How awesome does a video have to be to get me to update my blog for the first time in months?
Exactly this awesome:
My friend Jordan sent me this awesome meme on Facebook (and yes, I know what you’re thinking, “Oh God another stupid answer-25-questions-about-me bullshit thing”, but this is actually awesome.)
1 – Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random” or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2 – Go to “Random quotations” or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3 – Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4 – Use photoshop or similar to put it all together. (if you don’t have it, here’s an online photo editor: pixlr.com/)
5 – Post it to FB with this text in the “caption” and TAG the friends you want to join in.
My result: Continue reading ‘The Most Fun I’ve Had on Facebook in FOREVER’
The last time I bought a DVD, it was about a year ago, and it was only because BestBuy was having a Black Friday sale and had Clue for a whopping $5 (and seriously, how do you pass up Clue the movie? Tim Curry? Priceless!) Before that, I bought a couple of seasons of the West Wing. Nothing since.
I chalked most of that up to having A) a TiVo that records ridiculous amounts of free television for me, including enough West Wing and Law and Order reruns to make my head spin, B) being broke as a mo-fo, and C) having not a ton of free time.
But it’s quickly coming to the point where I’m over DVDs. They’re dead to me.
Over Thanksgiving, I saw a total of four movies, and only one of them was on DVD. (Kung Fu Panda is funny as hell, by the way.) And that was from Netflix, not something out of my own collection. The rest came from a variety of online sources and were all MUCH more convienent than a DVD: no going to the video store, no waiting for something to come in the mail and then sending it back, and no having to figure out where to plug the damn DVD player in because we ran out of TV inputs two video game systems ago…
TiVo with Amazon on Demand is my favorite so far. The collection isn’t stellar yet, but it’s the largest of the bunch and it’s pretty darn good. I rented “Get Smart” and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the What the fuck was George Lucas Thinking” for a buck each (on sale), and sent them to my TiVo instead of watching them in my browser. When I tried this a few years ago, it took an hour for the download to start, two hours for it to finish, and you couldn’t start playing until it was done. Last night? Two minutes to start downloading and you could watch right away. Fucking brilliant.
Netflix Streaming isn’t half bad, either, although the collection is very limited right now. There’s a lot of old favorites that I haven’t seen, and now that it’s FINALLY Mac native I can watch it without waiting for my already overstressed MacBook Pro to boot Windows along side of OS X. It also just came out for TiVo, although I’ve found that to be a little buggy too (it won’t let me watch stuff in widescreen, just full.) It also has a nice collection of TV on demand, including the entire current season of Heroes. Even more than episodes than…
Hulu, the beast of free online video. They’re kicking YouTube’s ass up down and sideways right with their giant collection of free TV shows and movies. Things disappear (sometimes quickly) but it’s a great way to catch up on shows you may have missed last night or a week or two ago. And the movie collection doesn’t suck, either (Can you believe I’ve never seen “A League of Their Own”? Have now…got a little teary-eyed in the end…)
But then, there’s the one place DVDs still seem to kick ass: quality. For Christmas, my parents got a Samsung 46″ LCD TV with 1080p and 120Hz refresh, which makes things look…well just scarily real. I popped in “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” on DVD to test the machine and turned on all the fancy settings. It felt like I was hiding in the bushes spying on Frodo. The details were incredible. Of course, I also tried it with an episode of “The Office” through Netflix streaming, and it looked just as good…
So mabye DVDs aren’t quite dead yet, but they’ve got a foot in the grave as online media gets better and better.
I hate scheduling. Period.
Don’t get me wrong, Google Calendar is my PDA BFF; it’s made keeping track of my life so much easier than it used to be. I love that my boss and his family use it as well, it makes keeping track of work stuff a breeze. BUT: scheduling events is still a giant pain in the ass. Who’s free when? Who can’t do which time? The more people, the harder it gets.
So I got really excited when the Digital Marketer (a podcaster who’s a part of the Quick and Dirty Tips series that I love so much) mentioned a number of new web applications to help with this problem.
I’ve been working at Murky Coffee most of the afternoon today. Mostly because if I were at home, I’d be too tempted to do things like laundry, dishes, and watch Star Trek: Voyager on my TiVo, but also cause they have awesome coffee and I love the environment. It’s a little after 5, and just for kicks I thought, “Hey, I should post something.”
And that’s when I realized that blogging, just as a personal medium, is dead. Continue reading ‘Blogging is dead. Long live blogging!’
I heart my iPhone. I really do. Despite the problems with calls (which has gotten WAY better since the 2.1 firmware upgrade), it genuinely is the best phone I’ve ever had. It’s fast, it doesn’t crash on me, and it’s contact and call management is nothing short of suburb. Three way calling? No sweat. Putting a call on hold? Easy as cake. And syncing with my address book is, for the first time, ACCURATE. No more praying and hoping I have the fields lined up the right way (I’m looking at you, old Blackberry 7250….yeah…)
The Impulsive Buy is a hilarious website where a guy reviews products with the sort of random absurdities that you’d find on [adult swim] on a regular basis. For a hilarious read, you should go back to his review of New Kids on the Block’s Summertime.
His latest review covers Twin Lotus Herbal Toothpaste, a Thai herbal toothpaste that looks like just about the grossest thing I’ve ever seen. You can read the full review here, but he also includes the following actual ad for the stuff: Continue reading ‘Twin Lotus Toothpaste: Now Racistier!’
While it’d be a stretch to call me a “gamer”, I do genuinely enjoy both playing video games and, frankly, watching people play RPG games (the idea of developing the skills to actually play one myself seems like it would have about the learning curve of teaching me to operate a UPS truck, which would be less entertaining but more profitable). But I do love keeping up with all the news and sometimes ridiculous review of video game sites.
This weekend, we had the big move in our house: two roommates moving out, three moving in. As a part of this, my roommate Jordan had to clear out his bedroom, including the multiple cups of change that have been accumulating over the last five years. That’s right, five years.
After an attempt to take it to the Commerce Bank up the street (which we then discovered wasn’t actually…ya know…open…yet…), we took it over the Harris Teeter, which has one of those Coinstar machines. Normally, I’d never recommend this: 8% fee to get the money I already have? Seriously?
BUT: They now have a new feature! If you turn in the cash as a gift card for things like Amazon.com, iTunes, or Starbucks, they waive the fee. Epic. Continue reading ‘Coinage! The Coinage!!!’
