Rick's World

I passed!!!!

Tonight I took my final exam in my beginner guitar class. This is the second time I've taken the course. The first time, I didn't quite pass the final exam. This time I did. I had considered skipping the class tonight. I haven't practiced in over a week and I didn't think I was ready for the test. Thankfully my friend Dave encouraged me to go, so I did. Good thing I did too. After a little last minute 'cramming' with the class notes, I was able to rip through all the major, minor and 7th chords. I even did pretty good on the playing of a song. The teacher criticized me for restarting the strum pattern in mid playing. He was right to do so. I restarted because I screwed up one of the chords and tried to start over. You must never stop when you are playing a song. You have to keep going because it forces to get faster at switching between chords. Plus, if you are performing in front of an audience with a band, you can't exactly stop and restart a song.

I just signed up for a third go at the class. It doesn't start until August 17th (almost a month away). In this second class I didn't really learn much because I was still in the beginner side, so we were just going over stuff I already learned. Since I 'graduated' to the intermediate class, which starts an hour after the beginner class, I figure that means I'll start learning a lot more new stuff. I look forward to it. This class pushes me to keep going on the guitar.

I have had an email account on Yahoo for years. Probably since not long after it was first offered to customers. The site has not really changed much over the years. That is until recently. Now they are beta testing a new version of the site. A couple of days ago, they finally gave me access to the beta, so I thought I'd give my thoughts on it.

First of all, I gotta say that the technology of this web site is impressive. All this new Ajax stuff is really leading to some impressive web sites. Ajax makes all the old style web sites look very plain. The new Yahoo Mail Beta makes heavy use of this type of technology.

What I like about it is that it is very 'Outlook-like'. It shows a list of the email folders on the left, the email headers on the top right, and a preview of the email message on the bottom right. This is the same way Outlook and many other 'real' email programs work. It all works very well. It's practically indistiguishable from those programs. There is just one problem that REALLY annoys me and in my opinion ruins this awesome new site.

That problem is advertising. Now I understand the need for advertising. Someone has to pay for all that hardware, bandwidth etc. so that we can all get this free service. The problem is that I think Yahoo is way overdoing the advertising. It's bothered me for a long time about the huge ads that Yahoo places on Yahoo Mail. It seems like those ads take up half the size of the damn browser window! That is way too big and intrusive. With the Yahoo Mail Beta, the ads aren't as wide, but they are a lot longer. There is a large ad that runs down the entire right side of the browser window. This add is ALWAYS there. This has the side effect of taking up way too much browser screen space. When you add this space-waster in with the folder view, the message view, and the email preview, there is no space left on the screen to read the damn message! It's getting ridiculous when maybe 25% or less of the window is actually the email. That is way to much screen clutter. I also tend to have a sidebar open at all times on my Firefox for Sage RSS feeds, so that leaves very little space left on the screen for the email, even on a 1280x1024 screen!

Wow, I never thought I would be writing about advertising in my blog, but this is really cool.

In an earlier blog, I described a TV advertising campaign called One Second Theater. This was an interesting new type of television advertising directed at owners of DVRs, i.e. the Tivo and the DirecTV Plus DVR (both of which I own). The whole purpose of the advertisement is to make you want to view their commercials. How do they do this? By hiding messages in individual frames of the commercial. You can only see these messages if you go frame by frame through their commercial. These are things that only a DVR can do. General Electric did it in their One Second Theater commercials. In those you find odd little pictures and stuff in the commercial. Now Sprite has taken this idea one step farther in what I think is a VERY clever advertising campaign called Sublymonal Advertising.

Sublymonal Advertising is an obvious play on the term 'subliminal advertising'. This is a type of advertising that uses subliminal messages, usually flashed on the screen for only fraction of a second. You aren't conciously aware of these message, but they get into your subconcious and attempt to control you into buying their products. I believe this kind of stuff was outlawed many years ago. Sublymonal Advertising (note the word Lymon in there) is a reference no doubt to the 'Lymon' taste of Sprite. Plus since all the messages are hidden in there, it is a sort of obvious subliminal advertising... They are intentionally making no secret of it.

I was watching TV the other day and I came across one of those Sublymonal commercials. I had always thought they were very bizarre commercials. I'd always wondered what the hell this commercial was supposed to be saying. Now I get it. It wasn't until I noticed that at the very beginning of the commercial there is a message at the bottom of the screen that says 'DVR Ready'. That was a hint to DVR owners like me that there is something hidden in there. I like this! So just now I happened across a recorded copy of one of these commercials so I framed through it and found the message. I could only find two messages, and only 1 that I could read. It was well done though. In this advertising, you go to their sublymonal.com web site and type in the codes that are hidden on the commercial. From there you get little free stuff, like cell phone ringtones, music videos and stuff like that. Also, if you go to their web site and watch closely, they flash more 'subliminal' codes on the screen that you can type in to get more free stuff.

I love this kind of stuff. I like seeing companies embrace new technologies and find clever ways to use it, rather than to fight it and try to legislate it out of existence. ABC, I'm talking to you! If you made your commercials interesting and clever, people will watch them.

I have been thinking a lot about upgrading the PC lately. Do I really need a new PC? No, but I want one anyway. Now, whenever I upgrade my PC, that usually means a new CPU and motherboard. Unfortunately, when you buy a new motherboard, that often causes you to have to buy a lot of other new stuff. This is because technology changes rapidly, and the stuff I bought 1 1/2 years ago when I last upgraded is already out of date. My current computer has all IDE hard drives and DVD drives, as well as DDR400 and an AGP video card. Most new motherboards these days use SATA to connect their hard drives and DVD drives, rather than IDE. They also tend to use DDR2 800 for memory and PCIe for the video card. That basically means I have to buy a new CPU, a new motherboard, new memory, a new video card and potentially all new hard drives! That's not cheap! Most of those upgrades can't be avoided. There's no way to plug a DDR400 memory card into a DDR2 800 slot (as far as I know) and you can't plug an AGP video card into a PCIe slot. However, you *can* plug an IDE hard drive into an SATA cable if you buy a cheap little adapter to convert it from IDE to SATA.

A few days ago, I ordered a couple of these IDE to SATA adapters from eBay in order to see if I could use my old hard drives as SATA drives. I haven't actually bought any new upgrades yet. I have 4 SATA plugs on my current motherboard, none of which were being used. I figured that if I could convert all my hard drives to SATA on my old computer then it should be an easy matter to do so on the new one. I got the two adapters last night and tried them out.

At first I was concerned about the size of the adapters. The adapters plug directly into the IDE plug on the back of the HD on one side, and provide an SATA plug and a power plug on the other side. (Apparently the adapter card needs power of it's own to function). The problem is that the card sits flush against the back of the HD. I was concerned that it would stick up or down too much and potentially block the other hard drive above or below it. Thankfully that was not the case. The adapter is only slightly taller than the back of the hard drive (by a few millimeters) so it really doesn't interfere with the other hard drives. Since it sits flush against the back of the hard drive, it also doesn't stick out too much, so it really doesn't get in the way.

My first attempt was to just plug in one of the secondary, non-boot HDs into the adapter and reboot. This seemed to work perfectly. It even seemed to run a bit faster. So far so good. My second attempt wasn't so lucky.

For my second attempt, I tried to convert the boot drive to SATA. That did not work. The computer detected the drive, but was unable to boot for some reason. After trying everything I could think of, I eventually gave up on trying to get the boot drive to work.

I have three hard drives in my computer. One boot drive and 2 secondary drives. All IDE. I was able to get the 2 secondary drives to work as SATA but not the boot drive. I haven't tried the DVD drive yet, to see if that works.

It looks like for my new computer, I'm going to need to buy at least an SATA drive for the boot drive (which I was planning on doing anyway). The new motherboards seem to have at least 1 IDE port on them (as opposed to the old ones that have 2), so I figure I can still use that IDE port for the DVD drives.

Here's what I'm considering for the upgrade:

Any suggestions?

My friend Dave wrote in with his thoughts on the new Pirates movie. I thought I'd give me point of view.

While I agree with Dave that Pirates was an entertaining movie, I have to say that I just didn't think this movie was as good as the first one. Yes it had great special effects, but the movie felt very 'busy' to me. There was way too much going on in the movie. It constantly jumped from one location to another. There were some lengthy scenes that seemed to be thrown into the movie purely for cheap laughs (such as the water wheel scene). I thought a lot of the scenes in this movie were more padding than anything else. Also, the 'sea pirates' seemed way too detailed, if that makes any sense. While it was cool to see all the different pirates and how their appearance was related to the sea (octopii, starfish, blowfish, barnacles, sharks etc.), I just thought their apperance was a bit too detailed. It almost felt overdone to me. I really liked the skeleton pirates better. It was a much simpler look and to me anyway, they felt a lot more 'scary' than the sea pirates.

I also found some parts of it confusing. What's with the immortal monkey? How'd he end up on the Black Pearl? As I recall he was one of the 'skeleton pirates' in the first movie. Weren't they all turned human at the end? How'd he stay immortal? Also, it seemed that several characters who (seemingly) died in the first movie have suddenly reappeared in this movie, very much alive. I'm sure all this will be explained in the final movie that comes out next year, but for now it's all a bit confusing. Maybe I need to go back and watch the first movie again, to catch some of the things I may have forgot.

Dave (and my brother) both liked this movie better than Superman Returns. I can't say that I agree. I really liked Superman Returns better (but then again, I am a comic book nut). Oh well, to each his own. :)

OK, I finally figured out how to prevent anonymous users from posting comments on my blog. I had to do this in order to prevent the flood of comment spam that I've been getting lately.

Sorry to do this folks, but if you want to place comments on my blog now, you have to register as a user. I hate doing this, but to stop this spam, this is necessary.

Today I upgraded the blog to the newest version of the blogging software. Normally I don't like upgrading to beta software, but the spam has been so bad lately, I decided to upgrade anyway in the hopes that it would help reduce this spam. I'm still exploring what's new, but it does seem to have a few new features. You may notice a few small changes to the main web site page. It looks like more of the updates are on the admin side, which only I have access to. Let's see how this new version goes.

Today I donated blood. Well, that's not really accurate. I actually donated only red blood cells. This was the first time I'd ever donated just red blood cells, as opposed to whole blood. It was an interesting experience.

The reason they only wanted to collect red blood cells is apparently because they have a shortage of them. They told me that when you donate whole blood, it gets split up into its separate parts into 4 different bags. This means that once you've extracted the red blood cells from the whole blood, you really don't have much blood. So, rather than donating whole blood and filtering out the red blood cells at the end, they simply collect only the red blood cells.

They do this by hooking you up to a machine that basically pumps out your blood, filters out the red blood cells, then replaces the missing cells with some saline solution and pumps it back in. I was expecting two needles in my arm. One to pump the blood out and one to pump the blood back in. It turned out it was all done through a single tube. It would just pump the blood out for a while, then it would stop pumping out and switch to pumping it back in. I was watching this tube gradually switching back and forth from red to clear. It was kind of neat to see.

I donate blood pretty regularly. I don't mind needles. I usually donate every two months, which is the normal minimum time between donations of whole blood. This time, however, they told me I had to wait four months before donating again. This is because when they filter out the red blood cells, they are taking out a larger volume of blood, so it takes the body longer to rebuild it's supply of blood.

"What better way to celebrate the birth of your country, than by blowing up a small part of it."

Time to head out and blow off some fireworks!

Today I'm going to do something different. I'm going to review a movie trailer for the new Spiderman 3 movie. Why? Because, as I mentioned in my previous blog, there is a lot in this short 2 minute trailer. It actually provides a lot of information as to what is going to be in this movie, if you know what to look for. Since I've been reading Spiderman comics for over 20 years, I was able to notice a lot in this trailer that other might have missed. So, I thought I would explain (and show!) what I saw...

Based upon the scenes in this movie, here is my best guess as to the plot of the movie.

Peter and Mary Jane have been dating for a while. Peter decides to ask her to marry him. He goes out and buys an engagement ring. Right as he is about to ask her to marry him, he somehow encounters the black costume. The costume flows over his red and blue costume, replacing it with the black costume we see in the trailer. He goes about being Spiderman in this new black costume, thinking nothing is different. It turns out that the costume is affecting his mind. This leads him to stray from Mary Jane. He meets Gwen Stacy and has a romance with her. Mary Jane finds out and they have a big argument/breakup. Somewhere along the way the new Green Goblin and the Sandman make appearances. No doubt there will be a few scenes of the black costume Spiderman fighting them. Later, he discovers that the costume is controlling him and discovers that sound waves can kill it. He heads to the church bell tower and stands there while the bells go off. The costume supposedly dies. He leaves. Eddie Brock, who was also in the church, below the bell tower, finds the injured costume. They join together and become Venom. This leads to a climactic battle between Spiderman, back in the red and blue costume, versus Venom (and maybe Green Goblin and Sandman too). He fights and wins. He returns to Mary Jane and explains everything. They make up and he proposes to her. The movie ends with the two of them getting married.

How's that for a complete analysis of a 2 minute trailer? It should be interesting to see how close I was to the truth when this movie comes out a year from now.

Update: You can find my other Spiderman 3 entries here and here...

Update 2: I've seen the movie! You can read my followup on this article and see how well I did on my predictions. You can also read my full (long!) movie review.