Brief and to the point on this one – it pretty much sucked. Check out reviews on the IMDB site, but take it from me, aside from excessive gore (assuming thats even your thing, it’s not mine) and a scantily clad Milla Jovovich, this movie has nothing going for it. The plot follows the adventures of a team of commandos sent in to investigate what went wrong at the top secret research labs of a mega-corporation. Turns out evil brain sucking zombies is what’s gone wrong, along with a possibly evil supercomputer and genetically mutated killer zombie bunnies (I kid you not). Actually now the movie sounds like more fun than it is. I guess it would be ok for a ‘oh look what’s on HBO tonight’ kinda thing, but I wouldn’t waste time renting it.
Handy website for windows geeks
Check out The Elder Geek. There’s a great collection of tips, walkthroughs, and explanation on all things windows there. This site was very helpful as I tried to recover from hard drive death this weekend.
‘New’ computer back up and running
I think I mentioned last week that the hard drive started to fail on my primary desktop at home. I bought a new drive from my favorite online vendor and spent the weekend getting everything up and running again. Things went fairly smoothly with a few exceptions:
- I discovered that my machine cannot boot to its DVD drive. This took hours to figure out, the machine was failing to boot to the windows xp install cd. Ultimately I pulled the cd rom from my linux box and got it booting that way.
- I cannot seem to get Firewire working reliably. The DVD burner constantly disconnects from the machine, seemingly at random, which among other things causes burning of DVDs to fail. I’m still digging into this one. So far I know it is a known issue pre-service pak 1, but I already have that installed so thats not it.
Other than that, and the fact that I basically have no software installed yet, (oh, and the fact that it took pretty much all weekend) things went ok.
Have I mentioned how much I dislike Windows? Would that there was something better.
To have eaten what you have not
What is Quorn? Now I know. I’d read a bit about it here and there, and now I’ve finally had a chance to sample some. It’s not bad, tastes a bit like chicken thats been cooked too long, at least in the form I bought it, which was ‘reasonable copy of roast chicken.’
Quorn, for those not in the know, is yet another in an endless line of ‘Textured Vegetable Proteins.’ I’ve been eating quite a lot of them lately. For the most part they are at best just ok, and most of them suck. Most people have encountered them in the form of veggie burgers like Boca Burgers (which are actuallly very tasty).
Anyway Quorn is a product out of the UK and is marketed as the perfect TVP. I don’t know if it’s all that but I thought it was good enough that I’ll buy it again. They carry it at my local health food store. It turns out it’s mostly made out of mushrooms. It’s high protein, very low fat and cholestoral, and a good amount of fibre. On paper anyway it’s great for you. If you’re feeling adventurous, give it a shot, your heart will thank you later 😉
Don’t forget – Free $20 in cash
I keep forgetting to post this. Have you bought a CD from a music retailer between 1995 and 2000? If so the RIAA owes you up to $20. They lost a lawsuit over price fixing and as part of the settlement they have to pay back the consumers they swindled. If too many people sign up we get no money and it goes to charity, but supposedly almost no one is signing up so far. So Go sign up!. Worst case you get some spam from the RIAA, best case they send you a check for $20.
What is there?
Check This out Straight out of Stephenson’s Snow Crash (a most excellent book btw, as is everything by Stephenson). I signed up for a beta account. It just amazes me to see the stuff I was reading about in sci fi 10 years ago turning into reality. This may turn out to be the year of the mass market acceptance of virtual reality as a place to be, between this and The Sims.
Bad karma for 24 hours
Man it has just not been my day for the last 24 hours. First Lisa and I broke up, which though not entirely unexpected was still a downer. Then While I am sitting in my office ruminating on the end of yet another relationship my boot volume on my desktop pc starts making the click of death. It’s on its way out, meaning I will need to reinstall windows and all its components. There goes this weekend plus several days. Then I get in the car this morning and the Saturn makes some very ominous ‘your brakes are failing’ noises when I stop at the first traffic light. I had a hint this was coming from when I drove down to NY a few weeks ago but at the time I chalked it up to ice on the brake pads. So much for that theory. This is going to be a very expensive couple of months for me.
It’s Official
Well, it’s official. Lisa and I broke up last night. This is a bummer. Not a major bummer, there were some issues between Lisa and I that were giving me cause for concern about the long-term viability of our relationship, but still a bummer. She was a decent person and fun to be around, I will definitely miss her, and Samantha as well.
A guilty pleasure
Well, not really. I bought The Cartoon History of the Universe on a whim when I was ordering christmas presents, figuring it would be a guilty pleasure, but as it turns out it’s a great, often amusing ‘clif notes’ version of world history through the time of Alexander the Great. There are two other volumes as well. I can’t recommend these highly enough – if you’re feeling a little rusty on the basic history they taught you back in high school this is a wonderful and entertaining way to give yourself a refresher.
New Cool link of the day
Check out symbols.com. They have a huge searchable encyclopedia of symbols, everything from radiation to Danger, here there are people who will arrest you. No fooling – there’s all kinds of cool stuff. They also have a downloadable version of the encyclopedia.
