A Bit Eclectic

This story brought me to tears.  I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard.

Dave Barry –  A journey into my colon

The Periodic Table of Awesoments, almost intolerably awesome.

via Joshua Blankenship

From Hammacher Schlemmer for $29.95:

This toy blaster makes and launches softball-sized snowballs up to 50′, allowing rapid, long-range assaults during neighborhood snowball confrontations. Simply place snow in the forming chamber and close the lid; it packs three perfectly spherical snowballs. To blast your mark, place one snowball in the muzzle, aim the launcher, and pull back the slingshot mechanism. Because the blaster is powered by elastomers instead of batteries, it provides uninterrupted, fast-action play. Made of durable, cold-resistant plastic.

I see snow on the ground. Who wants to battle?

I find it interesting (and often scary) to look at other peoples computers.  You always find the oddest things installed and configured.  One of my coworkers recently had to fix his friend’s computer.  He found some interesting stuff while digging around looking for problems.

I booted up her computer to see what she had installed.  To my surprise, she still had the original Napster.  As I looked a little closer I found Morphius, BearShare, Audio Galaxy and almost every other file sharing program that I knew existed.  It was like taking a trip through the history.

He ended up reinstalling Windows to fix everything which probably would have been my first step.  All this makes me wonder, what does your computer say about you?

Welcome to Eclettico. Eclettico is italian for eclectic, which means

deriving ideas, style, or taste from a broad and diverse range of sources

I believe that is fitting for my diverse interests and wide range of post topics. Here you can find things covering movies, music, video games, books, blogs, websites/webservices, my opinion, news, technology, and just life in general. If you aren’t necessarily interested in all of these topics, feel free to use the keywords and tags to hone in on what interests you.

I have also imported the posts from all my other blogs so that you don’t have to hunt all over the internet for other stuff I have written.

Enjoy

In our increasingly busy lives, there is less time to do everything that enters our life. This forces us to make choices. One of these choices deal with entertainment.

I am having an internal struggle over the decision to choose a form of entertainment. Currently I’m a total TV junkie. I love TV shows and have 23 season passes set up in my TiVo. I have intense loyalty to my TV shows, I mean I am still watching Lost after the numerous let downs and frustrations.

At the same time, I love to read books. Books are one of the greatest sources of entertainment. It is great to be able to picture the story in my own way and be immersed in the world. The problem is my stack of books that need to be read is large and growing.

I have a limited amount of time to devote to entertainment, and currently TV is the winner. TV isn’t as rewarding as a book, but is much easier to absorb. You can have TV on while doing something else and still enjoy your show. TV is the low hanging fruit that is easy to grasp but contains the occasional worm.

TV can be extremely entertaining, but can leave you with endless unanswered questions (LOST). This helps the networks boost future ratings, but is very frustrating. You can also get involved with a show that ends up being cancelled due to low ratings. Now you are stuck with a story that was never finished properly. Also, TV shows are developed to run on for a long time, this can lead so a series finale that is unsatisfying. It can feel unfinished, like it should go on.

Books on the other hand are high up in the tree. They are difficult to obtain, but twice as large and extremely juicy. Books entertain you for a longer period of time and feel more rewarding. After a book, you feel a great sense of accomplishment.

Although books are more rewarding, they require a lot more energy and devotion. When reading a book, you need to devote all your attention to the book. Unlike TV, you cannot read a book and do homework at the same time. Also, it is hard to determine whether a books is going to be good off the bat. Sometimes you will be one third of the way through before it really turns good.

With so much of my time already invested in TV, I am having a hard time giving more of it to books. I need to find a way to get off of TV and onto books and feel good about it.

TV is the low hanging fruit that has the occasional worms. Books are the hard to reach, yet plump and rewarding fruit at the top. This is my battle through the tree to get the good stuff on top.

I have been trying to write a simple post about RSS for a couple months. It hasn’t gone up because I realized that I have no idea how to explain it effectively.

RSS has been a miracle in my Internet life. It allows me to keep up with over 200 websites without a huge time investment. This is why I want to bring it to all of you.

To help me introduce RSS to you is this video. I think it does an excellent job explaining RSS so that most people can understand and see the value. Without further ado, I present RSS in Plain English:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU]