Today is the 40th birthday of StarTrek. This being a geek related site I just had to mention it. I have a link here with information about that first, ever so important, broadcast. As a geek where would I be with out StarTrek and it’s important lessons about traveling the galaxy and dating green women?

I just wanted to say that I am greatly saddened at the loss of Steve “The Crocodile Hunter” Irwin. He was a unique individual that truly and passionately believed in what he did. He will be greatly missed by many. Please take a moment to watch these tribute videos.
Video 1        Video 2 

Well guess what? They did. Microsoft has recently finished the construction of one of the most state-of-the-art schools ever built. It is located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and has been designed from the ground up by Microsoft. You can read an article with the details here. I think this is a great idea and will be interested to know the results of the education it provides in a few years.

A guy goes to the supermarket and notices a beautiful blond woman wave at him and say hello.

He’s rather taken aback, because he can’t place where he knows her from.

So he says, “Do you know me?” To which she replies, “I think you’re the father of one of my kids.”

Now his mind travels back to the only time he has ever been unfaithful to his wife and says,

“My God, are you the stripper from my bachelor party that I had on the pool table with all my buddies watching, while your partner whipped my butt with wet celery?”

She looks into his eyes and calmly says, “No, I’m your son’s math teacher.”

Yes the rumors are true, the Sci-Fi network has cancelled Stargate. They will however continue with Stargate Atlantis. Maybe SG1 will get a transfer to the Pegasus galaxy before it ends. Maybe they will all just retire. I would imagine that after saving the entire solar system a 100 times you would get a great retirement plan. Either way it is sad to see the series go.

No, I mean really anonymously. You have for a long time been able to use proxies to surf the web and reasonably hide your IP and information. Now a Swiss company has setup a completely new commercial darknet. They have software you install on your machine (mind you the software is not US made in any way for obvious reasons, cough, government, cough) that sets up a VPN tunnel to their servers. You are then able to pass-thru systems washed of all personally identifiable data. Mind you they charge 5 Euros (around $6-7 US) a month for the service but say if you have 100 Mbps to the web you have access to your destination at that speed. Pretty cool stuff.

I did an email migration this weekend and had a big need for a tool to move mail for me. I needed to somehow synchronize POP3 email into a Microsoft Exchange server. I found this great utility called POPBeamer that worked nicely. It can be used one time as I did but it also can sync POP3 and IMAP mail into exchange on a regular basis. If you have the need this is a nice tool.

Ok, just one more Star Wars related post. 🙂 This is a lightsaber fight between Ryan Wieber and Michael “Dorkman” Scott. Ryan Wieber formerly worked at LucasFilm and created the effects for lightsabers in the Star Wars movies. This fight is actually up there in quality with all of the films and is very well done. There are some great moves in here I would have liked to have seen in the films actually.

I must be on a Vader kick lately but I have run across another good one. This is a video of Lord Vader from the first Star Wars movie with voice overs from other movies that James Earl Jones (the voice of Vader) was in. It is well done and funny as can be.

If you like Google maps and how very useful it is you may want to check this out. Microsoft has a similar offering called Windows Live Local. It allows you to locate businesses as well as easily make driving directions. Google of course still rocks but this isn’t bad at all.