-Fuck is the greatest word ever thought up, because it can be used in any way.
-Turning your headlights on when you cant see 5 feet in front of you because of the rain isnt that difficult.
-Using a turning signal isnt that hard to do either, especially when your about to make a turn.
-Anyone going slow than you is an idiot, anyone going faster than you is a maniac.
-Not being racist isnt a lesson to learn, but common sense.
-This isnt from uncle but from meh: My friend signed up for the beta of World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King. Now this wouldnt be so bad had he done it on World of Warcrafts official website, where they have the beta opt in application there. He goes to some other website advertised through a youtube vid and gets his account stolen! What lesson do i get from this? Dont be an ignorant dumbass and try to get ahead of everyone else.
-Most of the world is full of ignorant dumbass. “Bleating Sheep”
Is it just me, or is this scam getting more prevalent over the past year or so? In the last month, I’ve had two of these bastards call me. Typically, my short temper just causes me to snap and immediately start screaming at them like the inherently psychotic person I actually am. But, I’ve been trying to control my anger lately. During last week’s call, I actually started to quietly count to 10 to control my rage. Unfortunately, due to the caller saying “Hello… hello… sir?” I only made it to 5. As calmly as I could, I informed him that I was aware of his ruse, then urged him to end his own life of lying to others and leeching off of them, and politely asked him to never call us back again.
With today’s caller, I decided to play along for my own amusement. He’ll be calling me back tomorrow, at which point I hope to bat him around like a cat with a mouse, abusing him as subtly and politely as possible, until the inevitable point that I stop wasting his time and mine and mercifully hang up.
So, with that said… I know someone, somewhere has to be wonder “Wow, Steven… you seem to have a lot of experience with these bottomfeeders. How exactly does this scam work?”
Well I’m glad you asked. Their MO is to call up and introduce themselves as either being a toner manufacturer or working with a manufacturer and ask if you are the person in charge of decision making on printing supplies. They will then try to fish the make/model of printer you use, and inform you of what a great deal they can give you. Often they’re willing to send a demo that you just send back if you’re not completely satisfied. Sounds great, right?
If you pay them for the one you received, they try to tell you that by doing so you accepted your contract for 12 more cartridges. The cartridges themselves are dirt cheap, usually half the price of retail. The shipping on them, however, is not. They often charge $70+ per cartridge for shipping, and it usually drives the cost over retail. Oh but they’re so kind, and they’re willing to break the invoice down into more managable payments to help you out (and mask their sales tactics).
In short, don’t give these scumsuckers the time of day. Cuss them out, urge them towards quitting their job or suicide, toy with them like a cat with a mouse, or just hang up. Cold-calling toner salesmen are BAD NEWS!
It has come to my attention during a conversation today that my utter contempt for SpeedTV’s programming department has precious little to do with their programming director, and instead reflects the general “car culture” that we have these days.So allow me to shift that contempt briefly.
I hate today’s “car culture”. No, hate isn’t even a strong enough word. I loathe today’s car culture. I detest today’s car culture. I always thought the automotive scene was about horsepower… about racing… about cars.The shows that I liked on Speed have gone away due to this shift in demographic.Gone are the classic races on Legends of Motorsport.Gone are the brilliant beautiful cars of Victory by Design.Gone is the WRC. Gone is Motorsports Mundial. And now to replace them, we have the manufactured melodrama of Pinks smattered with a sprinkling of actual racing… and what I like to classify as “douchebags participating in douchebaggery” with shows like Unique Whips, Livin’ the Low Life, and SuperBikes.
Why?What has happened to “car guys?”It was pointed out that these days if you said Holman & Moody, most “car guys” would think it’s just a bargain basement knockoff of Bang & Olufsen.There’s more interest in paint jobs and sound systems than in superchargers and suspensions.This generation cares about the show, not the go.
And therein lies my contempt.I don’t give a flying fuck about seeing a Ferrari Enzo parked on the grass at a Concours d’Elegance.I want to see that Enzo driven in anger around a track.I don’t care how big the wheels are on an SUV, or how big the LCDs are, or how many decibels the sound system can do.I want to see that SUV out in the environment it was intended to be, and that environment involves rocks, mud, and a general lack of traction. It is my firm belief that cars have wheels… engines… etc not as another part to decorate, but because they’re meant to be driven.
So where does that leave us, the so called “hardcore” fans?What do we have to do to take back car culture?Do I have to go to NOPI, SEMA, etc. and personally stab every riceboy there to end the plague that is destroying our hobby?Must we convert them by the sword to our favorite form of motorsport?What will it take to change the demographic and bring back meaningful motorsports shows?I want more shows about vintage racing, down & dirty engineering, grassroots motorsports… and less shows about lowriders, “stunters”, and rich assholes doing hideous mods to otherwise beautiful cars.
So who’s with me?Who will take up arms in my crusade to spread the gospel of F1, ALMS, DTM, and sports car racing in general?Where’s our Jerusalem to crusade to?Which walls must we break down to drive the infidels out of our hobby and reclaim it in the name of horsepower and the smell of burning rubber?
I received a copy of CDW’s IT magazine “Biztech” today in the mail and started flipping through it. I noticed on page 17 there’s a review of the ATI FireGL V5600 card. On page 18, there’s a beautiful picture of a dual monitor setup in order to show off the capabilities of this card….
Now, do we see a problem here? Either it’s time for me to break out one of my old SGI workstations because ATI has at long long last released an up-to-date video card, and of course drivers for it….. OR…. some lazy layout editor at CDW unknowingly used a picture that’s probably 15 years old depicting SGI’s Irix operating system running the 4Dwm window manager and some unknown CAD software instead of actually taking a picture of the product being reviewed. If it wasn’t for Getty Images, what would lazy advertisers and editors do?!
And in the interest of disclosure, there’s a credit in the margin for Lester Lefkowitz/Getty Images.
Last weekend I took some pictures in my Kodak Brownie and Box Tengor cameras… and today I finally got around to developing it. I pulled the roll of film out of my refrigerator that I had shot in the Box… and my heart sank. What I thought was T-Max 400 was actually T-Max 100…. and I just knew it was going to be horribly horribly underexposed. So, I got my first experience with push processing.
Looks like the pictures came out okay. Only one picture looks truly underexposed, thankfully. Both rolls are hanging up and drying now, so they’ll be on my Flickr site tomorrow.
And apparently we also define “realtime” differently. At work, our contract with Symantec for AV is about to end, so I’ve been seeing what else is out there since nobody seems to like the new Symantec Multi-Tier stuff. So far, leading the pack, is CA’s eTrust Threat Manager. It combines their AV software and Pest Patrol, their spyware scanner. So, with my VM lab I set about testing by infecting.
I started with some screensavers.com crap. They’re notorious for spyware. Then I browsed to some known drive-by sites. I loaded more and more junk, and PP never complained. Doing a manual scan revealed quite a few entries, but realtime protection never worked. Eventually I just tried to see how much crap I could possibly load up on a PC before it died a horrible and painful death.
The end result of that was iexplorer.exe consuming almost 180 megs of RAM just sitting on the opening screen. And in all its glorious beauty…. BEHOLD!! <– click that to see a big picture
So, I must say… I’m disappointed somewhat. It seems to be a decent overall corporate package with nice centralized management and distribution…. but… the scan engine is lacking, to put it bluntly. Thankfully I made a snapshot in VMWare before starting the spyware install process, and going back took less than 5 minutes
Let me first preface this post by saying… I am not a meteorologist.
I AM NOT A METEOROLOGIST.
Now, here’s a picture.
This is what’s called a “hook echo.” It’s one of the telltale signs of a tornado in a storm system. As forecasting tools become more accurate and more advanced, and as scientists just generally learn more about weather, tornadoes, and how to predict them… things like this become possible. But I have to ask… “is it too possible?”
As a child growing up, I was terrified of thunderstorms. I spent most of my summer at my grandmother’s house, where she had one of those NOAA Weather Radios that would turn on automatically if an advisory were issued. I was gripped with fear any time I would hear that horrible “siren” sound as it sprung to life and began broadcasting with its early (and still unchanged) computer voice. I would scramble to turn on the TV so I could watch the news and see the doppler radar of our impending doom. And I can’t tell you how many times I heard the TV meteorologists repeat their saying.
A watch means conditions are favorable for the formation of a tornado. A warning means that a tornado has formed and been spotted, and you should take shelter immediately.
Watches were issued, both for tornadoes and severe thunderstorms, often before the first drop of rain or first gust of wind had ever hit us. It just mean that there was a good chance that bad things were coming our way. A warning, on the other hand, signaled quite clearly; “Bad shit is coming… hide now!”
But now, a warning has lost its meaning. A line of storms rolled through the Charlotte area today, and that wonderful screeching siren and computer voice broke in while I was listening to NPR at lunch. What it said this time was different from what I remember as a child. It said that a warning had been issued, and that meant conditions were favorable for the formation of a tornado. What? Favorable? Warning means “HIDE NOW!”… not “favorable”.
And I’ve seen a lot of these warnings on the news lately. We’ve had some decent thunderstorms in the past month or two, and all of them seem to have spawned at least one tornado warning somewhere in the area. Now that I know they’re being called out as “conditions are favorable” rather than “yup, we done seen it”… I understand why. But that brings me back to my original point. Are all the false alarms going to desensitize people to the whole ordeal? Are we going to get to a point where a warning is just as mundane and just as ignored as a watch? And if we do, is that going to put people at risk in the chance that they choose to ignore what turns out to be a valid warning? Why create a warning based on technology that seems to be getting it wrong far more than getting it right?
Don’t get me wrong, I love technology, and I’m always amazed at what can be done with it as far as weather is concerned. Whenever we have a storm in the area, the first thing I do is hit up Weather Underground, watch a time loop, and see when it might be coming our way. I saw the bow echo in today’s radar that probably led to today’s warnings in it for myself. (Can you find it?) I think I have a decent idea of how tornadoes form, and how meteorologists look for wind shear and certain shapes in the radar to make their predictions… but I still believe they need to be more conservative in issuing tornado warnings.
Any meteorologists out there in the world care to chime in?
Shot a roll of Fuji Neopan today, and I don’t think I’ll be doing it again anytime soon. The picture quality is fine, but the film itself is just cheap and crappy. It’s thin and prone to curling and cupping, and it dried with water spots all over it despite never having a problem with the rolls of T-Max film I’ve done. I can barely scan it as it just curls and bends and falls out of the film holder I have for my scanner.
In short, pay the extra 50c a roll for Kodak T-Max or Tri-X… and stay away from this cheap stuff.
After a recent incident on Wikipedia involving the deletion of an article about NASIOC, I have come to see a whole new side of it. Any respect I had for Wikipedia has pretty much been flushed down the toilet lately.
One argument was brought up during the request for deletion that:
I would disagree with that. After seeing the “back end” of Wikipedia… where these disputes arise and are settled, I think it’s precisely like Myspace. The side that most people see is an encyclopedia… a gathering of information. However on the back side, it seems to be a clique of users who make it into their own little social networking site. A look at user profiles shows “barnstars”, awards, cute little banners about the editor, and other silly stuff you’d expect to find on MySpace, Facebook, or any other social networking site. There are cliques and groups and cabals. It’s even an MMORPG. And from the outside, it gives the impression of a closed society, run by a bunch of insecure nerds who were bullied as children and are looking to wield whatever power they can.
I’ve always thought an online encyclopedia, not bound by the rules of print and the logistics of print distribution, should be inclusionist by nature. Anything and everything should appear in it, as a jumping off source to valid information. But, in the last few days, it appears many of the admins are exclusionary, and prone to delete anything they don’t like and don’t agree with. Of course, they have plenty of rules to back up their cherrypicking. And as always, there are even rules to contradict their rules!
So I wish Wikipedia the best in its ventures. If this is how the site is run, it is doomed to eventual failure. In the meantime, enjoy sniffing your own farts, and the farts of other admins… and I wish to issue the Barnstar of Exclusionism and Mediocrity to all of you brave souls who tirelessly delete and debate what others have created.
