mjm wired ;)  

A few days before Christmas I decided to watch Avatar with my brothers. I don't visit theaters often, so I thought it would be fun to watch it in IMAX 3D (based on great past experience). Considering it was the holiday season with more crowds the box office, I opted to purchase tickets online for a reserved seating show (a first for me). For security, I used a temporary credit card number (like I always do) and printed my confirmation/receipt and went to the [...]

This Thanksgiving was really unlike any previous that I can really remember. To start, very few guests actually came. While the house was full for Thursday night dinner, no one actually stayed over. Considering this year's events (2 weddings and a funeral), it was not much of a surprise. I just did not intend to be graced with an abundance of free time. With that there were quite a few "firsts" this year. My parents broke tradition and actually decided to cook a turkey. [...]

As I previously mentioned, I had a rocking good time at the U2 concert in Pasadena. I trekked all the way across the country because the 360 Tour was not coming to Michigan like they did in 2005. For those who were not as fortunate, the whole concert was performed live on Youtube (an internet first!). ... Anyways, when the dates were announced in April, I made the commitment to come out to California. Since I took floor ("non-seat") tickets in 2005, I thought [...]

I got back from my trip to California last night. As previously noted I was intending to relax a bit but that never really happened. For better or worse (more of the better), I went around. A lot!. I had a different city for pretty much every day. And I really don't know what I was expecting, but the traffic and driving were too much for me. Although, I was doing much more traveling on account that I was a tourist. I had a [...]

It has been rather stressful summer for me. Lots of ups and downs both personally and professionally. Unsurprisingly, I survived the last round of layoffs, but in some weird way I would not have been upset had I been let go. Quite a few "alternate" scenarios played out in my head. I'm an excuse person, I need an excuse to do something and not the other way around. Losing your job would be a great excuse to take some time off and relax or [...]

There is a pretty popular video featuring a staged wedding intro dance at a church in Minnesota. When I saw the video a week ago I think the view count was somewhere near the million mark(?) and as of today it is has passed 13 million views! Almost every news outlet has picked up the story considering the story is quite simple: a fun dance at a wedding featured on Youtube. I saw this CNN link about the video via the blogosphere. From the [...]

And the cycle is complete... Today Mozilla released version 3.5 of their popular Firefox web browser. The browser came with a exclusive Private Browsing mode which by their own words claims: "won't leave a single browsing fingerprint behind for others to discover". As silly as that statement is, Firefox is actually the 3rd browser to ship with such a feature. Chrome by Google (ironically Mozilla's primary "benefactor") introduced "Incognito Mode" last year, and even Microsoft's IE8 beat Mozilla with "InPrivate Browsing" in it's release [...]

I think it was during late 2004, that my younger brother said he wanted to buy a digital camera since he would be taking a trip to France. After a little bit of research (and seeing the ugly pictures from a co-worker's Sony camera), we both settled on a Canon PowerShot S410. I had a gift certificate from Best Buy, so I picked up S500 that Christmas (same camera but 5MP instead of 4.1MP). I have never regretted that purchase. For the past 4+ [...]