Saturday, May 30, 2009

People leave weird comments...

This one's a bit old because I lost it during a recent swath of moving data from Rorschach over to Octane.

The original posting was related to a Microsoft Video about what life will be like in 2019. Check it out here.




I know you'll have to click on the pic to see it in all its glory but it is definitely something that caught me off guard for sheer WTFness. Enjoy!

80's style FAIL!!!


Here's a doozy of a picture I came across while scanning some of my old childhood memories.

So many things wrong here it's not even funny.

Friday, May 29, 2009

Microsoft is full of jerks and Live Search blows!!!

I submit the following example, a little bit close to home perhaps but I was just about furious when I did a little experiment earlier today. First, a smidgen of back story to set the tone for this curious anomaly.

My desk sports a triple screen display, 3x 19 inch Hanns-G monitors on a horizontal span. That makes my desktop area something like 3840x1024 pixels. My job necessitates keeping up a MINIMUM of one firefox window, one Remote desktop session to our server for our CRM software as well as keeping track of email, instant messages (also work related) and any programs or windows I happen to need for experimenting or testing.

For a long time I thought two screens was enough. I was wrong.

Today, a client called in with an issue that was happening through IE but not Firefox and I wanted to see if it would affect my own experience. So I slapped up IE, took a look and out of habit I decided to check on the blog. I didn't have it bookmarked or anything so I just typed 'at the risk of being too cynical' ***That's the title of the blog*** and the live search came up totally and utterly empty.

What in the black bedeviled hills of hell? The exact same phrase from Google always pops up an entry as the first result. So, in the spirit of experimentation I tried the same thing through Firefox. End result?

Google Search:


MSFT Search:


Great scraping lolbutter what am I to think of this. I know that Google and MSFT are blood rivals in the search/ads world but still. Now I was really interested so I tried a phrase that would likely turn up the blog no matter what simply due to its unique quality.

This time the phrase was "Gigacalorie Project"

Google:

MSFT:

Oh come on you freaks that's not even fair. I was so pissed that I checked every single one of the 198 search results and does my little blog appear anywhere? Hell no.

Finally I tried a phrase that is unmistakeably and permanently tied to this blog.

Keippernicus:

No screen shot because it only turns up links to A: Youtube, B: Sites where I have made comments under the name "Keippernicus"

Now mudslinging is fine and dandy but I find this a little short-sighted even for Microsoft. I get that they are interested in keeping their ad revenue stream going but hiding access to their own user's personal blogs? Really?

Guess what, MSFT. You just lost the game.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Nudity on Youtube

I just don't get it Youtube. You can have all the body parts present and its nudity but not censored. You can have girls playing with their breasts playfully prior to the breast exam but post the same girls doing the same thing without the exam and it's censored. Penile manipulation, testicle man handling and vaginal penetration is all ok as long as its posted as a medical thing.

Yet you can also have tons of scantily clad females doing webcam dances wearing thongs and see through shirts, actin' all slutty and that's cool.

I just don't get censorship, yet despite all that I am glad that youtube does it simply because it would turn into a porn site otherwise. Or maybe they could keep it R but not X rated like Metacafe.

Breast Exam



Vagina Exam



Penile Exam



Medical Fingering



Ball Cancer Check

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Something for the stumblers...

Something a little different for the geekier side.

Not listed but still worth mentioning is the Stumbleupon toolbar. You'll want to snag Firefox first, my favorite browser (and I have tested all of them to some extent.) Be sure to give the blog/this post a thumbs up if you like the list.

23 things no IT guy or girl should ever live without.

  1. Azureus/Vuze - Ah, the wellspring from which my torrents flow. I used to use uTorrent but find the interface and performance of Vuze just kick tail.
  2. Open Office - Mo' bettah than MS Office unless you're using some proprietary CRM or PM software that requires Outlook for mail or letter merging from Word. I love that it's a full featured software suite that's tiny compared to its bloated MSFT counterpart.
  3. AVG - It's free anti-virus software. What's not to like about that. It's also fairly unobtrusive and acts as a vigilant sentinel without spamming you with notifications or eating all your RAM while you're trying to work. Not as good at killing as I would prefer but it serves as an excellent vaccine against viruses and rootkits
  4. Malwarebytes - My single favorite Anti-Malware program EVER. Only about 3 megabytes but packs the punch of a tactical nuke in close quarter combat.
  5. Ad-Aware - The spyware equivalent of AVG. Also free and better as a deterrent than a cleanup tool.
  6. CCleaner - This program is tight. Scrapes all the junk out of your system and cleans up the registry with little or no fuss. Really useful if you're cleaning up your box or shredding a lot of programs that leave crap behind.
  7. Smart Defrag - Faster than windows BS defragging capability and can be scheduled or run continuously in the background.
  8. SIW - Useful for spying on people...err, I mean for digging out information about a system's mobo, pci devices, memory capacity and type and passwords.
  9. Asterisk Password - A limited range of functions but really good for dumb asses that forget their password to certain programs. Also neat for spying though I would never do that myself...really.
  10. Logmein - This program is a staple of my existence. It's really handy for keeping track of all the systems that I have to look after or maintain (ie those of friends, family and friends of friends who don't seem to understand the concept of work boundaries)
  11. Real VNC - Another tiny ass kicker, this is best for remote access within a LAN. I install it on every PC I work on so all I need is a power cord and some Cat6 cable to access stuff in the office.
  12. Crossloop - Handy for situations where you can't pre-install Logmein or VNC. Relatively easy to walk people through in a pinch.
  13. 7-Zip - My favorite compression tool. Try it, use it, love it! Or don't, this is fucking America and you can do whatever.
  14. VLC Media Player - All I can say is you need to try this for movies, HD or otherwise because it fucking rocks the house.
  15. Robocopy - Windows Resource Kit Tools - NTbackup is a rusty spoon that ladles out your data to a backup drive. Robocopy is a tungsten-bladed nuclear powered steam shovel that muscles your stuff at relativistic speed. Super handy when combined with either Dropbox or Hamachi for an easy, reliable remote backup solution.
  16. Hamachi - Need a VPN in about 2 minutes and don't have/want/need the hardware. All you need is Hamachi and an internet connection. Useful for intranet over the web, COD4 games, remote backups with robocopy, and much much more.
  17. Ventrilo - Good for gaming but also good for remote meetings/conference calls in a pinch.
  18. Filezilla - The best FTP client available. The server is pretty good but the client is just unmatched.
  19. Google Chrome - I'm going to elaborate on this more so than the other programs because every dude on earth can benefit. I like Firefox much better but Chrome has a neat feature where you can activate an 'incognito' mode that doesn't keep track of history, saved forms or passwords. Best used for porn but other, shadier, pursuits could be sought along this avenue as well. Worth playing with but still not ready to replace Mozilla's warhorse in the browser arena.
  20. GIMP - Free, small (notice a trend) and capable of doing a hell of a lot more photo editing than I will ever need. Much easier than fucking around with MS Paint and cheaper than Photoshop
  21. Virtual PC - Another of my favorites for various reasons. And before anyone starts crying about VMware that's on my linux list. VPC is free, easy to use and handy for software evaluation, discrete data storage without the need for encryption and the saved state feature makes time-limited trial software no obstacle. My primary use of this is evaluating programs from shady parts of the web to see if they're really spyware/trojans. Call it ghetto sandboxing if you will, if everyone used a little more prudence this would be no problem.
  22. Pidgin - Cross platform messenging program. Very useful for keeping tabs on friends that use different IM programs than you are used to.
  23. Dropbox - Free online storage that is accessible from anywhere with excellent download speeds? Hellz yeah! I used to keep a bunch of stuff on our company FTP site in case I needed say, any of the programs on this list all in a handy spot. Now I use dropbox for speed, ease of use and easy customization. I definitely recommend everyone give this a shot for easy access, backing up documents and small files/programs. Also if you sign up via my referral link you get an extra 250 megs for free. Then you can coerce your friends into signing up for additional space up to 5 gigs.
Just click here and install it, takes about 2-3 minutes. Easy money. Also if you really like any of these programs a number are free but its nice for people to donate to the creators or to purchase at least one copy. Free software is wicked awesome and minor contributions can go a long way towards keeping a healthy FOSS ecosystem.

Week 15/16 Update: Still alive, somehow still on track

I'm too lazy to type this crap out again or copy pasta it for ya but here's a screenie.



I believe I am now in the phase where the sexy aspects of the project have worn off, the cheering crowds at the base of the hill are long behind and I have emerged from the treeline only to stare at a vertical climb that will take another (projected) 56 months to complete.

The attrition of late and suffering motivation are proving to be greater hindrances than anticipated though I am still performing at a comfortable margin above the necessary level. How this is possible I do not know.

Needless to say the effort is ongoing and swinging over into maintenance mode is taking some real adjustments, mental and physical. When you're not excited and seeing that first burst of weightloss its hard to stay supercharged for a protracted period of time. However there is hope and as of today's mad session and extra long walk I am already more than halfway done for the week.

Tomorrow shall bring fresh challenges, perhaps defeat and perhaps still another step towards victory.

Sunday, May 24, 2009

The world economy is negatively affecting my sex life.

Yes the all-pervasive negative effects of a massive economic system undergoing self-correction have managed to find their way into my bedroom/couch/handy countertop spaces. As if the depreciation on the house, fear for my job and general moodiness of the population were not enough.

Allow me to explain for Veko and any hapless stumblers who find themselves on this page.

Right now I am going through the biological experiment I have dubbed The Gigacalorie Project which necessitates burning 3800 calories via cardiovascular exercise per week. This entails 3-4 trips per week to the local YMCA.

Until a few weeks ago this was not a major problem however the local establishment is itself negatively affected by the world recession in highly visible ways. Allow me to enumerate a few of them for you:

  • The towel service has been indefinitely suspended. Therefore if you swim or shower you must bring your own linens. Also if you sweat enough to merit a little hand towel you are stuck bringing your own.
  • Excercise classes have been thinned out, some eliminated entirely. The pool schedule has never been freer once they trimmed off 8 of the 22 weekly water aerobics classes. Which is nice but all the flabby people still show up and take up both of the two available lanes. Bastards.
  • Shower time is limited to 5 minutes, which is fine but they've actually started having people periodically roam through and announce the limit. It's not exactly enforcement but it's enough to kill your enjoyment whilst cleaning.
  • Finally the worst and most egregious of the cuts has been to the air conditioning. This time last year, close to my failure of the last attempt at a gigacalorie the cardio room was kept around 70 degrees even when the outside ambient was above 90.
Nowadays the outside temp will be in the low 80's and the cardio room hovers around the 88-90 degree mark. I guess that's fine if you don't mind toiling through temperatures that make the third circle of hell seem downright breezy but this has had an immediate detrimental effect on my ability to lose weight.

A month ago I could easily crank out a 1500 calorie workout with exertion but still feeling pretty good once I got half an hour of sedentary fluid reclamation. Now it's a freaking miracle if I can crack 1200 and I feel like asscock for hours after. More on that later.

For now I interject a bit more bitching about the pool situation. Previously going was difficult because of the distribution of water aerobic classes and the constriction of the 2 available lanes. This only lead to three available slots when working out was possible and then there was always the fear that both lanes would be occupied.

Now, with lingering demand for the portly denizens of the indoor pool the schedule appears freer but is totally unpredictable. Somedays there is no one in sight, other days the place is packed to the rafters. It doesn't help that the outdoor pool hasn't opened to relieve some of the pressure for the locals to take their kids to swim.

But I am ok with that. I am no longer a swimmer and have made my peace with that.

Back to the sex life, here's the causal chain that leads from wall-street to my bedroom. In the spirit of brevity I have trunked the first few links into a simpler form.

Economy gets fucked>people spend less money>YMCA gets less revenue, less visitors>YMCA cuts costs to match the lack of funds>AC gets cut>workouts become harder, take longer>longer recovery times are needed to acheive normal operations>since I work out in the evening this narrows the windows when the time/opportunity to get jiggy with my wife are diminished.

Fucking economy!!

Saturday, May 23, 2009

The price of connectivity

Even when you're a cult legend, a top notch artist in a field that eats Legions of soft-science types there is always a danger to be had . . .

I submit the Peter Watts lolcat experience:

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

102 Days: Can't even keep my damn milestones...

So it's been a fucked up sort of fortnight. Stretching back over the week I found myself nearly single for a while, crashing my reluctant coworker's pad in raleigh and discussing the finer points of end game raiding whilst put up by a former roomate in Cary.

I have been slack as hell on the project though I remain adamant that last weeks shortfall will be reclaimed in short time. I'm still way above my projected average though its been harder and harder to drag myself out to the gym.

Also my nightly constitutionals just seem to drag on and on. Maybe I need a new neighborhood to tramp around in. Who knows.

I also started a new plan to do some terrestrial modifications to the woods behind my house. It started as an ambitious plan to clean the forest of dangerous poisonous plants, sharp pointy rocks and anything that might harbor the dreaded copperhead. So I started hacking and slashing my way through the foliage and some ideas started creeping into my head about water conservation and some much needed surgery for the yard.

Tomorrow I will make a short video detailing my progress thus far and possibly outlining the scope of the new endeavor. There are a number of obstacles to consider: a giant dead tree and me with no handy way to dismantle it, innumerable rocks, roots and creepers and of course good old fashioned North Carolina RED CLAY. I swear the shit halts time and space whenever a shovel hits it.

Plenty of good fodder for the compost heap at least. Now content yourself with some stats.

Current Status: 66+ MC (projected average is 54.3) Daily average remains in the 600 range and the weekly average is hovering at 4.8 MC.

Also my weight is now about 220 though after the Papa John's it is probably higher. Damn your better ingredients and gut-destroying business model!!!!