Just Horrible

Today's atrocity is a horrible thing. I give my condolences to the families of the victims and to the victims themselves. A couple of ponderings came up today when I was thinking about the events of today: limelight stealing, gloryhound assholes like Jack Thompson live for things like this to push their agenda, and this kind of stuff happens everyday in places like Iraq. For those less informed, Jack Thompson is an attorney hellbent on outlawing all video games on the grounds that they are some kind of murder simulators. Anyway, today he's already blaming the massacre on video games, but the identity of the shooter hasn't even been made public yet. How this guy gets air time (Fox News today) completely baffles me. People are killed just about everyday in Iraq. Car bombs go off in crowded places killing many people, and they certainly get coverage, but the effect is quite different on people. Obviously, when it's closer to home it hits a little harder, but I find it interesting that the events in Iraq hardly even get a mention at the office. Just an observation.

This is supposed to happen in threes, right?

A couple of weeks ago, by desktop computer died. My wife alerted me that she was getting some wonderful Blue Screens of Death when she would try to login. I tried it out and sure enough, the patented STOP BSOD's started happening to me also. Now, this desktop is pretty olde. I've avoided upgrading it as I use my laptop as my primary computer nowadays, and I even bought an Xbox 360 rather than upgrade for Oblivion. Well, my wife uses that computer to store her 771 megabytes of email across 4 accounts (isn't isp email just so archaic?), so I was compelled to fix it. After awhile, the computer would boot anymore, and would freeze after the BIOS printed "verifying DMI data pool..." to the screen. After a bit of troubleshooting and research, I determined that the primary harddrive was dying, which didn't surprise me too much, since it was a four year old 40 gigabyte Maxtor. I decided to go for longevity and picked up a brand new Western Digital 74 GB 10,000 RPM harddrive with a five year warranty. It has what they call ESATA (Enterprise Serial ATA), which means that it's intended to stay powered on all of the time. There were two things wrong with that decision: it wasn't the primary harddrive that was bad, and booting windows from a SATA drive is problematic at best. The Windows XP installation CD wants you to press F6 to install SATA drivers from a floppy, but I didn't have a working floppy, since my desktop was dead... I fiddled around for hours trying to boot from various boot CD's, but they just wouldn't boot. It turns out that the primary EIDE controller on my motherboard was fried. I ended up spending hundred of dollars upgrading to a PCIE motherboard, PCIE graphics card, and a 64-bit AMD 3200+ cpu... and I still wasn't able to boot from the SATA harddrive. I was able to install Windows on it, but boot from the ATA harddrive. So now I have some weird setup where I boot from one disk (c:), but windows resides on another (e:). It runs great. My wife can read her email at hypersonic speeds now. Oh, and while all this was happening, the graphics card on my laptop decided to die as well. My brand new Dell Inspiron E1705 should arrive tomorrow. Anyway, I wonder what third device is going to die on me. I give the kids' computer a month...

Slamming Alive and Well?

So I get a "bill" in the mail today from Domain Registry of America. It says that my domain (dadrox.com) is going to expire on 27Dec2006, which is true, but they try to make it seem like if I don't send in the requested amount, I'll lose my domain. I currently have my domains registered with 1and1, who has good prices ($5.99/yr), private registration, dns forwarding, locking, and some subdomains. DRoA wants $30/year, $50 for 2 years, or $95 for 5 years! Those prices suck! And a little bit of research shows that these guys are scam artists. I thought the whole slamming thing was over with years ago... I guess not. Anyway, if anyone out there happens to receive something that sorta of looks like a bill from Domain Registry of America, do yourself a favor, and just shred it.

"Steaming Pile" or "People Suck"

We've been hearing about the upcoming "blizzard" for a couple of days now. It didn't turn to be a big deal, and the 6-12" forecasted turned out to be around 3 or so. Snow has a couple of cool properties: it absorbs sound--it sounds very quiet when you go outside, and you can see all kinds of tracks in the snow. The record of tracks is cool when you have rabbits, foxes, and a raccoon or two running around. It's _not_ so cool when you see some dog tracks come up to your porch, directing your eyes to a lovely brown treasure. It's even _less_ cool when you see the owner's tracks following the dog's. Unfortunately, the was enough walking traffic, and subsequent trail obscurement, that we couldn't follow the tracks to the perpetrator. To me this is a whole new level of discourtesy. I mean, dog owners have been out walking their dogs and not had a mechanism by which to clean up after them. But on my porch!?! This just reenforces my thinking that people truly do suck.