Home of Ardor

Money money

2009-05-04T15:28:00.001-06:00

Stocks are good! Even Ocean Freight is up today. If you look around it seems that the economy is done collapsing. Now is the time to survey the wreckage and take a piece for yourself. The next generation of wealth is being created right now.

Astronomers Astonished by 'Monstrous' Star Explosion

2007-05-07T19:45:00.001-06:00

Astronomers Astonished by 'Monstrous' Star Explosion:
The newly detected ‘king’ of supernovas might be evidence of a new way massive stars die.

Ugh, a month and no updates. But this one's still a good read.

The Top 21 Tech Flops

2007-04-05T15:43:00.001-06:00

The Top 21 Tech Flops:
Excerpt
PetManimal writes "Whatever happened to Digital Audio Tape? Or Circuit City's DIVX program? Or IBM's PCjr. and the PS/1? Computerworld's list of 21 biggest tech flops is an amusing trip down the memory lane of tech failures. Some are obvious (Apple Newton), while others are obscure (Warner Communications' QUBE). Strangely, Y2K didn't make the list."
Yup, this is the stuff that we like to watch die. Most of it died by demand. Thankfully.

Review: Apple appalls where Xbox excels (AP)

2007-04-04T15:17:00.001-06:00

Review: Apple appalls where Xbox excels
(AP):
AP - Apple Inc. has graced the public with another smooth, white, exquisitely designed gadget, this time aiming at making it easier to play iTunes movies and songs on the living-room TV set.

This ended up being a really good article. I also agree, the itunes videos look horrible when you scale up the res because they are barely (and even arguably) dvd resolution. Why in the WORLD did Apple even BOTHER with the pitch that the AppleTV was a high def device when there is NO HD content?

Then they move on to the Xbox 360's Xbox Live Video Marketplace. Long name, but the quality is great. Fantastic actually. Even the pilot episode of MacGyver was encoded with minimal grainy artifacts. The files are not gratuitously large and the video is as crystal clear as they could make it, both in HD and SD. For any tv shows available via the 360, that's my choice over iTunes any day. I'll stop chattering and vote with my wallet.

Say NO to DRM! Go EMI music!

2007-04-02T16:03:00.001-06:00

EMI ditches DRM on iTunes

Bravo bravo. Kudos, especially to the EMI folks who made this deal happen. I for one am hugely excited by this and will promptly upgrade all my EMI tracks once this is available. I will also be encouraged to buy more music.

You should be too. This is one of the "Big 4" music companies that has had a change of heart that was VERY positive for consumers. The quality increase and lack of DRM is a great step. I will support further steps like this with my $$. Let the dollars speak for you too, buy EMI music!

This was a great announcement, and great coverage from Engadget too.

News: Remember a Previous Life? Maybe You Have a Bad Memory

2007-04-01T20:04:00.001-06:00

News: Remember a Previous Life? Maybe You Have a Bad Memory:

This is a fascinating article that combines information from a few studies and evidences that people who remember "past life experiences" are in actuality distorting a bad memory somehow.

Excerpt:
In other words, people who believe they had previous lives are committing a source-monitoring error, or an error in judgment about the original source of a memory. (In this case, they are misremembering the source—themselves—of nonfamous names.) This is important because source-monitoring mistakes are the first in a sequence of events that psychologists believe lead to false memories.

Halliburton provided contaminated water to Soldiers [video]

2007-03-31T21:54:00.001-06:00

Haliburton managed to extort billions of our dollars from this country. Only to turn and high tail it back to Dubai once the political situation became too unfavorable. Talk about unpatriotic, patriotism would be throwing the Haliburton executives through the meatgrinder over issues like this.Very sad video, mainly because it just illustrates with no doubt that we are allowing a truly horrible evil to take place.

read more | digg story

Report: Flaming Piece of Space Junk Misses Airliner

2007-03-28T16:09:00.001-06:00

Report: Flaming Piece of Space Junk Misses Airliner:
Excerpt:
SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) - Pilots of a Chilean commercial aircraft approaching the Auckland airport in New Zealand spotted flaming pieces of a satellite falling past their jet, the LAN Chile airline reported Wednesday.

This is just wild, space barely misses the airliner. Seems to be from a Russian satellite.

Fix health care. Raise taxes? Are they insane?

2007-03-28T15:57:00.001-06:00

Fix health care. Raise taxes:
Excerpt
John Edwards says we need to raise taxes to fix health care, and you can bet that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will eventually say so too. Their red-blooded Republican foes will counter that raising taxes is always and everywhere evil, because it hurts the economy.

*Cringe*

ARGH! No do NOT raise taxes to fix healthcare. If anything LOWER taxes, reduce entitlements, and move the government OUT of healthcare. Many providers are challenged by the increased entitlements given by the Medicare program due to one simple fact: Medicare often reimburses providers less than the costs of the services, and they have to take outrageous contract adjustments to meet the contracted rates. Thus HURTING the providers that participate. Now Edwards wants to make the problem worse!

Simple fact: Hospitals and Doctor offices that accept Medicare subsidize the losses taken by Medicare accounts across the rest of their accounts. The electric bill needs paid, the nurses need paid, the coding staff need paid, the maintenance guys need paid, and of course the doctors need paid. If all they got was paid by Medicare/government, the money coming in would not be enough to cover the bills and salaries. The solution is to reduce the ability to serve patients and gut their staff to a bare minimum overworked skeleton crew.

The way it works now is that everyone can get paid by the sources that DO pay. This is why your health insurance premiums are going up all the time, our wonderful Medicare and Medicaid systems.

Aged, Frail and Denied Care by Their Insurers

2007-03-25T21:34:00.000-06:00

Aged, Frail and Denied Care by Their Insurers:
That this is news is really surprising. Having worked in the health finance field for a few years...I can attest to the FACT that prices are not rising with premiums. That and denial reasons have multiplied. Many maternity benefits now require notification within the first trimester or the insurance will not cover any claims associated with the pregnancy. Four years ago the majority of health plans only required notification of the child for dependent care within 30 days after birth.

Excerpt:
Many long-term-care policyholders say that years of premiums have resulted in only excuses about why insurers will not pay.

South Park Studios: No Walk in the Park

2007-03-25T17:09:00.001-06:00

South Park Studios: No Walk in the Park:

This is actually a neat article on Apple's website about the South Park studio. It talks about how they moved from construction paper to SGI workstations. It also details the obligatory "Mac's are great" mantra of moving from SGI workstations to Macs using Maya, Photoshop, and Motion to basically do the entire show in about 6 days.

Excerpt:
Keeping it fresh is critical at long-running Comedy Central favorite South Park, where regular 120-hour work weeks and a studio full of Macs allow just-in-time delivery of over-the-top satire.

Flying the Airbus A380

2007-03-25T09:53:00.001-06:00

Flying the Airbus A380:

There was one interesting factoid of an otherwise very good read and video that I gleaned from this story. The A380's cabin pressurizes to an atmospheric equivalent to 5000'. This is a much higher pressure than the usual 8000' that most cabins pressurize to. Since I've lived at 6000' for many years, this means that flying the A380 would actually be a treat, no jet lag or dehydration, and my ears would pop minimally.

Looks to be a very nice flight, but mainly for international purposes at this point. It doesn't seem any domestic routes will be using planes the size of the A380 for a very long time.

Spammer That Sued Spamhaus Now Sued for Spamming

2007-03-25T09:40:00.001-06:00

Spammer That Sued Spamhaus Now Sued for Spamming:

There is justice after all....

Excerpt:
Dave Q. Lintard writes with a link to The Register's coverage of a suit against the spammer that sued Spamhaus. e360 Insight, as the company is known, is accused of using a botnet and compromised headers to get their 'advertising' into the mailboxes of the claimant. These are also the folks that tried to get the Illinois courts to suspend SpamHaus's domain registration when they wouldn't play by e 360's rules. 'e360 Insight sued Spamhaus after the anti-spam organisation blacklisted its domains over alleged spamming. In a default ruling made by an Illinois court in September 2006, Spamhaus was ordered to pay $11.7m in compensation to e360 Insight, pull the organisation's listing, and post a notice stating that it was wrong to say e360 Insight was involved in sending junk mail. UK-based Spamhaus did not defend the case and the ruling was made in its absence.'

DMCA Creator Admits Failure, Blames RIAA

2007-03-25T09:39:00.001-06:00

DMCA Creator Admits Failure, Blames RIAA:

The DMCA, the piece of legislation responsible for limiting our digital freedoms to work with data and reverse engineer proprietary systems has been lamented by its very own creator it seems. Compaq entered the PC market and became a global force that drove our technology forward by doing something in its day that is illegal now. Hopefully the democratic congress can show some balls and repeal some of this garbage. However, the new congress it seems is spineless.

Excerpt:

An anonymous reader writes "DMCA architect Bruce Lehman has admitted that "our Clinton administration policies didn't work out very well" and "our attempts at copyright control have not been successful". Speaking at conference in Montreal (video at 11:00), Lehman lay much of the blame at the feet of the recording industry for their failure to adapt to the online marketplace in the mid-1990s."

Rant on the transfer of wealth. Economics

2007-03-17T11:34:00.001-06:00

In reading that article about the Pfizer CEO profiteering from slitting the throats of his workforce I just have to rant a little on the economics of this type of fiscal policy.

Someone at Digg by the name of "SaSpurzFan" made the great point that this type of transfer of wealth is bad for society. I wholly agree.

Let's break it down into two categories of money. You have what are called utility dollars. This is the money circulated by the working class. It pays for food, energy, healthcare, and basic homeostasis for the average family. It is often seldom that after the utility dollars are spent there is very much for "low utility dollars". This is money spent on entertainment, recreation, and things like vacations.

The basic business practice of a major pharmacology company is the removal of wealth from utility dollars and converts that into low utility dollars for their shareholders.

I'd like to take the principle even further. Doctors should not make the money that they do on the basis that their conversion in lump sums of utility dollars into low utility dollars is a huge detriment to America. A physician uses their buying power to go far above and beyond basic homeostasis at the large expense of a major portion of a working class income. The reason this harms the economy is because the working class further resorts to more conservative fiscal spending to compensate the loss of utility dollars toward other basic needs. With low utility dollars being less utilized.

This is why the consumer confidence index is lowered and the markets centered around consumers spending low utility dollars have a generally more difficult time.

The other problem with this is that we continue to act as stilts for the few privelaged. It's turning into a truly bifurcated and uneven society. The few privelaged are not "trickling down" in their spending, instead they hoard it or it becomes a circular support system between themselves and other wealthy in the form of our stock system. It's more and more an aristocracy of an organized few with a self propagating support structure. The problem is also that it's continuing to be at the expense of basic needs choices for many of us.

$11 Million salary, 36% raise and 10,000 fired employees.

2007-03-17T11:16:00.001-06:00

This just irritates the hell out of me. When a patient goes on chemotherapy, those $20,000 per month drugs are not going to R&D as much as they say. If you look at how much the executive officers and employees in the upper eschelons of the company make, you're paying for greed pure and simple. No nobility exists whatsoever in these companies and this just proves it.

read more | digg story

Giant Pool of Water Ice at Mars' South Pole

2007-03-15T16:04:00.001-06:00

Giant Pool of Water Ice at Mars' South Pole:
Mars is unlikely to sport beachfront property anytime soon, but the planet has enough water ice at its south pole to blanket the entire planet in more than 30 feet of water if everything thawed out.

This is actually a pretty cool read.

An idea for physician accountability.

2007-03-14T17:07:00.000-06:00

When you go to a car dealership and get a car your contract is usually pretty cut and dry. When you sign you can see all the fees and terms of your purchase. Now go to a hospital for a surgery and what you sign doesn't agree to any set fee. Granted the human body is subject to many extenuating possibilities than a car, you should still have everything laid out for you.

A doctor needs to own what is done. He or she needs to be accountable easily for what they do during a surgery and explain and be held accountable for it in a way that indemnifies the patient against crooked physicians or just blatant CYA services so that a physician can feel better about the chances of malpractice lawsuits happening.

The real issue is that physicians still do not put patients in the charge of their care. The legalities of it still entitle the patient to full control over their healthcare. The problem is that many doctors lose sight of what will best serve the patient and not what will best serve their liabilities. Many physicians' modus operandi is to manage risk with patient care an afterthought to this one priority. Patients need to manage the risk. It must be up to "us" to challenge things and have a clear understanding of the roadmap of treatment being prescribed to us. Many people do not question what a physician does early on in treatment because the physician paints this picture of a situation beyond the scope of their understanding. Partly true, you can still dig in and find the basics. Simplistically "If I go get this scan, what does it mean with either possible outcome? What test will come after that and what will those outcomes mean?". A physician typically operates off of a flowchart, we need to get that flowchart.

We must have the means to dispute whichever portion we wish.

Granted I understand there are plenty of cases where a patient is incapacitated and needs certain treatment in order to avert death. This is unavoidable and the nature of the business. However, what I'm getting at is physicians ordering frivolous tests or performing things that aren't required. I'd also like to take a stab at the inconsistency of physicians. They "just decide" stuff for no reason sometimes.

Well here's to you doctors living in your self created super star realities. We the people are coming after your lack of business ethics.

Chang'e 1: China Gears Up for First Moon Mission

2007-03-14T16:10:00.001-06:00

Chang'e 1: China Gears Up for First Moon Mission:
China is ramping up for the launch this year of Chang'e 1, a lunar orbiter designed to set the stage for the nation's future Moon-bound missions.

I would just love to see China nudge the US out of its doldrums. Go China!

i,

2007-03-13T16:05:00.001-06:00

Halliburton's Dubai move -- a negative for the dollar:

Article reads:
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) - What's good for Halliburton shareholders, may not be good for the U.S. economy and the dollar.

Oh may not be good for the US?? May not be good?????

I think with just a smidgen of common sense, one can ascertain that a company assraping the federal budget and then high tailing out of the country as a primary business move would definitely be bad for the US.

Halliburton is Moving Their Headquarters from Houston to DUBAI

2007-03-11T17:54:00.001-06:00

Oil services giant Halliburton Co. will soon shift its corporate headquarters from Houston to the Mideast financial powerhouse of Dubai, chief executive Dave Lesar announced Sunday.As one Digg commenter remarked "It really just sucks to have to stand by while they f*ck us in the ass. Rome is falling..."

read more | digg story

'Berserk' house cat sends owner to hospital

2007-03-11T07:30:00.001-06:00

'Berserk' house cat sends owner to hospital:

"A house cat attacked its owner, sending her to the hospital by ambulance with more than 20 bite wounds."

Yep...the french SUCK!

2007-03-10T09:08:00.001-07:00

First Loss Ever at Airbus, and Profit Drops at EADS:
Profit plunged 94 percent at EADS after its main unit, the aircraft maker Airbus, reported its worst year ever.

Apple rumors - someone needs to get real.

2007-03-09T18:17:00.001-07:00

I made this post solely to point out an old Digg story I saw. It was at Digg and I must say some very constructive comments came about there about how pointless it truly is to say Apple is coming out with product X when it's entirely conjecture that's unverifiable.

I bring up this rant because I saw I, Cringely's article about how Apple is supposedly going to launch hardware H.264. While this is entirely plausible, I really don't care. I might find it useful for doing video editing, but in all honesty my CPU's are plenty fast enough for the task. The other thing is that we have no idea where the author got the rumor. Hence I reference the aforementioned link about creating Apple rumors. Cringely may be using this as a ploy to generate traffic, or it may be true. Whatever the case it's asinine. Dell could just as soon launch such technology in a kneejerk reaction to Apple's speculated move (however unlikely...check that...VERY unlikely). So now we're going to see news sites link to this article saying it's news and in turn other news sites call it a verified story which has a high probability of fizzling in the end.

Stop giving this crap such attention, if Apple reverse engineers the entire human genome then great. This is tantamount to inventing a self perpetuated fraud case.

I guess Digg users truly do forget all too quickly, like goldfish.

News: GDC: Intel solves speed problems with integrated graphics

2007-03-08T19:05:00.001-07:00

News: GDC: Intel solves speed problems with integrated graphics:

This has been a long running gripe that the integrated graphics used in Macbooks and Mini's are simply trash. The update to GMA965 will help make the trash less trashy, so that instead of pure garbage it's just a turd.

Here's to hoping Intel will someday just blow our socks off with some revision of integrated graphics.

Giant dinosaurs were genetic pip-squeaks

2007-03-08T18:49:00.001-07:00

Giant dinosaurs were genetic pip-squeaks:

This was an interesting read. T-Rex it turns out had no more complex a genome than a common bird.

News: Reports: Jury finds Vonage infringed on Verizon patents

2007-03-08T16:03:00.001-07:00

News: Reports: Jury finds Vonage infringed on Verizon patents:
"A jury has found Vonage infringed three Verizon patents."

Yet another example of complete BS patent law in action. Patents are suppose to protect Verizon from someone looking at their service and saying "Hey, let's steal this idea." when the concept of voicemail forwarding is in reality one of the most common things we know.

Patent law in this case instead is trying to make people Verizon customers who don't want to be Verizon customers, but Vonage customers. Patent law is getting completely asinine and devastating to our economy. The common person who wants to startup a business cannot avoid the various bear traps of patent infringement. This needs to change.

News: Gates calls for new privacy law

2007-03-08T15:59:00.001-07:00

News: Gates calls for new privacy law:
I thought this was an interesting news bit. Bill Gates is apparently trying to advocate privacy laws at a personal level for consumers. What's really funny is how he specifically mentions HIPAA as going too far and representing annoyance to consumers rather than service.

Well, working at a hospital, all I have to say is WERD homie!!!!! HIPAA has frustrated so many patients that walk into our doors, the initial reaction is that they think we've completely lost our brains with some of the asinine privacy protection we have to enforce on them. While I love the idea of privacy, I also love the idea of sensible privacy.

Here's kudos to Bill for speaking on this type of stuff.

Apple exec disses on Vista

2007-03-07T15:08:00.001-07:00

"Apple’s CFO said Tuesday that Windows Vista is no threat to Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” and argued that the steep hardware requirements of Microsoft’s new operating system will give Leopard an opportunity to step in and grab more market share."How very true. If history is any indicator, old G4's will be able to take advantage of Leopard without a massive "tax" on the users.

read more | digg story

Credit-card debt rises at slowest pace in 10 months

2007-03-07T14:59:00.001-07:00

Credit-card debt rises at slowest pace in 10 months:
This can only be good news. People are using less credit and getting into less debt.

GM's Electric Car Gets a Date

2007-03-07T14:02:00.000-07:00

GM's Electric Car Gets a Date:
The Chevy Volt is an awesome looking car in addition to being cutting edge.

If GM continues this kind of development I will end up as a huge fanboy.

Some more healthcare info.

2006-10-17T18:29:00.000-06:00

I'm sure we've heard some about the stock options scandal now hitting United Health and their CEO resigning. As it turned out he was granted 1.1 billion in stock options that are highly questionable prompting him to resign. The problem that we the people should have with this is the inflated cost of healthcare premiums helping contribute to the earnings per share. Essentially, all United Health customers and all contracted providers helped him get a pretty penny. Fortunately the cosmic balance seems to be restored and he will likely now be penalized along with a few other executives.

The question we should have now is how many other companies has this gone on with? Specifically healthcare? How many megacorps under the umbrella of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield association have had this problem? How has the BC/BS Association compensated their executives?

Another really good question is, why is it that as healthcare expenses go up, insurance premiums seem to go up and in turn make more profits for the health insurers? Haven't we seen this sort of thing happen with oil? It's as though the price per barrel justification for higher pump prices is tantamount to the health insurance premiums we pay. With providers charging higher prices for services it's as though insurance companies are hiking up premiums, raking in some nice profit margins, and then placing the blame on "the industry"...just like the oil companies. If this is accurate, I would half expect the CEO of Pacificare to make a statement like "Use less healthcare" akin to the Exxon CEO's remarks on oil prices.

Just some musings, it sounds perfectly plausible given some of the news blurbs about Wellpoint's profit's going up. For the lay person, Wellpoint is the name of the parent company of a few Blue Cross plans in some states throughout the country.

Misc musings about the oil market.

2006-10-12T16:54:00.000-06:00

The US has the potential to drastically reduce the consumption of foreign oil in a very short time. We can accomplish this not through reducing our consumption, not through drilling for more petroleum deposits domestically, and not through any existing environmental blockades. We can do this through oil shale.

A bit of a foreword. There is a good reason we aren't already going ape over oil shale. Especially if you are from western Colorado. From living here a short while I have seen an area that went ape over oil shale already in the past. As much as residents here would love the idea of massively boosting the oil shale extraction they do not want to see another oil crash so much in fact that they fear the experimental oil shale projects here for that very reason.

Oil shale right now makes sense. When Shell was looking at the prospects of oil shale production back in 2002 in Colorado it was a very wary of the oil market. Back then Oil was around $25 a barrel, and the cost per barrel of oil through this production method was around $27 per barrel. It made little economic sense, but they were thinking they could fine tune the process and turn a profit domestically. Now the price is at $57 per barrel and we're not going to see a huge drop anytime soon (but it would be nice wouldn't it?). This has gone from a very wary proposition to a very lucrative one in a very short time and any fine tuning they can do with the process now is just gravy.

Why are the communities here so leery of it? It's simple really, they've been through this before. Back in the 70's and late 80's was another very significant price increase of petroleum, oil shale was profitable and the energy companies jumped at oil shale. It's a huge untapped resource here and can be massively extracted, just around double the cost of regular crude reserves. When oil prices plummeted during the late 80's and through the 90's the energy companies took some losses and pulled out entirely leaving billions of development behind. The communities also lost their primary monetary and workforce source of income. These areas were economically devastated. They have recovered, but the potential "return of oil shale" is looked at very cautiously and some think the oil market could go bust again. These individuals are the jaded ones who actually fear petrol cuts in prices. They look at oil shale as only being feasible if the price remains high.

So while our enemies such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Kuwait seek to keep these terribly inflated prices high, they may actually be doing us a favor. If we can run their reserves dry and then simply revert to domestic oil shale extraction we would be effectively drawing to a close their foothold in world power. OPEC would simply fizzle into an unimportant and worthless organization.

I can hardly wait to see where we go with energy. For the most important reason, I want to see what we come up with that allows me to retain my purchasing power of other goods, energy needs to be cheap.

Yeah death and all that, BUT WHAT ABOUT REISER 4??

2006-10-10T20:37:00.000-06:00

With the death and possible murder by Hans Reiser of his wife, apparently some are more concerned as to what becomes of the Reiser project than the actual tragedy at hand.

read more | digg story

Battlestar Galactica iTunes users, read this about season 3.

2006-10-09T22:34:00.000-06:00

This post is surely to be deleted from the BSG Scifi forums, but a user was intrepid enough to do some serious digging and found the person apparently most directly responsible for the absence of BSG season 3 going to iTunes.

I have copied the entire post as follows from this location. As in Terminator 2, "The person most directly responsible for the holocaust is"......

LiquidThinking
OK. I have done a little digging and Homework. Here is what I suggest...

First if you can not be diplomatic then do not read any further...

I have found the person responsible for the Digital Media for NBC. Her info is...

"BETH COMSTOCK
President, Digital Media and Market Development, NBC Universal

Beth Comstock was named president of Digital Media and Market Development in December 2005. She is accountable for driving NBC Universal’s digital strategy and leading the company’s content and distribution efforts to capitalize on new and emerging digital platforms. Her responsibilities also include strategic marketing, research, communications, and advertising and promotion. She reports directly to Bob Wright, vice chairman of GE and chairman and CEO of NBC Universal. " (NBC's website)

The phone number for NBC in California is 818-777-1000. Before you spin up your mouth's FTL drive, read the rest of this...

Ask for the Digital Media and Market Development Group. If they can't find it after just a few moments say "That's Beth Comstock's group". Until they catch on, you will be transfered right away, (I was transfered in less than 20 sec.). When you get a HUMAN BEING. Ask for Beth or her assistant. With Regards? "I would like to discuss the Digital Media and Market Development Group's intentions toward Apple iTunes and NBC's customers. I would also like an explanation for the current delay with regards toward the availability of Battlestar Galatica season 3 on iTunes. I would like to suggest that the video source for the current week's episode be sent to Apple iTunes for processing ahead of time so that it is available shortly after the final airing of BSG on Friday's Sci Fi Line-up."

If they can't help you ask for Bob Wright, (her boss and CEO of NBC), or someone better equipped to assist you directly in this matter because you, nor anyone else looking for assistance with this, has gotten a response from any NBC affiliates since the episode's expected arrival time on iTunes has passed sometime ago."

DO NOT BE IMPOLITE!!! Be as professional as possible and as calm as possible. Explain CALMLY why you can not view BSG on Sci Fi at it's usual time and why you rely on NBC to use the iTunes service. If the Digital Media Group can't help you, (which they should because its THEIR department), keep asking who you need to talk to to resolve this issue. Do not let them off the hook easily. Pin someone down for a suitable answer of some kind. DO NOT BE IMPOLITE. BE CALM AND PROFESSIONAL. If they give you the name of another person to talk to ask nicely to be transfered after you have written their name and number down.

At some point they will catch on and just stop answering the phones, rolling the call to voice mail. When this happens LEAVE A MESSAGE! "Hi, I am calling with regards to NBC's and Sci Fi's show Battlestar Galatica season3 on Apple's iTunes. (Do not abbreviate! Execs don't know what BSG means!). I am calling because I have written to the feedback sections of your customer service department several times and have not yet received a reply of any kind fron customer service for several days and have not seen a suitable resolution to the Battlestar Galatica Season 3 on Apple's iTunes situation. Please call me back with regards to this at (and your phone number). Thank you for your time and assistance."

Let's get as many people as possible to call Tuesday and Wednesday. If only 50 people call one assistant and get no where someone will hear that there is a ruckus that needs looking into.

Report your results here ASAP! Good Luck!

A look at economy inflation versus oil inflation...and OPEC's continued greed.

2006-10-05T18:49:00.000-06:00

While I was reading some of the news regarding oil I was particularly irked by some of the statements coming from OPEC. Of note is this over at CNN Money

"OPEC is concerned about prices but the most important thing they are concentrating on are inventory levels," the delegate said.

They are concerned about price when just back in July prices were at $78 per barrel. Another snippet from this article irked me even further, from back when this horrible price gouging started to become its worst.

"The senior OPEC delegate said Saudi Arabia will reduce its production by 300,000 bpd from September's 9.1 million bpd, the senior delegate said, taking the kingdom's production to its lowest since May 2004."

In normal business you usually charge more because of a change in the product or an improvement in the quality of the product. If Intel, AMD, IBM, and Viatech slashed production of processors to justify an inflated price you can bet there'd be massive outrage. The justice department would get involved, mass lawsuits would be filed, and some people would probably end up in jail or severely fined.

How can they justify this? I don't see how other than despicable and grotesque amounts of greed. Let's look at this from a different angle. I did some thinking and it occurs to me that we should look at how this impacts inflation. With that in mind, thanks to Google handily returning some queries I found this nifty tool for figuring today's dollar against yesterday's. A brief foreword, the reason this shows 2005's figures is because we're not done with 2006 yet. With that in tow I decided to look back at 2002 just to illustrate where we've come in such a short while.

Google then lead me here (among a few other places). In April of 2002 the cost of crude oil per barrel was $21.47. Today it's hovering around $60. That's triple the price. According to this little graph we also show that unleaded gasoline was at $1.37. This is nearly triple the price. All of this is without adjusting for inflation. If we adjust for inflation we find that $21.47 is roughly $23.25 and $1.37 is around $1.55. What is today's prices against yesterday's dollar? $60 equates to around $52 or $53 and $2.75 was about $2.45 depending on the index you rate against. This is why so many people have experienced the "lowered quality of living" during 2006. It's only going to get worse too. When they say that the 80's were the worst it's ever been they are lying there as well. In some of the searching I also stumbled upon this URL, an inflation adjusted chart detailing peak prices and we're at the highest it's ever been.

What's my beef? Let's take a look at the timeline, the initial cuts were done back in 2004 when China was projected to have serious demand for fuel. The supply was already being hit hard and OPEC cut production on us. The motivation? %100 greed nothing else. They opened a freaking ski area in Dubai for crying out loud.

Now we have OPEC stating that they are concerned about prices and need to cut production. I'm afraid the only thing OPEC is concerned of is how to fatten their monetary gluttony even worse.

The oil is out there, the reserves are out there, and the energy companies continue to experience record profits. The only thing I'm surprised about is that we aren't rioting. If anything now I'm quite glad we went after Iraq and I'm that much more comfortable with the prospect of going to war over oil. Apparently that's what it's going to take. If Bush could just be honest about why we're going to war I'd have a much easier time supporting that decision. At the same time I would want every possible hindrance to getting alternative energy vehicles removed. Unfortunately we live in a corrupt country with corrupted motivations. It's up to "we the people" to understand and realize the facts.

Another popular hypothesis that's gaining ground is the actual origin of oil itself. As noted here oil reservoirs are refilling themselves. Now there's a depressing thought, that this price gouging is sustainable in the long term for many years to come...at least we probably won't run out of oil...we'll just be in a world where it's $100+ per barrel while economy inflation is far far behind...

The amphitheatre

2006-10-02T21:26:00.000-06:00

100_2026.JPG
Originally uploaded by jacobsonster.

This is a picture I took from a trail at Trapper's Lake. This formation gives a neat amphitheatre appearance.

Violent Islam, cowardly europe

2006-10-02T21:17:00.000-06:00

A cultural attack by Islam against the West is under way, to which Europe is responding with fear.

read more | digg story

DARPA Grand challenge, but this time in congested traffic.

2006-10-02T21:04:00.000-06:00

This is the grand challenge again by DARPA, but this time the vehicles have to do things such as parking, obeying traffic laws, and avoiding moving obstacles. The course is 60 miles and designed to simulate things like a city street.

read more | digg story

OSX Myths

2006-10-02T19:33:00.000-06:00

Having been on some forums and seeing people praise the decision by Apple to discontinue the "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" ads I see a lot of people baselessly denigrating Macs as a whole, specifically OSX. They say things like "the shortcuts are obscure and difficult to find" or "there isn't a wealth of software available like there is for Windows". Since these are pretty baseless assertions what else is there to do but revel in proving them wrong?

The keyboard shortcuts are limited in comparison to those Windows has, e.g. alt+F4

Not true. For one you can simply take a look at the various menu bar options that most programs have to see the keyboard shortcuts for almost every function. If you also want the window control shortcuts, a simple google search will get you very far. You will probably end up here.

Windows has far more software available than OSX.

Tell that to people who use fink or Darwinports. Not to mention the plethora of applications such as Garagesale, Ecto, Appzapper, or for example some of the file rescue tools available. For the experienced Unix/POSIX users you also have bash at your disposal. First I would like to point you to this very brief list of applications. This list barely scratches the surface as these are just some of many contemporary very well designed applications. If you have further doubts, check out this list of darwinports programs ready to install on your Mac. If you would like a different package management system there is also Fink with thousands of great applications available. Windows may technically have more applications, but I doubt you'll find a comparable ratio of useful apps as you would for the Mac.

OSX phones home just as Windows does.

Also not true. Some have contended that OSX started sending information to Apple starting with 10.4.7. The truth of the matter is that visiting Apple's homepage gives them more information than this new process does.

Apple copied Microsoft or Microsoft copied Apple in Vista/OSX/Windows in general.

The funny thing about this myth is that it's absolutely true. To throw you for a further loop, it's probably intentional. People have been quick to forget about this little announcement. The two companies basically agreed at this point to allow implementations of each others' intellectual properties. Thus you are wasting your breath or typing in arguing this point at all.

These are just some of the common myths, if you want to argue against the Mac, please make sure you're doing so without using any of these points. It's just not conducive discussion :)

Ripping and encoding your movies for iTunes

2006-10-01T16:03:00.000-06:00

One of the things I really enjoyed about iTunes 7 was the movies obviously. While many other users have covered in great detail the aspect of buying movies, it also works just as well to rip a movie that you like and encode it into an mp4 file for itunes.

The neat thing is...iTunes will take an mp4 video and automatically categorize it into its movie section. From there it's just a matter of choosing some different album artwork for it and you can even enjoy the coverflow browsing. Nothing to it.

Ripping and encoding via MactheRipper and Handbrake was easy enough, iTunes even made it simpler to import the file.

Now you'll notice that it simply grabs the first frame and makes that the artwork used by Coverflow. While in this case it works, if your dvd collection consists of Columbia-Tristar movies you'll get the exact same cover artwork. Thankfully it's easy as can be to just grab a file of your choice.
As you'll see it's just finding your cover art, saving the file, and using the "get info" menu of the movie file to add your own artwork.
Then we have the right coverflow look...
And now we have the best Batmobile yet doing its thing. This is one of my favorite movies by the way.

Peta BULL----!

2006-09-29T23:19:00.000-06:00


Penn and Tellers show BULL----! covers the two faced foundation PETA. My favorite line was well the whole thing. It turns out PETA has funded domestic terrorism and it's all in public document. PETA is a terrorist organization... I do have a favorite line actually... "You want passionate and truth, here you go, Teller and I will kill every chimp on Earth to save ONE street junkie with aids."

First look at iTunes 7

2006-09-12T18:21:00.000-06:00

Once again fine kudo's to Apple for a nice update. iTunes 7 has launched, and with it are some impressive new features. Of main concern are the new movies, but I was excited to see the nice interface and sort options. An already easy way to get around my music just got better.

As you can see the tv show sorting is improved. You can quickly get to an episode and it feels far less clumsy than it use to. Shows are organized episodically by the show itself and this makes browsing around quite a bit nicer. If you don't like this, Coverflow also supports tv shows as seen below.

New in the preferences pane aren't particularly stunning, as they just now reflect the options for the new functionality. Notably you can show "Movies" distinctly apart from "TV Shows". "Video" is no longer applicable as Apple has branched these two things apart. This is actually quite nice as you may go on to build libraries of tv shows and movies apart from one another.

The parental controls will be of particular interest as it's very intuitive. You simply select the rating you wish to restrict to and you're set. Of course the enterprising child/adolescent will no doubt challenge you, it's nice to see this initial level of protection.

Seen below is the very nice song/album browsing function of Coverflow. Unfortunately I have a lot of music on here that doesn't come from common albums, so I am left with the blank music note, but on the others it's a very nice way to present the music. I was very impressed nonetheless.

Also seen below is the refined interface. Quite frankly I prefer this as it's more refreshing to see the text against a dark background. I find as Apple goes along they seem to put less emphasis on application consistency and on just what works in certain situations. I can't knock this, it looks nice to my eye at least.

Here is the handy utility that recovered some of my album artwork. Very easy, once selected you see iTunes list the number of songs without artwork and a dialogue that it's checking for artwork.

Another nice feature to make its debut is the backup feature. If you have some dvd-r's, rw's, or DL's...whatever your fancy, Apple has put together a very simple utility to just back these up to a series of discs.

Once you select your applicable option and click "Backup" the iTunes dialogue area simply requests you insert a disc. If you use CD's and decide to backup 10-15GB worth you have my sincerest empathy.

That's just a preliminary look at the new version. I will hopefully get a chance to play more with it. I'm very happy with what I've seen so far. Apple has done quite well in progressing forward with all this, and I am one happy user for it.

Sunny day? Overcast?

2006-07-25T18:24:00.000-06:00

So here is how things are. In Craig the weather will be pretty dry and arid. You see lots of sagebrush and a lot of brown dirt. It's like a desert. However, travelling 45-ish miles east to Steamboat Springs yields you this beautiful rugged tree-filled generally-more-rainfall locale. The grass stays green, not much brown dirt. You have to look for the dirt actually the vegetation does a splendid job of consuming everything. 45 miles west is a desert, 45 miles east from the desert is forest. Right that makes a lot of sense.

So anyhow I'm up to 6584 steps today. My day went well, I got a lot accomplished. Many things did get done and I have the support of my peers. Pretty much run-of-the-mill really. Anyhow, that's enough for now. Soon as I have a net connection again I'll be sure to blog more.

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Daily blah

2006-07-24T15:43:00.000-06:00

So I'm up to 5908 steps, sitting here pondering how my day went. It was a rather good day actually. I got a lot done thanks to a very brutal sugar/caffeine high. Things are rolling along now real gooood. I thought it prudent to mention also that this is before my walk up the hill to the bus stop that I am over halfway through my steps. Not to mention that I have to walk home from the bus stop still also.

I should be quite pleased with my progress at the least. I brought my tennis-shoes with me for comfort...good afternoon to just zen out.

NEWS news. Honestly I've been getting a lot of use out of my PSP. I ran into the trouble of my UMD cases cracking and needing repairs. Fortunately I eventually located my demo disc and I also salvaged one of the cases. Oh, if you ever get krazy glue onto a UMD by accident...regular acetone based nail polish is your friend. I had noticed on my wipeout pure disc that I also had a haze, like the fume haze adhesing to the disc. The nail polish remover made this right as rain and the disc plays wonderfully again, no hitches.

That's all I feel like typing for now, catch you on the flip side.

Cool article on exploding star.

2006-07-23T14:55:00.000-06:00

I saw this on Digg, a neat article about astronomers observing an exploded star.

read more | digg story

When you make up for it...

2006-07-22T21:58:00.000-06:00

We seem to have some real bastard neighbors. I was asleep but my wife reports that they were awake partying with loud music and laughing outside enough to wake up the kids.

So, thinking I have to make up for my step count, was out at 7am with my lawnmower. I figured it was time to go ahead and mow the lawn and also mow out in the driveway and take care of a few large weeds. This had the added bonus of adding to my steps ontop of our normal weekend track workout. I took my sweet time with our loud lawnmower as well. I knew the mission was accomplished when I saw a very irritated neighbor walk out with a scowl, see me, then turn around and go back inside.

I hope that every cycle of the engine reverberated in his hangover headache too, stupid jerk.

So my steps ended up quite high, 12,689. I would have to say I'm quite satisfied. Thanks neighbor :P

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Forgetting something???

2006-07-21T23:10:00.000-06:00

Yesterday's steps ended at 7169.

Todays were 6797. Though I must admit I shorted myself quite a few steps. The bus today drove me right to the front door of the hospital. It was a very nice gesture of the driver that it would have seemed rude to turn down. Besides, on other occasions I'd have gladly welcomed the opportunity to be driven to the front.

Today was a far better day than its predecessor. Yesterday I was lethargic in the dealings of my personal issues and today I was lifted up quite a bit. It's always very nice to see those who recognize sadness and darkness respond in kindness and uplifting gestures.

In any case, the end of an interesting week. The main reason I hadn't blogged much is that I worked 4 ten hour days and had a very uncomfortable bus to ride in. Given that it doesn't react well to bumps I have had to keep my laptop safe in the backpack as opposed to just letting the hard drive crash on the 900th bump in the road. In any case, catch everyone later.

Oh and Maryland SUCKS for ever having enacted a law mandating higher employer contributions to premiums in the first place. It ruins the free market's system of balance.

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Hysterical Woman

2006-07-19T22:02:00.000-06:00

This video is simply hilarious. This girl goes completely nuts over rats...no wait...MICE. Priceless, though somewhat sad towards the end as it clearly goes from a funny scare to clear absolute phobia...but it's still a good laugh overall. Reminds me of the pickle video.

read more | digg story

Britain's Temperature to Reach 100 Degrees For the 2nd Time In History

2006-07-19T22:00:00.000-06:00

This is crazy, 2nd time ever huh? I do wonder how long we've been recording Britain's summers, and how credible this all is. It is interesting nonetheless, however.

read more | digg story

McCain to Israel: Kick Some Hezbollah Ass

2006-07-17T17:58:00.000-06:00

Senator John McCain endorsed Israel's attack on Hezbollah in strong terms. "What would we do if somebody came across our borders and killed our soldiers and captured our soldiers? Do you think we would be exercising total restraint?"

In the words of Jon Stewart to McCain "Don't MAKE me like you!!!"

read more | digg story

Frappucinos pack more fat than a Big Mac and Coke COMBINED

2006-07-17T10:52:00.000-06:00

Wake up and smell the coffee - that frappuccino you just drank contained more fat than a Big Mac and a medium Coke combined. A survey of national coffee chains Starbucks and Gloria Jean's Coffees, published in this month's Consumer magazine, reveals your coffee break could see you breaking the scales.

Yeuch, I'll pass....

read more | digg story

Accountability

2006-07-13T19:11:00.000-06:00

My steps, by the way, are at 6720 thus far and it is now again, on the bus that I am writing this. I am listening to Gunther's "Ding Dong" song.

Now, for the healthcare misc stuff update. We have 3 full time people just checking on what's going on with our claims when they go out the door. Basically they are tasked with finding out why a claim didn't get paid. One of the very common things is "Insurance says they don't have the claim". Naturally, we rebill the claim. Then it escalates from there. The breakdown of the system has happened in serious ways by now.

Colorado has laws saying the insurance companies have 30 days to pay/respond to a claim if it is billed electronically. We bill %90 of our claims electronically. Insurance companies that were supposedly billed electronically just flat out say they don't have the claim. We have a problem.

Our steps in investigating this is through our billing software vendor. I don't disclose whom they are, but I will say this...they SUCK. A few claims we are finding have indeed made it to the insurance company and that's all well and great. The problem with a few of our claims is that they are making it out of our facility to our billing software vendor and going precisely no where. Or at least, we have no proof it went anywhere. I don't know if it's just because we are a "rural" hospital or what the deal is, but if we're being hamstrung on our end that really blows. I am pushing my boss for a different system, and apparently he's more of an advocate for a different system than even I am. However, this isn't like some faulty software bug or some kind of entertainment software glitch....this is people's lives being affected by a billing system. On our end we're doing everything we can to do this correctly. That's not PR speak either, we really want this stuff to work because we want the money. It's less self pay work, it's happier patients who are prone to come back to our facility, it's our reputation on the line. No hospital wants to have a crappy reputation in the community. Our people want to go out into the town and be like "Yeah, I work at the hospital, and it's cool". Instead we are often tied to a reputation of sordid billing practices when here we are busting our asses. It's really a disappointment. Plus we want to have nice equipment and good salaries. This stupid billing system is impeding that. Our finances aren't "bad" at least, they're just not lining up with our goals. That's the dissappointment factor kicking in.

I am very pleased with how senior management is handling this. They have the attitude that we absolutely have to hold either the insurance companies or the billing software vendor accountable. They are very supportive of our ideas to do make that happen. My boss in fact has voiced his support for getting people's heads together in figuring this stuff out. I think I'm very happy where I'm at ultimately. The place is a good place to work, just not with one of the vendors we have.

In other info, I have the Sixtyforce emulator pretty well figured out. There are a few ROMS that aren't compatible. This honestly surprises me given the length of time we've had to emulate the N64. On the other hand it doesn't, because the guy is writing assembly code for PowerPC. This isn't like going in and changing a few lines of code to make a universal binary. When you code in assembly, you are coding for PowerPC all around. What he's doing in trying to make a universal version of sixtyforce is akin to taking the same newspaper and making the english version also read in arabic and having no translator software to help you out. Given that it's originally written for PPC, it makes perfect sense as to why it isn't flawless. With the current x86 emulators for Windows you could emulate N64 stuff on a P2-450 with a Voodoo2, but for OSX that kind of development just hasn't been around as long. Well, since I just..almost fell asleep...I am putting the laptop away and getting a bit more comfortable...and then falling asleep for real. I shall update the blog later with my actual step figure.

8293

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You have steps.

2006-07-12T18:14:00.000-06:00

So this is my third day, and my daily bus ride update. It seems I am up to 8017 already. I just might hit my 10,000 steps today, we'll see. It's another 1200 steps from the bus to the house, and if I decide to walk around at all this evening I'll be good to go. Actually, I was wanting to mow the lawn, that will help considerably in achieving that goal. All it will take would probably be an additional 500 steps on a short walk and I'll be there. If I can do this everyday I'll probably feel a lot better. Saturday and Sunday - gotta get my walk in.

Today was a meeting day. There are certain operational aspects of my work I am bound by confidentiality agreements and via HIPAA privacy requirements, but I will say that it was nice to be able to contribute. My boss had me sit in on meetings that involved some pretty influential and hefty decision making that needed to be done. It was a very nice gesture to include me in these meetings. I really like being able to contribute to this place.

For home, the wife and kids go to church on Wednesday evenings. I'll probably just be mowing away at the lawn so we'll see how that all goes. We'll hopefully be able to get the house a little cleaned up as well.

I have had the pleasure in my computer endeavors of trying out an N64 emulator with the laptop/gamepad combo. SixtyForce was the emulator I tried, and it is near flawless. Actually running in high res mode really improved the game, and there are only very negligible glitches in the speed emulation. The "speed limiter" function seems to do a very admirable job.

I suppose that's going to be it really for the update today. Not too much on my mind other than just wanting to kick back and listen to some music on the way home. By the way, I seem to be really into electronic stuff lately. Blue Stone has some good stuff out right now. I also have listened to a bit of Imogen Heap's stuff. Not bad, very trance-like in some of it. I've also of late been listening to Pharcyde's "Runnin". The beat intrigues me, and the lyrics aren't bad. Not my usual type of music though.

10850 is the number of the day...good night.

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Day 2

2006-07-11T19:17:00.000-06:00

Day two begins of my daily blog entries. Again, part of that whole "make sure you write in order to feel balanced". Thank god for blogging tools.

So as I sit here on the bus I'm at 6488. Lisa, my cohort at work who we seem to be in friendly competition lately, was at about 7400 steps. I still have my walk home from the stop though to gain lost ground. If we do an evening walk I'll be able to surpass her.

It's been sort of odd, my relationship to this coworker. There's a lot to like. She's older, but she's bubbly and just acts like she's about my age. At lunch we banter about work, or talk about work stuff. We bicker in a friendly manner but there's a very mutual admiration. I look up to what she's achieved and how fast she's come in the crazy world of healthcare finance. She looks up to me for my perceived "vast knowledge. She takes my advice in a very literal way. She's also a work relationship that habitually just stays at work. At work, however, she's a very direct influence on my moods and I generally expose my actual mood to her more than others. Not sure why.

Bleh, anyhow, we had a few challenges in our day. Meditech is a very complicated system. I had the realization that procedurally it was similar to learning how a natural gas plant works. For a short time I worked for a natural gas treatment plant. I was a roustabout. Work involved learning (sounds like a resume, ha) what the pipes all went to. I learned how one set of pipes influenced a part of the process, that certain pipes lead to certain tanks containing certain chemicals in either dehydrating the natural gas or removing noxious elements from it (sulfer etc). Each system influenced the other, if the pressure of one tank was off the entire supply line was affected. Changing one variable, altered the variabls of the entire treatment process. Meditech is very similar. Everything is connected in a way. Take the fact I just work in the business office and there are literally thousands, wait, tens of thousands of variables available to someone in order to meet the seperate thousands of variables in medicare compliance, and then add a module for each department of the hospital with their own thousands of variables and you start to get the idea of the ridiculous complexity you can get to in a facility like this.

Not all hospitals are this way. Some are simpler, some are more complex. It's about the variety of services a facility provides. For example, a hospital that just held people and did x-rays. You'd only be doing one type of billing. Take another hospital that does chemotherapy, short term inpatient care, short term acute inpatient care, intensive care for newborns, physical therapy, lab, and outpatient surgeries like gall bladder removal. Each of those categories falls into its own unique set of regulatory requirements set forth by "Medicare"..."Medicare" even structurally is complex. First you have the politicians, then you have the money people setting the budget after the politicians decide on things. Then you have the people that end up in "reality" who re-do the budget to make it reflect reality. Then it passes onto the federal department of human services who gets the budget and then they make policy decisions. They say we will cover things that are medically necessary. They help figure out what's medically necessary and how it's all going to be regulated. This then gets described in the Federal Register, which is sort of the all-encompassing document for recording what the government thinks it's suppose to do. From this, it then passes onto a division of the department of human services called "CMS". "CMS" is actually an acronym for "Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services". CMS actually decides in great detail how it's all going to work logistically. They figure out what forms are going to be used, how the facilities/doctors identify themselves, classifies said "providers" as in providers of service, lays out the requirements for some of the coding, prices the coding, then coordinates with the fiscal intermediary how the pricing works with individual providers, gets the doctors together to see if what was previously defined as "medically necessary" actually is medically necessary and uses this medical review to help define how a service is appropriately performed. Cripes...I could just go on and on and on....logistics....that's what they do. The buck then passes onto what's called "Fiscal Intermediaries". These are the guys who get a check cut by CMS, and then they doll out the funds to the "providers" that bill them. It's all fee-for-service, so it's not like they (at this present time) "run out of money" and stop paying...but that could change. Think of fiscal intermediaries exactly like it sounds, they are intermediaries or rather middle people for the money. They take what CMS instructs them on as far as logistics and then implements it. They of course adhere to protocol for implementation, but each "FI" as they are called has their own quirks.

I haven't even touched on the OIG yet. The OIG is the Office of Inspector General. Some people confuse where this agency fits into the federal government. The OIG is actually a branch of the federal department of human services, not a general agency responsible for "inspecting". These guys stick to healthcare. In the branch of things, they are on the same limb as CMS, but under DHS. These are basically the guys you hope you never hear from. They bust your ass. I'm not saying they only bust your ass if there's a problem, they bust your ass period. Not to say that they are "bad people" or a "mean agency". The system is just inherently so complex that it cannot be adhered to completely, and thus whoever gets audited has problems. Yes, by the way, the system is inherently too complex to be expected of a facility to be %100 compliant. It's like looking for a review of something and finding the truly perfect "10 out of 10". Whenever the 10 was given, something's shady going on or the person giving the 10 isn't legit. 10's in healthcare do not truly exist.

Let's see, what else can I ramble on about....ahh yes something I am passionate about...video games. Yesterday I acquired something that would help me out in my portable laptop gaming, a USB controller. I got the "Game Elements: Recoil". They prominently refer to it as its model number, GEG909. It was cheap, walmart deal, about 15-16 bucks. I mainly wanted it for playing Freespacec2 in OSX. To my delight this cheap controller is just about perfect. It's a dual shock controller with note-worthy features. It has keyboard/mouse emulation and vibration in addition to your standard-fare dual shock controller. However, both of those features don't work in OSX. Given that I want to play a space sim and maybe some SNES emulation, vibration and kb/mouse is completely an afterthought. I was pleasantly surprised with another feature of this controller, the recoiling cord. When you're done, unplug and push on the "recoil" switch at the top of the controller and the USB cord recoils perfectly out of the way, perfect for storing on the go. It can get in the way by trying to curl up as you play, but once you manage to get a feel for handling the cord it does not get in the way. It's a matter of only giving it so much slack, leaving just enough for moving around, and it stays out of the way nicely. Its accuracy is wonderful, and the tactile feel is really well done. It was very easy to assign the pitch, bank, and turning axis between the two sticks and then just customizing the "joystick" buttons as I pleased. Freespace2 SCP by the way is well suited for this type of customization even in OSX. The coders did superb in this port, even if rough around the edges. I still challenge you to find something as cool as the Psamtik's new look in another game.

Which is another thing worth mentioning...HOW COULD THIS WORK BE GOING UN-NOTICED??!?!? The new artwork looks incredible. They've really updated the look of this game into something very splendid. There are a lot of gameplay scenes I've had in the game so far that actually look BETTER than the cinematic ship flights. It looks very reminiscient of the intro to the original Freespace. The new subspace effects with new 3d effects are also awesome. The way the inside of the subspace collapse begins and ends branching out with a very eye-catching blue flare as jumps open and close. When I first saw the carthage and dashor show up, those two brilliant subspace flares were enough for me to have lost my shield strength dramatically to just about zilch. During gameplay I saw the two jumps happening and I just stopped. The Shivan fighter left my target reticle, went completely off screen as I just stopped, staring at how cool the new effect was. All I can describe it as is cinematic, but better than the subspace effects in the cut-scenes. These modders really went above and beyond and did something very cool in it. Also, the following treat was just in watching the two ships get into a knock-down fight against the Rakshasa. The Shivan beam effects are equally as cool. This isn't just Freespace 2, this is Freespace 2 practically re-made. The gameplay experience as it was, was already good...but pile on these insanely cool graphics and effects...and you have a new game. Bravo, hats off, I am addicted to a new game for the time being. Don't look at this as just an open-source project. Look at this and compare it to full-scale commercial production, these guys are pulling off something truly awesome. You have just got to see it, and if you're already a Freespace 2 fan, prepare for a lot of jaw dropping. It's that cool.

Another thing worth noting is this whole Japan and North Korea thing. I love the Japanese, I love their courage and honor. They really have a lot of guts to stand up and say what they are saying. If I can speak on behalf of the US, I'd say to them that we're right behind them %100 in what they are doing. If it came to war, being patriotic about that country would come just as easy as it does for the US. However, I do have to wonder what they are leading into. Not that I oppose striking North Korea, but I wonder what it would galvanize against our interests if the world were to see Japan militarizing. The Chinese seem to remember very well the Nanjing March, and they probably want nothing of that even being possible again. If I were China, I'd have some fearful twitches whenever Japan talks about things like "preemptive strike" against anybody. The Japanese have proven throughout history that they are a people about possibility in anything. I admire them, and support them...but I have trepidation about them deploying their military anywhere outside of their own soil. Not that I don't think a preemptive strike should happen. What I really wish for is that Japan felt comfortable enough with the US as an ally that they could negotiate us striking North Korea in their protection. The US has a lot in Japan, we need them very badly, and it's completely in our interests in this case to wipe out NK's military capability. We absolutely should, in fact, be taking care of the "North Korea problem" instead of the Iraq problem. North Korea and their intents and ability to cause problems were vastly greater than Hussein's Iraq was. Alas, I don't have the intel Bush had, so who knows. *shrugs*

Look for an update on the final steps walked...I'm just wanting to listen to music now.

7890 seems to be the final number for today. Would have walked more, but mosquitoes are out pretty bad. We'll see tomorrow.

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OS X Dashboard Doesn't "Phone Home"

2006-07-10T18:13:00.000-06:00

Exactly how 10.4.7's widget authenticity feature works. "You've actually given away less information to Apple than you would when directly visiting the Apple webpage."--Excerpt from Digg story.

This is actually really nice to read about. Back when the brouhaha came up about Apple's software "phoning home" made news it was just a blackmark for the Mac users to deal with. It seems that based on this we're a bit more "big brother" safe than Windows users are still.

read more | digg story

$200,000,000,000 isn't enough. We need more money. Let's tax the Internet

2006-07-10T18:10:00.000-06:00

This is a very interesting Digg Link. A story about the telco's screwing us in the rear, or rather business as usual.

The US government has paid the Telcos $200 billion dollars to build up the Internet's infrastructure to support 45mbps internet access due by 2006. We
are still waiting. Now, they want websites to pay as well. US residents tell your congress person to save the Internet from the greed of the Telcos. http://www.savetheinternet.com/

read more | digg story

Thus begins my journey.

2006-07-10T18:09:00.000-06:00

I have acquired a pedometer today and will be documenting in a diary as part of the wellness program. Not bad, it's a rather nice one to be had for $10 amongst other goodies that the facility kindly provides as part of the wellness program. Since I feel guilty for neglecting my blog, and part of the goal is to document a log of your steps taken every day....why not blog it.

It's really simply, you get a pedometer and the program is called "10k a day". Cheesiness aside, you shoot for 10,000 steps taken, or rather 5 miles. To achieve "balance" and "wellness" they also encourage that you log it every day and just write like a journal about the day. This makes some sense given that at my prior job with Colorado West Mental Health, it was said that "writing about your life events is cathartic" and thus encouraged especially when challenged or stressed out.

So, here goes....

Right this particular moment I do not have wifi access as I am on the bus. My pedometer is not registering bumps as steps, and as of this moment I am on step number 3623. I didn't get the pedometer until around 10 today, so I missed my steps from the house to the bus stop, and then from the bus stop in town to the hospital. We'll see this evening about how many steps I may have missed. Also we'll see how many more there are in the morning vs evening.

The obligatory "this is what work was like" section. Blah. It wasn't a bad day by any means it was just an odd one. We had several goals to which we are to meet. One of which is delegating a task list of the billers. It was more of a "who's opening the jar, whom is holding the butter knife, who is performing what" type of analogy with billing to making a sandwhich. We accomplished getting that done. Pretty uneventful day, no new weird healthcare regulations....etc

As far as personal stuff, that's yet to happen. When I get home I imagine I'll check digg for interesting stories, perhaps CNN perhaps a few other sites. I've actually been getting into Descent:Freespace's OSX port or rather the SCP project's port of the Freespace 2 engine. It's actually very impressive what they have done. They've taken an old game, added some glowmaps, some shine maps, and are delivering a very compelling visual experience to the old FS games. What's most striking is that as playing a very souped up version, it looked just as good if not better than the pre-renders for the intro to Freespace: 2. At some point I'll throw out some screenshots once I've tweaked my settings appropriately and are comfortably playing through the game. Again, most impressive is how they've updated the visuals. They really are different games now, and worth taking a look.

The other perk is that it's completely free and legal to download the actual game content, not just the source. While it's not a GPL license, it still reaks of "cool". Cool, as in, Bungie releasing the sourcecode for Marathon and then going the extra mile and just making the content freely available type of cool. Truly a liberated game, that is now able to transcend it's original time and conception and become something beyond what it originally was thanks to the efforts of the gaming community. It's really nice to see. If you look at the comparison of Aleph One versus the original Marathon, not just in visual but also control and the multiplatform aspect of it - Marathon is probably ten times the game now then what it was originally.

This is what all developers should aspire towards. You can't really fault id over Doom either, because the shareware version is practically its own entire game. Quake and following, however, are different stories. The point that id simply just releases freely for all the original content to Doom and Doom2, they will have reached the aforementioned "coolness". Kudos to them for at least releasing the sources though. I'd like to see EA do one altruistic and genuinely good thing for gamers along those lines. Wing Commander anyone? I forgot though, EA is run by the same guy who previously ran Clorox. All we are to expect from EA by that logic is a stinking caustic substance by a corpulent corporate body that takes the color and brightness of things, like employees for example.

Anyhow, enough rambling. This post is getting a bit long in the tooth. I'll update with my final figure on steps later tonight when I goto bed.

[Update]
Looks like I topped out at 5484.

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Senate deals blow to Net neutrality

2006-06-28T22:01:00.000-06:00

Yes this is the big story going about the internet.

I'm afraid that I cannot any longer support the conservative stances anymore. I support the effort in Iraq, healthcare, and some of the energy policies of conservatives.

There is the matter that came about when 9/11 happened. Before 9/11 we were transitioning funding from social services and unneeded government programs in an effort spearheaded by conservatives to reduce the size of government. After 9/11 the conservative mouthpieces such as Rush, Reagan, etc championed that we must affirm and assert our liberties rather than give them up. Rather than wait for the democrats to increase the size of government, the conservatives took away from the social service programs in order to fund their new bloatastic homeland security department. The net increase in the size of government was larger than any prior efforts of democrats and the result was a loss of liberties.

Now they attack our liberties on the internet. The problem with shooting down net neutrality is that it allows the purchasing power of the consumer to exit the equation of internet policy dictated by telecoms. This is business to business, not business to consumer. What ends up happening is that there is no way for a consumer to "pick telco's" that don't tier their services with content providers or rather, websites in general. With the purchasing power of the consumer removed from the equation this allows very unfair and destructive business practices.

Indeed, much like the FCC's decision to allow consolidation in the radio broadcasting business this locks out smaller content providers from being able to gain traction by design of the system. This means original and new ideas from smaller business on the internet are automatically locked out by their small capital and inability to compete with the larger content providers. This also will mean more pay sites for general content and the restriction of ideas and free speech.

This horrible loss infringes on the very thing that caused the internet to be the forefront of human accomplishment and knowledge sharing and the improvement of our species as a whole.

With the recent moves by republicans I only have one thought. If they need to lose to get the message, then lose they must! This coming from the staunchest republican supporter during the various campaigns...me.

read more | digg story

Energy, it's all going to be ok....

2006-06-02T19:19:00.000-06:00

It's quite alarming to read some of the stuff out there about oil and what it's going to do to our economy when it continually gets more and more scarce. One of the more alarming sites you can visit is Peak Oil: Life After the Oil Crash.

"Because petrochemicals are key components to much more than just the gas in your car. As geologist Dale Allen Pfeiffer points out in his article entitled, "Eating Fossil Fuels," approximately 10 calories of fossil fuels are required to produce every 1 calorie of food eaten in the US."

The implications of such things are that not only is the gas going to be expensive, but everything that it's tied to. Hauling, extracting, digging, power generation, etc etc.

This is very valid cause for concern, as what will we do? The article attempts to refute biodiesel as an alternative given that it requires the use of oil powered machinery.

This is a valid arguement, with the exception of some recent developments in the methodology in producing biodiesel. Most notably the discovery of biodiesel extraction using a species of algae.

"NREL's research showed that one quad (7.5 billion gallons) of biodiesel could be produced from 200,000 hectares of desert land (200,000 hectares is equivalent to 780 square miles, roughly 500,000 acres), if the remaining challenges are solved (as they will be, with several research groups and companies working towards it, including ours at UNH). In the previous section, we found that to replace all transportation fuels in the US, we would need 140.8 billion gallons of biodiesel, or roughly 19 quads (one quad is roughly 7.5 billion gallons of biodiesel). To produce that amount would require a land mass of almost 15,000 square miles. To put that in perspective, consider that the Sonora desert in the southwestern US comprises 120,000 square miles. Enough biodiesel to replace all petroleum transportation fuels could be grown in 15,000 square miles, or roughly 12.5 percent of the area of the Sonora desert (note for clarification - I am not advocating putting 15,000 square miles of algae ponds in the Sonora desert. This hypothetical example is used strictly for the purpose of showing the scale of land required). That 15,000 square miles works out to roughly 9.5 million acres - far less than the 450 million acres currently used for crop farming in the US, and the over 500 million acres used as grazing land for farm animals."

When you look at the fact that most extraction and heavy equipment runs on diesel engines that biodiesel can readily power with little to no modification...suddenly the future is quite a bit brighter. The venture capital in a post-oil-crash market to develop infrastructure for such mass scale production leads to a new trend.

For starters, economies of scale comes into play in the production of biodiesel. If people are buying biodiesel as oil runs out, there will be billions upon billions to setup these ponds. There will also be an opportunity for more producers to come into play domestically. Energy buyers could turn to almost any individual wishing to produce biodiesel, from farmers to dedicated companies with these algae ponds.

This also brings me to a question, will the oil crash create more jobs and domestic economic revival for the US with such a new industry coming online? Could the oil crash be the best thing for the US in a long time?

Just some thoughts, if I'm off-base, please let me know.

Interesting picture.

2006-05-27T12:48:00.000-06:00

Outside of the video store, my wife snapped this picture.

Soda, Killing You

2006-05-24T19:12:00.000-06:00

When is the last time you questioned the carbonation process and why it exists? Could something you least expect be harming you and your children?

This article covers a very truthful and direct process in which merely drinking soda invokes the stomach to start drawing calcium from the blood. In turn, blood takes calcium from bone deposits to prevent other damages from occuring. This also covers the rest of the chemical processes that harms the body as you consume soda, and why it's devastating to give to children and adolescents on a regular basis.

read more | digg story

Health insurance...a crock.

2006-05-22T21:13:00.000-06:00

Now before you try to skewer me for saying that, let me outline why.

Let's take a hypothetical scenario of a young couple about to have a baby. Let's say that the husband gets insurance through work. Let's also say that he has a small contribution for himself like say around $50 per month but to add his wife to the plan he has to pay something like $400 per month for the premium. This is not an abnormal situation.

The average deductible for such a plan is around $1,500 to $2,500. Let's compromise and go with $2,000. Let's also factor in a co-insurance of %20. Let's also not forget the out of pocket max, which is on average of about $6,000 now. So let's do some really simple figures..

Average uncomplicated delivery of a healthy baby with healthy mother will run a hospital bill of about $12,000. First you meet the deductible, so you are paying up front about $2,000 at least. Then your co-insurance kicks in and you "only" have to pay the co-insurance until your out of pocket max is reached. That's going to be another $2,000 that you'll have to pay before full coverage. Now, let's factor in the $400 per month premium over a year. You are now up to $8,800 you'd have to pay. The out of pocket max, mind you, doesn't apply to your premium. What's this? A family premium? Those run for around $600 per month, suddenly you've accrued $11,200 over the year... This means that out of $12,000 in medical expenses, it's quite possible that having insurance that you pay out the nose for will have only saved you around $800. Fine deal indeed.... *rolls eyes*

Apparently Dell thinks of customers as "dipshits" or "morons".

2006-05-19T18:26:00.000-06:00

Dell employees respond to the recent article found through Digg claiming that they are charging $49 to remove their own spyware. Although some of the responses are well written, one attacks the writer and calls him a "dipshit".

read more | digg story

Kissing is Healthy

2006-05-15T18:45:00.000-06:00

This is a very neat article. They cite research indicating that kissing reduces antihistamines, thus helping with allergies. In addition to other benefits such as improved blood circulation. Very good read.

read more | digg story

Gasoline, do your part.

2006-05-05T06:27:00.000-06:00

I saw this video on CNN with the Exxon CEO where he made a simple statement, "want cheaper gas? Use less gas". I'm sure he was branded a spiteful pigopolist, but he's also right.

It sickens me how much we waste. Back when I was working in Glenwood Springs, you know, the good ol $1.67 days I would look from the on-ramp of I-70 in Rifle at the other cars about me. One car, or in some cases one truck/SUV and one driver. No other passengers were present in the vehicles. Now I can understand you just need to make a trip here and there. After all, why should I be expected to be a carpool everywhere I go lugging the masses with me maintaining a full vehicle? No, these weren't just people making a trip between towns. I began to notice that I saw the same vehicles, the same drivers, every day doing the same routine going to work. Yep, one person per car, 30 mile trips. Often times in big trucks and SUV's wasting gas away.

Now don't mistake this for an anti-SUV article, I have no aversion to the availabilities and prevalence of SUV's on the market. I think if someone wants to buy an SUV, great. However, the complaints about high gasoline prices should be silenced. We have done this to ourselves, and it's just catching up to us. Ford isn't the problem, shortsighted and foolish citizens are the problem. I was part of the problem for the longest time because I wasted more gas than most. My commute use to be around 140 miles per day, often times with only myself in the vehicle. To my defense at the time, I did start carpooling wherever I could. I also ran classified ads trying to get people to participate or start up a carpool.

Time moved me to a different job, and I noticed the same thing between even two smaller communities. Craig and Steamboat Springs have the same problem. When I began the 45 mile commute to Steamboat, I saw the same thing. I saw cars, with one head in the vehicle doing a daily commute. Soliciting wherever possible "Hey, let's do a carpool" garnered absolutely no results. This was even in the $2.30 a gallon days too! Back then the rhetoric about how "enough was enough!" started, yet no one wanted to carpool. Simply wonderful.

Yet, there is some redemption here. Between the two communities, there is a bus system supported. Yes, the Steamboat Springs Transit, known in the area as the SST for short. Designed primarily as a commuter tool for the people who reside in more affordable Craig to work in Steamboat where the jobs are. After doing some math I have found that this system is about half the cost of commuting and would be similar to the cost of carpooling, and with far more effective energy usage.

In my vehicle, commuting on my own cost on average of $13 per day in gas when it was cheaper. Factor in today's prices and that costs around $14.25. By taking the intervals of oil changes, tire changes, and windshield repair and dividing that by the number of commuting days I have brought the overall cost of the commute per day to around $16.80. This was in a sedan that got around 34 miles per gallon. Now you also can't argue in favor of the vehicle's fuel efficiency either.

I found that with even 3 passengers, the best usage of "gallons of gas per person" was around .8 gallons per person with my car full in such a commute. In a bus with a capacity of 60 but only loaded to about 40, the usage per gallon of diesel splits down to about .65 per person based on the usages I have acquired from the bus drivers. "Hey how much gas do these things use, and how often do ya fill up?". If you load these to capacity, then you're getting .48 gallons per person.

This is the part that saddens me. The people that often use this service are those who have had DUI's and have no license, or people that are part of a criminal work/rehab program, and people who can't afford a vehicle. Granted, there are more like me, and especially with gas prices now above the $3/gal marker.

If this kind of utility had been used when possible, however, we may not have reached such a marker.

On a sidenote, the main reason that I use the bus is that my car was struck by a pretty good sized rock destroying my rear window and costing me extra money ontop of my commuting cost. Was that George Bush's fault? Or the greedy republicans? The terrorist oil producing nations? No, it was nobody's bad luck but my own. The high prices are also nobody's fault but our own. So I have to respect the message from Exxon. It's straightforward, and the best solution to our problem. Want cheaper gas? Use less of it. It can't be expected to have infinite supply with no end, and certainly complaining will do you no good. Plus you may get some of your health back. I have been using the bike rack provided on the bus, and I now get a pretty nice "built in" workout routine every day that has helped me to feel better. Not about the fact I only spend $140 a month on commuting, but overall. My commuting cost without the bus service would have ended up being $350 a month, so save your health, your conscience, and also your wallet. Do your part, I'm doing mine.

Network Neutrality Act of 2006

2006-05-03T07:06:00.000-06:00

"Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) threw down the gauntlet just moments ago, introducing the Network Neutrality Act of 2006".."This legislation is designed to save the Internet and thwart those who seek to fundamentally and detrimentally alter the Internet as we know it."

Alright, finally, politicians that are coming in useful.

read more | digg story

The art of wardriving.

2006-05-02T16:56:00.000-06:00

One of the perks I've come across in my routine is that you can wardrive exceptionally well on the bus. But first, here's a tip. Make sure if you do wardrive on the bus, that you sit in the center seats. It was made apparent to me, that the electrical systems on the bus generate proximity based interference. This due to EMI, but apparently the radio signals pass through just fine.

Yes indeed, I am a wardriving fool now....

No immigrants day - great, less economic drag to deal with.

2006-05-01T16:49:00.000-06:00

First of all, if you are of hispanic, or otherwise descendant of a particular nationality that is known to take offense to unpleasant critique, move on. This is a largely logical, but irritated post that is not directed at other nationalities but rather illegal immigrants. I am NOT racist or prejudice against ANY nationality/race. What I AM biased and prejudice against is people that illegally work and VIOLATE the laws. If you are offended by such logic, too freakin bad, I don't care. I hope that illegal immigrants find this post inflammatory, because you need to understand just one thing - you are all criminals.

Do we perhaps need reform? Do we perhaps need to change our immigration policy and make it easier for people to legally work here? Those questions need to be answered, but alcohol and controlled substance laws need to be observed before they can be changed.

Let me illustrate a major drawback to illegal immigrants.

Bypassing minimum wage affects national GDP and it also affects taxes. You are for one short changing yourself because you could potentially be making more money. If you are making a decent wage, you are dragging the rest of us down in your utilization of public services. If you use any federal service, or any public assistance you are STEALING from us tax-paying citizens in this country. You are also shafting other hispanics/oriental/african americans who got their work cards that pay their taxes. A nation and state does not function without collecting revenue, and we have laws about immigration for that very reason. If you work in this country you also need to pull your weight. I see no responsibility to people that violate law and steal resources.

So, you're going to go a day without working? Fine by me, stay at home too and don't partake in any government funded resources except the INS and then the job center. I am fine with you people coming here to work, but work at our playing level. It's not your country and these are not your rights until you follow the law.

Oh, and on another note to the hispanics that want the national anthem in spanish whom are also illegal immigrants. Learn english, it's the official language and the majority of us like it that way. Secondly, start flying American flags instead of Mexican flags. It's insulting to the rest of the people that provide you with money.
If it weren't a few agreements I signed in order to blog, I'd be displaying a picture of the Mexican flag with a big middle finger. The audacity that you people display is in-line with the stereotypes that already exist. Don't like these rules? Kindly stay out then. I make no bones in branding you as criminals otherwise, and will back this reform with my vote - which counts. Yours does not.

Amazing protest against ATI almost leads to arrest.

2006-04-30T13:52:00.000-06:00

Richard Stallman gets wind of a compiler architect from ATI speaking at MIT, so he decides to protest against ATI. Of course a police officer ends up on the scene with Stallman questioning whether he is under arrest.

read more | digg story

Child arrested for having porn on PSP

2006-04-26T20:30:00.000-06:00

Alright now this is just a little crazy. This 14 year old kid gets in a tussle with another kid. He scratches the other kid with his keys. Other kid runs to a teacher, and says that the 14 year old has porn on his PSP at school. 14 year old kid slapped with FELONY and arrested.

That's just totally overblown and absurd. Bismarck, North Dakota, YOU SUCK. Kids shouldn't be jailed for that, they should be parented. Note to self, the populace is apparently moronic over there.

read more | digg story

$16/gallon fuel launched in Europe

2006-04-26T15:42:00.000-06:00

Imagine paying $16/gallon for gas. BP launched a new high octane fuel in the U.K. that costs nearly 20 pounds in Britain. Being a high performance fuel it's meant for sports car that will likely swill it like a drunken sailor.

read more | digg story

Democrats pledge fight over Net neutrality

2006-04-26T15:40:00.000-06:00

A committee vote is expected Wednesday on a Republican-backed proposal called the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act, or COPE Act. Democrats say the bill's portions dealing with Net neutrality don't go far enough to restrict telecommunications companies for levying fees for faster access.

Now, we know the Dems can be a bit two faced, but when election time comes around this is going to hold VAST amounts of weight in the direction I vote on. If the Republicans back the telecoms on this issue, conservatism will have been destroyed in my mind. Granted I know it's grandstanding in most cases, but I will use whatever political force represents my interests in this particular situation, and then re-evaluate my stance later. Let's see what happens.

read more | digg story

The internet depends on us.

2006-04-23T12:00:00.000-06:00

I have voiced my opinion (not that mine will make a difference, it needs to be a lot of us) to my senator. I EMPLORE everyone that sees this, if there is no more important subject than this, to notify your elected officials. The internet MUST remain neutral, the industries and possibilities that have opened up due to a global freely accessible network cannot be ignored. We must fight profiteering gluttons at all costs and not allow this to be ruined.

We do face, the utter ruination of the internet.

read more | digg story

Ferrari 275 GTB driven by Formula 1 driver through Paris at 140MPH (video)

2006-04-23T11:57:00.000-06:00

On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris.

This has to be one of the coolest video's I've seen, that took some balls.

read more | digg story

Here is why boot camp doesn't help Apple's marketshare.

2006-04-23T09:49:00.000-06:00

One area I've read many an article on why Apple can't crack drastic captures in marketshare is because of the corporate environment. This is very true, and boot camp does nothing for this, if not complicating it. Granted I'm sure there are corporate environments out there that are predominantly Macintosh. I'm also sure that all 5 of them are very happy with them. The problem that you face when you are in a corporate environment is "Who's going to support this?". There are probably tens of thousands of people you can hire to administrate a microsoft lan and support windows desktops. Be they from Dell, Gateway, or any generic OEM. This is where Apple falls down, hard. There aren't going to be as many people on hand to support OSX, let alone dual booting.

Apple parades OSX around as a great Unix system, yet Apple's certifications aren't as applicable as say an RHCE or MCSE. It all falls back to OSX being an eccentric server by market standards, and by the Mach kernel's performance in database/high traffic environments stinking with multiple concurrent users. In the previous link to Anandtech, they found that OSX manages load extremely well, but pile on the threads and it just collapses. Thus this begins a vicious cycle. Other companies have undoubtedly found OSX to be an inadequate server, hence no one wants to get OSX server certification because there aren't any jobs for it further compounding the problem Apple has in getting people in the workforce with Apple certifications. The current reality is that most people getting a certification to assist them in their careers will go for an RHCE or MCSE long before getting ACTC or an ACSA. There is currently a much more friendly environment for Linux on the desktop for corporate than for Apple for this very reason. There are a lot of RHCE's out there that could most definitely support an Apple system, but they have linux training specifically and that's what corporate looks at.

What's this you say? Apple allows Windows on the machine so you can dual boot! In a corporate environment having OSX as an alternative OS to dual boot to is actually horribly detrimental. If you look at Linux corporate desktops, they are very seldom dual booting into Windows. The two reasons I can primarily think of are the productivity loss and the fact that you haven't saved an OS license this way. A person having to dual boot into another OS loses productivy (granted that virtualization helps with this, it's still a waste of system resources) and they haven't saved the company any money. If you get a Mac for a desktop user that needs Windows stuff now and then, you've for one purchased a more expensive machine than you could have purchased from Dell that would allow the same amount of work to get done, but you've also created a hassle for that user. If you run Windows in a virtualized environment, you're still wasting that user's time and potentially creating support problems. A virtualized environment is not perfect, and things can go wrong, when they do who's going to support this?

Now I am not a big fan of speculation, and there are COUNTLESS articles on what Apple "should" do. If you follow the logic it does become simple. Apple needs to have some success in getting OSX Server out there and performing really great. One avenue is to ditch the Mach kernel and go to another one. LowEndMac has a great article making the case to go to the Linux kernel. In that article Dan goes into a lot of semantics as to why Apple isn't already on Linux, that go way back to the NeXT days when they decided to go with the Mach kernel in the first place. He even makes mention of a Wikipedia entry detailing why Microkernels generally underperform by comparison. He's absolutely right on technical merit, but we run into a brick wall there. The GPL, Apple is very unlikely to use GPL kernels because then they have to document it's integration with the above functioning software layers much akin to how Darwin functions with the Mach kernel. If Apple pitched a fit about Asteroid going public, cows are quite a bit more likely to fly before that would open up. However there is the full BSD kernel, and it is no dog. In fact BSD holds its own quite well as you can see. It appears to perform great in scaling as well, which was a downfall for the Mach kernel.

Apple may already be going in this direction too, with the departure of Avie, who else will be making the pitch to Jobs to keep the Mach? One thing is sure though, performance has to increase.

Boot camp is something that can be done, so it is being done. People that will make the most use out of boot camp are very similar to the users that dual boot linux and windows. Let me just pose a question. If dual booting didn't send a visually superior, faster, leaner, more functional Linux into vast marketshare growth why is it expected to do the same for Apple?

Back in 2003 there were many pushes from Linux vendors, primarily Suse, that dual booting made the ideal workstation. Dual booting may have made more Windows users try Linux out, but they didn't have to buy a whole new machine for it. My notion is that boot camp is just going to make more Windows users out of Mac users, but at least they are doing it on a Mac, so good for Apple. The reason that it won't crack open desktop corporate environments is the support nightmare and lack of people in the workforce to support those systems. Expect it to be this way until we see real technical merit for running an OSX web/sql server.

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Is The Core Duo Intel's Best CPU?

2006-04-19T22:09:00.000-06:00

I'm afraid that I have to agree with the tech report. The Core Duo is the best engineering I have ever seen come from Intel. Apparently Apple was spot on, and Intel really did have a gem that we couldn't have anticipated based on what they were doing at the time.

This is a TRUE statement:
The Intel Core Duo is very close to being, and in some cases is, the fastest known x86 CPU you can buy.

Given that these are out for notebooks, you buy a notebook with one of these..and you are running a computer that only the fastest desktop Athlons can beat. I truly never thought that this could be attained, as AMD's engineering is legendary. Intel really pulled out all the stops, and for their technical marvel that is the Core Duo, I readily applaud them.

read more | digg story

Inane Dvorak quotes.

2006-04-18T21:24:00.000-06:00

Proof that Dvorak just says crap and that his insights really are no better than the couple of 4th graders speculating about what kind of PS3 games they'll see on the Wal-Mart shelf in the next year.

Just take a trip down memory lane, then recall what really ended up happening...then enter into a state of confusion as to why people still listen to this guy.

While a Mac OS running on AMD chips could be made proprietary to Apple hardware, it wouldn't take much more than a fix to go after the entire spectrum of Windows users.
I can't say that Apple has the gumption to pull off such a coup. We'll see. But the fact that Jobs called the Mac a PC may be a clue.--John Dvorak 3-6-2001, back when Jobs called the Mac a PC for no other reason than that Mac's ARE personal computers..

Source article.

Next one is good.

More important for Apple, the OS could check to make sure it was running on trusted hardware that was specific for it. The OS could see that it was running on, say, a Dell, then report the violation to the Apple police or, more likely, simply not work.

There is no question that this would be a boneheaded move, and as I see more and more chitchat about the possibilities, I'm now convinced that this is all a publicity stunt and the Apple community is being used—once again—by the company's marketing department.--John Dvorak 8-8-05

He must have had a memory lapse on the article above or he's just writing to that flavor of the week demographic hitting his columns. Either way, the article was interesting...for pure baseless speculation.

This one is really good.

The Taligent fiasco was unraveling amidst a series of inconsequential Apple CEOs who ran Apple like a tire company. After they nearly tanked the operation, Steve Jobs was brought back to add some flair, but underneath the glitz the new Mac was still the old Mac. OS X, with its underlying Unix kernel, an update. The new kernel was necessary to better manage today's networked multimedia.--John Dvorak 6-17-02

Ok seriously, how does anyone take this guy seriously? OSX, just an update. Wow, only in name. But then, expecting abstracting from a guy who doesn't seem to have long term memory is a but much. Here's that article.

He also goes on to say that we're in a "one chip conundrum". This is pretty out there.

The desktop scene had entered stasis with two platforms and two processor camps. But Apple has changed stasis. We still have two platforms, but we have only one processor camp, which means that eventually there should be only one platform, since all the software for both platforms will be usable on both platforms. However that turns out, it will ruin innovation.--John Dvorak 2-13-06

Whoa hey there, one platform? Funny it seems that Linux has been gaining traction. Maybe you mean hardware platform, but he does specifically mention the software being usable on "both" platforms so really it's just one...yeah that makes sense...whatever. SCORE another inane article for Dvorak!

What makes it really inane? Because in this article, which was done back in '04 he says Linux is more significant than the Mac.

The Mac platform is essentially stagnant. That becomes obvious when you look at the declining market share numbers—not from research firms, but from the W3C, which monitors online activity. As of December 2004, the Mac share as measured by online activity is 2.7 percent (Linux is 3.1), with all the rest going to various flavors of Windows. I'm now convinced that this stems mostly from Apple's inability to make the Mac a commodity computer by pricing it to compete with PCs made inexpensively in China and selling with razor-thin margins. Here are the reasons Apple can't sustain its position.

Also he remarks

You see the results. Market share for the Mac is crap.

Last two quotes, John Dvorak, 12-28-04. If what he said is true there, then the Sun Sparc market was more significant than the Mac, which means there was really THREE hardware players. Read this article here.

So fellow readers, how have we stomached this guy? I think he just tries to "say cool stuff". As one Digg user "atdigg" put it, "Dvorak style: let's fling sh** to the wall to see if it sticks."

Apple Needs to Make OS X Open Source...

2006-04-18T21:13:00.000-06:00

Dvorak is at it again...."A cloud is rising over Mac OS X and its future unless Apple makes its boldest move ever: turning OS X into an open-source project."

He makes a few very good points, but Dvorak ignores one major one....

If Apple drops the Mach kernel then the situation changes drastically...and eventually moves back into a philosophical discussion anyway.

read more | digg story

Little politics now and then?

2006-04-18T19:58:00.000-06:00

Alright, time to play my cards on this. Some of you may rejoice, some of you may cringe...

But what am I against? I am against liberalism, I'm against most public healthcare initiatives (despite working for a hospital), I'm against the vast majority of welfare and social security programs, and I am unequivocally against unlevelled open markets.

Let me elaborate on that...I'm against un-level playing fields...meaning if we are required to follow a certain regulatory standard that other players be governed by the same rules. In essence, if you outsource, the same labor standards are enforceable overseas as they are in the US even if the foreign sovereignty does not require it where you do business. In the end, if you do business overseas to make goods that sell in the US, you conduct your business as if the manufacturing occured in the US. This should be applicable to indirect outsourcing too.

ANYWAYS, the point of my political rant was actually a political post at Washington Times.

The quote reads

The terrorists "play our own media with a shrewdness that would be the envy of many a political party," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said recently. "Every act [of] carnage adds to the death toll. But somehow it serves to indicate our responsibility for disorder, rather than the act of wickedness that causes it."

Quite frankly, I don't care for national news. CNN and FoxNews are very biased sources that seem more part of a political engine than anything else. Unfortunately, when that political engine turns against a national effort and against our best interests because of selfish power plays I get disgusted.

It's an article I agree with, read it here. Clifford May seems to have articulated his points quite well.

Movement Alarm for your iBook/PowerBook

2006-04-18T18:54:00.000-06:00

This application is awesome. Basically, if you run this app it will check your powerbook/ibook's motion sensor. When the powerbook is tilted, lifted, jolted, or otherwise used it turns up the volume and the text to speech engine starts saying "HELP, I AM BEING STOLEN!".

This would be SUCH a good prank to pull on a fellow powerbook user too.......

read more | digg story

New blogging program.

2006-04-17T21:41:00.000-06:00

Just trying out Ecto. Which is a neat blogging program.

It was rather effortless to attach an iPhoto image, now to get it to show up :P

Still learning the program though. We'll see how it goes, very functional thus far though. Makes it a lot easier to blog on the go, and just publish when I can connect. That alone just might make it perfect for me.

Bill Gates "Get them addicted.

2006-04-15T15:19:00.000-06:00

Here at LA Times is a very interesting article on how Microsoft leverages piracy to their benefit.

I have to say that I agree with Microsoft's approach. Rather than sue their customers, they sue institutional users and distributors. They also leave an olive branch out to users. In fact, I recall seeing an article where Microsoft is cutting a break on people who got a PC with a pirated version installed.

Very good tact MS, it's definitely worth noting.

I want my themes!

2006-04-15T12:14:00.000-06:00

If you've ever toyed with Apple X11, you've undoubtedly noticed that running any gtk apps utilizes a very tortured theme. The classic defualt gtk theme, which unfortunately is the ugliest out of all of them. If there is one thing I am thankful for, it is the gnome beautification project...until that becomes standard for gtk, however, it seems we are as they say S.O.L.

Being an OSX user, I find gtk's default theme unacceptable. As you can see, it is about the farthest thing from being "aesthetic". This reminds me of the good old days of Windows 95. Heck, even OS8 looks better than this! How can we straighten this out? Well, when installing fink, and installing bluefish (or any gtk dependant app) fink gives you the "sw" directory on your root. In the sw directory is the familiar layout of what you might see in a regular linux distro install. Feeling comfortable, I went into the share/themes directory inside sw. In there I saw to my surprise, a group of gtk themes. In this group of themes was a "Default" directory. How interesting...

My next step was to pick out a theme to supplant "Default" with. AquaX seemed to look nice,
so I downloaded that and extracted the directories. Next I used the "mv" command to move Default to Defold. I then used the same command to "mv" AquaX to Default, and now we have a much more pleasing look to our gtk apps.

Yes, much better indeed.

Pics Of Air Force Base Hangar Foam Test Gone Awry

2006-04-13T22:55:00.000-06:00

Apparently, techs were unable to turn off the foam flow to this hangar after a routine test. The result, a foam wall filling a whole building and totaling more than a story high.

read more | digg story

Saying goodbye to the light bulb?

2006-04-13T20:10:00.000-06:00

This article goes onto a development made in OLED's that allows them to replicate the "white" or "daylight" style of light needed for homes and offices. They achieved this by replacing some of the phosphorescent material with a different type. OLED's are more efficient than even flourescent bulb designs, as they give off far less heat.

read more | digg story

Internet Explorer SUCKS!!!

2006-04-12T15:45:00.000-06:00

And by this article, it's going to CONTINUE to suck. If you don't like using a SUCKY browser, use Firefox, and if you're a Mac user you're golden...but Camino sure is nice too!

read more | digg story

Why A Spider Hanging From A Thread Does Not Rotate

2006-04-11T15:57:00.000-06:00

"The extraordinary properties of spider's thread are like a blessing for researchers working on polymers. However, the amazing twisting properties it displays are still not very well understood."

read more | digg story

Sex in the MRI machine...

2006-04-11T15:51:00.000-06:00

"This paper tries something different: the investigators had people have sex in an MRI tube, and snapped a few pictures while they were at it."

One of my favorites was "Unfortunately, it sounds like action was hard to come by—while the ladies were willing, the guys seemed to have, umm, flopped. The researchers say the experiment was only possible thanks to the availability of a drug called sildenafil (aka Viagra), with one exception."

The pictures won't make much sense, but the read is one of the funniest I've seen in a long time.

read more | digg story

Musings on our sun and about us...

2006-04-10T15:46:00.000-06:00

The sun is large. Its volume is 1.3 million times that of Earth. It’s mass, however, is thought to be around 336,000 times that of Earth. With that in mind, at only 336,000 times the mass of Earth it is able to anchor of all the other planets in the solar system with its gravity well. At that much mass constitutes %98 of the matter in our solar system. Leaving a paltry 2% to compose of all the other planets, including Jupiter. Our sun is a medium sized star. A medium sized star at one our distance from it is able to keep our oceans in a liquid form and hold us close to it, our planet being billions of tons of iron. Now put this in perspective, a ball of gas accomplishes this. It accomplishes this by simply being in quantity and not even being all that dense. The very core of the sun may have a great density to it...but for the most part the sun is not a very dense object.

If you were magically impervious to the vacuum of space and to heat, and you were launched toward the sun you would fall right through its surface. What you would see on your way down is not entirely known, but it is definite that you’ll fall right in.

The neat thing about the sun is the fusion reaction, of course. This wonderful dynamo, at least I believe, may be responsible for the periodic table as we know it. What happens with fusion? Simple, the electrons separate from the rest of the atom due to the high energy state or collision, and the nucleus impacts with another nucleus. In some cases changing how many protons and/or neutrons or even electrons present in the new atom. It is thus, the foundation for the nebular theory.

Our solar system having at one point having been a supermassive star that died throws the age of the universe back into question. Who really knows? Let’s say we really are the descendants of a supermassive star. It’s lifespan had to have been billions of years, and thus went supernova. Perhaps its core did not turn into a black hole, but itself exploded with the rest of the mass of the star. If it had been fusing atoms for a very long time we’d have a lot more than just hydrogen, we’d have all sorts of atoms now in the nebula, or corpse, of this once great star...and thus our periodic table.

The possibilities that I would like to explore here are when we get cold fusion finally to being feasible. The next step is to be able to use different types of fuel for this. We’d then be to the point to where we can engineer what types of atoms we can create. We’d then be able to engineer molecules for new building materials at a subatomic level. Just imagine if we happened to stumble across a metal that is twice as resilient as titanium.

I dunno, just misc musings. If I’m way off base, any scientists out there, please educate me :)

I guess you could say the point I was trying to make, if you call the sun a life form, and you compare us to stars...how significant are we?

The Powerbook Prank

2006-04-09T22:43:00.000-06:00

This is a priceless article, historical article actually.

It goes onto how a guy originally wanted to sell a powerbook, but only got contacted by an ebay scammer. In the prank, they make the scammer pay...LITERALLY.

I was laughing so hard after reading this, you have GOT to read this story. Click down on "read more". The power of nerds, NAILING scumbag scammers that deserve it.

read more | digg story

Why you shouldn't cheat Adsense.

2006-04-09T21:02:00.000-06:00

I found this nifty article as I was going through old digg stuff. It goes into explaining why if you thought of some neat way to get extra clicks or some way to con adsense into paying you for clicks you didn't earn...that you should just keep it to yourself.

I rather liked this excerpt:

With so much effort to cover your traces, actually you will get better result if you concentrate your effort to improve the website.

Write more contents, submit articles, improve on your search engine optimisation, improve adsense placement, and you can get the same earning or even more. Sure it will take some time, but this is legitimate.

Source AdsenseCheats.com

Lucid Decapitation

2006-04-09T20:31:00.000-06:00

This is a pretty interesting one, it goes into detail about the debate of whether or not human heads are lucid when decapitated...and the evidence supporting lucid cases.

*cringes*

read more | digg story

Illusions

2006-04-09T19:47:00.000-06:00

Ok this blog is really cool.

"Mighty Illusions" is its name.

Just gone of many...really eye boggling illusions you will see.

Source Mighty Illusions.

Video of a really nice new Civic.

2006-04-09T13:14:00.000-06:00

Perhaps Honda's best yet, kudo's for their features. I really liked the monitors for your economy and "revving" habits. Great way to keep conscious of fuel consumption, might help people to drag race through intersections a lot less.

read more | digg story

Nerds Make Better Lovers (Hellooooo Ladies)

2006-04-09T11:58:00.000-06:00

Now this article ROCKS. Thank you Glee Magazine, gotta get these ladies EDUCATED!!!

Excerpt
"It’s one of the biggest misconceptions in dating, and it’s time to get it out in the open for good. The so-called “cool” men and women out there aren’t half as good in the sack as their “nerdier” counterparts. Nerds not only have the brains, but they also have the most powerful possession of all, the love touch. These guys and gals have taken the time to do their homework, and they’ve mastered the geography, chemistry and mathematical formulas of how to make your body scream. Ready to smarten up and become the ultimate seducer? Then put away those shades and pick up a pocket protector because your about to get lesson 101 in love."

This article is PRICELESS!

read more | digg story

Unreal OSX

2006-04-07T20:12:00.000-06:00

I'm talking about Unreal, the original version that came out in 1997.

What I seek is the means to get Unreal working in OSX (via classic environment, of course). There does not appear to be any binaries out there, or patches, or anything that will help me to achieve this mean. To make matters worse, I cannot even find the original Mac edition of Unreal.

Where art thou?

Windows on Macs? Chill folks. It's much ado about nothing.

2006-04-07T20:09:00.000-06:00

"Gartner has these graphs that show how, in something called a 5-phase hypecycle, new technologies are originally meant with ill-founded euphoria followed by a trough of disillusionment. We should move straight to the trough if you ask me."

I agree buddy, completely and unequivocally. This will be a "oh yay" thing for about two weeks, and then it will be old news.

For me, the permanent "oh yay" will be when I can get a fully operational and FULLY functional OSX system on an Athlon64 X2 system. THAT will be a big deal, as on the desktop the Athlons SMOKE the best Intel has to offer.

read more | digg story

King Kong, Bose Triport Headphones, Laptop

2006-04-07T20:04:00.000-06:00

On my nice OSX laptop I decided to watch King Kong on the Triports just to myself. Simply fabulous. This is why the box office just needs to go away. An experience provided by a DVD, and a really nice laptop is far nicer. If you want big cinema, get an HD tv with some decent surround speakers. You're still getting a much much better experience than the theatre can offer.

What did the phone companies do to counter all the voice chatting and email conversation? They started offering internet access. Movie industry, you need to cater to the people and not expect the people to cater to you....

Experimenting with Camino and Safari.

2006-04-07T09:56:00.000-06:00

A little while back I saw this article on Digg called "Camino: A Better Mac Browser than Safari or Firefox". Check the article out here. Intrigued by this, and the release of Camino 1.0 I decided to check some things out for myself. Leaman Crews does a good job illustrating some of the functionality of Camino versus Safari, but I was left with the question of system resources. I was also wanting some kind of expression regarding real world browsing difference.

So without further adieu here is what I did. I downloaded Camino 1.0 and ran a simple test of the two applications. As of this writing Safari is completely up to date and I am running on OSX 10.4.6. The test was to open each browser and open up 4 tabs with each browser going to the exact same websites in the exact same order. I then opened 3 more tabs going to the same website to see how the browsers scaled up. I apologize for not screencapping the activity monitor for the 4 tabs, but I will substitute with a nice chart.

What can we glean from this? Obviously, Safari is a very lean browser. But, what websites did I choose for this test? I didn't test any flash based websites, but I did take some screengrabs of where I was.

If you click to the left, you'll find the lovely Camino browser loading various sites. Camino really does do a great job in the aesthetics department. Although it is not skinnable, neither is Safari.

And here to our right is the lovely Safari, which also is very easy to look at.

Now what was going on with all this? Let's have a look at the activity monitor. This is with the seven tabs open.

Another area we will see that Camino shines is if I close the last three tabs in the browser. Safari seems to still retain all the browser cache. This can be a benefit or a drawback, as you don't have to redownload any content. On the other hand, it may be the cache setting, but these are all at defaults. If you're a mobile user than perhaps you prefer less memory usage to conserve power. I understand that memory usage directly does not constitute a noticeable power drain, but less memory being in use minimizes the chances your hard disk spins needlessly helping with swapping. Apparently Camino seems to have a more efficient default, but this isn't a conclusion of performance or efficiency necessarily. This is an observation.

So what causes Camino to use up extra memory? Less efficient coding? Sloppy coding? More features? Let's answer that too. This is touched on in Leaman's article. There is a wealth of more functionality in Camino than in Safari but here's a deal breaker. I will provide two screengrabs of Camino versus Safari editing this same very post.

As you can see above, Camino gives you font manipulation, alignment, links, spelling, and image. This article was, in fact, composed in Camino because of what you will see (or won't see rather) in Safari.
Safari obviously is missing quite a bit, and it applies in a very real sense. If you are a gmail user, you will also see the same difference. Gmail's integrated googletalk client also does not function in Safari. So while Gecko may have trouble with the Acid2 test, Safari's passing the Acid2 test only accounts for passing the Acid2 test. It is clear that Safari has a ways to go for feature support. This was a deal breaker for me, and for that extra 10MB of RAM, it's worth it to me to switch to Camino full time. Good job and hats off to the Camino project for making such a well integrated and clean port of Gecko to OSX.