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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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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It's been a while, but Jerktowne has finally been finished. Prop-a-lops to Billie for whipping that up today.

So send all the jerks you know to Jerktowne.

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If you haven't noticed, I've been compiling all my online activities into one general news feed that appears on my home page, but I couldn't find anywhere that let me view my favorite YouTube videos as an RSS or Atom feed. Until now. I found this handy link while looking through the developer's guide for the Youtube API:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/your_youtube_username/favorites

It's not listed anywhere on the YouTube feeds page, and I couldn't find it posted on any blogs or other sites either. Maybe I didn't look hard enough, but now I'm happy.

I also had a hard time coming up with a past tense verb meaning "to favorite". I would use "favorited", but it's not a real word and that bothers me. I'd also use "loved" but I am already using it for my Last.fm loved tracks. So I settled on "liked", but I am not entirely happy with it. It'll have to do for now until I think of a better word to use, or somebody recommends one that I like.

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Just over a week ago I mentioned Jerktowne, a website that you can send people to if they are being jerks. I've been working on it a little, and just as I promised, I've developed an API that will let anybody with a website running PHP to connect to my database of jerks. This will allow you to do a quick background check on all of your visitors, giving you the power to restrict your content as you please. Nobody wants jerks reading their website.

Every time a user visits Jerktowne, their Jerk Rank is increased by one. This is limited to a one-time increase every 24 hours. For example, if somebody gets sent to Jerktowne 50 times in a day, their Jerk Rank will only increase by one. However, if they are consistently sent to Jerktowne every day of the week, they would gain a significantly higher Jerk Rank than others. This means you could optionally restrict your website from jerks who have a Jerk Rank higher than five, or ten, or even just one.

You can download the API here. It comes with an example file to get you started.

Also, I know the Jerktowne website isn't very pretty yet. It will be, one day.

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I came up with an idea for a website. It is a really good idea. This is the idea: The idea is somebody sends you to www.jerktowne.com if they think you are a jerk, and in doing so, your IP address is collected and you are forever labeled as a jerk. Forever. Except if your IP address changes, of course. I wish there was some way to uniquely and permanently identify every single user on the internet, just so my website idea will work better.

Eventually the dream is that there will be a single database of all the jerks on the internet, and any website owners out there will be able to access my database and restrict jerks from viewing all their cool content.

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