Dear World,

This letter will not apply to everyone in the world, however to those of you to whom it does apply, please take note.

Contention #1:
Can we ease up on the social media already.  Guess what?  I barely use Facebook.  I only do it because society has pressured me into doing so.  I don't want to share my favorite songs with all my friends... yes I'm looking at your Apple.  I don't want to share my recent purchase/like/random internet thing with every person that's ever had a minutes worth of contact with me.  What happened to the good ol' days of the interweb when everyone hated anything anyone ever said on the internets?  Oh wait, that's still true.

Contention #2:
DVR's have to be the best invention given to man since fire or indoor plumbing.  Despite its awesomeness, your friendly local cable provider have to provide you with the most horrendous error prone piece of crap DVR available on the market today.  But Nick, what is so horrible about it?  I'm glad you asked, let me enumerate:

  1) Hard disk size.  For a device tasked with recording the highest data-density media formats, why oh why, does my DVR feature a whopping 40 GB hard drive.  I can literally go to town tonight, buy a 500 GB hard drive for 50 bucks.  My iPod features 32GB of storage.  My flash drive features 16GB of storage.  Yet, only 40GB's for my DVR. 
  2) The Interface.  Can anyone tell me what blind moronic retarded monkey they let design the user interface for my DVR.  The colors are tooooo awful, however you would think a DVR could handle a simply task like changing channels correctly.  Wrong.  If I'm watching my HD channels, and I hit the channel button in the up position the channels go from 910 to 908 to 906.  If I'm watching some crappy standard-def television, hitting the channel button in the up position takes me from 821 to 823 to 826.  What possible reason in the universe would you decide half way through the manufacture of your DVR to enable this behavior?  People should be locked up for such atrocities.
  3) Random Bugs.  Let's say you are happily channel surfing and out of nowhere your DVR stops responding altogether.  Being a computer guy I'm assuming some moron has some sort of deadlock contention with the code bits that put operations to execute to the hardware with the code bits that read the operations to execute.  Or it could be that they are morons who can't even design something that will change channels appropriately.  Although my favorite bug has to be the "I'm going to fast-forward to my favorite part but oh dear Lord, it won't stop fast-forwarding, let me panic and hit random buttons until it responds and then I accidentally delete my show".  Epic fail.

If the above applies to you in any way, please attempt to fix in a timely manner.  I await your response.  Thank you.

Finally back to my blog after an uber-long hiatus because of life happening as it so often does.  Anyways, thought I'd ease back into the waters with another installment of "What I'm listening to, right now".  Without further ado,

1.  Back from Cali (featuring Myles Kennedy) - Slash  I gotta admit I'm not a Gun-n-Roses fan per se, but I do know a good rock song when I hear it and this my friends is such a beast.  If you dig, Alter Bridge, this is, in my opionion, Myles Kennedy at his best.  And, of course, you have Slash laying it down as well.
2. A Certain Shade of Green - Incubus  Usually I'm talking about new or semi-new songs here, however I thought this song was new until I did some research and realized this song is from Incubus' more hard rocking days on their album S.C.I.E.N.C.E.  Very cool, if you like hard rock and Incubus, you'll dig this.
3. Lose My Life - Papercut Massacre  Another good hard rock song.
4. Love the Way You Lie (featuring Rihanna) - Eminem  I've always been an Eminem fan but he most recent releases were not up to par, however with the new album I think he's back on track.  I usually care nothing for the rap plus pop singer pairing up but this is pretty good.  It has good dichotomy, take a listen and I'm sure you'll agree.
5. September - Daughtry  I dig Daughtry, if you do too, you'll like the song.
6.  Your Love Is a Song - Switchfoot  I'm a long time fan of Switchfoot and this is a great song from them.  I really dig the guitar throughout the song.  Very mellow song.
7.  If I Die Young - The Band Perry  Okay, if you've been following the list this week, I've been going from most hard rock to least and I end up with a country song.  I know country supposedly sucks and all that, but this is a great song and the lead singer sings it beautifully. 

If you frequent Facebook, I'm sure you've heard of Farmville.  Probably one of your friends has it and it posts a million messages in the news feed or maybe you are avid player.  Apparently a ton of people love playing this game.  So I decided to explore this "Mystery of the Interweb" and try to figure out why Farmville is so overwhelmingly popular.

Against my better judgement I signed up for Farmville by going directly to the farmville.com site instead of adding it through Facebook.  You still have to log in via Facebook connect, but that seems to work okay.  So the game starts out with you being a "farmer" having so much cash and a hunk of ground in which to plant various crops.  You click on the plot of ground, plow it and go to the market place to buy seeds to plant it.  When shopping for seeds to buy, some are blocked because you aren't a high enough level character and of the ones you can buy, it gives you the information about it.  This information includes, how much you can sell the crop for, how long it takes to grow and the cost.  So you pick one of the faster growing ones like strawberry's for instance and go plant that.

Okay so you've planted your seed and you hang out for awhile to watch it grow.  However, those strawberries you just planted, with a harvest time of 4 hours are barely moving.  As I wait around longer I realize that those strawberries will grow in 4 hours of ACTUAL TIME.  That's right.  That alone has to be the worst feature of the game, but apparently it keeps people coming back all the time to check on their crops.  Most games have "game time" meaning hours or even days can pass over the course of an hour or two of actual time.  To be honest, this is a killer for me.  I neither have the time nor the want to check Farmville every 3 or 4 hours to see if my crops are done.  Strike one.

You may say at this point, "But Nick, don't check back that often, just check back when you can.".  That sounds like reasonable and logical advice.  However, it doesn't quite work that way.  When I came back the next day, my strawberries I had planted had withered and died.  DEAD!  Needless to say, I was a little peeved at this most recent development.  Luckily I had planted other crops that had taken longer to grow and were still growing.  However, with some of my crops already dead because they "withered", I had to go ahead and call strike two.

At this point I'm already pretty annoyed with this game.  To further annoy me, Farmville bugs you incessantly wanting you to add "neighbors" and help friends with their farms.  Needless to say, I was NOT going to bother any of my friends with this monstrosity of a game, so I decided to help some people who already had farms with their farms.  To help another friend is easy enough, you put some fertilizer on their crops or feed their chickens or something lame along those lines.  However, more often than not, I noticed that my friends farm was full of dead crops.  Hmmm, apparently I'm not the only one annoyed with Farmville.  As if the game play wasn't bad enough, I then have to deal with annoying messages about my friends?  Sorry, strike three.

Sorry Farmville, you are out.  Perhaps you avid players of Farmville love it.  I have to say you have patience and stick-to-it-ness heretofore unbeknownst to modern society.  My hat is off to you sir or madam.  As for me, I think I'll stick to the big boy games.  However, I believe this "Mystery of the Interweb" will remain as such, perhaps one of its avid game players can explain it to me. 

(Note: Farmville and Facebook are trademarked and/or copyrighted by whoever they are owned by.  Futhermore, I am in no way affiliated or associated with either company.)

Well the weathermen were only off by 12 hours or so but the snow finally arrived.  I am, how do you say, NOT thrilled.  Why am I not thrilled?  3 reasons.

1. People cannot drive in the snow.  When something like work necessitates me driving in the snow, I have to be extra uber-vigilant to avoid the morons.
2. It screws with my plans.  When it snows you can't go running all over town, keeping the roads hot and living it up.  Not that I do any of those things, but I wouldn't mind to be able to go to the grocery or grab a burger. 
3. I don't get out of work when it snows.  When I was a kid, I used to wish for snow just so we could get a single day off from school.  However, I note now that I'm older that I enjoyed it more back then because I went sledding and built snowmen and threw snowballs and all that fun stuff.  No mas. I believe snow is the reason Scrooge was always ticked off.  Every movie they make about him, he always has to walk to work in the snow and the government taxes him so much he can't even keep his place of business warm.  That Charles Dickens was ahead of his time.

I can hear everyone, all 3 of you that read this blog, saying "Nick, Nick, how can you hate snow its so beautiful".  Yeah well, that's coming from people that think newborn babies look like the parents.  Guess what? They don't.  They look like aliens.  Anyways, here are a couple of pics of the snow.  Enjoy the "beauty".

Well I'm back for another installment of "What I'm listening to, right now" and its been awhile since I've posted, just because it seems there's not much out there that I really felt was listen-worthy.  Because of that, I've been going through my collection of CD's and digitizing them and found some songs I thought everyone might appreciate and there are a couple of new songs I'd like to share with.  We'll start with the new songs and proceed to the older ones...

1. Fire It Up, Thousand Foot Krutch  This is just an awesome rock song.  The first fifteen seconds of the song builds up and finally the guitar kicks in and rocks it out for the remainder of the song.  After all, you would expect a song entitled "Fire It Up" to actually get you fired up.
2. Still Counting, Volbeat Volbeat is a Danish band formerly into the death metal scene and it does show in this song at places.  I'm not even sure how to describe this song or why I even dig it.  Give it a listen and feel free to make fun of me for liking a Danish band.
3. 'Til Summer Comes Around, Keith Urban  Okay, I truly dislike Keith Urban.  I think all his songs sound the same nevermind the fact that they aren't that good.  However, most of his ballad-y or slowish type songs tend to be very good and this is one of them.  So if you wanna get bummed out, take a listen.
4. Hillbilly Bone, Blake Shelton  A little history with this song, I would see it come on my Sirius Satellite radio and the name alone made me turn the station.  I deduced in my mind it was going to be some awful song and it may still be, but it is catchy, especially the chorus.  I dare you to listen to the song and not sing along with the chorus. You may be able to resist, but I like to sing in the truck so its tough for me.
5. You Haven't Left Me Yet, George Strait  This is probably one of my all time favorite George Strait songs.  Its kind of a sad song but something about it I really like.  I suppose its probably the phrasing of the song, is very clever and its just a good country song.
6. La La, Ashlee Simpson  I know, I know.  I should get my man-card revoked for even listening to this song, nevermind admitting I listen to it on my blog and further recommending it.  I'd suggest you at least give it a listen before petition the man-council to have my membership permanently revoked, its a good Pop Rox song. (Sorry, couldn't find it to add to the Amazon widget.)
7. Alive, P.O.D.  This song rocks.  End of discussion.  I'd have to say this was one of my favorite songs from my senior year of college.  It also had an amazing video.

There's the list, hopefully the music industry will inspire me more frequently in the weeks to come.

I thought I'd take a few moments and talk about Carbonite.  However, but we talk about that software specifically, lets talk about a more generic problem.  Most everyone has things on their computer that they definitely do not want to lose.  Whether that be family photos, tax documents, homework or that code you've been working on its a real pain the butt if you lost them.  So what do most people do?  They burn a copy to CD or DVD and stick it on a shelf somewhere and forget to update it regularly.  Or they buy an external hard drive and backup things to it, occasionally, again forgetting to update that regularly as well.  So let's assume you are one of those methodical people who regularly perform backups to CD/DVD or an external hard disk.  That's great but your data still isn't protected.  So what is the best solution to regularly back up your data so its safe from not only computer failure, but catastrophic failure like your house burning down? Carbonite.

Last year or so, I discovered an online backup software program called Carbonite.  So what makes this software awesome? I'd thought you'd never ask.  For starters, all my information is stored on their servers.  Meaning in the event of a fire, I still have my data.  Secondly, it monitors the files and directories I tell it to and detects changes in real time.  This is absolutely a killer feature, because the largest amount of data I could lose would be the amount of data that hasn't yet been uploaded to their servers after the save starting at the failure.  Third, they don't place an upper limit on the amount of data you can back up.  They do mention on their site, that the limit is really set by your ISP and the limits of your upload speeds.  However, I believe I have upwards of 30 gigabytes backed up and never have a problem, but I'm not changing gigs of data every single day either.  Fourth and the best reason, price.  Its only 55 buck for a one year subscription or 100 for a two year subscription.  For my money and time, that is a price you simple can't beat.  Fifth, security.  Carbonite stores your files encrypted and they encrypt them twice prior to storage so you can rest assured those embarressing Christmas photos will not get leaked out to the internet.  I have also recently discovered a new reason to love Carbonite and that is for setting up a new computer.  I recently purchased a new computer and was transferring my iTunes music manually when I realized I could simply restore the files from my Carbonite backup, which I needed to transfer to my new computer anways.  Let me tell you, the transfer of data is much, much easier with Carbonite.  I simply pick the files I want from the Carbonite backup and tell it where to put them and wait.  As of this writing, it has restored almost 900 files with another 250 or so to go. 

So whats the moral of the story?  Get out there and find an online backup solution that fits you and your particular needs.  However, I doubt you'd find a better deal than Carbonite.

I did it.  I simply could not take it anymore.  It sang its siren song until I crashed my boat on the rocks.  What is "it" you may ask?  If there is one fundamental truth in life, its that men love electronic gadgets.  Its in our blood.  Ever since man discovered electricity, we adore things powered by it.  T.V.'s, stereos, MP3 players, video game systems, cell phones and even computers.  

So, what is "IT".  It is a computer.  A beautiful, glorious computer with an Intel Core i7 processor running at 3.0 GHZ with its 64bit awesomeness.  You may say to yourself, "Nick, that is cool, but its really just a fancy-smancy quad core, its not THAT awesome".  I beg to differ.  Due to its hyper-threading goodness, it essentially is a fancy-smancy eight core processor.  And with its glorious 64bitness, I will no longer be shackled by a mere 2 or 3 GB (let's face it, Windows XP does good to utilize 3GB). How much memory does it have you ask?  4 gig?  4 gig is for peasants.  6 gig? Nay! A whopping, 9GB of memory is at my disposable.  It will truly be an amazing machine.

So, now that I'm done with my nay-ing and what not, my new system will come equipped with Windows 7.  duh-duh-daaaaaaa.  (That was dramatic music.)  I keep hearing that Windows 7 is a lot better than Vista and that it "seems" faster than Vista.  I say it "seems" because everyone says exactly that.  There are simply no numbers out there that indicate a huge performance jump from Vista.  However, I am optimistic because I am making the leap from Windows XP 32bit SP3 to Windows 7 64bit.  

Well, I should be getting my computer in a couple of weeks.  I'm going to do one of those lame unboxing pictures, as well as an overview of my impressions and any new cool features I think you might want to know.  Its going to be a long couple of weeks.

Whew! Christmas is finally over.  Despite my best effort in destressing my Christmas preparation, it completely kicked my butt.  I was doing fine on Christmas Eve, which just consisted of visiting my family and even though it was late getting back, I still felt okay.  I think what put me over the top was hosting my girlfriend's family for Christmas dinner.  And you might ask, "Nick, did you have to cook and prepare all the food and stuff?" And the answer is no.  I didn't do much beyond picking up a few things from the living room.  Not really sure what my problem was.... maybe Christmas stuff is my kryptonite.  Regardless, I'm back in top form today, playing some video games and watching television... oh and updating my blog of course.  I hope everyone got what they wanted and gave somebody something they wanted as well.  The next big question is, do I host a New Year's Eve soiree?  

Christmas is nearly upon us and thinking about Christmases past, specifically how much they stressed me out.  The pressure of getting everyone what they want and shopping for the gift, which by the way, has got to be the worst part of the holiday season. It seems that everyone forgets their manners and straps their AK-47's on when out holiday shopping.  Since I'm a big fan of lists here on my blog, I thought I would share some of the things that have helped me destressify (definition: removing stress) Christmas. 

1. Save for the Holidays - Before the Holidays!  This may seem obvious, but in my experience very few people do this.  My recommended way of saving is to take a small amount of money out of my checking account every week and place into my Christmas savings account.  There are several ways of doing this, through your local bank as a Christmas Club account or my favorite way is a weekly deduction into a high interest savings account.  (Yes, I realize that now high interest is an oxy moron, but still.)
2. Reduce the size of your Christmas List  Again, this may seem obvious but people tend to buy people gifts for acquaintances or friends in general.   Let me make this easy, if you buy something for a friend there are only a few possible outcomes: you get them something they didn't want and they end up disappointed, you buy them something awesome and they get you something lame and you end up disappointed or lastly you get them something and they didn't get you anything and you end up disappointed.  Yes, yes I know its the thought that counts and all that jazz, but we are human beings after all.  So the best possible outcome is that someone gets disappointed.  Furthermore, you end up just swapping money with a friend anyways, so wouldn't it be better to just go out and have a holiday meal together where you can hang out and have fun?  The answer is yes.  Okay. Just in case you got it wrong.  So, personally what I like to do is to buy for my immediately family and my brother's family and if I'm involved with someone, they get a present as well.  (I'm not completely heartless.)  Its a good manageable size and its easy for me to save the money, see item 1, for my little group.
3. Gift Cars are your Friend  Okay, ladies, we're going to have a heart to heart here.  I know, you all hate buying a gift card for someone.  Its too "impersonal".  However, guess what?  Its quite the opposite.  So let me give you a little example here.  As I get older, which happens at an astonishing rate, the things I want, happen to be more expensive than I would want ANYONE to spend on me.  So one year, I asked everyone to buy me Best Buy gift cards.  This accomplished two goals, one, it helped destressify everyone who was buying for me and two, I was able to buy a Sirius satellite radio with all my collective gift cards, which was exactly what I wanted.  No returns required, no stress and everyone was happy.  So before you spend time trying to find that perfect sweater vest for your nephew/brother/boyfriend/man type person in your life, just give him a gift card, I'm sure he'll appreciate it.  Oh, and guys, if you are buying for a girl, buy them a gift card unless they have specifically requested something from you.  (Man Note:  If you have a girlfriend/wife/significant other this strategy will NOT work and will result in you being miserable well into the new year.  They will require you to work to buy them a gift that is meaningful and what not. Girls are uber-complicated.) (Woman Note: You shouldn't have read the Man Note.)
4. The Interweb to the Rescue!  Guess what?  Businesses sell stuff on the internet!  Wha...?!?!  Yes, its true.  And furthermore, I think it might be catching on.  (Note:  If you don't understand sarcasm, you will be relieved to hear that yes, I realize that there has been e-commerce on the internet for some time now.)  So before you spend weeks, searching the stores for that awesome thing that a store has continually just sold out of, look for it on the internet.  Yes, it may cost more, but it may also cost less depending on where you live.  I can hear you saying already, "Buy Nick, there are shipping charges and I refuse to pay for those."  However, there is no difference between you driving around a busy town all day, wasting gasoline that cost upwards for 3 dollars (here in Kentucky at least), when you can pay the 5 or 6 bucks for shipping to your house.  Furthermore, most places offer free shipping on items that are above a certain price range and places like Amazon.com even offer free two shipping for Prime members.  So, this year, er next year, stay at home and buy everyone on your list a nice gift on the internets.

Well, there it is.  My short list on how to destressify your life during the holidays.  Happy Holidays to you and yours.