Terminally Incoherent

I posted about Sun offering to send you Solaris 10 DVD kit free of charge few weeks ago. Today I got the DVD’s in the mail:

Awesome! Now if I only had a machine on which I could install it. Oh well, there’s always VmWare….

Also, I still didn’t get the Open Solaris kit.

My brother plays Megalomania a lot. He wanted to create a private forum away from the official game forums where he and his group of friends and allies could discuss strategies, evil galaxy domination plots and etc. He didn’t want to invest any money into it - he just wanted a free forum, preferably without annoying ads but he couldn’t find anything good out there.

I did some googling and found the FreeForums.org site. They offer to host a fully functional PHPBB for you with no ads or popups. I think they do have some limits on uploads, but I don’t think they have an upper cap on how big your forum can grow.

Their domain naming is also pretty good - you will simply get a subdomain under freeforums.org (ie. foo.freeforums.org). Sounds like a really great deal if you ask me.

If you are looking to set up a forum, and you want it to be hosted for free without ads, go check them out.

I just added some new features for your convenience. I added “quicktags” to the comment form, so that you don’t have to type HTML in the box anymore. And you can easily post a link, without having to type out the whole href tag.

Second feature I added is the “Quote” link. You will notice that right after the quicktags there is a “[Quote Selected]” link. It does exactly what it says it will do. Select some text on the page, hit the link, and it will be pasted into your comment in a nice quotation bracket.

Furthermore, each post now has a [Quote] link right next to the date and time when it was posted. You can use it to simply quote the whole comment.

This will hopefully help tracking long discussions. Personally I don’t like threaded comments (like on Live Journal) - I don’t think they really facilitate good discussion. Single threads with some quoting where appropriate is the way to go IMHO.

Anyways, I hope you like these. Feel free to disagree on the “threaded comments” thing. I would love to hear your thoughts on this, and discuss it further.

I would like to congratulate RIAA on winning the 2007’s Worst Company in America Award.

They have managed to beat Halliburton which is an incredible accomplishment right there. I wonder if they will finally get the message…

Oh wait… I forgot. They don’t care. It’s not like they are selling anything to us so being hated doesn’t diminish their profit margins at all. To really hurt RIAA we need to channel that hatred towards the actual recording studios that they represent and stop buying their shit.

As long as we continue hating RIAA but giving money to it’s members, it’s going to be business as usual for them. So I guess they really deserve some congratulations. Perhaps this was not intentional, but RIAA became something symbolic. It became the embodiment of all that is wrong with the music industry - something to be hated.

So the member companies used it as a scrape goat that can be used as a shield and distraction, and ultimately sacrificed on the altar of crushingly bad PR. In the meantime they can continue flying below the radar.

I dare you to name at lest 3 RIAA members without looking them up. If you can do it, I applaud you. If not, then you are in the same boat as most of the people who voted in the consumerist poll. These member companies are who is pulling the strings and organizing the lawsuits. RIAA is simply the public entity that takes the public beatings on their behalf.

They are the ones who should be receiving this award. Not the abstract entity that is RIAA.

Most of the simple digital photo cameras are essentially the same. They all have a lens that you point at your target, a viewing apparatus of some sort and a big button that needs to be pressed to take a picture. But every time you ask someone to take a picture of you they act as if this was the first time they have ever seen a camera.

It usually goes kinda like this:

Excuse me, can you take our picture?

How do you work it? Just press that button. Yeah, the big one underneath your finger. The big one! Exactly!

Wait, no, not that one. The one right there on the left! Yes, just press it.

No, wait… Don’t give it back to me yet. I don’t think ti took the picture. There was no flash, and no clicking sound. I don’t think you pressed the button all the way in. Try again….

See, you didn’t press it hard enough. Just press it down harder. Don’t worry you are not going to break it. I promise. Seriously.

Yes, it’s the big button. No, not the small one - go back. The big one… Agh… No… Don’t use the one on the side. That’s the off button. Wait… I think you just powered it down.

Ok, let me see. Yes, it is off. Let’s switch it back on. Now when I give it back to you, just point it at us, and press this button right here. Yes this one. The big, round button. Not the small rectangular one. Not the one on the side. Not this one on the front. Big round one.

I think you’re doing it to fast again. Just press it hard and hold it. Yes… Hold it in for a second. No! Use the big round one like I showed you. That switch over there is the zoom. Don’t press that. Press the big round one. Ok, ready?

You just shut it down again, didn’t you? That’s ok, don’t worry about it. Let’s power it up again. Remember, use the big round button. Let’s try this again. Ready? Cheese!

And you switched it off again. Ok, give it back and leave. Just leave. No, I don’t need a picture anymore. Thank very much but no, you can’t try again. You can leave though. Bye. Well, you’re an asshole too buddy!

Sigh… I don’t get it. Its’ almost as if handing someone a camera was causing some temporary brain damage. One minute they are fine, and then boom! They act as if they had a full frontal lobotomy?