This is one of those days that just really shouldn’t have happened. See you all tomorrow.

Yep, it’s one of those posts where I go on and on about something 99% of you won’t understand or care about, so, just move along and come back tomorrow.

Pictured above is the EMC Petabyte Array. Those nine boxes would fill a good sized room and that’s because they house 2400 little 500 GB hard drives. 1,240,000 GBs equal…a Petabyte. Considering most computers come with in the range of 180 GBs to 300 GB hard drives…yeah, this things a monster. Oh…and it will set you back only $4 Million! CHA-CHING! BARGAIN! Or you can try their entry level system of 48 Terrabytes (48,000 GB) for a mere $250,000.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go update my Amazon Wishlist.

Stolen from some friends on Live Journal:

I am not: a failure.
I hurt: When I fail
I love: making my friends laugh
I hate: when people hurt those that I love
I fear: things out of my control
I hope: for happiness
I crave: success
I regret: nothing
I cry: when I think of ones I love being hurt
I care: about my friends and family
I always: double check my alarm clock
I long: to finish “The Never Ending Project”
I feel alone: at times
I listen: to tv more than watch it
I hide: very little
I cause: headaches for people
I sing: in the shower
I dance: when by myself
I write: at least once a day in my blog
I breathe: and wonder how it all works
I play: video games, but not as much as I used to
I miss: the 80’s sometimes
I learn: from my mistakes (keeping that one)
I feel: too much
I know: never enough to satisfy myself
I say: too much most of the time
I succeed: to prove I do know what I’m doing
I fail: very rarely and then treat it as a learning experiance
I dream: about things I can never have
I wonder: when everything will work all at the same time
I want: to be rish if only to prove I was right
I worry: about letting my friends and family down
I wish: I was more realistic
I have: a wonderful pair of parents
I give: too much of myself
I fight: with stupid people constantly
I wait: for nothing, I make it happen
I need: more time
I live: to succeed

I had just walked in to Mrs. Coy’s business class when someone ran up to me and shouted in my face “Did you see it? Did you see it?” I had no clue what they were talking about, and they ran off. It was a few more minutes before any one said the words “Challanger” and “explosion” to me. I couldn’t tell you one thing I did in school the rest of the day, I walked around in a daze. My mom was picking me up from school that day and she filled me in on all the details I hadn’t heard during the day.

I have always loved space and space exploriation, and this just blew me away. No one had died in the pursuit of the space program during my lifetime, and here we lost seven in one day. It was hard for me to get my head around. My actual first thought was terrorism because I couldn’t beieve NASA would have such a monumental disaster. We all learned differently later, but I still back the program, even after the Columbia disaster, we have to keep pushing the boundaries, we have to reach out further and find out what is out there.

Ok, I don’t care who knows any more, but…I watch soap operas. Get over it. I only watch All My Children, BUT…General Hospital has won me back for at least two months with the reapperance today of Robert Scorpio, played by Tristen Rogers.

For those not in the know, Robert was part of the part of the golden age of GH when it was Luke, Laura, Robert and Anna running all over Port Charles saving it from the various evil plots of the Cassadines. And now the news that Holly, Robert’s second wife, played by Emma Samms is also returning for a few weeks…wow…I am so glued to this show for awhile.

Darn this show bringing back some of my all-time favorite soap characters!

Someone emailed me and asked what all I am doing on my diet, so I thought I would just write it up for everyone at once.

Wake up and exercise. If I oversleep I move the exercise to immediately after work.

Eat something very small (like 2 or 3 Hershey Kisses or a couple of corn chips) around 10 or 11 to get my metobalism burning

2:00 PM or 3:00 PM Have a smoothie

6:30 PM If morning exercise is missed, I exercise here

6:30 PM or 7:30 PM Have dinner

10:30 PM Have a smoothie

11:30 PM Have a cup of green tea. Good for you and helps your metobalism

It is of my own design and may make no sense to anyone else, but it seems to be working for me. I think part of it is keeping to a schedule, and I do change things up like every Thursday I go for lunch with a friend at Noon, so I made that my real meal of the day and dinner is replaced with a smoothie. Anyone have thoughts? Feel free to share them.

Richard Hatch, winner of Survivor:Borneo (AKA The First Survivor), was found guilty today of tax evasion for not paying taxes on his $1 Million prize from the show, $327,000 he was paid as co-host of a Boston radio show and $28,000 in rent on property he owned. He claimed, at least on the $1 Million prize, that the produces of Survivor had agreed to pay the taxes on the money due to a deal he struck with them to not reveal that other contestants had food snuck to them on the island, a claim the producers denied.

You know, fine, maybe he was confused on the prize money, but that still leaves taxes on $355,000 unpaid. How could he even remotely think he wasn’t supposed to pay taxes on those earnings? He can’t. It’s just plain arrogance on his part, something the entire country he know’s he has plenty of after watching him on the original Survivor.

He is facing as much as 13 years in prison, but the usual sentance is 33 to 41 months. He was taken into custody as soon as the verdict was read as the judge deemed him a potential flight risk. Why do I find this so oddly satisfying?

Couple interesting things today from the world of news about Television.

First off, The WB and UPN are becoming one network this Fall, due to be called The CW. Each pre-existing network will have a 50% stake in the new one, and each network will bring their gest shows with them. So shows like Gilmore Girls and Smallville from The WB and Everybody Hates Chris and America’s Next Top Model from UPN will be on the new network.

This could play out a couple of ways. You could lose a show you like, but areas of the country that have been underserviced by there two networks now stand a chance of actually having them. This could actually make another network, making a big five, where as spereate entities, they were never a threat. A story to keep your eye on for sure.

And the second thing I wanted to point out was that The Book of Daniel has been cancelled after only three weeks on the air. Of course the folks who complained the most are claiming a victory. This brings their victories to two in almost as many months. First the episode of South Park, and now this. With each victory the cencorship mavens will grow more bold and will spread their targets wider and wider. Hope you all enjoy what’s in store, because it’s far from over.

Well, the cable company checked the line first thing this morning, which impressed the hell out of me. The found some fluxiation in the strength. The put a booster on the back of the cable modem, and we seemed to be more stable today, but when the ISP pinged the router, we had gone from a 10% packet loss, to a 20% packet loss. Good times folks, good times. Well the new router will be here tomorrow, and hopefully that will solve the problems, but we will have to wait and see.

Why…why can technology never work smoothly. I will warn you this gets very geeky:

At work cable runs to the cable modem
Cable modem runs to the router
Router runs to a switch
Switch runs to the wall ports

We have been having a serious speed problem all of a sudden at work, and it is just getting worse. So I spent some time investigating it tonight and my ISP detected some static on the line, and when they pinged through the modem to the router we were getting a 10% packet loss. We took the router out of the equation and plugged straight into the switch and we had 0 packet loss. Put the router back in the line and back to 10% packet loss.

So, now the question is if it’s the static in the line and the router is catching it, or is the router bad? It’s a Linksys WRT54G and only about 4 months old. Anyone have thoughts?

I’m too lazy tonight to go out and dig up any news to comment on right now, so I thought I would give you an update on various aspects of my life:

Bedtime - My weekend bedtime is slipping more and more towards the 5 AM mark again. I really need to stop that. And during the week it is more around 4 AM. Way later than it should be.

Diet - Holding to it for the most part. The hardest thing to do is keep enough supplies around the house for my smoothies. Twice a day I am replacing a meal with a smoothie consisting of 1/2 a banana, 3 - 4 strawberries, ice and apple juice. So I am only eating one “real” meal a day, and at around the two week mark I am seeing a major reduction in my stomach already. We will see how long it lasts. And if anyone has any recommendations for other smoothie mixtures, please share! I am just trying to keep them as sugar free as I can.

Internet Addiction - You would think of 20 years on the internet, that it’s appeal would have worn off by now…nope. I am still on here everynight, wasting my life away. And as I add more late night chat buddies, that is why I am falling back into my old habits again. Darn them.

Work - Work could be going a lot better, but is there anyone who doesn’t say that?

NO!

That’s really the only word that pops to mind when I read about the goverment issuing a subpeona for Google turn over a list of all their search terms. For now Google is fighting them, but Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has asked a California Federal judge to order Google to comply. So far Yahoo, MSN and AOL have complied. The goverment is quick to point out that this is done in the name of protecting children from pornography.

I am all for protecting children, but where does it end? At this time they are only requesting the words, not who used them. What do they learn from this? Not a whole lot. So the word “teen” was searched on 5,000,000 times, so what? Yes, I am sure some of those searches were for teen porn, and some of the were probably searches for teen acne cures. If the govemerment is allowed this info, what will they ask for next? Maybe geogrphic information as to which are of the country searches on a word the most? What about city after that? Oh ok, by neighborhood…no, just tell us who searched on what. If you do not draw the line somewhere they will just keep taking and taking, they will never stop.

Again, I turn to this quote:

“They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” - Benjamin Franklin

Between the recent, potentially, unlawful, monitering of phone calls and this, it would seem everuone in the USA is to be considered under suspicion of some form of crime until we are told otherwise.

It’s well known that Steve Martin is returning to host Saturday Night Live on February 4th for his 14th visit, but now there is news that the musical guest will be Prince.

Prince? You have to be kidding me. THE Prince…short little guy who starred in Purple Rain and is well known for having no sense of humor Prince? Has anyone informed him that Fred Armisen mocks him without mercy in the “Prince Show” sketches? (actually one of the few hillarious recurring sketches as of late)

This episode could be the highlight of a season that has only recently regained some strength. The Alec Baldwin and Scarlett Johansen episodes were both fairly strong and harkened back to some of the older glory days. Maybe someone finally lit a fire under their collective behinds.

Things are just way hectic this week and things will return to normal by this weekend hopefully.

Sorry folks, no time for a real post today. We lost power for 3 hours at work today and it just sent the entire day into a tailspin.

I know my enteries have been a bit lackluster as of yet, but I have 5,000 things going on, so I am just sticking up random thoughts. Today is some of the huge pile of…well…I would say CDs, but it’s all been MP3s, I am working my way through. Anyway, some bands I have gotten in to that I had never tried before:

Bif Naked - Listned to Superbeautifulmonster, I Bificus and Purge. I have heard of Bif for many years, but never given her a try…I think I may be in love. Songs like “Funeral For A Good Grrl” are worth every penny.

The Distillers - Listened to Sing Sing Death House, Coral Fang and The Distillers. Gutteral, raw and full of energy. This band grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go. I mus thave listened to the song “Drain the Blood” three times in a row.

Yellowcard - Listened to Ocean Avenue, Lights and Sounds and Where We Stand. I liked all three albums, but they almost seem like the poor-man’s Green Day.

Within Tempation - Listened to Silent Force, Mother Earth, Enter and The Dance. A bit more gothic sounding than my usual taste, but I loved the albums. The female singer is amazing.

How? How in the world did I never realize what Google Desktop does for you, and how cool it is? You install it, and when your screen saver kicks on, it goes to work indexing your computer. When done, you click the icon and it launches a page that looks like Google.com. Once there, you enter a search term and it finds all occurances of that word on your hard drive!

As someone who quite often “loses” a file on his hard drive, this is a total blessing as the built in Windows search is so amazingly slow. So, go get Desktop immediately! Don’t wait like I did!

According to this AP story, researchers at McGill University in Montreal are trying to devolop a pill that would reduce the trauma of painful events.

This is great in theory, but who does not see the hundreds of potential abuses of this medication? A rapist could give it to his victim as soon as the rape is over to cloud their memory of their attacker. A murderer could take it after the event to fool a lie detector. People could start taking it recreationally, and if so, what are the effects of numerous modified memories?

Just because science can do something, doesn’t mean they should. The brain is a delicate and complicated machine, it’s not exactly something you should just throw medication at and “modify”.

It’s time to break out your iPod or whatever you have and press shuffle. List the first 20 songs that come up, no matter how embarassing. Be honest.

1. The Toasters - Matt Davis
2. Skavoovie & The Epitones - Wildfire
3. Sublime - Hong Kong Phooey
4. Neil Diamond - If You Know What I Mean (D’oh!)
5. The Cult - Sweet Salvation
6. Mozart - Symphony #40 In G Minor
7. K.M.F.D.M. - Bullets, Bombs & Bigotry
8. Don McLean - Empty Chairs
9. Fall Out Boy - Switchblades And Infidelity
10. Prince - Love 2 the 9’s
11. Madonna - Paradise (Not For Me)
12. The White Stripes - Forever For Her (Is Over For Me)
13. Jerry Lee Lewis - Great Balls Of Fire
14. Danny Elfman - Batman
15. Laurel Aitken - Boogie With The Bartender
16. Madonna - Bad Girl
17. The Ory/The Kitchen Conan The Barbarian OST
18. Rammstein - Dalai Lama
19. Bauhaus - Dancing
20. White Zombie - Thrust!

I swear I don’t have THAT much Madonna!

Yes! Finally Rent has a release date on DVD! February 21st will see both a Widescreen and a Fullscreen versions released. Although, I will never understand why anyone wants Fullscreen, but that may just be me.

If you didn’t get to check out this movie in the theaters, and judging by it’s $29,077,547 gross, you didn’t, you really should check it out on DVD. Great story, believable characters, fantastic music and stories & themes that we can all relate to in some way.