Its been a long time since I have posted, partly due because I’ve been busy with muh sweeeeetie (*smoochies* if you’re reading this), and another partly because I have been being a nerd and been playing my XBox 360 tooooo much. Well I’m back, with an article I have found from a couple months ago from a supposed third HD format.

You might be familiar with the HD-DVD or Blue-Ray “war” that will be going on for the High Definition era, replacing DVD in order to bring high definition movies and content to the masses. Well this article mentions a third format, that is still able to be read on traditional red lasers. What does this mean? Cheaper devices. The format, dubbed “MVD” for “Versatile Multimedia Disk”, will allow for 20, 30, and 40 GB disks, along with 100GB disks that are on the horizon. The players cost around 150 bucks, well below the 500 dollar + pricetags on any of the other two formats, which could have a great impact to consumers. However, since there is no backing for it, it will be a hassle trying to get its name known around the other two big shots… interesting to see what happens…

The article

Decided to do away with comments for posts on here. There was about 1 real comment every several hundred spam comments, so I disabled the ability to leave comments. The articles that previously have been written may still allow you to try to leave one, but it will just get sent to the moderation queue until I approve it, which probably won’t happen. I would probably just end up clickin the “delete” button to remove all of them… blame the spammers, whoever the few people you are out there who actually do leave comments…

I have been slacking off lately, and you can blame Microsoft. I was finally able to snag me up an XBox 360 from the Best Buy site and I received it a few days ago, so thats where I’ve been :) I am a geek. *putting on glasses* I am such a geek, that you can see my Gamertag on the right —->

I was able to connect to XBox live over a modem, using a combo of it (the modem) and a NIC card in my comp. Hooked the 360 up with a crossover cable into the NIC card, and then shared the dialup connection and Voila! It was a lil slow to run some updates that it needed, as expected, but I was able to sign on fine and actually play a few of the Solo Career races in PGR3 with no hassles, due to it only needing to transfer the total Kudos you’ve earned back to the service and update the boards. Playing actual real people will be a problem, though, can’t do that on a simple dialup connection, but I wasn’t even expecting it to sign on with dialup, so anything is a plus :)

I’ve decided to go back and try to remedy an issue with the anagram function of UnJumble. Currently, the results are only shown after the anagram is complete or if you close the program and view the results file for the matches that it found up until the point the program was exited. Also, the threading doesn’t really help improve anything the way it was implemented. Yes, it is ran on a low priority thread so you can work on other things while it is running, but if you try to close out of the status window, you probably cant without ending the program in task manager.

If I do end up getting the threading done correctly, you can expect to view the results as they appear in the results box, as well as possibly a progress bar to help show you how long the progress might actually take, being that longer strings of characters can take a great deal of time.

One other feature that might be added, and this might be a little ambitious, is an option to retain spacing in the results. Right now, it doesnt keep the spaces within the words, due to the amount of processing required. Trying to keep up with spaces will increase the processing time since any small change in the recursion will take longer, and that much more processing required is multiplied thousands and thousands of time since it is being called recursively over and over, but the results will be much easier to read and decipher at a quick glance.

Decided to post the problems with it here, so it is publicly viewable, in order to give me more reason to get back and try to program it better, so check back in a week or two to see if I have anything ready yet :)

I was finally able to snag a plain Premium XBox 360 console WITHOUT it being part of an overpriced bundle, online. Thank you BestBuy.com. After months of waiting, searching, and then finally giving up, you finally decide to put it up at the precise moment when I didnt give a crap. And I still bought it anyways….

Received my shipment email just a few minutes ago :)

Do you IM alot? Do you have instant messenger accounts on AOL, Yahoo, ICQ, and MSN, and you have to constantly keep switching between the two? Do having all of these programs up bog your computer down because it takes up too much system resources? Do you want to free resources up and handle all of your accounts under one common interface?

Then Meebo.

I recently came upon this link in a programming forum that I frequently visit and gave it a try. Meebo allows you to sign in to AOL, Yahoo, ICQ, and MSN messengers all within a single browser window! Yes. One lil webpage. Nothing to install! No more bogging your system down with buggy messenger progs that take up all of your system resources. You can even sign into multiple accounts on the same messenger. So you can have 3 usernames logged into Yahoo, 2 usernames logged into MSN, etc etc, and all of your buddies will reside in the same list. It was written in a variety of languages, one being AJAX, which allows it to actually look more similar to a regular windows proggy. Best of all?? Its FREE. I have been playing around with it for the past couple of days and I am really liking it. You dont have many of the advanced features like message archiving, file transfer, webcams, etc, but for basic messaging to your buddies, it all works.. beautifully. I believe you can even sign into it at work even if your company may have those messengers blocked, since it is all web based ;)

Its time to Meebo

In April’s issue of Esquire, there was this little tidbit in “Women: Myth or Not Myth?”

Lesbians Like Softball.
MYTH. They much prefer oral sex with other women.

To those of you who didn’t realize, at 1:02 a.m and 3 seconds today, the date was:

01:02:03 04/05/06 :)

For those of you who go by the dd/mm/yyyy format, you have another month…

Microsoft has free downloads for Virtual Server 2005 Revision 2 Enterprise Edition. Virtual Server is designed to allow you to test server applications in a server environment. This allows you to not have to buy a copy of Windows Server in order to do so :) Since I am always a fan of free software, I decided to pass it onto you…

FREE Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise

Added another update to MySystemSpy. It now displays properties correctly that are within arrays. A few additional hardware classes were added as well, the newer version is in the download links on the right.

EZIconConverter is a program I wrote in VB.NET that allows you to create icons from image files. You can quickly create icons from BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG, and TIFF formats. Its small, easy to use, and best of all, its FREE! Click on the download link on the right in order to try it out.

I have went through and created installation packages for all of the most used programs on this site. The packages allow it to be added to the programs menu, with shortcuts, as well as the ability to remove it from “Add/Remove Progams”.

A new update to MySystemSpy is available also. It now includes a version checker that checks the site for a newer version, and now has the ability to send error information to the site when one occurs. A further update is due out in a little while that will display the hardware properties that are within arrays…

For the past couple of weeks I have been renting a TON of old horror movies… Do you know when you have watched too many horror movies? Well, while watching Jason Goes To Hell (Part 9 of the Friday the 13th movies), towards the end, it shows Jason’s “sister” in the basement. Well besides her body is a crate that stands out with bright white letters marked “Arctic Expedition”. I knew right away where it was from, and was like “hey! I actually got it!!”. It is actually a throwback to another old horror movie that they stuck in there for giggles, the movie is “CreepShow”, and one of the chapters in it was a story about a monster who was locked up inside of an old crate from an Arctic Expedition…

The Texas A&M basketball team got its first NCAA Tournament win in 26 years with a 66-58 win over Syracuse on Thursday. Syracuse came in as a hot team, winning 4 straight, winning the Big East tournament, which put them in the NCAA tourney. Syracuse was a 5 seed, and The Aggies are a 12-seed. I haven’t watched many of the basketball games during the season, but this one was a joy. If anyone has watched tourneys in the past, “McNamara”’s name would always come up for Syracuse. He is a hot 3-point shooter, always scores lots of points, and even led Syracuse to a National Championship when he was a freshman. This time?? He had a supposed groin injury, and was kept without a fieldgoal the entire game. How big is that? It is the first game that this has ever happened for him, and it was, ironically, his last, as he is a senior. If you watched during the game, they kept showing McNamara on the bench, and it looked like he was about to cry….

The Aggies face LSU today (Saturday) with a chance to get into the Sweet 16!!

Haven’t posted in a while, mainly because I haven’t been up to much at all, just watching a bunch of movies, mainly old horror movies, so I figured I would put something up so this site doesn’t go stagnant :)

What I’m currently working on is an update for MySystemSpy. Its going to take a lot of work, but I can slowly tread through the many classes I am using and fine tune the values, as well as correctly display properties that are contained within arrays. Right now array properties are not being displayed. Its easy to fix, but takes going through each class and modifying the info.

One more feature that I want to add into it is error reporting. Since I have no idea what hardware is going to have problems with this, I want to give the user some way to report problems back to me when they arise… shouldn’t be too tough… I am halfway there, showing the information. Now its just a matter of being able to send this info through my site somehow…