So COOL! Comes out December 22nd, 2009

http://vanhalen.guitarhero.com/ – View the Set List

Watch the trailer in HD below!

The thermometer says it’s 90° outside. So I decided to stay inside under the ceiling fan ALL weekend and continue a movie watching spree some friends and I started LATE Friday night. We all watched I Am Legend and Blood Diamond until 3:30AM Saturday. I then continued the spree after I woke up Saturday afternoon around 12:30PM. I was all set to watch Déjà vu and saw the preview for The Prestige. It looked more interesting so I started with that. After The Prestige I watched Déjà vu, The Punisher, Shooter, The Guardian, and then went to bed again. I started Man On Fire Sunday morning after waking up and have now decided to end the spree. In total, I watched 1032 minutes (17.2hrs) of glorious Blu-ray 1080p this weekend. I slept for 16.5hrs (so far). There are 7hrs missing in the accounting of my two days, but I’m sure taking a shower, eating, watching a thunderstorm, and playing Scrabble on the DS is where I’ll find it.

I went to Walgreens recently to have a prescription (Qvar) refilled and with no insurance co-pay it came to $111.99. The inhaler is good for 100 puffs. In this case, the inhaler is used once per day. That a little over $1 per day… not so bad I guess. Currently there are no generic versions of Qvar so I thought $111.99 was enough to warrant a look into the pricing online. What I found was quite surprising. I thought I would find competitive prescription drug pricing online rather easily. I must have looked for about an hour for pricing search engines or companies like Walgreens readily making available their pricing without the need to fill out forms or obtain usernames & passwords. NOT THE CASE! I found tons of websites that want all your information before they will give you a price. I found the following websites willing to give pricing online without all the BS. The websites listed below all supply Qvar. I was able to find Qvar for as little as $83.72 which is $28.27 less than Walgreens.

See what the FDA has to say about Buying Medicines and Medical Products Online

This is the only “qualifying” live pricing search engine that I could find. HealthTrans is a Pharmacy Benefit Manager and it looks to require some type of membership through an employer. The price search does provide some valuable insight into who is charging what (basically who charges less) for a particular prescription. Obviously this doesn’t necessarily reflect the pricing you will receive. I thought it was interesting enough to see not only the available pharmacies in your locality, but also the price comparisons between pharmacies.

http://www.prescriptiongiant.com – Found the best pricing here

http://www.familymeds.com – The only “qualifying” Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Sites™ pharmacy I found online.

http://rxusa.com

http://www.drugstore.com

Through this process, I have discovered that Americans do not care about the price of their medications (most likely because they pay for it like they pay their taxes.... it comes out of their paycheck and it feels good to be "taken care of"). People will search online for pricing for their electronics, computers, office supplies, and all kinds of gadgets and crap, but when it comes to your healthcare... they don't care about the price... WHY!? Demand competitive pricing and value for EVERYTHING you buy people... even your healthcare.

A few months back Nintendo changed their searchable list of games to a terrible format. They made it difficult to find the games I was interested in. I have since found the old searchable list of games under the support section of their website. The old list is now called Master Games List and allows a significantly more granular search although I still cannot narrow the search to just Wii games that are not Virtual Console or WiiWare. Nintendo even has classic games in the list. There are over four thousand games in there! They have downloadable (PDF) lists of their classic games available on the same page. It’s not searchable the same way… but I’m glad to still see a list of all their old games available online.

So I’m getting gas at ARCO and I see this credit card looking flyer and decided to grab it to see what it was. It works kinda like a PayPal Debit Card except this thing is linked directly to your checking account. The attraction is no longer being required to pay the 45¢ “convenience” fee per transaction whenever you purchase anything. It looks like a good idea… but I’m not necessarily convinced just yet…. but wait … there’s more! You also earn rewards† on the things that you purchase. For each dollar you spend using you PIN, you receive a point. If you purchase something using it as a Debit MasterCard, you receive 2 points for each dollar spent. They even have a Preferred version of the Debit MasterCard where you pay an annual fee of $24.95 and get double points. Sounds like a pretty good deal… no 45¢ fee anymore… get bonus points that turn into cash (currently $.001 per point otherwise known as .1¢). I will apply for one of these cards, but I just thought the fine print was humorous.

†Rewards are not earned for ampm, ARCO and non-ARCO gasoline brand purchases.

I have noticed I leave final updates out of my blog posts recently. Hopefully this post clears up some of that.

Vehicle Problems: Replaced the spark plugs & wires. – Let this be a lesson to you (and me), don’t drive a car 100,000 miles without replacing the spark plugs! Duh.

eVGA 6200 LE Display Adapter: eVGA replaced the card with the exact same model. I guess they had some in stock… no free upgrade :)

Rats: They went away… then came back. They don’t scratch around under the house anymore, but I know they’re still around cause something is getting into the garage and destroying plastic bags on the floor. Time for traps.

That pretty much wraps it up for now.

Zune is 2½ years old and doesn’t work with Windows Media Player? OMG Why!? The Zune software is terrible! You cannot search for songs by folder. This is what you call “Seamless Computing”, which William Henry Gates III has been talking about forever. Is this an anti-trust “hot spot” or something? I say “This is just dumb”.

After adding a hard disk to my computer today, I found out that you can't have more than four MBR disks in your Windows operating system (even x64 versions!) and that MBR partitioned disks have an upper limit of 2 Terabytes! Normal (x86 & x64) Windows operating systems (Pre-Vista SP1) cannot boot from GPT partitions. It is unlikely that the standard version (32-Bit) of Windows XP will ever boot from GPT partitioned disks.

What does this mean? Unless Microsoft fixes/patches this for Windows XP, your boot drive cannot be larger than 2 terabytes. Since this size of hard disk is already in the market, I found it interesting enough to comment on.

Resources Below:

Windows and GPT FAQ

Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) and Unified EFI (UEFI)

Everything you want to know about GPT for Microsoft Windows with Itanium Processors