blueZhift Blog

恭 喜 發 財! Happy Chinese New Year! Today begins the year of the dog and boy are the kids dog tired after a day of celebrating my youngest daughter’s birthday at the bowling alley! And quite by coincidence, the birthday girl wanted a dog themed party to boot! Arf!

* BTW, I apologize in advance for my probably incorrect transliteration of the Chinese. I felt that this choice made it easier for an English speaker to pronounce the Cantonese version of the expression.

If you use a computer regularly, then you know that there are few things more fearful than the sound of nearly constant hard drive access, even when nothing else is being done on the computer. To make a long story short, Norton GoBack was the culprit. After I removed it from my wife’s computer, the constant hard drive access (and the noise of it) were gone. This is actually the second time I’ve been burned by GoBack, I won’t be burned again!

After wrestling with my daughter’s laptop wireless access today and having had long battles with the TiVo network access and the other kid PC, I’ve come to the conclusion that my Linksys WAP11 sucks! It seems to be locking up randomly requiring a reset or power cycle. It’s about 3 years old, but has really only been getting real use the last year. This is really sad, Linksys used to be a brand you could depend on, but clearly this has changed. And it would seem that I’m not the only one who thinks this.

Linksys WAP11: Worst Access Point Ever

I also had trouble with a Linksys wireless PCI card fresh out of the box a few months ago. I ended up returning it and getting some noname brand from a Taiwanese company which worked without a single hiccup. I wonder if they make access points too?

I don’t usually pay much attention to Slashdot on Sundays, but a documentary (or mockumentary) film on D&D players caught my eye today. After watching it and having a good laugh, I thought, “there but for the grace of God go I!” I was never into the D&D scene in highschool, Starfleet Battles was more my thing, but these games were played by the same crowd in my school. None of us had girlfriends at the time.
Fortunately, the 20-sided die of life rolled in my favor and I found the woman of my dreams (and sometimes nightmares). I think though, that the guys in the film are in a bit of denial. They’d be a lot happier if they just accepted who they are and just forget about girls.  Of course I don’t think anyone should take this too seriously. Anyway, here’s a link to the video on Google.

Fear of Girls

Live Linux CDs have been out for a few years now, but it still amazes me what you can do with this great tool. Today I had a situation where my main computer had no OS and a colleague had some difficulties with the laptop on which she was planning to run her PowerPoint presentation. A good solution to this was not at hand and in the end she just did the presentation from printed handouts. Even though it was, practically speaking too late, I wanted to see if I could boot my half dead laptop from Ubuntu Live and then use OpenOffice to read a PowerPoint file from my USB memory stick. Amazingly it worked!

I’m sure there are many out there who are not surprised by this, still, taking a machine that is mostly useless in its current state and getting some utility out of it is pretty cool to me. More to the point, these live Linux CDs are incredibly subversive! I say subversive because while I’m sure that the folks at Microsoft could create a live Windows CD, they never would because it undercuts the way they make money. I can make as many live Linux CDs as I like and use them on as many computers as I like without paying a cent for the privilege. Microsoft, however could not have people running around with CDs packed with Windows XP and Office using them on whichever machine they wanted to. Even if people paid full price for the CD and its software, the portability would just kill Microsoft’s revenue stream or at least seriously threaten it. That’s because Microsoft and other companies still depend on people buying new software when they buy new computers. Live CDs would make it too easy to just keep using what you’ve got on a new machine.

Admittedly, most folks would probably keep doing the same thing even if Microsoft did create Live Windows XP and Office CDs. But they aren’t likely to take a chance. Now there may be Live Windows XP CDs in the wild, but of course it is totally illegal to distribute them, but with such offerings on the Linux side of the fence, why bother?

Got my W-2 form today and this year I have promised to get the taxes done early, rather than the usual days before they are due after much nagging from WillowBrow my lovely spousal unit. Since I’m on a low nag diet, I’d better get out there and buy some tax return software!

Nothing like coding at work to the beat of para para remixed anime tunes blasting from the iPod. I bought the Anipara Club Para Para Dance No. 1 album by the I Love You! Project on iTunes several weeks ago, but hadn’t really made it a part of my daily rotation until today. This stuff is addictive!

It’s been on the E3 rule books for some time now, but E3 is finally going to crack down on the use of scantily clad women in exhibition booths at the show. It’ll be interesting to see what some exhibitors will do to get around the rules. Perhaps this year, the nearly naked booth babes will be replaced by smartly dressed booth OL’s!

Toyota is coming to NASCAR’s Nextel Cup racing series in 2007 and things are already starting to heat up. I know the purists out there won’t be happy, but I think Toyota’s going to come in and shake things up a bit. And that can only be good for competition and, ultimately, the fans paying top dollar for a good show. I mean, Jack Roush of all people is already concerned/worried that Toyota is going to be spending some major money in the series. This is 5 Teams Jack Roush!

Well don’t worry Mr. Roush, I don’t think that Ford, Chevy, and Dodge are going to leave you high and dry. So it won’t be easy for Toyota to simply come in and clean house. I like Greg Biffle’s attitude much better, “It doesn’t bother me any,” he said. “It’s free enterprise. C’mon, bring your best stuff.” You can bet that Toyota, no stranger to racing, will bring their best stuff. And as far as I’m concerned, Toyota has been in this country for a long time making cars and employing American workers. They’re naturalized enough for me!

This marks the first post since changing the blog from Nucleus CMS to WordPress. A hearty thanks goes out to Nucleus for getting me started and working when other blog software wouldn’t work with my host! Now I’m looking forward to getting things set up and all pretty under WordPress. So things are probably going to look weird around here for a bit.