Yesterday I was sporting my new t-shirt as gifted to me for Christmas, by Brother Jason and Sister-in-law Susan. Now, I had thought that the shirt was fairly self explanatory, and yet you’d be surprised at how many people asked me, “what does that shirt mean?”. (Truth be told – it was only three people which isn’t actually all that many, but there were a lot of confused looks. I’m sure they all wanted to ask.)

If you too are in the latter group of people who are a wee-bit confused by the shirt and afraid to make it known to the world – it’s a take-off from the iPhone’s “Battery Dead, plug into power” screen, only instead of a battery, it’s a cup of coffee, and instead of a plug, it’s a pot of coffee.

Thanks Jason and Susan!

If you’ve ever wondered why some people have a picture next to their name when they leave a comment, then wonder no more! You too can join the elite rank of the pictured cool, simply by getting yourself a gravatar!

It’s free, it only takes a minute or two, and after that, every time you leave a comment on a gravatar-enabled Wordpress blog (gerrod.com, stickfly.com, harveysathome, etc) then you’ll see your smiling face looking back at you. Best of all, they don’t need any personal information from you – all it takes is an e-mail address and a password! (And a photo, of course!)

It may take a day or two for your photo to filter down through the tubes, but if you build it, they will come…

Go on! What are you waiting for?

Don’t get me wrong; I like Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine to rival old faithful.

But as far as I’m concerned, Bing still has some catching up to do. Case in point:

• Search Bing for ZI146786039GB
• Search Google for ZI146786039GB

It’s the little things!

For about as long as I can remember, or at the very least, since a few weeks ago, I’ve been wanting to build a Media Centre PC. It’s not the easiest thing to research – there’s a few places where you can buy something “out of the box”, but I couldn’t find any that would put a machine together out of the pieces I wanted. So, I finally bit the bullet, bought all the bits, and put it together myself!

I’ve never actually put a computer together from scratch before, so I was a little intimidated. The thing I was most worried about was the CPU, as there’s so many things that can go wrong with it. For example, if you don’t have enough thermal paste between the CPU and the heatsync, and it can overheat, burn out, and potentially damage the motherboard as well. Ironically, if you have too much thermal paste, the same thing can happen!

There were a few other gotchas as well, like just trying to get everything to fit. It’s a fairly large case, but due to the way it’s “zoned” (which helps with cooling), there’s not a lot of space for all the cables to fit in. Plus, I made a few n00b mistakes, such as not attaching both power connectors to the motherboard, and then wondering why nothing happened when I powered on.

But after a few false starts, I finally had everything up and running! Here’s the final product – as you can see, the machine fits perfectly into our existing TV cabinet:

The only thing that I couldn’t get working properly was the sound. I was relying on the sound from the motherboard, but as it turns out there’s no optical output. So after a number of frustrating hours trying to get that working, I’ve given up and ordered a Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio card instead. Awesome!

Update: The new audio card has arrived, and has been installed. Just wish I got this one in the first place, it would have saved a lot of headaches!

If relinquish is a word, why isn’t linquish? It sounds like ‘re’ is being used as a prefix to me… Maybe linquish had an archaic meaning that has just been lost.

Then again, it sounds like the ‘pre’ in prefix is a prefix too, so maybe my logic is getting a bit circular.

Here’s a tip for all you youngsters out there – deleting a drive’s partition table is a baaaaaadddd idea, if the drive still contains data that you want. Now this is something that I’ve suspected for a while, but last night I proved myself correct.

Of course, I’d never delete a valuable drive’s parition table for the sake of proving a theory – that’s crazy talk! Instead, last night I was trying to format a spare 50GB partition that I’d set aside on my external hard-drive specifically for HFS+. So I had the drive hooked up to the Mac, and I went to the “Disk Utility” program, selected the empty partition, and clicked “Erase”. Disk Utility warned me that the data from that partition would be erased – no worries, it was empty to begin with – so I clicked OK.

Imagine how pleasently surprised I was when Disk Utility told me that it “couldn’t update the partition table”! Actually I wasn’t worried at that point; it was only when I worked out that, “couldn’t update the partition table” really meant, “couldn’t update the partition table, so I deleted it instead” that the feeling of impending doom set in. Without access to the partitions, we had lost all of our digital photos (12+ GB), videos, music (45+ GB), and the install files for a bunch of different applications. *gasp*

Wise man say: backup!

Thankfully, with the assistance of a few programs – TestDisk and PC Inspector (which are both free, surprisingly) – I managed to not only recover the main partitions, but almost all of the data as well. The only real loss looks to be a few install files which I have backups for anyway.

So the real lesson in all of this, was that it was frighteningly easy to resurrect partitions and files that by all counts should have been dead (once I got past my initial shock, that is). So keep that in mind next time you think you’ve erased a sensitive document; with the right tools and a little know how, it wouldn’t be hard to get it back! To really get rid of something, you need to use a tool like Secure Erase (or if you have a Mac, you can just turn on the File Vault and use the built-in Secure Erase).

I’ve lamented before that I feel like spam is getting worse, not better. Well, about a month ago, I decided that I’d give it a test. See, a few months back, I decided that I’d change all of my e-mail addresses to forward to my GMail account, since GMail’s spam filters seem to be orders of magnitude better than any other service that I’ve used. GMail’s policy with spam is basically:

• If a message looks like spam, it will skip your inbox, and instead go straight to the “Spam” area
• Any message in the “Spam” area that is more than 30 days old will automatically be deleted.

Not a bad policy – so I thought I’d test to see how much spam I get in 30 days. And, well, there’s no point being all dramatic here, as you can clearly see the answer from the picture. Seven thousand, five hundred, and ninty seven messages. (Ok, I wrote it out for dramatic effect, but I promise I’ll stop now). That’s a lot of spam.

Last time I did this test, I worked out I was averaging 40 spam messages a day. This time, just over a year later, and I’m up to over 250 spam messages a day. Scary! That’s a 625% increase in spam! So lets extrapolate that, figuring that 2 years ago I got practially no spam, and using a constant rate of growth of 625%/year:

Boy, things aren’t looking good for me for 2 years from now; my most accurate calculations put me at almost 10,000 spam messages per day! How much cialis can a person possibly need?

(Note: in the time it’s taken me to write this article, I’ve already received 11 new spam messages. Yay for me!)

I just read a very interesting article about a guy’s insight from working for Microsoft. It’s a bit long, but certainly worth a gander, especially for you software engineering folks.

Very few projects at Microsoft have “small” impact. Everywhere you turn, the projects people are working on are likely to be used by thousands or millions of people. You have the opportunity to earn, save, or cost the company millions of dollars through your work.

From what he says, it sounds like Microsoft would be a sweet-as place to be working. Just don’t know how I’d handle having only 2 weeks holiday per year!

Once again the wife has been complaining, this time about our lack of Xbox 360. “Why don’t we have an Xbox 360″, she would say. “When will we get an Xbox 360?”, etc etc. There’s only so much nagging that a guy can take, so finally I crumbled and bought the thing for her.

Of course, I wouldn’t be the kind, considerate husband that I am if I didn’t test the system extensively for her, and as such, performing these husbandly duties has been taking up a fair bit of my spare time. May I say, I’m rather impressed with the whole thing! The graphics are amazing, the gameplay is addictive, and XBox live totally rocks.

One of the other things that we’ve found so impressive so far is the controllers. For a start, they’re wireless – and obviously, not having wires to trip over is a bonus. Even cooler, you can actually turn the system on and off via the little XBox button on the controller! The connection port for the XBox Live headset also fits comfortably into the back of the controller, so talking to other players online is a cinch.

Now, a console gaming machine is only as good as the games, so to kick things off we’ve purchased Burnout Revenge and Call of Duty 2. I’ve only had time to play Burnout so far, which builds on the strong legacy of the previous Burnout games to deliver an amazingly furious arcade style of racer. The Burnout series of games are probably my favourite games ever played. I even gave an online race a go tonight, and managed to win! Woohoo!

My only complaint with the thing? Not enough of my friends have a system, so I can’t play them online. So do yourselves a favour – go and get one for yourself, and let me know your gamertag!

Sadly though, even with all the processing power, memory, and online capabilities that the system provides, Kristy’s favourite game is still Bejeweled. *sigh*. Maybe I should have just downloaded it for free, and save ourselves a packet…

Well, that’s what you’d have to believe judging by the shirts that were handed out today at the Microsoft launch. I mean, just look at this thing on me, it’s freakin huge! There is easily enough room for one-and-a-half of me in there. And that was the smallest size that they made them (XL); I’m not sure exactly how big they went to.

The saddest part is that it’s one of the better shirts that I’ve got from an event; the design on the front is palatable and on the back it looks like a concert tour shirt (which was kind-of the theme for the whole event).

Does anyone want it?

In happier news though, I found a gift voucher for Amazon in my pile of unprocessed mail today – a birthday present from my only nephew Owen! What a legend, not even 6 months old and already he has my tastes down pat. And in other happy news, soon I’ll be the proud owner of another new toy…