So far I’ve turned down not one but two offers of a Gmail account.
Yes, I’m that much of an iconoclast. Besides, I have my own domain and mail server. What the heck do I need another email addy for?
We now return you to your regularly scheduled, much more interesting, broadcast day.
UPDATE: Of course, the very day I post this, Dawn announces she has Gmail invites available. Heh.
Hi, my name’s Karel, and I’m a Neopets addict. (“Hi, Karel!”)
It was two of my friends that did it to me. They sat down and created an account and gave me my first Neopet. At first I resisted, but then I couldn’t bear the thought of my electronic pet going hungry, so I started looking for games I could play well enough to finance my Neopet’s diet.
Of course, then I found out about the free food options. I felt silly, but by that point it was too late. I was hooked on Destruct-O-Match, and then came Sutek’s Tomb.
The true realization of my addiction came today, when I realized that what I really wanted was to save up for a paintbrush.
My friends, I’m afraid it’s true. I’m a Neopets addict. No, no, don’t bother with the intervention. I’ll take a few NP if you can spare ‘em, though…
I finally assembled all of the spare parts. Motherboards, processors, RAM, hard drives, power supplies, video cards. Somewhere in all of that silicon and plastic would be the genesis of a new, albeit clunky and kludgy, Linux-based home computer.
Alas, it was not meant to be. After hours of testing, only one combination of CPU, motherboard, power supply and video card would achieve anything more than the barest sign of functioning… and not one combination would even POST. Argh.
I ranted in frustration for a short while, and then I decided to turn my attention to something else geeky, something almost equally worthwhile.
I attached the cassette deck to my new receiver!
And that didn’t work out very well, actually. It turns out that, according to the manual for my Panasonic A/V receiver, one cannot record audio or video from one analog source to another. Helluva “feature” if you ask me, but that’s okay. I worked around it through the simple expedient of attaching the tape deck directly to the computer.
The roomie and I then spent a happy few hours combing through our respective cassette collections and pulling off songs we’d long been yearning to have in digital form. He went for an XTC song and a few tracks from a band I’d never even heard of (the name of which now escapes my recall), and I plucked B-sides off a couple of “cassingles” in addition to a couple of stand-out tracks on otherwise-forgettable albums. (Let’s face it, David Gilmour’s old solo album really only has one good song on it.)
I love that living-room PC, lemme tell ya. Not only does it make a great myHTPC platform (all the better to watch anime with), but thanks to the LiveDrive hardware and CoolEdit 2000 software I was able to pull in audio from those old tapes and clean it up in a jiffy.
The results speak, as it were, for themselves. So, who wants a copy of a B-side track from the Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe album released back in ‘89?
Dear $VENDOR,
I understand your urge to design (and continually redesign) the innards of a desktop computer in such a way as to make them a) more easily accessible than usual, b) more efficiently cooled, c) able to fit more hardware in less space or d) all of the preceeding letters.
It’s option “e” I take exception to. That would be, e) unable to have anything other than vendor-supplied parts for replacements.
What really lit my fire this afternoon was the discovery that I can’t even replace a burned-out power supply in what looks like an otherwise-standard desktop mini-tower. Oh, no, that would be too easy. Sure, it was fairly easy to get to the unit. But there isn’t a standard power supply made that will fit into this chassis. Why? Because of the extra-special slot-based retention system you came up with. Nevermind that 99.9% of desktop power supplies are perfectly capable of staying put with the four screws usually used for such a task. Oh, no, you guys had to be different. “Let’s use only one screw, and some tab/slot dealie-bobs!” Great effing idea.
Did I mention that of the parts inside your average computer, the power supply is second on the list of Most Likely Bits To Fail? (The top item is, of course, “box containing flat round hunks of metal covered in magnetic bits spinning at very high rotational speeds.” Otherwise known as a “hard drive.”)
So if you have a situation like I did today, where one of my better salesfolks’ power supplies blew a capacitor, and I find I’m unable to replace the power supply from any of my numerous available stock… what am I supposed to do with the rest of the computer? I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay through the nose for a special $VENDOR-made power supply, thank you very little.
Consider this one more nail in the coffin of my ever being able to recommend your products with anything resembling my former enthusiasm, you braindead bastards.
I guess it’s time to gut this tower for parts, eh? Let’s see… 550 MHz Pentium-III CPU, 64 MB of RAM, and a ten gigabyte hard drive. Whee. What a freakin’ waste.
You’ll notice the OfficeCam link that normally lives right below the contact information at the top of the right-side column is gone. This is because I’m changing around the computers in my office, so the machine that normally provides the webcam “service” is unavailable for a while. I’ll get it running again at some point in the next few days, if at all possible.
We apologize for the darkness.
(Update: I’ve got it back. Not only that, but the cam page actually looks like the rest of the site to a certain extent. Whee! I may be having some problems getting it to refresh, though, so if the image never changes for you please let me know. Thanks!)
I’ve been (secretly) using this for a few weeks now, but since a new version just came out I figured I’d make some noise about it.
Feed on Feeds version 0.1.6 is available. Yay!
(Oh. What is it? It’s an RSS feed aggregator that lives on your webserver so you can access and keep track of your feed reads from anywhere, instead of being tied to a desktop-side aggregator that you can only check from a specific computer.)
(Oh. What is an RSS feed? It’s the syndication format a growing number of websites, and especially “blogging” systems, use to expose their collected entry data in a machine-readable way for external systems like an aggregator to pick up.)
(Oh. What is an aggregator? It’s software designed to automatically grab RSS feeds so you can easily keep track of what’s been updated on each of the couple dozen or so journals, blogs, thingies and news sites you try to visit regularly. Without having to actually, you know, visit them… unless they have new entries that interest you, which you’ll learn about because your aggregator software will have pulled the RSS feed for you.)
(Oh. I’m oversimplifying this, or not using the most precise jargon? Then you already know everything about this stuff, so why have you been reading this far? Sheesh.)
(Oh.)
