All posts by Jim Trottier

News

Independence Day 2004

We hope everyone had a great and safe 4th of July! WE certainly did, and all without leaving the house. We had a small assortment of fireworks I picked up from Extreme Fireworks on I-94. It’s a great fireworks store with a nice buy-one-get-one-free deal every day. I only spent $20 on the fireworks, and it was still way more than we could do in an evening ourselves. We ended up giving some away to the neighbors after we were thoroughly exhausted ourselves, and we still have a ton of bottle rockets, Yellow Rose Texas Rockets, and Snaps left over! We especially enjoyed the colored torches–they’re just like sparklers, only they come in various colors like red, blue and green, and they look closer to road flares than sparkers. They burn pretty much the same though, and Kevin had a blast with them. I got a few nice shots of everyone enjoying themselves, so take a peek if you want.

We didn’t want to bother with all of the traffic and hassle of the big show at the lakefront, so we stayed home and had our own little show here. As it turned out, watching all of the neighbors shoot their fireworks off turned out to be very exciting anyway! We were surprised by how many there actually were, and they were going off in all directions from our house, so we were never sure where to look next. We had some minor ground spinners, a couple of parachutes, sparklers and torches, but a few of our neighbors seemed to have the real deal–they sounded like cannons going off, and then there would be a full bloom or several blooms above the houses. Really neat.

Oh, and don’t forget the Fireworks For Fun link in my links list if you’d like to play around on the computer with your own fireworks.

News

Yard work and steaks

I spent a few hours working on the yard yesterday evening. I know, that doesn’t sound like me, and you’re right, it’s not. But I needed some time away from the technology, even if only for a few hours. So I grabbed my laptop and portable police scanner and headed out back… Just kidding… No laptop, no scanner, just me and the weeds (and two obnoxious Chihuahuas trying to bark a Briggs & Stratton lawn mower into giving up).

The yard was a bit out of hand. I realized this the other day when I came home from work and found some weeds over 3 feet tall crawling up the side of the house! I swear they popped up overnight, I hadn’t even noticed them before this, and I walk just inches from where they were growing every time I come and go from the house. I managed to rip most of them out by the roots, but some broke off, so I know they’ll be back soon. Time for a chemistry experiment I guess.

I mowed the lawn, then pulled weeds for awhile, and cleaned the back yard. Kevin helped out too, which was nice. After that, we practiced riding his bike for a bit. He seems to be underdeveloped in this area. He’s 6 years old and can’t ride yet. I don’t think he really “gets” it yet, and he’s still trying to grasp the whole pedaling and balancing concepts. But I explained how much more we’ll be able to do–ride to stores and buy toys, ride to McDonalds, ride to the park, and all over the place–and that seemed to help him put forth more effort. He asked if he could get a bag or basket for his bike to hold the stuff we buy, and I explained that first we need to learn to ride, then we’ll work on that stuff.

While I worked in the yard, Sandy cooked an awesome steak dinner on the grill. I can’t remember the kind of steak she said it was (it’s the CRS kicking in again, I’m afraid), but it had string wrapped around it. It was awesome though, very good steak! She also cooked me up an awesome “garbage plate” for a breakfast over the weekend. I told her to write down the recipe because it was very good, but she said she just threw some things together, and didn’t really remember. (she’s probably picking up my CRS through osmosis)

Anyway, I work with all sorts of weird and hazardous chemicals at work all day, and I’ve spilled my share on my hands and have had to scrub them off several times a day. They always look clean when I’m done though. But after working in the yard pulling weeds last night, I can STILL see black dirt embedded in areas of my palms and fingers! How can simple dirt possibly be harder to clean off than the chemicals and indicators from work?!? I was certain that an Iodine stain would be more stubborn to come off than our backyard dirt… I guess I was wrong. Even after all my testing and washing several times at work today I can still see the dirt. That’ll teach me. I’d better stick to repairing and building computers, it’s a lot less damaging to the body parts.

News

Tombstone

Well, today we went on a Wild West Adventure! We went to Tombstone! We had a great time! Tons of little shops and still some of the original Saloons! We even had a famous Bloody Mary at the Crystal Palace! That was where the “Cowboys” and the Earp’s had many encouters. It was right across the street from the Oriental Saloon (the Earps were partial owners of the saloon). We saw a reinactment of the famous O.K. Corral gunfight (the video is in the pictures)! It was alot of fun and very interesting. Boot Hill (the famous graveyard of Tombstone) was also another infamous spot to see. If anyone wants to see more, we have the map of the town and a book on Boot Hill. Just let us know.

News

Earthquake

Did anyone there feel the earthquake? It originated 70 miles west of CHI town and was felt in Milwaukee! It registered @ 4.1 on the Ricter scale. I just just wondering if anyone felt it? They said windows rattled and things as far north as Milwaukee.

News

Kenosha Parade 2004

We went to the parade Sunday and had a great time. We got a little burnt, even though we sat under a nice shady tree in our usual spot–at the Strawberry Festival at First United Methodist Church on 60th Street and Sheridan Road. We had some of their awesome enormous hot dogs & chips, barbeque, and, of course, the strawberries and ice cream. Kevin got a Spyro inflatable and Sandy got a new hat. I took 170 pictures, and all of them are here. Click on the image to view them.

News

A good decision, or a last-ditch effort

Wow, I was impressed with Bush’s decision to turn over the transfer of power to Iraq a few days early. It probably saved many lives. Hopefully the surprise won’t tick off the worst of them though, they still had several hostages, from what I last heard.

I’m sure the decision to turn it over early wasn’t Bush’s though. It must have been his team of political spin doctors trying to earn him some points in the polls, I’m sure. That’s all anything is about these days. We won’t know what any political figure is really like until after the November election.

News

Serious new Internet threat

Internet security companies and cybersecurity experts in the federal government are warning computer users to guard against a new online attack that can affect PCs running the Windows operating system. Specifically, the INTERNET EXPLORER web browser. What makes this latest threat particularly scary is that computers can be affected just by visiting a Web site that has been compromised by hackers. As I stated before–numerous times–don’t use Internet Explorer!

Many popular websites were hit, although specific site names were not released. They are being patched quickly though. A couple of the sites we DO know were infected were Kelley Blue Book’s site and one other medical site, but those are now patched as well.

Norton Antivirus and all of the other popular and frequently-updated antivirus programs already detect this threat and catch it before you’re infected, so make sure your antivirus program is updated! What this infection does is install a trojan on your computer which grabs all of your keystrokes (logins, passwords, etc.) and tries to transmit it back to a russian website. Many ISPs have already blocked traffic being sent from their customers to this site. I wish they’d also release the list of ISPs that took this action–I certainly hope MINE did–It would certainly give them points in MY book.

Update: One important factor I failed to mention above: This latest worm only infects Microsoft servers (go figure), so don’t worry about our website being infected, since it is Linux/Apache-based. And visiting these infected sites can still harm you if you’re using Internet Explorer. Also, I heard this evening that the Russian website that this worm sends its data back to has now been shut down.

News

My thoughts on website content

I love free website content. The more the better. The vastness of the Internet itself gives way to some amazing content, free for the taking (usually only for non-profit uses), from thousands of various commercial and non-commercial websites. The way I’ve seen it, a few years ago there was even much more free content than there is now. Not to say there is any LESS content on the Internet, just that there’s less FREE content available. Remember Webshots? It used to be a free application and all of the nice images on the website were free as well. Banner ads were on their site and in their program, but this was the cost of using their service. Well, they–like thousands of other Internet content providers–went the “pay” route and turned their site into a pay service. Sure, you still get some of the “standard” resolution images (you can call these “free samples”) for nothing, but if you want the full-resolution images and the extra features then you’ll have to shell out some cash for a subscription–and pay for it regularly.

Many of the best applications and services have gone this route now–even Incredimail. They’ve gotten so greedy they need a constant payment stream from their customers, and Microsoft isn’t far behind. I heard a while back about possible “service-based” subscriptions to their Office applications–you pay a monthly or annual fee and you get to access particlar web-based versions of their applications when you need them. I guess they figure this will be a success, because it’s cheaper for everyone that way, and the customer always has up-to-date software. How many more monthly payments do we need though? I’d still rather buy an application outright and know that I own that particular application, to install it and use it as I see fit, whenever I need to, knowing it will be exactly the same a few years from now–that is, if I’m even ABLE to install it on whatever operating system I’m using at that time… You also rarely see company offer “Free updates for life” for a product any more either. A few good ones still do, but be warned there too–I’ve seen more than one company change their policy and actually revoke their “free updates for life” policy and start charging again for major version changes. I guess the old quote used in virtually every policy I’ve seen comes in handy: “Subject to change without notice.”

Jasc is still doing it right, and I hope they stick to it. Paint Shop Pro is awesome. You can buy it in the store for about $80. No activation, and not even any of the serial number entry during installation. Just a plain old fashioned install and you’re good to go. It just plain works, and works well. You can download a lot of additional content for it as well from many websites, including Jasc’s own site. You pay for their major version release only–updates to it are free from their website. But that’s enough Jasc advertising, back to the content issue.

There is still a lot of free content out there on the Internet, but using a lot of it brings up legal issues. For example, you can go to a site for just about every product, movie, or service in the world and get an image of it–My favorite technique for this is to go to Google Images and type in what I’m looking for–instantly I have hundreds or even thousands of thumbnails in my search results that I can go through to get what I need. But copy many of those images and use them on your own site or in a creation of your own and you’ve got possible legal issues.

My final point on all of this is that you’re here, at jimtrottier.com, and we have free downloads and free images. And here you don’t have to worry. All of our downloads are 100% free, no strings attached, and you can use our images freely without concern. It’s one of those old-fashioned sites, here for the public to enjoy, to hopefully make the Internet a friendlier place. No banner ads, no self-installing browser hijackers, no popups. Make it your home page. Use it as a portal to everywhere else. Our links list alone contains hundreds of great sites to jump to from here. But by all means don’t make it your ONLY home page–Install Mozilla Firefox and have as many home page tabs as you want! Just make jimtrottier.com one of them. What?? Still using Internet Explorer?? Then you haven’t been reading enough content on jimtrottier.com! Uhoh. Now I’ve gone and turned this entire posting into an ad for my site. Well, at least it didn’t POP UP on you! =)

News

I’m sure glad I got rid of AOL log ago!

I read today that 92 million AOL screen names were sold by an AOL insider to a spammer. The spammer used them to send out his own gambling ads and then resold the list to other spammers. So much for AOL’s privacy policy. It means nothing now. I smell one or two lawsuits coming. I dumped AOL years ago and never looked back. I have nothing bad to say about them, except that they tend to block messages from MY domain as spam for some reason. I think it’s because I’m somewhere within a block of IP addresses that regularly DO send spam, so I’m included I guess. Well, I’m sure they’ll be blocking a lot more now, that’s for sure.

Just add AOL to that growing list of infected ISPs. Thousands of Comcast customers recently got a dose of the problems of spam as well, when some hacker/spammers managed to figure out how to install a trojan on their particlar brand of router, causing their customers to unknowlingly become the senders of thousands of spam messages! Comcast took action by eventually selectively blocking port 25 from those IP addresses suspected of sending spam.

It’s hard to blame AOL for their latest problem though. They just had a bad (VERY bad) employee, who will hopefully pay the price now. I hope they make an example out of him. I say confine him to a cell for the rest of his life and make him eat nothing but Spam (the Shoulder of Pork/hAM product) for 3 meals a day.

I still always wonder who the heck actually acts upon ANYTHING they read in a spam message??? Who are these people that somehow make spamming worthwhile??? Apparently there are a lot of sad people out there with gambling addiction, erectile dysfunction and micropenis.

News

A prayer for a child

This message is for everyone, please send a prayer for one of Shell’s friends. They have a 10 year old son who was diagnosed wrong as an infant and givin the wrong treatment. So due to the wrong meds he is wheelchair bound and has constant seziures. Well, as of last week, he went into a very bad sezuire and as of tomorrow, they will be taking him off life support. The Dr’s are giving a very low chance of comming away from this one. I can totally respect their judgment for not letting their son suffer any more, but I must say, I give them credit, that is by far the hardest decision any parent could ever make! Were praying for the parents and their son and ask everyone else does also…the power of prayer out weighs the power of modern medicine!

Thanks All

News

The Circus

Last night we went to the Circus in Union Grove. We had ticket for a free child admission and another one for a free adult admission with a paid adult, so with Kevin, Sandy and I we only had to pay for one adult ($20). Before the circus, however, they had pony and elephant rides ($4 and $6 respectively), so Kevin took a ride on a pony named “Blackey.” He was an all-black pony, and I told Kevin he looked just like Socks. Then he noticed a tan-colored one and said it looked just like Peanut. I had to walk with my arm around him around the circle as he rode, and I think we did about 10 laps–quite the workout for me. After that we were in line for the main event.

Is it me, or does the circus seem more and more like just a money scam each year? This year the tent seemed smaller than last year, much less seating, and less equipment-intensive acts. This year even the human cannonball act was moved outside the tent and performed after the show as sort of a grand finale as everyone stood around the parking lot and watched before leaving. There also seemed like many more “money schemes”– a “official” circus coloring book sale for $1, in which several coloring books contained “hidden surprises” with coupons for either a free balloon, popcorn, or cotton candy (Kevin won the cotton candy) which was offered during the first 15 minutes of the show and not even during intermission, a photo op with either a giant snake or baby tigers, and even a peanut sale in which a tiny bag of peanuts sold for $1, again with many of them contain coupons for prizes (Sandy won nothing). The latter, of course, was no-doubt also a tool used to sell more drinks!

In addition to the tent being much smaller this year, the acts were much smaller as well. The trapeze artist/hoola hooper/stunt girl was a small child, maybe 9 or 10 years old! She exhibited some neat skills for a girl her age, no doubt. The balance of the show included two elephant acts (not sure even these were the same elephants in both acts though), a couple dog acts, a monkey act, some “clowning around” in-between acts, a lady doing rope-climbing tricks, and the human cannonball finale.

We enjoyed the dog and elephant acts the most I think. The dogs appeared to all be either Jack Russell Terriers or something similar. The appeared to be slightly larger than Chihuahuas. They looked like they were all from the same family too, having very similar appearance. I think there were 6 or 7 of them in the largest act. They’d jump through hoops, walk on their hind legs, slide down a slide, etc., and return right to their stand afterward. One of them even walked on his front legs! The other dog act was much simpler, and consisted of several dogs of completely different breeds with various stunt skills.

The elephants were fun to watch too, especially in the much smaller tent–they appeared to be that much more enormous! They did some dancing, handstands, and various other tricks that seemed next to impossible to do within the small ring they were in, but they performed flawlessly.

It all seemed smaller and shorter than the year before though, but I don’t think Kevin noticed one bit. He got a toy–a cool spinning ball ($10) with various LEDs of different colors inside that flashed at different times while spinning, which creates a very neat effect! I’ll have to try to snap a night-shot of it to post on the site, and he got his cotton candy, popcorn, and sno-cone, so he was very happy. As we were leaving the parking lot he was asking when the next one was, so he’s ready to come again, as usual.

One ticket to the circus…. $20
A toy…. $10
A ride on “Blackey”…. $4
Box of popcorn…. $3
Sno-Cone… $3
Bottle of water…. $2
Circus coloring book…. $1
Bag of Peanuts…. $1

The look of joy on Kevin’s face as he watched the performance…. PRICELESS

News

The Spectacular New Atari Video-Game Computer!

I did a little more digging through the old boxes tonight and found this! It thrilled me beyond words. View the full-size image by clicking the thumbnail, then click on the medium-sized image. Read the entire ad. This is a real keeper. Can you imagine? I can’t even remember what we initially paid for our first Atari 2600 system, but I know we did get one early in it’s release, so it had to be close to this price. Wow. I even played Yar’s Revenge for a while yesterday. I relearned the gameplay pretty quickly and I was again hooked. That was one of my all-time favorites.

I almost fear that all of this reliving of my past is somehow going to cause my mind to lose what it currently knows about TODAY’S computers. Kind of like a retroactive brainwashing… Uhoh. I feel the gigbytes slipping away and being replaced by “k’s”…

News

Old Car Lovers Show

Kevin and I walked over to the car show at Baker Park yesterday morning. Take a look at the photo highlights. Kevin seemed pretty much disinterested, however. He seemed to be just tagging along, not thrilled at all by all the old cars, except a slight perk-up when he spotted a bright yellow one (his favorite color) and a flashy purple one with flames (mom’s favorite color). I was thinking maybe the car show would touch a nerve with him and spark some interest. He has expressed an interest in cars in the past, hence his collection of hundreds of Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars, but that seems to be fading these days.

I’m always searching for that one thing that’s going to thrill him to no end, to pique his interest enough to spark some sort of direction for him. For me it was computers and electronics. Once I found that, which happened at around 9 or 10 years old I believe, I was hooked for life. I’m hoping to help Kevin find that one thing too. I’ll wait as long as it takes. And until then we’ll try to expose him to as many different things as we can, giving him the opportunity to find his niche for himself. One thing is true though–he loves going “places.” No matter where, he just always wants to go to more places. Take him to school, then shopping, then swimming, which fills out the whole day, and he still says “I wanna go to more places!” even though he’s half asleep from exhaustion. He seems to just want to experience more and more of what the world has to offer. Perhaps he’ll be a traveler of some sort when he grows up, who knows.

But the car show was nice. As you can see by the photos, there were some awesome vehicles there, including the Prowler and several “Deathmobiles”, complete with coffins and–in some cases–skeletons. Kevin was afraid to approach the hearses with the skeletons and body parts all around them. I told him, “Come on, it’s not real, it’s make-believe” but he wouldn’t get close, so we moved on.

We had lunch there (hot dogs, soda, and ice cream), Kevin played on the slides and swings a little, and then we walked home. Later in the afternoon, Kevin, Sandy and I went to my dad’s to visit for Father’s Day. Sandy cooked burgers, brats, and hot dogs on the grill and we had a good meal. Overall it was a pretty nice Father’s Day all the way around.

Oh, and make sure you don’t miss Socks’ audition photo for the part of “Odie” in the new Garfield movie….

News

Something Old, Something New

There are new releases from both Firefox and Thunderbird available! I’ve made them available on my site for instant download. Just click on those links to download them immediately. They’re also in my new “Downloads” section in the right sidebar on the main page of my site. The new versions look really great, especially the enhanced themes for Firefox, and there’s been a lot of improvements all throughout both programs. One big example in Firefox: On any web page start typing a few letters of any link–for example if you’re looking for the link to CWShredder on my site just start typing CWS and Firefox jumps immediately to that link on the page! It’s not even a command, it’s just always there waiting. You’ll never have a hard time finding any links on a page again!

That was new. This is old: I took a huge leap back in time yesterday. A good friend of ours who passed away last December left behind a house full of “classic” computers and gaming gear. His wife offered this stuff to me yesterday after being turned down by several charity organizations. No one wanted to give his antique equipment a new home. I, however, was thrilled at the thought of reliving a huge part of my past, and jumped at the chance. I have 6 or 7 Atari game systems, a Colecovision, two Atari 800XL computers and hundreds of programs, games, controllers, and peripherals for them.

It’s really quite a sight, but I guess you wouldn’t appreciate it unless you were part of that era. I’m going to post some photos of the stuff soon, just for the other geeks from my generation to appreciate. Matt is currently experimenting with all of the hardware and software, so I’m waiting for his official word on today’s generation’s take on MY generation’s technology. It should be very enlightening. I’ll keep you posted. And don’t forget the rest of my essential downloads that are available. I highly recommend all of these:

AdAware 6.0 build 181
CwShredder
ComputerGuy.mp3
Dvd Shrink
DiskPie
Easter Eggs
Flash Movie Extractor
Kazaa Lite Resurrection
Kingdom Hospital Jigsaw
Matt Puzzle
Pop Peeper
Peanut & Socks Jigsaw
Spybot 1.3
WinTidy

News

Jay and Silent Ty Stop By

Jayson was here from Arizona this evening. He took us out for pizza to this place. By far the best pizza we’ve ever had! There’s just something about that super-thin, super-crunchy crust and perfect toppings that make this pizza awesome. And the garlic bread was great too! We’ll definitely be visiting this place in the future.

Jay also brought his new toy along (his Sony DSC-P73), so we compared features, talked geekspeak, and took a few pictures. I’ll let him do the posting in his gallery section this time–I’m sure he’s anxious to try it out for the first time with the new camera. I just had to post the one picture of Wells Brothers so everyone knows about it. It’s at 2148 Mead Street, Racine, WI, Phone: (262) 632-4408.

He picked up Tyler for the summer and they stopped back at our house shortly before heading off to their hotel for the evening. Tyler was pretty quiet at first, but once he started playing Eye Toy with Kevin he opened up pretty quickly and started having a blast jumping, punching, and kicking inside the video games.

They’re flying back to Arizona tomorrow. Definitely too short of a visit, that’s for sure! We’re hoping to be able to go out there to visit him in the near future for a “slightly” longer visit than this one was.

News

New camera!

Well, Today Shell and I got a new digital camera. Thanks to the expertise knowledge of Jim, we opted to buy the Sony DSC-P73. Wow, what a camera…many features which gives me a bunch of reading to do just to figure them all out! We messed around with it for a bit tonight and here are a few we took. Well, We will have many more comming! Take care all….

News

Site Changes

Don’t worry, nothing major. I added a “Downloads” section to the right sidebar of our main page, http://www.jimtrottier.com. This includes every file available for download directly from our site. I had a few complaints from users and customers having difficulty finding specific utilities I recommended that they download from my site, so this puts them all on the front page, so you can search the page for the text or just look through the Downloads list for what you need.

The main utilities, CWShredder, Spybot, and AdAware I’ll try to keep updated, since I use them regularly myself. In fact, CWShredder is a new version (version 1.59) already, since I first posted it on my site a few weeks ago, and Spybot has a very nice new version (version 1.3) as well. I don’t mean the updates either, I mean the program itself. So if you have version 1.2 or earlier, you should uninstall it and install this new version. It seems to run much faster to me, and is much easier to use than before. It even groups the Spyware it finds into a summary list, making much easier to follow.

The gas price updates may disappear soon. We’re back below $2/gallon for the most part, so the situation is a little better, and I’m not sure anyone really uses it besides me anyway. I do submit my readings to Kenosha News on Tuesdays and Fridays though, and it’s used in their “Gas Price Watch” column in Wednesday and Saturday editions of the Kenosha News, so it doesn’t go TOTALLY unused. But if you actually look at it and/or use it to decide where to get gas, PLEASE reply with a comment and let me know. It’ll help me to decide whether or not to keep going with it on the site.

News

Time for a Little R&R (Ronald Reagan)

Hey, did anyone notice Ronald Reagan passed away? How could you miss it, it’s everywhere. Every website I’ve been to the last few days has mentioned it, even the non-political and non-news sites. And now it’s on MY site! I make it a point to not get political on my site, so please excuse me for a moment. I think this whole thing’s a bit much. Everywhere you turn there’s tributes, stories, memorials, and remembrances day after day. I understand an ex-president doesn’t die every day, but the TRUE American Heroes you hear very little or nothing about when they pass. Why is that? Did we fly the flag at half-staff when Nicholas Berg was beheaded? Reagan gets 30 days, June 6th-July 6th, right on through Independence Day, when EVERYONE is staring at the American flag. How about what’s-his-name (see? I already forgot), the pro football player who gave up a multi-million dollar contract, dropped everything, and went to Iraq to fight for us as an Army Ranger and got killed? I read two articles and he was gone. Ray Charles died yesterday. He wasn’t a former president, but I’m sure he made more money in his lifetime and touched more lives.

Reagan liked Jelly Bellys though, that’s what’s most important. And for that reason and a few others every government office was closed today. Now we’ll remember Reagan for having stopped the federal government and Wall Street dead in its tracks for a 24-hour period of time on an otherwise busy and productive Friday. And watch out, here comes a new national holiday! And I’m sure my employer won’t pay me for it, either. But that’s ok. I say, instead of working every June 11th, let’s make it “FREE JELLY BELLYS FOR EVERYONE, EVERY JUNE 11TH!! — NO WORK! IT’S TIME FOR SOME R&R!”

News

Another DVR Down

Well, we blew our second DVR drive last week. I think we’re getting pretty good at it. This one was the second of the two original DVRs we got when we started using them back in August of 2003. They gave us a new box and we were back up and running again the next day. Except without the 20 or so scheduled recordings we had set. Now we have to wait until the fall TV season gets rolling again to find our shows in the schedule and set new timers. But luckily we didn’t lose any critical saved shows on the hard drive.

And since we got the new box we’ve been enjoying the free “on-demand” channels we now get! I think this is something new (the free ones I mean) because I hadn’t heard of them before. Sandy likes The Food Network On Demand. She gets a list of saved shows and recipes and she just chooses one and there it is, whenever you want to watch it. It’s like having a hard drive already filled with a bunch of shows from each channel and you just choose what you want to watch whenever you want. Kevin likes the Cartoon Network On Demand and PBS Kids On Demand and I like TechTV On Demand, although I’m not sure how long this channel will last, seeing how everything is so up-in-the-air now regarding TechTV these days. Speaking of which, I can’t record The ScreenSavers properly yet since they moved it to the stupid G4TechTV channel. There’s no show schedule on my DVR for that channel! It just shows “No Data” across the entire day for that channel. That kinda takes the Tech out of TechTV, doesn’t it? I haven’t gotten around to trying to create a manual schedule for it yet, but that’s what I’ll have to do I guess. But I can see it already–as soon as I create a custom schedule that works they’ll cancel the show and fire the staff. It certainly wouldn’t be much of a surprise at this point.

Time Warner also gave us 3 free months of HBO On Demand and Cinemax On Demand with the new DVR too. So guess what I’ve been catching up on lately? Season 5 of the Sopranos! This is awesome. I can’t wait until they do this with EVERY major TV show! Just scroll through each episode and watch the shows you missed, or watch the entire season beginning to end!