Author: nalter

Does anybody want a couple of 400 and 450 MHz AMD processors and motherboards?
The motherboards might not be fully functional. It’s been a while
since I messed with them. Anyway, they’re free if you want them.

I was just chatting to associate Kelly. I think he and I agree
it’s fortunate that, through the magic of highspeed internet,
we can musically live the UK where there is no such thing
as Justin Timberlake. (Well, almost no such thing.)

I was watching an episode of Dr. Who, The Three Doctors. The doctor
travels to the anti-matter universe. What does it look like?
Well a gravel quarry, of course. I think at least 50% of Dr. Who
is filmed in gravel quarries.

What is it with these silly low carb diets like Atkins?
Restaurants are selling things like the
turkey
bacon melt wrap or
sizzling New York steak with blue cheese.
They act like it’s fine as long as it doesn’t have any bread-related stuff.
Have all the grease you want! Have a bucket of grease for lunch!
There’s no bread in it! Lose weight and your health at the same time!
My advice is to try the DDR diet instead.
It’s called exercise, people!
Unfortunately, it actually requires you to get off the couch.

I got the video for KLF – Doctorin’ the Tardis. Nice.

We finally got around to putting the crib together last night.
Cleaned out a few boxes and papers in the baby room.
Did taxes too. Used taxactonline.com. You enter the info
on their website and pay $16 for federal and state submission. All through
the information entry process, they hound you to buy the Deluxe version
of their software. They sometimes put a button to buy it where you
would expect the OK button to be. Tricksy! Kinda like those software
license agreements that say something like, “By taking a breath within
the next five minutes, I agree to abide by this software license.”
No wonder Vanessa had tax nightmares all night.
Due to recent high veterinarian bills, we shan’t get to eat out much (if at all)
this month or next month. Lemme tell ya, we’re missin’ the gyros. Aye, for real.

An interesting
article
about this guy who makes animatronic heads. Wonder how long before he makes Data.
If they could just build the robot body and let you switch out the motherboard
and processor, you could just constantly upgrade the “brain”.

I was just looking through info about
this
worm/virus. It’s amazing, all the stuff it does. Steals your BF 1942 CD key.
Tries to stop your anti-virus processes (even the less popular AVG).
It even tries to kill other competing worm processes. Little virus kit punks.
Shouldn’t be long before the viruses access your X10 robot to steal
your wallet and Fedex it to them.

An old memory returns. I remember going to a big tower Mexican restaurant
in Denver as a kid. It had cliff divers, a neat fountain and an arcade.
It is Casa Bonita.

I was looking through the newspaper this morning during my idle
time at Krispy Kreme and noticed how many lawsuits there are against
ordinary businesses. There were about three or four against Smith Food
and Drugs and about two against McDonalds. The woman who won a bunch
of money for spilling McDonalds coffee on herself was in New Mexico.
She musta set off a tidal wave. You could probably start a business
in adhesive flooring and people would still come from miles around
to slip on your floors.

I went over to Krispy Kreme this
morning to pick up some donuts for the coworkers. Some of them worked
this weekend to help clean up that production mess. I get over there
and realize I forgot my wallet. I found that I had some change in the
car so I grabbed some and walk in to see how much the donuts were. They cost
more than I had with me so I went back out to the car, about to just go
home, get my wallet and head to work. Then I found I locked my key in the car.
Yay! I went to a gas station half a block away in the cold to a payphone and called
Vanessa to bring my wallet and spare key. Got her some donuts. She noticed
they had a Krispy Kreme baby shirt.
Eh, maybe a baby shirt for some defunct brand like Atari, but not for
Krispy Kreme…just too commercial. (But I’d wear their paper hats.)

Slashdot points to this
article about how computer chips are made from silicon. I used to do
some networking with equipment in clean rooms. The article briefly mentions
the bunny suits I grew to despise.

I was reading somewhere that you could get rid of the Quicktime
nag screen by booting up, changing your system date to some date years
in the future like 2010, starting Quicktime to get the nag screen
and clicking “remind me later” and then setting your system time back to normal.
I’ll see if it works.

Ah, it’s been interesting times at work. We had a script to clean up
an old table related to processes. They tested the script and
it seemed to have no problems in the test environment. What
doesn’t run in the test environment is a job scheduler process.
When they ran the cleanup script in production, the job scheduler process
panicked and started rescheduling the old jobs that were being cleaned out.
This messed up the production database which had to be backed up to an earlier
time in the day. All the new information people were entering had to be
re-entered.

I’ve played enough BF 1942 now that a nametag
shows up over my head.
(Guess I’m on the Allies.)

I trained a bit more on a 9 foot song, Breakdown, in DDRMAX2 last night.
It has some krazy krossovers. I don’t know
if I can keep that up for the whole song. (
This (AVI)
is just one small bit of it.)

Why is James Brown green?

Vanessa and I were talking about the problem of friends who gladly
give your email address to random websites to send you “things of interest”
(which then sell your email address to spammers or spam you themselves
because they have a “prior business relationship”).
We theorized that one should have two personal email addresses. One would be
johnfornetsavvypeople@whatever.com and the other,
johnforspammagnets@whatever.com.

Don’t you love it when there are bagels in the break room and you
go for the blueberry spread and need a sweet bagel. The only
ones around seem to be jalapen~o and plain. You carefully
select a plain one to go with the sweet blueberry spread.
You bite into it all and it turns out to be a garlic bagel.

We have an old Amiga 500 sitting in the closet taking up space.
Vanessa was looking up the going rate for them. They go for about
$50.
And that’s usually with extra add-ons.
Bleh. Anybody feeling nostalgic?

My coworker works on the computer system that automatically
answers customer calls. I asked him how people respond to it. He
said in the initial stages of the project they had to listen to
some calls to see how it was going. The system was pretty obtuse at
that time and many times it would say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that.” He
said that some old lady was saying, “No, again, you’re not listening! Here’s
the deal. My grandson came in and was messing with the lights…” And
she went on and on as though she were talking to a person who could
understand her.

My progress last night on training with
Breakdown
was pretty pitiful.
You figure out after a while how the steps author intended for you
to move your feet and this one has some pretty unintuitive stuff
like putting your right foot on the left arrow first in some
sections. Most crossovers happen later in a section…not immediately,
but this song seems to be an exception in some places.
The step charts
at DDRFreak help you to rehearse how you would go through a song.

John Peel says,
“I’ve always loved the word ‘molybdenum’.
I’ve dreamt most of my life of owning a piece of molybdenum.
I don’t know what it looks like or if it’s fantastically valuable
or radioactive and would kill me in seconds or what
but I want to be able to say, ‘this is a piece of molybdenum.’
Well, it never happened. Who can tell?”

A coworker who is into more professional photography showed me his 6 megapixel
camera and let me take a shot with it. He sent me the file and it’s 3 MB.
Wowzers.

Craig Charles (Lister on Red Dwarf) seems to now have a
radio show
on BBC 6 Music.

While looking at baby stuff on the web, Vanessa found what
looks like a
knitted Magneto skull cap.