My old faithful Intellimouse Explorer’s scroll wheel became clogged on what must be the combined microscopic remnants of a thousand lunches eaten at my desk. When I noticed an actual scrolling callus developing I decided to throw on the coat and walk the long block up to CompUSA for a replacement.

I knew I wanted a wired mouse since I already have enough battery anxiety in my life — battery anxiety being the constant nervousness brought on by countless battery powered life necessities. And even though it was being targeted at gamers, I opted for the laser mouse 6000, because well, let’s face it, it has a laser in it and the model number is 6000, which is very high. The old kind, optical, is just a LED of some kind I guess. When you turn it over you can’t see the laser though, it is an invisible laser.

This does seem to be quite precise, which is the whole selling point of the lasers. I am new to this concept, since my old one seemed precise enough, but I have noticed that with 1600×1200 resolution and occasionally trying to move images one pixel at a time or click on very small buttons, this mouse does a good job.

My complaints are all based on the fact that it is omni-handed, or whatever you call something that is made for right and left handed people equally. This screws up the general feel and puts the #3 and #4 buttons in odd places, which I’m not happy about. Still I sit here long enough to be able train my hand to get used to it.

$49 at CompUSA.

Circa 1993, my family was using (Autoroute?) a DOS based driving directions program. I believe this is what ended up evolving in to MS Streets & Trips. Anyway, it was pretty good. It was geared towards a user that is trying plan a trip with features to match. You could specify that you wanted to stay off certain types of roads, you could mark certain points you wanted to stop along the way, specify how fast you drive. It would give you choices like a) fastest route b) shortest route c) scenic route.

I wanted to point fellow ski house mates to the best way to get to Mt Snow VT and just tried to get one the heavily touted and heavily invested online services to do something even close and came up way short. They insisted on I-95 and anyone knows that has actually done the trip both ways, you want to take the Merritt parkway. I guess I’m just pointing out that I might prefer to have a few more practical features pushed up the priority list before some of the more eye-popping stuff. Granted the new MS Live bird’s eye view is incredible.

My latest optimization project has been the electric bill. I bought some of the new breed fluorescent lights for the kitchen, they have a nice soft light and don’t seem to flicker as much as the standard office kind. They put out the same light as a 65 watt incandescent (regular) bulb, but only use like 12 watts each. As much as it annoys me to do, I’ve been putting the computer to stand-by at night. Consumption went from 421 KWH last month to 399, but my bill went up by $20. 

A bill from CON EDISON has arrived. 
Billing Details
 Payee Information
 
Current balance: $119.28
Minimum payment: $119.28
Due by: 12/30/2005
Payment option: Manual
 Payee: CON EDISON
  
Receive, review, pay, and organize all your bills online.
http://www.paytrust.com

Am I the only one surprised by this? I knew that heating oil prices would be up this winter, but I hadn’t read anything about electricity going up. My landlord pays the heating bill, so I’m sure I’ll see that reflected in next year’s rent negotiations.

I know I probably read too much Paul Krugman, but I am definitely one of those working people who feel like supposed positive economic trends do not seem to trickling down into my checking account. There seem to be a lot of these little attack vectors that while each are small are having a significant net-effect on my balance sheet.

Oh, btw, I use this service called Paytrust, which is a deluxe third party bill pay service. My bills actually get sent to their address in South Dakota and they scan and OCR them. I can do all sorts of fancy things with it from there, and it is all online, so I get almost no bills in my mailbox at home and can receive and pay them from wherever I happen to be. Recommended.

I’ve been using BlogJet pretty much since I started this blog, I actually don’t know how I would do it without it. (BlogJet is an offline blogging composition tool)

It has been a pleasure watching it get better and better and the latest version has some really nice stuff included.

Author’s announcement blog post:

I’m excited to announce the new release – BlogJet 1.6 “Lime”! (Lime is a codename ).

NEW FEATURES [edited by Corey]

• Free Flickr integration plugin (included, no installation required).
• Auto Replace.
• Title and rel attributes for links.
• Ping default URLs.
• Zoom icon for generated thumbnails.

Download here: http://www.blogjet.com/download/
Buy here: http://www.blogjet.com/order/

NYRR Holiday 4-Mile
List by Name: Corey Henderson

Distance: 4.0 Miles, 6.4 Kilometers
Date/Time: Dec. 3, 2005, 9:30 am
Location: Central Park, NYC
Weather: 32 deg., 57% humidity, cloudy

Results
Sex/Age: M29
Bib #: 4541
City/State: NEW YORK  NY
Overall Place: 686
Gender Place: 546
Net Time: 30:10
Pace/Mile:  7:32

Total Finishers: Men – 2201 Women – 2366 Total – 4567

I missed my sub-30 minute goal and I am pretty motivated to do better at these distance events. Genetically speaking I feel like I should be able to do well at distances under 10k, and I need to figure out a training scheme that will get me there.

I am a big fan of these NYRR races, they have a nice balance of social, competitive, community and active aspects. The picture to the right is actually from the 5M Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving in Southport, CT.

Four or so years ago my brother Kevin bought me a Logitech WingMan Formula Force GP (for the PC) as a gift.

At the time I didn’t really have a computer with the gaming horsepower to take advantage of it, but as time went on and I upgraded, I settled into a regular pattern: about every six months a new racing/driving game comes out. I’ll buy/try/download it, play for approximately 20 hours, more or less straight, finish it or get to a point where I don’t know what to do next and won’t bother going to find an online gaming guide, and put the wheel in the drawer until it is time for a new title.

This week’s game is Need For Speed Most Wanted. It is a substantial improvement from the previous Underground version in the series. I won’t go into great detail on a game review, since I don’t think most of my readers are into that kind of thing. I will say they have done a great job with this one making it really addictive. The classic “win races, get money, upgrade vehicle” mode works on me every time. I started out with a plain Volkswagen Golf and now I’m driving a Porsche Cayman S with a whale tail and flames on the side.

The other notable thing about Most Wanted is part of the game is trying to avoid the police. They will try to box you in, set up roadblocks and try to arrest you. It is very stressful — you can sometimes outrun them, but then you have to hide out waiting for the cooldown period to end so you can move on to the next race. Whew.

Freeware program Who’s Connected analyzes and displays your active Internet connections. It’s a quick and simple tool for finding out what programs are using your bandwidth.

Who’s Connected may come in handy when you suspect a bandwidth hog on your computer, but can’t seem to find the culprit. While the software currently lacks a bandwidth monitor for each connection, the feature is currently in development.

Who’s Connected

[via LifeHacker]

I’m one of those guys who has to make things difficult computer-wise, running all sorts of strange application combinations that the designers never imagined someone would do. The other day I ran a netstat and determined that there were hundreds of connections going every which way and I had no idea where they were coming from. LifeHacker just happened to post this little tool which will tell you which app is opening all those connections. In my case it was Cloudmark SafetyBar, an anti-phishing toolbar, which I’m sure is an ok product, but something in my configuration, probably my winsock proxy client, causing it to spread tentacles wildly all over my tcp/ip stack.

Tags: tcpip‘>tcpip, tools‘>tools

Eater/Curbed:

Aspen (right), which last week got a ton of just-opened buzz actually opens tonight.

That’s funny. Emily and I went last night.

There was brown paper up in the windows and no visible address, but we did the old “this must be it” and just walked in. Bars are funny like that; trying to be hard to find to make you feel special. There weren’t all that many people there and everyone seemed to already know each other, but whatever, we were determined.

The place was split between the front bar part you see in the picture here and a restaurant in back. This was clearly a bar before they moved in, and I don’t think they went quite far enough with the decor. I didn’t at all feel like I was in Aspen. The glass deer heads and wood paneling were cool enough and I guess they can fool the average customer who hasn’t been out west ever. The restaurant in back was while elm themed and I quite liked the vibe back there. 

We sat down and ordered our drinks, but the bartender didn’t ask for money. We had stumbled into a (semi) private opening type party without knowing it. After we finished up the cocktails, being the moral people we are, waved the bartender and asked what the charge was. He leaned over and said “aren’t these guys with you?” to the manager/owner, I guess she said no because we got the bill, paid it and left.  

I was just reading about Joaquin Phoenix playing Johnny Cash in the new biopic, stumbled into IMDB per usual and, whoa, did anyone else realize that he was Max from Spacecamp (ha, released in 1986).

“Max and Jinx… Friends… For-e-ver.”