Punch a Dolphin… In the Mouth!

I love The Oatmeal.  Funny. Freakin. Site.  Bookmark it now – ditty mao!

This week I convinced my cheap ass to spend the $9.95 USD on their book: 5 Very Good Reason to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth. It arrived last night,  hilarity ensued.  The beer in my system had nothing to do with it.

I am not a photographer, pic taken on my iPhone.  Don’t judge me.

This Is How You Bake a Cake

Clickity click!

Weekend Life

Just got off a 4-day weekend, thought this was appropriate.   “It’s funny cuz it’s true!”

Source

View From The Top

I’m not a fan of heights (it’s the sudden landing, not the fall), but this video of the Burj Dubai tower is awesome… in a very frightening way.

I Love / Hate Impulse Buys

I don’t live in a large enough city that public transportation is an option, so I’ve opted to own a vehicle.  I’ve been through… many… vehicles in my lifetime.  I’m indecisive, what can I say?  Anyway, my most recent “fleet” was also a learning experience for me. Can you consider two vehicles a fleet?

I owned a 2004 BMW 325Ci and a 2005 Toyota Tundra SR5 Double Cab (see stock photos below, yay!).  Both were fantastic vehicles, but I realized that owning two vehicles to achieve one goal was just plain stupid, especially when one of those gets 10mpg and can’t fit in downtown parking stalls.  :S

(ahem, stock photos, but very close)

So, while driving down the main city strip, a gorgeous, metallic beast caught my eye at a dealership.  With no intention to do anything but look, I stopped in.  But when I left, I was driving an entirely different vehicle: a 2006 Nissan Murano SL.  The picture doesn’t do it justice.

Heck, I didn’t know dealerships would take two vehicles on trade!  So, now my duo is once again a solo.  Hopefully, I won’t feel the need to change again for at least 2-3 years.  Goals are good in theory…

How to Pass the Time During a Holiday

So, the great thing about a Holiday is the time away from work.  Provides you with ample time to… well, you know: work those long-ignored projects, catch up with family, and clean your damn house!  But after the systems are built, the 100th “How’s life?” question (fine), and your house is all sorts of sparkly, what do you do?

I’ve got two weeks off from work, so I’ve had to find plenty of things to fill the void.

1. Play Assassins Creed II offline and Borderlands online
2. Download game demos from XBL
3. Watch Dexter Season 4 (OMG)
4. Start Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya Season 1
5. Watch some movies (Star Trek again, Law Abiding Citizen, Surrogates)
6. Check email at a Coffee Shop despite the prices and my own perfectly capable coffee maker
7. Try to avoid work at all possible
8. Read up on some cool blogs (RadishTM, for one)
9. Blog for myself!

Ok, so that’s not everything, but you get the idea. What have you been doing?  Get anything cool / amazing for Christmas?

Wow… work sure does consume a lot of time.

The Known Universe

I love vids like these… makes everyday life a little easier to live.

What a rappy day

Dear Intarwebs: Today wasn’t an interesting day.

I was home visiting the ‘rents, who deided they wanted to offload some furniture onto me.  I’m more than happy to oblige: I have two empty bedrooms.  We load them up this morning and I headed out – late, of ourse.  5 miles outside of town, I disover that it’s far more windy than our strapping job an deal with, so I turn around and head bak into town.  A little rope, and I’m bak in business.

20 minutes outside my hometown, it begins to rain.  Now, I saw the ominous-looking louds, but I thought “Meh, I’m lose enough.”  FWOOSH! Damn.

You may also notie that I’m missing one partiular letter through out this entire post.  Yes, it rhymes with “see.”  Anyone know any good keyboards out there? I have a feeling it’s time to replae my Mirosoft omfort urve 2000.

Dual Screen Laptops a Reality (and coming soon?)

A friend sent me a link which refers to a Gizmodo article debuting some sweet dual screen notebook computers from Alaskan company gScreen.

I can’t tell you how often I’ve thought “gee, it would be great if I had dual screens on my laptop like my desktop.”  Really, I can’t… but trust me it’s been > 10.

Ok, so you won’t find me in a coffee shop with both screens extended, but when I’m in a testing lab,  I can easily see Wireshark | Putty | Terminal on one screen, application in another.  No more flipping back and forth.

I <3 My Pipes to the Intarwebs

It’s difficult to find sites that are capable of truly testing high speed Internet connections.  Speedtest.net is de facto for tests in this area of the US, but test results are often finickly.  There’s a whole slew of problems with this service: 1> web servers were designed to serve, not receive; 2> the host provider may be an ISP that’s oversold; 3> you may be testing during the ISP’s peak time; 4> the testing server may not be tweaked for high TCP performance.

So, I’ve been using Internet2’s list of NDT servers that use the customized Web100 kernel which been tweaked for 100Mbps+ throughput.  When your system is tweaked properly, you’ll find much more accurate results than what you’ll see from Speedtest.net’s servers.

Below is the result of a test from a Windows 2008 R2 RC box with tweaked TCP parameters for high throughput:

Sweet.

Here’s a list of Internet speed test sites I frequent:

• Internet2 NDT
• Verizon Online
• Speedtest.net
• Speakeasy
• DSL Reports

PS – FWIW, Verizon has built their speed test site using the same userland client as the Internet2 NDT servers, but I’ve always had trouble getting upload to scale beyond 4Mbps on a Windows box no matter how it’s tweaked.  YMMV