Soupergenius

Recently I had been looking into upgrading my home computer so that I could look at Vista. Well after buying two different video cards, I was able to finally get to use Vista with full abilities. It did not make sense to me to have a crippled OS so I got an ATI Radeon 1650 Pro card. My computer finally scored a 4, up from a 2 in the performance rating. I also found out, with my motherboard, I should be able to drop a new processor like an AMD x2 or FX processor with no work except updating the bios. This made me happy, as I thought it was going to take a new motherboard to get to new processor architectures. The thing I like the most in Vista so far is their Parental Controls. This is a feature that should have been added during one of the XP service packs. I also have been trying to get Fedora 6 to install in a Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 environment and finally was able to accomplish that. It seems to run slow, but I have not really done anything with it. To install, it was necessary to use the “linux text” install option. Then it was necessary to modify the xorg.conf file and change the color depth to 16. I also changed the video card to “vesa” in the xorg.conf file and that supplied more video resolutions to choose from. I also changed the option to have gdm start during bootup, as I am very visually orientated due to using windows for so long.

Finally, the weather is getting back to normal. Schools were closed for most of last week and reopened on Tuesday. The dogs did not know what to do with all the ice on the ground, they could not find places to go to the bathroom. I had to go 4-wheeling to get into my parking place. Luckily the weather has warmed up and things will be all better soon. It was nice to have the 1 week of winter, but now I am ready for spring.

This was a really good movie. I was able to predict that the Countess was going to be alive at the end, but there were times throughout the movie that I questioned my self. Edward Norton is a really good actor and continues with his performance in this film. I was glad that they explained everything at the end. The chief inspector was also very good. I also like him in Private Parts as pig vomit. I was glad to see that he is still working, because he is very talented as well, just not as big a name as Norton. I was led to believe that this movie may be based on actual events, but am not too sure about that. If so, this magician probably rivaled Houdini.

This is our first real storm of the season and it is turning into nothing. A week ago there was talk of multiple inches of snow with a little ice. Now it is 1-2 inches of snow with a quarter inch of ice, but the last thing that I heard was that there was going to be rain all day tomorrow. That will probably melt everything off, so our storm is a one night inconvenience. I was hoping to have some time at home to finish a few things and work on my RC cars. I also wanted to play with them in the snow, but there is not enough to play in. There is talk of snow this weekend, but just a dusting. Hopefully they get that wrong as well and it is a 6-8 inch storm. It is weird that we have not had that much snow yet this year. Maybe there is some truth to the global warming effect.

I did not even think about it and ran into an issue with the old theme. I am still looking at new themes and when time permitting, will create my own (more than likely). This seems nice and allows pictures to be displayed well, so I will probably stick with this one for a while. So far everything except the theme are working well. While I was typing, I just saw it auto save my post. Very Cool feature. I am still looking at the plugins that are supposed to work with 2.1 and have tried to implement a plugin to allow mobile viewing. I have not tested that yet, but will do so soon. More to come later.

Ron Artest of the Sacremento Kings sakys that he is ‘horrible at’ dog care.  If you are so bad at it, why do you have any dogs?  If you can’t take the time to make sure that they are doing well, then give them to someone who will.  Mr. Artest will make over 7 million dollars this year.  If I had that kind of money, I would definitely be able to make sure that my dogs were in the best care possible.  I would have someone come over a few times a day to excercise with them (especially if I were on a road trip) and make sure that they had food available and most definitely a source of fresh water.  Kudos go to the neighbors who stepped up to help these poor dogs out.  You know it is a bad situation if the neighbors are supplying water for the dogs.  The courts should take all of his dogs from him and make sure that he learns what animal cruelty is before letting him have any ever again.  Also, bringing in a professional doggy watcher from out of state is not going to fix the problem, the problem is with him and how HE treats the animals.  This is just like cases of animal hording that can be found all over the internet.  People think that they are doing the right thing and most definitely are not.  If you are not responsible, then don’t take on more responsibilty.

The fact that Sirius lets me stream my radio broadcast to my desktop makes me really glad that I am a subscriber.  I can’t wait until all the stations are available though.  I hope that my the NCAA tournament, that I will be able to listen to games and to NASCAR races through the internet.  This way I don’t have to run an antennae all over the place just to get reception.  In my office, the reflecting windows seem to mess with reception.  Now (well for a while now) all I have to do is open a Yahoo widget and I have access to all the music stations.  It definitely makes time go by with good music in the background.  I also use a widget to listen to 106.7 WJFK in the mornings, so that I can hear Junkies in the morning.  It is much easier to use than their stream page.

This year’s Super Bowl was a pretty good game.  I thought at first that the Bears would blow out the Colts, especially with the initial touchdown.  I kept hearing how good their defense was, but it looked average to me.  After the first touchdown, the Colts pretty much owned the game.  They had turnovers that kept the Bears in it, but also got just as many as the gave away.  The game was exciting and that was probably more due to the rain and the slick football, but it is hard to stop a team that can control the ball like Indy did, when your own offense is doing nothing.  I would not be surprised to see the Bears look for QB help for next year.  Their game plan was very simple because they did not have enough trust in Grossman to give him free reign with the offense.  All the Colts had to do was stop the run and force him to make plays.  He made a few, but also made some mistakes.  Overall I would give the game a B.  Prince was better than the Rolling Stones of last year, even though I am no Prince fan.  The commercials were pretty lame, and so am I since I was looking forward to watching them.  My favorite was the Bud Light commercial with the hitchhikers.

This past weekend I went to the car show at the Washington Convention Center. It was the show with all of the new products from the car manufacturers. It was pretty interesting and really fun. The new Chevrolet Camaro concept and Chevrolet Volt were probably the highlight for me. I also enjoyed seeing what the prices on the production cars were listed at, as that helps to keep me looking at cars in my price range. I saw the Bentleys, Rolls Royces, Ferraris, and they were all very interesting, but I spent more time looking at the Toyota FJ Cruiser, the Honda Ridgeline, and the Cadillac CTS, as these are the vehicles that appeal to me. One of the neat features of the FJ Cruiser is the 110v outlet in the back of the truck. I have always wondered when these were going to become more popular. My only problem with the trucks that I looked at is that the back seats are all a little smaller than I would like. It almost seems like you need to get a full sized truck just to get decent back seat room. One of the main reasons for attending the show was to see how many new alternate fuel and hybrid style cars were going to be coming out. I did not see as many as I would have liked, but a lot of the manufacturers talked about E85 and gas/electric hybrids. Ford had a chassis with a hydrogen tank on display, Saturn had a cutaway vehicle pointing out hybrid technology and Toyota had a big walk through display (that I did not go through as the line was way to long). Overall, it was interesting to see the future of automobiles starting to really change as hybrids and gas alternates are becoming more main stream and designed with mass market appeal. The Prius looks to be old school and the Volt appears next generation.  I took some pictures and loaded them into the gallery.

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Since I don’t really have much to say I will talk about general things. First off, I am really starting to like Microsoft Virtual Server, it makes testing products much easier since I can have a baseline and add and remove stuff easily. If I make a mistake, I can be back to the original build of the product in minutes instead of hours. I have not figured out how to put Fedora Core 6 (ZOD) Linux on it yet, I keep failing during the install. If I end up having more free time I will try again or just use Ubuntu Linux or Knoppix. I have used all 3 of these and am a bigger fan of Fedora for a work setting and Knoppix for utilities. I am just barely familiar with Ubuntu, but it seems to be one of the faster growing distributions. I also want to figure out how to run one of these distributions from a usb drive (under 4 gig).

Our dogs are all doing well. Pharaoh has had an upset stomach and has not been a fan of the cold weather recently. He is getting pretty good about using his “litter” box during this weather. Not 100% but still better than not at all. It is just a large rubbermaid storage container with the front cut out and some puppy training pads inside of it. Actually, overall I think all of the dogs have gotten better about their training. I still need to get them to classes for some extra mental stimulation.