Welcome to Jon's Journal. This is my personal website where I post my random thoughts, pictures, projects, and anything else I feel like writing about.
I am sure you have no doubt noticed I have not been updating my blog very much as of late. I think a large part of it is because when I write something these days I tend to focus too much on political stuff, and quite frankly writing about politics these days is not fun or interesting anymore. Far too often I find myself getting headaches out of anger since the more research I do for a piece, the more shit I find that really infuriates the hell out of me.
So going forward I am going to completely avoid politics as a subject around here. People who know me know where I stand, and if I do get the itch to write about politics I will likely post on a more appropriate site such as OpenLeft.
I am also going to remove all of my previous politically-oriented posts from this site. No, I am not hiding nor am I ashamed of what I have said, but I am doing so because I want this site to be a place to share and discuss fun stuff that I enjoy in life. Stuff like geeky tech gadgets, toys, cars, home projects, food, music, life, etc.
If someone is really interested in my previous political postings I have made here and since deleted, they can always use the WayBack Machine. Once you say something on the web these days you best be ready to stand by it because when it is out there, it is out there for good 🙂
Cheers,
–Jon
So tonight I went to do my usual monthly routine of skimming through my spam folders to make sure that there was nothing legit accidentally placed in there. This is far from an enjoyable task, especially on my Yahoo mail account which averages 8,000-12,000 spam emails per month – a drawback no doubt from having the email publicly out there for over 11 years and used for pretty much all correspondence where I suspect I will be spammed.
I can safely say I pretty much fucking hate spammers. If I did not sign up to be on a mailing list for XYZ, DON’T FUCKING TELL ME ABOUT IT.
It is kind of interesting the shit you see in your spam box. And surprisingly it is lacking in diversity as when going through it there are some themes that seem really common.
This got me to thinking, if somehow all email was archived in a cave somewhere, and the Earth got fucked up by a meteor or something, and email was the only way visitors from space got to learn about our society, what would they learn about us if they read the spam?
1. Apparently folks in our society do not need to go to college to get an education – all you have to do is pay some site and you will receive a degree. Obviously this makes you highly qualified.
2. All Canadian pharmacies sell only viagra, cialas, and oxycontin. And everyone needs this stuff.
3. College girls love to masturbate, but only on camera. And only if you visit their site because they have a crush on you. And you pay them money. Maybe they would not need the money if they went to item #1 above.
4. Everyone needs more credit cards. Especially ones from no-name banks with 30% interest rates. But it’s ok, everyone that applies gets one!
5. I am pretty certain if the spam is to be believed I am the only person in the US without a time share! I guess I am not a good member of society.
6. Everyone on Earth seems to have some serious fecal problems. All we need is colon cleanse. Colon cleanse should obviously be a part of your daily consumption as if it were another food group.
7. You should never pay for software, music, movies. You can always get it cheap from China. Everyone in the software and entertainment biz works for free!
8. There is a lot of money waiting for me. In an African bank. Just provide pertinent bank info and await the deposit!
9. No one drives to work anymore. We all work from home making $7,500-$10,000 dollars a month with our own franchises.
10. And last but not least, there must have been a major outbreak of small penis syndrome since obviously EVERYONE needs penis enlargement.
–Jon
I have been an avid fan of real-time strategy games ever since the first time I played Dune II on my old Pentium 90 back in 1993 up through the now-legendary StarCraft. Building up a base, gathering resources, building and mobilizing armies and the rapid pace at which you have to make decisions in a tough, competitive match can be a real adrenaline rush.
I remember back in 1998 when StarCraft first came out that we would play it on the LAN in our office every evening when work was done for the day. Some of the games went late into the night and would be pretty heated. The best times were our 4 vs 4 games. These were the real battles. The rivalries and competitive drive would rival that of cross-town baseball teams. There would be shit-talking, name-calling, teasing, gloating etc. And we loved every bit of it.
Well, that is almost ten years ago, and while some may disagree with me, I have to say the genre has become stagnant over the last 6-7 years with most of the new titles being released either being a) shitty or b) minor upgrade/re-skin of an older title. Then you had good franchises that had a good title, but the factions were poorly balanced like in Red Alert 2: Yuri’s Revenge. No one can tell me with a straight face that Yuri’s faction was balanced.
Enter Command & Conquer 3. C&C3 was released this past spring, but due to my ill-conceived assumptions that it would suck I did not get around to buying it until recently. In fact, if not for a trip to the Apple store and seeing it on the shelf I might not have tried it. But being that I am a happy Mac user who is experimenting with Mac gaming (improving but still has a long way to go) I decided to buy it for the hell of it.
Needless to say I was pleased. The game is fun. The artificial intelligence seems to be a HUGE improvement over previous titles in the franchise. And as far as graphics go this one is probably the biggest leap forward in an RTS game to date. In fact even on my Macbook Pro with it’s substantial specs, setting all the graphics options to full slowed the game down enough to be noticeable.
First thing I did was fire up some skirmish games to get a feel for it. Set up some games with me and three computer teammates versus four computer opponents. A cocky decision – I set the AI for my opponents to “brutal” – in Red Alert 2 I could man-handle brutal computer opponents even out-numbered. In Command & Conquer 3 I got curb-stomped pretty hard.
I had a base in the corner of the map with a substantial defensive setup and the AI was smart enough the find the one hole I had and exploit the hell out of it. I quickly learned that the artificial intelligence is not the same inept AI as in the past. No longer would they repeatedly zerg my most fortified points. At one point they even somehow managed to sneak this massive artillery unit into the thin strip of land behind my base on the border of the map to bombard the hell out of my power plants which brought my defensive systems down and enabled them to hit me from the front of my base as well. I pretty much got my ass handed to me.
Another cool option when setting up a skirmish game is that not only can you set the level of the AI for the computer opponents, but now you can set their style – ie. they can focus on all-out offensive rush, turtle-like defense, or balanced. Combine these factors with the difficulty, and the new handicap modifier the game has a substantial amount of room to customize the battle. Whether you want a near-impossible scenario, or a game where you fire it up and just romp all over the computer you can pretty much do it all.
As with other real-time strategy games, there are many web sites where you can download custom player-created maps to try out. Some are designed to give you unlimited resources so you can really give it to your opponent while others are designed to make it hard to attack the opposing bases by using landscape to create some natural defenses and choke points.
After a couple of weeks doing skirmishes and playing some online games I have started playing the single-player campaigns. So far so good. This is one of those areas where the Command & Conquer franchise has always done well. The storylines are fun and well-written and make the game feel much more alive. Seeing Michael Ironside and Billy Dee Williams among the actors in the game is kind of like an 80’s flashback, but cool although I must admit that I am somewhat biased since I am a fan of their work.
Between C&C3 and the announced StarCraft 2 it looks like the genre may be experiencing a bit of a renaissance.
–Jon
It was a little over two years ago I made the “switch” to Apple for my main computer with the purchase of a G4 Mac mini and I have not really looked back. As a technologist, I pretty much keep my eyes open to every bit of technology out there. Until Mac OS X came out I did not give the Mac a serious look because in all honesty, the “Classic” OS sucked. It was slow and it seemed to struggle with multiple applications running concurrently.
Well, that is a long time ago now and Mac OS X is on it’s fifth cat now with Leopard coming out last month. Leopard seems like a whole other world when looking back at that shitpile they called OS 9. With Apple’s migration to Intel hardware it felt like it was a good time to upgrade and besides, I have been using the same Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop for about 7 years now so I decided to kill two birds with one stone.
Enter my new 17″ Macbook Pro that recently arrived. I named it Aries and it is a pretty sweet machine. I got this sucker loaded up with the 2.6ghz processor, 4GB ram, 200GB 7200 RPM hard drive.
A lot of my free time the past couple of days has been spent setting it up my way. You know how that goes, you get a new machine and you have to tweak the hell out of it, install your favorite applications, and iron out any kinks to reach that point where it feels perfect.
From my many many years using a Windows computer as my main machine I had a set of apps that I had grown accustom to and would always make sure they are installed. Well, on the Mac it is the same, except when I made the switch I had to spend some time figuring out what applications that did not have Mac versions and what replacements that were comparable to what I used on Windows. Luckily it seems more and more organizations are making their products multi-platform. I already have Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Thunderbird, and Firefox on the Mac, but not a day goes by anymore where you don’t read about other application being ported.
Here are some of my favorite Mac apps:
skEdit
On the PC I was a HUGE fan of UltraEdit – I still install and keep it updated on my Windows machine at home. skEdit is not quite as good as UltraEdit, but it is very close. When I first made the switch to Mac, I tried TextWrangler and a few others that had the ability to do editing/saving over SFTP connections. skEdit does the colored syntax, WebDAV, and even has a plug-in to work with Subversion repositories which is cool.
Adium
Adium is like the ULTIMATE instant messenger on the Mac or on any platform for that matter. The closest thing to it is Pidgin which is my favorite on Windows and Linux. It took me some time to discover Adium. When I first made the switch I was using AOL’s AIM client for Mac OS X which by the way sucks and has not been updated in YEARS. I kept seeing Adium mentioned on TUAW and decided what the hell and gave it a try. Good call – it is very customizable, supports pretty much every IM protocol, and is a very solid app.
Cyberduck
In the Windows world I never did find an FTP/SFTP client that really clicked for me. I often switched between WS-FTP Pro and SecureFX – both commercial options and both decent. Thankfully on the Mac I found free options that I happened to like better. I first started off with Fugu, but unfortunately Fugu does not seem to be maintained any longer and it still a PowerPC app. So I started using Cyberduck and it has proven to be a great little program. Not sure why but the Mac seems to have many more good FTP/SFTP options that on Windows. Perhaps it is because of all the web designers that work on Macs. Who knows?
What I am looking for now is a good replacement for HyperTerminal. Yeah I know it is not a great app, but when I need to connect via serial console to a router or firewall the options on the Mac don’t seem to be as mature yet.
Here’s to the next year of Mac goodness 🙂
–Jon
We all have our vices. For some it’s TV. Others it may be alcohol or drugs. Some people even get so addicted to video games that it ruins their life.
What’s my vice? None other than Starbucks. I never really gave much thought about going to Starbucks on the way to work in the morning and plunking down four bucks for a venti mocha.
But it was not just the morning. I would also get one around lunch time. And if it was one of those slow days I would get yet another. At an average of four bucks a pop, that is twelve dollars spent per day.
Do the math over the course of a week, and then over a month, and then over a year. It is amazing how quick it adds up.
It finally registered for me when I was looking at my bank statements online and saw this pie chart for my expenditures last year. There was this relatively small slice of the pie that was there nonetheless – it was Starbucks. Sure enough, over the course of 2006 I managed to spend over $2,200 dollars just buying mochas! Needless to say I was displeased when I realized this. Think of what you can do with an extra $2,200 a year. Four bucks here, four bucks there, and damn – the little things DO add up, painfully hehe.
Empowered with this knowledge I have since started scaling back. I went down to two a day a couple of weeks ago, and now I am doing about 1.5 a day averaged out. Hopefully by next spring it will be an occasional “treat” as opposed to a staple of my diet.
Here is a sample of what last week looked like:
So yeah, take my advice. Sometimes making a seemingly small change can make a big change down the road. Money saved from less mochas will lead to a new laptop for me 🙂
–Jon