The force is with us

This is the line for the midnight showing of Star Wars III - at the least popular theater in town!

OK, I'm officially a geek

I just bought my tickets for the midnight showing of Revenge of the Sith.

But most of the reviews show that this one is much better than the last two prequels. The New York Times reviewer says it's even better than the original Star Wars. So that justifies the midnight showing on a workday, right?

MSN desktop search final

Microsoft has released the final version this excellent desktop search tool, which in my experience is the best of the three big file search tools (the other two are Google's and Yahoo's. All three are very useful, but MSN is the only one of them that indexes OneNote files, which I use extensively. It has tangibly improved the way I work, eliminating the file- and email-hunting that used to take up so much of my day.

Why are these tools any different from the regular Windows search function? For one, they're faster than the standard Windows search, even othose aided by Windows' annoying indexing service, which many power users turn off. Second, the new tools search the contents of files, not just the names. So it's easier to find that Coxinha recipe, even if you don't remember whether you found it on a Web site, saved it as a Word file or got it in an e-mail. And all three tools set themselves in your Windows taskbar, so they're always ready to use.

If you haven't tried out the services, you should. They're free.

Lavarific

My lava lamp at work came back to life!

We're No. 1!

L.A., S.F. Lead Nation in Rush-Hour Delays

Test from cell

Did it work?

By popular demand

Seattle's famous Perpetually Vomiting Bear.

One more time, with a better size.

I saw this at the Computer History Museum (it's here,not in Seattle). My favorite feature, as listed on the box: "Displays all words." As a writer, I can certainly see why this would be helpful.

Mostly fixed

Well, I found an old version of my page, so I won't have to re-do everything. This whole mess stemmed from some new photos-on-the-go functionality I'm trying to add to the site so I can post text and photos from my phone and Pocket PC.

Yes, as you can tell from all this free computer time I have, Andrea is in Brazil. I'll be joining her in two weeks. Maybe someday I'll find a job that offers real vacation time.

Ooops!

Looks like I really screwed up my blog. I guess I know what I'll be doing this weekend.

I'm in Seattle!

Testing.

Hold off on that memory upgrade

From Infoworld (via Yahoo News): Need DRAM? Best Prices Still to Come

Who says you need a pricey laplop to surf the Web at Starbucks?

This guy doesn't.

Longhorn peeks

This blogger talks about his dinner with Microsoft's Jim Allchin and gives some cool details about the upcoming version of Windows.

Andrea goes to Spain: The San Jose Mercury News sent Andrea to this year's Malofiej (a Society for News Design conference) in Bilbao, Spain. Here, we can see her having trouble with my iPaq. More photos here.

One's man's trash is another man's Ladmo Bag

Someone broke into my car -- probably after I left it unlocked, as I tend to do -- rifled though everything, but apparently didn't find anything he liked. Which is kind of insulting if you think about it.

I had a very nice mouse and keyboard in there, a pair of headphnes, some home-burned CDs and a couple of framed prints I plan to give to Goodwill. My stereo, factory installed, separates the radio and CD player. This setup hides the CD player near the cupholder, which makes the radio look like your basic factory-installed radio. Of course, even if the would-be thief had seen the CD player, if would probably fit only in another Honda Civic.

Ha ha!

Of course, this is probably a good sign that I should get a car alarm and clean up the car so no one is even tempted to see if I have anything valuable. Sometimes I do leave my laptop int he trunk.

Real-life searching with Google

The jaugernaut continues as Google unveils its new map service. It's a slick offering, with a 3D look for pushpins and direction bubbles. And if you click and hold your mouse button, you can drag the map around on the fly. There's lots of other nice little touches.

The one thing that this doesn't have yet is the ability to save frequently used adresses for quick directions like Yahoo, which is the deal-killer for me. But Google being Google, I'm sure they'll add the feature in eventually.

More on AAC+

This site goes into a litle more detail about the coding technology.

A few cool things

I've been neglecting the blog recently -- I've been extremely busy with work and life -- but I have some cool things to mention:

AAC+: Dolby's new sound format, which is part of the MPEG4 standard, gives really good sound at bitrates as low as 24 kbps. Don't believe me? Try Tuner2 and find out for yourself. I think you need Winamp 5.05 or above to use the format

Star Wars Republic Commando: The game demo is out. I liked it.

Lifehacker: This Web site explains how to do lots of techie and non-techie things. Pretty nifty.

Picasa 2: The new version of Google's photo-management software is out. It's free, and makes managing photos easier than it is on the Mac.

More of thiose red state family values

Police: Girl died after mother forced her to drink bleach - Jan 14, 2005

"A woman angry with her 12-year-old daughter for having sex forced the girl to drink bleach and sat on her until the child died, a police detective said.

The girl's 9-year-old brother was forced to watch the attack, Detective Warren Cotton testified Thursday in a preliminary hearing for Tunisia Archie, 31."