Mind you, the song is still about seeing a hot girl in a club and wanting to sex her up. But we took “god” out of it, so it shouldn’t offend the Christians.

O.o

The general premise (spoiler alert) is really just Skynet with rag dolls and not-actually-Nazis-but-clearly-Nazis. The idealistic scientist creates an artificial brain, and is then shocked when the government wants to use it for war instead of just building cool toys. The artificial brain eventually realizes that the world would be a lot better without humans, and thus turns it’s enormous war arsenal against humans and kills us all. Fortunately for us, the scientist created 9 little rag dolls and gave each of them a part of his soul. When the rag dolls use the soul talisman to defeat the artificial brain, then… Well, fuck if I know. We end the movie with the soul pieces from the five dead rag dolls ascending into the clouds and causing it to rain, while the remaining four rag dolls say “this world is ours now.”

Umm, did I miss something? What the hell was the point of this? Apparently there’s no humans left, and we’ve got four rag dolls that as far as anyone can tell have no way to reproduce that have inherited the war ravaged, corpse littered world.

Yeah, sorry, just doesn’t really connect with me as an audience member. At least in the Terminator movies you’re always left with the impression that if the humans can finally defeat Skyney, we can repopulate the world. When our rag doll proxy saviors accomplish the final victory it seems enormously empty and fruitless.

I think this single month expenditure earns me an automatic spot in Apple Heaven, even if I’m not a mindless Jobs Acolyte, right?

The actual Internet connection via power line was fine – fast enough for gaming, but still a little slow on the downloads. The big issue was that some of her HD movies on the NAS require 13+ Mbps to stream, and we couldn’t seem to push more than about 8-9 Mbps via the powerline adapters and even less via the wireless. Finally, I gave in to the reality that I would have to use a Cat5 cable to get the performance we needed.

My first instinct was to just run the cable along the floor board and tuck it under the carpet. The first problem with that plan was that I had to traverse the kitchen, which is linoleum. The second problem was that the build quality in the apartment is actually pretty good, and I couldn’t easily pull up the carpet edge.

Next I thought I might just get some white cable and staple it to the ceiling/wall. Reflection on that idea revealed that it would look too ghetto, especially since I couldn’t readily find color matching cable.

So I finally settled on doing it the “right way.” I got a shit load of wire mold (aka conduit) and starting running the cable. Several hours worth of labor later, we have 100 Mbps from the NAS to the PS3 and all is right with the world!

The Dell R210 is going to be the foundation for the NinjaLAN in our new apartment. It’ll have ESXi on it so I can setup VMs to experiment with Windows 2008 and Linux (two skillsets I need to polish). It also has a iDRAC6 card, so I can remotely power it on and off when I’m traveling for work.

The iPad is the more controversial of the two purchases… When the iPad came out, I was fairly vocal about my disapproval of the pricing. And truth be told I still think it’s overpriced. (It’s Apple, so no real surprise there, right?) But I’ve decided to make a real push at going completely away from paper for my work. At this point, I’m down to a notepad that I use for daily notes and at meetings, etc. I’ve already started transitioning everything I take notes on to Evernote, but the iPhone is just too small and unwieldy to use as a note taking tablet in meetings.

The other hurdle I’ve had with the iPhone platform for the last year or so was the absence of a task tracking sync between Outlook and the phone. However, I started using ToodleDo this past month and have been extremely happy with it. The features are so much richer, I would have happily moved to it from Outlook regardless of the mobile device issues. The combination of the ToodleDo app and the ToodleDo mobile website make using the iPhone and my laptop/desktop a perfect integration.

So now the end goal is to get to a completely virtual workflow for my professional work. The last impediment to that goal is the paper notebooks I lug around. I have more than one, because I separate my clients into separate notebooks. (I typically surrender the notebook to the client when a long term project completes, so they have complete work notes of how everything was put together.)

So we’ll see how it all works out in the end. Hopefully this really will be the last major expense for a while!

* This is the configuration I’ve been using lately, so the m0n0wall was hopefully going to match it for performance…

Two things are immediately obvious after these test. 1) Comcast is capping my upload speed at about 2.8 Mbps. 2) The m0n0wall firewall just isn’t going to cut it. Since the native connection (the bottom config) is pushing 36 Mpbs, it’s bad enough that the Linksys cuts me down to 30 Mbps. The features of the m0n0wall would be nice, but at least on the Soekris 4501 hardware, the performance hit is just too extreme. So for now it’s back to the drawing board…

I’m really looking forward to summer in the Boston area.

from	Emails @ Risk <emails.at.risk@gmail.com>
date	Fri, May 7, 2010 at 3:18 PM
subject	Emails use in Twitter

Dear dthvt

We have found that your email is shared in tweets. We advise you to hide
your email from spammers by sharing email address as an image or hide it
behind a url.

Visit  us at : http://emails-at-risk.appspot.com?e=sbao to find how you
can do this.

Happy Twitting !!!
"2 million  emails are sent every second. About
 70% to 72% of them might be spam and viruses."

<sarcasm> Oh wow, thanks for the unsolicited email warning me about the dangers of unsolicited emails! I’ll definitely click that link you sent me! </sarcasm>

Eat shit and die.

If you’ve never used Apture, it’s a set of scripts you can install on your blog (or website in general) and use to embed content like images or youtube videos on your pages. One of the neat features of Apture is that you could actually use their “Live Editor” to add content to your page after it was published. I never tracked down the exact mechanism, but the basic idea is that their servers store all the embedded objects for your page, and when your page gets loaded the Apture script automatically checks their server and then embeds the images, videos, etc. dynamically.

Long story short, if you use Apture’s “Live Editor” feature, those links, images, and videos only show up because a server owned by Apture tells them to. Apture’s recent email included the following tidbit:

If you previously added Apture links to your posts using the Apture Live Editor (triggered by hitting the “e” key on your keyboard and inserting links into previously published posts) they will continue to render on your pages. We will do our best over time to keep them rendering, but if you notice missing links please do not hesitate to reach out to us on Get Satisfaction or via email.

That sums it all up – if Apture were to ever go bankrupt or otherwise stop supporting your page via their server, your “Live Editor” images, videos and links would disappear. If you use their pre-publishing solution (where the links and objects are directly embedded in your webpage by you), this isn’t a problem. So I’m not saying to steer clear of Apture totally, just be aware of your risk.

This type of thing highlights the risk we all face to losing the content – whether that be pictures, videos, or blog posts. Make sure you understand the platform you chose to host your content, or you may get an email someday telling you that the site is going down and your content is going with it…