Geekdom

I loved All Points Bulletin (APB) for the short time it existed. That was about three months, and then the company that owned it, Real Time Worlds, went bankrupt and their servers went down.  In those three months, I'd created an awesome character, several cars, and an often-complimented death theme that re-made Kernkraft 400, by Zombie Nation.  When I heard that APB is returning through another company, I figured it would be great, but I was bummed that I'd probably lost all of my customizations.   READ MORE>

This one gets me every time, so I'm writing it here so I don't have to look it up again: I'm in a linux terminal and I need to find the IP. I try to do the command most equivalent to Windows' ipconfig; ifconfig. This is what I get:

-bash: ifconfig: command not found READ MORE>

 I'm about to design a new blog for microcars, which is one of my passions. It is therefore time to re-assess what CMS system I should use. In my first attempts to build websites that were more advanced than static pages (don't do static pages), I tried Wordpress, but I just found that it was too rigid to do what I wanted to do. Plugins were difficult to find that were powerful enough to, say, make a full-featured forum on them. READ MORE>

This is a quick one, since I'm about to start celebrating New Years.  I thought I'd share some of my favorite albums of 2010. Note: most of this falls under Industrial music.  I don't expect you to have the same wierd taste, but if you do, first CONGRATULATIONS! Second, you should check these out. READ MORE>

So Season 3 of Fringe is underway.  Awesome.  I really enjoy this show--it is like the X-Files but with more characters and a more structured story from the beginning.  The opening theme is pretty catchy too.  Apparently, Abrams, the director, actually came up with the theme song himself.  Apparently.  READ MORE>

 Today I was installing some stuff on a Windows Server 2008 server for the first time, and I came across an error when trying to install some web apps:  "The installer was interrupted before XXXXXX could be installed. You need to restart the installer and try again. Click "Close to exit:"

The first thing I did was to check the event log, and I found the following super-helpful message:   READ MORE>

 Since I listen to industrial and I'm somewhat of a geek, I've recently been enjoying a new album by Mind.In.A.Box called R.E.T.R.O.  In it the band recreates a bunch of classic old games into modern synthpop/industrial.  It's a good album and you should check it out.  After a week of constantly switching between that and Destroid's Loundspeaker, I saw the now viral short film, PIXELS on Youtube.  It's a great short film by Patrick Jean in which New York gets invaded by pixels. READ MORE>

My wife and I were doing some holiday shopping, and we decided to buy a few gifts at Best Buy with our Best Buy RewardZone gift certificates. We got to the checkout and asked for a gift receipt. The cashier told us that the recipient would't be able to exchange their gift. The only option would be to return it and the Rewards would be credited back to our account. We were told to go to Customer Service, return the items for the credit of our points and then re-purchase them with our credit card to enable the giftee to be able to exchange. We confirmed this with two other employees. Am I the only one who sees problems with this policy? READ MORE>

If you've been following my twitter lately, you might know I've been having a rough weekend trying to get Win7 to work on my ASUS EeePC 1002HA. The problem started when I upgraded and I found that when I powered the machine on, the screen would be blank unless I hit shift+F1 to put it into sleep mode and wake it up again. I tried upgrading the drivers from the ASUS download site, and that ended up getting me into a myriad of problems. However, I have finally gotten it all sorted out, and everything works like a charm. My observations on installing Win7 properly on this machine after the jump. Hopefully you read this BEFORE you start :)

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 As I write this, my completely-full 160GB IDE hard drive is making a very unhealthy sound, and I'm trying to make sure I don't get too many browser windows open lest my single-core processor gets bogged down.  Yep, it is time for a new desktop.  This one has served very well over the last 4+ years, but its time to go to Dell.com and . . . what, what?   READ MORE>