BS

Christmas… With 78 Mexicans

2008-12-25T23:32:33Z

So this is Christmas… (hard not to break into song, though a song that says the war is over is full of shit).

Can’t have snow so we got clear precipitation instead. That wouldn’t effect my mood any except that today, and yesterday my phone has been flooded with phone calls. Now usually I am thrilled to see local phone numbers calling me as it means I am getting some PC Repair work. I would even go so far as to work on Christmas if somebody called and wanted their new computer setup etc..

The thing is, they haven’t been calling for me. They have been calling for some Mexican towing service (I think). I have answered 11 of these calls hoping to find one that speaks English and can properly explain to me where they got my phone number from.

The first 4 phone calls I was all business and trying to figure out where the calls came from. In my broken Spanish I have managed to tell them that they have the wrong number and I even got one of them to explain where they got my phone number from, however he explained it in very fast Spanish and I couldn’t make it out as being anything besides a location.

After the first few calls I answered I have started making up random businesses that they are calling. So far I have used: Paul’s Pron Shop, Frank’s Yellow Snow, Poodle Punters, Church of Scientology, Nottherightnumber.com and my last call I proudly answered as “Thank you for calling Change Your Religion by phone. Press 1 to convert to Judaism, press 2 to convert to Mormonism, press 3 to convert to Satanism… I was going to keep going but they hung up after that one. Suppose even if you don’t understand English you understand El Diabloism.

For now I am just enjoying my Christmas in front of my computer. Just me and my 78 Mexican friends.

Oh, found a few new high speed DivX sites so I am adding a bunch of quality new movies to the site. I know… You all wanted the new games page to be done, but I would rather watch movies since I have abandoned working on the movies ever since DivX movie sites all died off or became crazy slow.

Secret Firefox Bug Fix Helps Site

2008-12-19T07:01:26Z

So I discovered a wonderful new issue that Firefox has finally fixed. In version 3.05 my artwork button works. It works over and over again instead of showing just one new piece of artwork and then needing to reload the page.

Now previously I had a “fix” where I told you to edit about:config and search for caching and turn off memory caching. If you were doing that before you might want to turn it back on since it does speed up a couple websites to have it on. It was a very annoying bug in Firefox that had caused me to want memory caching off so I am glad they have fixed the bug.

Now I just need to fix everything else that’s broken :)

Good times ~

Community Service on MySpace

2008-12-07T01:32:05Z

Being that I am a bad man, I needed to do 30 hours of community service before x-mas eve. However I don’t really want to waste a week worth of time cleaning up a road or something. I looked into all sorts of shady ways to get out of doing the community service. However I settled on creating a logo and letterhead for a company and then making them a MySpace page.

Now, technically they just make no profit and are not a non-profit organization. I’ve been assured nobody really checks into it and the letterhead looks pimp so I am turning it in. If the city has any issue with it I’m sure they will contact me about it in order to tell me I have to do more.

Either way I am done for now. If I have to do more due to me not “understanding” that the company needs to be titled as a non-profit organization then I’m sure they will give me an extension.

In case you feel like seeing the logo/layout I made them you can see it at: http://myspace.com/rpmproductionsnw08

Honestly it’s not really my style. I hate all the crap myspace puts on the page, but the client wanted all of it to stay. So I just hid all of it below the main image so that you have to scroll to see it. It seemed like a fair compromise with style. Client also liked gray better than red for boxes and background. Whatever works ya know.

Speaking of MySpace. I just redesigned my profile too. I managed to get it to hide the ugly menu bar and search and then look good in all the browsers. Before it looked totally different in Internet Explorer due to all the shit that MySpace removes from your code (unholy bitch of a site), but overall I would say the site now looks more like my site and less like theirs (woohoo).

http://www.myspace.com/trimidium

Am I Evil? Yes I Am

Stranger Than Fiction

2008-12-05T20:50:36Z

I just watched a fantastic movie. However I went into it expecting a mildly amusing movie that would just make good background noise while I worked on a project on my computer. Yet I was actually drawn into the movie and didn’t work on my project at all.

The movie was called Stranger Than Fiction and starred Will Ferrell. I know, the second I said who it starred your face made a weird little look. I mean sure you have seen a Will Ferrell movie that you couldn’t help but laugh at for the sheer stupidity that his characters portray. You remember chuckling a little when he got shot in the face with a tranquilizer gun or rolling your eyes at one of his outlandish stunts. However you have never sat and watched a Will Ferrell movie that you were captivated by.

I was in the same boat. I don’t think I ever went to the theater to see a movie that starred Will Ferrell and I probably didn’t pay to watch the ones I did see. This my friends is probably the very reason that I missed out on the 2006 movie Stranger Than Fiction.

To me I will put this in a category with Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. No, the story has nothing in common, but they were both excellent movies made starring actors that were known for being a certain kind of funny.

Perhaps there is real depths to all the people we typecast. Not just the actors, but everybody. So even though it has nothing to do with this movie I would like to dedicate a day to people doing what they are actually good at and what they enjoy instead of what they are programmed to do.

So I am marking my Google Calendar (which syncs with all my other organizers) down for “Do What You Enjoy Day”. I would like to encourage all of you to also write this down in your calendars and then every year in Winter when you are stressed out, cold and miserable you will have a day to just do whatever you enjoy. A day to totally change your focus, if even for that day. No worries, no problems. Only life and the enjoyment of it.

Download this movie via BitTorrent

Watch Movie Online
Buy @ Amazon for .60c

Government Uses FedEx to Smuggle Contraband

2008-11-25T17:15:28Z

So while my friend and I were driving to Wisconsin last week we got stopped in Missouri where all traffic was being forced to exit for an accident ahead.

The accident which I could see fairly clear was a FedEx truck that wasn’t moving. Now it was only using one lane and wasn’t scattered all over the road. It looked as if the truck just stopped moving and broke down.

There did not appear to be any other vehicles that had collided with the truck so one would assume that they would just slow down traffic and keep them in just one lane.

Since everybody was getting sent to the right upon exit we ignored them and we went to the left and used GPS to find our way back to the interstate.

During our process we saw a tow truck and a FedEx truck going towards the broken down truck. Then we continued to see a massive amount of FedEx trucks everywhere. Far more than would be needed to carry the packages.

We eventually got on the interstate again (at the same time as another FedEx truck was driving away from the scene). We had skipped probably 2 hours of stop and go driving with how far the traffic was backed up going to the right (suckers).

Still seeing what a huge deal was made out of this and how it all worked I would say that it would of happened the exact same way if a government truck carrying say, WOMD’s or other contraband had broken down.

So I have decided that FedEx is working with our nations leaders to help smuggle goods.

It makes perfect sense. Nobody will suspect that the million FedEx trucks on the road are anything but a standard package delivery system. Not even other truckers would suspect them. They stop at a truck stop and are wearing a FedEx hat and all is understood.

Before you rule this out for good I suggest you just start paying attention on the road. I didn’t see hardly any UPS trucks on the road, but after this for the rest of the trip we were seeing huge amounts of FedEx trucks… and UPS costs less and is available from more websites.

Now I don’t think they are all in on it. I think at least 50% of the FedEx trucks on the road are genuinely delivering our packages. It’s the other 50% I wonder about.

260 New Pieces of Artwork

2008-11-16T21:18:27Z

I was bored with the current art. So I spent a bit extra time collecting new artwork. Now I normally go and do a “new artwork week” and then I mix the old art with the new art but now I think I will leave this up until December since there is enough artwork to maintain the random without the 600 old pieces of art.

Now today I am also going through the old artwork and throwing it in a folder called “bored” so even when I mix the new artwork with the old stuff I will have cleaned out all the artwork I was bored of seeing. I mean I am not joking when I say there were 600 pieces of art on random, but if you visit the site every day like I do then you would know that it still likes to show you the same 40 pieces of art all the time for some crazy annoying reason.

I have seriously tried 3 different random scripts to fix this but there really is no such thing as a good random script. I need to write one myself that has some kind of memory so it knows how often it is spitting out the same artworks… Anyways that is for another day.

For now, if you don’t like the artwork that shows up click the artwork button to the upper left corner and change it. If your browser doesn’t load a new piece of artwork hold the shift key on the keyboard and click the browsers reload button. This will force it to reload my page without using the cached artwork.

Enjoy the new art ~ Soon it will be in a database and you can pick and chose only your favorite artists to show up.

Attacked By Terrorists

2008-11-15T20:11:03Z

I have had a popcorn husk stuck in my throat near my adam’s apple for over a day now. If it was a normal piece of popcorn it would have dislodged while I was sleeping, however It has hung on. I have tried all sorts of things to get this dislodged but have failed.

The only reason I can see that I would fail would be if the popcorn were deliberately put into my bag of popcorn as a new type of terrorism.

I mean think about it. It’s very distracting. You are trying to talk, or breath or read something and you have to fight to get your mind to keep focus since all it wants to do is think about the piece of popcorn constantly stabbing at your throat.

I for one think as one of Bush’s last acts as president he should send more troops to various locations that might contain weapons of mass distraction like this popcorn.

Biggest Douche In The Universe 2008

2008-11-14T07:49:44Z

South Park started an awards ceremony once where they gave John Edwards an award for Biggest Douche in the Universe. In keeping with the tradition today I was given a web address of somebody that I believe should win the award for 2008.

So today I nominate Gary Johnson of Phenomenon1111.com.

I would elaborate on the reasons why, however it will only take you 2 minutes to read his entire website.

iTunes Ate my ID3 Tags

2008-11-03T04:54:18Z

So I thought I would throw all of my music into iTunes now that my desktop computer is up. I mean that way I can have it download more cover art and can have last.fm read my library from it.

Seemed like a good idea at the time.

So it ends up in there and there is this new “album view” and I quickly notice an album the artist says “Amos, Tori”, and knowing that was not how it should be listed I right clicked on the album and chose “get info” which is where you go to update the ID3 tags on iTunes. So I checked in the box for Artist and Album Artist and I typed Tori Amos instead of Amos, Tori.

I hit okay and went back to watching a video. When I was done with my video I noticed that iTunes had finished “correcting my album”.

Though now it seems that not just that album was “fixed” but ALL of my albums were “fixed”. 250+ gigs of mp3’s from my Everything Else folder (or 63,439 songs) all had their ID3 tags changed to say that they were by Tori Amos.

I mean I didn’t think the album Abbey Road was by Tori Amos. Grr…

There is no such thing as an “undo” for changing 63,000 songs. So that means every single song in my entire library has bad ID3 tags.

Oh, I can just hear my friend Josh laughing now…

How to fix this.

Winamp has this “auto-tag” thing that actually works pretty well, but it’s not perfect. To prevent it from getting totally confused I need to remove the artist from all of my mp3’s so it doesn’t first look for Tori Amos albums.

So when it completes that I am going to throw ALL of my music into auto-tag.

Now, this will actually kind of suck. My music is VERY well. I mean I am very anal about my filing system. Artist\Year - Album\Track# Track Name.mp3

The ID3 tags are just as clean because of it. When I put them into my Everything Else folder I go and make sure all the ID3 tags are nice and clean to match the filing system.

So until an hour ago I had the world’s best sorted and cleanest music collection. After auto-tag it’s really a total crapshot as to if it will even be picking the correct information.

Some of it will be correct, some of it will be wrong.

I guess I am glad this has happened in 2008 and not earlier because mass ID3 tagging didn’t have an even half-ass effective global database even a year ago.

Seriously as stupid as I feel for having done this, I looked through iTunes and in it’s default mode this is 100% for sure going to happen to other people. Seems that every single file is checked in by default, only you can’t see that it’s checked in. When you right click on one album it highlights JUST that one album. So iTunes doesn’t care what is highlighted, only what is checked in, and as I said. It doesn’t show you what is checked in under the default album view mode.

I have never liked iTunes but this is a MAJOR design flaw.

BOOOOOO Apple.

Über PC Named LSD

2008-11-01T01:39:00Z

I seemed to have a lot of technical ranting in here so I decided to break the post up by themes. If you aren’t into the technical ranting or start to lose interest just skip to a different colored text.

<ultimatepc>
Even before I got back from New Zealand I had started to purchase the pieces to build my ultimate home computer. Believe it or not I am not a gamer, but I still needed to build a giant PC with the newest shiznit because I run so many things at once on my system.
</ultimatepc>

<boasting>
Right after I got back I went and ordered all the missing pieces for my computer. Spending more money than I had because to me a computer IS my lifeblood. I purchased 2 monitors (one 24″ and one 22″ that was also a HDTV) an insanely large computer case with water cooling.

The rest of the computer was a QX9650 (quad core, extreme processor 3.0ghz per core that can be overclocked and has 12 megs of cache), 4 gigs of DDR3 1600, an Audigy X-FI sound card, Some fancy 802.11n Wireless card, a nice Radeon video card and 6 terabytes worth of hard drives (though I owned most of them already.
</boasting>

<technical rant>
Here’s the funny thing. I fix computers for a living, tis all I do. I am VERY good at it. However when I built this and turned it on the first time It was working, however it started randomly resetting. I surmised at that time that it was either the really expensive power supply or that it was not grounded properly. The grounding being the more likely.

So I took it all apart and fixed the grounding issue (I hadn’t put a piece of mylar over 2 pieces of metal that stuck up underneath the motherboard.

However now I could not get the system to turn on. I spent 2 days trying to get it on and finally I got it back on, however there was no video and no system beeps for anything unless the ram was removed.

This all pointed to it being the motherboard having gotten messed up when I took it apart so I sent it back. They sent me another one with a note saying “tested/working” so I tried to turn it on and again couldn’t get video to work. So I went and got another video card and various other test parts. To no avail, still no video. So I figured they sent me the same board and it was still dead so I bought a new board $330 (the ONLY board that would work with my processor that I could buy at a retail store). Still no matter what part I swapped out I could not get it to work.

I had replaced every single part except the water cooling (which is a pain in the ass to work with when you are tearing apart and rebuilding a computer over and over… though perhaps not as much as thermal compound). I had reset CMOS and done every little trick in the book to make this fucker boot with video but it wouldn’t do it.

So that’s actually the compressed version of the troubleshooting. You can find the full version at various tech forums throughout the web because I was hitting my last nerve on this one.

So I bought a new less-shitty laptop and sold my other one to my roommate. The giant godlike computer has just sat in a corner collecting a LOT of dust for a couple months.

I have since rigged my laptop up to use my 24″ monitor and turned the other monitor into my tv (when my projector bulb exploded). I had just put my first ad on Craigslist to try to sell my processor before all it’s value was gone (since at this point it’s already worth only half of what it was worth when it was purchased), when my friend offered to try to fix it.

He had fixed a lot of computers in the past and I had 0 to lose, so I offered him dinner and eternal gratitude if he could fix it.

So he was here early in the day and we tore the computer down again and pulled every single thing out of the case and went through all the troubleshooting steps all over again.

He wanted me to buy some ram and another video card for testing. I grumbled and said I had already tested them, but whatever he was the one fixing it now. So I bought the cheapest ram that would go in my machine ($200… yes, seriously that was the cheapest one that Fry’s Electronics would sell me) and another video card.

Brought it back and we fucked with it for awhile and lo and behold it half ass turned on and gave some video.

What that means is that the brand new video card I bought to test a couple months earlier was DOA. A brand new dead card. Either that or my motherboard had fried it instantly.

Well the celebration couldn’t quite begin because no matter what OS I tried to install it started taking a shit during install. Eventually I got XP installed, however all was not good with the world. The random resetting problem kicked in.

This was my original problem before I blamed grounding and tore the system apart. Ram seemed like it could be the issue but the other ram we got was doing the same bullshit. So we started fucking with the bios. The memory was already being underclocked to 1333 instead of 1600, however the voltage was at 1.54 instead of 1.9 as was recommended by the ram maker. So we increased the volatage, however this just caused the computer to not turn on at all. Took awhile to even get the bios cleared and get it back on.

Finally my friend cut down the speed of the ram to 1066 and we ran the system and it seemed to be working fine. So we ran some burn in tests to juice the shit out of the system and Try to make it crash, however it wouldn’t.

Now this is bullshit. I have to run ram rated at 1600 at 1066 !!!!!!~~!!! WTF !~@~~~~~

Whatever, I am just going to give a huge recommendation NOT to buy “bleeding edge” components that are so new that ONLY Intel makes motherboards for them. I have never had any bad luck with Abit boards, and Asus boards normally have a couple quirks but overall work well. This Intel board has the newest bios updates etc… but can’t handle ram that is supposed to work in it.

So now I have to mail my video card back to newegg for a replacement and try to return the video card I am currently using to Fry’s.
</technical rant>

<thanks>
Still, a HUGE thank you to my friend Kevin who helped me with this. Because even though I had “tried everything”, I didn’t try everything twice… He also dealt with me bitching about how he was doing things and didn’t back down.
</thanks>

<name>
I needed a name for this computer but I had already named a different computer Evil. I briefly thought of naming it “Woman” because it is awesome but has been a huge pain in the ass all at the same time. I decided instead that I would get over the computer being a bitch and just name it LSD.

Why? Because it started as a bad trip but is now awesome. I figure it’s “all tripped out”.
</name>

<XP-vs-Server2008>
In a side note, I have installed both XP Pro 32bit and the 64 bit Server 2008 (supposedly 12% faster than vista) on here and I have done my own comparison tests.

XP can ONLY use 3.24 gigs of my 4 gigs of ram, and it obviously can’t run at 64 bit. However the speed of browsing the web, multi-tasking and running various apps that I normally use I have decided that XP will be my OS of choice. Not only does it “just work” with everything, it is going breathtakingly fast. My computer boots from being turned off to being fully loaded and running in 12 seconds. The second I see my desktop I can open a web browser and start using it, and there is no stall on anything on my website (known to juice cpu) in any browser I try.

By far the fastest computer I have ever used, though it seems sad that vista/s2008 both run slower for me. I mean what a cruel joke for Microsoft to play.
</XP-vs-Server2008>