Blockbuster Total Access Request

I love Total Access.  I love being able to exchange in store or by mail.  I still find it easier to find new movies that I've never heard of or forgot about by walking along the walls (read: the new releases) at my local brick & mortar Blockbuster store. 

What I need, though:  A way to add movies to my online queue while walking around the store.  Useful would be a setup much like most stores have bridal/baby registries, where you walk around the store and scan barcodes.  Value-added, Blockbuster!  Let's do this!

What's not in my wallet?

Capital One, that's what.  Today I finally received my refund check for a whopping $1.78.  This should mean that the account is finally closed.  It would appear that Capital One did, in fact, do the right thing by not tacking on any fees, which was my fear from day one.

Baby Young

We had our ultrasound today.  All is perfect!  Everything is developing as it should and working properly.  Bladder, kidneys, heart, it's all where it is supposed to be and doing the right stuff!

It's a girl!

Ah another weekend

This weekend was filled with shopping and breaking.

We went to Indy this weekend to find some jeans for the wife.  We found some great ones at Motherhood Maternity that she's pretty excited about, then followed that up with a maternity clearance rack at Kohl's that we raided.  She got a bunch of shirts for $3-4.

A real funny from the shopping trip:  We pulled into a shopping center from a side road, forcing us to drive beside a Best Buy.  On the roadway we were traveling was a group of emo/punk hooligans, probably in the 14-16 yr old range.  One of the boys, right in front of us (but I don't think they knew that we were there, or that they were in our way), decided to be cool rebel tough guy and throw his pop cup against the side of the building, spraying pop and ice all over it, and leaving the cup, lid, and straw on the ground.  I pulled up next to them, rolled down the window, and simply stated "Hey, you dropped something back there."  I really wish I could post a picture of the look on his face.  It was a nice mix of ghost/fear/nausea.

Broken this weekend?  My wife accidentally dropped my phone into a cup of cranberry juice.  [LG] Chocolate doesn't float in juice.  I went to the Verizon Wireless store, worried that I was about to be a lot less lighter in the wallet as I didn't have the damage insurance.  Thankfully, the replacement phone cost the same amount ($50) as the insurance deductible would have.  No problem!

Our old bed bit the dust today, too.  Hannah and I were wrestling  and one bounce split the rail.  Woops.

Who am I?

Sitting here tonight, listening to the latest episode of Cranky Geeks, and what do I hear?  That I am the newest CEO of Ziff Davis Media!  Ok, maybe not, but it's always strange to hear your name on a relatively popular podcast.  I decided to do a little more Googling on "Jason Young".  I'd done this before, but pretty much just found entries for a college pitcher.

Today's interesting finds:

• SuperJason - dot net developer (strange coincidence!)
• JasonYoung dot com - artist and really slick site
• Ramble On - blog of a systems manager
• The Big Think - blog of...a guy with a woodworking hobby?
• I'm a light board operator ...?
• I'm an Olympic Discus Thrower and strength coach at Texas Tech

When Googling "Jason P Young", go ahead and click "I'm feeling lucky", because my flickr site is the top result!  Also of note:

• Resident surgeon @ Loyola University Chicago.  Not only is his middle initial P, but his middle name is also Paul

That was fun!  Who I really am, though, is a non-smoker!  I feel confident, at this point, that it's for good.  On New Year's Eve, I was in a basement with a bunch of friends that still smoke, and I was honestly having a hard time breathing, and the smell was making me feel ill.  The same goes for today at lunch with my boss and coworker.  I don't remember feeling this way the last time I quit.  Is it the Chantix?  I have no idea, but it feels great.

Ever have one of those days?

I'm having one!  One of those days when everything just falls nicely into place:

1. The plumbers came and without issue removed our leaky water softener.  Only thing left to do is cleanup.
2. My order from PartsExpress showed up, one day after I placed the order.  I have successfully made my first two coax cables now with compression connectors.  Time to jump in the attic and make these splits and drops!
3. My new glasses, which were supposed to be in tomorrow, showed up today!  It was quite odd, actually, because I had to run to WalMart to get some supplies, and had planned on stopping in the vision center to see if, by chance, they were in.  As I was backing out of the driveway, they called to let me know they were in.  WIN!  It's nice having glasses that fit properly and whose lenses I can see through.

Vista gone, Ubuntu follows

I decided that since I wasn't really using Vista much on my laptop, booting almost exclusively into XP, that it was time to try out Ubuntu again. I got rid of the Vista boot manager, then the Vista partition, and went about installing Ubuntu 7.10 on that partition of my laptop.

The only real headaches I ran into were:

1. Wireless card. I needed to use the special unsupported driver for the Broadcom card that came in my Gateway laptop, but I needed some supporting libraries installed, which I couldn't do from the CD. I finally figured out that I needed to use a cable to plug into my router to update to this driver. Then all was well!

2. Video card. See above. Along with this, to run Compiz Fusion with this accelerator (ATI something-or-other), I needed to install xgl and set my x sessions to use it. Simple enough!

I now have the slick graphics turned on, and have installed some gooey Gui fun: Some screenlets and the Avant Window Navigator now adorn my Ubuntu Desktop.

The only headache left to solve is the suspend/hibernate modes. I cannot get the laptop to wake up from this, requiring a hard reset via the power button if I decide to close the laptop lid while booted into Ubuntu. My guess from the little research I've done so far is that I won't be able to solve this nicely, as it appears to be an issue with the video drivers required for the slick graphics.