Mostly about my amusement

Month: December 2009 (page 1 of 2)

HP Nagware (DO NOT WANT)

I have not yet found where to turn off this annoying HP nagware. Anyone know where it lives? You’ll note that the two options are

  1. Bug me to death later.
  2. Activate the trial that you don’t want.

Seriously HP and Norton, can’t you just get the hint? I am fine with losing all my data.

Update: After bugging me a couple more times, it puts an option to stop asking me.  Thanks HP, you get an E for effort.

Well that would sure end Democracy

No matter what risk to passengers, Unions Must Be STOPPED!

DeMint said Wednesday that he is concerned that Southers would let TSA screeners join a labor union.

via GOP Senator Says Dems Trying to Rush TSA Nominee – NYTimes.com.

Laughable. It must be nice being in the Party of No, not really much to do just complain and vote no on everything. Christmas Day and after demonstrated that the TSA is flying blind and still does not have a clue.

This is a great time to hold up the nomination of a former FBI agent and police detective as head of the TSA. The objection is not about his qualifications in law enforcement, it’s about if he’ll oppose those pinko commie you-n-yuns.

Life after Borderlands

I’ve now completed Borderlands 5 times. Twice with the Hunter character and twice with the Siren. And I completed the Isle of Dr. Ned too.

I have resisted the urge to get MW2 for one simple reason: I’m not thrilled about the story line. The first MW was gritty and depressing but it played well. All of the CoD games are very episodic and has to be played in order.

What I liked about Borderlands, FarCry (both versions), and Crysis was that most of the game was all over the map. You could go after each mission in sequence but how you approached the bad guys was flexible.

So for my current game I fell back to an old reliable source. I purchased Wolfenstein via Steam. It is visually different than the other Wolfenstein games (Blazkowicz isn’t blond?) and the play is odd so far. It’s like an updated RtCW but plays about the same.  There is a new supernatural element to the game play, but so far the games is not very entertaining.

I’ll keep at it and see if I like it. I’m of Polish descent so there is always the appeal of playing any WWII anti-nazi game. 🙂

1:10 scale Saturn V liftoff

Sometime you do find fun things on Reddit.

Yesterday was fun as the family did the Christmas day trip to my brother’s house.  We had a great time but I’m coming down with a serious nose cold. I think I only got two hours of sleep last night. Good thing I’m off all next week, I’d really hate to get sick at work…

Amazing stuff this “gasoline”

So this morning I attacked the pile of snow in my driveway. The gas from last year became no good so the snow thrower was stalling like crazy. Crazy as in every minute or so. This is not news to me, I had just thought that the power of positive thinking would make the old gas more combustible.

When that was a bust, Lily and I took the gas container and filled it up. For our troubles we narrowly missed getting slammed by another SUV.  The poor lady missed us and said “my brakes didn’t work”.

Funny thing that Isaac Newton and his laws. If only she watched Mythbusters then she’d understand better. I stepped on the accelerator and she passed behind me so it was all good. When I got home and put in fresh gas the snow thrower worked fine. Now the driveway is usable and I ache like nothing else.

Wow, it’s still coming down

Looks like I will have to use the snow thrower after all. Good thing it’s all gassed up. I started it yesterday before the snow came down.

At work Friday there was some discussion about what contingency plans will be for coverage on Monday.  That’s not looking like such a bad idea right now.

WordPress 2.9 is released!

I just got home from Christmas shopping and my SVN pull down of the trunk was 3.0-alpha.  Which told me 2.9 is released and I should switch to the 2.9 branch.

As always it’s just

cd wordpress-directory
svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.9/

And that’s it. I’m now on the 2.9 branch.

I’ve been using the 2.9 beta for a few weeks now and what I think will make this release a success is that it looks almost 100% identical to 2.8. Change on the back end is well recieved; change the UI and it’s an open revolt…

The WordPress user base can be a fickle group and each release brings a set of complaints.  I have not had any incompatible plugins (and I never do) but new releases always brings “issues”.

You can read up on the official notice here.

List of changed files

When ever a new release comes out, people want to know which files changed.  With every major release it’s always a lot and going from 2.8.6 to 2.9 really means do the whole thing. It’s 286 modified files that are different from 2.8.6 to 2.9.

Running this command got me the output.

$ svn diff --old=http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.8.6 --new=http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.9 | grep ^Index | sed -e's/^Index: //' > wordpress-286-29.txt
$ cat wordpress-286-29.txt | wc -l
286
$

You can view that list of changed files I created here. Also visit the codex link on 2.9, it’s a good description of what got in and what didn’t.

New PC vs old

81 lb monster? Meet your 32 lb replacement.

The old PC was a Core 2 Duo with two 150 GB hard drives and 8 GB of RAM. The video card is a Nvidia GTX-260 (forgot how much RAM that has).

The new one’s specs can be found here. If the old worked reliably I would not have gotten a new one. But as we say at work “It is what it is, and we are where we are”.

I’m probably going to clean off the old keyboard as I don’t like the new one too much. The new PC is fast and I like it.

Christmas tree 2009

I put the tree up last week but only today did the family put on the bulbs and tinsel. This year we could not find the glass spire for the star so we used one that we had that lights up.

It looks good and I’m very satisfied with it.

Who’s Ned? Ned’s dead, Baby, Ned’s dead.

It’s nice when you get confirmation of a decision.  My old PC refused to boot up when I turned it on this morning. Which is a shame since I downloaded and was almost finished playing the Zombie Island of Dr. Ned.

Like other DLC it’s a quick play and I am almost finished. Except for the location and the fact that everyone is Zombie-fied, it’s like the rest of Borderlands. It’s good fun and via Steam it only costs $10.