Q: How many MIS guys does it take to change a light bulb?
A: MIS has received your request concerning your hardware problem and has assigned you request service number 39,712. Please use this number for any future references to this light-bulb issue.
I tried Bluetooth several years ago and it left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s kind of like diet sodas. They taste alright for a couple of seconds but then that taste sets in and you want to pour the rest out. So I stayed away from anything that said Bluetooth. On every laptop, tablet pc and PDA I’ve messed with, one of the first things I did was turn off the Bluetooth. One reason was for power consumption but another was because secretly I was afraid of it. I’m a computer guy, give me a computer and some software and I’ll have it figured out in a short period of time. I’ve just about never been stumped by something that I couldn’t research it on the web and get it working. Bluetooth stumped me back then and I never forgot it. The scar is like that scar on Harry Potter’s forhead. Instead of a lightening bolt though it’s the shape of the Bluetooth logo.
I got a new phone, the Motorola Razr V3c and it’s got Bluetooth. It was frightening but I turned it on, turned on the Bluetooth on my tablet PC and set about getting them to talk nicely. It took about 10 minutes but I overcame my fears and conquered the beast! Then I was feeling cocky and I got the phone to talk to my Pocket PC and guess what… it worked too! :) Read my review and article about the Motorola Razr V3c on my other blog MISGuys.com
If ever there was an electronic device that would easily entice a guy to forsake his wife and have an affair with, it would certainly be the sexy Motorola Razr V3c. It is hot. I had the Motorola v265 and actually really liked it. Not enough to forsake my wife or anything, but It worked really well and I have had no problems with it. I used a V60 for a couple of years awhile back and really liked it as well. For a brief time I was enticed away from Motorola by the Kyocera Slider se47. It was bad. The thing got so hot I thought it might explode while I was talking on it for long periods of time.
I’ve had the Razr a couple of days and like I said I love it. The screen is huge and beautiful. The mp3 ringtones are way cool. The design and shape is great and solid. The sound quality is amazing. The camera works really good for a camera phone. Check out my moblog for some shots. The images on my moblog that are 640×480 are from the Razr. All of the other shots are from the v265. It’s not likely to replace my Nikon D70 anytime soon, but the camera works good.
I messed around and figured out the Bluetooth transfer for getting images on and off of the phone as well as getting mp3 ringtones onto it. It took a couple of minutes to get the two devices talking to each other. This was much faster than I expected. I experimented with some bluetooth stuff when it first came out and had a world of trouble getting it to work. I got the Razr to talk to a Motion Computing tablet PC and with my Dell Pocket PC. You’ll need to go to settings/connection/Bluetooth/Setup/ and do a couple of things on the phone. Change the name to something easily recognizable, make sure the bluetooth power is on and after those hit Find me. The Find me will make the phone “discoverable” by other devices for 60 seconds. This is a security feature so that your phone isn’t just out there all the time able to be connected to by other devices. Goto the other device and do a search for the phone and it should pop up. I always come back in and turn the bluetooth back off just to be safe.
Making ringtones out of mp3 songs was pretty easy. I used Sonic Foundry Sound Forge to get the piece of the song I wanted. Most of the ones I did were around 15 to 20 seconds. Since the clip I’m using is in the middle of the song I use the Process menu and select Fade-in to get a clean start to the clip. Then use Fade-out at the end of the clip. Then re-encode to mp3 and change the bit rate to 32k a sec at 22,050 hz, set it to mono and save. You then end up with a 80k to 100k mp3. From there I use the blue tooth file transfer to send it to my phone and viola! The Razr seems to not like long filenames so change the name of the file to something short. It didn’t like “I still havent found what I’m looking for” for a filename.
For the wallpapers 176×220 seems to be the perfect size. I just took regular jpg’s from my photoblog and grabbed pieces of a couple of those and get them sized to 176×220, transferred them to the phone and they look great! Here are a couple of the wallpapers I made for mine: (you are welcome to take these and use them all you want)
One little tip, I renamed the wallpapers and mp3’s after I got them on my phone and put a period at the beginning of the filename. That way they are all grouped together. The phone comes with a bunch of default images and sounds (which I’d like to just delete, but it won’t let me) and this little trick makes it easier to find the stuff you’ve put on the phone.
Overall I’m highly impressed with the phone. I didn’t really have any problems with my last phone, I was adding an extra phone to my plan so my wife would quit taking mine. I started to go with one of the cheaper phones and decided to splurge and get the Razr. Mostly because Brandon has one and I’ve got to keep up with him. You know that whole keeping up with the Jones disease. :)
I’m not a big city guy. I like where I live, it’s not big, but it’s not too small either. If you ever get a chance to visit Chicago I highly recommend it! I get to go there at least once a year. Over the past couple of years I’ve gone 2 and 3 times a year. During our many visits I’ve done most of the museums and attractions. Michigan avenue is the shoppers paradise. Riding the subway is pretty fun.
We flew in yesturday and walked ourselves into pain! We fly out tommorrow, so you can probably guarantee you’ll see shots from there over the next week or so.
It’s way too big for me to live there, but visiting sure is fun!
Thanks to Brandon for the picture of the Chicago skyline. He’s also my fellow Chicago adventurer. He’s started posting some of the shots he got this time around as well.
I love finding movies that were shunned by critics and yet are actually good movies, at least by my standards. House of D was written and directed by David Duchovny, he also plays one of the parts in the movie as well. Also in the movie was Robin Williams, Tea Leoni, Erykah Badu and Anton Yelchin. Anton Yelchin did a great job as the lead character Tommy. He was also in Hearts In Atlantis with Anthony Hopkins a few years ago and I liked that movie as well.
This movie isn’t your big blockbuster action packed movie. It’s follows Tommy as a 13 year old back in 1973 and some of the experiences that changed his life. Robin Williams plays Tommy’s retarded friend and did a great job as he usually does. Tea Leoni also did well I thought as Tommy’s mom.
The critics gave this movie a C with comments like “…House of D, is like the kind of sticky greeting card you’d find on CBS some Sunday nights…” or “…goes from bad to unbearable…” I have to disagree with them and easily give this movie a B+.
I’m not usually one for making New Year resolutions. They tend to not make it past the first week in January. But I decided this year to actually make one. Check out these definitions of resolution; resolving to do something (you aren’t supposed to use the word you are defining in the definition). A course of action determined or decided on (I like this one). A formal statement of a decision or expression of opinion.
I think alot of people make New Years resolutions without a course of action. They say I’m going to exercise more or I’m going on a diet or I’m going to stop smoking, but there’s never a plan or thought to how they will achieve the goal.
My New Years resolution isn’t top on many people’s list. Some might ask why that, but it’s to read my Bible every day this year. I started my photoblog almost a year ago. February 5th will be one year of posting a picture a day and I’ve actually managed to do that. So I thought surely I can spend 15 to 20 minutes each day and read the Bible. I hope by making my decision public and telling others that I’ll build some accountability and outside incentive to keep to it.
What are your New Years resolutions? Do you have a plan or thought to how you will stick to it?
This is exciting, it’s long been a pet peeve of mine that the scroll wheel never worked in the user interface for Visual Basic 6. I managed to get it working once awhile ago but it quit working soon after and I couldn’t ever get it back. I tried mouse drivers and a ton of other things. Well, while searching the web for tips on capturing extra mouse button events in Visual basic (which I still don’t have down yet) I ran across a blog called Unhandled Exceptions and a link to an article on Microsoft’s website for a fix. In his blog he mentioned the fact that the link on Microsoft’s site was broke, so I’m putting the fix on my site for future downloads in case Microsoft’s quits working. Of course now I can goto Microsoft’s support site and search for “scroll mouse visual basic 6” and the article with the fix is the first one in the list. For those of you who this is old news, I swear I tried searching Microsoft’s site, honestly I did. :)
Wow! Highly impressive. Peter Jackson shows his stuff and it was good. The first hour or so is a little slow, but Jack Black and Adrien Brody carry it well. The special effects are incredible. Naomi Watts did the best out of the actors in the movie in my opinion. I see so many movies and you just can tell when an actress or actor just doesn’t play the role and make it believable. Naomi was totally believable and did an awesome job. I wasn’t as impressed with the music as I was for Chronicles or Batman. But it was good. Kong did manage to knock Chronicles of Narnia from the top spot but it didn’t actually do as well over the first weekend as Chronicles did. Since I don’t think there are going to be any more really good movies for 2005 here’s my list of favorites for the year.
1. Chronicles of Narnia
2. Serenity
3. King Kong
4. Batman
5. War of the Worlds
Number 1 movie of the year hands down. That’s my opinion at least.
According to imdb.com the top movies for the year were (followed by my opinion):
$380,262,555 Star Wars: Episode III – Good, not great
$234,277,056 War of the Worlds – Really good
$209,021,798 Wedding Crashers – Wouldn’t touch it
$206,438,942 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Good, kinda wierd
$205,343,774 Batman Begins – Awesome, very good
$201,010,207 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – No thanks
$193,136,719 Madagascar – Good, not great
$186,330,528 Mr. & Mrs. Smith – Good, not great
$177,575,142 Hitch – Really good
$158,115,031 The Longest Yard – Avoid at all costs, too much cussing.
Not sure how well Chronicles will do in the box office, but in my opinion it beats all of these movies. The acting wasn’t top notch, then again the majority of the acting was kids and they did do a good job. I did think James McAvoy, Mr. Tumnus the faun, did really well. The White Witch, Tilda Swinton, was very believable and well done. I also enjoyed Liam Neeson as the voice of Aslan. From what I remember of the book the movie seems to have followed the story line exceptionally well. There were a couple of scenes that looked too fake. The animation of the animals and mythological creatures was wonderful. The battle at the end was on the size of some of the battles in the Lord of the Rings (my all time favorite movie by the way).
I went into the theater with fairly low expectations, not sure what to expect. I left impressed and wanting to see it again.
I’m curious to see whether they make any of the other Chronicles stories into movies. It’s a little unlike The Lord of the Rings in that the other 6 books don’t feature the same characters. I think the White Witch is in one of them, if I remember correctly. One last point…it’s good to see a well done captivating movie with no cussing and sex.
I have an application that I’m working on. As a side note it’s related to a previous post here on MISGuys. I wrote awhile back about RSS readers and the fact that I couldn’t find a single one that did what I wanted or that was priced reasonably. So I decided to make my own. It’s called squatRSS.
Not sure why I chose that name, it just jumped out at me and I stuck with it. I’ve got a pretty good start but it’s not ready to be released yet. I hope to release it at a later date. While I’m not trying to get rich on it I do plan on charging $10 for it because I have spent around 25 to 30 hours so far and I’m sure I’ll spend that much or more before I am ready to release it. We’ll see if anyone is interested in buying it and if not then I have a cool RSS reader and that much more experience in VB. $10 doesn’t seem like too much to charge for a good little application. Anyways, while I’m pretty proficient in VB6 I’m not guru enough to write my own code for taking a bunch of image files and batch resizing them. So I searched the web and after considerable looking found a good solution. The FREEIMAGE project is an open source library project that supports many different image formats and is able to perform many different image manipulation routines like rotating, resizing, flipping, color adjustments and more. I’m just using the image resizing part of it, so I can’t speak to the other functions, but resizing works really well and is quick.
