This is a big screen TV in the window of a Bank in Philly! Folks make sure if you are using Windows XP driving a screen thats intended for every passerby to view, turn off the auto update feature in Windows XP. It is very easy:

I feel it is great to have an interactive presentation but I have sat through many a presentation where the presenter was running commands, clicking on buttons and selecting options. It is awesome during the presentation to see and appreciate second hand as how easy or difficult a certain tool is. However, once I try to replicate same thing on my own, it takes me a while to replicate what the presenter did. I think having an interactive presentation recorded might aid an audience better post presentation. Will post if I ever get around to it. But if you have had good experiences with something similar, please feel free to comment.

The whale in the videos and pictures was going through its feeding routine creating a flurry of activity. It seems that is what attracted the dolphins.

I wish I had a steadier hand though. The new Panasonic Lumix Z-3 camera is a fairly good camera though both in it’s resolution and zoom. The pictures and videos came out good. Any bad pictures should be attributed to the photographer in my case.

Apple’s brand spankin’ new OS displays an old CRT monitor with a BSOD as an icon for a Windows PC connected to your network. Not to mention it uses the same icon for drives shared over Samba. I wonder who is looking more stupid here. The old Windows or the new OS X Leopard?

Anil Dash put it very aptly. But I am surprised to see how many people want to dismiss this as a joke. Yes, I understand that all the Mac vs PC ads are to sell Macs and to tell people how much cooler Macs are compared to PC. One however has to question the logic behind this one. Apple has grown in the last couple of years. It is high time they act grown up too.

Hey Mr. Jobs, the folks who bought this machine already know (or are about to find out) how cool your Mac is! Your ad campaign is working. You can stop with the PC bashing for folks who see your ads and buy your computers.

Engadget has some good instructions to make your brand new Mac be a little more politically correct.

I was checking out ISP’s just before we moved from Rochester and realized that Verizon was offering FIOS Internet in my building. I quickly signed up for it with a one year contract.

I love the speed. It is awesome. I have never had an outage so far with respect to the internet connectivity. I do have to reboot the crappy Actiontec router that came with it once in a while. It just seems to hang when I try to download or stream copious amounts of data.

However, what I did not know was the fact that Verizon blocks incoming traffic to port 80 and port 25. C’mon now, are you kidding me? Such policies make me laugh and cringe at the same time. I can run bittorrent to dowload massive amounts of content, all of it legal BTW ;-), run servers on all other ports but cannot have incoming traffic to these two ports. I just do not understand. I read some forums, Verizon lets you run servers only if you buy their business package.

I wish I were smart enough to realize what Verizon was thinking.

As a result however, I have had to transfer all my content from my trusty old AMD K6/2 to a managed ISP. I have had 1 and 1 as my domain registrar for the last couple of years and they have reasonable hosting plans. I have decided to move my domains over there till either Verizon changes its policy or I move to Comcast, the other ISP in Philadelphia. I am currently paying $4.99 a month to host this blog and my website. Do check it out. It has a nice slide show going now. The 1 and 1 package also comes with 2 blogs that can be set up through their control panel and use Wordpress, something I am comfortable with and have used i the past. The only drawback is, with the cheap plan, I miss out on all the little customizations I had going on with the older version of the blog.

I was also able to hack the Kubrick template to suit my needs for the main page. I may change it later but I am happy with the way it looks now.

Well, all said and done, we are back online. Hope I can continue to post on a regular basis.

BTW, someone should tell M$ that things like thse piss off paying buyers of their products and does not effect pirates in any way. It is very similar to the DRM dilemma. DRM hurts people who actually purchase music. I cannot transfer a song that I bought off itunes to Benita’s creative Zen without undergoing some creative process. Wheras had I just downloaded it off a p2p software, I would not have to deal with this issue. Hey, I am willing to pay for the content but try don’t control what I do with it.

I should seriously consider joining some anti-DRM campaign.

Here’s a picture of my co-worker Kathy being Dr. Evil. She has kidnapped all developers and is holding the project ransom for 1 million dollars…Muaaahhaaaahhhaa.

A picture of Mini Me shall follow soon.