The Pink, The Proud, The Petunias....

Here's a trivia question for you...what is the town of Dixon, known for BESIDES being the hometown of President Ronald Reagan?

Well, if the answer isn't Staring you in the face, it's the annual event we Dixon Alumns call the Petunia Festival. It's the one time of year that there is actually something to do in that little town (Population 15,000).

The one criticism of this event is that the slogan needs a little work. I know Petunia Fest isn't big budget, but seriously, it seems like they got 1000 monkeys typing on a 1000 typewriters making the Great American Novel. Gotta love my little po-dunk town...

Needless to say, my weekend plans consist of heading back home, take in a little of the sights and sounds of Dixon, and validate all the reasons why I left that place to begin with. Hopefully I will have good social recall, and enjoy a relaxing holiday weekend. Happy Fourth to everyone!

The Good, The Lag, and The Ugly

Last night's test was successful. It would seem that the issue with lag has been either solved or reduced. I hosted 20 players at the peak with no complaints. I could have never done that before. Of course, that may mean that my high upload speeds are going away. I had a dream last night that my dad and I were running around some Chicago/Milwaukee composite trying to find a store that sold Balsamic vinegar. I don't usually dream at all so it was an unexpected experience. I am sick now. It started with sniffles on Monday. Yesterday it progressed to nasal congestions which by the end of the day had left my nose and become chest congestion. I also have some pain in my left ear. There is nothing like a pending ear infection to ensure that I am going to end up in the doctor's office. For the first time in years, though, I am sick without a sore throat and it is progressing quickly. At the rate this cold is moving around I might be completely healed by noon. When I first woke up this morning I hadn't coughed in 8 hours so as I brushed my teeth I ended up coughing up a lung cookie that looked like a slug that had been doused with sodium chloride. I thought I might keep him as a pet. I decided, though, that if he truly loved me he would come back after I let him go. I wadded him up in a kleenex and flushed him.

Bush Address Outlines New Plan For Iraq

Included are designs for updated body armor for American troops(pictured right); putting an end to accusations that American forces in Iraq are woefully underequipped. That is only the beginning of what Bush announced will be a quick push to calm what 2nd in command Dick Cheney described as the "Last Throes" of the Iraqi insurgency. Donald Rumsfeld has confirmed, earlier this week, that the "Last Throes" are expected to be violent and last a very brief "...10, 12 years."


Not my picture. Gleaned from Suppository. Stu had gleaned it from somewhere before that. Glean. I like Glean. Glean Glean Glean. Please notice the egregiously generous nut bulb!

Lagthar of the Hill People

Today we got word that something on the network has been changed and that engineering feels that they may have fixed the problem. Team Engrish, tonight is another test night. I will be starting with a 32 player game. A coworker (doordolt, in fact) did some research and found a list of ports used by most xbox games (Star Wars Battlefront included). Most games use only the default xbox live ports of 88 and 3074 (udp and tcp). I had looked for this info many months ago but was unable to find it. Doordolt found it in 30 minutes. Either it's new info or he had an angle I hadn't considered. He gave that info to one of our engineers and I think they have moved those ports higher in priority on the packetshaper (that we don't have). Either that or they have configured the packet shaper to lets communication pass on those ports without any shaping at all. We'll see. I am excited that the problem might be fixed but that would also mean an end to my high upload testing. :) and :(

Opened Soda Never Spoils??????

Everyone is guilty of it...I know I am...of buying perishable food items, and promptly forgetting about them for a few years...you know the ones in the very back of the shelf with so much dust on them that an archaologist would have a field day? Well, now there's a handy dandy guide on the rule of thumb shelf life of lots of things, check it out here:

Food Spoilage Guide

Use this guide and avoid eating egg salad sandwiches from a truck stop mens room!

One interesting note in this guide is that it claims that an opened can of soda never spoils, but an unopened one does. So does that mean I should open every can when I get home from the store? :P

Lag of Omicron Persei 8

Hosting tonight was a bust. We hit about 5 players on a 32 player game before the reports of lag started coming in. I stepped it down to a 20 player game and EzMezzo was getting lag with just 5 total players. It was a real shame. I don't know what the problem is. As I have mentioned, I have my theories but they are pure speculation. Educated guesses, though they are. I wish I had some way to actually monitor the traffic directly. There are possibilites but all of them seem improbable. I thought I might start running some ping tests with Ping Plotter overnight and while I am at work. It really doesn't seem like a latency issue, though. It could be dropped packets. I am not getting any packet loss if I ping Yahoo for 10 minutes like I did this afternoon. It just seems as if the provisioned bandwidth of the modem is not being delivered. It seems like I am not getting close to that bandwidth. It tests OK on speed tests but in real applications it seems to be failing. In a team meeting a few weeks ago one of the higher-ups in engineering mentioned a possible duplexing issue. That might be closer to the truth than anything. I like this added bandwidth because it does improve my gaming experience. However when you go from hobbled to limping you still long to run. I don't really know that having us test these higher speeds is really doing anything. I can't really piece together any way to gather hard data. Without generating imperical data what's the point. If anyone has any suggestions on how to really break it down your suggestions would be welcome.

Setting Myself Up For Failure

So, as part of this testing I am involved in at work I have had my home internet connection provisioned for 3 sync. I did a test via remote desktop (which, no doubt, influenced my upload result) and tested at 3354 down and 1924 up. That is more than sufficient bandwidth to host a 32 player game on Star Wars Battlefront. I will be doing so tonight. Team Engrish, I hope to see you all there. No doubt it will be a miserable failure but at least I will have tried.

The picture in this post is a drawing (in negative-originally in blue on a white background) by a Miami artist named David Valdes. He was my roomate for a while in 1995/96 when I lived in Chicago.

Wendy's, WTF?

I Went to Wendys today for lunch. The plan was to get a Baked Potato ...I get up to the order box, and the guy says "sir...we are out of potatoes for another half hour..." What's up with that? It's not like I went through the drive through at some ungodly hour! It was during the noon hour!

I realize the bad press for the "finger" incident has hurt their rep...but come on, step up to the plate...gotta give us consumers what we want in a market economy such as this!
Thumbs down to this spud zero incident...well, in Wendy's case, it's finger down I guess!

Start On One Subject And Migrate To Another In The Manner Of A Raving Lunatic

I am back at work again. I am using remote desktop to access my home PC. At home I am provisioned for the 1.5MBps sync service again for testing purposes. It seems that my employer is entertaining the idea of a gaming package but wants all the kinks worked out in advance. What reallys sucks is that there is something going on within the network that is killing gamers or anyone else who has need for a stream or continuous connection. It's worse now that it ever was before. Last night my ping meter looked good on Star Wars Battlefront. All the way in the green, they were. I have a 1.5 sync connection and should therefore be able to host a 32 player game. I hosted a 16 player game and was getting lag complaints after only 4 players had joined. Yesterday, at work, I was streaming some audio from home with remote desktop. It was variable bitrate WMA and the album I was playing ranges from 206 to 400 kbps. It was skipping every few seconds. Keep in mind that I should, theoretically, be able to stream close to 1500 kbps from home. If I can't even stream less than a third of that without skips and drops there is definately a problem. There isn't any packet loss and ping times look good. I have a theory that there is a device on our network that is causing the problem. Officially, we do not have one of these devices. Few people even know what they are. All ISPs have them but I challenge you to find an ISP who will admit to it. They are designed to limit traffic on P2P networks among other things. Generally they should be set only to watch certain ports but in the case of my employer it took them 4 years to find out that the thing was running a process ever 15 minutes that was causing packet drops so I seriously doubt they have configured it to only watch the appropriate ports. It's likely that it is watching every packet and shaping it accordingly. Hint Hint. It wouldn't do you any good to ask your ISP if they have one. They do. The technical reps don't know they have it. If you have an ISP whose technical reps have the same unprecedented level of access to the systems that we do at my job they are likely to have been sworn to secrecy about it. I was, pretty much, told to lie about it. If someone asks if we have one we have been instructed to say "We do not limit access to P2P sites or services." It doesn't answer the questions but it kinda seems to. It's a dodge. I don't like being asked to lie. That's why I'm blabbing here. ISPs are limiting your access to P2P sites and services by limiting the amount of bandwidth on the network reserved for that purpose. You aren't getting that new Yin Yang Twins song at 6Kbps from 4 users because that's all they can send you. It's coming in that slow because your ISP has made the badnwidth available to P2P extrememly narrow. Also, STOP USING P2P. There are alternatives. All P2P has spyware. EVEN when you pay for the spyware free version.

A Co-op blog is the best idea ever..... except.....

HA! EzMezzo and I have never really agreed on anything. That's what is fun about having him as a friend. We are both independent, too. Subsequently we have different ideas for this project. The tagline under Mental Fiber took, in aggregate, several hours of the two of us throwing ideas back and forth. Then end result was a compromise on both sides of the aisle. LOL. I had an idea for a tagline contest where we could solicit suggestions. I didn't like the idea after I thought about it. It was just a way for me to leverage for a change to the current tagline. EzMezzo liked the idea. LOL. I took a piss right on my own feet. I had decided to put my name at the beginning of each post and encouraged Mezzo to do the same. He disliked the idea. I maintained that the name at the bottom forced the reader to reach the bottom without understanding the full context of the post. I intended to keep doing it anyway but Mezzo changed the template of the blog so that the names are now displayed of the top of the posts as well. That's a good thing. Now if I could just get the tag line changed to "Mental Fiber : It's Like Sex Only You're Having It." all would be complete. :)

Whackly's Challenge

So I talk to Whackly on the phone last night, and he says..."You need to keep up posting on this blog, or face being drowned out by the Whack..." Wow, so I guess I had better at least keep some sort of presence on this blog!

Listening to the TWITcast for this week http://www.thisweekintech.com/, and longtime Tech TV Personality Jessica Corbin shows up for a guest appearance. The old Tech TV was great...with Jess, Sumi, Erica...Whackly knows what I mean.... Anyways, she announces on the show that she is starting a new venture called the "Fempire"...hmmm I wonder if Jess is doing an ode to fembots? Interesting. Now she is threatening to release the Fempire on the TWIT army... If the Fempire runs marathons like Jess, I think Leo's truly in trouble...

"I like the heat, the humidity"... The weather here has been brutal. 90+ degrees with lots of humidity. I have the AC cranked up to high in my house...and in my car, trying to insulate myself from the outside conditions. Although, being the stupid fool that I am I went out golfing last weekend in the 95 degree weather. You know it's bad when the golf course manager laughs at you for being the only people dumb enough to walk around a course in that kind of weather. At least we had the course to ourselves!

Can't Sleep

Some lady on the 1500 block of 24th Ave woke up yesterday morning to find a stranger in her bedroom. He got in through an unlocked window. That type of crap makes it hard to sleep. God help any poor idiot who climbs in my window when I'm home. I've no doubt he might harm me. I'm not a Kung Fu master. But he isn't going to leave my house in one piece either. I know where all the sharp shit is in my house. I had to hide it from a curious and observant toddler. Anyone breaking in and threatening my family is just asking to get poked with something. That, and I'm a biter.

We just had some sever weather and 2000 people in and around the Twin Cities are out of power. Sucks to be them. A good night to be on call. Perhaps I will make some overtime tonight. Actually, I am not on call but I forgot to hand off the laptop and nextel and whoever is on call either didn't want it or didn't know about it. Sucks to be them too, I guess.

I just scratched a mosquito bite on my leg I didn't know about. Apparently I was scratching it in my sleep last night because I ended up scratching up a scab and staining my sock with blood. I didn't know it was bleeding until I thought I had a bug on my leg and slapped a big splattery handprint over my shin. It's too dark to tell if my hand is all bloody but it smells like blood so I'm betting it is. It's actually a good smell when it's your own. It's not as pleasant when it's someone else's.

Welcome to what the middle of a sleepless night is like for me! I need to start drinking.

All my homies in the U.S.A. throw your hands up!

Respek Knuckles!

I am too angry about today's news to really get started so I am just throwing out some general respek knuckles to anyone smart enough to agree that this whole country has become functionally retarded. It's time to thin the herd. Since this country's constitution and Bill of Rights seem to mean nothing any longer why don't we just scrap the whole system and rebuild the whole country as a Theocracy with laws based on insulting speculation on what the victims of the World Trade Center tragedy would want. We will have Representative Randy Cunningham of California write our new constitution since he can, apparently, channel those who died in that attack. We can base the entire system on fear and control. I understand that might have seemed obtuse to some of you. If you are one of those people do yourself a favor and look up Mr. Cunningham and his ridiculous comments concerning how the people who died on September 11th wouldn't want Americans to have the right to burn the American Flag in protest. Thanks to Doordolt for bringing this one to my attention. Any chance of getting It's Doordolt in the links?

Those Busy Bastards.

Apparently, now that every road under the Bush Administration leads to Theocratic Totalitarian Dictatorship anyway, the Supreme Court has seen fit to just start pissing all over the Constitution. Don't believe me? Well here are some links that should get you started on a road to frustration.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/06/27/scotus.reporters.ap/index.html
and
http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=businessNews&storyID=2005-06-27T192554Z_01_N27697531_RTRIDST_0_BUSINESS-COURT-GROKSTER-DC.XML

Link #2.
It seems that the Supreme Court has ruled that, since P2P software makers didin't do anything to prevent the distribution of copyrighted material, they can be sued for damages by the makers of Movies and Music. I supposed they will be able to sue the makers of blank DVDs and CDs as well. Microsoft doesn't stop anyone from distributing music or from storing and burning illegally gotten material. Why not sue them too. Screw personal repsonsibility altogether. Why not sue ISPs. Why don't they sue themselves for making catchy brainless tripe formulated to appeal to mass audiences and then marketing it adnauseum? Aren't they attempting to make people need their product but then deliberatly keeping the prices high? Remember when new CDs were $9.99 and then the RIAA went after Best Buy and other retailers for refusing to step up to thier price fixing scam? CD prices have been $15 to $18 ever since. The music and movie industry revenues have gone up every single year since 1974. It's not like they are losing money on this. So some record company sells 1.48 million copies of an album instead of 1.5 million copies. Boo Hoo. The artist that made the music only gets pennies for every album anyhow. Here's an idea. Go download an album off Limewire and send the artist $3 directly. It's a better system.

On to link #1.
The Supreme court has refused to hear the case of Time magazine's Matthew Cooper and The New York Times' Judith Miller who are each facing up to 1.5 years in jail for refusing to reveal the source who comprimised the identity of former CIA operative Valerie Plame. The source is widely speculated to be someone within the White House and for that reason many people really want them to cough up what they know. It seems many people would absolutely love to stick it to Bubba Bush and the V.I.P.E.R. assassin squad he keeps around him. Anyone who knows me knows that I am about as much a fan of GW as I am of venereal disease but my hatred for him does not prompt me to ignore the Rights of the Free Press! If jounalists cannot assure their sources that secrecy will be maintained there will be no more sources. No more secret sources means no more investigative journalism. No more investigative journalism mean s carte blanche for politicians and corporations to just bend you over and fuck you right in the butt.

They handed down a bunch of other rulings today both bad and maybe bad. As bad as this current iteration of the court is imagine how much worse it would be if any of them croak or retire and Bush gets to try and replace them. I think I'm going to throw up.

Addendum!
This is another story brought to my attention by Doordolt. I didn't want to make a new post about it so I added it to this one. It's perfect. Absolutely perfect. http://www.freenation.tv/hotellostliberty2.html

PSP Version 1.5 Finally Hacked

After a LONG LONG wait, someone finally figured out how to hack the US Version of the PSP (Version 1.50 of the firmware). The hack called KXPloit allows non-signed homebrew code to be run off of a memory stick. The most exciting part of homebrew for me personally, is the ability to run homebrew emulators. I can now reminisce back to the good old days, when the Genesis ruled the earth with a 68000 Microprocessor and games like Sonic the Hedgehog were the cutting edge of technology! Read about the KXPloit here http://www.psphacks.net/content/view/273/2/

A Recipe. Gotta Post Something

1. Melt / dissolve 1/2 cup of sugar in 3 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar over medium heat.
2. Add 1 tabelspoon boysenberry syrup (vary syrup according to the fuit you are going to use).
3. Heat on medium until bubbling activity commences.
4. Add 2 - 3 cups of sliced fruit (The original recipe was developed using strawberries).
5. Stir and wait for the mixture to cool slightly.
6. Add 1 teaspoon ground cardamom.
7. Simmer over low - medium low heat until reduces to an "elmer's glue with chunkies" consistency.
8. Remove from heat. Allow to cool. Serve with ice cream, toast, vodka. Whatever charges you.

Store in sealed container in the fridge.
I would imagine that if you were to follow proper canning procedure it could be put into mason jars and kept on a shelf indefinately.

This recipe is an invention of mine. Is it a compote? A jam? Anyone?

My First Post.
Wow. I am blogging. You can't imagine the thrill. I think I have found my purpose in life. The picture shows the excitement in my eyes.

First Post

Well, here it is...at long last...the first collaborative blog between Ezmezzo, and Whackly...the Devils Advocacy Group (DAG) was nice enough to let Tad out of his exclusivity contract...so now we can get this thing going...enjoy the ride everyone!