The Wrath of Kuma

I was eating at Kuma's corner with three friends, and I was bothered in a way I haven't been in some time. Enough to actually write in this thing about it, since I'm not conceded enough to complain to a friend about my own hangups (at least this one). I hadn't eaten, I was a bit sloshed, and I was served last. A drink I ordered had taken an excessive amount of time, and I bitchily asked our waitress where my drink was. She said she was waiting on the bartender, bitched her out, then gave me my drink.

But when she gave me my drink, it came with a look and a gesture that I've never experienced and hope to never again. It was her dropping the beer onto the table, sliding it towards me, and giving me the most chilling look I've not seen in quite a long time. It was her discarding me as a person, saying nothing but "you have wronged me and I no longer consider you in any way." It was incredibly sincere, I've not seen such an honest expression of emotion in months and it chilled me to the bone. Simply put, I've never been discarded before. Even by an acquaintance, no one has rejected me so completely.

For the rest of the night it was the characteristic cold shoulder 'I am a black hole of scorn' type of service from her. When she eventually looked at me I called her over and apologized for being a bitch to her, but damage done. I'm a big fat pansy for feeling this terrible over a look, but most of the time people are a little two faced... trying to wear a mask, trying to hide one emotion with another, trying to give you what you want to hear and see, but not her. It was pure contempt, unfiltered and unmuddled.

Fascinating.

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.

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

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

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.