New Laptop!

I ordered a new laptop last week and I have been playing around with it for a few days, and realized I forgot to brag about it :P

Dell XPS m1330

It’s a Dell XPS m1330 in tuxedo black (matte finish). It features an Intel Core 2 Duo T8300 2.4GHz processor, 4GB DDR2 SDRAM, 320GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM), slot load CD/DVD Burner, 128MB NVIDIA® GeForceâ„¢ 8400M, wireless broadband card (Verizon), 2.0 megapixel webcam + microphone embedded in the monitor, HDMI output, and some other goodies I can’t really remember.

I thought it might be tough to adjust from the 15.4″ screen on my old laptop to the 13.3″ on the new one. The keyboard is also a little more condensed. But all in all, I’m loving it. Mostly because my old laptop lost some RAM somewhere along the way and went from 512MB to 448MB. That, along with the dated Pentium 4 processor really didn’t make for a good time when multitasking. In fact, I’ve never been able to run iTunes and Firefox at the same time on my old laptop. Now I can run iTunes, and play games on Pogo (Java) in Firefox, chat (Pidgin) and copying files (from the old computer) via USB. Might sound like commonplace for some of you, but it’s a whole new world for me.

Not to mention battery life.. I can get a little over three hours out of the battery if I turn the screen brightness down to about half. My old laptop would die after 10-15 minutes. But that was because never turned it off and it was always plugged in. But that’s enough bragging for now. I just wanted to share :)

Filed under: life — Tags: , , —

Playlist: October 2008

I used to post these somewhat regularly, but the last one was a year ago. Here’s the playlist I’ve been listening to lately:

Artist Name Album
01. Noize Poison Legacy Noize Poison
02. Eve Let Me Blow Ya Mind (feat Gwen Stefani) Scorpion
03. Velvet Revolver Get Out The Door Libertad
04. Airbourne Diamond in the Rough Runnin’ Wild
05. Brooks & Dunn My Maria The Greatest Hits Collection
06. The Righteous Brothers You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ Top Gun
07. Nonpoint Bullet With A Name To The Pain
08. Pearl Jam Man of the Hour Rearviewmirror (Greatest Hits 1991-2003)
09. The Misfits Shining American Psycho
10. Green Day King For A Day Nimrod
11. The Donnas Better off Dancing Bitchin’
12. Lars Frederiksen And The Bastards The Viking Viking
13. Black Tide Shockwave Light From Above
14. Johnny Cash A Boy Named Sue Legend
15. Avenged Sevenfold Bat Country City Of Evil
16. Foo Fighters Monkey Wrench The Colour and the Shape
17. Metallica All Nightmare Long Death Magnetic
18. Papa Roach Last Resort Infest
19. Lostprophets The Fake Sound of Progress The Fake Sound of Progress
20. Clutch You Can’t Stop Progress From Beale Street To Oblivion



You can view my entire music collection, and feel free to suggest some of your own favorites to me.

Filed under: music — Tags: , , , —

Review: 3000 Miles To Graceland

3000 Miles To Graceland I added this movie to my Netflix queue quite a while ago, and it finally made it’s way to the top. I remember seeing trailers for it when it was in theaters, but I never got a chance to see it, even though it looked like a movie I would enjoy.

Tonight after work I popped it in and enjoyed all two hours and five minutes of it. The movie starts out a little strange, but it picks up quick. A group of Elvis impersonators rob a casino in Vegas and quickly begin to fight over the money. The group slowly shrinks until there are only two left. After Michael Zane gets involved with Cybil and her son Jesse, Murphy comes looking for his money. Clever tactics on both sides turn everyone against each other and it all ends in a warehouse. I don’t really want to ruin the movie, because I thought it was done really well, and you should watch it for yourself. I suppose I would relate it somewhat to Fargo or The Ice Harvest, maybe even The Italian Job in a few places. It was pretty packed with stars including Kevin Costner, Kurt Russell, Courtney Cox, Christian Slater, David Arquette, Jon Lovitz, Kevin Pollak, Ice-T, and football star Howie Long. I thought it was kinda cool to see Kevin Costner (or “Dances With Wolves Guy”, as Ben calls him) play a bad guy, and contrary to some of the reviews on IMDB, I thought the kid in the movie was really good.

Filed under: movie, review — Tags: , , —

Command & Conquer: Red Alert

A few months ago, Electronic Arts released Command & Conquer: Red Alert as freeware. I read about it at the time, but forgot shortly after.

Today at work I was participating in what seems to have become a routine on Mondays with Aikins and we were talking all about classic video games, and I remembered that EA had released C&C:RA as freeware, but I had never downloaded it. Aikins and I had both played it back in the day, so we began to recall our hazy memories of the game.

Just minutes ago he sent me a message demanding me to download it game so we could play online. If you ever played it, or want some good old fashioned fun, you should too. The game is available as two ISO files of ~500mb each (one for each disc), and the site says it is only officially supported on XP, but there is a guide to make it work on Vista as well.

Filed under: news — Tags: , , , —

Sidebar Integrated

After trying unsuccessfully a few times, and sort of giving up, I decided to give it another go to get my sidebar from Wordpress integrated to the rest of the site. Turns out I was just using the wrong keywords when I was searching on the Google.

It’s actually really easy, and useful to include just about any piece of Wordpress code into any page that isn’t a part of Wordpress. Since all the pages used the same header, footer and CSS, I just used a little snippet I found here to allow individual components from WP into any page with only two lines of code. A few clicks later, and it all looks great.

The Super Cache plugin is still bothering me though. I really like the idea of it and it would work well if except for the fact that it caches stuff from the sidebar (my current status (fed from my Facebook status) and recently watched movies) that updates more often than the cache. It’s a little annoying when you surf from page to page and see different bits in the sidebar on each. From what I can tell, the cache only refreshes after a specified number of page views, where I would rather have it go by time. I’ll see if I can find a way around it or maybe a different plugin. If you know of one, let me know!

Filed under: site — Tags: , , —

Pink For October

You may have noticed (then again, you may not have..), but my site is now pink. This is something that I have done for a few years now during the month of October as a part of the Pink For October campaign.

From the PinkForOctober.org:
Web sites will Go Pink during the month of October to bring attention to Breast Cancer Awareness Month, get people talking about breast cancer, and raise money for research. But to be clear, raising money isn’t the primary purpose of this web event. The hope is that you turn your site pink (in whatever way works for your site), educate yourself about the multiple issues related to Breast Cancer, then take that knowledge and tell someone else what you’ve learned.

So for the entire month of October, my site will be pink. If you decide to make your site pink as well, please be sure to sign up at the link above to get your site listed.

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