McCarron's Piece O' Mind

I have updated my Digg News Konfabulator Widget to version 2.1. It now has customizable fonts & colors and a configurable drop down description box to view the digg description in a much easier way than before, but the old "classic" way still exists if you want to switch back. Not to mention even more digg RSS feeds are added!

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It seems that the next two Batman movies, sequels to this year's incredible Batman Begins may be shot back to back. The movies' villians would be The Joker and Harvey "Two Face" Dent. Harvey would get turned to Two Face evil at the start of the 3rd movie during The Joker's trial thanks to The Joker himself. This could be very interesting, can't wait to see who gets cast in the roles.

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Well now it looks like now everyone will have to be responsible for their own actions for once. The 20 year old Devin Moore (pictured at right) claimed his killing of three police officers was because of the game "Grand Theft Auto" and childhood abuse. The jury didn't buy it and convicted him of capital murder after deliberating for about an hour. That time was probably spent eating their lunch and stretching their legs. Glad to see the system still works sometimes.

A sad related item is the victims' families are creating a civil suit against the game developer, Rockstar Games, for the game's "responsibility" in the slayings. But that could probably fail because the criminal suit didn't find. Then again, the system doesn't always work the way it should.


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Today I created my first Widget for Konfabulator. What is Konfabulator you may ask? Here is the description from their website:

Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your WiFi signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols, and even give your current local weather.

For my first foray into widget development I decided to make some updates to the Digg News v1.3 widget by Gates McAllister. I am currently addicted to visiting the social bookmarking and technology news website digg.com. So I wanted a good widget with more access to more of digg's RSS feeds and give it a cleaner look more similar to the Digg.com website. So began my work on Digg News v2.0. After a long night of development (no caffiene surprisingly) I added all those features I wanted and a few more! You can now download the widget (for Windows or Mac OSX) at my Widget Gallery site. I hopefully will have more widgets to add in the near future once and idea pops into my head.

Here is a screenshot of it in action: (more in the Widget Gallery)

UPDATE 8/8/05 - I have now gotten this tested on Mac OSX, and it is reported to work great. Thanks Ryan!

For the past few years NBC have been moving the start and end times of their TV shows by a few minutes from the standard start times.

This was either an effort to annoy DVR owners and possibly also to raise advertising dollars they receive for commercials. The shows would start at times like 7:28pm or 8:58pm instead of the standard 7:30/8:00pm we are all used to. This would cause DVRs to not want to record a show on a competing network, CBS/FOX/etc, that ran in the timeslot before or after it. It would also cause some recordings to not have the last few minutes of the program. I had this problem a lot on my old Dish Network DVR.

Well it appears that NBC is finally stopping this practice for the next upcoming season. The shows
are now starting at the hour and half-hour marks regularly. Thank you for finally playing nice NBC, just I hope you stick to it!

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Chappelle's Show cast member Charlie Murphy, whose brother is the famous Eddie Murphy, is quoted in a TV Guide interview that Chappelle's Show is "Done". He says that Comedy Central has the 8 episodes that were filmed before Chappelle went AWOL and will more than likely will be a straight to DVD release.

This is a sad day for fans of Chappelle's Show, it was one of my favorite TV shows. I will miss it and can't wait to see what Chappelle has on his plate next, heard he's been around doing standup.

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This is an old internet pass around video that I've seen many times. Someone was nice made into a handy GIF file for easy viewing. I have yet to try this, but I have a friend that swears by it.

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I always give blood whenever they come to our office. I like to give blood because I have an universal blood type, O-positive. So I went down and gave blood, nothing out of the ordinary there. I came back to my desk and about ten minutes later went to warm up my lunch.

Well I guess while I was away from my desk, a woman working with the Red Cross called my desk and left me a voice mail. I didn't notice when I got back from the microwave and started to eat my lunch. A few bites into my chicken breast she stopped by my desk saying she was the one who called earlier and the Red Cross needs me back downstairs because they had a few questions for me about my donation.

This confused me because I had no idea why they'd want to see me again, this is out of the ordinary. So I finished up my lunch really quick, and not two minutes later I received another phone call from another woman working with the Red Cross. So what's the first thing you think of when this happens? All the horrible thoughts went through my mind as I went downstairs. All the possible things that could be wrong with me went through my head, like could it have been a dirty needle contamination, or worse??

Well I get down there, they take me behind a table with a privacy wall and tell me that they forgot a question on the initial questionnaire form that you are supposed to do with a nurse before giving blood. I was so relieved that it was nothing serious, but it gave me a real scare.

The question they forgot to ask was, "Are you currently taking a medication for any infection?" Which is an easy answer of no for all you nosey parkers out there.


On the note of blood donations, I finally got sick and tired of LifeSource, or as I now call them VampireSource, calling me once every few days to give blood again. I will now only donate with the Red Cross because they are much more professional and don't hassle me over and over. The last call I got was a day after another call in which I told the operator that I was already scheduled. Their excuse for always calling us? "Well you wont donate any other way?" Really? I am pretty sure every time I've donated in the past had to do with me going out of my own free will like today when I saw the sign posted. No one had to telemarket me to pressure me into giving my blood, if they did anything they just drove away me from ever giving to them again.

Birthday wishes to writer, director and king geek Kevin Smith, who turns 35 today. He is the writer & director of some of my favorite movies: Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back and Jersey Girl. He is going to be begin filming of Clerks 2: The Passion of the Clerks later this year.

Happy Birthday Kevin!

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Brittany Murphy has signed on for the upcoming sequel to Sin City and Mickey Rourke will also be back as the over-sized anti-hero Marv. Robert Rodriguez will return as director and he'll work with Sin City creator Miller on a script, all in time for summer 2006 release.

Also remember Sin City arrives on DVD on August 16th, so don't forget to order it today!

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A woman upset that she bought the video game "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" for her 14-year-old grandson without knowing it contained hidden, sexually explicit scenes sued the manufacturer, Rockstar Games, Wednesday on behalf of consumers nationwide.

This really agrivates me because she said she knew it was rated M for Mature, for ages 17 and older, when she bought it. So it was still inappropriate for her grandson before the "Hot Coffee" hidden area was discovered. But I guess killing, stealing cars and picking up hookers is okay content for her 14 year old. She did the right thing by taking the game from her grandson, but she should have never purchased this game for him in the first place. Practice proper parenting first, not after the media tells you something is bad.

There is similar stuff in other M Rated games, namely the "Playboy: The Mansion" game. That game comes with content similar to the "Hot Coffee" modification without needing a console modification device to use it. It's in the game out of the box, an option to "Have Sex" with the girls in the game. Yet this title is only rated "M for Mature" like San Andreas used to be before this whole media hype began.

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A typo can cost you your posessions. A woman's house was robbed in broad daylight by multiple people due to a misprint in a public notice. She is only asking for $3,000 in lost posessions but also lost her cat. The thing I wonder is how they even got into the house.

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Simply enter your zip code and it will show what type of people live in your neighborhood. It's interesting, fun, and has many useful applications. Like checking out the type of folks who live in a place you're considering moving to.

I found some very unexpected results for my area, it has a lot of potential according to that tool. Shows a large percentage of new home owners, and a youthful crowd. I guess that's not all bad afterall.

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Digg is now ranked among the top 2,000 websites in the world! (today's ranking is 1,875). Check out the graph and you'll see that Digg is on a collision course with other popular news sites like Slashdot!

Digg is one of my new net addictions. It is a rather newly created news website that is controlled by you, the user, instead of the standard editor. You submit stories, and if people Digg them they get moved up eventually to the front page. There is also a weekly Digg Podcast/Videocast over at Digg Nation.

Also one of the cool things about Digg is that you can also find the stories your friends Digg. Here is the link so you can see the stories that I Dugg. It's also on my links menu on the right.

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For those who are new to Podcasts, they are basically (usually) free radio shows you can download to your computer or portable music player like the iPod. They are really catching on, even major media companies like NBC and FOX are trying to get on the bandwagon.

My favorite Podcast is This Week in Tech (or TWiT) and can be downloaded from This WeekInTech.com or via the iTunes Music Store Podcast section. It is a show where former cast members of TechTV's "The ScreenSavers" talk about various tech related news. Very intertaining AND informative. They just released Episode #16 today. Go check it out!

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I hope he is the first of many to get busted for steroids. I love how he said he never "intentionally" used steroids. Does that mean he just told his trainer to give him anything, but never knew it just so he could plead ignorant once he did get caught. In addition to suspension, I think the MLB needs to punish all who are caught by noting in the record books that the person who broke a record had tested positive for steroids when the record was broken. Or even remove them from contention for breaking records, or deny them from the Hall of Fame as well.

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This can come in very handy for most people, I for one needed something like this over the weekend when an install went bad and I had to upgrade my XP using a new CD to recover it.

Quote from Digg.com: "Windows users who need to reinstall windows while keeping their data in tact are in luck. Over at PC World's Computing Center they've got a detailed tutorial that explains how you can reinstall your Windows OS without having to reformat your hard drive."

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