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Dressing as a priest seemed fitting for a heretic like me.

Heather and I are off for an evening of fun at KUFO Paranormal Party 8 at the Crystal Ballroom.

Several years ago while Heather and I were still living in Milwaukee we happened across this odd business called Yes Men. I used to pass their Farwell Ave storefront every day on my commute from Shorewood to MSOE, where I was a student at the time, and I had always wondered what the deal was with them. They never seemed to be open and their storefront gave no real indication of what they did. In addition to appearing to never be open their windows were shuttered so you could not look inside the space. One day out of curiosity Heather looked up their phone number and tried to call them. Their answering machine message was equally obscure providing no real information about what went on there. Years go by and we still have wondered what the deal with them was. This week I accidentally happened across the answer.

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Enjoying the warm weather on the drive home.

Heather and I caught a sneak preview of Team America World Police tonight. The film stars puppets (ala Thunderbirds) who are locked in the global war on terrorism. The movie is irreverent, offensive, violent, and downright hilarious. I would suggest people catch it on the big screen while they can as the film is sure to incur a backlash from those who miss the satire. I think Parker & Stone’s Orgasmo is still their best work to-date; however, Team America would have to be a close second.

Last week I picked up a new Bluetooth dongle for my laptop in order to use my cell phone as a wireless modem while I was out of town. I ended up picking up a D-Link DBR-120 since I had recalled hearing good things about them (compared to the shitty Ambicom adapter I also have). I was pleased to find that it worked out of the box with the native Windows XP Bluetooth stack included in XP SP2 . The Microsoft stack works well allowing one to avoid all of the hoops necessary to configure and bond two devices when using the Widcomm (Broadcom) Bluetooth stack. Given the choice between the two I would use the Microsoft stack hands down as it provides a nice UI and it actually works - providing a USB like automagical experience when using Bluetooth devices on Windows.

This got me to thinking if it would be possible to make my Ambicom dongle work with the Microsoft Bluetooth stack. After uninstalling the Widcomm drivers I was using and rebooting I found Windows would detect the Bluetooth adapter but complained that it did not have a suitable driver to support it. Fortunately with a bit of Googling, I was able to find a way to make it work simply by altering the contents of the Windows bth.inf file. The info here at Jon’s Guides was pretty helpful to putting me on the right track. To make it work you simply need to add the applicable hardware IDs to the list of supported devices. Once this is done Windows will detect the adapter correctly and load the Microsoft Bluetooth stack. After the drivers are installed Bluetooth support is ready to use - in my case after bonding my Nokia 3650 phone to my PC (using the included wizard) I was able to fire up Nokia’s PC Suite and everything worked automagically.

In case anyone is curious here is how I edited the bth.inf file to support my Ambicom adapter:
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WordPress 1.2.1 was released today in response to a pair of security issues. I was pleasantly surprised to find it took more time to download the tarball than it did to upgrade my three hosted installations

Picking pumpkins.