Month: April 2007

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Random Crap

Forgot to wish Tekman HAPPY BDAY!

I’ve added 2 new categories: Food and Comics

I found this bumper sticker and found the slogan hilarious: My kid has a cooler job than your kid. – Microsoft College
my kid has a cooler job than you - microsoft college

Otters holding hands (from Esca) – Vancouver Aquarium: two sea otters float around, napping, holding hands. SO CUTE! You know, I haven’t visited Vancouver Aquarium yet.

I know it’s way past April Fool’s day, but it appears that after you graduate from college, people just forget about April Fool’s day. I got so many people IMing asking me if this was real: Google TiSP and when I mention it was April 1st / April Fool, they go, “Oh yah! I forgot about it.” Another Google joke was GMail Paper.

Along the same topic, there was Ten of the best April Fool’s Day hoaxes: US museum (from Digg) – Here were the ones I liked:

  • In 1957, a BBC television show announced that thanks to a mild winter and the virtual elimination of the spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. Footage of Swiss farmers pulling strands of spaghetti from trees prompted a barrage of calls from people wanting to know how to grow their own spaghetti at home.
  • In 1996, American fast-food chain Taco Bell announced that it had bought Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell, a historic symbol of American independence, from the federal government and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. Outraged citizens called to express their anger before Taco Bell revealed the hoax. Then-White House press secretary Mike McCurry was asked about the sale and said the Lincoln Memorial in Washington had also been sold and was to be renamed the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial after the automotive giant.
  • Burger King, another American fast-food chain, published a full-page advertisement in USA Today in 1998 announcing the introduction of the “Left-Handed Whopper,” specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. According to the advertisement, the new burger included the same ingredients as the original, but the condiments were rotated 180 degrees. The chain said it received thousands of requests for the new burger, as well as orders for the original “right-handed” version.
  • Noted British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on the radio in 1976 that at 9:47 am, a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event, in which Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, would cause a gravitational alignment that would reduce the Earth’s gravity. Moore told listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment of the planetary alignment, they would experience a floating sensation. Hundreds of people called in to report feeling the sensation.

Bulgaria goes into debt to buy fleet of Porsche Cayenne ambulances (from Digg) – There’s few things that could make one turn away from the blue light at the end of the tunnel and return to the land of the living, but a ride in a Porsche Cayenne ambulance just might do the trick. Apparently Bulgaria agrees, as the cash-strapped country’s health ministry is using a loan from the World Bank to buy a fleet 32 Cayenne’s destined for ambulance duty (a Russian Porsche Cayenne police vehicle is shown above). Maybe I should work as an ambulance driver for the Bulgarians.

Don’t buy an HDTV without reading this first (from Digg) – Forking out a few thousand dollars or even just a few hundred is a serious investment, and the last thing you want to do is buy an HDTV with lousy color rendition. Navigating the minefield in consumer electronics is a confusing proposition even for the seasoned gadget geeks, so I created this survival guide to help you make a wise decision. I’ll explain the various types of HDTVs as well as cabling and testing the color depth of your display. I think this guy does a rather good explanation of the difference between the types of HDTVs and all those random specs one usually has no idea what they’re talking about.

MPAA names its Top 25 movie piracy schools – The MPAA may be gearing up for an RIAA-inspired assault on US colleges and universities. Last week the group announced its support for the “Curb Illegal Downloading on College Campuses Act (2007),” and MPAA head Dan Glickman said that his organization would work with school administrators to put an end to movie piracy on campuses, which Glickman says costs the industry $500 million annually. Stanford and Berkeley rank 24 and 25 respectively.

HostTracker (from Digg) – website monitoring service. I’ve been using InternetSeer, but this one looks good too.

tapefailure (from Digg) – tapefailure lets you record your users’ browsing sessions and play them back, just like a tape, as well as view numerous useful statistics about your users. Really sounds like a neat feature when it gets released.

Panama co. says brews world’s biggest cup of coffee – Panama’s top coffee producer said it believes it has set a new record for the world’s biggest cup of coffee, after brewing 750 gallons (2,840 litres) in a giant mug on Sunday.

bowling dental insurance ad
Very Clever Marketing Campaign (from Clip Haven)
However, if I was bowling in this alley, I’d sort of be creeped out.

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Crisping Tray

Once again, it’s been a long week. My random crap has already been backlogged to 3/28. I haven’t even check Digg and in 3 days. It’s going to take me awhile for me to push this crap onto you guys. ;p

A few weeks ago, IRobertI IMed me asking what the those gray disks that microwavable pizza come with are called. I had always thought they were just just paper cardboard with some plastic/wax thing on top of it. He tells me if you try microwaving a pizza normally without this special cardboard, the pizza’s crust becomes all soggy. I think then propose the fact that since most of these dishes allow air to go underneath it, that may have something to do with making it crispy.

Here’s what one of them look like:
microwavable pizza and crisping tray

I started searching online and there’s a bunch of threads and patents that popped up, but nothing really that describe how it works. Some claim there’s some sort of metal in it and it acts as a resistor, heating up when microwave frequencies hit it. But isn’t putting metal into the microwave counterintuitive? Anyway, I started reading the back of my Bagel Bites box and they refer to it as a crisping tray.

I decided to take apart one and unless the gray coating on top of cardboard is the metallic part, I found now no evidence of any sort of metal hidden inside the cardboard. If anyone knows exactly how this magic is done, I’d like to know.

Random Crap:

Bruce Lee – high speed painting – This is a bit different from my normal stuff. Check out my other art at http://www.philinthecircle.com / MySpace. Music: Elephine / Song: Five / http://www.myspace.com/elephine Nice painting, but sure spent a lot of time and energy.

UPS: Request Delivery Intercept – UPS has rolled out a new service where when you pay some extra amount, you can request UPS to perform one of the following actions:

  • Return to Sender: Return the package to the shipper
  • Deliver to Another Address: Reroute the package to a new address
  • Reschedule Delivery: Hold the package for delivery on a future date
  • Will Call: Hold the package for pickup by the consignee

How Eisenhower solved illegal border crossings from Mexico (from Digg) – A very interesting article. First get rid of corrupted officials. Second, don’t just drop them at the border and give them a chance to just get back across, take them deep into Mexico before releasing them.

Yahoo Mail Announces Unlimited Storage (from Digg) – Yahoo is announcing that all Yahoo Mail users will have free unlimited email storage starting in May 2007. The current storage limit is 1 GB per account (2 GB for $20/year premium users). With this change, Yahoo leapfrogs Gmail (2.8 GB and growing) and Live.com Mail (2GB). Yahoo mail currently has 250 million global users, more than any other online service (Live.com has 228 million and Gmail has 51 million users). See this feature by feature comparison of the services for more information. I wonder what paying users get then…

Japanese goldfish live in (and clean) a deep fryer (from Consumerist) – More here: Deep-fry diving for goldfish in Japan. Someone commented: Unfortunately they don’t really explain well enough to understand well. But there is a cooling system between the water and the oil. It took them ten years to develop it. So the bits of tempura batter fall down and stick together, which keeps the oil clean (the bits don’t float around and burn). Also, if you throw frozen pieces of food into a fryer, usually the oil will react violently, but now the waters sinks and cools instead of becoming vapor.

Gateway 2 (from Digg) – a pretty fun, yet somewhat depressing flash game. It’s one of those escape from the room type games, but in this one you’re trying to piece together a story. If you need help, walkthrough, or solution, scroll down to beppe1’s post over at Escape The Room.

Home is where the heart is for world’s tallest man – The world’s tallest man, whose search for a bride covered the world, ended up marrying a woman from his home town nearly half his age and more than two feet shorter, Chinese media reported on Wednesday.

Mad Track in a Japanese Game Show – Sasuke 2007 (from Digg) – The Japanese are famous for their extreme game shows on TV. Here is an example of the tracks the competittors need to finish on a TV program called Sasuke. This is their spring special aired march 21st 2007. It’s quite amazing (and this is just the first level). Wow, this really puts American Gladiators to shame.

If you like the previous IMDb page layout, apparently you can still visit it at http://former.imdb.com/.

Real Life Comics – Relevant Information – As someone who does computer tech support for my family and relatives and friends, these little jokes always hit it home.

Google Maps – from Chicago, IL to London, UK (Consumerist) – If you take a look at step #20: Swim across the Atlantic Ocean 3,462 mi. Appears to be some sort of joke that the developers decided to add in. The minimal amount of driving directions come from Boston, MA to Le Havre, France, which still results in a 29 day swim. At 3,426mi in 29 days, we’re still talking about 119 miles per day and 5 miles an hour (non-stop). Programatically, all they had to do was connect Boston to Le Havre in their map and give it a distance and time. Therefore, any location that’s connected into the USA can reach any destination that’s connected into France. Unfortunately, Mexico doesn’t have any maps on Google, so Central and South America are basically cut from this. And it looks like only Western Europe can connect into France.

xkcd – The Difference – The difference between a normal person and a scientist. 😉

Don’t Do This With a 19 Inch Dildo (from Tera) (content is work safe, but ads are not) – Here’s something not to do with a 19 inch dildo. So my friend is a nurse. She tells starts telling me this story about a guy walking into the emergency room hunched over and walking funny. The guy says he has a pain coming from his stomach and butt. He doesn’t mention anything else to doctors. So they Xray him to find out what’s wrong. Here’s what they found.

Ancient riddle of the Great Pyramid’s construction is turned inside out (from Digg) – In Paris tomorrow, Jean-Pierre Houdin will unveil the fruits of eight years’ work by describing at a conference how the pyramid of the pharaoh Khufu was built from the inside out. He will propose that the Egyptians carried the building blocks up an internal ramp that formed a spiral tunnel within the structure’s outer wall. These tunnels, he believes, must still exist today. With the help of sophisticated computer software developed by the French company Dassault Systemes, M. Houdin has been able to reconstruct a three-dimensional simulation of how the great limestone and granite blocks of the pyramid were put together stone by stone.

WiigoBot: The Perfect Game – Presenting a Lego NXT Wii Playing Robot that can bowl a perfect game. I wonder if the robot knows when its his turn again, or if it’s just timed.

Wonderbra Ad Malfunctions (from Derek) – Really clever ad for the Wonderbra or just a broken billboard?

Amazing French Beatboxer Part 2 – The same awesome beat boxer we posted last week was back on French idol dropping some sweet beats. This time he does a little Justin Timberlake and I gotta say this guy is talented. Here’s Part 1 (Looks like this is from an American Idol type show in France, one of the contestants is an amazing Beat Boxer. Listen him seamlessly go from Michael Jackson Billy Jean to Usher Ya! When does he breathe?) and part 3 (The Amazing French Beatboxer is back and again with another great performance. This time he mixes a little techno music with Britney Spears and more.) if you’re interested.

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DreamHost 500 Internal Server Error – Part 2

So I get a reply to my request for more information and here was DreamHost’s reply:

Well, each shell/ftp user has their own resource quota…so basically, all of your sites are sharing a quota at this point, as well as your shell user…so if your nano session happened to be the one process that crossed the threshold, then it would be the one killed. One thing you might try is creating another shell/ftp user, and setting the site to run under the new user. This would give the entire site it’s own resource quota, and probably help to prevent these errors in the future.

As far as the process watcher, the threshold is reasonable, and it’s a VERY simple program…just a couple of IF statements. IF overall server load is above a certain level, enforce the rules. IF a user reaches a certain CPU/Memory level, kill the offending process. Not much to go wrong…

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Thanks!
Jeffrey

So I’ve decided to split my blog and gallery into 2 users and then I’d get twice as much CPU power (if what he says is true). Turns out I can actually create upto 75 user accounts.

Unfortunately there’s no way to set users to share directories, so I ended up creating a new subdomain and copying stuff over. When you visit the old gallery link:
http://www.krunk4ever.com/gallery/,

You’ll automatically be redirected to:
http://gallery.krunk4ever.com/.

I originally was hoping to put it in the 1st level, but gallery was giving me some problems if I didn’t place it inside /gallery, since it was originally inside gallery.

I somewhat got the 1st level thing working by fixing my .htaccess file and in config.php, set a baseUri:
$gallery->setConfig(‘baseUri’, ‘/main.php’);

The process was actually less painful than I originally thought. I had imagined hacking the database and having to do a bunch of random fixes.

The only thing I had to do was copy over 2 directories:
/gallery (where the website code was located)
/g2data (where the images and data were actually stored)

In config.php, I had to update data directory:
$gallery->setConfig(‘data.gallery.base’, ‘/home/krunk_gallery2/g2data/’);

When I loaded gallery, it asked me to run through the update wizard.

The initial setup failed because the web user didn’t have write access to the g2data directory. It suggested that I had chmod 777 the g2data directory. After I did that, that error went away.

The last thing I did was update my .htaccess to do all my redirection by adding this line:
Redirect permanent /gallery/ http://gallery.krunk4ever.com/gallery/

Afterwards, everything just worked. If you hit into any problems with the gallery or my blog, please let me know.

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DreamHost 500 Internal Server Error

I’ve been getting a bunch of 500 Internal Server Errors on my website, especially when adding images to my Gallery. Takes about 3-4 times before it’ll work. DreamHost is apparently having some recent slew of problems and are currently trying to fix all the issues: DreamHost Status.

If you unfortunately hit this problem, try refreshing the page a few times and it should work. I apologize beforehand for the inconvenience.

Looking at the error.log, I see:

[Sun Apr 15 19:33:12 2007] [error] [client xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] Premature end of script headers: /dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi
[Sun Apr 15 19:33:12 2007] [error] [client xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] File does not exist: /home/krunk4ever/krunk4ever.com/internal_error.html

I had tried reverting back to PHP 4.x, but get a similar error:

[Sun Apr 15 22:30:15 2007] [error] [client xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] Premature end of script headers: /dh/cgi-system/php.cgi
[Sun Apr 15 22:30:15 2007] [error] [client xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] File does not exist: /home/krunk4ever/krunk4ever.com/internal_error.html

Oh well, guess I can only wait for them to fix the problems.

Update

So DreamHost got back to me:

It appears some scripts on your site are being killed by our process watcher program. This keeps the CPU/Memory load balanced for all users on the server. Unfortunately, while we can’t change the settings on that, there are ways to reduce the CPU and Memory footprint of your site. One is to make sure you’ve disabled hotlinking of your images. More often, the culprit is robot “crawlers”, such as googlebot, which like to get caught in loops on some sites, causing the load to jump on the server.

You might find the following articles in our wiki useful in helping you reduce the load your sites put on the server:

Finding Causes of Heavy Usage

CPU Resources FAQ

and

Bots spiders and crawlers

Please feel free to let me know if you have any other questions.

I’m note exactly sure what changed and I’ve already enabled caching for WordPress and full acceleration on Gallery. Hotlinking has already been disabled a long time ago. I went ahead and followed one of the suggestions of delaying crawlers by added a robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Crawl-Delay: 60
Disallow:

However, the wiki does state that Note: this is relatively worthless as it has been confirmed that Googlebot ignores it

We’ll see if it gets any better.

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Comedy Central: Roast of William Shatner

I just watched the Roast of William Shatner and it was all in all rather funny. I’ve always loved the roasts. The first one I saw was roasting Hugh Hefner which was hilarious. Followed by Chevy Chase, which was ok. Then roasting Pamela Anderson, and finally now William Shatner. I’m not much a a Star Trek fan (surprise! surprise!) and the number of Star Trek episodes I’ve seen, I can probably count on one of my hands. So before when someone would say the captain in Star Trek, I would always think of Picard (also plays Magneto Professor Xavier from X-Men).

Official Site
IMDb: 7.1/10 (209 votes)
Yahoo! Movies
Rotten Tomatoes
Amazon.com DVD
MY RATING: 7/10

Comedy Central Roast of William Shatner posterComedy Central Roast of William Shatner poster

There’s not going to be any spoilers sections here as there won’t be any spoilers. I mean, come on, it’s a roast, sort of like a stand-up comedy. If you ask if I could recognize today’s Shatner with the Shatner from the Star Trek series… my oh my, he’s gotten fat. The jokes were dirty and crude, but it was all in the spirit.

The only thing I really knew about Shatner before watching this roast was the fact that Stewie from Family Guy made fun of him: Stewie Griffin vs William Shatner: Rocketman.

Did I mention he’s gotten really fat?

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New PC

So I finally got all my parts for my new PC. I started to build it early this week, but I should’ve really waited for the weekend as I really didn’t have time this week to mess with it. You’ve probably noticed that I’ve been on and off AIM a lot as I install and reboot and tinker around with it. I was contemplating either to install Vista or XP, and decided to go with XP for now as driver support for Vista isn’t all that great yet and I have a bunch of programs I don’t know if they’ll run in Vista or not. As a media center PC that I don’t use mostly other than to watch media, Vista is awesome. But for my main box, I decided to stick with XP for now.

My PC now consists of:

  • Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13GHz
  • Abit IL9 Pro Motherboard
  • Asus Radeon EAX1600PRO Silent X1600PRO 256MB
  • Kingston 2 x 1GB DDR2 PC5400 SDRAM
  • Seagate SATAII 500GB Hard Drive
  • LG GSA-H42N-BK 18x DVD Burner
  • Lite-On 48x CD Burner
  • Ultra V Series 500W Power Supply

A pretty simple machine. Motherboard contains 5.1 surround sound + digital and optical ports. It also has a gigabit ethernet port so I didn’t need to buy another one. So far, I’ve been pretty happy with it. However, I have noticed that I’ve been getting flickers with this CPU, motherboard, graphics card combination. When I launch a video, the moment right before the video starts playing, I see these funky colors/lines for a split second. Also, sometimes I see a line flash out of nowhere. I’m pretty sure it’s related to the video card.

Initially I thought I had a bad video card so I contacted Newegg and Asus support. However, I decided to see if this problem repros on my MCE box. Indeed it does. It’s even running Vista, so it’s not exactly the same setup. Derek suggested I try upgrading to ATI’s newest drivers. I had been using the drivers provided on Asus’ download site and they’ve worked well for the most part. I installed the newest drivers: Catalyst 7.3 onto both boxes and the flickering still reproed. I’ll need to ask Xyon if he seems something similar as he has the same video card I have.

Also noted by Derek is the fact that these new Catalyst drivers have a problem with our Vizio 47″ LCD TV. For some reason, it overscans or underscans. In my case, you see a black border around my screen about 1″ thick. I downgraded it to Catalyst 7.1 and the overscanning still existed. Finally downgraded to 8.31 (not exactly sure how the number system worked before 7.1) and the overscanning problem went away.

I’ve also had another flickering problem with Quicken 2007. When it does any sort of animation, my screen jitters like crazy. At first I thought it was related to these other video card problems I’ve been having. However, a quick search online revealed this thread: Screen Flickering. Apparently there’s a problem with Quicken and ipoint.exe. ipoint.exe is the Microsoft IntelliPoint software that you install for your mouse that provides it with the magnify and instant viewer functionality. I actually thought the instant viewer was nice and was sort of a hacky version of expose. Apparently when Microsoft rolled out version 6.0 of ipoint.exe, Quicken’s been having problems with this massive amount of flickering. With ipoint.exe killed, if you look very closely, the flickering still occurs, but at a much quicker pace. I think they just have a very unoptimized way of redrawing their entire window.

As for my old parts, I was planning to build another file server. I have 3 Seagate SATAII 500GB drives that I purchased just for this. However, it hit me when I was installing my new PC that my current motherboard didn’t support SATA. I searched online. There are some SATA I PCI cards that support upto 4 SATA devices, but PCI cards can only support upto 2 devcies if you want SATA II. They were about $40 each and that’s an additional $80. The I tried searching for motherboard that support Socket-A and had SATA II connectors. My previous CPU was a AMD Sempron 2800+. On Newegg, they only carry 4 socket-A motherboards and none of them have SATA connectors. So I thought I might as well wait for the next Fry’s CPU+Motherboard combo for $79 or lower and as long as it has 4 SATA connectors, I’d be fine.

Honestly, it’s been a pretty bad week for me. But that’s a story for a later day.

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28 Days Later

So I’ve heard that 28 Days Later was one of the better zombie movies, however there are so many bad zombie movies, what does “better” really mean? The only semi-decent zombie movie I can think of was Shaun of the Dead, but that was more comedy than scary, not exactly a thriller type move if you get what I’m trying to say. Anyway, I saw the trailer for 28 Weeks Later and decided I’d go and watch 28 Days Later just to see how it was. It turned out rather good. The storyline flowed rather well and with most zombie movies, you’re thinking what the heck happened to the rest of the world, but this one answers it to some extent. Also these zombies aren’t dumb like most of the just walking very slowly saying “brain…”; these zombies actually are smart, can run, climb, open doors, etc.

Official Site
IMDb: 7.3/10 (41,681 votes)
Yahoo! Movies: The Critics: B+ / Yahoo! Users: B-
Rotten Tomatoes: Rating: 89% / Average Rating: 7.3/10
Amazon.com DVD
Amazon.com Sountrack
MY RATING: 7/10

28 days later poster28 days later poster

Spoilers: (Show)

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Random Crap

Humor in church: the rite stuff? – “Fight truth decay” is a favorite. “Come in for a free faith lift,” is another — two examples of the toe-curling puns plastered across so many notice boards outside British churches. … Among the classics she cited were “Chxxch — Have you guessed what’s missing.UR!” and “God, you’re great!”

The Wisdom of Children (from Digg) – A Conversation at the Grownup Table, as Imagined at the Kids’ Table:

MOM: Pass the wine, please. I want to become crazy.
DAD: O.K.
GRANDMOTHER: Did you see the politics? It made me angry.
DAD: Me, too. When it was over, I had sex.
UNCLE: I’m having sex right now.
DAD: We all are.
MOM: Let’s talk about which kid I like the best.
DAD: (laughing) You know, but you won’t tell.
MOM: If they ask me again, I might tell.
FRIEND FROM WORK: Hey, guess what! My voice is pretty loud!
DAD: (laughing) There are actual monsters in the world, but when my kids ask I pretend like there aren’t.
MOM: I’m angry! I’m angry all of a sudden!
DAD: I’m angry, too! We’re angry at each other!
MOM: Now everything is fine.
DAD: We just saw the PG-13 movie. It was so good.
MOM: There was a big sex.
FRIEND FROM WORK: I am the loudest! I am the loudest!
(Everybody laughs.)
MOM: I had a lot of wine, and now I’m crazy!
GRANDFATHER: Hey, do you guys know what God looks like?
ALL: Yes.
GRANDFATHER: Don’t tell the kids.

No sex please, we’re daddy’s little girls – It has all the ingredients of a wedding. The proud tuxedo-clad father, the frosted white cake, the limousines and an exchange of vows. But there is no groom and the girl in the long gown is no bride. She’s daddy’s little girl, there to take a vow of chastity.

Best of Car Talk Letters – Response to MIT’s invitation letter – Gentlemen: Given your recent reading of the college application essay and your ties to that other (lesser) institution in Cambridge, I thought you might enjoy this. Yours sincerely, Stan McGee. MIT certainly has a reputation to be proud of, but its admissions department went a little over-board, I think. The first letter is an honest-to-goodness mailing from MIT, the second is one prospective student’s reply.

IRS Urges E-Filing — But by Vendors Only, Please – The IRS recommends that taxpayers file electronically — e-filing saves the government time and money, and is more accurate than IRS employees who type in the data from paper returns. But the IRS refuses to set up its own Web portal to receive the filings. Instead, most Americans have no choice but to e-file through private companies like Intuit (Turbo Tax) and HR Block (Tax Cut). There is something very very wrong with this system. E-Filing should be free if not have an extra discount. I mean, how much man hours are we saving them by having all our tax documents and numbers in digital formats which they can simply import it into their database. But no, instead, they decide to outsource it to other companies which charge a fee to save IRS some time. Sigh…

The Cure for Insomnia (from Tera) – The Cure for Insomnia, directed by John Henry Timmis IV, is officially the world’s longest movie, according to Guinness World Records, as of its release in 1987. Running 5220 minutes (87 hours) in length, the movie has no plot, instead consisting of artist L. D. Groban reading his lengthy poem “A Cure for Insomnia” over the course of three and a half days, spliced with occasional clips from heavy metal and pornographic videos.

pSX emulator (from Angelus) – This emulator fully emulates the Sony Playstation. Compatibility is fairly high, most games I’ve tried work well. An R3000 debugger is contained which may be of interest to people working on translations. Check out the screenshots.

TomTom PLUS services – I get this email a few weeks back saying apparently I can download new voices for my TomTom GO 700 (for a price of course) and they were advertising Mr. T. Check out what he sounds like when giving directions.

popuri.us (from Digg) – A tool to check at-a-glance the link popularity of any site based on its ranking (Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati etc.), social bookmarks (del.icio.us, etc), subscribers (Bloglines, etc) and more!

How do you prove photography to a blind man? – That was the question I was asked: how would you prove to a blind man, that photography exists? A very interesting article.

Couple tie knot in ‘moving’ ceremony – Because the bride is a snowboard instructor, her guests rode snowboards. The bridegroom is a ski instructor, and his guests were on skis. The Rev. Mike Boucher skied backward to face the crowd, wore a helmet camera during the ceremony and had a ski-mounted lectern that housed a public-address system.

People banned from SNL – Saturday Night Live’s producers, especially Lorne Michaels, have famously and dramatically banned for life several celebrities from ever appearing on the television show. Reasons for these bans vary, as sometimes they can be seen as a rational response to a star’s grossly innappropriate on-stage behavior, while at other times the reasons are harder to understand as they stem from far more mild, or even superficial transgressions.

Eddie Griffin Crashes Ferrari Enzo (from Derek) – While practicing for a charity race to promote his new movie Redline, comedian Eddie Griffin crashed a rare $1.5 million Ferrari Enzo. I guess the Undercover Brother never learned how to drive a stick. How many Enzos have crashed? Isn’t there a limited number of them?

2 Chinese Boys Sing Jessica Simpson “A Public Affair” – The two Chinese Boys who did Back Str… The two Chinese Boys who did Back Street Boys are ack doing Jessica Simpson’s new single “A Public Affair!” You get to see their roommate in the background, and you wonder how he can stand this. ;p

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Random Crap

First of all, I apologize for the lack of posting. It’s been a busy week at work and I haven’t been getting that much sleep, coming home around 11pm-1am. Even had to go into work today for a few hours to finish testing some stuff.

NYC couple hail cab for 2,400-mile ride – Betty and Bob Matas have retired and are moving to Arizona, but like many New Yorkers they don’t drive, and they don’t want their cats to travel all that way in an airliner cargo hold.

Swimmer’s life at risk after record Amazon trip – Slovenian Martin Strel, after braving crocodiles, piranhas, disease and the threat of an imminent heart attack, on Sunday completed a record-setting 66-day, 3,274-mile (5,268 km) swim down the Amazon River and was taken to a hospital.

Jesus drinking Coca-Cola? Not this Easter – An Italian film showing Jesus Christ drinking Coca-Cola sparked such strong protest from the soft-drinks giant that it blocked the film’s Easter weekend premiere, the film makers said.

Captured Lightning: 2.2 million volt Lichtenberg Figure (from Digg) – The interior of an 18″ square x 1″ piece of Plexiglas was charged to 2.2 million volts (MV) using a 5 MV particle accelerator. A layer of excess electrons become trapped deep inside, When discharged, the excess charge escaped with a bright flash and a loud bang. The hot, lightning-like discharge created thousands of microscopic fractures inside the acrylic, resulting in a branching “Captured Lightning” sculpture (or Lichtenberg Figure). Read more about how these beautiful objects are made at:
http://lichdesc.teslamania.com

Debunking myths about the “Third World” (Amazing graphics) (from Krrkb) – With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, Prof. Hans Rosling uses software from Gapminder debunks a few myths about the “developing” world. This global health visionary has discovered a powerful new way to communicate complex data about the world; his remarkable interactive graphs help deliver profound insights about global trends and will change forever the way you think about “us” and “them.” Rosling is professor of international health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder, a nonprofit that brings vital global data to life. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA.) More TEDTalks at www.TED.com

Take a Peep at This Story – Americans eat enough peeps before Easter to circle the equator — twice. Interesting video about those Easter marshmallow candy.

Today’s realistic video: GTA IV trailer in real life (from Digg) – While its not a down-to-the-finite-details replica of the Grand Theft Auto IV trailer, it’s pretty darned spot-on. If you factor in that he made it using only clips that he could find on YouTube, it’s even more amazing. When they cut to that one shot of the actor … you’ll be wondering if they used that for the actual game trailer. Compare that to the real trailer of Grand Theft Auto IV.

Puff Piece – Harvard tells Hollywood to ban cigarettes from kids’ movies. – Stanton Glantz, professor of medicine at U.C. San Francisco and creator of the Smoke Free Movies campaign, says Glickman probably expected Harvard to come up with a limp education campaign and leave it at that. But Harvard got tough. In recommendations presented to the industry last month and made public this week, Harvard said the studios should eliminate smoking altogether from films “accessible to children and youth.”

Uganda scraps “sexist” adultery law – Uganda’s Constitutional Court ordered the changes to the Penal Code, under which it was legal for a married man to have an affair with an unmarried woman but against the law for a married woman to have an affair with an unmarried man.

Photo in the News: Century-Old Fish Caught in Alaska – Commercial fishers in the Bering Sea recently hauled in the female shortraker rockfish seen above, which scientists say was between 90 and 115 years old. Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) used growth rings in the fish’s ear bone, or otolith, to make their age estimate.

century old fish

Badass origami stuff – Some REALLY amazing origami art here.

dragon origami

360’s Guitar Hero II guitar works in Windows, Frets on Fire – The USB-equipped X-plorer guitar that ships with the just-released Guitar Hero II for Xbox 360 has some interesting tricks up its nonexistant but metaphorically convenient sleeve. No, we’re not talking about breaking or shape-shifting (sheesh) — we’re talking about things like effects pedals and oh, what’s this, Windows support? Randy tipped us off that the guitar controller works in Windows Vista, but we had to check for ourself. The above image was captured in Windows XP. The five frets control the first five buttons, Back and Start control buttons 7 and 8, the d-pad and strummer control the Point of View Hat, the whammy bar controls the X Rotation, Star Power controls the Y Rotation, and the Z Axis sorta just wiggles when you move the guitar. The X Axis / Y Axis does nothing (gotta save something for that effects pedal, no?). Sweet! I can’t wait for the wireless version to come out now so I can play Frets on Fire with a wireless guitar on my Vista box.

Wrapped in Subway Logos, Free City Condom Is a Hit – In just a month, the city gave away five million of its new subway-themed condoms, officials said yesterday. Lest you read past that number unimpressed, consider that that was about two condoms for every man living in the city — more than the city distributed in all of 2003.

Online hoax ad strips home of everything – An online ad offering everything in the house for free left one landlord with quite a shock. By the time she realized what was going on, the house had been stripped of its light fixtures, hot water heater — even the kitchen sink. … “In the ad, it said come and take what you want. Everything is free,” she said. “Please help yourself to anything on the property.”

Sub loses job over pinchy punishment – Four boys said spring-type clothespins were placed over their upper or lower lips for talking too much in class, Amanda-Clearcreek Primary School principal Mike Johnsen wrote in a letter to parents this week.

Girl had suspected ‘boyfriend’ was woman – A 14-year-old girl authorities allege was sexually abused by a 30-year-old woman who posed as a teenage boy said she didn’t know about the ruse but eventually suspected it.

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Roth IRA

I just wanted to spend some time talking about Roth IRA since 2006’s last contribution date is coming up. You’ve probably heard of terms like 401K and IRA and then there’s traditional vs Roth and all being retirement accounts, and you’re thinking what is correct for you, what’s the difference, and so on.

To put into simple terms, 401K replaces pensions, and is a retirement investment account provided to you through your employer. You decide to put x% of your salary into this account each paycheck and so on. The 401K account I have also restricts me to what I can invest in to a limited set of funds and stocks, but I’m not sure if that is the same for every employer. When you changed jobs, I believe you stop contributing to your old 401K account and you create a new 401K account with your new employer. You do have the option to consolidate your old 401K account into your new one.

IRA on the other hand is a personal investment account, where you get to put in money whenever you want. It has no relationship with your employer. The deadline to invest for any particular year is the deadline to file your taxes. For the year 2006, the last day you can contribute to an IRA account is on April 17th, 2007.

The biggest difference between 401K and IRA besides 401K is tied to an employer and IRA isn’t, is the contribution limit. These limits change from year to year, but for 2006, 401K’s limit was at $15,000 and IRA’s limit was at $4,000. With IRA, you can decide after the fact if you want to contribute to it depending on your tax situation. With 401K, you have to consistently contribute and have to prepare beforehand on what you want to do.

Tax implications wise, there really isn’t much difference between 401K and IRA. What the difference lies is if it’s a Traditional or Roth. A traditional 401K or traditional IRA is where you contribute money (pre-taxed) and when you do take the money out, the full amount (original contribution + gain) will then be fully taxed. On the other hand, a Roth 401K or Roth IRA is fully taxed now, but when you take the money out, it will not get taxed again and neither will your gain.

Derek’s suggestion is to contribute to both Traditional and Roth retirement accounts because who knows what it’ll be like when you retire. Most people contribute into a Traditional account because they’re assuming when they retire, they won’t have a high income, so money they take out will be in the lower tax bracket. However, who knows what the tax situation will be like 40 years from now. If you have both Traditional and Roth accounts, you can withdraw accordingly. Take money out from the Traditional accounts if the tax is low. Take money out from the Roth accounts if the tax is high.

Anyway, after I got my tax refund this year, I decided I wanted to start my Roth IRA account. Another thing I researched on was penalty for early withdrawal. For Traditional accounts, since it’s only taxed when you withdraw, there are a bunch of fees and penalties for withdrawing early. However, with Roth accounts, you’ve already paid the tax, is there any early withdrawal penalty. Here’s a good example from The Motley Fool:

Jim, age 30, made a Roth IRA contribution of $2,000 in 1998. In 2005, Jim’s Roth IRA has a balance of $3,500. Jim decides to close his Roth IRA in a non-qualified distribution that year. Since the distribution is non-qualified, Jim will owe taxes on his Roth earnings of $1,500, and will pay tax on this amount at his marginal tax rate. In addition, since the distribution took place before Jim reached age 59 1/2, and since Jim did not meet any of the exceptions, Jim will also be assessed a 10% early withdrawal penalty on the earnings. If we assume that Jim is in the 28% marginal tax bracket, he will pay $420 in tax on the earnings, and will pay a penalty in the amount of $150 on the early distribution. This is a very steep price to pay.

In other words, I can withdraw early on the amount that I contributed without paying any fees/penalties. However if I early withdraw any of my earnings/gains, those will be taxed at my current tax bracket + an additional 10% early withdrawal penalty. I’m thinking, who the heck won’t invest in an Roth account then, especially Roth IRA since you don’t have to make a decision until April for the previous year. Another way to put this is that you’ll always have access to your principal, penalty free, which in most people’s case is all they’ll need. As long as you keep your earnings and gains inside your Roth account, there won’t be any penalty.