To The Metal

Took a little trip up to Bear Mountain State Park today, decided to try out the camera on my HTC Incredible… In short, HOLY @!#$. Enjoy the gallery!

Decided to finally cave in and join the smart-phone crowd… I’d had an iPhone 3G through my office for some time but I generally do not use it since AT&T’s reception is utter crap unless you happen to live somewhere OTHER than where I need the phone. Contract was up on my Moto flip, and while I did like the iPhone, and Verizon will likely have one soon… I generally root for the underdog and consider Steve Jobs to be an even bigger peckerhead than our current presidential administration, but I digress…

Initially I planned on a Motorola Droid, but had to put that off due to a PITA sales person who put commission above customer satisfaction at the Middletown, NY Verizon store. I ended up using the Goshen, NY Verizon store which didn’t hesitate to help me. I checked out the Motorola, then I checked out the new Incredible by HTC, picking that one in the hopes that the newest, fastest android phone may get me a few more miles than the Motorola version which has been around for some time.

Since I’m already used to an iPhone interface, it took a bit to get used to the interface of the Incredible, but thankfully I can still flip back and forth with my finger through various apps and widgets. The thing that threw me off to start though was that the home screen is the central page, and then I can scan 2 or 3 pages left and right.

I prefer the email application on the iPhone over the Incredible, as standard email (which is synced with my office Exchange server) and gMail are 2 different applications, and I can’t get one page that just tells me what is going on with all 4 of my email accounts… maybe there’s an app for that, who knows.

All of the apps are very responsive, the camera is quite nice (built in camcorder is spiffy too) – not too thrilled about the storage but I can always put in a bigger SD card if I need it.

I figure I’ll be continuously tweaking this thing – but so far I’m pleased with the purchase. It cost me $150 ($250 up front, waiting for my mail-in rebate to come back).

Had originally planned to take the bike down to the shore today, but 100F+ temps and the idea of NJ traffic PLUS those temps changed my mind rather quickly. Instead I decided to grab some lunch at the Grist Mill in Andover, NJ. They’ve apparently changed owners at some point, the food and drinks are still good – but the place has a decidedly more clinical feel… Gone are the stacks of books and fresh copies of Weird NJ…. instead there are sparsely decorated walls, dull music, and a general feeling of ‘well this isn’t unique anymore, feels like every other coffee shop.’

From there I ran back up to NY to grab a new copy of my birth certificate, as well as a new social security card (both are somewhere, no idea where though). I go to the local SSA, they tell me that they can’t help me – I need to go to Monticello or Newburgh. I then go to the town hall who tells me that my birth cert is at the village hall. I get to the village hall, and the registrar is out to lunch until 2pm. At this point, I”m absolutely roasting alive and am starting to feel faint, so I take a break and chug one of those $.99 Arizonas… Back to the village hall and voila, I’m reborn. Apparently I would have needed a new one anyhow, the originals are no longer accepted for things like passports, marriage licenses, etc…

Next trip, Verizon. My phone plan is up and I’ve got an itch for a smart phone… I get to the Middletown store, and after waiting 20 minutes I’m told by a completely disinterested sales girl that my plan doesn’t expire until TOMORROW, so I can either get the phone now and pay $20 more than the list price, or I can come in tomorrow and get $50 taken off of it. I ask her if she can do anything, and through the pot-smoke filled haze of her response I’m told ‘no.’ If I go tomorrow, it’ll cost me $100. If I do it online, it’ll cost me $100. If I order through Dell, $20. Hmmmmm…

So back into the heat I go, up to Monticello. I have NO idea where the SSA is, so I stop at the local library – they say its in the Government center. I go to the GC, they say it’s down the street. I *FINALLY* get there, and am about the 14th person in line. So I fill out the form, talk to a rep with the personality of a potted plant, and am on my way with a receipt and a promise that I’ll have the new card in 2 weeks.

So now I’m in Sullivan county, starving, a little tired, but my day isn’t over yet. I get back on the bike and make my way to Wawayanda park in Jersey to get my feet wet and take a break from the bike. In the process of getting my gear sorted out, I managed to melt the sleeve of my jacket on the exhaust… GREAT. Still wasn’t too bad, water had to be like 75-80F, was kinda nice, not as refreshing as I had hoped though.

I leave the park, ready to meet up with some friends at Smokey’s in Vernon (on Vernon Crossing, where Someplace Special used to be)… That’s not until 8 though, so I figure I’ll stop at the Nordic Haus coffee shop for a bit… they’re closed. Thankfully one or two of my buddies are already on their way there.

Now Smokeys has been open for a few weeks, they’re still sorting everything out… The food was outstanding, prices were alright. Initially, the service left MUCH to be desired. I don’t blame the wait staff – but our food took an extraordinarily long time to arrive. They accidentally messed up one order, and immediately made a new pizza, leaving the old one for us – gratis. They then brought the wrong pizza as a replacement, but that was quickly sorted out and the correct pizza arrived… however they then returned with the second wrong pizza and gave it to us anyhow. The desert wasn’t anything spectacular, and our coffee was luke warm, but the star of the show was the pizza… by far the best thin-crust pizza I’ve ever had… was like crack… on a plate. If they can improve the amount of time it takes to get an order to the table, I can easily see this place burying a few competitors… I’d say the VI needs to keep an eye on this place, that tiki bar won’t save them when the weather cools down.

I finally managed to get home around 11, discovered that my wonderful fiancee had completely redone our bedroom and made it look like one of those staged rooms you might find at a furniture store… definitely a welcome change… this girl just never stops impressing me 🙂

And now… I shall pass the F out. 🙂

So in an earlier post I had commented just how much I loathed GTA4… Mainly because on top of the fact that the controls were sluggish – my top of the line gaming system was choking at a level set by Rockstar’s own configuration system.

After doing some homework via Google, it turns out that there are a slew of command line parameters for the game, two of which I now use to bring about acceptable framerates… “-dx9” and “/high” The first forces the game into DX9 mode, and the second forces it to take the highest priority on the system. The real kicker though, the one that eliminated this infuriating stutter in the graphics involved disabling a feature which allows a player to record their gameplay and provide clips to people who actually find video clips of a video game worthwhile. I also disabled the ‘definition’ setting via the P key, when disabled you get the motion blur that earlier titles had.

At this point, the framerate is acceptable, and “The Ballad of Gay Tony” is turning out to be a much more satisfying add on than “The Lost and The Damned” turned out to be… both being infinitely better than the story GTA4 shipped with, IMHO.

Still, GTA4, as well as the add-ons are less of a game than the previous titles… that’s something that has been lost and seemingly forgotten by Rockstar, and something I hope returns in a future release (along with vehicles that handle like they did in the GTA3 line of games, I’m sick of driving on oil!!!)

So Price Chopper came through again, picked up 3 racks of pork ribs for $10 (due to a mistake on their part that they acquiesced to), managed to stuff everyone very well.  Topped it off with a few rounds from the 12 gauge (which promptly sent neighbors fleeing indoors) and a selection of 13 year old bottle rockets that my buddy Jeff and I picked up on an overnight fireworks run out to Tioga, PA quite some time ago.  There were a small handful of duds, but most still shot up in the air and made significantly less noise than the Mossberg… LOL

Set the kids up with a cable box in their room, then proceeded to spend 20 minutes locking every single channel besides Disney… What would be NICE is if the cable box could be set up to block everything by default, and then allow the user to selectively un-block things.  There’s decent parental controls, everything other than a G/PG rating is blocked and needs a password to access.  Now I know why my folks got me a TV set when I was their age, it wasn’t for me, it was so they could watch THEIRS again… Still, $200 a month cable bill leaves a slight taste of vomit in my mouth… blech.

Hoping for a somewhat lazy week, still have a ton of wedding prep to sort out, and a probable ride down to the Jersey Shore for a day mid-week…. but it’s nice not having to fix anything for a while.

My glasses broke a 2 weeks ago, the nosepad snapped off. I soldered it, but the solder didn’t hold for long. I decided to bring it to the store I bought it from – LENSCRAFTERS in Middletown, NY. It was a Saturday afternoon, and the store manager blew me off. She first didn’t consider repairing the glasses, nor did she consider placing my perfectly good lenses in an alternate frame. She looked up my prescription which hadn’t been updated since 2008 (hasn’t needed an update) and said I would need a new prescription, and new glasses… and promptly pushed me out of the store.

I decided to stop at a local optician today – Riehle over in the Merchant’s Square Plaza. Over the course of a half hour, they had my current lenses in a compatible frame, and I was on my way. Turned out I was working with the owner, but everyone in the store was extraordinarily helpful, and completely eclipsed my experience with Lenscrafters.

That’s the problem with big chain stores like Lenscrafters, unless you’re walking in ready to drop an obscene amount of cash on one of their high profit margin package deals – they couldn’t care less about you.

Now I just need to schedule an update for my contact lens prescription at Riehle and I’m good to go.

So STEAM still has that absurd sale going on till the 4th, I picked up Flatout Ultimate Carnage the other night for $2. First problem I encountered is that STEAM discovered the hard way that when you price a good game at $2, it sells fast… so fast in fact that they ran out of licenses. Simple enough fix, went over to MegaGames.com and downloaded the crack. The game is surprisingly good, they’ve got a derby mode, a racing mode, and a street mode. So far the only one I’m not too thrilled with is the street mode, but that might just be my car selection too. Ended up running a trainer so I could try out a few vehicles without being stuck with one I didn’t like, but no matter what I’m driving, the fully destructable environment, decent physics, and top notch graphics (I think they may have used the same engine as Burnout) – made it a fantastic purchase. If you’re a gamer and haven’t tried STEAM yet, what are you waiting for?

So last night one of the web servers at my job took a dump.  It ended up coming back up before I could take a look, so I just kept an ear out for trouble…

This morning, same server drops…  I reset it since I can’t actually get into it, some time goes by, another server drops…  I check the firewall – nothing really standing out, so I follow up on some errors in the server logs, and make some suggested performance tweaks…  Then after a quiet hour or two… the feces hit the oscillator.

Two specific webservers start getting SLAMMED.  That cascades in a way that affects a few other servers.  Now mind you, the root of this entire problem is a denial of service attack. Once I stop that, we’re good.  I dig into the firewall, and start to identify the attackers.  As they hit me, I’m blocking them.  It’s tedious, but besides limiting the number of connections per second, my only real recourse.

In the middle of all of this, identifying attackers, blocking them, bringing the servers back up, and trying to make sure that this all can’t happen again… I get interrupted at least every 20 minutes by someone who doesn’t understand that the problems they want me to fix are being CAUSED by the f’n DoS attack.

I finally manage to block the attack after nearly screaming at the person who kept interrupting, and in the process manage to mess something up with my firewalls.  I spend a few more hours trying to fix what I messed up, but decide to call it a night, go home for some dinner and a bit of a break before I head back in after everyone’s gone home to fix the problem.

I call in my consultant friend, he tries for about 40 minutes but kicks it up to support.  I call support, my contract is for Monday through Friday from 8am-5pm…. it’s now 10pm.  Still, I explain my story to the tech, and he helps me… by about 10:40, the firewalls are back to normal… no server issues since the late afternoon…peace and relative quiet.

Only redeeming fact of this entire day was being out on the bike in the cool, clear evening air.  Was a great way to decompress from the stress of all this BS.

Hoping tomorrow that I’ll get out of work around lunch, go to the gym, then come up and make some GF cupcakes for the potluck at my church.  ~fingers crossed~

I’m really tired of the sensationalist bullshit that gets thrown around the Internet these days.  It’s nothing new, but I got an email today which really annoyed me.  It pushed the idea that the interior components of a modern car pump out insane levels of benzine, which is probably why everyone is getting cancer.  Their solution?  Don’t turn on the A/C in your car in the summer when you first get in, no – open your windows and let the evil benzine leech out into the surrounding environment – thus ridding you of the risk of getting cancer.

The funny part?  The first line of the email is a link to an article at Snopes.com.  If you click the link, and read the story, as well as the study (from Korea in 2001) that the email is loosely based on you come to realize that you are more likely to inhale benzine during the winter months in Korea as a result of burning FUEL then you are from the interior panels of your car heating up in the warmer months.  The worse part of it all is that people will blindly pass this crap on, when the facts that completely trash the argument are sitting in the email itself.

I feel sorry for anyone who reads it and subsequently is now airing their car out every day instead of enjoying the sweet, sweet air conditioner.

Morons.

http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/benzene.asp

Read and give it some thought

Car Air-conditioning –

No wonder more folks are dying from cancer than ever before.  We wonder where this stuff comes from but here is an example that explains a lot of the cancer causing incidents.  Hmmm.  Many people are in their cars first thing in the morning and the last thing at night, 7 days a week.   As I read this, it makes me feel guilty and ill.  Please pass this on to as many people as possible. Guess it’s not too late to make some changes

Car A/C (Air Conditioning) MUST READ!!!

Please do NOT turn on A/C as soon as you enter the car.

Open the windows after you enter your car and turn ON the AC after a couple of minutes.

Here’s why: According to research, the car dashboard, sofa, air freshener emit Benzene, a Cancer causing toxin (carcinogen – take time to observe the smell of heated plastic in your car).

In addition to causing cancer, Benzene poisons your bones, causes anemia and reduces white blood cells. Prolonged exposure will cause Leukemia, increasing the risk of cancer. Can also cause miscarriage.

Acceptable Benzene level indoors is 50mg per sq.ft. A car parked indoors with windows closed will contain 400-800 mg of Benzene.

If parked outdoors under the sun at a temperature above 60 degrees F, the Benzene level goes up to 2000-4000 mg, 40 times the acceptable level.

People who get into the car, keeping windows closed will inevitably inhale, in quick succession, excessive amounts of the toxin.

Benzene is a toxin that affects your kidney and liver.. What’s worse, it is extremely difficult for your body to expel this toxic stuff.

So friends, please open the windows and door of your car – give time for interior to air out -dispel the deadly stuff – before you enter.

Thought: ‘When someone shares something of value with you and you benefit from it, you have a moral obligation to share it with others.’

Ever since GTA4 came out and I wasn’t entirely thrilled with it, I’ve had a goal to get back into the series give it another run through to see if my memories were accurate and if GTA4 really did stink that bad.

Thanks to a ridiculous sale at STEAM, I picked up every single GTA title for $40.

I started by playing GTA, the original.  Still fun, my biggest complaint overall?  No save ability.  Essentially, you beat all the missions for a city, then move on, and that city is now unlocked.  I’m glad that they got it to run on Windows 7, that’s for sure.  So then I jumped up to GTA 3, the sandbox title that started a gaming revolution.  I dove right in, the controls were familiar, the gameplay just as addictive, it was FUN!  The only complaint I’ve had so far?  I can’t remember how to access the in-game map, if there was even that ability.  Surprisingly enough, in the years since I played the game, I still remember the layout.

So I take a break from GTA3 and fire up the GTA4 title I haven’t touched yet, ‘The Ballad of Gay Tony.  Graphics?  Photorealistic.  Controls?  Sluggish.  FPS?  Choppy.

I’m not playing this on a low end system either, I’ve got a top of the line gaming rig with the latest i7 CPU, NVidia gaming card, etc…  This thing chews up games and spits out framerates that’d make any gamer cry.

So while the plot isn’t anything huge, I’m already distracted by how shitty the game runs (and I’m using the auto-config from Rockstar to select my settings), I’m annoyed because the controls are so sluggish compared to GTA3, and don’t even get me started on the physics engine.  Well, why not.  The physics for the driving engine were always somewhat realistic, you can’t drive like an Andretti and expect to keep the car in one piece… but the physics in GTA4 have just gotten… ridiculous.  We’re talking Forza Motorsport / Gran Turismo style physics in an arcade style sandbox shooter.  Instead of wrecklessly hurtling from point A to point B, trashing the car in the process – you have to pay attention when you drive or you’re just not going to get to point B.

Visually – GTA4 is an unbelievable improvement over its predecessor.  The ways people die, blood splatters, and cars wreck / detonate are entertaining in themselves…  But the game play feels numb, disconnected.  I feel more connected to the game world after 5 minutes in the cartoonish GTA 3 and its two subsequent titles than after glitching for an hour through the updated GTA4 world in all of its really spiffy photorealism.

I’m going to guess that we may get one or two more expansions minimum in the GTA4 engine, and I don’t know that they’ll really be able to rejuvinate it to the extent that will bring about the satisfaction of prior titles, but maybe – just maybe – when they bring about GTA5 – they’ll remember first and foremost that this is a GAME and should play as such.

I’ll have more updates as I progress.  I figure I’ll take a quick jaunt through GTA2 before I put a stopper in my ADD and begin to complete them one at a time. 🙂