Hmm, looks like it might be time to stop using that pirated version of Windows...

This article on news.zdnet.com goes over Microsoft's new plan to "provide a better experience for users of licensed software." Right. Sounds more like a way to find out more about who's NOT using licensed software to me. It's optional at this time, but who knows? They could start making it an automatic mandatory check, like whenever you go to Windows Update it would automatically check maybe. We'll see what becomes of this, if anything.

Make your own Flash movie

This site is pretty fun - D.Film Moviemaker. you can choose from pre-rendered backgrounds and characters, add some music and your own words and make a fun little flash movie! Have fun!!

Try it - you might like it

Been listening to some new bands recently on my iPod -

Coheed and Cambria - a quirky little band from upstate New York. You've possibly heard the single A Favor House Atlantic or seen the video for it. If your interested and you have iTunes, you can click this iTunes button to download it for yourself!


My wife heard this song and thought it was Rush - because she thinks the singer sounds like Geddy Lee. And he does - a little bit :)

Lacuna Coil - an Italian band, kinda Goth rock, I like the tune Heaven's a Lie a lot. A guy on a message board I frequent described Lacuna Coil as "Evanescence, but with talent". Hey, that's not nice... or am I dumb for thinking Evanescence has some talent? Again, if you're interested and have iTunes, you can download the song by clicking the iTunes button -




By the way - these aren't free downloads. If you want them, you'll have to pay 99 cents. Not a bad price to hear some cool new music, but I wanted to be sure nobody thought I was giving away free music or something!

Whoops, forgot one!

Forgot one game on the post from yesterday -

SIMS 2 - for PC - This is probably the most anticipated sequel of the year so far, I can't believe I forgot to list it before! It's getting good reviews from the game magazines - looks like it's even more fun than the original, and I'm sure it will sell VERY well.

New and upcoming video game releases

I know I said I'd be posting yesterday, but I had a big problem with my PC and spent a good few hours fixing it, didn't feel much like doing anything else on a computer after that! So, here's a little info about some upcoming video games (a subject near and dear to my heart) that sound like fun -

FABLE - for PC and Xbox - This game came out today, and it sounds really cool. It's a role-playing adventure game with a twist - everything you do from childhood (where the game begins for your character) to death - affects the game and your character, how he looks and acts and interacts with everyone in the game. Neat stuff.

HALO 2 - for PC and Xbox - This one doesn't come out til November 9th, and I can't wait!! It's going to be even better than the original Halo, check out the trailer if you don't believe me.

KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC II : THE SITH LORDS - for Xbox on 12/04 and for PC on 2/05 - I loved the first KOTOR, and this one certainly is shaping up to be as good if not better than it was.

PLAYBOY : THE MANSION - for PC and Xbox and Playstation 2 - This game gives you the chance to BE Hugh Hefner, building the Playboy magazine empire from scratch. And as you become more rich and famous, you get to outfit the Playboy mansion and throw huge star-studded events. Could be a good time! (Definitely ADULTS ONLY, though)

LEISURE SUIT LARRY : MAGNA CUM LAUDE - for PC and Xbox and Playstation 2 - The new installment of the famous Leisure Suit Larry series looks like it will live up to the old games and will also push the boundaries of the Mature rating for video games! This one is out now, check it out - if it's your kind of game :) (Again, ADULTS ONLY).

Short post

Not going to be able to post much of anything, cause I'm sending this one in over dial-up. Yuck. I had forgotten how bad dial-up sucks. Cable modem or DSL - it's the only way to fly, baby. I'll have much more to say tomorrow once I'm back at my own PC and my cable modem and wireless network. That's the good stuff!

Never Forget

Resident Evil:Apocalypse

Went to see an advance screening of Resident Evil:Apocalypse last night with my wife. She's not a big video game fan, so it wasn't her cup of tea, but we had a good time. I thought it was an alright movie, and that it was certainly better than the first one. Milla Jovovich is back - but none of the other actors from the first movie. It also stars Sienna Guillory and Oded Fehr. Here are a couple of pictures -

Sienna Guillory as Jill Valentine


Milla Jovovich as Alice


Like the first movie, this one also dosen't hold true to the storyline of any particular Resident Evil game, but uses some pieces of the games and develops a story based on events that happen in them. This one borrows plot elements from Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3:Nemesis. It was a pretty decent movie - especially since we got to go to the advance screening for free!

Truly not happy about this...

Alright, I read this story from USA Today. And I got a little mad, because I'd jokingly said awhile back "Gee, wouldn't it suck if Lucas goes back and replaces Sebastian Shaw with Hayden Christensen at the end of Return of the Jedi?" And he DID IT. Man, I'd actually pay a lot of money to get the real, unchanged, un-Special Edition, ORIGINAL Star Wars Trilogy on DVD. But apparently that isn't even close to what we will be getting on September 21st. Damn it, we need to save these movies from their directors!!

Michael Moore wants to show Fahrenheit 9/11 on TV before the election

Here's a link to a message written by Michael Moore and posted on his website in which he explains why he isn't submitting Fahrenheit 9/11 to be nominated for a Best Documentary Academy Award. This is a great idea!!

Whoopsie

Seems like Blogger was having some server trouble yesterday. I wrote two posts for the blog yesterday morning, and tried (several times) to publish them - with no success. Kept getting an odd error message, after it had tried for 5 minutes or longer to publish. So I emailed Blogger support around 10am yesterday, and hadn't heard anything back from them by 3pm. I decided to try one last time to publish the new posts - and that time it worked! I did get a reply from Blogger support later on that said they had been having some problems and that they should be resolved now. So now I'm keeping my fingers crossed every time I try to publish new posts to the blog - hey, you never know what will help, right?

I'd heard a story about this band on NPR a week ago, and just today got around to checking out their website. The Mini Bosses. They play rockin' versions of old NES game music, like from Mega Man and Ninja Gaiden. You can download a few songs from the website to see what I mean. Takes me back to the old days when I spent hours sitting by the TV playing those games on my NES - good times...

Atari to re-issue some old games

Interesting news here - Atari announces it will re-issue some of it's old games. Called "Atari Anthology", it will include 85 games that were originally on the Atari 2600. Another collection of re-issues, Atari Flashback, will include 20 games and will actually be a miniature Atari 7800 console complete with old school joysticks. Might be cool, might suck - I'd totally kill at all the 2600 games.

Give 'em the old flim-flam flummox, daze and dazzle 'em...

Greetings all - I had intended to post on Labor Day, but it turned into a really weird day that involved a almost 2 hour stint at the urgent care office (not for me, for my wife), followed by a fruitless search for a open pharmacy on a holiday. Some HAD been open, but since we were looking for one after 5pm, they had closed. Everything is OK, no major trauma and she ended up not needing the prescription anyway. But no post Monday. Ah well, could have been worse.

Yesterday we went to see Chicago - The Musical at the Ohio Theatre. Been a while since I've seen a musical, and I really enjoyed it. We have season tickets, and this was the first show of the series. A really great way to start - hopefully the other shows will be as good or better. Coming up in the series are Oliver!, The Producers, and Moving Out, among other shows. Should be a good series!

America lagging behind in broadband access?

Acoording to this article, the US has dropped from third to tenth in country-wide broadband penetration across the globe. And some articles in the media indicate that America has "missed the high speed revolution" and is a "broadband backwater". Sure, South Koreans and Swedes "enjoy 100Mbps connections" - but they are more compact geographically the the US. No denying though that I personally would LOVE to have a 100 Mbps broadband connection (by comparison, the best available cable modem connection in the area I live in is 6 Mbps download and 512 kbps upload). Heck, who wouldn't want to be able to download a 72 megabyte file in like 6 seconds?

The new iMac

The new version of Apple's iMac was unveiled at the Apple Expo on France on Tuesday. Here's the info from Apple's website, and here is a picture of what it looks like "under the hood".

Don't Panic!!!

This is awesome news from the BBC - new version of Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy text adventure game to launch on BBC Radio 4's website. The original version was created by Douglas Adams and Infocom back in the 80's, and I loved that game. The online version of the original game can still be found through this website, but read the description on the page carefully to learn how to play the game online. EDIT - Apparently the website's online java version of the game is not always available, so some times it may not work. You can try again later in the day. Just an FYI.

It's still a really funny (although sometimes exasperating) game, and it really brings back memories of the old days when I played it on my old Atari 800 (64K of RAM, baby!!). The packing for the game was the best - all the neat stuff you got with it. It came with Peril Sensitive Sunglasses (black cardboard wrap around sunglasses), pocket fluff, a miniature space fleet (empty plastic bag), Hitchhiker's Guide brochure, and "Orders For Destruction". They just don't make games like that anymore.

Go see Napoleon Dynamite - it's fricken' AWESOME!

Forgot to mention this a couple days ago, but my wife and I went and saw Napoleon Dynamite last Saturday. It was really funny, and we thought it was pretty good. The website is kinda fun too, has some quizzes based on events from the movie. Anyway, I'd recommend the movie pretty highly - and stay till the end of the credits!

Not sure about this idea...

Sorry for the lack of posts recently, and the brevitiy of the few post I made within the last week or so, I've been kinda out of it. But I think I'm finally over being sick, so that's a good thing! And hopefully I'll be able to post more often now, which would be an even better thing, right?

This is kind of interesting, but I'm not sure it's a good idea - Nintendo's new handheld gaming system, the Nintendo DS, to have free Voice over IP chat feature. The deal with it is you can connect a headset to your DS and use it's built in 802.11b WiFi capability to connect to a wireless hotspot and then chat with other Nintendo DS players. But the maybe not so good part mentioned in the article is that you can also make free phone calls. I'm hoping that isn't actually the case, but I suppose it is theoretically possible. Nothing on the company website specifically confirming or denying this - there is some pre-release DS info on their site here. It does mention voice chat and wireless networking for multi-player, but not VoIP calls. We'll hear more about this in the coming months, I'm sure.

Google Search bar

You'll notice that there is a Google search bar up under the blog title, but there's also a search bar at the very top of the page. Well, the one at the top is a Blogger feature and is there to search this site only. The Google search bar under the title runs a normal Google search - just starts it from my site. You'll probably also notice ads from Google too - hey, like many other people out there blogging and whatnot - I want to get PAID too!! Many other sites use Google's ads, now I do too. So, do click an ad or two if you see something interesting - every little bit helps, right?

And the winner is -

Read this article to find out what the top ten Sci-Fi movies are, according to The Guardian UK's panel of experts. That list works for me, I agree with it for the most part. I probably would have put The Matrix up just a little higher, but not much higher.

Don't forget to watch Dave Chappelle's Showtime special, For What It's Worth. It premieres on September 4th at 9pm.