Author: lux

Slender Bodies, Empty Minds

Not that I’ve ever used the stuff, but if you do use SlimFast, you should know:

Slim-Fast has dropped Whoopi Goldberg from its advertising after the comedian made a sexual joke about George Bush.

Per Atrios. He has contact info if you want to give the SlimFast folks a piece of your mind.

10 Things I Hate About Building PCs

I’m sure I’ll get a bunch of smarmy comments from the Mac contingent over this, but I’m currently in the middle of a PC upgrade fiasco, and I need to get it off my chest.

I really like the new City of Heroes game, but unfortunately the PC I use, a homebuilt box, does a lousy job of running the game. The graphics card I have (a Radeon All In One) isn’t quite powerful enough, but due to the age of the motherboard, I can’t upgrade to a better graphics card without also upgrading the motherboard. Which means buying a new case and power supply, because the 4-year-old case won’t hold newer motherboards. And at that point you might as well go to 512MB of memory and upgrade the processor. Now you’re up to $500 worth of new hardware to run a $50 game.

Scott suggested new hard drive(s) as well but I drew the line there. And I decided that since I have so much free time right now, I was going to be the primary builder of the new box. I’m about 4 times as slow as Scott when it comes to hardware installation, but with him working and me not, it seems unfair to make him do it all.

That all leads us to the point of this post, which is a list of the 10 things I most hate about building your own PC:

  1. Despite the huge pile of PC hardware in our office, some of it up to 7 years old, none of it is actually useful
  2. There is no easy way to grab onto PCI cards when you’re trying to take them out of their slots, resulting in cuts on your fingers
  3. Instruction manuals on the one hand omit key pieces of information yet offer pages of useless drivel on the other hand
  4. Power supplies, whose huge masses of cables block critical space inside the PC case, don’t have enough plugs of the kind that you need and too many if the kind that you don’t need
  5. I don’t get why you need 6 different kinds of screws to put one PC together
  6. Operating systems that give a BSOD on boot-up if the CD drive isn’t found suck
  7. Motherboards with secondary IDE controllers that don’t work out of the box or even after you’ve updated the BIOS also suck
  8. Resellers who ship motherboards that have non-functioning secondary IDE controllers suck even more than that
  9. Planned Obsolescence in general, for being the root cause of the entire fiasco
  10. Having to do it all over again when the (hopefully fully functional) new motherboard gets here some time in the next few days

And While We’re On The Subject

Speaking of other bloggers who are better and/or funnier writers than I am, check out this great bit in fafblog:

In the meantime because I was tricked into believin in Joe Wilson, I also believed that Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program didnt exist when in fact it must have because Joe Wilson got his job from his wife! Even now I am trembling in fear in the knowledge that somewhere out there Saddam Hussein is sittin on a giant pile of Nigerien yellowcake uranium. “Ho ho ho,” laughs Saddam Hussein as he takes a bite of rich, creamy uranium. “Soon I will grow ten thousand times my current size, spewing radioactive fire breath across Mesopotamia, until as Nuculo-Saddam I shall control the Middle East!” “Oh no Saddam don’t do that!” I say. “It is too late!” he laughs. “And I owe it all to you, Fafnir – to you and all the other hapless peaceniks deceived by the nepotism of Joseph and Valerie Plame-Wilson!”

Friendster: About Face!

This is exactly the kind of action that makes people have no respect for what corporations say: Friendster, which has made much of its ‘no fake profiles’ policy, is now allowing fake profiles as long as they’re sponsored by a paying advertiser.

From its earliest days, many Friendster members introduced fake profiles — known variously as fakesters, or pretendsters — into their networks of friends. Often, members posted profiles of their pets and linked to friends’ pets. But the service quickly demonstrated it didn’t see the humor when it began purging the network of the fakesters.

Yet now, the company sees little irony in cooperating with Anchorman developer DreamWorks in introducing the movie’s characters into the Friendster network. In fact, it says the move is indicative of a larger cross-promotional plan the company has undertaken.

“What Friendster is doing with these movie-character profiles is actually a brand-new paradigm in media promotion,” Friendster spokeswoman Lisa Kopp said. “We are working directly with a number of production houses and movie studio partners to create film-character profiles, or ‘fan’ profiles, that allow our users to share their enthusiasm about the film with their friends.”

The message I get is that Friendster is tone-deaf to how this looks to their customers. Why is it not OK to put up a profile for a (real) pet bird but OK to have a profile of a fake anchorman for a not very funny summer movie? Oh right, money.

It’s been widely reported that all of the ‘social networking’ companies are having an issue trying to figure out how to make them profitable. This is one way of generating income that doesn’t require a full-out pay for content model, and in that sense it’s not a bad idea. But the hypocrisy inherent in the process does leave a bad taste in my mouth.

I’m probably not their target customer anyway. I signed onto Friendster a year or so ago. I was familiar with the “fakesters” on Friendster, even linked as a friend to the Howard Dean profile. As the Wired article mentions, it was a way of establishing community and saying something about myself by my choice of association. But ultimately, I gave up on Friendster and stopped visiting. The site was too static, didn’t really allow for much interaction – in short, I found it boring.

I prefer Orkut, which has user-formed community groups and message boards – much more interactive, much more interesting. It’s not a major part of my online activities, but unlike Friendster, Orkut is interesting enough for me to keep visiting & contributing to the site. Orkut is also invite-only, which helps keep the trolls out.