Dylan Greene dot com

My house-mate, some friends, and I decided to host a last minute New Years bash at our place for all those without plans yet.

We did the same thing last year.

I just got tickets to Vegas, baby! I'm going to the 2005 Consumer Electronics Show!

Yeah, I'm that big of a geek that for vacations, instead of going the beach or skiing, I go to a consumer electronic show. What can I say, it's what I really enjoy, and I'm going with close friends Chris and Dennis (if he gets his plane ticket).

Basically think of Best Buy, but full of devices that wont be in stores for a another year, and often times not affordable for many more years to come. Also there'll about 100,000 people there. It should be fun!

The 2005 CES is January 5th to January 9th. Bill Gates is giving the keynote - there are rumors that he use this opportunity to announce XBOX 2, but we'll wait and see.

I'll do my best to blog the conference, and there will be lots of photos on this site.

Happy Holidays to all those that are celebrating them!

I'm Jewish, so last night I did what many Jews do on Christmas Eve: Chinese carry out!

Today I'm catching up on things I've been wanting to get done for a long while but have been to busy to, namely working on my web sites.

When I have the motivation, working on my web sites is extremely relaxing and exciting. It's like sculpting: taking a block of the web site and slowly working at it until something nice comes out. And if it doesn't look good, I can re-work it until I like it or move onto another part of the site.

We all know to avoid McDonald's because of the high fat and carb content, but what about "America's favorite drug dealer," Starbucks?

Maps and Legends' Craig Pfeifer, a proud Starbucks junkie, wrote about the upcoming Starbucks Chantico - a 6-ounce "chocolate bar in a cup" with 390 calories, 21 grams of fat and 51 carbs.

Read Craig's take...

Chantico is the Aztec Goddess of the hearth and terrestrial fire.

From GodChecker: "With her red serpent accessories and crown of poisoned cactus spikes, she symbolizes the combination of pleasure and pain."

Kinda fitting?

Diebold, provider for most of the election machines used in the past election, has settled with the state of California for providing insecure voting machines. Researchers showed that the systems could "easily allow someone to cast multiple votes in the same election." Diebold is paying California and Alameda County $2.6 million.

Diebold is facing charges in other states as well.

In 2003, Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell was under fire for proclaiming that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." O'Dell, a top contributers to the Bush Campaign,wasproclaimed a"Pioneer" at Bush's Crawford, Texas Ranch during a fund raising dinner,sharing a spot once held by Enron CEO Kenneth Lay.

It was also recently discovered that, in 2000,Florida Republican Congressman Tom Feeney paid aNASAprogrammerto build a prototype that could change votes on touchscreen voting machines. It is stillunknown if what was built had effected the election results.

BlackBoxVoting has been covering these and many other voting issues, something that the US media has been ignoring since the election.

PC Magazine has posted their list of ten geeky gifts to avoid.

Example:

Desktop PC: For Apple, the entry-level eMac really does represent Think Different. That's because for a company that prides itself on quality, this computer is different. As in bad. On the plus side, it's stylish. On the downside, it's slow, underpowered, and pathetic. The 40GB hard drive will fill up quickly, the lack of a DVD burner makes offloading files impossible, and the Radeon 9200 graphics card won't even run this fall's hot Mac games. And at around $800, this eMac ain't cheap. If you're considering a home Apple, think different. Buy a Dell. Or be prepared to spend a lot more for an acceptable Apple computer.

Read the others at PC Magazine. They also link to geeky gifts that they recommend.

Last friday Microsoft acquired the relatively unheard of anti-spyware company Giant.

Coming from Microsoft, there's no doubt this will eventually become a popular tool. But what is it? We all know of Ad-Aware and Spybot Search & Destroy, why did Microsoft buy some unheard of company?

Paul Thurrott has a preview of Giant AntiSpyware. It actually looks pretty cool.

It drives me nuts that there's no "player profile" feature on XBOX Live. It's great that I'm playing humans from all over the world, but who the hell are these people?

At bare minimum I would like to see the following:

• City, State, Country
• Home page, blog, journal, or MSN Space
• Job, occupation, and/or school/university
• Photo, avatar, icon, or image
• A note field that I can fill in with information like "how I know this person"

Why?

I bought a new XBOX to replace my stolen one, and I played Halo 2 last night for the first time in a month. My friends list is full of people but I forget who many of them are. Or I'm just curious as to who I'm playing against. Sometimes it's just cool to find out you're playing somebody in another country, or somebody down the street.

Off topic: MSN Messenger and Bungie.net are both saying my Friends List is empty. Bug? Must be, now I see them again.

A friend sent me a link with a preview of the upcoming Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith action figures.

I loved the Star Wars toys as a kid, but I'm now finally past that stage. I think part of that is how silly some of new action figures look. See the two pictures to the right for an example.

Maybe they were that silly back then too and I just didn't notice or care.

In other Star Wars news, this past summer at BrickFest they showed a a sneak peak of an upcoming Star Wars video game based in the LEGO universe and we were very impressed. After months of waiting there's finally an online preview with screenshots.

We pride ourselves on having a volunteer armed forces... but how volunteer is it when a solder are has himself shot so that he wouldn't have to go back to Iraq?

If he didn't want to go back why should he have to? I believe he won't make an effective solider and would only bring down the moral of the other men. Okay, maybe he'd make good canon fodder, but I see no reason to add to the 1,299 Americans killed and 9,844 Americans injured in Iraq.

Plus, he had himself shot - so he's obviously not in the best mental condition. The Army should have recognized his mental problems and discharged him long ago.

My opinion is that if somebody like him doesn't want to be part of the war he or she should not have to because that person will only be endangering the lives of the people around him.

Know this building?

If I can wake up in time I'll be down there. Not sure where the best place will be to stand, and I bet it will be cold, but I've never seen a building imploded before in person, especially not one that I've been to fairly frequently.

According to PubSub, my PubSub Ranking is 8,153. This means that, according to PubSub, there are about 8000 blogs and web sites that are more popular than this one.
PubSub's popularity ranking is based on blog posts, so the more people that link to this site in blog entries, the better the ranking will be.

Is 8,153 good? I don't know, but it's more than half the value of where I work. (Lower is better).

What's your PubSub Ranking?

Saw this comic today too.... :)

I'm in Denver for the next two days for a work project. I'm staying at the Luna Hotel which is this ultra-modern uber-trendy hotel in the young, hipWazze district of downtown Denver.

They say that since the city is a mile up, it's harder to breath but I haven't noticed it yet.

I sleptwell except I didn't have my pillow with me. I've very picky about pillow. The fancy overstuffed ones give me a sore neck.

Helpful links for all you Smartphone owners, or soon-to-be owners:

Games

• Mavec
  A "online world" game with quests, property buying, etc. Simple and entertaining. The only online turn-based game I know of. And the only .NET Smartphone game I know of. And it's free!
  http://www.mavec.co.uk/

• Done in 50 Seconds
  Cool puzzle game with 60+ levels.
  http://www.aimproductions.be/smart_downloads.asp

Applications

• Agile Mobile
  A nicer client IM than the MSN Instant Messenger included. Supports MSN, ICQ, and AIM. I'm on MSN IM no matter where I go thanks to this app.
  http://www.agilemobile.com/downloads.html

• Beta Player
  For watching movies and playing mp3s, this is a little nicer than the windows media player included. It doesn't support WMA yet, but it plays videos full screen.
  http://betaplayer.corecodec.org/

• Smartphone Thoughts
  http://www.smartphonethoughts.com/
• CoolSmartPhone
  http://www.coolsmartphone.com/index.php
• MoDaCo SmartphoneForums
  http://www.modaco.com/index.php
• SmartGamer
  http://www.smartgamer.org
• Smartphone.net
  http://www.smartphone.net

Forty Media has an excellent list of predictions for web design in 2005.

If you are into web design, this is a must read.

Here are some examples:

Colors

Color of the year: Brown

Tech grays and blues take a sabbatical; may not be back soon.

Pure red (the new blue of the past few years) falls into disfavor.

Designers are feeling confidentlots of bold colors this year.

Lots of in-between colors (yellow-greens, red-oranges, etc.) used to achieve fresh looks.

Web-safe palette is at last widely understood to be obsolete; Web-smart palette takes over.

Typography

Designers realize that Verdana is ugly; most stop using it.

The novelty of Georgia as a body text type wears off; still used for headings.

Arial dominates as the body text typeface for the year; despite much disdain for this overused font, it provides some needed relief from the overuse of Verdana.

Heading text increasingly done in serif typefaces, especially with sIFR.

Ahh... web design geek humor - I love it! What, you don't get it?

Read on...

Found on Gizmodo:

Take a model airplane...

Strap a digital camera to it....

Take lots of pictures over scenic areas....

....And you get relatively inexpensive yet amazing aerial photography.

Happy Hanuakah!

Happy Hannukah

Happy Hanukkah!

Happy Chanaukah!

Merry Miracle!

Since Jewish holidays are based on the Hebrew calendar which in turn is based lunar cycles, the date changes every year. This year it starts tonight and ends next Wednesday.

Here's a cheat sheet for the next few years:

• December 7, 2004 - December 15, 2004 (last candle: night of 12/14)
• December 24, 2005 - January 1, 2006 (last candle: night of 12/31)
• December 14, 2006 - December 22, 2006 (last candle: night of 12/21)
• December 3, 2007 - December 11, 2007 (last candle: night of 12/10)

ARGH!!! Silly me for waiting until the last moment to even look at my own cheat sheet. I'm going to Denver on a business trip next week and I planned it so I'd be home in time to light the candles on the last night - but because all Jewish Holidays start in the evening (remember - lunar calendar), I'm going to be home on Wednesday, which is the last last day. The last night when all of the candles are lit is Tuesday night! Doh!

More about Hanukah....

Blogger Corey Gouker wrote a plug-in for Internet Explorer called FlashBang which disables Flash when you don't want it. This blocks all of those annoying Flash-based ads, including those thatappear over the text you are trying to read.

I'm using it now and it works great.

Corey gave me credit for the name - it was originally called TorchFlash.

More info about FlashBang.

From my dad:

Cereality Cereal Bar & Cafe

It's a resturant that serves all kinds of cereal in custom mixes with your choice of toppings. It's all served in chinese food carryout-like boxes.

Yahoo has more about Cereality.

Not much to say about this, except why isn't there one near me yet?

This goes well with Zagat rated Peanut Butter & Co. in Greenwich Village which serves all sorts of peanut butter sandwhiches.

I live just outside of Washington, DC. Do we have any unique places like this here?

From a friend at work:

You've dreamt about it. Envied your kids for having one. Wished someone made one for you. Now they do! Be the first on your block to own a high performance ADULT sized Big Wheel!

Power slides and skidding stops are only days away!

Hmmm.... I always liked by Big Wheels as a kid. New fad or dud?

http://www.bigwheelrally.com/store/adult.htm