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Archive for April 2002 From the Showdown mailing list: Subject: ELO for breakfast! Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 12:59:12 -0700 From: WFC83197@aol.com (TBill) Has anyone else seen those commercials for that new breakfast bar that has some sort of milk by-product in it? You know the one, it's got the granola bit, but there's some milky stuff in the middle to make it 'like a bowl of cereal.' Anyway, have you noticed the part where they throw the bar through the air, and then they show it spinning in freeze-frame? Doesn't it kinda look like the ELO logo? Hmmmm. Maybe I'm just a little too ELO-obsessed, huh? (is that possible?) [snip] PS. If you play back the audio from the commercial backwards, you'll distinctly hear all the song titles from Zoom: "All Dry," "Moment in Oatmeal," "State of Milk," "Just For Food," "Stranger in a Quiet Bowl," "In My Own Mouth," "Easy Eatin," "Really No Milk at All," "Ordinary Cream," "A Long Time Crispy," "Melting in the Tummy," "All She Cooked," & "Lonesome Lullabreakfast" First of all, my new machine is working okay, and when I say okay, I find that if I boot up with my Wacom tablet drivers, I get a blue screen, but everything works except graphic-intensive stuff like games. And out-of-memory errors with sound editing software. Bah. By the way, the problem was the AGP aperture size. I set it too high. I read a few sites that said "go for it, it won't hurt anything, if it's too high it'll cap at whatever speed it can handle." BS. That was my whole problem. Is building your own still worth it? Probably. Work is extremely busy. We have a release coming soon and I've been coming in on weekends. As a result, my days blend together. It's 1:44 right now, yet I don't feel that tired, and the extra time I've put in last week *I feel* would afford me some leeway in the morning. I don't try it, though, and try to show up before 10, and leave at 7. I'm lucky to work somewhere that has a margin like that, since I feel less productive in the mornings and get much better at night. Of course, if this margin is imagined, I'd hope they tell me so I can stop that. So, very busy. Gates indicated in court that Windows would break if Internet Explorer was removed from its seat in the OS. I agree, it would break, because Microsoft has worked hard the last six or seven years to make sure IE was bound good and tight in the system. Of course it'll break. I don't want to go into why it's in there -- to crush other browsers -- but I noticed sometihng I hadn't before when reinstalling Windows this weekend. IE is integrated, so you can browse your hard drive with Windows Explorer much the same way as you'd browse the internet with IE. That said, WE has buttons like IE: "Forward" and "Back." These are counter-intuitive as hell. Will I go back to the last opened subdirectory, or back up the tree? No thought was put into it at all. "Back" is meaningless in a directory structure context. It's like "Z-axis." Anyway, Windows would indeed break if they tried to yank it out right now. So how about a plan to remove it over time, say in two or three years? There's a new Windows out every damn year, and service packs. Lots of dev cycles. But ultimately, MS is not committed to that because they'd have to get away from DOS. I haven't seen much of XP, but I'll bet you can find a prompt easily. The LEAST MS should do is label the prompt "DOS Emulation," make us think they've gotten away from it. But they haven't gotten away from it, because all the code is there, and they build on top of it year after year. Not doing that anymore would give them a real chance to show some innovation, and it's funny that they picked that to be their buzzword, because they do the least innovation of any developer out there. They should be more general, like with spirit or friendship or something. If I was more clever, I'd come up with a script to do this automatically, but try it yourself: Step 1. Go here: http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat Step 2. Take the subject of one of the headlines. Step 3. Add the predicate from another headline. Step 4. Go to comedy Valhalla. Examples: - Dog on abandoned ship being sued by its yodeler - 6 hurt after bartop blaze stunt allows horse to live normal life - Shark kept in bar tank used as weapon during robbery - Guard living longer than expected - Harvard survives after being thrown off bridge - Artificial leg jailed for helping smuggle sperm (good God) If you're wondering why I'm typing this up right now, the crash testing takes a while and I have no other projects. Having some problems at work with a strange crash in one of my projects. This crash hasn't happened before in it; it was working fine until this build. All it does is open up two XML files and compare them using some proprietary XML services... the bizarre thing is that it crashes in certain low-level class destructors when trying to free memory. So this crashes on free(): XMLClass::~XMLClass() { if( object ) { free( (void *)object ); object = NULL; } } The actual crashing occurs on some line in Visual Studio's way-down-there code where it's trying to remove an element from a linked list. I'm not doing tricky stuff here; what's the deal? Plus, the if succeeds, and then the free() crashes. Is this not an adequate check? My computer decided a person shouldn't be allowed to build two machines in a row without difficulty, so last night for absolutely no reason, everything stopped working, and I've spent last night and today trying to bring Windows to a functional state. This is my official stance now -- NEVER BUILD YOUR OWN MACHINE. NEVER BUILD IT. IT'S NOT WORTH IT. I'll say this everywhere I can. I have no idea what stable pocket of my computer I'm able to post this from, because the screen only has 3.5 colors and is 30x40 pixels, but that is my message to you. Go buy an Alienware, go buy a Mac, do anything except build it yourself. Have a friend put it together for you. And to that friend I say, DON'T PUT IT TOGETHER FOR THEM. I've got both my hard drives connected to that thing now. That's 40 + 60 GB = 100 GB! It does load faster, maybe 40% less time to boot up. But the most amazing thing was seeing Jedi Knight run at 1600x1200 with all the details up with no slowdown. But will the thing overheat? My stomach has been bothering me the past few days. It's almost like I'm really worried about something, and yesterday I felt pretty terrible in the morning. I'm okay today. I've been trying to eat more of those... what do you call them? The green stuff that surrounds food at restaurants. But I think it was a bug. Anyhow. I also built my other computer recently, without making much mention of it here. A lot of parts were scavenged from my old machine, so here are the important additions. Athlon XP 1900+ 512 MB RAM GeForce 4 Ti 4400 So far I'm not very impressed with the speed. When I built the P3-933, I had a P2-450 before that and the gain was noticeable. This time I'm not feeling it, and the chip is supposed to be equivalent to 1.9 GHz. (Maybe that's because I haven't had time to put anything on the thing yet.) Kurt will get my old machine, and hopefully I will find time to set that up on the weekend if/when I'm not at work. *sigh* The ELO newsgroup and mailing list become increasingly difficult to read. I must have joined at just the right time, when there was the prospect of a new album and new material on the horizon, and everything was buzzing. I can only imagine what was talked about there for the 11+ years ELO had vanished from the radar. There is a thread going on about what Jeff says with the vocoder before "Big Wheels" starts (on OOTB). If I remember correctly -- hell, I have the CD at work here -- the vocoder says, plainly, "big whee-ls, keep turning, over for-ever and ever." Why is this still a topic of discussion? Groos or Bruce? JEFF SAID ALREADY! On Zoom, there's a bit during "In My Own Time" where the (boringly-arranged) cellos taunt "nyah nyah nyah nyaaah nyah," and they are saying "wowzers! You're right, they do! Do you think Jeff meant to imply that old schoolyard taunting song?" Oh, I don't know. Another helpfully adds that the taunt appears in "Rain Is Falling" : Raining, pouring Old man is snoring Rain, rain, go away Come again another day And yet no one seems to realize that that kids' whyme existed previous to this song, and that since the song is about RAIN, that rhyme can be tossed in there! (See also Supertramp's "It's Raining Again.") I guess there isn't anything else to talk about. Jeff is recouping from the concert debacle, I suppose. He turned up at the Oscars with Paul McCartney and his wife, and God knows what they're up to. Well, this isn't a very constructive entry. I can complain all day about what they talk about, but I offer no alternatives. So let me think of a few things *I'd* like to have answered: - How many songs were completed for Secret Messages? Every time I hear about it, Rob Caiger has dug up another seven completed songs (that will never see the light of day). - Same question for Time. What became of the live album material for the proposed Time double album? - Is anyone willing to produce some ELO guitar tab, as opposed to saying they did a ton of really awesome transcription, while they just sit on it? (Translation: "I tried doing Jungle but got stuck at the chorus and gave up.") - Do you think the new spaceship could kick the old one's butt? - What about "Big Wheels?" Actually, the vocoder stuff in "The Whale" is so hard to understand, that's a good one to figure out. But then, honestly, who cares. It's probably lyrics from another song on the album backwards. ASTRONAUTS WASTE TIME WITH NEW SPACE RAILROAD! BUT WHY A TRAIN IN SPACE? "WHY NOT?" ASKS DR. PETERSON OF JPL! WHY NOT INDEED! http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/04/15/shuttle.iss.ap/index.html AND THAT'S YOUR MARCH OF NEWS! COPYRIGHT MCMCLXLCLCII INTRANATIONAL NEWSREEL CO. Some spam I received: *** True Story *** NO JOB---THEY REPOSSESSED MY CAR---GOT AN EVICTION NOTICE AND HAD A BABY ON THE WAY, I HAD TO COME UP WITH SOMETHING… Beefy Over The Top Idea breeds $80,000 In Cash To My Doorstep. …And that was just the first (4) months! Sounds like a bold plan... a bold, beefy plan! John Wayne would approve! Les choses viennent le long bien. Au cas où vous interroger sur français sur plan page, non un avril imbécile prank. L'Amérique ne m'a donné rien, et je veux montrer ma gratitude à mes lecteurs français. Quoi qu'il en soit, les choses sont faire bon aujourd'hui... je avoir jouer beaucoup Jedi Chevalier II qui Mélisse acheter pour quand venir dehors. Ce jeu est doux! Ils sont descendus la droite juste de lightsabres. |
