The solution to the problem of fighting between Hamas and Fatah seems pretty simple to me.  The west bank and gaza strip are seperated anyway, so just make a Fatah homeland and a Hamas homeland.  Problem solved!  Then the palestinans can get back to their oh-so-important work on...hating Israel.  Oh, and then Hamas state can get that pesky attack on Israel out of the way and win themselves a Darwin award.

Oh, and I was just reading yet another article about the plunging birth-rate in Japan.  Lots of people cited financial reasons, later marriage and work, but not a one of them mentioned something I've heard mentioned A LOT...many point out that they're a society of work-a-holics.  Sure, lots of poor people in America work a lot AND have large families, but many of those are mistakes (due to...our terrible literacy levels...and our piss-poor and horribly unrealistic sex "education" policies)

You know, I just realized I have COMPLETELY forgotten to mention the whole 2girls1cup phenomenon.  Currently on youtube there are hundreds (possibly thousands) of REACTIONS to the 2 girls, 1 cup video.  Here's one of the better ones...

...and in case you're curious...here's the actual video WARNING! WARNING! DANGER WILL ROBINSON! It will probably sprain your brain.

Veterans day: OOPS!  I knew there was a logo I was forgetting!  Need to do a dough boy poit logo for that, I suppose.  Hmmm, while I'm at it I think there are SEVERAL dates for veterans day world wide.  LOL, for some reason that reminds me of the comment in the game Bioshock in which the guy's voice log mentions someone setting their lock code to Australia day...which I vaguely remembered anyway because I set up the logos.

Channel your future self: I was pondering how a department head at the university is a nice guy, but he's being overwhelmed by the workload (or more to the point, his inability to let some of it go, unlike his predecessor who sat on his ass all the time.  I though...What would I tell him? The best I could come up with was...try to "channel" your future self.  You can see how the work's (or anything in his life...or YOUR life) making you feel, you can see the direction the changes are going.  Sort of push them to extremes and see what kind of cynical, jaded asshole you'd become in that position and then think of what you'd tell your younger, more idealistic self.  The idealistic you really does have a great attitude and is rather optimistic.  The FUTURE you is probably going to be overworked (in this case), pissed off...and horribly cynical about things.  Perhaps it would be best to salvage some of the happier, more optimistic you (the current one hopefully) but write off some of the tasks/people your future self is obviously going to write off as not worth his/her time.  In doing that, you'll avoid the stresses that those things gave you in the first place and HOPEFULLY *fingers crossed* not turn out quite as bad.

Spaceman got me a fantastic gift...a new motherboard.  Come to think of it he got me the last one.  Aaaaaaaaaaaaanyway...The Abit IP35-E seems to ignore whatever the heck Intel put in their chipsets and/or CPUs to stop extreme overclocking.  Most of the time the CPUs seem to only overclock from one standard bus speed to another (or anywhere between within that range).  800mhz CPUs tend to go only 1066, 1066 don't seem to go much above 1333, etc.  Anyway, my Core2Duo (E4300) is currently stable with at 3.2ghz, roughly an 80% overclock and I think an FSB of 1420ish.

Biofuels called crime against humanity by some UN official.  Hmmm, I hadn't thought about it in QUITE that way, but I can see how ANY substantial development of biofuels (which is essentially burning food or crops raised on land that would otherwise be used to produce food) would lead to millions of people in the world starving as food prices soar.  Funny, you'd think they'd have hashed all this crap out in the 70's.  Important things to note, just because something produces energy...that doesn't mean it's worth the trouble of using that energy...and just because it's "renewable" that doesn't mean it's good for the environment.

 RAID ARRAY: Well, I finally settled on what hard drives I was going to get.  Originally I'd intended to get a 500gig and run a RAID5 array using a 250gig partition on the 500 along with the two other 250gig drives...but I just couldn't get FreeNAS to recognize other partitions (even if I set them up myself).  So, I picked up a couple of open box drives off newegg.  One 250gig, one 400gig.  I'll use the 400 to temporarily free up space on the 250's, then it'll be a sort of junk drive.  One thing I will need to do is swap one of my 250's with my father so I have a SATA connection free to connect the 400gig.

Currently the camera's memory card (from two small batches of pictures) has 350meg on it.  I imagine we'll burn through hard drive space at a crazy rate if beth (or myself) start taking a lot of pictures.  The RAID array will be the new home of our photo album, web page backups, beth's poetry and whatever sort of documents we generate.

Hmmm, I just discovered I have a tolerable announcer voice. It sounds nothing like me.  That's pretty much it for that tidbit.

In other news, I've been playing Psychonauts.  It's an incredibly inventive game.  The "levels" take place in the (often horribly fucked up) minds of the game's characters.  Some of the more amusing levels involve...being a giant in a city of talking lungfish and an Escher-esque map full of rather obvious agents sporting disguises consisting of nothing more than a single tool (often used incorrectly).  For a review that does the game far more justice (and the reviews from this guy are just funny as hell anyway...so you should see them) check out the Zero Punctuation review.

Well, I've been watching Dead Like Me...a short lived series about grim reapers "living" among the living.  Pity it only had two seasons, it was a god show.  The main character has a lot of short internal monologues dealing with the various issues of being undead.  Basically the only good part of being undead is that they don't die (although catching small glimpses of other people's afterlife probably makes that seem like a down side) and they  heal quickly.  They still have to hold down jobs like the rest of us although one perk of actually being able to talk to the recently deceased (or heck, even being around them a lot) is that they can sometimes take stuff :D

And speaking of death *sigh* one of my wife's friends died recently.  Kind of hit her hard since he died of pneumonia and that's kind of similar to problems that have hospitalized her in the past...then of course there's the fact that he died at 31!!!  And speaking of taking dead people's stuff a little earlier, the guy's family left his 19inch monitor (CRT) in front of the dumpster so...I'm back at 1600x1200 :D

Just in case someone stumbles onto my little web page in a search for the Bioshock patch for Shader 2.0, you can find all the info you need over at the patch blog

Kind of amazing that they could get the patch working pretty well in just a couple weeks but the game couldn't ship with it.  Anyway, they suggest it will work on cards like the ATI 9800 series and above (probably the X600, X700, certainly the X800 series.  I haven't bothered to try it because it was only a concern while I was waiting for my new graphics card.  might give it a quick test on the wife's machine and see if a 9600XT can handle it. 

Well, it was crashing at the bathysphere ride up into Rapture (the name of the city in Bioshock) but apparently one of the fixes I had tried (reinstalling DX9, the ATI bioshock hotfix, etc) did fix it...but the game just didn't know it yet.  Uninstalled and reinstalled a third time and this time it got things right. 

The game looks great and it's one of those games you can't stop playing (until you finish or need sleep). Part of it is standard...you've got a rather linear goal (life is like that a lot of times though) but many, many ways to achieve it.  It's interesting to listen to all the tapes laying around.  It's obvious that some of the characters go crazy by using the technologies they've created.

Combat is really interesting because your augmentations to weapons, combat skills or physical abilities.  I've dealt with hordes of security bots (when I broke out a display window) by simply standing still and letting my chameleon kick in, or hordes of unfriendly people by killing one then beating the others with the bodies of the dead thru telekenesis.  You can even make them fight each other in the right situation.  Anyway, great game and BTW, the water looks frigging awsome!

Damn shame I can't play the fucking thing.  I've got a compatible video card...I've got a fast enough CPU, plenty of HD space, plenty of RAM...just won't work.  Oh, it's nice enough to let me go thru the mandatory intro scenes...but then it crashes just before I can do anything.

On the bright side, the new video card works great (X1950GT) and the new camera seems to be pretty good.  *sigh* just no ability to play Bioshock :(