Staying Under The Radar In Vista x64 - Trickier Than You'd Think

Recently I've been trying to replicate some of the things that I felt made my XP system pretty secure onto my Vista x64 laptop, and I finally got around to (attempting) installing Peergaurdian 2 when I ran into a snag. For anyone who reads this blog (ha) and doesn't know what that is, basically it protects your computer from companies like Mediasentry, you know, one of those watchdog groups that work for the likes of the RIAA and the MPAA, effectively blocking them from seeing your internet traffic based on what IP addresses they use, which is stored in 'blacklists' which are (I think) ultimately updated by the BISS community, who as far as I can gather from their website/forums are just a bunch of people on the net trying to make it secure for those people who want/need it.

So, back to the Peergaurdian, I tried installing it and basically got an error message involving the driver for some reason. So, being inquisitive as I am, I did some web sluething and found out what the deal was. Basically Microsoft, in an attempt to make the OS more 'secure' requires that all of the drivers to have to have a special code signature that is provided by them so that, presumably, some malicious driver doesn't get installed or some such, but I doubt that it actually protects you from much. Normally this wouldn't bother me too much, but given the fact that it has a yearly fee attached to it, I can't say I'm a fan. This is a big reason that Peergaurdian 2 doesn't work on vista, they can't afford the yearly licensing fee. So given that, I wanted to find out how to disable whatever part of the OS checks for the driver signature. The Phoenix labs guys (Peergaurdian creators) have a method of doing this or you can apparently disable the check in the advanced boot menu if you press F8 before windows starts loading, but the latter method is only for the one session so you would have to do this everytime you wanted to boot up Vista and use Peergaurdian.

Enter ReadyDriver Plus. Apparently someone made a program, a mod of the program ReadyDriver, which installs itself onto your hard drive and, as far as I can gather, alters the windows vista bootloader to disable the check for your drivers by default. I haven't used it yet, but if do I'll post about any unwanted side effects I notice after the install. I'm probably just going to use the PeerGaurdian method posted on their RC1 download page, but I just wanted to make note of this program in case there's another program which uses unsigned drivers.

Now that I had found all of this out, I realized that if I wanted to dual boot operating systems that I couldn't use that program and boot from GRUB, since it wouldn't use the vista boot loader at all. That means I would need to find a way to boot linux through the windows boot loader, and luckily I found a way here.

So I suppose to sum up this whole post, vista is a freaking hassle.

Racism in Ohio, Political Style

Holy motherless son of a crap, apparently Al-Jazeera was at a Palin/McCain rally in Ohio and they did a piece about, I don't know, racism? Basically this is all tied to the comment Obama made during the third debate where he said how people at McCain's rallies have been heard shouting things like "terrorist" and "kill him" after his name is mentioned and the lack of addressing this by the McCain campaign, and this video kinda corroborates that claim. Actually, it really corroborates that claim. I'm not deluded enough to think that this is how all people in Ohio or all conservatives or whatever think, but it confirms the existence of some extremely nasty racism in parts of America, and it makes me cringe to think that people have clung to such backwards beliefs for so long.

McDonalds, Apparently Not Really Even Food

So I was wandering the web like I always do when I came across the picture above. It's a picture of a McDonald's Hamburger that's 12 years old. I never really knew how little food there was in McDonald's cooking, because even if you left that in the fridge for that long something would have started to grow on in, something from the air, something from the water, something from the meat or bread, ANYTHING. Bacteria is freaking everywhere, and yet here this burger is, clean and neat just like the day it was bought. I'm a little frightened by this burger, despite the fact that I don't even eat the stuff.

1996 McDonalds Hamburger

My Bloody Valentine, Only Shallow

Okay, so I know I'm a little late to the party but holy crap is My Bloody Valentine freaking amazing. I finally watched this video and read their wikipedia article, and man their story and last album (not for long though!) are so insanely beautiful, I can't even believe that I claimed to like shoegazey music before getting into this band as hard as I am right now. The noise and soft vocals are such a great contrast yet they compliment each other, it's so great to listen to. Watch the video, see for yourself how great this band is.



My Bloody Valentine

If Charles Darwin Were Alive, I'd Give Him A Big'ol High Five

Well well well, look who's got egg on their face 150 years later. Well, I shouldn't poke fun, but I have to admit this is a very satisfying article. Essentially the article says that the Catholic Church now acknowledges Darwin's theory of evolution is compatible with the Bible. Score one for Biologists and people who are educated properly everywhere! An excerpt from the article:

The Catholic Church teaches "theistic evolution," a stand that accepts evolution as a scientific theory and sees no reason why God could not have used a natural evolutionary process in the forming of the human species.

It objects to using evolution as the basis for an atheist philosophy that denies God's existence or any divine role in creation. It also objects to using Genesis as a scientific text.

As Ravasi put it, creationism belongs to the "strictly theological sphere" and could not be used "ideologically in science."

Well, now I suppose Creationists have even more opposition to their views. Yah know, other than most of the rest of the global Christian population that thinks Creationism and Intelligent Design being taught in schools is pretty ridiculous.

Vatican: Guess what, Darwin? Evolution is OK

NOW, Thanks for actually keeping women's Interests in mind and not bein' fools about it

NOW, the National Organization for Women, endorsed Senator Barack Obama for president recently. I... I'm just so happy right now, as, irrational as it may seem, this feels to me to be an omen of sorts, that McCain's 'Palin boost' is really all hype and when you line the two candidates beside one another, the most intelligent people I've met or heard endorse Barack. It offers hope that the Democrats, despite their terrible missteps in the better part of the past decade, may just win back the executive and just maybe we actually may see changes in how the government is run, since I really doubt that the man who has gone back on some of his most fierce beliefs is going to resist his party's influence if he were president.

National Organization for Women PAC Endorses Obama-Biden

'Hillary's women' reject McCain's VP choice

And just for fun, let's link to a 'why Obama's better' story:
Why Obama's Health Plan Is Better

Joe Rogan, now officially the motherfucking man

Oh lordy lord, have I got an amazing blog post for you. It's from Joe Rogan's blog, and it's called "Porno Party," and yes, it's as hilarious and interesting as it sounds. Basically Joe doesn't really like going to parties because he rarely finds people who are interesting to talk to at them, but likes them for the crazy crap that could possibly happen and the stories he could tell because of them. So when he gets invited to the "Porno Party" he can't resist, especially because a group of his friends are going with him. When he arrives, he sees an empty parking lot and forty chairs filled with dudes watching a porn flick, which doesn't seem too interesting until the movie stops and a director steps out. Apparently this is a screening, and the flick that was just on was just a warm up or some such. So the movie starts, and it seems fairly run of the mill, until the actress (yes, the one getting rammed on screen) shows up. What happens next is rediculous, and has already made my day. Read the post to find out what happened, and then immediately thereafter laugh your ass off. Obviously this one isn't for the kiddies, but do yourself a favor and don't scroll to the bottom of the page until you read the whole story. It's like the icing on the freaking glorious cake.

"Porno Party"

Anatoli Bugorski, Fucking Invincible

Holy crap, I had no idea who this guy was until I read his wikipedia article:

"As a researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, Bugorski used to work with the largest Soviet particle accelerator, the synchrotron U-70. On July 13, 1978, Bugorski was checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment when an accident occurred due to failed safety mechanisms. Bugorski was leaning over the piece of equipment when he stuck his head in the part through which the proton beam was running. Reportedly, he saw a flash "brighter than a thousand suns", but did not feel any pain. The beam measured about 2000 gray when it entered Bugorski's skull, and about 3000 gray when it exited after colliding with the inside of his head."

If anyone ever made a crack about looking bad or something, he always had an ace in the hole! "Well let's see you have a proton beam shot through your skull and we'll see how good you look." That guy is just great if you ask me. I mean, how can you be a bad person if you've actually seen a proton?

Anatoli Bugorski

She & Him, "Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?"

Zooey Deschanel, I heart you SO hard.

Iraq cancels six no-bid oil contracts

This just makes me so happy;

"Iraq's oil minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, told reporters at an OPEC summit meeting in Vienna on Tuesday that talks with Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, Total, BP and several smaller companies for one-year deals, which were announced in June and subsequently delayed, had dragged on for so long that the companies could not now fulfill the work within that time frame. The companies confirmed on Wednesday that the deals had been canceled."

Hazaa for the Iraqis! Stand up for your country and don't be corrupt American puppets, otherwise we may have another Saddam in like 40 years. Seriously, I hope the new administration revises their foreign policy and just stops meddling in affairs which have nothing to do with us.

Iraq cancels six no-bid oil contracts

Just When I Thought The Internet Couldn't BLOW My Mind Once Again

www.cakefarts.com

BLOW YOUR FREAKING MIND

Male Homosexuality: Side Effect of Female Evolution?

So I personally love evolution, it was one of the first scientific concepts that fascinated me as a kid and it still intrigues me just as much to this day. There was one thing about the theory and human behavior that I never thought added up though, and that was homosexuality. Basically, if Evolution by means of natural selection was the way it all went down, then why wasn't homosexuality just rubbed out of behavior in general earlier on since homosexuals couldn't have kids? I never could answer that question, and it has bugged me and more than likely countless others for the longest time. That is, until I read this article reviewing a recent paper which was published on the matter.

The long and short of it is, male sexuality, at least according to the statistical analysis done in the paper, is linked to female relatives on the mother's side having a larger than average number of children. This is hypothesized to act as a buffer against extinction, since in the event of a dip in the population these women will just let their loins burst with children, possibly because their attraction towards men is stronger than the attraction felt by other women. An apparent byproduct of this is that males who are the offspring of these females will carry the same genetic trait, and thus be more inclined to fancy the boys rather than the gals. Taken from the article:

"...if the authors are correct, we're not really talking about genes for homosexuality. We're talking about genes for "androphilia," i.e., attraction to men. The importance of the genes lies in what they do not to men but to women, by increasing reproductive output so powerfully that these women compensate for the reduced output among their male relatives. You can't isolate gay men as a puzzle or problem anymore. You have to see them as part of a bigger, stronger, enduring phenomenon."

I love the fact that the whole experiment is based on analysis of breeding data that was already there for anyone to look at and the primary investigator just took a fresh approach to it. It actually kind of reminds me of Mendel's peas, you know that little experiment which is widely accepted as the forerunner to all of genetics? It makes me feel good that the model that he began is still being used to this day, albeit with slightly more advanced statistical techniques, but still, ya gotta love Mendel. Anywho, read the article, it's nice and it clears up (at least in my mind) the debate whether Homosexuality is genetic or cultural.


Sexual Antagonism - A genetic theory of homosexuality.

Al Leong, I Salute You

Do you remember that guy who was in all kinds of action movies in the past who was always a bad guy (except for his bitchin' sweet facial hair, there's no way a Fu Manchu can be evil) and always ended up dieing in the end? Well I do, and it always bugged me that I saw him in dozens of movies but never knew who he was, so I looked him up on IMDB, and then on wikipedia. Apparently his name is Al Leong and has a huge cult following exactly because of his showing up in crap loads of action movies and just exuding bad guyness (and of course, that glorious stash). And so Al Leong, I salute you.

Iraq was premeditated!? Cheney and Rove were pulling the strings!? *GASP*

2004 CBS 60 Minutes Interview:

Scott McClellan, I owe you a beer

This guy's a class act in my book. This man was a part of the Bush administration and was told to tell the American people everything that the administration wanted them to know, and when he either found out or simply suspected that the administration wasn't on the level he did something about it. He wrote a book about his experiences in the administration, pointing out all of his suspicions and the questionable circumstances he witnessed as the White House press secretary and then talked about it in front of a Congressional committee, something that no senior level official in the Bush Administration has been willing to do and for which McClellan is taking all kinds of flack and criticism. So good for you, Mr. McClellan, for standing up for what you believe and speaking up in front of all of your former coworkers and friends, you're a real patriot.

I just hope that the talk of impeachment I saw from Congressman Wexler in the video linked below from the post by The Raw Story goes somewhere and isn't simply something that becomes empty rhetoric that never sees the House floor. Get your head out of your ass Pelosi and friends and realize that impeaching Bush would be one of the best moves the Democrats could make, as well as punishing a clearly corrupt and incompetant executive leadership that needs to be punished in order for this to never happen again.


Dem Rep. calls for impeachment at McClellan testimony: video

Quite Possibly The Best NERF Office War Ever

Good god man, this is the office war to end all office wars. With the largest array of NERF guns I've ever seen anywhere outside of a toy store, this is packed with foam dart pwnage and is so freaking awesome.


http://view.break.com/521743 - Watch more free videos

Deals With Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back

Image taken from original New York Times Article

Whooo, don't you love when the crazy conspiracy theorists are right for a change? I'm sure I'm the only blogger covering this (har har) but the New York Times is running a story about how the four major players in the oil industry which were in Iraq before Saddam Hussein nationalized oil (Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, and BP) along with a handful of other American oil companies are getting no-bid contracts (though only 1 or 2 years long) to start oil production in Iraq:

'Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.'

Later on is my favorite part of the article though:

'The first oil contracts for the majors in Iraq are exceptional for the oil industry.

They include a provision that could allow the companies to reap large profits at today’s prices: the ministry and companies are negotiating payment in oil rather than cash.

“These are not actually service contracts,” Ms. Benali said. “They were designed to circumvent the legislative stalemate” and bring Western companies with experience managing large projects into Iraq before the passage of the oil law.

A clause in the draft contracts would allow the companies to match bids from competing companies to retain the work once it is opened to bidding, according to the Iraq country manager for a major oil company who did not consent to be cited publicly discussing the terms.'

This is just great, another way for the US government to hurt our reputation internationally both in terms of business practices, ethics, and energy consumption, and the icing on the cake is that people have been saying this for years, everyone kinda shrugging them off as crazies without proof, and then BAM, here it all is in its terrible terrible glory. Icing on the freaking cake. Enjoy future me, enjoy:

Deals With Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back

Possibly the best use of censor bars ever

THE BPA 'TOE JAM' FEAT. DAVID BYRNE & DIZZEE RASCAL

Slap Fight Game

Oh my God I've played this game for two minutes and it's already one of the most hilariously awesome things I've seen all week. It's basically a fighting game where all that happens is women slap each other. I absofreakinglutely love it. Below is a screen from the game. Those eyes man, those eyes.

http://nigoro.jp/game/rosecamellia/rosecamellia.php

Death From Above 1979 On Conan

I was just browsing the interwebs when I remembered the day I fell in love with Conan O'Brien's drummer Max Weinberg, and it's during this performance. Freaking great stuff, and it won Mr. Weinberg the utmost respect in me ol' noggin. Hats off to you sir.


Death From Above 1979

An Omen! Hopefully

So future me, here's the skinny on a dream i just had. Yes, I know, the dream journal thing is just sooo interesting, but bare with me. The setting is a little vague, because I'm the me of right now, but the setting is from the me of the past, around high schoolish. I walk with an enormous amount of people who I don't know into a really huge gimnaysyum that's been decorated with photos taken from the project we're supposed to be working on (it's some sort of field trip/colloquium class hybrid) or studying or some such, and it's a social experiment between groups of 18+ girls and 18+ guys. Also they're naked for some reason, and the study revolves around this fact somehow. Something about the social dynamics of naked chicks in a collosal hot tub (predictable college graduate dream eh?). I didn't really pay attention to the guys part of the social experiment (much to the dismay of the school field trip supervisors, for some reason), so I can't really elaborate on it.

Anywho I begin looking around the room for a familiar face when i spot some peoples from my high school across the room and I wave and approach them. They're all hanging out in a room that's separated from the rest of the high schools and once I get into the room I discover it's actually some sort of a bus or something, because when I walk in we're obviously moving inside of this little box with a few benches and desks inside it. In this bus are three of my old high school buddies, Joey C, Patrice, and Liz (I think that was her name, I'm so bad with names) but they're not the versions of those people I know right now, they're the versions I knew in high school. Apparently they didn't think the field trip project was interesting enough so I joined them and we just made up some bull shit answers for the credit, as is the cutsom amongst high schoolers, and ditched to hang out in some random place. I had no idea we were supposed to have answered any questions at all, but this apparently doesn't matter that much.

Joey (from the past) asks me (of the now) how my job hunt had been going, and I told him that I didn't get the job at Washington University (*sigh*) but I did get the job at UIC, and his immediate response wasn't some kind of simpathy for me and my sadness or anything, it was instead jubilation that I'd be in Chicago for a year and that I should live with the three of them so that we could all "play." I'm not exactly sure what that meant, but the next thing I know I'm actually decent at playing on my drum kit and we're in their idealized college studio appartment jamming out. The place is in a very colorful part of Chicago where there's plently to do and immigrants everywhere, and we all lived like a little family with four odly positioned bunk beds and murals and posters covering wth walls. I was having the time of my life, I was happy. Then i woke up. So Mr. Future me, what do you make of that?

Personally I hope it means that living in Chicago will mean that I'll actually have a good year filled with hanging out with my friends and not living with my parents and basically being miserable. Also I should give Joey a call, I haven't seen that kid in ages.

John Mcain Didn't Used to Scare Me

So now that the tickets for the two parties of the great two party government that is the US government have been decided (D-Obama, R-Mcain, future me) Mcain, who I used to really like maybe ten years ago (really I had no idea who he was at the time, I just read about and heard some great things he did way back when) but now that I keep reading his voting record for the past few years has been unsettlingly in line with Bush's every desire, that he apparently doesn't know how to use a computer, and that American troops don't really need to leave Iraq, I have some pretty big doubts about him and whether or not his administration would bring this country back fromt he brink of, well I suppose disaster is too strong a term, but what would you call it when going in the price of oil was $8 a barrel and now it's something around $135 a barrel?

Well rest assured future me, this little bit of information scared the living crap out of me when i read it and put Mcain in a very dark political place in the ol' noggin. Now given it's fair to say that this was still earlier in the Bush administration when Mcain said those thigns and he may not have known everything that had been going on and that he said those things when the Bush administration's approval ratings were at least reasonably high, but still. If there's any chance at all that vice president Cheney (who I like to call one of the puppet masters) will be involved in the next presidential administration my insides will just start shrivelling up and go cold. I mean this current administration has already cost me and my entire generation more than anyone could have ever thought possible (who do you think is going to pay for this war, the baby boomers?) but I'm also probably going to have to foot the bill for the leagues of baby boomers that will be retiring during my lifetime and wanting social security checks kust like their parents got when they retired. Seriously, if Cheney still has a political future that isn't all shrouded in shadows and secrecy but is instead left out on a platter for the most influential groups to claw at I don't know what I'd do, future me. Hey though, if the next administration needs more money to fuel some other damned fool idea they can always take money out of education, right?

Another Theory

Fox News Producer Ambushes Bill Moyers; Gets Taste Of His Own Medicine

I love this. Found at crooksandliars.com, Bill Moyers was ambushed by a producer from the Bill O'Reilly (Porter Barry) show for what appeared to be an attack piece asking him why he would not appear on O'Reilly's show, but he basically got served responsible journalism style. It's a great little video belittling FOX, and I love it. Enjoy future me, enjoy.

Developmental Aid Workers Are Killing Africa

Hey so over at Spiegel Online someone thinks that developmental aid workers are really why Africa has starving people, and his argument for why that is makes a lot of sense. Here's a snippet:

The aid workers are drawn to the arid lands, where the poor live and the help is urgently needed. Under normal circumstances, such areas don't contain many starving people because they are thinly populated. In the Sahara, for example, hunger emergencies are comparatively insignificant. But in northern Kenya, and particularly in the region's bordering desert land, such as the Sahel, they happen all the time.

And that's why the aid workers dig wells there to provide the inhabitants with clean drinking water. Soon enough, there's a downright crush around the well. Then, more and more cattle drivers and more and more nomadic shepherds bring their wards to the well. And these herds -- and especially the goats -- eat everything up. And, there, where you used to have someone coming by only rarely, a dusty little village shoots up, and then a little city. And, now, more and more aid workers are necessary to feed all the people who settle around the well and the feeding stations. Pretty soon, nothing can happen without aid. The area becomes hopelessly over-populated, and there is no way out of the dilemma in sight.

He goes on to mention that corrupt politicians, rather than building infrastructure for transportation of food and services rely on foreign aid to feed their people and blow the money either on themselves or on big flashy capitols and things that the state overall really doesn't need. Why do yourself what you can get for free eh? Read the whole article, it's relatively short and the guy seems to have looked at the situation pretty thoroughly.

Developmental Aid Workers Are Killing Africa

Mission Statement

Before this post I had tried doing various blogs that had a specific audience in mind and a specific kind of genre of blog in mind, and I thought that this kind of classification would make it easier to get myself to write something, anything, just because I want to keep writing and not lose all of those skills I picked up writing paper after paper in college. I tried the personal blog where I became a whiny high school student on the internet venting about their "feelings" and what not, I did the music blog thing but figured there was already enough pretension in the world, so now, I figure I'll just write to a completely new audience; me. Specifically future me. This will be like an electronic journal where forty years from now I'll be looking back and I'll see that I was into this movement or this piece of music or whatever I want to write about when I was just a young whipper snapper, because frankly writing to an audience outside of yourself when you don't lead an interesting life or don't really have an expertise in anything (at least to any practical degree) is just too much useless work, and I really don't care about entertaining other people right now. So, as of this post, I begin the great 'I don't give a crap about your opinion internet' experiment. Not that you ever write back anyway. Jerk.