Verizon Math

I caught this on YouTube and thought it was pretty funny. That guy has some incredible patience!

Extreme Makeover: Haunted Mansion Edition

While researching some reference material for my modeling class, I came across some fellow bloggers with a serious-or should I say a severe interest in Disneyland Haunted Mansion collectibles.

Well check them out for yourself here and here. Crazy stuff. Being a small collector myself I recognize most of the items, but some items I've never seen before like the stretching room gargoyles. I suspect that those are unofficial, but still cool none-the-less. The first link is from an animator who worked at Walt Disney Feature Animation for a number of years, and has described in detail how he created a lot of the props for his last Halloween.

On a related note, I was telling Mark last night about Disney having a clearance sale on the remainder of last summer's Haunted Mansion merchandise. The Haunted Mansion Bride figure is only $59.99, down from an original price of $169. Not a bad discount. At that price, I don't expect the bride to stay in stock very long.

FiOS Update

Some of you have been asking how fast FiOS is. Just to give you a point of reference, I used to have a 1.5 Mbps DSL connection, which I then upgraded to a 4 Mbps cable modem and finally ended up with a 15 Mbps FiOS connection. All these speeds are "up to" which means that is the max you can get but in real world situations it could be a lot less, depending on network connections.

To be honest I can't really tell that FiOS is much faster than cable when doing everyday browsing. There was a big jump in apparent speed when upgrading from DSL to my cable modem but I don't feel the same increase when I went from cable to FiOS. I think this is due to the fact that most websites are optimized for narrowband (56K) and up to DSL speeds for broadband detected connections.

Not to say that the relatively high speed of fiber isn 't worth it... when I'm downloading large files and/or uploading files I can definitely tell the difference. Just today I downloaded a 560 MB ISO image from Microsoft in under 6 minutes.

From what I hear the US is a bit behind when it comes to broadband penetration to its consumers. I was talking with my Japanese coworker who told me that many people have 100 Mbps connections to their house for the same price as what we typically pay for DSL. Imagine that!

New look?

It looks like Blogger listened to my cries for help and reinstated my admin status again. Or was it you Mark? -the new admin of Saint Cafe? ;) In any case, I can now see all the usual tabs in Dashboard-Posting, Settings and Template.

As you can see, I decided to experiment with the template feature in the new Blogger where one can easily customize the design and layout without knowing one line of HTML or CSS. What do you guys think? I thought there was nothing wrong with the old look, I just wanted a change. If you guys have access to the same settings as me then feel free to test one out also. We can always go back to the original Minima Dark version.

On another note, Dave did you ever get an invite from one of us to upgrade to the new Blogger? I'm thinking that's why you're not listed as a contributor. I'm not sure if you favored being forced to setup a Google account in the process or not.