Miscellaneous Ramblings....

Amazon's new A9 search engine has cool feature, which is covered on SearchEngineWatch: Visual Yellow Pages.
When you look up a business, you can actually take a virtual walk on the street that the business is on.
Now for the downside: currently this only works for the following cities:

According to Amazon, it will be agressively trying to roll this out to additional cities.
For the geeks amoung us who are interested in how Amazon did this, read on....

In an effort to make Windows more useable (or at least as useable as Linux ) -- I did track down some interesting Windows pages from PCWorld, including tips on customizing the Windows Menus, some nice free add-ons, as well as some pain-free tweaks.

Also, for those who are interested in WindowsXP hacks, I would recommend O'Reilly's book: Windows XP Hacks (Note: a 2nd Edition is scheduled for release in Feb 2005 which includes the new features of Service Pack 2). Most of the information contained in the book can also be found on the internet as well, but there is something to be said for having the information in one place without having to search for it.

OK, just rubbing shoulders with only one so far . One of the people who I work with (and sometimes socialize with) has just had their blog (Fimoculous) nominated for a Wired Rave Award in the Blogger category. I'll keep my fingers crossed that he'll win, because his blog is really cool to read (no, I am not biased at all ).

Yet another nice article that I found on the SearchEngineWatch website (I can see that this is going to be one of my "regularly" read blogs ) -- this article documents a nice tool (Adobe Reader Speedup) that greatly speeds up the startup time of Adobe Acrobat by disabling a lot of the plugins (which most people don't ever use) that Adobe Acrobat usually loads upon startup.
For the power Adobe Acrobat user, don't worry. The tool is a GUI interface that lets you select which plugins that you want to have loaded.
(Note: it is recommended that you (temporarily) revert to the default settings {all plugins loaded} before applying any additional Adobe Acrobat updates).

I was doing my usual trolling around the web and came across the SearchEngineWatch web site. It is a blog that has some nice tech info regarding searches, including this article which details three cool search options that you can plugin into Firefox (or IE). Of the three, I like the jux2 (which lets you compare search results from Google against two other search engines of your choosing) and WhoIs.Sc (which is very robust Domain as well as IP searcher). (Note: If you want to add the WhoIs search to your Firefox search bar, go to this link and search for whois in the Site Name box. Click on the WhoIs Source link to install. ).

I took my two younger nephews to see the movie Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events this afternoon. The movie was good and my nephews enjoyed quite a bit as well. However, between the prices for the tickets and the prices for the food, I suddenly don't feel so guilty about pouring more money into my DVD collection -- it is much cheaper .

Went and saw Hotel Rwanda last night and to say that it was a deeply moving picture seems to be a huge understatment. It was very well done, but at the same time a hard movie to watch, since it deals with Rwandan tragedy without shying away from the unpleasant details (chief among them, the world turning the other way while the genocide takes place). I was very happy with Don Cheadle playing Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager who used his hotel to protect over 1000+ Tsutsis. Don Cheadle plays him with an understated dignity. It does make you wonder what would have happened if there had been 100 more people like Paul Rusesabagina or even 10? (Also, a good book on the Rwandan tragedy is: We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch).

Wellll, it had to happen finally. My (beloved) Cassiopeia E-200 finally went to PDA heaven in November of 2004. After much reviewing and poking around, I finally narrowed the field between the HP hx4700 IPaQ and the Dell Axim X50v. Both had the VGA screen, the XScale 624 MHz processor, integrated Bluetooth and WiFi as well as the ability to take both SD and Compact Flash media. The downside of the IPaQ was that it was more than I wanted to pay for a PDA. The downside of the Dell Axim was that: No way to do a hands-on preview of the product before buying it. Relatively new release (officially Nov. 17th, 2004). Heard murmurings on the Dell Forums board of the Wifi being somewhat flaky. Heard more murmurings of programs actually running slower on the X50v than on the X30. Nonetheless, I still kept holding out on the IPaQ, hoping it would go on sale, or show up in my Xmas stocking . Finally, after missing my sixth appointment (my nephews' school carnival) -- I decided to just go for it -- and I have been looking at the nice VGA screen ever since.... Still working on getting it customized just the way I like it.....

So in the vein of working less hours and spending more time with the family, I go over to my nephew's house this evening to spend some quality time with my grand-niece. I am greeted with "our computer is having problems -- the browser no longer goes to the ESPN home page". .... 3 hours later (since the Norton virus definitions were almost 2 years out of date), I finally have the laptop running cleanly through SpyBot, Ad-aware and AVG Anti-Virus (thanks to my niece for jogging my memory )
(of course, I did get see my grand-niece in between scans and reboots ).

(2/16/05) Update: There is another free Windows Virus software program which I have found out about recently and heard good things about: ClamWin (although I have not used it myself).

Through my internet meanderings, I came across a cool software title which is only available for the Mac (this is the second title -- iCal being the first -- that I wish was available for the Windows-world). It is called Delicious Monster (I know, odd name), and it is a nice and quick way to catalog all of your DVDs, CDs and books, plus it has a host of other features as well, such as title recommendations, a "item check-out tool", etc. Update (09/11/08): There also the added capability to export your collection to the iPhone or iPodTouch. Yeah! Version 2.0 is now available, but only for Leopard.

For all of you SciFi buffs out there, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trailer is online. Unfortunately, the trailer doesn't really give any inkling as to what the plot of the movie is..... BTW: Here is the official movie site: Hitchhikersmovie.com (2/19/05) Update: The Official Movie site now has a much better trailer of the movie online (actually gives a hint of the plot).

While looking through the Visi newsgroups (which I haven't done in months), I did find a reference to a cool freeware tool: WindowsStartup. This tool will present a Windows Explorer-like interface for manipulating the program startup list (as well as providing detail on what each of the startup programs do).
Nice !

Part of the joy of working of working at a company that has a high ratio of geeks/nerds (ahem, I mean, technically proficient people ) is that you get the opportunity to come across some very nice tech information. There are some tweaks available to speed up various browsers' rendering of pages: IE Tweaks and Firefox Tweaks.

{Note: you probably don't want to tweak your browser settings if you have a slow internet connection (i.e. dialup) }

Enjoy !!

Well, I am back at work, after having alot of time off to perfect the fine art of lounging around . At least the Xmas break was good (sans the furnace purchase) -- I officially broke in my Pentax digital SLR by taking over 200 pictures at Xmas (no, they are not online yet -- eventually.. ).

I did find another useful site: Cooltext, which is very nice for generating graphic logos and buttons on the fly.