[fuzzy world]: August 2006

Thursday, August 31, 2006

The Matador

It's a really good movie, which seriously surprised me. Very human and touching. Brosnan is at the top of his game and Kinnear finally lives up to the word "actor". Sure, you can say he was pretty good in "As Good as it Gets", but there he was carried by Jack (not Bauer). Although I did see a bit of the "As Good..." role in his performance in "Matador", esp. when Julian makes a pass at him in the bar. Hope Davis is superb, but then again, she doesn't have a lot of screen time and I don't remember her in any other movies.

Too bad yesterday I watched "Ultraviolet". For stupid action flicks (and it wasn't a good action flick either), it's, well, pretty stupid.

Spam!

A short post on spam.

Using the Treo to post blogs is interesting. I write the blog on the Treo, email it to a secret (and pretty random) address, then go online and change the blog from Draft to an actual Post. Lately, though, I've been getting spam on that e-mail address. I am getting spammed on my blog! If I checked one box, the e-mails would be posted immediately, so that spam would reach the web before I decided to delete it. Bah.

And, I am officially a M$ employee: I am getting spam in my mail box! Yay.

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Yes, it IS Willem Dafoe

Yes, it IS Willem Dafoe
Originally uploaded by FuzzyGamer.

Yikes!

I was just walking back to my office from the Caf,I passed some dude's office and had to stop and take a look at that again. This guy has Logitech Z5500 speakers wired around his desk: full 5.1 surround sound, with the back speakers nailed into the walls. From my own experience, those are powerful speakers. Powerful enough to make food inside of a fridge shake. Two rooms over! My RA Martha wasn't very thrilled, but I got a good laugh.
Boy, I don't envy that guy's neighbors. Turn on Mozart's Requiem and watch the walls collapse!

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

First blog from M$!

Hooray for work, a window office and slow internet!

Monday, August 28, 2006

Window office!

Window office!
Originally uploaded by FuzzyGamer.

Even if it is for two weeks.

Awwk

My manager's name is Nikolay Smolyanskiy.
Coincedence? Did I spell coincedence right?

Whaa?

Ever met a person you know, but now they have a different name, face and background? And yet they have the same mannerisms. Same way of speaking, same expressions, same gestures, same stories, same everything! I'm sitting next to Nate right now, but he's named Vincent now.

Welcome to the M$ NEO

Welcome to the M$ NEO
Originally uploaded by FuzzyGamer.

"Kiss kiss bang bang"

"Kiss kiss bang bang"
Originally uploaded by FuzzyGamer.

Watch it! It's really good.

It's more of a book than a movie, really.

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Too easy?

Too easy?
Originally uploaded by FuzzyGamer.

Fine, I won't say it.

Saturday, August 26, 2006

Kill Bill

Kill Bill
Originally uploaded by FuzzyGamer.

Some network is showing the movie.

Unedited but with the commercials. Awkward.

Late night stroll

Late night stroll
Originally uploaded by FuzzyGamer.

Airplanes and muffins

Airlines have been assholes for a while, now they are just more forward about it. On a four-hour American Airlines flight from Chicago to Seattle they serve a snack to first class and beverages to coach. Now everyone is being shafted. And they don't care.

This time I decided to get some food before getting on the plane. BTW, they don't allow liquids or gels on the plane now. Bastards! I planned on killing some starving Ethiopians this morning and couldn't! So, anyway, I decided to buy myself a treat at Starbucks. The second best thing about a bluberry muffin is that the backpack is gonna smell like muffins for a while. Longer if I seal it in a plastic bag and stick it in the fridge.

I wonder what happens when I write the following blog entry: a dozen every-day items to use as a weapon and several ways of smuggling explosives onto an airplane. I'm not planning on writing that blog. People have been sent to Guantanamo for less. I've been flying around a bit and got ideas for "safe" items to be used as weapons and some ways to sneak in explosives. Certainly I won't be doing it, but follow the logic. Some idiot, like the incompetent shoe bomber, tries something like using a newspaper as a machine gun (fake examples, but think of stuff you could do even with a newspaper). He gets caught and the country is swept up into yet another panic. Now, no newspapers on planes. (Oh, I just came up with a way to use very little electronics to take down a plane. Makes me think if the goobers are just idiots, using the same old bomb-smuggling tricks as before. Anyway.) We slowly get everything else taken away and it gets to the point that you're naked, gagged and chained to a seat at 30,000 feet. All because some assholes came up with a shirt-underwear-spit bomb.

Friday, August 25, 2006

Take this Taty!

My dad asks me if I'm drinking Coke or Pepsi.
I answer Coke: "Tastes like children."

My baby's gone to a better place

My baby's gone to a better place
Originally uploaded by FuzzyGamer.

Redmond, Washington

What? Disagree? Bite me.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Treo

Treo is coming back, soon, with unlimited data. And you know what that means: lots of low-res images from my all-too-boring life! Yay!

Stuff that's just... meh

Two things bugging me right now. Sorta.

Fake programmers and car makers. Those are two things. It's not some guy who pretends to be a car maker who programs.

Fake programmers know the very minimum for whatever they're doing. They use a fake language, like programming cells in Excel. Maybe they use a real language, like HTML, so they've never heard of compilers, assembly or machine code. They will try and solved any problem they encounter with the "knowledge" they already have. Sometimes, that's not enough and they are completely lost. The slightest deviation (I am talking about: "Your toolbars are not in the order I have them, I can't work like this") will have them scaling walls and unable to work. Fake programmers have a very hard time coping with change of any sort, like the update of a program. Moreso, when the update does happen, they run around, complaining of how the new program is stupid and the old one was so much better. They can't do work with the new one, obviously. The toolbars are the wrong order and the buttons are placed strangely. Fake programmers try and apply their experience to everything. Assembly and HTML are all the same to an Excel programmer. Fake programmers haven't developed a real programmer's intuition and reasoning. "I know 'do' and 'while' loops, but have no idea about these crazy 'for' loops." Fake programmers are worse than idiot users: they're still the same kinds of idiots, they just don't know it and think they are computer gods.

Car makers piss me off. I was looking over this pamphlet about the Toyota Camry. It explains how stuff works. It's written to be read by any Camry owner, from the CE to the XLE, so you get to see what you have and what they have.
Here's the differences these goobers decided on:

If you hold the window up/down switch all the way down and let go, the window will keep going down automatically. That's standard for everyone. Only the XLE (most expensive one) has the automatic for down and up. Guess there's some real high-tech stuff in that auto-up switch. Either that or they just don't trust the cheapskates to have enough logic not to get their head chopped off by the window.
The convenient remote that opens and closes doors is not available on the CE (cheapest one). Guess the reasoning was "Everyone else is making the remote thing standard. Well, we're gonna make it an expensive option. That way the bastards will think they're getting a good deal."
The cup-holder has this removeable divider. With the divider, there are two cup-holders. Take the divider out, it's a largish rectangular hole for keeping crap in. Here's the tricky part: the divider isn't available if you're getting manual transmission. WTF?! What kind of a decision went into that choice? What, decided that the people with the manual transmission shouldn't have rectangular holes for crap? Or maybe the divider is a very important thing for the manual transmission to work? I can make my divider non-removable with some super-glue: presto! I have manual transmission, just like that!

Who the hell decides these things? Next, they're gonna make the steering wheel optional. Some of these, you'd just love to be in the room when they rolled that one out.

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Here's my e-mail, feel free to spam me to hell

Ever need something real bad, like a driver for some obscure hardware, or need to read/post to a forum or need to enter in that awesome "everyone gets a free XBOX 360" contest, but they want an e-mail address? You're not gonna want to give away your precious, 10-year old e-mail address that has that really cool sounding name. So, you make a temporary e-mail account at Yahoo! or Hotmail, get the single e-mail and forget about the e-mail address, right? WRONG!
People, there's a few things wrong with that. For one, it's a waste. Sure, Yahoo! and Hotmail delete your account after 6 months, but during that time the 2 gigs of storage are just sitting there. Sorry, it's my own thing, but that's a waste of technology and it makes me a saaaad panda. The other reason is that it takes too damn long nowadays to register for an e-mail of that sort. You have to confirm a bunch of stuff, subscribe (or not) to a bunch of offered newsletters (waste again!) and all the BS steps that they feel you need to jump through.
Or maybe you've got an e-mail account that you just use for these things, something like spam_this@hotmail.com, and you don't really care. Still, that's a bit of waste, as well.

Well, there's an alternative. Meet the only (good) e-mail service that doesn't require users to have passwords!
Link - http://www.temporaryinbox.com/
You get a random string of characters (it's pretty long), paste it into that pesky form, then go to the website and enter that same e-mail address (and no password) to check your e-mail. Once you get the confirmation e-mail and the address is no longer necessary, forget about it. Instead of half a year that it takes the big guys to delete you, this address is cleared out after six HOURS! No waste!
Even better, get the IE or FireFox plug-in, and you have a temporary e-mail generator at your fingertips. Awesome idea. Esp for those people looking for info that's behind those pesky "users only" signs.

Another service that the website offers is a forwarding e-mail address. Get an e-mail, and all the mail is sent to any other e-mail address. As soon as it becomes bogged down in spam, you can delete the forward and get a new one. Same thing as before, you can just have the e-mail sent straight to ThunderBird or Google and cancel it at any time. Beautiful idea!

Now go and register a bunch of fake e-mails for a bunch of useless, asinine and self-important websites! Damn goobers with their delusions of grandeur!

Seriously, who decided that to read a stupid forum that's free, you have to waste time to register?! It's free! You know most people get the account just to sneak a peek at some specific info, they're not gonna be life-long members! Argh!

Sunday, August 20, 2006

"Remember, remember the 5th of November"

Watch "V for Vendetta". You won't be sorry. Unless you're a totalitarian government, a social conservative or a Christian. Seems this movie pisses them off. Go figure.

Hey, when some conservative goobers say "a vile, pro-terrorist piece of neo-Marxist, left-wing propaganda filled with radical sexual politics and nasty attacks on religion and Christianity" and "the most explicitly anti-Christian movie to date", you know it's going to be good.
Here's link number 1: http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=49317
Here's link number 2: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21871

I'm planning on watching this one a few more times before my copy shows up in the mail.

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Treo Posting

For the next month (or so), there will be little to no posts done from my Treo. As such, there will be little to no posts done at all. I know, I know, what's the big deal. Really, no big deal, just throwing it out there.

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Non-intrusive updates

Non-intrusive updates
Originally uploaded by FuzzyGamer.

Yeah, right! Restart Now or Restart Later anyone?!

Sorry the quality sucks. The Treo isn't good at close ups.

Say NO to Facebook pictures!

You know what I'm talking about: a picture of a person has a part, or even the whole, of another person in it. Usually you get a picture like this from taking a group shot and splicing yourself out of it. Unfortunately, you get stuck with all these left-overs from the other people, like someone's arm on your shoulder or a group of people all around you. Facebook pictures tend to be awkward, zoomed in and completely devoid of any sense of style.

I suppose it's OK to put these on Facebook, as college students don't have enough time to stand in front of a wall and have their roomy take a half-way decent photo of them. But when these start cropping up other places, like dating websites, you've gotta draw the line. I haven't seen one on a serious website yet, but expect it. I figure graduation photos will take a step in this direction as some sophomoric goober decides that it's easier to crop than to take more pictures.

The most hillarious (and also quite pathetic) example of this was an image that was a print-screen of a person's friends list: there, two people, one after the other, used almost the same photo as their profile photos. It was a photo of the two as a couple. Almost the same, except that in one picture the guy's face was blacked out with pixel-wide black, in the other the girl's face was blacked out in the same fashion. So, they're too lazy to take a picture, but not lazy enough to fire up Paint and do some editing. Hillarious, but really sad, too.

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