99 problems

 

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Cheap Chinese netbooks: THE REVIEW
My friend Trey was looking for a netbook for his wife this Christmas. It needed to be as cheap as possible (her restriction, not his) - she actually wanted "a $150 netbook", which wasn't really possible. So, I ended up hitting eBay and discovering that it was FLOODED with interesting Chinese-manufacture no-name netbooks.

After pointing Trey at the most promising looking vendor (and promising to put a clean install of Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it once it arrived), he managed to score a "Tengjun Mini 1006" for $243 including shipping. (For reference, that's at least $100 less than a Dell Mini 10v - my personal favorite netbook - and $38 or so cheaper than Wal-Mart's price for an Acer netbook.) I was itching to get my hands on that thing to play with it! Today, it finally got here.



( screenshots and review details and INEXPLICABLE CHINESENESS inside )

All in all, at $243 this thing is neither a terrible buy nor a great buy. Wal-Mart is selling Acer netbooks for $280, so basically you're trading away a fanless heatsink setup and a legit copy of Windows (which only matters if you planned to run Windows in the first place) for $37 savings. That's if you're shopping the cheap end to begin with, of course; if you want the best then you're probably looking at a Dell Mini 10v with upgrade to SSD and - unfortunately - aftermarket upgrade from the Dell wLAN to an Intel 5300 half-height, for more like $450 by the time you're done.
 

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only two ways to stand out

Her: Did you see [particular person in crowded area]?
Me: Doesn't ring a bell.
Her: I'm talking about the one [add details].
Me: Sorry, don't think so.
Her: But they really [more details], almost like [exaggerated depiction].
Me: Honey, you pay a LOT more attention to individual people in crowded areas than I do. In general, if it doesn't look like it needs fighting or wants fucking, I probably didn't notice it.

I might be a Neanderthal, but at least I'm in touch with who I am, right?
 

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How does this even happen?
$customer has some of those god awful "control panel" servers... not Plesk, but the same concept. You get the idea. $vendor is forcing him to do a migration, because they no longer support FreeBSD, so they want him to move to CentOS. $customer contracts with $vendor to maintain these things... sorta, mostly, except he's still responsible for maintaining the actual servers. Confused yet? Me too.

( don't click if you don't know or care what SQL is )
 
Current Mood: boggled

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Jane pic du jour
Going back through the metric ton of Jane pics in my camera, this is one of my favorites. She was just under 4 months old when it was taken.



Clickable if you want to embiggenate it.
 
Current Mood: happy

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freak of culture like a white girl with cornrows
Last night I dreamed that I was a teenager again, and that I had an older brother. We were on some kind of screwy football team in high school, with a coach who kept advising us to bang all the (female) reporters who apparently wanted to interview us for the local papers. They were real sluts, and, apparently, wanted some kind of scoop badly enough to be perfectly willing to fuck their way through as many high school football players as necessary along the way.

Also, we were living with grandparents who turned out to be undead. They were feeding us human flesh to turn us into ghouls. And, apparently, the grandparents were going to kill us before the transformation was complete, and feed on us - only I ran away and turned myself "all the way" undead first. By RIPPING OFF ALL MY REMAINING LIVING FLESH. Ha ha, creepy undead grandparents, I win! I think.

I have got to find out what the hell the wife is putting in my drinks. And ask for more of it.

 
Current Mood: baffled
Current Music: Atmosphere - That's Not Beef, It's Pork

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a freak of culture, like a white girl with cornrows
So, the wife and I came home with another box of hand-me-down baby clothes, sized six months bigger than the last time.

Janis's role in this is to sift through the hand-me-downs and sort them into piles of "wrong size", "too stained", "nothing irrevocably wrong with these", and "hey I kinda like this one." My job is to look on, horrified, and advocate burning the entire lot of them.

One of the little 6-month size shirts this go-round had paired strawberries over the left breast, captioned "Berries" in large cursive text underneath them. Y'know, just in case some onlooker is simultaneously incapable of identifying a strawberry yet capable of reading English.

Wife: This one?
Me: Strawberry, strawberry was the neighborhood ho.
Wife: I don't know why they have to put writing on these.
Me: Yo E, she's a berry, let's run a train / Man, I wouldn't touch that bitch / Me neither, ho go home and wash out your beaver.
Wife: Well, I guess that's a "no" then.

I guess we can add "doesn't listen to NWA" to "has never seen the internet" when listing the qualities of people who make infant clothing.
 

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Dell Mini 10v - first impressions
I recently realized that I no longer needed a "full-scale" notebook, and that since netbooks were so inexpensive, I could actually make money selling my Inspiron 6400 and buying a Dell Mini 10v to replace it. So I did that. Much like the Inspiron it replaced, I did pimp out the 10v a bit over baseline - upgraded to Dell's 16GB solid state drive, upgraded the wireless, and upgraded the battery (from 3-cell to 6-cell).

I was never a big fan of the netbook (or, formerly, "subnotebook") form factor - I thought that it sacrificed too much usability for the sake of "being tiny and cute" - but given that I no longer really needed a desktop replacement to go on long trips with me, and given the much lower cost, the netbook was suddenly attractive. For occasional, relatively brief use doing network testing, it's hard to beat.

( more detail behind the cut )
 

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Baby's First Modeling Gig
OK, OK, so we were paid in merchandise and it's just for this chick's Etsy store... but hey, there was a professional photographer shooting it.



This one is by far my favorite... Jane kicking it Roaring Twenties style with a crazy giant-flower-adorned lace knit headband. I suspect we are going to be seeing that expression A LOT. In Janis' words, "that's the Daddy look."

( more pics under the cut )

pics are clickable, if you want to see them in their original ginormous glory.
 
 
Current Mood: happy

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They hate our freedom^H^H^H^H^H^H^H undeclared war
Maybe, just maybe, "they" don't really hate our freedom. Maybe "they" actually hate the way we attack civilian targets inside the borders of countries with whom we are not at war. I mean, it's just a thought. When you're making the news for sending in Predator unmanned attack drones to volley missiles into the funeral of a bunch of people who were killed by - you guessed it, attack by Predator unmanned attack drones, maybe that might piss the survivors and the neighbors off a little more than your "freedom"?

Seriously, why isn't this getting more news coverage? Let me recap:

• We have not declared war on Pakistan


• We are using military hardware to attack targets within Pakistan's borders


• We are attacking civilian targets within Pakistan's borders


• WE HAVEN'T EVEN DECLARED WAR!

Why the hell isn't this raising red flags all over the country? I mean, for crying out loud, have you ever watched a Western? The guys who ride by the ranch firing their guns into it through the walls at midnight are not the heroes of the piece.

I'm really not coming at this from the perspective of a fainting dove: I know the place is a goddamn mess, and there's a lot of Taliban in there. But this just isn't the right way to go about... whatever the hell it is we're trying to accomplish. We should either be getting openly and officially invited in by the Pakistani government, declaring war and doing it our way, or butting the hell out. "Just sorta sending in drones to attack civilian targets with HE missiles", with or without the "tacit" support of the Pakistani government - and with increasingly strident protests from Pakistani civilians - is a direct slap in the face of everything this country is SUPPOSED to be for.
 

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