Fully Blown

Just look at what satire can do to you http://90percenttrue.com/index.php?p=41. If you use satire you're a terrorist! Plain and simple.

It's a little long but worth the read.

Ever gone to a movie, expecting to see something, then after the movie thinking "that was completely different then I thought it would be". Well chances are good you have been lured to a movie with a cleverly crafted trailer. Studio houses put a lot of time and money into trailers because they know they sell movies, even when the movie isn't worth selling. Well I came across a trailer today, you can download it here . I would like to see people's faces when they see the shining after seeing this trailer. This is creative ability at its best. So seeing how one can piece together a narrative with some clips from a movie and build an illusion of a completely different movie, are you really going to trust movie trailers?

It appears that lakes can explode. That's 'splode' to the brown dogs in the audience. I'm not making it up, you can read it here http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050926/full/050926-4.html . From the article, there are a couple of lakes in Africa that have a large amount of carbon dioxide trapped in the water at the bottom of the lake. The lakes are over volcanic sites, it appears there was a landslide under the water that caused the water from the bottom to be pushed up. Causing the carbon dioxide to be released from the water which ended up soffocating more then 1700 people. After reading the how and the why, and after doing some research it makes perfect sense as to how this can happen. I find it interesting because several years ago I got my SCUBA diving certification and in the process they teach you the (limited) science of how fluids can hold air under pressure and how that air can be released when the pressure is decreased rapidly. The rapid release of air is what causes the 'bends' or decompression sickness. It works just like a bottle of pop. If you get a bottle of coke from the store and look at it, it appears to be just a black liquid. But if you shake the bottle and increase the pressure, then open the lid quickly, you'll see bubbles appear. When you scuba dive, the pressure causes your blood to become nitrogen rich. So you should avoid any rapid ascents so that your body can obsorb the nitrogen before it forms into bubbles.

Back to the article, more then 1700 people lost their lives from this 'explosion'. That is a major loss of life and is perfectly explainable from a cause and effect point of view or more specifically from a scientific point of view. Now that we have a better understanding of how this can happen we can take proactive actions to mitigate this kind of disaster in the future. However if science was left out of this many people would probably assume that 'God' was punishing them for some misdimeanor or whatever. Which leads me to the question, if you claim 'God' is punishing you for something how do you know what that something is? Perhaps you jumped to the wrong conclusion, perhaps you were being punished for wearing those shoes with those pants and not for screwing your neighbour's wife?

I read the weekly commentary over at www.randi.org and I find it amusing to hear how absurd some people's beliefs are. On this weeks commentary there is an article about a canadian ex-cabinet minister. I'm not sure if federal or provincial. However he believes that UFOs are real and governments are covering it up. You can read the article here http://www.randi.org/jr/200509/092305northern.html#1 . How is someones full belief in UFOs anymore nonsense then one's belief in any form of religion? If you believe in something, you're not rationalizing or producing logical conclusions based on facts or evidence. I find it amusing that people can be scared that a politician can be "in charge of the nation" and yet believe in stupidity like UFOs yet people en mass don't bat an eye at the fact that they (the politicians) also believe in equally stupid ideas such as God, or Jesus, or Allah. It's kind of like saying your imaginary friend is sillier then my imaginary friend.

I had a strange problem appear the other day, i have an asp.net form that allows users to upload images of broken down machines in the field. This program worked great until someone tried uploading a 5MB file. Turns out the errors given by IE and FF are pretty much useless to try and figure out what is causing this, both browsers give a generic "fuck you" error message. The IIS logs just add a little insult to injury too. But it turns out its a simple parameter in machine.config the parameter is "MAXREQUESTLENGTH" by default this value is 4096K (4MB), changing this bad boy to anything above that and 5MB image upload works like a champ. Although set the setting too high and people will abuse. Also anybody out there buying a "58,000 megapixel " digital camera to take a picture of a flat tire, do yourself and everybody else a favour and set the damn picture size (I purposfully avoided the term "Quality" because picture size and quality are too different animals) down to a reasonable size. For your average picture, that you will be emailing to friends setting your camera's resultion down to 400 x284 pixels by 24 million colours will result in a good picture quality (although you won't get good enlargement capabilities) and good physical file size, that is good for email and web use.

being that i'm one of the few poeple on this planet, that has no love for the iPod or any of it's variants. I'm also one of the few that think the iPod's make is certainly most un-cool, and have a complete distaste for all of their products. I find this article rather amusing http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4265374.stm . Not that Apple copied their design from anywhere, just amusing that's all.

check out the developer toolbar for IE if you do any web development, very handy tool.

http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2005/9/21/1315

it's been a while. and for some good reasons. since february 16th of this year i have been working almost constantly on getting a new home. it started by realising that I wanted a house with a pool, and also realising that i didn't really care for my current house. so I hooked up with a real estate agent and started the search for a new pen. i never knew how much work it is to find a house you want to buy. roger my real estate agent would setup roughly two house walk throughs a night each one lasting roughly an hour a piece. we started looking in a smallish town north of toronto called Bolton, that on the surface seemed like a good idea, it was roughly half way between my work and chuck's. but once we actually started driving there to look at houses we realised it might as well be on the other side of the earth, it took almost 45 minutes for either of us to get there from brampton, and that's in non rush hour traffic. we also noticed that the houses in bolton typically cost $20 to $30k more then a similar house in brampton. the other off putting about bolton was the severe lack of houses with pools, while looking not one house with a pool was on the market, south of $700k. so I focused more on brampton, however this time looking in an older part of brampton. I was shocked when I found many houses that fit my criteria and matched the price I was willing to pay. so long story short, we found a house we liked, but needed some major renovations, like new kitchen, two new bathrooms, new furnace/air conditioner, basement. But never one to shy away from a bad thing we bought it and began a summer long work marathon renovating the house. I touched my computer roughly twice the whole summer outside of checking email. so now that summer is over and there is an almost complete working kitchen time to start writing again, not that anyone reads these.