Dan Mayer's Blog

A first for us and Seekler, tomorrow we will be live listing, during the Super Bowl creating a list of the best commercials during the Super Bowl 2008. I haven't done a live list before so it should be fun, we can get a bunch of our friends together all with our laptops and begin ranking the commercials as they air.

People that know me, know I could care less about the football game, I don't even know who is playing, but most years I haven ended up at a friends super bowl party. So I might as well use it as a chance to promote Seekler right? I don't really care about commercials either, but you have to admit sometimes commercials really can be an art form and often times the best and the most creative commercials are launched during the super bowl. So If you feel like participating have your computer ready, play along, tell your friends as we rate all the super bowl commercials from best to worst live.

Best Super Bowl Commercials of 2008

UPDATE: We are currently ranking these live

UPDATE 2: Thanks for those that participated, linked, or checked out the Super Bowl lists... It was a pretty good little success, best Sunday traffic we have ever had! If you have an account, can you digg it?, as it could help.

Tonight I will be caucusing for Obama. I hope those of you that can, go participate as well. I didn't think I would be able to because I was registered as an unaffiliated, but apparently that isn't a problem in Colorado, I just sign some statement of intent.

Get out there and spead the word, even if your not for Obama participate, vote.

All that and no voting apparently the Denver Clerk was not correct. I couldn't vote if I was registered as an independent. The Democratic party does require you to be a registered Democrat, not state law as this is left up the party, but apparently it is a party law. I was turned away, which sucks big time. I hate voting.

Anyways the 2 parties that I don't want to be associated with strikes again, apparently to participate at all I have to declare one not as crappy as the other, which makes me mad cause they both suck. I will be updating my registration tomorrow and become an official Democrat which makes me angry.

I understand why they try to prevent other parties from voting, but unaffiliated just means undecided. Dave apparently you were right and I needed to call the Democratic HQ since they were the one that had the final say. I guess I will need to learn to check with multiple sources.

Cheers to all those that actually could get out and really vote. I just got cold and my shoes wet to come back home!

Oh well at least I tried and at least I am excited about an election for once.

Happy Vday everyone. Yippie for Hallmark making me spend money I don't have... hehe I joke I kid, while it is dumb and hilarious that we have such corporate holidays, we need them because we didn't create enough cool national holidays in the first place. Everyone needs a break no and again to make them think about the more important parts of life. If I was part of a religion that had a ton more holidays and traditions I would probably be covered, but I am not so I will take some joy in a corporate holiday. Yippie for relaxing good food and spending time with someone I love.

Tonight Erin will arrive from NYC so we will get to spend the evening together, and we will basically be celebrating the holiday for entire 3 day weekend. We have various activities plan and should get a good amount of time to just spend with ourselves which should be great. It will be a nice weekend to not really worry about work, money, or anything else. So I am thankful for this nice little holiday break. I hope it find everyone else well also...

A Valentine's Day card from my mom. Thanks mom.
(For those keeping score posting my valentines day card at low resolution is likely copyright infringement, thanks lobbyists)

A bunch of friends and I saw the sold out Flobots show at the Gothic, on Saturday night. It was a good time. It is fun to watch the band really make it big. Over the weekend, I heard their song on the radio twice, and heard it mentioned or in ads on 93.3 over a dozen times. The shows are still fun, but I actually had more fun when the shows were smaller and we could all be up close to the band with plenty of room to dance. Now we could try to cram in with a ton of fans uncomfortably or dance all the way in the back (which is what we ended up doing). When your that far back you just really don't get to feel as much of the energy of the crowd.

I might actually get to see them at a tiny show again sometime soon. I should be in Cali when the Flobots are playing LA, so I will be making an effort to see that show.

Well my crazy weight loss continues, but now I have to revise my thoughts that my glider caused most of the weight loss. I haven't been on the glider much lately as I have been busy, but I have lost another 5ish pounds, putting me at 124 lbs, which is really light for me, back at my HS weight. I never wanted to drop below 125 so I am on a mission to gain some of it back, preferably with some muscle, but if I just gain some flab that will work too. So I am thinking that reducing drinking was the cause of this weight loss. I have been drinking a lot less since the new year, and I guess it caused me to shed another 5ish lbs. To bad I don't feel really awesome, in fact my body has been feeling kind of crappy lately. I also have had far more allergic reactions lately than I normally have. Anyways, I have been trying to do push ups and sit ups a couple times a day just as a little break or part of my getting out of bed routine. So hopefully if I keep laying off the booze and eating healthy and working out a bit I might start to actually feel in better shape. I thought once I lost some weight I would feel like I was in better shape, but it just hasn't really changed how I have felt very much. My heart burn has been slightly better but that is about it.

Erin went back to NYC today, which is sad. We had a pretty simple, but wonderful time together for Valentine's day. Next up is her bday, and we will celebrate part of that during her Spring break. So I guess we have some more exciting times to look forward to.

Alright that counts as a short little rambling blog post... getting a few thoughts out of my head.

We have been with out water since I woke this morning. We called the construction company that is working across the street, because they have knocked out out water (x3), gas, and power before. They got back to us about 5 hours later saying it wasn't them call Denver water. We called Denver water which got someone here to check things out in less than an hour, and they said all our house is good but the water main is dead and it has to be the construction. So now Denver water is sending the main/valve team out to talk / work with the construction crew to see why the water is out.

All I know is right now we have both sides saying it isn't really their fault. At least Denver Water is acting quickly and putting pressure on the construction team to figure things out, but I might have to cave and go buy some water bottles. Once we get water back we are going to fill our fridge with water bottles (refilled bottles, not purchased) seeing as each time this has happened we have wished we had some extra water around.

Best part was we had a meeting this morning and had to go to that with out showers, classy. I have another more dressy meeting at 5:30 so if we don't get water back soon, it will be awkward. Stupid old house and stupid construction.

Update: The city now says the water is making it to the curb side meter, which is where the cities responsibility ends. Two problems they could do a little additional checking, but the curb valve is inaccessible, because it has moved so much over the years under the ground. That piece is the home owners responsibility. Even with that part fixed (requires digging a 4 ft hole), they might just be able to tell us there is a blockage in the houses plumbing. Either way means we need to get out landlord involved to fix our issue. Normally it takes us a couple days to get a hold of our landlord. So we might have to evacuate our house (go stay with friends) until we can get water back. We left a message for our landlord.

Update 2: Roadside valve connection realigned. Denver Water coming (at 2:30) back to check pressure and verify which side of the meter the plug/jam is happening. If it is on their side the city has to fix it, if it is on our side we have to get the landlord to fix it. 1 and a half days with out house water, having a guest staying at our house the next 2 days.

Update 3: So the pressure coming in curbside is pretty much nothing, not enough pressure to get the water out of the basement. So they call additional teams, Denver water figures out that they think it is the main. Which in turn they will dig out tomorrow, if they find that the contruction broke the main, then they have an issue and have to fix it / pay for it or whatever. Either way was were told we should have water by the end of tomorrow. I have morning meetings and have to find another house to shower at, and we have a guest staying at the house tonight... nice isn't it.

Update 4: We have water back 3 days later... got turned on at 4:30ish today (friday). Yippie for water I am so excited I have just been running around the house flushing toliets.

Steve was in town for a couple nights... We had a really good time, we didn't do anything in particular, but all the nights were fun.

I forgot how sore I can get after playing basketball, it was still a blast though.

We tried some new Sushi place in Denver on Saturday, it was pretty awesome, I think I had my favorite piece of veggie sushi it was called a salad roll.

I am so amazingly happy to have water back that I can barely express the joys of flushing toliets and washing my hands.

Early meetings make me afraid of sleep, I feel like I won't sleep well because I am scared of sleeping in to late and missing a meeting... I have an alarm set, Ben would be around and wake me, and yet I am annoyed with the idea of trying to fall alseep...

I have been meaning to write this little tutorial ever since I fixed my iTunes on windows XP. I have a pretty good computer (3.4 ghz 1Gb ram), so I was confused when switching from WinAmp to iTunes to find my music randomly stalling. If i was running something process intensive like compiling or even just loading a new program my music would stutter on XP. I search around the web and found that others were having this problem, but not many had a good solution. After browsing around the web, I found that the stuttering in my music was caused when iTunes didn't get enough of the CPU to process the music file. So when something would jump up and use 90% of my CPU iTunes would happily stop processing the music because it didn't have a high enough process priority to keep a couple percent of CPU for itself. When playing music in the background iTunes only needs 3%-4% to play the music.

So now knowing the problem I searched for solutions and many just said that every time they started iTunes they would open the Windows Task Manager go to the processes tab and right click on iTunes to set the priority of the process to high. This did in fact work, but now I had to do that every time that I openned iTunes which was really annoying. So I continued looking for a better solution. There are special windows programs out there, most of them cost money, that will monitor which processes are running on the system and automatically change the process priority on any app you tell the system to increase the priority to whatever settings you choose. This seemed like and OK solution but now having an app running all the time checking my processes and just some other app that could cause problems, seemed bad. It also seems that processes aren't as stable if you switch their priority after they begin, it is best to set the priority as they are started. So off searching for a solution I found that you can start processes in does and pass what priority you want to start the process. So I decided to just hack up a little script which would launch iTunes from dos with a process priority of 'High'.

to run a windows app at a different process priority than the default you can create a file named "appName.bat" (in this case iTunes.bat), place this file in the same directory as the executable you want to run with a higher priority. Then edit the bat file (you can edit it in notepad). Add this line to the file

start /high iTunes.exe

(or start /priority_setting application.exe)

Save your bat file... Now all you have to do is create shortcuts to the new bat file instead of the shortcuts pointing directly the application.

To create a shortcut right click on your bat file and select 'Create Shortcut'. If you want the shortcut to have the same icon as the original app instead of the dos icon, right click the shortcut and got to properties, then the 'Shortcut' tab, and click Change Icon. Select browse an application to search for an icon in, then select the application you are creating a shortcut for (in this case iTunes.exe), it will display the available icons select the one your want.

Anyways, I hope this helps anyone else having trouble getting audio to play smooth on windows XP with iTunes. I have also used this method to speed up some other processes that I always want running full speed on windows, with pretty good success.

A friend of mine is doing the Avon Walk for cancer because her mom is currently fighting her third bout wiht cancer after winning the previous two. She will be walking / jogging a full marathon. I just wanted to shout some incuragement, and let others know that if you want to help out or support her or a good cause you can donate to her walk. My donation side of life is pretty tight right now, but I donated what I could. Anyways just wanted to say, Go Christa and good luck.

Her team name is awesome also: Joggin' For Jugs

Christa's Avon Walk Page