Sword's Tavern

I was doing some surfing around the ‘net, and decided to do a little searching for some new computer sounds.  Every once in a while you have to liven’ things up a little and add some personality to your PC by adding some custom sounds.  Well, I do anyway.  In my travels, I came across this site presumably run by Clay Loomis since the domain is clayloomis.com (notice how my sharp eye and keen intellect worked that out!).  What I found there was a Goldmine of audio files, not really for making computer sounds, but great stuff to listen to nonetheless.  There are Mel Gibson goin’ crazy phone calls right down to  Bill Cosby singing The Beatles Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (I haven’t built up the courage to listen to that one yet, but I will get there!).  Those are just the “Oddities” section, he has several others that should be more “normal”.  Anyway, after coming across this I knew I had to share it with my readers so take a look and enjoy!

http://www.clayloomis.com/odd.html

Don’t ask me why, ’cause I don’t know, but I had major surgery recently and as I am resting and recovering I have spent some time watching TruTV and their coverage of the trial of the doctor that has been put up on murder charges.  Let me tell you, I can see right through all of this bullshit, there is no real murder trial here first of all.  This trial is a scapegoat trial because rather than admit that this guy (Michael Jackson) is human, and had some problems (OK, let’s face it, the man had lots of problems), and some of those may have been pain related that lead to the drug use, or it might have been some time of psycho analytic thing, but regardless he had an addiction to drugs, there is no doubt about that if you open your eyes and look at what all has gone on from the beginning.

So, let me make a little sense here from what I just said above.  Rather than admitting that Michael Jackson was a man, and a human being with god and bad and trials and tribulations just like the rest of it, the are trying to point to the doctor and say that he did it, so that Michael’s “image” can seem untarnished by this, it was the doctor that caused his death not his addiction to drugs.

I say come one people, look at the facts, the real facts, not what the news pundits are trying to spoon feed you.  My bet is that Michael was in a lot of pain, between all the surgeries he had, and the extremely physical performances he put on, all that stuff takes a toll on your body and I bet he used the pain killers to help with that.  The problem thought, is that like with a lot of people, famous or not, they get to depending on them too much and whammo, they are addicted.

Michael Jackson was a man of huge and extreme talent, the likes of which we probably never see again, at least not any time soon, but he was still a man nonetheless, and a great loss when he died.

Well, I was going to write up a post about Criss Angel and how bad he sucks at magic and even just plain entertaining people. Then I found a nice write up at another blog out there and I really couldn’t see that I would improve upon it so I figured I would link to it instead.

“First of all, Criss, can I call you Chris? If you’re going to take a pseudonym, why don’t you not spell it like a jackass? I mean, I understand if you’re one of those people whose parents thought they were being original and decided to spell your name with all kinds of crazy extra vowels, misplaced consonants and the letter Y. But you, you CHOSE this name and that’s the route you went? Interesting.

Anyway, I don’t know if any of you have ever seen the show “Mindfreak” on A&E – but it’s terrible. It’s got “acting” and a production quality on par with porn and is generally pretty uninspiring. In addition to dressing like a model from the Hot Topic catalog CA’s deep self love and constant chest pounding/finger kissing/pointing at the sky routine wears thin pretty quickly.”

Check out the rest of it here …

Forgive your enemies – It really messes with their heads!

You want to know one of the things that really draws my ire?  I mean really makes me want to uninstall your pathetic excuse for a piece of software, remove any remnants or traces of it having ever been near my machine in the first place, destroy the CD it came on with fire called down from the heavens and send ravenous zombie hordes to your home office?  It’s when some developer douche bag decides that he knows what I want more than I do.

I don’t mind if you ask me, give me a choice, but not every damn program out there needs to put one or more items into my system tray to load there every time the computer starts and slow down my startup time, eating away at memory and CPU power.  Normally this is under the guise of “speeding up the application”.  Well, I say that if you need all of those pre-loaders to make your application function acceptably, maybe you should go back to Fortran 101 and learn to write good code in the first place!

What’s worse, are the damn services that get installed and started that we don’t even know about.  Why does a simple media player need a web server?  Why does my GPS management app want or need to check out my hard drive at night?  Have all developers taken refuge at the throne of Bill Gates and Lenovo or something?

“We have a right to look at the user’s private information because they bought our crap.”  or “We don’t need to worry about writing tight, efficient bug free code, we’ll just tell the customer to by a new computer and get more kick backs from Intel.”

Not to mention the shift away from ownership to leasing.  Now when you “buy” software, you really are only “buying” a license that allows you to use it for a period of time.  Screw that noise, man.  If I am interested in a certain product and see that kind of license, ffft it’s gone and I am looking at something else.

This is just one reason why Open Source software is so damn good and popular.  Microsoft and the other behemoths of the commercial software industry want to come out and tell everyone that free software isn’t really free, it costs you more than the expensive slop that they sell.  The thing is, they don’t get it.  We don’t mean free as in dollars, we mean free as in spirit and ethics.  You get some open source code and you may spend a few bucks to implement it or get some support, or you may not, either way it is completely open.  All of the source code is there so you can make damn sure no one is spying on you or stealing information from you.  You can make a change to the app if you feel like it so that it fits better to your needs, instead of only getting “good enough”.  It’s free like the wind and water cascading down the mountain, and brothers and sisters, that’s a great place to be.

As in, the name is …

Went to see the latest animated monster box office explosion Saturday with my family, and I have to tell you that it was awesome.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed Despicable Me and after that Mega Mind.  However, Rango was written on a much higher level while also on the lower kid level.  This was much like the old Bugs Bunny cartoons where kids and adults both loved them and thought they were funny, but for two very different reasons!

So, I say all of this to say, go see Rango if you have the opportunity, it’s a blast, I am sure you won’t regret it.  The whole theater was packed and everyone, even the kids, where belly laughing all over the place.

Teachers’ hefty salaries are driving up taxes, and they only work 9 or 10 months a year! It’s time we put things in perspective and pay them for what they do – baby sit! We can get that for less than minimum wage.

That’s right. Let’s give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they worked; not any of that silly planning time, or any time they spend before or after school. That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 to 3:00 PM with 45 min. off for lunch and plan — that equals 6 1/2 hours).

Each parent should pay $19.50 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children.

Now how many do they teach in day…maybe 30? So that’s $19.50 x 30 = $585.00 a day. However, remember they only work 180 days a year!!! I am not going to pay them for any vacations.

LET’S SEE…. That’s $585 X 180= $105,300 peryear. (Hold on! My calculator needs new batteries).

What about those special education teachers and the ones with Master’s degrees? Well, we could pay them minimum wage ($7.75), and just to be fair, round it off to $8.00 an hour. That would be $8 X 6 1/2 hours X 30 children X 180 days = $280,800 per year.

Wait a minute — there’s something wrong here! There sure is!

The average teacher’s salary (nation wide) is $50,000. $50,000/180 days = $277.77/per day/30 students=$9.25/6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per student–a very inexpensive baby-sitter and they even EDUCATE your kids!)

Here it is folks, what I am proclaiming to be the number 1 video of the year, if not all time.  It’s the video for the song Overlord from Zakk Wylde and Black Label Society.  This song comes off of their most recent Top 5 album The Order of the Black.  I don’t want to spoil anything, but this video is filled with awesomeness, you just won’t believe your eyes when you see it.  So, click on the link below and watch it right now!

Watch the video now!

Maybe it’s me, and please feel free to drop a comment and let me know what you think.  In fact, I am asking you to comment or hit the feedback button/contact form and let me know your thoughts.  I have working with what seems like a bazillion different operating systems over the years, to varying degrees of proficiency and intimacy.  I don’t just mean various versions of Windows either, I have worked with BeOS, DOS, Linux, MacOS, MenuetOS, NetWare, OS/2, SkyOS, UNIX, and Windows to name a reasonable sampling.  That list then breaks down into further releases, variations, versions and more.  The point I am trying to make here is that aside from the fact that I enjoy tinkering with operating systems, I have a pretty wide field of experience with many, many different ways to boot a computer.

The one big thing that I notice as a glaring difference between practically all of the operating systems I have tried and Windows is multitasking.  I mean true, let us do more than one thing at a time multitasking.  Not just do a little here and do a little there, the “hand off a lot, back and forth, and it’s real slow but we’re gonna call it multitasking while we entertain you with pretty pictures” kind of stuff.

My two primary operating systems these days are Windows and Linux, Windows 7 and Debian to be more precise.  Depending on where I am and what I am working on those can vary, but here at home, I tend to stick to those two as much as I can.  I have gone all Linux before and I loved it, and to be honest I’d love to do it again, but there are games I want to play and some development and music recording/production software that I can only run on Windows that I just don’t want to give up.  Therefore I run both.

Now, on to the crux of this long winded diatribe.  It seems like I can run many applications, daemons, processes and whatnot on my Linux boxen and it is happy to do so all day long.  In fact, I can overload it to the extreme and it will still function, albeit quite slowly.  No crash, no fuss, no muss, and once I stop some surplus processes it will come back and to a more or less normal state.  Except maybe if I am running Oracle, there seems to be no way to recover from running Oracle.

Compare this though, to my Windows box, where I can literally bring it to it’s knees with two … maybe three processes.  And I don’t just mean performance knees either, I mean the box will sometimes lock up, or even if not it never quite recovers (I suspect memory leaks maybe).  This gets especially if not exponentially worse if these two or three processes are attempting to access files on the same disk or partition.  It’s like Windows cannot stand the thought of sharing disk I/O with anyone, even itself.

Now, all that being said, let me make another note, this is not another Windows bashing article that are aplenty all around the ‘net these days.  These are my observations and frustrations that make me shake my head and wonder why slick marketing and strong arm business techniques always supersede quality and performance when it comes to sales (Beta versus VHS comes to mind).

What do you think?  Am I crazy?  Getting senile in my middle age? Or have any of you out there noticed similar things?

• It takes 7 seconds for food to pass from mouth to stomach.
• A human hair can hold 3kg.
• The length of the penis is three times the length of the thumb.
• The femur is as hard as concrete.
• A woman’s heart beats faster than a man’s.
• Women blink twice as much as men.
• We use 300 muscles just to keep our balance when we stand.
• The woman has read this entire text. The man is still looking at his thumb.