Random Access Memories

This is the box I just got from McMaster-carr with some bolts I ordered.

Notice anything odd?

Can’t believe I didn’t think to make these sooner on my 3D printer.

I have some excess pulleys here that are no use to me since I’m using GT2 belts. I’m selling them off.

Pitch: 0.080″ (2.03mm)
Outside diameter: 0.362″ (9.19mm)
Hub & flange diameter: 0.551″ (14mm)
For belts up to 0.16″ (4.05mm) wide
Number of teeth: 15
Bore: 0.2″ (5.08mm)
Set screw: 4-40 (Included)
Material: Aluminum alloy

2$ Each, includes shipping inside the US.

Send me an email if you’re interested, thanks.

Well, seems the concept of downloading files to print your own stuff has finally reached the world of Piracy.

Piratebay as added a “Physibles” category, https://thepiratebay.org/browse/605 and it already has it’s first infringing file that was removed from Thingiverse.

I have a feeling it’s not going to take long to fill up as those files removed from sites based on copyright infringement (Really it’s patents that have to be claimed on 3d creations, but that’s a topic for another post) show up on Piratebay.

Someone was nice enough to point this out to me today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(1985)

The federal government brought its initial case against Dowling in the United States District Court for the Central District of California, arguing his guilt on the basis that he had no legal authority to distribute the records. Dowling was convicted of one count of conspiracy to transport stolen property in interstate commerce, eight counts of interstate transportation of stolen property, nine counts of copyright infringement, and three counts of mail fraud. The charges of mail fraud arose out of his use of the United States Postal Service to distribute the records.

Dowling appealed all convictions besides those of copyright infringement and the case moved to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he argued that the goods he was distributing were not “stolen, converted or taken by fraud”, according to the language of 18 U.S.C. 2314 – the interstate transportation statute under which he was convicted. The court disagreed, affirming the original decision and upholding the conviction. Dowling then took the case to the Supreme Court, which sided with his argument and reversed the convictions. From the Reporter of Decision’s syllabus:

“The phonorecords in question were not “stolen, converted or taken by fraud” for purposes of [section] 2314. The section’s language clearly contemplates a physical identity between the items unlawfully obtained and those eventually transported, and hence some prior physical taking of the subject goods. Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple “goods, wares, [or] merchandise,” interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.”

So I hear is that this is the code to jailbreak a PS3 that Sony itself retweeted.

Welcome to the Streisand Effect Sony.

import sys, hashlib, hmac
print hmac.new("46DCEAD317FE45D80923EB97E4956410D4CDB2C2".decode("hex"), sys.argv[1].decode("hex"), hashlib.sha1).hexdigest()

Posted here under my First Amendment rights, and as the Copyright Office concluded in 2010 that, “while a copyright owner might try to restrict the programs that can be run on a particular operating system, copyright law is not the vehicle for imposition of such restrictions.” (I don’t even own a PS3, heh)

Consider it payback for your illegal 2005 CD rootkits.

So my landlord got a new Dell color laser printer, and I was curious about the “yellow dot tracking” that new printers use. So I printed a page and scanned it at 600dpi.

Ok, nothing crazy going on there, as one would expect, so I looked closer.

Hrrm, look there, I see some yellow dots. Let’s strip away all the colors but blue so they get darker.

Well, will you look at that. Sure enough the page is covered in little dots in a specific pattern.

I guess it’s all totally true, color laser printers are adding information to printed pages to show where they came from.

I can’t say that makes me overly happy.

Recently I caught wind of the “classic” or “retro” shaving movement. For those unaware this is the concept that the evolution of the razor ended with the invention of the “safety razor” in 1880 (Yeah, 130 years ago…) and the invention of it’s replaceable blades in 1901.

Simply put it makes the case that from that point forward companies competed to “buzzword enhance” the razor rather than actually improve it’s practical functioning. (IE. modern fights between Shick and Gilette over who has rights to a 3/4/5 bladed disposable razor are just fluff, and that these devices do not do a better job of shaving than the razors our grandparents shaved with)

Since I despise shaving with an electric razor, and disposable modern razors don’t do much better I figured I would add a badger brush and a safety razor to my Christmas wishlist. Tonight I got around to trying them.

In a phrase? Holy crap.

First there was the old-fashioned thick lather and brush, then the heavy steel razor, the whole process just exuded a feeling of timelessness compared to a can of foam and a plastic razor. On top of that there is a certain comfort to knowing that you can get safety blades almost anywhere in the world and very cheap compared to modern plastic disposable cartridges. Along with that the razor itself will probably outlast me. Also gone was the clogged disposable razor issue that I had come to despise.

The process will take some getting used to, it’s much easier to razor-burn yourself than with a disposable (especially if one rushes), but the shave is much closer as well. I was probably a tad overly cautious, but repeating the process bordered on enjoyable.

In the end it was an excellent example of how the new ways are not always really an improvement over the old.

Sarah’s mother has gifted us with a ton (38 aluminum and 12 carbon) of arrow shafts. Now, we just need to find a good deal on 50 foam stress balls.

So for awhile now I’ve thought that gold is way overvalued, and is going to have a sharp correcting within he next 5 years.

I’ve talked to other people regarding this, and many agree, but they brush off the risk by saying that it won’t be that bad since the average person is not invested in precious metals.

Yet today what do I see on TV? An ad for a “Gold IRA”. Sure, invest your retirement savings in gold.

How many people will be stupid enough to make this risky a move? Time will tell I suppose.

Well, got it together. Hopefully it will work.

I give up, I really fucking give up.

It used to be that no matter how diverse people’s opinions were in matters you could always attempt to draw some measure of logical argument and try to come to something resembling compromise. Even within the last 20 years this seemed possible.

Not anymore.

Now it appears to be all about what team you’re on. And if you dare speak out against one team or the other you’re labeled a traitor and you might as well be speaking pig latin at that point because the side that has labeled you does not want to hear anything you have to say anymore regardless of how logical it is.

A lovely example of this can be found here: http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/world/52812832-68/story.csp

The short version of that story is that a prominent climate change skeptic crunched the numbers and found he was wrong. Did the other skeptics take note? Certainly, but only to scream and yell that he was a traitor to their cause. This is cultist thinking, not science.

For someone like me that is exceedingly logical it’s a pile of horseshit. You cannot run a nation with nepotism.

The Washington State government is whining that it won’t be able to find the money to back the proposed ballot initiative I-1163, which calls for better licensing and regulation of long-term care workers.

What is really funny is another version of this same ballot measure passed in 2008 (I-1029) with an overwhelming 72.53% of the vote and yet, they couldn’t find the money to pay for that one either.

They’ve been all about cuts and not nearly enough about increasing revenue (IE. raising taxes).

So, when is it time to say that democracy is more important than the local politicians that don’t dare to pass tax increases? The people have voted for this measure, the government should fund it, end of story.

So “New guidelines from the U.S. Department of Agriculture would eliminate potatoes altogether from school breakfasts and drastically reduce the amount of potatoes served in lunches.”

And of course politicians from potato-heavy states like Idaho and Maine are up in arms about this.

Since of course everyone knows that politicians and farmers know what is truly healthy, not doctors and nutritionists.

A Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera

You literally toss the thing in the air, and when it reaches the highest point in it’s trajectory it takes a picture with each of it’s 36 digital cameras giving you a complete 360 degree panorama around all three axis.

I am certain that people who know me will find this utterly hilarious, if only due to the name of the song, heh. For those unaware this is a dream sequence from the House M.D. Episode “Bombshells”.

As far as I was able to find out that is in fact Hugh Laurie and Lisa Edelstein singing, and Hugh playing the piano. (I just love that, I hate it when they dub in someone Else’s voice or piano playing in a show/movie.)

(Direct Download link: Here)

Yeah, I know, “Who?”.

Take a minute and look at your computer, look at all the software you are running, look at all the websites you visit, look at all the portable devices you use. Chances are almost all of them owe a big thanks to Dennis Ritchie.

Dennis Ritchie is the writer of the “C” programming language. Between it and it’s derivatives they are responsible for almost all the software you run or use online. It is also the basis of most operating systems that run your computers as well

Yeah, he wasn’t rich, or powerful, or famous, but his idea and work was the very foundation of our modern computing system.

Perhaps you should know who he was.

I ran across a tidbit from back in 2009 on Cracked.

The list is as follows:

1. Power
2. Genius
3. Beauty
4. Wealth
5. Fame

What DOES make people happy?

Friendships, altruism and religious practices.

And the number of people killing themselves for wealth, power, fame, etc. that actually believe this information? Too infinitesimal to bother pondering.

Sarah got a birthday card that was as follows:

“Happy Birthday from Charlie, the Birthday Armadillo!”

(The front shows a very depressed looking armadillo wearing a party hat)

The inside is as follows:

“Look, you and I both know there’s no birthday armadillo, but charlie’s had a run of bad luck – no work, a bitter, messy divorce – so please, just humor him and have a happy birthday, okay? This could be the one little thing he needs to turn his life around. Thanks, and have a good one.”

Yeah, makes me feel cheery, what about you?

EDIT: We decided to return the money, since that is what seems to be important to them.

I was just asked today to help someone break into a facebook account.

I’m sorry, but what? They want me to risk my freedom and my livelihood so they can stick their nose into someone else’s little back and forth squabble?

Hell no.

The USA has gotten stupid as a society.

We’ve allowed people with the most money, the scariest message or the loudest voice to convince us they are right without us demanding proof of their wild speculation.

What happened to intelligence trumping emotion?

Years ago some nut would say “The end is near!” and people would say “uh huh, sure, I’ve got work to do.” and now they’re able to build a huge cult following.

And now in politics there is no positive message, there is just a message of fear against the other guys.

It’s a no-brainer that this is unsustainable in the long term.

The US economy is in the tank, consumer confidence is down, sales are stagnant, but to listen to the GOP getting thigns turned around means “Less regulation and less taxes on business.”.

My take on that? In a word, bullshit.

Talk to a small business owner, chances are they will tell you they are not hiring people right now because demand for their products or services is down. If nobody wants something done there is no reason to pay someone to do it.

Frankly. business has one goal, “To make money”, and if that means it’s more profitable for a business owner to fire 500 people than to hire 500 more which do you think he’s going to do? You guessed it, 500 people get pink slips.

I might not trust the US government firmly, but I trust it a hell of alot more than I trust business to “do what’s right”.

We need a huge spending package to put people back to work or this mess is going to last a long, LONG time. And by the look of Washington, it’s not going to happen.

Maybe things would change if the government was not made up of the rich and the business owners who are trying to take care of, well, the rich business owners.

It’s sloppy, but most importantly it works, and it backs up EVERYTHING. Terrain maps, world map image, .oar, .xml, all three .ini files, mysql database, etc.

I based this off the backup script here:

I’m running Ubuntu 11.04 server, x64 btw and this all works.

I store both scripts in /home/username/backupdir/scripts, the shell script gets run as a cron job.

#!/bin/sh
;Not that it *really* matter that we tell people, but I think it's polite, heh.
screen -S opensim -p 0 -X eval 'stuff "alert Beginning full simulator backup, things might be slow for a bit.^M"'
;Yes, I'm redundant, this is just in case I missed something
cd /home/username/backupdir
;Copy the old backups to a holding directory, I clean them out by hand every so often. This could be an offsite location.
mv /home/username/backupdir/*.* /home/username/backupdir/old
;This line runs the second command script inside the opensim process.
screen -S opensim -p 0 -X eval 'stuff "command-script /home/username/backupdir/scripts/osbackup.txt^M"'
;Now dump the mysql data to zip and date it.
mysqldump -ulogin -ppassword opensim | gzip > /home/username/backupdir/opensimbackup_`date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S`.sql.gz
;Copy and date the 3 .ini files
cp /home/username/opensim/bin/OpenSim.ini /home/username/backupdir/opensim_`date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S`.ini
cp /home/username/opensim/bin/Regions/Regions.ini /home/username/backupdir/regions_`date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S`.ini
cp /home/username/opensim/bin/config-include/StandaloneCommon.ini /home/username/backupdir/standalonecommon_`date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S`.ini
;The next line is just a delay so the .oar output can finish, it might take your server much longer, change as needed.
sleep 30
;There is likely a much more efficient way to do the following, but this was what I could figure out
timestamp=$(date)
;these rename the opensim dumped files to add timestamps to the names. I think this makes them easier to manage later.
for f in epsilon.*
do mv "$f" "epsilon_$timestamp.${f#epsilon.}"
done
for f in techrealms.*
do mv "$f" "techrealms_$timestamp.${f#techrealms.}"
done
for f in theta.*
do mv "$f" "theta_$timestamp.${f#theta.}"
done
for f in delta.*
do mv "$f" "delta_$timestamp.${f#delta.}"
done
for f in connections.*
do mv "$f" "connections_$timestamp.${f#connections.}"
done
; Guessing this could also probably inform something in-world that could record backups. I'm not sure how tho
screen -S opensim -p 0 -X eval 'stuff "alert Backup complete, thank you.^M"'

This second script is executed inside the screen that is running opensim.

;Script Name = osbackup.txt
;executed with "command-script /home/username/backupdir/scripts/osbackup.txt" inside opensim
;
change region root
; Persist objects to the database now
backup
;
change region techrealms
; export world map image
export-map /home/username/backupdir/techrealms.jpg
; save terrain
terrain save /home/username/backupdir/techrealms.r32
; save prims to XML
save xml2 /home/username/backupdir/techrealms.xml
; save the current region to an opensim archive
save oar /home/username/backupdir/techrealms.oar
;
; repeat as needed
;
change region delta
export-map /home/username/backupdir/delta.jpg
terrain save /home/username/backupdir/delta.r32
save xml2 /home/username/backupdir/delta.xml
save oar /home/username/backupdir/delta.oar
;
change region theta
export-map /home/username/backupdir/theta.jpg
terrain save /home/username/backupdir/theta.r32
save xml2 /home/username/backupdir/theta.xml
save oar /home/username/backupdir/theta.oar
;
change region epsilon
export-map /home/username/backupdir/epsilon.jpg
terrain save /home/username/backupdir/epsilon.r32
save xml2 /home/username/backupdir/epsilon.xml
save oar /home/username/backupdir/epsilon.oar
;
change region connections
export-map /home/username/backupdir/connections.jpg
terrain save /home/username/backupdir/connections.r32
save xml2 /home/username/backupdir/connections.xml
save oar /home/username/backupdir/connections.oar

Use them however you want. If someone wants to clean them up for me that would be appreciated.

Thanks & good luck.

So I ended up with a dozen Blue Jacket carbon arrows, and needed nocks for them.

Which turned out to be a bit of a problem. The arrows are 230s, which means they are .23″ in diameter. That’s not a size anyone makes parts for anymore since Blue Jackets have been out of production for many years now.

So after multiple failed attempts to check at archery stores I rustled up nocks that normally go on kites at Goodwinds. As it turns out they fit perfectly.

Goodwinds also deserves a nod for their reduction of their shipping costs since they’re only an hour away from me by car, and their good attitude with my over the phone while I ask about archery uses for kite parts.

On to fletching.

“Reality has a well-known liberal bias.” – Stephen Colbert, White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, 4/29/2006

So a few months ago it was all doom and gloom about how the increase in Seattle parking rates would drive away business and send people to the outlying areas with cheaper parking.

Yet just this Tuesday I was downtown in a car (odd for me) and there was zero parking available anywhere. Literally no space available, at all.

This would seem to indicate to me that all the gloomy predictions are not founded in reality.

All but the main chip.

If you’re curious it’s this: http://reprap.org/wiki/Sanguinololu

The control electronics for a 3D printer.

Only the connectors left to go.

Thanks again to Fenchurch for his adorable arduino boards.

Tomorrow we see if I can program them.

222,570, that’s my first number to think about. Almost one quarter of a million.

Now compare that number to 6,400.

The first number is the UN total on how many people were killed in the 2010 Haitian earthquake. The second is the death toll so far from the recent Japanese quake. That’s thirty five dead in Haiti for every one person dead in Japan.

4,672 Haitians have died just from the cholera outbreak after the quake alone.

Haiti has no running water, no sanitation, no insurance, no stable government, no infrastructure.

So some may find this callous, but seriously, which place should donations be going to at this point?

Recently I read a piece that described there being 45% more dogs than children in Seattle.

Some say it’s more educated population is putting off having children, but I think that’s only part of the equation. Let’s look deeper at some other commonly cited numbers shall we?

According to the Puget Sound Business Journal 75% of single apartment renters in Seattle own dogs.

Recent census data shows that just one in five Seattle households includes children under the age of 18, only San Francisco came out lower.

Also According to the 2000 census projection on 2004 Seattle has the fifth highest proportion of single-person households nationwide among cities of 100,000 or more residents, at 40.8 percent.

Yes, yes, all plenty of figures saying that Satellites don’t like kids and like dogs.

However, is it just kids? Let’s move onto the things that I don’t have facts and figures for.

Since I moved here 4 years ago I’ve found the great majority of Seattle residents to be very neighborly, helpful and kind. They will stop for a jaywalker and wave him across with a smile for example.

However what they won’t do is get to know people. In my opinion Seattle has an issue with “people connections”, be it the weather, be it status of hipster circles, be it the phases of the moon Seattle is not a “friends” town.

One interesting thing I noticed was that SeaTac Airport near Seattle does NOT get horribly crowded around the holidays (I’ve seen this firsthand) It gets busy during the summer months instead, meaning the family connections that people travel for during the holidays are not present here in such abundance.

Right now you’re probably asking yourself “So what? What’s this have to do with me?”, well, if you’re young and liberal (Which is likely 90% of the people reading this), everything.

Let’s think about it. Seattle is one of the most liberal places in the USA, boarding on Socialistic. They like to increase taxes, they like public programs, they like taking care of the environment, but the numbers on households and their general attitudes towards others seem to show that they don’t like connecting with other people. How can those things interact together in a healthy way?

“Yes, let’s make sure everyone is taken care of.. but I really don’t want to know any of those people, I just want to take care of them.” Please, tell me how that doesn’t seem empty and heartless.

What worries me is that this attitude is a spreading thing. Will the next generation have fleeting internet connections into their old age instead of just their myspace and facebook “friends” of today? I guess time will tell.

Not too bad, both harder and easier than I expected in certain ways.

Only screwed up one component.

Likely news you have heard nothing about, but I found it very interesting.

In New Brunswick back in 2008 a young lady by the name of Erica Sparks was injured in a car accident. She attempted to sue the other driver for damages. The insurance company of the other driver fought the claim.

During the trial they decided they wanted to see Spark’s facebook photos to determine the level of her injuries.

The Judge (Fred Ferguson) decided she might try to delete her photos before being forced to hand them over, so he ordered her lawyer (James Crocco) to mislead her by hiring another lawyer to summon her to his office.

He was not allowed to tell her anything about the meeting at which she was under court order to login to facebook and provide the photos.

How exactly will things change if judges get an idea that they can hand down a court order to force a lawyer to do something against the client’s best interest?

So in the last few days I have gotten several notices from meetup.com.

They are all for “women only” meetup groups. For those of you that are unaware I am both male, and a strong advocate against sexism towards men.

So I was curious, I searched for what groups where specifically “women only” and found quite a few near me.

Someone please tell me how this would be accepted if groups were listed as men only?

It wouldn’t, so how it is that it’s acceptable for groups to be listed for women only?

EDIT: Apparently meetup works on the “These are all independent private clubs, they can do whatever they want”, etc. Of course if someone started a “whites only” group I’m rather sure it would suddenly be removed even tho it was “private” since they would say it “offends people”.

I saw this today at Daiso in Seattle. It made my brain hurt.

Shot in the face today by a disturbed young man.

Blame now flying amongst the Liberals, “It was Sarah Palin’s Fault” some say, others scream “It’s all about the Tea Party! They wanted war!”.

And you know what the most important thing about these illogically quick judgments is? That they are directly from Sarah Palin’s Tea Party playbook itself.

Here we have a sudden cataclysmic event that is pulling together Liberals against what they are not seeing as a common enemy, even if no such enemy exists.

Which is exactly what the Tea Party has been doing.

So out of curiousity I asked when my cable provider would have this up and running.

“Q2 2011 at the earliest” they said.

IE. They are not rolling things out until absolutely required.

So the Republicans won the House of Representatives, but they don’t have the Senate or the Presidency, so they can accomplish nothing. However, they can hold up everything.

I think personally it’s one more example of why both parties are going the wrong direction.

Young people are more liberal, that’s a given, they want to work together not fight across the aisle.

I guess it’s going to be 20 years or so before we truly see that change in Washington politics.

So our “relatively new” Mayor in Seattle wants to raise downtown parking rates.

His budget proposes parking meter fees of $4 per hour. A sharp increase from the $2.50 per hour that is charged now. People are taking sides on the measure now with some downtown businesses saying it would be very bad for their bottom line.

My take on it as a North-Seattle resident with a car? It’s not enough. I say double the current rate to 5$ per hour.

I’ll happily explain why.

First and foremost I only own a car because I previously owned it before I moved to Seattle. Most things I need are within walking distance for me, and if I want to buy something big I could easily go rent a pay-by-the-hour car to pick it up. My car is old and I’ve been hesitant to replace it, because I really just don’t need a newer one. Moving out of Phoenix reduced my driving by over 95%. It’s much better to take the bus and let someone else do the driving. Having said all this if I want or need to drive downtown for something that requires a car I want to be able to find a parking space.

Downtown Seattle is notorious among residents for it’s lack of available street parking with a large number of the available curbside slots taken up by downtown workers that drive. They find the $20 parking fee for 8 hours curbside beats the average 25$ daily commercial garage fees and it’s hard to blame them.

This seems to indicate that a rise in parking fees would be beneficial rather than detrimental to downtown businesses allowing more customers parking spots for an hour or two since fewer workers are using them. I know I would pay more for this.

Also, one needs to look at what businesses there are downtown. The area is not filled with dolor stores, or big box stores, or huge furniture outlets, it’s primarily small retail establishments and high-end restaurants with a smattering of expensive furniture stores and art galleries where the customers are most likely happy to have things delivered and don’t care about the added expense.

The there is the amount of the increase, which would make us the second most expensive city to park in behind Chicago.

Again I say that’s a terrific idea. Seattle is tearing down the Alaskan Way Viaduct and building a multi-billion-dollar tunnel to route traffic past downtown in favor of pedestrian amenities on the surface. This was supported over cheaper projects that took a huge chunk out of the waterfrost area for an above-ground road.

In short we are simply not a “car-friendly” town and our parking rates should support the general attitude of the population to move towards public transit and pedestrian access and away from automobiles. There was no public outcry over previous parking increases, and I doubt there will be one now.

So I decided that if I was going to let my girlfriend drag me back into WoW I was going to play with at least 2 toons i a team. Hence I would need some control software for this functionality.

I stumbled around and didn’t really find much information regarding the different software packages out there and how they compare with each other. I ended up going for “Pwnboxer”, which I have ended up regretting.

It does have a rather simple setup, and does simpler operations like cloning keystrokes well and laying out window locations and setting CPU affinity. What I didn’t realize is several other software packages do that too, and do it much better.

My list of issues, gripes, etc. (Which has gotten more and more negative as I dug around looking for details on the software and it’s author)

#1 Only videos for setup and information. Not only is this impossible to use if someone is deaf, but it’s also quite hard to search for a specific piece of information. Pwnboxer has no written documentation at all, no database of bug reports, nada.

#2 No contact information on their website. This should have been a huge red flag for me. The only way to get in touch with the person that wrote the software is to post on another forum that is not owned by Pwnboxer and hope you get a reply.

#3 The affiliate system and it’s advertisement. When you start Pwnboxer you get a “Message of the day” that pops up. It tells you about the latest patch (7 months ago at this point) and asks you if you “Want to earn $$$ promoting Pwnboxer?”. Uh, no, I don’t, I already paid for the software so I would just like this blatant advertisement to go away. But you can’t shut this off, this is behavior I expect from shareware, not retail software.

#4 The issues. I could never use the “Mouse Broadcasting” to clone my mouse on all the other screens, it would cause the screens to break from their set locations and spread all the way across both of my monitors. This was not high on my list of priorities at the time, but I later found I needed that to work. Which is something their competitors software did straight out of the “box” without any issues.

#5 Screen placement. For some reason Pwnboxer does not like to accept how big I want my screens to be. I would repeatedly put in “720×450″ and it would change it to “719×448″ or something, leaving annoying gaps between the screens. The most maddening aspect was that this behavior was random, neither the times it did it nor the numbers were the same twice.

#6 No program control functionality when you are inside WoW. IE. I couldn’t set different things in Pwnboxer to be controllable inside WoW. Well, I suppose maybe I could but I couldn’t check for that on their documentation could I?

#7 Well, so I went digging around and found multiple Pwnboxer reviews that I had seen before, but oddly I had never noticed they were ALL positive, with nothing negative to say about the software at all. Interestingly enough they also have Clinkbank links from them to the affiliate program, so that when a user clicks through and buys the reviewer gets a cut of the purchase. Does that seem unbiased to you?

Disagree? Ok, count the number of comments on the reviews you find. Hrrm, Seems most don’t even allow comments, the others don’t have any comments. Doesn’t that seem just a tad odd to you?

#8 No trial option. If you want to see what the software is like you have to cough up money in advance.

#9 The author is apparently shunned by the multiboxing community. Something I did not know to begin with. If you look around you will find that Pwnboxer is not listed on dual-boxing.com. Nor is it listed alongside other multiboxing software like Keyclone or ISBoxer. Now I don’t know why exactly, but it raises another red flag in my mind.

I think the authors own words help sum up the basis of my complaints nicely:

“These days I can say that there are tens of thousands of people using Pwnboxer”

Which at 35$ per yearly subscription is $700,000.00 gross. And yet his support system?

“I’m trying to close resolved support threads to keep me on target with helping people out, so if you (or anybody else reading this) encounters a problem, please feel free to post what it is.”

Color me unimpressed with the support given for that level of profit. Perhaps that many users are just a few too many for one person to support directly? Perhaps he should put some of that money into making his product feel more like retail software that is worth paying for? I still have 10 months of my subscription, go ahead, impress me, I dare ya.

In a word, disappointing.

A panel of 4 hardcore female gamers mostly patted themselves on the back. Rather than have a male on the panel to provide an opposing view, or a female gamer that enjoys “girly” games they seemed to just be trying to empower the women in attendence.

Heavy on jokes, heavy on putdowns of older male-dominated gaming, light on the future of females in gaming.

http://techie-buzz.com/mobile-news/motorola-droid-not-to-be-manufactured-any-more.html

The Motorola Droid has now been listed as “end of life” in the Verizon inventory system. Yes, your beloved Motorola Droid is finally going to be phased out. In the upcoming few weeks, the Droid will be completely phased out

Motorola and Verizon will be replacing the Droid with the Droid 2.

Droid users should not be disheartened since the Motorola Droid is a very popular phone among the modding community. The Motorola Droid sold like hot cakes when it was launched. It was and still is one of the most popular android phone out there. The successor to the Droid – the Droid 2 will feature a 1 GHz OMAP processor, and 512MB of RAM. The sad news is that the Droid 2 will feature a locked bootloader, which will severely limit its modding capability.

The Droid 2 is expected to be released in August, and will be announced my Verizon within the next few weeks.

It will be nice when we can buy unlocked hardware and add it to the network of our choice.

At least I got my Droid when I could.

Quoting Steve Jobs from his press conference this morning regarding the Iphone 4.


But how is this not a lie? Their solution is to put a “Bumper” on the phone so the antenna issue does not occur. That is literally a band-aid if ever there was one.


He also said:
“looking at the data, we don’t think we have a problem.”


Well, if you don’t have a problem, then one must ask why you are offering everyone with an Iphone 4 a free case to fix a problem that you say you do not have.

http://community.developer.motorola.com/t5/MOTODEV-Blog/Custom-ROMs-and-Motorola-s-Android-Handsets/ba-p/4224

Custom ROMs and Motorola’s Android Handsets
by Lori Fraleigh (lorifraleigh) on 02-12-2010 04:41 PM – last edited on 02-12-2010 06:01 PM

My name is Lori Fraleigh and I manage the technical team behind the MOTODEV program at Motorola. We provide tools, like MOTODEV Studio, and a variety of technical services including application testing services, developer education materials traditional technical support and serve as experts on our discussion boards. Today I’m stepping a bit outside of my day-to-day job to try to answer some questions we have seen not only on MOTODEV, but on various other sites. I’ve worked with a number of other Motorolans to bring you the information in this post.

For the Android application developer, MOTODEV provides a wealth of resources to help you create and bring your applications to market. We provide a comprehensive Eclipse-based development environment, MOTODEV Studio, as well as SDK add-ons which provide emulator images that represent the software on our handsets. To aid developers who may not have access to physical handsets, or who may wish to test on a carrier network unavailable in their physical location, we provide access to handsets via the Motorola Virtual Device Lab at DeviceAnywhere. All Motorola application developer resources can be found at http://developer.motorola.com.

We understand there is a community of developers interested in going beyond Android application development and experimenting with Android system development and re-flashing phones. For these developers, we highly recommend obtaining either a Google ADP1 developer phone or a Nexus One, both of which are intended for these purposes. At this time, Motorola Android-based handsets are intended for use by consumers and Android application developers, and we have currently chosen not to go into the business of providing fully unlocked developer phones.

The use of open source software, such as the Linux kernel or the Android platform, in a consumer device does not require the handset running such software to be open for re-flashing. We comply with the licenses, including GPLv2, for each of the open source packages in our handsets. We post appropriate notices as part of the legal information on the handset and post source code, where required, at http://opensource.motorola.com. Securing the software on our handsets, thereby preventing a non-Motorola ROM image from being loaded, has been our common practice for many years. This practice is driven by a number of different business factors. When we do deviate from our normal practice, such as we did with the DROID, there is a specific business reason for doing so. We understand this can result in some confusion, and apologize for any frustration.

We do hear your feedback and read your posts – whether on our MOTODEV discussion boards, our Owners’ Forums, our Facebook pages, Twitter, or a variety of other sites on the web. We take the time to understand the issue and then pass the information on to the appropriate product (or other) teams within Motorola. We then try to respond with explanations or updates as we get the answers. Thank you for your continued feedback.

If you have further questions, comments, and feedback, you can comment on this post as well as use the following sites:

Use of open-source software at Motorola: http://opensource.motorola.com
MOTODEV and Android application development on Motorola handsets: http://community.developer.motorola.com
End-user support for handset owners: https://supportforums.motorola.com/community/google-android

I guess they failed to recognize the depth of people’s outrage with this because comments were closed after 54 postings and 25,000 views.

I’m an end-user, not a developer, and I want control of my phone. Is that wrong? According to Verizon, Sprint, AT&T or T-Mobile it sure is. Which means it’s more than likely they leveraged weight upon Motorola to lock down their devices.

Another win for the big corporations and another loss for the end user.

Quoted from here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20010351-1.html

The seemingly unending saga of the iPhone 4 antenna issues has grown yet again. After a negative report from Consumer Reports, Apple has apparently deleted all threads about the findings from its popular Support Discussions forums. As Kent German reported earlier today, Consumer Reports has issued their official stance on iPhone 4 and they can’t recommend it.

Moderators for Apple’s Support Discussions forums quickly deleted growing threads discussing the Consumer Reports articles. Though these threads are no longer viewable, you can read through cached versions via Bing.

Despite the generally positive reputation that Consumer Reports enjoys, many Apple fans vehemently defend iPhone 4 throughout the thread. It will be interesting to see what sort of fallout this finding will produce in terms of sales for iPhone 4 moving forward. Despite the early reports of these very issues, iPhone 4 still out sold iPhone 3GS by nearly double over its first few days. Not to mention, Consumer Reports has already stated that the issues related to iPhone 4′s antenna are not unique to iPhone 4.

Reminds me of that Mythbusters quote, “I reject your reality and substitute my own!”

Glad only men are allowed to enjoy good cutlery.

Sexism is the new norm, right?

I mean the latest Acura commercials make an excellent demonstration that only men make illogical luxury purchases.

Don’t you love how this little gadget to open plastic packaging comes inside that evil plastic packaging itself.

“Sure, all this will fit back in the box sir. No need to put a bigger box on there!”

“If aliens were among us then it would be all over the papers and if it was being covered up by the Governments then they are doing a far better job of it than they have managed with anything else”

From our recent backpacking trip.

“The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.” – Confucius

So AT&T will change it’s pricing plans and do away with “unlimited data”.

“AT&T defends its decision to eliminate the unlimited data plan, saying statistics show that 65% of their customers use less than 200MB of data per month, while 98% of their customers use less than 2GB of data on average each month.”

Yes, I agree those numbers are likely correct. However, they are making this change in conjunction with the rollout of the new Iphone 4G. Now who really thinks that someone with 4G is going to use less than 200MB.

I am rather certain we’re going to see customers screaming bloody murder over this one in the near future. Nothing like increasing profits in the short term while you make customers unhappy.

So my girlfriend got Pokemon Soul Silver for her DS. And I must admit i’m oddly attracted to the idea of how to cheat the little pokewalker pedometer that comes with the game.



Also, it takes around 2 million steps to unlock the highest things in the game so it seems most people think it’s not that bad to cheat.

It seems to gain it’s steps based on an accelerometer, once it hits a certain level of “shock” intensity a step is recorded, so a gentle motion doesn’t seem to work as well as a sharper one (I guess it reads the shock of the step).

I scrounged out the vibration motor from an old PS/2 rumble controller and used a paperclip to make a wire “hanger” on the back so it could be removed.

After that I added some foam so it wouldn’t rub against the motor. Then after a few wire connections, and a string to hang it from I plugged it in and checked the number of steps it recorded over 1 minute, 72.

Not that bad, but not awesome either. Then I slid the walker so it was not hanging off the motor, but rather directly in-line with it and checked again, 144 steps per minute!



I think that should be good enough, heh.

No, I will not make you one, but if you want detailed instructions end me a note.

As you can easily see below the Federal Nutrition Recommendations do not match Federal Food Subsidies.

You can draw your own conclusions on why the 2 items vary so wildly.

For awhile now I’ve been trying to get the backlight on my LCD panel working. The link here http://www.nerdkits.com/videos/backlight/ at Nerdkits shows how they made a small kit to get an EL (Electroluminescent) backlight working with a DC to AC inverter. However it does not go into much detail on building a kit yourself beyond explaining that they had a handful or parts laying around and bought a few at Radio Shack. This is nice in theory, but not all of us are Electronics Gurus.

Through some sleuthing of my own and a lot of digging plus a few emails to Nerdkits support I put together a list of Digi-Key parts that should make this kit work.

Qty ... Part Number ..... Manu. Part Number .. Price USD
2 ..... IRF730APBF-ND ... IRF730APBF .............. 3.96
2 ..... MUR1520GOS-ND ... MUR1520G ................ 2.42
1 ..... M10136-ND ....... 78F101J-RC .............. 0.30
1 ..... 495-1234-ND ..... B32521C6333J ............ 0.47

These should allow me to finally get my backlights working. We shall see.

So what’s come to the top of the pot in the US recently?

We’re found that both BP and the Government were grossly wrong about the flow rate of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (No shock there really, what company isn’t going to make it’s figures as low as possible when it’s impact on the environment is concerned).

We’re learned that Transocean who owns the rig has received 411 million dollars from it’s insurance company, but is trying to use a law written in 1851 to limit it’s liability to 21 million total.

To top it off the last flight of the shuttle Atlantis is scheduled for this afternoon, and the final flight for all the shuttles is a November launch of Discovery. The replacement launch vehicle “Orion” has a scheduled launch date of 2015, anyone that seriously thinks that is going to be on target is fooling themselves.

The US has ignored the job of the Federal Government to push the envelope for the good of the nation and instead now has handed off such trivial things to private corporations. Those corporations are now almost completely running the show, able to do almost anything and ignore the consequences of their actions.

In the end tho isn’t it the people that need to do something about this? Given the great divide in US politics I don’t see that happening for more than 20 years.

So all we can really do now is keep fooling ourselves into thinking that we matter while of course remembering to bow to our corporate masters who demand our money and ruin our environment. Yeah, I am no more thrilled about this idea than you are.

As I was saying, there is a smoothie place in Seattle named “Crazy Cherry” but upon trying to get a cherry-flavor smoothie was told they do not make cherry.

I’m sorry to say I hope this disaster is as bad as can be thought of.

I want to see hundreds of millions of gallons spread from Texas to Florida.

Why?

Because it’s going to take that kind of a massive disaster to get people to stop ignoring the ecological price of filling their gas tank.

So very wrong, heh

This sure seems like a Banksy, I saw it by Harvard Exit in Seattle by chance.

But since there is a Banksy movie opening in the theater next door I’m skeptical.

So I needed a mono amplifier, I decided to just pickup this kit: http://www.chaneyelectronicsstore.com/servlet/the-121/20-Watt-RMS-Mono/Detail



Which I must say had some good and bad effects on my project.

#1 The PCB. I hate to start with a negative but this one is a glaring disaster. The single-sided circuit board was simply horrible. It had no information printed on it whatsoever and relied on the instructions for all placements and orientations. (It did not even have information as to what wire connections went where, you’ll notice my sharpie markings)

#2 The kit came with a much smaller heatsink which was extruded aluminum rather than the sheet-metal one that appears in the sales shot. This is fine for my uses as i’m putting the thing into a box with multiple other components.



#3 The instructions. Three pages, color, very concise.

#4 The Pot. Too short, the knob I put on it barely fits at all, this could have been far better.

#5 The included wire. It was red. Why one color of wire was included in a kit that needed 6 different wire connections is beyond me, I guess they just figure that you will connect the same red wire to your unmarked power connections and somehow remember which is which.

The kit does what it says it will do, but in the end I was not very happy with the overall construction and contents of it. A friends suggestion made it sound FAR better however.

This consists of one 10uH inductor, 1 560 Ohm Resistor and 1 10uF Capacitor (Need not be 100v). Put them together as shown in the “+ Input” line between your source and the board. I found the new sound to be much deeper and full.

Good luck.

So lately i’ve been playing around with electronics parts, and I stumbled upon a post that said there was a really good accelerometer in the Wii Nunchuk controller.

Not wanting to let a good thing pass me by I ordered a cheap one on Ebay for $5. Well, that was my first mistake.

The data was horrible, totally substandard, today I bought a true Nintendo brand nunchuk used for $15 and well, the data speaks for itself.



Lesson learned, I now wonder what other controller devices have such awful components in them that we never “see” outside the packages, nor get a look at the raw data.

A friend pointed this stuff out to me today. It’s aluminum t-slot building parts for small project and hobby use (Think large stable erector set parts)


http://www.microrax.com

I’m tempted to buy some but I don’t have a real need for it at the moment.

Now to start with I in no way condone the actions in Austin, Texas this morning. Violence does not solve problems. Killing innocent people is horrible. Period.

But when something like this happens in our modern era and online information turns up about it that information seems to vanish at a shocking pace.

Case in point, Joe Stack’s website at embeddedart.com. If you went there after about 10am PST this morning you got this message. You could still see the cache of the page on Google, but that was cleared about an hour later.

For future reference I post a cache of the original site here.

Strangely enough the hosting company T35.net returned the page as it was originally while I was writing this for unknown reasons. Then by the time I finished writing the site was offline again and pointing to http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2010/0218102stack1.html. That page says the original replacement message said the page was taken down at the request of the FBI. Perhaps in all fairness the company was not the one covering it’s butt, rather it was the Feds.

When I emailed the webmaster at T35 they responded with: “Yes, we did receive several requests from the FBI (to remove the page). They were made over the phone.”. I would give a lot to know what the FBI was thinking when it made those requests.

Likely, we’ll never know the whole truth.

Ever so often an image comes along that sums up a problem so very nicely.

This is one of those images.

Can’t wait for my new electronics parts to get here so I can really start doing crazy stuff.

Whee!

Now if only someone would pay me for doing crazy stuff, that would be awesome.

This is beginning to really annoy me.

More and more the USA is becoming a nation of “if you can’t accomplish something yourself, you’re a loser”.

Even here in Seattle people are still judgmental and arrogant with their individualist thinking.

Makes it a bitch to try and stop acting like that myself, heh

I’ve been waiting for a viable “slate” device for 10 years. Knowing this was going to be a big thing when it hit the public market. Today I got the first hint that the markets are ready for a slate, but it’s not the slate I was expecting. I still think I was right and this is a game changer, but is this going to be the “Next big thing” for Apple? I don’t think so, here is why.

First, the iPad is not the iPhone, even tho they want people to compare the two. The iPad will have an app market, but it’s not an “app” device, it’s a true computer, and people will want to use it as a true computer. They will want to read books and comics and websites on it along with working on their business functions, which is not something the iPad will really allow, you only get one application at a time and you don’t get a true OS you get the iPhone OS.

Secondly it has no camera, stylus or mouse capability. People want all-in-one devices, they want options, they want precision, slates are going to be used for EVERYTHING, finger-touch will not be good enough.

Along with those you cannot make any calls off the device even tho it has the audio capability. A slate needs to be able to make calls over Skype or other providers.

You also cannot use spare batteries to extend your work time, this is something basic to netbooks and most notebook computers.

Lastly it has no expansion capability, no USB ports, no SD or even MicroSD card slots, on a device this big that’s like not including a spare button on a $200 sweater, it’s a silly lack of basic functionality that people are going to want.

In short, it’s not being treated like a computer it’s being treated like a big phone that you cannot make calls off of. Seriously who is going to be open to that type of limited functionality? When the first slates come to market running full OSs they will dominate multiple fields that the iPad will not be useful in, such as medicine, research, college students, anywhere where a full-size computer is useful and needs to be carried around (Think the PADD devices you saw on star-trek) slates are going to be the pocket-calculators of the new techie revolution.

Now, the key is what companies to buy into to ride the wave. Unfortunately I don’t know yet, Asus and Acer will be big players, Dell is sure to make it’s own device, but it’s OS that will determine who succeeds, any of these devices can be made into functional PPCs (I’m thinking this is a good shorthand for “Pad Personal Computer”) by installing Linux, but people are still stuck on Windows, so I think the model with a functional copy of Win7 at a good price will be your first hit.

All hail the beginning of the next technical revolution, in ten years i’m betting PPCs will be replacing netbooks and small notebooks completely. (Well, at least i’m hoping)

Thanks to the Supreme Court corporate money can now flow into political campaigns with reckless abandon.

If money is now considered speech then those with more money have more right to speech.

So much for the average voter actually having a meaningful voice anymore.

It seems Google has raised quite a few of eyebrows with it’s public announcement of attacks from Chinese sources.

I think it’s way past time to hold tongues just because of profits.

Oh i’m very unhappy about this one.

Reports are that gmail accounts have been compromised by Chinese governmental organizations.

Precisely what is out there to stop them from trying to get into mine? Sure, I have nothing on it that China would care about, but that’s not really the point is it. It’s that my data is *MY* data, not China’s data.

I feel if Google wants to live up to their mission of not being evil they have little choice right now but to leave China for the good of all their other users around the globe.

Seems that being the largest private torrent tracker in the world has some downsides.

Especially when music is relatively small and fast to download. If you end up with new invitees just downloading what they want and trying to upload it to have a positive ratio you’re going to have alot of people waiting a very long time.

Their solution? Screen new members in an “interview” process. Make sure they’re capable of uploading something. But how many really ever get anything worth uploading that isn’t already there yet?

“I could upload my parents collection of Korean folk songs, but I doubt anyone would want it. However it’s the only thing I have that they don’t already have on the site.”

Also invites are only now being given out to users that upload, no uploads, no invites.

But thinking about percentages this isn’t really going to help them out. There is only so much music out there that “online downloaders” want in the first place. If you have 99% of it already then anyone you add is going to have a harder and harder time of maintaining a positive ratio. And you’re going to get more people uploading junk because that’s all they can find to upload.

The solution? I suggest converting to a private pay site, no other fix it going to deal with the ratio issues music entails.

Just in case anyone ends up searching for information about them.

My GF and I got 2 Droids from them on the 27th of November at 1:04pm.

Her Droid developed an issue and needed to be replaced. We took it back on December 27th at 5:01pm.

They promptly told us the 30-day warranty had expired 4 hours ago and we would have to get it replaced through the manufacturer, have a nice day.

Needless to say this is not what I consider good customer service. Be warned.

Just a little note for those folks searching out a sweet red wine.

I’m partial to “Sweet Lucy” from Kokopelli Winery.  (http://www.kokopelliwinery.net)

So they are recalling 50 million window blinds due to the deaths of 5 children.

http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/ConsumerNews/50-million-blinds-recall-child-deaths/story?id=9336171

Literally because a 1-in-10 million chance of death is too high.

The odds of being struck by lightning each year? 1-in-750,000.

MIT team wins Darpa’s treasure hunt in less than one day

From Bobbie Johnson, San Francisco – guardian.co.uk

A $40,000 online challenge proposed by the US government has been won by a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – just hours after it was launched.

The Darpa Network Challenge, which took place on Saturday, offered a cash prize for the first group to successfully locate 10 large red weather balloons hidden at a string of secret locations across the US.

Competitors were asked to use the internet and social networking sites to discover the whereabouts of the balloons, in what Darpa – the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – said was an experiment to discover how the internet could help with rapid problem solving.

More than 4,000 groups eventually registered to take part, but although the organisers had given players up to nine days to track the balloons down, the team from MIT scooped victory within nine hours of the launch.

“Darpa salutes the MIT team for successfully completing this complex task less than nine hours after the balloon launch,” said Regina Dugan, the director of the agency.

The winning team has not explained precisely how they came to discover the location of all 10 balloons, but the process detailed on the team website explains that they created a viral campaign to encourage people to put forward information they gleaned about the locations.

The team offered the first person to spot a balloon a $2,000 share of the prize money, but smaller awards would also be given to those who referred that player to MIT’s website – a scheme of incentives aimed at getting people to urge their friends to take part.

Whatever happened in the end, it appeared to work – and quickly.

“The challenge has captured the imagination of people around the world, is rich with scientific intrigue and, we hope, is part of a growing ‘renaissance of wonder’ throughout the nation,” said Dr Dugan.

In the end the eight-foot balloons were hidden in locations across nine states: Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.

I’m quite happy with this little gadget (Especially now that there is a browser that uses multitouch and zooms in much farther than the built-in browser)

The fact that it links with all my existing google data, and it gives me realtime bus routing in Seattle it’s perfect for my needs. Audio “phones” are beginning to become archaic, data devices are the future yet they are just barely becoming available.

The New York Yankees have won 27, or 25% of the 105 World Series to date and have 43% of the 61 AL wins.

Go ahead, tell me that it makes things fair and interesting when the richest team wins 1/4 of the time.

From Kitmous:

I came here from the “Stumbling toward Ecstasy” post at Shapely Prose. I was reading about your struggles with diminished smell/taste, and thought I would come offer a suggestion.

I was in a car accident more than a decade ago that resulted in cranial nerve injuries. I have diminished smell and taste, and ‘sweet’ (because it’s on the tongue and not reliant on smell for intensity) is also the one that for me is strongest and most reliable. What I’ve taken to doing is pursuing REALLY strong-flavored foods–sharp English cheddar cheese instead of mild American cheddar, dijon mustard instead of yellow mustard, “everything” bagels instead of plain bagels, filet mignon instead of cheaper/less tasty cuts of beef, that sort of thing. Foods (for me, anyway) that actually have flavor. I don’t need to eat as much of them because I can taste them, so my body/brain is satisfied with less.

I’m just some random human on the internet, but I thought I’d pop over and offer a suggestion.

I do tend more towards VERY sweet things (IE. I like a little tea with my sugar in the morning) and I adore extremely sharp cheddar.

Sometimes tho a taste will completely overpower everything (Shitake mushrooms are a good example of this, coffee is another).

If I want a mild flavor I have to eat ONLY that thing (Shrimp, crab legs, steak fit that catagory)

Some flavors are powerful, but fade quickly for me (Mustard, horseradish fall here)

I also like to make a huge pot of soup with lots of veggies and lean meat, I can eat lots of this and it’s both low in calories and very good for me. Compared to snacking on other foods.

I appreciate the info, I never knew that certain tastes were not at all nose-dependent.

To quote Mark Greenbaum of the Christian Science Monitor:

In a nation that is so diverse economically, culturally, and politically, a party that enforces a rigid litmus test for membership will not be able to remain viable.

If Republicans continue to move from the center in areas where adherence to conservative ideology is not palatable to a majority of voters, the GOP will not be able to regain Congress or the presidency anytime soon.

I think they’re dying, they just haven’t been buried yet. The sooner they realize this the sooner we can quit having “us or them” politics.

I’ve thrown my support behind the “New Atheist” movemtn.

“Intolerance of ignorance, myth and superstition; disregard for the tolerance of religion.
Indoctrination of logic, reason and the advancement of a naturalistic worldview.”

Right up my alley.

Republican National Chairman Michael Steele issued a grudging statement this morning in response to the president’s being awarded the Nobel peace prize.

“The real question Americans are asking is, ‘What has President Obama actually accomplished?’ It is unfortunate that the president’s star power has outshined tireless advocates who have made real achievements working towards peace and human rights,” Steele said.

“One thing is certain – President Obama won’t be receiving any awards from Americans for job creation, fiscal responsibility, or backing up rhetoric with concrete action,” added the former Maryland lieutenant governor.

His attitude is a very good example of the sad state of US politics. I think it’s time to come together and be US Citizens instead of making everything a partisan fight.

Whatever happened to being proud to be in the USA?

Heaven is Where:

The Police are British,
The Chefs are Italian,
The Mechanics are German,
The Lovers are French and
It’s all organized by the Swiss.

Hell is Where:

The Police are German,
The Chefs are British,
The Mechanics are French,
The Lovers are Swiss and
It’s all organized by the Italians.

I would say this is a fail.

This place is nice, they give you power plugs next to network jacks with crazy speeds. For free!

This is totally hilarious.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39495

So the other week we went to Game Crazy which resides in Hollywood Video to get a used DS Lite.

They were nice enough to give us a sheet of 12 free rental tickets, one per month. As the gentleman said “These are so you have something to play on your new system”

“Oh, you rent DS games?”

“No”

??? right….

I’m having a cruddy week of fighting the “Seattle Freeze” effect. (It’s a Seattle thing, people want you to “Have a nice day, someplace else”).

It’s odd how it seems alot of other people also have this problem, but we can’t network worth a crap.

So most of the globe is shocked and saddened that Michael Jackson is dead.

Personally I feel that it’s hardly a big loss, he had not contributed much to society in quite some time.

Everyone dies, it’s just a matter of when and how.

I noticed this on Zdnet, it’s well worth reading.

Why Raid 5 stops working in 2009
By Robin Harris, July 18th, 2007

The storage version of Y2k? No, it’s a function of capacity growth and RAID 5’s limitations. If you are thinking about SATA RAID for home or business use, or using RAID today, you need to know why.

RAID 5 protects against a single disk failure. You can recover all your data if a single disk breaks. The problem: once a disk breaks, there is another increasingly common failure lurking. And in 2009 it is highly certain it will find you.

Disks fail
While disks are incredibly reliable devices, they do fail. Our best data – from CMU and Google – finds that over 3% of drives fail each year in the first three years of drive life, and then failure rates start rising fast.

With 7 brand new disks, you have ~20% chance of seeing a disk failure each year. Factor in the rising failure rate with age and over 4 years you are almost certain to see a disk failure during the life of those disks.

But you’re protected by RAID 5, right? Not in 2009.

Reads fail
SATA drives are commonly specified with an unrecoverable read error rate (URE) of 10^14. Which means that once every 100,000,000,000,000 bits, the disk will very politely tell you that, so sorry, but I really, truly can’t read that sector back to you.

One hundred trillion bits is about 12 terabytes. Sound like a lot? Not in 2009.

Disk capacities double
Disk drive capacities double every 18-24 months. We have 1 TB drives now, and in 2009 we’ll have 2 TB drives.

With a 7 drive RAID 5 disk failure, you’ll have 6 remaining 2 TB drives. As the RAID controller is busily reading through those 6 disks to reconstruct the data from the failed drive, it is almost certain it will see an URE.

So the read fails. And when that happens, you are one unhappy camper. The message “we can’t read this RAID volume” travels up the chain of command until an error message is presented on the screen. 12 TB of your carefully protected – you thought! – data is gone. Oh, you didn’t back it up to tape? Bummer!

So now what?
The obvious answer, and the one that storage marketers have begun trumpeting, is RAID 6, which protects your data against 2 failures. Which is all well and good, until you consider this: as drives increase in size, any drive failure will always be accompanied by a read error. So RAID 6 will give you no more protection than RAID 5 does now, but you’ll pay more anyway for extra disk capacity and slower write performance.

Gee, paying more for less! I can hardly wait!

The Storage Bits take
Users of enterprise storage arrays have less to worry about: your tiny costly disks have less capacity and thus a smaller chance of encountering an URE. And your spec’d URE rate of 10^15 also helps.

There are some other fixes out there as well, some fairly obvious and some, I’m certain, waiting for someone much brighter than me to invent. But even today a 7 drive RAID 5 with 1 TB disks has a 50% chance of a rebuild failure. RAID 5 is reaching the end of its useful life.

“An American-born journalist imprisoned in Iran for espionage is expected to be freed today after an Iranian appeals court cut her eight-year prison term to a suspended two-year sentence, her father said this morning.

Roxana Saberi, 32, “will be freed today, hopefully,” Reza Saberi, waiting outside the jail in Tehran, told CNN. “The papers are ready … it is just a matter of time, a couple of hours.”

The Iranian court of a appeals “reduced her jail sentence from eight years to two years of suspended sentence … and she will soon be free,” said her lawyer, Abdolsamad Khorramshahi.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/05/11/2009-05-11_iran_to_free_jailed_american_journalist_roxana_saberi_after_appeal.html#
”

About time.

Roxanna Saberi was convicted of spying today in Iran following a one-day closed-door trial.

Can you say “sham”? Good, I knew you could.

I hope she realizes that many of us back in the USA are hoping for her safe return. Maybe at least when she gets back and all this is over it might make the memories a little less harsh to know she was not really “alone”.

Iran Convicts U.S. Journalist Of Spying

April 18, 2009

NPR.org, April 18, 2009 · An Iranian court has convicted U.S. Iranian journalist Roxana Saberi of spying and sentenced her to eight years in prison. Saberi, who has reported for NPR, only recently learned of the espionage charge.

Saberi’s lawyer was not allowed to ask the court about bail. She has been jailed at Evin Prison in Iran since Jan. 31.

The deputy director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Robert Mahoney, says her sentence is too harsh.

“We believe that Roxana Saberi’s trial was not transparent,” he said. “And it does not seem that she has been treated fairly. We would call on the Iranian authorities to release her on bail pending appeal because we believe she should not be confined in Evin prison.”

NPR’s CEO Vivian Schiller says Saberi has already been held in for three months. Schiller has appealed to the Iranian government to show compassion and allow Saberi to return immediately to the United States.

So I stopped by their little shop the other day, and they have a nice selection.

The people however seem to be a little full of themselves. For instance if you are going to argue about technology with your customer it helps to know what you’re talking about. Telling me a USB port could not be put on a detector because it wouldn’t be waterproof when the detector itself is not, and waterproof USB ports do in fact exist does not show much wisdom.

Also one could say it’s not wise to try and argue religion when your customer, especially when they obviously do not see the issue the same way you do.

These are both good reasons why I myself am not in business.

Would this stop me from shopping there? Not likely, but it does make me not want to go ask them for help.

Geez, it feels like a funeral. I’ve been in quieter libraries. It felt “tense” like nobody wanted to say anything for fear of looking silly maybe.

The Linuxchix were MUCH more my speed. I like friendly and fun with lots of talk rather than movies and presentations. I think having it in an office conference room definitely had alot to do with it.

Oh well, I tried.

Reposted here because I don’t see this version on the web anywhere.

The Cartoon Rating Guide for Smart Adults: v3.0 4/24/2008

Why watch cartoons if you’re an adult? Because cartoons often have the best scores, most interesting plots and/or most humorous dialogue, and the most accomplished “cinematography” of any visual media. The best are stunning works of art and imagination with gorgeous matte landscapes.

This is a rating guide, not a review book — its purpose is to quickly alert you to animation you may never have heard of; consult elsewhere for extended analyses. It is skewed from the perspective of an adult animation fan — a lowly-rated show may be immensely enjoyable for children and even well-made, but couldn’t captivate my attention; a highly-rated show will be competently-made, but may or may not be enjoyable for or even marketed to (or even appropriate for) children. If a show has English-language versions, those are the versions I have likely watched. A cartoon with great writing and voice-casting but average animation will score higher on this list than a show with top-notch animation but mediocre scripting and voices, or an extremely well-made show marketed to children.

This list covers mainly animated television series, although some films are included, and one “webtoon”. I have not seen every episode of some shows rated 7 and lower and many episodes of shows rated 5 or lower; indicated ratings may change if I see new episodes of better or worse quality than those previous, or if many better or worse other shows are added to the list which alter the bell-curve landscape. Note: There are literally hundreds of mediocre-to-terrible shows that are not presently on this list, including a lot of uninspired anime and older “dumbed down” cartoons of low or no interest to the smart adult; I haven’t created this list to exhaustively include them all.

Anything rated at least “5″ is in the category of “average show worth watching once for the cartoon buff, provided you have time”; you probably won’t watch re-runs, however, until a decade or three have gone by. A typical “5″ cartoon features arch-type characters and villains, with serviceable if unexceptional dialogue, animation and plots. “4″s and lower feature too much bad animation, one-dimensional characters, lousy voice-acting, plot-holes, dumbed-down or just plain stupid writing and spastic slapstick for this adult reviewer to stomach — although kids will like many of them. “3″s and lower will have the smart adult scrambling for the remote. “6″s and “7″s feature more charismatic characters, more innovative drawing and intelligent scripting than average, and anything rated “8″ or better is likely to pull you in to watching a re-run while you’re channel-flipping, even if it’s well-memorized already. Anything rated “9″ is truly exceptional, and perfect in nearly every way. “10″s are reserved only for those shows which, IMO, will become or already are timeless classics. “11″s are simply phenomenal; you’ll feel empty inside after finishing the last episode and realizing that there aren’t any more. Highly-rated shows generally have unique and memorable musical scores associated with them. Make an effort to see every “9″ and up before you croak, and most 7s and 8s.

Q. Where do I find the latest CRGFSA?
A. It is always posted within a torrent; try searching here: http://tinyurl.com/2oxsn4

- “11″ – a rating which is off the 1-10 scale. Incomparably great.
- “3D” indicates an obvious computer generated style as opposed to a 2D drawn artwork look.
- “adult” indicates overly lewd sexual references and/or repetitive foul language. Some adult-oriented cartoons are witty parodies or taut thrillers, but most are extremely cheaply-made rancid, brain-dead trash.
- “adventure” means the main characters are perpectually on the move.
- “cards” means the show is a marketing vehicle to sell trading cards; most of these involve children with strange monster pets or summoned creatures who fight each other.
- “comedy” describes humorous shows that are neither toons nor spoofs.
- “DCAU” refers to the “DC Animated Universe” created by Bruce Timm and Paul Dini.
- “east” denotes an overtly oriental-themed cartoon, often involving samurai or ninjas, or emphasis upon martial-arts or medieval-period Japanese or Chinese clothing and settings. This guide does not otherwise distinguish between cartoons and “anime”.
- “educational” shows frequently deal with ethical, historical or geographical aspects.
- “family” indicates a show with very broad appeal; it isn’t specifically written for any age group, and is neither “dumbed down” nor “sophisticated humor”.
- “fantasy” indicates the presence of magic or “chi” and/or spirts, gods, ghosts, demons, undead, fantastic animals, etc, but the setting is in an otherwise more or less realistic world.
- “flash” is cheap-looking computer animation of mostly moving cut-outs and vector-scaling.
- “Ghibli” indicates the acclaimed Japanese animation studio, or anything prior involving its founders Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata.
- “girl” indicates the presence of important female protagonists.
- “kids” means the show is appealing to small children (whether or not dialogue is dumbed-down). Virtually all kids shows are also comedies if not toons.
- “Mainframe” refers to Mainframe Entertainment, a pioneering 3D animation company.
- “mecha” indicates giant robots. Most mecha also includes sci-fi elements.
- “movie” means a single, stand-along show, regardless of whether it played in theaters.
- “realistic” indicates real-world physics are observed, nobody has superpowers, and animated characters are essentially like real people and don’t take inordinate risks, speak “one-liner dialogue” or “mug for the camera”.
- “scary” means weird monsters may frighten very small children and give them nightmares, even if it’s a comedy otherwise popular with kids. I afix this term only to shows marketed toward family or children’s audiences (I take it for granted that teen- and adult-oriented shows are filled with imagery guaranteed to frighten toddlers, especially anything rated “violent”).
- “sci-fi” shows are set in the future, or concern exotic technologies such as space-travel.
- “series” means plots span multiple episodes and even seasons (so they are best watched in order); lack of this term doesn’t mean, however, that all of a show’s episodes are “stand-alones”.
- “spoofs” parody cultural or other-show references which younger persons are less likely to be aware of; a kid’s cartoon which is also a spoof is likely to drag up this reviewer’s rating due to intelligent writing. On the other hand, a spoof’s gags tend to be topical in nature, and the humor may fall flat with the passage of time.
- “superhero” means some characters have extraordinary abilities or “mutant” powers which permit them to cheat real-world physics which others have to obey in an otherwise more or less real world. While many cartoons feature characters who trend in this direction, superheroes are invariably costumed protagonists who are famous for their abilities. Superhero shows often include sci-fi elements.
- “toon” means real-world physics are expressly NOT observed, animals talk, characters have “three fingers & thumb” hands, gravity is defied until noticed, etc. Many competently-made toons have lowered ratings in this guide due to emphasis on slapstick antics and marketing toward children.
- “violent” means there’s realistic-consequences combat with injuries and blood, and/or on-screen death, and the show is usually inappropriate for small children (the lack of this term, however, doesn’t mean that a show lacks fighting). A show labelled “violent” does not necessarily contain violence in all or even most of its episodes.
- “ultra-violent” shows so wallow in gore that many would consider them completely depraved.
- “WMT” indicates Japan’s “World Masterpiece Theater”.

(Like the amplifiers in “This is Spinal Tap”, the Cartoon Rating Guide now goes to 11!)

11 – Cowboy Bebop – series, adventure, sci-fi, violent, girl (English language version)
……..The greatest sci-fi cartoon series of all time. Nothing else is even close. Nothing else even tries. More recent shows may have flashier graphics (barely), but none capture the heart, the soul, the soundtrack, the rich variety of settings, and especially the quality of writing and characterization.

11 – Persepolis – movie, girl, adventure, realistic, educational, adult
……..The mesmerizing autobiography of acclaimed author Marjane Satrapi. Banned in Iran.

11 – Romeo’s Blue Skies – series, family, adventure, realistic, WMT, educational
……..Schools should be replaced with vid-screens looping this show. Children (especially boys) will learn about everything important here: Life, death, respect, values, integrity, initiative, creativity, empathy, education, courage and purpose.

11 – Whisper of the Heart – movie, girl, family, realistic, romance, Ghibli
……..While their fantasy advantures are all very good, this is Ghibli’s most satisfying and polished work.

10 – 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother – series, family, adventure, realistic, WMT
10 – Adventures of Prince Achmed, The – movie, family, fantasy, girl, adventure
10 – Avatar: The Last Airbender – series, family, fantasy, adventure, girl, east
10 – Fairly OddParents, The – toon, spoof, kids
10 – Future Boy Conan – series, family, adventure, Ghibli, girl, WMT
10 – Kiki’s Delivery Service – Ghibli, movie, family, girl, fantasy
10 – Laputa (Castle in the Sky) – Ghibli, family, movie, adventure, girl, sci-fi
10 – My Neighbor Totoro – Ghibli, movie, family, kids, girl, fantasy, adventure
10 – Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water – series, family, girl, violent, adventure
10 – Oban Star-Racers – series, adventure, sci-fi, girl
10 – Popeye: Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp – toon, family, fantasy, movie-short
10 – Samurai Champloo – series, spoof, violent, adventure, adult, girl, east
10 – Venture Bros., The – adult, spoof, violent, sci-fi

9 – Batman, The Animated Series – superhero, DCAU
9 – Batman Beyond – superhero, DCAU, sci-fi
9 – Beauty and the Beast – movie, Disney, fantasy, girl, family, scary
9 – Danny Phantom – comedy, fantasy, girl, superhero
9 – Eureka Seven – series, mecha, violent, sci-fi
9 – FLCL (Fooly Cooly) – series, comedy, girl, sci-fi, fantasy
9 – Grave of the Fireflies – movie, drama, realistic, violent, Ghibli
9 – Invasion America – series, sci-fi, violent, adventure
9 – Kim Possible – comedy, girl, Disney, superhero
9 – Lupin III (or the Third, English version) – comedy, adventure, girl, spoof
9 – Megas XLR – mecha, spoof, girl, fantasy, sci-fi
9 – Mysterious Cities of Gold, The – series, kids, adventure, girl, fantasy, educational
9 – Pom Poko (The Raccoon War) – Ghibli, movie, fantasy
9 – Porko Rosso – Ghibli, movie, adventure, girl, fantasy, family
9 – Prince of Egypt – Disney, fantasy, movie, musical
9 – Princess Mononoke – Ghibli, movie, fantasy, adventure, violent, scary, girl
9 – Sea Prince and the Fire Child – movie, toon, fantasy, girl, romance
9 – Spirited Away – Ghibli, family, movie, fantasy, girl, adventure, scary
9 – Superman, The Animated Series – superhero, DCAU, girl, family
9 – Teen Titans – spoof, superhero, DCAU, girl, family

8 – Akira – movie, sci-fi, violent
8 – American Dragon Jake Long – kids, superhero
8 – Ben 10 – kids, comedy, sci-fi, girl, adventure
8 – Cat Returns, The – movie, Ghibli, fantasy, girl, family
8 – Courage the Cowardly Dog – toon, family, spoof, scary
8 – Full Metal Alchemist – series, fantasy, violent, comedy, east, sci-fi
8 – Futurama – adult, spoof, sci-fi, toon
8 – Gargoyles – fantasy, violent, scary, girl, Disney
8 – Gauche The Cellist (Sero Hiki no Goshu) – movie, Ghibli, family, fantasy
8 – Ghostbusters, Extreme – fantasy, scary, comedy
8 – Ghostbusters, The Real (seasons 1-3 only) – kids, fantasy, scary, comedy
8 – Heavy Metal – movie, fantasy, sci-fi, comedy, violent, adult, girl
8 – Howl’s Moving Castle – Ghibli, movie, girl, fantasy, violent
8 – Iron Giant, The – mecha, comedy, family, movie
8 – Jackie Chan Adventures – family, fantasy, girl, comedy
8 – Justice League / Unlimited – superhero, sci-fi, DCAU
8 – Kamichu: Teenage Goddess – series, fantasy, girl, east
8 – Lilo & Stitch (movie, TV show) – kids, sci-fi, comedy, girl, Disney
8 – Martin Mystery – sci-fi, comedy, scary, girl
8 – Mulan – movie, fantasy, girl, Disney
8 – Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind – Ghibli, movie, girl, fantasy, adventure, sci-fi
8 – ReBoot – toon, fantasy, spoof, 3D, Mainframe
8 – Rocket Power – kids, comedy, girl, educational
8 – Rocky & Bullwinkle Show, The – kids, spoof, toon
8 – Secret of NIMH, The – toon, adventure, violent, movie, Disney
8 – Shadow Raiders / War Planets – series, sci-fi, girl, 3D, violent, Mainframe
8 – Static Shock – kids, superhero, DCAU
8 – Valhalla – movie, kids, fantasy, girl
8 – W.I.T.C.H. – girl, fantasy, comedy

7 – Batman, The – superhero
7 – Beastwars – series, sci-fi, fantasy, mecha, 3D, Mainframe
7 – Big O, The – mecha, sci-fi, violent, girl
7 – Bleach – series, fantasy, violent, comedy, east
7 – Case Closed (Detective Conan) – family, mystery, adventure
7 – Daria – girl, comedy, realistic, adult
7 – Death Note – fantasy, violent, series
7 – Dexter’s Lab – kids, toon, spoof, sci-fi, girl
7 – Ghost in the Shell, Stand Alone Complex, 2nd Gig – series, sci-fi, violent
7 – Infinite Ryvius – series, sci-fi, drama, girl
7 – Invader Zim – toon, kids, spoof, sci-fi
7 – InuYasha – series, east, violent, fantasy, girl
7 – Juniper Lee (The Life and Times of) – spoof, girl, kids, fantasy
7 – Kappa Mikey – spoof, toon, girl, flash
7 – Korgoth of Barbaria – adult, spoof, fantasy, ultra-violent
7 – My Dad the Rock Star – kids, toon, comedy, girl
7 – My Life as a Teenage Robot – kids, toon, sci-fi, spoof, girl, superhero
7 – Naruto – series, east, violent, girl, fantasy, comedy
7 – Outlaw Star – series, sci-fi, comedy, girl, adventure
7 – Pinky and the Brain – kids, toon, spoof
7 – Popeye – toon, family, spoof, girl
7 – Powerpuff Girls, The – kids, toon, spoof, girl, superhero
7 – Robot Chicken – toon, spoof, adult, violent
7 – Rock & Rule – movie, fantasy, sci-fi, girl
7 – Samurai Jack – kids, sci-fi, superhero, adventure, east
7 – Scrapped Princess – series, fantasy, sci-fi, girl, adventure, scary
7 – Shuriken School – kids, toon, spoof, girl, east
7 – Star Wars: Clone Wars – series, sci-fi, fantasy, adventure, violent
7 – Superman Doomsday – movie, superhero, violent, DCAU(?)
7 – Time Warp Trio – kids, fantasy, adventure, educational
7 – Trigun – series, sci-fi, violent, comedy, girl
7 – Tutenstein – kids, toon, adventure, girl

6 – A.T.O.M – kids, superhero, sci-fi
6 – Aeon Flux – series, sci-fi, ultra-violent, girl, adult
6 – Afro-Samurai – series, east, adult, ultra-violent
6 – Aladdin – kids, toon, fantasy, Disney
6 – Blu Gender – series, sci-fi, mecha, ultra-violent, drama, girl
6 – Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers – toon, kids, Disney
6 – Chop Socky Chooks – 3D, toon, spoof, girl, east
6 – Dragon Booster, kids, fantasy, 3D
6 – Duck Dodgers – toon, spoof, sci-fi
6 – Escaflowne – series, fantasy, mecha, violent, sci-fi
6 – Fafner in the Azure (Dead Aggressor) – series, sci-fi, mecha, violent
6 – Get Ed – toon, kids, sci-fi, 3D, girl
6 – Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, The – kids, toon, spoof, girl
6 – Hercules – kids, fantasy, superhero, comedy, Disney
6 – Hobbit, The – fantasy, adventure, family, movie
6 – Johnny Bravo – toon, spoof
6 – Legion of Superheroes – kids, superhero, sci-fi
6 – Mar – toon, fantasy, comedy, east
6 – Martian Successor Nadesico – series, mecha, girl, comedy, sci-fi
6 – Ninja Scroll – movie, adult, ultra-violent, fantasy, east
6 – One Piece – kids, toon, adventure
6 – Paranoia Agent – drama, violent, comedy
6 – Replacements, The – kids, spoof, girl, Disney
6 – S-CRY-ed – sci-fi, mecha, superhero, east
6 – Silverwing – series, kids, scary, adventure
6 – Skyland – sci-fi, adventure, girl, 3D
5 – Storm Hawks – kids, 3D, adventure, sci-fi
6 – Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! – kids, toon, mecha, superhero, scary
6 – Tenchi Muyo! – series, fantasy, girl
6 – Legend of Tarzan – kids, toon, girl, adventure
6 – The Tick – toon, kids, spoof, superhero
6 – Thunderbirds – series, adventure, comedy
6 – Totally Spies – comedy, girl
6 – Winx Club – girl, fantasy, comedy
6 – Witch Hunter Robin – series, fantasy, girl, violent
6 – Wolf’s Rain – series, fantasy, violent, sci-fi
6 – Xiaolin Showdown – kids, toon, fantasy, comedy, east
6 – Zeta Project, The – kids, girl, superhero, sci-fi, DCAU

5 – As Told by Ginger – kids, girl
5 – Beast Machines – series, sci-fi, fantasy, mecha, 3D, Mainframe
5 – Beavis and Butthead – toon, adult, spoof
5 – Berserk – series, adult, ultra-violent, fantasy
5 – Blue Submarine #6 – series, sci-fi, realistic, violent
5 – Buzz Lightyear of Star Command – kids, toon, sci-fi, Disney, 3D
5 – Cartoon Planet / Space Ghost Coast to Coast / Brak Show – spoof, adult, superhero
5 – Digimon – kids, toon, cards, adventure
5 – Dr. Who: Infinite Quest – movie/series, sci-fi, 3D
5 – Dragonball Z – series, east, violent, fantasy, cards, comedy
5 – Duck Tales – toon, Disney, kids
5 – Duel Masters – kids, cards, spoof
5 – Dungeons & Dragons – kids, fantasy, scary
5 – Gigantor – kids, mecha
5 – Gokusen – series, adult, east
5 – Goof Troop – kids, toon, Disney
5 – Gotham Girls – series, girl, superhero, DCAU, flash, webtoon
5 – Gundam Wing – series, sci-fi, mecha, violent
5 – Hey Arnold! – kids, comedy
5 – Horus, Prince of the Sun – movie, Ghibli, fantasy, adventure
5 – Johnny Quest, Real Adventures of – adventure, girl, fantasy
5 – Justice League: The New Frontier – movie, superhero, sci-fi, violent
5 – Metalocalypse – adult, spoof, ultra-violent
5 – Mobile Suit Gundam – series, mecha, sci-fi
5 – Phantom 2040 – series, superhero, sci-fi
5 – Proud Family, The – toon, Disney, spoof, girl
5 – Recess – kids
5 – Record of the Lodoss Wars – series, fantasy, violent
5 – Reign: The Conqueror – series, fantasy, violent, adult
5 – Rocko’s Modern Life – kids, toon
5 – Sailor Moon – series, kids, east, girl, fantasy, cards, comedy, sci-fi
5 – Scooby Do, Where Are You? – kids, toon, comedy
5 – Samurai Deeper Kyo – series, fantasy, violent, east
5 – Sandokan – kids, toon, adventure
5 – Shinzo – series, kids, fantasy, cards, east, sci-fi
5 – Speed Racer – adventure, series
5 – Spongebob Squarepants – kids, toon, spoof
5 – Swat Kats – kids, toon, fantasy
5 – TaleSpin – kids, toon, girl, adventure, Disney
5 – The Future is Wild – kids, adventure, girl, 3D
5 – The Secret Show – kids, spoof, sci-fi, superhero
5 – The X’s – toon, sci-fi, flash
5 – Time Squad – toon, spoof, kids, educational, sci-fi
5 – Timon and Pumba – kids, toon, Disney
5 – Trinity Blood, Blood Plus – series, vampires, ultra-violent
5 – Wild thornberrys, The – comedy, kids, girl
5 – Willy Fog (various shows) – kids, series, toon
5 – Wizards – fantasy, movie, violent
5 – Xyber 9 – mecha, sci-fi, series
5 – Wayside – kids, toon
5 – Yakkity Yak – kids, toon
5 – YuYu Hakusho – series, east, girl, fantasy, comedy
5 – Zatch Bell! – series, kids, cards, comedy

4 – Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, The – kids, toon, 3D
4 – American Dad – spoof, toon
4 – Animaniacs (without Pinky and the Brain) – kids, spoof, toon
4 – Beyblade – kids, east
4 – Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo – toon, kids, spoof
4 – Blue Dragon – kids, series, fantasy, sci-fi, east, cards
4 – Camp Lazlo – kids, toon, girl
4 – ChalkZone – kids, toon, girl, fantasy
4 – Chaotic – kids, toon, fantasy, girl, cards
4 – Chowder – kids, toon
4 – Class of 3000 – kids, comedy, sci-fi, girl
4 – Codename: Kids Next Door – kids, toon, girl
4 – Corneil & Bernie – kids, toon
4 – El Tigre – kids, toon, flash
4 – Emperor’s New School, The – toon, kids, Disney
4 – Family Guy – adult, spoof
4 – Fantastic Four – superhero
4 – Fillmore – kids, toon, comedy
4 – Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends – toon, kids, fantasy, flash
4 – Growing up Creepie – girl, fantasy, comedy, flash
4 – Idaten Jump – kids, toon
4 – Johnny Quest (original) – kids, adventure, violent, sci-fi
4 – Kong: The Animated Series – kids, fantasy,
4 – Legend of the Dragon – toon, superhero, girl, east
4 – Little Einsteins – toon, kids, girl, adventure, educational
4 – Little Mermaid, The – kids, toon, fantasy, Disney, girl
4 – Lord of the Rings (Fellowship, Return of the King) – fantasy, movies, violent
4 – ¡Mucha Lucha! – kids, toon, superhero
4 – Mummy, The – kids, adventure, scary
4 – N.A.S.C.A.R. Racers – kids, 3D
4 – Pepper Ann – girl, Disney
4 – Pokemon – toon, kids, cards
4 – Pucca – kids, toon, girl, east, flash
4 – Rugrats – kids, comedy
4 – Shin Chan – comedy, adult
4 – South Park – toon, adult, spoof
4 – Special Duty Combat Unit: Shinesman – sci-fi, comedy
4 – Super Milk-chan Show, The – toon, kids, spoof
4 – Thundercats – kids, fantasy, girl
4 – Voltron – mecha, sci-fi, kids
4 – Yin Yang Yo! – kids, toon, Disney, spoof, east
4 – Yugi Oh! – kids, toon, cards

3 – Aqua Teen Hunger Force – toon, adult, spoof, flash
3 – Dora the Explorer – kids, toon, educational, girl
3 – CatDog – kids, toon
3 – Dragon Tales – kids, toon, fantasy, girl
3 – Ed, Ed & Eddy – kids, toon
3 – Grossology – kids, toon, flash
3 – Flintstones, The – kids, toon, girl
3 – G.I. Joe – kids, violent
3 – He-Man & Masters of the Universe – kids, fantasy, superhero
3 – Inspector Gadget – kids, toon
3 – Kenny the Shark – toon, kids
3 – Krypto the Superdog – toon, superhero, kids
3 – Lucy, Daughter of the Devil – adult, toon, 3D, flash
3 – Magic School Bus – kids, fantasy
3 – Mike, Lu & Og – kids, toon, girl
3 – Moral Orel – adult, toon, 3D
3 – My Gym Partner is a Monkey – kids, toon
3 – Prince of Tennis, The – series, girl
3 – Spider Riders – fantasy, kids
3 – Spiderman – superhero
3 – Superfriends – kids, superhero, girl
3 – Superman: Brainiac Attacks – kids, movie, superhero
3 – Top Cat – kids, toon
3 – Tracy McBean – kids, toon, girl
3 – Transformers (several shows and movies) – toon, mecha, sci-fi, (some 3D)
3 – Ultimate Avengers – movies, superhero, sci-fi, girl, violent

2 – Amazing Chan Clan – kids, toon
2 – Captain Planet – kids, toon, superhero
2 – Chuck Norris Karate Kommandos – kids
2 – Frisky Dingo – adult, spoof, violent, flash
2 – Home Movies – toon
2 – Jabberjaw – kids, toon
2 – Little Bear – kids, toon
2 – MaggieBeast – kids, toon, girl
2 – Sealab 2021 – adult, spoof, flash
2 – Xavier: Renegade Angel – adult, toon, 3D

1 – Assy McGee – adult, toon, violent, flash
1 – Gary Coleman Show – kids, comedy
1 – Squidbillies – adult, toon, violent

3 12 hour days in a row really suck.

Thankfully one way or another i’m not going to be dealing with this schedule for much longer.

“Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.” -Plato

Well, i’ve made my mind up, i’m moving to Germany ASAP.

I’ve got a few friends lined up that will give me a place to live over there (there is a really nice girl named Lirpa Sloof that has a spare room), and i’ve got enough money in the bank to live off of for quite some time.

I’ve just had with with the USA. The place is too damned individualist for me no matter what I do.

Better to cast the dice someplace else more fitting for me than die slowly here.

I’ve already downloaded the German version of “Rosetta Stone” so i’ll know at least some of the language.

I hope to be packed up and on my way over there by June 1st.

Wish me luck!