return void;

The NBA Playoffs have kicked off, and the Spurs are off to a descent start. However, I am in a situation where I can’t justify spending money for satellite or cable television for a couple of reasons; one my TV is 13” and second I don’t watch all that much TV. This leaves me not having access to TNT and their NBA telecasts, until my friend BullMoose hooked my up with his SlingBox feed.

Now that I have the ability to see the Spurs go on to defend their title, and with a little luck repeat I have the unfortunate pleasure of seeing TNT’s barrage of repeat commercials. In 2003 it was commercials for the Hulk movie, 2005 it was for TNT’s series “The Closer”, “Into the West” and Coors Light “love train commercial. Seems like they are about to out do even themselves with the number of times they are running the Vince Carter (Vinjury) T-Mobile commercial. I really don’t need to hear him say that his dog is bulimic again.

The other commercial is the three year old McDonalds commercial, where two schmucks are getting a platter of double quarter pounders with cheese ready to serve to their guests as h’ordurves (spelling?). I don’t need them to tell me to “pound one” any more ~ STOP RUNNING IT!

Then I saw this, and isn’t it the truth?

And uhmm…Go Spurs Go!!!

It began with an innocent chuckle on the van coming back from work, which somehow mutated into a laugh that is very similar to Ray Liotta’s portrayal of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson from the movie field of dreams. I am not exactly sure how it happened, but there is a character who got the nickname “Chuckles” on the van becuase of his habbit to laugh at just about anything he or some one else says.

S1n somehow started to mimic this, and through him doing this it sounded quite a bit like this laugh here: hahaha.

There is a film available on the internet entitled Loose Change which presents several alternative theories as to what happened on that dreadful day back in 2001. Just with anything is history, there are always individuals who raise bizarre scenarios to tragic events which occurred, but can we really trust what was simply fed to us through today’s media? The truth will probably never really be known, but the film raises some interesting points.

Loose Change presents several theories as to why it could not have been a 757 striking the side of the Pentagon, and continues to talk about what could have caused such destruction. Such theories have been made as to make people think it could have been a missile, a smaller passenger plane, or even an A-3 Skywarrior.. If it was a plane that slammed into the Pentagon, where was the debris from the plane after the crash? Where are the markings on the ground of where it would have skidded its way to the Pentagon?

The film then moves on to the events which happened at the twin towers. Loose Change does not go so far as to lead you to believe that the planes were shot by a missile prior to impacting the buildings. What the film does state is that the planes alone could not have caused the towers to fall down. Prior to this moment, no commercial grade buildings of this type in history had collapsed due to fires alone. If it was true, then all three would have occurred on the same day, starting with the two towers, followed by building 7. On February 12, 2005 the Windsor Tower in Madrid burned for almost 24 hours, with the top ten floors collapsed, but the building did not collapse completely. So what did cause the towers to fall?

All through the morning of these events eye witnesses, police officers, fire men, and reporters all mentioned hearing and feeling secondary explosions. The lower windows on the towers had been blown out; marble panels in the lobby area had come off the walls, all allegedly due to an explosion almost 1300 feet up. Loose Change goes on to explain how secondary explosions caused the collapse, and not simply just the planes. After reading a few other articles, this portion of the film is not as quickly rejected.

The film saves its most wild tale for last. There is some controversy concerning the attacks on the Pentagon, fewer people seem to argue that it may have been secondary explosions which caused the towers to collapse, but the events which occurred with flight 93 just seems too far fetched. It goes into an elaborate plan where the flight 93 actually landed in Cleveland and its passengers exited the plane. It continues to suggest that the phone calls made were in fact faked, and discusses the probability of being able to connect a call made from a cellular telephone.

So after watching Loose Change I wonder what the motive behind its making was. Was it to provoke thought into the minds of people who simple accepted what was reported to them in conventional news media? Could it have been motivated by their loathing of President Bush? Or is it a masked plea to try and prevent the government from delivering the truth to its people? If it is the truth, why is it people here have constantly felt the need to question the legitimacy of the information being spoon fed to them?

Loose Change Movie
9/11 Truth Movement
Tower Collapse Analysis
9-11 Research
Prentagon Attack Errors
Loose Change Analysis

As of lately, I’ve started experiencing hardware failure more frequently than before on my main desktop machine (citadel, Gentoo). The HDD I have in use has been clicking for a while, which means the drive head is having problems. When I upgraded kernels from 2.6.11-gentoo-r4 to 2.6.15-gentoo-r1, I lost my ALi IDE chipset support, so DMA was not enabled. Once I got that working, I started noticing the following type of errors (not my actual errors, the machine is off):

MCE: The hardware reports a non fatal, correctable incident occurred on CPU 0.
Bank 1: 9400000000000151

Apparently, after rooting around the Gentoo Forums for “mce correctable incident”, I came to the conclusion that many people get this problem due to overheating and/or overclocking of the CPU and memory. It may also be caused by a poorly seated processor. I will try to solve this problem later today when I try to setup the dual-layer burner.

Okay, so with all of these hardware problems, I’ve finally resolved that it is time to build a new machine. The one I currently have was built back in 2001 from mostly used parts. I’ve been playing around with some options and I have decided the first thing that I must buy is the storage device. I’m looking for something screaming fast and relatively cheap.

IDE is basically out due to it being phased out of use and it’s slow speeds. DMA helps IDE drives feel more like a slower SATA drive, but still not worth hanging onto a dying technology.

So originally, I looked into the idea of using flash memory for a bootable device. Flash cards currently have a max speed of 20MB/s (still has to go through USB reader). That is unbelievable slow, so that is really not an option. To make matters worse, they withstand a mere 100,000 write cycles. That means the average flash card won’t last much longer than 3 months of continuous writing, if not less (estimation).

So then I thought, well SCSI drives are really fast and have ridiculous lifespans (1.2 million hours MTBF). The problem is, Ultra 320 SCSI drives are not cheap. In fact, the are some 18G drives online that run for about $70. That is still cheaper than the flash card option, which run for about $50 per GB. Ultra 320 SCSI drives also have a max speed of about 320 MB/s, which is ridiculously fast. This is still a viable option.

Then, there’s SATA II drives. SATA II drives are larger and cheaper than SCSI drives, but have a higher failure rate. They also run at about 300 MB/s, which is basically as fast as the SCSI drive. This actually sounds like a better option until you realize that Linux SATA support can be problematic at the least. Most chipset manufacturers make awkward variations to the standard much like IDE. Since SATA is relatively new, this support should get better. SATA II drives are still viable as long as I can find a decent SATA chipset.

Then I heard about i-RAM. This looks very interesting! Basically, it adds a battery to standard RAM which helps maintains the state, effectively turning regular memory into non-volatile RAM. It also looks and acts like an SATA drive. This is definitely something worth looking into. I need to do some more reading about this, but it looks like a screaming fast storage option but may end up being fairly expensive.

So what has everyone else gone with? Mind you, this is desktop storage only as I have network storage that can be extended as needed. I don’t need 200G for my desktop (but would be nice in my fileserver).

There are no computer graphics or digital tricks in the film. Everything you see really happened in real time exactly as you see it. The film took 606 takes. On the first 605 takes, something, usually very minor, didn’t work.

They would then have to set the whole thing up again. The crew spent weeks shooting night and day. By the time it was over, they were ready to change professions. The film cost six million dollars and took three months to complete including full engineering of the sequence.

In addition, it’s two minutes long so every time Honda airs the film on British televis ion, they’re shelling out enough dough to keep any one of us in clover for a lifetime. However, it is fast becoming the most downloaded advertisement in Internet history. Honda executives figure the ad will soon pay for itself simply in “free viewings” (Honda isn’t paying a dime to have you watch this commercial).

When the ad was pitched to senior executives, they signed off on it immediately without any hesitation – including the costs.

There are six and only six handmade Accords in the world. To the horror of Honda engineers, the filmmakers disassembled two of them to make the film.

Everything you see in the film (aside from the walls, floor, ramp, and complete Honda Accord) are parts from those t wo cars. The voice-over is Garrison Keillor. When the ad was shown to Honda executives, they liked it and commented on how amazing computer graphics have gotten.

They fell off their chairs when they found out it was for real.

Oh, and about those funky windshield wipers. On the new Accords, the windshield wipers have water sensors and are designed to start doing their thing automatically as soon as they become wet. It looks a bit
weird in the commercial.

Enjoy
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