Some pictures from our conference back in January.

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I cannot believe I haven’t written about this application yet.  This one is a must have it makes syncing and backing up a snap and also allows you to setup remote backups to FTP and allows you to run schedules.  I use this application once a week to copy my important files from my laptop to my backup hard drives.  I also use it to backup my pen drive (lesson learned there) and to sync 2 external hard drives with all my music as well as syncing my music folder with my girlfriends laptop.  Super easy to use and the price is right….FREE!

I figured I would upload this file because it looks like some of my favorite applications are starting to disappear online or go for a paid model.  I have mentioned this one before and it is by far the easiest and best way to manage your MP3 tags.

MorningStar is a website that I have never heard about that one of my teammates in my accounting class turned me to.  We used the site to pull down financial statements for some companies for a paper we had to write.  This site is great for pulling and comparing financial statements and does a lot of the heavy lifting for you when it comes to some of the accounting ratios.

As the weather starts to get a little warmer I am able to get my bike tuned and ready for another season of riding.  This season I decided to purchase some new bike tires so I figured I would write down the information somewhere so I wouldn’t forget it…

For paved trails I picked up the Nimbus Armadillo 26′ 1.5′ tires

For mountain biking I still have the stock (2007 Rock Hoper) Fast Track LK 26′ 2.0′ tires

Last summer I picked up 480 miles on the trails around my house so figured I should pick up some paved trail tires along with the mountain tires.  I hope this year to get into some more mountain bike riding as I feel a little more secure on my bike as well as being in better shape.

Today was my first big ride with the new tires (20 miles) and there is a huge difference.  The first thing I noticed is the tires coast a lot better and let me hit higher speeds.  I also noticed the tires are a little quieter then the bigger ones.  There is a big difference to be riding on 60psi rather than 35psi.  One thing I forgot to do was re-calibrate my bike computer for the new tires, I noticed the mileage seemed a little high when I got home as I have done the exact same ride many times.  After making a quick change to the circumference settings all should be good now.  Looking forward to a nice long bike riding season.

I am a huge fan of Launchy and it has replaced my start menu totally.  Well today I decided that I would look around and see if I can change the skin a little bit.  Well low and behold our good friends at DeviantArt.com have a whole library of skins for you to download.  Install is as easy as downloading, unzipping and changing the skin in Launchy.  Click the image to see the gallery of skins you can download.

Looks like Mozilla has gone through with their promise and spun off Thunderbird to its own development team.  I think this is a good thing so that Thunderbird can get the attention it needs to become its own awesome application.  I also noted Spicebird is a fork of Thunderbird’s code as well.  Looks like they just released another beta version a few days ago so I will have to keep an eye on that one as well.  I use Thunderbird mainly as an email archiving application and use Yahoo Web Mail for most of my emails.

I hate to say it…yes HATE…but I must admit that this little thing is pretty awesome.  With the new iTouch I can access my email, check stocks, check the weather, browse the Internet (sorta) with a little hand held device.  This is great for things like when I just want to check my email and not deal with turning on a computer.  The integration with Yahoo! mail is great it is a realtime look into your folder any emails you delete, respond, forward, read are marked accordingly in Yahoo.

I did come upon this by winning it at a convention for work that I went to so the price couldn’t be much better ($0).  I won the 8GB model which holds enough music to keep me happy as that is about 2,000 songs but not my full library (running about 33GB).  I also, for my birthday, received my car connection bridge from my girlfriend so now I have it directly connected to my car and that is really nice.  No more dealing with changing CD’s and I got the connection cable that plugs into the headphone jack so I can plug into any MP3 player not just iPod.

I have it synced up with my outlook calendar which is linked through Plaxo to my Gmail account so now it is easy to see what meeting I need to be at next for work.  It is also synced with my Yahoo! contacts.  The web browser is alright and gets the job done but I wouldn’t surf the net for long with it.  Also Safari doesn’t support flash so anything with flash doesn’t work on the device but I just read something that said this will be changing soon.

For a first generation product I am very impressed.  But as usual Apple always kills the early adopters and added a 32GB model and rumors are they are going to drop the 8GB version and drop all prices by $100.  Right now the 32GB version runs $499 which is a lot of money but I would expect the price to drop to $399 in the near future.  As long as you find a way to work around iTunes, get the album art, update iTunes, get your MP3 tags inline and download your MP3’s the iTouch gets a very positive review

So today thanks to the help of a gift card from my girlfriend for Valentines Day I made my first purchases of MP3’s from Amazon’s site.  I must say it was a great experience.  After a short download of their download app (very very small) I was up and running and downloading MP3’s.  Amazon grabbed my attention a while ago as the first ones to sell non-DRM MP3’s and for a cheaper price than iTunes.  Everything about that last sentence should tell you why I love the service. 

You can download full CD’s for $9.99.  After download you can go out and grab the MP3 files and do whatever you want with them like move them to your external hard drive or put them on your MP3 player.  You can also setup the application to automatically add the files to your iTunes Library but I turned that feature off because I store all my MP3’s on a separate hard drive and wanted to do a little tag modification before adding it to my collection.

It is safe to say that this is where all my music will be purchased because it was such an easy and good experience.  The files quickly downloaded and were already setup with album art as well as all the ID3 tag information.  Plus the fact that there is no DRM on them makes them actually worth something to me! 

This is how downloading music should be…

Well what can you say about the game of the year for 2007?  Other than the fact I now understand why it made game of the year.  This one took me a little while to beat mainly because of time management with school and work and life and Uncharted but I got through it in about 4 days.  This one was fun to play and one that required you to stop and think about your actions before running out in the middle of the battle scene only to be mowed down by an RPG.  You also have to get used to moving at the pace of your teammates because if you leave them behind you can call the mission over.  The controls of the game are quick and easy to pick up as long as you can reload, duck, aim, change weapons all at the same time.  I didn’t have too much of an issue with this but my girlfriend…well she gave up after 10 minutes.

The battle scenes are intense and get you very involved in the game.  One thing I was a big fan of because the world is so large you can go in any direction, but if you go in the wrong direction you are killed almost immediately.  This saved a lot of time because if you kept dying then you were doing something wrong.  Also there was a compass with a heading on it that told you about your next objective this made the game very easy to keep moving and not get lost or stuck in a building or the forest.

I was a big fan of all the different roles you get to play and the briefing of the missions they setup.  One of my favorites is when you are in the plane and you get to shoot the big guns or small guns and protect your forces on the ground.  I was really impress with how you had moments where you were in shock without a weapon and all you could do is look around slowly and kinda get what’s going on.  Some of the scenes were very realistic and after reading this past weekend that a Marine had a flash back after playing this game and disappeared does surprise me as the realism is definitely there.

This game is great and not for the little kids as it requires a little bit of patients and finesse to get the job done.  This has game has created a new interest for me with the combat games that there seem to be a lot of these days.  I am waiting for Metal Gear Solid to probably be my next one of this genera.