2006s

    Weather is freaking me out

    Alright, the weather is really starting to bother me. Today, December 30th it was 41 °F while we were driving around this afternoon and it was raining. This wasn’t a “normal” winter rain. This rain felt like April showers. Nice big drops with a regular patter on the street. It’s December! Where is the snow!? I realize talking about the weather is so very Minnesotan of me. The faithful readers of this website probably care about my weather as much as what I had for lunch. But I must comment anyway.

    I read a great article in last issue of The Week about depression rates being high in Moscow because there was no snow! This is the warmest winter ever for Moscow and the days are so short that the lack of the snows reflective qualities results in their rarely being any light.

    What in the world is going on here. Take a look at December with this graph.

    temp-december-2006

    For the whole month of December the weather has just hovered in these ridiculously high ranges, barely dipping below freezing at night.

    Enough already, let’s get some snow!

    We Love the Wii

    I’ve been wanting to use that headline for a while now. ;-) The Wii made the trip to North Dakota for Christmas. I wasn’t planning on taking it but then some of my cousins got wind that I had one of these prized units and suggested I bring it. It was a huge hit. The little Wii served over 9 hours of playtime on December 25th – by far the longest workout it has ever gotten.

    It’s really amazing to watch people that never have any interest in video games playing a Wii and liking it so much. Wii Sports, the free “in box” game was the biggest hit of the day. The fact that it requires no experience to play, you just pick it up and go, makes it a big winner with people that are just getting acquainted with the Wii and it’s free motion controls. We even made a number of Mii’s for some of my relatives and everyone had a blast making them look as close to the person as they could.

    I also scored two new games for my Wii: Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz and Red Steel. I only played a few minutes of Super Monkey Ball myself hitting a few of the party games. The game has a lot of promise. i played Red Steel for about 20 minutes and it was pretty good. I’m not a fan of most first-person shooters, but this was actually controllable and again the free motion controls made it easy to work with.

    In other Wii related news I grabbed the preview of the Internet Channel for it. I was really impressed with it. First off, Nintendo did the right thing by not making their own and getting Opera to build a Wii version. Secondly, the speed is much better than I expected. I’ve always felt the “Internet” features on the Wii were really slow, but it must be something on the Nintendo side since the browser itself was very usable. It even plays flash video, making it a great YouTube surfing station.

    Merry Christmas 2006

    Tammy, Mazie and I all want to take a moment to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a great holiday season. You have possibly been checking your mailboxes eager to open the 2nd annual Thingelstad Christmas letter. The anticipation has been high, everyday eagerly looking forward to that postal delivery, only to be let down.

    Well, unfortunately the post office isn’t to blame but instead we are. We never got it done. We held out hopes for a last minute “hail Mary” letter to be produced but it never happened. You can stop checking your mailbox with vigor and jeering at your postal carrier for not bringing you the letter. It isn’t coming.

    Keep your eyes out however for a 2nd semi-annual Thingelstad Christmas letter in 2007. From our family to yours, Merry Christmas!

    Traineo

    While reading TechCrunch about a week ago I saw a headline about a “web 2.0” community-centric fitness site called Traineo. This hit all my hot buttons since the “geekery” sounded cool and I’m looking for something to help me along my path to getting smaller again. A couple of days later I finally got to the site, signed on and I’ve been really impressed. I’ve decided to start using this to track my fitness progress instead of my decade-plus venerable Lifeform software. Lifeform is still the best food logging software I’ve ever seen, but the rest of it I can do it Traineo easier and it’s a service with community.

    Traineo provides some buttons for you to put on your site and such, you will see one on my site showing my progress towards my weight goal. Of the features that I particularly like is the motivator system where you pick four people that will get weekly reports on your progress.

    I’m gushing a bit, the service isn’t perfect and I hope to see it improve significantly, but so far I’m really enjoying it. Check out my profile on Traineo. If you’ve been looking for a site to help you with your fitness goals and connect with a community, this is the place to go.

    Cha-Ching

    The other night while catching up on my RSS feeds in Reader I stumbled upon a small software project for the Mac called Cha-Ching. Cha-Ching is a product from Midnight Apps that intends to take on the personal finance heavyweights like Quicken. It’s not open source, but it reminds me of Firefox finally providing real competition for the lagging Internet Explorer 6.0 and pushing innovation in the market, and this is a market that needs innovation.

    Cha-Ching is far from being able to supplant Quicken, but it’s sleek and well done. It feels enjoyable to use, and at only version 0.4 there is much to hope for. My hopes are with the Midnight Apps crew to build a product that will have elegance and simplicity, with rich and powerful features.

    Operation Junk Mail

    I’ve decided enough is enough. Perhaps it’s just the holiday season, but our mailbox has been overloaded with mail order catalogs. Sometimes as many as ten a day. It’s insane! I’ve decided to declare a War on Catalogs!

    I’ve had good success so far. I’m going to the website of every company that we get a catalog for and submitting a customer service request. So far most are responding promptly. I’m keeping a list of who I contact, when and any relevant tracking numbers so I can escalate if I need to.

    Hopefully our recycling will go down, our mail carrier will be happier, and we’ll have less junk thrown in our face to buy.

    Wii Component Cables

    My component cables arrived for the Wii today. I finally was able to move off the incredibly lame composite connection and 480i to a nice crisp component connection and 480p. I know that this is a much better setup, and I eagerly plugged it in and decided to get my camera out and do some before/after comparisons. While I can tell the difference, it’s not as striking as I expected. These shots are all taken from the Wii menu screen. I took photos of the “disc” channel and of the Mii channel. I also took a photo of the Wii settings button on the lower left corner of the screen. See what you think.

    480i composite of Wii logo in the Disc Channel

    480p component of Wii logo in the Disc Channel

    You can tell that the progressive scan smooths out the fonts a bit.

    480i composite of Mii Channel

    480p component of Mii Channel

    Great example that when you are not “super-zoomed” into the image, you can’t really tell much of a difference.

    480i composite of lower-left Wii settings button

    480p component of lower-left Wii settings button

    This extreme zoom shows the best the differences between the two settings.

    There are other write-ups about the component cables that show the differences.

    USB Drive Roundup

    At the end of August I picked up a new USB thumb drive that would perform at a pace capable of running applications. I got the OCZ Rally2 2G drive and was very happy with it. One of the only deficiencies of the drive was that there was no way to attach a strap to it, and that proved fatal. On a business trip a couple of weeks ago I lost it. Huge bummer. I also lost a bunch of data that wasn’t recently backed up. Bummer ^ 2.

    I went on the hunt for a replacement and decided to try some non-traditional form factors. I was happy with OCZ, and they had some good rebate deals on NewEgg so I ordered up a variety. I got the OCZ Rally2 4G, Mini-Kart 2G and Roadster 1G.

    The drives fit a bunch of different sizes and use cases (pictured here with a quarter for comparison).

    OCZ Rally2 4G

    OCZ has revised this drive from the one that I bought a couple of months ago. They added a lanyard strap to keep the drive from getting lost, however the cap still doesn’t have anything to attach it to the drive placing it at risk of getting lost. The drive is spacious and it turns out respectively faster than even the last one. The last version (2G) maxed out at 9.5M/sec write and 19.7M/sec read. This new version ramps it up to 12.8M/sec write and 22.5M/sec read!

    The traditional form factor makes this drive still not great for constant road warrior use, but the size is great for moving ISO images around and it’s got the speed to keep up.** **

    OCZ Mini-Kart 2G

    The Mini-Kart is a trip. It is slightly thicker than a credit card, and has a non-traditional USB plug that sits in the USB slot. It could be placed in your wallet pretty easily, and doesn’t require any protection on the plug. It’s big enough for most applications, and sports a nice blue LED on the end to indicate activity. I did a speed test and was pretty impressed with the performance for a compact unit. It topped out at 7.3M/sec write and 13.2M/sec read.

    This drive should be great for road warrior usage, but I worry about the exposed connector and I think it could be snapped if it’s flexed too much. However, it is very solid and I’m sure would take a big beating.

    OCZ Roadster 1G

    The Roadster is the drive made for the road warrior. It is a clam shell design, collapsing the USB plug in on itself making it both small and exceptionally tough. I love the design, and love the size. It can be attached to your key chain and forget about it. However, the drive performs miserably. This is a big let down as this is the perfect drive for ultra-mobility, but it’s speed limits its viability for mobile applications. The drive posts a pretty sad 2.3M/sec write and 9.8M/sec write. Very sad since the average “give-away” free USB drive performs about this well.

    Great form factor, but the performance is very limiting.

    Conclusion

    I love the Roadster’s design, but it’s speed is a problem. I’ll likely use the Mini-Kart for my mobile applications since it has the speed and a reasonable form factor. I’m very pleased with the Rally2 for moving large data around, and am going to give it a try using it for Vista’s speed boost feature as well.

    Mazie's Kitchen

    I got to play Super Dad today and put together Mazie’s christmas present. December 3rd? Sure – she’s 18 months old – it’s Christmas! 🙂 Tammy and I got her a “kitchen thing” for Christmas and have coordinated with her Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles and other relatives to get presents that go along with it.

    The kitchen came in 4 boxes, with lots of assembly required. Just a bunch of peices of wood. Tammy suggested that she put it together while I was in NY last week. I thought about that for a moment, and I didn’t like it. Assembling the “assembly required” Christmas present is a Dad job for sure – and I didn’t want to be deprived of my fatherhood rights.

    I got a bit frustrated at the beginning. Not too frustrated though, I’m pretty sure my language was clean the entire time. I put every joint together with added wood glue. This thing will be around for generations to come. She is having fun with it and it will be nice for her to get her pots and pans and other accessories to go with it.

    Mac Pro in the House

    About 2 months ago my primary workstation died. The machine was behaving very flaky, not posting from time to time and requiring my to jumper the Clear-CMOS on a routine basis. After a couple of times doing that it gave up the ghost and refused to post ever again. I’m fixing it, but it broke my back on home brew machines. I’m just not the kinda guy that wants to open my machines case on a regular basis. Particularly my primary machines that I depend on for a variety of applications and uses. It was time to ditch this thing and move on.

    A faithful reader of my website would know that I’ve been on a string of Mac purchases lately. The most recent computers I got were a MacBook and before that an iMac G5. Why break the trend? I decided to get a Mac Pro.

    It all started very benign. I just started looking for a new box and scoured Dell and a variety of other sites. I wanted something with serious power, lots of memory, big graphics and growth for the future. Regardless of how you feel about Apple, if you are looking for a great machine at the high-end you need to examine the Mac Pro.

    Mac Pro

    I placed the order and got the machine on Halloween. I ordered it with the 2.66Ghz CPUs, the upgraded ATI Radeon X1900 XT video card and the Bluetooth option so I could go wireless on keyboard, mouse and eventually headset for Skype. I got it with 1G of RAM installed (2 512MB FB DIMMs) and ordered another 2G of memory, totaling 3G.

    The hardware is very impressive. Taking the side panel off (which is ridiculously easy, yet stable) shows a very well designed machine. The drive bays are elegantly arranged with no cable messes. I dropped 3 additional SATA drives in it to fill it up. The 16 (!!!) memory slots are on a daughter card that easily slides out for adding memory.

    I powered the machine on and it is very quiet. The 10,000 RPM boot drive I have in it is the loudest thing in the machine. This is a machine that was completely thought through in all aspects. Two, big thumbs up.

    I’m particularly pleased that I’m pretty future proof. I can take memory to 32G if I wanted to and it’s possible to upgrade the dual-core Xeon’s to quad-core and go 8-way with the existing motherboard. Yeah!

    Cinema Display

    I'd picked out my new machine and I already had the dual Dell 2005FPW monitors from the previous machine. I could have used them, but I had to admit that I wasn't that happy with them. I found the vertical height (1050 pixels) to be confining. When using these monitors I always felt like a 6' man standing in a room with 5' 6" ceilings. If I was going to get completely happy with my home workstation a new monitor was in order.

    An Apple Cinema Display was needed, and I decided to go all out with the 30" version (2,560 x 1,600 pixels). The real-estate on this thing is massive. Acreage! This is the largest monitor I’ve worked with and I really like having that much contiguous space. There is something to be said for having multiple monitors, I think it’s a necessity at work where Outlook lives permanently camped on one. At home however the ability to launch Lightroom or Final Cut Express on a huge single display is just amazing. I can view my digital photos at near 1:1 with this display.

    Software

    When I ordered the machine I was thinking I’d probably just Boot Camp it and run Windows Vista full time. I’m changing my mind. I’ve been enjoying Mac OS X a lot on my MacBook and while I’ve got a lot of software hurdles to get over, I’m going to give it a try full-time. Many applications I have will work in both, but I’ve had to rethink a lot of thins. There are also some applications that are either absent or notably better on Windows (Garmin Mapsource, Quicken) and I’ll either run those in Parallels or Boot Camp. I am going to put Boot Camp on it and Windows Vista just to have it for the occasional times.

    I’m immensely happy with everything about this workstation. I recommend everyone, not just casual folks, check out these new workstations from Apple. As I take inventory in the house now, excluding the servers, Macs now outnumber Wintel boxes by 3 to 2. Pretty amazing.

    Butter Bakery

    Tammy and I checked out a new restaurant this weekend. Butter Bakery is in south Minneapolis and serves a brunch menu as well as traditional baked goods and coffee. We had lunch there on Saturday and the food was so good we returned for breakfast on Sunday.

    The bakery items are all great. However, most notable was the pancakes. I have no idea what they do to their pancakes but they are amazing. They are gooey, and incredibly flavorful. Go there, and get some pancakes!

    Mazie Conquers Stairs

    Lately most of the news on the Mazie front has been about new words. Lot’s of new words. She can usually get her point across now, at least to Mom and Dad, and she’s picking up new words faster and faster.

    However, a couple of days ago she made it down both flights of stairs in our house without any help. Obviously Mom and Dad are surrounding her with hands ready to grab her if she falls. She’s really careful, and braces herself to the wall but makes it pretty solidly down each stair – one step at a time.

    She’s a long ways from navigating steps without help, but she sure does have fun walking down them. She gives a triumphant giggle when she finishes all the steps.

    Dad Skill #138

    Singing the A-B-C song backwards. (Wait for the 3rd verse…) Try it. It’s harder than you would think.

    This skill courtesy Ralph’s World.

    Wii Meets the Family

    Releasing the Wii shortly before Thanksgiving was a brilliant move by Nintendo. I’m sure thousands of Wii’s accompanied their proud owners on Thanksgiving trips to relatives houses where they were quickly added to the wishlists of others.

    I brought mine to the Olson family thanksgiving morning and 3 hours of game play quickly swept by. Kudos to Nintendo for making a game that people in their early 20s enjoy, as well as those in their early 60s. The Wii was a huge hit with everyone taking turns playing Wii Sports.

    Prediction: The Wii is going to dominate the console market in units sold by a factor of 2 on it’s nearest rival.

    Migrating .Text to WordPress

    I recently bit the bullet and migrated my ancient DotText (.Text) blog to WordPress. It wasn’t painless, and involved writing some code, but I’m exceedingly happy with WordPress and finally feel like I’m on a modern blogging platform again.

    I considered for months and months (years?) going to Community Server (CS), which is the natural descendant of DotText, but it just didn’t make sense. CS really serves a different purpose, and WordPress is so well designed for the task at hand.

    Before starting on this adventure, you may want to take a moment to increase your script timeout value for PHP to something exceedingly long. Some of the import PHP scripts will run for a couple of minutes (if you have hundreds of posts) and you don’t want them killed in the middle. Change this in your php.ini.

    Migrating Posts

    This is actually pretty easy. There is no DotText importer for WordPress, so you have to resort to the lowest common denominator, RSS. WordPress has an importer that will take an RSS feed in a file and import the posts. The first step though is getting all of your posts in an RSS formatted XML file.

    DotText obviously supports RSS, however it only outputs the last 10 or 20 posts in the RSS feed. You can get around this by altering DotText to output all posts in the RSS feed. You can find how to do this, along with some pre-compiled DLLs to alter the behavior at PinkJoint. Once you’ve dropped these DLL’s in when you hit your RSS feed it will return all posts. After that, save it to a file and you are ready to import using the RSS importer in WordPress.

    I found it helpful to open the RSS/XML file up in a text editor and do some regular expression work to change the URL’s for referenced images to something more WordPress friendly. In my case, the path to images referenced in posts were all changing. It’s perfect to do this to the XML file before doing the import.

    Now for an unfortunate item. RSS doesn’t have a means (in a standard way at least) to include things like categories. Importing your content via RSS means you lose all existing category associations. This didn’t bother me that much since I wasn’t happy with the existing comments. You can also get WordPress plug-ins that will allow you to assign categories in bulk mode making it easier to fix this after migrating.

    Migrating Comments

    Now that the posts are moved over, we need to deal with comments. At first I considered just starting fresh with no comments, but I have over 400 comments and that seemed like a lot of content to just throw away. The method below worked great for me. I purposefully focused on tools that I was comfortable with, this could be done many different ways. The basic approach is to export all the comments into a simple CSV file, then import them using a custom PHP import script for WordPress. The connection between the comment and the post is the post title, so it is critical that you do not edit the titles on any posts until you’ve imported your comments.

    The simplest way to get the comments into a CSV file is to use the SQL Server DTS tool. I selected a CSV file as a destination and used this SQL query to get the relevant content.

    SELECT     posts.ID AS PostID, posts.Title, posts.DateAdded, comment.ID AS CommentID, comment.Title AS CommentTitle, comment.DateAdded AS CommentDate, comment.Author, comment.Email, comment.TitleUrl, comment.Text
    FROM         blog_Content comment
    INNER JOIN blog_Content posts ON comment.ParentID = posts.ID
    WHERE     (comment.PostType = 3)
    

    This will get us a simple file with all of our comments dumped into it. With this file in hand, we can now do the import.

    <?php
    
    class CommentsCSV_Import {
    
        var $file;
    
        function header() {
            echo '<div class="wrap">';
            echo '<h2>'.__('Import Comments from CSV').'</h2>';
        }
    
        function footer() {
            echo '</div>';
        }
    
        function unhtmlentities($string) { // From php.net for < 4.3 compat
            $trans_tbl = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES);
            $trans_tbl = array_flip($trans_tbl);
            return strtr($string, $trans_tbl);
        }
    
        function greet() {
            echo '<p>'.__('Hello. This importer will load the comments from a previous blog that you have dumped to a CSV file into Wordpress. Find your special CSV file to upload and click Import.').'</p>';
            wp_import_upload_form("admin.php?import=commentscsv&step=1");
        }
    
        function import_comments() {
            global $wpdb;
    
            /*
            open up our file and loop through it...
            the CSV file is expected to have these columns
            0 = Original Post ID
            1 = Post Title
            2 = Post Date
            3 = Original Comment ID
            4 = Comment Title
            5 = Comment Date
            6 = Comment Author
            7 = Comment Email
            8 = Comment Author Website
            9 = Comment Text
            */
    
            set_magic_quotes_runtime(0);
    
            $row = 1;
            $handle = fopen($this->file, "r");
            while (($data = fgetcsv($handle, 10000, ",")) !== FALSE) {
                echo "<p> <strong>Reading row $row.</strong><br /></p>\n";
                $data[1] = str_replace('\'', '\\\'', $data[1]);
                echo "<p> Comment ID $data[3] ($data[4]) for Post ID $data[0] ($data[1]).<br /></p>\n";
    
                // get the ID of the post this comment is for
                $post_id = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT ID FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_title = '$data[1]'");
                echo "<p> Found new ID of $post_id.<br /></p>\n";
    
                //get the dates in the right format
                echo "<p> Comment from $data[6] ($data[7], $data[8]) on $data[5].<br /></p>\n";
    
                /*if ($post_date_gmt) {
                    $post_date_gmt = strtotime($post_date_gmt[1]);
                } else {
                    // if we don't already have something from pubDate
                    preg_match('|<dc:date>(.*?)</dc:date>|is', $post, $post_date_gmt);
                    $post_date_gmt = preg_replace('|([-+])([0-9]+):([0-9]+)$|', '\1\2\3', $post_date_gmt[1]);
                    $post_date_gmt = str_replace('T', ' ', $post_date_gmt);
                    $post_date_gmt = strtotime($post_date_gmt);
                }
    
                $post_date_gmt = gmdate('Y-m-d H:i:s', $post_date_gmt);
                $post_date = get_date_from_gmt( $post_date_gmt );
                */
    
                // cleanup the comment text
                // Clean up content
                //$post_content = preg_replace('|<(/?[A-Z]+)|e', "'<' . strtolower('$1')", $post_content);
                $data[9] = str_replace('\'', '\\\'', $data[9]);
                $data[6] = str_replace('\'', '\\\'', $data[6]);
                $data[9] = str_replace('<br>', '<br />', $data[9]);
                $data[9] = str_replace('<hr>', '<hr />', $data[9]);
                echo "<p> Comment:<br/>$data[9]<br /></p>\n";
    
    
                // prepare the comment for insertion
    
    
                // insert comment
                //if ($row == 1) {
                    $ret_id = wp_insert_comment(array(
                        'comment_post_ID'       => $post_id,
                        'comment_author'        => $data[6],
                        'comment_author_email'  => $data[7],
                        'comment_author_url'    => $data[8],
                        'comment_author_IP'     => '0.0.0.0',
                        'comment_date'          => $data[5],
                        'comment_content'       => $data[9],
                        'comment_approved'      => 1,
                        'user_id'               => 0)
                        );
                //}
    
                // increment counter
                $row++;
    
            }
            fclose($handle);
    
            //  $post_author = 1;
            //  $post_status = 'publish';
            //  $this->posts[$index] = compact('post_author', 'post_date', 'post_date_gmt', 'post_content', 'post_title', 'post_status', 'guid', 'categories');
        }
    
        function import() {
            $file = wp_import_handle_upload();
            if ( isset($file['error']) ) {
                echo $file['error'];
                return;
            }
    
            $this->file = $file['file'];
            $this->import_comments();
            wp_import_cleanup($file['id']);
    
            echo '<h3>';
            printf(__('All done. <a href="%s">Have fun!</a>'), get_option('home'));
            echo '</h3>';
        }
    
        function dispatch() {
            if (empty ($_GET['step']))
                $step = 0;
            else
                $step = (int) $_GET['step'];
    
            $this->header();
    
            switch ($step) {
                case 0 :
                    $this->greet();
                    break;
                case 1 :
                    $this->import();
                    break;
            }
    
            $this->footer();
        }
    
        function CommentsCSV_Import() {
            // Nothing.
        }
    }
    
    $commentscsv_import = new CommentsCSV_Import();
    
    register_importer('commentscsv', __('CommentsCSV'), __('Import posts from an CSV file of comments'), array ($commentscsv_import, 'dispatch'));
    ?>
    

    Copy the above CommentsCSV importer and place it in the importer directory. Go to the import tab and you will see CommentsCSV listed. Upload the file and watch it do it’s magic.

    Note that CommentsCSV does a minimal effort to make things XHTML compliant, but don’t expect pretty XHTML at the end.

    What’s Left?

    So we now have all of our posts (without their categories) and they have all the relevant comments attached to them. We are sitting pretty at this point, but, there are some gotchas.

    Articles don’t get sent in the RSS feed for DotText so you will not have those imported. There really isn’t an equivalent of an article in WordPress, and most DotText users have a small number of articles. I’m just moving mine by hand doing a copy/paste of the HTML into WordPress.

    I hope that others find this helpful in their migration to WordPress. Feel free to contribute your own experience in the comments.

    I had my telescope out for about an hour tonight and sadly I still feel like a complete “noob” using it. I just did a quick Alt-Az mount, skipping “the wedge” but wasn’t able to get a good alignment.

    It wasn’t a complete waste though. I got to do some great up close viewing of the moon.

    Wii In The House!

    Wii is in the house! Yeah!

    Okay, so it only took about a week for me to turn into a total fanboy in regards to the Wii. Really, I became a bit obsessed with it. (This is when the folks that know me pretty good shake their heads back and forth.) Alright, enough about me, how about the Wii?

    I played with it for a little bit today and the most impressive thing is the controller. The “free motion” moves are pretty amazing and bring you into the gameplay in a way that no other game system ever has. Tammy and I spent the first hour with the game just playing the included Wii Sports. Tennis, boxing, even bowling are pretty fun and the motions are life like.

    Tonight I spent a bit of time with Madden 07 and again the motions of the controller made the gameplay so much cooler. To pass the ball, you throw your hand. To kick, you swing your arm. Very nice.

    I got Zelda, Madden and Rayman with the unit. Haven’t played Zelda yet, saving that for when there is more time. First impression of the Wii – it’s a winner.

    PS: The order that Tammy placed got canceled. They apparently didn’t have enough units.

    The Kindness of Strangers

    So, you don’t just walk into a store and get a Wii on the very day it comes out. This morning just before 8am Tammy suggested we should run to Target and check things out. We got there just after 8 and there was clearly a crowd present. Upon entering the store our hopes were dashed. There were well over 100 people in line and they had given out tickets to those that had been camped out all night.

    No ticket, no Wii. There were 80 tickets, plus more people that didn’t have tickets and a miserly 60 Wii’s in stock to sell.

    As we were standing at the end of the line, my hopes dashed, this scruffy dude said “You need a ticket?” “Yeah,” Tammy quickly replied. He handed over one of the tickets, and not just any ticket, it was ticket #9!

    Moral Dilema

    Now, here we are with Ticket #9. We didn’t do much of anything for this other than respond to a guy that obviously looked like he had spent the whole night outside. Dozens of people further ahead in line had just watched this guy walk buy and not responded to his query. He wasn’t being shy that he had an extra one. Do we take it and get a Wii?

    You bet we do. :-) Wasn’t that hard to get over. We went right up to the front of the line and they were taking anyone with tickets less than 17. We inserted at the front with our stuff and were on our way, Wii in hand.

    Thank you kind anonymous dude with an extra ticket. Wish I could have given him something, some cash or anything. I have no idea how he had an extra ticket. Perhaps a friend of his camped in line just for fun? Or maybe they forgot to take it from him? Who knows…

    I’m curious – would you have done the same? Or would the boy scout in you kept you from getting such unearned gains?

    PS3 and Wii Bananza

    My friend Chad brought over his brand new Playstation 3 today and I got my first taste of the hardcore gamer dream machine. The graphics are stunning, particularly when paired with a nice high-end HDTV. The games were obviously first generation and I’m sure they will get progressively better over the coming months. However, not my kind of gaming system. Very focused on first-person shooter type games.

    On the Wii front, Tammy decided that I had become enough of a “fanboy” over the Wii lately that she ordered me one. I’m hoping it will be here before Thanksgiving for some family fun waving the Wii controller around in the air.

    Good Spam Filtering for Home

    I’ve started to get deluged with spam again at home. The last time this happened I decided to switch my email address – a little “shake and bake” as it were with due credit to Talladega Nights. At work I’ve been using Postini for years now and I’m a huge fan. They do an amazing job of handling spam and viruses – both of which I had nothing to stop at home.

    I would have loved to use Postini but they don’t offer individual accounts, boo! However, they do have resellers. Some quick searches and I found a Postini reseller that set me up for $2.50/month per address. They got me setup very quickly and now I’m a much happier email recipient.

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