Any powerpoint attachments sent to any of my accounts will now be forwarded immediately to Bill Gate’s Personal E-Mail address and then deleted.

     So I’m sitting down to play another friggin’ boring game of Call of Duty: World at War on the Xbox 360.  I hate that game.  I truly do.  I play it because a few friends drag me in, and tonight, I decided try and improve my gamer score a little. 
     But no bones about it, I hate the game.  It’s laggy-slow.  It commandeers bandwidth worse than the porn-hungry neighbor who “stealz ur internets.”  The glitches and screen artifacts pretty much screw up any chance of having a decent experience playing the game in multiplayer mode.  The bug reporting mechanism to the manufacturer, Treyarch, pretty well leaves you open to be bashed and belittled by the game’s developers for even having the balls to open your mouth about their precious turd.
     And if friends would stop playing it, so would I.  Which is why I’m looking forward to Infinity Ward’s release next month:  Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
     Because Treyarch, and their patheticly overdone World War II scenarios, can suck my left nut, right nut and anus.  Or, better yet, Brandon’s anus…

     So anyway … About an hour ago, I was abruptly disconnected from Xbox LIVE for an update.  It took a several minutes. 
     “Okay, WTF?”
     My Xbox restarted, downloaded a few more updates.  Restarted again.

     By 10PM EST, I was back online, with a new tab in my dashboard.

     “Xbox Preview.”

     Ahh, looking around… Facebook? Check.  Twitter?  Check.  Zune Video Marketplace?  Check.  Xbox LIVE News?  Check.  MSNBC?  Check.  Dillbert?  Check.  The New Yorker Cartoons?  Check.  last.fm?  Well… if you can call it that.

     Yep … all working … trippy … so I send out a couple of test messages on Twitter, update my Facebook status, browse friends and leave a couple comments…
     Then I start screwing around with the absolute worst interface ever.  The last.fm app seriously sucks.  I can’t even explain “why” it sucks, except to say, you’ll have to experience the suckiness yourself to understand.  Basically, if you’re looking for something easy to use, sensible, start a channel and add music to it, you’re pretty well going to be in “WTF?” land for a while.

     That aside … It’s still a bunch of neat new toys.  If you’d like to sign up for the “next generation” Xbox 360 Dashboard, go and register.  And get one of these, because you’re gonna need it…

     Why, now, I can see when this Brandon twit decides to Tweet that he’s going to take a crap … without having to log into my PC … *rolls eyes*

     A little while back, I did a review about the reacTable, a table-top music synthesizer.  People loved it.  So when Microsoft comes up with Microsoft Surface, people are going insane on the Microsoft-bashing bandwagon.

     Check this out …

(Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VfpVYYQzHs)

     Sorry, cool stuff.

     Still, a lot of people are screaming that, ”Microsoft is inventing a product which there’s no need for!”
     My honest opinion says that that those types of short-sighted Asshats can suck a big one.

(Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZuGClKRDtc)

     Whether or not some people see a need for it or not is irrelevant.  There certainly are uses for it now.  Think in terms of business and Government, where untold sums of money are spent on Conference Calls, cameras, long distance charges, couriers, paper documents, signatures…
     Imagine the ability to slide a signed digital document across the desk to a guy sitting across the country … or at a manufacturing facility in Singapore … sending a design specification, and getting back photos of a prototype … having a Sales & Marketing meeting, complete with fresh demographic material from a country you’ve never been to …
     Imagine the ability for a President to learn about a culture by reading interacting with their representative … being able to read their material, on the fly … forging a pact … stopping a war … signing an International Peace Accord.

     Coming from the Asshat line of thinking, we had bonfires, so who needed a fireplace?  We had fireplaces, so why have an oven?  The oven was fine, so who needs a microwave?  Seriously, why have a refrigerator when we were perfactly happen asking the ice-man to come into our cellars and fill the icebox?  Why did we need telephones when we could visit?  Why did we need cellphones when we had perfectly good landlines?  Why did we need e-mail when we had a perfectly good postal system?  Why did we need the Internet at all?

     Innovation is great.  It helps fulfill our quest to better ourselves, and when used correctly, allows us to be more productive.

(Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cog8b8ojji0)

     I have to admit, however, that the little show when they sit my drink on the bar is definitely gonna distract me from watching the carbonation rise to a head in my Guinness…

     I’ve had this HP Pavilion 513W sitting here for a while now, but when the guy first asked me about it, it would lock up when it attempted to load the AGP driver — even in safe mode.
     Now, I don’t make it a habit of working on Home machines for obvious reasons, but I know him, and was pretty sure of what was going on with it.  Told him I could take a look at it, but in the meantime, he wanted to see what HP said.  Apparently, he and his father decided to do a system restore, erasing all of his data.  Still, each time it got to Disc 6, the system would stop writing to its 80GB Hard Drive and halt.  Given all that, I was reasonably sure the restore CD’s were scratch just bad enough to quit working.

     After finally locating an HP Operating System disc and trying that, I realized the machine would never boot into XP.  I changed the hard drive to no avail.  I changed the memory, power supply, and even the CPU, and it still kept happening.

     Today, just for a test, I unplugged the Combo CD-RW/DVD that came with that particular Pavilion.  To my amazement, the system booted right up, no problem.
     Confused, I plugged up a Sony DRU-14A DVD-RW and the original 80GB drive, and XP Home is installed just perfectly (on a drive which previously complained intermittently).

     Eventually, everthing was right.

     Or so I thought…

     The next hurdle was Windows Activation.  After a half hour on the phone with Microsoft Customer Service, they gave me a key required to activate Windows XP, and everything was good.

     This is why I don’t work on Home machines … Strange things happen with Home computers that never happen on Business machines.

     I wonder what’s gonna happen when he upgrades to Windows Vista next month? 

     Nonsense title?  Check this out…

     This week, we had Firefox cozying up to Microsoft in order to make a Windows Vista version of their product.

When Microsoft’s open source lab offered to help the Mozilla foundation with getting Firefox to run well on Vista, reactions ranged from skeptical and suspicious to surprised and excited. But in fact, the two teams have already been quietly working together. In this thread, Mike Schroepfer wrote “we are already in contact with your team via email”. The lab time would be helpful, though, according to Mozilla developer Mike Beltzner, who added “yes, we’d definitely be interested in getting some 1:1 support”.

It just goes to show that developers from organizations that are outwardly fiercely competitive are often quite civil with each other when nobody is looking. Perhaps that’s why projects like Apache and Eclipse are so successful.

     Which led me to do the following cartoon…

     Wonder if it’ll chew off its leg when it wakes up in the morning?