wherever

California information for you. Flight out on Thursday was uneventful. United Airlines has a great way to check yourself in at the airport. They use a kiosk where you swipe your credit card, then bam, you are checked in. Nice. Way better than having to wait in a long line to talk to a crabby ticket agent, or whatever their PC title is. Anyway, it was nice to not have to wait in line forever.

John Wayne airport was pretty nice, kind of hard to tell late at night. Just another airport I guess. One thing that I did notice were the cars in the parking garage were nice and clean. No rust or anything like that. Weird. Anyway, it was a fun trip overall.

Disneyland was mediocre in comparison to other amusement parks of today. The Indiana Jones ride was pretty awesome, line was definitely the longest for that ride. Anyway, maybe I am just getting old, but amusement parks are a once a year kind of thing for me anymore.

Another really cool place in California, is the In-N-Out Burger. The food was pretty good for fast food, but the real kicker is their secret menu. Check out genexs In-N-Out Burger secret menu. I wish that I had this secret menu before I went, but it is good to get the word out anyway. I was lucky enough to have my sister tell me about the monster style burger, definitely very good. I wonder what their training program is like at the In-N-Out Burger? It must be cool to be taught all of those hidden menu options. Definitely a great way to bag a girl. Hey, wanna know the secret menu items for the In-N-Out? Nice.

I remember typing an update in Cali, but its not on the site. Weird. Anyway, it would have screwed me up since I keep a local copy of this page on my pc, so I would have had to update that file as well. In all honesty, it would have taken me less time than it took to write this stupid paragraph.

I suppose that I should talk about the trip and all of that good stuff. Cali was definitely a good time. We definitely had some California style food, very interesting. It is interesting in that they create their own version of food. Not sure if this is the same everywhere, but anyway. I will write more on Cali tomorrow. I would like to take this time to give a big shout out to my gurl, KT. I miss her. Anyway, California was interesting, and kind of refreshing to see a new way of life.

Have you ever noticed that any kind of transportation just sucks. Trains, planes, cars, they all suck. Too many cars, trains out of money, planes never on time. When a plane is late, it is a huge deal, often throwing your entire itinerary out the window. Cars are not that huge of a deal since you are in control, but planes are totally out of ones control. All that anyone can do is roll with the punches.

Have you ever wanted the ability to have virtual control over your pc? There is a product out there called PC Anywhere. The program is way too bulky and beauracratic, much like the government. There is a better product called VNC. Real small and simple to setup. Just start the VNC on the main PC as a client. Install and RUN the VNC on the clones as servers. Some might think this is backwards, but the clones are serving the information. Shut up. It works.

NOTE TO SELF: Make the site look better.

Today is the big flight day, how exciting. Flying on United both ways. I hear that United has a kiosk for e-ticket travellers such as myself. Definitely going to give that a whirl this evening.

Have you ever wondered why the traffic in the summer is so bad? I sure do. I understand the traffic increase at night or on weekends, but traffic sucks all the time during the summer. I wonder if people do not work during the summer. I know that people who work in the travel arranging have a slow time because those that want to travel this summer have booked with them last winter. Odd isnt it?

NOTE TO SELF: Create section on the site to list PC components in use.

Have been thinking about how the internet works. It is really quite amazing to see all the “stuff” out there. But, even a PDF document can take up to a minute to download on a network connection. Times to come will be even more amazing, I hope. Another really cool thing on the internet is Mapquest. What a great feature! Custom driving directions from your location to your intended destination. Turn here, turn there, its great. When it works properly of course. As with anything in this world, it is not error free. Not much you can do, but to always carry a road atlas. Definitely a life saver, although not error free itself, but can usually lead you in the right direction.

Distributed.net stats are coming back online again. Good thing, they have been down for a while. Although I do not actively particiapte in d.net anymore, I still am quite interested in the concept of distributed computing. The computing power working on that project right now is simply amazing. The best part of d.net is the use of extra CPU cycles that would otherwise be wasted. Can you imagine the endless loss of computing cycles that goes on each day.

Currently, I am active in the SETI project, member of TeAm AnandTech. You can check out my SETI stats if you like, not very impressive at all. The only drawback of the client is that it bogs down the machine its running on. This would be negated if the screensaver was used. However, the command client is by far more efficient in completing work units. The price one pays for that extra bit of computing power dedicated to SETI.

Another really cool and innovative thing that SETI die-hards do is create SETI farms or nodes. These nodes can be created with as little hardware as a motherboard, network card, memory, CPU, and power supply. With todays motherboards, they contain integrated features, such as video, audio, and LAN. One may lose a bit of performance with this type of chipset, but the space savings, and simplicity, allow this to be an effective solution. A server will send a boot command to the node to start and run a ramdisk. Thus, no need for an expensive physical hard drive.

Going to be doing a bit of travelling this weekend. Going to sunny Cali. Should be a good time. I would post my flight information, but what is the point? I know when I am supposed to be there, do you?

NOTE TO SELF: Include section on BTE. Also find great animated GIFs.

Link of the day: SETI farms

Found a site dedicated to the rescue of Golden Retrievers in the Chicago area. I have always loved the golden retrievers. I have not had the pleasure of having a golden retriever. But, I do have a beagle. Check out the little buddys page. I know that the page is lacking in content, but version 2.0 is in the works. One thing I hate having to deal with when looking at dogs is this. If you “relinquish” your dog, then why the hell did you get the thing in the first place? I understand that living situations change, but the whole idea about having a pet is to make it a member of the family. That pet is now going to be a member of your family for its entire life. To give up such a member is the equivalent of abandoning your kid(s)/spouse. I do not even want to explore puppy mills and the like. That being said, might have to create a section on the links page to include worthwhile dog rescue societies.

For those looking to add some cool colors to your web site. If you would also like such a listing, then here you go.

Frames in web pages has also become a necessary issue. If you notice, the current pages at jetskr9.com use tables to separate the links on the left of the page from the actual content of the site. Sucky content, but content nonetheless. I think that frames would be more appropriate in this application. From current experience, it sucks to have to update all of my pages whenever links are removed/added/moved.

Have you ever taken any of the NETg courses? I understand that the courses are meant for a novice. But, all user courses require you to spend one-third of the course going through how to click File, Open, etc… In this day and age, you would think that everyone knows how to do that. Better yet, why does NETg not have an intro course that goes over the File, Open junk before one starts the training of a specific application.