MiguelitoNet

I’ve upgraded to the latest MT 3.1x version. Yeah, I paid for it… I figured it was worth it to get some of the new features and especially to gain the typekey integration.

Yes, you’ll have to get a typekey account now to post here, but it’s anonymous, free.. and it’ll block the spam I’ve been getting in posts lately. I’m tired of ads for penis enlargement stuff.

I’ve been playing with the stylesheets and stuff too, so if you notice something screwy.. let me know.

oh.. and here’s a pic to test that new bit..

That’s a shot of the view from my new office. Overlooking the 805 there.

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So many in the EU claim (though they mention “tongue in cheek”) that they “Won” the olympics with their 82 golds and 286 total medals.. The US is next with 35 golds and 103 total. There’s also talk about EU athletes carrying the EU flag to show their unity in the 2008 games.

OK.. I’m all for that. But of course, that means that they don’t get to have up to 25 teams per event (1 team per each of the 25 EU countries that participated this year) anymore.. only 1. Or, if they prefer, the US gets to have 50 teams per event… 1 per state, since the EU seems to imply in some cases that their individual countries are basically like the US’ states.

All in all, this claim of their’s is just stupid. As if 25 countries vs 1 in all other cases (US, China, Russia, etc) is anything close to fair when comparing medals.

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So today makes 1 year to the day that I gave up drinking sodas. Now this might not sound like much, but those who know me know that I used to drink a ton of soda. I drank nothing but diet sodas because that’s what I was used to. In my experience, soda, much like normal vs non-fat milk takes time to switch between as you get used to one’s taste and the other is actually nasty at first

Anyway, I used to drink more then a 12 pack in cans a day easy. When I say easy, I mean that a 12 pack was almost a bare minimum. I used to also keep 2liter bottels of soda in the frig at home and drink from those on top of the cans that I would drink at work. I would drink even more then that if I was really focused working on a script or something elase at work that keep me working long stretches non-stop… I could just blow through cans like you wouldn’t believe.

So last March 15th, I just decided to stop.. I realized that all that carbonated soda (not to mention the nutrasweet) couldn’t be good for me.. and I was tired of having to get up to pee several times a night. Boy those first few days were tough too. I just quit cold turkey (had run out of soda and just didn’t buy more). Headaches were bad for almost a week, but the Monday and Tue were the worst.

Now, a year later, and I’ve had less sodas in a year then I used to drink in a typical day. I’ll still have a very occasional soda during a family get-together or when eating out… but I don’t buy it and keep it in the house anymore.

Boy I drink a lot of water now… 🙂

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…of the day I got Summer from the Humane Society. She’s been a great dog and in 2 years I think we’ve missed a total of 20 days worth of walks… she keeps me from falling out of that habit.

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So my little upgrade/maintenance plan for this weekend turned into almost the entire weekend. Aftering putting my new drives into my server, and getting serveral hours into working on it, I found that one of the two new drives I just purchased is bad. I was even seeing issues with my bios settings being reset constantly (if I wanted to boot from CD, I had to go into the bios settings and change it every time) but after replacing the bum drive, the settings now stay.

I’m such the geek… I did most of the work using my mac laptop from my living room, but at one point I wanted to see the system while it rebooted to see if anything made it hang, so I setup my webcam:

It worked really well, I was able to see what was going on and while it’s not clear enough to read everything, it was plenty to tell if the boot was going well or not.

Anyway, it’s good to finally have all the data that matters (everything but the OS bits) on mirrored filesystems for safety.

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Anyone that knows me, knows that I think Microsoft writes the worst OS in major use today. It’s not user friendly (contrary to what they claim), it’s nowhere near as stable as any unix system I’ve used, and they abuse their monopoly status to overcharge for it.

There’s been a lot of discussion about their new licensing/activation scheme since it debuted in Office and Windows XP. So far, it hadn’t been much more then a nuisance to me, as “activation” over the net was pretty simple. Well, yesterday, I learned what a huge inconvenience it can be, and it became clear to me that they put very little thought into how one would activate when changing hardware.

This all started when I replaced the failing motherboad in my grandparent’s computer with a new cpu/mobo combo with onboard video, lan, etc. First boot into windows resulted in it complainig that the hardware had changed, and that a reactivation was required; this was, of course, expected. What I didn’t expect was that windows wouldn’t even allow me to login before reactivating. “What’s the big deal?” you might ask? Well, you can’t use the network to activate until you’ve installed a driver for the NIC, and you can’t install a driver until after you log in. It won’t even let you boot into single user until reactivated.

So I ended up having to call the stupid 1-888 number and walk through that manual process to activate. While it did work pretty well, in fact, I was impressed with the computer voice recognition (not a single repeat required) it took a good 10-15 minutes to get through it all. Activation over the net takes all of 2 seconds.

Wakeup call to MS: You need to allow a grace period for one to get onto the box and install drivers to activate, you morons… at least new installs give a 30 day grace period.. even a few minutes would’ve been enough in this case.

I guess my main problem with this whole activation scheme is the fact that it seems to assume that we’re all criminals, and that we have to prove ourselves as valid customers to use their products. I already had bought, installed, and activated this copy of XP on the computer for my grandparents a couple years ago, I shouldn’t have to prove to them it’s valid just because I upgrade the hardware.. something that plenty of us do quite often.

Since I bought myself a 17″ Powerbook with Mac OS X a few months back, windows has been relegated to a game platform for me. I’m thinking that in the future, I’m going to push Macs on my family members more and more.. it’s just more stable, easier to use, and doesn’t treat me like a pirate anytime I make a change to my hardware.

If it weren’t for the lack of games on OSX, I’d have removed windows from my home already.

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Oh, I see.. it’s perfectly ok to discriminate… as long as it’s in a Politically Correct way of course.

The double standard that’s so alive and well in today’s world really pisses me off. I’m all for equality, but there’re too many groups today that want equality… but still want to have extra special rights due to being different at the same time. This school is a perfect example… gay people are always asking to be equal, have rights for same sex marriage and the benefits of marriage.. but still have the right for special treatment like this school. I’m all for the equlity bits (not sure how I feel about the marriage though), but let’s make equal actually mean equal, ok?

Just as every spring for the last few years there seem to be news articles about students at high schools having seperate proms. Whenever a minority group does this, it’s applauded and seen as “celebrating their culture” or some other PC reason. But if a group that’s at all caucasian tries to have a private dance/prom.. it’s immediately scorned and called racist. Hello?!? Either they’re both racist, or neither is… let’s have a little consistency.

Note (7/29/03 9:30): To clarify about the school in NY, it’s not the school itself that I have as much of a problem with as the fact that it’s being done with public funds. I do still think this “self segregation” is pretty stupid though… especially when the aim is supposedly for equality. However, if people want a school that’s exclusive for a group? Then do it privately, like parochial schools. I love that so many people are against vouchers because it might mean public funds going to a religious school… but discriminating using public funds this way is ok… uh huh. That makes perfect sense…

Update (7/29 11:30): Don’t know how I did it, but I’d copied the wrong URL the first time.. it’s fixed now.

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This and this are just signs of complete sutpidity. I’ve got a few points for these protesters:
– While you have the right to protest, this is going over the line.. you do not have the right to block streets, vandalize, etc.
– These actions are not going to win people over to your point of view, you fucking twits. On the contrary, you’re likely to piss of people, and probably push a few that were on the fence onto the other side.
– I hope the cities you’re doing these things in charge you for the emergency services you tied up due to these moronic acts (like the Firemen who had to cut the pipes so the people handcuffed to it could be arressted).

Here are some gems from the articles:

“We don’t want to alienate people. I hope people realize that political murder merits action that inconveniences them,”

Hey.. guess what? That’s all you’re doing.. alienating people. Stupid!

“You suck,” yelled Larry Chu, stuck in his car outside the Transamerica Pyramid. “Why don’t you all go to North Korea and do this?”

I’m with you Mr. Chu. I’d have leaned on my horn and shouted at these people non-stop if I’d been stuck because of idiots like this.

“Now, at a time of war, these people out here protesting are behaving like traitors,” said Russian immigrant Alexander Gosen. He spent the morning at Franklin and Fell streets waving a sign reading “Viva Bush” on one side and “Go to hell, peaceniks” on the other. “They should all be arrested. They don’t know what it’s like to live under a tyrant.”

I find it sadly ironic that it takes someone who immigrated here to say something like this that I think makes a damn good point.

A band calling itself “Pukers for Peace” vomited on the steps of the Federal Building.

We’ll see how smug they feel if they keep that up and burn a hole in their esophagus. Yes.. you can do that.. look it up.

“This is a great education for our kids,” he said as he explained the protests to his 9-year-old son, Brandon. “It’s like we’re watching the news as it happens. There’s nothing like this in Phoenix.”

Yep, must be one hell of a lesson on how San Francisco is full of a bunch of loonies.

At leasthere’s we have some examples of sanity. Police acted swiftly to block loonie protesters from obstructing people this time. There are a few gems in this one too…

“They are definitely more aggressive today,” complained Van Jones, an attorney with the group Bay Area PoliceWatch. “They gave us inadequate time to disperse, and they violated their own department’s policy.”

Uh heh… “boo hoo.. they wouldn’t let us screw around with traffic and businesses today.. *sniff*” Idiot. They were doing their jobs, which plenty of people (including the mayor, who’s against the way himself) asked them to do. There’s no law that says you get x amount of time to screw with others before you’re told to stop. This from a fricking lawyer!

“I feel like they’re tactically keeping us from peaceful assembly,” said Chantal Kovash, an elementary-school teacher from Marin.

Newsflash: Blocking traffic, building entrances, etc.. is not a legal “peaceful assembly” you twit. Note for those that wonder why so many people think the public school system is becoming an indoctrination to liberalism.. here’s a good example. She’s a school teacher!

Police Sgt. Felix Bilbao, working the Bechtel protest, shook his head emphatically when asked if he had urged his men to move faster on the crowds Friday. “I don’t think there’s anything different about what we’re doing today,” he said, as a bus full of arrested protesters was taken away. “Our job is to clear the street, and that’s what we did.”

Right on.. some people appreciate this. I hope they know this.

We’ll see what other stupid things the loonies do as this goes on. And before anyone thinks I’m equating being against the war as being a loonie.. I’m not. I can respect thinking the war is wrong, and I can respect you protesting it if you feel that way. But the people in these articles were not peacefully protesting, they were vandalizing and being public nuisances. There’s a difference.

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Classic:

And people wonder why CNN has fallen in popularity lately. Well, here’s a clue: Your people are freaking morons. Not to mention the attempt at looking like MTV-NN on the headline news channel is just annoying as hell.

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No, I don’t mean until the Super Bowl.. well, ok, so it’s the same day. This Sunday is my birthday.. and not just any birthday, it’s the big 3-0. Man… 30. Starting to feel old…

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