Falling sand is fun?

So I found a fun new time waster called "The Falling Sand Game". Sounds lame? Yup! But it's addictive as hell. There's basically four "faucets" along the top of the screen dropping salt, water, sand, and oil. You can build walls, grow plants, mix the elements, set fire to the oil or plants amongst other things. Still sounds boring? I thought the same thing. Then I ended up screwing with it for 45 minutes. Check it out (picture to the right is clickable).

In the Quick Links bar on the left I added a link to Digg.com. It's supposed to be a "Slashdot killer". If you don't know what Slashdot is, just move along and pretend you didn't read this. Digg is basically a news submission blog type thing; or, as Digg says "With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do."

I just got my girlfriend set up with Dragon Naturally Speaking software (speech recognition) and a Plantronics headset for voice recognition. This stuff seems pretty sophisticated and actually works. No more typing? Say it ain't so! I can see it now, me, programming: "public int Get Customer Balance Open Parenthesis int Customer ID close parenthesis open curly brace sequel connection cust db equals new sequel connection..."

If you like pina colada!

Why the hell is this song stuck in my head? I actually had to look it up... it's Escape (The Pina Colada Song) by Rupert Holmes. Whoever the hell that is?
I moved a bunch of older posts off to an archive page because they were slowing down the load time on this page. Thanks for the "kickass" 256k upload and blocked port 80 Cox! I'd host the site at work like I have in the past, but thanks to wonderful Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, it would be considered a breach of proper security policy. Yay.

I just went to register for Tri-C web based courses and was pissed to find that every single damn web course is filled. Sociology. Humanities. History. Archeology. The hell? *sigh* I ended up signing up for English Technical Writing. Another exciting action packed semester ahead for me! I think Junior's reaction (picture on right) about sums up how I'm feeling about things right now.

*yawn*

So I went to Canada for my yearly trip last weekend. Pictures are here (nothing you haven't seen on most postcards). I think this will probably be the last time I go the weekend before Christmas. People were driving like absolute IDIOTS on the QEW. All Canadians were tailgating over 90mph and merging and changing lanes within inches of each other (also above 90mph...). Eaton Center in Toronto was packed ungodly beyond belief, as were the surrounding streets downtown. So much for a relaxing vacation! I must say that my onboard navigation system kicked ass for getting me around Niagara and Toronto without worry. Map? Whats that? Oh yah, my car also really really likes cruising above 70mph :)

The other day I found two pretty decent BitTorrent trackers that replaced the infamous Supernova site that went down awhile back. These are the four best trackers that I know of:

• The Pirate Bay
• Mini Nova
• New Nova
• TV Torrents

Winter Sucks

So I now have a car that I actually want to keep around for awhile, which means not just leaving it the way it is for winter. $110 for four new waterproof floormats. Ching. $20 for new wiper blades/arms. Ching. $540 for four new Bridgestone Blizzak WS-50 tires, including mounting, balance, and installation. Ching. Ever driven a large rear wheel drive car with balding all weather tires in snow? Yah. I have less than a month to buy a 2005 CD set for my navigation system for my yearly trip to Canada. $200. Ching. I hope to sell the regions I'll never drive in (like California, etc) to make some money back on those.

I think in the Spring I'm going to buy new rims and performance tires so that in the future I can do a fall/spring tire swap myself (or at least save money on tire mounting charges). I bought my new tires off of tirerack.com. They were ~$15 a tire cheaper than any place around here (yes, including shipping). Is there anything you CAN'T buy on the Internet anymore?! ;)

Whoopti Dew!

Nothing cool has happened since I got my car. I think it'd be pretty hard to top that :) My new job is going ok I guess. At the end of the day, a job is a job and work is work. I think I'd like to pull an Office Space. "I'd relax, I would sit on my ass all day, I would do nothing." Actually, the Megamillions drawing was a few minutes ago... maybe I can finally do nothing! With some of my co-workers if the pool wins, or alone if my personal tickets score. One can only hope.

I finally got my paperwork to get my license plates today and had to go to the DMV. Let's just say they lived up to every cliche, every movie, every line a comedian has ever spoken. *TWO* people handling a room full of people. Average time handling each person? ~8 minutes. How do I know? Because I stared at the clock on the wall waiting with hate and angst hoping one of them would spontaneously combust and provide some entertainment. What if checkout clerks at grocery stores took as long as these people to do menial paperwork? God help us all.

Sinatra was right

"Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you. If you’re young at heart." I took delivery on my favorite car this week: a loaded 2001 BMW 740iL. I've wanted one of these bad boys ever since I rode in one back in 1997. The best part? The price. I won't say how much I paid, but lets just say after taxes it cost less than most new Hondas or Toyotas. It also is a CPO (Certified Pre-Owned) vehicle, meaning that if I have any problems with it, I just waltz into a BMW dealership and get it fixed.

This thing has a leather interior with real wood trim, power windows/locks/trunk/mirrors, heated seats with 3 mode memory, a/c, cruise control, auto dimmed mirrors, rain sensing wipers, onboard computer, 6 CD changer, GPS navigation, power moon roof, three programmable radio transmitters, dynamic stability control, remote keyless entry, dual zone climate control, alarm system, 4.4 Liter V8, and built-in analog phone service.

Dead Tech

This week I attended the Spectrum International MultiValue Conference in Cincinnati. Basically, this conference is for a technology that is dead and should be gone. It's a database format (if you can call it that) based in technology from the 70s/80s that uses green screens. Green screens. Why am I attending a conference in 2005 about a database with a green screen interface? Because my new employer's accounting system is based on it. That's fine and all, use what works, don't fix what isn't broken.

I don't get how IT professionals can sit around for 20 years and say "this is all I know, and it's all I will ever work in". It's like FoxPro. DIE ALREADY. Since I've started in IT I've had to progress from HTML to Cold Fusion to ASP/VBScript to Visual Basic to C#.Net, and that's just programming languages. I've also had to pickup knowledge of packet routing, security, hardware troubleshooting, and systems/database administration. The fact that these grey-bearded, beer bellied guys have conferences for themselves annually to tout 20 year old technology baffles me. I walked away from the conference with only one valuable nugget of information: two vendors put out a .NET data connector to connect to their horrid "databases" since they are neither industry standard OLE DB or ODBC compliant. Praise Jesus! I don't have to learn their archaic "TCL language" to utilize their data. The IT God's have truly smiled upon me.