Before I broke.
Yesterday I loaded up my now unused thumbdrive (thanks DropBox) with Winamp Portable and about a Gig of tunes, so now I’m back listening to music at work.
It is no secret here that I loved the first Iron Man, SOI have been eagerly awaiting IM2 for some time now. The trailers have looked awesome.
But now I’m not so sure. I’ve now seen a couple of clips from the Iron Man movies and I think it may suffer from the same fate as TDPM series (the first was great, the second sucked and the third was an embarassment.) In the second trailer the Stark Expo entrance entrance takes 20 seconds, in the actual movie it takes 2 minutes which is about a minute too long.
In the car race sequence where Whiplash chops Tony Stark’s car in half we get introduced to the new portable armor, the suitcase suit. The suit is a marvel (pun unintended) in that it is light enough for Pepper Potts to toss out of a car 20′ away to Tony’s feet and it is strong enough to withstand ferocious electrical whippings. Then it takes 20 seconds for it magically expand and then snap back shut bit by bit. It must have some hypnotic qualities as well because Whiplash just stands around waiting for the thing the finish coalescing into a complete suit before attacking.
The movie has actually had it’s world premier yesterday in Hollywood and the early reviews are mixed. I’m thinking that a week from Friday I may just pop the DVD of the first movie in and savor it.
Added a link in the Miata section called Miata Mondays. It is from a site called Cold Track Days and features a photo every Monday of a tricked out Miata.
Watching LOST last week, every time they showed Jack standing there in his dark blue t-shirt I couldn’t help but notice the resemblance to the protagonist in that video game Another World that I so loved, but couldn’t get to work back in December.
There are only 3 episodes and the two hour finale left of TDTVS and then it will be all over on Sunday, May 23 (why Sunday?) But that’s OK maybe they will make Saturday morning cartoon of the show.
You know how I spent a couple hours the other day ridding my work PC of ClearType after the Office 2007 install? Well guess what is running on the home laptop and hasn’t bothered me one bit?
House viewers must buy a lot of trucks or someone thinks they do because the big three have all run truck ads during tonight’s show.
We grabbed a cache on the way home from dinner out in Augusta on Friday. We got a find and removed one of our DNFs. We didn’t find this one a while back, but we weren’t the only ones, the container had gone missing. The owner has since replaced it and we found it.
Saturday we got up early and headed north and east with the goal of finishing up our SC Challenges in that part of the state. One of the counties we needed was Chesterfield which is where Cousin Laurie resides, so instead of our typical breakfast at Cracker Barrel meets in Florence, we did a lunch at Subway in her home town of Chesterfield. She even joined us on a caching expedition behind the town’s high school. We were gone for almost exactly 12 hours, covered a touch over 400 miles and got to check off the 3 counties and 4 DeLorme pages that we needed with the 11 caches we found.
After yesterday we were at 392 total. We needed to get just 8 to get to the next milestone and there were 8 relatively fresh caches along the bike lane they added along side the new I-520 section in North Augusta. Seemed like somebody was trying to tell us something. At first we tried to resist, but by after lunch the pull was too strong. We parked at the DMV and started along the trail. Donna’s idea was to walk to the furthest cache and work our way back (this strategy worked well yesterday when we went all the way north and east before working our way back home.) And that is almost exactly what we did, the pent up desire to do something caused us to pick up #2 before walking the whole way. We found all eight giving us exactly 400 finds. Turns out there was a cache right there behind the DMV building where we had parked, oh what the heck, might as well start on the next hundred, plus 401 is a prime number. By the time we were done we had walked 4.7 miles.
Why are the ferns the first to poke out of the ground after they do a prescribed burn in the woods.
This picture is from last weekend’s walk in Hitchcock Woods.
I was upgraded to Office 2007 at work yesterday. My cubical neighbor (Hi, Jim) has had it for a few weeks and has done nothing but complain. I have to admit I am not in love with the new interface, it does look like it might be helpful to novices and today’s big button/colorful icon lovers, but I’m old school and like the drop down menu thing better. I quickly figured out how to hide the Ribbon and add my wanted buttons to the top menu, so I can deal with the changes.
Office 2007 turns on Microsoft’s ClearType automatically which they have designed to make text look crisper on LCD screens by blurring the edges. Some people love this “advancement”, most don’t even notice and another faction hates it. I thought I fell only in the hate column because at work and home when I have run into Clear Type in the past the first I did was to disable it. To me the slight blurring of the characters, just makes them look out of focus.
Off to the web to see about shutting off the Blurr Type in Office 2007. Before you jump in to let me know Microsoft has Control Panel App for tuning ClearType, I tried it and it didn’t help.
Depending on which version of Windows you have there are different ways to turn off ClearType. For XP you have to:
1. Click Start, click Control Panel, click Appearance and Themes, and then click Display.
2. On the Appearance tab, click Effects.
3. Click to select the Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts check box, and then click Normal in the list. This turns it off for a lot of things, but Office 2007 still uses it.
To shut it off in Office you need to follow these instructions:
1. Click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click program Options.
2. Click Popular.
3. Under Top options in working with program, click to clear the Always use ClearType check box.
4. Click OK to close the program Options dialog box.
5. Restart the 2007 Office program. This is all well and good, but Outlook is still holding out!
To bring Outlook into line you need to go to View -> Current View -> Customize Current View -> 1) Other Settings Button – Change the 3 fonts, Column, Row, Auto Preview & 2) Automatic Formatting Button – Change all 5 rules. Then go to Tools -> Options -> Mail Format Tab -> Signatures Button – Change the font if needed. Then select the Personal Stationary Tab – Change the three fonts there. I changed them all to Tahoma and left the point size alone. Arial would work pretty well here too.
After all that, the documents now use the crisp sharp fonts I know and love, but guess what, all the menu text in Office 2007 still looks fuzzy. Turns out Microsoft commissioned some new ClearType friendly fonts to be use in the Office interface. Bastards!
There may be a different way to cure this issue, but I opted for the brute force method, my Google searching turned up a site that listed those fonts and I moved them and all their variations from the windows font directory: Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, Corbel and Segoeui.
I missed celebrating 420 today. Bummer man, might have helped watching tonight’s episode of TDTVS.
