J Marcus Daily
Emode.com - The Super IQ Test - page 1
Have a little time on your hands? Your wife, girlfriend, friend, father, mother, husband call you stupid recently? You know you're smarter than you sound, but how do you prove your mental strength? Emode.com has the answer. The IQ test. Tap your intellectual strengths; get a personalized report detailing the inner workings of your mind and a fancy score to boot.
Seriously, this is a great little tool for gauging where you sit on the ladder of human intelligence. PhD's around the world have placed a great deal of stock in the validity of an IQ test. You've met these people at cocktail parties smoothly dropping their IQ score into polite dinner conversation. Now, you too can join the crowd. Or at least learn to avoid the subject all together.
Now, without getting into scores, I'll say I took this test recently and had fun. A few pointers before you sit down to do this exercise. Turn off the TV, put the kids to bed, and don't take it too seriously. The test is straightforward enough. Answer the questions get a score permanently placing you into an intellectual box you'll be straining to get out of for the rest of your life. Argg. No, really, as I said, this is for fun. Take the test. You may just learn something about yourself. Just don't talk about your score at any cocktail parties or I'll have to visit your house with a baseball bat.
(Author's disclaimer: All references to violence and/or physical harm of any kind should be taken in context and not as a factual representation of future acts. Take it from experience, if he plans to clobber the garden gnomes perched on your front porch, you'll never see him coming.)
LasVegas.com
Visiting Las Vegas in October is slowly becoming an annual event. Every year my wife's company has a convention during October for a few days. Instead of coming home when the event is over I fly down and spend the weekend with her and her colleagues. This year, the trip turned out to fall on my birthday weekend. So, last Friday I found myself sitting at a blackjack table in the Caesar Palace Casino waiting for Andrea to finish with her presentation. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon or a birthday weekend.
For one reason or another we seem to visit Vegas a few times a year. Andrea's work ends up taking her there more often than mine. Most of the time, I visit for pleasure while she is there for work.
Vegas is an interesting place to visit. Good and bad, sexy and disgusting all wrapped up in the desert oasis where inhibitions disappear at the bottom of a Malibu and orange juice. Each time I go there I have a blast. By the end of the trip, I'm ready to go home. There is only so much debauchery even I can take in one sitting. Andrea was excited because she won a $1000 on a slot machine. It's rare to leave Vegas a winner. This time around we did okay and had a good time.
Time to get back to the realities of life. Ah, well, I'll be going back in January for the Consumer Electronics Show. Can't wait to see all the new stuff in electronics coming up for the next year. Now, that is real fun.
For the last couple of weeks I've been on a buying frenzy. Under normal circumstances I try keeping it just under a small fortune. As a tech junkie, I could spend every dime in the bank account and every minute of my day looking for electronics to add to my collection. Luckily, I've been asked to do some electronics reviews giving me the perfect excuse to buy some neat toys.
The most notable of my purchases has to be my IPOD. This supped up MP3 player has brought music back into the forefront of my life. Who doesn't love music? We all do. Walk into any CD store and you’ll find variety to suit every taste imaginable. In recent years I've felt a large void in my life from not listening avidly to the music I would like.
I'm burnt. I hate toting around CD's. I like a wide variety of music. I can't stand listening to an entire CD by one band. Each time I walk by a three hundred CD player the guards have to hold me back with tazzers to keep me from running to the register with one. Of course, I could make my own CD’s with a computer burner, I’ve tried, but I’m lazy. Between my wife and me, we have hundreds of CD’s…perhaps more than a thousand. And mind you, that’s after giving away boxes of them to my sister and her brother while they were in college. So, who has the time to devote to sorting through hundreds of CD’s, thousands of songs to make mix CD’s?
If that wasn’t enough to burn me on CD’s, look at what has happened in recent years to music. Everyday (at least it feels like it) a new format comes out. Look at what we've seen in the world of music just in my lifetime: records, 8-tracks, cassettes, CD's, Mini-Disk players, and now MP3. These are only the ones I care to remember.
I love buying electronics, but I'm tired of buying new machines to play music. This is made ever more so painful because none of them have been extremely convenient for us users. For a number of years now the music industry has been in the business of selling us round objects to listen to their music. Right now, record executives the world over are having coronaries trying to figure out how to keep their control over the music they own. They’ve never had to worry about digital reproduction of their material, or a massive means to share between users worldwide. Listening to music has been cumbersome, the devices taking up a quarter of our living rooms and bedrooms.
Until now.
The IPOD promises to provide a portable means to carry your entire music collection with you, everywhere you go. With the 40GB model, it has the potential to hold 10,000 songs. If that doesn’t make you go Wow, then I don’t know what will. So, I’ll say it again for you, Wow. In only a few weeks of owning this thing it has dramatically changed the way I listen to music, the way I look at music. In the car, in the house, on walks, next to my nightstand at night, my IPOD has become a regular fixture in my life.
As you can tell, I’m very excited about this purchase. I love this thing. In the next couple of weeks, I’ll include a review of the IPOD with all my likes and dislikes of this little digital music miracle.
Starting to get into the swing of things with this whole Blogging concept. Before you know it I'll be writing multiple times a day. We'll see. For now, I'd like to share some of the work I do reviewing DVD movie releases. For the last four months I've been doing reviews of upcoming DVD releases, both of the movie and the extra content on the DVD.
Most of my time is spent reviewing the movie because most of the DVD releases don't have much for extra content. The menus are occassionally the most interesting thing on the DVD. Director commentary while sometimes interesting usually doesn't do it for me. Most common is a featurette on the making of the film done for promotional purposes during its theatrical release. With all the promises of DVD technology most releases don't make much of an effort to make use of the extra room.
I love electronics. You name the gadget and I probably like it, own it or would like to own it. From DVD players and Home Theater to Laptops and MP3 players, I devour everything I can on all sorts of electronic equipment. Lately, I've been taking on more assignments reviewing technology so I've been able to purchase more of the latest and greatest in the tech industry. Almost daily, and much to the dismay of my wife, I find a new device to bring home. Yesterday, in fact, I went out and purchased the Logitech Wireless Trackball to replace my mouse.
Trackball? You might think I'm crazy. Most people use mice and they seem to do the trick. Until recently, I never even thought about making the switch. Years ago my brother-in-law had one and I hated it. Rolling my fingers around on this little ball making the cursor run around the screen didn’t feel right. Like many, I liked my mouse. The alternatives weren't much of alternatives. Trackballs? Pen Tablets? Give me a regular mouse. Nothing fancy, just something to move my cursor around and get my work done.
Then my wrist started to hurt. My arm hurt thinking about working on my computer. So, I began to do some research. Wireless. Optical. These two innovations added a great deal to my standard roller ball three dollar mouse. After reading every review I could get my hands on, and spending hours playing at the computer store with every model in stock, I bought a new mouse. Then a second. Then a third.
While they each had their own bit of 'Wow' factor built in, after a week or two of working with them my wrist still hurt.
My wife doesn't quite get my obsession with electronics. She understands this latest Mouse Crusade even less. And she probably won't be excited when I get into replacing our antiquated keyboards. For now, I've just started using the trackball. As with most of the new input devices, it was easy to install and Windows XP quickly recognized it. The Logitech Trackball is USB standard and comes with a PS/2 adapter. Right off, the first thing I found useful was the number of extra buttons, eight in all; each customizable with a wide range of options to program them. Scrolling on the Web is nice, and the page forward and back buttons come in handy.
I'll report back in a couple of weeks on the trackball. Even if it is a trackball, I'd like this one to work so I can get onto changing our keyboards.
I'm lucky my wife loves me.
