girl got gun?

Missy Higgins-Warm Whispers

drunk homeless guy has lazy eye out for interesting and cool girl - 30

Hey there...
I was drunk and enjoying the sunset the other day on top of a building downtown and a security guard approached me, asked me if I was gonna jump, I said I had no intention so he walked away disappointed. Now I'm on top of another drinking whiskey and would love to share these awesome moments with someone intelligent.


Craigslist: Location--denver

Fun with engine timing

My truck was running pretty badly for a couple of weeks. Today was warm (54F) so I decided to figure it out.

Basically it didn't have much power at med-high rpm. At idle it seemed OK, but at rpm it was basically was a dog.

I changed out the plugs, checked all the wires, reset the idle fuel to air mixture, checked the mechanical timing advance, then checked the distributor dwell and timing.

The timing was really off! Off like 18 degrees off. I'm not exactly sure how that happened, since I just checked it this last fall. Either way, it only took a few minutes to fix, and now the truck runs just fine.

What I really need is a C/O monitor. Basically it helps you set the fuel/air ratio on the carb. Right now I'm doing it off of idle vacuum, which is OK but not ideal.

Another couple hundred dollars in tools, I guess.

Update: After a bit of a nap I went back out and replaced the points on the distributor. I can't find my feeler gauges, so I had to eyeball the gap. The dwell needs some adjustment too, but I'll do both later this week.

Monday

Thomas

Friday

Ford Claims Ownership Of Your Pictures

Mike Rogers writes (slashdot)

"In a move that can only be described as 'Copyright Insanity', Form Motor Company now claims that they hold the rights to any image of a Ford vehicle, even if it's a picture you took of your own car. The Black Mustang Club wanted to put together a calendar featuring member's cars and print it through CafePress, but an attorney from Ford nixed the project, stating that the calendar pics and 'anything with one of (member's) cars in it infringes on Ford's trademarks which include the use of images of their vehicles.' Does Ford have the right to prevent you from printing images of a car you own?"

Spam

I don't even use outlook at home any more, I use GMAIL. Gmail is nice, because it saves the billions of emails I've sent or received over the last few years. It also has a decent search ability, which I use often.

Another nice thing about gmail is that the spam filter works. Anything in the spam box gets automatically deleted after 30 days. Aparently I need that, because at the moment there are 7400 spam emails in my 30 day box.

That's a lot of spam.

Nice dog

Sophie Ellis Bextor

Cleaning carpets

I am, without any doubt, the carpet cleaning master.

While new carpets would be nice, that is not going to happen any time soon. Here I will reveal my secrets for keeping carpets looking new for a long time.

You will need: vacuum, carpet steam cleaner (hot water extraction, technically), good carpet cleaning soap, vinegar, and boiling water.

Vacuum at least a couple times a week, and use the best vacuum you can afford. Lack of vacuuming will ruin a carpet in no time at all, from dirt.

Take your shoes off. Duh.

A couple times a year, use the steam cleaner. Buy the best one you can afford. Here is how it works:

Boil a large kettle of water (the largest you have).
Use soap and boiling water in the cleaner as per bottle directions.
Go over each area at least twice, maybe more. This will depend on how dirty the discharge water is when you dump it.

This is the part where most people stop. This is BAD. Soap is a base, and attracts dirt. Your carpets will stay clean about a week this way.

Next, use boiling water and 1/8 cup of vinegar in the cleaner. Go over the carpet until the soap in the discharge water appears to be gone.

Last (optional) straight boiling water.

Here are the key parts:
Water: the hotter the better. Boil it.
Rinsing: you need to get the soap out. The vinegar solution is slightly acidic, which cuts the soap and neutralizes the PH in the carpet.

Word of the week!

Main Entry: whore
Pronunciation: \ˈhȯr, ˈhu̇r\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English hore, from Old English hōre; akin to Old Norse hōra whore, hōrr adulterer, Latin carus dear — more at charity
Date: before 12th century
1: a woman who engages in sexual acts for money : prostitute; also : a promiscuous or immoral woman
2: a male who engages in sexual acts for money
3: a venal or unscrupulous person

In case you didn't know.

Meredith Emerson

She wanted more.

Binding energy per nucleon

I drew this on the back of a post-it at a party last night, to help explain how fission and fusion release energy.

Remembering a 20 year old fact? No problem. Remembering the names of who I was talking to last night? Not a chance.

Sleep / computer shit

I quit caffeine a couple of weeks ago (no coffee, no diet soda) under the theory that it would help me sleep better. Of course, since it's about 4am you'll see how well that is going.

So basically I'm up every night from 2-4am or so, no matter how tired I am when I go to bed. The great part is, although I'm wide awake from 2-4am or so, I'm dead ass tired from 6am to whenever I can manage to crawl sleepily out of bed. Lately that has meant no workouts, and that is a big big problem.

The raid array on the computer is alive again. All I really did was swap out some power cables for the drives, which isn't really an answer to why it screwed up in the first place. I'm still getting the occasional bad block indication, and am still not getting WHICH drive is generating the bad blocks, so it's basically a waiting game now.

The array has a hot spare, which basically is a spare drive for when a drive in the array goes poof. I probably have a flaky drive in there somewhere, but without more info I'm clueless to which one.

Work has been pretty much the usual daily humiliation on how useless I really am, but theoretically that will all change one magical day long in the future and then...I'll be adequate.

While awake tonight I ran through some patent bar questions, watched some nova show on the Korean war, and set up an event monitoring program on my home computer to email me when bad things happen.

Other than that, there is not much else to tell. I'm a bit behind schedule at work, so I'll probably be working late this week and going in on Saturday.

I owe Jeff a call and get-together. I've been basically coming home to sort-of-sleep, so I'll have to figure out when that is even possible.

Why computers kind of suck ass

Honestly, I have no idea how the average person handles computer problems. Maybe they just ignore them. Maybe, just maybe, they'll push the power button 10 times in a row and then go buy a new computer.

I came home tonight after spending my 3 hours a year with Javon (a kid I used mentor who moved with mom to Nevada) to a very very unhappy computer.

My computer is on all the time. That is just the way it is. No, I don't have solar or a big creek to generate some good old green power -- I just burn coal. Lots and lots of coal.

I also build the fucking thing from scratch. Every part, every drive, the graphics card, the memory, the motherboard, the power supply...each one was evaluated for only one thing: reliability.

SO, no no-name crap in the box. No 'psst...wanna power supply?' from some guy driving a gremlin. Top shelf. The good stuff. Because I hate computer problems.

Anyway, so I come home to an alarm from the adaptec 3805 raid controller. Basically somewhere along today the computer blue-screened and bombed, and restarted with some missing drives from my 1TB data array.

So, wiggle some wires, rebuild the array and wonder WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT ALL ABOUT? Of course, there are no logs. No data to indicate what might have crapped out...just a pissed off computer.

Everything is good...rebuilding...rebuilding...some occasional bad blocks which are not the end of the world, but IT WOULD BE NICE IF YOU IDENTIFIED THE DRIVE THAT GENERATED THE BAD BLOCKS, YOU WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT...rebuilding....rebuilding...then pow... drives fail to spin up, communicate, or some other shit, and the computer crashes.

So what could it be? 2 flaky drives seem unlikely. Maybe it's a power issue? I run a 1000w power supply -- enough for 2 computers, easily. Bad cable? Too many drives on one power supply rail?

Who knows.

Then on to computer #2 (32mb ram celery thing running windows 98). My job, since i've taken it on, is to figure out why the thing doesn't work anymore. Well, it boots now. I guess that is new. Of course, the ethernet card isn't working which basically means no software to download to do any tests/fix the thing. Hey, let's use this handy dandy usb key! Naw...98 needs a driver for that. Instead, let's burn a cd with a 10K file just so the usb key works.... which it will ONLY work on if it's windows 98SE..which it appears to be NOT.

Ok, computer #3. Friend of a partner at work. Some ancient laptop with 256mb of ram and xp. First we download 500mb worth of patches, so we're not chasing some bug that was solved 2 years ago. Then we get to the problem that keeps the friend's wife up every night -- it won't install flash so she can check out some pillow designs online. No flash -- no pillows -- one pissed off wife.

Download, install, fail, uninstall, download install fail. Shit.

You google for 30 minutes before you find some obscure post on REGISTRY PERMISSION PROBLEMS. Wow, wouldn't it be nice if the install failed and said 'hey dipshit, I need to write a registry key and I can't?' Of course that would be too easy.

Run some patch thingy and you're a god-damn hero.