Kobe cheers from the sideline. The Lakers distribute the ball to the tune of five players averaging 10 points or more over the first two games. Two wins, no losses. No Ball Hog. Imagine Odem playing with a point guard who passes the ball instead of hoisting up frozen rope threes from the parking lot. No doubt, Kobe is a very talented player. But he can’t be very fun to have on your team.

Most years Halloween was a time to gorge myself on Butterfingers, Snickers, Tootsie Rolls, Licorice, and Candy Corn. But this year has been different. Having weened myself off sugar about 3 months ago, I’ve decided I’ll leave the candy to the kids (in moderation) and take the rest to work. I’m sure for the next couple of weeks, a bag or bowl of candy will be brought into work to share with everyone. I don’t really have candy cravings very much these days although those “snack size” Reeses Peanut Butter Cups looked really good today.

This must be a tough time to start a diet with all the junk around the office and it only seems to get worse around Christmas. Pretty soon a number of our clients will be sending us gift baskets loaded with cookies and brownies and all sorts of sugar-loaded confections. I’m glad I started a few months ago or I don’t know if I’d have the will-power to pass on all the goodies.

Tired of moving from city to city after nine years in the NBA, Keith Van Horn decides to sit out this season and spend his time his family. How crazy, how unexpected, how cool is that? Here’s a guy who clearly puts family first. That he’s a former University of Utah alum makes it even better.

This is going to sound really vain. But if I’m shopping for an item of clothing other than socks, I like to see how it looks on me before I buy. I walked through Marshall’s tonight looking at light-weight jackets. I found a nice wool one and tried it on while I went searching for a mirror. I spent a good 5 minutes trying to locate a mirror. I eventually wandered over near the shoe department and found a small, too close to the ground one that was probably meant for shoes, not jackets.

I guess this is just part of the bargain shopping experience.

A list of stuff I used to do but don’t anymore.

1. I no longer subscribe to a newspaper
2. I don’t watch local or national news
3. I don’t subscribe to Netflix
4. I don’t watch live TV unless Seattle is playing in the Super Bowl
5. I don’t go into banks and seldom use cash machines
6. I don’t fill out “sweepstakes” offers
7. I don’t answer our land-line phone
8. I don’t bookmark websites
9. I don’t carry any department store credit cards
10. I don’t take my laptop home or to meetings
11. I don’t use a subscription music service
12. I don’t use Microsoft Internet Explorer
13. I don’t use LinkedIN
14. I don’t update my bank, eBay or Paypal information
15. I don’t “hold” while you take another call
16. I don’t shop at the “Foot Locker”
17. I don’t dress up on Halloween
18. I don’t have a MySpace account
19. I don’t “Do the Dew”
20. I don’t use gasoline additives

If you are looking to start your own blog or want to move from a hosted solution (Blogger, Typepad, etc) to running your own WordPress blog, send email to brett@nordquist.org and I’ll be glad to help you get started at no charge. Whether you need deciding on a hosting company or need technical assistance, I’ll do whatever you need done to get you started with WordPress.

Update: Several people have asked if they can run WordPress on a Windows machine. I’m not sure if you can do that and I’m only familiar with the version that runs on Apache and MySQL. If you are looking for a great hosting company with very quick and easy WordPress setup, you can’t go wrong with Bluehost.

#1 on the list is Silent Hill

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As much as I didn’t want to like Vista, after installing it a couple of months ago I don’t want to go back to Windows XP. At first it felt like Microsoft had slapped a more modern skin on top of Vista. But the more I play around with it, I see they have made some subtle changes in many areas that add up to an improved experience. The best thing I can say about any OS is that it doesn’t get in the way of my work or play. After some tweaking to alerts and such, Vista behaves quite well. Out of the box I’m certain some users will be put off by alerts that constantly ask for your permission before completing seemingly harmless tasks such as installing the program you just double clicked on to start the install. Do all those alerts make for a safer computer? Probably so but I wonder if tossing out so many alerts will desensitize users to the point they just ignore the alerts and click “yes” to everything? If you’re used to running your system with Administrative privileges you’ll probably end up disabling “User Account Control” in the Windows Security section of Control Panel. Once I did that, Vista stayed out of my hair and let me work like I’m used to.

I won’t get into all the Vista features since they described in detail on sites such as Paul Thurrott’s Supersite. But I especially like the “Backup and Restore Center” where you can take an image of your machine or specific folders. This is a much appreciated feature and will certainly take a bite out of programs such as Symantec Ghost that people have relied on for personal backup duties. Control Panel is so packed full of utilities that it’s a bit overwhelming at first, but there’s an amazing array of tools there for the taking. Oh, I can can’t forget that you can now schedule disk maintenance such as defragging. Finally!

When Vista finally is available for consumers I will be upgrading our two PCs the Ultimate Edition.

The winner of this cNet review shouldn’t come as any surprise to those who have used both browsers. IE is much improved but it was so bad to begin with that anything would have been an improvement over version 6. The add-ons for Firefox have won me over and I can’t imagine going back to IE.

It’s funny to see Microsoft touting security and tabbed browsing as cool new features. Tabbed browsing has been around for years and Microsoft touting security makes about as much sense as K-Fed writing a book on fatherhood.

I normally don’t really care for “live” recordings of my favorite songs. But one exception is this version of Running to Stand Still from Rattle & Hum. Amazing.
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