Asbestos in Milwaukie

Published
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Gizmo
on June 28, 2008
in Personal, Rants and Uncategorized
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Well, my mom wanted me to go help her around the neighborhood this morning since she decided she wanted to go for a walk at 4am; I figure it’s a good sign during Kemo if she actually wants to be active and excersize, so I said what the hell, I’d go check out the constructon they’re doing at Linwood Grade School since I hadn’t heard anything about it…

I get over there, and start walking around…  They’ve GUTTED the place, the insides are bare, even the friggen overhangs are down to the boards…

I get to the side entrance, and what am I greeted by, but a huge “Warning, Asbestos” sign…

Yeh, that’s right, Linwood Grade School is closed, RE: Asbestos…

It was so sad walking around just seeing that place that I spent oh so much time in (even helping teachers prepare for the new school year during the summer) to see it taken down to little more than boards and struts…

They have a LOT of it sectioned off so that you still can’t see in, but if you go to certain areas you can see in just fine…  I’d love to tell you where, but all of the teachers have changed and moved around, so my locations will only be known by those of you who went there with me… BUT:
1. Mrs Mick’s old room is open, Mr Knowles is now in there (go figure he’s still there, second grade according to the sign)
2. Mr. Knowles old room and the ones in that quad are all open, you can see through to the other side
3. Office area is gutted completely…  i spent oh so much time in that nurses office lol…

The odd thing is, even parts of the new addition which I know for a fact don’t have Asbestos are gutted too…  I mean, at least where Mrs. Schwitser and Mrs Cole’s old rooms where part of the old addition; the shit they tacked on (I think 4 rooms and another restroom) are only like 5 years old…

So odd… so odd…

I’d rather be “some jerk” and have some fun than be “some tightwad”…

Published
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Gizmo
on May 17, 2008
in Rants
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Ok, so I’ve been palying around on myspace for once… The new apps are amusing me, it’s a virtual slave trade on the “my pets” appication… You can buy your friends, their friends, etc; and earn in game funds… Basically you won’t care, that’s not the rant ;)…

So, I don’t even recall how I found this chick, but she had a friend I wanted to buy, so I did it, then she bought her back… went on that way for a couple days… I even bought her at one point as a joke…

So I hop on, she’s bought me, and changed my title to “Is a huge asshole who needs to stay out of a certain circle of friends”… Wow, here I’m trying to have some fun, sitting here on the internet, at 3am and you’re taking things a little too far for an overweight prostitute (she is an “escort”, mumble mumble lol)…

So now I have her and her friends trying to thug me, which is hilarious; I’ve never been on this side of an attempted internet “punking”, I can’t wait to see the stops they’re willing to pull ;)…

We’re not being paid for this…

Published
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Gizmo
on May 17, 2008
in Rants, Tech and Whining
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Ok, so I do a lot of free support at communities, and it makes me wonder sometimes if people even try to help themselves before running in for a hand holding session…  Usually I’m fine with it, but after a while I have to just think they’re just being lazy…

So, I have a small rant, and hope you all bear with me through it…  It’s not directed at any one user (ahem) and not at any specific community…

Ok, we’re here for free, we don’t ask for anything in return; we’re here because we understand the solutions to the problems and want to (in most cases) help everyone to make any situation work for them…  We do this to help the admin’s of the sites that we enjoy; because without them we’d not be able to do what we enjoy.

Now, when you come in, and ask a million questions about the most basic stuff that could be learned by spending 5 minutes either reading through previous posts or poking and prodding the product, you’re taking our time away from users who actually have valid problems that they cannot figure out…

Utilities are built and put in place to help you lookup things like language file locations, styling on cells/sections, they’re there, we look things up the same way you do…  We’ve all been in the newb position, but we learned to think for ourselves and look for items vs sittig and whining for the most basic crap…

Then you ask for help with things that aren’t even related to the product…  Sorry, we’re not the w3c, we’re not PHP.net, we’re not going  to teach you how to code… And we’re certainly not going to do it all for you all of the time…

Please, for my sanity (or what is left of it) please learn to help yourself!  That is, unless you’re paying me to do it…  In that case, you can take this post and put some honey mustard on it and I’ll eat it ;)…

Tips to extend your cellular battery life…

Published
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Gizmo
on May 17, 2008
in Entertainment, Rants and Tech
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Ok, so I spent several days going through reviews on the Nokia 6555 cellphone, listening to people whine and whine about how the battery only lasts a day when they don’t run anything special…  Well, news to you, you are…

Cellphones are delivered to you with every feature enabled…  All of them…  And all these nifty features kill your battery life, so unless you charge your battery every night, you need to disable some things…

First, turn packet data to “as needed” instead of “always on”; this will only connect to the network when it’s needed (like when you want to use the internet with your phone); otherwise you have a constantly connected connection to the internet with your phone, which just zaps your battery.

Second, if you’re not using it, consider turning off bluetooth…  Bluetooth is the wireless utility hwich lets you use a wireless headset with your phone… And it uses a LOT of your battery to have on.  Consider this, only enable bluetooth when you need it…  You can enable it during a call on most phones as well.

Third, turn off your screen saver!  Just let your phone standby the screen when it’s not in use; your nifty looking analog clock screensaver will just be using the screen at all times instead of turning it off when it’s not in use.  I highly doubt you can even see the analog clock while it’s in your pocket ;)…

My last tip of the evening…  Which isn’t even power related…  Set your own PIN on your phone, for crying out loud, your tech support at your cellphone company doesn’t want to hear about your kids locking you out of your phone ;)…

Goal of this blog…

Published
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Gizmo
on May 17, 2008
in Rants
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Initially I figured that I’d take and make this pretty much tech oriented; but I get bored just talking about tech stuff and not deviating, so I’ve all but made this just random musings…  I’m sure most o you will get more enjoyment of it that way ;)…

I tend to post here when I have something to say and no one to yamer with; so I don’t guarentee any new postings, ever…  There will be periods of dry spells, it’s to be taken with stride ;)…

Right now, I’m simply sitting here watching CoD4 being played and listening to Plain White T’s; much fun I know…  Though I plan to type up a bit about the Nokia 6555 that so many people complain about…  It’s a great phone if you know what energy suckers to disable ;)…

Walkin, Talkin, TBird!

Published
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Gizmo
on April 11, 2008
in Entertainment and Family
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Trey is absolutely astonishing me lately…  I can actually lead him to talk in a conversation… He’s like my ventriloquism puppet! lol…  He’s gotten really good at spewing words out and he will ultimately try to say anything you ask him to say.

So here we are, 1am… I pick him up, set him on my lap… Sam’s on her DS, so she’s not paying attention… So I whisper to Trey, “Say, Mommy”; and he’s all “Mommy”… “Say happy”, “a-ppppy”…  “Anniversery”… “aaveeeerrrrr sss ry”…

I did sooo not think he’d be able to spew out anniversary…  But it was close enough to hear, we all got a decent laugh ;).. hehe

The DVR Mission, PT2 - The future and beyond!

Published
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Gizmo
on April 11, 2008
in Rants and Tech
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Ok, so with my DVR I have the Hauppauge 350 card; it’s not a dual tuner card like the 500, but I specifically wanted the radio, a hardware decoder, and the IR remote receiver (Even though I also bought the “White Box” Firefly remote from BeyondTV)…

So, what do you ask are my plans?  Well, I’m still deciding…  I want to be able to stream the radio, but at this point it doesn’t look like there is a upnp option for that, so I’m probably going to install BeyondTV again once I get a decent SVideo/Composite switch… Ideally I’d like one that I can use a remote with (I have an 8 device learning remote, EVERYTHING is in it, including the wall fan… scary).

I also plan to buy a media extender for my Hauppauge 350, it has headers for it, which means the one card can read in two streams… Which means I can have both my VCR and Satelite dish streaming into the DVR…

Also, my mom said she’d buy me the IR Blaster for my birthday, but it hasn’t gotten here yet…  Which will be nice as I will be able to have the computer capable of turning the satelite dish’s channels…  Which will be smoothe ;)…

Other than that?  Not entirely sure… Definately open to sugguestions though ;)

WMC for WXP, the mission that finally was…

Published
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Gizmo
on April 11, 2008
in Rants and Tech
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Ok, so on my previous posting I talked about getting Windows Media Connect working on my Windows Media Center PC (DVR), but I also wanted to get the same software running on my desktop that I had been using as a media dump for the last 2 years…

Well, I did a simple google search, “Windows Media Connect” and wham, instantly found the Microsoft page… This was too easy…  I go to the page, and what?  Yeh, it was too easy… “This package is no longer availalbe for download, instead, upgrade to Windows Media Player 11 and share from there!”, well, that’s all fine and dandy, and I do have WMP11 on all of my computers… But I like this utility, and its UI is perfect… And I don’t want WMP running ALL the time just becuase I want to share some files…

So I search around, and around, and around, and FINALLY find an install package for WMC2 for WXP, I download it as fast as I can and go to install it…  It bogs, it dies, the install just dies!  I go to the directory and look, and it did create several files, but the important ones are 0byte…

So I look and find an article on the XBox360 site talking about the method of manual install for WMC! YEY!…  So I follow the instructions and FINALLY get it installed… And it works flawlessly…

I wrote up a small batch file to do the install process, and I have the files… All of which will be published to UGN Security within a few days… (what can I say, I have a lot to write up, and it’ll be a busy weekend…)

The DVR Mission, PT1

Published
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Gizmo
on April 11, 2008
in Entertainment, Rants and Tech
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Ok, so a while ago I bought all of the equipment for a DVR, and I got fed up with it… I took everything apart and put the disk on Sam’s desktop and just said the hell with it and left everything in a big pile of expensive parts…

Well, since the XBox360 now supports DIVX and I can stream media through UPNP I decided that I need to get back on track and work to make things how I initially wanted… You know, being able to stream movies, music, and my favorite tv shows to my tv through the xbox, screw the svideo problems i was having before…

So, I piece everything back together, ensuring I have the best secondary hardware in the house in the machine (yes, I was a jackass and compared my mom’s hardware in her desktop to that of what is in my DVR, but I already had the good stuff…). After failing that mission (well, I think I passed since it was mother superior!) I got to work…

I decided that I had wanted to go with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, so I got to work and got to patching, moving things around, and after getting pissed at a black screen on windows setup and referring to google, I got windows installed and MCE running…

A quick “what was” for those wondering, when you run the Windows Installer when you’re installing from running a Linux distribution (CentOS/RHEL in my case) you’ll want to use a disk fix utility to just blindly format the drive to NTFS, I used the Ultimate Boot CD. What happens is that the Windows Installer cannot read the Ext2 partition and dies, leaving you with 0 information on what happened…

So, now that I had WXP MCE installed, I decided to work on hardware and see what I could get to work with my Hauppauge 350 multimedia card (hardware decoding baby!)… So I get all my drivers installed, and I load up MCE… It doesn’t like the radio function of my Hauppauge… Moreover, it doesn’t even recignise that it’s plugged into a media source… Nor does it utilize either through the media center connection to the XBox… Such a let down… (I will write another entry on setting up the XBox360 to a media center, so be patient for a next entry)

So, here I am just waiting for an answer, so I visit the xbox360 website and look for more options… Well, one option was to use Windows Media Connect (WMC) to connect my XBox to my PC… Well, this uses uPNP to make a connection… What have I been using before? Same crap, different program… BUT, this one doesn’t keep a library, it seeks all data live, when you look for it… So no need to make updates every time I add a new file…

So I get it all installed, set my media folders (Digital Camera, Digital Camera Corder dump directory, etc) and I go to the XBox and look for new devices… WHAM, “DVR - 1″ is a new device on the network… So I connect looking for video, and what do I find? All of my video! 0 problems!

So, I have a working DVR now, so I can ease off of Sam’s computer… Well, not really, I have a lot of stuff there too… Next posting? WMC for XP a pain to find…

Halo3 Legendary Map Pack, April 15th…

Published
by
Gizmo
on April 11, 2008
in Entertainment, Gaming and Rants
. 0 Comments

So, Bungie is releasing their Legendary Map Pack for Halo3 on April 15th…  I can’t wait, in fact, this weekend I’ll be going and buying some Marketplace Points for the XBox360 so I can be sure I’m one of the first Halo addicts with the new maps…

However, I’m not one of those hardcore nerds who wants them to be the first few players playing them…  I want to be one of the first few nerds attempting to find all of the glitches in the maps, then be the top archetect editing the maps…

In fact, I had the Heroic Map Pack in December when it first came out and I rarely even played the stock maps until they begun to be in the standard rotation this week when they became free…

Which brings up another point…  When the next map pack comes out, the previous will be made available for free.  So since the Legendary Map Pack will be out 4/15, this month the predicessor (Heroic Map Pack) was issued out free.  So, where I could wait ~4 months and get them for free in August/September, I’d really rather have the edge on hacking at the maps (I work on so many maps that I’ve reached my editing quota several times and had maps overwritten and gotten the editing warning that so few rarely see).

One thing that I don’t like however is the price…  The maps cost 800 Marketplace Points, which amounts roughly to $12.95…  Well, I bought Halo3 for $60 when it came out, and it came out with 11 maps…  So for a fifth of the cost I’d expect more than 3 maps when I got a game and 11 maps for a bit more…  I’d expect say 5 maps per map pack… Yes, that’d make a happy Gizmo…

I think I may type up a couple of little tidbits about the new maps and what I like about them and expect to do with them through observations of what I’ve seen on them a bit later…  Two of them look pretty beefy, but the one looks rather small, so I’ll get back on my plans when I have a bit more time to rant and lookup images for detail…

Well, that’s my nice little halo3 map pack rant…  now that you’re all asleep…  I cut the cheese.