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 [...]

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 don't get it. Seriously. Twitter? Identi.ca? Jaiku? Huh? It's stupid. 140 characters. I have EVDO in my pocket. I'm a hypocrite. I know. Follow me. Or [...]

Towards the end of last summer I purchased a new laptop since I was on road quite frequently. I selected a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 notebook for two reasons: well known reliability and a I got a good deal from a friend. It was working flawlessly till I updated it with XP SP3 (note that I purchased Windows Vista Business but later installed Windows XP). I found myself having occasional lockups and reboots. I downgraded SP3 but I still found it occasionally problematic. I decided [...]

I spent almost 4 weeks cleaning my music collection. It was one of the most tedious, time consuming, frustrating things I've done on my computer. I started by systematically re-ripping every CD I own. In my foolishness a few years ago many, if not all, of my albums were ripped in the Ogg Vorbis format which led them to be incompatible with my MP3 player, a Creative Zen Vision:M. Anyway for ripping I started with free ware options, but their reliance on the often [...]

I finally got around to seeing the U2 3D and did it ever rock! It was released to IMAX theatres in February but I've been so busy to see it. Luckily I did before it stops playing at the end of this month. I know this old news to people who've seen it, but I really enjoyed it. I would even go so far to say that with some minor tweaking, I might prefer to see concerts like this, instead of waiting and standing [...]

I hate cell phone companies. I truly do. Yesterday I got a call from my provider during dinner trying to get me to renew my contract. I signed up 2 years ago and in the past few weeks I've been getting nonstop mailers, emails and now calls trying to get me to renew. Cell phone guy: "So how many minutes do you use per month?" Me: "Like 100-200" Him: "Hmm, so it looks like ... umm, good ... so how often do you exceed [...]

I've been juggling quite a few different tasks and projects over the past few weeks. Some technical but most are just random personal things. I haven't had much time for blogging or even maintaining my website due to other priorities. But what adds insult to injury is having to keep up with the idiots on the internet. In the past few weeks I've been slammed with spam email, spam blog comments, bot attacks, script kiddies and just plain stupid wannabe hackers. Someone used my [...]