Rantings of a Nerd

Not that I love the ipod more than my archos but these guys are making sense. Check out the site and send the fax if you feel comfortable. I did. They need to force some debate on this rather than rubber stamp it.

You know that old sneaking suspicion in the back of your head that there is more going on than we know in the world. This news from Russia points out that there was indeed some things we didn't know nor need to know at the time about President Bush's decision to invade Iraq.

I have to wonder if Putin intended to never make this public or if this is a quid pro quo to get us not to push the issue on the Oil for food fiasco. Hope that isn't it. Perhaps he just follows the news in the US closely and decided it was time to point out what an ally he is.

I have moved my preferred personal browser from mozilla 1.6 to FireFox 0.9

This should prove interesting. In initial testing it is much faster, and has shown no problems loading my normal web pages.

Looks like WB's big plan for filling the Angel gap is... Lost In Space.

Did we need another pass at this idea of a family who can't find their destination? I will hold my opinion until we see the results but I am not hopeful.

Will they do the trial episode with the lost wrench where the alien judges want have put them on trial for losing a wrench light years away from the place it damaged? We all know how those lightspeed traveling wrenches are.

We are not allowed to have original science fiction on television these days. We only need to see what happened to Firefly to know that.

Thanks Kenzoid for posting this in your blog. Let this be a warning to all who are in range of my computer speakers. You will hear a lot of W. Not really, but there is some great potential error message sounds.

Nothing like have W let you know when a critical stop has occurred.

Not having her permission to post her reply I will not, but I will say I was impressed with the fact that she decided to reply to an e-mail from an unknown reader of her reviews.

I respect her decision and still do not agree with her assessment she did have some interesting points.

It goes to prove that you can get peoples attention by being respectful and having a point.

Those who like to shout and believe they can win an argument by yelling, "your an idiot." Never win it is just self-delusion.

I will admit that at first I was tempted to send a flurry of profanity filled partial sentences, but thought it over for a day or so. I am baffled by the grade of an F. I must admit this will make me think twice about how much store I place if you reviews in the future. I could have seen a C based on what you stated in your review, but I think you were simply being unfair to this film. It is what it is. Pitch Black was brilliant, but it wasn't that good. Vin Diesel is more of a model than an actor, very much the equivalent of Pamela Anderson, but for action rather than semi-pornographic television shows.

This move was entertaining and escapist. There is no back story to concern yourself with. Nothing to argue about over the directors interpretation of the novel. There is no novel. That is a rare thing these days. I can't name the last major Sci-Fi action movie that was just that, a move. Most these days are novel adaptations.

You should have given this some more thought and praised it for what it accomplished, rather than where it failed. The irony is that I work for one of the competing mega corporation so it make no difference to me if this film makes money. In fact it may hurt my earnings if it succeeds, but good art is good art. This is good art, and good film making, just not the best.

Sincerely,
The Code Wizard

At the risk of acting like that cereal commercial... I lowered my cholesterol. My triglycerides are down, my HDL is up, my LDL is down. My Internist has declared me as healthy as I can be.

Anyone who eats breakfast with me may be shocked by this. Four days a week I eat eggs bacon and sausage. So how can this be? I am exercising and losing weight.

Dr. Atkins was right. There may be exceptions and some people may have high cholesterol while eating more meat, but losing weight and exercising offset the other problems.

You can't sit on your ass and eat a pound of bacon every meal and lose weight. That is not what Dr. Atkins taught. It is what some would like you to believe, but it just isn't true.

I am not on a diet, I have change my eating habits for the rest of my life. There is a big difference. In less than a year I have lost 70 pounds, dropped several clothes sizes and dropped my blood pressure to the point I no longer need medication. I have also avoided being put on medication for high cholesterol.

I was on the path to a heart attack and an early death. I have removed most of those things that were speeding me down that road.

Self-Centered Rant over.

Feel free to check these guys out for yourself, but I won't be going there again. Without being too specific any place I pay for food that 2 hours later I need both a trash can and a toilet at the same time I will avoid in the future. I will even let that slide, saying it may have just been my reaction to the food, everyone else was fine. The little wizard still complains of a horrible taste from the salsa 2 days later.

I am more surprised at how weak the menu is. No Queso... they stared like they had never heard of such a thing. Just salsa... fresh made by them, but nothing to speak of. It is just another California burito place with lots of chrome.

If you must have a California burito go to Moes or Willys. They have more options and a good sense of humor about what they do.

Chipotle is style over substance. Funny, they are claiming the exact opposite. Just check out the web site. All style no substance.

I have gone with the mid ranged priced sound blaster Audigy LS. It comes with a wide array of software that I will never use but it does use the 24 bit chip set. If I decide to go with dolby 5.1 in the office I will find this useful. For now it sounds great. If you can't tell the difference between the radio and a CD then this would be a waste of money, if you agonize about the placement of the speakers around your seating area for that perfectly balanced sound, then you will be happy. There are more expensive options available for those who just have to spend more.

In years past the kids would be made to clean up the mess and told not to do it again. Sometimes you have to let people "blow off steam." We can't do that any more. 7 kids in a food fight is now a riot.

What a country. We have become wimps.

The sound card has finally given up the ghost on my main XP box. I am debating over spending $20 on a similar replacement card or getting the $99 USB external sound card with dozens of options and every input and output imaginable for sound.

I will probably just go with the cheap option for now. I don't want to sink too much more money into this box. It is 2 years old right now. I can only wonder what will go wrong next.

It has been a week now. So far ClamWin is doing all it promised. Multiple viruses found in old archives. Things commercial products missed. Guess the archives were too big? I have this running on all my computers for my family and at least one friend running it at home with success. Word of mouth.

Drawbacks are few but important. The scanner is slow, compared to Norton. But then again it is finding more. The lack of a RTS, Real Time Scanner, is a problem as well. This a mail scanner and hard drive scanner, it will not find active viruses. I am betting they are working on it, I didn't read enough on their site.

I am not giving up on these guys and intend to stick with them and spread the word.

On the list of strange things I have seen while driving to work, this was minor. This guys was driving a new maxima with white cloth gloves on. Not fancy driving gloves, but more like simple work gloves. His clothing was also a t-shirt and blue jeans. Why does this seems strange? His look. Something was just wrong. Did I see his face? No. The angle was wrong. Hope that wasn't a stolen car. What what other people would have thought faced with the same situation.

Not that one... The beer race again. This is too funny. The market follower started poking the leader and the leader has noticed their presence and started striking back. Now Miller is upset. Hate to say it, they asked for it.

I wonder if any of this is helping sales? If it is, then this is brilliant, but I am guessing that most people who drink beer have made their choice at this point and no amount of funny commercials will change anyone's opinion.

To my media challenged friends, Ken, there is an interesting ad campaign going on in the beer world. Budweiser who claims calls themselves the "King of Beers" is being challenged in an ad campaign from Miller Beer who say they are running for the position of "President of Beers." Miller has gone as far as creating away to vote... Either in stores or on the web, I confess that I have not paid enough attention to know for sure.

Well Budweiser has fired back with their Lizards and new spokesdonkey... Budweiser has started a series of ads pointing out that Miller is now owned by South African Breweries and therefore is no longer eligible. I love a good ad war. This will be a nice distraction from the other election.

To my media challenged friends, Ken, there is an interesting ad campaign going on in the beer world. Budweiser who claims calls themselves the "King of Beers" is being challenged in an ad campaign from Miller Beer who say they are running for the position of "President of Beers." Miller has gone as far as creating away to vote... Either in stores or on the web, I confess that I have not paid enough attention to know for sure.

Well Budweiser has fired back with their Lizards and new spokesdonkey... Budweiser has started a series of ads pointing out that Miller is now owned by South African Breweries and therefore is no longer eligible. I love a good ad war. This will be a nice distraction from the other election.

I have finally found an alternative to spending hundreds of dollars a year on anti-virus software at home. The experiment begins tonight. If it works at all it will be better than nothing.

I applaud these guys just for trying.

I don't know why this continues to annoy me, but it always does. My little guy wants the new Pikmin 2 game. I don't understand it, the first one drove us both nuts. The release date was set for 6/1. I understand it is a Tuesday right after Memorial Day so some things may be delayed. Chronicles Of Riddick was set for release on 6/2 according to the giant standup ad at EBGames. Understandable.

When you walk into the store on 6/1 and ask for your shiny new copy of Pikmin 2 they look at you with a pleasant understanding smile and say, that doesn't come out until August 31. Now the really annoying part is that on Saturday at the same EBGames said it was released on 6/1.

I realize that they don't set the release dates. I am rather happy that the software company delayed the release if they have a problem and they want to get it right. However this happens with such regularity that I am sure it is simply a lack of communication from the distributor.

How can this be made better? Change the distribution method. iTunes seems pretty capable of getting it's software distributed the day it is released. The new gaming console which is still vaporware at the moment plans to allow for downloads from the net for all new games. XBox live allows for content download, given the size of the hard drive in that thing it could download multiple games.

Distribution methods will catch up once companies realize that they can make the same money or even more if they can just get their product to us before we have time to move on to another product.

Not sure why this happened, but with XP that is the norm, My main XP box decided to stop playing sounds. No errors, no conflicts, looked like it was playing the sound, just no sound.

After hours of tweaking and uninstalling my phone software, Which is what I had just installed, I decided to rollback the sound driver. I don't remember applying a new sound driver anytime in the past year, but it worked.

The fear of not being able to hear my iTunes was overwhelming. Funny, that the one thing Fedora RC2 is being beaten up over, sound drivers, failed on the mainstream operating system of choice just because it was memorial day.