August 2nd, 2008 — Family Fun, Fun Stuff, Geek Fun, Travel
Not sure if any of the places/things mentioned in this InformationWeek article qualifies as budget unless you live near the spot and visit as a staycation, but I thought the idea was on-topic for my blog…
I also learned about the book…
A Nuclear Family Vacation: Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry
…while listening to a Science Friday podcast with an interview of one of the book’s authors: Sharon Weinberger. And, there’s also the book…
…for more geeky vacation tips.
August 1st, 2008 — Gadgets
You don’t really hear people referring to the mid-1990s as the good old days. But, if they did, this little bill from June 1995 might shock them out of that thought. I found it while cleaning up my home office. Yep, that is a $709 price tag for a 16MB (that’s MEGA-BYTES, not gigs) RAM board for my PC.
August 1st, 2008 — Family Fun, Fun Stuff
Here’s another good link from my friend John Pescador’s tumblog…
Marvel: Create Your Own Super Hero
Trivia info: Did you know that the two word phrase Super Hero is jointly trademarked by Marvel Comics and DC?
July 26th, 2008 — Fun Stuff
I’m finding all kinds of interesting stuff as I clean-up and re-organize my home office area. I found a Voyager Company 1993 CD of a transfer of The Beatles A Hard Days Night movie. Voyager, long defunct, also published the highly regarded Laser Disc Criterion movie presses. This CD version apparently came from that project. The movie is delivered as 10 QuickTime MOV files that play fine today. The video window is tiny and difficult to see (increasing the size results in heavy pixelation). However, the sound quality is very good. It is fun to see a time warp of not just an old movie (the movie was released in 1964) but also the pre-DVD movie deliver method.
July 26th, 2008 — Family Fun, Fun Stuff, Gadgets
Labyrinth LE for the iPhone is one of the many free games available. Even the first few levels were tough for me but still a lot of fun.
July 23rd, 2008 — Tech Tips
I’ve been cleaning up and reorganizing the work room in my home since I’m spending so much time there these days. I found a bunch of CDs stored in white plastic sleeves that I think were recycled from the discs that my MSDN subscription CDs came in during the late 1990s (they currently come in black sleeves made from different feeling materials). All the slleves (now at least 10 years old) were disintegrating into a white powder. I’ll probably clean the CD surfaces with an eyeglass cleaner (mild solution) before trying them in a reader. But, the lesson learned is to check the sleeves and other containers more frequently.
July 22nd, 2008 — Fun Stuff
Batman The Dark Knight is a huge hit and there’s a boatload of comic book superhero movies in the queue. But, I really wish Hollywood would give Doc Savage another chance. Savage preceded the comic book superhero movement. The character first appeared in a pulp magazine in 1933 (5 years before Superman appeared in Action Comics #1) and was, if you will, the bright contrast to The Shadow (like Batman contrasts with Superman). There was a campy but entertaining 1975 movie (Doc Savage: Man of Bronze) made. But, I think Doc Savage deserves another big budget Hollywood shot. Its 1930s steampunk-like high tech with a built-in cast of interesting supporting characters could take off where Indiana Jones left off.
Marvel tried to move Doc Savage from its very successful Bantam Books reprints (I have dozens of the Bantam Doc Savage books stored away somewhere) to the comic book world in 1972. It really hit its stride with issue #3 IMHO. It featured the Jim Steranko cover shown above. Steve Englehart was the writer and Ross Andru the artist in #1 and #2. The difference under the cover in #3 was the inker. Tom Palmer came on board for three issues starting with #3. He really brought Andru’s layouts and pencils to life (see below).
July 22nd, 2008 — Fun Stuff, Travel
No exactly a budget item. But, definitely a fun item. My good friend Ryan Ozawa and his wife Jen are heading to San Diego to attend the ginourmous Comic-Con in San Diego. You can follow their adventures on special blog just for this event:
July 21st, 2008 — Finance
I’ve never leased a car myself. However, I happened to read in our local paper (I know, how quaint and archaic that I still read a hard copy newspaper :-), that some people are trying to get out of car leases for large expensive to operate (burns a lot of fuel) cars. The person quoted in the story said that he went to…
…to find get out of his car lease. As fuel prices rise and the economy continues to sink, I suspect we will start seeing these kinds of sites prosper (at least in use if not in actual income).
July 20th, 2008 — Tech Tips
It turns out that Microsoft Word 2003 canNOT correctly record a macro to paste unformatted text. Word’s macro recorder kept storing the command to paste text as-is (e.g., with web formatting). I didn’t know the command for an unformatted text. Fortunately, I found this blog entry that explains how to do this. You can see the incorrect macro command commented out in the Word macro below. The correct command to paste unformatted text is below it.
Sub PasteUnformated()
‘
‘ PasteUnformated Macro
‘ Macro recorded 7/20/2008 by Todd Ogasawara
‘
‘ Selection.PasteAndFormat (wdPasteDefault)
Selection.PasteSpecial DataType:=wdPasteText
End Sub