Tag: soap box

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People who I don’t like

Action that, when taken, immediately makes my opinion of you go down to “moron” or lower:

Pushing the crosswalk button or elevator button when I’m already standing there waiting for it.

Hello! I am not a moron and standing here without pushing the button. By pushing it, you are insulting my intelligence and disrespecting me, and therefore deserve no respect. Especially with elevator buttons where you can already see that it’s pushed.

I’m sure I’ve ranted about this already, but it happened not once, but twice today. At the same crosswalk.

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Overplayed non-music

Over time, I alternate between listening to the radio and listening to my CDs. I’ve been listening to the radio for a while now, which means there’s a few overplayed songs that are starting to get on my nerves. Usually when one starts playing, I have an alternative station that I switch to.

Yesterday, my number one most annoying song of the moment came on: Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl”. So I switch radio stations… and do a double take, ’cause the other station is not only playing the same song, but at almost the same spot.

I’m thinking it’s about time to start listening to CDs again.

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I never know the depths of rage, frustration and directed anger until I try to update a FFXI update.

Stupid Square Enix doesn’t understand the concept of beefing up server banks to handle increased load. So now 90% of their users get a stupid POL-1160 error (“the network is busy”) another 9% start downloading but get interrupted and lose all their progress (“we don’t know how to program an updater that saves its progress”) and something like less than 1% actually get through it all and get into the game. (“We sold our souls to the devil.”)

People keep saying they should use some BitTorrent type update. It would certainly be better than this stupid system where nobody can connect because we’re all trying to connect. The last time, it took me more than 24 hours to finally get connected and back in the game. This time doesn’t look like it’s going to be any faster.

I want a fourth button next to “Network Connection Information”, “Retry” and “Exit” labeled “Stab the person at Square Enix who thinks that the current system works and since everyone keeps paying their monthly dues there’s no reason to change anything.” then one next to that that says “Move update servers to North America so the Japanese players that are currently all getting nice quick updates have to sit through this frustration that all the rest of us are feeling.”

Bad user interface to have all that text on a button, but hey, I’d hit that fourth one over and over and over and over and START THE DAMN DOWNLOAD AGAIN YOU STUPID PROGRAM I JUST WANT TO GO TO SLEEP.

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Falling blocks.

As I mentioned in passing before, I bought Meteos for the Nintendo DS. It’s scarily addictive, and for the entirety of AX, and a bit after, I would see falling blocks whenever I closed my eyes. I’d recommend it to anyone I know who owns a DS. Oh, wait… that’s none of you.

Did a bit of shopping today, ended up at Fry’s and saw someone I knew there. I was also briefly at Sunnyvale Golfland and saw someone I knew there, too. Didn’t see anyone else at the other places though.

After listening to waaaay too much radio advertising, I can officially say that the marketing gimmick of “Verb one, Verb two, Repeat” is now old. I declare it so.

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Another week, whee.

Heaven forbid a week goes by where I don’t make a post that isn’t “GRRRR I HATE MY LINUX MACHINE WHY WON’T IT WORK? BLAH BLAH BLAH!”

So I’ve been thinking about this one for a while, just so I could get enough to make a “list.” So here goes — here are actual things that I have said out loud around the house.

“Who left all the lights on in here?”
“Is it so hard to put your dirty dishes in the dishwasher?”
“I just cleaned this kitchen! How did it get so dirty already?”
“Who’s mess is this?”
“Why is the front door unlocked?”

And a few others I’ve forgotten. It’s official — I’ve become my parents.

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Pacbell DSL

I am rather disappointed right now.

I started wondering to myself today when I was working remotely on my linux machine and all of a sudden the connection got very laggy. I figured a bunch of people must be viewing my webpage at the same time. So I ran a command to see how many open connections I had, and I was very distressed to find that it was one user causing that lag. Let me explain a bit of back story.

We have DSL from Pacbell which is 384kbps/128kbps. That means we get 384kbps (about 7 times faster than a 56k modem) downstream and 128k (about 2 times faster) upstream. This is exactly what I had before at my old apartment through Verio.

(As an aside, be glad I didn’t have this journal when I was going through my hell with Verio… in a way, I wish I did, because then I’d have an account of it, but anyway…)

The upside of this arrangement is that the 384 is a lower limit. We actually get speeds approaching 1.5Mbps, the theoretical maximum for DSL. Yay us… blazing fast downloads and all that rot. The downside is that the 128 is an upper limit, which means that if we ever had the possibility of downloading faster, some piece of hardware on Pacbell’s end limits the bandwidth.

So, if you do the math, if two people using 56k modems hit my webpage simultaneously, they’ve pretty much sucked up the entire bandwidth of the DSL. If that one person happens to be on a faster connection, they’re probably going to suck it all up themselves.

This is distressing, because this machine is not the only machine on this connection. There are three other machines, as well as a mishmash of other random devices, that all use this bandwidth. Let’s say Ken’s in the middle of a Counterstrike match and someone goes to my photos page… all of a sudden, he gets a bit of lag and dies. Not a good thing, ’cause then Ken’s gonna take it out on me.

Now you’d think that I would have seen this coming. The thing is, as I said before, I had the exact same numerical specifications for upstream and downstream with Verio, but I never had any problems. Verio must not have been doing the bandwidth limiting thing.

Hrm. Pacbell isn’t exactly the most user-friendly company to deal with. I have very little leverage, as the only other pricing option on their webpage is three times as much per month for 384 upstream (which then comes with a proportional increase in downstream). Which makes sense, numerically.

The other option is to move my webpage elsewhere. But at 45 megabytes and growing with every photo album, I’m highly unlikely to find a free, or even cheap option that’s going to meet my needs.

Argh. Argh argh argh. I think I’m going to call Pacbell. If they won’t charge me a fee to transfer service over to the higher rate, I’ll see if Luke and Ken would be interested in making some sort of uneven split of the monthly charge, so that they don’t pay much more than they are now… (in theory, since we haven’t made the first payment yet.)

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A.I.

I just saw A.I.

Stanley Kubrick must be spinning in his grave.

The movie should have ended after two hours… the last 15 minutes is such Speilbergian tacked-on sentimental… stuff.

Unless you’re not paying for your ticket, like I didn’t… don’t bother. Wait for the video.

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Bleg.

Okay, those annoying “pop-under windows” or whatever people are calling them are getting very annoying. I’m about to start browsing the web with javascript turned off wherever I go…

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Whirlwind graduation tour

Here comes another long one… my weekend. I went down to Southern California for a variety of reasons which will become apparent as the weekend unfolds in this entry.

I could start at Friday night, with Friday Night Magic, but that was a typical Friday. The fun really began Saturday morning at 9am.

Waking up at 9am is sort of early for me, but bearable. But having to wake myself up, “pack” (I only had to bring enough clothes for one night and my toiletries), and get to the airport. Of course, I forgot I had to get gas first, so by the time I got to the airport, I was running late enough that I didn’t want to risk missing my flight and parked in short term parking instead of long term parking. It was only going to be for about 30 hours so it wouldn’t be that bad. I am one of the last to check in, but I make it before the 5 minute rule (yay Southwest).

On the flight I try to play some GBA Castlevania, but the amount of time that you get on the 50 minute flight that isn’t ascent or decent and they aren’t serving drinks is about 15 minutes, so I didn’t get much in. That, and the whole light issue made it hard to play. Also, I felt very weird, as the young woman who was sitting next to me was sobbing uncontrollably (and unapproachably) for most of the flight. I never found out why, but it did cause me to think quite a bit about it. I had another one of those “weird intersections in people’s lives” moment. But of course it didn’t last long, because we landed in Ontario before too long. About the time that they said that we could turn on our cell phones when we had reached the gate, I realized that I had left mine on the whole trip. Oops. I’m glad I didn’t make the airplane crash or something.
Continue reading “Whirlwind graduation tour”

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Basic Math

So I was at Taco Bell today. The total for my meal came to $4.85. I gave the woman a 5 dollar bill. She gave me $1.15 in change, even though the do-the-math-for-you cash register said “$.15 change” on it. Being the honest person I am, I told her that was $1 too much. She gave me an odd look, as if she didn’t understand. I said “5 minus 4.85 is .15”, she still didn’t get it. I tried a few more times, and gave up and just pushed the dollar back at her on the counter. She got confused and asked “oh, did you want it in quarters?” I backed away slowly, saying “you gave me too much, leave it in the drawer…”

This, of course, was on top of the fact that I had to tell her I wanted it “for here” twice.