Assortments Today

Olympics Closing Ceremony

It’s become a bit of a tradition for me to blog about the Olympics closing ceremony. Despite feeling particularly incensed by NBC’s coverage of these Olympics, I definitely still feel a sense of melancholy to see the Olympics go away after having their company for the past two weeks. These Olympics were particularly memorable and poignant for me because I had the great fortune to actually attend three events – my first Olympics experience ever! I saw

Getting into the Olympic spirit

Almost time…

Super Bowl was fun… and avast!

Haven’t updated the blog in a while, and the Super Bowl is as good a topic as any! So, this was definitely one of the most exciting and action-packed Super Bowls for me in recent history, right up there with and likely exceeding the 2008 Giants-Patriots game. I was actually rooting for the Colts going into the game, but when the Saints stumbled to a ten-point deficit in the first quarter, I found myself starting to root for the underdog. …

No more weird characters!

I’m pleased to report I’ve solved the odd database issue I was experiencing. Sadly, I don’t think I can go into much detail about what exactly I did; I am just no MySQL wizard, and I placed complete trust and confidence in the expertise of others. I do know it had something to do with my database’s charset and various differences between MySQL 4.0 and MySQL 5.0, but I honestly couldn’t explain anything beyond that.

For those who…

Wordpress 2.9 and MySQL

As you can see, there’s an oddity with various of my Wordpress posts. This is due to an apparent incompatibility or bug when upgrading from a MySQL 4 database to a MySQL 5 database.

All of this hooplah was precipitated when I attempted to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress. Wordpress told me, as it did to many, many others, that my version of MySQL was outdated and that I had to update. When I contacted my host about…

Windows 7: Installation

I’m now running two freshly installed copies of Windows 7 Professional 64-bit! As promised, here is an entry on my upgrade experience.

Upgrade and Full Version Baloney

First, a rant. It took me longer to decide how I was going to install Windows 7 than to actually install it. Although this delay was partly due to my idiosyncrasies, I think a lot of the fault here lies with Microsoft and the confusion they engender (inadvertently, I hope) by releasing…

Windows 7

Windows 7 has been released into the wild, and I cannot wait to get my copies. I have an upgrade to Windows 7 Professional making its way through the mail that will be replacing Windows XP Professional on my desktop, and I will be upgrading my laptop to Windows 7 Home Premium (a free upgrade that came with my laptop, and which will happily remove all traces of Vista). Of course, they’ll both be clean installs. I’m so pumped about…

Digital Music Player

I’ve been a holdout on the iRiver ifp-790 for a while now. It’s a durable little guy with 256MB of flash memory, support for a wide variety of audio formats, a built-in microphone, and an FM tuner (which is a requirement for me). But, it’s about 5 years old, and its age has been showing for a while now, particularly in the memory department. With all the hubbub over the new Zune HD and the 5th…

Dell… what the heck

Man, Dell’s Adamo is intriguing me again.

I like thin laptops and all, but this is crazy!

UPDATE: Whoa.

An Update

Haven’t made many substantive updates here for a while. Here are some random ramblings riddled with rigorous reasoning. Or not.

The other day, I downloaded Security Essentials, Microsoft’s new free antivirus program. Surprisingly, I’m rather impressed with it; it actually detected a virus (!!) that AVG was missing. Needless to say, I’m now using it instead of AVG. There are a ton of really basic user interface enhancements

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