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SIMON’S PICKS – WEEK 8

SimonHey, ya’ll! Simon here! Guess who went 12-1 last week? Go Simon! Go Simon! Thanks to that great week I’m now 61-43 for the season. And I’ve got a good feeling about this week’s games, too! So here are my picks for week 8!

 


Buccaneers at Vikings: This game features two groups of sexy outlaws: the dirty swashbucklers from Tampa Bay vs. the handsome Nordic raiders of Minnesota. Gosh, who to pick? Simon wouldn’t mind being boarded by the Bucs… but he wouldn’t mind being ravaged by Vikings, either! Oh my! In the end (hehehe!) Simon thinks that handsome Adrian Peterson will run all over those dirty pirates from the place bad strippers go to die from Tampa Bay. Take Minnesota for the win!

Panthers at Chicago: Simon just can’t be bothered with politics, so instead of watching the debate last night he watched the Bears’ defense totally shut down the Lions’ offense. Now ya’ll know I love me some Cam Newton (and some Steve Smith and some Jonathan Stewart and some DeAngelo Williams!), but Simon just doesn’t think my hometown kitties have the mojo to beat the Bears, who seem to be clicking at just the right time. Simon says to take Chicago to make Carolina look like a Division III team!

Chargers at Browns: Phillips Rivers looks like a giant doofus. And one could argue that Norv Turner doesn’t deserve to be a head coach in the NFL. But I don’t think they’ll have any problems taking out the hapless Browns this week. Sure, the Browns are probably better than their 1-6 record would indicate… and oftentimes it’s the teams with nothing to lose that you have to worry about. But honey, San Diego will dominate this game! This one is a lock!

Seahawks at Lions: Getting back to that Monday Night game: Are the Bears just that good? Or are the Lions just that overrated? Simon loves him some Matthew Stafford, and he especially loves Calvin Johnson (Heeeeyyy Megatron!!!). But the Lions’ dynamic duo just looked lost last night! I know they’re playing at home this week, and I know they’ll want to redeem themselves. But I think that sexy Russell Wilson and that chocolate Adonis Marshawn Lynch will run rampant (haha! Heraldry humor!) over the Lions this week. Take Seattle to win, girls!

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1,000 Plays!

According to Last.fm, as of Wednesday of this week I’ve officially listened to my new favorite band, Marsheaux, 1,000 times since December 11, 2011:

marsheaux_1000_plays

That’s an average of 3.22 Marsheaux songs a day over 311 days! Obsessed? Perhaps!

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RETRO TECH: Sony NetMD Walkman

I’ve owned several mp3 players over the years. Back in 1998, I got a Diamond Rio PMP300 for Christmas (which was eventually stolen… enjoy your 32MB mp3 player, jerks!). After that, the girl I was dating at the time gave me a Samsung UpRoar for my birthday, the first cell phone to feature mp3 playback. After I moved to Charlotte, I upgraded to a Samsung SP-i600, a giant clamshell phone running Windows Mobile 2003. The i600 was pretty nice for its time, but I’ve always been the kind of guy who prefers a single gadget that does one thing well over a “Swiss Army” gadget that does many things poorly.

You would think an iPod would be right up my alley. But iPods were expensive when they first came out, and I was reluctant to buy an Apple product. The search for a music player that was better than the i600 but fairly inexpensive led me to the Sony NetMD MiniDisc Walkman:

mzn505

Sony developed the MiniDisc in 1992 to compete with Philips’ Digital Compact Cassette (DCC). While DCC was an abject failure, the MiniDisc fared slightly better. The format was popular in Japan, where record labels enthusiastically released albums in the MD format (record labels in the rest of the world? Not so much.). But because of the strength of the dollar against the yen at the time, MiniDisc players were just too expensive for most folks in the United States. And the fact that only component (non-portable) MiniDisc players had the ability to record also limited the appeal. A few years after MiniDisc players hit the market, CD burners became popular, allowing people to burn their own CDs for use in nearly ubiquitous portable CD players. So, by the early 2000s, the MiniDisc was all but a dead technology.

Sony is also the poster child of “Not Invented Here” Syndrome. Sony executives dismissed the mp3 format as an inferior technology. They, of course, considered Sony’s own ATRAC encoding to be a better product. That may or may not be true, but what really mattered was that no one was trading ATRAC files on the Internet, or ripping their CD collections into ATRAC files. So Sony sat on the sidelines, touting their “better” in-house technology, while Apple sold iPods by the million.

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SIMON’S PICKS – WEEK 7

SimonHey, ya’ll! Simon here! OMG! WHAT is going on in the NFL? Denver led 24-0 at the half… only to lose by 11? Dallas had multiple chances to beat Baltimore… but gave it away? Oakland took Atlanta to the brink? The Giants destroyed the 49ers? I just don’t understand! I went 4-10 last week, but I guess lots of others did too! Let’s see if I can rebound in week 7!


Seahawks at 49ers: That super-sexy Russell Wilson hooked up with studmuffin Sidney Rice to spank the Pats (and my beloved Tom Terrific!) last week! [imagines Russell Wilson nude, spanking Tom Brady] Ummmmmm..What? Oh yes, sorry. The Seachickens turned giant-killler by knocking off the Pats last week… but do they have the cojones to go to San Francisco and take one from the 49ers? Will the 49ers, still smarting from last week’s ass-beating by the Giants, let them do it? Simon says no! Take the 49ers to win, although Wilson and company could make this a close game!

Tennessee at Buffalo: This is a game between two hapless, middling teams. It’s like “Olive Garden vs Applebee’s”, and there’s just no winner here if you know what I mean! I want to pull for the handsome Southern gentlemens from Nashville, but I think the home team will (just barely) win this one. Simon says take the Bills to win this one!

Cleveland at Indianapolis: Cleveland or Indianapolis? And I have to choose between them? It’s like the Price is Right Showcase… in Hell! Do I pick the dying Rust Belt town known for being a mistake? Or do I pick the town so fat that a deep fried pork brain sandwich is known as a “light snack”? You sure there’s not an NFL team in Saint Lucia? Simon would be happy to go on a fact-finding mission to investigate! No? Blech. Simon says take the Colts at home, although he’s not happy about either pick!

Green Bay at St. Louis: You could see it building and building. For weeks. Green Bay’s frustration mounted and mounted and mounted… until last Sunday, when they blew up all over the Texans! Honey, if the Packers play the rest of the season like they did last Sunday, they’re a lock for the playoffs. And Simon thinks they’ll bring their green and yellow vengeance to St. Louis this week. The Rams are a better team that most people think, but they’ll be no match for the handsome mens from Green Bay. Simon says take the Packers to win big, baby!

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COOL SITE: Filleritem.com

As you probably know, Amazon offers free “Super Saver Shipping” on most purchases of $25 or more. But what do you do when the item you want is, say, $21.95? Do you bite the bullet and pay $4.95 for regular shipping? Or do you look for a $3.05 item to get you to $25?

If you’re the latter type of person, you might want to check out filleritem.com. It’s easy: just figure out how much you need to get to $25. Heck, if you’re bad at math, your Amazon shopping cart will helpfully tell you how much you need:

amazon_2

Then go to filleritem and enter that amount:

amazon

The site will then give you a list of items around that price. The results page will be plain HTML, with popular items listed in bold face and really popular items in boldface with a thumbnail of the product. Just click any link to go to the Amazon page in question, then add it to your cart and get your free shipping!

I’ve known about filleritem.com for a couple of years now, but only used it for the first time last week. I have a beach trip coming up somewhat soon, and both of my pairs of flip-flops are on their way out. I’ve long heard that Havaianas sandals are the best in the world, so I went to Amazon to see what they had. I found a pair I liked, but they were $21.27. Shipping was $4.98, for a grand total of $26.25.

I went over to filleritem and looked for a $3.73 item to add to my cart. It was kind of fun looking at all the random stuff you can buy at Amazon for $3.73: really awful CDs and DVDs, odd spare parts for aquariums, and weird bits and bobs from the hardware department. It took around 15 minutes and a couple of searches, but I ended up ordering an 8″ micro USB cable. I have one of those external “battery pack” chargers that I mostly use for my phone. The regular 36″ USB cable that came with the phone is a bit much to carry around… but the 2″ cable included with the charger is too short, and includes various (easily lost) adapter tips for multiple devices. The 8″ cable seems like a nice compromise. It was only $3.95, making my total for the order $25.22, a savings of $1.76 over buying just the sandals with standard shipping. It’s not the “Deal of the Century” by any means, but I saved almost $2 and got a USB cable out of it, versus paying $2 more for… well, nothing, really.

The only downside to filleritem is that if you’re in a hurry, it’s not the site for you. The results page(s) give you the name of the item only, with no context. If you can figure out what Sue Devitt Silky Sheen E/S – Prague or Fart Bombs are just from their names, good for you. But if not you’re going to have to click the link to figure out what the item is. And some items – like Dorman HELP! 85568 T-Tap 16-14 – have no additional information on Amazon’s site, either. I went to the page but still have NO IDEA what a “Dorman HELP! 85568 T-Tap 16-14” is! Do you?

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Win7: Checking Battery Health

For years, laptop users who wanted to check the overall health of their laptop battery in Windows had to hope that their OEM included some kind of monitoring software on the OS install, or had to track down a utility from the third-party vendor.

Happily, Windows 7 has a built-in way to check the overall health of your laptop’s battery. It’s not very elegant, and it’s kind of hidden, but it’s a way to know how well your battery is doing:

1) Fully charge your laptop’s battery. It doesn’t matter if you do the remaining steps with the laptop on AC or battery.

2) Click on the “Start” button and type “cmd” (without quotes) in the “Search programs and files” box.

3) Right click on the “cmd.exe” icon in the Start Menu and choose “Run as administrator”.

4) At the command prompt, type “cd %userprofile%/Desktop” (without quotes) and press the ENTER key. Note that the next step will create a report as an HTML file on the desktop; if you want the report in a different location, change to that location instead of the desktop.

5) At the command-prompt, type “powercfg -energy” and press the ENTER key.

The command-prompt will say “Enabling tracing for 60 seconds” and then “Observing system behavior”. After a minute or two, the process will complete and you’ll see a file named “energy-report.html” on your desktop (or wherever you decided to save the file). You may exit the command prompt by typing EXIT and pressing the ENTER key.

Open the “energy-report.html” in your favorite web browser, and scroll towards the bottom of the report. Look for a section called “Battery Information”:

Battery Information

See the two entries called “Design Capacity” and “Last Full Charge”? This tells us how much capacity the battery was designed to have, and how much it actually reported the last time it was charged. I don’t know exactly what units the report measures, but if you divide the “Last Full Charge” by “Design Capacity”, you’ll get the overall percentage your battery is charging to. In the screen cap above, you can see that the battery on my netbook is around 92% (44820 / 48840 = .9176), so that’s pretty good. Once that number gets below 50%, it’s time to replace the battery.

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RETRO TECH: The Metric System

I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering how the metric system, a system of measurement used almost everywhere in the world except the United States, and which appears to be in no danger of being replaced any time soon, can be “retro”. Well, for Americans of a certain age, it certainly seems like a retro tech.

Metric

The United States has toyed with the idea of the metric system since… well, forever. In Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution, Congress is given the power to “fix the standard of weights and measures” for the nation. And, in 1789, the first Congress looked at a proposal from Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who decided to ditch the English system for a decimal system of his own making. It was very similar to the metric system… however, the big shortcoming of Jefferson’s system was that although it adopted 10 as a base unit, it had unique names for each individual unit of measurement (so no centi- or milli- prefixes). What’s worse, Jefferson’s system used existing names for his new units. The basic unit of measurement of the Jefferson system was the foot, which was subdivided into 10 inches, which were further subdivided into 10 lines, with each line subdivided into 10 points. And the less said about his long distance and volume units the better.

At any rate, Congress looked at Jefferson’s system and half-heartedly liked it. But no academics or powerful businessmen advocated for Jefferson’s system. Many in Congress saw Great Britain (and, by association, her Imperial measurement system) as America’s most important trading partner. Many Federalists (the main political party of the time) disliked France generally and were deeply suspicious of anything French. And since adoption of Jefferson’s system could cause mass confusion, at least for a time (“Is that an English foot? Or a Jefferson foot?”), Congress let the whole thing die.

America flirted with the metric system from time to time, but the metrification of the rest of the English-speaking world in the 1950s and 1960s led to ever louder calls to adopt the metric system. The end result was The Metric Conversion Act, passed by Congress on December 23, 1975. It declared the metric system to be “the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce”. Unfortunately (or not), the act lacked any means of enforcing this. People and businesses were free to continue using customary units.

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The Great Oktoberfest Burger Battle!

Believe it or not, I’d never been to a Red Robin before. But for the past week they’ve been running TV spots for their limited time “Oktoberfest Burger”: a yummy looking burger with “Swiss cheese, beer mustard onions and black forest ham on a toasted pretzel bun”. It sounded so delicious that I made the executive decision last Friday to drive to Northlake Mall and get one. Of course, Lisa came along, and as I was telling her about wanting to get one of those burgers, she said that we’d recently gotten a Steak ‘n Shake flyer in the mail which advertised an almost identical Oktoberfest burger. So I went out and had one those yesterday, too.

Red Robin’s Oktoberfest Burger:

Red Robin Oktoberfest Burger

Steak ‘n Shake’s Oktoberfest Burger:

Steak N Shake Oktoberfest Burger

So… which one will reign supreme? Read on to find out!

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SIMON’S PICKS – WEEK 6

SimonHey, ya’ll! It’s Simon again! Your football feline went 9-5 last week, and is 45-32 for the season so far! Not bad for a little kitty, eh? Let me put down my MANmosa and give you my picks for week 6, honey!

 


Steelers at Titans: Wow… the boys from Steel City sure looked like a more balanced team with the strong, sexy legs of Rashard Mendenhall in the lineup, didn’t they? And even though that hamdsome James Harrison didn’t have a great game stat-wise, the Iggles still had to account for him. Even though my boys gave up the Eagles touchdown in the 4th quarter, they looked pretty good for most of the game. And here’s the thing: the Titans ain’t the Eagles. If the Steelers can contain Chris “Sexy Legs” Johnson and force Matt “My Best Days are Behind Me” Hasslebeck to throw, it will be an easy win for them. I take the Steelers to win this game, hopefully easily.

Oakland at Atlanta: Matt Ryan… Tony Gonzalez… Michael Turner… Julio Jones… the Falcons aren’t just stacked with talent… they’re stacked with sexy! They’re 5-0 and, barring some kind of unforeseen disaster, will be 6-0 after this game. Ya’ll know I love me some sexy pirate mens… but Atlanta’s just got too much talent. Take the Falcons to win this one! (Sidebar: so the Falcons’ quarterback is Matt Ryan, but the kicker is Matt Bryant? Well that’s confusing!)

Cincinnati at Cleveland: One word: Ewwwww! Take the Bengals.

St. Louis at Miami: Ahhhh… South Beach. All those handsome mens in Speedos rollin’ around in the sand… Oh MY, girlfriend! The Dolphins have been surprising all season, and the Rams aren’t all that bad, despite they’re being from St. Louis. I’ll take the Dolphins, although the Rams could make this interesting!

Indianapolis at New York Jets: Simon’s got a funny joke for you: “the New York Jets”! If this game were in New York New Jersey, Simon would give the Parade of Incompetence that is the Jets a slight advantage. However, they’re playing in Indianapolis, where the home crowd will give the Colts a slight advantage. I’ll take the Colts, but I’m not really sure about them.

Detroit at Philadelphia: My beautiful man Calvin Johnson! I’ve got me eye on yooooouu! But seriously, Captain Walrus and the Dog Killer are still smarting from their loss to Daddy’s Steelers last week, and they’ll be out for blood here. I think Philly just has more talent than Detroit, and if Dog Killer can hold on to the ball, I think the Eagles win this one!

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-10-07

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