I’m happy for a really geeky reason

When you are big in to Nascar, you get excited when you learn that your favorite driver earned some new sponsorship or won the pole position for the big race. When you follow a band you get excited when you find some rare recording or get to see them at a tiny venue.

Well, I’m a geek. I get excited about some things that are probably going to seem, well, geeky. Like today when I loaded up my browser and pulled up the geeeek.com home page and found that I FINALLY have an alexa.com rating! They basically rate web sites by popularity. yahoo.com is ranked #1. google.com is ranked #3. As of today, geeeek.com is ranked 3,279,454. Watch out, Yahoo, here I come!

Even though my rating is 3 million plus, I’m excited and happy to see that some work I’ve been doing is actually paying off. I took a lot of tips from Jason on ways to improve the site. But, one of the main things I did is actually just starting writing a whole bunch. Amazing how much more often people will visit when the site actually changes from day to day.

So, for those of you who visit regularly, thank you. And for those of you who rarely ever visit, what’s wrong with you?? ;)

Seriously, thanks for visiting.

Digital Jack!

The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie\'s RevengeOK, file this under “I CAN’T WAIT”!

The release date for this game has been pushed back several times, but, it appears the game will see the light of day this Tuesday, 10/11/05. If you’d like to check out some cool trailers for the game, head over to GameTrailers.com.

I did find it a little funny that a game being distributed by Disney Interactive, the kings of all-things-kids, has a game with an ESRB rating of “Adults only”. That rating means Titles rated Adults Only (AO) have content suitable only for adults. These products may include graphic depictions of sex and/or violence. Adults Only products are not intended to be sold or rented to persons under the age of 18. - I wonder if there are hidden scenes where Jack and Sally are getting it on? Or, maybe Dr. Finkelstein creates a new girl who IS willing to play nice-nice… It boggles the mind… well, at least my warped mind.

[edit] ahh crap. I see now that it’s just Amazon.com’s screw up. The game is not rated Adults Only. It’s rated “E - for everybody”. While I’m sure the game will still be good, I’ll have to put my warped little mind back to work on something else…

Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire

If you read the Harry Potter books, you know already that Snape kills Dumbledore at the end of book 6. For those of you that don’t read the books, woopsie.

OK, to make up for screwing up the next 3 movies for you, here are some screenshots from the new movie and here’s a link to the trailer for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

This is honestly one of the best trailers I have ever seen. And, once again, they’ve cast some great faces to take on the important parts from the book. Cho, Cedric & Krum all look to be perfect fits for their parts… And, as you’ll see from the photos below, they have cast Ron Weesley’s dad to play the part of Ron Weesley. Holy crap, that kid looks like he’s in his mid 30’s. I guess he worked on the film only after dropping his own kids off at high school…

Well, enjoy.





Legos out, Pixel Blocks in!

ThinkGeekOh, holy cow, I must have these!!! Imagine an entire box full of 1×1 colored bricks that connect together to make all sorts of cool (OK, you got me… geeky) art pieces. Follow the link and click on the Additional Images or Action Shots links. You’ll see what I’m talking about. There are a bunch of cool old video game art works like Mario, Sonic and other pixelated heros. You can bet these will be on my Christmast list!!!

Things I’ve stumbled upon

A few weeks back, somebody I know told me about this cool tool called Stumble Upon. It’s a toolbar for your browser that chooses random sites for you to visit based on some general categories that you select. I have found a dozen or so REALLY cool sites that have things like remakes of video games I played growing up, or cool inventions people make. But, tonight I found something completely different. This site takes post cards sent in by people who have a secret to tell, but nobody to tell it to and they post them for people to read. It’s all done anonymously.

Reading these postcards was very powerful. While I don’t think I was near tears, it certainly stirred emotions that made me feel happy for some of the authors and sad for others.

It’s sorta funny how some things hit you when you aren’t really expecting it. I can’t think of a single topic that I would have selected in my “stumble upon” preferences that would have brought up this site. I’m sure glad it did, though.

Tradeshow in San Fran.

I can’t even recall the last time I was in San Francisco. I know I haven’t been there since meeting my wife so that’s at least 18 years. Well, on Monday morning I flew out to attend AdTech. It’s a tradeshow for the online marketing industry. It turned out to be a great show for our company. We met with dozens of companies that we either work with already, or, who we want to work with. Also, it was cool to meet some people in person that I have been working with for a long time.

While in San Fran, I tried Sake for the first time. It was mango flavored. It was damn good! There was a little bar called Anabelle’s. It’s right across from the Marriot in downtown San Fran. If you get a chance to try their sake, do it!

Also while there, I saw the movie Sin City. Awesome! The way it’s shot, the look of it and the great cast make this a movie you should really check out.

Hope I get a chance to get back up to San fran at some point soon. Had a great time and it was a pretty cool city to hang out in.

New appreciaton for Nascar

Ready to Race!My company put together an awesome team building experience this past week. They took several of us out to Las Vegas Motor Speedway to take part in the Richard Petty Driving Experience. The program is about 5 hours long and includes about 90 minutes of instruction plus you get to drive the car two separate times. We did the “Kings Experience” which let us drive 8 laps the first round and 10 the second. You are to follow your lead car at a distance of 4 car lengths. I tell you what, at 130MPH+, 4 car lengths feels more like you are in the guys back seat.

Drive it like ya stole it!After the driving is all done, they give everybody a sheet that tells you your lap time, average MPH and your top speed. Since we are all a bunch of competitive guys, of course there was bragging rights due to the guy with the best scores. Several of us had the same top speed of 137 but I took top prize with the best lap speed. 1.5 miles in 44.24 seconds. I won’t be challenging Jeff Gordon to a race any time soon, but, it was good enough to take top honors in our group!

I can’t thank the powers that be enough for the great day out! This was an experience I will NEVER forget!

Double or nothing

When I go to the casino, I’m going for entertainment. It’s like going to the movies to me. Nothing more. I enjoy all the aspects. Watching people get excited when they win is a lot of fun. Watching people lose also has it’s entertainment value. If you go to the casino thinking that you are going to strike it rich, you are gambling for all the wrong reasons.

In this guy’s case, I think it’s a little bit different. I think he’s just a mental case. He’s sold all his worldly possesions and is heading to the casino to place a single wager for all his money. To me, that’s just insane. But, I guess if you have no wife or kids to look after, anybody could build back up from nothing if push came to shove.

UPDATE!
Here’s the follow up. The guy put it all on the line. Can you say “Lucky number 7″? He bet it all on red and it hit. He did not let it ride after that and walked away with $270,000. Lucky bastard!

Software ‘ATMs’ shell out programs

It pains me to think that CompUSA is the one who’s leading this charge since I hate them so much. But, I really think this is a cool idea. They have interactive vending machines that allow you to choose the software you want and then it burns it to CD on your way out the door. I think this has some great upside, but, I don’t know if it’s something that will fly. With more and more people getting access to broadband, why not just purchase the software online from the original manufacturer? That’s fine if you know exactly what you are looking for , but, I could certainly see how something like this would work if there was a feature database on the backend that allowed you to sort titles based on the features you needed.

It’ll be interesting to see if this takes off or not.

Guts: a story

In the current issue of Playboy, Chuck Palahniuk has a new story called Guts. To say that the story is a little disturbing would probably be an understatement. Especially when you find out that while the author was reading the story at a few public reading, people in the audience passed out.

A couple people were kind enough to post copies of the readings. Check them out here

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