I'm a "VOLCANO" Explorer - 20 points

"VOLCANO" Explorer
Found all of the target marks in Mission 8.

It's over!

Unfortunately this weekend is coming to an end. :(

It's a Rhode trip!

And a live blog. It's all geek to me!

[7:00 AM] Ridding the train on my way to the rendezvous point, I realize I can't insert symbols besides what's on my cellphone's keyboard. Crap!

[7:10 AM] Got to 42nd Street and debating with my fellow strap hangers if this is a local or express 7 train. I think it's a local and it better be.

[7:15 AM] It's a local (I told you guys). The dude sitting next to me looks like he slept about 2 hours and keeps starring at me typing on my cell. The guy across from me looks like he slept 3 hours. I love early morning train rides.

[7:21 AM] The train just turned into an L. Everybody in the car check their cellphones. I think I'm going to be way early.

[7:27 AM] Just text messaged Amit. I forgot to print driving directions. I hope Steve's printer is working.

[7:29 AM] Pulling into the station. I'm half an hour early. Damn!

[7:33 AM] There's a spanking new Starbucks at the corner but I already got my bucket of coffee so I'll pass. No reply from Amit.

[7:45 AM] I'm on the sidewalk checking my email, checking the board and blogging... Awesome!

[7:50 AM] Steve just walked out. His printer is indeed working.

[7:56 AM] Printing driving directions or at least trying... What's that flashing?

[8:01 AM] I can't get the printer to go. No news from Amit.

[8:15 AM] Amit is 5 mn away. Printer is printing.

[8:25 AM] Where's Amit?

[8:29 AM] Steve got tired of waitng. He's going to get some caffeine.

[8:30 AM] Here's Amit!

[8:34 AM] Steve's here. We're on our way!

Lost Planet just won't go away.

"MIRAGE" Explorer: 10 points.
Found all of the target marks in Mission 3.



"AURORA" Explorer: 15 points.
Found all of the target marks in Mission 5.



"THUNDER" Explorer: 15 points.
Found all of the target marks in Mission 6.



"TORNADO" Explorer: 15 points.
Found all of the target marks in Mission 7.

All on the same day. I guess I'll keep playing for a while just for the Gamer's points.

Mission 11 Cleared

Successfully completed Mission 11.

Not exactly sure what I'm doing at this point. I mean technically I have finished Lost Planet and I squeezed over 300 points from it but I have the feeling I could get another 50 fairly easily before sending it back to Gamefly. I'll sleep over it.

HOW THE F**K COULD THIS OF HAPPENED!?

My first laugh of the day. And Downfall is a masterpiece.

Mets won 8-4

I love my new camera. :)

Popfly

Ah yes mashups, it's all the rage right now. I received my invitation to Microsoft's Popfly this morning and played with it for about 10 minutes. I don't quite get it yet... But I'm sure I will... Eventually.

Mission 10 Cleared

Successfully completed Mission 10.
20 points...

Back on XP

I finally had the time this morning to roll back to XP Media Center Edition on my main machine. The saddest part of the story was my sigh of relief deleting the Vista partition.

I really tried to make it work but I realize now I should have switched back to XP weeks if not months ago.

I wouldn't put Microsoft latest OS at the same level as Windows Me but it's a close second, there's also ample evidence the wave of discontent is building up but enough rambling I'm back on a working computer! Woohoo!

John Williams and the NY Philharmonic poster update

I stopped by Lincoln Center with my new toy :)

New Toy

Sony Cybershot DSC-H7. I was looking for a new camera and this is the review that convinced me.

We have a poster!

I went to the Box Office to see if I could get a ticket for the open rehearsal on September 14 but they won't go on sale until August 26 when I noticed this right outside:

Just got my John Williams concert tickets!

Finally! And if anyone is wondering, they are in a safe as of this morning not to see the light of day until September 14 :)

More on the Midnight Magic Costume Party

The event held at the Barnes and Noble Union Square was just massive! They had setup areas on all four floors and activities from 5 PM all the way to the launch of the book at midnight.

The first floor was for Wristband check-in. If you had reserved a copy of the book you were getting a gold wristband, if you hadn't a red. That were the Eeylops Owl Emporium was as well.

On the second floor was Diagon Alley with the Magical Managerie, Weasley's Wizard Wheezes, the Apothecary and Ollivanders.

The third floor was Hogwarts Castle where they had converted the cafe in Hogwarts Dining hall and the other side of the floor was the Forbidden Forest.

The fourth floor was for the activities.

Reporting live from Union Square

I just thought I'd drop by Barnes and Noble at Union Square to check the launch of the last Harry Potter book and the event is just massive. They took over all four floors of the store and have schedule a whole bunch of activities since 5 PM to keep everyone busy until midnight. More later.

My 7-Eleven turned into a Kwik E Mart.

First post from my cell. :)

iPhone... Do you really?

I was able to get my hands on an iPhone for a full day and went through the entire process, from taking it out of the box to activating it, to configuring it, to actually using it.

Unpacking the iPhone is pretty much like unpacking a video iPod. It comes in that sleek black and silver box with a color photo of the device on top. In the box is the phone of course, a set of headphones looking exactly like the ones for the iPod but with a mic so that you can pick up a call while listening to music, a USB cord to connect the phone to your MAC or PC, a power supply similar to the iPod but smaller, a dock station and a lint free cloth to keep your shiny new toy clean. Also included is a small booklet giving a brief description of all the basic functions but do not be fooled, the full fledged user's guide is 124 pages long.

The first surprise was, although the phone is silver and black, all the accessories are white. You could make the case for the iPod that most people got theirs in white but as far as I know, the iPhone comes only in one color.

Activation. The phone out of the box is locked and has to be activated via iTunes 7.3. My task was to transfer an existing Verizon number out of a business account with multiple numbers. So just to make sure I wasn't messing up with the entire account I called At&t (the only carrier for the iPhone but more on that later) and the first operator I spoke to wasn't very knowledgeable, she told me that I had to call Apple and offered to transfer me. I realized quickly I had been transferred instead to another At&t operator on top of her game this time. She answered all my questions and I went ahead with the activation on iTunes. It took less than 10 minutes to complete the process and the old cell number was transferred to the iPhone within 30 minutes.

On one hand I was very impressed but on the other a couple of things hit me. One of the reasons I wasn't planning on getting an iPhone to begin with was the single carrier thing. As far as New York City is concerned I would not consider using anything else but Verizon and I'm perfectly happy with my Motorola Q but besides that the minimum requirements to have an iPhone are:

1. A Mac or a PC with a USB 2.0 port and one of the following operating systems:

• Mac OS X version10.4.10 or later
• Windows XP Home or Professional with Service Pack 2 or later
• Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate edition

2. the latest version of iTunes.
3. a high speed Internet connection (iTunes 7.3 + QuickTime is a 58Mb download)
4. a major credit card

and it left me wondering how many people were left in the cold for not meeting just one of those requirements?

Configuration. Apple's strong suit. Not very much to report here. It's very user friendly and fairly intuitive although I find the ringer to be too low even at maximum level and you cannot install your own custom ringer (although there appears to be a hack for MAC users).

Configuring a POP3 email account is very easy as well, as long as you have your account information.

Same goes with the Wi-Fi which was a pleasant surprise since I thought the only way to go online with an iPhone was through At&t.

Using the iPhone.

Part 1 - The Good: You've seen the commercials, you've seen the demos on TV or maybe you've been lucky enough to have someone at the office let you hold his or hers for a brief moment yanking it back quickly from your prying hands.

Yes, it's that cool and having one will make you cool, for the next month or so anyway and since you'll have to agree to a 2 years contract with At&t, I would suggest you to drink a glass of ice cold water and think before you run out the door to buy one.

The touch screen is awesome and seem to be as scratch resistant as Apple is advertising (as in: not like my video iPod). The quality of the display for video playback is amazing. I loaded an episode of LOST to check the quality and it's all I've been waiting for from a next generation iPod.

The user interface for the iPod part of the phone is substantially different from the interface of the standalone iPod and I was finding it awkward to use initially until I figured out I could customize it to my needs by dragging and dropping the functions I wanted to the browser bar and all was well with the world again.

But I don't need to lay down the selling points for you so lets go right to...

Part 2 - The Bad: I had to transfer manually the phone numbers stored in the old phone to the iPhone. Fortunately it wasn't a whole lot of them and it gave me the opportunity to make an extensive use of the on-screen keyboard... I hate it. I thought that's because the keys were too small and I kept missing the target but come to think of it the keys on my phone are probably smaller. So I'm not sure what the issue is but I'm all thumbs with it and got frustrated very quickly.

There's no "Manually manage music and videos" function in iTunes for the iPhone. Consequently your phone tries to synchronize with your entire library as soon as it's connected to your computer. That might work for most users but my library went over 200GB a while ago so the only option you have in that case is to create a playlist for the iPhone. Drag and drop the tracks and/or albums you want on your phone and then sync.

I have two issues with this. One, and that's because I'm really anal about it but, I don't want a playlist to appear on my iPod or my iTunes if it is there for no other reason than transfer music. it's staring at me taunting me... no seriously it drives me nut. Two, I've always managed my iPods, since the first generation, manually. That's the way I've always done it and I don't see why I'm not able to do it with the iPhone.

Part 3 - The Ugly: Unfortunately the iPhone being a phone there will be times when you will have to hold it to your ear. Even if you're using the headphones or a bluetooth headset there will be that one time when the only option is to pick up the iPhone and slap it to the side of your face and you will discover to your horror a layer of grease coming from your skin on your wonderful 3.5 inch screen. I think the cloth does a lousy job at removing it and of course the more you'll be using it as a phone the worst the problem will get.

To conclude this extensive post, I think the iPhone is a great device but not quite a killer app. Even if all the things I mentioned previously where fixed I'm still not sure I would get one because all I'm really waiting for is an iPod that looks exactly like the iPhone but with a 100GB hard drive and I don't necessarily need it to be a phone.

But then again I could change my mind about this.

Leifang's Idolic Collection - 20 points

Collected all of Leifang's idolic swimsuits.
The most pain I had to score 20 points so far. And now on to Tina's Dynamite Collection!

It's not summer in New York...

...until the NY Philharmonic plays in Central Park.

XBox 360 and External Hard Drives: The odd couple

Besides breaking a lot, the XBox 360 is damn near freakin' perfect as an entertainment center, so why did Microsoft had to make it so difficult to connect an external hard drive to its next generation console?

I'm not sure I have an answer to that and I don't necessarily see some ominous plot between MS, the RIAA and the MPAA but here is what I know about using an external Hard Drive with an XBox 360.

I'll start by stating the obvious: it will have to be a USB drive because you have only USB ports on the console. Now that we've got that out of the way it's going to sound umbelievable but the Operating System of the 360, a Miscrosoft product, does not identify the NTFS format so your drive will have to be formated with FAT32.

FAT32 allows a 2TB partiton so no problem there, it has however a very annoying limitation that to my knowledge cannot be changed and it's a maximum of a 4GB file size. In other words you will not be able to store a file larger than 4GB on a FAT32 drive. It might seem like a no brainer when it comes to photos and music but it pretty much rules out videos, especially high definition videos which doesn't matter anyway because the XBox 360 will not play any type of video from an external hard drive.

So to sum things up, you'll need a USB external hard drive formated in FAT32 and you'll only be able to read photos and music from it.

One final note, USB ports on the 360 are "read only" so don't expect to transfer anything from your console to your hard drive either.

It's all pretty useless when you think about it. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go back to watching Tokyo Drift in HD streamed from my PC.

The curiously strong gum

Eclipse Peppermint New Triple Action. It's the good stuff!

Bastille Day?

I had such a crappy day today, someone had to wish me a happy Bastille Day right before entering the theater for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for me to realize we were indeed July 14... I've been here for too long.

I'm throwing the towel.

I was reading this morning the Washington Post‘s article about Windows Vista, then went on to watch the YouTube video of the ever excellent Chris Pirillo.

And I realized that consciously or not I’ve been playing with the idea of rolling back to XP Media Center for a couple of months now. Vista just won't work for me. Not that's it's a bad Operating System, in many respects I love it and as long as you're dealing with first party software and hardware, it's great but when it comes to third party, I pretty much gave up trying to make things work.

Take my sound card for example. I had specifically picked it for it's ability to output 5.1 surround sound to my receiver and the manufacturer even released a Vista driver. the card works fine except that it will not ouput under any circumstances 5.1 surround sound.

When it comes to third party software you can end up with some pretty funky stuffs. To download 'recipes' off Usenet (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) I like to use GrabIt, specifically an older version, 1.5.2 Beta, which has always been good to me. After completing installation, entering my account information, subscribing to my fovorite newsgroups, I then proceeded to download a first batch of posts, everything seemed to go well except after opening my "Download Folder" nothing was there. I knew however from the free space left on the hard drive (big long recipe) that the files were there. After doing a quick search by size and date, I quickly realized Vista was storing my GrabIt downloads in a mirror directory under AppData. I resolved the issue by changing the security settings on the GrabIt download directory:

Right -click on "Download" -> Security -> Edit -> Users -> Allow full control.

Then there are maddening issues directly related to the Operating System itself like the User Account Control(UAC). This thing will prompt you for something as innocuous as a "cut and paste" job. "Are you sure you really want to do what you're trying to do?" Errrr yes most of the time I do, thank you very much. Some will be quick to point out that you can disable it and they would be absolutely right, however no sooner do you turn off the UAC that the Security Center freaks out because your settings potentially expose your system to hackers and viruses. So now here we go disabling the notification settings of the Security Center. All I was trying here was prevent my computer to ask me twice if I really want to move that file!

Not to mention the sidebar that's buggy at best!

So at the end of the day Windows Vista, as it is, gets between me and my computer whereas Windows XP IS my computer. I'm switching back to XP next week.

PS: G4 you can bring back “Call for Help” still broadcasted on G4 Canada and “The Screen Savers” (I hate “Attack of the Show”) any day of the week