travis' brain dump

Rants

Common sense… or the lack thereof.

by on Dec.07, 2011, under Humor, Rants

So walking in this morning from the bus station to my office, I see a couple workers on the 16th St mall area standing by a running truck, one on the phone, one smoking a cigarette… both keep looking under the truck and discussing. I walk by and glance over to see what they’re looking at and notice what appears to be gas dripping from the tank under the rear of the vehicle. Again, I notice one of them is smoking… I hurried myself along.

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eat it at&t… that is all

by on Sep.01, 2011, under Rants, Tech Stuff

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/08/31/justice-seeks-to-block-att-merger-with-t-mobile/?iid=A_F_News

For the record, I believe AT&T needs to go pound sand. The thought of them taking any part in T-Mobile disgusts me. I went to T-Mobile because of extremely poor service from other carriers and their value to cost ratio. AT&T would completely undermine the values of T-Mobile should they acquire the carrier. Not to mention we’d watch our rate plans and phone costs go through the roof. I hope they get burned for this and it costs them that 3 billion in reversal fees. It would serve them right for trying to covertly corner the market by strategically positioning themselves to own almost half of it.

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SyFy: The Official Harbinger of Death of Science Fiction

by on May.10, 2011, under General, Rants

Ok, I love Science Fiction. It’s fun, it inspires and overall it’s pretty entertaining anyway… But I feel that SyFy has pretty much killed mainstream delivery of any quality science fiction.

Last night I watched the season/series finale of SGU. After watching it, I kinda wish I hadn’t. The ending was a great season finale, but a horrible series finale. It just didn’t fit well and quite honestly was a blatent banner for how horribly mismanaged that company is. Upon reading up on some things this morning and seeing the giant axe driven into the chest of the Stargate Franchise by SyFy I couldn’t help but feel as though SyFy has done nothing but KILL science fiction over the last few years. Don’t get me wrong, some of the shows out there are pretty decent and whatnot, but overall they seem to wipe out the really good and interesting shows in lieu of something less appealing. Looking back specifically at the StarGate franchise, they cut short SG-1 leaving only a DVD movie to finish the series out;  they cut Atlantis, albeit at least with a decent ending but nothing really out there to wrap up the story and then left you hanging out to dry with SGU right when it was finally getting interesting… It wasn’t the best SG series ever, but it was finally gaining some traction in the story line and actually had me intrigued as to what would happen next.

So, I’ve come to a conclusion… I’m done with SyFy… I hope some others of you feel the same way and do what I’m doing. While I enjoy Warehouse 13 and Sanctuary, I’m sick of getting invested in shows that the network just seems to come along and wipe out without any possibility of a solid wrap-up. It happens constantly and they continue to blame the shows when they should be blaming themselves… I’m deleting my DVR schedules and ignoring the pathetic offering SyFy has out there. I’m sure my life will be much better off because of it … Since when did wrestling belong on a channel that was supposed to be dedicated to science fiction? It’s fiction, yes, but there is no science to it. LOL

I took a good long look over the last few years of what SyFy has done and I was just appalled. I remember being able to see some pretty interesting (albeit some even short-lived) shows fill in the gaps during the days that were dedicated to the story theme of science fiction and be ramped up to get into Sci-Fi Fridays with some friends and such… but slowly but surely they’ve replaced those shows with re-runs of semi-reality shows and the removal of good ole b-rated scifi flicks filling in where they lacked content for shows… it reminds me of the loss of MTV to “reality” shows in the 90’s… on a side note to that: it’s disturbing that Beavis and Butthead are being brought back… what will they talk about? the latest episode of 16 and pregnant? *rolls eyes*

While I’m bashing in SyFy, I think it’s fair to say and worth mentioning that I think TV in general has gone down the tubes… looking over most of the shows I used to watch and watch now… I spend FAR less time watching TV now than I did even 5 years ago. I guess that’s a good thing though right?

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they’ll let anyone online these days…

by on Jan.31, 2010, under Rants, Tech Stuff

Disclaimer: I can’t claim credit for finding this one… Carson found this one probably in his never ending quest to find the end of the internet. 🙂

wow… i mean, really… wow.

I can admit, I’ve seen some stupidity before, but this one really takes the cake. I seriously have to ponder if this kid will survive to adulthood. Evidently this kid, who posts up videos on YouTube, goes by the screen name ‘NextGenHacker101’… Personally that name makes me laugh in and of itself but pushing past that, I actually watched the video (posted below). “NextGenHacker101” goes on to explain how he’s going to show you an ip viewer than lets you see people’s connection speeds and such connected to a specific website. He goes on to explain this whole “cool” utility, etc.. etc.. and then goes to demonstrate…  

First off,  glancing at his desktop I had to stifle *some* laughter since he was instructing from Windows XP but pressing forward nearly choked on my drink as he prompted you to launch the command prompt ‘cmd’.  As the words left his mouth ‘Tracer-T’ I believe is where I completely lost all ability to maintain any composure. Seriously… if you’re going to “instruct” people on “cool tools” to view people’s connections, learn what the heck you’re talking about before making a complete idiot of yourself. *trace-rt* is short for “traceroute”… *rolls eyes*. I share this video so that you don’t actually need to go to YouTube and seek this confused individual out.

Could this tool be used in any shape or form for hacking? Sure. Could it be used the way this kid described it? Not at all.

For those of you that don’t know. The utility that this poor uninformed soul completely botched the explanation of is used to determine the route taken by packets across an IP network. It’s most often used for network troubleshooting and in no way could be used to show you who all is connected to a website or how fast their connection is.

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