NorthWest Miscellanea

What do you do when you’ve got a choice between two different electronic gadgets, both of which would definitely fill an important need of yours, but the cost of either of them isn’t exactly chump-change.

The Sony Reader

I gotta say, it looks mighty healthy with respect to meeting my needs finally.

I originally mentioned my frustration here about not having a device for organizing all of my Ebooks that I have not read yet, and getting them onto some kind of portable device that I could read away from the PC.

But there is such incredible value in NOT getting lost while driving!.

So what you have is another semi-expensive device called The Garmin..

Too bad that Garmin and Sony can’t just see my dilemma and go to work on a device such as an EReader that also tells me where to drive, or a GPS device that also holds Ebooks! I would be very grateful, but I don’t foresee a lot of cooperation there, just for my needs.

I always appreciate it when a retailer can come up with a witty and humourous way of asking for the serious cooperation of its customers.

In a coffee bar down the street, there is a small sign right near where you get your sugar and cream.

The sign says:

“Any kids that are left alone will be given a double shot of expresso and given a free puppy.”

I forgot the actual wording, so I will need to return tomorrow and get it exactly right, but you can get it’s intending meaning, I’m sure.

.. and even if I don’t , I’m still never moving away from WA.

Street signs, first.

This is what you need each time you come to an intersection and you need to know what street it is:

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This doesn’t bode well. This Dotnet thing is snowballing for me. Now Microsoft has come up with the next generation of the command line shell, called: PowerShell Batch.

Now I have to spend time picking this up. Being a command line person, it’s kind of a given. It’s a huge, kind of complicated, but very powerful replacement of DOS and CMD.exe .

The link above is an excellent introduction to what it can do for you , and it gives you the most important command examples, so that you can at least start using it for the primary usages of the command line that are common among many users.

Where this ties in with DOTNET:

Everything is based on objects with this PowerShell. You can iterate through a structure, for example, that was in itself returned from a previous command, and save results into objects, and then read a value via object properties. In fact, some or all of the commands return .Net objects, such as the DateTime type. So the more you know about the dotnet framework, the more power you can get out of it.

A quote from the article, and my last sentence in this entry, since I need some java right about now.

The .NET framework is the foundation on which PowerShell runs. The more you know about .NET, the better your PowerShell experience will be.

.. because it can make you laugh your rear off  pretty much, and so you got that whole mind-body connection going…

.. you know, the research on how your immune system is boosted when you laugh.
My favorite types of clips to look up on YouTube, which I’d recommend to anyone:
Crank Yankers (it looks lame at first.. cuz all you see are puppets, however this show (cancelled a while back) was my favorite on the comedy channel.. it’s basically short clips of real crank calls, really crazy funny ones.

Conan O’Brien (since I’m not up when his show is on at night, it’s perfect to be able to see some of his show on youtube, he’s beyond hilarious)

Animals - There’s some good ones.. especially one that I saw, where this cat was defending his food and swiping at this dog which wasn’t much bigger.. funny as heck

SouthPark - I saw an 30 min episode on YouTube. (I’m sure by now, it was yanked off). It was where the southpark kids were playing a role playing avatar type game. It was absolutely hysterical. In this episode, this loser kind of slob of a grown up man was completely killing everyone with his avatar character. And the kids decided that they didn’t have the life points to have the kind of arsenal, to stop him.

So they all decided to stay away, for the time being, from this killer character, until they gathered enough points to have advanced shielding, weaponry, etc.. and to do that, they all stayed at their computers, through dinner and overnight, to do repetitive tasks that got them just one or two points, but had low-risk. (such as kill wolves with their weapons) .  Never thought I’d spend 30 min on South Park. I probably will never do that again, but I just couldn’t click Stop after 5 minutes of this particular episode.

Your favorite comedian, see if he’s on YouTube! I recommend: Mitch Hedburg, Kathleen Madigan, Craig Shoemaker, Brent Leek, Carlos Mencia(sp)
There’s more I can’t think up now, but you get the point.

(I’m glad Google bought them, because it gives me confidence that they will stick around, and won’t run out of disk space)

http://www.youtube.com

Is it really that futile? I’m talking about waiting for a company to produce an electronic device for the sole purpose of reading PDF’s ?? Many writers, more and more, have been offering PDF versions of their books.

I have a huge collection of pdf books - like many people - that I have been wanting to read, but up to now, have simply been organizing them into a tree of Windows folders.

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