They Erased Them?!?

Possibly the most important historical evet that has happened…well ever, we actually have audio and video of it, and they manage to erase it.

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE56F5MK20090716

Not is some freak computer power outage, not by someone spilling coffee on it or accidentally  dropping it down a flight of stairs, no, it was erased to save money. Now we are stuck with low quality copies that CBS happened to save.  But don’t worry they assure us, the crappy copies will look better than the originals after they have been restored! Talk about a false dichotomy,  you know what would look even better, the originals digitally restored.

The End of an Era

Can’t say I am all that suprised, but Wotmania is closing down.  I guess in some ways it is fitting that the site should shut down since Robert Jordan is dead and the series is almost finished (fingers crossed). It isn’t that I visit it all that often anymore (it was announced that it was shutting down a few months ago, I just found out) but I will still be sad to see it go.  I wasted countless hours pooring over the theory board in college, reading crack brained theories and trying to figure out who killed Asmodeon (I still have money on Lanfear).  I still go there occasionally with a sense of nostalgia and poke around to see if there is anything new. Hopefully Sanderson will be able to give the series a fitting conclusion (1st of 3 final books combing out fall 2009!) and we can all move on.

Famoso

I was reading a paper the other day, decided to check the references, and lo-and-behold this is what I saw.

….

I have been cited.  I am pretty sure this is the first one, although I guess there could be many others out there citing my work as instrumental in the fight to cure cancer and stop global warming, but I kind of doubt it.

Old Man

As of Friday morning I have been unable to walk standing up straight, I feel like an old man or old Barney Stinson

I didn’t do anything dramatic to hurt my back, I just got out of bed leaned over to do something and kablam incredible pain.  It has been slowly getting better but I have spent some quality time flat on my back in bed.  So back pain sucks, although if you really needed a vacation it might not be a bad gig.

New House, New Flash

Well we made the big move from apartment to house.  We got all our stuff moved last weekend and have been working to get everything unpacked, so everything is a mess and I can’t find anything.  It is nice to be in a real house again, we have a yard, space for a garden, and a garage.  But most important of all, God has promised not to destroy our house with a flood.

While neither of those are exactly out house, they are the ones across the street and ours is the same layout as the one on the corner.

I also got a new fancy flash for my birthday.  I haven’t had a chance to use it much but so far I am quite happy with it.  Personally I hate using a regular flash indoors I think it looks washed out and terrible, this has lead me to try and shoot without a flash.  This works ok if you have image stabilization, a little better with a very fast lens (if you can afford one), but it still struggles if people are moving around.  I am hoping with this I will finally be able to get good indoor shots.  The top photo is with the camera flash, the bottom photos is with the new flash bounced off of the car ceiling.  Even in this setting where the old flash looks ok, the new one is still much better.

22????

I decided to uninstall Visual Studio 2008 from my work computer today to try and fix a problem I was having.  Logically I went to the Add or Remove Programs control panel and selected Visual Studio 2008 and hit uninstall.  After about 15 minutes the uninstall completed and I noticed there were many other programs listed that were related to Visual Studio 2008 that hadn’t been removed.  I did a google search to figure out which to remove and found the official instructions on how to remove Visual Studio 2008.  From Microsoft’s website:

Manual uninstall instructions

1. Go to the Control Panel and launch Add/Remove Programs
2. Remove all instances of Visual Studio 2008/Codename Orcas products
3. Remove any remaining supporting products in the specified order.
   1. Remove “MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2008″
   2. Remove “Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5″
   3. Remove “Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 Design Tools”
   4. Remove “Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 for Devices”
   5. Remove “Microsoft Visual Studio Performance Collection Tools”
   6. Remove “Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK R2 for Pocket PC”
   7. Remove “Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK R2 for Smartphone”
   8. Remove “Crystal Reports 2007″
   9. Remove “Visual Studio Asset System”
   10. Remove “Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component / Microsoft Web Designer Tools”
   11. Remove “Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System Runtime”
   12. Remove “Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System Runtime Language Pack” (non-English editions only)
   13. Remove “Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office Runtime 3.0″
   14. Remove “Microsoft Document Explorer”
   15. Remove “Microsoft Document Explorer 2005 Language Pack” (non-English editions only)
   16. Remove “Microsoft Device Emulator 3.0″
   17. Remove “Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 3.5″
   18. Remove “Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 2.0 SP1″
   19. Remove “.NET Framework 2.0 SDK”
   20. Remove “Microsoft Visual Studio Codename Orcas Remote Debugger”
   21. Remove “Microsoft Visual Studio 64bit Prerequisites Beta” (64-bit platforms only)
   22. Remove “Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5″

22!! I kid you not, 22 seperate “programs” to uninstall to get rid of this beast!  They also provide a handy .exe you can download that will do it all for you but you have to go to their website to get it.  WTF did the one that I ran do?  Conveniently removed 1/22 of the installed product.  Who designs this stuff?

Race to the Bottom, Part 2

There are two great clips I found from the daily show relating to my previous post.  The first makes fun of both parties, the second is just McCain bashing.  To be fair I do think the McCain campaign deserves more criticism on this one.  I think Colbert said it well, “if you want a transformational figure…endorse John McCain, this campaign has transformed him into everything he hated!”.

link to “Daily Show – Rallies of Fear“, posted with vodpod

link to “Daily Show – 10,000 McCainiacs“, posted with vodpod

Race to the Bottom

I have been following the election fairly closely this year and if nothing else it has been interesting.   I think both candidates are normally fairly respectable and not your usually slimy politician.  Going into the election I would have thought we might get some respectful discussion about the plans each candidate has if they were elected. While we have had a little of that we have also had a lot of idiotic name calling.  Does it really matter that John McCain has a bunch of houses or that Obama’s middle name is Hussein?  Obama does not hate America and “pal around with terrorists” and McCain is not a senile old man.  To suggest so is dim witted and extremely insulting.  It says that we the American people are not intelligent enough to decide based on the different tax and economic strategies or the ideas on diplomacy, so instead we will vote for the one with fewer houses or the one who’s name doesn’t rhyme with Osama.  It is pandering to base emotions and the least intelligent of voters, and terrifyingly it appears to work.

It is understandable that at the political rallies the crazies and idiots (extreme left and right respectively) will come out and say stupid things, but what is wrong with calling them on it and having them removed from the crowd?  To his credit John McCain has done this he defended Obama’s character from his own supporters and got booed for his efforts.  For me that speaks more to the character of John McCain then anything else I have seen and I don’t know why it hasn’t received more coverage in the media.  He should be applauded for it and Obama should be challenged to behave similarly.  However, at the final debate with everything pre-planned he said he was proud of the people that come to his rallies.  To me this says the real John McCain is an honest and intelligent person, the scripted PC John McCain is shamelessly trying to claim the crazy vote.

Another troubling trend is the popularity of the “common man” political figure, politicians who cultivate an image of a “normal” person just like me (I’m looking at you Bush and Palin).  People apparently like someone that seems like the neighbor from down the street with “small town values”, whatever that is.  Why having a folksy accent would help convince some voters and attending one of the most prestigious universities in the world would discourage some voters is totally beyond me.  I don’t want someone just like me to be running the country, I want someone much more intelligent than me!

For once I would like a candidate to treat me like an adult tell me that we are going to have to raise taxes and cut programs to realistically balance the budget.  If the budget can’t be balanced in 1 year show a plan to do it in 4.  Pie in the sky tax cuts, no major program changes, and a budget surplus sound nice but so does a 3 day work week, I’m not holding my breath.  The only politician I know that has done this is, not suprisingly, not a real politician, Arnold Schwarzenegger.  He presents a responsible balanced budget with contains program cuts and raised taxes and the result was a deadlocked legislature for 85 days.

I plan on voteing for the candidate I think we reduce the deficit the most, ironically right now this appears to be the Democrat.  I’m not sure when fiscal responsability left the Republicans (ok it was Regan) but until it returns I will be looking for greener pastures.

Particles Called Protons

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) started up today and it was a success.  I saw the the story come up this morning and headed over to the BBC to read what was going on.  The article greeted me with this great sentence “They have now fired two beams of particles called protons around the 27km-long tunnel” (emphasis added).  Really?  Who doesn’t know a proton is some sort of particle?  Did they think someone would think, “protons, those are beach balls right?”

If you haven’t read about it, it is a really amazing project.  While the physicist in me thinks this is spectacular I can’t help wondering, how did they get someone to pay for this?  It cost £4.5bn, that is $8.9 billion with a B, US dollars.  Not exactly pocket change.

They still haven’t collided any particles called protons yet, so the predictions of creating a massive black hole that eats the earth still might come true.  I’m not to worried, mostly because I don’t think it would be that easy to destroy a planet.  Everyone knows that you need a moon sized machine to destroy a planet, not a measly 27km ring.

iMac

Well the pictures pretty much says it all, my new computer is enormous and I like it.  This is the first Mac I have had since I started buying my own computers, this is also probably the first time I could afford one.  It is a lot to get used to and so far it is about a dead heat between PCs and the Mac:

Mac	PC
Networking and File Sharing Actually Work!	Games Actually Work
Nicely Designed and Quiet	Maximize Button Maximizes the Window
Plays DVDs Out of the Box	??

Ok well I guess the Mac is winning by a little bit, which is a good thing as it is brand new.