Not on my wishlist, but fun. Also very practical for the IT worker on the go...

ThinkGeek :: Fundue - desktop USB Fondue Set

Taking a page from SciFi and Battlestar Galatica. Star Trek Enterprise is offering a Podcast 'audio commentary' of the show from the writers perspective. I listen at it is interesting. Too bad they only have 3 or 4 episodes to go, or maybe that is a good thing. I will admit this it is nice to have on science fiction show on while Galatica and Atlantis or on a season break.


STARTREK.COM : Podcast

This is neat, but can be very disturbing... Since I am not allowed to put letters on my refrigerator at home I is very cool, but some users are a little, well, opinionated and obscene so be weary others are playing with the letters too.

Just Letters - A browser based multi-user Flash game

This was courtesy of Dvorak Uncensored » Just Letters - A browser based multi-user Flash game

Not sure how legal this is, but it is pretty neat... You can add the daily playlist directly to itunes or winamp and listen to the songs. You don't actually download the files, but merely listen from the location they were posted to...

The Hype Machine

This information was courtesy of Micro Persuasion: Where to Find the Next American Idol

This is a funny blog written from the perspective of Darth Vadar... The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster

Thanks to Slashdot for referencing it.

Feedburner?

I have moved to a feedburner RSS feed. I am trying to convince myself that I have lots of readers, but only through RSS. Please use the new feed of
http://feeds.feedburner.com/axsy/qaj.

Thanks - Rob

The Revenge of The Screen Savers...

Leo Laporte, of former Tech TV and The Screen Savers glory, posted what appears to be a weekly Skype call (converted to Podcast) with Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, Robert Heron, and himself.

This looks to have great promise and can be obtained by visiting Leoville.com

Strike Two! Fry's fails again

Fry's once again disappointed today. Looking to buy the unabridaged version of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith audiobook. I discover that the store doesn't have audiobooks...

Very Sad...

The Office

Have you seen 'The Office'?  It is a new NBC sitcom based on a British comedy.  Watch it on Tuesday nights at 8.30.

In a gift box, the show is about a office, which isn't difficult to figure out.  The action though surrounds a boss who has some social disorder that made him managment material or in medival times a court jester. It is nice to see fiction imiating real life and that court jesters still have a career path.

Hosting pain... painful memories recounted... Or How EZOShosting blows?

As you all might be aware, Brandi and I have a few web sites, some aren't live yet and other are. Well, about a month ago we moved the biggest of our sites TexasUnwrapped.com to a new server and hosting provider due to some poor performance and more appropriate some poor support.

After being online with TexasUnwrapped.com for a few months and implementing a new look and feel. We started to experience times when the site would be choke to death. Our PHP pages won't pull up at all and HTML would crawl to the screen if displayed at all. Brandi contacted the hosting provider through trouble ticket system and received a 'we don't see any issues' response. Being a busy guy, I didn't have time for the first week to get involved in the process, but day after day the site would choke and Brandi would attempt to get help. Sometimes they would restart the services or the server, but continued to claim they didn't have any issues.

Well, after Brandi explained the nonsense and her concerns over the problems, I took sometime to try and work the issue out. I started slowly by working with support on her trouble ticket. I asked if they could figure out the root cause of the performance issues that we were experiencing... my question was never responded to. After another outage, I figured I needed to pick up the pace. I thought that I might be able to reach tech support via the phone and a well placed call to sales, but the automated voice response hell offered no hope of real human interaction. Once again took to the trouble ticket with a demand for assistance, (ticket below) this time I was a bit more forceful indicating that the support provided was on worse then if I ran the server in my own house (I know nothing about Linux so my support would suck, but at least Brandi could turn it off and on during the day when problems occurred). I also contacted a friend with PHP and MySQL experience to discuss moving to another provider. With my friends encouragement and ezoshostings silence, I got space on another providers server and began to move the site.

Thirty-Six hours later, I was completing the DNS change for the new site and we finally received a response from ezoshosting. It seems all our issues were caused by a new spam filter they deployed. Glad to see that they were able to isolate the cause of the issue based on the recent changes they made. I wonder why I ask users when they complain about a problem if they installed something recently. Unbelievable... Frustration.... The good news is I learned a new skill and we won't have to deal with the company that hosts sites out of their basement.

My good friend Joel has jumped into blogging...

Random Thoughts...

Third try to post the openning day of Astros season photo of Brianna in her new Astros outfit... Ok, I went crazy at WalMart, but you cannot argue with results like this picture!!!

By the way, thanks to EMLarson for introducing me to Picasa2.

Major Nelson released information about the premiere of the new XBox.

Major Nelson.com » Blog Archive » Next Generation Xbox to premiere on MTV

Anyone want to give to my charity and buy me tickets and transportation to one of these?

Star Wars Movie Premiere Tickets - All Proceeds to Benefit Charity

38 days to go!

Slashdot | Revenge of the Sith Officially Rated PG-13

Cargo Pants required safety device?

I recently bought a pair of cargo pants from Sam's Club (yes, I buy clothes from Sam's and the reason is they are CHEAP). Since I work with technology it is a real plus that the pants allow me to store far more then standard khakis. But there is a hidden safety benefit that I recently stumled upon!

If you have your wallet/money clip/money stored in your cargo pocket, you don't have to unfasten your seat belt while paying at a drive through. Isn't that wonderful and far safer then fooling with the seat belt as you wait for your double quarter pound with cheese and a large coke.

I think congress should call the fashion designers , fast food operators, and car manufactures together to come up with a universal plan whether it be manditory cargo pants for all drivers or possibly large foam car separators (akin to grocery lane separtors) to ensure no accidents occur as drivers do the seat belt, pocket, wallet dance.

No earbud condoms...

I am sorry to report that Fry's disappointed today. The Electronics store that seems to have everything didn't have the earbud condoms that I required to replace the lost one on my iPod. I had thought about checking Radio Shack first, but shock myself when I realized I could go to the wonderful mecca of Electronics that opened up next to my office instead. It is a sad day!

On the positive note though, I was able to get a Coca-Cola with Lime from Fry's.

Another new podcast!!!

TheForce.Net - Latest News - Our First Podcast

I never figured when I found CherryOS last year that is would be shrouded with such issues...

Slashdot | CherryOS Goes Open Source

Looks like it might be free in a few months, but I still don't have a copy of OS X...

Somewhere if David Davidson read my blog he would be doing back flips over this great news:

'Transformers' live action film

Thanks to Slashdot for the information and with a little research here is information about the upcoming film from Yahoo Movies

Google Maps has satellite images! I can scroll alone the freeways of Houston finally with no traffic!

With blogs, April Fools day takes on a new level of fun and misinformation...

Stay away from reading any blogs today. Separating fact from fiction might be simple, but I just don't want to go to the trouble.