIII 850 MHz won't be getting the upgrade. It's still XP and a dock for that box.)

As you can tell from the screenshot, I'm running XP with a 7 inspired theme at the moment. Both on the main machine (where the screenshot came from) and my older PIII box.

Windows 7 - Anybody Using It?

Are any of you using the leaked Windows 7 beta? I've heard good things about it. I've been tempted to grab it. Supposedly it's a vast improvement over Vista and as stable as XP. I don't want to bother with dual booting, but I'm also gun shy about putting 7 as my main OS on either of my main boxes.

Starting Friday, you can officially download the beta from Microsoft: Microsoft releases Windows 7 Beta as a free download.

It's Been Awhile Since I've Posted My Desktop

My (Not-So) Thrilling Adventures In Doing Mundane Household Tasks

A good chunk of my weekend was spent doing some cleaning. I like cleaning when I stumble across things that I shoved into a box and forgot I owned, like some old comics or DVDs.

Among the non-essential cleaning tasks was re-organizing my computer area a bit. So that's a bit nicer now.

I finally remembered to get a can of compressed air to clean out the insides of my computer case. The heatsink on my CPU had the most dust out of everything, since I had recently cleaned out the fans with a Q-Tip and a dust rag. Afterwards, I used the compressed air on the fan on my external hard drive enclosure, and it seems to have helped that a lot. The fan was noiser before the blast of air.

The fan that I use to cool my bedroom to conked out on me. It was a vital piece of equipment, used to cool that room down to "Africa hot" temperatures as opposed to "center of the Earth" temperatures. Luckily, it's pretty much the end of summer, so I should be able to get a replacement on end of summer clearance. I guess after a decade that fan finally gave up, they just don't make things like they used to.

Other than that, I've been killing time by replaying CALL OF DUTY 4 and watching GHOST RIDER (never saw it and I was bored) and DEEP RISING in HD on OnDemand, and then ENTOURAGE on Sunday night.

Chrome - I'm Sticking With Firefox For Now

All of the hype about Google's new Chrome browser has me curious, but not curious enough to switch from Firefox.

Firefox works great, plus I can't imagine browsing without all of the extensions and customizations I've got in my browsers. Seriously, I can't imagine just browsing the web without AdBlock Plus, Greasemonkey, and Stylish. That's not even taking consideration Firefox extensions that make running a website easier like "Copy as HTML link" or Affiliator.

Then again, Google always has a way of eventually wearing me down. I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader, from my domain mail to Gmail, and from my own webhosting to Blogger. None of which I had planned to do. In fact, after initially trying each of those things I went back to my old, familiar online appication. (The only Google product I've tried that I never adopted permanently is Google Talk/Chat whatever it's called. I still have the account, I just never use it. Then again, I don't really use any IM at all anymore.) So, I'm sure eventually I'll cave on the Chrome thing.

Anyway, I'm curious if any of you have tried out Chrome and what your impressions of it have been so far.

A Few Things On My Mind

Monday night I got a warning on my main computer that I had a virus. I did scans on all of my machines. Two out of my three computers had the Agent.THO trojan on them. Luckily NOD32 caught it in time. I'm still trying to figure out how it got on both machines, and what I didn't do or visit on the machine that wasn't infected. (The only thing I can think of doing on the two that had the virus that I didn't on the clean machine was go on IRC.)

I don't think I would make a very good Superman. I mean, if I had all of those powers, one of the first things that I would do would be to hold a press conference where I would give a speech. My speech would start with, "As your new king..."

Am I the only one who thinks that the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA prequel, CAPRICA, sounds boring? The trailer certainly didn't change my opinion on that. I love BSG, I don't know if I'll bother with watching the prequel.

The other night while looking around for something to watch on OnDemand, I stumbled across one of the most genius concepts ever, Bikini BBQs. It's a cooking show featuring hot chicks in bikinis. That's the exact sort of thing that I wish I had thought up and capitalized on.

Here's A Helpful Hint About Rapidshare And Google

Looking over my stats, I see that some of my referrals come from people on Google looking for Rapidshares of things. This is most likely because I've mentioned Rapidshare in addition to whatever it was they searched for but didn't post anything on Rapidshare. (I should though, because when you post things and people download them you get points on your premium account which you can use to buy more premium time on RS.) Anyway, I've got a helpful hint for those of you who are searching for things on Rapidshare via Google.

When using Google to search for something on Rapidshare include this in your search:

intext:rapidshare.com/files

For example typing...

randomtvshow.s01e01.hdtv.xvid-fake intext:rapidshare.com/files

... into Google would find pages that link to that file.

That'll look for pages that actually have the Rapidshare links that you're looking for and not pages that just include the terms "Rapidshare" and "whatever it is you're searching for". You'll still get dead links and some false positives, but you'll get far better results searching that way instead of just typing in "(whatever the file name is) rapidshare".

I created my own custom Rapidshare/Google search engine for Firefox. You can download it and manually add it to your Firefox profile. (Add it to the "searchplugins" directory in your profile and restart Firefox.) This plugin probably works in Internet Explorer 7 but I can't be bothered to try it there. If you want to get really lazy, then you can also use this in conjunction with the Context Search Firefox extension.