All Narfed Up photography and words by Bryan Villarin

I just watched “The Grudge” tonight. A couple of friends that saw it already said it was good, so I figured I’d watch it as well. Wow. Scary? At times. Weird? Immensely. Worth $7.50? Not a chance.

I usually check Screen It to see how clean a movie is before watching it. I’ll find some reviews if I feel skeptical. But usually, I’ll see a new movie with a huge group. However, if some of my friends already watched it, I try and trust their opinion. Well, they failed me. I won’t explain too much in depth why I feel this way about the movie, but other than creeping me out a couple of times, it just didn’t make any sense.

I’ll bookmark Rotten Tomatoes for future reference.

Other than that, I hope you all had a happy Halloween!

I wanted to explain how to prevent spam in this entry, but at the same time explain the spam-filtering technology you should adopt if you didn’t know about it already. Most people I know want to block senders so they don’t get spam from that person anymore.

Disclaimer: I tried to be neat with all this information, but I think I failed quite miserably. (Insert nervous chuckle here.) In any case, I wanted to pass along the basic information of spam and prevention, and I felt this did an adequate job. (more…)

I was chatting in the WordPress IRC channel, and someone said that Firefox 1.0 RC1 was released. It was mentioned in the MozillaZine forums (unofficial), and wasn’t officially announced until about an hour ago. Some extensions weren’t compatible, so they got disabled. Out of the 12 I had installed, five were disabled. I exported my bookmarks before jumping into the install. So far, so good. I thought I read somewhere in their forums that it’s faster than 1.0PR1, so that might be some incentive to try it out and sacrifice the few days (hopefully) the developers update their extensions.

Working: Adblock, ChatZilla, Web Developer, Sage, WeatherFox, QuickNote, and Sort Bookmarks

Disabled: Permit Cookies, miniT (drag+indicator), CuteMenus, Titlebar Tweaks, and Copy Plain Test

Oh yeah, watching the game right now? Go Red Sox! I’m glad Damon struck right away - he’s been doing well for me on my fantasy baseball team all season, and I was hoping he come through even bigger in the post season. Note: Thanks Chris, I sounded like my stats would continue. I know they end after the regular season. Thanks.

Update: I think I figured out that if I try to install to an NTFS partition, my unattended install won’t go through - I need to use the FAT filesystem. Why? Because I thought I read it somewhere in the nLite forums. I don’t really utilize the NTFS anyways, and I’m 99% sure I was using FAT32 when I first reviewed nLite. In any case, I’ve just installed the latest drivers and hotfixes since SP2. Without anything else installed, my PF Usage is steady around 101 MB, and my Windows partition is taking up 806 MB of space (paging file is on another partition). In a little bit, I should be back in full effect on my main desktop. I’ll post how things are running when I finish up. (more…)

Hanni, thank you for helping me out with trying to get this hack working. For everybody else, don’t mind this - I’m trying to figure out how to get Matt’s Asides working with this Kubrick template. Sorry for the interruption.

I haven’t seen Grouper before, but two features that I think I’d like are the ability to drag and drop files while chatting to people, and the encryption. Sending files through AOL Instant Messenger isn’t that bad, although there are times when transfers won’t go through due to firewall configurations, and the transfers aren’t even encrypted.

I’m posting this in case someone out there might see a big benefit from Grouper. (Thanks Marc.) It is new, so don’t be surprised if there’s a few bugs. I don’t need this program right now, but it’s great to know that I have a viable option if the need arises. (To my close friends - I have a four N-vites for a service that starts with a “G” and ends with “Mail”. If you ever realize how much Hotmail stinks, and want something better, holler at me.)

I’m posting this because I know a lot of friends and myself travel to school through freeway or a number of streets. Luckily, a lot of us also use Verizon Wireless (I love IN-Network minutes). Now, with their site redesigned, it seems they’ve launched some new services that I can’t remember seeing before. The one that stands out is Traffic Alerts, where you can customize your routes to notify you of any problems only when you’re going to work/school, or going back home. It won’t alert you when you’re not even going to head out there.

Technically, I haven’t had a chance to try it out, but we’ll see how it goes if something does happen to come up.

Head over to their GetItNow website and getGoing with Traffic Alerts.

Oh yeah, for the sponaneous trips you end up taking, SigAlert does the job (for California). They’ve redone their site also, and it’s looking pretty good if you ask me.

Since I started using Synergy, there are times when I don’t want to stray to the other system. For that program, it utilizes scroll lock so the cursor doesn’t move away from that particular system. However, I can’t see the Numlock, Capslock and Scroll Lock keys since part of the desk covers them. Systray Indicator comes to the rescue and shows me what’s active and what isn’t - for free.

These are great ideas for anybody who has to deal with sales. However, don’t overlook the fact of selling yourself as well. You need to present the best part of the package: you. It’s not something you do actively, but subconsciously. The way you dress, speak, act, and carry yourself are all factors when you’re dealing with a potential customer or client.

Let’s say you’re selling a custom-built PC or web services. If they feel comfortable around you and they feel they can trust you, it helps them realize that you’re not only a salesperson, but you sincerely care for them.

Two proven ways to get over the fear of rejection

Plug: I do sell custom-built PCs, and I’m hopefully going to get into selling web services, such as website design.

This isn’t exactly a bunch of web stuff, per se, but some things I thought were really good when I was reading today’s LangaList Plus Edition.

Aaron Margosis’ WebLog - The Non-Admin blog - running with least privilege on the desktop

Ray Trygstad’s Essential Tools - Over 60 programs this LangaList reader recommends

BASK 1.41 Beta 1 Build 80 - BASK is a simple synchronization based backup and restore utility. BASK provides many different file set operations
that allow you to backup, restore, and delete files from source and destination folders.

And finally, some funnies:

Computer Stupidities

This last funny wasn’t on the LangaList, but intead I saw it from Donncha’s blog:

If Architects Had To Work Like Web Designers…

Oh yeah, I remember some comedian that did a skit of showing you how tech support works, but I can’t remember where it was or how to search for it. It was a good sized one that you can see as a video clip. Does anyone know what I’m talking about? :puzzled: