Terminally Incoherent

Is it just me, or was Tony Soprano on a receiving end of a karmic bitch slap? If you dream about being slapped in the face by a bhuddist monk you are probably a despicable human being

Seeing Tony as dorky salesman is just beyond bizarre. Is this how his life would be if he was not in the mob? Man, that blows… I think he was better off as a crime boss. I seriously think this is actually what hell is like. You wake up as a lame salesman, stuck in a shitty convention town and no matter what you do you can’t get out

Last week I was sure that Tony will be just fine, but now I just don’t know. I have this sneaky suspicion that he might be comatose for the rest of the season… That would be seriously gay!

BTW, I would like to thank Jamie-Lyn Discala for not wearing a bra in this episode. I guess it was cold in there or something because I could clearly see nipples in more than one scene. Yay!

I just watched the last episode of Fullmetal Alchemist, and right after I poped in Conquerror of Shamballa. To my knowledge CoS was never dubbed. My version was in Japanese with English subtitles. Ed’s voice just sounded so bizarre… I guess I was just so used to the English dub

The movie was good, but I was not all that impressed. I think the best part of Fullmetal was the slowly unveiling mystery of the philosopher stone, alchemy and the haemonculi. The show started bright, and cheerful and then it got progressively darker, and more sinister and the Elric brothers uncovered the secrets of alchemy. In CoS all the secrets have been revealed. The plot is fairly straightforward. It is definitely worth watching but please do not expect something out of this world. The movie is essentially as solid as a good stand-alone, Fullmetal episode. It’s top notch anime but simply not as capturing as the last few episodes of the series.

[Minor spoilage may lurk below]

The plot is simple - you have two brothers, one stuck at each side of the gate. Al is trying to bring his brother back. Ed wants to go home but unfortunately in our world alchemy does not work… So he is stuck in Munich where he can witness the birth of the Nazi party.

A German occult organization called Thule Society manages to find Envy in his dragon form (last shape he assumed when traveling through the gate) and use his body to temporarily open the gate to the other world. Ed finds about it.

And it goes from there. You can expect to see people on both sides attempting to create a stable gate, brothers getting reunited, a war between worlds, and appearances by all the main characters. You can probably figure out what happens in the movie just from this description.

But this is Fullmetal, right? One would expect some shocking, mind boggling revelations at some point during the movie. But, unfortunately there is no deep underlying mystery. There are no shocking revelations about the nature of alchemy or the world. It’s just action and adventure. Not that there is anything wrong in this. I just expected more.

German Hues comes off as a real dick. Munich Bradley on the other hand is a good guy. We also see Scar driving a truck at the end of the movie

I give it a solid B. It really could have been so much more if they just added some of that of that Fullmetal mystery and shocking twists into it.

Wow… Just wow… The *AA organizations just transcended to another level of unspeakable evilness. This is from Freedom to Tinker:

There were many suggestions to legalize breaking DRM if it would compromise critical infrastructure and/or directly endanger human life. The response from the RIAA and MPAA corner was a categorical no.

They’re worried that there might be “serious doubt” about whether their future DRM access control systems are covered by these exemptions, and they think the doubt “would be even more severe” if the “exemption would turn on whether access controls ‘threaten critical infrastructure and potentially endanger lives’.”

(…)

One would have thought they’d make awfully sure that a DRM measure didn’t threaten critical infrastructure or endanger lives, before they deployed that measure. But apparently they want to keep open the option of deploying DRM even when there are severe doubts about whether it threatens critical infrastructure and potentially endangers lives.

And here’s the really amazing part. In order to protect their ability to deploy this dangerous DRM, they want the Copyright Office to withhold from users permission to uninstall DRM software that actually does threaten critical infrastructure and endanger lives.

So there you have it… It seems that they haven’t learned a damn thing from the Sony debacle. Now they are trying to buy themselves laws that would allow them to continue using dangerous rootkits…

Part of my job is tech support for our field employees… On most days the calls I get are easy to fix, but sometimes I get these bizarre issues that just boggle my mind.

I encountered the weirdest email problem ever today.

A guy called me up complaining that his Outlook won’t pull email anymore. I run him through the usual hoops, checking and retyping all the settings, creating a new Outlook profile and etc… Nothing worked.

He can ping both the POP and SMTP servers. He can telnet to both servers and issue commands. When creating a new profile (via Control Panel), the “Test Account Settings” shows him that everything is set up correctly, and he can connect without a problem. And yet, when he runs the same test in Outlook it fails to even connect.

Something is preventing Outlook from connecting, but it’s not the firewall. The guy swears up and down that the firewall is disabled, and switched off. I made him check it like 20 times. But there has to be something blocking it - I just can’t get any useful info out of him. Clueless people make phone support really difficult…

I told him to install tightvnc - and on Monday I will make him plug the laptop directly to the modem so that I can remotely get in and poke around. I bet this is something fucking trivial - he is just to clueless to notice…

Another guy actually managed to completely destroy a fresh install of Win2k in 3 days. I sent him a clean laptop with Norton AV and Windows AntiSpyware crap on Tuesday. I run a virus and spyware scans before I packed it into a box. Today his machine was barely moving at all. Norton is completely disabled, and something is locking his task-manager (when he does Ctrl+Alt+Del, or right clicks on taskbar the Task Manager option is grayed out). He said that AntiSpyware found tons of things and removed it yesterday. When Norton was still working, it also removed 5 or 6 viruses in the past few days. And then it just died. I actually don’t know if it is even possible to recover from this shit. It sounds like his system was completely overrun…

I seriously don’t know how people do this… How can you get your system so badly infected? Sometimes I think it would just be easier to have a training session on how to download pr0n without destroying your system. I’m pretty sure this would really cut down on the amount of tech support we need to do here…

Today was a weird day…

I think I saw the stupid ProLiant logo in my dream… Damn that stupid server. This is the only thing it does these days - it shows ProLiant on the screen and stops. I have seen so much of that logo in the past 2 days that I think it got burned into my retina…

When I was getting ready for work today, the TV was on some news station (I think CNN). I actually caught a glimpse of a HP commercial on TV at some point. Guess what were they selling? Pro fucking Liant servers! Agh!

HP technician finally showed up to replace the mobo. After he plugged in all the hardware into place, but before he put the air-guards, latches and all the other funky bullshit in place he did a test. The server zoomed through the ProLiant logo and started doing the POST. I was ready to hug him! But my joy was short lived… Soon after POST finished we run into a non-system-disk error.

The technician said not to worry, because we might need to fiddle with the BIOS a bit to get the RAID working and all. He powered the machine down, put it together, closed it and and booted back up… Only to see the static ProLiant logo. He spent the next hour and a half fiddling with the parts and scratching his head.

He is supposed to come back tomorrow with a new CPU and power supply… Will it get fixed? Who knows. This damn thing is shot… I’m just praying that the MySQL database and the nightly backup dumps are on the backup tapes… If the drives are dead, I am going to puke.

Fast forward till after the lunch. One of my co workers went absolutely hysterical. Apparently her boyfriend tried to commit suicide, took something and then called her at work while being barely coherent. It sounded really serious… There was really nothing we could do. We all sat there listening to her pleading on the phone with him. Petrified… Another girl quickly called in an ambulance for him (while he was still on the phone), and then offered to drive her home. That was pretty much all the assistance we could give.

What do you say in that situation? What do you do? It’s messed up.

When I got home I saw another ProLiant commercial… Fuck ProLiant! I hate their guts!

Some days are just weird like that…