Snowman Studios
I came across
this link at work today while I was waiting for my computer to recover from crashing. If you are either a fan of military history or a gear head, read it. Nothing is funnier than a guy used to reviewing Porsche's and Hondas to review a tank...
Break was good and now it's time to return to work hard. Today was slow and go with the developing program dying on me about once an hour. Each time I'd walk down to the Systems guy and by the end of the day he ordered the memory my computer would need to run. It'll get there Thursday or Friday, just intime for the big move. That's the other thing that is going to kill productivity this week. Since I take my productivity there seriously, I am not happy about it all. I'm not angry or upset or anything, it's just that I want to 1) do my part for the company and 2) improve and show off my skills.
Elaborating further on Tuesday, I didn't really eat dinner that night. When I was back at NU doing late night work at the CS department, I'd go to Philly's Best to get food, then come back. But here, I was having to tell myself "there's no need to go somewhere else, all the food you could eat is right here in the freezer." It's definately something that requires a change of habits.
There was something else I was going to meantion about it, but I'll post it when it comes to me.
An addition to what I was saying about LCD screens. After looking at info on new NVIDIA chips, a lot of them seem to not have VGA ports at all (just DVI and S-Video). I don't know if this is something to support the LCD market (and the buying of new equipment while phasing out the old) or if it's a cost cutting thing (if DVI is the standard, and no one uses VGA then why spend the money on a VGA port).
Much has happened since my last update.
Monday I had my last small group for the season, and we had a potluck. It was very enjoyable and the socializing after was awesome. Didn't get back until around 11.
Tuesday I lazily got out for work as I was going to have to do my major update on the server after hours. It went well, but I only got about 80% of it done (but the last 20% will be easy) and I didn't finish until 11:30 PM.
Wednesday I went to the Optomitrist to get my eyes checked for a prescription. Things went well and with my glasses I will be able to see 20/15. I think they gave me some discounts on the glasses and such as I don't have any insurance to cover eye exams or glasses. When I went into work, I recieved praise for how smooth the whole updating process went. There was one hickup and there are some small issues, but those will be ironed out in the coming work days.
After work, I went out to look for a LCD monitor. My previous monitor was doing ok, but starting to show it's age. More importantly, I have heard that LCD screens are better for the eyes than CRT monitors. I don't know if it's related to it, but the picture is much crisper too. Also, my parent's monitor is in bad shape and if anyone has heard from me how computer upgrades work in this house (I buy it to replace mine, they get the hand-me-down) then they know how that works. What I ended up getting was a nice Sony 19". I hooked it up to my DVI connection on my video card and the picture is visibly better.
A game to re-create the
Kennedy assassination.... that's a new one. Brought to you by such loving developers as Traffic Games, makers of works of art like State of Emergency.
This
Bush picture had me laughing. Anyway, it's unfortunate that things didn't go so well in Chile.
This coming week at work is going to be crazy. I have no idea when I'll be going to bed on Tuesday night as I will be doing some major changes that need to be done all on Tuesday night. To make things more crazy, I have an appointment back near my home at 9:30 on Wednesday morning. Originally my plan was to take a pillow and crash in the office (somewhere) if I was there too late to drive home safely, but now I may have to revise my plan slightly.
So these past two weeks I was trying to get myself to work longer hours so that this coming week I would work normal hours and still get paid for thursday and friday. Well, it looks like I will have so much work that I will have no problem doing the 21 hours I need to do this week (I only managed 4 hours in advance).
"All fighters in Fallujah should surrender, and we guarantee they will not be killed or insulted."
-- American psy-ops message broadcast from Humvee-mounted loudspeakers "We ask the American soldiers to surrender, and we guarantee that we will kill and torture them."
-- insurgent response over mosque loudspeaker
In other news, many people resigned today. People are thinking that Rice would be a good replacement for Powell. Please, no... not that ditz...
Mini's website recieves my award for horrid site design. The criteria for such an award includes, but not is limited to:
- excessive use of flash
- pages unable to load because of said flash
- simple content takes minutes to navigate to
- site going down while searching
I have been told by an SUV driver that a STi is silly. I seem to have improved at not laughing when I don't want to.
And
less than half the state thought that he could fix everything...
A couple of months ago I was reading through a magazine I had come across. I was very bored and was despirate for something to read. While the magazine is not of lewd subject (it was about firearms), many of the ads had women in different states of undress, or would show the item in question with a portion of a woman's body that would be hard to capture without her being rather exposed, but again not showing nudity.
As one tends to read from the front to the back, I was reading through the letters to the editor. One was from a mom who ordered the magazine to make available for members of a boy scout troop, but was complaining that she was having to rip out many of the ads and would not resubscribe because of this. The editor's response was to say that anyone walking around any high school or jr high would see far worse (or better?) things than what they allowed in their magazines (there was also something about language, and I caught some things that would bug some but he said that the language was completely clean which was false).
My opinion of his response is that it's a cop-out response. First off, I wasn't seeing girls (or portions of girls) from my highschool at the same level of undress depicted in their ads. Granted, we had a uniform, but I was around public schools and people from public schools too. So, beyond the "any" part, I have yet to find a high school with such a level of exposure by female students. Granted, I have yet to visit an inner-city school.
Now it is definately possible that worse is exposed during non-school activities by high school kids from any high school (with a small exception, I mean the unfortunate reality of society today combined with the raging hormones of someone at that age), but that is not part of everyone's high school experience. For someone who
should be as knowledgable as an editor, it was a pretty dumb-assed response.
Deuce-Deuce.
Work went well today, and I have plans to eat dinner with my parents followed by meeting up with people from church tonight.
All in all, not a bad day.
Silly me, I thought 512 megs of DDR RAM and a 1.8 ghz processer would be plenty of power for doing software development outside of graphics.
The reality is that I don't have nearly the memory (1 gig apparently is the norm in the office) nor the processing power (I think much of that is from the slow motherboard; laptop motherboards are often 100 mhz to conserve power).
So tomorrow I should be starting to use one of the extra servers as my work machine. Apparently they had 6 or so machines doing the job of being a server. Now that we have a full-time systems engineer, he's freed up 5 machines (and I have claimed one of them). I will probably continue to take my laptop as it is generally nice to have either two monitors or a second machine when doing development work.
Today my two main concerns about the political situation are as follows:
1) Bush talks about wanting to restructure the taxes to make it more flat, but specifically does not want more revenue to be generated. The first concern in this is what is going to happen to the deficit. I mean, a government can not run a deficit forever. At some point a government must run a surplus to pay off the debt generated from a deficit. Some feel that is not the case, and that a government can have debt and the savings bonds and such are an example of the interest money being recirculated into the economy. But few Americans make any significant amount of money from these; most of those who do could also invest the same money in other areas (say, the economy... wouldn't it be nice to have that money invested there). Also, foreign investors can benefit from the debt. It sure makes me feel all warm and fuzzy knowing that my tax dollars are going into the pockets of rich people from Europe and Asia.
So to sum up, I don't know how the government can maintain it's current spending habits and not collapse. If they do plan on changing to a smaller deficit eventually (or just saying that the Democrats can do that when they get in power and seem like the bad guys), I would like to know their rational. If their goal is to make the government smaller, then cut spending in areas other than education.
2) I am enraged by the mis-use of religion and values by the Republicans. As it turned out, a large portion of the votes recieved were by people supporting Bush on his anti-gay stance (I want to hear Cheney's oppinion on this, I know it's different). But that's nothing knew, America has been known for being full of homophobes. Something like 80% of americans feel that gay people should not be allowed to marry. "It ruins the sanctity of marriage"... bullshit. When 50% of (married) americans have committed adultry and something like 50% of marriages end in divorce, that threatens the sancity of marriage than the less than 1% of homosexual marriages that would occur.
Now, I've spoke of strong words on this subject before, but there's something that really gets me. The Bush camp sent out fliers throughout the bible-belt saying that Kerry, if elected, would ban the bible. Yes,
ban the
bible. "Did you know Kerry will ban the bible if elected?" "Yeah, damn Catholics." Lie to me, waste my money, take away my job, send me to a needless war and I will dislike you. Use my religion as a political tool and I have yet to find words in the English language to describe the rage that I feel.
On another note, this is
damn funny.
I have mixed feelings about the results last night.
First, I am glad that the results were fairly decisive. I mean, yeah there is an outside chance that Kerry would snag good ol' FL from Bush with the supposed 1 million absentee ballots and such (I feel sorry for those people too [Kerry supporters that is], I mean it's almost like their votes weren't counted since Kerry stepped asside before 13% of the FL vote would be counted). But I don't entirely fault Kerry for doing that either. Even if Kerry won FL, Bush still would have the popular vote. I know that's not how the rules are, but if you are trying to prevent a re-occurance of 2000 even if it means loosing, it's a reasonable thing to do. I'm not saying he did the wrong thing, but it is something to think about.
Second, I feel that Kerry's biggest mistake was bringing Edwards on the ticket. I meantioned it in the past, and I still feel it. Gen. Clark would have been much better, and brought far more to the ticket, especially in the area that I felt Bush's job quality ratings were inflated by mis-perception. Hindsight isn't quite 20/20, but it's better atleast.
Third, I hope Bush doesn't ruin things for the worst. 4 years ago I was working at a start up and the Nasdaq crashed around the time when Bush was declared winner. Well, I'm working at a start up again and am hoping this won't cause me to loose my job (if we can't get enough investment, we're in big trouble).
Exit polls by Zogby (may not load on first try)
Friday was pay day and after depositing the checks and writing checks to bills, I had a net profit (pre-tax) of $50. Granted, this is opposed to simply not being able to pay 80% of my bills before (with my parents paying them instead), so it's not like I'm opperating at a loss here.
With election day happening today, everyone is heading to work later after voting in the morning. On the drive to work, there were a bunch of people with signs at an overpass. I was thinking that if they were the cause of the traffic jam, I was going to speak my mind (either with voice or hand signals).
It reminded me of once in Chicago where some newspaper sellers were standing between the lanes at the Sheridan, Lake Shore Drive, Hollywood intersection. They had basically caused a traffic jam by slowing the progression of cars (no one wants to hit them, it's like they are trying to get hit so they can sue). There was no running out infront of cars, but just standing on the lane lines is enough to make drivers nervous and slow up. So I honked as I went by one. He didn't like it, and probably wouldn't have sold me a paper. But then I didn't want one.
