Can't tell you more than I told you already?
Overall Rating: ****
Summary:
| Battery: | 18650/2xCR123A |
| Switch: | Reverse clicky |
| Modes: | 1 |
| LED Type: | Cree XP-G R5 |
| Lens: | Glass |
| Tailstands: | No |
| Price Payed: | $17.24 |
| From: | DealExtreme |
Pros:
Cons:
I remember watching some kind of MTV or VH1 compendium of best videos and seeing one I really liked for Fat Boy Slim’s song “Praise You”. It’s a pretty famous video, but probably a lot of people still have never seen it or even heard of Fat Boy Slim, who was in the 80’s British band The Housemartins under his real name, before mixing electronic music as a DJ calling himself Fat Boy Slim (and using an Amiga computer, no less, at least up through doing the music for the movie Moulin Rouge in 2001). I put the song on Grant’s MP3 player and he says it is one of his favorites.
Anyway, I was writing a review of the movie Where the Wild Things Are which I had very high hopes for since I always thought it was a cool children’s book and it has Spike Jonze directing. He also directed one of my favorite movies, Being John Malkovich and starred in a lesser favorite, Three Kings. Well, Wild Things didn’t turn out that great, but I looked up the movie on Wikipedia and wound up reading more about Spike Jonze. He got his start making commercials and music videos, which I knew. One of the videos he made, well into his career (after a number of videos and around the time of Malkovich), was for Praise You. And what I did not realize was that the main guy in Praise You is Spike Jonze himself as a nerdy community-oriented B Boy dancer. The video itself looks like something someone would shoot and put on YouTube, but at the time there wasn’t quite so much material out there like this. But it was certainly shot the same way, and when the manager of the theater comes out to turn their boom box off, that is real, since they didn’t get permission beforehand.
You can watch the video on YouTube and read more about the song on Wikipedia
Mom dropped off her new Dell Inspiron 1545 for me to set up this weekend. Her old laptop was a Frys store brand, but this is a Dell and the price was the same (except that she got an extended warranty on the first one and this one she is just doubling Dell’s one-year warranty with her credit card). Moore’s law says that the number of transistors on a computer processor doubles every two years. It has been five years so everything should be at least 4 times better and maybe 6 times. Let’s see:
The old processor was a 1.3GHz Celeron and this is 2.2GHz Dual Core Pentium. Since there are two cores (processors) now I’m going to say this qualifies, but I have no idea how many transistors are on a Celeron or a Pentium. She had 256MB RAM and now she is getting 3 GB of RAM (1 GB was added to the old laptop later on). So that is 12 times. The old hard drive is 40 GB, the new one is 250 GB (6 times).
There are some notable changes between laptops of yore and today. Most of the ports, including the USB ports, were on the back of the old computer. Now they are on the sides. Her laptop didn’t come with a built-in wireless card (though the computer that replaced it when her hinge cracked did) but it was 802.11g and this one is also 802.11g (I guess that’s more of a notable lack of change). In the meantime they have come out with 802.11n, and most of the higher end laptops support that, but this one does not. There is a SD card reader in the front for transferring pictures from a digital camera. Also, while the old laptop had a microphone, this one has a microphone and a web cam for internet video calls. Also this screen is wider in relation to the height to mimic HDTV’s. That changes the overall shape of the laptop a little, but this one seems about the same size and maybe a pound lighter than the old one (and noticeably lighter than my 2-year old Dell), which was pretty heavy. Lastly, this computer has Windows 7 and the old one had Windows XP, so she skipped right over Vista. I like Windows 7 so far. It seems pretty snappy and hasn’t given me a ton of warning messages.
I planted a bag of mixed daffodils several years ago in the little plot in front of my house. It gets a lot of sun and the daffodils come back every year. The regular ones come up first and are followed a week or two later by these little multi-daffodils where several smaller flowers are on a single stalk. So all of the regular flowers have died back and all of these little ones have just bloomed. Time for the macro lens.
No, not just because I have too many flashlights now, or because I have done driver swaps, or gotten lithium-ion batteries. It is official now because at CandlePower Forums if you post over 100 messages your status goes from “Enlightened” (people with less than 20 posts are “Unenlightened”) to “Flashaholic”. The next step as far as I can tell is 500 posts when you just get an asterisk after Flashaholic.
This started last May when I was at Fry’s and bought a LED bulb for my Versapak Snakelight, so not even a year ago. But I know so much more about flashlights now.
