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Somehow I talked my beloved wife into allowing me to get some Lord of the Rings statues from Sideshow Collectibles. The premise is that we LOVE LOTR and are trying to get into “fine art”. So figured that these would bea nice combination.

The statues we received were Helm’s Deep and The Golden Hall part of their “Environments” series. Unfortunately I missed out on the first one, Orthanc which is now selling on eBay for around $1,000. We can only hope the same happens to our new statues.

They are beautifully detailed, especially the Golden Hall. Unfortunately the Hem’s Deep statue is covered by semi-hard to see reddish/marroonish dots. They definately don’t seem like they fit in… unless they are squished orcses or something. I sent an email to Sideshow asking if this was a bug or a features, and that I could provide pictures. I was quickly responded to with a request for the pics, so I will have to take some tonight to send along. So far so good on the customer service. Their FAQ’s state that sometimes replacements can’t be had due to limited number editions (which this is) so I’ll then have to decide if I want my money back or a botched statue.

Anyway… will post the results of the dot findings when they happen, but am excited to add these to the collection. Now I just have to find a place to display them proudly.

**update**
After sending some pics they approved my return, and sent someone to pick it up. According to the UPS tracking number, they just got it. So hopefull a new unspotted Helm’s Deep will be on it’s way shortly.

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Well, I have joined the ranks of the iPod owners. The most recent price reduction put it in a range that I was willing to pay. So after checking a few places to see who had one in stock, I ventured down to BestBuy to pick me up the 20gig 4g model.

I’m not sure how I feel about going to the dark side (Apple that is… really… one mouse button? come on!), as it felt a little weird looking down at the apple logoed cable sticking out of my box. But my hatred of the OS aside, you can’t deny that the iPod is a good product, and will hopefully bring me many hours of enjoyment.

So I’ll try and post every now and then how things are going with my new Apple relationship…. maybe that will get me to post more then once a month.

I’ve now had it for just over a day. First weird thing I noticed while clicking (scrolling) around the menus was the capacity before I did anything with it was 18.6 Gigs. What the heck is on there that takes 1.4 G of space? I can understand a little descrepency in size for whatever OS is on there, and a little for other misc stuff… but 1.4 gigs? Come on… Ok, I’m leaving the above rant just for history sake, but decided to go Google ipod capacity 18.6 while typing this up and found that it kind of was what I thought above… that whole “misc stuff” stuff. Binary verses decimal… yadda yadda yadda… blah blah blah… still sucks.

Anyway… am in the middle of re-ripping all my CD’s to have them at a higher quality (192 instead of 128 or whatever I had before), and to start over in a new folder with all spiffy legal music. Ripping CD’s is quite easy with iTunes… but still boring as heck.

Enough blabbering for now… back to ripping… weeeeeee.

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Alex sent me a link to this on a different forum, but tracked down the original. I had to try hard not to LOL at work while reading it, is freaking hillarious.

Requirements: Have seen LOTR:FOTR, and be a gamer

sif = As if
ffs = For F*** sakes (their words not mine)

F3ll0wsh1p of teh R1ng

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Thanks to my friend Alex , I am the prowd owner of a gmail account. I know, I know… they are just a lame kind of status symbol right now, but I was more interested in how they did things. Working in a User Experience group at Sprint, I was curious as to what methods they used for intereaction, the “discussion” concept, and the like. I just got it a day or two ago, so am still learning what I like and don’t like about it, but I’m sure a lot of that will changes as it is still only a “beta” product and will have many changes on the way.

Dislikes so far are:

• Filters don’t work very well. They don’t explain how they work, so there isn’t much “help” to go with it. I tried just experimenting with it to figure out the syntax that is allowable, and found a few things out. But when I do a test search it comes up with X number of messages that match the filter. But when I apply it, only Y messages are listed.
• Labels are nice, but folders have perks too I love being able to assign a given message to 5 labels. But I hate that unless I want to archive a given message, everything shows up in my inbox. So the daily status emails I get from my server that I don’t want to really read right off the bat… are just sitting there staring at me, taking up prime realestate. It would be nice to have both folders AND labels, so I can physically move a message to it’s “main” category, but still be able to find it as associated to other labels

Gotta get back to work, so I’ll make this short. Just wanted to link to a few cool places:
Gmail4Troops.com - Donate your invites to those defending our country. A small but valueable way to say thanks.
Pop goes the GMail - A hack to download your gmail to a pop account.
Gtray (sporatically working link) - A desktop application that sits in your tray and checks for new GMail every X minutes. It uses Internet Explorer as a conduit to do the checking, and can only open IE directly… so as a FireFox user, I just see the bubble popup saying I have a new one and know to go look, instead of going through that bubble to see what’s new. This is a very early program, so hopefully things will get better.

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Introduction

This lengthy article is here to describe the process of how Shaun Inman’s IFR technique came to be used on Sprint.com and SprintPCS.com. This is my first write-up of the process involved in implementing a major new standard, and I didn’t take the notes I should have along the way… so please bear with me.

(Read the article)

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