Geek On The Mountain

Though I don’t follow the sport, I couldn’t help but laugh when I read the other day that only 6 teams raced in the US Grand Prix at Indy. I suppose if I were a fan it wouldn’t have been quite so funny…

Then I laughed again. Now it looks like F1 has found 7 of the teams guilty of breaking their rules.

The seven were found guilty of not having suitable tires “but with strong, mitigating circumstances'’ and not starting the race even though they could have used the pit-lane on each lap, the FIA statement said.

So I guess the problem here is that they didn’t run and then just pit every lap…..that would have made fans just as happy. Apparently, they weren’t guilty of refusing the race at slower than normal speeds…..I’m not sure how they evaded that one (maybe 0 MPH qualifies as a slower speed….).

It all started when Michelin decided that their tires were unsafe for use on the track after one blew out on a driver during practice. The problem in specific was that one of the turns would put too much strain on the tires. Michelin advised all teams using their tires not to race on them.

To add to things, F1 rules apparently prohibit teams from switching tires after qualifying. Since all teams had qualified, they were unable to stitch to a different, safer tire. Despite the circumstances, F1 would not allow the teams to change tires.

The final result: 14 teams refused to race, leaving 6 cars to race on the 2.5 mile track. Apparently fans, who had paid $85 - $150 for tickets, started booing, throwing stuff out onto the track, and demanded a refund….go figure.

On the up side, Michelin is apparently refunding the ticket costs of everyone who went to the race. Pretty cool of them really.

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I’ve been meaning to put out a nice, meaningful post about podcasting for quite a while now. It seems to be all the rage and whatnot. And now that iTunes 4.9, which adds support for podcasts, has come out, there has never been a better time to have my say. The one thing you really need to ask yourself though is

Do you like talk radio?

Yeah….umm…..podcasting. Podcast is really a stupid name for it all. It makes it sound like you need an iPod to do it. Not only do you not need an iPod, but you don’t even need an mp3 player of any sort. If you find yourself wondering exactly what a podcast is, then know this. It’s an mp3. That’s it. Specifically, it’s an mp3 of people talking about something. When someone podcasts, they will do various “shows” that will each be their own mp3 file. You get the shows via an RSS feed. That’s all there is too it. There are programs you can download that will automatically download the mp3’s from the feeds and even copy them straight to your iPod or whatever you like. But then, like I said, iTunes does this now as well.

Did you hear the part where I mentioned it was people talking?

A podcast is talk radio. Geeky talk radio that you download online, but talk radio none-the-less. I’m not a big fan of talk radio myself. It’s OK sometimes, but most of the time I’d rather be listening to music. When it comes to news and such, I’d generally rather read about it. I know that writing can’t contain everything you get out of talk radio, but it’s still generally boring to me.

Since I’d rate talk radio as boring, I can’t say much better for podcasts. Obviously a lot of people think otherwise, but to me, podcasting is just a bunch of hype.

You heard it here first:
Podcasts suck.

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I’ll admit it. I’m a slob. I tend to clutter my desktop with crap and my taskbar quickly fills with a million open programs. You don’t even want to know the horror I can create with Firefox and different windows and tabs…

I had actually thought that virtual desktops would be handy a while back, but I had lost the functionality that I once had in that my nvidia video card’s software had that functionality built into it. Of course, since it is pretty much useless, I’m stuck with my old voodoo3 3000 and without said software.

For anyone unfamiliar with the concept of a virtual desktop (you’ve probably never used linux… ), it’s just separate desktops that exist on the system at one time. You can switch between them and you’ll find different icons on the desktop as well as programs that have launched there. It’s also rather preferable to put different backgrounds on each one so you can easily tell where you’re at.

I finally got around to looking the other day, and there’s a WinXP power toy that is a virtual desktop manager. I installed it, and was then confused as to how I actually used it. After a little bit of looking around, I found that it installs itself as a toolbar (right click on the taskbar to enable/disable them). I’ve got it running now and I’m good to go.

I needed some new wallpapers so I stopped by Digital Blasphemy, a site for some great looking computer art wallpapers that I’ve been going to for a couple of years now.

So now I have 4 desktops….I’ll use one for general uses (internet and such) and another for development. That was really my main concern originally… organization in general is a plus, but I’d like a clean area to program in without closing everything else down. That leaves me with two other desktops…..not real sure what I’ll do there. Perhaps one for porn and the other for posing in chat rooms as Inga, 16 year old exchange student from Germany.

Or maybe not.

I’ll think of something I’m sure.

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Damn. It’s been 10 years I’ve been playing with computers now. For the most part anyways. It’s good excuse to spill my guts on my wonderful and interesting history with computers.

10 years ago I got my first computer. It’s fair to say that I began to gain knowledge much more quickly after this. But why stop at just 10 years ago? To go back to the start you have to roll back a few years more even. (I’m reminiscing here. I can’t help it ) I wish I had been exposed more to computers at a younger age. Although I always enjoyed my Nintendo, those were a bit too specialized to be anything compared to a PC (or any general-purpose computer really). My first exposure was in school. When I was in fourth grade we had a couple of commodores and apples on carts that would float around the classrooms. They just had learning games on them (or rather, they had disks with games on them that you could use on them. Good ol’ 5 1/4’s (not really). I doubt they had hard drives). All I can particularly remember is that one of them (the commodore, I do believe) needed some long ass command to be typed in in order to load a program and most people couldn’t remember but I did. Exciting.

When I was in 6th grade, we really got high tech and they installed a network of 286’s (I know they had some 8088’s mixed in as well). They were all IBM’s and they had those wonderfully clangy keyboards. Mind you, these were cheap computers. At the time, 486’s would have just been appearing on the market. They were literally installing 6 or 7 year old computers. Then again, the sub $500 computer didn’t exist back then like it does today, and they would have had to spend an incredible amount of money using newer computers and all at a time before computers had become more or less essential, so I’m sure the budget just wasn’t there. They actually continued to use that network for some time. I know they kept it installed in the libraries of most of the schools to handle the card catalogs until I was at least a junior. With these around, I got minorly more exposure to computers, but I wouldn’t pick up a whole lot until 2 years later when I was in 8th grade.
(Read the article)

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I imagine that you’ve heard of people, when out in the middle of nowhere, just running through stop signs at night. When you’ve got some nice, wide open fields, you can see if anyone is coming from the other directions, so there’s no harm really. All that needs to be done is to turn off your headlights so that if a cop is around they can’t see you doing it.

If you’ve heard of that, then you’ve probably heard the myth of how so and so once new someone who did that and then crashed into a car going the other direction because they too were doing the same thing. This is supposed to deter you from doing this. If anyone ever tells you this, don’t listen. That’s right, they’re full of it. The chances of two vehicles doing this at the same time and actually hitting each other is what any decent statistician calls “statistically impossible.” That’s the official term. These guys use it all the time for various things that can’t happen. That’s right, there’s no way in hell that something like that could happen to you. It’s not worth worrying about.

On an unrelated note, I was just reading this Darwin guy the other day and his natural selection thingy. Apparently, species (or parts of species) that are weak will naturally not be able to survive and die out over time. Weak could mean physically weak, mentally weak, or that they’re unable to adapt to a changing environment. So basically, a creature not strong enough or smart enough to survive won’t be able to reproduce and make other creatures that aren’t strong or smart. It’s really interesting, but I’m not sure anyone’s ever seen it in action though. Sorry for all the big words in this totally irrelevant section as well. I’ve tried to simplify it as much as possible for those heading the advice above.

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