Erik Novales

I’ve been under the weather lately, but once I’m feeling better, I’ll be back to writing more regularly. Hope everyone out there has a happy new year!

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Merry Christmas, everyone! I got Sandy a Tassimo Hot Beverage System, along with a little fondue maker and some new glasses for our kitchen. The Tassimo is pretty neat — we’ve only used it for hot chocolate so far (since I wasn’t sure of exactly the kind of coffee or tea Sandy would prefer), but [...]

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I saw a post on the always-amusing Coding Horror regarding the fracturing of online identities. A couple of early blogging pioneers are mentioned, along with the number of separate profiles or identities that they seem to have — in the range of 20-30. The question is, which one of these is “truly” them? The somewhat [...]

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Yesterday I finally managed to redeem the Best Buy rain check for my free copy of Heroes Season 1 on HD-DVD. I originally got this rain check almost two months ago when I bought the HD-DVD add-on for the 360, and the boxed set hasn’t been in stock since then. Over the last couple of [...]

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One of the biggest guilty pleasures of my youth, American Gladiators, is being revived for 2008. This past Saturday, me and Sandy went to see a taping of the new show at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City. The hosts of the new show are Hulk Hogan and Laila Ali — pretty decent choices in [...]

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It’s my 29th birthday today. A quick Google reveals that not only do I share a birthday with Chris Difford of Squeeze (one of my favorite bands), but also Laura Bush. Hmm. Laura Bush is also an alumnus of SMU. Frightening coincidences!

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I mentioned recently that I got an HD-DVD player for my 360. Today I decided to do a quick visual comparison between the DVD and HD-DVD versions of Hot Fuzz (which conveniently come on two sides of the same disc), to try and see the difference in image quality for myself. First, I watched the [...]

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I recently took the plunge and bought the Xbox 360 HD DVD Player. There was a great deal at Best Buy that allowed me to get all of the following for $179.99 plus tax: The drive itself (which comes with King Kong) Two free movies of my choice (for which I chose Hot Fuzz and [...]

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And happy. We saw the wildfires from the plane last night — it was really crazy to see from that far up, and to realize how big they actually were. The whole region appears to be under a cloud of smoke, although today is a little better than last night. Everyone is hoping for a [...]

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For some reason, my blog is banned in China, according to this testing tool. Or is it? Every address that I tried, including ones that are in the .cn domain, came back as rejected. They state, “This version, 1.0 may report sites as being ‘blocked’, while there are only technical reasons for their unavailability.” Hmm. [...]

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