The Dorky and Skewed World of Me
For the most part, I stick things here I don't want to forget, or things that I find might be useful to others. Thanks for visiting...
“Kurtzman said, ‘The challenge of the movie is to be 100 percent true to the fanbase but also to bring in a whole new group of people who’ve never seen Trek before.’ ”
Translation – We’re approaching this in the same way Star Trek has been handled since Gene Roddenberry’s death, badly.” You can’t do both. The Trek movies that “non fans” love, the Trekkers hate. You have to make a choice. Trying to accomidate everyone creates a bad Star Trek movie/show.
A couple weeks ago, our 1998 Dodge Caravan died thanks to a blown head gasket. Instead of fixing the car, we decided to go look for a new one for Chrissy. We considered a bunch of options : the Kia Rondo, Honda Pilot, Nissan Xterra, Nissan Pathfinder, and the Subaru Outback, but in the end we decided on a user 2003 Hyundai Santa Fe. 
(We brought it home today.) It’s a silver V-6 AWD GLS model, with all the options except leather, and sunroof. (Just like my Sonata.) Chrissy’s really excited since she’s been wanting one of these cars since 2003. We almost purchased one instead of my Sonata back in 2004. Anyway, the price was right, the mileage was low, and the dealership was nice. (I recommend checking out Crossroads Ford at Wakefield if you’re ever in need of a Ford, or a used car. They were up front with me in regard to pricing and fast.) This car’s perfect for Chrissy, and is one I’ll enjoy driving with the family on the weekends.
I just purchased the new Apple Airport Extreme wireless router, and the first word that comes to mind is “neato.” It’s hard to get really excited about a wireless router, because it doesn’t really do anything cool like transform into a robot or anything. To honest, the best thing you can say about a wireless router is that “you never think about it.” If you’re not thinking about it, that means it’s doing it’s job. Like many appliances in your life, you take them for granted until they stop doing what they’re supposed to be doing. (Which is what happened to me. My 4+ year old D-Link Wireless Router died over the weekend.)
The Airport Extreme’s very easy to set up (like just about all Apple products) and like most Apple products, you get it setup and it just WORKS. I’m writing this post using the router after about 15min of setup. (If I didn’t configure it on my old eMac it would have taken even less time.) The feature that really sold me on the Apple Airport Extreme is that it supports printer and drive sharing. Using the USB port found on the back of the router, you can connect either a printer or a USB drive enclosure. (Both, if you have a USB hub handy.) This is a great little piece of computer equipment. At $180 it’s a little pricey, but the ease of use, and feature set make it worth it.
At a press conference late Monday, the CEO of Johnson Marine, makers of Johnson outboard marine engines and other recreational equipment, unveiled a new line of heavyweight cruiser style motorcycles designed to compete head to head with industry leader Harley-Davidson.
The new line of bikes, marketed under the name Big Johnson Motorcycles, will, according to Long, deliver what Harley has only promised. “Our research show that this, a Big Johnson, is what Harley buyers are really after.”
Manager Long also said that his company would follow the lead of Harley-Davidson and cash in on a huge market for non-motorcycle related products. “We realize that not every guy can have a Big Johnson,” said Long, “But image is very important to people. If they don’t have a Big Johnson, they at least want to project the image of having one.”
One female present at the product unveiling was quoted as saying, “There is no way I will let Lonnie drop 20 grand on another one of those Harleys, but 20 grand to get him a Big Johnson? Well, that’s something we could both enjoy, and it’s something he really needs.”
Sounds like a great product. I’ll be keeping my Honda though. 😉
From the ZDNet Article:
“Joanna Rutkowska has always been a big supporter of the Windows Vista security model. Until she stumbled upon a “very severe hole” in the design of UAC (User Account Control) and found out — from Microsoft officials — that the default no-admin setting isn’t even a security mechanism anymore…”
“[When] you try to run such a program, you get a UAC prompt and you have only two choices: either to agree to run this application as administrator or to disallow running it at all. That means that if you downloaded some freeware Tetris game, you will have to run its installer as administrator, giving it not only full access to all your file system and registry, but also allowing it to load kernel drivers! Why should a Tetris installer be allowed to load kernel drivers?”
This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Especially since Microsoft has had 3 operating systems with this dumb security model. There is no reason that Windows should require administrator access to install an application. This is one of the main issues involved with the security of Windows operating systems. In the Linux and Mac world, you login to your machine as a user – not an administrator. That way no program you run or install has administrator rights to the system. If you need to do something as an Administrator on the machine, the machine prompts you for the administrator username and password, does the required task, and then reverts your rights back to “user” privileges. (This is basically the “sudo” function found in Unix/Linux.) In Mac-land, for the most part, you don’t even need admin privileges to install an Application. You can just create an applications folder in your home directory and you’re good to go. This is why Unix based OSs will always be more secure than Windows. Until they change the very core of how Windows installs and runs applications you’ll always have to give applications rights you don’t really want them to have.
Scot Finnie, Windows expert for Computer World, has abandoned PCs and switched to Mac after reviewing each iteration of Windows Vista for the magazine.
“Bye-bye Windows! My three-month Macintosh trial has ended, but my permanent gig with the Mac is just getting started. Apple’s MacBook Pro and Mac OS X are now my computer and operating system of choice.
If you give the Mac three months, as I did, you won’t go back either. The hardest part is paying for it — everything after that gets easier and easier. Perhaps fittingly, it took me the full three-month trial period to pay off my expensive MacBook Pro. But the darn thing is worth every penny.”
Full article HERE.
Ah, the laughs, the memories, the NUTS.
For my birthday, Chrissy got me the iH5 iPod CLock Radio. It’s pretty cool. It comes with adaptors for each iPod type, and you can set it up so that your alarm in the morning is music from your iPod.
Another thing I love about it is that it charges the iPod in it’s cradle, so every night I put my iPod on the iHome, and every day I have a fully charged iPod to take to work. Also, the sound quallity is very good (by clock radio standards) so it’s nice to be able to play music in the bedroom. For $58, you can’t go wrong!