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I'll start by saying that I was a fan of the original 1977 The Hills Have Eyes film written and directed by Wes Craven, so my opinion of the remake is no doubt colored by that fact (come on, who doesn't love Micahel Berryman as Pluto?).

I was not so keen on seeing this movie when I first heard about it, as I'm not big on remakes (especially remakes of what I consider to be good movies), but eventually I decided to give it a go. Besides, in the worst case scenario a bad horror movie will always win out over pretty much anything Hollywood has to offer these days. In any case I went into The Hills Have Eyes with rather low expectations.

Casting - Unremarkable for the most part, though I always enjoy Ted Levine in pretty much any role. But really, who watches a horror movie for the casting?

Plot - If you've seen the original there aren't many surprises. "Family trip gone wrong in the middle of a town of freaks" pretty much covers it.

Effects - This is one area that I enjoyed. While not the best effects of the genre I think in many cases it was an improvement over the original which to be honest is expected. The gore level was about right.

Overall the movie met my low expectations and came nowhere near matching the awesomeness of the original. If you haven't seen the original and are wanting to watch this one, definitely side with the original and perhaps watch the remake for a comparison.

Valve, makers of the original Portal, and other classics such as Half-Life, have announced that the sequel to Portal will be released by this holiday season.

Yeah, that's all great and all Valve, and I'm sure I'll play it, but did you guys forget about Half-Life 2: Episode 3!? I've been wanting that one more than any game you've released since. While I love my zombies, I would have gladly waited on Left 4 Dead if you'd release Episode 3.

To me episodic content should allow you to have much faster turnaround than a full blown 30+ hour epic like Half-Life 2. We're past 2 years now and still not even a mention that it's still being developed. Please, before you start on any more projects, just finish out the 3 episodes that were promised, we were definitely left hanging and I don't appreciate a 2 year plus wait to find out what happens.

With a 5 year lapse between album releases, I have to say, I was completely and utterly excited when I heard that Rob Zombie was doing a follow up CD to Hellbilly Deluxe. I respect Rob Zombie for following his other interests and delving into directing, that diversion yielded one of my favorite horror/exploitation films of all time (The Devil's Rejects), but still, I was thrilled to hear he was coming back to what we all know and love him for: music.

I have to admit that I had high expectations of Zombie's musical return. Perhaps too high. It's hard, after all, to compete with such classics as Dragula and Living Dead Girl but I bought the newest album anticipating to have my socks blown off. They sadly only fluttered in the breeze at most. Now, this isn't to say that the new record is bad, it just didn't live up to the hype I had built up in my head. With a title like Hellbilly Deluxe 2 I was expecting a fluid continuation from Hellbilly Deluxe, but the style just seemed wildly different from the original.

I'm one that will in general immediately like or dislike an album on the first time listening through, and the feeling I got on the first go-round of this was luke warm at best. There were a couple of songs that I really really enjoyed, Sick Bubblegum (even though this one has a slightly mainstream feel to it it was still a good listen), and Mars Needs Women (which is a gritty battle cry of sorts that I love) among them. Mars Needs Women is perhaps the only song on the CD that I could picture on the original Hellbilly Deluxe.

My lackluster reception of the songs themselves aside, I love Rob Zombie's new lineup which includes: John 5 on guitar(ex-Marilyn Manson guitarist, he played with Zombie on Educated Horses, and is a great solo talent, pick up one of his CDs if you haven't, you're missing out), Piggy D on bass, and Tommy Clufetos on drums. They sound really solid together and I hope they stick together for a while.

All in all it was a mediocre comeback to music for Zombie, but I guess with a 5 year hiatus it's not completely unexpected. I look forward to seeing them on tour this summer on the Mayhem Festival co-headlining with Korn and Lamb of God and also to any new CDs they put out, which may be a while as Rob Zombie seems to be focusing his efforts back on directing, at least temporarily.

Around 5 months ago I began the process of shaving my head. This was a drastic change from my previous hairstyle which came down to the middle of my back. I knew nothing about shaving my head, I'd had long hair for something close to 8 or 9 years and had barely even had a haircut in that time, so I enlisted the help of a couple of female friends who happily (perhaps overly so) began the process of buzzing down and shaving my dome.

Perhaps the best video ever made.

I don't know how I've missed this for the (at least) 3 years this song and video has been out, but I just discovered it tonight and it's wonderful. Inspired by Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, well, the title kind of gives it away. The song is by the Greenskeepers.

A couple of weeks ago a customer brought in an HP DV9000 series laptop that was sluggish and he said the wireless wasn't working. We figured it was a virus or some other not so nice hardware conflict, but after a re-installation of the OS the problem with wireless not working persisted. We tried some drivers and after several failed attempts found a post online about many many of these occurrences in the DV series, ranging from the wireless problem to black screens and more.

I finally stumbled onto this page detailing the models that have been given an extended warranty that if I remember correctly runs out in September or there about. So if your computer is exhibiting symptoms it's worth the time to see if your particular model is covered. We were able to get the customer a replacement motherboard and other fixes because of this warranty extension completely free of charge (including shipping!)

A while back me and some friends were messing around in the lab at school and figured out that by replacing sethc.exe (the executable run when sticky keys is triggered) with, well, anything, you're able to run that new program with at least administrator privileges under any account (that is if you made the change as an administrator of course). We replaced sethc.exe with cmd.exe and were able to spawn an admin shell from even non-admin accounts simply by hitting shift 5 times quickly.

That's bad of course.

In Windows XP we were able to launch it under SYSTEM credentials. The SYSTEM user account has privileges higher than that of a normal administrator, so that makes it doubly bad. In Windows Vista (Home Premium) if you invoke sticky keys on the login screen you get an administrator shell and calling explorer.exe aside from possibly having some weird side effects, will log you in as SYSTEM as well.

Despite the fact that I said that I saw no immediate need to upgrade to Windows Mobile 6.1, one of my friends convinced me that I needed to try it out. So far I haven't really seen a difference except for layout and UI, it might be a bit faster, but not exceedingly so. I installed the Kavana 6.1 ROM. Setup was fairly simple, just follow the prompts. Once finished I noticed incorrect key mappings for some keys and so I installed the eT9 language pack linked on the download above. This fixed a majority of the problems but there were still problems with alt keys.

I read through some tutorials and thought I was going to have to write my own keyboard layout file and registry entries to use, this turned out not to be the case, thank goodness. I was poking around the directories (initially the Windows directory) but found what I was looking for in \Program Files\eT9\. Here are all the files that the eT9 install installed and fixing my problem was as easy as editing the eT9.Excalibur.0409.kmap.txt file (409 is the ID for English). The structure of these files are really simple provided no one messed up really badly and wrote the wrong hex for the keys, that would be less fun to track down. I've posted the fixed eT9.Excalibur.0409.kmap.txt file.

I'm assuming what I have is a standard US layout, so if you're having problems with the English layout for the eT9 pack, download this file and just drop it in \Program files\eT9, do a restart and hopefully all will be well.

Note: For some reason Drupal decided that it needed to rename the file eT9.Excalibur.0409.kmap_.txt, take out the extra underscore when you download.

Late January and most of February for me was spent in the hospital. It was at this time that I realized that my phone was not quite up to par for being away from a computer for extended periods and it was then that I decided when I got out I would get a smartphone.

Unlike a lot of people these days my fetish isn't the latest and greatest phone. I've gotten by for a long time with a simple flip phone that just makes calls and texts with little else notable about it. I only know about the iPhone and the Google G1 because they got a fair bit of press. Enough press to know that I didn't want either; not because they're bad phones, but because of the cost of the base phone plus the required data plan.

When it came time to look for my "perfect" phone I asked a couple of people that were far more knowledgeable in the mobile arena than myself and finally figured out that I wanted an HTC Excalibur (more commonly known as the T-Mobile Dash). I didn't really have a lot of requirements in my search. I knew I wanted it to be in the $100 range and WiFi would totally be a bonus so as not to have to get a data plan if not absolutely necessary. Hotspots are everywhere now it seems and being able to tap an existing network for a quick email check or something seems a far better alternative to a ~$20/month data plan.