Call me kooky

First they took away the cream and sugar, which probably saved billions but now they want to ice the coffee.  This wouldn’t be a big deal but the local “company” store no longer has buckets of ice.  How do you ice the coffee with no ice?  Why you get a bucket of some sort and sit there for twenty minutes in front of the soda machine while it slowly creates enough ice to fill the bucket.  Repeat untill iced coffee container is full.

I laugh when I seem them doing this, but then I’m a mean spitefull person.

Call me kooky,
Phosphers

First they took away the cream and sugar, which probably saved billions but now they want to ice the coffee.  This wouldn’t be a big deal but the local “company” store no longer has buckets of ice.  How do you ice the coffee with no ice?  Why you get a bucket of some sort and sit there for twenty minutes in front of the soda machine while it slowly creates enough ice to fill the bucket.  Repeat untill iced coffee container is full.

I laugh when I seem them doing this, but then I’m a mean spitefull person.

Call me kooky,
Phosphers

I took dad’s camera for an extended spin today.  For the record it’s a nikon E8400, not a bad camera really…. but I have a few nitpicks.  The one that’s been giving me a hard time is macro mode.  I just couldn’t figure out what the damn thing’s problem was, but it turns out this camera does not need to be all that close to the subject.  My junky kodak needs to be about 3″ away to actually focus, any farther away and it won’t get a lock but the nikon is the opposite.  A foot away is what the camera says, which is totaly the reverse of how I normaly take close ups.  However, with the different lens and better overall zoom the nikon does a pretty good job at that foot away.  I’ll have to check the pictures to see how well it did though, and I would post them but they’re around 6mb each and fuck that.

Another big issue is that the camera is unbalanced.  At least as far as the carry strap is concerned.  The pivots for the strap, which don’t really pivot, aren’t equaly spaced.  The right hand pivot is farther forward so the camera tips when hanging from the strap.  You end up holding on to the camera anyways because of the tilt so why bother with the strap?  Very annoying.  Yet another nitpick, the camera is too “large” in the layout.  I can’t work the zoom buttons with my finger on the shutter, I have to shift my hand to reach.  I’m not sure if I can set the “wheel” for the zoom or not, I’d have to find the manual .  I’m also having issues with the lens cap.  Since this is a higher end camera it doesn’t have an automatic cover for the lens.  Unfortunatly there just isn’t a good place to store the cap while shooting, having it dangling off the left pivot drives me buggy but it needs to be handy since the lens doesn’t have a cover.  Other than that the camera is quite usable.

Update: I’m a goddamned idiot at times.  I did something to my knee while cleaning up the back yard, then I walked around the Bellevue botanical gardens for over an hour.  My knee is fucking killing me.  Rrrrrrgh!

Call me kooky,
Phosphers

Just a collection of interesting stuff I came across the last few days.

Grave Robbing for Dr. Pepper!
Some interesting facts about social security.

That’s it really, I just love the grave robbing bit.

This is interesting. I haven’t finished reading the post yet but I know some of this holding on to money is to prevent wire fraud and supposedly fights terrorism (terrorists trying to move 49k at once is a big red flag and they know that. They aren’t stupid). The response from the teller to a very specific, and somewhat important, question is what gets me though.

On a totaly unrelated note there’s a WAMU branch nearby that basicly has an ATM to dispense cash, but it’s not an atm! You do the whole teller bit then walk over to the machine with your reciept, punch in a code and you get your cash. This totaly blew me away, it can’t be “easier” or “faster” for the customer. the only reason I could see for such a system is the branch’s location…. yup, little mexico (I say this somewhat sarcasticly, Bellevue is pretty well mixed ethnicaly and economicly). Even with the location I can’t wrap my mind around this thing. Is it to prevent robberies? I can just see some methed up junkie flipping out and killing people because it’s a “cashless” facility. Not sure how they handle cash deposits though…. Anyone else seen something like this?

Call me kooky,
Phosphers

After much fucking around I now have a mobile formated edition of the blog. It should scale fairly well, and strips out most of the fancy stuff that just adds to the amount of data transfered.

http://blog.phosphers.org/mobile.php

Cram that in your cell browser and enjoy!

Call me kooky,
Phosphers

On I whim yesterday I thought I’d check if my blog was valid (ie: not a bunch of crap). Turns out the theme had a bit of a muck up but I got it ironed out with the help of Znuff and uh….. letys I think it was. Thanks guys.

Eck…. seems the CSS has some problems too. Fun.

Call me kooky,
Phosphers

I had noticed I wasn’t getting anything from my DSL router in the logs so I mucked around a bit. Turns out everything is setup right, the router is just that stable. No errors, nothing to report.

And now it seems wordpress has lost a lot of of the layout stuff. Not a clue why, it works in IE just fine.

Call me kooky,
Phosphers

I still don’t know why they added this “feature” to email clients.  Ever wonder why outlook is such a security hole?  It can execute just about anything that has HTML tags.  It’s real hard to infect a machine if you send just text.  I’m pretty sure email was originaly designed to send text not a bunch of shit.

Call me kooky,
Phosphers

Came across this at coding horror Desktop RAID: oversold?. Though the articles listed make good points I’ll sav this of RAID 0, there is a notable increase in performance. I used to run two 40g ibms in RAID0 and large data like Anarchy Online and most games loaded A LOT faster. There is one caveat though, small files were either slower or unchanged. I’m talking about loading up 500+mb of data at once here. If your file is only 4k you’re not going to notice anything.

RAID0 is also somewhat stupid if you don’t have good backups. Lose one drive and you’re hosed. RAID10 (1+0) is smarter, you stripe and mirror. Slightly increased performance and a “live” backup at the same time.

Call me kooky,
Phosphers