It doesn't have to be mean or vandalism to be a good school prank.

Gotta give 'em credit. Well done.

Ummmm, wow. Just click it.

I just saw a post over at digitalmediathoughts.com that points out an unadvertised sale at Amazon.com on HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray discs. So, I went to Amazon and got three movies for the price of two - I can confirm it's for real. no idea how long it will last, but if you're a HD disc person, it's a good deal on some flicks.

Not all titles are available. You have to put them in your basket (no one-click) and then "proceed to checkout," and then you will see the credit for the lowest priced disc under "Promotion Applied" (see my order below).

UPDATE: Here is a link to Amazon.com where they have a list of all the movies that are eligible for buy two get one free (for HD DVD):

Buy Two HD DVDs and Receive a Third Title for Free

Select any three titles from the list below and get one of them free. The promotional discount will be applied at checkout. You will see a credit in your shopping cart. Limit two of each title per customer. Quantities are limited; order now before we run out.

Cool.

Obviously, I could have been better off to choose three discs priced at $27.95, but you get the point.

Get it while it's still there. Enjoy.

I'm a little more behind the times these days than I tend to want to admit. Management work, flying all over the place, integrating two companies and the day job will do that to a technologist, let me tell ya. So, I was pretty amazed otday when I finally got to see some cool stuff I have been hearing about lately.

I have an older Mac Mini in the kitchen at home and that's the extent of my Mac world: Checking the day's weather, doing an occasional Google search, getting movie times - and applying seemingly weekly OSX and app updates.

Sidebar: I'm leaving my place of work after this week and moving on to new things, so I have been thinking about laptops (I have used a work laptop for pretty much everything up til now). I have been looking at Lenovo machines and some Dells as well, but someone mentioned running Windows apps on a Mac recently, and I started thinking about that this evening.

There's a cool app called Parallels that lets you run Windows apps on the Mac. People have told me it's really cool. But my friend of many years, Chris Pirillo, told me tonight to look hard at VMWare Fusion. Chris is a geek's geek and you might know him from his Lockergnome empire or from when he was on TechTV a while back (obligatory funny link here, heh). Anyhow - He cares desperately about usability and product quality. My area is more infrastructure, so we compliment each other. When he says look at Fusion, I listen. When I say look at RackSpace for hosted exchange, he listens.

Chris runs this great live video show online, and when I IMed him this evening to ask him what he thinks about running Windows apps on the Mac, he was pretty emphatic and told me to turn on the video feed:

Greg Hughes says: have you run windows on the macbookpro? with that program that lets you do that things where you can run windows apps in OSX and all that?
Greg Hughes says: i liked the idea of running a native windows app in OSX
Chris Pirillo says: Vmware.
Greg Hughes says: parallels?
Chris Pirillo says: Vmware fusion
Chris Pirillo says: Trust me, d00d.
Greg Hughes says: k
Chris Pirillo says: TRUST ME
Chris Pirillo says: Perf + seamless
Chris Pirillo says: Here.
Chris Pirillo says: watch
Greg Hughes says: k
Chris Pirillo says: No, i mean - watch the vid.
Greg Hughes says: one sec
Greg Hughes says: ok am watching...

Then he proceeded to show me via the live video feed (along with everyone else in his viewing and chatting audience) how incredibly slick VMWare Fusion is, and why I should look at it instead of Parallels. Both are cool apps, but the VMWare seems really cool for performance.

This stuff is really amazing, and this is a great example of something that's a lot easier to explain by showing it to you.

Chris has an archived video (see below) and a related blog post where he did a comparison of the two products (Parallels vs. VMWare Fusion). If you have not checked out Chris' video show, it's pretty slick, he does call-in's for tech support and all sorts of stuff -- and http://live.pirillo.com is the URL to watch.

I'm looking forward to playing around with this stuff. My inner geek is waking up and getting a bit excited. I need to find a Mac notebook to see how this stuff works, then write some more I think. Should be fun.

Here's Chris' archived video where he discusses the VMWare Fusion and Parallels software products:

Well, I just discovered that I am missing at least one blog entry from the past. I know it's missing because I specifically went looking for it today. I also linked to it in the past from another entry that still exists on this blog. It's just gone. Weird. Also not good. Makes me wonder what else might be missing. I have an idea what might have caused this, but that doesn't help solve the issue. I may have to go back and find some old site content backups and figure out when it disappeared, and probably enumerate all of my posts from the old backups and compare them to what's online now. from there I can make repairs.

Ugh, that just sounds like so much fun... A use for my copious spare time, I guess. Not. Heh.

If you happen to find a link to something here that doesn't work (it will probably redirect you to the main home page), please let me know the original URL and the topic or place you found the link.

Thanks.

This one should be interesting to watch. There's a new blog at Microsoft's MSDN blogs system called hackers @ microsoft (http://blogs.msdn.com/hackers/), and the first (introductory) post is up. I hope to see some interesting security and general information here. Might be a good source of some useful insight. There are many things Microsoft is doing right these days, security-wise. More on that in another post some other time.

From the opening post on hackers @ microsoft:

"Welcome to a new blog from Microsoft.  The focus of this blog is likely to be a little different from most other blogs you'll see on blogs.msdn.com.  Microsoft employs some of the best hackers in the world and actively recruits them and develops them.  They work on all kinds of projects, whether it be in development, research, testing, management and of course security ... So yes, Microsoft does have hackers, and its time to introduce you to some of them and show you what it is, exactly that they do."

Cool. Subscribed.

(via betanews.com)