My last post of 2005, and I have both nothing really important to say, but also a lot to catch-up stuff to mention. Ugh.

We've listened to some sweet music at work lately, including:

"Digital Ash in a Digital Urn" (album) by Bright Eyes
"Shine" by Kevin Reeves
"Sound Scientist" by Bill
"Get Behind Me Satan" (album) by The White Stripes
"Betty" by The Lascivious Biddies (check out their biddycast!)
"Good" by Better Than Ezra
"From Under The Cork Tree" (album) by Fall Out Boy
"Trashed & Scattered" by Avenged Sevenfold (A7X)

I enjoyed some very tasty Blue Diamond Honey Roasted Almonds, as well as some delicious imported Lindt Extra Fine Dark Chocolate ("Lindt Excellence", made in France) - 70% cocoa. Mmmmm.

Adam Curry has been discussing the Gillette M3 Power razor a lot lately (on his Daily Source Code). In a fluke deal, I also got one of these razors a short while ago (although I got the cooler black Nitro version). The vibrating head gives the illusion of using an electric razor, while still getting the satisfying close shave of a triple-blade wet razor. It does numb your hand, though. The weird thing is that I accidentally dropped the razor and lost the orange lube strip on the initial blade, and I thought it wouldn't matter that much, but -oh- was I wrong! That little orange strip is the secret of the smoothness of the whole experience!

At work, we also recently listened to the Bodybuilding.com-sponsored broadcast of the Boston College vs. Boise State game (the MPC Computers Bowl) on the radio. It was a very rainy second half, and Boise almost won it, but couldn't quite pull it off during the last minute. They came from behind, though, and scored three touchdowns within one quarter and were just a few yards from winning the whole thing with just 45 seconds left. Very intense last quarter, for sure!

We were all shocked at work about the Craig Titus and Kelly Ryan murder case recently in the news. The Las Vegas abandoned car burning, their fugitive flight to Boston (but not Greece), and subsequent arrest had us all very occupied for a few days.

Weird fact of the day: typing "www.x" in the browser address bar resolves to paypal.com - bizarre. Why'd they register x.com?

We've viewed many Christmas-gift films over the past few days, including "Batman Begins" [Two-Disc Deluxe Edition] (2005; Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes, Gary Oldman) on widescreen DVD, the entire first season of "House" (2004; Hugh Laurie) on DVD, "Fantastic Four" (2005; Jessica Alba) on DVD, and "Hitch" (2005; Will Smith).

Here's an interesting piece of audio: the signatures of every Billboard Top 100 Chart #1 songs from 1958 to 2000, all mashed into one long song.

Did you hear about the leap second? Speaking of time, we received a very cool, very large SkyScan analog clock (24" diameter, model 88204) over the holidays. It automatically sets itself and keeps itself in sync with the NIST atomic clock in Colorado. Very cool!

Did you know that Silly Putty shatters (instead of stretching, compressing, or molding itself) when impacted forcefully? Very strange.

NOTE: Obviously, this didn't get published on the 31st, but I did start it before the year ended, despite it finally getting onto the site a week later. Thus, I'm calling it my last post of 2005.

Well, we're back. We finally got the DSL back on, so the blogging, podcasting, and caching, etc. should resume fairly quickly. Congrats to Brad and Emilie on the arrival of baby Chase! I'll be blogging some more this weekend, so look for some updates soon! (Ugh, so much to catch up on!)

UPDATE: Christmas photos, house photos, etc. coming soon, too!

We moved into our new house on Saturday, woohoo! We're super tired, though, so more details will follow later. Zzzzzzz.

Here's a short list of eccentric/cool/nerdy things I've seen on the 'net since yesterday:

Lady-like Holiday decorations
Dickens' classic "A Christmas Carol" - the 5-part podcast series
Bigfoot's autobiography

I saw this fake-blue-enhanced fountain on my way to work, and had to snap a photo to share (oops, is it cold outside?):



Question: Is there any way to have Firefox set as my default browser for one XP user, but IE as the default for other XP users (in WinXP Home)? Sucks if there isn't. I tried it, but it changed the setting for all users at the same time. Lame.

I met and shook hands with Bob Cicherillo yesterday. He's quite funny in person!

I tried (and enjoyed) the very tasty Turkey & Cranberry Club sandwich at Blimpie today for lunch. Mmmm.

First there was the Sony DRM that could be bypassed with a piece of scotch tape. Now, apparently, biometric fingerprint scanners can be easily fooled with Play-Doh. Doh!

Speaking of Sony woes, Sony has decided not to recall any more CDs, instead just offering a software patch to fix a new problem with CD DRM protection.

Sony's affected artists include Maroon 5, Alicia Keys, and Santana. (Recap: First it was the XCP rootkit, then MediaMax security holes, and now songs being blocked from being transferred to iPods.) The saga continues. Artists have been bypassing record labels and mailing out unprotected, burned copies of CDs to fans to help save some face. Ridiculous.

In other music news, I've heard some fairly good new music over the past few days, including:

"If Every Day Were Christmas" by Podsafe For Peace
"In The Morning Sun" by The Lingus

We did a 'taste test' recently, comparing two brands of protein bars:

PowerBar ProteinPlus Chocolate Crisp (23g protein)
vs.
Myoplex Storm Chocolate Peanut Caramel (27g protein).

And the winners are PowerBar ProteinPlus (for taste), but Myoplex Storm (for feeling full in your stomach). Personally, I think they're both quite tasty!   =)

Oops, Sony CDs have yet another bug. Some people are actually suggesting that this is exactly the kind of copy-protection Sony secretly wants - that people will be too afraid to play the CDs in a computer and will therefore only listen to them in regular CD players, hence no piracy. Hmmm, I love a good conspiracy theory. =)

We watched a rerun of a Idaho Steelheads vs. Utah Grizzlies hockey game (at Qwest Arena in Boise) for a few minutes on T.V. Interesting.

We saw "White Chicks" (2004; Shawn & Marlon Wayans, John Heard, Jessica Cauffiel, Terry Crews) on VHS a few weeks back, but I obviously forgot to mention it. Funny.

There were two similar unfortunate Wikipedia stories this week: Adam Curry trying to rewrite podcasting history, and the unfortunate John Seigenthaler joke.

It appears that Sony has patched their second DRM flaw. Oh, joy. Britney Spears and Billie Holiday CD's sport the new Sony DRM this time around (Sony dumped the first DRM that caused all the problems, and has embraced that of another company).

I found the "Picture Perfect" cache yesterday during lunchtime. More excitingly, though, is the fact that I won an iPod Shuffle from Litehouse Foods! It came in the mail yesterday, and I was completely astounded. There were 1,000 winners, and I was one of them. Crazy. Thanks, Litehouse!

Regarding the Shuffle, however, is this the hardest thing to use or what? How the heck do you synchronize this thing without using iTunes? (I really hate iTunes, by the way. Besides, why should I have to put in a credit card number just to download the free weekly songs? Lame.) And what's the deal with music mode vs. file storage mode? In storage mode, the Shuffle shows up as an external drive, allowing me to copy over MP3s with no problem, but then apparently in this mode the Shuffle can't play them because the songs aren't in the Shuffle's database? Lame. And then when you're using it in storage mode, you now have to stop the USB device before removing it from the USB port? Lame. In music mode, the Shuffle doesn't appear as a drive (it's hidden or something), so I can't transfer files over. Lame. And this is supposed to be easy?

Okay, a little searching around and I finally found a solution: Shuffler. It allows you to transfer files to the iPod Shuffle, and then it rebuilds the database with the playlist, so Shuffle will recognize the music. No iTunes needed! Slick. I previously tried iShuffle, but it didn't work for me. (It looks very pretty, though.) I also checked out, of course, the Sourceforge offering (shuffle-db), but I didn't want to install Python just for something this trivial. Here's more information.

We're both disappointed with Google at how "off" both Google maps and Google Earth are when you overlay satellite images with street maps. Try it: the street lines from the maps and the streets on the satellite photos never line up very well when you zoom in. Here's an example:



Granted, it's only ever off by about 100 yards or so, but can't they compensate for this? I guess you get what you pay for (it's free).

We went and saw "Wallace and Grommit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" at the $3 theater last night. Although Becky snickered at a few parts during the film, she enjoyed the closing credits the most. Jared, however, slept through it. Sleepy son.   =)

The word "podcast" will now be added to the dictionary, while "sudoku", however, will still not be (yet).

We signed all the paperwork on our house today (at Pioneer Title) and scored some sweet pens in the process. =)

We've been enjoying a plethora of forensics/murder mystery shows on primetime TV as of late. The newest additions to this litany are "Cold Case" and "Killer Instinct". Not bad, although CC seems to be better than KI, in our opinion.

We swung by an event cache tonight ("TVCA Meeting - The Winter Opener"), and I got to see our first 2005 White Jeep Travel Bug. (About time!)

Today's Word of the Day is "logorrhea", which is just a hilarious term. I think it's cool that there is now a Gold's Gym in Reno.

We found our 500th geocache tonight: "Sudoku Numbers" in West Boise. Misti solved the three Sudoku puzzles requisite to getting the cache's coordinates. A new twist, indeed.

I guess I hadn't noticed this before because it didn't apply to me at the time, but since we're now in the market for a garage door opener, it's interesting to note that alleged DMCA violations affect even garage doors. Hmmmm.

Save The Muppets!

Our 'podcast' from last Sunday night is an interview with Darlene Barnet, plus some wonderful podsafe music. Tune in here:

Show #: 20  
Length: 13 minutes, 5 seconds
Bitrate: 128 Kbps
Size: 11.99 MB

Mentioned in the podcast:

The Secret Life of Bees
Cruisebox
Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute
Craig Caesar
Alex Brooke
Aux and Big Mike

I tried running the new SNARF email tool, however when I ran it, it threw several errors and exited. Hmmmmm.

Did you know that Gmail can be made secure with a trivial hack? Use "https" instead of "http" and all your traffic will be safe from looky-loos. Simple, yet effective.

Well, I finished listening to "A Knight of the Word" by Terry Brooks yesterday, as I mentioned would happen a few days ago. I love this series.

We tried to find three caches yesterday, but only found one of them (the "Be Prepared" cache). The other two are currently buried under piled up snow from the parking lots.

Speaking of snow, here's a photo of our place a couple of mornings ago. It all melted away, however:



For our Christmas party at Bodybuilding.com, we attended the Idaho Stampede game last night at Qwest Arena here in Boise. The Stampede won, beating the Rockford Lightning, 105-103.

Misti's been enjoying some Sudoku puzzles recently. We actually stumbled across this game because a cache is requiring us to solve three sudoku puzzles to get the proper coordinates. Interesting.

Well, there is a javascript exploit now in the wild that affects even fully-patched XP SP2 using MSIE. Ouch.

New music discovered while at work:

Electric Six
"Feel Good Inc" by Gorillaz