Captain’s Log

I just ordered Mitch Hedberg’s Strategic Grill Locations CD a few days ago. I already own his Mitch Altogether album. It is hilarious. The guy is hilarious. I couldn’t believe it this morning when I heard that he had died.

Unfortunately, I have to skip on Opie and Anthony on opening day down at Fenway (April 11th). I will be in London for work. Incidentally, in booking the tickets I came across this pretty cool site - SeatGuru.com. Now I’m reasonably comfortable that I picked seats that have a power outlet in them, thanks to the nice map they have of the Boeing 777.

The Immodest Proposal was pretty popular in the blogs this week. The author went on to start up the American Liberty League which appears to be worth supporting. The basic gist of this orginization seems to be to steer the Republican Party more towards Libertarian ideals - strong civil liberties, conservative fiscal policy, and strong national defense.

This is pretty funny. Amazon accidentally listed a computer with a 10 GHz processor and a 3 terabyte hard drive (30,000 Gigabytes). As a result, they got a lot of sarcastic reviews on the typo-laden product listing.

“I hooked up my scanner to this beast and now there are two of me…. and my copy (no - really - the COPY) is getting me into all kinds of trouble.”

This product seems pretty cool. It’s a watch that monitors your sleep patterns - the review seems to confirm that it actually works. Instead of simply setting an alarm to wake you up at 7AM, you can set the watch to wake you up sometime between 6:30 and 7, and it will detect when you’re sleeping the most lightly and wake you up at that time - so the whole wake-up process isn’t as painful.

Mentioned on Gizmodo.

I did some snowmobiling in Vermont this weekend. Pictures are here if you’re interested.

This weekend Juliana came into town, as did her sister and her sister’s boyfriend. We proceeded to tour the Sam Adams brewery and the Harpoon Brewery. Pictures in Flickr for those who are interested and/or have an account.

If you happen to install Visual Studio, make sure you make no mistakes in your product key. If you don’t, it won’t tell you until after installing the multi-gigabyte beast. Then when you run it, you get an error. How do you re-enter the key? Simple, according to the knowledge base article you just remove and re-install the whole thing. 3 hours later, you’ll find out if you got it right or if you have to reinstall again.

Amid the stories yesterday of XM raising rates to $12.95/month, one of the facts that seems to get buried in the Sirius vs. XM comparison is that Opie and Anthony’s channel will cease to become a paid extra. It will now be included in basic XM service. The expectation of the boys, of course, is that this will open them up to a lot more new listeners.

Also with the new pricing, online access to XM becomes part of the standard plan rather than a paid extra. So, for people who used to pay for both online access and O&A, the new pricing will actually be cheaper.