1-December 2007 to 29-February, 2008
| Friday, February 29, 2008: Rant-o-rama. This time, the bad guys are GOOGLE and WILDBLUE. I would tell them this myself, except they make it impossible to send anything anyone will pay attention to. Instead, I am #154 in queue for a chat, with 51 minutes or so estimated wait time. Great job, guys! Customer alienation at it's finest! What I needed support for was that WildBlue (who provides me with satellite internet service) decided that they were going to "improve" my service by "partnering" with GOOGLE to convert their email service to gmail. Now, for myself i would not be bothered, I have other email accounts I use, but Kay uses her wildblue.net address almost exclusively, so I have been trying to manage the conversion for her sake. The conversion isn't going well. I have managed to login to the webmail component, and have configured POP access, but GOOGLE informs me it has no account under the username I was told to use, and the user/pass that works for webmail will not work in the POP access (incoming or outgoing). Obviously, a clever case of ready, fire, aim. Neither of these players care about aggravating customers, just about whether their stock value can be made to go up any faster. Well, WildBlue is, as far as I know, a privately owned company, GOOGLE's stock sinking like a stone. Perhaps, times they are a-changing? Alright, so the account started working while I was waiting in queue for chat. That doesn't really make me any happier, because it just shows that incompetence, arrogance and just plain insufficient tools to do the job rule. I made a change to enable the POP access, and that seem to have taken a half-hour or more to propagate. Another cee-gar for the weiners! |
| Wednesday, February 20, 2008: I have remained very busy with ranch work since my last post. I finished my loading platform... it turned out as well as I had hoped for. I have since put it to use by hauling a pickup truckload of fertilizer, unloading it and then loading it into my spreader attachment for the tractor on two days this week (one and a half tons) and then unloading and using a dolly to truck and store a ton of feed today. It is so much easier stacking bags and wheeling them than it is picking them up and carrying them into the tack room. The feed I bought today is to continue to put weight on the group of steers I have out in the front pasture. When this load is depleted, in about a month, I expect to load them up and sell them. In the Spring, there is a good demand for young steers from ranchers in colder states, who put them on pasture until fall, when they are sold to feed lots. Speaking of tasty animals... years back someone registered the domain PETA and dubbed it People Eating Tasty Animals. The animal nuts group PETA sued to get the domain name they had never thought to register, and that set a bad precedent that companies owned some interest in a set of initials. There are a bit over 15,000 possible 3-letter acronyms and a bit over 300,000 4-letter acronyms possible in English... that may sound like a lot, but it is small enough a pool that there are a lot of possible conflicts. Someone that registered their initials may lose the right to use them because it happens to be the stock symbol for some company. Anyway, I was messing around and happened on a appeal from PETA to send emails to Lowe's to demand they stop selling glue traps. Glue traps are a very effective way to capture mice, you put them along a wall and the mouse gets stuck running across it, you just throw the trap and mouse away. But these guys are very concerned about the poor rats mice. Never mind that they spoil food and carry germs that can cause diseases like plague. Think of the poor animals, not people. So I played with it and found that in the form mailer they have you can edit the text, although they prefill it with a suggested text. I changed it to encourage Lowe's to continue to sell these wonderful traps. I don't expect Lowe's to pay much attention, and it is obvious that PETA doesn't know what happened, because they thanked me and included a plea for a donation. You can go to their website and do the same thing, too. They are the wackiest of the weirdos on the web. They have a spin-off site Cows Are Cool, that is filled with misinformation on leather. Of course, they are against the use of it. Like the humane society, they are really out to try to eliminate the use of animals for food, clothing or sport altogether. One inch at a time. |
| Thursday, February 14, 2008: While today is Valentine's Day, I am going to skip past that and get right to what is on my mind. Another rip-off story to tell. This one is about domain names, and the "Domain Registry of America". It has been long enough since private registries for domain names were made available that most people should be aware of it. The purpose was to allow some competition in the domain registry part of the internet. Well, the Domain Registry of America looks through the domain registrations, and sends letters to people that have registered a domain telling them that now is the time to renew their registration and transfer it to them. In the latest case, a letter I received from them today, the name doesn't expire for nearly six months. There is nothing wrong with what they are doing, on the face of it. Except the price. They are asking $30 a year for the renewal, everywhere else is $15/year (or less in some package deals). So they are doing mass mailings, sending them out extra early and hoping to capture business from some people that are not minding the details and can send them a check or a credit card number. I think they might deserve a price premium for managing the renewal process for people, and if you forget to renew your domain name it will quit working and someone will snap it up in the off chance that you will want to buy it back. Of course, in the fine print on the back of the letter they disclaim any responsibility if anything like that would happen. But soaking people for twice the going rate (which is higher than it should be already) is not good business, it is preying on inattention and stupidity. While it seems like this is such a bad deal that no one would take them up, they have been sending me letters long enough for me to believe that they are getting plenty of takers. Sad, but true. P.T. Barnum would not be surprised. |
| Tuesday, February 12, 2008: Today a news article quoted the head of NOAA worrying about waking people up if they have a warning of a hurricane or tornado. If you look here, you see I have tornado damage pictures on this site. One reason I survived to post those pictures is because I knew a tornado was in the area because of a warning from NOAA that was transmitted over their weather radio system. I have a weather radio, with battery backup, turned on at all times, full volume, on the nightstand at my bedside. I believe in their mission, and I believe they do as good a job as could be expected. I don't think they need special new systems to call people on their cellular phones to wake them up, if you want to spend more public funds on safety, give out coupons for weather radios instead of digital TV converters. One thing that has been bugging me is that, here at least, we regularly get Amber Alerts transmitted over the weather radio. I find this very annoying and a bit like the old story of the boy crying wolf. It seems that a lot of these cases are parental abductions. There is some pressure from a parent to "save my child", but no one has the guts to say that the weather radio is an inappropriate place to put non-emergency messages. Sure, it is an emergency in the parent's eyes, but what use is telling people a hundred miles or more away on a country back road? There is zero chance I will go outside and watch the road in case the kidnapper's car goes by. There aren't more than a couple of dozen cars go by here on a typical day. But the biggest issue is that when I hear that warning tone from my weather radio, I expect it to be some relevant weather information. In my opinion, piggybacking Amber Alerts on that channel is as invasive as telemarketers calling me despite my phone being on the do-not-call list. It has spoiled some of the trust I have in the radio. Now, when I hear it go off and walk to the bedroom to hear the warning clearly, on the way I am asking myself if it is another stupid child-abduction alert. I might say I am sorry for the parents of a child abduction, but I am not sorry about my opinion. Signs on the interstate, news alerts on radio stations, all those efforts are fine. But stay off my weather radio. When a storm brews, more is at stake than one child. Look at the 57 or so people killed recently in Tennessee and elsewhere by tornados. We should not cheapen the value of a weather radio alert by having so many child-abduction alerts. I say to the Director of NOAA: Grow a spine! |
| Saturday, February 9, 2008: Just because I don't make updates every day or so doesn't mean there isn't a lot going on. Today I continued work on the loading platform, which has had a substantial amount completed, although there are still a few days worth of work left. I will have to continue to set out hay every few days for a while, although the earliest signs of Spring have started showing. Besides nice weather (the high today was over 75), I noticed that the Oak tress have started growing the buds that will become their new leaves for the year. And enough rye grass has popped up in my yard that I may have to mow it soon. Yesterday at feeding time I noticed one of my cows had calved, but was unable to locate the calf yesterday or today. This cow should not have calved for six more weeks, so there is a strong possibility that this was a stillborn or overly weak calf. Calves do not do well when they are premature. We also lost one of our cows today. She ate something that gave her bloat, and she had a less than comfortable exit from her life. She has had three calves in the time I have had her, the latest one is right at four months old. Not as old as I would usually wean a calf, but old enough to survive without milk. She is wandering around the pasture tonight mooing for her mama, who has been removed from the pasture. She was a good cow, and I don't have any idea what she ate, but it made her very sick. |
| Monday, February 4, 2008: Over the weekend I came up with an idea to build an unloading platform, level with my pickup truck bed, next to the tack room so I can use a cart to help unload and store feed. Before construction, I needed to get the area filled in, as it can be mud hole there. So I called a contractor, who brought me three large loads of sand fill. I didn't expect same day service, but I guess they weren't that busy, because I got the first load a little over an hour after calling for it. So I had to stay busy getting each load spread before the next one came. Since it looked like it might rain, I finished off the third load as soon as I could, although as it turned out no rain came this afternoon. Nonetheless, that task is done, and I can now start on design, material acquisition and construction of the platform. Weather permitting, I hope to get that done in the next two weeks, before I have to buy more feed. |
| Tuesday, January 29, 2008: It is considerably cooler tonight that the last few. This afternoon the wind turned back from the North and was at times quite strong and gusty. The temperature at dinnertime is twenty degrees lower than at lunchtime, and scheduled to drop more overnight, although the forecast does not call for a freeze. My new tractor was delivered yesterday, as scheduled, but they did not load the hay spear. I elected to go pick it up instead of waiting for delivery. Kay and I had to meet in town and sign some paper, so I was already well on the way to the dealer after that. I mounted the spear and used it to carry a bale out to the pasture. Then I worked on taking my canopy from the old tractor and mounting it on the new one. The gusty wind caught it and blew it off the strap I was using to help raise it up, nearly bonking me on the head in the process. That's part of the trouble working here by myself, if it had hit me and not killed me, I still would have had no help until Kay got home from work, in this case about five hours later. I got the canopy mounted like I wanted, and some other things rearranged, including mounting the backhoe on the old tractor. I removed the leaky rear tire and took it to town and dropped it off for repair. I have never had so much trouble with flat tires as I have had since coming to Texas, mainly because of the thorns on those mesquites. Tomorrow I need to get a load of feed and put it away, then in the afternoon I can go into town and pick up the tractor tire, put it back on and get the old tractor and backhoe stowed. |
| Saturday, January 26, 2008: The weather was much better today than it has been for a week, I think the overnight low was 40 or better and the high was over 60... not paradise temperatures but more tolerable. Kay and I went up to Temple (TX) and nosed around in some different stores. I ended up buying a set of speakers (with subwoofer) for my computer that will net out to about $20 after rebates. I am enjoying the setup as I write this. I used the older set I had to make a quadraphonic stereo system. Since my den/office here is only the size of a child's bedroom, the power level is plenty good. I can only make use of part of the available volume, even when I want to 'rock on'. But the best news today was a new calf. The mother was a cow I had bought back in October that was already bred. I had checked on her yesterday, when I put out hay, and I knew she was close to calving. I happened during the wee hours or early this morning. I don't know what breed the father was, and the mother is a crossbred cow herself, but the calf is a nice looking black baldie. I think it is a heifer calf, but I didn't get close enough to make sure, after spooking the last calf born here. The calf seems to be doing well and the cow is mothering it, so all I can do is leave them to their own devices. In the past, the calves I have had trouble with were never strong after they were born, this calf is up and going as well as any do their first day. It's quite a difference between their development at birth and the state humans are born in. Of course, a human child might take a dozen years to reach the birth weight of a calf. |
| Friday, January 25, 2008: Today I am on the warpath with Adobe. I use their free PDF viewer plug-in for Internet Explorer, but just because they make it available for free doesn't equate to my need to accept poor quality and arrogant abuse of my system. If they want to keep people using their PDF format so that they can sell the tools to make the files, well then they need to make something that works as well as HTML web pages. That they have never been able to do. But what has me teed off today is system security. I don't allow anything that hasn't been previously approved to access my network connection, any protocol or port. The list of Microsoft modules, such as Access, that try to connect and allow you no option to undo that configuration is long. But at least when they are denied they accept that they were unable to connect and proceed to perform their intended task. But the Adobe Reader... No. This arrogant little collection of fecal coli-form smeared castoff whatever, after going idle waits a few minutes, and starts hammering the connection trying to connect for an update. I personally do not believe the check for an update that so many programs do by default is solely based on trying to provide better service to the customer, although that is one positive effect. I believe there is a more sinister aspect, and that is collecting how many different computers are using a program and how often the usage is. I know that all of these programs have unique identifiers, "serial numbers" that are placed on your computer during installation. So stepping from that to sending the identifier in a packet requesting a response from a server about whether there is an update available and then the server recording that in the log file and the marketing department getting these usage reports is not a big leap of faith. I do not know for certain that Adobe does this, but it is well within my scope of belief that they could, and my experience in the business world is that if information can be gathered, marketing wants to see it. Is this just paranoia? Well, perhaps. But then, maybe they really are out to get us. This is further enhanced by the fact that the Adobe software tried 72 times in an approximate two minute span to make a connection that they never asked permission for and provide no option to disable. And that is after the request failed a few minutes earlier (yes, 73 total). That is absolutely shocking, stuffing so many requests into such a short time (the firewall logs every one). If a person asked the same question that many times, expecting that the answer might change, they would be diagnosed as crazy. And that is what I think this program is. That is six dozen times in two minutes that system resources were attempted to be hijacked after being denied the first time. I can only guess that they think the user will be busy reading the document and will not notice the network access attempt. But I do, and I count. And now you know, too. How long have they been gathering your data? |
| Thursday, January 24, 2008: I can be as giddy as a teenager sometimes, but instead of getting a new car, I bought a new tractor. It is bigger than the one I have now (which I am keeping) but only by about a fourth more capacity, but half again as many horsepower. While I could do all that was required with the old one, it was at the edge of it's capability doing some tasks, such as front-loading large round hay bales and mowing densely grown Bermuda grass. It also (like it's owner) is showing it's age a little. It has worked hard for me, but needs enough repairs (leaking seals and worn bushings) to consider a new one. I have a detachable backhoe that fits it, and I intend to mount that on the old tractor and use it more. Right now, it takes enough time to swap it on and off that I try to put off tasks that could best use a backhoe until I have several to do. So the new tractor is due to be delivered Monday. I last blogged some about Maya. One thing I neglected to mention is that it has a top-notch paint program that rivals PhotoShop built into it, and that you can paint directly on your 3D model (complex textures, too, not just dabs of color). Viewed in that light, the asking price seems a little more reasonable, because PhotoShop is not cheap, either. Other than that excitement, things have been slow here at Ranch Como. Winter is a time when many tasks (like weed control) no longer need done, instead, running a feeding program for the cattle that allows them to continue to grow during a season when all else doesn't is where the main focus lies. While that doesn't require a lot of time each day, on some days weather conditions make going out and doing those tasks pretty onerous. Part of the business, though. It's not like I didn't know when I got into it, but I am allowed to grouse a little about it, anyway. After all, it is MY blog, right? |
| Saturday, January 19, 2008: As if I didn't have enough things going on around here, I had decided to make a concerted effort to improve my modeling skills, particularly character modeling. I had a book already called "Game Character Development with Maya" by Antony Ward. I have only two things to say. Wow. OK, that's just one thing, but it goes both for the book and the Maya program itself. Now, I was just using the Maya PLE, which doesn't really save anything usable (come on, if they gave away a version that worked 100%, why would anyone buy their product?). In the past I had avoided toying much with Maya, because it is very expensive (the cheapest package is $1,995), and I had felt for the level of my 3D modeling skills, it was not a cost effective program for me. Well, even though my modeling skills are not so much better, the more I have learned about the program, the more impressed I have become with it. So far, it is incredible, and I haven't really drilled that far into it. There are plenty of options and menus I haven't used. But some of the things that you can do are really slick. Besides being able to model with 4-sided polygons, which really is easier, the tools you can select entities (vertex, face, edge) with are amazing, including a paintbrush selection tool. The Undo is very effective, the program works very well using a pen tablet, but, there's more. You can work on a character model on just one side, and set the other side to be a duplicate instance, with the left-right swapped. This makes a mirror image that updates with every move. You can put scanned in drawings in the program, scale them to the size you want, and put them into a separate layer, which you can make visible and invisible with a single click. Then, you can set the model you are working on to be shaded, but with the optional X-Ray mode, sort of half-transparent. So you can start with a cylinder and scale and move the parts around to shape it like the drawing. Not quite as easy as tracing, but close. But if working with 2D drawings as a guide isn't enough, you can import parts of other 3D objects, put them into a separate layer and then when you select the parts of the model you are working on, the parts in the layer are not selected. This is really, really effective, because you can select a vertex and move it in whatever direction is needed to set it along the edge of your guide. Now, tracing parts of some other artists 2D or 3D work certainly takes less talent than creating it from scratch, but it isn't the same as copying, and it is a lot faster way to get the rough outline of the object done. And it looks to be a very effective way to create a low-poly version of a complex model. As for Mr. Ward's book, it provides a very good outline of the steps to make a 3D character. Because I had previously done this on my own, with some small level of success, I have progressed pretty quickly through the first chapters. But his description of the way to methodically add the needed details to the model, as well as the ease of doing so because of the power in Maya has been very instructive to me. While I am not done with the model I am making, it is looking quite good for a low poly model, especially one that I have done from scratch (following his line drawings of the character from the book). Art, by it's nature is hard to describe in the kind of precise terms used for science and programming, but Antony Ward did a good job of showing how to add in the muscle lines and bone ridges to make a realistic model. I don't know if the book is still in print, because I bought it some time ago, but if this is something you wanted to do yourself, this is certainly a good way to start. |
| Tuesday, January 15, 2008: So I have been a little bit behind on my blog. I have been busy on my website. I have been having trouble with people getting 403 (Forbidden) errors on pages. I thought that it was only on the forum, and have spent a lot of time looking at logs and updating the forum software. Then, while using Google's webmaster tools I found that the problems were also on the base web pages. So I opened a ticket with the hosting service and today they fixed something in the server configuration that made them all go away. Yay. I just hope the issue stays gone. Today is new hardware day. I ordered a new Wacom Intuos 6x8 Pen Tablet and it was delivered today. While it was replacing another Wacom 4x6 pen tablet, the extra size makes it a lot easier to click accurately on a specific spot, such as when I am modeling and animating. It didn't take too long to uninstall the old drivers and then install the new ones. The old drivers worked, but did not support the extra buttons and increased resolution of the new tablet. So far, I have been well pleased with the tablet. |
| Wednesday, January 9, 2008: I don't have any written policies here, because I don't collect information or user names or money, nor do we have any advertising. Not that I am opposed on any principles, but really, this isn't the sort of thing I would spend any money on, so why would I think anyone else would? But I have discussed some commercial products here before, and I am going to again. I don't discuss these to sell or promote anybody else's stuff, and if I decide to promote my own stuff (assuming I ever make any) it won't be difficult to tell. No, if I discuss some software, it is because I like or dislike or find it useful, and I will just pass that along, for what it's worth. If I have a good experience with something and someone reads that and buys it and has some problem, I do not want to hear that it's my fault: make up your own mind. With that said, today I bought a pretty cool program called Ultimate Unwrap 3D Pro (UU3D). It is a commercial software product, a UV mapping program, and since I am not promoting it, use your search to find their site address. Virtually every 3D modeling program has some UV mapping capability built in, some better than others. I have a need for a good UV mapping program, and UU3D does that, well, but the authors have built a huge number of file formats into the program, and also the capability to load animations along with the model. And they work. The list of formats they support is long, and includes all of the most popular and quite a few less popular formats. I was able to seamlessly pass the mesh and animation data from the Torque .dts format, the Autodesk .fbx format and MilkShape's .ms3d format, and that is just what I tried. While every 3D program has some special aspects that may not be supported by other 3D programs, which makes truly universal data interchange remain a dream, this program does an excellent job of getting the main object and animation components from one format to another. For example, this is the first program I found that actually does a good job of importing Torque DTS files. This was important to me because many of the original models for characters and objects that people have given to the Torque community are in 3DS format, and I don't own that program. Being able to move the mesh and animation into MilkShape is a huge step, even if some effort still needs to be placed into configuring the data somewhat for export. That isn't a big issue, because the whole reason I wanted to work with the item was to modify it, so even if it doesn't sequentially import and export some format with 100% functionality due to specialized configuration capabilities for that format or platform, it is still very useful. Someone else read my gripes about McAfee and Symantec anti-virus programs, and suggested a company named Kaspersky for their antivirus and firewall product. Probably like most Americans, I never heard of them, but they appear to be a large European company (German, I think). Like before, I am not providing a link but I had no trouble finding their website. While it took me a a few days to discover how to set things up like I want it (since I didn't bother reading the help files), it not only does the protecting job seemingly well (although I am not a security expert), but it is easy to change the firewall permissions tighter and looser, and while I found some irritating 'nag' items in it, I found that it allows ME to choose whether I want those to be seen, or heard, and allows you to set the alerts to be partially transparent (via a slider) so that you can still see what is under the alert. That's what I want, something that allows me to choose. I left almost all of the alerts visible, but I made them partly transparent and turned the sound off on some of them. And now I don't have any programs that popup trying to connect to the internet when I am concentrating on other things. All I have to say is, Sweet! |
| Tuesday, January 8, 2008: Kay has been sick, some sort of flu/respiratory/fever malady. Yesterday I had to spend all morning running errands, and ended up visiting all three pharmacies in town in order to get all the medicines she needed, because the cough medicine she was prescribed is in short supply for some reason. Aside from the many hours required to keep up with web activities, I have been forcing myself to stay on track with my self-study modeling and animation activities. While I haven't made anything especially cool, it is because I am following tutorials that were written to stress the skills, not the models. I am working on IK animation right now, wrestling with rigging and constraints. Pretty impressive stuff can be done quickly once the joints are properly rigged, though. Last night I spent quite some amount of time uninstalling and then reinstalling the drivers for my all-in-one printer, because the scanning had quit working. Last week I ordered a new audio card, a SoundBlaster X-Fi model, and it was delivered this afternoon. So today I spent some time installing and updating the card and software. I used a four speaker configuration, two tinny speakers in my ViewSonic monitor and two other small speakers. Because of the extreme tonal differences in the two speakers, the setup produces some very impressive effects, tricking my ears into thinking that there is a depth element, even though all four speakers are in front of me. I also can now do what I was trying to do with my old setup (an onboard audio capability) which is to take midi tracks and make .wav files from them. In fact, the card has a capability to record what you hear, meaning I could probably record a lot of other things off the web with it. |
| Saturday, January 5, 2008: First post this year. I have been sort of neglecting my blog because I have to spend a lot of time trying to keep up, especially the Custom Sims3 forum, which can be a time sink. I figured it would be, but I started it anyways, so I have no one to blame but me. The weather since last night has been much warmer. Friday, Kay and I went to a cattle raising seminar in Milano (TX). Then today, I drove up to Temple and finally found a nice looking file cabinet to put in my office here for some additional storage. I didn't break too much precedent, however, because after I got it assembled and in place, I put all my files in there, without labeling. While they are better organized than they were in two big stacks, there is still room for improvement. I have been working on my modeling and animation skills. Instead of just trying this and that, I have been following some of the tutorials that came with the programs, and in addition, I have been working on them using my Wacom pen tablet. It works well for both the pen and the mouse. I recently reorganized my workspace, and now I have the dual monitor setup, tablet and keyboard all organized in a much back and eyesight friendlier manner. |
| Friday, December 28, 2007: While I generally post something or another on the internet every day, it isn't always at this site and not always this blog, or journal, or whatever. I spent a lot of time in the last few days building a new human mesh model, UV mapping and animating it, and testing my results in the Torque Game Engine. Today I created a new forum in my CustomSims3 site for talking about modding Torque, and populated the first two posts in it with a picture and directions on how to reproduce my results in a downloaded copy of the demo for the Torque Game Engine Advanced. Outside of fiddling about with meshes and whatnot, little else is going on around here. The weather remains seasonably cold, and feeding the animals is about the limit of what is needed to be done. Everything is dry, static electricity is everywhere and my dry skin gets itchy. Some people love the cooler weather, I hate it, and I am glad that the colder part of winter here is a short span, although I did pick to settle here because having some freezing in winter makes for a different agricultural climate than the semi-tropical areas, where it rarely freezes in any one year. |
| Tuesday, December 25, 2007: Christmas day. Kay and I exchanged presents last night, because she is working all day today. I had a couple of neighbors drop by briefly, bringing us some goodies for a present. I always appreciate the thought, but as I am trying to lose some weight, I can't eat them. So far, I have lost over a dozen pounds. It is not coming off all that fast, but it is coming off steadily. That keeps me committed to seeing it through, because it does work. What I am doing is my own version of a low-carb diet that I call the "no white" diet. No sugar, wheat flour or potatoes or anything made from those. So I mainly eat meat (my favorite anyway), mushrooms, salad veggies and green beans. Most of the variety is which meat I choose to eat. It takes some willpower to stay on this, because your body just screams for some of those refined carbs. But after doing without for a while, the cravings are not as bad. Ranch work is down to maintenance level. I make sure that hay is available. That requires a bale to be set out about two of every three days. I still feed the cattle daily, but that is all, and when it is cold and a bitter wind is blowing, that is enough. The cattle have all gotten heavier coats, and it seems not to bother them so much. After all, they have a custom-fitted leather coat. |
| Friday, December 21, 2007: I should smell some roses now, instead of ranting about antivirus programs. One of our neighbors brought several children and adults from the neighborhood church to our home on a hay ride, pulled by his tractor, and they sang us Christmas carols. It was very nice, and made me feel good that we were considered to be a part of the community for them to come see us, also. On my software efforts, I have also made some progress, and learned some new tricks. I mentioned earlier that I had started playing with the Torque Game Engine. Last night, before I got sidetracked I had succeeded in porting a mesh, textures and an animation that would work in The Sims 2 game into a demo Torque game, and had it behaving as intended. While this is certainly nothing on the level of a scientific advance, it was all new to me, and now I know how to tie work I had done before for The Sims 2 game to display in a different game engine. Of course, I am not planning to do this as a project, because it would violate Electronic Art's copyright and their EULA. But it does show me that techniques that are used to build models for their game can be used for another. And, I had fun doing it. |
| Thursday, December 20, 2007: The honeymoon with McAfee has had a sudden ending. I am absolutely livid that McAfee used their software automatic update to put an ad on my computer screen. This is not free web page, or shareware service, I paid for this. They interrupted what I was doing to put a pop-up on my computer screen, telling me I could save $30 for a gift idea, and my choices were to buy, or click to continue what I was doing. Nag-ware, plain and simple. I am at the moment wondering where else I can make other people aware of this. Of course, I have started by complaining to them. They should know better! One of the very things that they have built a business on, after protecting us from viruses is to recognize and stop ad-ware and spam, and they BUILT IT INTO THEIR PRODUCT. What were they smoking, and where can the rest of us get some at? I am pretty upset about this. For one, I do not like being interrupted when I am working, as it breaks my thought chain, and it take time to get restarted. You buy their program, trusting them to protect you, and they use their advantaged trust position to place an ad ON YOUR COMPUTER. This will end, I guarantee. Either they will quit or I will. But if they run me off, it will be at after I have done everything I can to make their life miserable. I think I will cruise by the FTC website and see if I can start with a complaint there. And maybe my state attorney general office. This is a totally unacceptable practice. |
| Wednesday, December 19, 2007: In my prior postings about my Symantec antivirus program that quits working, the tech support request I sent to them on 12/3 got responded to today, 12/19. This was the response that was originally promised within 24 hours. Of course, all I got was a form mail that referred me to an FAQ page of theirs. I advised them that I no longer needing any support because I uninstalled their programs (as if they will care, they already have the money). They should be ashamed, but of course they won't... I am just a number. But this number will never do business with them again. I injured my back Sunday afternoon, slinging feed bags around instead of lifting carefully. I knew better, but I was trying to hurry the job up. So now I have had to find someone to deliver some more feed, because I don't want to further the injury by overuse before it has healed. I am already paying a price for my inattention in the form of pain (although it has now reduced itself to an ache). I still have to go out and feed, but I am being careful not to lift too much, and to be attentive to how I am lifting. |
| Saturday, December 15, 2007: I have been more than a little busy trying to maintain a forum site here (see link above). I still have odd problems that show up for some people which do not leave a trail, or perhaps the trail goes cold because the server error log is reset daily, I think at 00 hours GMT. A lot of days I check on things in the morning, and then when next I check the day change had happened. I don't think there are a lot of problems, and they may be at least partially related to server load (which can vary due to the nature of shared servers). I think if the problems become frequent enough, I will see them myself and then be able to trace them through. I spent a lot of time today doing offline things, like attending a cattle auction and then we had a rehearsal for the Christmas show at our church (which is scheduled for tomorrow evening). I am the narrator, which is good, because I cannot sing very well. I am happy to be able to contribute to the show in some small way. We had a small dinner after the rehearsal, and I talked with a few neighbors about the wild hogs, among other topics. Everybody is having problems with them tearing up the fields. I related the story I have about wild hog hunting, which I will repeat here. Several months ago now, one afternoon a person appeared at my back door and told me that they had been hunting hogs with dogs on an adjacent property and the hog had run across onto my property, dogs in pursuit, and requested permission to come onto the property and finish him off. While I am all in favor of exterminating them (they are not native wildlife here) I do not usually allow hunting on the property, because I don't want my cattle shot by mistake. I asked them to stop by when they were done, and I learned that they didn't shoot the hogs... they stuck it with a long bowie knife. The dogs get the hog cornered, and one of the hunters steps in, flips it over and stabs it. I know other people that have hunted wild hogs, and many of them carry a handgun just in case they fail to kill the hog with their rifle, and these guys kill them with just their hands and a knife. I certainly would never dream of doing that, and many of the people I tell the story to shake their heads in disbelief, but I saw the dead hog and I know it wasn't shot. So there are some tough boys here in Texas. |
| Thursday, December 13, 2007: More Symantec aggravation bubbles up. The Live Update program they have creates a Windows Service, and that service stayed installed, after uninstalling the rest of the programs. It starts up with the computer and runs automatically, stealing CPU time and network bandwidth from you. I know how to turn services off, and I nuked the binaries, and still I found hundreds of Symantec keys in the registry. Very unprofessional and not anything I think programs should do. Yes, some keys are created by system software, but plenty of registry items remained, and that just burns me up. If you think I am put off at Symantec, and not willing to by any of their schlock crud anymore, you would be thinking right. And to think that Norton was a premier name, definitely cutting edge software. The world turns. K-Mart and Sears were once world-class merchandisers, K-Mart had to be rescued from oblivion out of bankruptcy court, and Sears sold the company before they had to make that trip. While it remains to be seen of their new ownership can turn the tide and reestablish their brands, it also goes to show how having a good name and a healthy business is no insurance against poor management flying the business into the ground. With the taste I now have for Symantec, I would bet against their viability for long term survival. |
| Wednesday, December 12, 2007: The topic today is "How Symantec really sucks and why Peter Norton should be ashamed of what happened to his name". About a year ago, I was tired of all the Norton Antivirus nag screens, so I switched to McAfee. I certainly am not easy to please, and I became annoyed at the McAfee software, particularly the automatic updates. This might come as a surprise, but Microsoft has the only automatic software update I have seen that works as smoothly and unobtrusively as I like. McAfee isn't all bad, but it for one insists on telling me it updated by using a popup from the windows bar, and if I tell it to check for updates and tell me, it wakes up anytime it wants and places an always-on-top window that I cannot ignore. I would like to be able to finish a task uninterrupted by some moronic popup that someone else thinks is more important than what I am doing. Hey, designers, I can think. I can make rational decisions. But back to why Symantec sucks. Less that two months ago, I decided to switch back to Norton Antivirus. So I bought a package with the antivirus and their SystemWorks programs. SystemWorks has disk optimization and error checking, as well as file deletion and restoration. Well, folks, it is as stupid as a rock. The file deletion protection works by creating a service that runs at startup for you. But, the disk checking utility, as well as the Windows provided one, will not be able to run as long as that service is running, and the Disk Check is too stupid to know that it is another program they wrote that makes it fail. Can you say bonehead? But the crowning glory is that their antivirus software goes to sleep, leaving me at least partly unprotected. I complained, got an automated response and then nothing, despite their promise to respond in 24 hours. I updated the software and it still happens. So this morning it went stupid on me, so I decided to switch back to McAfee and scrap the Symantec dud package. Another pet annoyance is system restarts. These rocket scientists designing their packages should be able to figure out how to get their product on and off my system without making me restart the thing. But I had to restart my computer after I uninstalled the Internet Security System software from Symantec. After that, their Protection Center stayed installed and I had to look at it in my system tray, with a red "X" on the icon, telling me that I was unprotected. Duh! I uninstalled your package, I know I am unprotected. I ended up uninstalling the SystemWorks program, too, to get rid of the nag-ware stuff. And THAT required ANOTHER RESTART. It is all I can do to tell this story and resist lacing the tale with profanities. Profane language is not my style, but this aggravation is driving me close. So I wasted 316 days of protection that I paid for to scrap the Symantec junk. While I may never be totally happy with any package, I can say that I installed and then updated the entire McAfee package with NO restart required. Someone is thinking the right way there. |
| Monday, December 10, 2007: Today I opened CustomSims3.com back up, and announced it on MTS2. Then I ended up spending most of the afternoon chasing bugs and updating the forum software. I don't want to make a career of managing a free website, but there needs to be at least some bridge or path available between now and when demos or the game start shipping. Otherwise, it was a cool, wet and foggy day here. |
| Friday, December 7, 2007: Almost a week went by without an entry here. This week I got the remainder of my hay delivered. I have been feeding the hay and placed the last of the old leftover bales out yesterday. I also saw the tree harvester yesterday and today, hauling two loads out total. So I have a couple of large piles of debris that needs burned as soon as the wind is calmed down enough. I have been spending a lot of time inside, with the cold weather, working on understanding the Torque Game Engine, and torqueScript. So far, I am not really having trouble with the scripting itself, as it is like C, with a few tweaks. I am trying to get a good grasp of how the data parts get put together, as experience has shown me that organizing your data is the prime key to coding any project in any language. You need to know what you have, and how you want to use it, and then you can write the code. |
| Saturday, December 1, 2007: We got part of out hay delivered today. This is good, because this morning I put two bales out for the cattle, leaving me with just four bales from last years purchase. The producer is only hauling five bales per trip, using a trailer that dumps the bales off. While that means the 100 bales I am buying will take twenty trips, the land the hay is coming from is on the same road I am on, although on the other side of the main (state) road. They had some other things that had to be done in the middle of the day, so they only got 35 bales delivered. |
Find older entries Here