Nothing quite like that stinging, acrid smell of burning PCB. Just as I’m about to go to bed it hits me like a punch in the face and I immediately know what’s up. I ran into my room, yanked the power cord and fanned the machine manually trying to cool it down. I didn’t know what had happened so I touched my brand new Zalman CNSP-7000B-Cu heatsink to find it barely room temerature despite running seti@home full bore since the heatsink was installed almost two weeks ago. One of the coils close to the processor socket was glowing red hot (not usually a good sign) and caught fire, yes literally. Pretty safe to say the machine is a total loss. One of the bad parts about mini-pcs is that when one part dies you have to replace the whole box. Can’t reuse the case because micro-atx boards are usually prohibitively expensive to come by in single units.
This machine used to be my Wintendo, but when I stopped playing PC games I turned it into my main linux workstation. Now I’m glad I didn’t sell the old athlon box. Seems I’m going to be using it for a while until dual-core athlon prices come down…
You would think with these scams having been around for so long people would have caught on, but no, 419ers are still going strong. No longer content with the relative safety of the unsolicited email these people seem to be stepping things up by moving to instant messaging. This could either lead one to believe they’re still finding success with these scams and are branching out to increase revenues or, as is more likely the case, people are getting wise and their emails are getting blocked by spam filters causing them to resort to new mediums to find their victims.
For people who don’t know 419 is the Nigerian penal code for fraud. These people operate in teams in various countries sending out emails, and now instant messages, promising millions in unclaimed funds to the lucky soul who will only put up a few of their hard earned dollars to grease up the otherwise tight ass of some banker. These people fleece retirees out of their savings and decent, honest, albeit naive, people out of everything they have. These scams have seen plenty of coverage over the years with my person favorite being 419er in space. These guys just don’t know when to give up. This particular asshat was no different. He came complete with the whole package. Recently deceased rich asshole, an obscene amount of money, an official sounding bank with a website circa 1996 and the will to say anything to get some money.
Read on for the blow-by-blow of my run-in with a 419er…
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I’m the last person you’ll catch voluntarily listening to MTV-esque top 40 radio, but anyone who works in a warehouse setting will tell you a lack of background music will drive you insane pretty quickly. Bad thing is I live in an area full of rednecks and ghetto gangsta wannabes so naturally most of the local stations play country or rap. At work we’ve settled on one that’s more akin to VH1; no rap/hip-hop/r&b and no country so at least it’s tollerable. I’ve been noticing recently that a lot of bands that are getting air have a real 80’s sound to them. The lyrical and musical stylings in most Killers songs to the liberal use of synthesizers in recent songs by The Bravery and Beck. With the corporate rock scene churning out a seemingly endless stream of shit these days (and record sales going up, go figure) it’s nice to see people going a bit retro.
I didn’t get into ska and punk until around ‘89/’90 so the 80’s was when I got my first taste of music. Being in grade school I couldn’t exactly buy albums so the radio was all I had. Until we get an 80’s station back around here (fuck you and your new classic rock format KRPM) this retro trend will have to do.
Anyone looking to unload any 80’s pop or new wave vinyl, let me know…
Just got back from the first sitting at Rebirth Tattoo for my first bit of ink. I decided this week that I’ve held onto my designs long enough and it was time to get off my ass. Pretty much every tattoo site you find is going to be filled with stories of people thinking up a design, tweaking it for a week, then getting it done only to hate it 6 months to a year later. My method of choosing a tattoo design is a little more complicated and time consuming. The designs I’ve done have been finished for at least 6 months to a year. Believe me it takes at least that long to decide whether or not you really want it. The tattoo isn’t going to come off, you’re going to be looking at it for the rest of your life so if you can look at a design on paper for a year and still want it as much as you did the day you designed it, go get it done. More often than not you’ll eventually get tired of looking at it, think it’s not as cool as you did when you drew it or find out it’s become incredibly trendy and, even though you came up with it as an original idea, it’s not original anymore.
A few simple rules to getting a tattoo you’ll never get tired of:
- Design the tattoo 6 months to a year in advance to see if you tire of it.
- Only consider tattoos that have some kind of special meaning for you. Don’t get a fad tattoo (band/sports team logos, tribal, etc.) you’re almost guaranteed to hate it later.
- Don’t let your friend the aspiring tattoo artist do your work for free in his mom’s kitchen. If you do anything stupid by not using a real tattoo artist you deserve to get a horrible tattoo.
- Investigate your options in artists. Check out all of the local shops. See the artist’s work and pick one that’s previously done well at elements of what you would like done (shading, fine line, filling, etc.)
Most importantly just think for fuck sake. Don’t come at the situation like a tattoo is something to do some night you’ve been bored. Give it the thought and consideration it needs, make it something that’s special to you and you can’t go wrong…
The post’s title sounding like a bad Eric Roberts pseudo-action flick aside this week’s jaunt to the library turned up a few more nuggets of joy keeping with the same destruction and mayhem theme that started the whole experiment. The more I look for books of “questionable” topics the more I’m suprised by the seemingly dwindling number of titles in these areas. While there’s no shortage of the latest Harry Potter or Dean Koontz snooze-fests topics like anarchism, socialism, anti-capitalism (and to a lesser extent destruction and explosives) turn up fewer and fewer hits as the weeks go by. If only the library system weren’t so helplessly dependant on the regime o’ the day for funding maybe they’d be more inclined to keep a more well-rounded selection and dabble in more subversive topics.
I realized after I dropped my books off in the return slot that I hadn’t written down the titles., but this week I walked out with the following:
- The Chemistry of Powder And Explosives by Tenney L. Davis, Ph.D. © 1943: 1943?!? Holy way-the-hell-out-of-date-books Batman! This book is supposed to teach me about powder and solid explosives and it pre-dates napalm, plastic explosives and “the bomb”? Ok. The fact that this book was published when my grandfather was being drafted for WW2 to kick some Nazis in the eier didn’t prevent it from laying down the basics. A decent amount of pictures and aparatus designs to impart the reader with a working knowledge of things. Mr. Davis offers nothing in the way of manufacturing, well, perhaps if you have a degree in or serious understanding of chemistry it does. All in all a pretty decent read, but a bit tame for my purposes.
- Crisis Response - Inside Stories on Managing Image Under Siege by Jack A. Gottschalk © 1993: This was a total waste of time. I figured I’d get a book to see how corporations deal with serious crisis i.e. terrorism, natural disasters, civil unrest, armed revolution, etc. Turns out it’s just a public relations handbook on how to rape the environment and steal millions from unsuspecting investors while putting on a happy face to tell people everything’s A-OK! One especially nauseating section is on the Valdez oil spill and how Exxon could have done a much better job protecting thier corporate image. Fuck their corporate image you ass hat. A drunk fuck ran a god damn oil tanker aground and spilled 240,000 barrels of oil that saturates Price William Sound to this very day and this book wants to critique their corporate image. I recommend this one if you’ve accidentally injested drano, it’s sure to induce vomiting.
- World Trade Center Building Performance Study FEMA © 2002: I picked this one up just for the title. Ought to be a good addition to any would-be terroists reading list. Has lots of bright colors and pretty pictures, but doesn’t get anywhere close to some real questions like “how do not one, but two, 80+ story buildings structurally fail and come down in a nice tidy pile no larger than the space of the city block they rested on?”. To me there are a hell of a lot more holes in the story that this book tries to put a Mr. Wizard spin on.
Not a bad take this time and there’s some decent reading in there even if it did come from a 60+ year old book. If you want some more sane and thought-provoking material pertaining to 9/11 I highly recommend checking out In Plane Site by Dave vonKleist and William Lewis.
As I stated yesterday I’m a Firefox user. One thing I didn’t get into was the coolest part of Firefox; extensions. Extensions are plugins that can add any number of features to Firefox. For a while I didn’t use them, now I find it hard to imagine using a browser without them. I thought I’d document the ones I use.
- Adblock: Allows you to block images, flash, embedded iframes or even entire domains so you never have to see another ad again. YOU NEED THIS!
- Basics: Adds back some basic usability features that were removed in early releases.
- ColorZilla: Normally I wouldn’t include something like this on a “must have” list, but I’ve recently discovered a rather handy use for it. I was testing out different extensions at the same time as I was working on some CSS and realized that the color picker will highlight the element it’s hovering over. Not only that, it shows the name of the element in the status bar. This can be incredibly valuable when debugging or trying to get an intricate layout working because it offers a visual representation of elements so you can see how things are fitting together.
- FireFTP: A complete, full-featured FTP client in only 70KB. Opens in a new tab or separate window. Nuff’ said.
- Forecastfox: Especially helpful if you live in an area where the meteorologists couldn’t forecast their way out of a wet paper bag. Extremely accurate for most areas.
- SessionSaver: Easily my favorite extension. It saves everything about a given session. If your [windows] machine crashes, there’s a power failure or you accidentally close FireFox this allows you to immediately restart it exactly how you left it. It can save each tab and window you had open with their complete histories intact. It also includes SnapBack Tab/Window that will ’snap-back’ any tab or window you didn’t mean to close on the page it was on when closed also with the full history intact. Great if you have a strong preference for the order your browser tabs and windows are laid out.
- SwiftTabs: Switch tabs with user-definable keystrokes.
- TargetAlert: Shows you what type of content a link is pointing to.
- Web Developer: Perhaps the most important extension for any would-be web designer. Fuck IE, make those pages validate!!
These are the cream of the crop as far as I’m concerned. If I’ve overlooked a nugget of joy leave a comment and let me know…
I checked my site at work today so I could see how it rendered in IE. Rendered pretty well. A few glitches with the link images on the left and a few various CSS errors here and there, but with IE that’s to be expected. Since I don’t run windows at home I don’t have the ability to check my site on IE/win. Not that I care really. It’s all 100% valid XHTML so any standards-compliant browser will be able to render it near exactly how I want it. The issue here is that IE is by far the least standards-compliant browser ever written.
With IE having enjoyed a browser market share in the high 90% range Microsoft changed widely adopted web standards in the name of “innovation”. The real evil being wrought was akin to a drug dealer exploiting an addiction. They knew that web developers would have no choice but to adapt to the new IE-only techniques or face a veritable nightmare of hacks to get their sites to run in the now dominant browser. Of course people opted to make their lives easier by coding web sites and web-based applications specifically for IE.
Microsoft’s mindset is to maintain their cancerous stranglehold on the technology industry by exploiting their complete, albeit weakening, monopoly in the browser market. They know that if all browsers were 100% standards-compliant people would only be able to choose a browser based on it’s technical merit where IE has none. FireFox is free both as in speech and beer. You can obtain it free of charge at the same time you’re completely able to dig under the hood and make changes should you see the need. This is arguably FireFox’s greatest advantage over IE. When a bug or security flaw is found it’s generally fixed within 24hours and a new release is issued almost immediately in the case of a real nasty one whereas with IE you can wait weeks or months for a hole to be patched… if Microsoft acknowledges it at all. They see the writing on the wall and will do anything to maintain their illegal monopoly.
Eventually web-based apps will be so complex and fast that it will pretty much eliminate the OS layer from the equasion and people will be free to use what they want without worrying about being tied to a specific platform so they can run a specific app. Windows will finally be recognized for what it is, a gaming platform not an operating system.
My site isn’t written specifically for any browser, nor will it ever be.
