guapacha.com

I bought a Dell Axim x51v to replace my stolen iPaq. I found a page that had coupons and other information to get discounts, and sellers on eBay always have $45 off coupons that you can buy for $4 and apply to almost any Dell purchase. Bottom line: got a $600 Axim for $300 direct from Dell.

Had trouble getting it to sync with Outlook though. After much installing and crap I eventually traced the problem to my personal firewall software, Zone Alarm, which was blocking attempts to send data to the Axim.

Now I don’t use Outlook at all, other than as the backup store for my PDA. Instead I use the always wonderful Thunderbird which today announced a brand new version 1.5. If you don’t already use it, I encourage you to check it out.

Big news of the week is the announcement of Apple’s Intel boxes and the hideously named MacBook. I guess they’d run out of iNames but that really is lame. Sweet hardware, and the new iLife totally rocks but still too expensive to justify a purchase for me.

I’m almost ready to put up my rogue’s gallery from the New Year’s break-in, I’ve narrowed 300 pictures down to 15 and will put them up soon.

My MINI blog is worth $3,951.78 and my flying blog is worth absolutely nothing!

1. Ex-criminal Martha Stewart’s lame-o show is being cancelled after the first series.
2. I won the Football pool at work! I know nothing about football so this is a finger in the eye to all the people who studied the stats all week to make their picks. Maybe this means I will win the $315M lotto tonight!

Google have just announced their new, free, website access tracking tool – Google Analytics and I’ve added it to my three blogging domains today. It takes some time for data to start coming in so I don’t yet know the innermost secrets of the people who come here. But I will!

I bought Civilization IV last night, something to keep me busy at my San Diego residence during the upcoming winter months. But, to my dismay, it seems like my laptop isn’t up to the job – rather than lush green tundra and rolling ice fields, my people were moving around a totally blank background. So now I’m stuck, I can’t return the game and I don’t have time to play it at home, so either I wasted $50 or I need a new computer for the loveshack.

As the saying goes, life must go on, and for some stupid dumbshits, that means spamming websites. Whilst I was gone this site and my MINI one accumulated 400 comments and over 50 pointless trackbacks. I really fail to see how any of it makes sense, that there is any value (monetary or kudos) to spending the time to do it. So time to put in place more barriers, maybe I will add one of those word icons that you have to copy when you add a comment, and I’m definitely going to close comments for posts that are old.

Well, after some playing around I’ve decided to give WP-Hashcash a try. I like the premise of how it works and I think it should be almost undefeatable. We’ll see…

Ok, looks like the plugin is interacting with this theme to prevent Firefox from displaying the comment page. Works fine in IE, and on my Flying blogpage in both browsers, so must be something funky with the comments page….

So today, Apple unveiled their new cell phone/iPod dealie, the ROKR E1, which will allow you to store up to 1000 songs on your phone:

But I don’t get it, why do I want to listen to music on my cell phone? Most of the time, the call sounds terrible so why try and play music on such a device? Same thing with video phones – why would I want to watch Batman Returns on a 1″ screen?? Of course, its a cool looking phone and will no doubt sell like hot cakes.

In more interesting news, check out the iPod Nano, the new ultra-small colour iPod:

Now that is something I wouldn’t mind having on my hip.

Thanks to a neat new service at FeedDigest.com I was able to add a list of the most recent posts at the other guapacha blogs in just a couple of minutes. Now you don’t need to visit the other sites to see if they are updated. Of course, you could just subscribe to the RSS feeds but I kinda like it like this.

Its not because their products stink cos really they aren’t much worse than anything else, they get the job done with no frills etc. But I am tired of their attitude. They don’t innovate and so when something comes along that takes over the market they get all sulky and make grand statements proclaiming their competitors can’t last like these two this week:
The ipod is on the way out
Google to perish in five years
I think Gates and Ballmer see themselves as God-like, issuing sermons that the great public will just lap up and obey without reason. I’m dupming my iPod for a crappy cell phone, Bill Gates told me to! Rather than spin PR, I think the MS $ would be better spent making a better product that can compete with the incompetent companies like Apple and Google.

Keen readers amongst you may remember that I lost all my music files in my recent hard drive crash but I am glad to say that this awesome piece of software has come to my rescue. Anapod Explorer lets you transfer files to and from your iPod as it were a regular Windows device. Plug it in to your PC and it appears in your Explorer like just another drive. It will let you manage playlists, stream your iPod music from your PC or even over the web! Here’s a comparison of Anapod and iTunes to help you out. I bought the Universal version and it really does rock.

I’ve managed to get my home PC working again, it appears that my reboot problems weren’t caused by a faulty driver install but instead by a massive hard drive failure. I was able to get the C drive back using chkdsk and 3 of my other 5 partitions are also working again. The two partitions that won’t repair are, naturally, the ones with all of my photos on and the all my music files.

Yep, 17.6G of music is currently lost. I do have all the music on my iPod and a friend tells me that she has a program that will recover the music back to the hard drive so maybe it is not lost yet. And amazingly I found a backup of my pictures from last April so they aren’t all gone.

And in the meantime I am downloading every file recovery program I can find in the hope that one of them will work. But I think the CHKDSK program has probably scrambled the partitions beyond recognition now so I’m not sure I have much hope.

Fry’s has a 200Gb drive for $69.99 after rebates, and a350GB for $149 right now, looks like I’ll have to go do some shopping.

Oh, a belated happy st georges day to you.