My vote is for “just annoying”… fund managers are a bunch of wankers.
Continue reading IRA’s: Smart Investing or Just Annoying?
Yearly Archives: 2005
Grump Grump Grump – Weekend Edition
Yeah, well, so I finally got around to playing a bit more with the Mac mini today. Not much, though, because there’s a new collection of outlets in WA now, and much like the outlets in CT (same owners, ironically) they are near a casino… priorities! So, before I get into the Mac mini story, I gotta say that those new Texas Hold’em Bonus tables are a lot of fun and I’m pretty thrilled that Tulalip got them already – I follow the company that makes the tables and they’re still pretty new. The game play is odd, but fun. Um…
Continue reading Grump Grump Grump – Weekend Edition
An Unlikely Proclimation
I don’t really like the term Killer App, but I feel I have to use it this one time, cuz I want an application that could make the PSP a very nifty gadget… and it’s not that I don’t want to use the term “killer” or think that one app could create gazillions of dollars at the expense of every other competitor… it just reminds me of every marketing person that I’ve ever worked with and didn’t like. To the people that I’m thinking of, everything had to be a “home run” or it wasn’t worth doing; they forgot that four small singles also make a run, so there should always be room for non-killer apps in the world.
Anyway, it’s not just an idea for a Killer App, but it’s an application that I can’t code which bugs the shit outta me… I don’t like having digitial ideas that I can’t work on, but that’s exactly the case here. The PSP is a completely new platform with a new-to-me compiler and I know dick about streaming video feeds, so I have to just say that I want it and wait for someone else to code it.
Continue reading An Unlikely Proclimation
Retro-Rant: Pregnant Youth
[One of things that SharpMT has helped me do is stockpile Rants – that way when I’m busy, I can dip into the pile and pull one out… over the last few months I’ve been keeping a pretty steady stream of posts, but over the past week I’ve been swamped so I thought I’d dip into the pile. Of course, that’s when I realize that some of those posts don’t age all that well so I went ahead and deleted those, but this one seems to have aged OK. In fact, it was first written in July of ’04, but it still looks pretty damned applicable.]
Simple question: when did it become socially acceptable to get pregnant as a single girl? Like a kid that’s still in high school? I want to know when it happened so that I can do two things: first I need to stop it from becoming acceptable and then I need to beat the person responsible with a fish billy.
Continue reading Retro-Rant: Pregnant Youth
SharpMT 3.0 Beta 2
wOOt! A new mini-feature and a bunch of annoying bug fixes makes for a sub-release of a pre-release of a beta release. Or Beta 2, for short. The bug fixes in the installers and some dialogs/version numbers was for my own benefit, but the mini-feature is a first shot at this bookmarklet stuff. This first cut works very similarly to the way the RSS Aggregator works: click a link and the test will appear in one of SharpMT’s text boxes… in theory. More on this in the article…
Continue reading SharpMT 3.0 Beta 2
Tiger and Apple
[insert whatever “yay it’s Tiger Day!” obligatory post here, if you want to, but I can sum it up another way]
I hate you, Apple.
Continue reading Tiger and Apple
Poke Her? I Hardly Know Her!
Given the recent popularity of poker – Texas Hold’em or otherwise – I have to say that the run just continues to astound me. You see, I grew up around cards – for the two of you that have actually read Memoirs of an Italian Geek I can confirm that the bit about how I learned how to count with “ace two three” and stopped at eleven because I knew “jack” wasn’t a number is a true story. In fact, I learned how to add by playing black jack with one grandfather and I later learned ratios by talking about craps with my other grandfather [betting the 6 and 8 typically pay 6:5 which isn’t all that common in math class].
All this poker awareness this has led to a few observations in my poker abilities and other such skills.
Continue reading Poke Her? I Hardly Know Her!
Interesting…
Tom’s Hardware: Microsoft officially launched the 64-bit client version of Windows XP professional today at WinHEC and announced that it will offer users of 64-bit processors and the 32-bit XP Pro a free upgrade to the new operating system.
Classy move. Other OS makers should take note of the gesture.
SharpMT 3.0 Beta 1
The latest beta of Visual Studio 2005 included a license that allows people to “Go Live” with applications: developers are allowed to offer applications that have been coded on VS2005 to the general public.
And Go Live, I shall: the first beta of SharpMT 3 is now available. And yes, you’ll need the Beta 2 release of the 2.0 version of the .NET Framework.
Continue reading SharpMT 3.0 Beta 1
Doh: She’s Early!
TUAW: Well, if you didn’t order your copy of Tiger directly from Apple, but rather from PCMall or ClubMac, then you may be lucky enough to receive Tiger today. […] In other news, reportedly somewhere near Infinite Loop, a bearded gentleman wearing a mock turtleneck was seen from a distance and heard clearly exclaiming random expletives in a string of curses aimed towards PCMall and ClubMac.
“Sweet.” – Eric Cartman
Sigh…
I know, I know, I know, alright? I knew that if I re-wrote any of my apps for Beta 1 of VS2005 that there was a good shot that they wouldn’t work with Beta 2. There was never any discussion about migrating the Beta 1 projects forward… in fact, since you weren’t allowed to release any applications based on Beta 1, why should there be a forward upgrade path?
Continue reading Sigh…
PSP Accessories-o-rama!
Brando has done it again: http://shop.brando.com.hk/sonypsp.php. His shop has put together a bunch of PSP accessories, including neato keen things like replacement analog sticks and other types of cases or protection thingies. Neat stuff.
Employee of the Month
MSNBC: The woman, identified only as Lori in Wednesday’s Fort Worth Star-Telegram, said she recently phoned authorities after coming home to find her daughters fighting. She told the dispatcher that her 12-year-old had kicked a hole in the door.
A 911 dispatcher was reprimanded for responding to a mother’s plea for help with an unruly child by saying: “OK. Do you want us to come over to shoot her?”
And he’s getting backlash over it, because “Lori” was offended. “Lori” should be mortified that she complained about this. Unless she came home and found a chunk of skin dripping from one of her kid’s bloody mouth or her errant daughter cut herself while kicking a door, why in the hell would she be calling 911? Parental advice??? She should get a Talking To, for having tied up an operator for this…
I swear, having kids should be regulated as a privledge and not a right.
The Prelude-to-a-Shot Heard Round the World
Visual Studio 2005, Beta 2 has been released. Express is available to the public; MSDN Subscribers have access to all of the bits. The problem I faced is “what to download”? Here’s a post about what the versions mean [via Firedancer] which helped me out a great deal…
Continue reading The Prelude-to-a-Shot Heard Round the World