automaticable

I just ran across this deeply disturbing page on Clusterflock. It links to a story about a journalist who posed as a 10 year old boy, Billy, who sent letters to serial killers such as Charles Manson and Richard Ramirez asking them if he should drop out of school. These letters were all sent in 1998-1999. Now, 10 years later, “Billy” has sent responses back, thanking these insane men for their advice and how it has helped him get into law school. One particularly disturbing response from Richard Ramirez:

Bill,
Greetings. Received your letter. Glad to hear my letter to you in ‘99 made a difference. When do you graduate? Yeah, get me a subscription to Radar Magazine. What is it about? Know any Asian girls willing to correspond? Send pictures. You can photocopy 5 on 1 page or send ‘em singular. Nothing scenic though. Send some of girls in bikinis. Do you go clubbing? Seen any good movies? Saw 3:10 to Yuma the other day. It was an OK Western. Didn’t do too good at the box office though. Do you have family? I’m youngest of five. That’s all for now. Take it E/Z write when you get a chance.
Your friend,
Richard

Ramirez, or the NightStalker, is focused more on getting pictures of girls in bikinis than how he has helped Billy succeed. Other responses are equally disturbing, as they ask more about Billy’s personal life than anything else.

Check out the entire story. It is absolutely enthralling. As an added bonus, there are also letters to other famous people such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Alan Greenspan, asking them all fairly humorous questions. Too bad most of their responses are canned and lifeless.

For the whole story, check out Radar Online.

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Working on SEO projects can be difficult and time consuming, but with the right tools you can cut your research time down significantly. Firefox has made the job of the SEO expert not only easier, but more efficient at the same time. So without further ado, here is my list of the top 12 SEO Firefox extensions. Continue reading “The Top 12 SEO Firefox Extensions”

Well, It’s official, there is another reason why the Nintendo Wii is almighty. Today I had the urge, the urge to splurge, so you know what I got? I bought my girlfriend Mario Kart for Wii with an extra steering wheel. I want to start off by saying that the fact that the Wii incorporates a steering wheel to play mario kart is just AMAZING in itself.  It brings a whole new sense of awesomeness to the game. Being the stubborn person I am, I didn’t bother reading the little instruction manual before I started playing the game because I’ve played so many different Mario Kart series that I’ve realized how to do just about everything. I was wrong this time.  There’s so much more you can do now with the Wii version that you were unable to do in any other version of Mario Kart, so take the time and read that manual and learn all the cool tricks before you play!

I’m now going to go through a list of Pros and Cons of the game from my point of view and at the end give my final opinion on the game and if you should buy it, or just mooch off your friends.

Pros:

• Automatic Drafting for those of us who were never good at it in the other versions
• An actual steering wheel instead of just a lousy controller
• Mario Kart against people across the world via internet
• Incorporation of tracks from previous Mario Kart versions
• More tracks

Cons:

• Automatic Drafting: Although it may help those who don’t know how to do it, it makes it too easy
• No co-op Grand Prix
• The mini-map while racing is a little larger than I’d like, and haven’t figured out how to get rid of it yet

In my opinion, I loved the game. I think it is a GREAT upgrade from both Game Cube as well as N64. I have played I think every version (except DS) and I have to say that by far Mario Kart is the one game that Nintendo will never stop making, and you basically can’t screw up, you can only make it better. For those of you wondering if you should buy it, I HIGHLY suggest it. Also pitch in and buy a few more of those steering wheels.  They’re only ten dollars more and will add a GREAT deal more fun for those around you wanting to play. So go out there to your local Best Buy or Toys-R-Us and get Mario Kart for Wii today! You won’t regret it for a second!

Season 4 of The Office is inching towards another season finale. So far the season has been an interesting one, starting the year with hour-long episodes (well, really 2 episodes back-to-back, but don’t tell anyone that) and a writer’s strike in the middle. Because of the loss of a few episodes during the writer’s strike I feel like portions of the storyline have been moved forward too quickly, as they lack the subtlety of other seasons. These not-so-sublte plotlines have brought me to the following conclusions:

• Ryan will be fired from corporate. His drug addiction (be it cocaine, speed, meth…who knows?) is an obvious sign of a downward spiral. His removal from corporate will be due justice for his pompous and superficial attitude towards the people gave him the opportunity to move up the ranks so quickly. Hopefully this will land him back in Scranton as a temp. I would love for Michael to be able to lay into him for being such a jerk.
• Jim and Pam will not get engaged. The season finale would have been an amazing time for Jim & Pam to get engaged if it had not been for Jim showing us the ring already. Something will happen to postpone the engagement. I do not believe J&P will break up, as they are the only real romance in the entire show. This isn’t a real prediction, but I’m thinking someone close to Jim or Pam will die and they will be too distracted to focus on romance. What show is complete without a good emotional death close to one of the main characters?
• Michael will get back together with Jan. She disappeared way too quickly without much explanation, and Michael has been failing miserably as a bachelor. Scott (the Wegner, not Michael) brought up a good point, too. Michael’s single life storyline is already getting played out a bit. They can’t keep relying on his social awkwardness with single women to keep the show interesting.
• The love triangle: Dwight, Andy, and Angela. Dwight just got his mack on with an amazon woman, so we know he has game. But we also know that the only person in the world that is right for Dwight is Angela. Andy has been a non-character for a long time, so it isn’t going to take much to convince the audience that it is time for those two awkward lovebirds to get back together. Andy has too much fun as a single guy anyway.
• Going back to the whole Jim and Pam thing, Roy has been gone for way too long. Maybe he will be the cause of putting off the engagement. I don’t think Pam will have second thoughts about Jim and go for Roy again, but there might be other elements of Roy’s story that will distract Pam long enough to keep an engagement out of season 4.
• This last point isn’t as much of a prediction as it is a wish. I want to see more of the secondary characters more! I feel characters like Creed, Kelly, Oscar, and Kevin have been left out for a long time. I know these are not plot-enhancing characters, but they added so much to the humor. Maybe they have been what has been missing since we came back from the writer’s strike.

Ok this is getting rather long. Agree, disagree, or just add your own opinions in the comments. You know you love The Office as much as I do!

Oh, and I realize that we are too close to the finale for ALL of this to come true, but I think a good portion of it will apply to the end of season 4.

Continue reading “I bought new hair clippers”

Well, it’s finally here, the latest release from the Ubuntu team.  Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” is the second in the line of “long term releases”.  This means that Canonical and the Ubuntu team will continue with support and updates for 3 years on the desktop edition, and 5 years for the server.

If you’re ready to convert a new system today, the fastest way to get Ubuntu will be through torrents.  If you’re upgrading an Ubuntu system, simply open the Update Manager and it’ll show a new option to upgrade.  Make sure you’ve selected local repositories, because the servers are going to get hit hard today.

Be sure to check out the desktop feature tour.  And if you plan on burning some Ubuntu CDs, print off the CD album artwork for the cases.

The weather is finally starting to turn here in Illinois and we’re feeling the effects of Spring. I brought my bike out of hibernation, and I’m finding excuses to spend more and more time outside. I’ve also started running whenever I get the chance, and it’s been great so far. I want to keep running and working out over summer while the weather’s nice, so I’ve been putting together something of a “workout plan”. Here’s the deal: Continue reading “Summer Workout Plan”

Our countdown to Hardy is nearing its end; we are just days away from the final release of the latest version of Ubuntu, codenamed Hardy Heron.  I’ve been testing since the alpha release, and I can safely say that it’s come along way.  It also marks about a year since I installed Linux for the first time.  I feel like I’ve learned a lot in the process.  However, I think I want to start clean with Hardy, and setup my system with a few goals in mind:

• Drop Windows Vista:  Currently I have a dual boot setup with Vista on a separate partition.  But at this point, it’s a waste of space, and a waste of energy everytime I boot into it.  The only reason left for using it has been for Netflix, but I think I can live without it.  Worst-case scenario, I can setup Wine or a virtual machine.
• Separate /home Partition: I think this should be done on new Ubuntu systems by default, but alas, it’s not.  By putting your /home directory on its own partition, it’s very easy to separate your data from program files.  This makes it very easy to upgrade, or share your /home folder in a dual-boot.
• Optimize MythTV: I have a TV tuner card in my computer, and I’ve only been using it experimentally at this point.  But with Hardy and a clean system, I’d like to install MythTV and really use my computer for it’s media-center potential.
• Leave Some Test Space: Along with Ubuntu 8.04 coming out in the next couple days, there are also many other great Linux distros planning releases right around the corner.  I’d like to set aside a partition on my system for testing on distros, such as Fedora, openSUSE, or Debian.

Recently I felt that my ipod was going a bit stale.  We have outlined ways to improve your ipod before, but my problem is a bit different.  I have a 4GB ipod nano, so I am limited to having only a fraction of my music collection on the device at any given time.  My strategy until late has been to unload what I am getting the most sick of as I get new music.  Although this has worked fairly well so far, I feel like I am hearing the same music over and over again.  So it is time for a change.

My solution here has been to go old school with my ipod.  I wiped out the contents of my ipod completely and imported all of my favorite music from high school and a bit from the first year or 2 of college.  So far it has been absolutely wonderful.  Putting my ipod on shuffle keeps me on my toes not knowing what is coming next.  Most of these songs I literally have not listened to in years, so it is really good to hear them again.

There are definitely some downsides to this though.  Back in the early years of online music sharing, quality recordings were hard to find.  Many of my favorite bands were introduced to me through super low quality recordings, and many of these albums are so old and obscure that I doubt that will ever change.  Because of this I have been having volume issues, with lower quality tracks requiring a higher volume to rock out to.

Other than volume issues and some really bad songs slipping in here and there, I feel this has been a good decision.  I don’t know how long these songs will last on my ipod as my musical tastes have changed a bit since high school, but for now it is a good thing.

So automaticable, what are your strategies for keeping your music fresh?  I would especially appreciate tips from anyone who has an ipod with limited space like mine, though the same idea can probably be fixed through different playlists on larger ipods.

I’ve been busy lately but had a few things I wanted to post about, so I’ll make the points short.

• Last night was the Democratic Presidential Debate in Philadelphia.  I wish I had time for a whole post on this as I have a lot to talk about, but I’ll stick to one point.  When the issue of gas prices came up, Hilary responded that she wanted to find out if there was price gouging going on in the energy markets (which I’m glad to hear) and she hoped that would lower prices.  She then followed up with saying she would tax gas companies majorly because of how much money they are making.  Hilary, maybe you’ve never taken an economics course, but you know that corporate taxes are passed on directly to the consumer, right?  So a tax on Exxon increases the price of Exxon gas.  Awesome.  I liked Obama’s response much better: he would focus heavily on alternative energy issues and increase the minimum MPG on American vehicles.  Decrease demand and decrease the price at the same time.

• I didn’t even mean for these 2 points to relate, but my second topic is also about gas prices.  When I moved to Atlanta I was paying somewhere in the neighborhood of $2.55 for gas.  Today it is $3.49 at the same station.  That is a 38% increase in less than 1 year, and this is not even peak gas season.  I just wish my paycheck also increased by 38%, as I’ve seen these gas prices effect not only the cost of my vehicle, but my favorite food joints are also feeling the heat and increasing their own prices.

• My third and final point is just to let you all know that something big is brewing for me right now that I’m really excited about.  Actually, 2 things.  I’ll give you more details when I can, but until then I will probably be pretty busy so my posting on here might be fairly light.

That’s all for now.  As always, leave any thoughts you have in the comments.  I’ll definitely have time to respond to comments, as those don’t take nearly as long to write.