09.18.08
Posted in Random at 11:56 pm by kenners
I just sat in a chat room entitled “politics” and in the span of 5 minutes, was bombarded with a ton of negative energy regarding my current employer. I’m not going to mention them (though read between the lines if you want), but I was linked to NASAWatch, and it reads like a hitpiece on the government organization. Note that it is not an actual NASA website.
The strangest part is that, the things they talk about, have nothing to do with what we actually do on a day-to-day basis. I go in everyday and try to save my team time and money, and hopefully I learn something in the process. I work in my own way: sometimes I walk outside, sometimes I close my eyes for a few minutes. They’re called breaks, people. Rocket scientists need them, too. And, through the breaks I am rewarded with amazing situational insight, ephiphanies that make my team’s work a little easier.
I don’t really appreciate all the negative “shouldn’t they have thought about this?” commentary, especially since they haven’t walked a day in our shoes. Who cares if our email servers are down? They’re always down! That’s not the point — if IT was an actual foundation of our core business, we’d care more about it. More specifically, Congress (the people who actually make our decisions) would have to care more about it. But, it’s IT. It’s always crappy, no matter where you work. We just have more transparency than most companies. We also configure our own custom networks, and have to do paperwork on a daily basis just to get permission to try something. The IT folks are doing a fabulous job simply putting up with the system Congress and upper management has imposed on them. Hey, not like we do anything interesting anyway, right?
Anyway, IT is a silly thing to complain about. Email’s down? I’ll use a phone. Phone’s down? I’ll use my feet to walk to the next building. Maybe I’ll get a bright idea or something.
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Posted in Random at 11:56 pm by kenners
I just sat in a chat room entitled “politics” and in the span of 5 minutes, was bombarded with a ton of negative energy regarding my current employer. I’m not going to mention them (though read between the lines if you want), but I was linked to NASAWatch, and it reads like a hitpiece on the government organization. Note that it is not an actual NASA website.Â
The strangest part is that, the things they talk about, have nothing to do with what we actually do on a day-to-day basis. I go in everyday and try to save my team time and money, and hopefully I learn something in the process. I work in my own way: sometimes I walk outside, sometimes I close my eyes for a few minutes. They’re called breaks, people. Rocket scientists need them, too. And, through the breaks I am rewarded with amazing situational insight, ephiphanies that make my team’s work a little easier.Â
I don’t really appreciate all the negative “shouldn’t they have thought about this?” commentary, especially since they haven’t walked a day in our shoes. Who cares if our email servers are down? They’re always down! That’s not the point — if IT was an actual foundation of our core business, we’d care more about it. More specifically, Congress (the people who actually make our decisions) would have to care more about it. But, it’s IT. It’s always crappy, no matter where you work. We just have more transparency than most companies. We also configure our own custom networks, and have to do paperwork on a daily basis just to get permission to try something. The IT folks are doing a fabulous job simply putting up with the system Congress and upper management has imposed on them. Hey, not like we do anything interesting anyway, right?
Anyway, IT is a silly thing to complain about. Email’s down? I’ll use a phone. Phone’s down? I’ll use my feet to walk to the next building. Maybe I’ll get a bright idea or something.
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09.15.08
Posted in Random at 1:51 am by kenners
This was originally posted on the Bar Room Heroes forums. The original post was a link to a Lucky Star mashup that featured millisecond clips from the show to the tune of the Super Mario Brothers theme. Following this was a mix of IOSYS, AMV Hell, SMB, and related YouTube links.
A pointed analysis below the fold.
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09.14.08
Posted in Random at 3:50 am by kenners
Made it to LA to meet up with JPN in Los Angeles. I got lost on the way though, and this is the route I took.
I met 6 people instantly, and of course I was terrible with names. I actually got put on the spot to impress, and I think I failed with style. We went out to dinner at 7pm, and had an interesting time…
But, more to the point, somewhere near the end of dinner, we had a stranger join us. She sat down right next to me after the circle of hugs, and was introduced to me and the guy sitting next to me, the two strangers to her at the table. JPN said she had to guess my name, so she turned and looked straight into my face. I’ve never been looked at like that before, and known about it. Ever. It was unnerving. And then she guessed “David.” I guess… well, I don’t know what to guess. I felt defeated.
I also went completely ga-ga and said something stupid and cliche: “You can call me whatever you like.” I can’t believe I said that. I think someone needs to chop off a limb or something as punishment. I mean, what the hell is wrong with me.
Anyway, to sum up the night: failure to impress people deserving of being impressed, and failure to respond appropriately to invasion of soul. Awesome.
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09.11.08
Posted in Random at 12:10 am by kenners
So I was walking out of the house to go to McDonalds, and I felt like I wanted to listen to Mute Math again, and I had Plan B stuck in my head. Mend it all, etc.
But I got in the car, and Crystal Method’s Vegas was already playing. So I dismissed it. BUT, as I was pulling out of McDonalds, High Roller came on, and I was hit by a HUGE wave of nostalgia. The beat laid down by this track, mixed with the faux-space-transmission cuts just really resonated with me when I first heard it… I think I was still at RPI at the time, so I had this on loop for a few days straight on my computer, and then of course as I walked to classes I had it on whatever mp3 walkman I used at the time. Those days are completely and utterly gone, but I’ll still be walking down the street, and be reminded somehow of this song, even when I’m 40.
The best part is, dozens if not hundreds of songs can trigger such a strong memory in my mind. If I ever could focus enough to diary all the songs that do this, and make a mix CD of them, I think the CD would grow a brain and take over a Starbucks or something. No joke.
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09.06.08
Posted in Liveblogging at 11:10 pm by kenners
For being such a powerful piece of hardware, my gaming rig has TONS of driver, compatibility, and software problems. I can’t really identify why except for a combination of bad luck, beta software, and Windows Vista.
Update I: 175.92 drivers come with NVidia PhysX software! I can’t wait to see if it matters to anything, ever.
Update II: After passing the Vista boot loader and the cool little OS loading progress bar, my system halts at a black screen, numlock fails to respond, and I’m a tad angry. I’m calling it the BlackSOD. It could be your death, so watch out.
Update III: Luckily, safe mode still works, so I’m able to walk around my system. Gonna take some time to download cleaning software, and see if I can’t get rid of every NVidia driver intertwined with my windows installation folders. I’m going to try using Guru3D’s Driver Sweeper software to make my life a little bit easier.
Update IV: Finally uninstalled all display drivers to the point where I could reboot my machine and successfully load Windows, which I’ll be calling the baseline.
Update V: Installed 175.89 forceware drivers, which brought back the BlackSOD. The uninstaller in Safe Mode brought me back to baseline.
Update VI: Okay, after reaching baseline, I was asked again if I wanted to install drivers from NVidia, and normally I had been saying “Ask again later.” This time, I said “Go ahead and install.” I’m not sure what it actually will install, but I guess I can check later.
Update VII: Got BlackSOD again, but this time I accidentally hit the power button instead of the reset button. I shit you not, the system booted up properly. I don’t know what the hell is going on here, but I don’t fucking like it.
Update VIII: I rebooted after that weird miracle occurrence, and now my system is exhibiting a true BSOD, message SYSTEM_SERVICE_ERROR, at nvlddmkm.dll. Fabulous. What the hell is it?
Update IX: After an uninstall, I didn’t go back to baseline, and I’m back to BlackSOD again. No power button tricks either, this thing’s dead in the water. I guess I’ll attempt to revert to the 175.19 official drivers from June.
Update X: As if by magic, my graphics cards now appear as Standard VGA Graphics Adapters. I may have achieved a clean slate? Yeah right. I’ll make a restore point just in case, and then run the setup for 175.19.
Final Update: A really detailed look through the Event Viewer showed that the NVIDIA Display Service couldn’t start because a dependency service failed. Since the system was waiting for that service to actually start up a window manager, it froze. I really had no idea how to fix this problem, so I checked to see if there were maybe any windows updates that would fix this problem. I last checked for updates last week, but that was before I had installed this new driver. Lo and behold, some updates were availale, and after installing them, the system started to behave as normal again. To me, this is a crap solution, but it’s late, and I’m going to bed.
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