I wasn’t aware that Asus was coming out with a small affordable desktop solution to complement the Eee Laptop.  This thing sounds like it would be perfect to shove into you entertainment center and give your plasma/LCD screen some very nice Internet connectivity.  It even has built in Wi-Fi and all the ports you need for basic use.  The main gripes about the box are that it doesn’t have an optical drive or HDMI out, but you have to cut the costs somewhere plus really are CD’s/DVD’s really going to be in our future? I think the price point is just dead on at $299

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This weekends ride I went up to Pine Valley Ranch up by Buffalo Creek by Conifer Colorado.  This was a great ride and I am very happy to say that this is the first one for me to complete all the way through.  The first 3 miles were a little rough and a lot of uphill but after that it levels out quiet nicely and makes for a very enjoyable ride.  This is where the Pine Valley Fire was in 2000, so the trail goes straight through one of the major burn areas.  It was pretty crazy to see all the damage but nice to see the re-growth of the forest. 

Using my mountain biking guide I found all the trails and made the loop with no problems.  Looks like Mount Evans is going to be covered in snow for a while!

One interesting thing I noticed during the ride is I passed about 3 people for the whole 2 hours I was riding.  Looks like gas prices are keeping people away which I am just fine with!

Here are some pictures from our Memorial Day bike ride up to Waterton Canyon.  We didn’t do any of the Colorado Trail but road up to the trailhead past the dam.  The weather was perfect overcast and about 54 degrees perfect!

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I cannot remember the last time I road up into Waterton Canyon it has been many years!  I think it was my Sophomore year of Highschool (1997!)  When I was told last weekend though from some guys on the Mount Falcon Trail that this was a great mountain bike ride I was a little confused because my first response was ‘Well isn’t that a dirt road?’  Yes, for the first 6.5 miles that is true.  But if you keep riding past the dam and follow the road it eventually turns into the Colorado Trail and has some awesome biking.

Total ride for this was about 16 miles, I didn’t make it too far on the Colorado Trail but I did get a good workout especially after riding up 6.5 miles to start the trail.  I made it to the dam in about 35 minutes so not too bad and then all of a sudden it was a drastic change in vertical.  Over 6.5 miles the trail only rises about 600 feet but then goes up quite a bit after that.  The trail was beautiful with lots of wild life and a ton of spring run off.  I did this ride on the day I played hookie from work on Friday so there were very few people on the trail considering what it is like on the weekends.  After this ride I decided I must start bringing my camera more on my rides.

The Colorado Trail part of this ride was great.  Actually probably my favorite ride to date.  The switchbacks are tight and the hill is up but nothing too steep and no big waterlogs to navigate.  There are some rocky sections but nothing too bad and the nice solitude of the mountains is always a welcome gift.  This is a great cardio workout ride as it has the easy 6.5 miles before and then a great mountain bike ride after that.  I plan on doing this one again and making the loop that the book suggests.

Wow, sorry a little behind in the blogging game due to the craziness of life.  Figured I would first start with the two bike rides I have done since I last updated.

Last weekend I went up to MT Falcon.  This is a foothill that is right behind Red Rocks and very close to Bandimere Speedway as I could hear the cars racing.  This trail is 1800 Vertical foot gain in about 1.8 miles.  So yes basically straight up.  I don’t think the vert of the trail was the killer but more the waterlogs that are on the trail.  Coming down they are easy to go around but going up at a slow rate of speed they are a little tough to jump.  I made it about 1.4 miles and decided to turn around.  This is a historical site because I guess this is where they were going to build the summer White House for the President but decided not to, but not after pouring a large foundation at the top of the peak.

This is definitely a great training for hill climbing and a good technical workout.  I am just trying to make it a little farther each time I do these rides.

After riding only 3 miles I decided I needed to add something to make it a little longer, I drove down the street a little to Deer Creek Canyon and did a ride on the Coyote Song Trail.  This trail was great rolling hills, no rocks, and a great view.  Only issue was it is only 3.5 miles and then you turn around.  However it was a great confidence booster.

Even though this is the 4th game in the series this is the first time I have ever had a chance to play as Neo.  The game had awesome game play and was very entertaining and had a very good story line.  This was the first game that I had when I bought my new Dualshock 3 controllers so it was nice to feel the rumble again in the controller.  The videos were great in this game and I liked the story line my issues come in with the actual world itself.  One thing I didn’t like is I felt like I was stuck in a PS2 game where it looks like you can keep walking forever but then all of a sudden you hit a wall.  I understand having barriers to your world but I think that you need to work a little harder to make them actually look like a place you couldn’t go.

I wasn’t able to complete this game as I ran out of time thanks to the summer finally being here and school.  I found myself stuck on one level and couldn’t beat that main person for my life and became frustrated and I stopped playing.  I did find it very helpful to use the FAQ game walk through’s that are available from Gamefly.  This game reminded me very much of the old Zelda in the fact that with the completion of each level you are given points.  With those points you can buy objects and skills that allow you to kill people faster and allow you to restore your life.  Problem is, just like Zelda, there is an unwritten path of upgrades you need to go on.  If you decide to spend all your cash on one big item you find out that you needed a bunch of the little items to pass.  This was the issue I had and the reason I was not able to complete the level because I could do cool moves but I couldn’t live long enough to kill the bad guy.  The acrobatics of the game were fun but I found them to be hard to control and not as graceful as Drake made them out to be.

  This application is well amazing!  It installs as a little application on your toolbar and is always running when you run Windows.  You can set it up to automatically load when Windows does.  This little guy finally manages to keep Firefox from hoarding all your memory.  It does slow down FF a little but nothing that is too bad and it is worth the memory savings.  Lately I have been noticing that FF has been taking up on average 445MB of ram on my computer.  After this application is running it shrinks FF down to an amazing 1K.  I am sold!

I know the FF3 is supposed to solve this issue and I have listed a few fixes before.  But until FF3 is in a stable state or at least supports all my plugin’s this will have to do.

I have found this website that lets you plug in the details of the images you want to rotate, the size, and the link you want and then it generates the code for you for a simple plug and play effect on your site.  I have never had the use for something like this until today when I had a request on one of my website’s to change the banner each time the page loads.

HTML Basix - JavaScript Banner Rotator

Some minor tweaks, but pretty noticeable changes to the Stylish format for Gmail.  Now the style includes new icons as well as copying the style throughout the setting pages of Gmail. Also the chat boxes are a little prettier and some cleanup of some other fonts and whatnot.  Looks amazing, kinda bummed that stylish doesn’t pick up on the updates and you have to do it yourself.   This makes Gmail much better  Check it out.

  I have added a few things to my Firefox lately, so here are some of the icons that are sitting on the toolbar

 Stylish.  This plugin works very similarly to Grease Monkey, I am using this right now because they have an awesome redesign for Gmail which allows me to use Gtalk and AIM from work through Gtalk. 

 Meebo.  This one adds little notifications (similar to guifications for PIDGIN) to Firefox for Meebo which makes Meebo just that much better, this way you know when you get IM’s regardless if you are focused on Firefox or not.

 IE Tab. nothing new been using this one for a while

 Foxmarks.  This one is amazing because it syncs all my computers Firefox’s bookmarks making bookmarks actually something that I use. 

 Fast Video Download.  This allows you to download any YouTube video with the click of a button.  It downloads the file a .FLV

Autocopy.  Nothing new here have been using this one for a while.