Unbeknownst to you, a few months ago, I setup Google’s tracking software on this site <insert evil laugh here>. Yes, it’s not all that great, it does a few little tricks. I actually only set it up so I could see if I would be useful for some clients at work (it is free, after all)

One thing I can find out from the reports is what you searched for to get to stupideverything. By the way, we are glad you came!

Give Google Analytics a try on your site. It is free to setup and sort of intuitive to use. Sort of. I don’t have time (well, no, I have time…..I don’t have patience) to go write a full-on review.

Microsoft unveils Vista editions

Who cares about Derek Zoolander anyway? The man has only one look! Blue Steel? Ferrari? Le Tigra? They’re the same face! Doesn’t anybody notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!

Honestly, is this retarded to anyone except me? How is anyone expected to keep up with crap like this? 6 versions?!?!

I’m tapping out; technology is just getting too stupid. I swear that people make up buzzwords, complications, and now 6 versions just to mesmerize everyone into a state of “buy what I say”.

Retarded marketing. Judgement has been passed.

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills

A hilarious essay - how stupid assignments should be answered.

College Essay

Last night I had an interesting driver moment - I was very fortunate to get out of it like I did.

I’ve mentioned before that the city of Calgary has some interesting ideas about marking their roads. They also don’t plow the roads when it snows, except for the very well travelled ones, and even that’s done infrequently. It doesn’t help that they have ridiculously complicated intersections, either. Can you tell that I fucked up and am trying to blame the city for my stupidity yet? Nah, I screwed up pretty large last night, and this is how it went down …

So, it’s been snowing here for a few days. It’s awesome, I love it. It’s winter, and the world should be covered in snow. I have snow tires on my car now, and have been waiting for a good snowfall ’cause the +15 degree weather just wasn’t making me feel good about spending the cash for the tires and rims. Last night I was driving around running some errands - it was dark, around 8pm. I was in WestHills at the Indigo there, and leaving back to my place. So, I came to an intersection, which I must show you before I continue:

Now, that’s an interesting place to be. Note the two median’s where the turning lane is. But what I did, just isn’t right. I was turning East on Richmond from the North side of Stewart Green. It was really snowing and I couldn’t really see lanes or anything much on the road. There are 2 turning lanes, and there was a van beside me I didn’t really want to hit. So, I turned into the left lane right after the median. Oh. Wait. That’s actually the turning lane for oncoming traffic. In fact, now I’m in the North lane of the Westbound Richmond traffic - going east, and there’s a car right beside me and another car coming right at me. So, I dodge around the car beside me, drive over the median to my side of the road, and continue on Richmond road as if life is perfect. Here’s the graphical version of what I did:

I drove the red line. I wanted to drive the green line.

I have totally never done anything that ridiculous before. Well, not that I didn’t mean to do, anyway. I sure as hell am lucky I didn’t end up hurting anyone, or myself. Kudo’s go to the dude for taking it all in stride - reason number 3 why Subaru’s rule, right there. Also, I’m pretty damn happy I had winter tires then, I doubt I would have been able to stop or jump the median quite so well with my bald all-seasons.

A strange site, an interesting concept.

1.5/5

This was a perfect case of taking a risk and it not paying off. We all do stuff like this from time to time. Me and Jen got into town and were kinda bored, so went down to Chinook to look at some shoes, we got there at about 6pm. We thought the mall would be open normal hours for the holiday, and it wasn’t. We took a risk.

So we walked through a locked up mall, thinking about what else there was to do in the area. Nothing. So a movie it was. And we had no pre-decided movie in mind. That can be dangerous.

We chose Freedomland, not because of anything special we had heard. It had to do with the choices: Curious George, Nanny McPhee….and a bunch of other unmemorable junk. This movie at least had Samuel L. Jackson, so we thought, how bad could it be?

Now, it’s not that this movie was bad, at least not in that ‘Master of Disguise’ or ‘Manos: The Hands of Fate’ sort of way (worst movies of all time, by the way). It just wasn’t good. I couldn’t decide what sort of movie it was….was it a cop movie? was it a thriller/mystery movie? was it some kind of statement about racism movie? Who knows. It was like all of those together. And it ended up not making a lot of sense sometimes.

Some of the dialogue was a little stupid. People would go on these long long speeches, and say things that people in real life never say. It was like the writters were trying to be poetic, but it doesn’t work. People we are crack addicts don’t talk like that. These speeches, and the senseless plot made the movie drag on and on.

The bottom line is, this movie isn’t very good. It’s not even worth renting. Sorry Sammy, you were in a crappy movie.

This is hilarious! Did you see Torgo in there?

Flash » The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny

Ahhhh. The weekend.

On Saturday, I couldn’t decide if I should go biking, showshoeing, hiking, or just for a walk around town. It’s not every weekend that you’re blessed with +12 degree weather - especially in February. These choices were vetoed. Jamie was nice enough to pass along a cichlid of his, which I promptly took a picture of to show the badminton boy. I went to grab the pics off my camera, and noticed my nice new machine wasn’t answering me. From another machine, no pings were coming back. Huh. Screen was black, couldn’t see what happened. So, I rebooted.

Now here’s when I noticed something bad was happening. The fans all came up and started running. The drives all got power, but there wasn’t much HDD activity. I say much ’cause when they first get power, they thought for a bit. The BIOS didn’t show up. In fact, the montior was getting nothing at all. Blown video card? Unlikely, because the machine wasn’t booting at all. You know when your machine starts up and begins to load? You can tell - it makes noise, and the hard drives think. Well, even if I left it for a good half hour, or tried putting in bootable linux OSes in the CD, nothing was booting. So, at this point, I had to conclude that it was the motherboard. I did take the advice of some friends and try reseating all the cables into the MB, but that didn’t help me out, although it was a good idea.

That was unfortunate, but it should be under warranty - I bought it about a year ago. I call up Computer Rack to find that it was actually a year and 3 weeks ago - in store warranty? Gone. Props to Murphy on calling that one. I can send it back and the manufacturer will give me a new board, but I’m too impatient. Plus, I think the word “manufacture” is an ugly word - best to avoid contact with it at any level. So, I went to buy another one. Now, I called the Calgary North store, but went to the South store. And Desmond was working there, who I know from work. Now, that was customer support. Once he found out what happened, he gave me a new motherboard for below their cost - the other rep was going to give it to me for cost. He also arranged for me to drop off the old board and he’d get it replaced for me. If it turned out it wasn’t the board after all? Just to bring this one back, no worries there. Nice guy. So, I went home happier ’cause I spent less than I thought I was going to have to.

I put the board in pretty quickly, no problems until I tried to put in the cooling fan for the CPU. It’s made of cheap plastic and is pretty flimsy, as follows:

It just wouldn’t fit properly. Understand that I have fairly large hands, so sometimes trying to maneuvre little plastic things in small spaces doesn’t work well with me. I moved it around and it seemed like it was just going to click in place, so I pull down the locking lever, and the thing explodes! In fact, it broke in 4 places, and it’s a good thing I’m nearly blind, as one of the pieces flew up and hit my glasses. Yes, it was nearly an ocular adventure as well, but that was avoided. Just as it broke, I reached a level of frustration that I would qualify as high. The computer came very close to flying. At that point it was 9pm, and I would have to wait until Sunday to go get a new cooling fan. So, I watched the Fifth Element, which, of course, rocks.

Sunday, I went and bought a new cooling fan (complete with circular heat sink!). It’s quite pretty:

- and more importantly, quite solid. Metal braces instead of plastic ones. That’s what I like to see. As a side note, I took that picture while the fan was running. So, then I used some Naptha and a Q-Tip to clean off the old grease on the CPU, applied some new grease, and bolted the thing down. Then I plugged in the power and started up the machine. It works! A miracle! I lost no data, and nothing else was hurt. For some weird assed reason, the MB just decided to crap out. It’s odd ’cause this machine is the least used and newest of my machines. So! That was my weekend, which was different than I planned, but nonetheless, fun - I don’t get to play with hardware much. Plus, I got a cool CPU fan out of the deal.

When will it end? When will we be satisfied?

You know, eventually, you are going to have to buy it. They are going to stop making whatever it is you are using now, even though, you are completely satisfied with the job it’s doing. Slowly, they will phase out everything you use in favour of “new technology”. But it’s not new technology. It’s old technology. repackaged and redesigned so you have no choice but to change.

In other news, soon I will need cable TV. What a day….

I was embarking on a quest to waste some of my morning today. Something completely trivial - how about the commercials during the superbowl? Yeah, well, why not. Some of those were pretty funny, eh?

On a side note, it’s completely fucked up that a company will pay 2.5 million dollars for 30 seconds of air time. Forget the cost of making the commercial - I’ll assume they’d make the commercial either way. I find it interesting that a company can justify that it will get more attention from spending that much money on 30 seconds of air time during the superbowl, rather than spending it in the community in some way. Look at the companies who bought 10 commercials - that’s 25 million dollars. Are you sure you guys can’t think of something better to spend your money on? I mean, honestly - I would probably buy my domains from GoDaddy.com because they gave out 20 million dollars to help out 3rd world countries. Shit, I would even switch from the dudes hosting my domain, and pay more if I knew they were doing that. Do something real with the money, and I’ll support your company even if you aren’t “the best”. Show me that you’re responsible with your profits - I’m not an idiot, I’ll recognize the effort and appreciate it.

And air the funny commercials during normal air time, man. They’ll still make a buzz, and I’ll still be impressed. I’m not saying don’t make them, they’re great advertising, and I understand their value. But you’re paying that much money because you will. If nobody pays that much cash for a commercial, then guess what? Yeah, they’ll stop charging so much. You think there are an unlimited number of companies that will step up and spend that? No, not really. You think they’ll show dead air during that time if you don’t? No, not likely. And even if your biggest competitor decides to spend that 2.5 million on a commercial - don’t you think you’ll get more press by donating that to a worthy cause?

Aaaaand back to the point. I tried to view a particular video (sent to me by J-dawg), and was denied access because of where I live. Luckily, I happen to sit next to one of the biggest hackers I’ve known, and by the time I had even begun to bitch that the link he had just sent me didn’t work, he was already watching the video. Yeah, he can hack. But can he throw sticks? No, not so much. But that really clued me into a bigger issue here.

I love the internet for a number of reasons, but here is the big one: complete freedom to information. Anyone can host whatever the hell they want on the ‘net and anyone else can see it. Why the hell are country’s restricting access to data based on the country it comes from? Is it an attempt at governing the internet? Shouldn’t the internet be completely outside the control of a government or a company? Personally, I would like anyone from any country to be able to see whatever I post on the net. If some group of people shouldn’t be seeing something, then don’t put it on a medium designed for free access to information, right?

What I’m worried about is this becoming more popular, and governments or companies restricting access to information based on the source of the request. That defeats the purpose. Let everyone share ideas, share knowledge. I hate the concept of not being able to share my super awesome Open Sourced Software because I happen to live in a different country than people that could use it. I really, really hope that’s not where shit like this is going.

So - let me throw it out there - why is that happening? Anyone know?