There are times when I have no choice but to simply sigh and wonder how some people are CEOs of major companies and I have yet to hit the jackpot.  Take, for instance, Tim Armstrong – CEO of AOL.

The new AOL brand identity.

Over the past couple of week, as he attempts to save AOL from dropping further behind its competitors, he’s come up with a whole slew of oddball ideas.

First, he’s “updated” their image.  Check out the new brand identity logos as found on Businesswire.  That’s right.  There’s a goldfish, a purple sponge, a figure with a ball of yarn for a head and a random green squiggle.  Shouldn’t there be a cat chasing these things around?  Not to mention that the company name has been shifted from the AOL we all know and love (note all capital letters) to a cute looking “Aol.”  Yes.  With the period. That’s right. Just like a one word sentence.  What??

As Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo aptly points out in his article “AOL’s Latest Dumb Business Plan“, it sounds remarkably like A-Hole without the ‘h’.

Manjoo goes on to discuss his opinions on Armstrong’s new business plan which rests on “…a high-tech system for mass-producing news articles, entertainment and other online content.”  This is Armstrong’s key strategy as he aims to “…make AOL, which has been losing visitors and revenue, a magnet for both advertisers and consumers by turning it into the top creator of digital content.”  as discussed in a recent Wall Street Journal article.

That’s right.  Armstrong wants to mass-produce content, while still being a “… top creator of digital content.” (emphasis added).  To start with, when I read about high volume content creation, my mind jumps to YouTube.  Or perhaps the blogosphere.  But certainly not a news source.  News sources may create a lot of well written, credible articles.  But I’m sorry, they don’t take the cake in quantity.  What’s more, mass-produced news seems like a terribly bad idea.

So from what I can tell, in order to overcome the small hurdle of having to pay a finite number of editors and writers to cover stories, Armstrong and his company are discussing using the thousands of readily available, want to be published, never written before people who want nothing more than to get published.  Armstrong’s model will be to see breaking news, put out a call for articles, and hope that they will get first hand accounts, photos, video, hell — anything really from the community.  And I’m guessing for free.

How’s that for reliable news?  How’s that for responsible journalism?  Instead of rewarding high quality journalism, they are looking for the largest volume of quick stories, not the best.

And lets not forget Armstrong’s goal of making Aol. a “… magnet for both advertisers and consumers…”  With this ideal in mind, and the  mass-produced news, we should all look forward to a shitty news site with tons of ads.  Great.  Sign me up…

So, who is going to unsubscribe from the new A-Hole?

Osho – No faith for Nostradamus

…and there are no micro black holes eroding away at the core of the planet!

Oh yes. A thousand times yes. now, I’m no nu-clear physicalist or even any kind of scientist. What I am, however, is a man who loves explosions. I am also a man who is completely infatuated with the idea that we can push science forward and understand more about the universe we live in by accelerating things to near the speed of light and shooting them at other things going nearly the speed of light.

I might not be obsessed with destroying things, but I’m getting close.

I’ll be raising a glass tonight… for science. I might even dump out a bottle of colt 45 in the fresh winter snow for all those gangsta scientists. You know who you are.

I truly think that DwarfFortress is as close to “awesome” as any piece of software could be. There is no other way to justify the goodness of this game. For example, yesterday I was roaming the “Jungles Of Quietness” during the night, when I got attacked by a Cougar. The moment was tense, the cougard could’ve ripped me apart with his claws in no time… I needed to keep it at distance. Time froze, until I got the ultimate idea: vomit!

After the cougar started vomiting, well, he was a really easy victim for my mighty hammer. The vomit saved the day again!

Let’s be a bit more serious now: the above situation is interesting, because it allows us to understand the extent of the work done on this little gem of a game. Look at the text from the image, there is a lot of information about how deep such a game is: let’s briefly analyze it.

For example, the first thing that we see is that “The spinning vomit strikes the cougar in the lower body”. This implies many things:

• there is the concept of vomit as a biological thing (like it is not there on the floor, but it is monsters and people producing you)
• objects can be thrown
• the vomit hits the cougar in the “lower body”: this means that the cougar has an anatomy that is properly designed. You should see what happens when you encounter a giant scorpion… Those things have many many legs, and your sharp weapons have a the change of getting stuck into all of them, meaning quasi-instant death

The situation becomes even more insteresting if we consider the full situation. Think about it: I threw some vomit at the cougar, hitting him in the belly. As a reaction (think at what would happen to you if someone would hit you hard in the belly), the cougar feels sick and vomits too. Awesome. Just awesome.

I want One!

Following my recent coming out as a tech porn addict I’ve been greatly comforted to discover that Daniel and I are not alone in our guilty perversion. Just today I learned from a former colleague, an accomplished guitarist and writer, that he goes into our local guitar shop Mansons from time to time to just look at the high-end instruments and has admitted to secretly shuddering as he admires them.

It’s such a relief to know that I am not alone in my shame. It was bad enough believing that I was the only gay twelve-year-old on the planet but this, how would I break such a shameful addiction to my long-suffering family?

I resisted the urge to secretly go to the AKG website but then something even more seductive fell into my browser, the Korg site, thank heavens my credit rating sucks so badly!

Well, this week has crept up on me and left pretty quickly.

Here are some more youtubes of the band in action, or inaction.

The other night a couple buddies and myself spent some time hooking up a few Xbox 360s and televisions to play some Gears of War 2 on Horde. The setup worked pretty well and it turned out to be a lot of fun. It reminded me of LAN parties past; World of Warcraft, Diablo, Starcraft, all the way back to Classic Doom. Only with far less cramping and claw-hand from a mouse.

All I can say is thank god science fiction and fantasy are thriving somewhere. This allegory business is important, and I have to say science fiction in film and television have been a serious disappointment lately. With all these advancements in technology lately it seems that content has taken a spot on the backburner. The people I know have seen me turn my nose up at almost every movie and television show I’ve seen in the last ten years. Here’s to hoping that The Road turns out a little better than damn near everything else I’ve seen lately. My point is that despite all those absurdly terrible movies out there at least I’ll always have that devious concubine Video Games. Yum indeed!

Finally I’d like to share this. After my last stint working at a gas station I too have many stories about ignorant customers starting arguments regarding the stupidest stuff… “what do you mean I have to pay Tax?”, “What do you mean I can’t smoke while I’m pumping gas”, and my personal favourite “What do you mean you don’t have any gasoline? What happened to it?” I know it’s a lot to ask, but please don’t be a goon when you need goods and services.

Well, I’ve entered into the world of blogging! The welcome is warm like a pile of laundry fresh from the dryer! The faces are familiar like a high school reunion! I did expect the food to be better, however.

Well, first things first. This past weekend my band mates and I decided to take some time and make a video. I’ve been wanting to try and sync up audio and video from independent sources for some time now. This is my first real attempt.

Sadly though I think either the audio recording rig (Funk Disclaimer: That last one’s a doozy) I used or the video camera had some lag time which ended up desynchronizing the video in a nasty way. Both recordings were done at the same time and synced up to the drum count in editing. Speaking of which I ended up using the windows live movie maker that came with this new Windows 7 business. At 4:30am it was troublesome that this didn’t turn out perfect to say the least. I know now, at least, that it is plausible with my current setup.

…and Them Crooked Vultures! Holy damn! I think I enjoy the idea of this band as much as the follow through. The best of the stoner rock, post-grunge alt, and classic rock in one delicious package? Yes please! Though one thing isn’t sitting right. Ever eat an entire tub of ice cream or box of Oreos and feel guilty afterwards? Are you a victim of Catholic Guilt? I get that same guilty feeling after listening to these guys. I can’t stop after the first bite! It just feels so good.

I suppose that’ll be all for now. It’s just about time for a sandwich.

I want you - NOW!

I have to thank Daniel for putting my mind at rest. Until I read his post Yesterday  I thought I was the only person on the planet who got inappropriately damp over music technology. I can now, at last, come out and admit that I love music tech!

Working for AKG in the mid 80s was the perfect job for a degenerate who could almost get a hard-on just holding a microphone, listening to some of our top end headphones was, well, a little bit naughty and should have really been done in the privacy of my own home. As UK Sales Office Manager my principal job was to talk to people from the world of music, broadcasting and film to advise them on which bits of our kit were best for what job, I was also allowed to be completely honest and if a band rang up looking for a front line vocal mic’ would usually point them at the legendary Shure SM58 rather than one of ours.

The best part of the job though was manning stands at music fairs. Apart from getting to know a lot of people in the various businesses, I got to play with the kit that other manufactures were showing off. The first time I saw a Fairlight I damn near came in my pants! I know that the poor old laptop I’m writing this post on is more powerful than that and my PC, which I use for my composing now, is way more powerful still, but they just don’t have the sheer sexiness of that gorgeous piece of machinery.

Of course music fairs were also a great opportunity to ogle the hordes of young muso wannabees that came to the public days, but that’s quite another story.

I have to go now or I’ll end up closing the curtains and visiting the AKG site in secret

…this still makes me laugh like a 12-year-old…

Writer and star of the Broadway musical In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda performs “The Hamilton Mixtape” at the White House Evening of Poetry, Music, and the Spoken Word on May 12, 2009. Accompanied by Alex Lacamoire.

And it’s full of geeky goodness (and some mild adult language).

There’s a new Film Blog in town, it’s called The Film Buzz and you can locate them by pointing your address bar towards http://thefilmbuzz.com.

The Film Buzz.com

The Film Buzz offers the latest film trailers, reviews, previews and posters of new and upcoming film titles as well as some old one that they love. check it out now or check them out on Twitter or Facebook.

The Film Buzz is different from other Movie Review sites, they like to keep things short and sweet – simple, all film previews include a trailer with HD options, so check it out now.

Just so we’re clear the web address is: http://thefilmbuzz.com

It was a dark and stormy night. A tree fell half a mile down the road, broke a power line, caused a brown out, and somehow all of that killed my main computer. Not my server mind you, it was fine. But my main computer that I work and play on was dead as a doorstop. But my story is not one of tragedy or loss as you’ll often hear from people who have all their wedding pictures, baby pictures, vacation albums, life-long memoirs, and PhD thesis all stored on a computer which they never bother to back-up. All my important items were on my file server which I backup frequently. So no, mine is not a story tragedy but of new opportunities, and the final kick I needed to get around to building a new computer for myself.

Yes, I build my own computers. Building a computer may seem intimidating to some, but it’s not really all that difficult. You can save a bundle of money buying your own parts from online retailers like New Egg, and best of all, you know exactly what’s going into the machine. It’s the ultimate in customized computer perfection. Having said that, you do need to do a bit of research to find out exactly what you should get and, more importantly, what parts are compatible with each other (i.e., make sure you get the right motherboard with the right CPU socket for the processor you want to get, and likewise, make sure you get the right kind of RAM that fits the motherboard).

This post is going to follow my build process step-by-step, and may also be used as a light tutorial. But if you are new to building PCs, I strongly recommend you do a bit more research before diving in head first. I take no responsibility for any damage that may occur (either to your hardware or to your person) if you follow this guide alone — it is not a complete step-by-step, and is valid only for this particular configuration.

But first, here’s a run-down of the hardware I bought:

- RAIDMAX SMILODON ATX-612WBP Black ATX Mid Tower
- 600 watt OCZ ModXStream Pro modular power supply
- GIGABYTE GA-MA770T-UD3P AM3 AMD 770 ATX AMD Motherboard
- AMD Phenom II X3 705e 2.5GHz Socket AM3 65W Triple-Core
- OCZ Gold AMD Edition 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM 1600 MHz
- Sony SATA DVD-ROM
- Sony SATA DVD/CD Rewritable Drive
- GeForce 9500 GT 1GB 128-bit GDDR2 PCI Express 2.0 x16
- Intel X25-M Mainstream 80GB SATA II MLC SSD

Of course, this is by no means the best and baddest hardware — I aim for cost effectiveness and efficiency, while maintaining fairly high (but not over-the-top) performance.

Let’s begin with the case. A lot of people consider the case to be of secondary importance, or simply find one that looks good but lacks functionality. The RaidMax Smilodon both looks good and is quite functional (a smilodon, by the way, is the proper name of a saber-tooth cat, if you were wondering).

Look how the motherboard tray just folds out. Few cases do this, but it’s very handy.

I also bought a 600 watt modular power supply from OCZ to replace the cheep piece of junk power supply that comes with this otherwise awesome case. Modular power supplies are the only way to go.

Here’s the motherboard. It does not have a built-in video card (I bought a separate “sort-of high performance” card for advanced 3D acceleration) but it does come with on-board LAN, 8-channel audio with digital optical output, and 8 USB ports, and 2 Firewire ports.

This is the main CPU that clips into the AM3 socket on the motherboard. It’s a triple-core AMD Phenom II, which means it actually has 3 cores in a single chip. Yes, 3 cores may sound kind of odd, but it’s just an ordinary quad-core with 1 core disabled (I could attempt to re-enable it, but I really don’t have the inclination). Next to it is the heatsink and fan for cooling.

The RAM. It’s 2 chips, actually, totaling 4 GBs of DDR3 SDRAM running at 1066 MHz (1333 MHz is max if overclocked, but I don’t really overclock either).

This is the video card. It’s a GeForce 9500 GT with 1GB of GDDR2 RAM. If you’re a hardcore gamer, you’d probably laugh at this. But as I suspect you’ve gathered by now, I’m not a hardcore gamer.

These are the two Sony DVD drives, both are SATA (that’s serial ATA): one is just a reader the other is a DVD writer. It’s not a Blu-ray writer, but like I said, I’m not going for the biggest and baddest.

Here’s the nicest bit: a generation 2 Intel X25-M 80 GB Solid-State Drive. If you don’t know, SSDs are the future of data storage. Unlike traditional clunky, noise, mechanical, spinning, adjective-filled, magnetic platter hard drives, these are basically super-high performance flash memory devices. Sure, it’s only 80 gigabytes, but is much, much, much faster than traditional hard drives. I’ve been waiting 15 years for this technology, and now it’s finally available and affordable (well, sort of affordable).

Let’s start by adding the power supply to the case. First I remove that piece of junk power supply that came with the case, toss it aside, and then attached my shiny 600 watt modular power supply.

Many people would add the motherboard next, but I prefer to get the drives in place before hand. To do this, I just pop out the drive bay cover plates and screw the drives into place. However, this case comes with fancy locking rails. I’ve never had a case with those before — they really make things easier.

And then I attach the Intel solid-state drive in a similar manner. The Intel SSD is only 2.5″ wide and is designed for notebooks. To make it fit in a 3.5″ bay, I had to use mounting brackets.

At this point most people would install the motherboard. I am not most people. I prefer to install the CPU chip and memory before putting the motherboard in the case. It just seems easier. First we install the chip. That’s the easy part:

Attaching the heatsink and fan correctly is extremely important. Failure to do so could result in a catastrophic chip disaster (aka, a broken chip). The heatsink that came with the chip I bought has a thermal compound already added to the base, but if you get a 3rd party heatsink and fan (many people prefer copper coolers, as they do conduct heat better), you may need to add your own thermal compound. Either way, once you’re ready, firmly place the heatsink into position and make sure it looks to be aligned correctly. Then we clamp down the massive retention mechanism to keep this whole assembly permanently in place. If you hear a crunching sound at this point, you’ve done something horribly wrong and will need to order a new chip. Trust me… I know.

Also, make sure you plug the power for the fan into the correct prongs on the board. If you don’t do that, the fan will not run, and you will likely burn out your chip rather quickly.

Once that’s done, we add the RAM. If your board uses dual channel memory, check your manual to see what the optimal RAM placement calls for. You will want one stick on channel 0 and the other stick on channel 1, rather than both sticks on channel 0 (or 1). This board is configured such that memory slots 0 and 2 go to channel 0 and memory slots 1 and 3 goes to channel 1. Thus, I put the two sticks in slots 0 and 1 (just as most people would do anyway, even if they did not read the manual). Of course, with 4 sticks of RAM this would be a mute point. The slots are usually color-coded now, too, so just remember to set both memory sticks in the same colored slots.

Now, finally, I attach the motherboard to the motherboard tray on the case. As you can see, this is extremely easy with a case that has a fold-down tray. Just put it into position and bolt it down with a few screws.

Then we insert the video card into the PCI-express x16 slot.

With all that done, we need to attach all the cables. First, we need to hook up the connections for the front panel, including the all important power and reset switches. Also, if you have them, connect the wires for the font panel USB ports as well.

Next we plug the power into the main board (do make sure the main power cable is NOT plugged into the wall outlet).

Now we plug the power into the SSD and to each DVD drive.

Then we’ll attach the SATA cables to the SSD and the 2 DVD drives (the days of those hideous parallel ribbon cables are now thankfully gone–and good riddance).

If there are any additional fans on the case (and this case as several) hook them up to the power as well. I did not hook up all the fans on my cases, as I do not anticipate my rig generating an excessive amount of heat… but if it does, I can always go back and activate the other fans for additional cooling.

Before closing up the case, double-check all the power and wiring connections, and make sure the memory sticks and video card are well seated in place. Now we close up the case, connect a mouse, keyboard, and monitor, and switch it on!

Okay, let’s plug the power cord into the wall and try that again.

If nothing happens, don’t panic. There may be a master cut-off switch on the back of the power supply that you need to flip to the “on” position first. Then push the main power button on the front of the case and cross your fingers.

If you get this… well, ummm…. oops.

Otherwise, if the computer boots up, you’re good! You should hit DEL to get to the BIOS screen and set that up for the optimal configuration. I won’t go into those details here, but the manual should have a guide. There is a great, fairly up-to-date BIOS guide here.

If you have a Ubuntu disk, just pop it into the CD or DVD drive and boot. This should give you a menu to install (or repair) Ubuntu, or to go into a “live desktop” mode from the CD itself. The Live mode will run very slow (since it is running off the CD), but will get you up and running immediately to test things out.

Also, if you boot off the Ubuntu disk you have an option to run the Memory Test (Memtest86+). I strongly recommend that you run Memtest86+ for a minimum of 6 hours once you get your PC up and running… you could simply start it up and leave it running all night or when you go to work (be sure to turn off your screen). Memtest86+ will run a long battery of tests to make sure the memory is OK… this also has the effect of testing your CPU to a fair extent as well, so it also doubles as a fairly good “burn in” test for your new PC. Note that Memtest86+ will run forever if you let it, so don’t wait for it “finish”–otherwise, you’ll be waiting a long time. Just make sure it does a few complete passes (at minimum) and then shut down or reboot the computer. Hopefully you won’t get any errors. If you do, you’ll need to return the memory as defective (better to find out now, right?).

Now with the build finally completed, you just need to install an operating system like the latest 64-bit release of Ubuntu Linux or (gasp!) Windows. Then make sure it’s setup and configured properly, test drive your machine a bit, and install all your applications. I set up mine to dual boot between Ubuntu (for 99% of my daily use) and Windows 7 (for occasional casual gaming).

And that’s it! See how easy that was? In my next do-it-yourself post, I’ll show you how to build a electromagnetic plasma-ion propulsion system.

…or maybe not.

I am officially revising. This means I officially have writers brain. So I bring you this to entertain you this Monday morning.

Star Wars geeks and Gilbert and Sullivan nerds unite! I’m serious. It’s like chocolate and peanut butter. They just go together. Todd (from Geek Girl’s Guide) gives it a big thumbs up.

dont mind me, testing feed

So, I survived an unseasonably muggy Halloween night dressed as Golden Age comic hero Sandman.

Here’s the proof:

Today was my first ride on Katies horse Dallas. It was a lot of fun! I stayed in te round pen this time. I have to hand it to Katie for her patience in instructing me. She rocks! Dallas is such a good horse also. Nice mellow disposition. I am excited to come out to the barn next week and ride some more. As soon as I relearn my equestrian basics we will go on trail rides. Maybe a picnic in the mountains.