A waste of bits and bandwidth

This is so freakin’ cool. I remember watching this on PBS back in 1995 and I’ve always remembered it.

After just paying 100 yen for 10 minutes of access, I found I could buy 24 hours of wireless access for 500 yen. Dammit. I hate when that happens.

I don’t care about the money, I’m just tired. I’ve been up for 18 and I have 2 hours until my flight leaves. Can I just say, there is nothing to do here. There’s plenty to do if duty free shopping and smoking figures highly on you to do list. There are a lot more shops and actual restaurants in the other terminal.

I’ve fired up a packet sniffer to amuse myself. Nothing so far but I have nothing but time. Maybe I’ll get password of some harried salary man. There are more than a few people on laptops but they’re all watching movies. “Come on dude; login to you bank or your email or something. Throw me a bone…”

I’m also paying close attention to the JAL mileage bank machine; I have two hours to learn enough Japanese in order to collect my miles. I guess the worst that could happen is that it would eat my boarding pass and leave me here with no place to go. At least then I could curl up on this bench and sleep.

So, if you surf pr0n in a foreign country but the pr0n is coming from a different country than the one you’re in, you’re fine right? I mean, the Japanese are pretty whacked to begin with… Roger? Biff? Anyone?

I woke up this morning with a bit of a headache. Normally this would annoy me but then I realized that not everyone has the oppourtunity to drain a quart of Wild Turkey before bed every night. Glory be, I am thankful.

The air was crisp as I left my plush, well-lit apartment. The fresh snow was crunchy under my inadequate footwear but I was optimistic that I wouldn’t slip on the ice and injure myself. I felt bad to think of all the precious snowflakes that I was so carelessly crushing under my feet. Each one an individual creation of nature, each one unique never to be created again. Each footstep crushed my soul.

Along my walk I stopped to look at a little bush that was laden with snow. My heart ached to think of this defenseless bush, unable to remove the crushing load of snow from it’s branches. I spent a few moments trying to decide if I should clear the snow… “but what if I harm the little snowflakes?”

I took off my scarf and gently brushed the delicate snowflakes from each of the frozen, fleshy leaves. 20 minutes later the job was complete. I was so full of joy that tiny frozen tears ran down my face. Glory be, I am thankful.

I greeted my fellow commuters and we exchanged tidings and good wishes, on this, a fine Monday morning. Glory be, we were all thankful. Thankful to just be alive and breathe the fresh air. I arrived at my place of work and greeted everyone warmly, I inquired as to the adequacy of their weekends.

Warm laughs were shared as my fellow workers shared stories of their families and volunteer work in the community. Glory be, I am thankful to be surrounded by such good people. Yes today was a good day. So was yesterday and so, I am sure, will be tomorrow. Glory be, I am thankful.

Happy, pappy?

I’m settling into a weekly posting schedule and I still have nothing of interest to say… With that being said, let’s begin.

I was chatting with the wife on the weekend and we were discussing all the stuff that we should be thinking about buying. Furniture, dishes, pots & pans, you know, domestic crap. She has it in her head that she’s going to buy all these Korean pots & pans and then bring them here. This likely is why she wants me to go to Seoul and pick her up…

Then she said it… “I want to get an LCD TV” Dear God… and here I was trying to come with ideas to slip that one past her. I figured that leaving large, open coffees on the TV would be a good start. “Hey MiHwa, whatta ya say we toss the old pig skin around? Wanna wrestle?”

[startTech] Tech squimish readers can now go away. “Thanks for visiting Biff!”

I’ve been testing [tag]Windows Vista[/tag] at work. It was my suggestion so I openly declare myself an idiot… Three days of attempting to get it to install finally culminated in the PC blue screening. I tried it on different machines, including a server class box, followed by [tag]VMware[/tag] and Microsoft’s own Virtual Machine.

I downloaded it twice and yes, I did confirm the checksum. So then a dev walks by and mentions that he was able to install it in VMware. After I finished banging my head on the desk, I asked him to put the image on the server so I could download it.

Today was my first full day using it. Oh. My. God. This is a release candidate? This is what you have to show for 5 years of dev work? I understand that most of the years were spent crippling the feature set but it’s more like a beta than an RC. Picture XP with a new theme and all the menus moved around and there you go. Except that the requirements for Vista are so high that even a 3GHz CPU cause it to stutter and chug away.

Now it’s only been a day and I’m not a big fan of [tag]Microsoft[/tag] so I guess I’m biased but really… Moving stuff around and then creating a new control panel so the user can now control all the items that used to be together is not moving forward, it’s busy work.

The good news is that our stuff works on it. That’s [tag]Java[/tag] for you… Good enough; let’s not speak of this again. [/startTech]

My first upload to [tag]YouTube[/tag]. Nice that it took forever to convert a 1MB file…