M. Hirsch

04:31 pm: Now you know what to get me for Kwanzaa
The hottest calendar of the year!

The site doesn't answer my one burning question, though...( Read more... )

05:11 pm: Misguided Music Videos 7: Senior Sampler
Gramps? Grandma? Nooooooooo!!!



This may not qualify as "misguided," as it's very possible that the cringeworthy discomfort of this performance may be the creators' intent. (The cringe factor is quite dampened when you know that's what they meant to do.) It still hurts, though, and, post-election, there's a been a lack of political propaganda to fill the gap.

02:08 pm: Dawn of a New Era

(Image swiped from this awesome gallery)

I went to vote on Tuesday morning, and despite my fears of a long wait, there was no line at all at 9am for my Wellesley precinct. It took longer to park than it did to actually vote.

Since Victor Von Doom, pHD, was not on the ballot¹, I voted for the guy with the scary Arab-sounding name. I also voted for a bunch of democrats, and I voted to keep the state income tax, decriminalize pot, and ban dog racing. Pretty much everything I voted for passed, which is nice but also makes me feel like an unoriginal bandwagon chump. On second thought, I probably should have voted against Kerry just out of spite, but even if he didn't win, he'd probably be destined for Obama's cabinet anyways.

The only vote that I really had to think about was question 1, the state income tax. I'm actually opposed to income tax in general, but the method proposed in the MA ballot initiative was much too drastic and short-sighted. They basically were going to abolish state income tax in two years, with no concrete plan on how to cut spending or generate revenue from other sources. The q1 backers' argument was that 40% of the state budget was "waste" and since state income tax generates 40% of state revenue, cutting the tax would immediately save a ton of money for people and cut out the "waste." They didn't really have a good idea of what the "waste" was, or how it would be cut out of the budget without damaging non-waste, so I think that MA would have been pretty fucked if the initiative had passed.

¹ I probably could have written him in, but I'd be a little bit worried about the ambiguity between the powerful, badass Doom from the comics and the pathetic, nerdy Doom from those crappy Fantastic Four movies.

12:33 pm: Prophetic Onion
"Under Bush, we can all look forward to military aggression, deregulation of dangerous, greedy industries, and the defunding of vital domestic social-service programs upon which millions depend. Mercifully, we can now say goodbye to the awful nightmare that was Clinton's America."

The Onion published this piece as humor in January 2001.

11:04 am: System Build Double Fail
So I'm in the middle of building a new gaming comp for myself. My current rig is about 5 years old, and it's time for an upgrade. I've done the research and the parts ordering, and I'm on the brink of building my next monstrosity of first-person-shooter goodness. Yesterday, I got the final shipment of parts, including the oh-so-glorious GeForce 9800 gx2. My current card is a low-end GeForce 7600 GS, so I'm anxious to jump from the lower end of the 7 series to the uber-slick high end of the 9 series.

Once I saw that it was delivered to my house, I actually took a long lunch break at work to rush home and take a look at it. I unwrapped the shrink wrap and... the metal backplane is bent like Uri Gellar's spoon. The bulk of it seems to be ok, but it's hard to tell what other damage could have occurred. Theoretically, I could unbend it with pliers and it may work ok, but the righteous and safe thing to do is send it back to the seller and get a new one. I go back to work sad and depressed.

I've got the rest of this gaming box sitting in pieces. I don't have any video card for it ... until I realize that my ancient PCI video card (circa 1995) should still work. It won't play any 3d games, but it's good enough for installing software and testing memory. After work, I get to carefully unboxing the cpu, motherboard, case, etc. so I can at least get the system running.

Cpu and motherboard are properly installed in the case. I open up the power supply box, and I notice a funny thing on the power supply... one of the wires on the 8-pin motherboard connector is hanging free. They never crimped the wire into the connector. In theory, I could use the 4-pin connector (the 8-pin is supposedly only necessary for overclocking stability, and I'm wasn't planning on overclocking anytime soon) or I could even jury-rig the wire back into the right spot. But I've already filed an RMA on the order for the video card, so there's room in the shipping box to return the power supply.

So now I need to take another long lunch from work to take my fucked-up hardware to the UPS Store for shipping. It will take a few days for it to get there, another 2-5 days to be processed and another few days for the new stuff to get back to me. All in all, it looks like I've got to wait nearly 2 weeks to finish my system.

Also, fuck PNY (video card) and Antec (psu) for their shitty quality control. Props to newegg.com for having an easy-to-use, albeit slow, return process.

09:14 am: Space Olympics
Brace yourself, 'cause there's no gravity.

01:00 pm: DELICIOUS
From this article:

Raw foodists believe cooking vegetables even a little destroys their nutritional value. And eating meat is even worse, Kulvinskas said, because you eat the animal's fear.

This guy just made me love being a carnivore 500% more than before. I'm really going to savor my next fear-burger or fear-filet.

10:25 am: Vi, som har det iskalla Trollblod!
(in English: We, who have the icecold Trollbood!)

I just saw Finntroll in Cambridge last night. They were, as expected, fucking awesome. Mad props to fudjo for letting me know about the show, as I likely would have missed it due to other distractions.

10:00 am: "Get them dang teenage punks off the road!"
So MA has just started seeing the results of a new teen driving law, where upon ONE speeding ticket, any under-18 driver has their license suspended for 90 days. The process of getting their license back costs a total of "$800 or more." (the article doesn't say if that $800 includes the cost of the original ticket, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't include the horrendous insurance costs that come with that ticket)

Teenagers are the easiest targets of these kind of laws. The under-18 ones don't vote, and the slighly-older-than-18 ones have better things to do than vote. Drunk drivers are the next easiest target, which sounds great in theory. The drunk driving laws get fishy when they lower the BAC minimum to change the definition of "drunk" to the point where impairment is questionable.

Back to the danged kids, though, I hate to see anyone taking such a harsh penalty for one speeding ticket. Sure, we all have the mental image of a reckless joyriding teen careening through the streets, but this law is also gonna nail mostly responsible kids who happen to pass by a cop who's low on his monthly quota. It's a pretty hefty price to pay, and I don't really feel any safer on the road. For the teens that actually are dangerous, it seems like it would be much smarter get them early via on driver education and tightened road testing, instead of trying to catch them retroactively with a speeding ticket.

In the meantime, senior citizens are free keep on cruisin'.

(Personal note: My grandmother is nearly blind and still drives. She can't read road signs, and she can't distinguish me from my brother or my dad across a room. But she got a "doctor's note" that let her bypass her last eye test, and there's nothing we can do to convince her to not drive. If you see a white volvo in Sharon, MA, there's a good chance that the driver cannot see you.)

05:40 pm: Thoughts After Seeing HBO's "Recount"
- I'm still angry about the 2000 election. Probably even angrier than I was back in 2000, as the Bush administration has turned out to be even worse than we thought it would be.

- Katherine Harris is a stupid, self-absorbed bitch, but they probably didn't need to make her portrayal so one-sided in the movie. Caricaturizing her made her less believable.

- Florida is an awful, awful place.

- The fact that I enjoyed a 2 hour "political docudrama" makes me feel old. Immediately after, I spent some time setting people on fire in Team Fortress 2, but I still couldn't shake the frightening premonition someday I will watch C-SPAN and like it.

08:53 am: Misguided Music Videos Part 6.66: McCainiac
Apparently McCain's three biggest female fans (after his first two wives¹) are back. Now they are threatening us with a McCain knife attack and, finally, a giant flying cyborg McCain.



¹Fun McCain Fact: McCain ditched his first wife, Carol, after she was disfigured in a car accident.(link) He married richer and hotter Cindy a month after his divorce. Now he's running on the "Family Values" platform.

01:23 am: Misguided Music Videos Part V: Hillary Overdose
I thought I would run out of these, but they keep popping up. And, like a bad STD, I can't resist sharing the misery.





Again, as far as I can tell, neither one is a parody. It seems like real people actually think they're helping their cause by producing and distributing these videos.

05:26 pm: Misguided Music Videos: Immortal Edition
I thought I was done posting political music videos in my LJ. I didn't think I would find anything more overdone than "It's Raining McCain." But I was wrong.

So here it is... Political. Rock. Horror. Musical. Barackula!
(Warning: requires Quicktime, and it's kinda long.)

12:53 pm: Ipod Death
In other news, my ipod mini is completely dead. I never changed the dying battery, but instead I just hooked it up to USB or car charger power when I used it. It was working when I left for Pittsburgh, but now it's totally non-functional. The screen only shows the "folder with an exclamation point" or just an Apple logo if I try to go to Disk Mode. No amount of resetting/recharging/cursing will get it to respond otherwise. It's still possible that it may self-resurrect when I put a new battery in, but I think may spring for a new nano instead of waiting for a battery shipment. I was originally considering the Touch, but it lost major brownie points because a) it's hard to use when driving (can't feel the buttons), b) SDK requires MacOS (go figure), and c) cost.

08:07 am: Be Grateful That There's No Photo
( Cut for grossness... you've been warned )

08:18 am: Misguided Music Videos Part III: Can it get any worse?
Today's weather forecast: "It's Raining McCain."



This could plausibly be an anti-McCain video. That would make sense. If it isn't, I don't understand how people could make such a terrible creation and think that it would help McCain at all. If they are pro-McCain, the McCain "Girls" are drowning so deeply in McCain precipitation that they've lost all ability to perceive right from wrong.

08:11 am: Misguided Music Videos Part II
These guys are gonna put Weird Al out of business! Actually, this really could be done as a metal song. (Naglfar lyrics come to mind) However, it probably works best in its original form: For those of you unfamiliar with the 'artists,' they're Westboro Baptist Church. They're best known for protesting soldiers' funerals, proclaiming that God kills US soldiers in Iraq as a curse for the US' tolerance of gays. 80's music parodies are just their side hobby.

05:22 pm: Can't Decide...
My good old ipod mini's battery is dying. I'm not sure if I want to just get a new battery (with the requisite ipod surgical tools) or if I should plunk down the cash for the total full-color portable-web-browsing hotness that is the ipod touch...

05:00 pm: 3d6 Minutes of Silence
The passing of Gary Gygax is really yesterday's news, but I'm still kind of awestruck. D&D is the progenitor of all RPG's (online and offline), CCG's (via Magic), LARP's, and the whole slew of culture based on those games.

I'm not big on celebrity worship - I walked right past Mr. Gygax at GenCon a few years ago, and I didn't stop to beg for him to autograph my shirt or anything like that. (looked like he was busy anyways) But I still have a huge amount of respect for him, his works, and the industry and culture they spawned.

06:05 pm: IT'S OVER