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Ok, so I’ve noticed over the last few weeks that more and more ‘gentlemen’ are not flushing the urinal after use. I think it must be 50-50 right now as to whether there will be a nice clean bowl when I go into the bathroom or a stinking yellow fluid to look down on. Its the office, its public restrooms at the beach, the freeway, restaurants, everywhere. Has our society become so selfish and lazy that we can’t even flush the freaking toilet after ourselves now??

Sitting in my hotel last week I watched a lot of Olympics which surprised me as in 2000 I found the US TV coverage of the games to be unpleasant and distasteful: no coverage of foreign athletes and way over the top hyping of even the most unqualified US contender. This time around it seems better, sure we don’t get to see events that aren’t contested by a strong US athlete and if a foreigner beats an America we often don’t see them for more than a split second, but I am enjoying the games this time around. Now if they would only show a British athlete…. but, I know, you blink in an early round and you’ve missed them.

In case anyone is wondering about my PC woes, I have everything working but the performance of the 3.2G P4 chip is sorry to say the least. I’ve learned that the people at ChipsAndMemory are clueless morons and I will never buy from them again. During the install my digital vidcam decided it didn’t want to talk the firewire any more which is a major pain since the 8mm film transfer relies on it. Canon vidcams are notorious (I have since found out) for not working with firewire cards. Odd thing is that it was working on my old machine fine before I built the new one; now it won’t work in either machine. I have other firewire devices that are working so its definitely an issue with the Canon camera.

So no updates this past week due to the fact that I started a new job in San Diego and didn’t bring the URL to the post page with me! But yes I am finally back to work not much to do in my first week but once they discovered I was a Perl person they had me fixing Perl programs – seems that no matter what I get hired to do at any company, I end up writing Perl.

Oct 12 2004: At the request of my employer, I have removed all references to the names and places of my employment from this article.

Found out about this cool service today on the MINI forum I read. At PhotoStamps you can upload any picture you want and they will send you real bona fide stamps with that picture on. It works out around 75c for a first class stamp but would make a great item for mailing special cards etc.

Update: The site doesn’t appear to work in Firefox 🙁

The cable modem has been acting up all week and Adelphia sent someone out to look at it today. Temperatures are now easily in the 110s during the day and it was already 92 at 9am this morning when the guy arrived. He had to do some things outside for maybe 5 minutes and looked a soaked wreck when he was finished. And this is just the start of his day. A lot of people have to work outdoors for some or all of the day so I just wanted to give a shout out to them, much respect to those who can handle it.

I’ve built quite a few PCs in my time and after every one I say “never again” and yet still I am lured by the promise of a cheap machine in exchange for an hour of construction. But it never is an hour, if the machine starts at all, there will be a problem with memory, or if not, the drivers won’t work with the OS etc etc.

My most recent machine built without problem but I discovered that the motherboard was so cheap that the CPU was running real slow, and this machine was going to be my main video compression platform. So I bought a new mobo but destroyed the CPU trying to get it out. Now I have a new CPU (P4 3.2GHz) in the new mobo and the damn thing doesn’t boot into the BIOS, but isn’t giving any errors.

Next time I’m just buying a G5.

It seems like the right time to do it… the Thunderbirds movie is out, and my mail app for the last 8 years, Eudora, keeps crashing when a message has in-line graphics. Further, it likes to put email from potential customers of the business in the Junk folder without me seeing them. I’ve emailed support but all they can tell me is to put the incoming email addresses in my address book. Well, er, I don’t know who these people are before they email me so how the !@%!@ am I supposed to do that?

I’ve already made the switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox with a fair bit of success, so now I’m going to try the email client, Thunderbird. Initially I’ll just use it for the business email but if it looks like a success then Eudora will be history.

As a huge fan and user of Priceline for hotel bookings I had the idea last night that I should try out the concept on my DVD transfer business. So I spent this morning hacking up some forms and PHP to allow people to name their own price for the transfer work. Pretty simple stuff to do but I don’t know of any competitors that allow the same so I am thinking that, so long as the promotion gets coverage, it could bring in quite a bit of work. I guess we’ll see.

So the previous blog wasn’t real good by anyone’s standards; it had been my intention not to rant, rave or otherwise post real pointless drivel but that’s all I could come up with most of the time. So here we are with a new blogging system, the excellent WordPress, and a new start. This time I’m just going to post any old crap and to hell with it.