Awesome new Mercedes-Benz commercial with Nico Rosberg, Michael Schumacher and a pregnant woman.

There will be spoilers. I'll start off by stating I think the game is fairly good. Great? No. Worth $60 (plus tax)? Err ... possibly. Game of the year? If EA and Bioware pony up more toys to game reviewers than Microsoft does when Halo: Reach comes out, probably. (GT5 would get 'game of the year' by default for finally releasing ... but it won't ... so, no worries there.) The bulk of my frustration is that I can see where this, could've been a truly great game instead of a mediocre game cloaked in a shroud of game reviewer hype declaring it a great game. It's the same frustration I've had with Bioware games since KOTOR (although I have fond memories of KOTOR that would likely be dashed if I played it now); they focus too much on the voice acting and leave the quest and level design to rot. I have to say though, for the NPC specific missions they did some work on level design. But once you're in it, just the same one-track corridor with random crates / barriers to hide behind. It feels, and is, forced. ...

This post is outdated after the Dharma release, I will copy relevant info from this post to the newer post. [Note: There's currently a bug that has been fixed in svn (changeset) that causes Aeon to crash. I compiled and installed from svn and confirm that the bug is fixed; will create an idoits guide to installing from svn soon. Again, like most things XBMC, it wasn't hard but nobody wanted to give up concise, correct instructions.] Notes I'm filling in a lot of blanks from this guide on the XBMC.org forums here, or the Lifehacker guide here. Unfortunately a lot of this info is scattered around forum posts and these guides will only get you most of the way there. For instance, don't mess with adding the nvidia drivers to the iso ... I mean you could if you wanted to but why not just do them after install? Purpose I need to catalogue all of the changes I had to make so that, in the event I ever need to do it all over again, I don't spend the six - seven hours it took me the first time digging through random forum posts. For my purposes, I want to install ...

Sony KDL-40XBR Review Bought a new TV. Another one. Cause our house got straight up robbed. And all they stole was our beloved 37xbr6. No Christmas presents, no jewelry, nothin'. They rifled through everything, and at first I thought they stole our camcorder (with tape that hadn't been transferred yet) and an old sentimental watch. Later it turned out they just moved them while digging through our crap. Sad that all we own worth stealing is our TV. Walked right by my iMac in the kitchen, didn't touch it. They even moved the Christams ornaments that were sitting in front of the TV and set those aside so as to not break them. Thoughtful criminals. Funny story: Logan was so upset that they'd stolen his shows until we explained that his shows were on the TiVo and it was still there. Which means, in about two-three years the natural evolution is that DVR will be built into the TV. His mind was absolutely blown that anybody would enter our house without our permission. He's still kind of stressed about that. Anyway, back to the new TV. It's not as good as our old ...

This is all old news, everything I have here is found other places, but I did run into a big bug that I had to sift through forums to find the answer to: 2.8 and above has broken image uploads. And from the forum posts its not just when running on IIS. I hadn't run into it when I was running 2.8 on Apache, but I was also running a very old version of PHP. The symptoms are that when trying to upload a picture into a post, the screen will show, 'crunching' and then, when finished, will be blank where you'd normally expect to see the uploaded image along with it's options. If you check the server, thinking there might be a permissions issue, you will find the image that you uploaded. My solution was to downgrade back to 2.7.1. Couple of things we'll need: Windows 2008 with IIS 7 ... obviously (or 2008R2 IIS 7.5) URL Rewrite PHP 5.2.11 or 5.3 Non Thread Safe MySQL 5.1 Community Server [optional] MySQL GUI Tools Wordpress see release archive for 2.7.1 if newest version is still having problems with image upload The focus of this post isn't a complete end-to-end Wordpress setup since ...

Okay, so I've been a big Forza fan from the beginning. To me, it just seems more sim-y than Gran Tourismo; especially GT5 Prologue. I love the new tracks, and I love the new graphics. But, I wouldn't be me if I wasn't hyper critical; Forza 3 is weak sauce. What's weak sauce about it? The damn cars! They're the same damn cars that were in Forza 2. Hello, the world has moved on since 2007. Yeah, sure, there are a couple of new cars here and there, but for the most part it's the same old same old. Audi R10; Audi is racing the R15 now. Oh, and they felt necessary to add the Benz ML63, but not the C63 or the E63!? For that matter, they add a couple of SUVs but then neglected to put an SUV racing series. So, what? You're supposed to race around in normal races against normal cars with a big old SUV? W E A K sauce. And then, I hadn't been paying attention and apparently I have to purchase the Limited Edition if I ever want to get ...

After Lewis made his first pit stop and they started talking about the Brawns being on a on one stop strategy, I knew, I knew, that Rubens was set to hoist himself up into the top three; possibly even the win. The big question was, would the team pull the dick move of delaying him just a touch in the pits to let Jenson leap frog? Or would Jenson pull a Schumacher and put in a stellar in and out lap to pull the lead? Everything played out. Ruben's gear box (that caught on fire two laps from the finish of the last race) held up and it was his second victory of the year. Bigger yet, the old man has out raced Jenson in the last five races. I don't have big hopes that he's going to catch and pass Jenson for the championship. I'm certain Jenson and the team feel that any wins Rubens can take, mean that Jenson's rivals aren't getting them. It's almost a certainty that this will be Rubinho's last season, so I get crazy stoked that I can watch him go out on a high.

How great was my Sunday? Not as great as his, the old man finally pulled one off! No mistakes, no team orders, everything just aligned perfectly. It more than made up for not having Schumacher in a car.

Finally made a decision and bought a bike. Ended up going back to a mountain bike; I just didn't want to be confined to road only, but who knows how much real off roading I'll ever do. Ended up with a Gary Fisher Wahoo. Surprisingly, there really weren't a lot of options in the $500-$600 range for bikes. I don't know why it surprised me, my bridgestone that I bought back in college was $550. And it didn't have a front fork and definitely didn't have disc brakes. Having ridden it for just a bit (once to work and back, approx. 8 miles) a couple of observations. The frame is a lot lighter than I remember bike frames. Aluminum for frames was at the high end back in the day, so it caught me off guard that most everything is now. Which, and maybe this in my head, makes the bikes I tested feel a bit strange. It feels like the heaviest parts of the bike are the extremities. Also feels like just about everything on this bike, except for the frame and rear derailer, is pretty low end. Hopefully it holds ...

And a couple that he did, that I didn't pay attention to at the time. In the vein of '1001 rules for my unborn son', I want to lay down some things for Logan. Some will be taken almost directly, some will come from me, and some will come from things my Dad passed to me. Some I don't practice what I preach; I know I should though. This will always be a work in progress. Learn to throw a football/baseball/frisbee. You don't have to be great at it, just get the basics. If someone is required to carry a firearm professionally, they deserve your respect. They've sacrificed more for you than you want to know. Nobody likes a know-it-all. Sometimes, what someone doesn't say is more important than what they are saying. If you're afraid to try something, force yourself to do it as soon as you can; reality is never as hard, or scary, as you've built it up in your head. Over tip breakfast waitresses. Always smile at a pretty girl. You never know. Never side against your sister in a fight. Nobody ever wished on their death bed that they'd spent more time at work. College is a controlled environment where you ...

Not that I watch much TV; this adds a forth season pass to my TiVo. F1 doesn't really count as a show though. That leaves Battlestar Galactica, which has jumped the shark a couple of times now but I'll stick it out to the bitter end just to see how they wrap up. And Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which is spotty at best. But I absolutely can't stand reality TV so this is kind of all I have. At some point last summer, Heather and Logan were out of town and I was home working on the house. I was getting ready to start an all day trim caulking project (all the cold weather split most of my joints this winter, so I'll be redoing it all over again soon), that I still haven't painted, and I needed something for background noise. Turned past USAHD, and the Burn Notice intro was playing and it caught my eye. So I sat down and watched part of the episode and kind of kept it on in the background. Ended up being a Burn Notice marathon leading up to the season finale so I left it ...

It came down to the last corner of the last lap. And fittingly, he won the championship by one point where he lost it last year by one point. Cynics won't help being able to believe it was orchestrated. Timo Glock, who'd chosen to stay out on dries when everybody else dove in for wets, clawed up to forth putting Hamilton in sixth behind Vettel. Lewis, not able to put any moves on Vettel in the closing laps appeared to lose the championship to Massa. Massa and Ferrari were celebrating on Massa's victory lap. And then, out of nowhere, on the very last corner of the last lap Glock wobbled on the increasingly wet track letting Vettel and Hamilton by, giving Lewis the fifth place finish he needed to go one point up on Massa. Sadly, it was the most exciting event of the entire race. Another season over. I won't see another race until the baby is born.

What a novel fking idea! MTV puts some music videos online; now if they'd just put them back on TV like it says in their name then it'd all be good. Strangely most of the top picked videos right now are 80's stuff. Are us old codgers the only ones that watch music videos now? I tried to pick the absolute lamest video in history to embed. C+C Music Factory |MTV Music