Dear Mister Jones

About a year ago I bought a video game, Supreme Commander, to play on my PC.  I don’t buy new video games very often, which probably explains why I still think Pong totally rocks.  So needless to say, I was excited to play my new game.   My computer was relatively new and the game had been out for a while so I only glanced at the system requirements and made my purchase.  Of course, when I got home and installed it and tried to play, it didn’t work.  Upon closer inspection I realized that my video card didn’t have a ‘Vertex Shader / Pixel Shader’.  It was too late to return it at that point, of course, as I had already removed the shrink-wrap.  I considered selling it on ebay, but just depressed myself further when I searched and found that I could have purchased it myself there for about $20 less than I’d paid for it.  So … it sits on my shelf, and when I next upgrade my PC then I’ll finally have a chance to take it for a spin.  I’m sure the wait will be worth it - after all Gamespy said that it was “A game so immense that ’supreme’ might be too delicate a word”.

Since my impulse purchase of a year ago - I have learned that there is a web site you can go to which will scan your computer hardware and tell you whether it’ll be able to play that new video game you’re contemplating.  It is found here: http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/referrer/srtest.  Happy hunting.

Looks like Tige is willing to spend big cash to see people land the elusive 1080 trick (3 complete 360’s, for those of you who are not mathemagicians).  They’re offering $10,080 to whichever finalist can land the trick at the upcoming 2008 Tige Pro-Am Wakeboard Championships.

Me? I’m pretty good at a 180 (only one direction as of yet), and would be happy as a clam at high water if I could ever graduate to pulling a complete 360.

Have you ever had the unfortunate task of removing tree sap from your hands?

I was worried I would end up with the keys from my keyboard stuck to my fingers a few minutes ago, but luckily I picked up a tip here: http://www.ehow.com/how_10395_remove-tree-sap.html. Some helpful soul mentioned that smearing your sap soaked hands with butter and then washing with soap and water would free you. I gave it a try and it worked! Just thought I’d share with you all, in case you just happened to have a run-in with a weepy tree in the future.

 here's a CMD shell tip that works in W2K, WXP, and W2K3.

There is a BASIC MIDSTR function equivalent in batch files... use this syntax as a modifer:

~:start,end

e.g.

set foo=\\servername
@echo unretouched [%foo%]
@echo modified [%foo:~2,99%]

will output:

unretouched [\\servername]
modified [servername]
 

In a corporate network, this is a handy thing to have, for example, if you want to ping the server indicated in the LOGONSERVER variable, which is a UNC instead of just a host name:

ping %logonserver:~2,99%

Or let's say that you want the day of the week. This:

@echo unretouched [%date%]
@echo modified [%date:~0,3%]

will output:

unretouched [Tue 05/06/2008]
modified [Tue]

Nifty.
 

See the help at the end of “FOR /?” for other expansions to variables in file paths, some or all of which are repeated below.

See the Windows Help (no, seriously) and search for “using batch parameters” for lots of interesting expansions, e.g.

%~1 Expands %1 and removes any surrounding quotation marks (”").
%~f1 Expands %1 to a fully qualified path name.
%~d1 Expands %1 to a drive letter.
%~p1 Expands %1 to a path.
%~n1 Expands %1 to a file name.
%~x1 Expands %1 to a file extension.
%~s1 Expanded path contains short names only.
%~a1 Expands %1 to file attributes.
%~t1 Expands %1 to date and time of file.
%~z1 Expands %1 to size of file.
%~$PATH:1 Searches the directories listed in the PATH environment variable and expands %1 to the fully qualified name of the first one found. If the environment variable name is not defined or the file is not found, this modifier expands to the empty string.
Andrew.

What’s in a name?

At one point in my high school experience, we happened upon an old 2-door, beat-up Datsun B210 that my dad was able to purchase from the owner for a whopping $50. I remember taking pride (oddly) in the fact that I had to pay more for insurance than we had paid for the car. As guys often do, my friends and I gave the vehicle a name - calling it the ‘Nuclear Tomato‘.

It had been red at one time, but by the time I was its proud owner, the finish had long since disappeared and the paint had faded to sort of a burnt orange color. It had a chalky texture to it, and if you rubbed up against it with a white shirt, you’d come away looking like you’d just been hit with a well aimed shot of Tang. It had 4 white mag hubcaps.

For anyone that was lucky enough to witness its passage, it screamed that we were at the upper echelons of lower class teenage children. Its greatest feature was the fact that it was missing 3rd gear, so we’d drive around town with the engine RPMs nearing redline all the time in second gear, and occasionally we’d quick-shift into fourth gear while passing girls so they wouldn’t be overpowered by the high whine of the engine. I don’t remember what eventually happened to the car, but it had a very short life. I think it eventually lost fourth gear as well, and I believe we ended up selling it and still making a profit on it.

When my son’s old enough to drive, I’m looking for something similar to the Nuclear Tomato. It didn’t do much for my dating life (the passenger door only opened from the inside, I just remembered that), but it increased my coolness factor with my buddies in the way that only things like broken bones, belly button lint, and never-been-washed T-Shirts can.

As far as names go, I’ve always thought that we had dibs on the coolest name ever given to a car. Saying that you were heading out to go somewhere in the ‘Nuclear Tomato’ always elicited fun responses.

Can you identify these 11 famous cars?

Here are some nicknames given to some famous movie and television cars. How many can you identify just by their name? See if you can recall where they appear before clicking to find out. FYI - 8 of these are from movies, and 3 are from T.V.

• Chitty-chitty-bang-bang
• Greased Lightning
• Christine
• General Lee
• Lightning McQueen
• Ocho
  
• Kitt
• Bluesmobile
• Ecto-1
• Eleanor
• Dragula

What other famous car’s are out there with well-known names? What are some of your better nicknames you’ve had for your own cars?

It was Tuesday, August 24th, 2004 and I was watching the Olympics. I remember in particular the women’s 100m hurdles. The winner of the race, and of the gold medal, was Joanna Hayes of the U.S. It was quite a dramatic race; Perdita Felicien, the favorite and the world champion at the time, fell heavily at the first hurdle, leaving Joanna Hayes to carry on leading from start to finish. In the media coverage that followed, much was said about Perdita Felicien and Joanna Hayes. But in that race, there is one hurdler who was hardly mentioned at all, but to me, her race was the most poignant one of all. You see, when Perdita Felicien fell, in an attempt to cushion her fall, she threw out her right arm and caught Irina Shevchenko from Russia, causing her to fall down as well.

When I saw Irina Shevchenko go down, I could only imagine the heartache and mental anguish she would be feeling as the day wore on. Such thoughts as these would be going through her mind:

Read more »

There’s just something wrong about the fact that solar powered calculators do not have an off button. Even though it’s been this way for the several years that I’ve owned my Texas Instruments BA-35 Solar, I still check occasionally, just on the off chance that I’ve missed it all of these years. When I’m unable to turn it off I somehow feel like I’m wasting the sun’s energy. Someday someone is going to find out that the combined heat from all of the solar powered calculators on the earth was the tipping point that kicked off the whole global warming situation. Help save the earth, turn your solar powered calculator face-down when you’re not using it.

I wonder why they haven’t created a solar powered TV remote control yet? Sure, it’d still have to use batteries at night, but if we can harness the power of the sun to calculate the square root of pi, then why can’t we figure out how to use it to flip to the Daily Show?

Here’s a quick little movie about how someone found a way to help their customer’s feel special - so much so that they’d stand in long lines just to be serviced by this associate! http://www.stservicemovie.com/

Dare to give excellent service - now.

Securing your web site or your MTA with SSL encryption (i.e. HTTPS traffic) can be a daunting task if you’ve never worked with it before. The following steps assume that you’ll be working from a Linux server running Apache web server and/or postfix.

To understand how the whole SSL encryption process works, check out this article here.

From the server you’re going to install the ssl certificate onto, do the following:

Read more »

If you want a better understanding of how TCP Windows work and how they interact with round trip time to contribute to delays that you may experience with network communications, I recommend reading this newsletter by Mark Minasi, specifically the ‘Vista and 2008’s New TCP Windows’ section.