LotR:TRotK EE DVD – 4h50m+?

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I think I just wanted to make the most cryptic post title possible. ;)

Apparently, Peter Jackson recently revealed that the DVD Extended Edition of Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King “will be longer than 4 hours and 50 min” long!

Wow.

Let’s see. About 3:28 for the extended TFotR, about 3:43 for the extended TTT, and possibly over 4:50 for the extended TRotK. We’re rapidly approaching a solid twelve hours for the full saga when all is said and done.

Sweet. I’m all for it. Bring it on!

(via Jarret House North)

2003 Pictures of the Year

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©2003 Alan Berner

The Seattle Times’ Pacific Northwest magazine has released their 2003 Pictures of the Year special issue, and all the shots have been posted on their website.

While some of the photos merely state the subject and what is happening, several include the thoughts of the photographers regarding the subject matter, how the photo was taken, and other such things. One of the things I enjoyed reading was how often these professional photographers deemed their shots “total luck” — it makes me feel better about my ratio of good shots to pure dreck. ;)

(via Spiel)

Nobody's tried this yet?

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Frankly, I’d be more than a little surprised if nobody had attempted zero-g sex yet, no matter how strenuously NASA denies it. Still, if you’re looking to be the “official” first couple to give it a shot (and happen to be absolutely filthy rich), just give the Russian space agency a call!

THEY put the first man in space, then the first tourist. Now the Russians could make one wealthy couple the first members of the 240-mile-high club.

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In its latest attempt to develop space tourism, Russia is offering a pair of newlyweds the chance to swap Venice or Paris for a cosmic honeymoon on board the international space station.

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For $US48 million ($65 million) – the cost of a pair of space return tickets – the couple could become the first to experience the uncharted joys of sex in zero gravity.

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“It would bring the mile-high club to new heights,” said Rob Volmer of Space Adventures, the company that has teamed up with the Russian Aviation and Space Agency to offer the trip.

(via GothicVamps)

Books, sir…books.

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What did we do for endless and disheartening time-sinks before computers? I never lost twenty hours trying to make a fridge work properly, or to make a chair I’d accidentally upgraded turn itself back into something you could sit on.

&mdash Neil Gaiman

Top Word Lists of 2003

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Top 10 Words of 2003:\
embedded\
blog\
SARS\
spam\
taikonaut\
Bushism\
allision\
recall\
Middangeard\
celibacy YourDictionary.com has released their Top Word Lists of 2003: the Top Ten Words of 2003, Top Ten Personal Names of 2003, Top Ten Youthspeak Words, Bonus Youthspeak Phenomenon of Note, Top Phrases of 2003, 5 Top Mispronunciations by President Bush in 2003, Best New Product Names, Worst New Product Names, Top Enron Inspired Words, Top Internet Words Moving into Widespread Use, Top Sports-related Words, and Top Word Trends in Pop Music Names.

Most of the words and terms in the lists I’d heard before, though there were a few exceptions (Poolife?). I thought this bit at the very end was especially cool, though…

Most frequently spoken word on the Planet:

1. OK Still the most popular word in languages around the world. “OK” originated in a joke in the 1830’s, spelled “oll korrekt” in Boston newspapers, the joke being, both words were incorrect. It became so popular, that it was soon abbreviated to simply “O. K.” Despite its popularity, the word would have fallen by the wayside had not Martin van Buren, called “Old Kinderhook” for being born in Kinderhook, N.Y. used it in his presidential reelection campaign of 1840. So don’t “misunderestimate” the impact of presidential usage on the growth of our vocabulary. It is also spelled “okay.”

(via Scoble)

Bonus list: In the comments to Scoble’s post, Raymond Chen pointed out Merriam-Webster’s top 10 words of 2003, as determined by how frequently they were looked up on the online dictionary:

  1. democracy
  2. quagmire
  3. quarantine
  4. matrix
  5. marriage
  6. slog
  7. gubernatorial
  8. plagiarism
  9. outage
  10. batten

I need a new router

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I’ve got \$75 of gift certificates to Best Buy thanks to a promotion through work, and I need to get a new router — but I don’t know quite which one to go for. Anyone have any suggestions?

Here’s the deal. Right now I’ve got a Linksys BEFSR11 firewall/router, but I’m really not happy with it at all. Ever since I bought it a few years ago, I’ve had to constantly struggle with it occasionally locking up. It appears to still be functioning, the lights still flash as if traffic is passing through, but no data will actually move from my LAN to the ‘net at large until I reset the router by unplugging it for a few seconds. I’ve upgraded the router’s firmware a few times over the years as updates have been released, but it’s never cured the issue.

I’d avoided the hassle for the past few months by taking the router out of the network — my PC was having issues, which dropped me down to only two functioning computers, and as I’ve got two IP addresses available, that worked fine — but after spending some time resurrecting the PC yesterday, I needed to put the router back into the mix. Sure enough, not ten minutes after it was back on the network I lost my connection. Grrr.

So, I need a new router, and I don’t want another Linksys. Nor do I want a Belkin, after their little destination hijacking spam trick two months ago. I don’t need to spring for a wireless router (three desktops in my apartment, none of which have wireless access cards, and I’ve already got Ethernet cable strung around the baseboards), so that should save a few dollars.

Looking at Best Buy’s Networking section online, they seem to concentrate on products from D-Link. Anyone have any experience with their routers, good or bad?

Still digging

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(This post is mostly me whining. Feel free to ignore it.)

I’m so frigging tired of time and time again finally getting to a point where I feel like my finances are coming together and getting under control, only to have some catastrophe send everything spiralling downhill again. I end up in this same frustrating cycle over and over and over again, and it’s getting really old.

A few months ago, things were looking up. I had a good job, doing work I enjoyed, getting more experience under my belt, and getting a halfway decent paycheck (just a touch above $12/hr). I wasn’t out of debt — far from it — but I at least felt like I had a handle on things, and could foresee being able to pay everything off eventually.

Then I goofed up, and everything fell apart again. Suddenly unemployed, I had a month without any income, and if it hadn’t been for the kindness of friends and many strangers, I wouldn’t have been able to make rent that month. Even with rent being covered, all the other little day-to-day expenses (food, laundry, transportation, etc.) still ate away and what little savings I had, until things were looking pretty dire.

Thankfully that only went on for a month, but it dug a pretty decent hole, and now I’m facing troubles getting out of it. While I’m employed again, I’m earning about $2/hr less than I was before, and I now have more expenses (as my current employer doesn’t supply me with a bus pass as my last one did), plus I’m having to adjust from a weekly pay period to a bi-weekly pay period, which makes a huge difference in being able to plan and budget bills.

With the way pay periods since I’ve started have worked out, I had to float my rent check for December. The property management company apparently took their own sweet time putting the check through, which normally would be a good thing under the circumstances, but it ended up hitting my account at the same time some other bills did — sometime within the last two weeks.

I just deposited a $700 paycheck, and got my balance back as $175, indicating that I was around $500 overdrawn until my check went in — and another $650 in rent is due in about a week, with my next paycheck not appearing for another two weeks. ARGH!

Gah. It’s just frustrating. I’ll make it through, though it’ll probably be with a few bounced check fees here and there, and hopefully should at least be caught up to paycheck-to-paycheck living (rather than last-paycheck-to-last-paycheck living) within the next couple of months. I just hate being in the situation I’m in now.

Anyway. Just had to bitch and moan for a few minutes. Sorry ’bout that.

Nothing to see here…move along…

Talk about geek heaven!

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The 'Glow Grave'

I just stumbled across this while perusing the Ship of Fools’ 12 Days of Kitchmas (which is well-worth visiting in itself), and just cannot get over this item: the ‘Glow Grave’ — a stainless-steel grave marker complete with an LCD display that can be hooked into a PC interface to change the epitaph whenever you want!

I can’t. Stop. Laughing.

All I want to do is put a motion detector or pressure sensor on one of these things and hook it into a computer attached to the display so that it can dynamically react to people coming by to visit the grave site. Once it detects someone standing at the grave site, the screen would suddenly start displaying messages from the dear departed…

“I see you!”
“Hey, buster, you’re on my head.”
“It’s hot down here!”
“I knew it — God uses a Mac.”
“Help! There’s no air!”
“These worms really itch.”
“God is a woman after all!”
“You’re next.”

The miracles of Christmas

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The real miracles of Christmas, according to me:

Miracle One: In thirty years of Christmas seasons, to the best of my knowledge, I have never seen either It’s A Wonderful Life or A Christmas Story. Never. Not once. I haven’t gone out of my way to avoid seeing them, but I certainly haven’t gone out of my way to attempt to see them, either. For one reason or another, it just hasn’t happened.

Miracle Two: That despite having no less than three different versions of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” programmed into the in-store Muzak at work, resulting in my having to listen to that insipid song no less than 240 times over the past month (three times in a two-hour repeating block of music over eight hours, twelve times a day, 40 times a week, 240 times since Thanksgiving), not to mention being treated to innumerable different versions of every other Christmas song ever recorded every time I stepped out of the house since Thanksgiving, I still managed not to devolve into a gibbering psychopath and start randomly destroying speakers, PA systems, stereos, and random carolers whenever I passed them.

It was really, really, really tempting, though.

A quiet Christmas

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It’s been a nice Christmas holiday this year. Due to financial difficulties, I wasn’t able to head up to Anchorage to be with my family for Christmas, so I ended up spending Christmas on my own for the first time in my life. While I missed being able to see family, all in all, it really wasn’t such a bad thing — there will be plenty of other chances for me to head back up to Alaska in the future (possibly even a few that aren’t in the dead of winter!), and it gave me a few days of just “me time” to kick back and relax without having to deal with the rigors of travel.

I’d originally thought I was going to work on Christmas Eve day, but things were slow enough at work that I ended up getting the day off after all. A nice surprise, though if I’d known earlier, it might have made the trip to Anchorage more likely, so there was a slight element of frustration, too. However, not being one to complain about an unexpected day off, I spent most of the day just relaxing at home, with a few hours of wandering around downtown Seattle watching all the last-minute holiday shoppers hurry from store to store.

On the way back home from my wander, I decided that I might as well do what I could to celebrate the Christmas holiday in my own particular style — and ducked into the theater to see Bad Santa. What a wonderfully horrid little movie! The entire thing is very, very wrong, and very, very funny. Definitely not a movie for everyone, but if you’re into black comedy and don’t mind a film taking quite a few outrageous shots at the Christmas season, it’s worth checking out.

After a bit more time goofing off at home, I headed up the hill that evening for Christmas Eve at the Vogue. What better way to spend Christmas Eve than at a goth club with a lot of people dressed in black and listening to dark music, right? ;) Hey, it works for me — especially as there’s nothing wrong with having a little fun with the night, and among the songs played at the club that night were a few of the songs from the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack.

Today’s been another day of nothing. A little dinking around on the ‘puter, a little reading and zoning out, and seeing Return of the King for the second time. My only frustration was that I’d intended on calling home to wish Mom, Dad and Kevin a merry Christmas — but I don’t have long distance, and I discovered today that my phone card had expired a couple of months ago. Of course, this being Christmas day, I don’t know of any open stores close to me where I could pick up a new phone card, so I may have to take care of that sometime in the next couple days and call them this weekend instead. Hopefully they’ll understand!