Nerd Stalker

Oh yeah forgot to mention in my previous post to check out the picture of the blue screen of death I got when walking into the Microsoft Keynote this morning, hilarious. Pretty bummed at Microsoft they really blew it for developers at this conference as all of the developer track rooms are over flowing. Really poor planning on Microsoft which is really surprising. I had to defer 2 of the breakouts I wanted to attend, I checked out the "Sandbox" this morning which was probably the hidden gem of the event. At the sandbox they have tons of machines with virtual machines on them with labs of the various new technologies to try, it was pretty cool. Then sat through a cool track called "Developing Data Driven Applications Using the New Dynamic Data Controls in ASP.NET", problem is this stuff is still in the early phases and sort of sidtracks biz rules and the whole biz logic layer instead depending on future release of Linq. Tried to see the ajax patterns with asp.net tr...

So i'm at the Microsoft Mix conference here in Vegas and there is quite a buzz in the air here. Started with a great band that sounded like a mesh between oingo boingo and devotchka. Then Rey Ozzie took the stage to deliver the new path of microsoft, in short it's that for now there is going to be a connection between web and client apps as one is not dominating the other. Then he hyped Silverlight, which is squarely aimed at Flash and Flash video, looked nice but it's beta till the summer 1.0 release. They mentioned something called Photosynth for some uber powerful online photo zooming. Scott Guthrie then took over and mentioned Silverlight has a streaming option, a cross platform .net framework (yes runs on mac), demo's available for download starting today, silverlight.live.com free vid hosting/streaming, multi browser support, and support for virtually all programming languages. They are seeing a 300-1000% speed increase over using javascript. They showed demos run...

Ok so I'm skipping ahead but it's my second day here in Vegas and I can't believe I haven't even played a hand of poker yet. I did see the bizzaro show called Jubilee at Bally's, yeah I will never do that again. In a nutshell baby was awesome on the plane, it's really warm/hot, the venetian rooms are amazingly huge, view blows a bit, people are bizzaro, the girls dress like prostitutes/prom queens, many jock hawks, and i'm exhausted and need more sleep. I'll be getting my first tournaments in tomorrow, probably at Caesars, Paris, or Ballys. more to come....

I've rediscovered that when you go to any non apple store you get lots of misleading and incorrect answers to any mac related questions you have. So I'm at the point where I'm ready to connect the mini audio to my bose system. The mini has a optical out option, but the jack can be used for either optical or your regular 3/4" headphone jack. So I went to Radio Shack to look for a cheap optical to RCA cable as my old bose only takes RCA. Radio Shack tells me only the Apple store has such a cable, and that Apple likes to make things you can only get at the Apple Store (bs), I know they don't know what theyre talking about so i'm off to Best Buy. Best Buy tells me essentially the same crap so i'm finally off to the Apple Store. I park far far away from the Apple Store and make the trek, they tell me theres to such cable and that going optical to RCA makes no sense anyhow so I may as well go 3/4" to RCA. They show me the cable they have which sells for $30...

Great little vid Will Ferrell put together check it out .

I'm a huge fan of The Bourne Identity series, in my opinion they have blown away every bond flic for quite some time. Check out the yahoo exclusive trailer for The Bourne Ultimatum .

If you are needing some inspiration and motivation this week, the Pop!Casts from Pop!Tech might be just the answer. The people who create the Pop!Tech new ideas conference each year and brought you the beautiful AntiBabel EP have recently released vidcasts of some of the most inspiring presentations from their conferences over the last three years. So far there are 22 casts online but new segments will continue to posted every few weeks. Pop!Tech tell us that the Pop!Casts are “published under a Creative Commons license, meaning you can distribute, translate and edit them as you wish for noncommercial use. Sharing Pop!Casts with peers is one of the ways you can inspire collective thinking and action around the topics you’re most interested in.” I recommend presentations by Richard Dawkins, world-renowned biologist and evolutionary theorist, Reggie Watts, human beat-box polymath musician and comedian, Lester Brown, preeminent environmentalist and head of the Earth Policy Institute and...

I was watching Frontline the other night and came across an amazing non profit they were profiling named Kiva . Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can "sponsor a business" and help the world's working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you've sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back. I'm partial to Bolivia, register then login and do a search for "Bolivia" and give a little to someone just trying to become self sustainable. The best part is when you get paid back you can just loan it to another person in need. Banks sometimes charge 30% for loans and loan sharks charge 200-300% interest, Kiva charges nothing, they are nothing short of amazing. Make sure to check them out .

This won't surprise people who have been following JFK's assassination for a long time, and many disbelievers will ignore this, but this is an important confession and, hopefully, more will follow. read more

Ok so I went to the tiny apple store at the santa rosa mall (don't ask) and picked up my hdmi to svid cable. When I got back home that evening in sf I hooked it up and it worked instantly, I'm very impressed. Now I'm just shopping for a blue tooth keyboard and trackball, why a trackball? Cause using a mouse on the couch would be lame. Also still shopping for an external drive, was thinking of trying to replace the existing drive but it looks like a pretty giant pain in the arse to do, that and the fact it uses a notebook sata type drive, i'm still deciding on what to do. Frys sent me an email that my killer deal ram I already bought is out of stock, god they suck.

Cleans the desktop with tabs pretty cool and nice demo. read more

So the mac mini was delivered the next day i bought it via fedex even though i picked free shipping cause it was so close in Sacramento, kick ass. Problem is we were not home to receive it so I had to wait 2 days and got it today. I'm already cruising dealram to buy a couple chips to bump it up from 512k to 2gb of ram. I'm also having a distant thought of replacing the 80gb sata hd with something bigger. In the short term I'll buy or build an external giant drive. So I've been looking into the pvr solutions for the mini at first I was sold on the elgato solutions but after reading amazon reviews I'm gonna do more investigating. One big issue is that the remote that comes with the elgato will not control my directv box thus forcing me to use it like I was using my old vcr. That is keeping it on channel 3, telling the elgato to record at various times but selecting the shows via the directv box a bit of a pain but better than a monthly fee? not sold yet. Tivo is start...