My sister emails me today:

Stripey has been killed. She went missing almost two weeks ago, which was strange because she had never run away before. A handful of other people happened to have lost their cats around the same time. We didn’t think much of it, but today when I checked the mail there was a letter from the homeowner’s association that said they found at least 4 decomposing cats in some trash cans. They had like, BB/pellet wounds. So I mean, none of us actually saw her body, but… like I said, she wouldn’t just disappear on her own. Some punk(s) I guess decided to torture cats to death. 🙁

Seriously?  What sick bastard decides to find a cat WITH a collar and name tag just to shoot up.  Not one, but four?  Are you kidding me?  My parents live in a decent neighborhood too!  This is so irritating.  Stripey wasn’t all that fond of me though.  I wasn’t around much for most of it’s life so it doesn’t really know/remember me.  However my siblings/Dad loved that cat.  She was pretty hilarious too, I wish I had a picture.  She looked so fat but her hair was just sooooo poofy she looked much larger than she was.

Man that’s so messed up.  I hate people like that.  Again, Stripey had a collar and everything. I don’t care so much if people go around shooting alley cats or whatever.  I certainly don’t endorse it.  But when they’re clearly OWNED by someone you shouldn’t mess with them.  My cats are only maybe 2 years younger than her too.  She certainly didn’t live the full rich cat life.  =(  While my Dad seems to feel that it’s perfectly fine to let cats roam about, I’m too protective to let my cats do that.  You just can’t trust things like drunk drivers or accidents or INSANE PEOPLE WHO SHOOT COLLARED CATS!

I remember years ago when Max Payne came out and the office was abuzz with chit chat regarding the awesomeness of the game and it’s bullet time effect.  For some reason, I didn’t play it.  I managed to avoid the peer pressure.  Maybe I wanted to play it and never got around to it.  Maybe his scrunched up face was a little off putting.  Seriously, can Marky Mark pull it off?  Let’s see the comparison:

Look at that face.  Sure you look at the back of his head for most of the game but when he turns around that’s what I gotta look at!  Anyway, faces aside, the movie is coming out.  And I’m watching it, and they mention something like “The devil is building his army” and “God wants to stay hidden” and then I see these demons and I think to myself, “Ummmm, I don’t remember demons in Max Payne.”

SHOTTY however said that I was an idiot and should have played that game for it to make more sense.  I don’t see why you’d market something for the minority if you want to make a successful movie.  I mean, wouldn’t you want it to be accessible and give it a mainstream appeal?  Wouldn’t after the movie you want to go play those games?  I don’t think airing a trailer highlighting confusing factoids would do that.  Buuuuuuuuuuuuut, then he linked a quality 2 minute trailer:

http://movies.ign.com/dor/objects/150748/max-payne/videos/maxpayne_livecomic_092308.html

and it explains everything!  Now, I’m thinking, “Hey, this might be a totally awesome movie that I might go see!”

Smallville Season 8 premiers tonight. The CW’s take this season:

THE JUSTICE LEAGUE RETURNS TO FIND CLARK AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF THE FORTRESS; THE NEW CEO OF LUTHORCORP COMES TO TOWN — The Justice League, lead by the Green Arrow (Justin Hartley), hits the Artic in search of Clark (Tom Welling), who disappeared after the fortress collapsed. The team immediately has a confrontation with the new CEO of Luthorcorp, Tess Mercer (Cassidy Freeman). Meanwhile, Chloe (Allison Mack) is being held prisoner by a suspicious group who has discovered she has a new power, and Clark has been stripped of his powers by Jor-El. Erica Durance and Aaron Ashmore also star.

I still haven’t watched the abbreviated season 2 of Heroes.  Other than that, Battlestar Galactica sounds like it’s postponed until next April and that’s all I watch.

UPDATED: Impressions of S08E01 past the break

Read the rest of this entry

If you need Microsoft points for something go here: http://stridelovesrockband.com/ and sign up.  I signed up on Monday and got my winning email today (found it in my junk mail so maybe I won yesterday).  If anything, it’s a free $2 for you to spend however you want on the MS store.

Coincidentally most of the songs are recent Rock Band 1 DLC songs.  So great!  Very varied though eh?

I’m officially addicted to RSS.  Let’s start at the beginning here.  Most modern day web pages publish articles to their website but simultaneously to a sort of simple version of the site as well which is just the collection of articles.  This is their RSS feed.  Now knowing that such a page exists, the technology also exists with which you can see when the feed is updated and pull the new article into a reader.

Anyone who peruses their favorite web sites for the newest news can know how silly it might seem to hit refresh every 60 seconds or just randomly browse and hope there might be a new update to the page.  However, if you begin to use an RSS reader you realize how great the automation becomes when the reader tells you fairly quickly after a page is updated.

So I started my RSS journey with the Sage plugin for Firefox.  Instead of opening up every single page I read and hoping to read the new news, I simply told Sage which feeds to check and I’d hit one button and it would give me the list of news.   The downside to this method is that I have to set it up for every computer I use which is very cumbersome.  Overall, this is a much faster way to read and digest new articles of news.

But then one day I find out Google has an RSS reader as well.  After setting up my feeds in Sage for the 983792857th time, I was hesitant to start again.   However, I decided if I set it up on Google I’d never have to set it up again because it’s based on the web, which is one of the HUGE plusses.   So I went and made the dive.

There are levels of effeciency that come into play when dealing with this sort of stuff that are probably beyond my set of knowledge.  But the switch to Google Reader has been, what I feel like, an incredible boost in keeping up with current events.  I’ve moved from 20 feeds to 49 feeds because I feel like Google does a much better job at keeping me up to date, yet I’m maintaining relatively the same amount of time to read them.  I think even though there’s more to read, I filter out quite a bit and read maybe 1 out of 20 articles.  You’ll find that some feeds have higher quality reads but low volume or vice versa.  There’s this obsession now to want more and more, but I’ll probably reach a limit of feeds that I can’t keep up with.

One of the cooler parts of Google Reader is now evidenced on my sidebar.  I can actually share stories I find interesting with the click of a button so you can sort of keep up with what I keep up with.  Additionally there’s a specific link for my stuff located at: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/15227217337039956264

So at this point, I try to advocate the sort of switch from aimless browser refreshing to a more reliable way of keeping up via RSS.  It definately clicks with some people, but with others I think it might be too foreign.  For those in the too foreign camp I imagine they don’t utilize the web as a sort of informational overload, but more as a passing recreation which is why the obsession to be kept up to date isn’t keyed in for them.  Either way, it’s worth checking out.

My tip for you, I use Chrome set with reader as my homepage.  This goes along with the multibrowser thing I detailed below in the Chrome post.  I find quirky things to use individual browsers for.

Thanks HAMMERON!

I was talking to a friend about Chrome concerning the way they unified the search and address bar.  I have a variety of search engines in Firefox/IE that I use so I frequently go to the search bar, type in what I want, choose the relavent engine, then hit bombs away.  However, it turns out there’s a far faster and far better way of doing this in Firefox coupled with a handy shortcut key.

In the first place, control+L will take you directly to the address bar in every browser EXCEPT IE.  Couple this with smart keywords and you have a killer way to basically move to an all keyboard solution to searching quickly and effeciently.

Visit the page that has the search field that you search with. Right click on the search field. Choose Add a Keyword for this Search… The Add Bookmark dialog will appear. Give the bookmark a name, e.g. “IMDB Search” and create a keyword e.g. “imdb” and file the Bookmark somewhere. Firefox comes with a Quick Searches folder so you could use that. Click OK

Now enter imdb Matchstick Men into the Location bar and press Enter. You’re done! You can repeat these steps for any searches you use – e.g. Amazon, your corporate phonebook, your favorite bittorrent site, anything!

So now, what you can do is have google set as something like “g” and then hit control+L then type “g cats” and it would run a google search on cats.  Run a similar setup for wikipedia, youtube, etc and you have this really cool shorthand search method!

Thanks to Hammeron for the tip!

Chrome Documentation

Chrome Download

Read the documentation, it’s very interesting how they’ve gone through the architectural process.  I was thinking just the other day how I use IE/Firefox/Safari all fairly interchangeably.  Yes, I said Safari, I actually think it is the fastest web page renderer but I’m not sure.

I feel old recalling a time where if you used IE you were doomed to spyware and other bad things, but most things have been resolved in IE7, not all, but most things.  I’m not a big plug-in user for Firefox so the transition is pretty seamless between all the browsers for me.  The big plug-in I use is Sage for my RSS feeds but I keep getting pressured into using Google Reader.

Anyway, it’ll be very interesting to see Google entering the browser war.  I wonder how quickly it will be adopted.  If they can deliver on the speed and reliability, I think a lot of Firefox users would probably switch.  IE has such deep penetration on the market because of its bundling with Windows.  There are A LOT of people who can’t abstract the idea that the Internet and IE are seperate entities.  I had someone at work who had no idea that you could get to web pages with something that wasn’t IE.  So we’ll see.  There’s a level of marketing that would have to be pushed out to go to the average user.  Alternately, if they have some great packaging options like they seem to be doing with things like Adobe Reader then it might take off pretty quickly as well.

UPDATE: Anyone using Symantec Endpoint Protection (which includes anyone at TTU using the antivirus software)

If upon boot you see this message: “The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000005). Click ok to terminate the application.”

You need to remove the Application & Device Control from the installation of this product – i.e Add/Remove programs – click on Modify and unselect it