Gift Ideas

Posted by | Filed under Life

I recently ran across a cou­ple of items online, but not on Amazon.com that I showed my wife as things I would like for Christ­mas. Since they weren’t on Ama­zon, I can­not just add them to my wish­list. She requested I add those items to CB.net as a blog post. I started to do so, but it occurred to me when I find other ideas I’d have to keep com­ing back and edit­ing that post. And even­tu­ally the post would dis­ap­pear off the front page, mak­ing it more dif­fi­cult for her to find those sug­ges­tions. Then it I thought, why not just use my del.icio.us account and tag inter­est­ing items with “wish­list”? I couldn’t see a down­side, as it’s easy for me to update and I can setup a book­mark for her to pull up the page to look at. So have at, oh wife of mine! :D

Halloween Recap

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At work, we had a mas­sive potluck and I def­i­nitely won’t be pack­ing a lunch next time we have a potluck. I’m used to potlucks where most peo­ple bring desserts and you have to bring your own “meal”. Yesterday’s potluck had the expected mas­sive table of desserts but peo­ple also brought in 2 kinds of chili, 2 kinds of stew, roast beef, potato salad, a veg­gie tray, crack­ers and cheese.

At home, we weren’t sure what to expect for trick-or-treaters as this is our first Hal­loween in the new house. I’d talked to a neigh­bor and he said to expect some­thing like 50–80 kids. We bought 2 large bags of candy and had some Hal­loween toys from pre­vi­ous years. Naively, we thought this would be enough. And per­haps it would have been if we only got 50–80 kids, but we actu­ally got some­where between 100–120 kids1! Still our good­ies held out until about 7:45PM and trick-or-treating offi­cially ended at 8:00PM; so we didn’t do too badly.

Over­all, the kids were polite and it was a fun evening. Espe­cially since I was lazy and let Ariesna do all the run­ning around to get the candy to the kids2. How­ever there were a cou­ple of down­ers dur­ing the evening; for one, there were sev­eral kids who stood on the porch look­ing in their bags after get­ting their treats ask­ing what they’d been given. What the heck is up with that? Sure, Ariesna was toss­ing some toys in with the candy but it doesn’t take a genius to fig­ure out what they were. Espe­cially if they wait until they get home and really look over their loot. I prob­a­bly wouldn’t have minded it much, but most of them doing it were the older kids who were prob­a­bly bor­der­line too old to be trick-or-treating any­way. So it was really tick­ing me off.

1 My wife has the exact num­ber, but I for­got what she said it was.
2 I wasn’t entirely lazy, I spent about half the night try­ing to get a a fire blaz­ing in the fireplace.

Top Quotes from October

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These quotes are all snip­pets of con­ver­sa­tions with friends, fam­ilys and co-workers. Some­times the peo­ple I know say the darnedest things (and they’re not even kids). *grin*

  • “Yeah, but I’ve got more crazy in me than life, the uni­verse and everything.”
  • “Never give a nuclear weapon to an unsta­ble girlfriend.”
  • “I’ll let you stick it wher­ever you want.”
  • “Gra­ham crack­ers make every­thing bet­ter, even cold-blooded murder.”

Review: Valley of the Soul

Posted by | Filed under Books, Reviews

Valley of the Soul

Val­ley of the Soul
My rat­ing: 5 out of 5.

My first intro­duc­tion to the world of Fal­dor­rah came about 2 years ago. AWelkin knew the author and had an early copy of the first book, Ghosts in the Snow. My wife and I were over at AWelkin’s house for a visit, plan­ning to watch some anime. How­ever my wife picked up Ghosts in the Snow and was lost to us for the evening, as she wouldn’t put down the book for any­thing. I got my chance to read the book later that week­end and was hooked myself. That first book in this series com­bined ele­ments I really enjoyed from a vari­ety of gen­res into one book and it was fan­tas­tic. Then last year, Threads of Mal­ice, the sequel was released. It was a good read, I found the sec­ond book to be too dark dis­turb­ing for my tastes. At the end of this month, the third book will finally be released. But hav­ing “con­nec­tions” helps, as AWelkin was kind enough to pro­vide me with an advanced reader’s copy. For­tu­nately, I’ll have to give it back and go out to buy my own copy.

Yes, you heard me right. I am quite happy to return this free copy so I can go out to buy my own copy. No, I’ve not lost my mind or been replaced by one of the pod peo­ple. While I tend to keep a grip on my spend­ing money; this book is def­i­nitely worth buy­ing to sup­port the author. This third book in the series is prob­a­bly Ms. Jones best work yet.

This time around Dubric is out of the cas­tle inves­ti­gat­ing some grue­some1 ani­mal killings. All of the char­ac­ters who sur­vived the Threads of Mal­ice are still around but have def­i­nitely been psy­cho­log­i­cally scarred by their expe­ri­ences. It’s really good nice.… Hmm, it’s hor­ri­ble the sorts of things these char­ac­ters have been put through but it’s great that Ms. Jones con­tin­ues to build on her pre­vi­ous work, rather than just ignor­ing how her char­ac­ters would react after liv­ing through some­thing like that.

While Dubric is out in the field, he almost gets his first ghost of this book. I say almost because it’s just the head, the rest of the ghost’s body is miss­ing. This is some­thing new and dis­turb­ing for Dubric. The rea­son behind the ghosts show­ing up in parts2 was a sur­prise but one that fits nicely into the world Ms. Jones has cre­ated. In a sense there are mul­ti­ple vil­lains in this book and Ms. Jones kept me guess­ing through­out the book. Basi­cally, if you like Ms. Jones’s other works (par­tic­u­larly her first book) then I’d highly rec­om­mend you pick this one up as well.

1 Not nearly so grue­some as the 2nd book in this series, but still rather unpleas­ant.
2 If you think reveal­ing that there will be mul­ti­ple ghosts in this book is some kind of spoiler, than you must be com­pletely unfa­mil­iar with Ms. Jones’s work.

Windows Tips

Posted by | Filed under Computers, Software

This post was inspired by a recent arti­cle over at Life­Hacker. But before I get into the tips, I’m going to bore you with a slight digression.

Life­Hacker is one of the very few blogs that I actu­ally check daily for new con­tent. And I’m not talk­ing about using an agre­ga­tor, I will actu­ally pop up a web­browser to hit them up. I read their site so often it wasn’t until today that I real­ized my por­tal page didn’t1 link to them. As a gen­eral rule, the arti­cles there are inter­est­ing and/or use­ful. I don’t have a Mac, so some arti­cles don’t always help me, but over­all they have a really good mix. I sup­pose given how much use I’ve got­ten out of their site, I should be a bit nicer about this.… But the tip posted today was so shock­ingly lame that I feel the need to com­pile my own list of tips for win­dows users. Sorry, jus­trick but this one shouldn’t have made it past the editor’s desk!

Right that’s more than enough com­plaints, here’s my favorite Win­dows tips (in no par­tic­u­lar order)

  • Refor­mat your dri­ves and load your favorite linux dis­tro (I sug­gest either Kubuntu or Open­SuSE).2
  • Use the Win­dows Key shortcuts:
    • Win + E: Launches Win­dows Explorer
    • Win + D: Pressed once, shows your desk­top. Pressed twice, restores your win­dows to their prior posi­tions. The same effect can be achieved with Win+M and Win+SHIFT-M, but Win+D takes less effort.
    • Win + R: Launches the Win­dows Run Box. True, this isn’t as pow­er­ful as the Linux cli but you can do some good tricks with it (I’ll cover some of those later).
    • Win + L: Locks your com­puter, good for cor­po­rate environments.
    • Win + BREAK: Launches the Sys­tem Prop­er­ties window.
    • Win + F: Launches the Win­dows Explorer Sear­ach func­tion, use­ful in locat­ing files3. Of course, if what you’re really look­ing for are other com­put­ers on the net­work then you could use Crtl+Win+F.
  • If you use the Win­dows Com­mand Prompt fre­quently, then set­ting up some aliases for your most com­monly used com­mands is help­ful. the one I like to do on evey Win­dows machine I use is to cre­ate C:\Windows\X.BAT. This batch file con­tains only one com­mand and that’s EXIT. Since the batch file is in the Win­dows direc­tory, it’s in the sys­tem path on a default con­fig­u­ra­tion. When I’m ready to close any com­mand prompt, I just hit “x” (minus the quotes) and I’m out.
  • If you don’t have a fancy key­board with extra keys for macros or launch­ing other pro­grams, you might want to use things like:
    1. Press Win+R
    2. Type in “notepad” (minus the quotes)
    3. Press enter or click ok. This will launch the Win­dows Notepad acces­sory, great for edit­ing small text files or mak­ing quick notes to your­self. the other app I fre­quen­tally launch this way is the Win­dows Cal­cu­la­tor (use “calc” instead of “notepad”).
  • If your Quick Launch bar is over­flow­ing but you still need quick access to more pro­grams and you don’t have a fancy macro­ing key­board, then you can setup short­cut keys for your pro­grams by right-clicking on their icon/shortcut, select­ing Prop­er­ties, click­ing in the Short­cut Key field and press­ing the key combo you want to launch the pro­gram. For example…
    1. Go into Start -> Accessories.
    2. Right-click on Paint and select Properties.
    3. Click in the Short­cut Key field and press Crtl+Alt+P
    4. Now when­ever you press Crtl+Alt+P Microsoft Paint will launch. Keep in mind that this can cause prob­lems with other pro­grams if you try over­writ­ing a key­board short­cut that the other pro­gram already uses (e.g. Ctrl+C).

Those are all of the Win­dows tips that imme­di­ately come to mind. If any of my read­ers have addi­tional ones they like, please post them in the comments.

1 As soon as I real­ized this, I added the link.
2 If this tip offends, I’d apol­o­gize but you should know by now from read­ing this blog, that I vastly pre­fer Linux.
3 Though installing Google Desk­top and using hit­ting Crtl twice is eas­ier over­all and GD does a bet­ter job searching.

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