Archive for March, 2007

1 year, 1 month ago

Just in case you were wondering

If people were at all thinking of getting me presents or anything like that let me make things simple for you with a list of a few things I could use or would appreciate (besides cold hard cash right now).

IR Remote Control for my Nikon D50

Clear Lightsphere II (Size P1) for my Nikon SB-800 Flash

Netgear WG311T PCI WiFi card (for Aircrack-ng use)

D-Link DWL-G122 Revision B1 USB WiFi adapter (for Aircrack-ng use, ONLY B1 rev)

Babylon 5: Season 5 DVD Box Set

Anyways, just throwing it out there in case anyone was curious or wondering. Back to your regularly scheduled nuttiness.

1 year, 1 month ago

Money is ridiculously tight

Well folks, here is the deal. As of right now I have a ridiculously small amount of money in the bank and the following events coming up ahead that I have to budget for somehow.

Federal Income Tax: $590 (Yes, I’ve done every deduction I have receipts for. Getting almost 16k worth of 1099-MISC is a bitch even when you’re a student. )
Books for Spring 2007 Quarter: $281.75 (And thats if I can get all my books used)
Parking Permit Spring 2007: $138
Discover Card: $75
T-Mobile: $138.15

Seeing as I just sent out an invoice for $220 worth of work, that still leaves me with a hell of a lot of ground to catch up on. That being said, it looks like I need to try and sell the old laptop to make some money. So here is the deal:

12″ PowerBook G4 laptop
12″ 1024×768 resolution matte LCD screen
32MB Geforce4 420 Go video card
867 Mhz G4 Processor
1,152MB of RAM installed
40GB HD
Superdrive (only reads CD/DVDs, no burning, costs about 100 for a new drive to fix)
802.11b Airport card installed
Bluetooth 1.1
56k v.92 Modem
10/100 Ethernet
2 USB 1.1 ports
1 Firewire 400 port
Has new battery (old one was part of the battery recall)
Bottom of case has some scratches/blemishes
Top lid has two blemishes
Screen latch is broken, this was common on this model of laptop
3rd party AC adapter with taped connector (this is why Apple switched to the new magnetic power connector)

Comes with OS X 10.4 and iLife 06 installed

Asking $350

Basically this is a great laptop for writing, web browsing and classwork in general. The laptop’s video card is able to play World of Warcraft if you run it with lower detail settings. I’ve also done work on it in Pro Apps like DVD Studio Pro and Final Cut Pro and it does a decent job in them. The laptop is lightweight at only 4.6 lbs and will come with a carrying sleeve for it. If you are interested in the laptop or know someone who might be, please have them email me at timelord@gmail.com or call me at 562-331-1603.

1 year, 1 month ago

My Birthday Party is coming…prepare yourselves!

 I am turning 31 years old on April 12th! But parties on weekdays suck so we’re doing it on Friday the 13th!

What can I say? I’m a year older and perhaps wiser too! If you can see this, it means your invited. You don’t have to bring presents unless you want to! Seeing as we demolished Aaron’s stock of booze last party please try to BYOB or something to add to the party in general. So if you show up, try to be adults and have fun and save the stabbing of people until after the party. Thanks! I hope to see you all there.

When: Friday Apr 13, 2007 at 7:30 PM

Where: 10626 La Rosa Ln.
Fountain Valley, CA 92708

If you get lost of need directions, call me on my cellphone 562-331-1603.

1 year, 1 month ago

This fraking WTF moment brought to you by…

If you have not yet watched the last episode of Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica then this won’t make much sense to you. But this image I think epitomizes the essence of your bog-standard WTF moment.

If you haven’t gotten to Season 3 in your watching yet then I highly recommend you catch up because Season 3 goes out on a fucking BANG!

1 year, 1 month ago

Does this reflect poorly on CNN or Americans?

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, well I think this says quite a bit more then that

So the Iraq, the Attorney General scandal and Iran stories are all more important about autopsy results for a dead model best known for being a human trainwreck with a nice rack.

What the hell is wrong with this country? Is this what CNN thinks American’s want to be informed about? Or is this what American’s have told CNN they want to see on their “news network”? I wonder what course is possible that could change this for the better with the populace in general.

1 year, 1 month ago

Pictures from Aaron’s party

Hey everyone just wanted to let everyone know that my photos from Aaron’s party this last Saturday are now up at:

http://www.nonmundane.org/gallery2/v/aarons_party_032407/

Below is a sample of what you people missed out on. Basically a ton of fun plus Downright did some songs and generally kicked ass so hard we got a visit from the cops.


Downright doing their thing, go A-Train!


A-Train will have no part of the hot lesbo action. For shame!

Hope everyone had as fun a time there as I did. Lord knows you missed out on some funny shit, including me doing a sommersault. Damn that was hilarious.

UPDATE: Fixed the bands name, sorry guys! Thats what I get for writing at early AM with little sleep. Also, the guys will be playing on April 14th at 8:30PM at Di Piazza’s
5205 E. Pacific Coast Highway
Long Beach, CA 90804

1 year, 1 month ago

Links and Stories from my 41 open tabs in Firefox

That’s right, I’ve got 41 tabs open in Firefox right now and that’s just for stories and other interesting bits of information I haven’t gotten around to posting in the past week and a half because I’ve been busy with finals or work to some degree. Mind you, I have more than 41 tabs open in Firefox in total right now; the total number is something closer to about 60 something. Having that many web pages open is using 243.7MB of RAM on the system right now so I thought I’d finally dump these suckers into a post so I can clear the cruft out of my tabs.

Dead whale explodes in Taiwan, without the help of explosives:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4096586

Recent analysis of just how fucked we are if a nuclear attack happens in a major US city:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=522

Sony UK boss thinks Americans are “cheap”:
http://www.playfuls.com/news_06695_Sony_UK_Boss_Calls
_the_US_a_Land_of_Cheap_People_to_Justify_PS3_Price.html

An MIT acceptance letter and its resulting response:
http://www.cartalk.com/content/features/hell/Bestof/mit-letter.html

Tim O’Reilly and Doc Searls seem to think they know how to save newspapers, I’m not so sure:
http://doc.weblogs.com/2007/03/24

10 things about software development that had to be learned on the job:
http://www.taylor.se/blog/2007/03/22/top-ten-things-ten-years-of-
professional-software-development-has-taught-me/

The CG Society’s EON film trailer challenge winners, some very impressive work indeed!
http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=3987&page=2

A list of things that will take you 50 years to learn, or you could just read it here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/3716/ebookebook-16-things-it-takes-most-of-us-50-years-to-learn

Human brain is a poor judge of risk….hmmm, sounds like a certain administration I know:
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/1,73047-0.html

Do you like heavy metal music? Then you might be smarter than you think potentially:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2007/03/21/nmetal21.xml

Some good information on Google AdSense ads and how to use them effectively:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/03/22/google-adsense-facts-faqs-and-tools/

New X-ray imagery of the Sun reveals previously thought impossible acts:
http://space.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn11432&feedId=online-news_rss20

MoveOn pokes a little fun at Stephen Colbert with this parody:
http://falsiness.org/

Tony Snow once abdicated against Executive privilege with regards to subpoenaed testimony of White House staffers:
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2007/03/tony-snow-says-president-must-let-his.html

White House offers up Rove for testimony…just without a transcript, or under oath. Talk about insulting our intelligence!
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Conyers_Sanchez_to_seek_subpoenas_of_0320.html

The world’s first blue rose, pretty wild if you ask me:
http://www.thestreaming.info/development_crossing/2007/03/the_worlds_only.html

A gated community in Tennessee thinks it has the right to revoke the 2nd Amendment under its community rules:
http://www.newschannel5.com/Global/story.asp?S=6242822

A Republican from Texas who claims he would “reinstate the Constitution” if elected, sounds interesting to me:
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/GOP_Presidential_candidate_would_restore_Constitution_0321.html

Tech hits wrong key in Alaska and wipes out 38 BILLION dollar fund, hope they had backups:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2007-03-20-alaska-data_N.htm?csp=34

NFL tried to take copyright and DMCA too far with Superbowl and now faces breaking DMCA itself:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070320-nfl-fumbles-dmca-takedown-battle-could-face-sanctions.html

Why I love NPR more than ever now that the CPR is trying to kill off Internet radio for the RIAA. Et al:
http://consumerist.com/consumer/riaa/npr-vs-the-riaa-244318.php

Not only do they not have enough armor, but our troops don’t even have the best carbine in their hands. Truly maddening:
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/02/atCarbine070219/

Using Bluetooth as a proximity sensor to lock/unlock your OS X laptop:
http://www.technocrat.ca/?p=44

The AppleTV system is looking to be a worthy replacement for aging XBOX Media Center softmod systems:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2391956&perpage=40&pagenumber=9

Free speech case for high school students goes to Supreme Court, looks to divide Bush and his religious right base:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/washington/18scotus.html?ei=5124&en=9751776d478fdf0f&ex=1331870400&partner=digg&exprod=digg&pagewanted=print

How to not let your IT department become like Dilbert (good luck):
http://www.eweek.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=203343,00.asp

1 year, 1 month ago

Finals are over! What is Spring Break?

So last week marked that 10 week annual festival for me known as finals week, or 10 ways to get sleep deprivation on the cheap while chugging Red Bull like it was going out of style. This time the assailants were statistics, operating systems theory, human computer interaction and networking. Overall I feel like I did okay on some of these, I probably could have done better on the statistics and HCI class but I just sort of let myself get swamped around midterm’s time and it took a while to get things back in order after that. This being said, I now have just three more quarters left at UC Irvine Spring, Summer, and Fall 2007 after which point I graduate provided nothing horrible happens.

Of course, today is now officially my 3rd day of “Spring Break™” and I have the following to do:

  1. Call someone in San Diego regarding a project I did network design work on
  2. Write up invoice of current outstanding billable hours
  3. Do my taxes in a vain hope I will be owed money
  4. Try to work as much as possible this week to offset extreme lack of money right now

There would have been an additional item on that list for me to have a phone interview with Apple so their engineers could see if they wanted me for something to do with the company. This is actually now the second time that Apple has emailed me and said that they wished to interview me on the phone. Of course when I get these kinds of emails I am very polite and thank them for the interest and inform then that:

  1. I’m taking 12 units during the summer and not available for internship positions
  2. I’m graduating at the end of 2007 and thus can’t work fulltime until probably February 2008

I have to admit it is somewhat frustrating to have to append this information to recruiters and HR people constantly. My resume clearly states my expected graduation date. Even more frustrating is the fact that the Apple recruiter that was on campus for the engineering jobs fair that I gave my resume to is what caused these last two interests at Apple to be generated. I specifically told them that I was not available for internships and was interested in full-time opportunities after graduation. I guess it just goes to show what a hard job recruiters and HR people have these days if they don’t have the time to read my resume. I’ve considered modifying my current resume so at the top it reads “NOT AVAILABLE FOR INTERNSHIPS” followed by “NOT AVAILABLE FOR FULL-TIME WORK TIL FEB 2008″. I’d probably put it in blinking text too if I could find a way to do it in a PDF just to make me point clearer.

In any case, Spring 2007 quarter is going to be a bear for me. I will be taking two senior project classes, one in networking and the other in HCI, along with an artificial intelligence class and the first of three world history classes. Hopefully I will manage them decently. I already have a reading assignment for my history class if I want to get a head start on things. Heck, they are even going to have the discussion section meet on the first day of class which I almost never see happen these days.

This brings me to the topic of Spring Break. Spring Break has been turned into this mythical time where students go somewhere sunny and beach-like, or perhaps a large lake. Whatever the case, someplace where multiple people also on Spring Break go and congregate and frolic, imbibe excessive amounts of alcohol and generally engage in casual sex.

Damn I sound like a bitter old man there.

What can I say, the few times I’ve happened across MTV while they were broadcasting whichever particular incantation of Spring Break in <INSERT HOPPING PLACE HERE> it almost seems like an event wholly fabricated from cloth.

Granted, I’m probably not the most hip person I know of, but I tend to at least have a decent grasp of what is going on around me. And the Spring Break of MTV and movies just doesn’t seem to happen with anyone I know of or am friends with. There is a part of me that wonders if I am missing out on something worthwhile, some kind of bonding with friends or whatnot. I don’t know. Of course, being nearly broke during ones massive week long vacation doesn’t really help either.

1 year, 1 month ago

Testing posting from within Word 2007

So this post is being written inside of Word 2007 using its ability to talk to WordPress in an attempt to see how this works out. Overall I have to say that so far it seems not all that bad. If I had to fault it for anything it would be a lack of SFTP support.

Of course it remains to be seen how one would go about using extensions to the WordPress TinyMCE web editor within Word 2007 itself. Perhaps via way of custom Word macros perhaps? I’m not sure yet.

1 year, 1 month ago

Changes and other things

So, in case anyone hasn’t looked at the blog recently you will see that I’ve changed the look of things. I’m also trying out MarsEdit to write the post, so we will see if this successfully gets cross-posted to my LJ and Vox accounts. I also got my Google Adsense ads working again on the main site, well sort of. I seem to be having some issues with CG-Inbetween and the Redoable theme, or it could be to do with Wordpress 2.1 perhaps. I’ll have to check more indepth after finals are over.

1 year, 2 months ago

Updates to the new desktop

Recently my new SilenX fans and 5.25″ bay fan rheobus controller showed up from the guys at FrozenCPU.com. These new SilenX fans kick major butt. First of all they are far quieter then the stock Silverstone 60mm and 80mm fans. I now have two 60mm fans installed in the case, one for the vertical blowhole over the PCI-E card slots and one in the horizontal blowhole directly over the card retention brackets blowing out the back of the case. I also replaced the 80mm fan cooling the hard drive bracket with a blue LED SilenX 80mm fan which makes for a nice blue glow look through the ventilation grill on the side of the system. Click on any of the photos below for the full 6MP resolution photos (big! 2MB+ files).

 

The only problem I ran into with the variable speed fan rheobus controller was that it was slightly wider then the 5.25″ bay I had free on the case. I ended up having to bust out the wooden block and sandpaper down the edges of the wrap-around plastic sleeve on the Silverstone case. Additionally I also had to use a metal file on the retention flaps for the controller to shave off some excess metal to get the controller to fit. Eventually it did go in, but not before the plastic retention sleeve cracked in one of the corners from over stressing. I also replaced the interal IDE ribbon cable with a nice shielded rounded cable as you will see in the photos below.

At this point now, all that remains to be done to the system is to upgrade to a modular PSU at a later point when I am ready to purchase an ATI R600 based DX10 PCI-E graphics card, provided the retail card will fit in my case or not. That still hasnt been resolved to my satisfaction yet and it looks like I have to wait till April for the card to get released to find out for certain.

I also went ahead and took the time with the system open to install the new 500GB hard drive I had gotten for Christmas along with a spare older D-Link 802.11g PCI WiFi card that will work well for wireless network sniffing work.

Adding in all of the fans and switching over to the SilenX fans has had a good impact on the system overall. It is now quieter but more importantly the system temperatures seem to have improved as well.  Right now the CPU runs 45C at idle which is higher then it used to be. The ICH hub chip however runs at 51C which is 25C lower then it used to be! So overall the temps seem a little higher, but overall decent enough. This is also with a second hard drive in the system now and slightly less cable cluttering up the airflow inside. Its still not exactly ideal but its good for now until I get the modular PSU for the system.

1 year, 2 months ago

Time to make the donuts

Ack, laundry time, aka the witching hours for me. Sometimes I wonder what it is about me and my genetic makeup that makes me seem predisposed to being more productive at night time then I am during the day. Maybe it’s because there are less distractions for me, maybe its because I need to adjust my sleep schedule so I go to bed earlier in the evening. Regardless of the cause I felt like I should show some of you the current state of the humble room/abode I’ve been toiling away at since I started my full-time class schedule at UC Irvine almost a year and a half ago now. Feels like a decade ago almost.

Click on the photos for the full 6MP resolution pictures:

Back to catching up on my reading for Informatics now.




About the Author

Daniel Spisak

Daniel Spisak was born from the fiery depths of fusion and now roams the pale blue dot known as Earth. I obtained my bachelors degree in Computer Science from UC Irvine at the end of 2007.

I am also involved in technology & security consulting firms as well as being a freelance technology writer. I also contribute to Jerry Pournelle's website and Chaos Manor Reviews. Additionally I am also a freelance photographer as well and you can find my photos either on my own personal gallery or up at my Flickr account or on Zivity.

This blog is one of the main locations where I do my writing, which is then automatically sent to my LiveJournal, VOX, and MySpace accounts. I can also be found on a variety of social networking and microblogging sites like Pownce, Twitter, Brightkite, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

If your viewing this site with Internet Explorer it may not look correct because IE is horrible about following W3C web standards properly or consistently. I suggest you try browsing the Internet with Firefox. It is much better and not as vulnerable to security flaws as IE can be.

My Current Qik Video

Daniel Spisak's Flickr

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