ClearTheRail

Woo Ha!

As this goofy foreign guy I played with in Atlantic City would say, today was the most happiest day of my life. No, I didn't get married. I didn't get lucky with some hot cocktail waitress. I didn't even play today so I didn't win a single cent. So why am I so happy? I discovered an extension for Firefox that makes those annoying new window links pop up in a new tab instead. Fucking brilliant. I imagine that this will save me somewhere between 1,100,000 and 1,230,300 mouse clicks per week.
Just a note to my readers, if you aren’t hip to Firefox, let me set you wise. It is by far the best web browser available. It is made by the Mozilla crew, and is a stripped down (none of the non-browsing features found in Netscape or Mozilla, but more browsing related ones), high speed, lean, mean browsing machine. It features tab-based browsing, which is the greatest web browser innovation since the back button. I greatly expect that the next windows will have many of its features built into IE, but until then it is the stone cold nuts in web browsing.

High Tech, Low Tech

I am one of those people who most would consider to be very knowledgeable about computers. I build my own PC’s, am always buying nifty tech gadgets, watch Tech TV with a near religious devotion ( I'm not excited about their merger with G4 either), and try to stay on top of all the latest changes in the hardware world. I am not really a gamer, so I haven’t much use for the latest Radeons or anything, but I do still like to have a powerful PC. Mine isn’t that great anymore (Athlon XP 1800+ was very close to as fast as it got when I built it) but for surfing the web and playing online poker (and of course writing in my blogs) it gets the job done. It is pretty well stacked with accessories (including a tight windowed case with some blue and green cold cathodes) but I am considering building a new one soon with the Athlon 64 processor, a tight video card in case I ever want to get back in to WarCraft 3 or something, and some other tricked out accessories.
Anyway, back to the point. I have come to the conclusion that if you are a computer person like I am you should not tell a single person, other than people you know to be equally savvy. For instance I have a friend who is also into computers and whenever he asks me for help it is something interesting like a motherboard not working. Finding the root of problems like that is actually fun, since it can be a rather tough task at times, but just about all of the questions you get from non-computer people are as fun as being stuck on a plane to Europe next to a old man who needs to change his Depends. All these people ever want you to do is either help them setup or fix their home network, or take some crappy computer from 1982 and make it as good as anything on the market for under $50.
It is truly amazing some of the things people have asked me to do with their old computers. One guy wanted me to take his old Packard Bell processor (powered by the Intel 486 processor) and make it able to run Poker and Windows XP. The best part is he bought the computer off of someone for a couple hundred dollars. This thing has a slower processor than the average solar powered calculator and he wants to do everything he could with a 2 GHz P4. Humans have this penchant for taking old things and making them work as good as new, and despite the fact that for just about anything other than a computer restoration usually costs more than just buying a new one people who know nothing about computers always expect you to be able to buy a little more RAM for $50 and spend 20 minutes installing it and voila, supercomputer.
Now another friend of mine bought a laptop from the Pentium II days from some junk merchant and can’t connect it to AOL, so I have to try to help him tomorrow. Why anyone would ever want to connect to AOL is definitely beyond me, but I imagine I am going to spend an hour or two of my time reinstalling some ancient version of windows on this turd with an LCD screen. I seriously need to stop being such a nice guy.

Master of My Domain

This site is now www.cleartherail.com, and my other site is now www.thepokerchronicles.com. Guess I went a little godaddy crazy.

Search Update

I have updated the list of google queries that land people here. Some good stuff.

I'm Sold

I was browsing the new Napster today wondering why anyone would ever pay for something they could download for free and I finally found a reason why. Because they can't find it for free. My searches on Kazaa for such artists as Meade "Lux" Lewis and Albert Ammons generally return one or two results if I am lucky, but on Napster I managed to find more than 20 tracks for both of them. I used to think that nobody else listened to this stuff, and my inability to find any of it on Kazaa reaffirmed that. Turns out there are other boogie-woogie fans out there. I searched to see if other members had downloaded any Meade Lewis and one other had. Albert Ammons seems to be a little more popular with about 20 users.
Napster also has very nice bios on the artists. I find their interface a little hard to navigate at times, perhaps a little unwieldy. For instance if you are looking at an artist, and navigate to a particular album it is hard to get back to the artists listing again. The back button will take the pictures and bios back but not the tracks, etc.
The thing I dislike most about Napster is it uses the WMA format. I understand it has good Digital Rights Management, and DRM is necessary, but I personally prefer MP3 files because of the easy to edit ID3 tags, and their wide acceptance among portable digital music players. I don't think iPods (the number one selling player) will even play WMAs.
Now I am going to check out iTunes to see if they are any better. They use MP3 or the vastly superior AAC format so I am already predisposed to favor them. I have a new player coming today, a 20gb from i-River, a company that always makes kick ass digital music players and was determined by Tech TV to be better than the iPod. And cheaper. Now I must go reboot to load iTunes. See y'all in a bit.

How To End Spam For Good

President Bush finally did something I approve of, which may be the first time in his career. He signed a piece of legislation meant to reduce the spam in our inboxes. Sure the economy still sucks (it has been "getting better" for months without still actually becoming better), Osama is still roaming the Middle East (but Sadam is caught, which is good for Iraqis but doesn't make me feel any safer), and public schools are inundated with the task of conforming to the useless yet tedious No Child Left Behind Act. But I have to be honest if my inbox becomes somehow free of spam I may vote for the idiot again.
I was looking in my inbox today and here is the spam breakdown. Roughly 10 porno sites, 3 emails trying to sell me some generic non-adult oriented crap I do not need (diet pills), and 22 attempting to sell me adult oriented crap I do not need. Of the 22 adult oriented ones 11 were pills or devices to enlarge my penis. Why on earth would I want to do that anyway? I know longer shotgun barrels make the bullet fly straighter so maybe it would improve my accuracy at the urinal but I rarely miss anyway, and when I do I am usually drunk and in a public place where I do not have to do the clean up anyway. The ads seem to think a couple extra inches would boost my confidence and enable me to bag more women. I’m not sure how other guys attract women but usually by the time one sees what size my penis is I've already got her hooked, and I've never even heard of a woman running away from someone because they were too small. Perhaps that does happen and explains why men feel the need to buy these things.
What I find the most curious about penis enhancement is that some of these devices look like electric tubes which you plug into the wall and they use suction to stretch you. Anyone willing to stick their John Thomas in an electric device bought from an anonymous emailer deserves what they get. So this led me to my own way of getting rid of spam. It is a long term approach but in the end I feel it will be much more effective than any legislation. What you do is you spam people with these penis pumps but have them made specifically to castrate the users. So eventually all the idiots who buy these things are made into eunuchs and are unable to have slack jawed children (which anyone who buys a penis pump undoubtedly would) and in a few generations you would have no more idiots dumb enough to buy penis enhancers through spammers. Therefore the spammers go out of business. And as a special bonus side effect this approach would also eventually get rid of Reality TV shows and ‘N Sync.

More Fun With Google

I found out today that if you search for "Sucking Toes Pleasure Scientific" on Google my site is number 2. Of course I found this out because someone actually searched for it and landed on my site. I have to go hurl now.

Can I Please See Some ID?

I am getting ready to take a one week sabbatical from work (if you can even call it that) starting in a couple days here so I decided to go get a PC game from Sam's Club (by far the best place to buy major releases) to fill the 25 hour void that will be created. I happened to see a review for a game on X-Play called XIII that looked pretty good so I went to buy it. It is a cell shaded FPS that looks like a living comic book (neat huh?) and I like First Person Shooters (though I suck at them) so I bought it. I suppose it is a fairly violent game though in a cartoonish sort of way. Any way when I got to the register to buy it the cashier asked for my ID. First it upset me a little because I think it is fairly obvious I am over 17, but I know the cashier is just some pissed off lady working a sucky job for $7 an hour wondering why she didn't go to college or at least marry some rich guy, and she is just doing her job. But it kinda bothers me that you have to be 17 to get a video game. That isn't a law. I won't even open the whole "GTA turns kids into mass murderers" can of worms but I am curious how 17 was determined to be the magic age where children can kill people in a game without it making them psychotic. I guess children on their 17th birthday finally realize that video game violence is not OK in real life, but it is at age 13 that they have the same epiphany about movie violence. And they are born knowing that violence on TV is not to be imitated, which is why Walker Texa Ranger is OK (morally speaking, quality wise it is unviewable) for children. And at 21 you can drink without becoming an alcoholic or behaving in an irresponsible manner.

I Hate Mac Users

I accidentally stumbled across a Macintosh user’s website today, and it was so asinine I refuse to put a link to it here. Needless to say its message board was full of the same haughty attitude that seems so common among Mac users, as if the 5% of them know something that the other 95% of the world has not figured out. What on earth is so great about Macs? They cost three times as much as a PC of equal performance and can’t run a very large amount of the best programs around. So I’ve compiled a little list of why people think Macs are better, and why they are wrong.
1. Mac users think Macintosh OS is so much simpler to use than Windows. This is ludicrous. If you are not a computer savvy Linux user, but are just a normal everyday home user who cannot figure out how to do pretty much anything you want to do in Windows 98 or XP do society a great big favor. Go to Google, type in “how to commit suicide”, click the button that says I’m Feeling Lucky, and follow the instructions. The average Joe home PC user does 3 things: play solitaire, type the occasional paper in Word, and look at porn on the internet. If you are so dumb that you can’t do all of this stuff in Windows please quit wasting valuable oxygen.
2. Macintosh is better for graphic designers. Graphic designers say this ALL THE TIME. So I asked a few that I knew what programs they worked with, and sure enough the answers were various Adobe and Macromedia programs, all of which are available with full functionality on Windows. I guess maybe Photoshop just runs better when the computer its on is overpriced and has the processing power of a potato chip.
3. The new iMac looks so cool. No it doesn’t. It looks like someone duct taped a flat panel to a desk lamp. Which is roughly what they did, given that the average desk lamp and the average iMac have about the same processor speed. Also see how much you like the design when something goes bad and you have to send the whole thing to Mac’s repair center.
4. Being a Macintosh user is an expression of my individuality. OK, so no Mac users ever really come out and say this but it is obviously what they all think. And the simple fact is they are idiots. I have yet to figure out how buying a computer for twice the amount of a PC which would have twice the processor power and have thousands more programs available is an expression of anything other than sheer stupidity. You want to express your individuality grow a mohawk; you want to buy a $2000 computer with a processor equal to a 1 GHz P3, buy a Mac.
The simple fact is PCs are the way of the future (and the last 10 years) and it isn’t hard to figure out why. When you have multiple manufacturers competing over the various components you get amazing products at rock bottom prices. When you have one company making all the parts you get outdated computers at ridiculous prices. So to all you Mac users out there quit acting like you are members of some exclusive club. You’re members of the “I bought a shitty PC for $3000” club. Remember in your future purchasing decisions, Windows or Linux. The rest is useless.

Sponge Bob Sqaure Pants

Apparently in my earlier post “I Whupped Sponge Bob’s Ass” (the title of which is a tribute to the late Wesley Willis) I misspelled the word square as sqaure. I only happened to notice because in my visitors log I saw
that people were being redirected to my site from Yahoo! and it turns out if you misspell square that way my site is number 4 in the rankings. Normally I would fix it but hey why mess with free traffic, even if it is a bunch of eight year olds.