Mark Poppen

A while ago I entered a “Comment to win” on Andy Sowards’ blog. The assignment was: post the best comment on “Why you should win the Canvas or Business cards”. UPrinting supported the contest by giving away 1000 business cards or a 24″ x 18″ printed canvas.

I posted this comment:

I already have a stack of business cards, so I’d got for the canvas.
I think it will look pretty professional if I have a canvas on the wall of my office with my company logo on it. I’ll add a little tag with the text “brought to you by @andysowards”, like they have in art galleries.. but without a price

Andy thought that was worth the canvas, so a few weeks later I got in this gorgeous print, provided by the awesome UPrinting

Image 1 to 3: how the canvas was wrapped (good job guys!)
4th image: The canvas!
The 5th image is to illustrate how big it is. The dot in the middle is a Canadian 2 dollar coin.
The last image is to show that I kept my promise.

torrent episode downloader

Huh? Doesn’t that sound a bit personal? Don’t worry, I’m not going to bother you with my personal life too much, but I met ted today, and he’s my new BFF.

Since my wife and I moved to town in June, we didn’t bother getting TV here. We have a TV, but it’s just hooked up to my computer. We’ve been talking about getting a satellite reciever, so we can sit on the couch and zap through 3 zillion channels to find out nothing interesting is on, or just watch 0.001% of all the available channels, so no TV for now.

Like I said, ted.. ted is an awesome little, lightweight program that sits in your system tray, waiting for new episodes of your favorite TV-show to come out on a bittorrent network. When it finds a new episode, it opens up your favorite torrent-client and downloads that episode. It comes with a list of preset popular TV-shows, so all you have to do is browse. If there’s a show missing, you can easily add it to the list.
Right now I’m monitoring: Heroes, Bones, Flashpoint, NCIS, Numb3rs and Top Gear.

The only downside of ted is that you can’t download sports-events. I’d like to download formula 1 races as soon as they are available. Maybe in the next version?

I’m a big music fan. The type of guy that gets goosebumps from live performances, lumps in his throat when somebody nails a high note in a Queen/Freddie Mercury-song and (something that drives my wife nuts) one who needs to know the artist’s name and title of a track before he goes to bed.

Thanks to @KathleenLD I got to see another cool thing. Ok, it didn’t give me goosebumps, nor did it make me cry, but this is freakin’ awesome! (I know, old clip yadda yadda, but I hadn’t seen it before).