So this weekend brings news that our wonderful government is planning on bailing out yet another bank. Really? I guess the fact that this tactic failed the first half dozen times or so doesn’t mean it won’t work this time around, right? Oh but wait despite what it sounds like there are some fresh tactics, only it’s not what we need but rather what the people who stand to lose the most actually want: ...
Today the US Congress rejected the Financial Bailout Plan as put forward by the Bush Administration. While they are vowing to restructure the bill and get another vote going when they return from recess later in the week, I believe the idea has summarily died. The concept of bailing out the financial wizards who claimed that effectively turning debt into a form of currency via securities was risk-free is a disheartening concept to most. This is understandable. However others seem to believe that regardless of who directly benefits, this bailout was required in order to save our economy. ...
So ever since Tuesday, I’ve had some rough stomach problems. I’ll spare you the sloppy details, suffice to say that I’ve been spending most of this week at home trying to work my way through it all. Sometime in the last few days, I found a wonderful video series on YouTube called, “You Suck at PhotoShop”. This series of ten videos are essentially at their core, tutorials for how to use PhotoShop for advanced image manipulation. However this rich content is encased in the author’s hopefully fictional drama, his hatred for you and the rest of humanity in general and a biting rhetoric that surprises even assholes like myself. ...
So I was doing a bit of surfing from my new server (see my previous post) and I happened to check out South Park Studios for an list of current South Park episodes, and I got this tasteful tidbit for my trouble: Now that is some funny shit. It’s good to see that South Park Studios really is designed in the same spirit as the show it showcases. That gave me a good laugh for the day. I figure it will either piss you off or make you laugh and if it is the former, get over it already hippie.
So it has finally happened. What you say? My old server that I was using for everything here at home, has finally been replaced. No it didn’t break or fail in some way. After 5 years of good dedicated service (4.5 of which were trouble free), it was just time to move on to another box. Of course this had nothing to do with the fact that for this old Dual P4-Class Xeon box, upgrading the RAM from one gig to at least two gigs would cost me at least a thousand dollars. RDRAM ain’t cheap nowadays. Can’t say I’m surprised given how bad it bombed in the long run. ...
Let’s start this post with a bit of background information: For starters, in late 2006, I purchased a Tivo Series 2 DVR and replaced my Cable Company’s PVR with it. Since it was a Series 2 DVR, I was no longer able to receive digital or HD cable stations, but that was okay because at the time having a PVR that actually worked correctly consistently (yes Moxi I am looking at you) was more important than high definition. ...
So it seems that I’m not the only retro-gamer out there wishing for more of the good old days of gaming. One of my all time favorite RPG series, Fallout is typically revered as a pinnacle of the CRPG experience. That having been said, it appears that an enterprising soul has taken it upon himself to add missing content that the devs cut and make a number of other mods to Fallout 2 and release them for public consumption: ...
So of course I’m still gaming. Pretty decently too. Over the last year I managed to snag a Wii. The Wii is a pretty cool piece of equipment. However my mainline gaming interest has stayed with RPG gaming. Over the course of the last year I’ve played and beaten a number of games (some not for the first time either) such as all three Gothic games, Baldur’s Gate 1 (still working up to actually playing through 2), Neverwinter Nights 1 (almost finished but dropped at the end), Oblivion (Morrowind was better), KOTOR 2 (which was great until the last 4th of the game) as well as a number of other classics like Chrono Trigger. ...
Yeah it’s been awhile. I’ve been busy. I just finished spending a full month with the newly released Windows Vista and boy do I have quite a bit to say about it. To put a long story short, I’m now using Windows XP once again. As most of you imaginary readers know, Vista is in and of itself a culmination of over five years of effort on the part of Microsoft to follow up on their previous consumer OS release, Windows XP. Though controversial, due to its newfound copy protection, Windows XP is widely considered to be the latest success in the line of ever evolving operating systems produced by the software giant of Redmond, Washington. ...
That title pretty much sums up the state of my website, does it not? I still keep an eye on it and obviously I have secured some form of hosting for it since moving into my first home, though I have yet to actually do anything with it. I guess it takes two ingredients to keep a site going: Hosting and somebody producing some sort of content. As you can imagine, I have been quite busy. Not only with the house but with work as well. The house has become a pretty accepted part of life. I have gotten into the habit of mowing the lawn once a week, tending to the hedges as they outgrow my perception of the volume that should be occupying, whacking weeds and taking potshots at the neighbors noisy dog(s) with the hose whenever the opportunity presents itself. Work has been hectic. There seems to be a stream of work and less and less time in which to do it. Our company seems to have slipped into the terrible habit of overselling software so to speak. While this tends to work to our advantage more often than not when it comes to time and material projects, it becomes a real burden on flat rate projects. I am working on at least one project that has ballooned to occupy a large chunk of my time over the last two years despite the fact that it was originally supposed to last less than a year. ...