Been working on a little program the past while, see the files section. I call it, excitingly, Timed Shutdown. It started as just a little window that could count down seconds until it shut down my DVD player on the computer, to keep it from spinning at the menu and keeping me from sleeping with irritating music.

Now it’s a proggy that can terminate any window, process, or logoff, restart or shutdown the computer itself. Can optionally have the program self-terminate (no real reason not to really) and have the screensaver come on.
files section
Timed Shut Down executable
shot 1 shot 2 shot 3

Anyway, just a handy utility for me that has been way overdeveloped (except… still doesn’t send email yet… hmmmmmm) and I put it online and the source too. Written in VB.NET so you’ll need the bloated framework, unfortunately. Was thinking of backporting it to VB6 but I’m just that too much lazy.

Now I need something else to occupy my time… been thinking of working on Asylum again, but my last decision was porting it to C# to benefit from managed DirectX, but as Nintendo has patented a key aspect of the game, I’m suddenly lacking in interest in continuing.

Also been thinking of porting zygote to windows, but I dunno, I’d have to figure out how to get OpenGL working on windows, and probably rewrite half the libraries we got in cs488 and totally hack things up majorly. But it’s still the more likely project… just need the will.

And the time

I just added a captcha to the comments section. It used to be that I had to moderate every comment that was posted, because the word list, no matter how much I added to it, wouldn’t catch them very well, and I lowered the URL content to 1 without needing moderation, but the spams sometimes only use 1, so I lowered it to 0, or basically, I moderate all the time, and it was a bit confusing for some people, since it didn’t even tell you (I put in a message myself, but alas)

So I got a library to do it.. well, I didn’t like the image it generated, so I took another library, and then tore it apart, keeping only bits of it, then shoved it in the shell of the first. There are some unfortunate weaknesses of the current system, so I might go back and essentially rewrite the whole thing, but for the moment, let’s see if it’s sufficient.

You can comment away.

I’d also like to note that for some reason my Bandwidth Bandits post has been very popular for this, 33 spam comments in 5 days for that, pretty much out of the blue (in terms of particular focus, I get sprinkings).. and all that for what I think is a virtually unknown blog, alas. I feel sorry for those who say things of worth.

Usually I like to steer clear of political things in this blog too, but something I read recently really grinds my gears.

There is a hurricane having gone on, still going on, not sure, in New Orleans, the storm itself is lovingly called Katrina. What really irked me was a quote from some mayor in the area, and then reprinted in CNN in bold as if it was an important quote.

‘This is our tsunami’ he says…

The article then goes on to explain the reference… “referring to the December 26, 2004, tsunami that killed more than 226,000 people in the Indian Ocean region.” At the top of the article it says the deathtoll, as it stands, is 55, likely to rise…

Is it going to rise by 225945 more people? Or is having 55 forward moving industrious clever U.S’ians die simply worth 226,000 backward poor etc. etc. people who died in the actual newsworthy event?

I wonder if anyone else finds that invocation offensive.

Edit:
Now they’ve invoked Hiroshima
“I can only imagine that this is what Hiroshima looked like 60 years ago,” (login required, use BugMeNot)

Yes, I understand that it’s a horrible situation, and compared with everything being fine, that hurricane has made this very much less fine. But they just keep comparing their situations to ones much much worse, I dunno, find it arrogant.

Edit2:

Another aspect I don’t like about the coverage that goes on with these types of things is you get 2 or 3 stories related to the actual event, and then at least one about “Canadian’s may be victims” and “Canadian found safe” and such, I mean, sure, *maybe* it’s of interest, but it’s still sort of an us vs. them in the face of a disaster. “No canadian’s were harmed by god’s randomly exploding people, phew, that’s good, in other news, all other nations are dead, meh” Anyway, I think this will be my last rant on this, heh.

When people die, it’s usually not a good thing (I am not in favor of immortality though), but I don’t see any reason to quantify it other than by the obvious methods, it’s not a contest. I’d say it’s the fault of the media, but the quotes were media-generated.. but they were media-focussed, so maybe they are at fault, okay, that’s fine with me. I’d rather focus my blame on larger institutions that individuals, it’s less tiring

Edit3:

Nope, not my last rant, just wanted to throw this in.

Very last words, ‘Brown “remains focused on helping Americans through the worst natural disaster in history,” FEMA said.’ It’s nitpicky, but I’ll still dock them karma for not saying ‘their’ worst natural disaster in history. I don’t beleive they can possibly mean that the splash they had can compare to other natural disasters in history, but given all of the above, I wouldn’t put it past them.

I don’t normally do this, nor did I want this blog to be one of *those* blogs that just links to a bunch of things (not that there’s anything wrong with that, I find those interesting sometimes too), but there’s a blog I’ve been following rather consistently (consistently being slightly more often than totally randomly, as it is with most of the blogs, journals, and friend’s sites that I know of)

I’m following the blog of Zulieka and it’s of that which I speak. At first, I read it from a link from a blog I got to from a link and so on and so forth, all the way back to the highly controversial beginning of the universe. I stayed at first, rather admittedly, because it was 9 parts interesting, and 1 part a girl who very occasionally would take revealing pictures of herself (as seems to be the style lately). Well, moreover, that’s why I stopped, but one reads too, and there was an interesting story there.

Then the story changed to a girl who suddenly discovered she was pregnant, which itself was interesting, as I’ve never been close to such a story, and from all tell it wasn’t entirely planned either. But now it’s the story of a girl who’s given birth to a girl of her own, and it’s touching to hear about her pained breastfeeding and horrible fears about things happening to her baby.. er, if all that can be considered touching, because it all comes back to something she herself wrote: “It’s a nightmare to love a human this much”, the rational versus the instinctive.

It’s like how I see when my female friends, one of them in particular, she sees a baby or toddlers running around, being annoying as toddlers are, she goes into a sort of Maternamode, very slightly. And that type of thing nearly puts me in Paternamode, if even slighter. Odd that, since a child tends not to do that directly (as my annoying toddler remark indicates). Oh well…. I’m sure Nature, in her infinite wisdom, is working on it.

So I’m back online once again. And, of course, there’s a bit of a story to tell, none of which is particularly interesting, but I like to vent my frustrations.

It seems that even plugging a patch cable into my computer and the other end into a working modem and following details steps off a CD program is beyond my ability. As I have recorded somewhat in this blog, I have a very bad time with my computer(s), usually it’s whenever I try to upgrade, the physical hardware, it becomes nightmarish, let’s review together:

1) Put 40 Gig drive in P2 – resulted in rider BIOS needing to be installed, which resulted in no Norton utility ever working from boot again.
2) Install 120 gig drive – resulted in win98 to never installing again as the installer just threw garbage characters all over the screen, needed to install windows XP, and then again every time the computer was turned on again because the thing would kill itself every month or so.
3) Buying new computer – gave me wrong video card, waited a week for a guy to come install the proper one since they couldn’t just send me the damn thing for me to do myself.
4) DVD Burner – Windows complaining that it needed to reauthenticate, but never displaying the numbers I needed to feed to the system to obtain my key. Calls to technical support and giving my computer ID from the stickers resulted in them telling me I had a 64 bit computer that wasn’t even supposed to be built yet and that I must be a pirate. Several reboots eventually solved the problem.

And probably others that I can’t remember right now, suffice it to say, nothing that is supposed to go smoothly seems to when it comes to either my old computer, or this new one. Now, all I had to do was plug the patch cable from the modem that was definitely online to my computer which had enjoyed internet access before, but not for a while.

Nope, no connection, please reboot modem, computer, fridge, and life and try again, joy. I decide to replug the cable in the back of the computer, accidentally jog the monitor cable out of it’s outlet, monitor goes funky, plug it back in, computer reboots, joy. Comes back up claiming it found new hardware, and ethernet card, doesn’t know what to do with it, can’t find drivers off the MS disc (which is where it got them in the first place), no good. Ian comes over at this point, on unrelated business, and tries his magic… after a reboot, no longer even bothering to announce new hardware, a big yellow question mark is now a small yellow exclamation mark, joy.

Finally, open the computer, unseat the Ethernet card, reboot, shutdown, reseat, reboot, oh, there it is, oh, and drivers too, oh joy. Still, XP things it’s disconnected, but internet works, after 2 hours of fun in the sun.

Now I just have to install a month of patches, updates, and viruses

I’m starting to dislike toronto, this time it’s just in terms of the number of people in it, making it statistically more likely for certain things I don’t like to happen to happen rather quickly and almost certainly often.

Was crossing the street to get to my bus stop after work, and this car wasn’t stopping very well, in that it stopped at the light halfway into my little crossing zone, so I went around them. And two girls were in there (might have been more, couldn’t see, nor did I want to) and one of them sticks their head out of the window and starts calling “hey sexy” at me… there was no one else crossing, nor any other cars stopped, and they were saying it right at me, so there was no confusion as to who this was directed towards.

I kept walking, not looking back at them, and she kept shouting more, “hey..” something, I couldn’t tell, maybe “sexy”, maybe worse. But I just don’t understand why people must do that kind of thing, insult them by telling them things in complete contradiction to the truth. Do people have nothing better to do?

In case the reader has no idea why I would be annoyed at this, please refer to the title quote of this blog for an example which also does well as an analogy.

A quick one, but I’d just like to say how much I hate sponsored links. Articles that have hotlinks all over, and you think, hmm, maybe these links go somewhere relevant or something… nope, just to whatever company “sponsored” a random link which is far more invasive than having ads on the borders of the article because now the article text itself, the whole point of delivering anything at all, is now polluted.

I fear for the day when people actually buy things because they saw some obnoxious online ad, but I think I should be in fear of that having happened already, as I suspect is the case.

So here I am (or rather, I’m at home home this weekend, I still don’t have internet at the apartment yet)… my new apartment is pretty nice all and all. A fairly large living room, kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. Got couches and such, coffee tables, balcony stuff. And my commute has gone from 2 hours to half an hour, still on a damn bus, but regardlessly more tolerable.

Been setting up all my utilities, got my phone already, internet and cable tv is next weekend, then I’ll be set up and paying horrendous bills

Anyway, didn’t really have a lot to say, just bored and lonely

Stupid TV, it’s doing “that thing” again.

It’s not a very interesting story, but I’ll tell it all the same. I have this TV, fairly small, but usable… got it something like 10 years ago, but it’s been fairly reliable, the picture still seems find to me, the tube doesn’t seem to be going in any obvious way, but there is an odd problem.

Every now and then, when I turn it off, it just doesn’t. See, normally, when I turn it off, I get a nice little click sound inside the TV, a reassuring clunk that tells me “Yes, it is indeed shutting off”, and the screen does a little dance of white in the middle of the screen for half a second, another notable indication of shut-off-edness.

Unfortunately, what it does when it doesn’t shut off, is I don’t get a clunk sound, and the screen just goes black for about 2 seconds, the sound is suspended, and then the picture comes back, and doesn’t respond to the remote control… sometimes, in the past, I’ve been able to hit power again, and then the sound comes back, but hitting it again just results in the same thing… so it’s like something inside isn’t disconnecting. The last time this happened is like a year ago, and even then, now, I’d say it’s only happened about 5 times, usually, I thought, when it was very humid and thought that had something to do with it, but I had just turned it on for 10 minutes, and it’s not humid, it’s nearly cold.

Whenever it happens, I just unplug the thing, leave it for a few hours, and it has come back fine after that, but still, wtf? With this, and cases of my VCR actually locking up when I hit stop sometimes, and actually getting confused as to whether a tape is actually in the machine or not….. maybe 10 years is good enough for the life of such heavily used appliances, and I should break down and buy something new…

Now all I need is money