The Ultimate Halo Ebay Auction

This eBay auction is insane. Basically everything under the Halo sun, including Bill Gates’ autograph on your 360. His signature looks like a 2nd grader.

The Mist Trailer

Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novella The Mist is finally a reality. Word is that Darabont’s been trying to make this movie for years (he had planned on making this his directorial debut, even before The Shawshank Redemption). I’m glad to see it’s actually happening, because the movie looks awesome, if something of a departure from his usual style. Shawshank, The Majestic, and The Green Mile (two of which were also King stories) all had strong similarities. They shared some spiritual qualities and sort of coming-of-age, philosophy-changing moments in the lives of the characters. The Mist looks much more gritty and in your face in the style of 24 or Battlestar Galactica.

The Mist tells a story of a fictional town in Maine which, after a storm, is overtaken by a mysterious “mist.” Concealed within the cloud of mist are strange and terrifying monsters that begin attacking the citizens of the town. The plot centers around a group of people trapped by the mist inside a supermarket, and the psychological breakdown of the survivors as they end up destroying one another in their attempts to stay alive.

A sick noseblunt in skate.

psMonitor: Make PDFs without Adobe Acrobat

GhostScript At every IT job I’ve worked, I’ve noticed that the ability to create PDF files in business today is nothing less than an absolute necessity. Even with the pricing of Adobe Acrobat skyrocketing (about $250 per seat), and PDF becoming an open standard, it’s still difficult to find a reliable, totally free method for creating PDF documents.

My father’s company, like most, ran into this issue a couple of years ago. So my brother, who was doing the network management at the time, developed a PostScript monitoring service to convert PostScript files to PDFs; a program he called psMonitor. After some coding and setup, anyone in the office could print to a PostScript file in a specific directory and have it automatically spit out a PDF file. Saved the company nearly $3,000 instantly. The savings in a larger firm could be even more astounding. The full version of Acrobat is still crucial for proper PDF editing and markup, but most of us don’t need that. We just need a simple way to convert files.

What follows here is my guide on how to set up your own psMonitor service so that you too may disown Acrobat!