Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr Pepper

A few weeks ago I saw an ad for Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr Pepper on television. I had even seen the Cherry Chocolate Rain song by Tay Zonday on Youtube.


It took me a bit to find it, but I did. Quite an assortment of flavors we find here.

The soda itself really does have a red tinge to the normally caramel colored liquid. The smell was slightly sweet, with strong hints of cherry.
I could distinctly taste the cherry and chocolate flavors. Seemed to me that there was a bit of vanilla too. The Dr Pepper taste was in the background and subtle. The aftertaste is exactly that of a spoonful of Cherry Garcia from Ben & Jerry’s.
It’s quite a niche flavor. I can’t see drinking this day after day, but it would be good on occasion or as the base of some sort of mixed drink or shot.

The Colossal Remote

Last weekend I was in walgreens to pick something up when I spotted the Colossal Universal Remote Control.


The remote is 11″ by 5″. Compared to a standard Tivo remote, it’s positively colossal!
Obviously, I had to have this. Even my daughters would have a tough time misplacing this. I bought it and took it home. I put in two AA batteries and entered the standard Sony universal remote code and wham, it was controlling our Sony TV.
However, all it could do was turn the TV on/off, change channel, and work the volume. When I tried to change the video input, the menu would come up, but there was no way to select a new input.
There are three buttons on the top of the remote for TV, VCR, DVD. They can be programmed to any code and are not tied to one function. I looked for the code for my Oppo upconverting DVD player, but saw nothing. Scouring the web was fruitless as well.

I was a bit disappointed that it couldn’t do much more than the TV. On a whim I googled looking for a Tivo code. Sure enough, Brookstone sells a rebadged Colossal remote (actually made by Innovage) and in the user’s manual is a code for a Tivo (111).
Amazingly, it worked and the Colossal Remote was running the Tivo. I can pause, rewind, fast forward easily. The record button even works. The channel up/down works, as does the numeric keypad. But without a guide button or directional buttons, you are very limited in using your Tivo.
The girls think the remote is neat, but I want my $10 back.

Snickers Charged

This morning, I stopped by the 7-Eleven for coffee with Michele and saw something new.


Yes, it’s a Snickers bar with caffiene and taurine. Of course I picked a couple up for Cruft Labs.
Previously, I’ve discussed Buzz Bites, but Snickers is a mainstream brand. Mars Company is seriously testing the waters here with caffeinated food.
I love the icon of a charging rhino on the package!

Included with the Snickers bar are the following stimulants:
60 mg caffiene – equivalent to to a can of Mountain Dew
250 mg taurine – 1/4 of the taurine in a can of Red Bull
0.2 mg vitamin B6 – 10% of the RDA
0.6 μg vitamin B12 – 10% of the RDA

I was hoping for something cool on the outside of the Snickers, like a rhino or something, but it just looked like a Snickers bar.

The inside of the Snickers Charged looks pretty much exactly like a regular Snickers bar. Some kind of color or sparkle would have been neat. The Shrek version was at least green…
It tasted exactly like a Snickers. I couldn’t detect any of the metallic caffeine taste that I’ve sometime found in other caffeinated foods. If I didn’t know, I would have thought it was just a plain Snickers bar.
The idea is interesting at least. With the candy costing less than a buck, it’s a cheaper caffeine fix than coffee, soda, or an energy drink. In the afternoon, the caffeine might actually ward of the sugar crash of the 25 grams of sugar you just ate.

Good movies

I’m not a huge TV watcher. I barely keep up with one television show at a time. But I do love a good movie, especially the classics.
Turner Classic Movies is airing 31 Days of Oscar this month. 5 classic movies a day with no commercial interruptions. It’s a Tivo owner’s dream.
Here’s an example of two days:
February 20th: Some Like it Hot, Stalag 17, The Caine Mutiny, The Buccaneer, On the Waterfront
February 29th: The Day of the Jackal, Three Days of the Condor, Marathon Man, The Boys from Brazil, Kotch
All without commercials…

Importing Photos in Vista

This post is for Vista users that might have run into the same problem.
I’ve been transitioning Michele from a homebuilt XP system to a iMac running Vista. Everything had been going along smoothly until I tried to import some photos. We’ve always used her computer as the import station for all our digital cameras. The photos are backed up on several other computers.
The issue is that the default Vista camera import method sucks, mainly because you can’t select which photos you want imported and where to put them. It’s an all or nothing arrangement. This may be great for for 90% of users, but many of us want to be a bit more selective about how we import and place our photos.
In XP, we had the Scanner and Camera Wizard, which was pretty damn good. I used it for years with no problem. Seemed simple enough to me.
The Vista team must have disagreed and made the new import system basically into a on-click, no options process. As a result, many people feel that the default Vista Import method is inferior to the XP import method.
The last couple days, I have done a bunch of research on alternatives. In the end, I found that Windows Live Photo Gallery is the solution. I’m not sure why it doesn’t come with Vista, but it’s a free download.
Importing with Windows Live Photo Gallery gives you back all the features of the XP Camera Wizard. It gives you the option to import everything or select individual photos or even groups of photos to import into specified folders and rename as you desire. There’s even an Autoplay option to always use it when you connect a camera.
I’m quite happy now with the solution and Michele is ready to move to her new computer full time.

A year in Hotel Rooms

I travel a lot and end up in a lot of hotel rooms. In 2007, I stayed in 16 different hotel rooms. That doesn’t include 2 vacations where I didn’t stay in hotels.
In 2006, I started making short videos of my hotel rooms to show to Michele and the girls. I’ve been posting them to my Vox account. Now that 2007 is over, I can present you with:
My Hotel Rooms of 2007
January 15th – San Jose, California
January 16th – Emeryville, California
February 6th – Toronto, Ontario, Canada
February 9th – Bellevue, Washington
February 24th – Las Vegas, Nevada
March 17th – Austin, Texas
March 27th – London, England
April 18th – Las Vegas, Nevada
May 14th – Cupertino, California
May 27th – San Francisco, California
July 1st – Long Beach, California
July 17th – London, England
August 24th – Seattle, Washington
October 10th – New York, New York
October 18th – San Francisco, California
December 5th – San Jose, California
Vox makes it very easy to upload videos when I’m in the road. They recently added the ability to embed Vox videos on other sites. Even if you already have a weblog, having a Vox blog is fun and useful.
As an example of the videos I made, here’s the one from Long Beach, when my daughters and I attended the Anime Expo.


My Hotel Room in Long Beach from https://cruftbox.vox.com/

Why CDs are still better than downloads


This is the third time I’ve bought an album from Amazon and the third time that the downloader has crashed. When this happens I have to send an email to Amazon to get them to unlock the album and allow me to redownload it. A huge pain the butt. With iTunes full of DRM & wacky AAC files, Yahoo Music & Napster with DRM & wacky WMA files, it simply doesn’t make sense to buy music digitally.
A CD still makes the best sense for music. You can play it in a CD player and you can rip it to MP3 (even if you lose the files).
You can try to tell me I’m wrong, but you know in your heart I’m right.

Good things in 2007

Now that it 2008, it’s time to discuss a few things about 2007. You start seeing stories about 2007 just after Thanksgiving, when the year isn’t done yet. Seems strange to me.
So Happy New Year to you, Loyal Cruft Reader, here are my thoughts.
Books
The Good Fairies of New York – Martin Millar – This was my most enjoyable read of the year. Not a new book, but a great one. My review explains.
Glasshouse – Charles Stross – Stross’s previous work have been excellent and Glasshouse was fantastic as well.
Sun of Suns: Book One of Virga – Karl Schroeder – Space Opera meets Niven’s Smoke Ring in a new series. This is the first book. I eagerly await the third one to be published.
Games
Bioshock – A fantastic single player game. The first game in years without multiplayer that I’ve loved. Great story, music, game play, and astounding graphics. Perfection.
Portal & Team Fortress 2 from the Orange Box – Who cares about Half-life anymore? Portal is a truly innovative game that uses sharp writing and design to elicit various emotions. Team Fortress 2 tosses the notions of realism out the door and gives us a cartoon world of team based mayhem.
Movies
Dan in Real Life – I’m not sure why this film struck a cord with me. Perhaps as a father of daughters, I can relate. In any case, a well written and well acted film about people dealing with love & loss.
3:10 to Yuma – A classic western that looks at the motivation behind men’s action. Fantastic acting and better writing.
Sunshine – A good attempt at hardcore science fiction. The last 20 minutes devolve into a horror film, disappointing me a bit, but worth seeing anyways.
Web Sites
Woot.com – I’m now firmly addicted to Woot, patiently waiting until 10PM when the new items appear.
Ask Metafilter – Not a new site. I’ve been a member at Metafilter since 2002, but recently I’ve enjoyed reading & answering people’s questions in a sane, controlled environment.

Hardware

The iPhone – Simply the best mobile phone available. Fanbois can try to deny it, but the iPhone completely changes the face of the cellular phone industry. Strangers don’t want to look at your Voyager or Blackberry, but they sure as hell want to look at your iPhone.
Humanscale Foot Machines – Michele bought me a FM500 for my desk at home to put my feet on when sitting. I highly recommend getting one. With the amount of time I spend at the computer, proper posture is essential.