The Universe According to Mr. Haydel

I’m…I’m speechless. I am literally without speech.

Both via.

I’d have to say this is by far the most exciting three and a half minutes of basketball I’ve witnessed, maybe not ever, but in a very long time for sure.

Is Barton this year’s Jason McElwain? You be the judge.

One thing to note though as you watch: has it ever been any clearer just how important free throws are in games? Just sayin’.

… if I can get back into this. We’ll see.

For starters, I read this amazing article today on the 10 Most Magnificent Trees. Above is number 10, the Lone Cypress at Pebble Beach.

Secondly, a coworker of mine has made it his goal to blog, hopefully with video, every day on his (”business”) trip to Hawaii. I can vouch for him when I say that if he pulls this off, it will be quite impressive, given the hours that he’ll be running on. Check out his first post here. Good luck Trace, you’re gonna need it.

The thing you must do:

See the movie An Inconvenient Truth. (Wikipedia entry)

The thing you should consider:

Downloading the Rijksmuseum’s widget. (Lifehacker entry)

Why:

I decided that I (and Mandy) should see An Inconvenient Truth after reading Roger Ebert’s review of it. I know some will say they don’t listen to movie critics, or that the critics are always wrong about the movies they review, but in this case that adage doesn’t apply. Read the review, then go see the movie, or vice versa. Oh yeah, and watch this video of Al Gore on The Daily Show. I will say this: Al Gore’s movie really brought to my attention something I had never given any thought whatsoever.

Global warming is real.

It is caused by human activity.

Mankind and its governments must begin immediate action to halt and reverse it.

If we do nothing, in about 10 years the planet may reach a “tipping point” and begin a slide toward destruction of our civilization and most of the other species on this planet.

After that point is reached, it would be too late for any action.

Those are the points Ebert starts out with in his review, which are all facts Gore lays out in his movie. Here again, do not for one second let Al Gore’s name (or politics, anyone’s, not just his, for that matter; it’s downright idiotic) get in the way of seeing the movie. Forget it’s even Al Gore. It’s just a man giving a presentation on a topic that people should be more aware of than most currently are. There are too many interesting and startling facts to throw out here. Just. Go. See. The. Movie. Then, maybe even look into buying the book.

How’s this: I actually wouldn’t mind seeing the movie again. So, for anyone reading this, I will not only go to see the movie with them, I’ll pay. Seriously. Not from ’round these parts? I imagine something could be worked out. That’s how strongly I feel about people going to see this movie. I’m no idiot so I’m going to say that I won’t go over $100 in movie tickets. If you wanna take me up on that offer, e-mail me at mrhaydel at hotmail dot com.

On to the widget. Yahoo’s widget engine is a great thing. At home, I don’t use too many widgets (just the standard weather one, and now the Rijkswidget). Work is a different story. I’ve got a range of widgets, from one to tell me the time and date to the this one that tells me the lowest gas price in my area. But, by far the coolest widget I’ve ever seen is the one that the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam put out (the widget can be downloaded here, also see above). With it, each day a new picture from their collection is displayed. On the “reverse side” (found by clicking the arrow in the corner) is a description of the painting, with a link to more information on it. You can also increase the size of the painting too (which helps when the description is too long on the reverse side). I think the museum puts it best when they say “The Rijkswidget only does one thing, but that one thing is absolutely splendid.” Indeed.

The fact that it displays a new painting each day is great in of itself, but I think what is amazing to me is the idea itself. Consider: name one other place or company (other than Macintosh maybe) that has put out its own widget. I mean, how cool is it that a relatively unknown museum (at least, I’d venture to say that not too many people know it) in Amsterdam releases a wondeful little tool to browse its collection? There really needs to be more places that do this. How about the Museum of Modern Art in New York, or the Louvre? How does this actually work? I guess the museum already has its collection digitized? (does every museum these days?) I think the Rijksmuseum is taking a big step forward in taking the time to put out something as thoughtful, appropriate, and relevant as this, and it’s a shame it probably won’t start a trend.

Over the past four weeks, I know for a fact that writing a post has crossed my mind. I think I just thought something like, “oh, I’ll get to it at some point;” I never did. It certainly wasn’t for a lack of stuff out there to write about.

It’s old news now, but I spent the better part of those four (or how ever many) weeks watching the Mavericks work their way to within 1.2 wins of a championship, only to witness the most epic collapse in NBA history. .2 because they pretty much had the third game (and win) in the bag. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing. The San Antonio series was, unfortunately, the high point of whole run, and I didn’t get to watch one game of it. I sure listened to them on the radio though. Talk about some of the best basketball to ever be played: the literal underdog, having just lost two games, takes the world champions to seven games, and wins. In overtime. On the road. I had the privilege of going to game one of the Suns series; it was a blast, even though we lost. When they beat the Suns (on the road, again) to make it to the finals, you could definitely just feel a different vibe in the city. Some will look back and say the city jinxed the whole thing by planning the parade extremely prematurely, but everyone felt it was a sure thing once we went up 2-0. Again, I managed to get tickets to Game 1 of the Finals. Sure I could have sold them for probably close to $300 (or more) a pop, but I wasn’t that dumb.

Here’s how I saw it: I was going to be witnessing history. The first NBA Finals game in the Mavericks’ 26 year history. The first NBA Finals game in the Heat’s 18 year history. The first NBA Finals game in Dallas. Two first-timers in the big dance? Did you know that since 1970-something, there have only been 7 different teams to win the NBA championship? With this matchup, there was a 100% chance that new blood would wear the crown. But alas, it was not to be for Dallas, even though it seemed like there wasn’t a way we couldn’t win. The only radio station I listen to now, SportsRadio 1310 The Ticket, had a great segment on all the dumbass predictions they made after the Mavs went up 2-0. Funny stuff.

Life goes on though. I’m still absolutely loving reBlog. I’ve used it to sift through thousands of articles over the past couple months. I keep up with around 140 different blogs and websites without any trouble at all. Check out my published feed for what I considered worth reading out of those thousands upon thousands of items that came up. RSS in general is just such an awesome thing. There are any number of things you can do with it that though you might have never thought to do so, the fact that you can so simply and easily makes it worth all the while. Check out Steve Rubel’s article on 35 (more) things you can do with RSS.

The new teaser for Spider Man 3 made its way on to the web (har) today. Looks pretty damn sweet. I never kept up with Spider Man all that much, but I think I can vaguely remember this whole “dark” suit/period thing he goes through (I mean, what superhero doesn’t go through that?), and it should make for a very interesting movie.

Speaking of superheroes, Superman Returns starts tomorrow. It’s showing in IMAX 3D: that should be sweet huh? Well… after reading Roger Ebert’s review, I must say I’m a little less excited about it (the movie, not the 3D part). Yes yes, I happen to respect Mr. Ebert and his reviews, as they tend to be right on the money. At least for me.

Hell. Yes.

‘Nuff said.

I think there are a lot of areas where this statement is applicable as well as valid; this blog happens to be one of them for the time being. Like I’ve said in the past, I guess something really just has to catch my eye in order for it to wind up here. Two things did just that today.

There is only one thing that I genuinely miss about having a console and dislike about the PC game market as a whole. Platform games. For consoles, both old and new, there are droves out there that you can sit down and play for maybe 10 minutes, or 10 hours at a time and still feel satisfied and as if you actually accomplished something. The same can’t be said for PC gamers - there just aren’t any decent platformers made for the computer. Of course, there are good reasons for this, and it’s not as if there aren’t *plenty* of games I can play on my PC that someone who owns a PS2 or XBox will never get to play. However, I know that at this instant, I could sit down with my trusty ol’ Super Nintendo Entertainment System, pop in Super Mario World, and be entertained for the week or so I’d allow to go back through and beat it. Heck, I did it not more than 3 or 4 months ago. In fact, I even went so far afterwards as to go on eBay to buy the sequel (Yoshi’s Island), and Super Mario All-Stars, just so I could relive the days of being able to just sit in front of the TV and play a game that didn’t require any remapping of keys, no extensive tutorials, no driver updates, no tweaking, no settings of any kind; just all out jumping and running and that’s that.

One quick digression concerning the topic at hand in a way: check out this video of a little kid and his sister getting a Nintendo 64 for Christmas. This video made me, as well as my coworkers, laugh hysterically all day. It still does for me. I can remember when my brother and I got our Nintendo for Christmas one year, and how excited we were, but I know we weren’t that enthused, or at least not that outwardly.

OK, enough of all that talk and buildup about platformers and the heyday of video games. Here’s what got me jealous of the console-bearers: the New Super Mario Bros. (Gamespot profile here) for the Nintendo DS. Check out the official site for a few short videos of the game in action, but the real treat is this five minute video. Watch it and tell me that that doesn’t look like it’d be just plain fun to play. It looks like it takes all the things that made the past Mario games great, and rolls it into one compact package. Portable no less! (Remember, the DS is Nintendo’s semi-successor to the Game Boy) If I didn’t know any better, I’d go out and get a DS just so I could play it.

Second on the list of what caught my eye today was a little site called Share Your OPML. What’s OPML and why do I want to share it you say? Well, in a nutshell, consider an RSS feed. Think of the feed as a way of getting little nuggets of info from a site fed directly to you, any time you want. So we might say that feed could be like a table of contents with chapter headings (the items in the feed) in a book (the site). An OPML file would be like a collection of headings broken up into many different books, sort of like an encyclopedia. Not a great analogy, but it’s the best I could come up with. Read the Wikipedia entry on OPML to get a better explanation.

So Share Your OPML aims to be a “commons for sharing outlines, feeds, and taxonomy.” You upload your OPML (most feed readers will output either a local file or a URL), and it will let you share it with others, and even try and tell you other people who are most similar to your style of feed reading based on what you’re subscribed to. My biggest point of excitement about this is that it’s a great way to be introduced to other sites out there, because in my opinion, there wasn’t a very good way to do so otherwise. I guess you might think of this as a pseudo-del.icio.us-Pandora for RSS feeds. Both Michael Arrington at Techcrunch and Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion (Techcrunch’s take, Micro Persuasion’s take) talked about it, and both seem pretty positve about its potential. I know I am.

I wanted to go ahead get this post out there, one I’ve been meaning to write, but waiting until the right time to do so. Well, the time is right today. One thing I haven’t updated on since early March was the state that my new Dell was in.

Just as a caveat, this post might be long, so turn back now if you don’t feel up for it. Read on if you’re interested. I’ll try to keep it as short as I can.
When I received my new Dell in February, I was giddy with excitement as I set it up and got it running. For roughly two weeks, it was great; couldn’t have been better. Then the dreaded Blue Screens of Death started. Constantly. Consistently. Every 30 minutes. Each time the same BSoD appeared, pointing to the same file, with the same “IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL” message. The first few times, I could recover just fine, but it eventually got to the point where I had to call Dell, and mess with their at times extremely frustrating tech support. It was only then that they let me in on a little secret: I could hold down CTRL-F11 at startup, and restore my computer back to its factory settings. A great feature, but one I wished I had known about before all my calls for help.

So I did that, and everything was kosher. For the next few weeks of course. Then, the same thing happened all over again: BSoD every 30 minutes, on the dot. I saved myself a call and simply restored my computer. Again. I told myself I’d do it right this time, and after I took off all the crap that’s on there initially and installed what I wanted, I would make an image of my drive with Norton Ghost so that I could restore back to that image should anything go wrong again, effectively cutting out the step of using Dell’s restore.

So I did that. Just in case, you know. Sure enough, the BSs popped up again, and I was ready for them. I get to the point of restoring using the image I made (it actually wound up being with Acronis TrueImage), and halfway through, it tells me the archive is corrupted. So I’m left with a half-restored-half-good hard drive. Needless to say, Windows can’t really boot to such a drive.

I call Dell, and tell them that the solution to my problem is that they send me out an entirely brand new system, and I’ll give them back the one I had currently, to which they replied: “We don’t do system exchanges past 21 days.” I tell them that doesn’t work. They’ll have a manager call me in the morning they tell me. Fine. Of course, I don’t get called, and when I finally have time, I call them back and ask where my phone call was. “Oh, there wasn’t a slot available” at the time that they said was available not more than 12 hours prior. I eventually get redirected to someone who can actually do something, and it’s determined what they can do is send me out a new hard drive, RAM, and motherboard (this is because I told them that I thought it was one or all of these things, not because they suggested it). Why all 3? Because while my issue may have seemed like a hard drive problem, I wasn’t about to have them ship me out one new hard drive, only to have it be something else and have to go through this all over again.

Now originally I said this is again why I want a new system because Dell shouldn’t be making their customers put in hardware like this themselves. “Oh, well we’ll send out an onsite technician to put them in for you. Is [my work address] where your at?” “Well, yes but that’s not where my box is.” Which meant I was going to have to leave work early one day just so I can let them come in and replace the parts. I still couldn’t really see how it’s cost effective for Dell to pay some third party company to have contractors, who no doubt get paid a decent sum per hour, come out to my apartment and install hardware,when they could just ship me a new computer for probably cheaper.

Anyway, I get a call from the technician in a few days saying she (yup, it was a woman) had my parts, except that they didn’t ship the motherboard. I told her that she needed to call Dell and tell them to get it to her the next day, and for her to still come out and put in the HD and RAM, because hey, it might not be a motherboard problem. She puts it in, and of course it didn’t solve my problem. The next day, after me leaving work early again, she came out and replaced the motherboard, after which she saw with her own eyes that it did nothing to alleviate my BSoD disease.

Back on the phone the instant she left, I told whoever answered the phone at Dell that they were to immediately escalate my call and get me a hold of someone who could give me a new system, because this was absolutely rediculous. I get put through to Wayne, who I now know can get stuff done, as hard as he is to get a hold of, and he put out the order to send me a brand new system, complete with a return shipping label, because no way was I paying to ship a broken computer back to them. This was on a Thursday.

The next Monday, a week ago (April 17th) today actually, I get my new computer, at work. I open it. There’s no return shipping label. Oh. My. I immediately give Wayne a call, but only get his voicemail. Whatever, at least I have a new computer.

I get home, fire it up, and it appeared to be running smoothly. And it still is to the very instant of me writing this post.

For the most part, that concludes my initial issue. I mean, I got what I originally asked for: a new system. But wait, there’s more.

After giving this whole ordeal more thought, I realized that while I may have been satisfied with how my story ended so to speak, I was extremely unsatisfied with how that happy ending came to be. For the less than 60 days that I had that system, it had been stable and operable for less than 20. Maybe it’s just me, but when I pay $1500 for a computer, I expect it to work flawlessly (within reason) out of the box. Period. Not to mention what I had to deal with and go through just to get to the point that I knew at the very outset of this was the solution.

What did I really want though? An apology? Money? A refund? Well, I did really just want a working computer, which I eventually got, but as long as I was going to make it known that I was not a happy customer, I had to get something out of it. That’s the way it works isn’t it? So, that Friday after the request for my new system was sent out, I e-mailed Wayne, and let him know all this. My request: upgrade my video card to a 512MB one. I don’t care if you have to resubmit the order, I’m already waiting for it.

Now, this may sound stupid to some of you reading this; a different video card? Sounds stupid. But when considering all that I could ask for, it was really the only option that made sense. More RAM? Maybe, but I’ve already got a gig, and RAM is pretty cheap if I want more. A bigger or second hard drive? I’ve already got an extra 120GB one. Another monitor? Yes, but asking for another 20″ may have been a bit overzealous. Well my e-mail went unanswered for a week, as did my voicemail messages left with Wayne, and countless other people I thought could get my request solved. At one point, I was offered a $100 concession coupon for Dell online from a guy calling to figure out when they could come pick up my old system. I told him no, because I didn’t see myself needing or wanting to spend one more cent at Dell’s website any time soon.

It was at that point that I decided that I would basically just hold my old system hostage; I wasn’t going to send it back to them until I got what I wanted. Surely after a while somebody would realize I still had it and try to get a hold of me right? Well, I kept trying to call Wayne, and finally today, after about two weeks of phone calls, I got a hold of him.

I explained to him my situation, and told him what I wanted.

I will be receiving the 512MB ATI Radeon X1900 XTX either Tuesday or Wednesday.

So, I think my mission is over. I think that my little episode just goes to show that as long as you keep at it, and are polite, and talk to the right people, you can pretty much get what you want. While I may get irritated at having to talk to countless people over and over again, I have no problem doing it knowing that I’m not giving up, and that I will get what I want. Worked for me.

In true Lifehacker-esque fashion, I thought I’d do a roundup of my own. Here are some videos that I’ve found to be entertaining, amazing, inspiring, interesting, funny, gross, a combination of the above, or all of the above - depending on how you look at them.

• The first came to me by way of a co-worker earlier this week. It’s a truly amazing story about a dog named Faith who doesn’t have any front legs, so she walks bipedally. Incredible dog. Honestly, I didn’t know whether to laugh, feel bad, or something else when I first watched it.
• Here’s a video of a very crowded and busy street in India. While I can’t vouch for India, I can say that when I was in Indonesia, this kind of scene was all too common; I guess that’s why everyone had someone to do the driving for them. Two things to watch for in the video: in the lower right hand corner, a pedestrian is momentarily “trapped” between a scooter and car (doesn’t seem to phase them one bit), and later on, in the top center, there’s a white car that totally goes against traffic. (via)
• Creepy crawly alert! This video is of a giant centipede eating a mouse. Look, if you don’t wanna watch it, then don’t. I’m just the messenger ok? ‘Nuff said. (via)
• By now, most people have probably seen some incarnation of these crazy Japanese-Rube-Goldberg machines. Here’s a whole bunch of them in a nice, albeit 12 minutes long (it’s worth it, trust me), video for your viewing pleasure. (via)
• Here’s a closely related video, except this time the contraption has a purpose: to make ramen in the most convoluted way possible. I’d say it was a rousing success.
• This one’s not really new, but one I’m throwing in because it still makes me laugh: The Ulitmate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny.
• Again, this one is kinda old, but it is certainly one of the funniest I’ve seen. Period. Classic stuff. All about The End of the World.

So there you have it, a nice little series of videos that I think you should watch. This could be a great feature for me to do, maybe like once every two weeks or so, because I always run across some pretty interesting videos during the week. I’ll do the dirty work and filter out what’s not worth your time. See ya next time.

I’ve noticed that over the years I’ve started to listen to less and less “hard” music. But, I’ve also found that when I do get the urge to, it is still just as enjoyable as it was when I was back in high school, or whenever.

I’m still a big fan of Metallica, but I do have to be in the right mood to go on a listening spree with them. Come to think of it, there weren’t too many other metal bands that I really felt were actually worth listening to.

One of those few though is Tool. Arguably much harder than Metallica, and a bit more…off-beat(?), they managed to put out some truly great albums. Aenima comes to mind immediately.

Apparently, they have a new album coming out May 2nd, entitled 10,000 Days. I managed to get my hands on their upcoming single from it, and let me just say: it rocks. Hard. It sounds exactly like the Tool I’ve grown to enjoy and relish in listening to, loud.

The cut is called Vicarious, and if it’s any indication of the rest of the album, consider it one I’m gonna purchase.

Give it a listen below, or if you want it to listen to whenever you want, go ahead and have it. Just, you know, maybe consider buying it when it comes out. Or something. (via)