There are some problems that I encounter from time to time that make me say to myself: "Somebody must have figured out an easy way to do this by now", and most of the time I am right. There are times, though, where no matter how hard I search, the solution always evades me. Today was almost one of those times.

I found a great deal on a Acer Aspire One netbook, so I couldn't help myself from buying it with some accumulated Christmas money. The only problem was that it came with Linux and I really had no desire to figure it out. I might leave that challenge for another day. I told myself I'll just format it and install Windows XP, no problem. It doesn't have a CD drive, but you can boot the setup files from a USB disk, right?

Hours of Googling resulted in several completely over complicated guides on how to create a bootable USB disk, and I was beginning to think that I would have to buy an external CD-ROM, or at least find somebody that owned one. It wasn't until later today that somebody pointed me towards a handy little application, oddly enough, called WinSetupFromUSB. The nice folks that made it basically packaged up all the complicated steps in creating a bootable USB disk into a simple application with a GUI. By following this guide, I was able to create my bootable setup disk in just a few minutes.

Now here I am, writing to you on my fresh installation of Windows XP. On my brand new netbook. In bed.

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I found this site called Art of the Title while reading my daily feeds. It is a blog that posts interesting and/or awesome title sequences from movies. You can view them in 480p or 720p, which I feel is pretty awesome.

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All the blogs on the internets are probably already abuzz about this, but Microsoft just launched the new dashboard for the Xbox 360 yesterday and I have to say it is pretty awesome. One of the biggest new features is the ability to create a custom avatar for yourself very similar to the Mii channel on the Nintendo Wii. Except it is a lot better. Here's me:

You can also rent movies in HD, which apparently has been a feature for the past six months or so, but it's news to me. They did, however, integrate Xbox Live with Netflix, which opens the selection of movies from a few hundred to probably thousands, but I am pretty sure it's only for US citizens.

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I've never had immortality explained to me in a way that made perfect logical sense:

Actuarial escape velocity is the concept of a point in time at which the rate of advancement in biomedical technology surpasses the rate at which humans age. At this point it is proposed the average human life expectancy would increase by at least one year each year. In this manner, reaching acturial escape velocity has been proposed as a mechinism to achieve indefinite lifespan.

How about that.

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So I redesigned the home page a little bit to have a news feed much like Facebook. Right now it lists whenever I update my blog as well as whenever I share something using my Google Reader account. I took the Last.fm recently played songs list off for now, but I will probably tweak the design a little bit more and find somewhere for it.

One day the dream is to list other junk in there, maybe my Twitter activity (which is pretty non-existent right now).

The news feed on the home page now lists my Twitter activity, as well as my Last.fm loved tracks. You can also view the history all the way back to the beginning of my life of using online services such as Twitter and Last.fm. Amazing!

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