Here's one for ya. Back in my autosound installer days I had a good repeat customer who was a long-haul truck driver, used to drive for car shows, CES, big corps, stuff like that. Needless to say his truck was all top notch. N'way, he one day brings in an airhorn from a diesel-electric locomotive. It was HUGE, something like 10'-12' in length if memory serves me right. He wanted to know what we could do with that. Well, much bracket fabricating, some pluming, a solenoid and a few Boch relays and a homebrew triple 5 timming cicuit later I had that dude mounted under the cab and running off of the factory horn button for manual and in conjuction with the timmer circuit off of his alarm. Good thing my sister was the cop on duty in that area that day when I had to explain what was upsetting the neighboring shopkeepers;-) I believe it took just shy of three minutes to deplete the aux air tank with the enjine shut off.
Because my wife and I didn't work very hard at becoming debt free before the IT job market iploded, taking me along with it, our last few christmases have been as thin as yours and not by choice.
Things are coming together now though so I think I'll take your advice and have a few more thin christmases but by choice. Thanks.
OS X and Linux (Slackware, thanks very much!), Honda Element (basic, simple utilitarian truck-like thing, Dodge Dakota 4X4 (Thought it was a nice little truck utilitarian thing but is hungry gas fiend that doesn't get from A - B any better than the Honda would've...)
Re:Someone had to say it...
on
The Year In Ideas
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Oh how about...
Could you imagine BOFH getting hold of a Beowulf cluster of these?
Canned Tornado + Bosses chair = fun!
on
The Year In Ideas
·
· Score: 1
Hmmmm, I know a particular executive I work for as a vendor whos office chair I'd love to install one of those windhexes beneath. Ohhhh yeah, Just fire that baby up via some sort of remote during our next "Tiger Team Meeting Quality QA1 A-OK" goddamned corporate browbeating conference call. "Bla blaaa bla bla blaaa" WHOOSH! Then, beautiful silence ensues. Glee!
Or I could just settle for filling her crack with molten rock-gravy. Yup, great ideas indeed!
In a fit of rage induced by two weeks (~20hrs a day, 7 days a week) of fruitless coding and the pressures of a particularly stupid PHB (I think he was a DM for a car stereo shop chain in his previous employ...) mine got the fist of god. Keys flew and that just had me grab the thing and pound the edge of my desk with it a few times. I swear I heard things crack. Mind you, this thing had gotten a coffee enima before and was already two years old.
Well, after that I realized that it was the only working kyb I had and my work was still undone. I spent the next hour or so putting it back together. The spacebar was a little wonkey and popped out once in awhile but other than that it worked fine. Good thing I was working from home then or else that outburst would probably have gotten me a nice security guard escort out of the building.
It's demise was finaly my wife. She tossed it in one of her (much forbiden) cleanings of my den of geekery. It was still working when she tossed it. It had been sitting on a shelf as a spare. Oh, and the project, I had my part of it done the next day. Best damned temper-tantrum ever;-)
You seriously need to consider just where you are and what you're doing. I mean simply just look around you. What is comfortable to you? I used to have a constant 2-3 hour commute and after I got my first work-from-home J.O.B. I was sooooooo relaxed. Then I was bored. Then I found I had time I never before relized was stolen from me. Check out my old itenary:
6:30am get up, have coffee, converse with my family.
7:00am bathe
7:15am Kiss my wife goodbye
7:16am Play music, code, babysit my kids
8:30am Take my kids to scool
9:00am code my ass off, work, make calls, drive in for a few hours sometimes, once in awhile, if not wokr and enjoy the view. show that my work was done or up-to-date, take mnt bike rides from my doorstep ( I live near some sweet riding areas), never adhear to a dress code, cook good chilli whilst I work, call my friends and meet them for lunch, get bored or "blocked" and then be able to complete my work at 3am when I can't sleep... The list goes on.
WTF man? have you no sense of creativity or no ability of time management? Now, I don't have such luxeries and still work from home and am a district manager. I don't mean to be a dick but with bitches like yours I'd pull you into a cubicle in an Orange County half-breath.
My point, realize the time you have, relish it, make the best of it and enjoy it whilst you have it. Stop whining. I still work from home and now I never see home. If you want to hear bitch stories E me. You're lucky enough to get out and make your own time. Sorry to be rude but you have the proverbial keys, pinkslip and Ferrari. I envy you. Enjoy it whilst you can and be creative with your time.
We will need to parking lot that until we have more time to open up a dialog on it at our next Tiger Team Meeting. I'm certain that at that time we can get warm and fuzzy around the problem.
I admittedly didn't research every fscking handset on that anouncement site. The general fine print I did read on the BT handsets pretty much pointed to the Bluetooth phones, once again, being only for GSM/GPRS.
Sprint and Verizon, what gives? What the hell do you guys have against BT??? I work in the industry and have even queried a few manufacturer reps and higher-ups at the carriers and the results have been disparaging, to say the least. Reps scurry away quickly with hands firmly clamped over their ears screaming "HEAR NO EVIL! HEAR NO EVIL! No wana go to house of pain!" and the carrier suits just cast glaring, angered looks my way.
Whatever happened to that Sony-Ericcson T68-like tri-band CDMA handset that Sprint nearly adopted the first part of this year? The same one that anyone who did have knowledge of it seems to have now been lobotomized. Well, at least Sprint recognized that Bluetooth exists. Um, Verizon, there's this nifty little wireless technology that many of your customers would like to see in their handsets... Your competitors all have it for the most part but their networks pale in comparison. Um, did I mention it was wireless?;-P
Goddamnit you CDMA carriers! I want bluetooth! And not that stupid Motorola T270 strap-on bluetooth battery cover horseshit either! Ah, if only I could sync some sort of svelte little phone with my Palm or iSync on my Mac... SANS DATA CABLES! It's just plain frustrating. The good cables cost a kings randsome and the cheapies, sometimes they work and sometimes you piss away a weekend getting 'em to work.
Seriously though, if any of you fine folk out there in the industry know of any hope of a real BT/CDMA solution in the works then how about just a little tease, eh?
Yeh, yeh, go ahead and mark me as a troll but I honestly felt it needed to be said. Again. Really, all I want for Xmas is a CDMA/bluetooth phone. WAH! WAH! WAAAAAAH! Ahem.
Well, if there are auroras to be seen this far south we'll never see 'em.
I live in Riverside, CA, just 12 miles south of San Berdoo. We've not seen the sun in going on near a week. It's common to see the sun blotted out for 30 minutes or so at a time when fires happen but to see it gone for days at a time is strange to say the least. Right now, at 11:28pm it looks like a thick fog is moving through but it's smoke. Many of us with respitory problems are misserable to say the least.
It's not worth bitching about though after seeing what's happened in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mnts and much lower than that. You'd need to live here to apreciate just how far the fire has burned. It's gone clear out to La Verne and beyond, two couties away. That's about 26 miles in one line. Worse yet, the fire is just now getting to the edge of a thick forest that has much dry and dead wood due to restricted logging and a very bad bark beetle infestation. I go hiking, camping and mountain biking up there often and over the past few years, and have been doing so for the past 15 years, one can crest any hill and see acres and miles of brown where there was once green.
IMHO, it's environmentalism gone wrong. And now, there's many folks, some of whom I know personaly, out of a house. I've spent much time in the neighborhoods that have burned, These are not even places you'd expect to see get leveled but they have been. They're well out of the mountains and still, they've burned. As I write this I'm brushing bits of ash from my ibook keyboard and I don't even have the windows open. I'm not trying to be dramatic, just telling it as it is from the locals POV.
Odd stuff. I hope it ends fairly soon. I have friends directly afected by this who are now waiting it out in motels or friend and/or relatives places. I hope it all works out for them. BTW, one of the major hiways, I15, has been getting shut down almost daily. Many folks out here live out in the high desert above Cajon pass and commute that thing daily down to the valley for work. It's only about an added 45 minutes/45 miles to their drive but when it kills your work day it sucks. When we get bad snow up in the pass it sometimes gets shut down for part of a day or so but not usually for days at a time. I15 is a major artery between LA, Vegas, and beyond. I hope it all works out. I feel very fortunate I've not been affected other than crappy allergy problems. I really have nothing to bitch about for myself and feel kinda guilty.
Sorry for the rant, just trying to give a local's view of things.
I'm a recent convert. I got to Mac just because I hate windoze, love Linux, but hate even more how I kept blowing up my desktop box or wasting away entire weekends everytime I went in pursuit of the next shiny trinket that wasn't rolled into whatever the distro D'jour was. Needless to say, enter OS X. BTW, all I could afford at this time was an iBook 800 but I'm much happier now nonetheless. I still use Linux for my house server/NAT box/firewall etc.
So, yes, I too have an MD. Personaly, I think it's pretty neat. On Windoze (yes, I kept around an XP partition for awhile, mostly for just the MD or the occasionaly squirrely work required Orfice.doc Open Office could not handle. I have an windoze box around now 'cause work gave it to me - I feel so dirty...) I found the much-not-talked-about NetMD simple burner software that is on the same CD as that OpenMG atrocity. It worked quite well for simply ripping a CD, or tracks thereof, onto an MD. I also used to take MP3s and "burn" a CD image, usually much larger than 740MB, and then mount that image with a freebie 'doze CD image mounting tool and rip that virtual CD to MD.
All in all the sound quality was not as good as my 5GB iPod, sometimes very noticeably so, but still much better than tapes (remember those?) and, for the most important part, playable on a portable machine that if I destroyed it I'd be nowhere near as bummed as I would be if I had killed my iPod. I must also say that the battery life of that little thing and lack of skippage is quite good. The sound quality didn't bug me much because I used it when doing stuff like mowing the lawn our out mountain biking. Small headphones and low power kinda toss high quality sound out of the window in noisy environs. As for the biking, all it took was one yardsale (going over the bars and tossing all your stuff) with the ipod and scratching the bejesus out of it to get me using the MD for that activity. That little MD has been wrecked and beat to hell and still works fine. So, in short, the MD makes for a good little thrasher stereo. Kind of like a POS radio and speakers one would put in their beater work truck for a little entertainment noise, if one is into that sort of thing.
Now that I'm mostly Winfree I no longer have that MD option and miss it. I'm a clumsy bastard and just don't want to subject my ipod to the biking and yard-working tourtures anymore. I use my iPod mosty in lieu of a CD changer in my truck and it's enjoyable around the house with a good pair of headphones or jacked into my home stereo receiver.
I'd like very much to see Sony put out an OS X version of simple burner. As for DLing recorded tracks over USB from the MD I'll not hold my breath. That doesn't even exist in the PC world and folks have been asking for it since day one. Sony just poo-poos it even though many MD users have a valid and legal use for it. Ah well, their loss. It took 'em 10 years or so to start selling the damned thing en masse so it'll probably take another ten years to get truly good funtionality out of them for cheap. It'll come about the same time that they shit that proverbial diamond out of their collectively tight ass;-)
Once I procure a PB or some kind of G4 or better desktop I'll try the VirtualPC route. I've read a few times that it works. Seems a shame to polute perfectly good Mac with that stuff though;-)
This may mark the decline of free WiFi....
on
Interview With a Spammer
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I was hoping to read a little more about the WiFi quip. I'm assuming that the notion of a "drive-by spamming" has evolved to a reality.
I can't wait until I see the first 1975 rusted-out Chevy van festooned with soup, floppy disk and pringles can antennas galore, cabin lit by the pale glow of an LCD, go creeping through the neigborhood.
Oh great, I just realized something else. All the telcos and cable co's will finally be able to have their congressional butt-pupets legislate all of we pesky home WiFi users out of existence now. After all, we're too iresponsible/stupid/ignorant/lazy to do anything about security on our APs and so, can't be trusted with them. With all those unsecured APs out there on the user end of those thousands of DSL and cable connections acting as virtual spam-spots instead of hot-spots the internet will become an instant disaster! Oh the HUMANITY!
Anyway, soon after the telcos/cable co's save us all, yet again, from our own self inflicted demise we will be lining up at the retail outlets of [insert wireless carrier name of choice here] to sign up for service. It will be quite reasonable at ~$75/month for all you can eat or ~$20/month for say, a generous 500KB/month and then $5.00/minute after allowance usage. Oh, and it will be secure and guaranteed to work with Windoze. Only Windoze. So it can be secure...
Eventually, SCO will have Mother Teresa exumed and then sue her because she used the words "open" and "source" somewhere within her long timeline of existance.
This whole debacle is nothing more than an overly extended episode of stupid pet lawyer tricks. Yes, that's it! Merely "prole feed" on some obscure digital cable channel, way up above ch1900 or so....
Brand me as Troll-boy if you must, I guess I deserve it. But at least make me up a word that is analogeous (How to spell?) to being and athiest of Karma;-) Thanks, Late...
I think it's there so Mr. Lifto (dig around for your own pics damnit! I'm too lazy to link deep right now;-) can swing it around from his, uh, lifting points...
I'm 36. I like bikes. $5K is way too much scratch to pay for a scooter, IMO. For $5k I can get me a really nice mountain bike, a good road bike, a good commuter bike as well as a Bob trailer to haul stuff with. More than enough stuff to negate most short car trips. Oh, and for that kind of cash I can also get a nice laptop backback, a new iPod (not recomended cycling gear, use at your own risk), extra tubes, a good helmet, and perhaps a couple monthly train passes to help extend the range of my bike(s). You get the picture.
No, I'm no tree hugger. I just hate traffic jams and smogy air. I especialy dislike seeing so many SUVs (AKA living room on wheels) piloted by inattentive, rude, angry cellphone wielding moms contributing to said traffic jams. I've spent much time commuting by bike/train and by car to work in one of the worst commutes in Southern California and in all the road time I've spent over the years I've almost NEVER seen an SUV being used as a carpool vehicle. The usual population is one small woman driver doing anything but driving (usually eating/makeup/yacking on the phone. Simutainiously. Guys don't get off the hook either. They usually are working a laptop/shaving/eating/reading/phone yacking. Simutainiously...) and one small brat in the back cooing away at the built in Disney Brain Melting box, AKA video system.
Oh, yeh, back to the bikes thing. I see these same screwballs making short drives in their Denali/Expedition/Escalade/H2/Conquistadore 5000/whatever piece of shit all the time. When I say short I mean like from the next street over or up the block from me to the gym or market two miles away or the elementary school 1 block away! Now, if said people were to get a decent bike capable of hauling a few items and perhaps a kiddie trailer then they could make said short trips to the market for a few goods, maybe even drop the little one(s) at daycare or preschool. Do enough of those and they can do away with that SUV trip to the gym altogether.
Obviously the bike isn't an answer to all commuting/hauling needs, like a big trip to the market. I much prefer a pickup truck to one of my bikes when it comes to hauling home concrete and fenceposts from the hardware store 8 miles down the road. Bike commuting isn't for everyone and can be inconvienient. But I don't see many folks making any sort of effort to even try anything like I'm suggesting. Not many who are more than capable at least.
All I'm saying is give it a try once in awhile. Maybe even consider a bike commute or at least a carpool in your Urban Assault vehicle. I see quite a few old timers around here pushing those 60 plus pound tricycle things around at a good clip so I'm sure most of you can get your fat ass on a 25lb commuter bike with a rack and grocery basket on the back and get around for a couple of miles every couple of days. I'm sure you can also find someone within a few miles of you at both work and home ends of the work commute willing to try a carpool. At least hang up the phone and get fully dressed and fed before you hit the road. Perhaps you'll not run me over as you make your way to the freeway.
No, no, better yet just introduce your little food seeking furballs to the pleasures of a drier ride. It's like Magic Mountain but for our feline friends! I keep two cats and I can tell they just love it by the way they run around in circles, walk sideways and act all silly after a good drier ride. That and tossing a softening sheet in there makes them smell all springy-scent fresh and they're just oh so fluffy too! Good times;-)
***DISCLAIMER!***
Neither of my cats have ever actually riden in the drier or any other household apliance of mine for that matter, at least to my knowledge. There was that one time when my son was 5 and had been hanging out in the laundry room. The cat kept bumping into furniture and walls and he was laughin and I had thought I heard the infernal machine running briefly but that's it, I SWEAR! This is a posting of humor so please don't bother hunting me down and sicking animal control and a pack of flesh-eating lawyers on me. 'Nuff said, PEACE OUT!
4,000 dongs? No wonder that redheaded witch Ms. Rosen is so wound up about this whole MP3 thingie. Why, I think she should just get herself an iPod and lock herself in a room and STFU!
Yes, my dad would've said the same (but because the 'net as we know it now didn't exist back then this is all hypothetical) and I would've ACKed by grumbled something like "OK Dad" and then completely ignored him. Then he would've proceded to throttle me thereby throttling my bandwidth useage by proxy. I've never been any good at computer usage during a physical altercation. Thereafter he would simply have to issue the GET OFF THE DAMN COMPUTER command, I'd glady ACK and produce his desired result before he even completed his command and the much more difficult direct throttling method would be completely avoided.
My only complaint being that I was just about to throw down the gauntlet and get me a combo drive 12" iBook, bump it upto 256, add airport, and eventually find some sort of bluetooth dongle. But now with that 12" powerbook out there I might as well save a little longer. Nice, very nice. (Chuq mopes off to the corner with his curent, ancient laptop drooling and mumbling at the pretty powerbook pictures and feature list...)
I'm going to shove my Harbraces in a place that you don't want it. Damn the Brocholli, damn propper grammer (and spelling) and damn the Wright Brothers!
Exactly my point. Maybe one day most, or all, 'net access will be wireless. It may at least one day be ubiquitous enough for my scenario to take place and that would suck. So when we're all wired and most of what we buy is wired in some form or another just how do we go about thwarting the needless intrusions? It's one thing for those of us in the know but what of the unwashed masses? Before they catch on it'll be far too late to get the legal wheels into motion in any effective fashion. Think about it. If MS got away as they did do you think it will be very easy to take away from the big other corps what they snuck in under the wire? They've got lots more time and money than most of us and won't give up that sort of cash cow without some serious fighting. That's the sort of buffoonery I see in the near future. Anyway, it's all hypothetical and I'm just ranting from mere annoyance and from what I've seen done with tech advances by major corps over the past few years. I love the tech but hate in many cases what's being done with it by those who have the money to advance it. Nothing's free but I honestly feel that the balance between what we collectively give up and what we get in return is badly skewed towards what we must give up. Perhaps I'm wrong but common sense and current trends tell me otherwise. In the mean time, if I ever do get stuck with one of them thar hypothetical, newfangled, wireless 'net enabled refridgerators I'll just take to living from an ice chest and then stock the 'fridge with lots of stuff I'd never eat. Hmmm, I wonder if I can keep cleaning products and motor oil in there with no detrimental effects to the use of them? That should bake their noodles at least.00001%;-) Or I could just peel the damn RF tags from the products that enable the 'fridge to do it's inventory. Y'know, the ones we're gonna have soon and that will probably have something like "DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW" printed on them. I'll keep 'em with the mattress tag collection I've built up over the years.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's one for ya. Back in my autosound installer days I had a good repeat customer who was a long-haul truck driver, used to drive for car shows, CES, big corps, stuff like that. Needless to say his truck was all top notch. N'way, he one day brings in an airhorn from a diesel-electric locomotive. It was HUGE, something like 10'-12' in length if memory serves me right. He wanted to know what we could do with that. Well, much bracket fabricating, some pluming, a solenoid and a few Boch relays and a homebrew triple 5 timming cicuit later I had that dude mounted under the cab and running off of the factory horn button for manual and in conjuction with the timmer circuit off of his alarm. Good thing my sister was the cop on duty in that area that day when I had to explain what was upsetting the neighboring shopkeepers ;-) I believe it took just shy of three minutes to deplete the aux air tank with the enjine shut off.
Things are coming together now though so I think I'll take your advice and have a few more thin christmases but by choice. Thanks.
Um, I don't really know who originaly said that...
OS X and Linux (Slackware, thanks very much!), Honda Element (basic, simple utilitarian truck-like thing, Dodge Dakota 4X4 (Thought it was a nice little truck utilitarian thing but is hungry gas fiend that doesn't get from A - B any better than the Honda would've...)
Oh how about... Could you imagine BOFH getting hold of a Beowulf cluster of these?
Or I could just settle for filling her crack with molten rock-gravy. Yup, great ideas indeed!
Well, after that I realized that it was the only working kyb I had and my work was still undone. I spent the next hour or so putting it back together. The spacebar was a little wonkey and popped out once in awhile but other than that it worked fine. Good thing I was working from home then or else that outburst would probably have gotten me a nice security guard escort out of the building.
It's demise was finaly my wife. She tossed it in one of her (much forbiden) cleanings of my den of geekery. It was still working when she tossed it. It had been sitting on a shelf as a spare. Oh, and the project, I had my part of it done the next day. Best damned temper-tantrum ever ;-)
6:30am get up, have coffee, converse with my family.
7:00am bathe
7:15am Kiss my wife goodbye
7:16am Play music, code, babysit my kids
8:30am Take my kids to scool
9:00am code my ass off, work, make calls, drive in for a few hours sometimes, once in awhile, if not wokr and enjoy the view. show that my work was done or up-to-date, take mnt bike rides from my doorstep ( I live near some sweet riding areas), never adhear to a dress code, cook good chilli whilst I work, call my friends and meet them for lunch, get bored or "blocked" and then be able to complete my work at 3am when I can't sleep... The list goes on.
WTF man? have you no sense of creativity or no ability of time management? Now, I don't have such luxeries and still work from home and am a district manager. I don't mean to be a dick but with bitches like yours I'd pull you into a cubicle in an Orange County half-breath.
My point, realize the time you have, relish it, make the best of it and enjoy it whilst you have it. Stop whining. I still work from home and now I never see home. If you want to hear bitch stories E me. You're lucky enough to get out and make your own time. Sorry to be rude but you have the proverbial keys, pinkslip and Ferrari. I envy you. Enjoy it whilst you can and be creative with your time.
We will need to parking lot that until we have more time to open up a dialog on it at our next Tiger Team Meeting. I'm certain that at that time we can get warm and fuzzy around the problem.
I admittedly didn't research every fscking handset on that anouncement site. The general fine print I did read on the BT handsets pretty much pointed to the Bluetooth phones, once again, being only for GSM/GPRS.
;-P
Sprint and Verizon, what gives? What the hell do you guys have against BT??? I work in the industry and have even queried a few manufacturer reps and higher-ups at the carriers and the results have been disparaging, to say the least. Reps scurry away quickly with hands firmly clamped over their ears screaming "HEAR NO EVIL! HEAR NO EVIL! No wana go to house of pain!" and the carrier suits just cast glaring, angered looks my way.
Whatever happened to that Sony-Ericcson T68-like tri-band CDMA handset that Sprint nearly adopted the first part of this year? The same one that anyone who did have knowledge of it seems to have now been lobotomized. Well, at least Sprint recognized that Bluetooth exists. Um, Verizon, there's this nifty little wireless technology that many of your customers would like to see in their handsets... Your competitors all have it for the most part but their networks pale in comparison. Um, did I mention it was wireless?
Goddamnit you CDMA carriers! I want bluetooth! And not that stupid Motorola T270 strap-on bluetooth battery cover horseshit either! Ah, if only I could sync some sort of svelte little phone with my Palm or iSync on my Mac... SANS DATA CABLES! It's just plain frustrating. The good cables cost a kings randsome and the cheapies, sometimes they work and sometimes you piss away a weekend getting 'em to work.
Seriously though, if any of you fine folk out there in the industry know of any hope of a real BT/CDMA solution in the works then how about just a little tease, eh?
Yeh, yeh, go ahead and mark me as a troll but I honestly felt it needed to be said. Again. Really, all I want for Xmas is a CDMA/bluetooth phone. WAH! WAH! WAAAAAAH! Ahem.
Well, if there are auroras to be seen this far south we'll never see 'em.
I live in Riverside, CA, just 12 miles south of San Berdoo. We've not seen the sun in going on near a week. It's common to see the sun blotted out for 30 minutes or so at a time when fires happen but to see it gone for days at a time is strange to say the least. Right now, at 11:28pm it looks like a thick fog is moving through but it's smoke. Many of us with respitory problems are misserable to say the least.
It's not worth bitching about though after seeing what's happened in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mnts and much lower than that. You'd need to live here to apreciate just how far the fire has burned. It's gone clear out to La Verne and beyond, two couties away. That's about 26 miles in one line. Worse yet, the fire is just now getting to the edge of a thick forest that has much dry and dead wood due to restricted logging and a very bad bark beetle infestation. I go hiking, camping and mountain biking up there often and over the past few years, and have been doing so for the past 15 years, one can crest any hill and see acres and miles of brown where there was once green.
IMHO, it's environmentalism gone wrong. And now, there's many folks, some of whom I know personaly, out of a house. I've spent much time in the neighborhoods that have burned, These are not even places you'd expect to see get leveled but they have been. They're well out of the mountains and still, they've burned. As I write this I'm brushing bits of ash from my ibook keyboard and I don't even have the windows open. I'm not trying to be dramatic, just telling it as it is from the locals POV.
Odd stuff. I hope it ends fairly soon. I have friends directly afected by this who are now waiting it out in motels or friend and/or relatives places. I hope it all works out for them. BTW, one of the major hiways, I15, has been getting shut down almost daily. Many folks out here live out in the high desert above Cajon pass and commute that thing daily down to the valley for work. It's only about an added 45 minutes/45 miles to their drive but when it kills your work day it sucks. When we get bad snow up in the pass it sometimes gets shut down for part of a day or so but not usually for days at a time. I15 is a major artery between LA, Vegas, and beyond. I hope it all works out. I feel very fortunate I've not been affected other than crappy allergy problems. I really have nothing to bitch about for myself and feel kinda guilty.
Sorry for the rant, just trying to give a local's view of things.
PEACE!
Chuck
I'm a recent convert. I got to Mac just because I hate windoze, love Linux, but hate even more how I kept blowing up my desktop box or wasting away entire weekends everytime I went in pursuit of the next shiny trinket that wasn't rolled into whatever the distro D'jour was. Needless to say, enter OS X. BTW, all I could afford at this time was an iBook 800 but I'm much happier now nonetheless. I still use Linux for my house server/NAT box/firewall etc.
.doc Open Office could not handle. I have an windoze box around now 'cause work gave it to me - I feel so dirty...) I found the much-not-talked-about NetMD simple burner software that is on the same CD as that OpenMG atrocity. It worked quite well for simply ripping a CD, or tracks thereof, onto an MD. I also used to take MP3s and "burn" a CD image, usually much larger than 740MB, and then mount that image with a freebie 'doze CD image mounting tool and rip that virtual CD to MD.
;-)
;-)
So, yes, I too have an MD. Personaly, I think it's pretty neat. On Windoze (yes, I kept around an XP partition for awhile, mostly for just the MD or the occasionaly squirrely work required Orfice
All in all the sound quality was not as good as my 5GB iPod, sometimes very noticeably so, but still much better than tapes (remember those?) and, for the most important part, playable on a portable machine that if I destroyed it I'd be nowhere near as bummed as I would be if I had killed my iPod. I must also say that the battery life of that little thing and lack of skippage is quite good. The sound quality didn't bug me much because I used it when doing stuff like mowing the lawn our out mountain biking. Small headphones and low power kinda toss high quality sound out of the window in noisy environs. As for the biking, all it took was one yardsale (going over the bars and tossing all your stuff) with the ipod and scratching the bejesus out of it to get me using the MD for that activity. That little MD has been wrecked and beat to hell and still works fine. So, in short, the MD makes for a good little thrasher stereo. Kind of like a POS radio and speakers one would put in their beater work truck for a little entertainment noise, if one is into that sort of thing.
Now that I'm mostly Winfree I no longer have that MD option and miss it. I'm a clumsy bastard and just don't want to subject my ipod to the biking and yard-working tourtures anymore. I use my iPod mosty in lieu of a CD changer in my truck and it's enjoyable around the house with a good pair of headphones or jacked into my home stereo receiver.
I'd like very much to see Sony put out an OS X version of simple burner. As for DLing recorded tracks over USB from the MD I'll not hold my breath. That doesn't even exist in the PC world and folks have been asking for it since day one. Sony just poo-poos it even though many MD users have a valid and legal use for it. Ah well, their loss. It took 'em 10 years or so to start selling the damned thing en masse so it'll probably take another ten years to get truly good funtionality out of them for cheap. It'll come about the same time that they shit that proverbial diamond out of their collectively tight ass
Once I procure a PB or some kind of G4 or better desktop I'll try the VirtualPC route. I've read a few times that it works. Seems a shame to polute perfectly good Mac with that stuff though
I can't wait until I see the first 1975 rusted-out Chevy van festooned with soup, floppy disk and pringles can antennas galore, cabin lit by the pale glow of an LCD, go creeping through the neigborhood.
Oh great, I just realized something else. All the telcos and cable co's will finally be able to have their congressional butt-pupets legislate all of we pesky home WiFi users out of existence now. After all, we're too iresponsible/stupid/ignorant/lazy to do anything about security on our APs and so, can't be trusted with them. With all those unsecured APs out there on the user end of those thousands of DSL and cable connections acting as virtual spam-spots instead of hot-spots the internet will become an instant disaster! Oh the HUMANITY!
Anyway, soon after the telcos/cable co's save us all, yet again, from our own self inflicted demise we will be lining up at the retail outlets of [insert wireless carrier name of choice here] to sign up for service. It will be quite reasonable at ~$75/month for all you can eat or ~$20/month for say, a generous 500KB/month and then $5.00/minute after allowance usage. Oh, and it will be secure and guaranteed to work with Windoze. Only Windoze. So it can be secure...
This whole debacle is nothing more than an overly extended episode of stupid pet lawyer tricks. Yes, that's it! Merely "prole feed" on some obscure digital cable channel, way up above ch1900 or so....
Brand me as Troll-boy if you must, I guess I deserve it. But at least make me up a word that is analogeous (How to spell?) to being and athiest of Karma ;-) Thanks, Late...
I think it's there so Mr. Lifto (dig around for your own pics damnit! I'm too lazy to link deep right now ;-) can swing it around from his, uh, lifting points...
Uhhhh, I can't understand it. I think it's in Fremch.
No, I'm no tree hugger. I just hate traffic jams and smogy air. I especialy dislike seeing so many SUVs (AKA living room on wheels) piloted by inattentive, rude, angry cellphone wielding moms contributing to said traffic jams. I've spent much time commuting by bike/train and by car to work in one of the worst commutes in Southern California and in all the road time I've spent over the years I've almost NEVER seen an SUV being used as a carpool vehicle. The usual population is one small woman driver doing anything but driving (usually eating/makeup/yacking on the phone. Simutainiously. Guys don't get off the hook either. They usually are working a laptop/shaving/eating/reading/phone yacking. Simutainiously...) and one small brat in the back cooing away at the built in Disney Brain Melting box, AKA video system.
Oh, yeh, back to the bikes thing. I see these same screwballs making short drives in their Denali/Expedition/Escalade/H2/Conquistadore 5000/whatever piece of shit all the time. When I say short I mean like from the next street over or up the block from me to the gym or market two miles away or the elementary school 1 block away! Now, if said people were to get a decent bike capable of hauling a few items and perhaps a kiddie trailer then they could make said short trips to the market for a few goods, maybe even drop the little one(s) at daycare or preschool. Do enough of those and they can do away with that SUV trip to the gym altogether. Obviously the bike isn't an answer to all commuting/hauling needs, like a big trip to the market. I much prefer a pickup truck to one of my bikes when it comes to hauling home concrete and fenceposts from the hardware store 8 miles down the road. Bike commuting isn't for everyone and can be inconvienient. But I don't see many folks making any sort of effort to even try anything like I'm suggesting. Not many who are more than capable at least.
All I'm saying is give it a try once in awhile. Maybe even consider a bike commute or at least a carpool in your Urban Assault vehicle. I see quite a few old timers around here pushing those 60 plus pound tricycle things around at a good clip so I'm sure most of you can get your fat ass on a 25lb commuter bike with a rack and grocery basket on the back and get around for a couple of miles every couple of days. I'm sure you can also find someone within a few miles of you at both work and home ends of the work commute willing to try a carpool. At least hang up the phone and get fully dressed and fed before you hit the road. Perhaps you'll not run me over as you make your way to the freeway.
As long as the last sound you hear is the ubiquitous flushing of a toilet then I'm all for this idea....
***DISCLAIMER!***
Neither of my cats have ever actually riden in the drier or any other household apliance of mine for that matter, at least to my knowledge. There was that one time when my son was 5 and had been hanging out in the laundry room. The cat kept bumping into furniture and walls and he was laughin and I had thought I heard the infernal machine running briefly but that's it, I SWEAR! This is a posting of humor so please don't bother hunting me down and sicking animal control and a pack of flesh-eating lawyers on me. 'Nuff said, PEACE OUT!
4,000 dongs? No wonder that redheaded witch Ms. Rosen is so wound up about this whole MP3 thingie. Why, I think she should just get herself an iPod and lock herself in a room and STFU!
Just the link alone to realbeer.com alone was worth it's weight in, um, beer. GLEE!
Yes, my dad would've said the same (but because the 'net as we know it now didn't exist back then this is all hypothetical) and I would've ACKed by grumbled something like "OK Dad" and then completely ignored him. Then he would've proceded to throttle me thereby throttling my bandwidth useage by proxy. I've never been any good at computer usage during a physical altercation. Thereafter he would simply have to issue the GET OFF THE DAMN COMPUTER command, I'd glady ACK and produce his desired result before he even completed his command and the much more difficult direct throttling method would be completely avoided.
My only complaint being that I was just about to throw down the gauntlet and get me a combo drive 12" iBook, bump it upto 256, add airport, and eventually find some sort of bluetooth dongle. But now with that 12" powerbook out there I might as well save a little longer. Nice, very nice. (Chuq mopes off to the corner with his curent, ancient laptop drooling and mumbling at the pretty powerbook pictures and feature list...)
I'm going to shove my Harbraces in a place that you don't want it. Damn the Brocholli, damn propper grammer (and spelling) and damn the Wright Brothers!
Exactly my point. Maybe one day most, or all, 'net access will be wireless. It may at least one day be ubiquitous enough for my scenario to take place and that would suck. So when we're all wired and most of what we buy is wired in some form or another just how do we go about thwarting the needless intrusions? It's one thing for those of us in the know but what of the unwashed masses? Before they catch on it'll be far too late to get the legal wheels into motion in any effective fashion. Think about it. If MS got away as they did do you think it will be very easy to take away from the big other corps what they snuck in under the wire? They've got lots more time and money than most of us and won't give up that sort of cash cow without some serious fighting. That's the sort of buffoonery I see in the near future. Anyway, it's all hypothetical and I'm just ranting from mere annoyance and from what I've seen done with tech advances by major corps over the past few years. I love the tech but hate in many cases what's being done with it by those who have the money to advance it. Nothing's free but I honestly feel that the balance between what we collectively give up and what we get in return is badly skewed towards what we must give up. Perhaps I'm wrong but common sense and current trends tell me otherwise. In the mean time, if I ever do get stuck with one of them thar hypothetical, newfangled, wireless 'net enabled refridgerators I'll just take to living from an ice chest and then stock the 'fridge with lots of stuff I'd never eat. Hmmm, I wonder if I can keep cleaning products and motor oil in there with no detrimental effects to the use of them? That should bake their noodles at least .00001% ;-) Or I could just peel the damn RF tags from the products that enable the 'fridge to do it's inventory. Y'know, the ones we're gonna have soon and that will probably have something like "DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW" printed on them. I'll keep 'em with the mattress tag collection I've built up over the years.