Archived News starting from 04-19-2007 and earlier
BlogToday I brought my
Cougar into the local Tuffy shop to get neutered. The noise from my flowmaster muffler was too much for Lisa to handle on trips, and my approach to 30 years of age has been making me rethink the noise as well. That or Lisa has successfully hooked into my subconscious and is now controlling my thoughts. The owner of the Tuffy shop has been named "The Rainman of Exhausts" by
Duane for good reason. He can whip up a solution to just about anything for $200. For my situation he had a muffler from a minivan ready to mount under my car, and he actually got it to
fit successfully. At idle I don't even know my car is running, but anything under load it's almost louder than it was before the operation. I'm guessing it's jammed so tight into the exhaust chamber the vibrations are transmitting directly into the cabin area. Needless to say the operation failed, and I still have a loud Cougar. My next step is some kind of vibration dampening or a return to the restrictive stock exhaust. Since old folks over 30 shake their fist at any kind of noise, and don't need a fast car, it will probably be the stock exhaust. Unless of course Lisa implants another thought into my subconscious.
Thanks again to the
transitive property, I now have a new Wii attached to my 42" Plasma TV. I decided to let the Morlock unbox, set up, and try it out before my Wii bowling debut. Lisa dominated the first few games, but the Morlock eventually beat us both. I was in last place due to the defective Wiimote which interpreted a curve for my every throw. This was later confirmed at the
Kelleys where my bowling game improved significantly on their properly calibrated Wii. I imported my Mii from Steve's Wii, and Lisa whined excessively about the suggestive nose we gave her Mii, which of course prompted a permanent lock on her character. I have to admit it's an addictive gaming console; the
giant 8-bit mario in Super Paper Mario alone justifies owning one, but something seems not quite right
from this angle.
There comes a time in every mans life when they learn the depth of their fiances love. For me, today is that day. The original
Knight Rider car KITT is
up for sale in it's fully restored condition. Will she rob a bank to give me the ultimate 80's nerd posession? Only time (and devotion) will tell.
Lisa and I recently returned from a
visit to the flatlanders to celebrate their newborn flatlander. The baby
loves bacon and eggs, so we were treated to breakfast every morning. We were also given a new addition to the Gnome family, henceforth known as "Fruity." Lisas parents also gave us "Bugsy" with his very own mushroom house. I was so excited about the new Gnomes I bought the last
Quiznos bundt cakes in Ohio (they are discontinued) to celebrate. Unfortunately, neither Lisa nor the flatlanders wanted anything to do with this delicacy, so I was forced to eat them myself.
Ron and Jen's gift of
Sleepy on St. Patricks day before Fruity and Bugsy has resulted in an exponential increase in Gnome population at my house (MiDGE is the
most disturbing Gnome ever). No longer a solitary Gnome, Butt now has to relearn socialization with
Fruity and Bugsy outside while Sleepy and MiDGE party inside. I predict an outcome similar to the
crack spider with Butt as the victor (and mushroom house owner).
Four years ago I
bought a Roomba, which I used for about 8 months before the ledge sensor busted, at which point I sold it on eBay. Fast forward to a few days ago and a
refurbished Scooba deal sucked me back into the world of iRobot. My hatred of mopping and Lisa's continued disregard for the
good wives guide created a need for something to clean my hardwood floors any ways, or at least that's how I justified it. It's definitely much larger than my old Roomba, and after a full nights charge it was cleaning my kitchen floor
better than I had ever done. The "waste water" was a dark black to prove the job was done, and so far it's performed flawlessly. It's "AWARE" programming as the manual claims still seems to be the same random circle/wall follow/45 degree turns my old Roomba did, but who am I to argue with marketing acronyms. Hopefully I'll update in another 8 months that it's still working, but even if it isn't I'd pay $180 for 8 months of not having to mop.
This plagued me for over an hour today and I thought it would be helpful to make a post since a Google search yielded lots of complaints but no solutions. I did find
this work around which avoided the problem, but I suspected the video card drivers might have been the cause. After reinstalling the drivers, I was able to re-enable all the animation options the work around disabled with no problems. If you get a "Sysfader: Iexplore.exe Application Error" dialog box with something like "the memory was unable to be written" reinstalling your video drivers will solve the problem. I'm guessing sysfader.exe interacts with the video drivers in a specific way (fade effect) and causes the error to occur.
I recently discovered
OpenSearch, a search description standard similar to RSS that serves as a web site search API among other things. I'm sure it's been around for a long time, and I'm just now discovering it, but the important thing is that
IE 7 and
Firefox both support it. If you're reading this from my website, and using one of these browsers, check out the upper-right search box in your browser. There's an arrow to choose more search providers and "Atomic News" should be one of them (IE7 goes all crazy orange to let you know). Why everyone doesn't have this setup is a mystery to me. I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to search a website for "Shenanigans" but had a morbid fear of clicking the "search" link on the webpage. With this feature, you can set your fears aside and stay comfortably within the browser, without clicking on any of those scary links on the webpage. Since I know everyone added my search as one of their providers, you can now find out what I think about any topic immediately as you browse the web. Don't kid yourself, you know that's what you've been dreaming of for years.
Whineyho introduced me to a movie called
Idiocracy. If you never heard of it there is a theory it was
sandbagged for the negative portrayals of it's sponsors. Despite it's non-exposure I thought it was awesome, as Whineyho predicted. I found the
movie intro for anyone foolish enough not to watch it based purely on my opinion.
After
Stavos built his new computer and
bested my 3DMark score, I learned that Philips is
phasing out plasma displays. My
50" Plasma is now heading toward end-of-life technology as the LCD display grows exponentially in popularity (and size). With my computer and tv no longer on the cutting edge, I was feeling old and obsolete. Even my useless-but-cutting-edge x64 Vista install wasn't helping. Then I found the
plasma wikipedia entry which lead me to the
plasma tv science website. Here I could drown my sorrow in the history and future of plasma displays, and get a good feeling about my TV back. The next logical step is to join the
8800 club, but so far my cheapness is winning that battle.
At the bequest of the
Morlock, I installed
ASP.NET 3.0 along with
AJAX for .NET on this server today. Thinking I had done him a great service, I told him it was ready to use to which he immediately responded with a complaint that I didn't make a database change in my comments. I told him to use the new .NET 3.0 workflow system I just installed to write up a detailed flowchart of the change request. Ten minutes later I got
this jewel in response. Clearly the best workflow diagram ever.
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