My view of the world

I just finished building a computer for a friend.
It cost him $3k in parts, I spent at least 6 hours researching the parts I put in this box. It has an AMD fx60 cpu, 2 gig of top end corsair memory, an ATI x1900xtx, a pair of 10,000 rpm SATA 150 gig raptors, as a single 300gig drive in raid 0, it has a 500 watt power supply and the case has more lights than a casino (the case is not my fault).
This was the only case he could find, on the shelf, with a large enough power supply.
The fans all have lights, the see-through power supply has lights and the front of the case has lights on the corners in addition to the power and hard drive lights and the cables all glow in the dark, in a lovely lime green.

This machine was built specifically to run one game, Oblivian. He found one of the only copies in town, at Fry’s, nobody else had a copy.
I thought this machine was overkill, but as it turns out, when you max out all the settings on the game, the machine bogs down.
They took 4 1/2 years to develop the game engine and graphics, I’m told that the AI is the most advanced in the industry and the NPCs interact within wider parameters and fewer repeating dialog sets than in any game in history.
I run Doom 3 and Half-life 2, they are processer intensive and pretty well max the ATI x850 video card, but they are not on a par with this new one.
Oblivion looks to be the cutting edge for at least the next year.

The workmen next door are doing a good job on the roof, so I guess I was wrong about them never having done this before.

Inbred, mongoloid, idiots still rule the roads in Las Vegas.

I’ve got the usual website, design problems. The client starts out with a really simple project and then complicates it and now I’m waiting for the new data.

I finally got the curved corners with no image slicing using css to work, with and without javascript. “With” is much easier.

And I am still firmly convinced, that the rest of you are crazy.
After all, sanity, is strictly a matter of opinion and the rest of you are crazy.

I was watching the workmen tearing the wooden shingles off the neighbor’s house this morning.
When the garbage people dropped the dumpster off, the owner of the house had them stop about 10 feet from the eaves. Which means, the guys on the roof have to load the shingles on to a tarp and then two of them carry it down a ladder, down the driveway a few feet and then lift it into the dumpster.
Is it just me or does this sound like these guys have never done this before?
The odds are, that these guys are illegals, there’s no contractor, and they showed up in one of those little trucks with 3 in the cab and 4 in the bed.
On the upside they were working their butts off, on the downside, I don’t think they’ve ever reshingled a roof before, this should be interesting.
It’s sad commentary when you can’t afford to hire a contactor for something like a roof, but these guys will use the same materials and pay retail and still beat a licensed contractor’s price by at least 50% and as long as they get the tar paper down right, the new roof will last just as long.

There’s something wrong with this whole picture.
A contractor would probably use these same guys to do the work, because to be competitive, a small contractor can’t afford to use union labor.

I was coming into work this morning and in spite of light traffic, the Boulder highway was slow.
I know the phrase “lost tourist” is redundant, but what in the world are they all doing on the road that early.
There was a semi-truck from one of the tire companies, with Colorado plates, that had no idea where he was going, next to him were a couple who were gawking at the sign in front of Arizona Charlie’s and right behind the tourists was a guy with a small pickup truck loaded with what appeared to be lighting fixtures. The little truck was trying to get over to the right, but the tourists were doing about 30 in a 45 and the semi kept hitting his brakes. I was behind this mess trying to figure out what these fools were doing, while traffic kept piling up.
I let the little truck in and he made his turn, the semi finally found the right driveway and the lost tourists were last seen wandering aimlessly in the center lane.
I understand why some people refuse to leave their house.

Do you ever talk to the other drivers? I do, everything from profanity to snide comments about their ability to operate a motor vehicle. It doesn’t make a difference, but sometimes it makes me feel better.
I did have one guy follow me home after I waved and gave him the universal sign for “have a nice day”, a single raised finger. Nothing came of it, but yelling seemed to make him feel better, although getting out of his car didn’t seem to be an option.

We have 5 to 6 thousand people a month moving to Vegas, not to mention the millions of visitors, all trying to use roads that were designed to handle 0ne tenth the traffic.
The strip looks like downtown Manhattan, and the roads crossing the strip are bumper to bumber, but, the worst area is the spagehtti bowl, where the two main freeways cross. This mess was obviously designed by Pinky and not the Brain.

I’m also firmly convinced that in this valley, they now give an IQ test at the DMV and if you fail, they give you a drivers license.

Nothing’s going to decrease the sheer number of cars on the road, road rage is becoming more and more common and idiots will continue to drive like idiots.
That’s life in the big city.
End Rant

Someone I know just put up an emploees only forum and is going to be terribly disappointed.
The theory is that the emploees will use the forum for gossip, news and information. Unfortunately most of the employees are computer illiterate, they understand the telephone, but very few of them use a computer anywhere but work, so they are not comfortable putting things in writing, when they could just pick up the phone and call.
I understand the intent, but I find the basic concept of a small company relying on a forum to be funny.
These people don’t use blogs, they only use a computer for accounting because they have to, they don’t use IM and for the most part, they never check their email.
The company needs a very specific reason for this forum.
The theory is, if they use this forum, they won’t be misunderstood (Yea, right……most of them can’t spell and very few of them articulate well), the data will stay around forever, unless the admin doesn’t like it, in which case it will disappear.

We’ve all seen this before, when you go to a large forum, you see the same names over and over.
With larger companies it’s a great idea if you have enough people and tech support isn’t needed yesterday, problems can be discussed and suggestions can be made, unfortunately, even in large, computer-centric companies, only a fairly small percentage actually participate.

Have you ever noticed that at meetings very few people say anything except in agreement with what someone else just said.
The basic problem is human nature, most people are sheep and won’t express themselves no matter what the subject.
When you combine sheeple with technology they are not comfortable with and you get deafening silence.

Still, in spite of the incredibly small number of people who might have something to say and the inconvenience of having to check the bloody thing every day, this experiment might work. All they have to do is find a reason for people to want to participate, it needs to be fun, or at least interesting.
I wish them luck.

I have an idea.
I’ll suggest a party with free food and booze, but only people who post to the forum get to go. If they think this is a good idea, I’ll join as a consultant and post something right away.

In the stats for this site, I noticed quite a few hits from Canada, the UK and Australia, but suprisingly the fifth country down on the list is Israel, followed closely by Germany and the Netherlands.
The reason I find Israel to be surprising is that, given the total population, a very large percentage of households that must have computers in order to generate traffic for a site like mine.
I would also assume that the reason for the larger number of visitors from Europe and Israel is the language, since a large number of people speak at least some English and an even larger number recognise the letters of this alphabet.
As an example, if I read something in German, Dutch, French or Spanish, I can figure most of it out and run for a dictonary for the words I don’t know, but if the message is in Hebrew or Arabic my current setup won’t even display the language properly.
The world is getting smaller because of the current state of communications, the internet is the ultimate instant messenger, where else can you piss off an entire continent with the singe push of a button.
Even the language differences are slowly disappearing because of the net, with English becoming the most common form of communication.

Mean while back at the ranch, one of the people I’ve actually had some face time with, wrote asking a question I couldn’t answer, because he wrote it in the Cyrillic alphabet, and while my machine will display this alphabet properly, I had to look closely at the headers to just to figure out which language it was and then who might have sent it… Putz

As a side note, I want to thank the people who’ve sent comments, then translated them into English and resent them.
The comments and the extra effort are appreciated.

I have received several comments via my contact form, it’s at the upper right and is labeled “your input”.
At first I got the usual collection of spammers, now, most of them seem to have given up, at least for the next few minutes. But I’m getting comments from g-mail accounts, that apparently have links attached. When I click on these links I get a server cannot be found page, whether this is due to email filtering, my using firefox instead of IE or g-mail being misconfigured, I don’t know.
G-mail is still in the Beta stage and looks like it will be a while longer, so this could just be a bug.
I do on occasion receive spam at my normal email addys from g-mail accounts and those links always seem to work, so it could be that there’s something in my contact form that’s not sending the complete link.
Whatever the cause, this absolutely breaks my heart. I mean, after all, how’s a guy supposed to get through the day without following a random link to a site that generates pop-ups, pop-unders and demands money so you can see more of the same?
If anyone wants me to see a link they should just type the complete url without the href and if it looks interesting I’ll take a look.

The ongoing battle with Google and their page rank continues.
I started as a page rank 0, then I showed a page rank 4. I just checked the Google data centers and found that on 12 of them I’m a pr 4 and on 8 of them I’m a pr 0. Another site I checked shows a pr2 on eight datacenters and a pr3 on twelve.
The pr of this blog makes no difference to me or anyone else, but the way Google has things buggered, it could make a major difference to any commercial website. They can’t even be consistant among their own datacenters.
I know that they are continually changing the algorithm, partly to try and outsmart the spammers and I’m quite certain it’s partly to make sure that the people who buy Google ad words rank higher than the rest of us. But you would think that they could keep some sort of equity among their own datacenters.
I don’t even pretend to understand what they’re doing, for all I know a page rank 5 in Nevada is a supposed to be page rank 2 in Maine.

I know that if you want a page rank 7 you pretty much have to buy links.
Google says some interesting things in their section on page rank, but on the whole they need to rewrite those pages every time they do the infamous Google Dance and as long as they continue to measure the value of links the way they do, to get a really good pr you have to lay out a bunch of cold, hard cash, some to Google and some to the sites who already have great page rank.

I guess what we all need to remember is that Google is not evil they are a commercial endeavor, they’re in it for the money and they are not there for our benefit.