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Shhh! After a year of adding more cooling to my computer, I'm now tired of all the noise it makes. It's probably running up near 50-55 dB of white noise -- loud enough to be annoying even with the TV on and a computer game playing. Right now I'm looking at options from places like 3DCool.com, PC Power and Cooling, and Quietpc.com. More later.
Our Bush Future Happy about your federal tax rebate? Read Texan Molly Ivin's amusing but insightful essay on Texas after George W., "What Can You Do When the Cupboard is Bare?"
Toasted Buns I'm not usually one to judge (okay, I am), but methinks that if you're going to try to put out something called an "eternal flame" you'd better figure out a safer way than sitting on it. It may have had more style potential than the Mexican guy who doused it with a drink, but he didn't end up in the hospital. (Note to self: if designing eternal flame, make it strong enough that you can't put it out with a Pepsi.)
Photos! Mostly for my friends, I've put a set of my photo albums online. It's a great demonstration of the free web applications available thanks to PHP 4.0.
Pearl Harbor Forgotten Despite having anticipated seeing the new movie Pearl Harbor, I'm not going to spend my hard-earned $10 on a film the Times describes as "feeble", "forced and foolish", and "sanitized." But never mind that the movie has little value as a work of cinematography...
Worse than the film's problem is its producers and studio's lack of political backbone. It looks, unfortunately, like Michael Bay willl succeed in sanitizing the memory of Pearl Harbor in a way the Japanese never could have. Not only does the US version portray Japan's rulers "superficially and sympathetically as leaders who feel compelled to attack to preserve their way of life" but reportedly, the film has been further sanitized for its release in Japan. It's bad enough that their own government and schools rewrite history. We shouldn't be helping them. I have to wonder how the Jewish actors and crew who wrote, produced or marketed this movie would feel if that kind of editing was applied to the Holocaust. New York Times Review (Requires free account.)
Productivity Boost Just what I needed at work... a listing of the top 100 comic strip sites. (Check out Sinfest.)
I'm comics-deprived, because I'm a New York Times child (my parents read it) who still likes that and the Wall Street Journal. For news. Yes, I'm a media snob. I went to journalism school, it happens to you there. I love that on the net I can check out tons of unknown comic strips, and that they don't all have to be totally G-rated like newspaper ones.
Fix Your Broken Windows I'm not usually one to get excited about Operating System Updates (or even new editions (really.)) But after having Windows 98 and 2000 both installed on my home machine for a year, Windows 2000 Service Pack 2 has delivered such an improvement in performance (coupled with DirectX 8.0a) that I don't see much reason to using Windows 98 anymore. And that means a lot, since until now I've used Win98 for 90% of my computing, both at work and home.
Unfortunately on my first attempt to install Service Pack 2, it completely destroyed my old Windows 2000 install, making it un-bootable. Luckily, I keep my data on a different partition, but I recommend backing up all your data, and having driver disks and downloads on hand, before embarking on this journey. Once done with a clean install of Win2000 and SP2, however, my computer runs beautifully, games actually play smoothly under Windows 2000, and overall, the universe inside my computer seems much happier.
Flirting with Disaster Little Gamers is having a "girlfriend special week" that's starting out fairly funny. Start reading here.
On-line dispute ends up in MLB news. And you thought that a little on-line multiplayer gaming would never affect your real-life work? Read this story about an on-line dispute motivating a major-league baseball player to score two home runs off his former teammate and Everquest buddy.
(D)ack Well, it's twice in a row, but Dack.com makes it appearance for what seems to be the last time. After two years of writing dack.com, author Dack Ragus has decided to call it quits and pursue other timesinks. Happy trails.
Welcome from Dack Just a note to welcome those of you who are visiting today because of the link from dack.com. (For those of you who didn't come here from dack, we contributed an entry to his signs of the apocalypse list.)
Aim Low So AOL has decided to block a lot of AIM-clone clients since they don't show the ads that AOL pushes through AIM clients. Although it's not as bad as ICQ is now (with 468x60 banners in the message windows!), it's still annoying. Want to turn the ads off? Observers.net has a story on a 30 second, two character edit you can do to deactivate the ads in AIM's own client.
Changes I did a bit of administration on the site this morning; some annoying old things like 404 errors when you forget a trailing slash should be gone now. If you run into any problems, email me.
Pretty Pictures Old favorite skinz.org has been gutted by the eFront debacle, but there's ane even better place to go to replace your desktop wallpaper once it gets tired: deviantART.
No Justice Ex-Webvan CEO George Shaheen will collect $375,000 a year in retirement pay, in addition to having a $6.7 million loan from Webvan largely forgiven, reports Cnet. Between Webvan shareholders, and hundreds of laid-off ex-employees who at best got 2 months severance, not 30 years, there's got to be a lynch mob forming somewhere.
Flying Gerbils Outpost.com has reposted their famous flying gerbil commercial video. Don't know what I'm talking about? Then you definitely need to check this out. One of the best ads from last year, if not the most politically correct.
Updated: Okay, it's not actually that funny to me anymore. But it was amusing the first time I saw it on TV. I guess video on the net just has to be more outrageous to have impact, considering the last animal one I saw was a real squirrel being flung off a pigeon launcher (used for throwing clay pigeons while skeet shooting.)
That Let Down Feeling Sorry the site was gone for the last few days. I was really busy and didn't have time to totally investigate why the site was inaccessible despite the server being perfectly happy. Turns out that my IP address got changed somewhat randomly, which of course made the domain point to the wrong place. Anyway, it's fixed now.
Nominate a Friend. Entries (and write-in nominations) are now being taken for this year's Sexiest Geek Alive awards. It's not Miss America, but at least we may see an MIT winner here. Maybe.
Help for GeForce owners. If you have a GeForce 3D card like me, you know that extra information (good extra information) is hard to find. Check out the GeForce FAQ page for a lot of help on installing, fixing and uninstalling drivers, tweaking, etc.
Feel the burn. Yeah, I know everyone's been up and down, but it still hurts to look at your mutual funds and see charts like this one. I'm just glad I got in on the tail of this, rather than when it was up in the sky at 90.
(By the way, the chart is a little deceptive. It doesn't start at 0. Maybe someone should send MSNBC an Edward Tufte book before they give some poor investor a heart attack.)
The Cost of Ignorance The Phillippines continues its political instability as supporters of deposed president Estrada continue to protest, reports CNN. In order to maintain control, the new government intensify protest crackdown. I have to wonder if countries can really sustain democracy in a stable manner when a large portion of the population is poor and ignorant; it's evident from the last few week's events that most of the reporting on Estrada's corruption and impeachment trial were meaningless to many of the poor in the Phillippines. Not only that, but the lack of education seems to result in a very short political memory: some of the senators that have been arrested for inciting these protests supporting Estrada were the same ones who arrested opponents of Ferdinand Marcos when he declared martial law and proceed to rob millions (perhaps billions) of dollars from a small country with poor economy.
Remember It's May! I've been waiting like 6 months for the movie "Pearl Harbor" to hit theaters. Only 24 days to go!
Word of the Day. Skootch. Why don't we use it more often?
More later.