Happy Howloween!

Another year and more spooky fun this scarey night ;)

At the office we all dressed up as we always do and although I didn't post about it last year properly I thought I would share this year.

Last year I was the "redneck boyscout" complete with a six pack canteen, ill fitting uniform and a slew of merit badges you can only get here in the deep south like drinkin' , huntin' (Bambi with with cross hairs superimposed) and raisin' hell (anarchy symbol). I even had Nascar and Jack Daniels logos. My favorite was the breast exam merit badge, but sadly no one would take me up on it.

Don't feel too bad for the scouts however as my boss pulled the ultimate prank and got me back by coming as me (a caricature of my real life persona). She was eight months pregnant so she certainly had the belly for it. There were a lot of very inside jokes to her costume that most people didn't get (like my hiking shoes coming untied all the time and a brush in my back pocket). I had a good laugh. If you can't laugh at yourself then who can you laugh at?

This year I donned the guise of the International Man of Mystery. It got a lot of good laughs too. I love Mike Myers. Now if only I could someone to play Wayne I could make a pretty good go at Garth haha ;)

Happy Halloween Baby! Have a Shag-tastic Time!

And you thought roaches would inherit the Earth...

I don't actually know if this 100% true. It's making it's way around the fringe news sites and I haven't seen it being reported on any "big name" news websites (not that it would really matter as I know they don't validate anything either), but if it is true then it is FRIGGIN SCAREY

Apparently they have discoverd a strain of mice that can regenerate lost organs:

"Studies in the MRL mouse have demonstrated a unique capacity to heal wounds through a process of regeneration. This has been shown in multiple tissue types including muscle, cartilage, and connective tissue and in organs such as the ear, heart, and digits. The concept that life extension may be mediated by regeneration and its associated processes is a reasonable proposal. We will present molecular and cellular evidence from the MRL which examines this possibility. "

Here's one version of the report from wired.com (largest link I could find)
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/medtech/0,68962-0.html

Worse this ability seems to be genetically passed on and worse than that in some reports they are saying can be transferrred in limited capacity to other mice via injections of spinal fluid from the MRL mice.

How long until we have breed of indestructable mice that traps and poison aren't going to stop?

Q: What do you call an indestructable man injected with super rat DNA?
A: Ever what any of George Romero's movies? (shudder)
hint: braaaiiinnnsss

If you build it they will buy it

All this machinery making modern music
Can still be open-hearted.
Not so coldly charted, it's really just a question
Of your honesty, yeah, your honesty.

Google buys YouTube (there's some weird twisted irony in there)
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,127436-page,1/article.html

They only paid 1.6 billion in stock shares (are you kidding me... dot com stocks... even Google ones... yesh)

Bottom line is corporate America is all to happy to buy out anything that seems cool or grass roots... provided thousands of people are using it.

Wow can't wait for CocaCola billboards in my next first person shooter that I play... oh wait they already do that too!? meh

Lost again...

I meant to post about Lost the other day, but really got caught up in a lot of other stuff. No spoilers, but I will say that it was an unbelievable first 3 minutes to start the season. Totally blew all of my theories out of the water to be sure (I actually thought it was a flashback at first). Great first episode and it really sucked me back in for another season.

Also watching Jericho which is very good and looking forward to BSG season 3 on the sci-fi channel. Everything else I am kind of trying here and there as I have time to watch it. Overall a so-so season of TV, but in the long run that will be a good thing for me as I turned into a real couch potatoe last year!?! ;)

POOF!

And now for some teleportation. Apparently scientists in England teleported... err... something about 18 inches long a distance of a half meter. O.k. so it's not like Wonkavision, but if you can teleport one atom of anything even the smallest distance that is pretty badass!

This may well turn out to be how my insurance company grabs me 500 years from now (if they don't spend my 38 billion on robot women first):

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/10/04/teleportation.reut/index.html

Securing my future

I think this is a pretty good deal. For just $10 they guarantee that 500 years from now they will come and get me and take me back to the future (sans DeLorean).

Of course they do not cover the unforseeable such as the Earth being destroyed or time travel being illegal, but every insurance policy has it's stipulations I suppose:

http://www.timetravelfund.com/

The List

O.k. so I catch a lot of flak about this at work, but oh well. With tounge firmly planted in cheek - This is my official TOP 10 GAYEST musicians EV-VER list. Sure it's not politically correct and allegedley I may have listened to some of them secretly (cough Asia cough), but no man worth his heavy metal, head banging, ripped jeans and Metallica concert tee would admit to having these guys qued up on the play list.

* note that a band member doesn't have to actually BE homosexual to appear on my list (I mean come on Freddy Mercury was one of the greastest singers of all time and well I'm just not sure about Rob Halford, but I'm never gonna give up on Judas Priest)

** note that having said that some members of the list are pretty blatently homosexual (you know who you are)

And without further ado:

10. Loverboy
9. Culture Club (o.k. mostly Boy George)
8. Clay Aiken (sorry not a gay-niac oops I mean clayniac)
7. Hall and Oates
6. Barry Manilow (I can't stand Copa, I just... can't)
5. 'N Sync (they made boy band popular... greatttt)
4. The Village People
3. George Michael (with or without WHAM!)
2. Chicago

and the number one GAYEST MUSICAL GROUP OF ALL TIME is...

1. The Bee Gees

Honrable mentions go out to David Hasselhoff, Asia, Night Ranger & Lionel Richie.

Comes in 5 new bloated colors

Meant to post this last month, but eh.

For those who care (and most of us don't really) Windows Vista starts shipping next month in November. It comes in 5 exciting new flavors... maybe I should say Xciting... nah lets not go down that path about what a WONDERFUL experience using Windows will be for you.

The 5 versions are: Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise and Ultimate (ohhh ahhh)

SRP Pricing ranges from $100.00 for the barest minimum upgrade version to somewhere around $400 for a full blown "ultimate" version.

The system requirements are 1 Ghz processor, 1 gig RAM and 15 GB of harddrive space (good lord!). Not surprisingly it only comes on DVD. We'll see if they break down and offer it on multiple CD's... anybody rember installing Windows when it came on like 12 floppy disks?!?

Pretty much feature wise it's as a typical Microsoft OS - few worthy new features, lots of shiny graphics and some horrendously bloated sounding bits (instant search, superfetch, etc.) that will probably put a choke hold on your system (no wonder it needs a gig of RAM). The only really good stuff would of course been better as an upgrade to the current OS, but that's pretty much the way it's been since 95.

Some of the very things that I found at least interesting on the surface:

* Explorer has a "live" thumbnail showing the actual document as a tiny icon instead of a generic icon which is pretty cool if you were looking through lot sof text documents, .html pages, adobe .pdfs etc. Of course generating all those thumbnails comes at a price in speed.

* Same thing with the task switcher (alt+tab) you get little thumbnails (of course mine already does that thanks to the Microsoft power toys, but hey it's something they should have doen to begin with)

* A better system restore which actually saves copies of the original system files if they are changed. Again this comes at an obvious price - eats up harddrive space.

and my favorite

* You can plug in jump drives and use them to as extra RAM. This is a pretty keen idea and with USB 2.0 I imagine that it actually will work decently enough making it an easy and cheap way to boost your RAM. Everything is becoming more component-ized which makes it easier and cheaper to repair and upgrade PCs. Obviously it's better to add actual high speed RAM right into the motherboard, but I like the idea for it's simplicity.

Other features are hype and outright lies like better security, IE 7.0 (meh), pretty "Windows Aero" graphics fluff, desktop gadgets, easier networking, better security, blah blah blah.

One last thing that I think is... interesting in it's implication is SideShow (not slideshow). It's hard to describe, but basically you could check your email without opening up your laptop LOL. Not sure how useful it is, but it's a unique concept. Wonder if it will be the next MS white elephant. See the concept here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/features/foreveryone/sideshow.mspx

It goes without saying that anyone worth his salt would recommend never switching to a new version of Microsoft until after the first and optimally the second service pack has been released.

Incidently the REAL purpose of this post is to let you know that Microsoft is getting MUCH more agressive about checking to see if you have an authentic copy of Windows XP installed. Do if you don't, well shame on you and don't be expecting to update your OS again EVER, because if you do your copy will stop working thanks to the "genuine advantage" program which gets rather stealthly installed on your PC. Not that I don't think they are entitled to protect their products... I'm just not keen on the methodology.