FanLess server / router / firewall
This little box does everything that your Linksys router does, in addtion to having a built in firewall, it does 802.11b, and also has a fileserver for you to backup files to.
Update: - Note from Tad, apparently Toshiba made a simular device that wasn't Fanless, but same concept. They sell on ebay for about 1/8th the cost. Ebay search for Toshiba Magnia
The fast and the Corvette Furious
Got a link from a friend of mine... looks like those videos you see of kids with Rice Rockets driving their cars fast... but this time its VETTE's... lots of smoking tired, going fast, and CORVETTES!
Corvette Chaos - Requires Windows Media Player
MP3 File Renaming and Tagging
If you have an iPod, having correctly tagged MP3's is important. In the past, with the first versions of ID3 tags, there was not alot of options of what you could store in the tags. Now a days, most people don't seem to put much in the tags, and most file names are very useless. iTunes for example names files as Track Number and Song Title. Thats IT. So getting good information in the ID3 or ID3v2 tag is important so atleast your player can give you good information about the song. Most CAR MP3 players only seem to look at the filename, not the ID3 tag. Hopefully this will change.
There are several useful programs for looking up ID3 Tags.
Music Match - I like Music Match's program because it has a pretty good engine for looking up album information from just filenames. It also allows you to paste a Photo of the album art right into the MP3 itself. Which, is annoying that all that data needs to be copied to each MP3 file. So be sure to pick a nice small thumbnail.
ID3-Tagit - Got this link from Tad, its a nice little .NET program that lets you rename files, supports ID3v2 tags, pull tag information from the net and more. Its a must have.
MadiTag - A VB application that yours truely maintained after the original author moved onto other things. Mostly I like the ability to have specific fields 'stick' as you tag multiple files. It also allows you to clean up and rename files. It uses a much older naming convention than what is currently used now.
Magic Mountain
I'm going to Magic Mountain on the 21st after doing my Button Willow Driving School on the 20th. Since hotels can reach $129.00 a nite, I'm going to look at staying another night in Buttonwillow for $34.00 🙂 They don't open til 10am anyways.
ButtonWillow December 20th
I will be going to ButtonWillow the weekend of December 20th.
For $175 you get some track time with an instructor and also some safety lessons, all in the comfort of your car. This weekend I will probably be staying with Noel from the 19th to the 21st and heading over to the track in the morning.
Just spoke with Jason, and we are staying at the Homeland Inn in Buttonwillow.
The address is:
20688 Tracy Ave.
Buttonwillow, CA 93206
Price: $34.00 a nite
Phone: (661) 764-5207
Babysitting Links
Tonight is my first night doing any type of Baby Sitting... Being the nerd I am, I went and found some helpful links on baby sitting. 🙂
SpeedPass meets your credit card
Interesting as RFID (RF Identification Device)? advances, we are seeing more and more ways of people being able to wirelessly identify themselves.
Its like SpeedPass for your credit card
LAUNCHcast – Free good music
I found this new web site that lets you create your own 'radio station' of music. You go in and create a free account using a Yahoo email address, and then choose the type of music you are interested in (even to the detail of which types of bands). Then it pops up a window with the player in it (you must use their browser/player). Each song displays the artist, song title, and album. Allowing you to link to it and buy it or write it down so you can goto www.amazon.com and buy it for less? What I particularly like is the system is dynamic. You are able to VOTE on how much you like the current Song, Artist and Album. Helping your radio station be more like you. 🙂
Check it out launch.yahoo.com/launchcast
My radio station is SDTJ_2003
Just saying NO to the Dating Industry
Just Saying No to the Dating Industry
November 30, 2003
By KATE ZERNIKE
BY her own admission, Sara Cambridge was "totally
cruising."
She spent hours trolling online dating sites, sending
e-mail messages to potential mates and creating "a real connection," which would invariably sour into deep disappointment within the first five minutes of an actual date. At which point she would return to the sites, send more e-mail, make another connection and suffer another snap disappointment.
Finally, there was the left-leaning writer, who took her to
a Japanese tea garden and, like so many of the others,
seemed so perfect from his résumé.
"In the e-mails, he would say, `Tell me a story,' which I thought was kind of charming," said Ms. Cambridge, 38, a graphic designer in San Francisco. "When we got together it was, `Tell me stories, tell me stories, tell me stories.' I felt like I was auditioning for a play."
That was it.
"I realized I could be starting my own business in the time
I was spending looking at these ads and crafting these responses," she said. So instead of going back online, she began taking a Small Business Administration class and designing funky planters.
Ms. Cambridge's tale is one small act of resistance against what might be called the Dating-Industrial Complex, a mighty fortress increasingly hard to ignore. To Match.com and Nerve.com, add DreamMates, The Right Stuff, eHarmony and eCrush (neither to be confused with Etrade, though the general concept is the same). TurboDate, HurryDate, 8minuteDating - or It's Just Lunch.
Reality television shows - "The Bachelorette," "Average
Joe" - have fed the impression that finding the right mate
is as simple as being presented with a room of 10 people
and picking one. Bookstores bulge: "Surrendered Single,"
"Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School," "Make Every Girl Want You." That is just a sampling from the last year; the next two months will bring one manual promising to lure the love of your life in seven weeks, another in a sleeker six.
"There's a fetishization of coupling," said Bella DePaulo,
a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who studies perceptions of singles. "It's made the pressure that's always been there more intense."
Yet like Ms. Cambridge, longtime combatants in the dating
wars, psychologists and those who study the lives of
singles talk about increasing dating fatigue. They say more
and more people are taking dating sabbaticals or declaring
they will let romance happen by chance, not commerce. Once-obsessive online daters are logging off, clients of speed dating services - which offer dozens of encounters in a roomful of strangers - are slowing down. A book due out in January, "Quirkyalone," offers "a manifesto for uncompromising romantics" - those not opposed to romance but against the compulsory dating encouraged by the barrage of books, Web sites and matchmaking services.
Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma report that singles are signing up for housewarming and birthday registries, deciding they do not have to wait for a wedding to request the pastamaker and flatware. Smaller stores report single women registering for china patterns and crystal, without ring, proposal or mate.
On the extreme end of political activism, the American Association for Single People, a kind of AARP for the unmarried, convinced governors in five states to declare Unmarried and Single Americans Week in September. And a small voice in the Web wilderness reassures: Itsokaytobe single.com.
"I have no doubt that there is a great, committed
relationship out there for me," Ms. Cambridge said. "I
don't identify at all with people who think, `I'll never
find another person.' I just think the best thing to do is pursue my goals, and whatever unfolds will be a new story."
Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-director of the National
Marriage Project, who relied on a national survey as well
as in-depth interviews and dating histories of 60 women for
her 2002 book, "Why There Are No Good Men Left: The
Romantic Plight of the New Single Woman," said this
hard-won wisdom is increasingly common. "People are making
some kind of private agreement with themselves that they're
not going to do this in a panicky, driven way that
implicitly buys into the notion that if it doesn't happen
to you, you'll be miserable," she said.
As Sari Siegal, who surrendered her love life to fate after
a dating binge last spring, said, "This Internet stuff
makes it seem like there's no excuse for not having
someone."
"It trivializes it," said Ms. Siegal, a 30-year-old
graduate student in New York. "It's like a math equation."
The discontent, Ms. Whitehead said, is not limited to
women. Marc Johnson, 33, describes his late 20's and early
30's as a cycle between looking for dates, planning dates, going on dates or deconstructing dates with friends. He submitted to innumerable setups, and endured the gentle but persistent nagging of suburban-with-children friends. Every year, the fall scramble - the rush to find someone to cuddle with against the winter chill - gave way to the spring fling, and then a rinse-repeat.
It all began to seem a bit small last year when he returned
to New York from a trip to Vietnam, and was greeted by
friends hassling him about when he was going to date
various women.
"When you're seeing the world and civilizations that are thousands of years old - it seemed so petty to focus on `meeting the right match,' " he said, his voice mocking the phrase. "You get a bit older, you go through this a couple of times, you start to think that life is short."
Like others, Mr. Johnson now feels you can't hurry love.
"It's not a backlash or resenting the whole dating thing,"
he said. "It's just, you've gotten over it, it's no longer
of the utmost importance to go on a set number of dates or
be on dates or to meet some specific person. By taking off
that pressure you allow yourself to just go through life, enabled to meet people."
Kara Herold, 34, who lives in San Francisco, grew
increasingly alarmed as friends succumbed to the pressure
to find a mate, buying - and buying into - the endless
supply of love-help books.
"In college when I was 20 it was dieting, now it's men and relationships," she said. "I was in a panic, but part of me thought, `This is crazy, why are we concerned about this?' "
Ms. Herold is turning her disgust into a documentary, "Bachelor, 34," which captures her mother's urging her toward a relationship ("He's Catholic and Republican, but it's nothing you can't change") and her online experiences.
Sasha Cagen, the author of "Quirkyalone," wrote her book
after being, as she said, "thoroughly messed up by `The
Rules,' " the best seller that advised women to play the old-fashioned game of hard-to-get.
"The whole idea that you shouldn't ask someone out, that
you're putting yourself out there to be rejected, that's
just stupid," she said. "It just reinforces this warped, passive vision of what it means to be a woman."
Her manifesto exhorts singles to "resist the tyranny of coupledom." To Bridget Jones's Smug Marrieds, she adds the "Perkytogethers." After she wrote about the concept in her self-published magazine and the story was picked up by the Utne Reader, people in four cities held "International Quirkyalone Day" parties as alternatives to Valentine's Day celebrations earlier this year.
Ms. Cagen, 29, is not against setups or dating, online or otherwise. She is emphatically not against sex (the book includes a lengthy discourse on the Quirkyslut: "usually emerges during travel"). Rather, she writes, she is "anti dull relationship."
She reminds her followers of the power of not yearning for
a relationship. "If you are in a relationship to feel
normal," she writes, "get out."
"I think the era of the pitied single is on the way out,"
Ms. Cagen said in an interview. "It's about trusting
yourself and respecting yourself despite the onslaught of subtle and not-so-subtle messages that there's something wrong with you if you're not dating, that you must have some sort of fear-of-commitment pathology, or you're overly picky or you've become so accustomed to being by yourself that you'll never be able to accommodate another person."
Still, the dating industry steamrolls forward, particularly online services, which claim a huge jump in membership in the last two years.
While the services love to talk about the success stories,
they also admit, more quietly, to the dropouts.
Matchmaker.com said its internal surveys show that the No.
1 reason people leave is that they do not find the right person. Just below that is that they have met someone, and men are twice as likely as women to say they met that companion offline, not on. (Women who drop out after meeting someone are twice as likely to cite an online
connection.)
Tim Sullivan, the president of Match.com, one of the
biggest dating sites, said people can't rely on fate alone.
"I don't think their chances are as good if they don't take
a proactive approach and try to blend the natural fates
that exist out there with a proactivity," he said.
Experts say the rise of the Dating-Industrial Complex, and
the burnout, is an inevitable result of the increasingly delayed age of marriage and the lengthening of the dating years. Nationwide, the number of single households continues to rise. The technology and advice industry that has developed in response advertises efficiency. In fact, Ms. Whitehead said, it offers anything but.
"It requires a whole bunch of energy and time and entrepreneurial drive," she said. "If you do that for a number of years, it begins to be fatiguing and you think, `There are better things to do with my time,' things with a known payoff like travel or learning a language."
"It's like trying out a new diet," she added. "You hear
about a new system or a new approach or a new site, and it seems to offer a lot of what you're after. You go through a period of being very high in the initial experience, then it doesn't quite pan out, there's a low, it leads to discouragement, you think, `Why am I doing this, I can be happy without it.' "
Ethan Watters, the author of "Urban Tribes," which began
with his own exploration of why he had remained single into
his 30's, said as people delay marriage, they begin to rely more on friends, and see relationships less as the missing piece that will complete their lives. "They realize that a good love affair has as the basis a really good friendship," he said. "They're not becoming cynical, but they're getting more savvy about the ebb and flow of relationships. I think people get a bit more relaxed about this thing as they realize that being single is normal."
Being relaxed, the resisters say, is putting faith in the
age old wisdom: you find the thing you're looking for just
as you stop looking.
"Not that I'm going to meet someone across a crowded room,"
Ms. Siegal said. "But I want it to happen in an organic
way, where it starts as just friendship or I meet someone
at a party. I think people think I'm living a fairy tale,
that it's unrealistic, but I don't feel that way. The right person has not walked into my world."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/fashion/30SING.html?ex=1071337125&ei=1&en=4ddbc02810e9c5c9
How to repair the RIM 950
How to void your warrenty 101
Well the screen on my 950 pager was slowly starting to fade. One by One the vertical and horizontal pixels would start to go out, making it next to impossible to read the damn thing. I had wanted to contact www.blackberry.net about getting it replaced and they wanted a ton of money. And to switch my device to another one I had would run me a $50 activation fee (bite me!). So after talking to Tad for a while (The Toy Manager), I decided that the screen would be replaceable with a screen from another 850 or 950 device.
What you need:
- T8 - TORX Screwdriver
- Replacement 850 or 950 Pager
- 10-15 Minutes of time
Once I obtained a replacement pager, I took to the task of opening up the pager. Remove the battery, and the two screws, and bingo... its open... and some random little piece falls on the floor. Note: be sure to open things slowly while you look at everything possible!. The piece that fell on the floor is the reset button rod that sits in the back of the device allowing you to reboot it. I found this out later while opening the 2nd pager vewwy vewwy swwowly.
The bottom of the pager comes appart easily, but the top you need to push gently on the two notches at the top to get it to unlatch while you are tilting the bottom up. The reverse process of putting the top of the pager together first is the best route.
Once inside the pager, you find that replacing worn keypads is very easy, infact it falls to the floor just as easy as the reset rod. The screen is accessable from a flat ribbon cable connector, which requires you to push little black plastic piece located on each side of the ribbon connector UP. I will take a picture to demonstrate. Once these slide up the ribbon to the screen slides out easily.
Replace the screen and reverse the process and your set.
Whats Next:
Now that I know how to take it appart, I'm going to find some Vinyl Paint and make it so I can turn my entire pager RED. 🙂 Nothing like having it blend into your outfit to make a fashion statement.