Saturday, March 17, 2007

Things That Must Go

Recently, I have have been busy buying a house. Along with buying a house are certain joys like getting to know the neighbors (important if you trust your home security to them), finding out where we go to church, and purchasing supplies to do modest home improvements. In my travels as of late, I have come across some startling things that I think must really be put out to pasture and never mentioned again. And now, I present a list of these annoyances for your viewing pleasure:

1. Dub+ sized rims on trucks and SUVs. What is up with a Chevy Tahoe and 26" rims with rubber bands for tires? That completely renders the SUV very un-SUV-ish.
2. People who drive with their high beam headlights on to compensate for a burned out low beam light. Come on, folks, they're not there as spare headlights. Get the freaking thing fixed!
3. Hardware stores the size of an airport. I mean, I know it's cool to be able to find just about anything under the sun there, but I hate having to use a GPS to get my bearings.
4. Unsecured wireless networks. I met my neighbors' wireless networks before I met them.
5. Construction on every single level crossing from Ogden to Nephi. Do you know how difficult it is to get to and from work?!
6. People who get into an accident during rush-hour traffic on HWY 89. Because of some jerk in a Mustang, it took me an hour and eight minutes to get from work in Kaysville to my home in Ogden the other day.
7. Rocky Anderson. He's like Tejano music: every time he opens his mouth, brain cells die and I feel stupider.
8. Comcast's willingness to connect a computer directly to a cable modem. Hello! Have you never heard of security?! That's the most dangerous way to connect a computer to the Internet because that computer has a publicly accessible IP address. Just don't do it.
9. People not watching out for motorcycles. Hey, we can use the road the same as the cars and trucks. So please, look out for motorcycles. ;)
10. Jerks who get into a turn lane behind you and then speed up and pass you. When traffic is moving along smoothly, that's just rude. I had some dude do that to me in his High and Mighty (SUV) and it made it scary for me to get into the turn lane as well.

Anyhow, I kind of had to stretch for some of those, but they are all things that irritate me. There are, however, some things that are really cool lately. For one, have you seen the late models of Yamaha Star Motorcycles? Oh, baby! Those things are awesome! And the new Harley Davidsons are beautiful, as always. :) Cadillac has some nice offerings, as does Saturn. Computers are getting cool again with multi-core machines. I'm excited about that. However, how well do most modern applications take advantage of multi-core? That remains to be discovered. I did get my domain name registered and I'm now hosting a real website. :) That's exciting news. GoDaddy is offering domain names for about $9 per year so I jumped on it. I have the server, they have the domain name.

So, with that, I will leave you and put myself in bed. It's friggen late. :)

Random thing to remember: When mounting a CD-ROM in a Linux box, it is often required to do it manually as follows

mount /mnt/cdrom

Of course, when you're done using the CD-ROM, you must unmount it:

umount /mnt/cdrom

Just in case y'all are wondering.