Month: November 2007

Were they good questions?

I frequent some political blogs just to see what people are reacting to. I don’t think it really matters what the current administration does or what the Democrats do simply because both sides are incapable of a genuine compromise. The partisan bickering makes both sides pretty impotent.

One of the sites I check out is Michelle Malkin’s blog (as a counter to Crooks and Liars). Honestly, I occasionally I find that she has a good point. Today I took a look and she has an entry about how the CNN YouTube questioners were plants from the Democratic party.

No where in the blog entry does it address if the “plants” asked good questions. It did mention CNN’s incompetence and Democratic slant. This is why I think that political blogs are not really going to impact the next election. They’re just slightly better organized rants with a nicer presentation. Both the Republican and Democrat PR organs are better vehicles for slant and spin.

I don’t watch the debates because it’s just political pandering; pointless noise. It would never occur to me that the questions and the people participating were NOT planted and screened for effect.

I’ll continue to check out the blogs in my Red State folder as well as the ones in the Blue State folder but only for the entertainment value, as well as the Jack Cafferty clips.

Back to Max Payne 2

Max Payne 2I saw a commercial for Kane and Lynch: Dead Men and I had to get out my copy of “Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne” and install it.

This game came out in 2003 and I still like playing it. It’s like Humphrey Bogart directed by John Woo. Very cool. I’ve only just started the game but so far I get to the cut scene right before I receive enough damage to kill me.

It’s the easiest level. How did I ever complete this game? The last scene I have to dodge a nut job tossing dynamite at me while trying to shoot out some wooden pegs. Oh and not fall through the floor in the just blown up holes.

I can’t wait till I get to the fun house scene…

What is very strange to me is installing a game that does not require an activation code. It does check the CD drive to make sure I have the game (that’s easy to defeat but why bother?). Also this game actually works unlike some games *cough* Halo 2 *cough*.

Nice to see how the game industry has improved in the last few years.

Mineola train crash and the wrong restaurant

Wow. This image is from Newsday’s web site.

Train and car collision in Mineola, image from Newsday.com

Lily and I usually try to catch the 5:53 PM to Ronkonkoma out of Penn Station. Thursday night all the passengers were told that there was a fatal car accident at Mineola. Luckily that accident was not fatal, in fact the driver was rescued with 10 seconds to spare. But our line was canceled until further notice.

With all the trains not running we figured it would be a couple of hours before we could even get on a train. So we went to look for a good Thai restaurant that we know of. It’s on 48th street between 8th avenue and Broadway, close to 8th. Remember that address.

We went up 8th avenue but turned towards 9th avenue instead. Lily used to work on 50th street and we were wandering around 9th avenue saying “Wow the neighborhood really looks different”.

It was different alright. Lily kept insisting that she would get to this place from work by going out the back of her old building. That was true, but her old building was between Broadway and 8th avenue. Her current building was between 8th and 9th.

I was pretty sure that we were on the wrong avenue and said so. But I did not push the point since I learned many years ago to not contradict my very determined wife.

Eventually we ended up in a different Thai restaurant where I looked up the address of the place we were searching for on my phone. We both got a laugh out of that and I was told “Why didn’t you look that up earlier?” (I had offered to do so, was told not to bother, see earlier point about not contradicting my wife).

We ended up catching the 9:14 PM train.

Okay I think I got ATPP working

I think I’ve gotten the machine translation working to a point of good stability. Meaning my MySQL config is not killing the box with requests, caching seems to be working fine.

Right now I have 65 translated pages in my database. When I encounter one that is munged (meaning the database timed out) I manually delete that page in the ATPP cache and only that page. So fare so good.

I combined ATPP with WP-CACHE and all seems right in the world.