I'm watching a documentary on the King of my parent's generation: Elvis. This film is focusing on his generosity - supposedly Elvis gave away more than 200 Cadillacs in his short lifetime. It probably adds to millions of dollars in gifts to mostly strangers.

One story, Elvis was driving by a Cadillac dealership in some city in his limo. He sees a mother and daughter looking at a new car on the lot, so he tells his driver to pull over. He asks the girl if she wants a car, and she says "Oh no. I could never afford something like this. I am only a student." So he buys her the car.

Another story. Elvis was like a 7th-level Black Belt in Karate. He worked with one instructor on and off for about 5 years. One day he handed the man a check for $50,000. That's $200,000 in today's dollars. The instructor tried to refuse. But Elvis said to him "I spend $1,000,000 per day and I still can't spend all my money."

Elvis was also notorious for being offended when someone either refused a gift or tried to return it. That was a personal insult for him.

Now this trait - the giving of expensive gifts to friends and strangers - is odd. Certainly you don't hear of Bill Gates buying Ferrari's for strangers. Or Beyonce.

Now it might be fun to have millions of dollars rolling in, and to be able to walk down the street and say "Get that man a car. Get her a car. And the baby gets one too." And mean it. The looks on people's faces must be priceless. It's the same thrill you hear on the radio when someone wins backstage passes to some concert. "Yeeee! Whooo!!! Yaa haa!" I mean, Elvis is Santa. And the screams he hears are genuine joy.

But to do this all the time? I can't imagine what he would really get out of it. Was his life so depressing that he needed to "live vicarously" through the joy of others? Wasn't the fact that people would go crazy when he walked in the room enough for that?

The other part of this is the way he treated his friends. Perhaps all of his friends were employees of some sort. He gave houses, cars, mink coats, trips, and jewelry to people who in his band, his bodyguard, his nurse, his hairdresser, etc. Some of these people genuinely wanted to refuse the gift. "No Elvis, I can't take this $30,000 diamond ring from you." And he would be pissed. Is this a good way to treat your friends? There is a fine line between being generous and basically buying people off. Did he cross that line?

It's hard to say. I wasn't there. It's hard to look a gift horse in the mouth as they say - a man you have never met calls you on the phone and offers you a car. And after you verify that, yes he is serious and there is no catch, what do you do? You probably take the car.

The last thing that struck me about this documentary was the people that said, "Elvis bought me a car and it has changed my life." The former Police Chief who said they have arrested thousands of murderers and drug dealers, but all anyone remembers of them is that Elvis bought them a car. The bodyguard who said that people come up to them even today and ask for their autograph - sign my wife's back, sign my baby's leg - because he drives a car that Elvis gave them (and Elvis didn't even ever own or drive the car). The news reporter who said the year after Elvis gave him a car was the weirdest year of his life.

Elvis had/has an aura about him, even today. He must have being living in a type of hell. He could only go out at night. He couldn't really, really trust too many people near him. He had tons of money, but could never enjoy it. Maybe he couldn't understand why someone would be excited to see him (humble) but he could certainly understand why someone would be excited to own a Cadillac (materialistic).

I wish he were alive today, just to see if/how he was able to overcome the craziness of the 60's/70's and get to somewhat of a normal life. Actually I think the Elvis-mania would be a lot less today if he were still around.

Do you remember when Jennifer Lopez couldn't go on a boat without pictures being beamed across the world? Do you remember when Angelina Jolie went to Africa to have her baby? That seems like so long ago because celebrity tends to fade if you keep out of the spotlight. But Elvis' celebrity has been going on for 30 years and is still quite bright. An interesting man, indeed.

If you don't know who Air Supply is, think "1980's Soft Rock". They are all about the love ballads:

• Lost In Love
• All Out of Love
• The One That You Love
• Making Love Out of Nothing At All

Do you see the theme? (Hint: starts with the letter L)

Anyways, let's get this out of the way first. I am not a fan of Air Supply. They are one-step below "tolerable" on the rating scale, whatever that is. "Mildly painful to listen to" would be about right.

So when offered free tickets to see them in concert, my wife did not even have to ask me. She said yes for herself and no for me. I love that about her - she knows when not to ask. That's a good attribute for a spouse to have.

Her friend had three tickets, one for herself, one for her boyfriend, and one for my wife. The only stipulation was that I would have to drive them there - which is fine. The concert was at a casino - they go to the concert and meanwhile I am playing Blackjack. I don't mind spending a few hours in a casino every once and a while. Everybody was happy at this point.

Well, I would describe "the boyfriend's" state as not so much happy, but ignorant. He had never heard of Air Supply, being a heavy metal/punk rock fan. He literally said to me, "Air Supply? Who's that?" I described them as being similar to Van Halen - a little white lie designed to keep him blissfully unaware and me in the casino until the concert had started... Self preservation.

Well, someone must have clued the boyfriend in to who Air Supply was. He pulled out of the deal the night before. Now, there was a ticket free. My wife was still kind enough to tell her friend that I would still not want to go. I was stupid enough to say "Well, if you can't find anyone else, I will go." When will I learn???

So I'm at the concert. Great seats by the way - 2nd row center. Amazing seats actually for any other concert.

The concert starts - first couple of songs are actually "covers" from other bands. Not too bad. Tolerable at this point.

The middle of the concert was a disaster. The human mind tends to block out painful experiences, so I don't really remember much. The half time show was just the back-up musicians performing one song - pretty good actually. But once the main act was back on stage, back to the suckiness.

And then to close the show they did 3 of their hits back-to-back. They invited the audience down in front of the stage, so my 2nd row tickets became 8th row. But that was fine, everyone was on their feet and singing along. Not too bad, based on the audience participation. The energy level of the audience does improve the experience.

Air Supply, as a band, is made up of two guys pushing 60 (one is 56 years old). Some of the show was really corny. There was a point in the show when one of the men was doing "air keyboard" for about 5 minutes. The real keyboardist was playing the song, but the lead singer was prentending to play keyboards in the air. At another point, one of the leads was using the other's fingers as a pretend keyboard for 5 solid minutes. A lot of unnecessary ass shaking. And a lot of unnecessary tight clothes.

Anyways, to my point. I will gladly give Air Supply a lot of props for their past success, and obviously their hard-core fans are pretty happy to be able to see them in concert. They are probably making lots of money on this tour, and great for them. Really - they deserve it. But the show they put on Saturday night could have been much better if they had just (a) dressed nicely instead of tight pants, leather pants and chest-showing shirts and (b) took some of the unintentionally funny (corny) bits out and just performed. The show could have been a 6 out of 10, but was instead a 4 out of 10, just based on their clothes and corny antics.

In the software development field, we have busy times and slow times. Periods of intense development, followed by periods of "mostly support".

I am currently in a period of intense development. Key word on "tense".

As a developer, you look at these periods with mixed emotions. I can't wait for things to slow down again. Don't get me wrong - I love my job. Developing software is what I was born for, and I feel I am good at it. There is a certain rush that comes with sitting down at a computer, writing some code, testing it, and seeing it work. There's instant gratification and a sense of accomplishment.

I would never want to be in too long a period of "mostly support". I find myself getting bored, my mental muscles not getting stretched. So I would not want to give up the intense periods.

But man, right now I need a break, big time. And I see no breaks on the horizon for at least 2 months out.

Rip It, Mix It, Burn It. That used to be the Apple iPod ad slogan, until the record companies declared ripping illegal. Coincidentally, the iTunes Music Store also debuted around the time that slogan died, as it become against Apple's financial interest for customers to Rip music. 

Speaking of which, no one ever "mixes" any more. I had a friend in University that used to make killer mix tapes. For you younger kids, he would get some good songs and put them on a cassette tape that you could listen to in your car. With the advent of the iPod, and MP3 players in general, I now carry 1,000 songs around with me everywhere, and mix tapes are dead. I do miss them, because creating them was an art. Not to mention the actual art my friend used to hand-draw for the lining of the cassette holder.

The next evolution in home-rolled entertainment became SVCD. It was so easy to take an AVI or MPEG and burn it on a CD-ROM. Even old DVD players supported VideoCD format. The downside was CD's could only support 70-80 minutes of video content. So if your movie happened to run 90 minutes, as most movies do, you ended up having to split the movie over two CD's. It was a bit of a pain to have to get up and switch the CD in the middle of the movie, but programs such as TMPGEnc made it so easy to convert and split long movies. Burning SVCDs were easy.

I have always found burning actual DVD's hard. Extremely hard. First of all, the CD/DVD burning software that I have does not convert the movies from AVI format to the proper DVD format. You have always needed DVD Editing Software. I even tried some trial-versions of DVD editing software, like Pinnacle Studio, and even could not get 1% close to getting it to work. I was destined to not be able to burn a DVD playable in a DVD player.

But then I found Avi2Dvd. I have used this software before and could not get it to work. But I downloaded the lastest free beta, and have been burning DVD's like crazy for two days. Whatever the author changed, it works. It really really works.

Now the basic DVD Burning is fairly simple - load the AVI file, leave the default settings alone, and click Add Job and then Go. Easy. Not even 1-2-3. As easy as 1-2.

You can also author DVD menus, although I have not yet tried to. You know, that intro screen where you can either press play, or set some options, or view a chapter guide. You can make them. And it's all free.

Really amazing. If you have some videos on your PC (home or otherwise) and you want to turn them to a DVD, look no further. The quality has been amazing so far. No coasters, no audio-video sync problems. So far, perfect.

I may have just bought my last $5 movie... blank DVD's cost 25 cents a piece!

I watched "V is for Vendetta" even though I did not really want to. My wife wanted to see it, although I don't know why. I didn't know much about the movie other than the title and the movie poster. And I was slightly afraid of both.

It turned out to be a wonderful movie. The best I have seen this year. Stop reading this, log off the Internet, and go see this right now.

The lead protagonist, V, is played by Hugo Weaving. The only thing I know about Hugo is that he played Agent Smith in the Matrix movies. He rocked in those films. First there were the 50 copies of himself that fought Neo in the schoolyard. He came in from every direction, and Neo fought all 50 of them. Then there were the 5,000 copies of Agent Smith watching as he fought Neo in the rain. He must have spent weeks doing head shots, different reactions, looking different ways. Hugo Weaving rocked the Matrix movies, and he rocks this one.

Natalie Portman ain't too bad. She has to stretch her acting muscles a little more in this one than in the Star Wars movies. I didn't like her acting in the Star Wars movies, so it's good to see her show something different.

Anyways, there are fast parts, with blood and killing. There is some of the trademark Matrix time-slows-down-while-the-knife-flies-through-the-air stuff, but not too much. And there is a true "detective" type story built in here as we try to figure out the story before it reveals itself.

All in all, a good movie. Hollywood should make more like this.

A week or so ago, I was telling you about my frustration with license keys, and how difficult they were to keep track of. The Microsoft licensing system has gotten so complex, I must own 8 or 9 licenses for Windows but only have 3 computers.

So I finally was able to install Windows XP on my second machine (soon to be my primary PC). I installed Windows Media Center. Now I wasn't planning on having a "media center" and if it wasn't for the fact that the only license key that I could find with a matching CD was Media Center, then I wouldn't have. But I did. And I like it.

It connects to my XBox 360 nicely. Although I can't play DIVX movies on there, I guess if I really wanted to watch a movie on my XBox over the network, I could reencode it to uncompressed AVI... Or I can watch it straight off the PC fine.

But in the end, I did NOT have to purchase an extra license. Did you know Microsoft is asking for $400 for a copy of XP Professional that is not an upgrade edition. Holy smokes! If it was $150, I would have probably ended up buying another copy. But $400 is basically what I am sending to World Vision on a yearly basis. It's a lot of money for some software who's development costs have LONG LONG since been paid for. Microsoft makes $1 Billion per month (or something like that) off of Windows alone. I don't need to be part of that.

Anyways, things are now good here. No other reason not to completely switch to the new machine... We'll see how long that takes.

Happy anniversary to me. I've been blogging for four years. It all started August 1, 2002.

Looking back, it seems my blogging started because I had something funny/stupid to say, and noone to say it to.

You see, an American news reporter was talking about the Pope's visit to Mexico, and how he canonized the first "Native American" saint there. In actual fact, the canonized man was an aboriginal Mexican. An Indian. But TV reports can't say Indian or Aboriginal on TV, so the poor man becomes Native American. Even though he was Mexican.

Oh well, at the time it seemed like a witty insight into political correctness gone awry. Now it seems less poignant.

Anyways, blogging is just a word to describe the combination of a personal web site with a content management system. Imagine if I had to code this page by hand? Yuck!