I Know a Guy Who Knows a Guy

We have/had the worst oil company ever.

Instead of spending my morning protesting in front of the local church, I was busy calling home heating oil companies. After twenty-three separate, "I'm sorry, sir, we only provide emergency service to existing customers," dead ends, I gave my neighbor a call. He's a man who's spent his life in Carlisle and seems to know a little something about everyone.

He leans on me for geek support, I lean on him when I have...I don't...I can't think of...any other kind of problem.

me:	“Hey, man. I got a problem with my furnace and I was wondering if you could help"”
John:	“Sure. What do you need"”
me:	“Um, two hundred fifty gallons of oil.”
John:	“Dauphin Oil left you high and dry.”
me:	“Yeah...how'd you know"”
John:	“Oh, everyone knows they've been havin' problems lately. I bet you're havin' fun tryin' to get someone to fill up your tank on a Sunday.”
me:	“I called everyone I could find in the phone book. They all tell me the same thing.”
John:	“That they only help existing customers, right"”
me:	“Right.”
John:	“OK, let me make a few calls. I'll call you back in a few minutes.”
me:	“K. Thanks.”
a few minutes later
John:	“OK, here's what you need to do. Call Carlisle Petroleum and...”
me:	“I already called them.”
John:	“Well, call them again. But this time, tell the person that the message is for Paul.”
me:	“Paul"”
John:	“Paul. And tell them that you're a customer of Dauphin Oil.”
me:	“OK. Is that it"”
John:	“Yeah. She won't do anything until you tell her that the message is for Paul.”
me:	“Tell her the message is for Paul and that I'm a customer of Dauphin Oil.”
John:	“Yeah. Tell them that and you'll have heat in an hour.”
CPI Service:	“I'm sorry sir, we only provide emergency service to existing...”
me:	“This message is for Paul. Please tell Paul that I need oil.”
CPI Service:	“....OK, can I have your address and phone number please.”

Fifty minutes later? Heat.

A Million Dollar Idea

Amazon has it right. In addition to providing one of the best department stores on the interweb, they have been quietly providing incredible web services. Elastic Computing Cloud, Mechanical Turk, Simple Queue, and S3 are few of my favorites.

All of these services share the same basic theme:

"We can do this server hardware stuff much better than you. So why don't you focus on the software, and we'll do the rest."

How much? Pretty damn cheap. For example, here is their pricing for S3:

• Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost.


• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.


• $0.20 per GB of data transferred.

So what can you do with it? That's up to the developer. There are several free and open source applications that provide slick interfaces to S3. I'm using JungleDisk. It's an active project with binaries for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. You give JungleDisk your S3 account information, and it gives you a file system that you can mount as a drive. The virtual file system JungleDisk provides is only available to your local machine, which is a little restricting, but there are ways around that.

Now that no one is still reading, here's my million dollar idea:

S3 + JungleDisk + Linux + Samba + Hacked Router = the perfect network storage/backup appliance.

1. Install Linux on a router. Linksys seem to play nice with Linux.


2. Install JungleDisk on the router.


3. Point the JungleDisk instance to your S3 account.


4. Install Samba on the router and use it to share the JungleDisk mount point.


5. Enjoy your worry-free network storage appliance.

So why spend several hundred dollars on a networked storage appliance with limited capacity, when you can have the Infinite Storability Drive from Sparrowlegs Systems Inc.

Sometimes I pee a little when I cough -Sometimes I ejaculate a little when I yawn

Don't ask me how I found this. I don't want to talk about it.

Clomipramine, is an antidepressant that has many interesting side effects. This one grabbed my attention: yawns can cause orgasms. The second case, "... A married male in his mid-twenties ...", was my favorite.

My mind was/is reeling thinking about the recreational possibilities this drug possesses (wow that word has a lot of S's).

Sherry, if you start taking this drug, can I watch? Imagine, you could climax before, during and after sex!

After I tell you a really funny and witty joke: orgasm.
After I tell you about my exciting day at work: orgasm.
During the 90 minutes of SNL: orgasm.
Morning: orgasm.
Night: orgasm.
An hour after eating turkey: oh god. oh god! orgasm.

Unfortunately, there are several not so entertaining side effects:

... , enlarged/painful breasts, unwanted breast milk production, irregular/painful menstrual periods, ... , trouble urinating, severe vomiting, ... , unusual/uncontrolled movements (especially of the tongue/face/lips), ... , black stools, ... ,vomit that looks like coffee grounds.

Coffee grounds!?

Challenge Pro Mode Matches On

The development of my favorite Quake 3 mod is alive and kicking. I'm amazed by the longevity of the game. I know it's dated but I love it. As I play into the night, (OK -- 11PM), I must be one of 30 people who hasn't moved on.

A few weeks ago, while aimlessly surfing the interweb¹ instead of writing a post for my blog, I decided to check out the Challenge Pro Mode site. Holy sweet Jesus! People are still actively developing the mod! The version I was running was 8 revisions behind. Wow, that's embarrassing. They have an RSS feed now, so I won't miss any future releases.

Here are my impressions so far...

Pros

• Greatly improved GUI, giving easy access to most of the settings. Wanna hear through walls, turn off rocket smoke, or add cool effects to the Railgun? No problem. It's all adjustable from the GUI. No more editing configuration files.


• Better looking fonts. Sounds stupid, I know, but they look so much better than the old ones.


• New in-game announcement voice option, providing a sexy female voice alternative to the default I-also-do-narration-for-movie-trailers guy.

Cons

• Lower ammo counts for weapon pickup. You know, when you frag someone and get to pick up ammo from the weapon they dropped? For the Rocket Launcher, it used to be a 10 round/rocket reward, now it's 5. Doesn't sound like much but you'll notice.


• Slightly less running speed. I realized that I wasn't able to make all of my usual trick jumps. Surely, it can't be me.


• More segmentation faults. The CPMA bots (level 6 and up) appear to be broken again. My version of the game crashes from a segmentation fault whenever I attempt to use them.

In related news, I got a new mouse for Christmas. When it comes to tracking accuracy and speed, this one is better than my old mouse. The buttons could be a little better. There are five buttons in the wheel: scroll up, scroll down, click, tilt-left, and tilt-right. For normal computer use, these buttons are really handy, but in the heat of battle, I still have trouble. The tilt buttons are really sensitive, and the mouse wheel click requires too much force.

¹ Deppen, I've added this word to my spell checker dictionary. So, no, I'm not going to stop using it. I'm a pioneer.