Did a little bit of...

shopping this weekend at two stores new to me. Ikea and Jungle Jim's

I didn't know what to expect when walking into Ikea, only that I wanted to get the same wine racks that Leaker has. Found new ideas for closet organization and kitchen redesign. The kitchen will probably come first, as it would be the most impressive update for the house.

Jungle Jim's is the craziest grocery store I've ever seen. I realized I need to expand my cooking repertoire to include Curry and Pasta, as their selection of Indian and Italian ingredients. (I'm saying this while eating my GFS Frozen Mexican Pizza.) Anywho, wound up buying some Cooper's Pale Ale, not Cooper's Lager, and 5 bottles of wine. Penfold's from Oz, and other random bottles that I found had amusing labels (Mad Housewife and Funky Lama.)
Click the pic to see a large image of the wine rack and my liquor 'cabinet'. Thanks to Duker for the idea of mounting the wine racks as if they were holding up the empties shelf.

So I got the...

NXE update from MS a day early, as I had signed up for the Preview Program After spending about an hour with it, here's what I've got.


Likes (in increasing order or likeness):

• Guide access via the Guide Button, is a nice way of having the old way in the new style, and I'll probably use it most often, as it's just quicker.
  
• Streamed video from my MacBook and it automagically resizes to full screen (didn't before)
  
• Netflix streaming works well. Actually, I'm pretty impressed. Quality is equal to or better than the DivX/XviD files I download, while FF and Chapter Skipping takes ~10 seconds to buffer. Definitely going to be exploiting all the Netflix capabilities.
  
• I was able to make an avatar that, scarily, looks a lot like me.
  
• Party Chat, FINALLY!!!! The ability to have more than 2 people in a VOIP session.
  
• The interface is really snappy, moves right along, and the bumper page navigation helps in long lists.
  

Dislikes (in decreasing order or annoyance):

• Menu items don't wrap, so browsing leaves me with a sense of everything being on the left side of the screen. Just feels unbalanced.
  
• Interface sounds are annoying, but then again, I rarely have system sounds enabled for anything
  
• Avatar clothing saves are listed as game saves under Avatar Editor, not quite intuitive, but I don't think I could suggest a better alternative
  
• Had to re-install media update to play DivX files; meh, hardly a gripe.
  

So far I only have one suggestion:

Higher-res downloadable gamer pic.

I want to be able to download something a bit better than the 64x64 pixel headshot graphic. I already changed my Facebook and myspace pictures to the small graphic, but one at 128x128 would be great to have. Maybe in the next update? or sooner? I think I know someone who knows someone.
 

Just added a new feature...

to allendukes.com Subscription links in the right hand menu!!! Sign up now to receive an e-mail when I post, via the @ symbol; or via your favorite RSS reader, via the rss icon. w00t!

Working under the moniker of...

Jimmy's Brother was the intro Arch gave us when we performed last week at the Canal Street Tavern. Our set included 7 songs, all covers, that we have been working on over the last few months.

Set list:

1. Halo of Gravel - Our Ani DiFranco cover with a Halo Theme intro.
   
2. Tattoo - By Jordan Sparks
   
3. Fell In Love With A - Originally by The White Stripes but our version is based on that by Joss Stone
   
4. Tornado - Our Mashup of "Your House" by Alanis Morissette combined with "Collide" by Howie Day
   
5. Come On Get Higher - New song by Matt Nathanson
   
6. Umbrella - Originally by Rihanna but we prefer the Marié Digby version.
   
7. Madly - Nice closer by Tristan Prettyman where we throw in a bit of outro and shout out to the audience.

The gig went great, albeit we went on a little later than we had originally anticipated. (Our fault, as we were unaware as to how to sign up in advance.) The people at CST were excellent, and worked to get us on the playbill. We'll definitely sign up in advance next time and throw out the details. Thanks to all who came out to support, and all others who keep encouraging our rock star dreams. Hit the Jimmy's Brother image link to catch the vids. (Thanks to Speechless, our videographer.)

"Ain't it funny how things work out like that"

"But again, how do you know...

...they're all female? Does someone go into the park and, uh... lift up the dinosaurs' skirts?" - Ian Malcolm. A line written by Michael Crichton for the Book/Movie Jurassic Park. I've read most of his books, see all the movies, and find it unfortunate that he has since passed RIP