Things By Mike

By now you’ve probably at least heard of if not tried out the new web browser from Google called Chrome. It’s a nice little browser, however it lacks some of the more advanced goodies (plugins and addons for example), so I’ve not as of yet been persuaded to make it my default browser. However that’s not what this post is about.

While clicking around the interweb, I stumbled upon Chromon, which is a game based on the Google Chrome logo. Perhaps you may have noticed that the logo resembles a popular memory game you probably once owned as a child. That game was Simon, of course! Now thanks to a man named Román Cortés, we get to play that game again. I’ve included it for you below. Enjoy!

For the first time in all the years that I’ve used computers, I finally found myself the victim of an annoying little virus this evening. It was surprising considering I’m very careful about what I download, what I open, etc. I of course also run virus software. My software of choice has always been AVG, however now I’m considering making a switch, since it did not detect any viruses.

Anywho here’s my story of what happened.
When I need to grab files from one of my hard drives on my PC, I always like to click on the “My Computer” icon on my desktop then navigate to the drive I need, for example the C: drive. Tonight when trying to navigate to a drive I found myself being greeted by an error message that read “c:\resycled boot.com is not a vaild win32 application”. Obviously there is no system folder called “resycled”, so I knew immediately that my PC was infected. Grr.

After doing some Googling and trying a few solutions that didn’t work, I stumbled onto one that did. I found a person on a tech support forum recommending a piece of software called Flash Disinfector. While it was created to disinfect USB flash drives, I decided to give it a shot anyway. To my delight it did the trick and removed the nasty little virus from each of my drives. The total time to remove it was no more than 10 seconds. Very nice.

If you’re having this same issue with your PC, I highly recommended downloading Flash Disinfector, which you can find here.

So I’m sitting here unable to sleep and clicking around YouTube and just stumbled upon this great performance of the song “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails and special guest, David Bowie. If you’re a fan of either or both, chances are you’ll enjoy this video as much as I did. Of course if you own the NIN DVD called Closure, you’ve probably already seen this. I obviously do not own it, so this was my first time seeing this performance.

Quite a while ago, I posted a semi-complete remix I created of the song called The Great Destroyer by Trent Reznor. It was okay, but as with all music I create, I have a habit of constantly nitpicking at it until I’m eventually at least marginally happy. My Great Destroyer remix was of course no exception to my nitpicking habit.

The past several days I’ve spent a dozen hours or so adding about a minute to the length of the track, making it feel much more complete. I think for the most part I’m now happy, though I’ll probably pick at it again at some point. If you’re a fan of Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails, feel free to click the play button below to hear my remix.

Eventually I plan to remix more of Trent Reznor’s music. I haven’t quite decided which song I’ll do next though. I’d really love to remix Hurt, though I don’t think Trent has ever released the proper files for remixing or even given permission to do so.

It seems regardless of how much I think about reviving this blog, I do a pretty lousy job. One shiny thing or another distracts me and suddenly a week or three flies by in between posts. I’ve been thinking about some ways to breathe life back into this place again, and I have an idea or two. In the meantime I’ll just write a little update about what I’ve been up to lately.

Grifball
Yep, I’m still playing this darn time wasting video game “sport”. It admittedly is probably one of the biggest reasons I’ve fallen off the face of the blogosphere. To say the game is addictive would be an understatement. Join a team, become part of league, play in tournaments and quickly it takes up even more time. I enjoy it though and I’m part of a great team with people I really like playing with. If you own an XBOX 360 and the Halo 3 game, I’d certainly recommend giving Grifball a try. You can read more about it here.

Dreaming
My cousin and I still aren’t giving up our movie dreams. We still have a couple screenplays that need tidying, some rewriting, and extra thought. Eventually we’ll be happy with what we have and move onto the process of finding an agent capable of helping us sell our work. At least that’s the goal.

Poker
Before the wonderful U.S. government decided to make it very difficult to play poker online for money, it’s something I used to do. I’ve missed it and lately have been just playing the game for fun. It’s still possible to play online, mainly in free games, but it’s better than nothing. It’s such a great game.

There’s of course other various things I’ve been up to, but nothing too terribly fascinating.

By the way, it seems while I’ve been away, Google has decided to decrease my page rank by 1. I guess I can’t blame them, considering how dormant this site has become lately.

The other day while sitting here sipping my oh so tasty Alka Selter cold medicine flavored water, I was perusing the Rooster Teeth website. There’s a section which is full of all the many crazy images the site’s registered users upload to their profile. There were several pages of the usual lolcats and motivation images. Pretty boring stuff. Then finally I landed on something that literally made me LOL.

If you’re like me and grew up in the early 80s, a fan of rock and heavy metal music, chances are you’ll remember the classic song by Metallica called “One”. If not, let me refresh your memory.

That would be a shortened version of the song, but the part to focus on is around the 3:30 mark. James Hetfield snarls, “Darkness imprisoning me, all that I see, absolute horror. I cannot live, I cannot die, trapped in myself, body my holding cell.”

Now let’s take a look at this great image I found on Rooster Teeth the other day. It features a couple of the guys from Metallica out shopping, probably somewhere posh like Beverly Hills. Check out James Hetfield in his flip flops. Pretty funny. What really cracked me up though is the great caption someone added to the image.

By the way their new album Death Magnetic is awfully blah, but that’s discussion for another day.

If you must go outside or interact with other humans, I advise you to take precautions and wear something not unlike a hazmat suit. If you decide not to heed my warning, you run the risk of being assaulted by a nasty pack of germs, hell bent on ruining a week or two of your life.

What am I talking about, you ask? It seems everyone I know lately has become stricken by a nasty cold/flu/virus/thing which has left them feeling down right lousy. Of course, because I had no warning, I’ve fallen victim to it. My days are filled with fever induced sweating sprees, epic coughing fits and unbridled sneezing spasms. It seems no amount of Nyquil is enough to make it stop.

On the bright side since I’ve felt like doing nothing but lay around in bed, I’ve spent some time watching plenty of tv and movies. One such movie that I really enjoyed was Kabluey. It was quirky, rather awkward and full of just enough laughs to make me feel better, if only for a short while.

If you’re reading this right now and find yourself surrounded by a mountain of tissues, feeling like you’ve been run over by a speeding bus, I recommend dropping Kabluey into your Netflix queue, so you can at least enjoy 90 minutes of your sneezy, cough ridden, stuffy headed day. You can thank me later.

I mentioned a few posts ago that after I finished moving into a new place I’d be getting a kitten. I did indeed, and it’s been fun having a little furball to play with once again. I’ve wanted to post pictures of the critter here since I got her, however she had a bit of an eye infection in both eyes, rendering her less than photogenic. On top of that she rarely sits still, complicating matters.

Fast forward a couple weeks or so, eye infection all but gone, I finally decided it was time to get this fuzzy bundle of silliness to sit still long enough for a brief (very brief) photo session. I was able to snap precisely two quick photos of her before she scurried off to chew on something or other. Admittedly these aren’t the greatest photos, but it could be weeks again before she settles down long enough for me to take more pictures.

By the way her name is Fidget, because as I mentioned before, she rarely ever sits still.

Fidget inspects my glass of water.

She’s a little camera shy.

If you own an Xbox 360, chances are you probably play online via Xbox live. Before you can log into Live however, everything begins in the graphical interface of the 360 known as the dashboard. This fall Microsoft will be rolling out a rather large update which will completely replace the old dashboard with something completely new.

This past weekend at the Penny Arcade Expo, Major Nelson of XBOX Live gave a demonstration of that new dashboard. This video is probably taken from someone’s camera phone, so it’s not the greatest, but it’s an early look at the changes coming this fall.

In my last post I mentioned I’ve been dealing with a huge case of blogger’s block, which is probably a bit of understatement since it seems I’ve been mired in a blogging slump for ages now. While I can’t say I’m feeling completely revived as of yet, I have finally made a change of scenery here in the form of a new theme, which is the first thing I wanted to do to try and kick start that blogging spark.

For the past several days I’ve been messing about in Photoshop with various layout ideas but nothing was really clicking for me. Finally I decided I’d just scour the web and check out what’s new in the free Wordpress theme world. I came across this great looking and very simple theme called DailyPress and decided that was the one for me. After a bit of tweaking this morning, I got it to look and function how I wanted it to and now I’ve officially made the switch.

Perhaps not everyone will like this new theme or agree with the change, but it’s nice to load up this site and finally have a fresh new look to it. I think it’s easy for our blogs to begin to feel very stale to us when we’re constantly looking at the same layout all of the time.

Now I just need to work on posting more again ;)