I already do a bunch of shopping on Amazon.com. If there price is within about 5% of the lowest I can find on the internet, I’ll usually buy from them just because I’ve never EVER had a problem with an order.

If you shop on Amazon, you probably know about their Gold Box deals. These are a series of 10 or so items that are available to you once per day for a discounted price. As you are shown these items you have the ability to say yes or no, but you can’t go back. The deals are usually pretty good, but your timing has to be pretty good also in order to actually need/want the items that they have in the Gold Box.

One better than the Gold Box deals is the Lightning Deals. These are only became available a couple times a day. They are heavily discounted items, but they are only available for purchase for a couple hours. Then, the deal is gone. The trick is, catching these deals when they are available. What to do, what to do.

A friend of mine has been digging in to the Amazon.com programming API and came up with a fantastic solution; GBNotify.com. Go to the site and either enter in your email address or a cell phone number and during the day as these deals become available you’ll be notified. I’ve been getting the updates for a couple days now. I haven’t found an item that I want to buy just yet, but the discounts on the items are staggering. I’ve seen 70%+ discounts on items go by. It’s almost worth buying the item to sell it for a profit on eBay. That’s not something I have time or energy enough to try out, but hey, somebody out there could turn this in to a nice little money maker.

I can not believe it’s been 4 months since I’ve blogged on geeeek.com. I haven’t had a drought like this in YEARS!! So what’s the deal? Well, it’s a combination of things;

1. Lack of direction
When you get down to it, I don’t really know exactly what I want to do with geeeek.com. Is it a personal blog? Is it a tech blog? If so, do I have time or the desire to stay up on tech subjects to make my site remotely interesting? I have to answer all of those questions with “I don’t know”

2. Lack of time
I got a promotion at work a few months back and it has really chewed up a lot of my free time. This isn’t a bad thing and it’s certainly not a complaint. But, it is what it is. More time at the office = less time at home. Less time at home means less time with the wife and kids. Less time to spend with them = less time for things like blogging and side projects.

3. Other hobbies
Since I don’t really make money from blogging (not much to speak of, anyway), I have to categorize it as a hobby. I have found that my free time has become more valuable to me and spending my free time sitting in front of a computer isn’t always what I want to be doing. I picked up a guitar (that I don’t play enough) and have recently picked up digital photography as a hobby. I’m really interested in learning both.

4. Other blogs
For a while I had a bunch of different blogs going. Some tech, some personal, some hobby and some just silly. I really enjoy blogging and have been blogging at least once a week on a blog I started a few months ago that is NOTHING but my personal rantings. That site is JohnHawkinsUnrated.com.

So, for now, geeeek.com will stay as it is. I can’t say when the next time I’ll post here will be. I’m guessing that if I do pick it back up at some time, it will have a specific focus. Not sure what I’ll do with the archived posts, but I guess I’ll figure that out when the time comes.

Cheers.

A common theme among movies aimed at teens these days is to release R rated clips from the movie months ahead of time via YouTube. With any luck the videos go viral and everybody and their brother has seen the clips a dozen times before the movie is even released. Unfortunately, as often happens, the hype build-up is greater than the movie can possibly hope to be. This was never more clear for me than with the movie Knocked Up. I LOVED the videos that were being passed around before the movie came out. Then, I went and saw it at th theater and I can hardly remember laughing during the entire movie.

When I first saw the R rated trailer for Superbad on Youtube, I laughed my head off. I could not wait for the movie to come out. I tempered my enthusiasm hoping that I would not have a repead of my experience with Knocked Up. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. I saw the movie the first week it was out in theaters and I loved it. Seth Rogan as Officer Michaels and Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Fogell (McLovin) absolutely made this movie for me.

The characters in the movie are all likable. You find yourself rooting for the three unpopular guys (Evan, Seth and Fogell) who have their chance to hang with the in-crowd and hopefully get laid so long as they can use their new fake ID to obtain alcohol for the party. Of course everything that can go wrong does go wrong. When they finally make it to the party with alchohol in hand, they are the hit of the party. The girl Evan likes has way to much to drink, takes him upstairs to a bedroom and is throwing herself at Evan. Evan, being a really nice guy, won’t take advantage of her in her drunken state and narrowly avoids getting thrown up on when she pukes on the bed. The chick that Seth likes won’t make out with him because he’s drunk, and Fogell gets cock-blocked by 2 cops who burst in the bedroom seconds after he starts going at it with a little hottie.

There are plenty of funny scenes in the movie and the DVD has a decent gag-reel, line-o-rama and some other extras that make it worth picking up.

A very funny movie that I’m sure I’ll watch a dozen or so times.

Click Here to buy Superbad from Amazon.com 

Recently I dropped and broke my digital camera so it was time to head to the store to pick up a new one. My requirements were pretty simple. I was looking for a pocket sized camera with a decent sized viewing screen and at least 5.0 MP. After checking out several cameras, I decided on the Fuji Finepix Z5fd 6.3 MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom.

Like I said, my requirements weren’t very difficult to meet. So when I got the camera home and started using it, I was pleasantly surprised by all the extras that came along with it. The 6.3 megapixels capture enough detail that you can print photo-quality pictures up to 14 x 19 inches in size. The 8 x 10 prints I’ve made from shots taken with this camera are amazing.

The viewing screen on the back is a 2.5 inch scratch resistant LCD. This was an absolute must! The big screen makes it easy to use all the menu options, and when viewing the shots you’ve already taken it’s easy to see which shots you want to save and which you want to delete. I’ve been carrying the camera in my pocket most every day and there are still no scratches at all on my screen.

The Finepix Z5 also shoots video. When you are out with your friends and somebody is about to do something really stupid, it’s nice to have a video camera so quickly available. I have a 1 GB Xd memory card in my camera and can shoot about 15 minutes of video at 640 x 480 resolution. Once I get home it’s a piece of cake to grab the videos from the computer and upload them to YouTube.

The sliding lens cover makes for a super quick on/off switch. If you are putting the camera in your pocket, you will want to be careful not to slid the lens cover open.

The camera performs better than expected in low light situations. Here’s a photo I took at an awards show.

The camera can also be set to several different modes depending on what you are shooting. The “Natural Light” setting takes two photos in rapid succession, one with flash and one without. Then, both images are displayed on the screen. This is great for shorts where you aren’t positive if the flash is going to be needed. I also like the “Continuous” mode. When using this setting, the camera will keep taking photos one after the other for as long as the shutter is held down. For capturing natural looking shots, this mode is fantastic.

The camera comes in three different colors. I bought the silver one for myself. My wife liked my camera so much she had be buy her the wine red model. It looks pink if you ask me. There is also a chocolate colored version as well.

Overall I’m thrilled with the Fuji Finepix Z5 camera. It far exceeded my expectations and would happily recommend the camera to anyone looking for a compact digital camera.

You can purchase the Finepix Z5 from Amazon.com. Or, if you would like to see all the technical specs for the camera, you can find them at fujifilmusa.com.

Last month while attending BlogWorld I had the opportunity to hang out with Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, at the WordPress Meet-Up. One of the topics we spoke about was Akismet, the spam blocking plugin. I had used Akismet a few years back, but had run in to some issues with it. At that time I found Spam Karma and started using it exclusively. A few drinks, a little dinner and some great conversations later, I headed home to give Akismet another shot.

I downloaded and installed the latest copy of Akismet on 2 blogs; geeeek.com and austinsink.com. While this blog has been around for several years, austinsink.com is relatively new and I was curious how it would handle the two. Would I seed any differences between a blog that receives a TON of spam and a blog that receives hardly any.

geeeek.com results
Total Comments: 10,724
Real Comments: 33 (0.30 %)
Spam Comments: 10,691 (99.7 %)
False Positives: 0
Uncaught Spam: 0
Uncaught Spam Pingback: 1

austinsink.com results
Total Comments: 73
Real Comments: 14 (23.72 %)
Spam Comments: 59 (76.28 %)
False Positives: 0
Uncaught Spam: 0
Uncaught Spam Pingback: 1

Overall I have to say I’m really pleased with Akismet. In the 2 months leading up to the switch, Spam Karma had been doing a great job of keeping the spam out of my blog and had zero false positives, but I was receiving a hefty amount of spam pingbacks that were all going uncaught.

I did have a bit of “user error” the first few days I was running Akismet. In the Options -> Discussion settings on WordPress, I had left the following box checked:

This setting was being overruled by Spam Karma. When I switched to Akismet, all comments needed to be approved prior to showing up on the blog. I was under the impression that all my comments were being held up as spam and I was counting these as false positives. I unchecked the box and the comments were flowing freely to the blog without my intervention. All is right in the world again, yeah.

So for now, I’m going to stick with Akismet. It seems to be doing the job fantastically.

So many tools that you run across on the Internet claim to save you time. When you try them out you find that they save you time initially, but as you use them more and more they have other aspects that end up costing you time. You can get blinded by the initial time savings. When I first heard about tubemogul.com, the first thing I was told was that it’s a huge time saver. When this is the lead-in, I’ve become jaded and immediately look for the catch.

  If you are unfamiliar, tubemogul.com is a free service that lets you upload a video to their site and then from their control panel you can have your video posted to several popular video sites, like: youtube, google, yahoo, revver, metacafe, myspace and several others.

Sounds great, right? So far, so good. The upload process is simple. You title, tag and categorize your video one time through a very simple interface. You select the video sites you want to post to, enter your username/password for each site and click the post button. Your video gets pushed out to several sites at once.

With most services, this is where the time savings would stop. Not with tubemogul. Here’s the part that really sold me on the service. Starting the day after you upload your video, tubemogul starts collecting stats for your videos across all the sites where you’ve published your video. You don’t need to log in to each of your video site accounts to see how many viewers you have had. You can check them all from one centralized location.

If you use video as part of your marketing or advertising and you aren’t using tubemogul, you are crazy. Did you miss the part where I said the service is free?

Check it out, you’ll be glad you did.

Back at the end of April, I wrote about being Blissfully Ignorant about the run I was supposed to do the following morning. It was to be my wife’s and my first training run with the Las Vegas RoadRunners. As I remember it, that first run was a whopping 20 minute run. It wouldn’t be very long before we were routinely running 6, 7 or 8 miles on a given Sunday.

Fast forward 6 months.

Bright and early yesterday morning, we left the house and drove over to Mandalay Bay. Thanks to me not listening to my wife, we ended up parking way too far away and ended up walking 15 minutes to the convention center. After a brief stay inside the nice and warm conference room provided to the members of the RoadRunners, we headed outside to take our place behind the elite runners and the running Elvi (of which there were more than 150) on the start line for the Las Vegas Marathon. The sun wasn’t up yet, it was quite cold and there were some 15,000 runners behind us waiting to start running.

On our way out to the starting line I was contemplating the nerves I had about running in my first half-marathon. I then thought about the small group of elite runners who probably had a hard time sleeping last night with anticipation for today’s race. While my race was against myself and nobody else, these elite runners are trying to finish first out of 15,000. That has to be a bit nerve-wracking.

Unfortunately, I injured myself about 6 weeks ago. My training was basically put on hold and in the weeks leading up to Marathon day, I had run remarkably little. I knew this was going to be problematic, but I was determined to go out and finish this race. Even if that meant walking the entire course. As it turns out, that’s pretty much exactly what it meant. My average pace time and my overall finish were nothing to brag about. Though, I’m still quite proud to have completed my first half-marathon.

A guy from my office recently completed a triathlon and went on to run the full marathon today. When I was talking to him about the injury he told me to remember that, even though this is the race that I have been training for, that doesn’t mean it’s the only race available. Compounding the injury by over-exerting myself for this ONE race makes no sense. There will be plenty of other races to be run. I took that to heart and really tried to maintain a comfortable pace that would allow me to finish without causing too much pain. The thing is, 13.1 miles, no matter how quickly or slowly you walk it, it’s going to cause some pain.

After the race we ate a bunch of the goodies that they were handing out at the finish line. We then went home and ate some more. Took a nice warm bath, took a short nap, iced my leg, napped some more and then got up and ate again. And, as if that wasn’t enough activity for 1 day, we headed back to Mandalay Bay last night for the Social Distortion concert at the House of Blues. General Admission tickets means you stand up the entire show. After the beating we put our legs through earlier in the day, this made for a very uncomfortable time. We stuck it out as long as we could, but eventually had to head home early.

I had an amazing time yesterday. I know for sure I’ll be back again next year. Hopefully by then I will have run a few more half-marathons. Next year I would like to finish in less than 2 hours and 30 minutes. We’ll see how that goes.

This is my first shot at video blogging. Leave me a comment and tell me if you love it or hate it.

Here’s some companion links from the video blog:

• utterz.com
• Follow me on Utterz
• scratchback.com
• Sites using ScratchBack

Last night the power went out at our house. Not once, but twice. After the first outage, I restarted my computer and set out to do a little web-surfing. When I opened FireFox and went to CNN.com, it was immediately apparent that something wasn't quite right. CNN looked like the image to the left. Other sites  I visited were having similar issues. I went through every possible option screen and was not able to solve the issue. When the power went out the second time, I decided to pack it in for the night. 

When trying to fix the issue the following morning with a clear head, there was still no luck. At this point it's looking like there is a corrupted file that's causing Firefox to act up. I was left with one option: re-install Firefox. As easy as that may sound, there's more to it than you might think.

The problem is, if you go to Control Panel and use the Add/Remove programs feature to get rid of Firefox, after you are done, there are still several files and registry entries remaining on your machine. If you then re-install Firefox, it's possible that the corrupted file may not get updated and your Firefox install will still be messed up. This is what happened to me the first time.

Here are the steps you need to take in order to completely remove Firefox from your machine BEFORE reinstalling:

1. (optional) Export your bookmarks (video how-to)
2. (optional) Create a list of currently installed extensions
3. Uninstall Firefox using the Add/Remove Programs function in Control Panel
   [Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs -> Mozilla Firefox]
4. Remove application data that's not automatically deleted in the previous step be deleting the Firefox directory located here: c:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\
5. Delete the previous Firefox install directory located here: c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\
6. Remove registry entries for Firefox using Regedit [Start -> Run -> regedit]. Search for and remove the following entries:

   [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\FirefoxHTML]
   [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Mozilla]
   [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\MozillaPlugins]
   [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Mozilla]
   [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\MozillaPlugins]

Once you've completed these steps, restart your machine. Use Internet Explorer to http://firefox.com/ to download the latest version of Firefox. Once you've installed the new software, you can import your bookmarks, reload your extensions and if all goes well, your Firefox install will be good as new. Thankfully, mine was. 

As smooth as I made this sound, my battle with Firefox last night/this morning didn't go as smoothly as it should have. To start with, I forgot to backup my bookmarks so they are all gone. However, one funny thing did come up. When using the "Add/Remove" programs, menu, I had to chuckle when I saw the status for how often I used FireFox says "rarely". Considering I use the software for several hours every single day, it makes me wonder exactly how much time you must put in for that rating to say something like "often".

Hopefully you won't need this information any time soon. But if you do, I hope this helps you out.

This just might be the coolest new product I’ve seen this year. This Wireless 2GB SD Memory card from Eye-Fi is a casual photographers dream. Rather than taking the photo, downloading to your computer, resizing and THEN uploading to your photo sharing service or social networking site, this card cuts out the middle man men. You simply take your photos and upload wirelessly. The built in software will resize the images automatically on the fly based on your preferences. The photos are simultaneously saved to your computer in their original format.

Here are some of the technical details:

• Uploads photos automatically from Eye-Fi Card inside your camera. Built-in Wi-Fi connects to your home network
• Provides free and unlimited photo uploads to your computer and your favorite photo or social networking website. Photo transmission is secure and private
• Supports sharing and printing websites, including Fotki, Shutterfly, dotPhoto, webshots, phanfare, Picasa Web albums, flickr, TypePad, Wal-Mart, snapfish, VOX, smugmug, facebook, photobucket, Kodak Gallery, and Sharpcast
• Handles full-resolution jpeg images and intelligently re-sizes photos if limited by your chosen photo or social networking website
• Fits digital cameras that use SD memory cards and offers 2 GB of memory to store photos on the card

Now, if they will just hurry up and make an XD version, I’ll own this in a heart beat!