Conference Time!!!

So I just spent the past two days at a PABUG conference in the Harrisburg PA area. For those that don't know, PABUG is Pennsylvania Banner Users Group. It's a group of universities in Pennsylvania and around the state of PA that use the Sungard's Banner software.

The first day wasn't bad on Monday. I went thinking the morning would be more interesting then the afternoon and that turned out to be the exact opposite. Tuesday turned out to be a more techy type day. I spent a lot of time hearing talks on Oracle's Application Express.

The very last session of the conference was a bit odd. Apparently Sungarde is moving in a Java/Adobe Flex path for their Banner product. I wasn't aware of it for the most part till that session. Everyone was asking about APEX and talking about what it could do for them. Then the Sungarde people kinda just brushed it off. Atleast that is how it seemed to me.

Ah well... it was a good conference anyway.

Mars needs women... and men!

Cause now you can get a drink it looks like if you go to Mars. Huge glaciers of pure water ice are just under the surface of Mars even away from the poles. Some over 3 times the size of LA and a half a mile thick. Check it out here!

Personal Goals

Today I reached a personal goal of mine. At the start of 2008 I set a specific goal to reach in order to start seriously looking for a house of my own in 2009. That goal is met and now I'm going to start really looking in to buying a new house of my own.

I'll keep this simple...

Lunch and Work

So it's lunch time at work and I'm reading Slashdot. And I read a story about the US Election and see the old speech posted that Howard Beale made once. So I thought, what if I WoW'ized it? Well...

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's an expansion. Everybody's out of a raid or scared of losing their raid position. The gold buys a silver's worth; guild banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a [Dwarven Handcannon] under the counter; l33t sp34k punks are running wild in the street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.

We know the potions are unfit to use more than once a fight and our food is unfit to buff. And we sit watching our ThreatMeters while some stats forcaster tells us that today we had fifteen low DPS moments and sixty-three over healing casts, as if that's the way it's supposed to be!

We all know things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're crazier than Yun’s prices on the AH!

It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in Shattrath, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our BGs. Let me have my [Arcanite Reaper] and my [Amani Bear Mount] and my [Armored PVP Drake], and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."

Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.

I want you to get mad!

I don't want you to forum protest. I don't want you to riot as a naked gnome on some server. I don't want you to write to your forum moderator, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the expansion and the consumable inflation and the Scourge and the “Slap in the Face Nerfs!”

All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.

You've gotta say, "I'm a WoW Player, goddammit! My subscription has value!"

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs (If you play Horde you shouldn't have them in the first place, they're piled up on the Bulwark!). I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it (Not click on the damn thing!), and stick your head out and /yell,


"I'm as mad as hell; and I'm not going to take this anymore!!"

Halloween Costumes

Friend of mine just sent me a YouTube of some kids Mech costume. Take a look here. :)

OS Upgrades...

A little while ago I bought a second hard drive for my desktop computer. I decided to give the Ubuntu OS a try on that system, more specifically the Kubuntu derivative.

For the most part the experience has been wonderful when I booted over there. The operating system boots way faster then Microsoft's Windows Vista and just seems to make better use of my systems resources over all (IE: No disk thrashing/taking forever to load things). I only run one anti-virus on my Window drive and don't load very many things at all during startup. I did check Vista's MSCONFIG to be sure.

Out of the box with Windows you get an Operating System, Media Player, Web Browser, email client, and a basic paint tool and some other things. With Ubuntu I got all that plus a full office package, photoshop like paint program, and access to tons of games. Plus I also got access to Wine which lets me run some Windows programs in Linux w/out Windows.

There thats my Linux sales pitch, now for what happened to me last night. Yesterday the new version of Ubuntu came out (8.10 I believe). You can either download the CD, buy it, or request a free copy. Unlike Windows, I found a nifty feature that let me upgrade the OS directly over the internet.

So I started the upgrade process and by morning my Kubuntu 8.0.3 install turned in to a Kubuntu 8.10 install. Everything appears to be working, I found no compatability issues unlike with what I found when I went from XP to Vista. The operating system did its job and upgraded the necessary packages to keep my system performing without a hitch.

With the updated Kubuntu I got the newest version of KDE desktop. Oddly enough the new KDE desktop looks a lot like the new Windows 7.0 screenies I saw on some news sites. I noticed the system tray on the new Windows 7.0 screenies reminded me of my Linux desktop with how some of the icons looked Linux'y and were on a Vista like interface. The only difference is the Linux version doesn't make my system choke trying to load different things or search.

Maybe Microsoft will get their OS to the point where it does things without spinning drives like crazy and bugging users with the (C)ancel or (A)llow question all the time some day. :P