No, I’m not scanning the back half. 
(Warning – original image size rather large, but looks good. Scanner works quite well.)
Archive for June, 2008
Got a Postcard
Saturday, June 28th, 2008why?
Saturday, June 28th, 2008Why does it take windows update five minutes to determine that I don’t have XP SP3? Strange. I think it should take around ten seconds, at most.
Well, in other news, I finally uploaded Melody photos. If you’re wondering why there’s no Ambassador photos, it’s ’cause they didn’t bring a camera.
Texas for Sale…
Thursday, June 26th, 2008Texas Real Estate Slump Lets Mexicans Take It Back
By Thomas Black
June 25 (Bloomberg) — More than a century and a half after Mexico lost Texas to the U.S., Virgilio Garza wants a piece of it back.
A "Texas for Sale” sign and cowgirls in boots and white hats greeted Garza at the Convex center in Monterrey, Mexico, earlier this month. A Monterrey developer and investor, Garza was in search of foreclosed U.S. property to buy.
"Texas is like our home,” said Garza, 45, who joined hundreds of Mexicans poring over lists of Texas properties at the four-day event. Garza, who owns manufacturing sites and other land in Mexico, said he and five partners may invest as much as $8 million in Texas. "We believe there can be some opportunities.”
A rising peso and an economy growing faster than the U.S. have given some Mexicans the buying power to take advantage of the housing slump in Texas…
My One Word Summary:
Let_Them_Have_It();
Quote
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008If anyone didn’t manage to get the quote tonight, here it is:
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. -Isaac Newton
Euro 2008
Saturday, June 21st, 2008My Euro 2008 recordings are available at http://content.icynemo.us/video/Euro2008.
Not all are full games, and two don’t have audio. User error.
Some notes of interest:
- There is no off sides on a throw in.
- There seem to be security guys a few feet off the field, and they always have their backs turned. I wonder 1) how much they are paid and 2) if they are guys who don’t like soccer, because it must be pretty hard to be that close and have to keep your back to the game the whole time.
- About halfway though the second half, there’s a "blurb" that shows the players who have run the most. That’s pretty interesting. I wonder how they keep track – it must be automated. Pretty amazing tech stuff. And it seems in a 90 minute match, the top distances are around 8-10km (~5-6 miles.)
There’s probably more, but I forget easily nowadays. Oh, there are three qualifying matches before the games go to tournament mode (ie, one loss = knocked out.) No team that has won all three qualifier games has won the tournament since France did it in 1984.
Boston Massacre
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008According to the Associated Press:
The largest margins of victory in an NBA Finals game: 42 -- Chicago (96) vs. Utah (54), June 7, 1998. 39 -- Boston (131) vs. Los Angeles Lakers (92), June 17, 2008. 35 -- Washington (117) vs. Seattle (82), June 4, 1978. 34 -- Boston (129) vs. St. Louis (95), April 2, 1961. 34 -- Boston (148) vs. Los Angeles Lakers (114), May 27, 1985. 33 -- Boston (129) vs. Los Angeles Lakers (96), April 25, 1965. 33 -- Philadelphia (135) vs. Los Angeles Lakers (102), June 6, 1982. 33 -- Los Angeles Lakers (137) vs. Boston (104), June 3, 1984. 33 -- Chicago (122) vs. Portland (89), June 3, 1992 33 -- Indiana (120) vs. Los Angeles Lakers (87), June 16, 2000.
There’s some crazy games represented there. I think I might remember the 1998 game when the Bulls held the Jazz to 54 points. 54 points! Imagine that! That was 10 years ago. MJ and Pippen, I’m sure. Rodman, too. How about Boston scoring 148 points in 1985? That was just a bit before I was born. Unbelievable.
Oh, yeah, and KG? 20-10, like always. 26 points, 14 rebs. I wonder how the series would have gone if LA had won game one, or two, or both. After all, Phil Jackson is 41-0 when his team win game 1. One of those things we’ll never know.
DX10 + Vista = ???
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008If you know much about gaming and Microsoft, you know that DirectX 10 is available only on Vista. For some reason, MS decided to not allow XP users to install DX10. This was most likely to "encourage" gamers to "upgrade" to Vista, as the newest, latest games would feature DX10, and you had to be running Vista to see the game at its best.
Well, that was the thought anyway. The list of DX10 games is fairly short. Crysis, probably the most hardware demanding game out there, will not allow a DX9/XP user to set the graphics to the highest setting – they are grayed out unless you have DX10. That’s not a huge deal, because until now, there was not a video card available that could run Crysis at the highest settings. From Slashdot:
"Maximum PC magazine has early benchmarks on Nvidia’s newest GPU architecture — the GTX 200 series. Benchmarks on the smokin’ fast processor reveal a graphics card that can finally tame Crysis at 1900×1200. ‘The GTX 280 delivered real-world benchmark numbers nearly 50 percent faster than a single GeForce 9800 GTX running on Windows XP, and it was 23-percent faster than that card running on Vista. In fact, it looks as though a single GTX 280 will be comparable to — and in some cases beat — two 9800 GTX cards running in SLI, a fact that explains why Nvidia expects the 9800 GX2 to fade from the scene rather quickly.’"
Well, it also turns out that you don’t need DX10 to run the game at its highest settings. You can merely edit a configureation file to bypass the ludicrous requirement of Vista/DX10 and run the game at the highest graphics level, very much equal to DX10.
Hmmm. Wonder who came up with that artificial limitation?
Futbol
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008If you follow my twitters, you know I’ve been watching soccer of late, online, superficially Euro2008. I’ve also been watching some MLS. Here are some world team rankings, by Fifa:
- 5. Germany
- 92: Austria
- 21: USA
- 121: Barbados
I was watching a Euro2008 first round game between Germany and Austria. I was surprised to find out Austria was ranked 92; they made quite a showing against 5 Germany: a 1-0 loss on a free kick at the start of the second half. On the other hand, 121 Barbados lost 8-0 to 21 USA in a World Cup qualifying game. Makes Austria look pretty good.
Free Stuff
Saturday, June 14th, 2008Head over to http://content.icynemo.us/apps for free stuff. (Legal, Very Legal)
Everyone should install and use Diskeeper instead of Windows default defrag software.
Enjoy.
Cosmic Dust – Winamp / Milkdrop
Friday, June 13th, 2008Another photo for your viewing pleasure (here’s a link to the last one).
If you aren’t running Milkdrop as Desktop on your Windows PC, you’re missing out. Maybe your computer can’t handle desktop mode – run it in a window then. Still very neat.
Here’s Cosmic Dust 2 – Cloud Journey by Geiss. Very very nice. I like 
Still running the spiffy orange (Lighten up | Orange | Bento to be exact) skin.
