The Screaming Viking

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Reason #1 to vote for Fred Thompson

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Gonna be a good fuckin day today….

Jesus christ I’m pissy. The kid pissed me off this morning, took her 40 min to figure out what she was going to wear. She get’s up at 640, I got up at 720 today…usually I’m up around 10 after. She get’s up fairly early to compensate for all the little kid bullshit she has to do. By the time I got up, she was standing there in her underwear staring at her closet trying to find clothes… Told her she had 30 seconds or she’s going to school nekked. Then I had to deal with frost on my windows this morning….that just pisses me off. I come in to work and the hands on the clock are actually moving backwards. Read the BOFH comic for today…that pretty much sums up my feelings about Fridays. I think they are actually worse than Mondays in some cases.

My god damn phone isn’t holding a charge again…charged it up full by 7pm last nite and today just before noon it’s down to one bar…fuckin things. Avoid the moto q, it’s not worth it. Hrm, the other day I enabled/disabled the pcs vision stuff to connect online, maybe that’s got something to do with it.

I requisitioned a laptop at the office here the beginning of this week, it was approved and all that jazz. I was hoping to have it today, but that’s not looking promising. Could end up being quite a bit down the road yet the way it sounds. If/when it comes, I’ll have to get rid of my dual 19′s and see about requisitioning a single 24″ monitor. I can’t get rid of the linux desktop box, but it can sit idle in the corner as a headless unit.

Been playing Hellgate London for the past couple of days. Pretty fun game. Could just as well have been named Diablo 3. My machine runs it pretty good, but I do get some chop here and there. Listening to a couple buddies explaining the chop they are seeing on various hardware, I’m thinking I’ll need to throw more RAM at it. Truthfully I’m betting it’s a coding issue in the game, piss poor memory management. I’m going to play through a little more on single player before deciding if the multi-player is really worth it.

Priced out a brand new box today…just to see what I’d be looking at. Seems like I could do it for 800 bucks! I don’t game enough for that…might as well buy an Xbox 360….

Fucking Fridays…and it’s only 1130….I might leave early today.

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The Xbox 360 just became a bit more interesting. If a guy can use it to stream media across the network…oof, that’s going to be hard to resist. I still don’t see a reason to get one until a guy get’s a high def TV…but maybe next year!

Why is this so fucking hard to implement? Take a read on this it should blow your mind.

The initial idea to me seems sound, the machine prints off a ballot at the end that the voter looks over, signs and drops it in a box on the way out. This is the official record of the vote. If there is a recount or some question then these papers are looked at as well as the voting machines and any discrepancy is dissected and explained…with the signed paper copy being the end all be all official vote for that person. If there is no paper ballot turned in by that person, their vote is discounted (only in the event of a recount…you’d have no reason to check otherwise). This is really not difficult. The print out, if done properly, leaves no doubt as to the selection…the “hanging chads” are done away with.

What is so odd in the article, you might ask (to which I’d respond…read it fucker!). Well, they still only recognize paper as the official vote…but they don’t have this “drop the receipt in the box” that I described…or it didn’t work for them…whatever. Sooooooo they are doing a reprint from the voting machine as it stands today….no voter sign off…no nothing. If something has been tampered with you have no sign off to verify it. This is colossally stupid.

Hilarious…any you thought your votes matter….

“A computer model simulation developed at UC Riverside has predicted that in late 2007 to early 2008, the interplanetary spacecraft Voyager 2 will cross the termination shock, the spherical shell around the solar system that marks where the solar wind slows down to subsonic speed. At the termination shock, located at 7-8.5 billion miles from the sun, the solar wind is decelerated to less than the speed of sound. The boundary of the termination shock is not fixed, however, but wobbly, fluctuating in both time and distance from the sun, depending on solar activity. Because of this fluctuation, the spacecraft is also predicted to cross the boundary again in middle 2008. The article abstract is available from The Astrophysical Journal.”

What do you suppose the speed of sound is in a vacuum?

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This was slightly amusing.

“I never understood that line,” Obama said, who said he did inhale marijuana when asked by a student. “The point was to inhale. That was the point.” Video Watch Obama admit he inhaled »

Clinton’s admission has become a cultural joke. Obama’s comments? If you ask Republican rival Mitt Romney, Obama’s comments were too honest.

“I think in order to leave the best possible example for our kids, we’re probably wisest not to talk about our own indiscretions in great detail,” Romney said.

Romney isn’t alone in that belief. When George W. Bush was governor of Texas in 1999, he talked briefly about his use of alcohol, but refused to talk about other drugs because he feared kids might think what he did was “cool.”

“too honest’ amuses me. When the little monster is old enough to ask and understand, I’ll let her know about my indiscretions…if she cares, I would hope her mother will as well. IMO it adds a bit more credibility to what we say and the example we set. Some only learn to lead by example after they fuck up, some don’t have too…and a few just never learn.

I still don’t plan on voting, that’s another blog for another time…but if I was going to vote, this guy would be at the top of my list.

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Benson broke his leg and will need surgery. Apparently it’s an injury similar to what grossman suffered early in his career. Hopefully they now have a reason to dump him.

Taylor died this morning, for those that haven’t seen any news. I’m sure you’ll hear the usual anti gun bullshit. The facts as I have read are that he was shot in his home late Sunday night by an intruder. He was shot in either the groin or leg, given the description of death it seems likely to be his leg. This was the second time in 8 days this home had been broken in to.

That’s all anyone seems to be reporting for sure. I do hope this isn’t some random violence and that it turns out to be his past/present biting him in the ass. Mostly because this along with the other high profile legal problems with some NFL players might actually start to make an impact on players coming in to the league. I remember being 22 and invincible, I can’t imagine how I would have acted if you added rich in the mix…

The amazon kindle looks to be a fantastic little device. Not so much in what it brings to the table right now…but in what innovations it should lead to. The iPod was an over priced piece of semi useful hardware at it’s beginning, but it has evolved into a solid piece of equipment, albeit pricey. Then came the knock offs and cheaper versions that did significantly less, but filled a niche. I would love to see the same thing with this thing. What I want doesn’t have to be any bigger than a standard paperback and about 1/4 inch thick. Only a couple of buttons, maybe some wheel thing like the iPod for turning pages. USB connection to the PC to load books on some internal storage with maybe a flash drive addition. WIreless would be ok, but not necessary. It doesn’t need to play mp3z and what not…just a regular electronic book. I’d give 30 bucks or so for a base unit like that…probably 2 bucks a download for books to load on it (paperback is…5-7 bucks?).

Maybe I’m the only one in the world that thinks that’s a good idea. But the device has to be affordable. Maybe it’s even worth 100 bucks, I dunno…really depends what it can do and how it looks. The books have to be cheaper than their dead tree counter parts though or I don’t see it being worth buying.

Sorry Tiff, your about 3 decades away from being out of a job!