Disneyland

If there is one person who can convince anyone of anything, it is Sheri. I had Jury Duty scheduled for the 6th of June. Sheri made the argument that I could either be gone from work a few days to Disneyland or unknown amount of time for jury duty, & Disneyland would be preferable. The Deans (who I work for) agreed and wrote a note affirming that I make no other income. So now I have the plane tickets and park pass, If they don't excuse me I don't know what will happen! Truth be told I am looking forward to seeing the 50th anniversary at Disneyland. It will be nice, and we will see if they break down and bring Sammy along. (He has been there 5 times in the last year or so...) I hope it will just be us. It is much easier to go on rides without a young child. With less than a week left I hope I find my Disney Visa. It gives me a few good discounts. Last week we stayed up at the cabin in Washington, CA. This week Disneyland.. As the Ward Finance Clerk I hope they don't get to mad at me for being gone all the time. About the cabin, I always seem to hurt myself in the river every time we go. This time the river was too full (about 3 times the norm) and I was unable to swim down the rapids. It seems habits are hard to break. I ended up twisting my ankle in a hole and fell and banged up my knee in the dark.

No more classes, no more books...

... No more teacher's dirty looks! Yep, finals is here and passed. My last was at 10:15 this morning. Speaking of 'no more books,' my history final ended with me looking down to get my books and they are gone. Luckily there was only 10 or so students left to look at me strangely as I stood up and freaked out. "My books are gone! I can't believe someone took them." The teacher said she would email me if they were turned back in. I'm afraid that even if it wasn't a thief but someone sitting next to me picking them up with their own will not bother to find the real owner. After all it was the last day. Well I had a jury duty in January. Barely a year after my last jury duty. They must have liked me :P Because of school starting in January I returned it marked 'Student'. Well, they didn't waste any time and sent me a new one last week. I now have a summons for June 6th. How fun. (I just have to figure a way to let my boss know his only employee will be out for an indeterminate amount of time) This week was also E3, which I wrote about in my last post. Now last month, around April 29th, Microsoft started a Windows XP Ad campaign to battle the great and wonderful Mac OS X (Tiger). Shortly after that, internet Ads were seen and were obviously created on a Mac with the Mac version of photoshop. Well they did it again. Microsoft's XBOX 2 playable demo at E3 was running on, surprise, 3 G5 Macs. Well you can see why Microsoft afraid OS X when 2 of their OWN departments are using Mac not Windows.

Podcasting, Nintendo & E3

By now, 90% of everyone who has a hard drive based MP3 player has an iPod. What may this mean? Well for starters, there is now a new medium for content. Basically it is radioshows from the internet. If you want to get started, and like Disney, try http://www.disneyland.com/podcasts . Even if podcasts don't end up being your thing the Disneyland Radio show is quite entertaining and informative. You don't have to have a iPod (but why would you want anything else?) The most interesting part of the new offerings at Disneyland this year is the Buzz ride. In July you will be able to play online with the ride, lighting up targets for the riders to shoot. It shall be interesting. Speaking of online gaming. It looks like a bright future for Nintendo. I admit I am a big fan. I got the Gameboy Advance and then the Gameboy SP. Well if you ever thought that even the GBA SP was too big and not a bright enough screen you are in luck! They introduced the GBA Micro! About the size of an ipod mini and much lighter. Also Nintendo's long awaited online service will be free!!! Take that XBox live! Infact not only will Nintendo have free wireless gaming via hot-spots and wireless internet but the Nintendo REVOLUTION will be all wireless. No more cables! I just hope the controllers have as much life as the wavebirds. The Nintendo Revolution might not be the 'best' box out there in mid 2006 but its on my list. Wireless online gaming and cordless controllers are cool enough, not to mention its gonna be smaller than any console out there, but what takes the cake is what is playable. Revolution games? Of course. Gamecube games? Great! DVDs? Finally. N64 Downloadable games? Cool! SNES Too? Awesome NES? Give me Super Mario 2&3!!! However, as can be expected no GBA or DS as they are still the games keeping Nintendo alive and strong. I will settle for a DS MMORPG! If not then Mario Kart DS (Online) and Mario Brothers Superstar Saga, will have to hold me over. Oh and Please hurry up with the new Zelda for Gamecube. I would love to morph into a werewolf. Note to Sony: The PS3 isn't too ugly, but those controllers are Ug-Ly. They better be darned comfortable. However I must congratulate Sony on putting SD slot into the PS3 (as is Nintendo). They rarely let other cards play with their "Memory Stick" which is probably why I don't have a PSP.

Its Here, what a great 29th of April!

I got my OS X Tiger today. What a great OS. If I ever need to replace our home desktop it will be with a Mac for sure now. Everything is great with the same two big exceptions. Mail doesn't support Hotmail (but who but Microsoft can?) so I'm really trying to depend more on gmail but you only have to forget to uncheck the "allow us to share your email" box one time and "you've got spam!". And Safari doesn't do in-bar searches with anything other than google. Firefox still has them beat there. Get with the program Safari, and one up them with in-bar logon for sites. But both of these problems (hotmail and inbar searches) are in both OS X and Windows. You still need firefox for in-bar searching and a Microsoft mail program for Hotmail. My External HDD wasn't working so I got a new drive and a new enclosure. Now I have 2 external 250gig HDD. I am wondering what I should do with the second one, sale it or keep it. (I put the new hard drive in the old enclosure and the old hard drive in the new enclosure. Since the old enclosure with the new hard drive didn't work It seems I will have to return the old enclosure.) I now have a Tivo to sell as well. Maybe I should have taken the drive out of that, could have saved a few bucks. It is a 220 hour Tivo. I recently had to replace the HDDs so it is in good shape. I was sick of having to pay for the service every month when comcast charges less and I can record two shows at once. With only 40 hours I have to only pick my favorite shows, but I could stand to watch a bit less TV anyway. Tivo is the greatest DVR (Digital Video Recorder) however it is EVIL. Why ? because you have to pay the monthly fee or they make you TIVO not work. I would understand that with comcast where you DONT have to buy the DVR just pay for the service. But if you don't pay TiVo you should be able to use it like a VCR without the fancy extras. But NOOOO they have to make it so you cant to crap! So, Anyone want to by my Tivo? More than anything I want to see Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe. Douglas Adams is the funniest. Anyways, Darby Conley(Get Fuzzy) says it best. be sure to check out the trailer. Now that this film is done, we have to wait till December 9th for the next big Disney Movie (Lion Witch and the Wardrobe). To bad they didn't recognize "The Nightmare Before Christmas" as great when it was released, they may not have lost "The Corpse Bride" to WB if they had. And with "Cars" coming in 2006 we might not get "Pirates of the Caribbean 2" till 2007 (the horror). I just hope they finnalize a date for it soon and have it arive in 2006. See you at the movies :)

The end of school comes rushing..

Finals, projects, papers and figuring out what to do with my math class (which I haven’t been to since the first coupla weeks) is rushing on top of me. I don’t know if other students go through the same thing. I don’t know if all this pressure had much to do with it, but my mind is slipping I feel. Sunday I woke and decided I should write my paper due Monday. Maybe somewhere deep in my mind I knew there was something that I needed to do. Well, as it turns out, as I started out the door (slightly late for church as it was) I realized that I was supposed to give a talk in church. Well I stayed at home. How lame is that.. I guess I’m hoping next week everyone will forget. We shall see. Whatever the case I will have a talk ready for sure. On a lighter note there are a few flash sites I am really into right now. (Flash is a form of media files on the Internet) Here are two videos I like, have a look and click the images below. (imagelink) (imagelink) Enjoy

April Fools

Well I haven't added much and thought it would be a good idea to do so. The family vacation went off without a hitch. We even needed no chains (thank goodness when we brought the wrong size). I would highly suggest using the Tahoe Keys Resort again. Today is (was) April Fools day. There was very little fooling, nothing big as far as I could tell. I was hoping I guess for something big from a corporation like Taco Bell. There was the usual round of pranks which have been on FamilyFun.com for years. Including at Moms school a teacher brought in a "Sponge" cake made with sponges. Well my old favorite comic strips (Foxtrot and Get Fuzzy) didn't let me down. And with a little magic from copyright infringement here they are.

This years online pranks, if your interested, can be found at Wikipaedia.org
(imagelink) Thats it. P.S. I ment to post some things about great programs that are free. I will at least say this much. Use Picasa2 from http://www.picasa.com to store, edit and manage your pictures. It is, dare I say, better than iPhoto (or at least as good).

How to spend money you don't have.

This week ends my spending. For a while at least. Since my tax rebate I have saved my money and then spent it all in the last month. Some are necessities, others not so much. I got my sister an iPod Mini (Gold) for her birthday on the 8th. I also got myself a iPod shuffle and it is great! If you like books on tape this ends all reasons not to use Audible where you can get 3 books for only 22 bucks. And a stick of gum sized player replaces the tons of cassettes or CDs previously needed. Only a few books are to large to have the whole book on the cheapest iPod Shuffle.
I've also dumped a bundle on compusa this year with the Hard Drive to backup my Laptop, a Palm PDA to keep notes, dates, and contacts on. I also went to get a cheap digital camera which turned out cheaply made. I in turn just got an SD card and ended up trying e(vil)bay one last time so I could get a cheap good camera . Compusa also got a $100 bucks from me because of SOE, which released Everquest 2 as a free trial. After playing EQ2 I'm not impressed, at least I got a good card.

The new card can have dual monitors. Its got me greedy enough to jump at a chance for a 19" LCD for less than $300. I got this great deal from buy.com which helped out on the tax which would have brought it over $300. They gave me $15 off with this coupon. What a deal.
But there is another snag. Now I have to turn in hundreds of $$ in rebates which had better come or I'm busted :P

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South Lake Tahoe

As often happens things get dropped in my lap when no-one has a clue. Our family rarely has time to vacation with everyone going to school or teaching. For spring break we all decided to get a cabin. In past years a friend, relative, acquaintance has provided the opportunity to get one at just the cleaning fee. This time we are on our own.

After much searching and with our usual last minute scramble we decided on a 5 bedroom cabin on sale. Most all of the cabins were in neighborhoods but being close to the snow and lake, and with parking for 5 cars it should work out perfect. (best part is no pets no smoking and a hot tub)

My many Emails

Well mozilla finally got it together and released a Thunderbird extention that allows for hotmail. jholdaway at hotmail.com is my email of choice, and Thunderbird is the best email browser ever and the best RSS/Blog reader too. Well it was allot more work than I thought and I ended up giving up. It would timeout after 30 or so emails and I had 2000+ emails in the account. So I emptied all my pre-2005 and it remained over 300 emails. As I said I ended up giving up. It was mostly the hotmail deal, If only they could get that working. But it was also the many email accounts I have. Here they are. jholdaway at hotmail.com jholdaway at gmail.com jholdaway at pcfocus.net jeffholdaway at comcast.net jh349 at csus.edu theholdawayfamily at hotmail.com holdawayfamily at comcast.net pcfocus at pcfocus.net jeff at pcfocus.net jholdaway at holdaway.net jholdaway at howtonfamily.com UPDATE: decided while im at it i should give my cellphone an email. To send me a message to my cellphone send it to jeff at holdaway.net As more and more people are finding out that emails change very often they are switching to hotmail. I did years ago. Our family email is now theholdawayfamily at hotmail.com. This is because it went from @comcast.net to @home.net to @attbi.com to @comcast.net, All due to merger after merger. Now we stick with hotmail.com 'cause it is likely to stay for years to come. P.S. an update on my new hard drive. I got it today, everything went smoothly. I sent Aunt Sandra a UPS label by email and check by billpay (BofA). UPS dropped a package Monday (what luck) so I got the drive today.

Just a bunch of links.

Everyday I check out all the major news stories. On all the major websites. No not MSNBC.com, no not CNN.com. I mean like slashdot.org or boingboing.net. Well today had too many great links to pass up. So im gonna list them right now. (Ready?) Help rat on people who sing Happy Birthday! Pranks on ZUG.com (check out The Credit Card Prank, The Credit Card Prank II, and Toll Booth Prank) I haven't looked at the rest but these were highly recomended and I found them hillarious! Also try out Angry Alien Productions. I really enjoyed alien bunnies.
(Photo Link)

Did anyone watch the Oscars?

I watched them, took about ten minutes thanks to TiVO. A bore as usual. Most of all the evening centered around Marie's B-Day and so we pulled out the red plate We baked a cake and Emily and I made 'tuxedo' brownies. You know the brownie batter on the bottom and cheesecake batter on top. Well I failed to read the instructions and poured it all in. So instead of being layered it was more brownie on the outside of the pan and cheesecake in the middle. (oh well, they tasted good.) Remember my (1st) post? Well Aunt Sandra pulled it off and I now have a 250G drive for $99. I don't know how Compusa can put things on sale for less than they paid for it. I'm guessing they hope you will buy more things while your in the store. Its the end of "Presidents Day" week long break for the grade schoolers. They went all over the place. To the mountains snowboarding and Friday to San Francisco by train and ferry. Aaris decided to record the trip by making a book for Show-and-Tell. Take a look at it.

My Stuff

I love my Apple Powerbook and there is a great program that lets you scan in your possessions which will help you keep track of them. The only problem is it isn't free. Well I found a PC version and went to town scanning in all my stuff. Here is what I have scanned in so far.
Now I can keep track of all my stuff. No more forgetting who I lent something out to. So feel free to borrow a audio book or two. Or a game 'cause I can put it in MediaMan. Now if there was only a program that keep kids from leaving my DVDs out of the case. (A larger picture of the one above is here )

Quest for 250G Drive.

Today was a pain but ended happly enough. I was looking to make a external drive for my laptop so i could backup my data and move my CD library to our PC. I saw a great deal on digg.com for a Maxtor 250GIG Drive. So after getting an enclosure I set out after school today to get the drive at CompUSA at the Arden area. They were out but the computer said Rosevile and Vacavile had some. I went to Rosevile and they had sold the last one that morning. For $70 off I would have driven to Vacavile, but after checking the computer all stores were out. Not always one to give up, I checked Seatle to see if Uncle Jim could get one. All the stores there where out too. Where there ever any drives? My last ditch effort i check San Diego. Both San Diego and La Mesa had the drive listed as In Stock yet it turned out only La Mesa has one. Aunt Sandra is going to see if she can pick one up for me after the Mormon Battalion Parade in Old Town San Diego. We will see how that goes. Well its getting late (or early) so i better get to bed.