Rangermatt's Weblog

One Tough Mother: Columbia’s Boyle Foils Home Invader

rangermatt — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 20:55:14 +0000

One Tough Mother: Columbia’s Boyle Foils Home Invader – Trailspace.com via One Tough Mother: Columbia’s Boyle Foils Home Invader – Trailspace.com.

Interesting read, especially since she can keep her sense of humour when the plice do arrive. I wonder how different business would be in America if all CEO’s had this level of “moxie”?

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Thoughts of the day

rangermatt — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:41:16 +0000

Just a quick post with some of today’s thoughts that have been tempered by my day today. Apologies to anyone that has posted these thoughts in any form or fashion:

On Travelling:
The TSA rulebook for railroad security isn’t available yet as they haven’t finished translating it from the original German.

On Following Instructions:
If you put a large switch in a cave somewhere with a sign on it saying “END OF THE WORLD SWITCH. DO NOT TOUCH!”, the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.

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How to fix American Politics (Start with Congress)

rangermatt — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 03:19:39 +0000

Regardless of which party you ascribe to, you have to admit, Prof. Dr. Lessig has a point here. Until the money is out of our politics, nothing will change. Please also read his article over at The Nation where the details about why this pernicious practice of both sides poses such a threat to our republic and why there is so great a need for this type of reform.

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Ok, this is getting to be annoying

rangermatt — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 09:58:23 +0000

Well, I just had a wonderful experience with the desktop, where I “lost” just about everything I had on it. Good thing: I had most of the data on a different drive. So now I’m re-installing the operating system, (and this time I’m putting the home directory on the 1/2 Tb drive) and will have to try to recover everything else that I’ve got to put back on there. I’m not too sure that some of this isn’t being caused by hardware. I’ve noticed that I’m seeing a lot of what I can only really describe as “pixel rot” where black and dark colors seems to fade out to random colored bits on the screen. Maybe it’s just time to open the case and vacuum out the computer again. We’ll see how this one turns out.

Time to update

rangermatt — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 00:46:24 +0000

I know the updates haven’t been coming quite as regularly as I would have hoped for, but I’ve been on call this week, which has definitely cut into my posting time. It’s always a little strange, when I get the pager, it seems that the calls come in groups. I can go three days with nothing, then it just kind’a hits all at once. If all goes well, I’ll be able to start putting up a real post again here in the next few days. That is, if I manage to finally get my house-cleaning done.

Posted in Uncategorized

Well, that explains some things

rangermatt — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 01:32:26 +0000

I was wondering why my Starbucks card stopped working, but I guess it just died early. The account stuff shows that its valid until today. I normally would have assumed that meant that it would stop working after midnight, but I guess not. The big thing that I’m wondering about now is just how long it’ll take them to send me the new “Gold Level” card that is to replacing it. I kinda hate that, since I really like the simple look of the current black cards. Oh well, all good things must end, I suppose.

Posted in Uncategorized

Behold, it works.

rangermatt — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 02:41:32 +0000

Ok, as you could probably tell from the last post, I was getting a little frustrated by the Windows 7 Starter Edition (should be Windows 7 We’ll-Crap-All-Over-Everything-You-Were-Used-To Edition) and was debating about what to do. Well, I got the Ubuntu Netbook Remix installed, it’s running, and I’m even posting this little note using the new BloGTK 2.0 from said netbook. I’m actually pretty happy with it so far. I do need to get all of the different hotkeys working again (especially the one to disable the touchpad) but that will come as I get everything up and running like I want. The best part so far, I HAVE MY OWN BACKGROUND on my desktop. Too bad, too. The netbook was poised to be the only windows-based machine I had. Now, the XBox is it. Too bad, really.

Well, this is a stupid idea…

rangermatt — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 04:11:43 +0000

Ok, so I sat down to put a different background image on my new netbook because I’m really tired of the really bad looking blue background with the stupid blue widows logo. I found the image I wanted to use, right clicked, and found that there’s not a set as background option. Ok, no problem, went into the settings for the desktop, and there’s not a choice there either. Hmm. Time to look deeper (Google is your friend) and managed to get to the Microsoft Answers website. “This is by design.” Windows 7 Starter was designed for low-powered machines, so they decided to block that “feature” until you buy the higher package. Ummmm, WTF,O? My 1Ghz, 2Gb RAM netbook isn’t powerful enough to handle a different bloody background image? This is making the decision to dump anything produced by Microsoft become an easier choice to make every time I try to do something I used to be able to do anytime I wanted. Right now, in fact, Ubuntu Netbook Remix is downloading on the desktop and USB drive is waiting to get the ISO file so I can test and then maybe blow away this bloated, crippled, POS-OS.

Hello world!

rangermatt — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 21:57:39 +0000

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!