You can now customize your RSS feeds...
I made another addition to the RSS feature. You can now create a custom RSS feed and pull down just the categories that may be of interest to you. I mainly added this feature for Geoff Bowers over at Full As A Goog.
Nikki (and Maddie) Update...
I thought it's about time I provide an update on the dogs. They're finally starting to calm down a bit and have even started napping together. Nikki wants to be around her sister all the time, and Maddie sometimes just wants to be by herself--it's like having a toddler and a teenager. :)
Nikki's still having some problems with house breaking, but she's getting much, much better. She's started going to the backdoor (most of the time) when she has to urinate. She's still urinating in the kennel. We've been able to monitor her enough that it appears she pees the second she wakes up. If she's napping in the living room and starts to stir, you've got to get her outside ASAP because she will have to potty. I also think she's doing a better job fully emptying her bladder when she's outside, before I think she was stopping prematurely. I beginning to give her a little more leeway in the house. I've even allowed her to sleep in bed a few times the past couple of nights.
NOTE:Point in case about the whole peeing after waking up. Right after I typed the sentence above about needing to take Nikki out right after she wakes up, I got a phone call. As I was talking on the phone, I heard Nikki stirring and turned around to look at her. She appeared to have been back to sleep, so I thought she might have just been getting more comfortable. Not 30 seconds later, I hear a sound resembling a someone hosing off their driveway. Sure enough, Nikki's urinating in her kennel again. I really have to start listening to myself!!!
Pittsburgh Steelers RSS News Feed
For those of you looking for a good Steelers-related RSS news feed, I played around until I finally figured out the URL to get Steelers only related news from moreover.com.
Pittsburgh Steelers RSS Feed:
http://p.moreover.com/cgi-local/page?feed=206&o=rss&n=50
They seem to have the PG, Tribune, ESPN and a lot of others as sources, so I'm hoping this will be close to a one stop shop to find Steelers news. If want the news in another format, play around with the "o" variable (values such as "html", "xml", etc.) Also, if you want to change the number of articles displayed, just change the "n" variable to something else.
New NVIDIA nForce3 Has Built-in Hardware-Accelerated Firewall...
NVIDIA has released it's nForce3 250Gb Chipset for the Athlon 64. The most intriguing feature to me is the built-in hardware-accelerated firewall. Check out the The Tech Report for their review on the chipset.
I Finally Added An RSS Feed...
I finally got off my lazy ass and added an RSS feed. You can thank Cameron Childress for getting my ass in gear. I've provided both an HTML and plain text version, although the plain text version may look a little rough and will be missing some HTML-only content (pictures, links, etc.) You can find the links to the RSS feed in the green box near the bottom of the left-hand navigation column. Now we'll see just how quickly I can bring down my server w/RSS requests. :)
For those of you who don't know what an RSS feed is, here's the v1.0 spec. Ok, that's probably too much information. Essentially RSS is a standardized method for syndicating and exchanging blog data. If you read a number of blogs each day that provide an RSS feed, you can use a program, like NewsDesk from Wildgrape, to keep track of all your different blog and news feeds—that way you don't have to visit a million sites each day.
Make sure to e-mail me if you have problems. I hacked this thing together pretty quickly, so there may be some quirks.
Gizmodo: A Gadget Weblog...
For those of you looking for a really good general tech related site, be sure to check out Gizmodo. They really do a hodge-podge of stuff and have been around for a long time. If there's only one general tech site you hit, this is a good one.
A Must Tab Extention For Mozilla/Firefox...
I've pretty much made the switch to Mozilla's Firefox as my primary browser. I find that browsing using tabs makes my life much, much easier—especially in regards to surfing message boards.
My biggest complaints with Firefox's tab interface have been with the inability to resort the tabs using drag-n-drop and the ability to configure things so that links that target a new browser window are opened in tabs instead. Well, thanks to the person/people over at Outsider Reflex they've released the "Tabbrowser" extension for Mozilla.
This is a must download for anyone using Mozilla and who uses tab to do their surfing! Finally, no more new window spawning—everything in one nice window!
Leo Leoport's Sudden Exit From Tech TV...
It appears that Leo Leoport has left Tech TV indefinitely. I tend to watch the show The Screen Savers in the evening, as they do a pretty good job covering the world of tech in a nice casual way. Even Jenn finds the show tolerable—which I'm happy for. She was the first to notice Leo's sudden disappearance. I first assumed he simply had gone on vacation. I didn't recall hearing anything about him going away or anything, but then found it odd they were talking about Leo at all on the show.
During last night's episode, I noticed that they had a new intro—one that looked pretty hastily put together and one that was lacking Leo. That made me very curious. That's when I went to Leo's blog and found out what was going on. Hopefully when Comcast takes over, they'll find a way to bring him back. It's very unfortunate the way things went down. Leo's a big part of the success of Tech TV.
Baldur's Gate III and Neverwinter Nights II Announced?!?!
IGN is reporting that an Atari PR rep has announced that Baldur's Gate III and Neverwinter Nights II—or have they?
Freaks & Geeks DVD Review...
A while back I blogged about the complete Freaks & Geeks episodes coming to DVD. Well I got my package last Monday in the mail. I decided to go ahead and flip the bill for The Freaks & Geeks Limited Edition Set because I am such a fan of this series. They really did an outstanding job on the packaging. The DVD set arrives as a 1980-81 McKinley High yearbook, with the majority of the pages being behind the scenes photos and stories from the writers and actors and the DVDs are neatly tucked away in the last few pages. They even went to the extent of having what look to be handwritten notes on the front and back covers of the yearbook. When my girlfriend came home from work and saw it, she thought it was one of my high school yearbooks.
For those of you unfamiliar with the series, it really was one of the best written shows I've seen in a long time. I recommmend anyone who grew up in the 80s (or even late 70s) in to check out this series. There are so many instances of show that could have been written as moments out of my own life, it's just scary. Paul Feig is really a great writer. (After Freaks & Geeks ended, he did another great short-lived sitcom called Undeclared for FOX.) I probably relate with the show even more because I was somewhere between the Freaks (or what we called "hoods") and the Geeks (aka D&D playing, sci-fi, comedy loving kids.) Growing up I played D&D, listened to heavy metal, played guitar for awhile, hung out with my friend's garage bands, drove around time looking for stuff to do, read fantasy novels, etc. So, I relate with both sides of the show.
If you enjoy the music of the 80s, you'll love this series even more. Part of the problem with releasing this series on DVD was they wanted to use original music used in the show. It cost them a pretty penny to get the licensing to use the tunes by Van Halen, Rush, The Who, etc, etc, etc. There's so much great back music packed in these episodes.
Just Finished Pandora Tomorrow...
I finished Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow over the weekend. I just bought the original Splinter Cell in January (having just recieved my XBox for Christmas,) and just got down with the game a few days before the new version game out. They're both great games, but I was a little disappointed with the length of the single player missions in SC:PT. The game play was shorter than what I was hoping for. It's possible I just got through the game quicker than normal, since I was so fresh off of playing the original game. I might have to pick try out XBox live to give playing online a try. I hate that Microsoft charges you to play online. I think I'm going to have to buy the PS/2 version of multiplayer games just to avoid paying a service charge for online play.
It's Back.... Bard's Tale!!!
The game franchise that really hooked me on computers, gaming and fantasy-based products has finally been revived by Brian Fargo. The franchise is no other than Bard's Tale.
I spent many a day and night in my youth playing the Bard's Tale series on my Commodore 64. The first Bard's Tale is a RPG classic, one I spent many hours trying to complete, most of those hours spent trying to map out a tower full of teleportation traps. (God, I wish I could recall the name of the tower, it was in the lower left hand of the map.) Bard's Tale 2 was a great follow up, but I was disppointed in the third installment—by that time the amount of damage you did was way out of hand and I wasn't a big fan of the jumping around from universe to universe.
I'm interested to see how the new franchise goes. It looks like the rendition of the series is going to be more comedy based. I don't recall there being a ton of humor in the first one, but that's cause a lot of it could have gone over my head at the time.
Minor Site Update...
I've finally added some pictures of Nikki to the left-hand navigation bar. I'll try to add some more pictures of both Maddie & Nikki over the next week.
