The Stars Like Dust

In case anyone lives in a cave and mine is the only website you can somehow visit you should know the Hubble telescope is back online after its latest repair by NASA. As usual it is providing some truly amazing images.

In case you didn’t catch it the title is a reference to an Asimov book, a great read if you have the time.

Indexed

With a tip of my hat to indexed I bring you a graph of my own

I should probably also make one with days spent in Detroit and number of blog posts.  I’m on my way home though so maybe next time I’m in Detroit.

80%

I would say 80% of all computer problems are caused by either viruses, or anti-virus software.

Today I could not print.  Jobs would go to the print queue and fail.  I could access the printer, my drivers were the latest and previously worked, and the printer would work for others, it just wouldn’t work for me. After some thought there was only one conclusion: McAfee.  Sure enough, in all of its wisdom it had seen fit to firewall explorer and a few other normal Windows processes.

I cannot overstate my contempt for McAfee, Norton, and pretty much all other anti-virus software.  They can take a brand new machine and immediately age it a few years by cutting its speed dramatically.  If you are foolish enough to install one of them on an older machine there is a good chance it will be rendered unusable (not from impatience either, we are talking 5 minute boot times and another 5 minutes to get to the Google homepage).  They guarantee nearly all of the detrimental effects of having a virus, and people voluntarily put them on their computers, even paying exorbitant amounts of money for them. I would say without hesitation that this medicine is, if not worse, at least as bad as the disease.

That isn’t to say anti-virus programs don’t have their place, but it is a sad lonely place that shouldn’t be anywhere near your day to day computing.

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