Microsoft » Ponderings Of Guy

When I was a kid, I had two friends, and they were imaginary and they would only play with each other.

Rita Rudner

25th August 2008

Ponderings For 2008-08-25

Another short list for today
Lightning seems to be a hot topic (sorry for the pun) lately on the net. Here’s another set of amazing lightning photos.
While we’re on the subject of photography, here’s some cool motion blur photos
A fun collection of great Daily Show clips regarding Olympics coverage
The $60 Microsoft Office Ultimate deal for students has returned
The deepest hole ever dug
Some of the craziest medical conditions you’re likely to hear of
Do not click this link

posted in Ponderings | 0 Comments

7th July 2008

Ponderings For 2008-07-07

This post wings its way to you from sunny Bellingham, WA (no seriously, whenever I’m here, it’s 72 degrees and not a cloud in sight). I’m here for a brief business trip, heading back tomorrow. So I sit here in the hotel room watching some TV. And as I watch said TV, a commercial plays for Visa’s sponsorship of the Olympic Games. It made me realize that there’s nobody who does voice over work as well as Morgan Freeman. Seriously, I could sit watching something that uses him narrating the phone book.
RIP: Don S. Davis (a great character actor from a number of sci-fi series)
Some seriously unfortunate ad placement
Holy cow. This is one seriously powerful backdraft.
Gotta love the insanity of Jackie Chan
The Weather: brought to you by NBC Universal
Interesting. Pioneer has introduced a new 400gb Blu-Ray format
Geniuses on motorcycles
GMail has added a nice new feature, showing other current logins to your account, and recent history.
Those pesky cellular charges
A good list of abandoned cities. Interesting stuff.
Headshots galore
Excellent. Super Chuck Norris Bros.
Adobe continues their streamlining process with Adobe Reader 9
Ooooh, here’s a really cool photo composite.
Coming soon: 5 terabyte hard drives.
Speaking of large amounts of data, check out this interview about the huge scale of operations for Microsoft’s data centers. Crazy stuff.
Here’s a cat that knows how to take a break from it all
Miley Cyrus may be drained of all natural resources sooner than expected

posted in Ponderings | 0 Comments

29th June 2008

Ponderings For 2008-06-29

Nice short post today to make up for the lack of them recently…
For those that missed news of the big event, Bill Gates officially stepped down at Microsoft on Friday, ending a major era of computing. One little tidbit: I’m roughly as old as Microsoft (born in 1975).
The official site for Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog has launched, along with a trailer. This is the production Joss Whedon did during the writer’s strike. Should be loads of fun.
The fourth Jason Bourne movie is now a go.
This’ll teach you kids to not capriciously jump around in mud puddles.
Tweak Firefox 3 to display fancier colors
I’ve seen WALL-E twice now, and loved it just as much the second time round. Go out and see it, folks. And while you’re at it, look for the usual hidden bits in the movie.
Here’s an interesting little piece of history from the Apollo program. Not to mention the Cold War.
Sony has been taking quite the loss on the PS3. Doesn’t come as a huge shock, given that most game consoles cost their companies quite a bit up front. Now, if only Sony hadn’t screwed up the line by dropping the Emotion Engine from recent models.
Interesting. Robert Rodriguez is remaking Red Sonja with girlfriend Rose McGowan. I hope they at least reference Ennio Morricone’s score - easily the best part of the original film.
IsoHunt has gone SSL. That’s a move that I think all the torrent sites should be doing (The Pirate Bay also recently did the same).
One of the many strange places one might find a server room, due to the expense of moving them: a women’s bathroom
For those who think there just aren’t enough monuments in this world
An interesting and exhaustive set of Q&A facts about LEGO
An amusing mistake in a Dell support online chat session
Putting those undergarments to good use
The Oasis Of The Seas: for those who want to take a cruise, but have zero idea that they’re on a ship.
Is Sears really too incompetant to take your money? Wouldn’t surprise me.
For you fellow Chicagoans, here are some fun stats about heat waves in the area over the decades. Sure does make the global warming nutters seem a little bit wrong.
Speaking of Chicago, the Tribune has posted a collection of pretty nifty Chicago photos.
Composer Bear McCreary has been doing detailed breakdowns of his scores for Battlestar Galactica over the past couple years, episode by episode. They may be a bit steeped in musician technical jargon, but they are still great reads. He even does plenty of responses to fans in the comment sections. Check out his particularly detailed and interesting write-up on Revelations, the recent mid-season finale (which had some amazing scoring work).
This wouldn’t be quite as pathetic if she actually did look hot.
This will teach you better than to actually believe your own brain
Is it really a surprise how much people hate dealing with communications companies?
Some more amusingly poor Enlglish sign translations
Speaking of amusing English translations, here’s an interesting article on the dominance of English as a language, and how the control of the language may not be in the hands of those who actually know how to speak it. Suddenly, the world of Firefly may not seem like too much of a stretch.
A write-up that the rest of us Windows users would likely agree with
What it’s like to go gun shopping in Mogadishu
A book on Steven Seagal that I might actually have to check out.
Here’s a fascinating hobby: documenting secret satellites
Shiptool is an interesting utility site for hunting down cheapest shipping rates
Here’s a great, detailed history of video game consoles of the 70’s. I have very fond memories of some of them (and own a handful of them that are still functional)
The fascinating great grandfather of modern computers
Speaking of which, check out this amazing work in 1934 that has some eerie early hints at what would eventually become the internet.
The next generation of tornado tracking equipment
You think you’ve made some mistakes in job interviews and on applications…
They were seriously going to let this talentless hack do the next Bond title song?

posted in Ponderings | 0 Comments

1st May 2008

Ponderings For 2008-05-01

What the……? How could you, Mr. Guillermo del Toro??? You make a sequel to Hellboy and DON’T get Marco Beltrami back for the music score? That’s downright criminal. His score to the first film was a masterpiece. Danny Elfman’s no slouch of a composer, but I find it impossible to believe that he’ll match Beltrami’s work from the first.
As you will have noticed, I got my Iron Man review posted after seeing it this evening. I’ve still got a handful of other partially completed reviews, both recent and from earlier this year, to get posted, as well as the number of other pending reviews I haven’t started yet. I swear I’ll finally get caught up. I refuse to let a number of them slip by permanently like I did last year. They may be late, but they’ll show up (hopefully before they’ve at least hit their video release).
The Descent 2 has been picked up. I consider the first to be a contender for my all-time favorite horror film. I have to admit that the setup for this sequel sound very lame, but I’ll be happy to give it a chance.
Microsoft has release a new overhauled version of their Photo Info tool, named Pro Photo Tools.
Here’s a column by John C. Dvorak about the failures of Vista. It’s a column I definitely agree with. I’d have other things to add, most of which are nit-picks. I’m one of those people who tells of personal dislikes for Vista and having fallen back to using XP (I type this on my machine that had Vista on it for about a month or two last year, and has been happily back on XP ever since).
Time Warner continues to struggle, thanks to AOL, as usual. When is Time Warner finally gonna manage to shake that AOL monkey off their back?
Seriously, how stupid can some people be?
4 kittens and a box. What more does one need?
Paramount has details of their rejoining to the Blu-Ray market.
Hebrew Press 1932: Hitler Makes A Good Impression. Good grief.
And here’s the rarest of postings coming from me. This one is sports related. And it’s awesome.

posted in Ponderings | 0 Comments

9th February 2008

Ponderings For 2008-02-09

YIPPIE! Looks like the WGA strike is at an end. The final ducks have to put in the row, but looks like that light at the end of the tunnel is about to be within reach. Here’s hoping it goes smoothly to get them all back in play on Wednesday. Now, to see what the results of all this fallout with finally be. The Oscar ceremony will be cutting it darn close. Let’s hope they can get things in order quick enough to get the ceremony under control.
This presenter’s “Immigration Gumballs” speech is spot-on.
The Microsoft takeover of Yahoo may end up being rejected. It’ll be interesting to watch this play out.
Check out this awesome Vanity Fair piece, recreating Hitchcock with modern actors.
A hilarious tally of kills (and other facts) about the Rambo films. I’ve got my review of the new film pending. I liked it, despite the simplicity. But yeah, it’s a VIOLENT film (I’m actually surprised the total kill count is only as high as 236). It’s interesting that the first and last film are the two that are more grounded in realism, and they are on the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of the amounts of violence.
Speaking of hilarious, here’s a 1985 Cherry Coke commercial. It’s, like, totally awesome.
A great write-up on the historical computer failure known as Coleco’s ADAM. I own a couple ADAM computers, and used them as a kid to do reports and such during elementary school. I have a nostalgic fondness for the system, but the design flaws it had were anything but subtle. The printer was flaw number one. It was also flaws number two through ten. The fact that it was the only possible power supply for the system meant that even if you were never going to use it, you had to keep it in the mix. And it was unwieldy and big. It was also INSANELY noisy, even for a daisy wheel printer. Let’s just say that the printer was a joke of an excuse for every single function it served - and it sadly server more functions that it should have. The tape drives were also the other primary weakness, as the article pointed out. Still, I remember that system with fondness. The ColecoVision game system is a different story. I completely loved that system, and not just for nostalgia reasons. It’s still one of my all-time favorite game systems. The ColecoVision rocked.
I’m your KITT… Cool news that Val Kilmer is now going to be the voice of KITT. The reason for the recast may be stupid, but I’m all in favor of it.
I finally got around to picking up the CD for James Newton Howard’s score to I Am Legend. I remember liking it when I saw the film, but clearly I wasn’t paying too close attention. I’m really loving this score on CD. What a gorgeous main theme he laid in to the score. Reminds me a bit of his beautiful theme work from King Kong, with an almost hymn-like texture to it. Howard’s scoring over the years has been widely varied, and I very often under appreciate him as a composer.
I’ve also been catching up on the last couple episodes of House. Not counting cable shows like Battlestar Galactica, which work on a different season schedule and such, House has been the best this season of the returning shows. This has been the best season of the show to date, which is quite an accomplishment for being the fourth season of a medical procedural. Granted, this isn’t the most typical medical procedural. House made some marks in the record books with the episode that aired following the Super Bowl (which was a fantastic episode, btw). Pushing Daisies, of course, easily qualifies as the best new show of the season. But unfortunately, it ran out of new episodes thanks to the WGA strike.
Cool, Amanda Seyfried (Lilly Kane from Veronica Mars) has joined on to Jennifer’s Body. I already wanna see the movie since the team of Diablo Cody & Jason Reitman are writing and producing.
Here’s a cool compilation of jets making high speed fly-bye runs.
Another volume of Greg The Bunny is coming on DVD.
Holland is prepared to float
Hey, I just noticed that the list of quotes I’ve added to bit-by-bit over the years has hit the 300 entries mark (it’s where the random quotes on the top of this site are pulled from). Neato.
Ah, just Smurf it all…

posted in Ponderings | 0 Comments

4th February 2008

Ponderings For 2008-02-04

Windows Vista SP1 & Windows Server 2008 RTM’d today.
A retro arcade gaming fan heaven. This is *SO* very cool. Man, I wanna go check that place out. Check out the official site, too.
Speaking of retro, check out this set of pictures, of one lucky dude unpacking a new, previously unopened Apple IIc. Ah, for the days where I actually liked Apple. I loved my IIc.
As somebody with interest in WWII history, this discovery of 3 scuttled German U-Boats is a cool bit of news.
The Buffy cast/crew reunion is starting to shape up for this year’s Paley Festival (of the formerly Museum Of Television & Radio). Good to see the cast lining up, but I wanna know how many of the writers will attend (please, at least get Jane Espenson). It’ll be cool to see the video of this event. Here’s hoping that more will continue to sign on to appear on stage at the event. The Paley Center always does nice Q&A sessions for their festivals.
Here’s the first teaser for M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie, The Happening. While I don’t think Lady In The Water was particularly great, I’m a bigger fan of Shyamalan than most people these days (I quite liked The Village). Anyway, this teaser looks great. I also like the one sheet pictured in the post. Nice, subtle references in the tag lines.
Good grief. That Toshiba HD-DVD ad from the Super Bowl didn’t actually run in HD?
Speaking of Super Bowl ads, I haven’t watched any of them from this weekend, but I did watch a few of them that were pointed out on somebody else’s blog recently and found this E*Trade ad that I didn’t remember seeing previously quite funny.
So, looks like the state of HD downloads is about what I’d figure.
Check out this awesome performance of Smells Like Teen Spirit by the Ukulele Orchestra Of Great Britain. Check out the related videos while you’re there to see some of their other great/hilarious performances.
Here’s a great commercial for Absolut.
I mentioned the fun of massive rails guns in a recent posting. Check out this mind-blowingly-insane video clip of a 32-megajoule shot. The description of the incindiaries you are seeing in the video is truly insane.
I’ll close out today’s post with a cool political survey web site. This’ll list out a bunch of the current hot issues and you answer if you are for or against, and your level of interest, and it’ll calculate your ideal (and less-than-ideal) candidates to vote for. Here’s my results (including the top pick, then 2 next-best, then 2 middle-of-the-pack, then the 2 bottom-of-the-barrell). The 0% for Obama is amusing, to say the least. I do feel dirty that there was actually 35% to match with Hillary. Try it out and see what you get. Their scoring methodology actually seems pretty fair to me.
- 87.04 Huckabee
- 70.37 McCain
- 64.81 Romney
- 63.89 Ron Paul
- 41.67 Gravel
- 35.19 Hillary
- 00.00 Obama

posted in Ponderings | 0 Comments

27th January 2008

Ponderings For 2008-01-27

Go, Amazon, Go…
Huge congratulations go out to Juno for passing the $100 million mark (well, worldwide, but so little of that is foreign that it’ll roll past the domestic $100 million mark any day now). That’s a big achievement for a low-budget, indie-style movie to pull off. On top of their 4 major Oscar nominations, the folks involved in that film (my favorite of 2007) are surely giddy. The tenacity that it’s shown at the box office is impressive.
An amusing approach to the insanity of cellular hardware manufacturers and their immediate disinterest in any hardware they’ve already produced, in immediate favor of whatever their next model is. I’ve got an AT&T 8525 (a re-branded HTC Hermes) which has served me well, but the lukewarm support for the device is a surprisingly altruistic situation for an industry that I’ve seen abandon models before most consumers have even got their grubby little paws on ‘em.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned the site before, but InterfaceLIFT.com is my most highly recommended source for fantastic photographic (primarily) wallpapers. Particularly high-res, widescreen ones. It’s intended as a MAC-centric site, but their archive of material is great for any of us high-res, widescreen monitor fans. Such is the case with this most recent example of a cool photo.
For those interested in Microsoft certification, they have extended their free “second shot” promotion until the end of June.
This is old news by now, but the title to the new Bond film is one of their truly stranger choices: Quantum Of Solace.
Also slightly old news by this point, but very, very cool, is the fact that Disney/PIXAR is releasing the Toy Story films in new 3D transfers.
Another great Dilbert Blog entry. This time, resulting in a surprisingly good song.
Speaking of Dilbert, you may have noticed (unless you view my posts via RSS) that I added the flash-based, official Dilbert strip digest widget to the side of the site. Not sure if I’ll keep it. Thought it was cool and figured I’d give it a run. Cool that the archive is to feature the strips in color, no less.
Geek lust: Canon Rebel XSi

posted in Ponderings | 0 Comments

5th December 2007

Ponderings For 2007-12-05

Some great uses for computer equipment
Ray Park cast as Snake Eyes, huh? Should be cool. Yo Joe.
Ever wanted to speak mech droid? Here’s your chance to learn how.
Microsoft has dropped the price of the XBox 360’s HD-DVD drive to a normal retail price of $129. For those that don’t know, these drives work great on a PC using XP or Vista (It’s what I use for HD-DVD, using XP).
Firefox to add online services, providing for browser sync and such? Neato. I currently use Google’s Browser Sync, which works OK, but they seem to have all but abandoned.
Spent a few hours playing with the new HD-DVD set for Battlestar Galactica: Season 1. Overall, a very nice set. Couple gripes, though. First, and less consequential, I hate the packaging. Yeah, the geek in me loves the cut corners style, but the gatefold crap is far more annoying than the previous slim cased in a box approach of the non HD Battlestar releases. And the gelatinous circles to hold the discs on are a real pain. Second, I need to take a moment to gripe about a favorite kind of feature that HD-DVD seems to love, and Universal in particular: U-Control. It sucks. It really sucks. I loathe it. I hate it with every fiber of my home video enthusiast existence. If you’re gonna do extras and interviews and stuff, just put them in documentaries and featurettes and let us watch them on their own, collectively. STOP spreading them all over the actual film/episode in varying degrees. And for the love of the lords of Kobol, *STOP* making us activate ever last frakkin’ one of ‘em. Seriously. If you’re gonna force us to wade through them as part of the watching the film/episode, at least let us turn on something that will make them autoplay. I’d rather you just leave the extra content off the release and use the space on the disc for something else rather than this “click select to activate this interview, or click select to activate this Encyclopedia Galactica entry (entries which are exceedingly lame and such, btw - the whole Enctyclopedia Galactica stuff is lame and worthless).” Still, the episode transfers are beautiful, and that’s what really counts.

posted in Ponderings | 0 Comments

4th December 2007

Ponderings For 2007-12-04

Poor, out-of-work Cylon. Too funny.
Neato - Star Trek: The Tour. And it’ll be visiting Chicago. I’ll be checking that one out.
Excellent photo of an aurora borealis over Bear Lake, Alaska.
A great response to Microsoft’s recent slamming of the benchmarks showing XP SP3 to be significantly faster than Vista SP1.
The MPAA hilariously violated copyright law in a recent attempt at tracking student activity at universities.

posted in Ponderings | 0 Comments

5th November 2007

Ponderings For 2007-11-05

Hope y’all had a happy Guy Fawkes Day
Today’s big news is Google’s amusingly off-center announcement of their open platform initiative for mobile devices called Android. People were expecting the announcement of a “GPhone” and instead got the reality of hundreds of them. Meanwhile, Google stock continues it’s meteoric climb.
Speaking of which, Engadget has this great article about Palm in light of Android. I completely agree with the write-up. I gave up trying to figure out Palm years ago. That company seems determined to nuke itself into oblivion.
So, the writers strike official kicked in today. It’ll be fun to see how the TV/Movie landscape shifts. Many things have already begun feeling the pressure. Heroes may end their second season with the mid-season finale (not to mention the death of Heroes: Origins).
Interesting local news. Microsoft is launching a $500 million data center in Northlake (A Chicago suburb just south of O’Hare airport)
Speaking of Microsoft, here’s some fun internal stats for you fellow IT nerds
Awesome! Check out the Last Starfighter arcade machine. Too bad those never quite made it to production. I’ve got a prototype Atari 5200 cart of the also-unreleased home version.
Check out 8 insane videos of twisters. Warning - plenty of language in the clips. Amazing footage, to be sure. And I love how being in the path of one ‘em turns anyone into a blithering lunatic.
On a more calm and collected note, how about some funny headstones?
You’ll have to confirm your age/consent to watch this video, but it’s absolutely amazing. Just wait for it. Don’t worry, it’s not gory or anything. They just have it flagged for the very nature of what it is - just shown at a distance. Wouldn’t that be classified as something a bit better than the average IED?
This just in from the “what the…?” department
And in case that one wasn’t enough, try this one - also from the same department.
A kinda nifty approach to measuring time in base-10
Hey hey, one of the universities has denied the RIAA outright
Here’s a collection of awesomely timed photos
No big surprise that Blockbuster is in such a tail spin
NBC to launch a spin-off of The Office? You know, if there was one show that I truly wish I could like, but just can’t after repeated attempts, it’s The Office. I don’t know why it fails so completely for me.
Looks like Shia LaBeouf’s fame finally caught up with him, as I’m sure most figured it would.
For anyone interested in a quick breakdown of Dubai and what makes it tick. Sure does make Vegas look like a theme park.
And, I swear I’m gonna try to get at least one movie review posted per day for the rest of the week. I’m falling behind…

posted in Ponderings | 0 Comments

27th September 2007

Ponderings For 2007-09-27

I upgraded this blog to the new 2.3 version of Wordpress. They’ve added official support for tagging in this version (there were a few plug-ins before, which I hadn’t been running). I’ve gone through all of the posts for September and added a bunch of tags. Don’t know how well they’ll work out for this site, but I thought I’d start playing with them. So, you’ll notice the funky new tag cloud on the left side of the site.
A couple more movie reviews are pending as well. If you ever wanna see what movies I’ve seen but haven’t gotten around to posting reviews for, just check my movie log page. It’s usually current (it is as of this post).
Sci-Fi has renewed Eureka for a third season.
Bionic Woman scores in the ratings for the pilot episode. Reaper also does well. Heck, even the unimpressive Cane does very well. BTW, I’ll have a post this weekend about these early days of the new TV season.
Transformers 2 has been greenlit by Paramount for 2009. I hold little hope that Michael Bay can get it right this second time, but I can dream, can’t I? You know, Bay should take on the job that Irwin Allen did on The Towering Inferno - “Action Scenes Directed By…”
Universal continues to mine their classic TV properties for remakes. First it was Battlestar & Bionic Woman, now it’s gonna be Knight Rider. If the excellent Doug Liman’s name wasn’t attached to this, I’d have serious doubts.
Speaking of remakes, Fox has slotted Christmas of next year for their intriguing remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still.
Microsoft has launched a new overhaul of their Live Search service. I haven’t really played with it enough to have any opinion.
Speaking of Microsoft Live service related things I haven’t played with much, FedEx has just integrated their Virtual Earth project.

posted in Ponderings | 1 Comment

up to content »

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
« Nov
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31

Ponderings For 2008-08-25

Ponderings For 2008-07-07

Ponderings For 2008-06-29

Ponderings For 2008-05-01

Ponderings For 2008-02-09

Ponderings For 2008-02-04

Ponderings For 2008-01-27

Ponderings For 2007-12-05

Ponderings For 2007-12-04

Ponderings For 2007-11-05

Ponderings For 2007-09-27

Calendar

Categories

Meta

Spam Blocked

35 Days Against DRM

Dilbert

Tags