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So the main printer in my lab (the only one really) has a page count of… well check out the screenshot:
So lets do some math. I know that a ream of paper is about 2 inches thick and has 500 sheets in it. So 500/2 = 250. 1124682/250 = 4498.728″ – which is 375′. Still 375 feet isn’t all that impressive.
Multiply 1124682 * 12 you get 13496184″ (if you stood all these pieces of paper end to end) which is about 213 miles according to the google conversion tool. Essentially a piece of paper end to end up the entire Oregon coast – which is a bit more impressive.
I ordered a new video card for my desktop PC from some guy on eBay (it was a good price…), but the way its being shipped is odd:
| LOUISVILLE, KY, US | 10/06/2009 | 11:50 A.M. | ARRIVAL SCAN |
| ONTARIO, CA, US | 10/06/2009 | 5:25 A.M. | DEPARTURE SCAN |
| BALDWIN PARK, CA, US | 10/06/2009 | 12:03 A.M. | ORIGIN SCAN |
| BALDWIN PARK, CA, US | 10/05/2009 | 7:27 P.M. | FORWARDED TO THE FACILITY IN THE DESTINATION CITY |
| 10/05/2009 | 1:16 P.M. | PICKUP SCAN | |
| US | 10/05/2009 | 6:10 P.M. | BILLING INFORMATION RECEIVED |
So basically its on a little odyssey around the country.
DeepFreeze is a tool made by Faronics corporation that essentially freezes the disk in place so that you can do whatever you like to the PC, but after a restart all the changes are restored to its frozen state. Its a really nice tool for someone who runs a lab, but how does it work?
Playing with it – I believe its a kernel level driver that intercepts filesystem calls to update the MFT (master file table – its a section of the disk that tells the OS where files are located physically and how big they are – stuff like that). Anyhow instead of updating the disk itself – it caches those changes on a separate file or in physical memory (not sure yet) and of course when you reboot those changes are discarded because the memory is reset. I’m still playing around with it – so its a theory still.
So the person I was working with resigned to go work for the county, and I got her old job. So I’ve been working 40 hours a week now 
.
The only place I ever worked where the machine on my desktop was even remotely comparable to the one I have at home was Adobe. Example – my machine at home is a 2x quad core Xeon machine with 8 gigs of ram and a NVidia GTX-280. One on my desk right now is a 2 core Core 2 Duo with 2 gigs of ram and some ATI video card.
Nothing wrong with that I guess, but I found I get a bit impatient at this machines performance.
I had a lot of at PAX this year, but it will probably be the last time I go. It wasn’t that there were too many people (it was way bigger than Blizzcon actually!), but I feel I don’t get as much out of it back when it was a small local convention.
I’ll miss the super-heroes though .
I’ve been busy moving, and I finally got a new job – but I have to admit its nothing special. It’s part time (19 hours per week) at Southwestern Oregon Community College managing their lab in the evening. However since the students haven’t started I’ve mostly been doing grunt work (moving stuff around, setting up labs etc).
Saw GI-Joe the movie – it was just like the cartoon/comic and the Baroness is still hot .
So I was a tad bit surprised to hear Michael Jackson has passed away in his home. Except for Thriller (yes I’m man enough to admit I bought the album – honestly no clue where the tape ended up – which is funny because while packing stuff up I came across my Def Leppard tapes) I really never have followed his music.
When I was in elementary school Thriller came out and was on MTV. The original music video is really quite long, but for some reason it was pretty cool. Many of my classmates however thought it was gay (the outfit he wore was pretty flamboyant) and guess who got called Michael Jackson on the playground? Yes the kid who had a similar name… I can’t really moonwalk, but secretly wish I could.
Rest in peace Michael – hopefully you find yourself in the afterlife.
Pretty freaky video ehh? They honestly played that every hour on MTV when it came out.
Managed to find my Nintendo DS while packing stuff, and it still works – however I found I’m kind of terrible at it. I was kind of surprised it still works really well.
I remember buying it to play with between called while I was at Stream. When I moved on to GTS Services I really didn’t have time sadly. When I started working on the Adobe contract at Stream there was a huge emphasis on first call resolution – which meant (paraphrasing our trainer Mr. Perkins) you stay on the call until the issue was solved within reason. Interestingly enough doing this only got most of us an average average handle time of around 22 minutes (which was only a bit higher than the mandatory one they use now). So while customers rebooted or did tasks I either was looking up info (to help them), or playing on my Nintendo. Not that this was allowed, and it was probably poor judgment on my part, but finding it in a forgotten box brought back the memory. I also read a lot of comic books – Ah My Goddess being my favorite at the time (I still have all of them!).
An indignant guild member in Dragonfire was upset that all Deathknights (the new class introduced with the most recent expansion) were being portrayed as “easy mode”. Fueling the fire as I like to do sometimes I linked this video:
So this guy bound every single one of his characters abilities to a single button macro (so he runs around swinging his sword repeatedly hitting this one button) using a feature in the client called /castrandom – think of it like a scripting interface for the game. It has a lot of limitations to prevent cheating, but what /castrandom does is it selects from an array of ready spells (in other words – not ones that have been used an are on cooldown) and uses them on the target.
Are they easy mode? Yes – sadly. They have been toned down and nerfed in recent patches, but its the only class in the game I can think of that can silence a player using any one of 4 abilities. Or stun players using blackout with their pet (I think that is what it was called). I actually hexed a deathknight (turned him into a frog) to run away – and his pet came and stunned me – after that wore off he came over and killed me. I do honestly think they were one of the poorer design decisions Blizzard has made for the game sadly.
