Nico’s

This great YouTube series of videos is my current favorite internet “thing”.
The premise is: back in 1968, Alrugo Entertainment filmed an italian action-adventure movie. It was deemed “un-viewable” by italian distributors and never released or shown.
The only 35mm print of the film was lost at sea, but it was recently recovered. Alrugo Entertainment now releases the film through YouTube, one bit a week.
The “production” does give the cheap, cheesy sense of it being an old movie. Or at least, it does for me, because I haven’t seen too many movies from that time. Regardless, it’s awesome. And that’s what matters right now.
Here is the trailer:

And if you go here, you can must see all the episodes.

I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to share a compilation of videos from one of TV’s greatest shows, Brainiac (Wikipedia article).
The premise is to capture somewhat normal things (like a slap to the face) in very slow motion, and seeing what happens in the blink of an eye. I must say that if I were to get slapped now, it’d hurt more Watch the video here, with my favorite part, the slap, at 3:30:

From the confines of my office, I celebrate Pi Day with you, via this creepy picture taken with my new MacBook:

Today, is the day. No moar typos. Their will be exellent spelling and grammer, and no moar confussion between nouns,adverbs, adjactives and propositions.
Why? Becuase, today is National Grammar Day!

To break the scary trend of politically charged posts , I’m going to tell you all about my newest USB drive. That’s right. Get into it, people!

I got a 4Gb Cruzer Micro, and the first thing I did after plugging it in, was uninstall U3. No, thanks, I don’t want something installing into my computer for my portable device. And it’s also ugly. And I didn’t want it, I just wanted 4Gbs of storage in my keychain!
Luckily, I was able to uninstall U3 without a problem, but after reading a bit, I guess some people have had trouble in the past. They have a page here to download an uninstaller, which to me says "oh hi, most people are not going to know how to uninstall this bloatware, and out of those, most of them are going to be to lazy to research how to do it, muahahha ".

At any rate, I happily had a device that was nothing but a dumping ground for all my secret documents. I was a happy customer now.

But then, I started wondering. Why would anyone even use U3? I came to find out that it would be useful to have some portable applications that you carry around on your keychain. Like your browser, with all of your bookmarks… And maybe even a password manager, so that you don’t have to remember all your different passwords for myspace, facebook, twitter and Oprah’s fan club site.

So, in search for an alternative, I ran into PortableApps and PStart. I ended up trying PortableApps first, and I haven’t had any problems at all, so I didn’t even make it to the other alternative. Now, I have Firefox, FileZilla, 7-zip, Miranda, Notepad++ and PuTTY, anywhere I go.

And one of these bookmarks that go with me now, is for FreeRice.com. It’s a good time killer for about 10 minutes, which serves multiple functions: entertainment, improvement of my engrish by making me learn new and crazy words, and it helps feed the hungry of the world, by donating 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program for each word you get right. Go check it out!

Try this experiment in the safety of your home!

Step 1: Watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BbUhlIEZEY. It’s a guy doing pullups from a crane, several hundred feet from the ground, without parachute, safety net or even a bungee cord.

Step 2: Notice how sweaty your hands are!

Why does this happen? I don’t know. Maybe it’s nature’s way of telling me "don’t you even dare try doing something like this, because if you do you’ll slip to a free fall death, sucker!".

So I checked my bank account statement online today, like any good conscientious bank user. Everything looks normal, until I get to notice the "pending" on a $120 invoice from my hosting provider, Dreamhost. The alarm is going off, that’s no pocket change!

I fire up the internets, and quickly find quite a few other people in distress about the same situation, to finally arrive at the official explanation: human error. One of the guys in charge of the billing operation did a few clicks in the wrong places, and all users got billed for a year or two of hosting, which starts at $120 and goes up and up.

The nerd community is outraged and understandably so. What if you’re living paycheck to paycheck, and this billing error causes you to overdraw your account, resulting in penalty fees? Will they pay for those too? Will they bite the bullet and give away a free month or two of hosting? I don’t know.

What I do know is that it’s pretty respectable of them to fess up to their error, and to give a thorough explanation of what happened, and why. I mean, shit happens, but how you deal with it it’s what matters, and in my book, they’ve dealt with it just fine. Unlike some of the other users affected, who feel like after this, they cannot have their site hosted by Dreamhost any longer, I’m sticking with them, because they’re alright.

I found this site, and I’m enthralled. You can do anything at zombo.com!

From http://site.gravatar.com/about: "Gravatar aims to put a face behind the name. This is the beginning of trust. In the future, Gravatar will be a way to establish trust between producers and consumers on the internet. It will be the next best thing to meeting in person.
Today, an avatar. Tomorrow, Your Identity—Online."

Doesn’t that sound like the future? Well, let me tell you, it does! And as such, I’ve jumped in the bandwagon and I’m part of it! Oh yes, that’s right. And this is what I think I look like, so I’m using this as my gravatar:

I used this website to make my avatar. You can use whatever picture you want, but I figured that since it’s representing me, I’d put something that looks remotely like me.

My picture will follow me to all sites that have Gravatar enabled, automatically insterting my picture. It just so happens to be that my blog is now Gravatar enabled, so if you are registered with them, give it a shot. Leave a comment, use the email address* that you use with Gravatar, and leave a mark!

* I know a lot of people are weary that if they enter their email address in a blog, such as mine, they’ll get a lot of spam. Do not worry, that would only happen if the webmaster was an asshole. And we all know that I’m not one.

I keep encroaching into this internet thing. My latest attempt is with Twitter, a "micro-blog". It took me about 5 minutes to sign up and get my cell phone and my IM* set up to be able to update my Twitter from anywhere

So what’s the need for yet another blog-ish site? Well, I’ll use Twitter to update stuff that no one really cares about, it’s just for fun. But just in case you, my loyal blog reader, are curious, I’ve added a widget to the sidebar on the right that will display a couple of my latest Twitter updates. It’s a win-win situation! 

*It took me a bit longer than usual because I use Miranda and I had to figure out a few plugins that I had disabled earlier.