Success can suck.

Satisfaction and depression are not so different.

I mean, once you have accomplished your goal, you would think that there lies some region of euphoria or happiness, right?? But there is not. There is boredom. What are you going to do once you have done everything you WANTED to do?? You’re going to get depressed, that’s what.

Trust me… no matter how outlandish you think they may be, set yourself some crazy goals. Always have something to strive for… something better than you… something you could never possibly achieve. Some people think that life is all about success… but I tell you now that life is actually about failure. Struggle. Conflict. … These are the things that keep us going, trying, and pushing to do better.

Once you get there, and have no more need to try harder…. that is the day you die and start decaying.

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An interesting night at the bar.

So, a friend (female) and I go the bar the other night to catch a drink at last call. There were two other couples there at the bar, each of them on a date (did not come together), and we were sitting next to them. It turns out the the man on one date, used to be boyfriends with the man on the other date!! The ladies were not real impressed, especially since seeing each other again made them both immediately realize that they are STILL gay, and still want to date each other.

Somehow, one of the ladies got the idea that she would be friendly with me and my friend, apparently in hopes of coming home with us for a good time. 🙂 I bought the girls another drink, we hung out and chatted for a bit… and by this time the guys and the other lady had all left the bar. The two guys left together, and the other lady went home alone.

All of a sudden this girl turns instantly psycho, starts getting up in my face calling me names, and then starts slapping me in the face. Not hard, just being a crazy bitch… So my friend and I decide to leave, and this girl follows us out in the parking lot, starts screaming and yelling, pushing me, and trying to block us from getting in the car. She starts going back and forth between being super angry psycho, to suddenly soft, and sweet and innocent, then BAM! Psycho again!!

We finally get in the car, and this chick jumps in, over the lap of my friend, and starts clawing and scratching at me. I had to grab her hands and restrain her, and she started flailing around and screaming. We got into a bit of a screaming match until she shut up for a second… giving me just enough time to push her out of the car and lock the door!

Good times in Eastlake! HAHA! Watch out for the curly haired brunette with chiseled eyebrows!!
She’s a wild one!!
🙂

 

How the GOP got their asses handed to them in 2012.

A NEW HP Pavilion!

It’s not mine… but an agent here at work just brought me his brand new, still in the box, 17″ HP Pavilion laptop, with the Intel i5, 6GB RAM, and 750GB HD. I will now review for you the process of setting it up.

Step 1) Take it out of the box, and pull off all of the little plastic covers and sticky protective coating things. Dang, this took almost 10 minutes, it was so wrapped up, and had little bits of plastic stuck in to little areas that were very hard to get out! I still think I missed a few chunks… but oh well. It’s pretty bare now. Next… install the battery, plug it in, and turn it on.

Now, I register the owner name, and go through the Windows 7 setup wizard. I tell it NOT to activate Nortons, which it begs me three times to do, but I said no. Then open the Add/Remove programs control panel, and tell it to uninstall Nortons. It makes me verify 3 more times, begs me to take a survey telling them WHY I don’t want Nortons (I did not do it), and then asks to be restarted after the uninstall. I do not restart yet… I still have more things to uninstall!!

Uninstall the Bing toolbar, uninstall 40 Games that came preloaded, uninstall Evernote… which crashes the machine, and I have to pull up the Task Manager, unfreeze it… Explorer closes down… screen goes black… wait for it… and now I’m running again. It has now been 40 minutes since I unpacked this thing out of the box. It is currently in the process of “installing” Office 2010, even though it supposedly came pre-installed. All I had to do was enter the serial number… and then wait. And then wait a little more….

While I wait, I scour around the outside of the laptop picking off pieces of the ‘protective’ plastic that it came shipped in. There’s little shreds stuck in every seam or joint. OK, it finally finishes installing Office 2010… and asks to complete the install. I click OK, Internet Explorer pops up… waits for a bit, then gives me the error: Internet Explorer has stopped working. ‘Close the Program’ or ‘Check Online for a solution’.

I re-open IE… and now it tells me my browser has been upgraded! Oh goody… upgraded from what? This computer is BRAND NEW! Oh… and guess what? The Bing toolbar is still there. Along with 10 bookmarks, each one asks me twice if I’m sure I want to delete it. 

OK, so I finally got Firefox installed, updated my apparently out of date version of Java and Adobe and Flash… cleaned up all the shortcuts and crap off of the desktop, and have things running seemingly smooth. Good. Time for a restart and see how it runs for a first real test…

It’s weird to still see little bits of DOS flashing on the screen during a reboot… but the glowing and pulsing Windows logo is nice, once it finally gets on the screen. 2.5 minutes later it now says Welcome… OOOH! I just heard the “happy” noise, and it looks like she’s ready to go for a run.

So, I had to open the HP “Launch Box” and inform it that, no, I do not want to automatically launch Skype and the HP assistant, and the HP toolkit, or the Cyber WebCam every single time I start up. OK, now to install printers, save bookmarks, set desktop shortcuts, and hand her over!! 

All in all, not too bad… Just less than 90 minutes. I just don’t understand why it had to come with all this useless crap on it! And the plastic, and the default settings… There was absolutely nothing “plug-n-play” about this thing. If my agent had to do this on his own… he would be buried in bloatware and probably have contracted a virus or trojan horse by now.

Final scores:
Ease of setup:  C-
HP product:  C+  (bad marks are mostly due to terrible packaging)
Microsoft:  D
Price: $530  (not including tax)

“Good” Hackers.

OK, I know there are some really smart people out  there. I mean, really smart… so smart, they can write a piece of script that will flood around the world, crashing and shutting down computers all over the place. Others will pop ads in front of your face, or trick you into giving them your credit card info… some just monitor what you do, and sell that info to other people… who will take advantage of you in one way or another…

But why are they all bad-guys?!? Where are the good hackers at?
I mean, come on… there has to be somebody out there with the brains and know-how of a hacker, but who doesn’t actually want to crash computers or steal money. Maybe you just want a good laugh?!

In the future, I would like to see more people writing trojan horses and viruses that do nothing other than simple jokes. Or how about a virus that actually HELPS? Wouldn’t it be funny if once an hour your computer just started tweeting like birds… only for a second or two, and then stopped? No malware, so spyware, no malicious data crash… just some birds chirping. 🙂 HA! Or, how about a trojan horse, that every 2ooth click of your mouse, will pop up a message dialogue box that simply reads: Everything on your computer seems to be running just fine. [OK] [DISAGREE] … Maybe one that right at noon, a loud voice comes on the speakers and announces “It’s 12 O’Clock, Yo!!” … Now that would be some funny shit.

Try to do it in such a way that does not eat up system resources… does not slow down my normal work flow, and is so subtle, and infrequent, that it will just be accepted by many, and pretty soon, the whole office building will be chirping like an aviary, and 12:00 Noon will be mandatory break time!!

GOOD hacks. Not bullshit ads and spyware. You are computer geeks, and you’re better than that. Prove it.

Cyber Springtime

For Kavina, playing the role of Spring, we decided to create something that was both organic and metallic. Sincere made her hair shoot straight up in a wedge, like flowers bursting their way into the air. We took lots of creative poses, trying to capture the mood of awakening to a fresh new landscape… and this is what we came up with. I painted her silver first, then she had her hair done. Then I painted on the black lines and green and yellow shading, red flowers, and some blue lines for water on the legs (which were sort of lost in this pose). Shot with a Canon 7D, and a 35mm f1.4 L-series lens, and a Photoflex Starflash 300, in the living room of my old apartment.

Cyber Samurai Project

Kristy in the Robo Wars of 2011