Home of the Forgotten

New media. this has been an interesting class and has helped give me some more insight into some of the newer thing on the internet. Blogging has been the weirdest thing for me so far. When i am online i like to stay low profile and almost never add to the internet. Blogging is a pretty good idea, but it isn't for me. Trying to think of topics for posts, and remember to get them posted proved a lot harder than i though.

if i could have choose some alternative such as making a website or create a more up to date video game. speaking of video games, the Inform project was really quite interesting although during this semester i was also taking a C/C++ class so when i was working on my inform project my mind kept wandering back to c and i ended up coding a good part of my IF in some weird hybrid form of C and natural language. Although the logic flow and basic setup of both languages are similar, they are also very much different.

After taking this class i would say i would recommend other taking it, but take it as more of an introductory class rather than thinking it more of a technical class. When i first signed up for this class i believed that it would be a good technical perspective on New Media, but after going through the class i learned that i was wrong, but the class still ended up being fun and i was able to pull a few things away from it.

Have you ever had a CD that you have played to death or a friend accidentally broke it while they were borrowing it? well i know that this has happened to me more than once, but seeing that i have already bought the original CD i should be entitled to download that CD if i want,right?

What about if there is an artist that was around in the 70's, that now it is imposable to find in the store?, the other day my father came to me asked if i could find him a CD of "Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen". as far as i know they haven't released any new music in almost 10 years. I decided that it should be OK to download one of there albums, i mean the ONE album that i was able to find was over 30 years old. I know that copyright holder are entitled to 50 years, or i believe 25 years after there death.

some might say that downloading music is illegal, in this case I feel that it is in the best interest of more people. My dad was able to have his music back after not hearing this band for almost 15 years due to a broken cassette tape, and also it is helping preserve a great band that could have been forgotten about in just a few years.

It seems that the way music industry is now, they could care less if you break a disk or it become unplayable, and there answer is to buy a new copy. lets look at this for a second : you pay 15 dollars for a CD, a few years later the disk become unplayable and you have to pay another 15 dollars, what happens in a few years when the disk is broken again you have to pay for the same music for a third time. this is absolutely outrageous it is just like if you bought a new car and when it gets a few scratches on it the dealer tell you must pay for a new car, but you still end up with the same car. People need to take a stand, it seems we have lost out fighting spirit. People just seem to take everything at face value, rather than taking the extra moment or two to see if something is good or not.

On a side note a great way to protect your music and still stay inside of your legal right of 'fair use' you can take that shiny new CD you get and encode it to your computer and back your own backup disks. this is what i have been doing for years now and i don't even have to worry about losing or breaking the original CD.

Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airman : Mama Hated Diesels
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBeai4VlZX4

Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen : Down to the seeds and stems
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7_SmqSstKU

this has been an interesting last 2 weeks, i haven't had the time to get on the computer, or even realize that two weeks have gone by.

Last week or maybe two by now, i was driving in new Brittan after my C class. I was on a little side road, kind of near the southington new Brittan reservoir. i was driving and a real quick 90 degree left hand turn jumped out at me, and once entering the turn the ass of my truck slid out towards the outside of the turn and then trying to recover and not hit anything the ass of my truck spun back the other way. my truck ended up spinning around in the road and sliding into a tall curb at speed. The front tire mad it into some guys driveway and the rear drivers side tire hit the curb (that should have been on my right, if the truck did do a 180) and broke my rim off and i my truck just leaned over and landed on the drivers side.

My friend hank happened to be with me at the time, and once my truck was on the side, i looked around to try and figure out what was going on. He said to me "what are you going to do now?" i turn and looked up towards him and said " i have no Fucking idea". We both came to the decision that it would be a good idea get get out of my truck. it took us about 10 minutes to try and hold the door open while the other person climbs out. once we were out i saw that there was a few people just walking down the street. once they got to my truck i asked them to help me flip it back onto its wheels. Well i was lucky in that we were able to get back on its remaining wheels about 2 minutes before the cop came.

As with all of my experiences with the police in the past i can never just get one or two cops or cruisers, and following the trend i had 8 cruisers show up with 5 minutes of each other. every cop out there made me perform a field sobriety test, and then they didn't even want to run my insurance information. to my saving grace the first cop that showed up was one of the nicest and friendliest officers i have ever meet. she ran all my information and saved my from getting even more tickets. once i was given my ticket (unsafe speed for conditions) all the other cops left except for the first one to the site. She end up giving my friend hank a ride across town to get his car and come back to where i was and try to jump me.

well my truck didn't want to start at first my after about 20 minutes i was able to get ti started. it made some of the worst noises i have ever heard, but eventually it calmed down and i was barely able to drive it to my friend house. I had to leave it there for the weekend until i was able to get a trailer and get it home.

this was quite an experience, one that i wont forget, but it did show me that my friends were able to come together on quick notice and help me out. I should have my truck back on the road soon, i hope.

Street Spam has been a new trend advertising, but rather than just barrage you with spam online, they have crossed into our real world as well. What i am talking about are those signs and advertisements that are hung on telephone poles about 8 feet off the ground. Just the other day i was driving down Queen Street in Southington and i saw a new streak of signs "WE BUY HOUSES FOR CASH". they started near the Wal*mart and went towards Plainville. I happened to get stopped at a light and there was a jeep with his emergency lights flashing, stopped in one of the 2 oncoming lanes. I looked and say that they guy had a stack of those signs and had once of those 'auto hammer' from the TV years and years ago, tapped to a 8 foot pole. Quite interesting watching his procedure for getting the sign up, but i did get a good laugh. Oddly enough when i was over one of my friends house in New Brittan , he started telling me that in New Britain, citizens are very against those sign and will take the time to rip them down, to keep the streets nice looking. IT is interesting how one city's residents work together to help keep the streets clean while the other town doesn't even seem to mind being assaulted with advertisements.

It made me wonder, if the average internet used was more well informed and knew how to deal with spam/viruses and other internet evils, rather than them blindly relying on anti virus/spyware/malware/whatever software to keep them safe. Do you think the internet might be a safer place or...

Would Getting everyone's knowledge and skill in computers, also result in the complexity of current viruses,spyware and everything else to skyrocket. So that no mattter what level of skill we got the average internet user to, the 'bad guys' would be always try to stay one step ahead? Going to ponder for a while, get back to me with opinions.

Crysis seems to have a great idea for a video game and even has a nice single player aspect to it. the major downfall of this game is the requirements just to play it. To play this game the way it should be played, you would have to drop at least 2 grand on a new computer. All in all crysis seems like it is Farcry 2 with better watter and trees. Although i will play this game again i doubt it will be for a while. With the cost of living and everything else there is no way i could afford to buy said computer. For now i think i will stick with DOOM 3 and Farcry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crysis

Computer games today are becoming unplayable due to extreme hardware requirements. I remember when you could bay just about any game at the store and it would at least play. it isn't even that hard to make new games work on much older hardware,but these games are a whole new marketing scam. Crysis'd developer Crytech says that 2.8 GHz (3.2 GHz for Vista); 1GB (1.5GB on Windows Vista) of RAM; NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (Radeon X800 Pro for Vista); 256MB VRAM; 12GB free hard drive space; DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card; DirectX 9.0c or DirectX 10Details[3] is enough to play this game, but my friend phil has a AMD3800+,2Gig of ram, and a 512Mb X1650, and he is forced to play this game on it lowest setting and he is only averaging about 20 frames per second.

I guess i will have to put off upgrading my computers for another year.

Just curious to everyone else in the new media class, what web browser are you using and what version?

coming from a programming background, Inform7 seems like a step back, way back. the program seems very well made and capable of doing many things, but as for the 'natural language' it does seem like it is trying. my one major flaw with this software is there is essencely no real structure to all of the coding. stuff can be just about anywhere and it will still work. I guess though i am going to have to keep playing with the software and see what happens with it. i have been having issues assigning objects ,so if anyone know what the different object classes are it would be usefull to me. right now i am trying to figure out what class a 'newspaper' would be.

All of the problems and lawsuits that the RIAA have been doing seem to be coming around to bite them. Most people know of all the bullshit that RIAA have been doing. They have very shady and irresponsible methods of obtaining their data. all they have been doing is going to an ISP and demanding IP ranges that seem to have a lot of data transpheres. This is not a very fair or effective method. Unless you pay extra money every month for a static IP address, you IP is Dynamic.

http://news.slashdot.org/news/08/04/01/0731209.shtml

Right now this is a few touchy subject, but take for example you haven't downloaded any songs and the RIAA came after you, right now they don't have to prove it was 'you',just that you have used a certain IP Address at some point, that was used to make large amount of downloads. In the court case that would follow you could be accused of 'stealing' say 100 songs. At the the current RIAA rate for stealing, they would want you to pay 75,000 dollars. Now if you had bough the music at the store,even if you bought 100 different cds, you would only be at about 1500 dollars. so why is it that they want the other 73,500 dollars? according to them it is for legal costs and for the artists. The other thing about the RIAA is that they arn't really member of the music industry, but rather a group of lawyers from large music labels.

http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/1419
http://consumerist.com/368663/riaa-pockets-filesharing-settlement-money-doesnt-pay-artists-whose-copyrights-were-infringed
http://digitalmusic.weblogsinc.com/2006/12/06/riaa-moves-to-reduce-artist-royalty-payments/

So i guess that i should be worried amount my legally ripped music and video collection. i refuse to download music of videos off on the internet. hell even though i don't download these i am still worried that they will com after me at some point anyways. I'm on a DSL line so my IP changes almost everyday, if not more. Although it doesn't seem like much can be done there have been a few people with enough intelligence , to file lawsuits back at the RIAA for their negligent and frivolous lawsuits.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080330-riaa-andersens-new-complaint-ignores-judges-instructions.html
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/03/24/2220222.shtml?tid=141

So read everything you can, and be prepared. The RIAA's tactics and basic business plans for turning a profit are ruining music for future generations. Would you really like to have to pay for every song you hear on the radio???

I have been into PC games from the first time i played href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacomb_3-D"> Catacomb Abyss back in 92 or 93. Games have come a long way sense then. Doom and Wolfenstein3D were some of the first almost 3D games to make it big. these games have continued to evolve and grow and even have other games based off their engines.

Doom 3 is the latest doom from ID studios. Doom and Doom2 were basically the same game except that doom2 was made to install to windows 95 rather than dos or 3.11. After that though they haven't done much with that game, until it was realized in 2004. Now to most people they would see this as an old game, but yet it isn't. My computer a 2.8HT, Gig of DDR400 and a X600 video card are still not able to play the game with all the graphics turned all the way up. The graphics in this game are basically a visual orgasm. Object that move and react to you shooting, and AI that will try and hide and get a better shot at you, even tuck and roll to get away from the shotgun. Although i have played many video games in my years, this is one of the few that have scared me. Enemy's will just spawn out of no where and then will group up and hunt you down. The big thing with this game is that you are given a flashlight and weapon, but you cant dual wield the light and a gun at the same time. this forces you to either keep weapon switching or just run and shoot at anything that moves. all in all this is one of the better games i have played in years.
[IMG]http://i244.photobucket.com/albums/gg12/gurken_bucket/Doom3inacave.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i244.photobucket.com/albums/gg12/gurken_bucket/doom3noclipping.jpg[/IMG]

the progress that is being made in graphical development in video games is mind blowing to say the least, i cant wait until i can afford a computer great enough to be able to play
Crysis

Well on the topic of the last two weeks not having the internet, and only being able to play games online has been a rather interesting experience. A few days after my internet problems began, i started to work heavily on my pile of computers, i was able to build about 6 decent machines and 2 laptops. Well as my law states " the more computers you have running at any time, the more likely that they will all die at the same point". My main gaming rig went down in a failed over clocking attempt at about 4 am, after 2 or 3 days of almost no sleep. Then when i went to us my Vista box i found that i wasn't liking the network card or video card anymore, so i moved on to my Longhorn box. this one was running good until i went to add more ram to the board because i had borrowed it for another machine. The board didn't not want to accept more ram and threw a tempter tantrum. So for a few days i was with out any computer access, but luckily one of my friends had some faster ram and i was able to bring my gaming machine back online.

technology and electronics is a very picky and temperamental beast, in this last week our induction cook top also died and we lost two of the five burners. quite strange how only 2/5 died. The company send a technician down from Massachusetts to fix the stove, it end up being only a 30 job to fix the whole thing. Kinda make you wonder about this company's.

This has been a weird last 2 weeks, First off my ISP has been randomly dropping my internet connection every 5 minutes or so. Thus it has made it almost imposable to get anything done. I called AT&T to try an get this resolved. After having to be on hold for almost an hour, i get a woman who can barely speak English, she then guided me through that same procedure i have been through with them the last 5 times i have had to call. and for reference rebooting a computer or DSL is not the solution for everything.

After trying to be nice and request a level 2 technician, and her telling me that i have to go through all of the steps that she has before i can be redirected, well after calling and going through this procedure every time I started to become annoyed. It took me screaming at her the same thing over and over " i have been through this 5 times, connect me to a level 2 technician" to finally get a different technician. Well this next one was Dan, me and him had a very long conversation , in which he proceeded to tell me it was my router that was at fault, and that all the line test that they ran were coming up perfect. Little did he know that after the first line test i had disconnected and unplugged my DSL modem. After this he keep trying to pin the blame on another company's, and keep trying to lead me down a different conversation path. In the end i end hanging up on him when he refused to send me a screen shot of the test results that he saw.

So now what almost 2 weeks later my internet connection has started to become more stable again, but i have learned that AT&T will drop your network connection when you attempt to use uTorrent. I know it isn't against the TOS, but they still fell like they should police the internet for everyone. but then again that is another whole topic.

Here is a little food for though.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2249209,00.asp

http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/2007/11/01/net-neutrality-advocates-hit-back-at-comcast/

In today's digital age security is becoming a much more important that ever. With people able to not only communicate with each other, but do so in real time around the globe. Security is not always something people thing of right away...

"well my password is 8 characters,its good enough right?"

no, passwords are just small part in the whole picture of security, what good is a password to your computer and your financial data, if the people who want your information can just go online and find that you have posted your address, phone number and maybe your mothers maiden name. It is amazing to see how much personal information people will give out or pass out without even thinking twice. This Saturday when i was at the new town dump, i was able to grab 2 Pentium2, and 4 Pentium 4 based computers. I did not have to dive for them, nor did i have to use social engineering , there were just free to take. i hope you can see where this is going...

Once i got all these machines home, i plug them to see if they worked. all but one was fully functional, and only 2 had passwords to login to the computers. the login passwords were guessed in less than 5 minutes for both machines, once onto the machine i had free access to all files on the computers. I could have taken a large amount of personal information from theses machine and used it against former owners, but that would violate my personal morals.

"with great power come great responsibility" and the internet is on of the most powerful tools that we have. posting you personal information anywhere on the internet is a security risk,not an issue if you will be taken advantage of, but when.

Stumble upon is by far one of the best ways to beat boredom. this is a Firefox extension that will allow you to choose a basic categories such as hobbies, cars and just about most other categories you may need. Once this tool is installed ,you simply choose a categories from the drop down menu and then click 'Stumble' and you will be shown a random website in the what ever topic you choose. This tool has the ability to mark pages as like or unlike, and you can ever add more pages you like , so other can stumble across them.

I have been playing with this extension for about a week now, and i think i am starting to become an nocturnal again. these are just an example of what i have found with Stumble.

My Favorite Net Things


V8 Powered Chainsaw


Women Drivers.






So get out there and STUMBLE.
and show me what you found.

I have Finally gotten my Dual Pentium 2 server running well. This server has had a long history with me, i got this box way back in high school as a sophmore. i spent a lot of time trying to make it work but never was able to find a good use for it, but now i have gotten Server 2003 enterprise edition installed and runing well. Remote Desktop and RealVNC are also working.

it has been a long time i have waited for this server to work correctly and now i am more than glad that it is going, full machine specs are as follows:
Dell Poweredge 2200 - Dual Pentium 2 each @ 333Mhz, 416 Mb of ram and three 4 gig SCSI hard drives. For the OS i have a stripped down version of Server 2003, it is only taking up 1.5 gig of hard drive space with everything i need installed, and with a remote user logging in only about 140 Mb of ram.

Ohh what a happy day!