stupid blog

Many feel blogging is a pointless exercise. The strongest argument for this is writing for the sake of writing accomplishes nothing unless for a book/news article. Divulging your personal life does nothing for the casual surfer, and yet it isn't set to private. Stupid, right? I suppose on the other hand, writing is excellent for developing the mind. You'll see how surprising you sound when you're actually given time to put thought into your words, and as your process develops you start to speak well also.

Keep your tyrades about supermarkets and customer service by instead using online reviews like google maps, bing maps or citysearch

If you're writing about a problem, common or uncommon, chances are google will scoop up people with the same issue and bring them to your blog to find the answer. Blogging for a purpose seems like an unpopular idea. But there are common problems written on thousands of virus-infected sites in order to draw traffic... DriverDetective for example. The answers that work draw traffic.

If you're cool, then people esp. teenagers seek role models ( regardless of the term they use for it) because they seek exceptions to the rule that adulthood means becoming a stiff, even though its true. Adults bring their jobs home, there's no way to get around it... society needs to admit that. Teens and 20 somethings are told to "do what makes them happy" but it means also, don't do things for the sake of leading an interesting life they try to emulate. So in short, its becoming a stiff that means being happy in a way only you can enjoy. It's just not our first choice. So all adults are consistently uninteresting or displeasing in some manner that your average teen would sharply criticize. And it's incredible the response that laid-back, seemingly happy adults get from kids.

I know some mySpacers who are so envied that their profiles have been completely mimicked. I call this "Virtual Attention" aka attention whore (-ing). Social Net'ting is a circus. If you become addicted to facebook, you're bound to forget the pleasures of face-to-face interaction. Why shepherd confused youth with your goth page, while spending time talking about people who are doing?

which brings me to the most intense form of action: Proactivism and its criticisms
Many intelligent people feel pro-activism is dangerous for them - because it almost always means confronting an uncooperative political figure whose resources transcend the law. Government employees have near despotic power when dealing with individuals, and more often than not, the channels for action are plugged artificially by corrupt obstructionists and apathetic workers, in league with the politician. Take mayor Byron Brown for instance. His son did a hit and run when he was 16, the college caught it on tape and Brown made a statement that the tapes belonged to the college. He does shameful things without a warrant, and yet he says its too much to start the process of getting one this time. The next step is proactivism... Going to the mayor himself with questions and a camera, and finding the woman whose car was smashed and starting the court process. If anyone else hit the car, I'd be ok to sue, but the mayor's son? How do I get the feeling my luck would be much different in the latter case?

Well let me start with the options of retail property in buffalo

If its not dilapidated, its still in a bad neighborhood. If its not too small (more than 700 sq ft,) its much too big (more than 1600 sq ft). If it looks perfect, the landlord is unavailable by phone, email and voicemail.

Then the lease... can be designed to screw you into oblivion. The building might also have zero traffic, both foot and street.

if you have something acceptable, the rent is simply very high because of the rare occurence that the building is not water damaged, the landlord is nice and is the right size with the right amount of traffic.

but really, what does that matter when you're just handing all the cash to your landlord?

1200/month is going to be impossible to justify. But I'm signing it, and yknow why? because there's not much opportunity out there.

It's like the property caste system in buffalo. But I must try even if it kills me, I don't want to sit around waiting for something magical to appear out of the mist.

Blackberry pit falls post 3

The call log doesn't work. Dont buy this phone its a lemon.

The Tech in a Sec retail location

this is my biggest undertaking since college. its probably not as big as that, but its close. Where do I begin? I got the store, the website, landlord and employees already. I just havent opened yet!

I'm waiting until aug 10 for my landlord, and I need to get some documentation to get everything rolling nicely along.

1. new york state Tax ID
2. Bank account in the businesse's name
3. letter of credit for international purchases
4. merchant account to accept credit transactions
5. POS system software and fully operational transaction database (wow)
6. Domain controller for the network
7. Liability insurance

I couldnt start on this tonight since I'm nocturnal and nothing's open... so I did what I could do, and got the Domain controller to work. Holy crap was that a nightmare with DNS... But its distributing addresses and sharing printers/files like a pro under windows 2003 server standard.

Any computer was going to work, so I used my very slowest one... a pentium II @ 350mhz from Q1 of 1998. It had a bad CD-ROM drive, floppy, hard drive and even the power button failed because it was caked with industrial sludge.

But I quickly replaced all those things with throw-away parts, and got it working on a refurb 40GB hdd using a cheap PCI RAID controller with its updated (2004) BIOS. I spliced the power button wires over to the unused reset button. This became the new power button.

Then I added a USB 2.0 controller from which the very large archive of ISO images, applets and other tools will be hosted on external hard drives totalling 2 TB. The controller also has two laser printers on a self-powered hub.

It distributes IP addresses, takes large print jobs, and authenticates in no time, all across the gigabit switch.

this useless piece of junk has been transformed into a worthy backbone for my business, but of course not without its many frustrated hours into the making.

Solid State drive in a pentium pro system

I wanted to make the coolest pentium 1 based system anywhere, and so I thought, why not make it solid state?

So I got an IDE interface to Compact Flash card adapter, as well as an 8GB sandisk Ultra III (30mb/sec read) compact flash card.

This is what it had:

Broken hard drive 3.4GB
3 PCI slots, 4 ISA slots
1 DIMM slot, 4 SIMM slots
socket 7 CPU, cyrix instead @ 250Mhz (upgrade from pentium 1)
CD-RW drive
broken floppy
Token Ring network adapter


I added this:
New hard drive 4.1GB standard hdd
256mb of PC-133, but only reads 128mb @66mhz
ATI All in wonder 128 16mb PCI video
Sound Blaster Live! Basic sound
Netgear 10/100 ethernet card PCI
USB 2.0 PCI

then I installed windows 2000 (2+hrs). I then took the basic 4.1GB drive, adapted it to a usb external enclosure hooked up to a new computer. I ghosted it over to the CF card.

I put the CF card back into the pentium pro and it started booting windows 2000. Everything was going great, I even played Zdoom for windows at 640x480, 25 FPS and with working sound. I was golden, and in solid state, no less. The boot and shut down times were phenomenal! The USB 2.0 card could never install devices correctly, however. I removed it.

I hit reset, and it froze while booting into windows 2000. I booted into safe mode and determined that the registry wasnt being handeled correctly on the CF card. the yellow exclamation points dotted device manager, and the reason was a "corrupt registry."

oh well. I just want to play doom again.

So reset, try again, reset, tried again, reset... success.

Now what?

well, this thing doesnt have enough ram to be a decent server of any kind... so I guess I'll try adding more ram to the available SIMM slots that were unused. I guess SIMM and DIMM simultaneously is bad news. The memory test tallied the total, but i got the black screen of nothing during POST.

I removed the simm ram and tried it again and it was running good in safe mode.

about a day later I returned to find that the system stopped booting entirely, even from the old hard drive.

OLD TECHNOLOGY is so unreliable! the HDD controller just failed for no reason! well, its actually the power supply's fault. it always is on old systems! and just a tip, when the Powersupply goes, the hdd controller is the first thing that follows.

But it sure was fun to have a solid state windows 2000 installation on an ancient 1996 AT-board PC! I hope to have a better ATX setup next time.

VMware installation pitfall

Don't install VMware products on a windows partition that doesn't use Drive C:\ as its root, and is on a mult-boot system. VMware will keep windows XP from booting because the virtual devices dont get installed correctly on non-C drive system roots.

Nvidia 780i overheating issues

overheating problems with your nVidia 780i SLI motherboard? EVGA or some other name is on it, no doubt, but that tends to make little/no difference. But unbeknownst to most is the tolerances are very high for the chips. MCP (south bridge) and NPP (north bridge) are like 86 C° to 120 C° ! The Nvida 9800 GTX/GTX+ GPU is like 120 C° and the CPU shouldnt get over 72 C° unless you're using a modded 486 HSF, or fanless metal arrangement. Those things can be huge.

I've been running strong since September of 2008 (5 months ago), and as much as unreal tournament's physx mods cook my GPU's they've never failed and I've never had an overheat failure yet.

Set the Nvidia control panel to alert you once components reach certain temps. that way i know when to unplug myself from the eye candy or pi calculations for a while.