12/24/09 Work related rant

Just for the record, using VB, ADO, and XML is generally a cluster fuck when it comes to Data Warehouse ETL work. Keep it simple stupid. Either write everything in an SSIS package or throw all the logic in a ANSI compliant stored procedure. I REALLY wonder what the fuck some people were thinking when they write a snippet of code, then again I'm sure people could say that about my code.

Stock Market & our economy (10/12/08)

Yes, its total crap right now but the US economy will not fail. we may hit a potential depression but no further than that. I'm briefly looking at the market with an inkling to start trading again. A lot of companies are severely under priced because of our contracting economy. I've always played with penny stocks which most of the time are absolute shit and can and usually are manipulated by the market maker, however, there is still a lot of money to be made. I need to find out what the day trader rules are because I've been out of the game for a few years. You can make money in a bear market.... I'll prove it. I just need some starter cash to kick this off :)

Are you kidding me ?

Yesterday on campus I witnessed a student receiving a ticket for jaywalking. He was crossing Magnolia Avenue near Domino's pizza. First off, getting a ticket for jaywalking on or near a college campus is absolutely absurd. We are all guilty of that so why should he be singled out ? That issue is debatable. Whats not debatable is the fact that two police cars were used for issuing the citation when not even a month ago Lauren Burk was robbed, shot, and left to die not too far from campus. I watched these two officers for 30 minutes, questioning, reprimanding, and flat out embarrassing this young man. Those 30 minutes could have been used looking for actual crimes and suspicious activity. Is this your idea of bumping up the man power to keep our community safe ? The Auburn Police department needs a good kick in the pants on what their priorities should be. Was it just a slow day at the police department or do we as a community really have a problem on police efficiency and where their services are most needed.

10/21/07

I rarely write my feelings down anymore, however I had a brief moment of enlightenment last night. I decided to finish off my night at the Duck. I stayed outside by the fire for awhile in deep thought as I always am. I met a gentlemen in his 60's doing that very same thing. We discussed life, the good, the bad. I shared my current state of life, my thoughts, ambitions... The guy gave me a little direction, maybe even some confidence to let me know I was on the right path. I REALLY enjoy talking to people with years of wisdom. Old, battered, yet still willing to share views on life. It still all comes down to loving like you've never been hurt before, living life without fear of what will happen, and striving to find what you perceive as God.

07/12/07 Motorola Q

I've been using the Q for almost a year now and I must say it is the biggest piece 'o crap.

My evaluation:

-The hardware side is kosher and I believe Moto did a relatively good job except for the power management. All Moto phones seem to be plagued by inefficient power management.

-Windows Mobile 5 is a joke... Poorly designed software, FULL of bugs. Of course, that seems to be the Microshaft theme. I rid myself of all microsoft products a few years back when it came to computing and I was a fool to buy a phone running an OS by Microsoft.


-I will never purchase anything even closely related to Microsoft and now sadly the Moto executive staff made a shity decision to partner with Microsoft so Moto is on the same level in my book.



You corporate cock suckers !! design, analysis, implementation, testing, and maintenance. Have you heard of such elements ? It's all good, a revolution has started with open standards cell phone technology

Cray had always resisted the massively parallel solution to high-speed computing, offering a variety of reasons that it would never work as well as one very fast processor. He famously quipped If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use: Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?


Seems as though Cray was old school and saw something everyone else didn't see. His belief of concentrating on maximizing dual processors was probably the better route to take. Instead of hitting 1 petaflop in 06' we probably would have been much faster by now with his mentality of focusing on the system as a whole instead of just the fucking CPU.

6/1/07 Unix Alarm Clock

I couldn't find my cell phone (i use it as an alarm clock) so I went on a little adventure to find one for Linux. I finally settled on this nifty little console jockey command, hey, it works..........

sleep 5h && cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp


That will wake anybodies fat ass up in the morning

5/31/07 - Ubuntu Linux

Wow...... as an avid computer dork I am SERIOUSLY impressed with this distro, installed without a hitch and I love the LiveCD installation idea. Finally, a linux distro that stomps the shit out of microsoft when it comes to GUI human-computer interaction. Vista ain't got shit on Ubuntu, especially when I install Beryl for a little eye candy :)

Thank god for South African entrepreneurs !!!



Beryl notes:

in etc/X11/xorg.conf you had to set the pixels depth to 16 instead of 24 because your video cards memory was filling up

4/25/07 PayPal litigation

There is Justice !!

Let me tell you a little story about a witch from New York that bought a SD card from me on Ebay...

Let me say first off, I am cheap. I would have not encountered this problem if I had not tried to skimp on the shipping.

An SD card is very small so I thought maybe I could save a few bucks by sending the card to her in a regular envelope. Evidently, she was so offended when receiving an envelope because she payed $4 bux for USPS Priority and her product was sent in a $.52 cent envelope ($.13 cents for overweight) that she claimed to have received an empty package from me. She filed a claim with Paypal asking for a full refund. Now let me elaborate a little on the PayPal part of this story.

I sent so much evidence (Reciepts, proof package was not empty etc....). I don't think a human even looks at a case until someone appeals it. They initially gave her a full refund because I didn't have proof of tracking showing that I sent her the package. Haha, she sent me back my original envelope with a note saying "Hi I received this blank envelope in the mail today, I don't know who you are or what you may have been mailing me, but it was an empty envelope" Isn't that proof of delivery when the recipeant sends the envelope back to you ? Anyway, took pictures of all this stuff and sent it into Paypal. This whole thing has been in litigation since mid-March.... So today, finally I receive an email from Paypal saying basically, " Ugh.... so yea, we're going to email her and ask for your money back because our Resolution Center sucks ass and we're actually just a bunch of trained monkeys"

Now granted, it was cheap of me to cut costs on the shipping but it was just as bad, if not worse to claim you didn't receive the product. What she should have done was sent me an email saying she paid for USPS Priority and wants a refund of the shipping diff. She got greedy and didn't think straight, which seems to be the human condition these days.

To the bitch in New York: "I learned my lesson and I hope you learned yours"

4/25/07 Earth-like planet

Look at the progress we've made as a human race in just the last 100 years. What advancements will we achieve in the next century ? We WILL discover remarkable things about life itself and our purpose for existence. I'm just glad to be living now and not some other time in history. As far back as our history books go, you can see a natural human pattern throughout time of wanting organization and proper order, enlightenment, ... etc. We have this constant wanting to seek, discover and expand our minds. One can see how things have morphed into the civilization we are today... I honestly feel like the world is not a shity place, it's a freakin miracle that we even exist, whether you base our existance on pure science or the notion of an all mighty creator AKA the Great Machine or God. I personally attest to the latter for many reasons but a big one for me is that Einstein himself said that the more he studied the universe, the more he was certan that there was in fact some sort of God, a creator of all things.

Wow, I've never really investigated the above quote but it seems that Einstein had more of a "guilty until proved innocent" mentality when it came to organized religion. He said "if people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed."

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms. " (Albert Einstein, obituary in New York Times, 19 April 1955

4/10/07 - Random thoughts

What made me leave Tofo Beach ?? Spent new years there, partied hard, but I'll tell yea what made me leave. The last night before I left I went on a little adventure to cover all of Tofo. Right before Fatima's Nest I saw this 40+ year old women just laying on the side of this dirt road sleeping, kinda odd. Women was just skin & bones, sleepin away in the dirt. On my way back home at like 4 am I walked by that same women, still in the same position, sleeping, thought to myself, shit, maybe she's dead. Walked over to where she was laying, greeted her, no response. I eventually woke her up and tried to speak some broken Portuguese to her but she just stared at me, like an empty shell. The place where I was staying had a few extra beds, thought she'd be better off sleeping under a roof rather than in a ditch on the side of the road. I think she was very sick mentally... Nothing I could do would motivate her to move or even acknowledge my existence, severe case of dementia if I ever saw one.

I felt really bad, partying the whole night, oblivious to the real world around me. That's why I left the next day, didn't feel right. A beautiful vacation destination but yet I see all kinds of shit that just makes me want to cry. How the fuck can you enjoy yourself knowing that there is some old lady half out of her mind sleeping in a ditch down the street ? I can't

Thinking about that night gives me more motivation to start this MozambiquMesh project. It will make a difference no matter how big or small. These people are beautiful and they deserve the best the world has to offer. Fuck the nay sayers, people that say ignorance is bliss in Africa.

3/9/07 Differential Equations

I havn't felt so good about a test since I don't know when, especially a math test. It's true.... countless hours of studying equals an A Hopefully my prof will give me a few extra retard points because she knows me.