James Chamberlin

WordPress issued another upgrade for security issues so I figured it was time. I went from 2.8.4 to 3.1.2. That’s quite a leap!

For the last few weeks, I’ve seen Heineken’s “Entrance” commercial dozens of times and can’t seem to get enough of it and yet whenever I’m on the computer, I can never remember to look up the artist responsible for the extremely catchy music that accompanies it.

To my amazement, I actually remembered today and it turns out a Danish alternative pop band called The Asteroids Galaxy Tour made the song. “The Golden Age” is a pretty hard song to get out of your head after seeing three or four Heineken commercials a day (or so it seems).

Not only does Heineken have the commercial on YouTube, but the band’s music video for the song is as well. Take a look at the two if you’re not familiar with them. The music video is a bit trippy.

Oh, how I hate April Fools Day. When I saw Google had a new feature for Gmail, I thought it would be mouse gestures, which have become an increasingly popular feature in some programs.

Then I began to watch their video for the “Gmail Motion” and within about two seconds learned this was just part of a hoax. It’s laughably stupid when you watch the video. I can’t believe these guys got paid to do this as part of their work day.

I have no idea how much time it took these guys to work on these quadrocopters, but the juggling video they put out sure looks cool.

Over the last six months, Charter has rolled out I believe two free internet speed upgrades and they haven’t been shy about saying it. At times, Charter’s ads for patting themselves on the back outnumber any other single company. I don’t think even Geiko can compete in the number of ads I’m seeing now.

What bugs me the most about these upgrades isn’t the self-congratulatory advertisements. It’s the bandwidth cap. Charter apparently has plenty of bandwidth to go around so they offer minuscule speed bumps all the while keeping moderate to heavy users in line with their monthly bandwidth caps. 100GB a month doesn’t quite cut it in the 21st century if you want my honest opinion.

I don’t know about other people, but I hate shoe shopping. Local stores don’t have my size (15!) so I have to do everything online. Picking the right shoe size used to be difficult until I began buying New Balance shoes a few years ago.

When I was a kid, my mom would always have to take me and my brother to the sports stores (Dicks, Foot Locker) to get shoes because they sold so many basketball shoes. Those were the only types of shoes that seemed to come in our size. The problem I’ve had with basketball shoes from Nike (the only brand we liked) was they only cared about the length of the shoe. My problem was my feet were also pretty wide so the standard 15 shoe was always tight across my foot.

A few years ago I decided to give New Balance a try and have been a loyal customer ever since.

Here are my new shoes, the New Balance 654 Tennis Shoes:

I’m a pretty simple guy when it comes to style. Bold colors aren’t my thing. A simple white shoe with black, blue, red, etc is fine. I’m more interested in the shoe’s comfort than how it looks.

My first day in the shoes was excellent. There’s a certain “springiness” to a new pair of shoes. The shoe’s cushioning hasn’t been killed with the hundreds if not thousands of miles a person will put on a pair of shoes over the course of a shoe’s lifespan. New Balance’s “ABZORB” cushioning feels great.

I don’t intend to wear my old shoes ever again. There’s no going back now.

As a Gmail user, I found the recent story of Google mistakenly deleting millions of emails belonging to some 39,000 users to be frightening. It, along with the Flikr user who lost thousands of photos because of a mistake made by a Flikr staffer has me wondering how much we should be trusting these enormous companies with our information.

I would be furious to see everything of mine deleted after logging in. Thankfully most of my emails are stored on servers I can easily back up.

I hate being sick. Every winter like clockwork I seem to get sick. This time, I believe I have the flu and I blame my dad for it. He came down with it and passed it on to me like Typhoid Mary.

Coincidentally, my mom got her flu shot two weeks ago so her immune system is acting like a ninja, destroying every bit of the flu bug that comes near her. Timing is everything in life.

There’s nothing about being sick that feels good. I would say the constant temperature changes are the worst aspects about the flu. I can’t stand being freezing cold and then suddenly overheating like a menopausal woman. Cooling down is easy, but warming back up to a comfortable temp after shivering can take more than a half-hour.

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with computer mice for as long as I remember. My favorite mice were of the trackball variety. I loved those. I liked not having to move the mouse all over the desk, just moving my fingers to control the mouse pointer.

After a few of them died after just a short life, I moved back to the more common style of mice, minus the old-school the ball in the mouse. Optical mice have worked well, but the Microsoft Intellimice I bought didn’t last as long as I had hoped. I went through two of them in a year.

Now that I’m on a new round of mice, I elected to get a new mousepad. For some reason, the old pads weren’t tracking very well anymore.

After some searching on NewEgg, I elected for the uber-popular XTRAC PADS Ripper Optical Mouse pad. So far, so good. The mouse pointer moves much better, but I didn’t take into consideration the size of this beast. The mousepad is 11″x17″, 3-4 times the size of my previous one.

I have to tuck one edge of it underneath my keyboard. It’s that friggin’ big!

One nice touch I felt NewEgg could have promoted a little more was the fact the pad was Made in the USA. I can’t remember the last time I bought something for the computer that wasn’t made thousands of miles away in a sweatshop somewhere.

Despite Intel’s botched Sandy Bridge release, I’m still excited about them. I know the SATA problems are well documented at this point, but there’s no question that those new CPUs are great. Intel’s public reputation will be restored to a degree after those faulty motherboards are recalled in full and new ones are released.

It does have me wondering what AMD thinks of Intel’s recent problem. I’m sure they’re taking notes so that they don’t encounter similar quality issues when their new Bulldozer chipsets come out. It would have been great timing if AMD had that chipset ready to go right as Intel has announced the SATA problem and then the recall. I would imagine AMD could have gotten a few people who were on the fence about the Sandy Bridge chips to buy their Bulldozer.

I don’t claim to be a fanboy of either Intel or AMD. Truth be told, I would like to see AMD doing a better job of keeping up. During the megahertz wars, AMD caught up, but quickly lost ground when it came to what’s been referred to the core wars, where the number of cores is now one of the big differences.

AMD’s upcoming Bulldozer chipsets have garnered a fair amount of buzz on some of the tech forums, but until I’ve seen them get tested, I’m going to remain extremely skeptical of some of those claims which state it’s 50% faster than the existing chips (presumably prior to Sandy Bridge’s release). 50%’s a big jump. I’m just not sure AMD will be able to deliver on that kind of hype.

If I had the money, I’d go with the Sandy Bridge system after the motherboard SATA problem gets ironed out and new mobos are shipped in a few weeks.

But if I had my chance at a dream system, I wouldn’t go with either. If someone at Intel has a spare i7 970 or i7 980x lying around, I would love to get my hands on one of those. They’re not Sandy Bridge processors, but they’ll still blow the doors off anything AMD has available right now and for the near future.