Doh.

[via jwz]

Here’s a fun game… First, look up the most popular and critically-acclaimed books, movies, and music on Amazon. Click on “Customer Reviews,” and sort them by “Lowest Rating First.” Hilarity ensues! It’s the Amazon.com Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game!

The Wizard of Oz – “For one thing, I don’t like to watch things with witches in them, especially if one of them is portrayed as a ‘good witch’ – that’s an oxymoron I can’t reconcile with.”

The Shawshank Redemption – “And finally … what kind of ending is it where two dudes are together on a beach.”

Psycho (original) – “This film is so boring and in the shower scene it was obviously Bates the wig even from shadow was awful. SEE THE REMAKE FAR MORE ENTERTAINING!” or “This has got to be the worst movie ever. A plot about a guy that keeps his dead mother’s body around and kills people in the shower. Lame”

Simpsons: The Complete First Season – “What is this!?!?! Homer Simpson acts like Yoge Bear!!!! The animation has to be the worst animation I have ever seen!!!!! Come on!!!!”

Beatles, Abbey Road – “I bought this album because I totally thought the guy on the right was Kate Hudson’s husband.”

And one final gushing review that probably doesn’t deserve it: “This book was one of the most interesting books i’ve read in my life.” — Come and Knock on Our Door: A Her’s and Her’s and His Guide to the TV show Three’s Company.

This stuff and more at Waxy.org [via MetaFilter]

 

I can’t seem to consistently workout unless I measure it obsessively. (Russian in Rocky V style)

A key instrument is the heart rate monitor. I wear mine everytime I run or bike. The older model Polar served me well for a solid four years now, but last week it finally gave way – either that or my heart rate is indeed 224 bpm. Now the search is on for a replacement/upgrade.

Polar has an array of options (ahem ahem), many with uplinks to the computer for analysis. I’ve been toying with the idea of making my workout information public here on coreyh.com as a incentive device. If I knew that everyone could see the gaps in my workout I’d be less likely to talk myself out of it.

I haven’t gotten to this level yet, but only because I think some of the stuff he carries around is too heavy: Flashenabled.com/run

Out at ol’ Irish McBar watching the Red Sox Yankees a drunken guy starts chatting up Vinod and me. He goes on and on and since we’re watching the game and not really paying attention, we let him keep going.

At some point he mentions that he collects DVDs and that he sometimes finds himself watching them over and over.

“For a whole year I would come home from work every day and put on a movie and watch it.” Us 20%-interested: What movie? “Men in Black… I just had to have it on whenever I was home; I slept on the couch so I could fall to sleep with it on. I saw it 317 times.”

Our company is undergoing a “server consolidation project” aka “Our CIO thinks we ought to have another mainframe”. Yesterday we took a bus load of folks from the IS team over to be wooed by IBM, their snazzy conference center, and the free schwag.

They lead off bragging about how many patents IBM submits and segue into how Linux is the future of absolutely everything and it can do magic. Choice quote “Linux is the only OS that can run on devices that haven’t even been invented yet.” At this point I had to challenge at least some of the major distortions emanating from the sales force. I made several challenges to the “data points” being presented. The best part was they seemed to get the message and follow-on presenters were much less likely to spin their products in such a manner.

It was a lot like going to the car dealership to buy a VW Golf. The dealership happens to sell Mercedes also and the salesmen spends the day walking you through the Maybach’s every luxury and feature, presenting it as an alternative to the Golf without mentioning the price differential.

If you are starting a .NET project in today’s world of impending Longhorn/Whidbey domination you are probably asking yourself: “Should I use ASMX, .NET Remoting, COM+, MSMQ, Enterprise Services?” or “Isn’t Remoting dead?”

I know I did all kinds of reading going back to the PDC in October, but I could have just watched this and been done.

Richard Turner, program manager on the Indigo team, gives developers advice about what to do today to get ready for tomorrow. Hint, it’s spelled ASMX.

What if you’ve already invested in remoting? Richard talks about what to do.
Watch the Video

[via Channel 9]

On my XP Build List I have two items: MaxiVista and UltraMon.

I’ve been using multiple monitors since my days at BondNet in 1995. There are lots of documented productivity improvements with multi monitors and I say with certainty that once you go multi-head you won’t go back. I am able to keep my Outlook tasks and calendar open all day long on the second screen. I keep MSN Messenger and Winamp open there too. This way I don’t have to stop what I’m doing to look over at my calendar and interrupt, click, click to get back to what I’m working on. I keep these things in the same place all the time. I foresee a future where we’ll have many application specific displays all around our desk area. Think about your telephone, you always know where it is, it never moves, and you don’t have to move your email aside to get to it. Same thing here.

At work I just purchased a dual-head ATI video card and grabbed a second 19″ CRT (3200 x 2400 effective resolution), but there are many other alternate ways to get to multiple monitors. You can buy a second PCI video card which I’ve done before. One of the cooler options is MaxiVista. It creates a virtual display adapter which connects a second networked machine running the client software. Windows handles it from there.

I had a old Dell Pentium II laptop with a beautiful 14″ LCD that had been collecting dust. Well, not anymore… For the $49 registration fee I have 786,432 more pixels to work with. The performance is completely fine for what I use it for, but I wouldn’t try anything super fancy without gigabit networking and/or until the product matures further.

I also saw this come across my Engadget RSS feed: Easy Cheap USB secondary monitor option.

And if you are going to be going the multi-head route you’ll definitely want to pick up a copy of UltraMon. It fills in all sorts of features such as allowing different wallpaper, screensavers and taskbars for each window. When you run it you’ll see why the separate taskbar is a must have.

Bonus tip: I originally had an animated gif for the MaxiVista graphic, but it just got too annoying. In IE, you can stop animated gifs from animating by hitting the stop button after the page has loaded.

New .Text skin today. I somehow borked blockquote in CSS and couldn’t fix it so I figured I take the opportunity to add a little slickness.

I found this here. Credit for HabaHaba 0.95 belongs 100% to:

Author: Christian Nordbakk
Date Created: 5/22/2004 1:40:08 PM
Author’s Website: http://anothereon.net/weblog/
Christian Nordbakk’s HabaHaba 0.95 skin based on his original AnotherEon001 skin that is now packaged with .Text. You can see it in use at his blog (link above).

Your humble blogger is just a bit humbler — I did not pass the Who Wants to be a Millionaire quiz.

There were about 100 people in line when they let us in, many daytime tv watchers in town on vacation, a few postal working jeopardy wanna-be types, and miscellaneous others. They lead us all into a cafeteria type room, hand out the scantron, #2 pencil and individually numbered envelope with 30 questions inside. Ten minute time limit. I made it through the first half with a really good feeling that I nailed almost all of them. The second half was trickier – questions ranging from ancient Greece (who was Cleopatra romantically linked with before Marc Antony) to soap operas (what soap takes place in Pine Valley). While I felt I did ok I knew I was going to get a few wrong there. Put your pencils down, time’s up.

Note, to this point nobody’s looked at my personality questionnaire, talked to me or taken my picture.

They announce, almost immediately, the numbers of the folks that passed the test and move on to the next round. #73 was not called

I guess if I want to be on TV and win a million dollars I’ll have to rely on something else besides smarts. Sexy bachelor? Daring Fear Factor guy? Knower of grocery prices?

Downloading the pictures from Beach Party 2004 using the normally stellar XP Picture transfer wizard thing I pointed the files to be saved into a folder that doesn’t exist anymore (partially my fault, partially MS’s) with the “delete pictures after copying them” checked on. So you know what comes next, the pictures vanished. Fortunately I have experience with undelete and the memory cards on cameras. Basically its pretty easy to do. I purchased Undelete from Executive Software makers of Diskeeper – which I swear by. Downloaded the installer and chose the “emergency recovery” option when the installer runs – you don’t have to actually install anything. A few clicks later, the pictures are all restored good as new.

Note, undelete works well in these situations because the camera card isn’t being used to write new stuff to like your c: drive does avoiding the possibility of writing over the data you are looking for. Also, though I recommend undelete for these tasks, I don’t like their recycle bin modification thing that gets installed when you install it. There might be a simpler, cheaper tool out there, but I knew Undelete and had success with it.