Recovery CDs are EVIL

A friend of my mothers is having a problem with her computer. The SYSTEM hive keeps becoming corrupt. This has happened before, but it 'magically' recovered itself. This time, it didn't. She called me, the techie, and asked for my help. Ok, I said, let's start with the Recovery Console. Get your Windows XP CD out.



What do you mean you don't have one? Ugh - a recovery CD?! boot it, lets see what we got...reinstall OS or reinstall OS and backup current hard drive to a subdirectory...wonderful...


And you're 2 states away so I can't just drive over with the install CD...


Color me pissed off - to save $1.25 on a CD, the computer manufacturer takes away the ability of a user to fix their problems....evil, I tell you - absolutely evil.

Who's a sheep?

Me - I'm a sheep - Now, besides my LiveJournal (which I never update), my Yahoo 360 (which I use only for photos), my Blog (which you're reading), my Newsvine (fad of the day), I also have a MySpace Page.

New Tele-Converter

I purchased the Quantaray 2x tele-converter for my Canon EOS (Digital Rebel - older body). With my Tamron 70-300mm lens (f4-f5.6) that boosts me to 600mm view (conversion factor 1.6 - 960mm!!!!!). There are now two complications that I am going to have to learn to overcome.

One - manual focus at extreme focal lengths. The lens is not fast enough to keep up with the autofocus circuitry at the longest focal lengths unless you desensitize all the way to sports mode and use the auto-servo. I don't know if you've ever used the auto-servo, but it has a tendency to focus on whatever you're not shooting at the moment. Shooting wildlife is why I wanted the lens, and you're normally shooting through brush or intervening woods, so focusing on your target is too hard for the constant focus mode...

Two - camera shake - Oh my lord. If I was Kate Hepburn before, now I'm Kate Hepburn on methamphetamines. On a cloudy day, at full focal length, open all the way (f5.6 for this lens)at 400 ISO, I was getting about 1/200th of a second (shake, shake, shake your booty) and fuzzy pics. At ISO 800 the result was a still picture, with about the quality of a 110 film blown up to 8"x10".....

I'm going to want lots of sunlight, and I'm going to have to take my tripod with me when I want to shoot.

My hobby just got a bit more complicated, and all for less than $100. Will post pics as soon as I get a clear one (out of 30 shots so far, nothing good enough to be associated with).

Erotic Trees?

Am I the only weird one? If you look at this image with just the right mindset, do you find it strangely erotic? It amazes me the shapes that nature can take, and walking through the woods near home, I spotted this twisted tree trunk. It reminds me of a woman's hips, perhaps with her hand reaching down. Maybe I'm just over-sexed? You decide. You can see one of her fingers.

Now that spring is here, I'll be posting more pictures. I'm not one for the cold, so even though winter can bring some pretty pictures, I'm more of a warm-climate photographer. I dumped my camera memory today and this was the most interesting of the bunch.

Tests find DRM shortens player battery life by up to ~25% - CD Freaks.com

More reasons to avoid DRM! I just finished reading this article: Tests find DRM shortens player battery life by up to ~25% - CD Freaks.com Basically, the headline says it all. Because DRM requires additional circuitry and additional processing power, you could be giving up your precious battery life to feed the fears of the music industry. And 25% of your battery life can be pretty precious with smaller players rated at only a few hours. I've posted about why DRM is evil before, but this is yet another reason to avoid feeding the DRM world. Digital Rights Management doesn't manage YOUR rights, after all. Instead, it steals them. By buying DRM music, you're agreeing to have your rights taken away. Do yourself a favor and don't buy into it.

Op-Ed Piece on Abortion and Community Rule

I've put up an opinion piece on Newsvine that talks about the recent South Dakota anti-abortion law and the planned anti-abortion community planned by Tom Monaghan (of Domino's Pizza fame). If you have a chance, please stop by, read the piece and give it an uptic if you find it interesting. Newsvine has a ratings system for pushing items to the front of the news pages, and I don't think I've garnered enough readers yet to get enough press for the piece. However, it's an important issue and I think that my opinion piece brings some valid discussion points to the fore.

Yet Another Place to Spout My Views - Newsvine

I've signed onto the beta for a service called Newsvine. It's a contributory online newspaper that is composed of postings from people and comments, pointers to online articles (like Digg or Fark) and other combinatory threads. So far, I've written three op-ed pieces (which you'll see if you click on the link), along the same lines as the crap that I usually post on here, but with less personal of a slant. I think I'm going to like the service, and perhaps it will intrigue me enough to keep me writing. At the moment, the service seems to be invite-only, but I have a bunch of invites if you want one. Just let me know and I'll hook you up!

Will Virtual War bleed over into reality?

Virtual Chinese warlords? Are Chinese warlords at it again, invading Korea and stealing their goods? This news article discusses how Chinese hackers are capturing the Lineage accounts from infected web-site trojans, and are alleged to be using that information to log into the user's accounts and steal (and sell) their online goods for real cash.

This activity seems to be leading to virtual war, with South Korean players attacking Chinese players on sight in the online game, identifying them by their inability to speak Korean. It was not stated whether other international Lineage players were also being slaughtered. With real-world cash on the line, could this virtual war lead to real-world war? Certainly the players behind the attacks on both sides may take the fight offline, at least psychologically.

Stay tuned to the battle, keep your eyes open, and your browser safe (stay off those hacker web sites, update your machines, yada, yada...).
*Thanks belong to The Raw Feed for bringing this to Rich's attention.

Changing Web Hosts

I'm changing web hosts to Lunar Pages. I was with Go Daddy for a year, and had problems with their customer service not knowing how to do things, and had problems with their control panel not having adequate control over the website files (like file-level permissions, for example). Now that my term is up with Go Daddy, I'm switching to Lunar Pages, and so far their technical support has been very good. The person on the end of the phone knows exactly what I'm trying to do, and can actually help me with it.

I had a few hiccups with repointing Blogger to the new ftp site, because there are three different places you have to set up the ftp path to your blog files, and it wasn't immediately obvious where the errors were occurring. The blog seems to be publishing fine now (although republishing the whole blog is still taking a while - not sure what the problem is, but 6 years worth of Blog entries could indeed take a while....)

I'll let you know how it turns out....so far I think I'm happier.

Internet Explorer 7: Beta 2 Preview

What I like about the Internet Explorer 7: Beta 2 Preview:

Better Printing - about time - printing a page won't overrun the margins any longer and you can size output intelligently. This has long been a pain in the butt in IE6.

Zoom Feature - an easy accessible Zoom feature on the status bar lets you blow up that picture of Pam Anderson (or whomever) quickly and easily. Great for hard-to-read web pages! It zooms the whole client window, text and pics, and looks like a great feature.

What I DONT like about it:

Whose dumb-ass idea was it to put a non-movable address bar ABOVE the File/Edit/View menu bar? When designing Windows applications, we are instructed OVER and OVER by Microsoft to keep the user interface consistent. That means Application Title Bar, Menu Bar, then anything application specific. What the hell is this crap? I used to be able to turn off the address bar, and now I can't? AND it has to stay on top of everything else?

The irremovable Search box - AND I have to have an extra input box to tab through to get to where I want to be when I'm in keyboard-only mode? Wasn't there ALREADY a search box in IE6 that would safely tuck away if you DIDN'T want to use it? YUCH!