NYE

Stephanie and I at Blue Canyon for New Years Eve dinner.

We highly recommend the S'mores dessert!

Christmas in Vegas

I'm still recovering from jet lag (that 11:45pm Pacific time flight home was brutal), but here are some pictures from my National Lampoon's Vegas Vacation

Christmas in Vegas

VHS>DVD>Internet

If you're in my family:
My dad has been going through the process of transferring all of our old home movies from VHS tape to DVD. As he does that, I'm going to then take the DVDs and put select movie clips online for your viewing pleasure.

You can view the movies here

If you're not in my family:
Move on, there's nothing to see here

Need a PS3?

This is the "best" deal I've seen recently on the PS3.

At least they're not making you buy any extended warranties or accessories.

I'm still holding out for a Costco PS3...

YAWTSM

Thought this was yet another interesting way to swap music.

Sick of buying CDs from the store or online? Instead, swap CDs w/ another user of Lala.com

They provide the mailers, similar to NetFlix. You just list which CDs you want to trade, and when someone requests it, Lala will notify you who to ship the CD to.

Cost? Under $2.

Do I see myself using this service? Not a chance. However, it's still a neat idea.

I'll take 2

I had a whole post typed up on this, but then my post got destroyed by either Picasa, Google, Blogger, or all 3.

(I'm guessing it's because this image is gigantic)

Anyway...Walmart is running a deal scam on the PS3 where you can order one if you opt to spend $1400+

Click on the tiny thumbnail for a mega screen-capture of the Walmart site:

People will buy anything

GMail invites used to be hard to acquire. I remember people selling GMail invites for $100+ on eBay and people were happily buying.

Well now GMail is a public service, no invitation necessary. So now what are people buying?

Pre-registered GMail addresses!

Yep. People are paying for "hot" "rare" "supercool" GMail addresses on eBay.

Check this one out. $50+ for a free GMail address?

That one is for wii.will.wii.will.rock.ya@gmail.com. GMail ignores periods in addresses, so somebody went and registered wiiwillwiiwillrockya as a GMail address and someone actually wants to buy it from them!

That's just weird.

Their stock is > $500 why?

Google's not having a good day in my book.

First I've been unable to checkout using Google Checkout this evening. Google has a great error handling method in place:

Then I discover that the Blogger Beta integration in Picasa simply means that the pop up a window to Blogger Beta when you click the Blog This button in Picasa. With the original Blogger, you could click "Blog This" and your picture would automatically get hosted at Blogger.com and become a new post on your blog. Now, apparently that doesn't work even though Blogger (owned by Google) claimed it does.

MyWishlist - follow up

If any of you are going to try the MyWish list promotion that I posted about yesterday, be sure to turn off your pop-up blocker (or add the site to your allow list).

I successfully got the 25% off at Borders coupon (whoop-dee-doo) at 11AM, but the site presents the order form in a pop up window.



So instead of an order form, all I got was:



When you click on the bar and tell it to allow pop ups, it refreshes the whole page....resetting the flash animation and losing your claim to the item.

Now this isn't a big deal for a Border's coupon that I probably wouldn't have used anyway, but can you imagine if that happened on the Porsche?

Amex Promo

The American Express MyWishlist promotion begins today and runs through 12/14.

The main Wishlist items are up for sale at noon, 3pm, and 7pm ET. There are very limited quanities, so they sell out instantly (for example...on 12/4, they will be selling 1 Porsche Cayman for $5,000 at each of those times. Obviously fat chance of getting one.

There are also Wish Certificates that will be available one hour prior to the main Wishlist items. For example, today's 11am Wish Certificate is a 25% off coupon from Amazon.com. These Wish Certificates are free if you can get one, but they also "sell out" instantly.

Last year the only thing I managed to get was a Best Buy coupon that I didn't even use (I think it was 20% off of $200 or more)

( you must have an AmEx card to claim/pay for any of the prizes )

Watch out Donald Trump

Congrats to real estate moguls Jimmy and Jakki VanMetre. Jakki sent me this link to a front-page article about their latest acquisition.

(copy of article here in case the other one disappears.)

Have people gone absolutely mad?

Can we go back to being civilized again?


Please?

It's a good thing I know a programmer...

Well, after poking around, I didn't find any tools that solved my specific ID3 tag problem.

I found a very useful .NET library built by Hundred Miles Software which provides a very easy to use object library to read & write ID3 tags. Using that library, I put together a simple little program to create or update ID3 tags based on the mp3 filename.

I stuck it up online so that anyone else that is trying to deal w/ missing ID3 tags can avoid the hassle of typing the tags manually.

Here you go: Version .00001 of EM ID3 Tool

Just extract the zipped folder to your hard drive and run EMID3Tool.exe
[insert usual warning about downloading .exe files here]

VZW...they can't hear me

Has anyone tried to call a VZW store lately? It's damn near impossible to get anyone on the phone.

The new LG-VX8600 came out yesterday and so I tried to call around to find out who had them in stock. None of the area VZW stores would answer their phone if you select option #4 - Sales.

I tried calling 4 local VZW stores and got the same thing at every store...probably about 20 times total between all the stores.

"We're sorry, Verizon Wireless [Insert city name here] is unavailable. Please leave a message."...grrrr

iTunes renaming problem

I just found a decent solution to a problem that has been bugging me since I started using iTunes/iPod and figured I'd toss it up here in case any of you have a better solution for me.

When I download music, a lot of time the ID3 tags are not properly set up. This is ok if you're looking at the file list, because the files are typically named "Artist Name - Track Name.mp3". But when you copy the song into iTunes, it uses the entire filename as the Track Name and then truncates it to 31 characters.

For example, a recent download was a list of Rolling Stone's top 500 songs. After importing to iTunes, this is how these songs looked in iTunes and on the iPod:



As you can see, unless the artist and track info was extremely short, the name got truncated by iTunes. For some tracks, this completely renders the song unidentifiable (#39 - Buddy Holly And The Crickets -"...Can you guess what song that is?).

I just stumbled across Wes Barris' website where he wrote a simple renaming tool called NameToTag. You just point this tool at a folder of files named in the standard Artist - Name.mp3 convention and it will automatically populate the Artist and Track Name fields in the ID3 tags.

One major problem with his software is that it isn't configurable for other naming conventions, so my Top 500 download which uses the "Track Number - Artist - Track Name.mp3" would put the Track Number as the Artist and the rest as the Track Name.

Since this tools seems to be quite limited, please let me know if you have found a (FREE*) tool that has better support for batch ID3 tag updates based on filename.

NOTE: I did a quick virus scan of the NameToTag program above. However, as with any random .exe file that you come across, use at your own risk and with EXTREME CAUTION!

*FREE is defined as meeting any number of the following criteria:

• Shareware


• Freeware


• Cracked software


• Commercial software with registration crack or serial # provided


• Commercial software that requires purchase - but someone else purchases it for me


• Corporate editions of software that do not require registration/activation

Since When?

I just did a quick search for a serial number for a piece of computer software that I "acquired from the internet" as I have done many times in the past.

When I clicked on a link to a serial number website, I was presented with the following message compliments of Google.

This is the first I've seen of Google intercepting a click from their search results.



By the way...the software that I was installing was a certain application to extract and create disc images. I just didn't want the actual program name displayed in the URL...just in case...

Mapping battles are fun!

vs.

Remember the good old days of Mapquest and Microsft's TerraServer when you had to click a cardinal direction and load one square of a map at a time? Gee, wasn't that fun?

No...I agree. It wasn't. Which is why the current "Mapping Wars" are so great.

This whole thing seems to have started when Google created one of it's killer apps by acquiring Keyhole.

Now we are fortunate enough to have two excellent products that are constantly one-upping each other.

Between Google Earth and Microsoft's new Virtual Earth 3D we have access to a wealth of cartographic information with an interface that is light years ahead of the old school click and re-load interfaces of just 3 or 4 years ago.

Microsoft's new tool actually bests Google Earth, in my opinion, by packaging almost all of the rich user experience that Google Earth is popular for into a simple web interface.

The one downside to Google Earth was that it required a stand-alone application that must be downloaded and installed.

While Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D still requires a helper application to be downloaded and installed, the actual interface is completely inside of IE.

While it would be nice if they could completely avoid the client-side download and installation requirement, the fact that these applications are so graphics intensive means that a client-side helper app will still be required for some time.

Enjoy the new 3D views of the world.

Oh...and don't forget to go VOTE!

No more Pi/2

Looks like Amazon has stopped their A9 Pi/2 discount (3.14/2 %).

It was fun while it lasted.

I feel old

Nothing makes you feel old like having one of your favorite band start to release "Best Of" albums.

On a related note...next month (12/6) will be the 10-year anniversary of my first DMB show.

Friends and Family Discounts

Here's a couple Friends & Family discounts if you're interested:

PDF Links:

KMart 11/5/06

Sears 11/12/06