A friend of mine turned me onto the HBO show Entourage. He called it "the best show on television". This is the same guy who turned me on to Lost, so I took his recommendation seriously.

On Saturday I was in the Chinese mall in Toronto, and saw (pirated versions of) the first two seasons of Entourage on sale. For $20, I could pick up both seasons on 5 DVDs. So why not try it?

I ended up spending Saturday night, Sunday, Monday night watching the first two seasons. Its a very interesting show, and I can see why he likes it. On Monday I downloaded the third season from a bittorrent server.

And as of last night, Tuesday, I've watched all three seasons. I'm completely caught up with the show.

Its amazing really, to see in 4 days what most other people took 3 years to watch. It's really a good way to watch television, because with a well-written episodic show, everything from earlier on in the season and earlier on in the series is fresh in your mind. Ari never says "Let's hug it out, bitch" any more.

Good show. Next up, watching the complete first season of Heroes.

Google has a cool new maps feature that lets you create your own maps and save them.

Here are all the cities and countries I have ever visited.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&om=1&msid=111478126673139393355.00000111c2daad45666d3&z=2&ll=44.087585,-3.867187&spn=144.363001,326.953125

Very interesting.

I'm sitting here at work, listening to the Best of Tears for Fears on my iPod. Oh my god, their songs are so good. They're now one of my favourite groups from the 1980's and 1990's.

Most underrated group of the 80's I say.

From time to time I get an idea... what if I created a little web site that does X? I often register what I think is a really neat domain name for it, and put a little web page up. Now sometimes it doesn't amount to much, and other times it gets quite involved. But the biggest pain for me has always been hosting.

This site is hosted by some friends of mine, and I am very grateful for their generousity. If you are a small or medium sized business and need a really cool web site done, head over to Cardinal Factor at http://www.cardinalfactor.net/ for web development. Check out their portfolio - I am really impressed at the work they have done.

But for me, I want something really cheap and easy for my http://www.scottsnextstupididea.com/ site. So I found a nice little host, called HostMonster.

Basically, HostMonster offers 2000 GB a month of transfer and unlimited domains and subdomains against your account. I could register 100 domain names and create 100 little 5 page web sites and they are all hosted under the one account, and for rock bottom prices. $6 a month cannot be beat.

Anyways, I've had a couple of friends ask about hosting, and so this is what I'd recommend. If you use the above link when signing up, I get a little cut and I will happily meet you for coffee or lunch (I'll pay) to find out what cool things you have been doing recently.

The hot new thing in blogging is this thing called Twitter. Twitter allows you to enter one sentence to let people know what you're up to. It's like a blog, without having to come up with a lot of witty things to say and form them into proper paragraphs.

After the success of my Office 2007 upgrade, I had been itching to upgrade to Vista.

Vista has an Upgrade Advisor Tool and it is well recommended. The Upgrade Advisor told me my system would be able to run Vista. It did point out a couple of issues, one of which stopped me from installing right away.

The computer I wanted to install Vista on has two physical drives, a C: drive with 15GB total space, and an E: drive with 250GB total space. The Upgrade Advisor said I did not have enough space on my C: Drive to run Vista. That worried me, because what was I going to do?

The other issue UA warned me about was that my video card did not support Aero Glass. I was disappointed.

Those two issues stopped me from installing Vista for a little bit, but one night I was listening to the Windows Weekly Podcast with Paul Thurrott. This Podcast had me so excited to try Vista that I said I would install it anyways, Upgrade Advisor be damned.

Now during the actual install, I thought I had the disk space problem licked. Vista asked me which drive I wanted to install it to, and I picked E:. Whooo!

Except, during the install, Vista started filling up my remaining free space on C:. It uses C: as its temp drive! Argh! Basically, I needed 5-6GB free space on C: just to install on E:. Good thing I had some free space.

After the install was done, Vista was looking great. I updated a few drivers, including my audio and video drivers to the latest version. And swapped in a newer video card I had from another computer, so now I can run Aero.

Basically, Vista is a prettier Operating System. I can see how the Mac-zealots say that Microsoft copied the look from OSX, although somehow I like Vista and not OSX. Microsoft has done it right, and the pretty graphics grew on me.

There's not much reason to upgrade except for the prettier UI. XP was pretty good, but Vista is a bit better.

I received a box of DVDs from Microsoft as part of my Microsoft Partner subscription, and one of them was the latest version of Office. I'm a sucker for upgrading for no reason, so I popped in the DVD and let it work its magic on my computer.

Now I don't use every component of Office in my everyday work, but the three programs I do use (Word, Excel and Outlook) got complete face lifts.

The big innovation in this release is the ribbon. The ribbon has been getting a lot of press and deservedly so. It seems to have been designed with significant thought and intention. It's like a group of usability experts got into a room and said, we're going to design an intelligent toolbar. Things the user is most likely to do should be prominent and hard to miss. Things should also be grouped together logically. And when the user does something, it should intuitively change.

This is the new ribbon toolbar for sending an email in Outlook:

Compare this to the old way Outlook used to look:

Its a vast improvement, not only from an asthetic perspective, but also in usability.

I highly recommend upgrading to Office 2007. And NO, Vista is not required for the upgrade.