Monthly Archive for January, 2006

Update season

Published on January 25, 2006 in Whatever. 2 Comments

Holy fucking shit! I did something useful!

Yeah. It’s finally happened. I actually got around to getting up and doing every possible update available for the Wordpress backend. Now usually I don’t concern myself with updates, because things like “security holes” forces me think of someone who is sporting a hole in their pants thus leaving them open to anal violation. And since this concept really doesn’t appeal to me, I simply don’t think about it.

But fuck, I’ve been waiting way too long for this.

It’s been over a week since my last update. Why? Well, I guess I’ve been busy with things other than sitting on my ass whining about why my computer is being a poo poo meanie pants to me, or why other people’s computers are wearing similarly poo-filled pants. I’ve been out and about, mostly catching Amtrak trains to Chicago and back to see the wonderful girl that is my girlfriend.

Oh shit, this is what we call a segway. As in, my writing segways to a similar topic that is related.

After going to Chicago, I realize that the job market in Michigan is utter shit. Opportunities seem to pop out of thing air in Chicago, something that here in Grand Rapids happens once every… … oh who am I kidding, opportunities don’t exist in this shithole. The only opportunity that really presents itself is one that allows you to bend down and suck off the nearest homeless guy because he hasn’t been able to pleasure himself as he’s holding a cup out waiting for someone to pity him and drop change into it so he can buy a bottle of cheap vodka and get trashed.

And if you think that’s a tongue twister, try explaining why downloading looking up porn and clicking all the little popup ads that say “ME SO HORNY PLZ FUCK ME :)”. Can’t? Shut up and keep reading then, tool.

But really, the job market here is sad. Every day I listen to customers talk about how their particular company or industry is laying off thousands of people to keep their heads above water. That’s an incredibly scary concept, especially when you’re working at a small company such as GPC. The fact that I can spend my mornings preparing computers and then watching an hour of X-Men the cartoon waiting for someone to walk through the door and save me from the horrible pit of boredom is proof that the economy here in our wonderful little state is clogged in the backwash drain of our current administration. YES GRANHOLM, I AM TALKING TO YOU.

It’d be sweet if she read this. I’d write her happy letters every day.

Fuck it I’m done.

god damn it’s slow…

Published on January 13, 2006 in Blood, Sweat and Technology and Whatever. 1 Comment

…at GPC right now. This really sucks, i mean yeah I’m still sitting here getting paid, and I suppose I could complain about worse but it just makes me concerned about this whole industry. For a while, we all kind of blamed it on the fact that Grand Rapid’s economy sucked and everyone around here is a cheep-ass. Don’t get me wrong, that is still a huge factor, but nothing compared to the abundance of TV and radio advertisements that constantly either poke fun at computers, making them seem nerdy and unattractive let alone the Dell ad’s that make people think computers really cost $299. I realize that most people will never actually care about computers, let alone bother to gauge their usage of them to justify the price of a PC that will actually do what they want it to, but it’s just really weird how the appeal of personalization, which has helped numerous industries, has only alienated this field. Because people don’t understand, or don’t give themselves enough credit in their understanding, everyone’s looking for “the name brand” or one size fits all. I have to admit that Apple is doing a pretty good job of this with their “I” everything marketing and technology that actually backs the ad’s, which in my opinion are not too bad either. At least they’ve got some decent endorsement…right?

So where’s this all going? I’ve come to the conclusion that, even if I wanted to, I won’t be building computers much in a couple years unless of course it’s a specialty system or a server. I can somewhat see an end to the desktop PC, going instead in favor of notebooks and home media centers. It just seems more feasible, and ultimately I see the “open architecture” marvel that we’ve been enjoying for years going down the shitter as companies realize that creating new innovative designs that stay within the “open architecture” is both technologically impossible and stupid business wise as they may hand over their designs and concepts to competitors which we’ve all seen so much of. I think Apple’s designs like the Mac Mini are going to get far more popular. They’re like a damn game console with internet access and an OS for dumbasses, yet are still powerful enough and the OS actually is just as, if not more, intelligent than Windows to be appealing to enthusiasts…well just short of gamers. Gamers, although I’m not really one myself, I have to give a lot of credit to, as we all should, due to their motivation of the industry to continue producing faster, hotter, more expensive, yet always exciting hardware. Problem is getting the damn software industry off their ass to be able to use the new hardware! Oh well…I guess when you’re this bored on the clock…you just have to wonder how much longer this position will even exist….

MacBook Pro

Published on January 11, 2006 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

just when i thought i had found the best laptop ever in my 12″ powerbook G4 Apple made a deal with Intel and releases the MacBook Pro. Well looks like Powerbook is old school now, but oh well. Anyway, i’ve always found it amuzing when people automatically assume that Mac laptops are dual proc’s because many of the desktop Mac’s do. Well, this is now finally a reality, which is sweet. I can’t wait to try one, i’m willing to be it’ll beat the piss out of an incredibly exspensive Alienware Dual-Core notebook. Yeah, it’s obvious that they’re meant for different purposes, but for those of us who don’t game, let alone on the go, i think Intel’s Centrino based dualcore with OS X would be the shit on the go, for a traveling professional or a student. From what i’ve been told by Intel reps, that Intel has really been focusing on power consumption to performance, i.e. Centrino. Now that Centrino is going dual core, or “core dou” as they’ve been calling it, and going to 65nm these things are supposed to be about 5 times faster than my 11 month old Powerbook. Damn, the only thing that conforts me is how slow the software industry is and how long it’ll be before they A. Port already popular Mac apps to x86 code or B. attract new software vendors to write code, as Apple always has, and which we all know probably won’t happen. Hell, how many applications do you have on your PC that actually uses a lot of the hardware driven technologies that improve performance, like multi threading for SMP, dual-core, HT processors, SSE3, 3DNow! Professional, etc. I think these hardware changes are great and all, and will undoubtably improve performance, i’m just courious/concerned to see how long it’ll take the software industry to catch up to this rather fast start to 2006.

am i the only one looking forward to this year? vista? the apocalypse!?!

Apple DVR/OS X/XP/Vista/Linux, all on separate cores? ;-)

Pentium D’s suck

Published on January 2, 2006 in Hardware. 0 Comments

Nevermind I guess I’ll just start technology bitching now since this is a new issue that really is driving me nuts.

About a month ago I got my hands on a Pentium D 840 with 4 gigs of RAM and an Intel D955XBK motherboard (I also got an Asus P5LD2 but I really don’t care about it.) All right, that’s all well and good, but here’s a little secret about the Pentium D’s—they’re fucking INEFFICIENT and they run hotter than Satan’s balls. I would assume Satan has hot balls. And not the “well damn those are nice balls” hot, the “OH GOD MY HAND IS ON FIRE WHY IS MY HAND TOUCHING YOUR BALLS DEAR GOD NO” hot.

Complete System Specs

Honestly, I’ve been pretty satisfied with the performance of the machine. My biggest problem is how awful the heat is. Right now I have this thing sitting with both sidepanels open, with a nearby fan blowing towards it. Check this out:

Seriously, this is hot stuff people. Granted, I’m pretty sure the temperature sensor on the motherboard doesn’t work (look at all the errors Speedfan is spitting out) but still, it’s pretty bad.

Regardless, Intel’s latest processors have run hotter than hell. Ever since Prescott, Intel has pretty much thrown thermals into the wind and built the hottest processors I’ve ever seen. In all honesty, the Pentium D’s run hotter than my old AMD T-Bird 1.2GHz box. Not to mention Intel’s rushed design of the Pentium D to compete with AMD’s X2 line of processors. Basically you have two cores sharing the 800MHz bus speed. And without an onboard memory controller, in order for this processor to communicate with the second core instructions must be sent from the first core, out to the bus to the memory controller and BACK along the bus to the second core, when the two are basically sitting nanometers apart.

That’s pretty bad, guys.

So the bottom line: if you were to pay full price for these CPUs, I have to laugh at you. You wasted your money.

What is it with people anyway?

Published on January 1, 2006 in Whatever. 1 Comment

I guess I just don’t get it sometimes.

You know, I deal with a lot of people on a day to day basis. Some of them are truly pleasurable to work with, most however are complete assholes. Either the bitchy woman, the crotchity old man, or the spoiled teenager. And out of all of those, the spoiled asshole teenager takes the cake. Or rather, the cake is spoonfed to him and he/she complains about it.

Although the concept may be laughable to many of you, I had to work for everything that I have today. A home, my car, the respect of my parents, respect at my workplace, and the love of my girlfriend. All of which takes some measure of work to accomplish or continue to have. And for a good percentage of people, all of this is simply handed to them on a golden platter. These people fucking bother me more than anyone else. And worst of all, this is a huge problem.

I don’t just see this on a professional basis. I see this happening to a good chunk of people I called friends. Now that nothing is given to them, they sit around all day doing nothing but getting wasted and laying at home while the rest of the world passes them by. News flash: your life is going to turn pathetic if you’re 30 years old doing the same shit. Surprise!

Oh well. Maybe someday the lot of you will grow the fuck up and take a look around. Maybe some good will come out of it.

FYI: I’ll go back to geek bitching eventually.