The Brady's

Ok, I saw the recent rash of posts today (talk about last minute!) and I felt obligated to contribute my bit (all we need is a post from Rob to complete the circle).

I was Wiki surfing the other day and came across The Brady's. Now as far as post-Brady Bunch shows I've only heard of the A Very Brady Christmas special as it seems to air every Christmas, but I have to admit The Brady's caught me off guard. It only had six episodes but just read what some of the events entailed...

• Bobby's budding car-racing career ends abruptly in the first episode after an accident leaves him a paraplegic.


• Peter breaks up with his fiancée, to whom he became engaged in A Very Brady Christmas.


• Jan and Phillip, unable to conceive children of their own, adopt a Korean girl.


• Stay-at-home mother Marcia battles alcoholism while Wally loses yet another in a series of jobs, the latest being Mike's campaign manager.


• Wally and Marcia, who along with their two children have been forced to move in with Mike and Carol, eventually decide to open their own catering business to support their family.


• Radio host Cindy begins a romantic interest with her boss, a widower more than 10 years her senior who has two children.

And here's the kicker...

"Despite the more downbeat tone, the show did feature a laugh track at certain moments."

What was going on in the Brady household?

GOW2

Ok, I jumped the gun on blogging the last blog, but I'm not removing the last one cuz I like the rub on cousin David. :-)

GOW2!!! Though not a lot is actually present on the site, and even though the video doesn't even show the actual game itself, man it sure pumped me up! The only downside to it is that it's a Christmas sale event! November release?! Argh!

Hey Marcos, while I'm thinking about it, send me a tm whenever you feel like playing Halo3, or GOW, if you have it, can't remember actually if you do or not. Sorry, I have a short memory. :-(

And next month is another big gaming month! As soon as I can look up what all is coming out, I'll make a new list of must buys next month! I may need a night job to support my gaming and movie habits!

Continue the Storm!....MacHeist

OK...so I've been slacking! What else is new? Well for my contribution to Blogstorm 2008 I wanted to comment about MacHeist. I'm sure you may have heard of the deal...14 Mac apps for $49. What's the catch? Shareware? Older versions? Crippleware forcing you to buy the full license? I'm happy to say neither! Full blown latest release apps with all functionality in tacked! The deal is long gone but with out it's controversy. I thought it was a great deal by developers to get their product's out to the masses and make a loyal customer come back for upgrades. 

My main draw was Ambrosia's Snapz Pro X. That app alone is $69. Since getting the bundle I have come to love some sweet gems. Mainly 1password and iStopMotion. Olivia and I have been working on a script to come up with a re-enactment of our favorite Star Wars scene using Polly Pockets and Lil Pet Shops with iStopMotion...stay tuned! 

Here is all the goodies for the price:

• VectorDesigner
• Snapz Pro X
• Pixelmator
• CSSEdit
• Speed Download
• 1password
• Cha-Ching
• iStopMotion
• Awaken
• Tiki Magic Mini Golf
• Wingnuts 2
• TaskPaper
• AppZapper
• CoverSutra

Hopefully I will have time to review each app as I get used to them. Let me know if you want to know about a particular one. 

Blogstorm

Well, it's February 29th, leap year day of 2008, and as a final sendoff for this day, I'm just doing my part to finish off the blogstorm we had this month!

That's right! I 'm only blogging this blog for the sake of the end of blogstorm Feb.! My only question is, where the heck was cousin ValleyHo?! the man from Pennsylvania didn't really partake in our spectacular run this month, thus effectively missing blogstorm!

No, I will not take into account that you, yes YOU David, made a couple of comments on our blogs! Comments are not blogs! Of course, this is also not much of a blog, other than for the sake of writing on this once in every four years day!

In any case, hopefully one of you other cousins will have the final blog for this day. Don't let this meaningless blog of mine be the last word of blogstorm Feb.! Pretty sad if blogstorm ended in a whimper. o.O"

By the way, this was by far and away the most challenging month for blogging. Is this the most we've ever blogged for any given month? Ironic that the most blogs are in the shortest month, even if it is leap year with the extra day! We can be happy about that at least. :-)

Finally!

When Steve Jobs announced at Macworld that Time Capsule would ship in February, I half jokingly thought to myself it would be the last day of February. Little did I know that I ended up being right! (Well only off by one day.) Apple quietly (doesn't even deserve a page 1 article at Mac Rumors?) started shipping its wireless backup drive today.

I never understood the reason for the delay in the first place. They already had the technology with their Airport Extreme. They just needed to purchase the drives from some other manufacturer and stick them together. Well OK, maybe it's not that easy but I'm still curious!

I'll write a review when I receive it in about two weeks from now (hopefully less).

DivX

Well, this will be short. I dunno if you guys ever went to this site, but when I'd miss something on tv, sometimes I'd hit Stage6, by DivX. It was a great site for some shows, movies or just some higher quality vids than YouTube.

Though it wasn't as extensive as YouTube, there were some cool things I was able to watch that looked excellent compared to the low res of YouTube. Today was the last day of Stage6 and was shutdown just a little while ago due to financial priorities.

I never thought I'd be much of a supporter of DivX, but it turns out that it's a great app that is really fast as far as download times go. And it's not like I 'm not for the format, I just didn't think I was going to need another video format was all. I know there are other sites that will replace it, but it had such an easy interface and was just super easy to use. I'll miss the site. :(

Nvidia Demo Junkie

It's no secret that I've been a huge fan of Nvidia ever since I purchased a Canopus Spectra 2500 graphics card back in 1998. Based on the Riva TNT chipset, it was my preferred card of choice at a time when 3DFX ruled the gaming world with the Voodoo 2. But performance reasons aside, one reason why I stayed loyal with Nvidia over the years was because of their awesome demos.

After several years of enjoyment with my TNT card, Mark showed me the Chameleon demo on his brand new GeForce3 card and I was blown away. The lizard's modeling, texture and animation details looked like something straight out of Toy Story. It was obvious that Nvidia was a force to be reckoned with in the graphics industry. I soon upgraded to a GeForce3 Ti 200.

The next year Nvidia released their GeForce4 series and Dave ends up buying one. I could only look at a prerendered Wolfman video in envy as he was playing with a real time, volumetric fur enabled, 3D creation.

Later that same year the GeForce FX was released and Kruddler ends up buying one. Again, I could only imagine what the angered Vulcan looked like forging the metals of the earth with his fire - all in real time.

A few more years pass by and I finally decide to make a purchase into the GeForce7 series with a top-of-the-line 7800 GTX. One of the first things I did after installation was download all of the demos that I could never play before. The Luna demo blew me away in much the same way as the Chameleon did. The translucency and displacement mapping as well as the dark, mysterious atmosphere of the demo were simply stunning.

It wasn't long afterwards that the next generation, GeForce 8 series were released but I was surprised to find out that some of the 8 series demos played fine with only a few reservations on my card. It wasn't until yesterday though, that I noticed the Human Head demo. It's so realistic looking it's kind of scary. Make sure to check out the video here. It definitely makes my Luna character look like a cartoon. I wonder how long it'll be before games start looking like that?

Here's looking towards the future.

Really?

Well, I stumbled on this little tidbit while checking my mail after I logged into my account with AT&T Yahoo.

My first thought at seeing the headline was, "really? I mean, really?!"

My thought after the article is, "really?" oO" I'm trying to take in what they want to accomplish, but if they are looking for abnormal behavior, that's almost all they are going to find in mmo's! And if they wanna see a pattern or whatever in mmo shooters and such, what else is there to do but shoot the enemy?!

And if a game like COD4 gets on their list to study, wow. I admit that I haven't played the online part, but I'm guessing there is a side versus the "allied/goodguys" side. If that's the case, how do you study and investigate something like that? I mean, if you are gunning for the good guys, do you get investigated? And what if no one wants to play that side anymore because of that? Doesn't that mean the end of versus mode? Game over!

I'm of course being somewhat sarcastic with this, but hey, what's a blog for? ;)

Desktops at Starbucks

I don't know why I thought this was funny but it made me laugh nonetheless. I guess because it reminds me of Rob's old 21" monitor he used to own taking up all that space on Rika's desk.

Buyers Remorse?

In case you didn't already see the news or read my last comment on the last Xbox HD DVD blog, Microsoft lowered the price of their Xbox 360 HD DVD player to $50 in an obvious attempt to liquidate their inventory. So far thats three price reductions since Microsoft first introduced the player back in November 2006 ($199 > $179 > $129 > $50).

They also updated their official Xbox 360 HD DVD web page today to reflect the fact they are discontinuing the device. The description is cleverly written in order to make it appear that the player is still a viable purchase. Since the majority of the eBay sellers that tried to dump the player within the last few months blatenly copied the old description verbatim, I wonder how many of the upcoming sellers will use the new text. What's funny is watching all the zero bids on anybody that priced their player for more than fifty bucks.

You may think that even with the new price, nobody in their right mind would still purchase it but one of my coworkers said he would buy along with some bargain basement HD DVD movies to go with it. I think that's a bit too hard core for me (he must be related to the 3D Realms employee). OK, I know I own one but I bought it at the time (for $179) when I thought the format war would last well into 2009. Plus I got a ton of free titles just for buying.

Heroes Season One = Free
Transformers = Free
Troy = Free
The Frighteners = Free
300 = Free
King Kong = Free
Babel = Free
TMNT = Free
Charley and the Chocolate Factory = Free
The Thing = Free
Seabiscuit = $17.99

You can see I only paid for one title and that was on sale at Circuit City. I'm also holding tight for some fire sales to see if I can pick up Planet Earth for cheap. That's right guys, I'm going down with the ship!

So do I have buyers remorse? No way, I love the quality of the movies, its far above what Verizon or the Xbox Marketplace can deliver and it will tide me over until a decent Blu-ray player hits the market for a reasonable price. My only regret is seeing NetFlix discontinue renting HD DVD's although this isn't scheduled to happen until later this year.

Obsolete Hardware

Mark's latest post about the discontinued Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive reminded me of a similar situation nearly a decade ago.

Mark and I were at the 1999 E3 convention in L.A. and were browsing through Microsoft's new PC gaming peripherals. I was particularly impressed with the SideWinder Dual Strike as it was specifically designed and marketed for FPS gamers like myself. On paper it seemed to have a distinct advantage over the traditional mouse and keyboard which I always thought was a temporary solution at best.

As soon as the SideWinder was available for retail, I purchased one at BestBuy for $49.99. Hardware design limitations aside, (it had a clunky D pad which wasn't very precise and a fixed rotational control which was fatal when playing with gamers who could rotate 180 degrees with a flick of their mice) I started to adjust to it.

Then, about a month or so afterwards, Windows 2000 was released. I immediately upgraded to benefit from the more stable NT kernel but without any regard to potential driver support issues. The Dual Strike was a brand new product from Microsoft and the company would surely support it with their latest OS, right? Nope - Windows 98 only. After contacting customer service, I was reminded of the system requirements on the box. Soon afterwards, Microsoft quietly discontinued the product. It wasn't until a couple of years ago did I have the strength to throw away the product and it's mint condition box in the trash. Funny that it was only today that I discovered that Microsoft reintroduced driver support with their Windows XP SP-2 update.

Gotta love technology.

Xbox HD DVD Discontinued

Well, Rob asked for it and now Microsoft delivered. The Redmond, WA based company finally discontinued it's HD DVD player add-on for the Xbox 360. Interesting that they disabled comments on their blog about it. I guess they don't want people to ask when (or if) their Blu-ray player is coming. It should just be a matter of time before they update their official website with the news.

Unreal Engine Tech Demo

At GDC 2008 Epic Games recently showed off the improvements made on their Unreal Engine since Gears of War shipped. It looks pretty darn impressive if you ask me, and I can't wait until Gears of War 2 is released this November. Hopefully it will contain most, if not all the features shown in the demo, especially the advanced character lighting since it appears that's what made the original GoW seem a bit too dark.

Halo 3 Time

Well after 4 months and 30 days since it's Sept. 25th release date, I finally found Halo 3 on sale at Frys for $47.99. I'll be definately picking it up this week before the sale ends. Ever since I got my Xbox 360, I've never purchased a game for the full retail price of $59.99 and I don't plan to start anytime soon. Finally I'll be able to join the fight and perhaps play some co-op with Kruddler (once he ever logs into Xbox Live). :)

The 13th Doll

While reading a Wiki entry of the 7th Guest some time ago, I discovered an unofficial (yet authorized) fan-based sequel to the franchise called the 13th Doll.

After it was apparent that the official development of the much delayed 7th Guest Part III: The Collector game had ended, a few global fans of the series decided to take matters into their own hands and create their own. (You can see a trailer of the Collector here. Even though it looks pretty cheesy now, being a hardcore fan of the original, I would still have purchased it!)

As you can see from the bottom image, the community of developers have to painstakingly recreate all of the game's assets from scratch. It's not a bad recreation considering they probably only have screenshots to work with. It's definitely a lot of work and my hats are off if they can finish what is essentially an unpaid, off hours project. Once completed, it will be distributed as freeware to avoid any potential copyright issues.

Duke Bets on Blu-ray

I came across this link today. It looks like good ol' Duke Nukem predicted who would win the next generation format war back last year. Always bet on Duke!

Lunar Eclipse

It was an eventful hour I just spent with my nephew on the roof, the rest of the family on the sidewalk huddling together because it is cold and breezy.

I won't bore you with any details other than Matthew was excited to witness this lunar eclipse, partly because we were the only two on the roof. :) I'm glad to see he was excited and liked spending time with me up there, both of us very much interested in this type of event and smiling the whole time as we talked about the universe.

We of course had our small humorous moments making dumb jokes, but hey, that's what guys do! That's what boys do, and I like being a kid with him!

Anyway, these are some of the highlight pics I was able to get with my meager camera. It's served me well, I must say. I also did a few video shots intermittently of the shadow growing and growing until there was only shadow on the moon. Very cool!

The best part of all this was being with Matthew though. And also knowing the rest of the family was just below us on the corner. Neat. Really neat.

IPhone Still Raising Eyebrows

Yesterday while I was on my breaks, I was writing the one blog and posting comments on blogs as you know. As I was doing all this on my funtastic gadget, the awesome IPhone (which I named Krudd's IPhone), several peeps came up to me wondering what I was doing.

At first the thought was I was only text messaging as from one's perspective typing on a phone usually means exactly that, tm'ing a friend(s). When I told them I was blogging, they would pause, not sure if I said what I said. I would then continue and explain how we cousins' have this blogsite and the convenience of being able to keep track of what's going on with all our lives etc..

The comments were not completely unexpected, but the actual amazement and genuine emotion of awe kinda was. Obviously they knew what blogging was, duh to me, but that I was doing a blog and posting comments on others was incredible to them.

I loved the reactions! They had funny comments about how cool it was or how jealous they were and just the overall wow factor of it all! After all these months of having this nearly perfect device, I'm still amazed that it still has that much wow factor left! People really still get very impressed with the IPhone and they do want one.

I knew Apple hit a homerun with the IPhone, I just didn't know it was the mother of all grandslams! I love my IPhone! Apple FTW! Again and still! Woot!

Elusive Yeti

As in many books and tv shows about creatures, aliens and ghosts, the best picture or video I could get of the yeti on Expedition Everest was what you saw posted on the previous fictional blogs. It may only be a manmade attraction, but the legendary yeti truly IS elusive no matter what!

I went on five times to capture that darn thing after Dave sent me a text to take a pic of it! I still can't believe the best shot was of its leg an clawed foot you saw on my last Everest blog. Five times and nothing! I resorted to doing one time using video with the hopes of using a frame as a snapshot, but true to those shows where you see a blurry figuire, that was actually worse than the still shots I got! The vid is pretty cool though. I may have to try and post it on YouTube.

Expedition Everest is probably my favorite ride at the moment. Not just for Disney rides (yeah I said ride and not attraction!), but of all the rides I've been on in any park! I know that's saying a lot, but for some reason I really got into it! I just had too much fun I guess. :-)

This blog was done on my IPhone, so no links or pics for now. Not that I have more Everest pics to post, just saying. oO"

It's Official

So after a few days of rumors it's finally official, Toshiba will finally discontinue it's HD DVD format. It's funny that they were quick to say they have no plans to adopt Blu-ray and start making players. I guess they need a few weeks for the fresh wounds to heal.

This makes me wonder what's Microsoft going to do about this recent news. Surely they are going to have stop producing the HD DVD add on (I was surprised to read that only about 300,000 of these players were ever purchased, which is a drop in the bucket) and start making Blu-ray players, even though they seem to discount the need.

It seems like the only other remaining issues is when Universal, Paramount and Dreamworks Animation are going to make their official announcements pledging their support to camp Blu. It's been an interesting ride and I'm going to miss all the Digital Bits commentary on this now dead war.

Mental Lapse in Judgement

After reading a comment last night to Krudd's latest WDW update, the first thing I thought was that it had to be spam or a virus link. I quickly deleted the comment but copied the link location to see if I can find anything about it in Google. The address was just some random letters ending in blogspot.com but nothing came up in the search. In a what was I thinking moment I copied the link into my browser's location bar and fired away thinking that because I was using Firefox, it would somehow not affect my system. Nope. The browser's window immediately auto expanded to fill the screen and a fake Windows virus scan started chugging away. I quickly killed my session but I knew it was too late. Symantec's online virus scanner told me I had the W32.Spybot.Worm.

Afterwards, I had to install Symantec AntiVirus and run a full system scan to get rid of it. I never installed an antivirus program before because I hated the memory overhead and other inconveniences like auto-updates and security notices when installing applications. I still feel as long as you update your OS and don't go to unknown, shady sites and accept or click on unknown links, you should be fine though. Moments like these will make me appreciate my future Mac purchase even more.

Expedition- Final Entry

This is the last entry of the missing expedition's journal:

"There are only two of us left, all our friends and guides are gone. We started out as a group of fifteen, hoping to find the mythical creature known as the yeti, and have now instead become hunted prey by something more horrible than we ever could have imagined.

The cave we earlier had sought shelter in turned out to be the creatures lair and most of what had remained of our group never came back out. While four of us managed to escape into the blizzard that awaited us outside, two did not make it very far and we lost them in the biting snow.

We aren't sure what time or what day it is, but we know this will be our final night and will not see our homes again. We hope this journal and camera will find it's way back to civilization to tell of our tale. Though we haven't been able to see any of the pictures we have taken, hopefully there is something that will help explain and tell some of the tale of our doomed party.

We hear something right now, not too far from us, and know we are only moments away from the hulking creature, which I know is not a fabled abominable snow man, but the real monster known as the yeti."

My Dell Gaming PC - RIP

I knew the day had to come sometime but my once high end Dell Dimension XPS Gen 4 (purchased back in December 2004) is no longer capable of playing the latest generation games. Well technically it can install and play them, but only on the lowest resolution possible and with all the graphical goodies turned off which looks ugly as sin. Even then its a side show for some of the latest titles like Crysis and Gears of War. Valve games with its less demanding Source engine was my last hope but even the most recent Half Life 2: Episode 2 slows to a crawl when the flashlight is turned on due to the incorporation of dynamic shadows.

I ended up buying Orange Box for my Xbox 360 and the difference was like night and day. I can now play it at 1920x1080 and it looks beautiful with a silky smooth frame rate. I hate to sound like a console fanboy but I'm officially out of PC gaming for now. It's not that I don't think PC's are capable of playing great games (I still think they are the superior game platform now and years to come), it's just that I can't financially keep up with all the upgrades needed to play the latest titles. A good video card alone costs almost as much as my entire Xbox itself.

Since I originally bought my XPS purely for game playing (all my other computing was done on my Mac), I've been asked what I intend on doing with it now. I've decided to turn it into my MCSE study computer, learn some programing languages, and install some Linux distros on it so it won't go to waste.

You had a good run my friend, and I will miss all the good times we've had on it. Rest in Peace.

When Good "Lost" Titles Do Bad Things: Part II

Mark mentioned that because he's watching Lost in HD now, the visually flawed title intro that I wrote about two years ago is bothering him too. He asked for a technical reason why these render gaps occur so here it is.

The NURBS curves used to create the 3D text are mathematically perfect and completely smooth but the problem lies with the construction of the extruded text as well as what happens in the final render. To speed up render times, most 3d applications automatically convert these perfectly smooth NURBS surfaces into tiny triangles. Because triangles are flat, if there are not enough of them, the edges start to look faceted. What compounds the problem is that in order to render the front of the text, artists usually create what is called a trimmed surface. This creates a discrepancy between the geometry of the front and the geometry of the sides. When that happens unsightly trim gaps usually appear.

So how do you fix it? The easy way is by brute force. You simply adjust the tessellation of the extruded text by adding more triangles. Because increasing the tessellation requires more memory and longer render times, these larger tessellation values are not set by default.

At Gnomon, because of these rendering artifacts as well as other issues with animation, we were never allowed to use trimmed surfaces in our classes and had to use a method of NURBS modeling that I would describe as painful at best. This is probably why so many artists prefer polygonal modeling. NURBS does have it uses though!

When I Will Go Blu

It may not be official yet, but it might as well be based on all the recent reports of Toshiba about to drop its HD DVD format. The irony of all of this was that I finally received my five free HD DVD movies just this week. It took the entire 10 weeks to ship but at least I got them. I sure hope Toshiba will still honor the offer for everybody that submitted their form even at this late stage of the game(I saw a guy buy a Toshiba HD DVD player at BestBuy just this past Monday).

Anyways I digress. This blog is about why I haven't bought a Blu-ray player yet. The simple answer is that there isn't currently one on the market that supports all the features I want for a reasonable price. I'm looking for a player that is profile 2.0 (or 1.1 upgradeable to 2.0), decodes both Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio internally as well as output the bitstream to a compatible receiver and has analog audio outputs (5.1 or 7.1) for under $400.

The closest player that comes to my dream machine would be the Sony PlayStation 3, however it doesn't have analog audio outputs so I would have to purchase a new HDMI audio receiver in order to take advantage of Dolby TrueHD. It also lacks support for decoding DTS-HD Master Audio inside the player and it won't pass the bitstream so I couldn't listen to any BD movie with DTS-HD Master Audio. Krudd also warned me not to purchase a PS3 just for playing BD titles which I have to agree with. I already have two game consoles (Xbox 360 and Wii) and don't need a third. Who am I, Leo Laporte?

Looking at the idoblu.co.uk Blu-ray player website, you can see a few models that will support the features I'm looking for, but neither one seems to be out on the market yet. What's worse is that I can't seem to find one that is near my price point. I bought a second generation Sony DVD player back in the day and it cost me about $500. After seeing the player prices drop dramatically over the next few years, I told myself I wouldn't ever pay that kind of price for a single purpose media player again.

In addition, I've heard complaints from early adopters that their Blu-ray players had various issues like slow load times (1-3 minutes from inserting the BD movie to the time it actual plays were common), constant need for firmware updates to play new BD titles, and the fact they couldn't play a simple audio CD. Call me crazy, but I want my next generation format to be just as good as the "older" DVD format its intended to replace.

Blu-Ray Profile 2.0 (now called Bonus View) is important to me, not because I think I'm going to use it much but because the same functionality was present on my HD DVD player and I don't want to consider taking a step back by going Blu. Besides according to the BDA, us early adopters should know what we are getting in to before purchasing. :-) In conclusion, it's rumored the new Bonus View players should be out by May. Hopefully this turns out to be true since there are quite a few BD titles I would love to own as well as rent via NetFlix.

The Cloverfield Monster Toy

I never mentioned it before, but a few days after watching Cloverfield, I placed an order for one of Hasbro's limited collector's edition Cloverfield monster toys. Although it wouldn't be shipping until October, the only question I had at the time was what it would look like. Due to the secrecy of the movie, Hasbro had delayed placing any images of it online until yesterday.

I normally try not to buy anything unless I really need it but my reasoning was this: popular movie + limited edition = profit on eBay if the toy itself didn't look awesome on my bookshelf case. The features seemed pretty cool like 70 points of articulation, authentic sound, 10 parasites and a Statue of Liberty head accessory.

Well after seeing it today I'm starting to change my mind. It's really rather ugly. I was thinking it would be more scary/cool and not so pale/spindly. What do you guys think? I'm down $118 after shipping and handling if I don't cancel my order before it ships.

Expedition gone wrong

It seems most of the pages cannot be translated from the journal that was recently found in the Himalayas, much damage was done to them. We were however able to recover another page that was over a week into the lost expeditions journey.

"We're lost. Half our members have been taken away by something unseen and big, which is hunting us as we climb down the blizzard drawn mountains. We found an old train station which still had a working engine and were almost set to speed our way down but no sooner had we left the station when the thing attacked and tore the tracks to shreds!

If not for the gusting storm, what we believe to be the yeti would have found us instead of tearing up the tracks. I think I was able to get a snapshot of it from a distance, but my flash may have attracted it to our location. We're at a desperate time on this forsaken trip. It almost seems to be toying with us, letting some of us get to a safe distance while somehow sneaking around and taking others without our knowing! What kind of creature is this?

The only thing we do know about it is that it's big, it's strong and it's hunting us along the way. We've lost most of our gear and food and this blizzard is making travel down the mountainside almost impossible. We're hoping we will be able to get some sleep in this small cave for the night."

Happy Valentine's!

Nothing says "I love you" more than the gift of additional RAM.

What I never noticed until now is that Dave and I share most of the same specs on our machines even though he has a MacBook Pro that was purchased several months ago. Same processor and speed, same desktop resolution, and now the same amount of memory- although I'm sure he didn't have to chuck a GB of perfectly good Hynix RAM that came with his machine.

I'll see if I can Craig's list the OEM memory but prices have dropped even further since the last time I checked. 4 GB's at Crucial only cost me $113.99 this week. Interestingly, Apple's online store charges an additional $850 for the same amount of RAM configured with a new iMac. Ouch!

NetFlix

After a good recommendation from Rob, I finally subscribed to NetFlix a few months ago. I got tired of paying BlockBuster $15 per visit (for about 3 movies) so I decided to pay NetFlix instead for the 2 at a time plan. I only wish I got it sooner as I've been catching up on the old classics that BlockBuster never stocked as well as some HD DVD titles that I would never consider buying. They also have a streaming service with unlimited downloads that is pretty cool.

I was a bit suprised to find the following email in my mailbox today that said they were discontinuing HD DVD titles and go exclusivly Blu-ray for their HD format. Oh well, I figured the party couldn't last long with Warner going Blu. Now if only there was a decently priced player on the market...

Expedition Everest

This is a page from a small group of explorers who went missing in the Himalayas. Another page is being translated and will soon make it to this site.

"It was at the end of the first day of our expedition up the Himalayas when we made a grand discovery! It seemed that the tales and myths might actually be true concerning the fabled yeti. We had started out thinking we could use the excuse of searching out the mythical creature for funding our trip with no real intent of finding the strange beast. Needless to say, we were not prepared for a find of this magnitude! Of course we did not truly believe in the many stories that surrounded this mysterious animal, but after our find, we must now sift through all the fables and find some common denominator and piece together what is fact and seperate it from what is fiction. None of us can get much sleep tonight as we are anticipating what tomorrow may bring!"