BrainWyrms

• Boot truck today. I am still not quite sure if I should risk my $80 allowance on Sketchers or stick with the proven Magnum boots. #

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• That was brilliant. I just took a hammer and tried to whack a rod into place. And shattered part of it. I hate it when I’m this stupid. #

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Mr. Rom, 8 years old, is rather displeased with me right now.  He’s been working on his homework since I got up this evening and I am not letting him “be done” with it until he double checks his answers for the math homework.

I don’t think he has really even confronted the idea of double checking before…  He keeps going back to the kitchen table and muttering, loudly and angrily, before coming back to me with the same unaltered worksheet.   The 8th question has a problem with carrying, so I can just glance at the sheet and see that he hasn’t fixed it yet.  I tell him to go finish double checking and he says okay nicely, to my face, and then angrily mutters back at the table.

I’m going to have to go sit down with him and work this out.  I want him to do the work, to get the concept, but I think at this point his aggravation is so  high he can’t even see where he is missing the point.

And oh my!  He’s really really not going to be happy when he finishes redoing his math and I tell him that his sentences aren’t sentences…

• Usb is too slow. 58 minutes to copy a DIR from one drive to an external. #
• In a stunning turn of events - Zune software doesn’t like having ONLY 128megs! #

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Today is my second youngest brother’s birthday.  Which means that he is now old enough to drink.  And old enough, hopefully, to be responsible about it.

I’m going to have to give him a yell later.  The last time I talked to him, he was planning on moving into the dorm… and that didn’t work out too well last time.

On second thought, I wonder if I’ll even be able to raise him on the phone.  He’s at least as bad as I am about that, though I seriously doubt he is anywhere near our brother Erebus.

A few months ago I, sucker that I am, picked up another pair of “gaming” headphones.  This particular pair is from Razer, the same company that makes all the gaming mice and my personal favorite pair of earbuds (m100.)  I was pretty impressed with the Barracuda HP-1 and their purported 5.1 surround sound… although my use has been practically nill.  I haven’t even had all of the wires plugged in yet.

What I did notice though, was the clean sound and clear distinction between the rear and center channels.  (Those particular channels only because those are the only ones that I plugged in.)  I thought that the odd DVI-style connector was a bit odd, but chalked that up to a failed entry into the sound card market.

Then I found the Barracuda AC-1 Gaming Audio Card at either Best Buy or CompUSA.  For just under $200!  Ack!

And today, w00t! has a new one for less than $70.  New!  Anyone want to lend me some money?  Donate?  I’ll do odd jobs!  Wanna buy a used hat?  Ummmmm, please!?

Woot : One Day, One Deal (SM)

The other day I ran into an article decrying the myriad of perversions in the video game “Mass Effect.” The author, one Kevin McCullough, is a fear-mongering deluded lier and, it turns out, a supporter of the presidential candidate Huckabee. [ The "Sex-Box" Race for President ]

I’ve been following the Republican primaries with such keen interest that this was my first introduction to Huckabee.

Today, I’m checking out the nifty photos of Mercury on the Bad Astronomy Blog, when I spot a post about Huckabee. [ Huckabee = very very very bad guy ] BAB has a quote from Huckabee via The Raw Story that is worth re-quoting. Again.

“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution,” Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. “But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.” - Raw Story

Mr. Musclehead, McCullough, makes me angry for being such an idiot. Huckabee just scares me silly. Even worse, Huckabee stands in second with 32 delegates to Romney’s 42, according to the Christian Science Monitor. Now I’m almost wishing that I was registered as a Republican so that I could vote in the primaries against this danger. I never thought that the American people would be stupid enough to vote Bush back into office, so now I know that they might be so dumb as to elect this monster. In fact, the more I think about it, the more scared I get.

A story from CNBC via Engadget has the following quote from Steve Jobs regarding Robbie Bach (Microsoft) saying that the Zune was an iPod alternative:

“Was he inebriated? Do you even know anyone who owns a Zune?”

Wow.  How very catty of Jobs.  [snert]  And a valid point to boot.   I have at least -seen- Creative Zen and Apple iPod’s in the wild.  I’ve never seen another iRiver, another Zune, another SanDisk Sansa out there in the world.

Forget the glasses for a HUD, how about contact lenses containing your “super” eyes and heads up display?

 Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

So far the lenses have been “successfully” tested on rabbits with no adverse affects, although the red-diode display has not been lit up yet.  I am emphasizing the “successfully” because the contacts were only in for 20 minutes.  I don’t imagine that my contact lens usage is all that far off from the norm, and I rarely wear my contacts for less than 10 hours at a time.  That means the new circuited lenses have been tested for 1/30 of a usage cycle.

I  doubt we’ll find these available at the local ophthalmologist office any time soon.  And I wonder how many people would really be willing to purchase disposable displays anyhow?  I am totally behind the cyborgification of humans (since we seem to have by-passed natural evolution) but even I (sometimes) draw the line at the checkbook when it comes to disposables.

According to an article over on TechCrunch, DreamHost accidentally overcharged for web services for the next year or two.  Oops.

For once, a company quickly owned up to its mistake and made things right… right away.  This isn’t like Microsoft waiting something like a year to acknowledge that there was something wrong with the Xbox 360 and its red rings of death.  This was even better than Apple returning some of the love to its most die hard fans by refunding part of the price differential after drastically cutting the price for an iPhone.

On the down side, the tone that DreamHost took seems to be offensive to some of the people whose accounts were closed due to “non-payment” and others who were merely overcharged by hundreds of dollars.  Okay, fine.  It is a serious matter and not a joke, but come on!  Didn’t anyone pay attention to ANYTHING DreamHost says on its web site?  Laid back, casual, easy - those are the words that come to mind when I think of how DreamHost runs things.

In other words, just what I expected from DreamHost.

Source::

Dreamhost Overbills Customers $7.5 Million; Uses Homer Simpson To Deliver Apology