Author Archives: Shadowtwin

PC; Pat Tillman

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I got the brand new computer today, and, as such, I am still trying to figyre out how everything works.

There were a few issues, which none of you give a damn about, that I have to talk about, for no good reason.

It took a good 45 minutes or so to get my ftp client working correctly. Whether that is related to using a different Operating System, or my own idiocy is something that I am pretty sure will never be clear. I think that it will be the new ‘conspiracy theory’. First, JFK is killed, then Kurt Cobain, and after all of that, my ftp client takes some extra nudging to work…. Sounds like a cover up to me…

• I read what Flux had written over there at BlackChampagne (whose layout I totally ripped off, but that is a whole different story). I am glad to see that he now concedes that ‘Pat Tillman’ may not have been an ‘over-the-top’, gung-ho military guy who just got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time…

There are some issues about his death that just do not click correctly in my mind. First, he died in Afghanastan, not Iraq. Second, he put his life on the line to try to eliminate the terrorism in Afghanastan. He died fighting against the soldiers in a completely different country than described in the web site that I read, and also what most other people likely saw.

Certainly, Pat Tillman does not deserve sainthood, but he does deserve to be remembered far better than those of us who tend to bitch about the military, yet do not have the fortitude to give up a comfortable life to protect the freedom that we hold so dear.

PC; Mac

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Yes, yet another missed post yesterday, and as luck would have it, I got of work early today and have to work late tomorrow. What this means to you is that my every other day update schedule is going to continue for at least a couple more days. I had no plan for it to do so, but sometimes we just can’t plan for anything.

The good news is that my missed update had nothing to do with “Deadly Rooms of Death”! The bad news is the only reason for that is that I am quite stuck on a board, and with the drod website still down I am not able to find any clues as to how to beat the board. It is quite an irritating little board, sicne it is just straight-forward, lots of roaches and spawners. The problem I keep running into is that after I kill the first spawner I am not able to get near any of the other spawners without having the little roach babies gang up on me from all sides. I may give it another go tonight, as I saved the room when I was in a far more favorable position than all of my failed attempts yesterday. Why do I feel that I have to solve this? You may as well ask why the sky is blue..

• What did consume a lot of my time yesterday was computer related, in that I was looking for a value in upgrading mine. I am sure that I have mentioned many times before that my current pc is a real dinosaur. I have been married for three years, and the computer was with me in the old apartment that we lived in for almost a year after we got married. I think it is almost five years old at this point, and it shows, kind of.

I am one of the idiots left in the world that approach computers with a ‘buy the base and add on’ mentality. I am not so sure if this is a good or a bad thing at this point, but five years ago a decent computer system was a hell of a lot of money. The computer that I use currently is an “eMachine 466is” yes, with the ultra fast 466 mhz processor. When I got the system it had an astounding 32 megs of Ram, and a 4.3 gig hard drive. Lets just say that it was not the pinnacle of modern computer technology even when I bought it, but hey, it was under 500 bucks, so it seemed a value at the time.

The first upgrade that I made was the hard drive, how anyone can survive with 4.3gigs is beyond me. I remember thinking, when I bought it, that it would barely be enough to hold a couple of video games. That was before the diablo 2 expansion came out, and I was damn sure right, you wouldn’t be able to have that one single game fully installed on a drive of that size. Anyway, I upgraded to a 40gig drive (which does not transfer at the correct speed due to the fact that my motherboard is so antiquated), which did allow me to store some photos and all the games that I play. Then I added a CD-RW drive to it, you should have seen the look on my wife’s face when I had the system open and started to smack it with a hammer and chisel so that I could add a new media drive. The final upgrade was to the ram, which I now have maxed out at 256megs. I did also add a 32meg 3d card also, but that wasn’t actually necessary it was added since I was playing everquest at the time. So the absolute total cost of the system with upgrades was about $750 over five years, I think that is pretty good over that span of time. -I also bought a larger monitor but that was a necessity, well a new monitor was since the old one died and the larger one was only a couple of bucks more, but it will be used with my next system so it doesn’t really count.-

A note about computer shopping. I have been seeing ads on t.v. and the internet for complete Dell Systems including monitors for about 500 dollars. They are airing the same commercials for Gateway Systems. I looked at the systems that they are offering at that price and they are just crap by todays standards. I did look at a bunch of systems on ebay, but was turned off by the fact that most did not have operating systems, and that you had to read the fine print to see if it actually had a hard drive. Amazon has a lot of systems, but there prices are not quite as low as I had hoped. I was about to give up before I decided to just go and check the websites for less expensive computers. eMachines.com was the first site that I visited, and though I went to a few more after that I ended up going back to it.

I hear a lot of people dogging eMachines, but that is what I am using now and I haven’t had a single memorable problem with it in five years. Sure there have been some software issues, but that is Microsoft’s fault, eMachines just puts the components in a box they don’t manufacture any of the hardware or the software. I did have a few problems with the machine while making upgrades, but they just required possibly a better than average knowledge of the system BIOS, and as such were not anything to require tech support. With the performance of this machine over the last five years I was absolutely confident when I hit the confirm button on the purchase of my new machine.

The computer (which I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of) is an eMachine. It breaks down thusly (skip this section if you just dont care);

2.8 Ghz cpu
400 Mhz System Bus
512 Megs Ram (upgradable to 1 Gig)
CD-RW/DVD combo drive
64 Meg 3d video card

There are, of course, a lot of the specs that I am not going to mention. I did find a bit of humor in that this new system has a front side bus that is damn near as fast as the cpu on my current system. Holy shit, now I might have to start going to star trek conventions. A bit of Nerd humor there.

I did pay the same for this machine as I payed for the one that I am currently using, about 500 dollars. It seems a bit pricy in that respect, but the new machine has sextuple the processor speed, triple the bus speed, double the memory already installed (upgradable to quintuple), a dvd drive and double the 3d video of my old system. I think it will likely be enough to get me by for another few years at the very least. When video games start demanding more than one Gig of Ram it must either be like actual virtual reality, or about time to let the game run without windows trying to slow it down at every step.

This is all subject to change, of course, once I get the computer and find that nothing on it actually works.

• I must admit that while I was going through the pricing while looking at purchasing a new computer, I actually checked out a few Mac systems. From all that I have heard/seen the OS on them is so much more reliable that I would likely have given it a go (keeping in mind that this is like a hick who grew up a “ford man” deciding to try a “Chevy”), had I been able to find one in anywhere near the price range that I paid for the new PC. The real “plug and play” aspect of them, that is you plug it in and it works, as opposed to having to spend a few hours on the internet looking for drivers, would have made me drop an extra hundred dollars or so just to check it out. The fact that the MAC systems that you can buy for over 2000 dollars have slower processors and less ram than a PC that you can buy for one-quarter of the price was why I didn’t.

I am not so naive as to think that the windows operating system is better than the mac system, far from it. I have no doubt that the mac system is way better, and to further that I am sure that the reason that the PCs need so much RAM to simply view web pages is likely because of the software clogging up the memory. I really don’t have any doubts that a MAC with a processor half the speed of a PC and half the RAM of a PC could probably perform better doing any task (ask yourself, if that was not the case wouldn’t Microsoft focus on that to try to slay their only real rival?). As the earlier Ford/Chevy reference would hint at, it is damn hard to sell someone on a different product regardless of how much better it is than the current product.

The part of that which I find a tad funny is that if you try to copy the look of the old product you will get people to buy it even if it is crap. For instance, I bought an electric razor back in 1991 or so that looked just like a “Norelco”, it wasn’t and I paid less than half the price of the name brand. Within the space of about three weeks I found that the blades were clogged, brushing them out helped a little but it still felt like shaving with sandpaper. Guess what, they didn’t sell replacement blades for the razor, not even the company that made it. They had invented a look-alike “Norelco” electric razor that was disposable. I have been soured to imitation products ever since.

Now, Apple has gone completely the other way with it. They want their product to stand out and look nothing like a PC. It has worked for them so far, or at least they haven’t gone out of business yet. That is why I am pretty sure that if I ever had the opportunity to use a Mac I would go with it and never look back. There must be a reason why your average “CompUsa” store will have a dozen systems on the floor and only one is a Mac, the fact that people that have used the Mac will walk past all the PCs to get to it is, I think, certainly proof that once you use one you will wonder what the hell you did without it. This is all conjecture, as I did buy yet another PC mostly based on price, but I really doubt that anyone that is currently reading this on a Mac would ever consider a PC as their next computer purchase.

Fox Sunday; Underworld

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Well, I skipped yet another update and the net result was one of my site’s busier days of all time. I had 6 visits, of which I can only name three of them. I think that the pretty picture that I had on the last update might have been a contributing factor. At any rate, yes I skipped another one, and if anyone who is reading this (other than my wife) really cares, shoot me an email to let me know how disappointed you were, perhaps I will feel for you and soldier on, even on days when I really just don’t give a damn. Don’t hold your breath.

There are three contributing factors to my missing an update yesterday. 1) I played way to much of the damn ‘Deadly Rooms of Death’ game. 2) With the obvious exception of ‘South Park’, Fox’s Sunday evening shows, King of the Hill, the Simpsons and Malcolm in the middle are the only reason anyone should ever watch network television (unless you get addicted to ‘Survivor’ like I did, in which case you can watch an hour of CBS on Thursday). 3) I watched a movie that my wife had rented on DVD, which I will likely bitch a lot about later.

The good news on the DROD front is that I have learned all of the necessary tactics to win nearly every board with ease. The even better news is that this has resulted in me not enjoying it quite as much as I did when I started, and as such had no clue how to play or what the hell was going on. The net result of that is that when I enter a new board I will scan it for a minute or two, come up with the solution and then play it through. Sometimes the playing it through can take thousands of moves, literally, and that becomes a tad boring. I think I will go ahead and complete my current level and then give it up. Much like Tetris, this game loses all of the enjoyment once you know all of the rules and the boards become more tedious than actually challenging. Hell, at least Tetris forces you to move faster the further you progress..

As far as Fox’s Sunday night line-up goes, it was pretty good this week and kept me watching. I think it is a solid fact that pretty much any show they put on after ‘The Simpsons’ is going to do really well in its time slot, but ‘Malcolm in the Middle’ is a rather amusing show. Perhaps I only think that because my mother has taken to believe that I am Malcolm, while the older brother who is away (I forget his name) is my oldest brother, and Reece(sp?) is the middle brother, who was always causing trouble just for the sake of causing trouble. As far as that little equasion goes my mother did pull of a pretty good ‘insane mother’, back in the day, while my father was never so subserviant as the father in the show, but it certainly paints a better picture of a real family than say ‘Full House’ for example.

• UnderWorld

Thankfully I did not have to pay theatre price for this movie. I watched it even after reading the horrible review that Flux over at BlackChampagne.com gave it. It was every bit as horrible as he said.

My biggest bitch about the movie is also one of my ‘pet peeves’ when it comes to films. Ammunition. You can either take the Hollywood approach, that is that you never run out of bullets, ever. Or you can take the ‘real life’ approach where both sides have to reload. You simply can not mix those two without making the movie seem absolutely fake. This movie even goes so far as to show you the clip that is being used in the ‘semi-automatic’ gun, which is conveniently ‘fully-automatic’ when it is necessary. Though the clip is mostly empty when you see it, you can deduce that it could only hold eight or nine more rounds, for a total of thirteen or fourteen, at best. Yet, the hand-guns are routinely fired sixty+ times, then they stop to reload. Come on..

Then there is the issue about Selene, she can be all-powerful, when necessary. She can be as fragile as a 300 year old tea service also, when necessary. She can beat the shit out of a dozen of the werewolves, yet can’t seem to open her own nail polish. It just seemed so fake.

As far as the ‘plot twist’ at the end of the movie, if you didn’t see it coming by the time you were a half-an-hour into the movie, you just weren’t paying attention.

The movie did take my mind away from real life for about two hours and that is roughly 1% of a week. By that metric, it only cost a few cents to watch the movie, and I still think I got screwed.

Mom’s PC; Wallpaper; Prison

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Wow, it is May already? I thought it was still April, all day I did, right until I got home, and looked at the little clock on the computer to find out that it wasn’t. Why does time seem to pass so slowly when you are a child, yet just fly by (faster than you can keep track of sometimes) when you are getting dangerously close to your second 29th birthday?

Well anyway, I didn’t post anything yesterday, yet again. This time I was trying to help my mom get a pretty picture for her pc wallpaper. No one sent me any links to the elusive ‘Peagasus and a Unicorn’ image that I spoke about a few days ago, so I tried to download one that I knew was totally filled with tracking software. I did a virus scan before I downloaded that file, as well as running ad aware, then I went ahead and downloaded it. Sure was a hell of a lot of tracking shit with it (39 total files to be exact) but it was all just your average Gator shit that was easily removed. The problem was that the actual photo that came with all that scumware still would not open. After I infected my pc with all that shit to try to make sure I got the image. It sucked, I was disappointed, I moved on.

I did find a relatively nice image for her to use as her wallpaper, keep in mind that she has only ever had a weird “PeoplePc” background which will over-write whatever you set as your wallpaper each time you restart the machine. The image that I sent her, and explained via the phone how to set as wallpaper can be seen here.

You could click on the picture to see it at the 800×600 resolution that it is for her wallpaper, but I really think that it looks way better at this particular size. Compare that image to a silly blue background that simply says “peoplepc” and you might see why she was so happy to have an actual image as her wallpaper.

• So it is not everyday that I come home from work to find my home surrounded by police cars, yet today was one of those days. It was well after dark when I got home, so all I could see was the flashing bars in the distance as I drove towards my house. I was hoping that they were not at my house, but as I grew closer it was pretty obvious that they were. What Really Sucked about the experience is that they had a “K-9” SUV looking thing on one corner (it looked like an ambulance from a distance) and then three cop cars surrounding the un-fenced portion of my house. As I was driving towards the house, my first instinct was that something had happened to my wife (praise the gods that this was not the case because, first, she was not hurt or involved in the madness in any way. Second, the police may have frowned on my speed reaching nearly 60m.p.h. in the three blocks that I had to drive to reach my house (that being in a 25mph zone, and the cops were obviously not interested in my actions).

One of the officers did stare intently as I parked my car and walked towards my gate, fortunately it was one of the officers that I know, by face more so than name, and he knows that I live here, after giving me a scolding about leaving a refrigerator outside for disposal without securing the door.

I am not really sure what actually happened right outside of my front door tonight. What I do know is that there was a drug sniffing dog involved, the vehicle in question was towed and it took about three hours for it all to come to an end. Now that it is all over I am just thankful that nothing happened to my wife (as I had suspected at first), or my house. But still, man that was a rather frightening experience. If they ( I say they even though I don’t know the number of people or the circumstances) were going to try to make a stand, my front door was only a few feet away, and very securely locked.

Which leads rather nicely into the short discussion of living in a town with so many prisons. The number of free residents in Florence compared to the number of inmates is about 1 person to 3 inmates. While on might think that this would lead to you fearing an escape that is just not the case. Sure, if everyone that was in prison here (in multiple prisons) were able to band together to take over the town we would certainly be fucked. That is something that just could not ever happen, as such we never think about it.

What we do think about is a single prisoner escaping (possibly two or three) and that is no big deal to the residents of our little town. You see the first thought on the mind of the guy who escapes is going to be to get as far away from the prison as fast as possible. There is a Highway between the prison and the town itself. If you happened to be in prison, then broke out, would you be more likely to run into town (and the local police) or try to put some distance between yourself and the prison? Your options are 1)Highway, 2)small town street, you have no weapon, you are wearing prison clothes, which do you choose?

I have been told, though I am not sure if it is true, that the last guy who escaped from prison here in Florence was caught at the Circle K store drinking a beer. If the story is true, he certainly didn’t want the highway to get out, he wanted the shortest possible path to a beer. The fact that I can understand his motive is enough to all but prove that any logical person will run like hell.

Long story short, I feel a lot safer living with all these prisons than I would feel if I was the owner of a liquor store in a place like L.A., at least my assailant will have no weapon and a burning desire to get the hell away as fast as possible.

Politics; Deadly Rooms of Death

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Well as you may have noticed, the real life event that I thought might lead me to bitching did not happen yesterday, sorry. It was such a good subject too, but since it didn’t happen it just makes me think that I am really a cynical son of a bitch. Today I will bitch, regardless of your protests.

There was, I understand, a closed door meeting today between George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the 9/11 commission. As of now I can only find one news story about it, and it does not speak of anything that might have come to light after the meeting. I went to check the Political Animal (which is the new blog spot of the former CalPundit blogger) and he has yet to put in his two cents. I am sure that whatever news you happen to see regarding that meeting is going to say the same thing; The administration didn’t know that there was any possibility of a multi-terrorist attack on American soil. Which is obviously bull-shit. The Clinton administration left them plenty of information regarding terrorist activities in the years leading up to Dubya becoming president. A cursory search for “9 11 warning signs” on google (without the quotes for the search) just got me a few hundred thousand web sites. I read a couple of the older ones and found that, yes, the information was in place, it was simply not acted on.

This is a subject that is far too political for me. I encourage you to check out the Political Animal website if you are looking for more information, he has nothing posted about the interview with the 9/11 commission at the time I am writing this, but in the morning he will likely have whatever is available, and break it down into bite sized pieces.

I think I am gonna totally switch gears. I was flirting with actual content there for a second…

• Deadly Rooms of Death (that cumbersome name) , yet again. I don’t know what it is about these old games that drives people to play them. I know what drives me to play them, but the rest of the people, I got nothing.

The game is, first and foremost, a puzzle game. There is an illusion created that there is some hacking and slashing, but the reality is that you are just doing puzzles. That may be the thing that sours the average ‘First Person Shooter’ player, while it is what lets me look past the really sparse graphics and focus in on the puzzle. Of course, talking about this game right now is like releasing the walkthrough for the old Atari Pitfall, but I must go on.

You would not like this game. It is one of the games that you either Love or Hate, there is no middle ground. It gets progressively harder as the level number raises, but the fact is you are doing a puzzle. It might look like you are actually killing things to clear out the dungeon, but if you don’t do it in the right order it is possible to be stuck to the point where it is impossible. Perhaps I have played way too much Diablo in the last few months and welcome a mental challenge, I don’t know, I just know that those puzzles keep making me try until I find the way to do it ‘just such’ to clear the board. Yet another addiction for me, how many addictions does one have to have before he/she can stop it.

• Mandatory Birth Control

This is an idea that I have been kicking around for a couple of years. I am sure that the idea is not going to go over well with people who are very poor, but those are the exact people I am hoping to get involved in it. If you have a baby, and you can’t afford to raise the child, needing the government’s assistance in the form of WIC, WELFARE and FOOD STAMPS, as well as reduced cost Housing, I think that you should have to take passive birth control measures.

I do not mean to say or imply that there should be government regulations regarding child birth, or who can have children, just that if you do have children you need to have a way to support them. It is very easy to have a child, a lot harder to support that child. If you have no means to support that child, and ask the government to do it for you, it would only seem fair that the government would ask, in return, for you to not have any more children, until the point where you can provide for them on you own. The easiest way to get to that point, in my mind, is passive birth control.

The passive birth control will be the latest birth control implant that women can get. It seems expensive at the start, but think that the cost of raising a child (food and diapers alone will cost more). No more babies while they are on Government Assistance plans. It really doesn’t seem that bad of a deal to me. If they want to have more babies, they just need to get off of the government assistance program, then they can have a baby whenever they want.

Please don’t get me wrong, I am a high-school drop out, yet I pay all my bills with funds that I earn through my own labor. I don’t ask the government for anything (possible exception being to make the man with the most votes be President), I just think that it is wrong that two people, without one job between them, can spit out kids and live as well as I do. The government pays their rent, buys their food, pays their utilities, even gives them gas money to look for work, though they never get the job. It could be different in your area.

So a child that is raised in that environment, do you really think that child is going to go out looking for a job? I think that child is more likely to do what mom and dad did. That is my tax dollars, and your tax dollars, but them, they get money back from the government even though they never paid in a dime…

Puppies!; Deadly Rooms of Death; Wallpaper

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Well again I completely skipped making a post yesterday. I have no good reason for it, so don’t ask. Not that anyone ever really asks me anything about what I write here anyway. My wife does get on my case on occasion for missing posts, but beyond that I am the only reason that I continue to do this. I guess I kind of knew that going in. I figure if I just continue to write things here, eventually I will write something that someone will find in a search and then maybe become a reader. I think that my Shadowtwinian Reign may take a bit longer that earlier anticipated though.

After a lot of thought I have decided that the way I can drive traffic to my site is to play on the weaknesses of the average person. So, perhaps if I were to put up a couple of beautiful puppy photos I could lure some unsuspecting people into my web. Here is my first attempt.

Isn’t she so cute? Of course she is, what a beautiful little puppy! I should here mention that the whole demonic green eye thing is not what she really looks like, most of the time anyway. I have been snapping away happily with the new camera, but I have yet to read the owner’s manual (which is thicker than a lot of novels that I have read) which would surely tell you how to get rid of the green eye thing. Hell this camera has so many features that I am sure I will never know what a good two thirds of them are. Oh yeah, if you click on the thumbnail you will see all of Zelda, and Warlock looking on merrily. The thing that is hanging out of her mouth is, in fact, a pig hoof. The whereabouts of the rest of the pig are currently unknown. Also I cropped the hell out of the photo, then saved it at 50% image quality so that it would come in under 100kb. If you want to see it full size/quality you will really just need to come to my house, or pay for me to get a broadband connection so it wouldn’t take me ten minutes to upload the thing at full size/quality.

You can never go wrong with puppies.

• One of the guest columnists over at DII.net had an interview with the creator of this little game called Deadly Rooms of Death or D.R.O.D. for short. I know that link is currently dead, I assume that the influx of traffic generated by being linked to on such a prominent site pushed him way past his monthly bandwidth limits. I was able to download the game before that site went down, and I found it at least a bit amusing to play. It is like a lot of puzzle type games that I have played on the pc before, pretty simple to figure out, minimal graphics. But, it comes with an editor.

So after having played a dozen or so levels in the game I figure what the hell, I am gonna make me a Dungeon. I took a scrap of paper to draw a quick layout of how I wanted the rooms for the first level to look. Mostly just for the doorways going in and out. Then I started to make “JoeBob’s Dungeon”. I only made the first level to it, and I think it is about ten rooms. One of the rooms currently just has a big block formation that spells the words “Cake Walk”, as I didn’t want to take the time to figure out another puzzle to put there, but wanted to make sure that the level clear thing would allow you to move on. It was a lot of fun trying to come up with unique little things to throw onto the boards to make them make you think, yet easy enough that it wouldn’t take you an hour to figure it all out. I did hit one snag with it, as I discovered while trying to play my new level all the way through. One of the levels that I made was unbeatable. I was able to do it while I was play-testing it, since it let me choose where to start, and I always started right next to one of the enemies so that I could clear the board before it was a horrible mess of bugs. The problem was that when you came in through the only door you could it was possible to clear all the bugs, but the spawners would put back so many of them so fast that you were not able to kill them without getting cornered. Without actually playing it you really wouldn’t know what I am talking about, so long story short, I had to eliminate a few of the bugs and a couple of the spawners to allow a player to get at least one of them killed before the new bugs would spawn.

Wow, I believe I have reached an all new low in content. Talking in length about a game that no one has ever played, on a board that I created so there is no way anyone could have played it…Now for something completely different.

• When I gave my Mother her new computer on Sunday, she was excited by the fact that the previous PeoplePC wallpaper could now be something different. I told her that I would try to download her a better picture for her desktop, and that is just what I have been trying to do, the thing is that all of the pictures that I have found which match the specifications are .exe files. That could mean that they are simply packed as .exe files with winzip or some such program, but I don’t want to take the chance with mom’s pc since she certainly doesn’t know how to fix it if something goes bad.

What I am looking for is a really pretty image of a unicorn and pegasus together. The image size would probably be best at 800×600 as I am sure that is what her screen area is set as. I found one such image at a pc wallpaper site, but after downloading it the file would not open, siting an ‘unsupported start of file marker’ or some such. If you happen to know where I can simply download a .jpg image such as described without having to sign up for weird porn email from here to eternity, please send me an email.

That is all for today. I may actually make a post tomorrow, even though it is my concrete day off, just because I have a feeling that a topic is going to present itself. I am basing that assumption on something that happened today IRL and I really beleive it could make for excellent bitching material. That being said, if I make no post tommorrow, don’t be disappointed.

Puzzles; PC; Left-Handed Whopper

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Well there was not a post yesterday, it was late, I was tired, I have a couple dozen more excuses, if you really want to hear them. As always, direct your complaints Here.

The thing that was actually occupying all of my time last night was trying to find a good example of one of the puzzles that I completed in the Sherlock Holmes game, the game that I have mentioned a bit about in the last few days. This was the single most difficult puzzle that I have ever done in any game. It was not that the puzzle itself was hard, it is that it gave you absolutely no directions at all. You are sitting there with a bunch of tiles of two different colors, and a blank graph. There are numbers around the edges of the graph, but nothing that made me say, oh, I need to put so many of this color here, and the other color there.

Searching by the name of the game on Yahoo, I was able to find a page that linked to many puzzles that are like it. The one that I found that actually had a really good description of how to do the puzzles, as well as a tutorial was found at Conceptis Puzzles. The puzzle in the game was not nearly as tough as the ones that you find on this site, with the exception of the fact that you go into it without a single clue as to the rules of the game. After having seen the demo for the “pic a pix” puzzle, I was pretty easily able to solve the one in the Sherlock Holmes game.

Then, for some reason, I was taking to solving other ‘Conceptis’ puzzles, just to make sure I could. I don’t know what it is with me, any puzzles that are just simply Logic puzzles seem to consume me. If I were to leave that puzzle unsolved, hundreds of thousands of other people would solve it, the universe would not go out of alignment, yet I feel compelled to do it anyway. Hopefully this obsession won’t have the same fate as the obsession with the Lights Out game from tiger toys, where I was so obsessed with it that I made a version of it in java, which can be found Here. I must also note that it took me almost an hour to find the link to that damn game, and it doesn’t look anything like it did when I was playing it back in ’97 or so. I bet the puzzles are all still the same though, and my java-based game has all of the original puzzles, as well as the original hint moves for the first twenty-five boards. My programming of it is a bit lacking, but it is really quite faithful to the original.

So, Mom came and picked up her new computer today. I did my best to try to explain everything that they were going to need to know once they got it home, I even fired up the internet with it, and added AntiVirus.com to her favorites list. Then I figure I would go ahead and download AdAware6, I am pretty sure that the link won’t work, so the program is called “adaware6.0” and it is quite a usefull bit of freeware. It will get rid of tracking software like “gator” and “timesink”. I really do use that program on a weekly basis and it really speeds up my connection by deleting useless/harmfull crap.

I am left wondering why didn’t I do that a couple of weeks ago when I actually bought the machine. It was an office pull, after all. I mean they could have had a bunch of tracking crap on there, even some trojans, well, It does have an updated norton, so likely not. There could have been tracking software on it galore, though, and there was. I forget the name of the program, but it was described on the internet as being able to download code, and upload statistics without you ever knowing. That is a crock of stinky crap.

I have to run that “ad aware” program on my system pretty frequently. For the most part all I find are cookies that I get from visiting sites like DiabloII.net, where they aren’t really trying to harm your machine, but they have to pay for web hosting somehow. I am pretty sure that the cookies aren’t really a big deal, with the possible exception of your transfer speed, I notice that particularly since I am typing this on a modem connection. The real baddies that you can get, as far as information sharing, are the ones that you get when you download free games or anything else that you choose to download. Cookies are harmless to your system, but if you download something from that site there is a really good chance that there will be a virus in it, which is why I had to buy mom a new pc in the first place.

Why do I feel like I am trying to teach an internet 101 class? If that email came from someone you know and has an attachment, make sure you know what the attachment is before you open it. Most people do not simply send attachments to their freinds without descriptions of the attachment. “Safe attachment, open now” is not the type of message that I would expect anyone I know to send to me. If it says, “DJ beat his dad with a shovel for the first time today”, I would read that one, yet families differ. If you have never asked for or gotten, a really weird screen-saver from your family members, why would you think they would start to send them now?

So, I guess what I am saying is that you should never read your email, everyone is out to get you..

• I am gonna be damn near a month late on this one, but I read this story through a link over there at BlackChampagne, it was all about April Fools Day hoxes. I didn’t find the humor in a lot of them, but I am American and relatively young. Lots of the hoaxes that it lists were of the ‘Greatest of all time’ sort, and thus get lost to people looking at it with 21st century eyes. One did catch my attention.

The place that I stole this can be found Here. The story reads as follows:

#8: The Left-Handed Whopper:
In 1998 Burger King published a full page advertisement in USA Today announcing the introduction of a new item to their menu: a “Left-Handed Whopper” specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. According to the advertisement, the new whopper included the same ingredients as the original Whopper (lettuce, tomato, hamburger patty, etc.), but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of their left-handed customers. The following day Burger King issued a follow-up release revealing that although the Left-Handed Whopper was a hoax, thousands of customers had gone into restaurants to request the new sandwich. Simultaneously, according to the press release, “many others requested their own ‘right handed’ version.”

I lagughed long and hard about this. Your basic fast food burger is always circular, if you rotate it 180 degrees, you are simply turning it a half a turn. The fact that anyone fell for this is certainly proof that some of us should not be allowed to procreate. If you can not figure out how to turn the hamburger with your own two hands, and thumbs, you may be better off dead.

As I said, I am young and American, the rest of the hoaxes may be more humorous to you if you are not from America, and, as such, can find the humor in what they are doing.

Pat Tillman; New Camera

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Well, I had hoped to finish the little story regarding the Sherlock Holmes video game today, I may, or not, depending on my endurance. There are actually a couple of things that I really want to comment on today, so I will jump right to it.

• I am linking to the story here, though I had heard about it on the radio as soon as I got to work this morning. It is the story about the death of Pat Tillman. If you do not follow American football, you likely have never heard of him, but I tell you that he was probably twice the person you will ever be. Especially if you, like me, are just sitting here typing at your computer keyboard.

By all accounts Tillman was a bit too small to make it in college football, but he made it, and even won the Pac10 defensive player of the year award his senior(I think) season. Despite that accolade, he was not selected until the seventh round of the NFL draft. -I should mention that he played college football for the Arizona State Sundevils, and was drafted by the Arizona Cardinals, that is why I really feel the need to talk about this, as it is so very close to home- He had to fight his way through training camp, and eventually was given a starting position. He broke the rookie record for tackles in his first (obviously) season. He put every bit of himself into every game, even though he was playing for a losing team.

Shortly after the attacks on 9/11, he made a decision that shocked the world -the sports world at the very least- by walking away from a multi-million dollar contract, to join the army. I am not entirely sure what his official title was, but I do know that he was in the ‘special forces’ which is a position that you must volunteer for due to the high risk factor. Also I am not sure when he was actually sent to Afghanastan, or what exactly his unit was doing there. I am quite sure that I could find all of that information if I were so inclined, the thing is that I am just not.

When the story about Tillman leaving the NFL to join the army first hit the news (I think that was in early 2002), I remember thinking that it was some sort of a publicity stunt. I remember thinking that there was no way anyone would walk away from, not so much the money, but the dream of so many children to play in the NFL. I remember thinking that once he started boot camp he would quickly change his mind. I remember all that, yet now I remember that I have not thought about him at all in the last couple of years. The reason that I haven’t thought about him in the last couple of years is that he has declined every request for an interview since he made his decision. He went out of his way to avoid publicity, he didn’t want it to be a big deal that he was making the choice to serve his country.

I have typed this line about a dozen times and then deleted it. I don’t think that there is anything that someone in my position can say about someone in his position. There is one thing that I can say, he was twice the man that I will ever be. I have always though that we were all just ‘Dust in the Wind’, yet now I feel that some of us (myself included) are actually dust that gets stuck in the boots of people like Pat Tillman, and I know that his is a name I will never forget.

• I was talking about a new digital camera back on April 20. Well I got it in the mail today, very quick shipping in my estimation. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, what after my first digital camera purchase. This one seems to be, better..

This is the first image ever snapped from my new camera. This was right after I put the batteries into it and set the time. I was a bit curious about the shutter speed, as that was one of the many downfalls of my previous digital camera. It seemed to work pretty well. You should certainly click on the thumbnail to see it full size, and keep in mind that I saved it at almost half of the original size, else it would have been a couple of Megs. I think that the single most impressing thing is that the fan that you see in the photo was actually spinning at the time, but it seems to be off. Well, not only that, but also the fact that the box that the camera came in is like eight or ten inches from the camera, while the t.v. is about ten feet away, and even the t.v. is clear enough to read the station id in the bottom right. Keeping in mind that the picture looks twice as good with the full file size, I just have to say that this camera is simply amazing, and it is last year’s model.

One of the things that I really love about the camera, which may be possible on all cameras for all I know, is that you don’t have to install the software for it. What I mean is that you can simply install all of the drivers for it and then it will let you access the camera from an explorer window, as if it were a hard drive. The only problem with that is you don’t get to see the photo previews and thus have to click them one by one to open them into your photo program. I really don’t have enough information to form an opinion on this little beauty yet, but I gotta say that for 80 bucks after shipping it seems to be well worth it…Remind me of that in a week or two when I am calling it a sham piece of shit.

At any rate, this new camera will likely mean that lots of photos will ensue in the immediate future. Whether they are good or bad will certainly be all your own opinion, they will likely be of our dogs, our house (which is over 100 years old) and the decorating scheme that I spoke about without photographic evidence a long time ago.

Check back often as I am likely to be ‘snap happy’ for quite some time.

Sherlock Holmes game

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As promised, there will be a bit of something here today, whether that actually makes you happy or sad is totally at your discression.

I am going to talk about the game that I was playing that made me miss the update two days ago, but that I actually mentioned yesterday. It was a pretty good game, for the money.

In case you have not noticed by now, I am one cheap bastard. I will not pay sticker price for pretty much anything. I am the type of person that sees a truck has rolled over on the freeway and wonders what could have been in that truck that I could buy on discount. Of course we all have to buy things at full price from time to time, I mean when you need a toilet plunger you are gonna lay out the six bucks for it, regardless of whether you saw one in the paper last week for half that price. Sometimes we simply can’t be thrifty, most of the time we can.

I take that same view into life, movies, video games, hell everything, with the possible exception of food. Sometimes it is better to pay full price for food than to pay half price for food, then pay twice the price the next morning, if you get my drift. I think “cheap” was kind of bred into me, since I did grow up pretty poor.

Once again I have gone way off topic. My intention was to speak a little bit about this game that I picked up for under ten bucks at a Wal-mart recently.

The game was The Mystery of the Mummy, and is an adaptation of the story written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Games that are based on stories are like, well, games that are based on stories. Kind of like movies that are based on books, but a bit different. The people who make the movies are trying to please the fans of the book at the same time as pleasing the average movie viewer. The people who make the games seem to be banking on the fact that ‘gamers don’t read’. That is certainly not a fact, but the game companies take a lot of liberties that would never be present in a movie, while I can not site one particular instance of it, trust me, it is all through the game.

The game in question depressed me for the fact that it made Sherlock Holmes sound like a high-pitched, whiny person. I, and I think everyone near my age, remember the voice/image of Jeremy Irons playing the character of Sherlock Holmes. The character, as portrayed by Irons, had a much deeper voice, and was really convincing as the cocaine using know-it-all. Of course all drug references are removed in the game, as well as the later adaptations of Doyle’s work.

This one will end prematurely. With luck, I will continue the discussion of that video game at a later date.

Camera; Dogs

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There were a combination of factors leading to me not posting anything new yesterday. The first was yet another silly little video game, which I may go into in some more detail at a later date. The second was a telephone conversation with my mother, which at least helped to ease a bit of family tension. The third was that I was looking to buy a new digital camera so that I could show off my handsome/pretty dogs, Warlock and Zelda respectively.

The first digital camera that I ever bought was an “Argus DC2000”, I bought that little sucker for 79 bucks a few years ago. You know, back when any digital camera started at a couple of hundred. That camera is just totally fucking useless, but don’t take my word for it, here are the reviews that it got on Epinions.com. Hardly glowing recommendations, to say the least.

I wanted to ensure that my next digital camera purchase would not just, well, piss me off, so I spent a bit of time reading reviews over at Epionions.com, as well as reviews for more recent cameras from sites like amazon.com. I read through the reviews on epinions, compared them to what I saw available on ebay at the time, and bit the bullet. The camera that I bought is a Kodak, which is a name that I am certainly more familiar with than the previous “Argus” camera that I had. The particular camera that I purchased has tons of reviews over there, the average is 4.5 out of 5 stars, yet there are a couple that just give it a 1 star rating. I think that might just be based on their inability to use it, but it could also be a piece of defective equipment. Only time will tell.

At any rate, I have not yet gotten that camera so I can’t yet voice an opinion. I am sure that it will be better than what I already have, but not sure if it will be the ultimate bliss that I am hoping for. I figure it will hit somewhere halfway between the two. If it is simply usable for taking still shots, it will be a hundred times better than my last digital camera purchase.

One humorous side-note to the whole thing. The number one ‘con’ to buying this camera was that it eats batteries, while the number one ‘pro’ was that it only takes two, while most cameras take four. Do the people that call it a pro that it takes less batteries, yet a con that it goes through them faster eat sugar-frosted lead flakes for breakfast or what? Of course it is going to go through batteries a lot faster when you are only using two, as opposed to four, the energy in the batteries is used as needed and, to my knowledge, can not be divined by simply praying over them. The camera runs on 3 volts, that means that it will operate on two AA batteries, the cameras that require 4 AA batteries last twice as long, but was there actually any savings to you?

I am sure that it is written somewhere in the fine print that the use of only 2 batteries is for the purpose of reducing the weight of the camera. I could be wrong, but it would seem too silly to think that you could get the same performance from a camera that had half the power. That is just my take on it, your opinion may vary.

• Country Thunder is descending on us like cancer. You can see signs of it all over the place, most notably the big-ass sign that they put up on the tiny little road leading into town. My wife often laughs when I say that I did not get the mail because there was too much ‘traffic’ in town. When I say that what I mean is that the drive-up-and-grab-your-mail slots outside the office are full. Once Country Thunder hits, it will be an adventure to simply make it home alive.

I said in my last blog that it is like Ozzfest, and it is in many ways, especially the drinking. People getting up at nine in the morning so that they can make the first show, taking time out only long enough to go get more beer. I have heard that they have better security and the such this year, but just imagaine trying to drive through a tiny town like ours at noon, when half of the driver’s are already drunk. I am pretty sure that I don’t want to have to be in the middle of that.

• Even as I pen (type) these lines, I may be looking at the last living moments of our older dog, ‘Warlock’. He is in perfect health, has had all of his shots, he is a good dog by the definition of dogs, but he may have to be killed. The little bastard kept myself and my wife awake all last night by first scratching on our bedroom door. She (my wife) let him go out, in case he needed to pee. He came back into the room and started sniffing at everything (you wouldn’t think that was loud, but you haven’t heard it). Then he scratched on the door wanting out, it took me about twenty minutes of laying there listening to him before I let him, and Zelda (who is the good dog at this point) onto the porch.

Dogs have nails like the talons of death, or so it would seem. After an hour of not being able to sleep because of the sound of the dog scrathing at the door, I let him back in. If the dog was intelligent, he would have noted that it gets better when he quits scratching, unfortunately, the dog is an idiot. Within ten minutes they were back on the porch. And the second he got there he was scratching at the door.

Long story short, if he does that again tonight, my wife and I will have a very beautiful stuffed dog.

I should also mention that I just got a call from my employers that will make it so that I will be able to make a post tomorrow, but not on Thursday. So Wednesday and Thursday are switching places, hopefully just for this week.