Lottery Post Journal

Good news for Who fans!

The new album will be released at the end of this month.

I really hope this isn't like the Rolling Stones albums that get churned out.  Pete Townshend is such a talented song writer that I have hope.

Here's some really cool trivia that I thought of while writing this blog entry:  If the last Who album released was back in 1982, then this album will be the first one they've ever produced that didn't premier on vinyl LPs!  Because CDs first debuted in 1983, the last Who album was released an entire year before CDs even existed.  Holy mackerel, if that doesn't put things in perspective!

The new IE7 web browser (which I previously recommended that all IE users upgrade to) includes a feature called "Search Providers".

In the upper-right corner of the browser window there is a space to enter text, and a small search button and a "down-arrow".  It is a shortcut to quickly perform searches using your favorite search engine.

So you just tell it what search engine you use all the time (such as Google), and every time you enter text there and click the button, it immediately goes to your search engine and performs the search.  It is a nice time-saver.

Lottery Post fully supports that new IE7 feature, and allows you to set Lottery Post as your default search engine.

Even if you don't want to use Lottery Post as your default, you can save it in your search engine list, so going to Lottery Post and performing a search is as easy as entering the search terms, clicking the down-arrow, and selecting "Lottery Post".  Again, a nice time-saver.

When using IE7, you will know that a web site supports the Search Providers feature because the down-arrow next to the search button will glow orange, like this:

When you see that, you can add that site's Search Provider to your list by clicking the glowing down-arrow, and selecting "Add Search Provider".  In fact, if you're using IE7 right now, look up at the top of this page and you'll see it.

Right now the Lottery Post Search Provider is used to search the forums.  In the future, I will add search providers to the other areas in Lottery Post as well, such as blogs.

By the way, Firefox also supports a Search Providers, and Lottery Post has supported that feature from the beginning, so you can do exactly the same thing if you use Firefox.  I previously posted about it here: https://www.lotterypost.com/thread/129103.htm

If you are a user of Microsoft IE version 6 or lower, I urge you to upgrade.  IE7 is just wonderful -- a vast improvement over what you're using today.

It's a free download, and very easy to install.

After installing things that you should immediately familiarize yourself with:

• Tabbed browsing -- have multiple browser sessions open within one window.
• RSS feeds -- have web sites tell you when new information is available, rather than having to check everything yourself.  I can't stress enough how important this feature is.  Once you get a library of feeds working for you, you will want to see that  symbol on every web site.

You can see more information about IE7 here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/

Or, you can go straight to the download page here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads/default.mspx

Today when I did a search for "lottery post" on Google, I got a pleasant surprise.

Google has made Lottery Post one of its premium sites by showing the Lottery Post listing with its top page categories broken out underneath.  It's something Google does when a web site is not only popular, but also has achieved a certain high status among all sites of its type.

Here is the Google listing:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=lottery+post

Anyone who has watched Battlestar Galactica will have heard this song in the second episode of season 2.

This evening I finally figured out where the song came from.  It was difficult to locate, as it is not on the soundtrack.

Very haunting and beautiful, see if you agree...

Click here to download 

(Large file - approx. 9MB)

By the way, anyone who has not watched Battlestar Galactica is depriving themselves of one of the best shows in years.

This is a follow-on the a forum post located here: https://www.lotterypost.com/thread/142461.htm

I located a web site that has photographs somebody took of his screen, which shows the difference between standard DVD movies and the new HD-DVD format. 

Note, HD-DVD is not the same thing as Blu-Ray, which is actually a competing high definition format.  The average Circuit City salesperson would confuse the issue, depending on which type of player they want to sell that day, but understanding that they are two distinctly different formats (HD-DVD and Blu-Ray) is important before making a purchase.  In my opinion, HD-DVD is better right now.

Anyway, back to the comparisons of HD-DVD to standard DVD (the type of DVD player that is right now hooked up to just about everyone's TV).

The photographs are good, in that they provide a good illustration of how that regular DVD picture -- which everyone, including myself, thought was so awesome -- looks like it has a blurry haze over it, compared to HD-DVD.  The pictures obviously cannot help someone understand the differences in sound quality, but from someone who owns both technologies, I can attest that the sound is improved at least to the same degree that the video is improved.

The interesting thing about the photos is that the person's video projector used to project the movie in the photos is not even displaying the HD-DVD video in the native 1080i or 1080p resolution, so it is being downconverted to whatever maximum resolution his projector supports.  That means the video, when shown with an appropriate TV or projector, will look better than what is shown, with a more striking comparison to standard DVD.

Here is one of the comparisons, taken from the movie Troy.  For the ladies's benefit I have posted a Brad Pitt comparison.

Pretty amazing, huh?  It's like the standard DVD had the camera out of focus.  I can tell you, it really does make a difference, especially for people with larger TV sets or projectors.

The rest of the comparison can be found here.  You can find a previous comparison the same person did with the movie Seabiscuit here.