http://www.roopeshsheth.com A random blog Sat, 02 Aug 2008 16:57:07 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I think my two readers should definitely watch Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog. NPH just gets funnier with age. http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/08/02/fun-dr-horribles-sing-along-blog I find it absolutely amazing and unacceptable that Apple can get away with almost a full day (so far) of downtime of their MobileMe (previously known as .Mac) service and there's hardly any news/blog coverage of the event. What was supposed to happen: 7/9/2008 8PM: Shutdown .Mac 7/10/2008 12AM: Startup MobileMe What has ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/07/10/mobileme-mac-down-for-a-full-day-wheres-the-outrage One of my first cats, Cali, recently passed away. She was sick (inflammatory bowel, pancreatitis, and cardiomyopathy) beyond saving and we had to let her go Friday, June 13, 2008. It was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. Thinking about her life got me thinking ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/07/06/a-retrospective-10-years-cali A while back I created an Entourage script to create tasks from email messages in Remember the Milk. Well, I finally got around to improving it. You don't have to be a geek (or nerd, or goober) to use the new features (see Enhancements below). Anyone with Entourage and ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/07/06/remember-the-milk-entourage-attachments Well, the keynote is said and done. We have some good stuff coming our way. Now let's see how I stacked up against the actual announcements: iPhone 2.0 (Software) - Finally, ActiveSync support, the long awaited App Store, and search capabilties. Though I thought the launch would be ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/06/09/follow-up-wwdc-08-predictions-outcome While there are more than enough rumors circulating about what will be unveiled at WWDC '08, starting tomorrow at 10AM, I thought I would weigh in on my predictions for tomorrow: iPhone 2.0 (Software) - Finally, ActiveSync support, the long awaited App Store, and search capabilties. iPhone 2 - 3G, GPS, more ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/06/08/wwdc-08-predictions Mr. Angry Overreaction Man, You're an idiot. Your photo is now on the Internet. Whatcha gonna do now?read more | digg story http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/05/09/fun-man-assaults-photographer-threatens-him-if-photo-shows-up-on-the-internet You know, since I got my MacBook Pro last year, I've become a total Mac convert. I bought Neela a MacBook Pro. I bought a Mac Mini as my desktop, replacing a huge custom built PC tower. I even bought another Mac Mini for my entertainment center, ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/05/05/my-mac-software-list I thought it would be interesting to create a list of all the Google services I use. Google experimental search Google hosted apps for domains (including Gmail) Google reader Google docs Google analytics Google AdWords iGoogle Google news Google groups Google code Google alerts Google earth Google 411 Google Maps Google Toolbar Google Talk Google SMS YouTube Holy smokes! 18 services! Now, I may not be on ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/05/05/google-services-i-use I have been a Petco customer for years and years and years. In fact, Quicken tells me I have been a loyal customer since 2002 (at least 2002, but that's when I started using Quicken), spending $500 on average per year. And it looks like almost $3,000 of ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/05/05/poor-return-experience-with-petco I usually don't blog about or post reality TV show stuff, as I don't watch that kind of TV. But this contestant was really good on the British show, Britain's Got Talent. Have fun! http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/05/05/fun-contestant-on-tv-show I own two Logitech Harmony remote controls (the 880, for the family room, and the XBox 360 for the room with the games and PS3).  Up until recently I had no problems updating the remotes with my MacBook Pro.  However, this past week I wanted to update the XBox 360 ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/04/21/why-is-logitech-hatin-on-macs As you may know, we recently went to our timeshare in Poipu (on Kaua'i). As usual, I had booked many, many months ago on Expedia. I had found what I believed to be a pretty good deal on first class round trip tickets on United Airlines, which I ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/04/05/why-we-wont-fly-united-again You know Rock Band.  You know you play Rock Band.  You know you love it.  But how much harder is it to pass a song that you actually can't stand to listen to?  And then when you can't pass it, you have to keep listening to it over and over ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/03/16/top-10-suckiest-songs-on-rock-band If you have off-site/hosted storage needs and haven't looked at Amazon S3, you really should. What is it? Amazon S3 (Super Simple Storage) is basically a pretty cheap ($0.15/GB at the time of this writing) storage cloud that anyone can use. Well, anyone with an Amazon account. So, basically everyone. How ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/03/11/initial-take-amazon-s3-bonus-s3-mac-app Remember my first take on Hulu? I wasn't impressed by the video quality. Sure, it's encoded at 640x360. Here's a screenshot of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles Season 1 Episode 8: (Click image for full size) Now let's compare that with a 720p rip that I found on The Pirate Bay ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/03/05/update-hulu I've got six Hulu invites. Let me know in the comments if you want an invite. http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/03/02/hulu-invites I woke up this morning to find myself personally invited to the Hulu beta. I tried to watch a couple of shows, but I have to admit that I'm incredibly underwhelmed by the video quality. The stream is maybe 320x240, and even at that its blocky. When I tried full screen, ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/03/02/initial-take-hulu I am really impressed with how Barack Obama's campaign is being run (not to mention that the guy is smart, well-spoken, and I'm looking forward to having him be our next president). I had joined Barack's Facebook group a couple of months ago. I get a few notifications per month ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/02/29/barack-obama-is-a-genius File this under incredibly useful. This is a FF/Safari/Greasemonkey script to show the keyboard shortcuts on the Remember the Milk site. Link http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/02/27/tip-display-keyboard-shortcuts-in-rtm Ah, the Internets really do bring us all together, eh? I've been having trouble with my Guitar Hero 3 wireless guitar for my XBox 360. I don't like my Rock Band guitar, so I had gotten back one my Guitar Hero 2 X-Plorers, which is working great. When I finally got ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/02/24/guitar-hero-3-wireless-guitar-is-broken You may remember that I said I was going to try out Remember the Milk last week. If not, catch up now. All caught up? Good. I played with RTM a bit more and decided I'm going to give it a try. It seems to work really ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/02/22/create-a-task-from-entourage-in-rtm In my continuing quest to ditch Yahoo!'s portal page, I also found Netvibes. Its very similar to Pageflakes, but it runs faster on Flock/Firefox, so that's something. It seems to offer many of the same features as Pageflakes that I mentioned previously. Other first impressions: I like the tabbed Search widget ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/02/17/first-take-netvibes Why? I'm not sure. I do know that I hatelove to be on top of technology. Oh wait, you didn't get the question? Why am I upgrading my perfectly working Windows XP Pro to Windows Vista? We all caught up now? Good. I actually tried this earlier today and ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/02/16/liveblog-updating-parallels-from-xp-pro-to-vista Will the quest ever end? Will my life ever be simple? Probably not. But in the meantime I can keep accumulating tools and options to make life better. The latest in my quest simplify my life is Remember The Milk. I just signed up today. Anyone ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/02/16/trying-out-remember-the-milk Oh man oh man oh man. I usually don't care much for shooters, but I really like Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six game. I really enjoyed Rainbow Six Vegas on my XBox 360. Now Rainbox Six Vegas 2 is coming out. I'm psyched. Peep the trailer. March ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/02/16/rainbox-six-vegas-2-coming-march-18th Found this on Lifehacker. Send any of these document types (click on the flag for an english translation) to the email pdf@koolwire.com and Presto!, you get a PDF back in your email of your document. I sent over a MS Word doc and got back a perfect PDF representation within ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/02/16/review-kool-sic-pdf-conversion-service Well, I guess Sony won. Toshiba has thrown in the towel and Blu-Ray will reign as the champion of disc-based video for the next 10 years or so, until the next Ultra Hi-Def Super Duper Audio & Video Format comes along. I'm not surprised by this turn of events. ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/02/16/wow-hd-dvd-is-dead-that-was-fast So, having nothing to do with Microsoft's imminent purchase of Yahoo!, I've been trying to find an alternative to Yahoo's pretty comprehensive portal (My Yahoo!). I just don't like Yahoo! in general. They're a bunch of, well, yahoos. I ran across Pageflakes about a month ago and spent a ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/02/16/just-started-playing-with-pageflakes Some of you may know that I've been on the fence about switching from Time Warner Cable to DirecTV. One of my factors for switching is the pure number of HD Channels on DirecTV. One channel in particular is only available on DirecTV, SciFi HD. Anyways, I was thinking maybe Time ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/02/15/link-directv-vs-att-vs-dishtv-vs-cable Could this be a step towards impeachment? Maybe? Dare I be hopeful? Dumbass Dubya's Presidency [rating: 0.25/20] Yes, that's one quarter out of 20 stars. And that quarter of a star is pretty generous. http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/02/14/could-congress-finally-be-getting-tough I signed up with PayTrust about two months ago. I like their overall idea and process: You change your mailing address for your bills to PayTrust's secure processing address You can add your expected bills to PayTrust, or just wait for them to start telling you they received bills. If you haven't ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/02/05/paytrust-60ish-days-review Absolute genius. Though I can take no credit for the content, I can say I almost fell out of my chair laughing. http://www.aclevercookie.com/rap-lyrics-explained-with-charts-and-graphs/ http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/01/24/fun-rap-lyrics-explained-with-charts-and-graphs As you can see, Sony (i.e. Blu Ray) is (sadly) winning the Hi Def Disc Format War. With only two studios now backing HD-DVD, I decided it was time to cover all my bases. So I have the HD-DVD drive for the XBox 360, as well as a ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/01/21/why-i-bought-a-ps3 I've tried a lot of different uPnP servers in the pursuit of using my XBox 360 to be a media hub. Now that I have a PS3, I figured one of the two ought to be able to fill the huge gap in my technology requirements. As I was out ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/01/16/connect360-works I've been working way too much. With the laptop plugged in and sitting at the kitchen table. Nights are the only time I get to catchup on actual work, since I'm in meetings almost all day. I'll end up working till 11PM or midnight. And get ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2008/01/09/new-rule-ill-work-at-home-till-my-battery-dies In case you're unaware, any gmail address has an unlimited number of additional address, simply by appending a "+" sign to the end of the username portion: joe@gmail.com <-- Primary Address joe+junk@gmail.com <-- Routed to joe@gmail.com joe+anythingelseiwant@gmail.com <-- Routed to joe@gmail.com Why is this useful? Many reasons: On the fly, without ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2007/12/15/the-gmail-trick-works-for-hosted-domains I was just browsing the Apple Dashboard Widgets site this morning and came across a Callwave widget. I had heard of Callwave, but wasn't familiar with the service. I installed the widget out of curiosity, went through the sign up service, and am absolutely amazed at how awesome ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2007/12/12/callwave-rocks Got the network running on my P5B Deluxe with Marvell Yukon. Use the instructions here. http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2007/12/02/hackint0sh-part-2 I'm attempting to create a Hackint0sh. I've got kick-ass hardware: P5B Deluxe Mobo2x300GB SATA Drives2GB 800MHz RAM2.4GHz Core 2 Duo (E6600)256MB GeForce 7600GT PCI-EPlenty of I/O ports in front and back (kick ass Antec case)I don't use my old Ubuntu config anymore, sadly. I've still got Windows running on ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2007/12/02/hackint0sh-part-1 Don't use it!! My Macbook Pro went to shit when I installed it. MSN Messenger.Mac crashed repeatedly, every time I closed a conversation window. Adium's Growls showed up empty. Parallels kept crashing. I uninstalled it and everything was perfect. Update: It works fine now that I ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2007/10/15/safari-303-beta I don't know how, but somehow this weekend I got some horrible adware/spyware/virus on my Windows XP running in Parallels on my Macbook Pro. It removed my company issued and maintained Trend Micro virus client. It would not allow me to install my Norton AntiVirus client. And ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2007/10/15/glad-i-use-parallels-snapshots Somehow, after all my rhetoric about Apple, I ended up being a Mac user. How? Well, I went to pick up my Lenovo T60p from our help desk. It took almost a month to arrive, and I was excited to get it. When I get there I noticed ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2007/10/14/switched-to-apple I always like seeing a cool license plate. I saw this one while out walking Toby one day. It would have been even cooler on a Land Rover. http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2007/10/12/cool-license-plate I've decided to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu. This was a tortured decision for me to make, but the right one nonetheless. While I've been able to do 99% of all my work and tasks in Ubuntu, it's not always easy to do what I want to do. I ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2007/09/17/dual-booting-windows-xp-and-ubuntu I got two iPods actually.  A 160GB Classic and an 8GB Nano. Whoa, let's back up first.  Why is this such a big deal to me?  How is this me "breaking down"? Well, for many years (as far back as I can remember), I've pretty much hated Apple.  Why?  I don't like ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2007/09/09/well-i-finally-broke-down-and-got-an-ipod Don't want to listen to me?  Read this. http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2007/07/17/proof-that-the-iphone-sucks Wow, my Blackberry Curve does something I wasn't expecting... it easily synchronizes the phone book with my 2006 Prius with Navigation.  None of my previous phones (Treo 650, Cingular 8125 (HTC Wizard), Samsung Blackjack, or Treo 750) would work with my Prius phonebook. I know it sounds trivial, but it's huge.  ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2007/07/12/curve-synchorizes-well-with-prius So my Blackberry Curve arrived today. Immediate thoughts: My Treo 750 actually synchronized with Exchange. The Blackberry doesn't really synchronize... deleting an email on the desktop does not delete it on the phone. It's not a true two-way sync. You have to Reconcile to get the server ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2007/07/11/curve-arrived-today I'm moving my mobile phone coverage to my company, since they'll pay for it.  I've been using a Treo 750 for about 4 months now.  I'm actually pretty happy with it, but I'm always open to new gadgets.  So I decided to order a new Blackberry Curve for myself. I'll do ... http://www.roopeshsheth.com/2007/07/03/ordered-a-blackberry-curve