I wasn’t horribly interested in the most recent Bond flick when I first heard about it. The only other Bond movies I’ve seen have typically left me underwhelmed - an invincible spy that kills bad guys and uses women while always keeping his cool - it’s just too easy of a movie. It doesn’t stretch your imagination.

Casino Royale, on the other hand, seemed to take a different approach (which it could do because it is the “beginning” of Bond). The future emotionless 007 had emotion, but a personality that would easily evolve into the completely cool James of the future Bond movies. Throw in a great chase scene with a freestyle walker, an interesting love story, and the story behind the ever-beautiful Aston Martin, and I was sold.

So, you get a new house and you can’t just keep your old RCA, speaker-kit-in-a-box system. So I decide to venture out and try to put together my own set. I searched around for a while and finally stumbled upon a Pioneer 5.1 speaker kit (I’d link that but it’s not on the site anymore) on Overstock. It got to the house relatively quickly and I had it all unboxed on Saturday. Turns out, speakers don’t do much without a receiver though, so it was time to shop. I had considered a Yamaha at Best Buy, but the store didn’t have it in stock and I didn’t want to wait for it to arrive via UPS ground. I wound up going with a Pioneer 7.1 x 100 watts/channel receiver which has 3 digital audio inputs and component video switching abilities (no HDMI at this price range) for $200 at an RC Willey Outlet store (the service was great, maybe we should have used these guys for carpeting). It had to come down from Salt Lake, so I didn’t get it until that evening, but that’s OK.

The beast took me a while to set up, mostly from inexperience and from being unsure how some pre-existing wiring in our house worked (someone had already done some wiring for surround sound, though it turns out it was just the left channel, *sigh*). But, finally, all the speakers were working and it was totally worth it. A-mazing. Seriously. The sub that came with the kit is much larger than the one I’m used to and the whole room vibrates comfortably as a result. So anyway, here are the totals (post shipped and taxed):

Speaker kit from Amazon: $84
Receiver from RC Willey: $212
Being able to understand the dialogue from Casino Royale: Priceless

Goes to show you can get a good system at a good price, but you have to put some elbow grease into the search. I’ll be able to hear the Wiggles like never before.

So I ran into a cool application for quickly creating PDFs out of word documents, web pages, etc. It simply installs a new “printer” on your computer that actually exports the current document or page to PrimoPDF, which then converts it into PDF format. This is great for people who want to post documentation online without losing font or layout qualities. And, since Acrobat reader is pretty much a standard now, you don’t have to worry about compatibility.

PrimoPDF is not only free, it comes with additional options, including security features to limit others’ ability to modify, copy, or even print material from the PDFs you create. Basically, it’s one of those 100% must-have freeware programs out there, like unto Audacity.

Download PrimoPDF

We used to think that our little girl simply didn’t like TV. It turns out she just didn’t like Nova and SportsCenter. Today, we tried out the Wiggles and she was an instant fan. The end of life as we know it has arrived. I’d heard about these guys, but I never thought I’d have them in my house. Way to go, stupid Disney channel. The lesson? Don’t get a TV.

So, I was thinking about it, and I’m really happy with my phone choice in the Samsung Blackjack. In spite of some issues I had originally with some dropped calls on Cingular, I am pretty much converted.

I enjoy that it’s a phone first, and a “smart phone” second. Since it turns out I use my phone mostly as a phone, that really works for me. An example of what I’m talking about: from the home screen, I begin dialing either a name (stored in my contacts) or a number and it starts to fill in the rest. I can then choose from a list of people who fit under the numbers I’d dialed. For example, I want to call “John Doe” whose number is 555-1234. I pick up my phone and start dialing either “J” “O” “H” (on the easy-to-use QWERTY keyboard)… or “5″ “5″ “5″… and it finds him.

Also, other little things like skinning your device, changing ring tones (including adding your own custom-made ring tones), and so forth are very easy to do. This is a welcome change from some other phones I’ve used that had to be tricked into adding a ring tone (like the Motorola RAZR from Verizon… what a pain…).

I think the smart phone features are still pretty intuitive, though. I can check multiple email accounts automatically, which is nice for business emails that I may need to reply to quickly. The browser is far from flawless, but it works. And Cingular’s 3G network is sufficiently fast for almost all of my phone-surfing needs. Throw this all into a sleek package, and I think I’m sold!

So Tracy here at work is getting married in one week. In honor, I queued up “One Week” by BNL. Postelwait informed me that Bare Naked Ladies are not cool. I wasn’t so sure, so I contested that they were pretty cool. He challenged me at a ping pong match to decide for sure… and I lost. So, sorry guys. I’m sure you still have tons of fans, but you are officially not cool.

As if my Carpenter’s song wasn’t irritating enough, I done went and made myself a whole new level of irritating ringtones. I now have one that plays the beginning of “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows” by Leslie Gore (as featured in the Simpson’s clip below). However, it replaces the word “lollipops” with a clip of the wonderful Michael Caine saying “The Prestige.” Does life get any better?

Download the Ringtone for Yourself!

So I’ve been trying to find a clean way to put a collection of Brian Regan videos on my fan site at allregan.com. I wasn’t able to find a satisfactory way online, so I had to get dirty and just figure out the javascript for myself. Let me give you the background and then the solution.

Background
I wanted to be able to play a bunch of videos on the same page, but without using 25 different windows (individual embedded videos). These get really long and make it hard to navigate the site. So, it was like this:

Texttexttexttexttexttexttexttexttexttexttexttext….

Text

Text

Text

etc…

I wanted this:

Video 1 (this is a link that will change the single, larger player)
Text text text

Video 2
Text text text

etc…

Solution
I used javascript’s innerHTML property to fill in where I wanted the single player to be. I then made a function that would replace that coding with a variable I fed it (the unique video name of each video I wanted to embed). It would swap them out and the video auto-plays to make it a smooth looking transition. The function also jumps the viewer back up to where the video is playing so they don’t have to quickly scroll up or miss the beginning. It was a pretty simple solution, but I hadn’t seen anywhere to rip it off of online, so I had to make it myself. And I’m pretty dern happy with it. For the actual code, you can check out the Brian Regan Videos page on my site. Then just right mouse click and hit ‘view source.’ Yep. Pretty proud of it.

So I was reading an article the other day about a woman who is suing her abortion doctor for not correctly performing the abortion. The baby was born, and she is suing under “wrongful birth” for the costs of raising the child and it made me think, how can I make the most amount of money fastest?
And then it hit me!
Which is why I am now suing my parents for creating me, and giving birth to me… I never gave them my permission, so they should be paying for me for the rest of my life
-end quote-

So I was at a local business & tech expo at a nearby college for a Utah SEO company I work with on the side and… let me tell you. Those bring out some odd individuals. Among those, of course, were guys that were primarily there to hit on the ‘booth babes’ (lots of companies hire attractive women to draw people into their displays, particularly in the bigger shows). Well, it turns out that we have a couple of legitimate employees who also happen to be quite attractive females. Naturally, they were hit on a few times. Here’s the best we got:

One guy approaches Jen to say “so are you guys a modeling agency?” Wow.

Another guy got Katya’s card and feigned interest in her love of the trucking industry. He saw her later on in the show to say “you really represent your company well.” And then proceeded to ask her out.

OK, I know people write humorous emails, websites, and even books of cheesy pickup lines, but I didn’t know people actually used them!