Matrix Reborn

This stuff is on indefinite hiatus as of right.... NOW.

If anyone could drop some pennies in my tip jar I'd appreciate it. Or if you want something in return for your cash buy a shirt - theres a lot of em.

I am freeloading off my parents right now until I can get a job out here in AZ. I have literally nothing but the clothes on my back and would appreciate some contributions (or people buying the shirts below, since they are really neat and not found ANYWHERE else).

Heres some of the shirts (look at the URLs for a hint as to what they are):

Shirt 1
Shirt 2
Shirt 3
Shirt 4 (I am going to get one of these for myself once my CC is paid off a bit)
Shirt 5
Shirt 6 (this is another one I want to get)
Shirt 7 (controversial, I think)
Shirt 8 (4 More in 2004!)

I have some more designs, but they are on my computer which is 1500 miles and $100 away from me at the moment. So this is it, and dare I say they are better than some of the other shirts being offered by various blogs on my blogroll *cough* Aaron's Rantblog *cough*.

Every little bit helps. I'd REALLY appreciate PayPal.com donations as they go right onto my other Credit Card and I can use it immediately to buy food/gas (if my parents ever let me use their truck).

Yay for being 30, separated from your wife and 2 kids, flat broke, jobless and homeless! Certainly makes life interesting (and not its not in ANY way G. W. Bush's fault, you fricking lefty).

I don't hate LowEndMac.com, its just that the guy running the site seems to think he has a better grasp on the Mac market than anyone else, including people actually at Apple (Steve Jobs).

If its not declaring that the G5s require memory running at half the processor speed (not true, the G5 uses up to 400 MHz DDR RAM) its his assertion that Apple could increase unit sales by 50% by simply offering a headless eMac for $599.

Unfortunately Apple's eMac has not substantially increased unit sales as-is despite its low cost and all-in-one desgin ready to go out of the box.

Only some of Apple's problems come from "sticker shock" by consumers who see ultra-cheap Compaqs and Gateways with what appear to be better specs. Having the buyer in the controlled, PeeCee free, environment of an Apple store can help reduce this effect, but Apple's prices are still higher than most other comprable PeeCees.

Another problem is simply ignorance of the Mac platform by the majority of consumers. Apple doesn't help this any by not advertising its products, not just its brand, to as many people as possible. How many Mac OS X commericals have you seen? How many iTunes or iPhoto or iMovie commercials?

Even Apple's G5 commercial barely shows the computer and never talks about its specs, its technologies or what you can actually DO with it (other than blow people out of their house).

So if Apple were to make a headless eMac would unit sales jump 50%? I don't think so. Apple's unit sales have not jumped any significant amount even with 3 PowerBook models, two distinct iMac models, the eMac and two models of iBook. Apple's market is so small that I believe consumers are simply choosing one model over another, iBook 12" vs. PowerBook 12" or an exiting eMac. If a headless eMac was offered consumers would simply pickt it over an original eMac and not swoop inboosting unit sales anywhere near 50% more than they are now.

A new model would basically fragment Apple's already small marketshare and perhaps boost unit sales a few percentage points only.

Wishful thinking with a total misunderstanding of Apple's business model may make nice filler pages to generate more ad impressions, but they will never change the world or at the very least convince business managers running multibillion international computer companies to do your bidding.

I got my first Nigerian scam email today. I had actually received several of these letters the old fashioned way years ago, they are in a drawer in the desk at my parent's business. They all vary on the details, but the underlying theme has always been the same; help me get some money out of African Country and you will get a commission for the use of your bank account. Of course what really happens is your account gets emptied or used for whatever illegal purposes the scammers have in mind.

If anyone actually falls for this, you deserve to get captured and killed by traveling to African Country to fascilitate the transaction - its just thinning out the gene pool as far as I am concerned.

I'd add links but this modem is so slow it takes forever to pull down these blogger pages, sheesh how did we ever survive before broadband? And I miss my multi-button mouse (the scroll wheel specifically)!

Well I am now in AZ, on a UMAX S900 (Mac clone) on a 33.6 modem that doesn't know it's a 33.6 modem.

Yay for old technology!

So the bus trip, wow. Lets just say that airplanes are worth the expense, because I could have flown home in the time I waited to leave Nashville on a bus.

Interesting bits:

A young Amish couple got off an inboud bus, which really got people's attention. Mostly because of the way they dress (think Little House on the Prairie). They had young baby with 'em and I have no idea where they were going, but to resort to taking a bus despite their aversion to technology it must have been important.

Someone had their bag stolen from the bus while in Memphis. Tip: If its valuable enough to keep with you its valuable enough to be stolen. Moral of the story: take your shit with you when you get off the bus for any reason.

One of the many bus drivers got lost outside of Fort Worth, Texas. Funny she managed to find the terminal there and yet could not find the freeway again.

Some guy in Abilene said to me: "Sure is hot today, gonna be 100 degrees." I thought to myself: "Whimp, this is nothing to someone from Arizona." I was here when it got 122 once, I even had a t-shirt celebrating that day.

If you didn't have a sleep disorder before riding the bus cross-country, you will at the end of your trip. Stopping every few hours and getting forced off the bus at all hours doesn't leave much time for sleeping. Then there are the kids/babies screaming, the bobbing and weaving of the bus at high rates of speed and the desire to not miss your stop all keeping you awake.

Screw that. Next time, I am flying.

I think I know what happened to all the Nimda probes from clueless PeeCee users on the same ISP as me, they have been taken over by Code Red infections!

I have gotten *zero* Nimda probes (okay maybe one) this week, but in their place I am getting Code Red probes from other IPs on my ISP every few minutes.

All of the probing is coming from people on my ISP not web hosted server or something, these are just average Clueless dingbats running some form of Windoze wide open on their Cable Modem and got infected with a worm/trojan that is now searching for new boxes to infect.

Previously I got Nimda probes every few minutes and very few Code Red, so this reversal is certainly interesting. Plus I have been sending out notices via the Early Bird script for EACH probe which may account for the drop off of Nimda, maybe. But that doesn't explain the surge in Code Red unless the infected computers got re-infected by a different worm/trojan most likely on already-compromised systems.

Even with all the "Security Updates" for Mac OS X I have yet to see any successful hacks using the various 'sploits the updates supposedly fix. The most common 'sploit of a buffer overflow executing arbitrary code doesn't even work on the Mac due to the very different CPU design of the PowerPC. So even if you have an unpatched SSL or apache a buffer overflow will most likely crash the daemon and that's it.

The Norks shot a whopping four rounds into the DMZ and the South Koreans responding three-fold.

Wow. It's total CHAOS - according to the news report on Foxnews.com.

Golly, its almost as if they nuked the South going by the rhetoric reported in that story.

I personally believe we should have preemptively taken out that nuke reactor with some Stealth Bombers and prevented all this nuclear blackmail bullshit. It sounded like they had just the one reactor for reprocessing, we know where it is and we have these long-distance stealth bombers and tons of troops already on the border in case someone got uppity at our bombing run. One strike, knock it out, no nuclear weapons and maybe some dirty soil no one can live on for a few hundred years and our convential forces already nearby and not in the mood to be fucked with to clean up the mess.

But what do I know, I am nobody. I don't even play military video games anymore.

There must be a Plan somewhere that no one knows about. Maybe Bush will come out one day and say we bombed the reactor, and the Norks will say nuh uh, and Bush will say yeah huh and so on. Maybe I spend too much time with my kids... Hmm...

Frankly I have no clue what will happen, but something big should happen to keep something really bad from happening.

The paper is signed. A division of property, rights, commitments has been made. My (ex) wife and I are no longer a "couple" - we are two individuals who remain married to each other only under the law.

Since I won't be around much longer, I am cleaning up my Blogroll to better represent what I like and more importantly represent ACTUAL blogs not empty URLs.

Most people politicize their blogroll, but me I just put up links to give people a chance to see stuff that I like to read and maybe discover someone new/different.

There are also several blogs/sites that I do not list but that I read regularly. I talked about one of them somewhere in the archives called ChronWatch which is kind of an MRC for pure politics not the media in relation to politics.

There were some lil "Homies" aka gang member-looking figurines in a gum-ball machine at a restaurant - one of em was of a lil Homie-guy in a wheelchair. Hah hah!

I thought it was pretty damn funny all 'round. Anyone else and I'm sure their face would be red from screaming RAAAAAAAAAACIST!! (for some reason that reminds me of the end of the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Donald Sutherland, you know when they find a human and point and howl like crazy).

[IMAGE MOVED - CLICK TO VIEW]

Just another tangential (its a word, look it up) thought...

If someone wants to make this into a Caption Contest, please let me know so I can see it (after all I made this parody image - thats a disclaimer for anyone who screams COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT!).

(BTW: Is there an IMDB plugin for Sherlock 3?)

Update: Yes the above image is Photoshopped. Amazingly I have a similar font to that used in the poster (its not an exact match tho). Its meant only to make a point, not to show off my mad Photoshop skillz, relax.

Update 2: Not being the Photoshop Wizard I just realized I should have just taken the entire yellow text off that image and recreated it so the font would all match. Duh. This is why I don't do websites or digital graphics for a living. Writing software takes a lot longer, but most people never see your mistakes (unless it causes a noticeable bug in an app).

I have been getting a lot of Code Red probes lately, and very few Nimda probes from other assclowns on my ISP.

Wonder what happened? I did notice an uptick (industry term) in probes during that hackfest that quickly devolved into the true expression of today's hacker culture - cannibalistic attacks on the point-keeping server, infighting and general mayhem of the participants and very few worthwhile defacements/breaches.

Bravo script kiddies! You really made your point, if it was to prove that you are a bunch of 'tards with grown-up hacking tools that you can barely use that you discovered in an IRC channel where all the l337 h4x0r$ are. You wouldn't believe how many hits I get for 'l33t text convertors' on my personal web site.

For anyone on a cable modem and on my ISP I have two words of advice: Fire. Wall.

For anyone with a teenaged boy to whom you have given a $3k DELL and Cable Modem and spends all his time in his room with the door locked and tells you not to answer the phone or check the mail without letting him get to it first: Military. School. Make the bastard a useful member of society by destroying FOREIGNERS stuff not our stuff.

I'm tired of your Nimda and Code Red infections. Don't all PeeCees come with virus software now? Why the hell aren't you using it? Oh, right, windoze users can barely get on the Interweb let alone update and use virus software (I kept getting all these error messages so I UNINSTALLED VIREX!!). Idiots (for using Windoze in the face of all its problems when viable alternatives exist in the Mac).

Okay so Apple put out a product commercial for the new G5 right after I said Apple doesn't advertise its products.

Its a funny commercial with a guy being blown through the walls of his house by the power of the new G5 computer which Apple is claiming to be the fastest personal computer in the world (provided you have the Dual 2.0GHz model stocked with tons of RAM and really fast HDs and run certain benchmarks).

I saw it on Fuse, the music channel which is KICKING MTV's SORRY ASS ALL OVER CABLE TV. I love Fuse especially since those limp-wristed Canadians sold it to an American company and they revamped their format to include more *gasp* rock/alternative/modern-punk music.

I am pretty sure it was on Fuse - I was really tired earlier and nearly fell asleep, but now its past 1 AM *again* and here I sit unable to go to sleep. That's okay though, I'm on AZ time now so its really 11 PM as far as I am concerned. AZ doesn't do Daylight savings time, which I am currently living under and is the stupidest thing ever - hey lets make it so that the sun doesn't set till almost 9 PM! That will save electricity because no one gets up to go to work when its PITCH BLACK OUTSIDE STILL BECAUSE ITS NOT 4 AM ANYMORE ITS 5 AM.

Fighting natural instincts to adapt to changing seasons and such is usually a bad idea. People are made to work with the changes in the season so why try to artificially suppress what Nature has accounted for? No wonder so many people are so stressed out - their internal clocks are all screwed up.

Did you cry when you took your photo down?

Funny being called a "butt" by someone who posts incoherently 99% of the time and has insane graphics all over the place that seem to reinforce the belief that he has mental problems.

If you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. You'd definitely never survive as a Conservative Mac User (double-whammy), whimp.

P.S. I take my photos down because I don't like people ripping off my ideas/stuff (its a recurring theme in my life).

I am now going home, officially, Friday.

So all this will go into "maintenance mode" and my other web site will be shut down indefinitely sometime Thursday as I need to pack up my computer.

I guess you will have to get your fix of people-that-are-politically-different-from-me-that-I-can-hate-easily somewhere else.

I have no idea what will happen, but I expect to have my computer at least in my possession so technically I could get a web site going again on an official web host (after I make a payment on my CC). My domain is paid for another year so at least I have that taken care of.

As I told my (ex) wife earlier, my life will be like before we met - only I have two kids that I will be sending a check to every month and have hardly anything to my name (not even a car or my lovely TV). I will probably end up in a roommate situation, which will be interesting. I sure hope I don't wind up with some intolerant liberal, geeze what a pain in the ass that would be (endless whining about everything and yet no clue how to improve their lot in life nor the motivation to actually DO anything to change their lot in life).

To quote Lawrence in my favorite movie "Office Space" (on DVD which I am keeping): Fuckin' eh!

Someone more adept at explaining the things I believe than I can commit to bytes has spoken..

Click me.

Heh, its some French holiday today (do they call holidays holidays, because they call all vacations holidays) so read up on how to be "French" or just ask John F. Heinz-Kerry how to at least look French.

For once I may just be ahead of the Blogosphere curve on this topic, yay for my own private source of political fodder to post about!

What the hell does this mean:

2003-07-14 00:58:46.888 Project Builder[9806] SRC Doc added new bp to proj with an absolute file ref for /System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/
Frameworks/HIToolbox.framework/Versions/A/Headers/CarbonEvents.h

Any idea? Thanks for using abbv. Apple. thx.