Tims Blog

Today was apparently Talk Like Shakespeare day in Chicago. Good to see that our glorious mayor is doing the city a favor. Who needs lower taxes and less public service when you can instead have a special day to talk like Shakespeare.

Maybe Daley will do us all a favor and fall on his sword like Brutus did. He can take Blago, Quinn, the U.S. Congress, Pres and his cabinet with him. One can only hope.

Aaaaanyways, since that’s unlikely, here’s some links.

• hash load balancing and persistence
• blocking unknown callerid

Something is screwed up with my DSL connection. I dunno if it’s interference or what, but the modem loses syncronization often when it’s doing data transfers of any kind and when it gets in synch again, I have a new IP. ddclient only refreshes every once in a while so that results in this website being off the air unless I force an update.

So Wells Fargo Auto Finance has gone from harassing, to evasive tactics, to now outsourcing of their collections.

Got a call today from a company called SourceRM who, according to their website, are “providers of best-in-class debt collection services”. Gag me. These people are just more bottom-feeding scum that are trying to crawl their way through life. I’d be happy to make your life difficult guys. Keep calling!

Spiderman Web of Shadows complete. Pretty good game. Had it’s flaws, but overall a prime piece of video game-ness

God. Wells Fargo Auto Finance just doesn’t give up.

I blacklisted their numbers in Asterisk, and now they’ve begun hiding their numbers from caller ID. Great.

So what did I do? Block all unknown callers in asterisk. These ass-hats really are a piece of work.

Pages of Atlas Shrugged. IMHO these here are, so far, the greatest pages of an already great book. Every time Francisco opens his mouth he speaks greatness. I was left speechless after I read his monologue on money being the “root of all evil”

Seriously, his views rang loud and clear in my head. I couldn’t agree more, and what he says is quite literally what I’ve always wanted to respond to clueless, irresponsible fiscal liberals with.

God what an awesome chapter

I like software that does stuff, but that extra stuff often comes with the added baggage of dependencies; especially in the RPM world. So I’m trying to install the newer Postgres libraries on my RHEL 5 box and postgres-libs is having a fit because APR-utils relies on libpq which is in that RPM. Of course, apr is a dependency for Apache so by removing postgres, I’d subsequently be axing most of the other software that I need on the system.

My best guess is that apr is included some bundled functionality that I’ll never use but is none-the-less compiled against the libpq shared libraries. I’m glad I’m not the first person who has encountered this though. I found a tutorial that walks you through how to resolve this issue.

• installing postgresql rpms on rhel

The Force Unleashed. Done. Over. Never playing it again. Microwaving it.

Ready?

Go!

Star Wars The Force Unleashed!

The Force Unleashed is a terrible game. Christ.

First of all, it’s a very poor attempt at being God of War. The action commands come at you way too fast. You’re not given crap for leeway in hitting the buttons. Next, the AI is too perfect. Case in point, there are storm trooper snipers in certain levels. They point a laser on you, wait about 5 seconds, and then shoot you. The AI is too perfect though. The laser does not lag behind you, or sway to the sides of you as you move. It’s always perfectly fixed on you. Impossible!

You also get damaged way too easily, and the opportunities to boost your skills are too scarce.

It’s frustrating!