MMA Weekend!

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So this weekend on July 19th, there were two great MMA events!  Affliction Banned and UFC Fight Night.  Banned was totally awesome!  The Andrei Arlovski vs Ben Rothwell was the fight of the night for me.  Arlovski was relentless!  Back to the Pitball days.  Barnett and Rizzo was a pretty good fight also, but the flying knees Arlovski was giving Big Ben were freaking Awesome!  Could not have been more impressive.  Arlovski just totally dismantled Ben Rothwell.  Babalu was also looking good, and Mike Whitehead was as disappointing as ever.  They keep saying how great he is, and then he gets in the Ring/Octagon and totally bombs. It is very sad.. You can see the potential.  Fedor was freaking awesome.  I have never been a Tim “The Wet Blanket” Sylvia Fan, and seeing Fedor dismantle him that fast was very impressive!

Fight night had several good fights. Velasquez looked awesome as he got O’brien held down from side mount, tied up his arm between his legs on one side and his other arm between his neck and shoulder and beat out a victory in short order.  Rory Markham gave a highlight reel knockout kick for his debut in the Octagon againt Brodie Farber. Kevin Burns vs Anthony Johnson was the controversial fight of the night.  Burns seems to have broken his hand multiple times, and feels he can not do a punch properly now, so does an open palm hit, which seems to turn into an eye poke all to often.  After two good rounds, with a couple of minor eye pokes, there was a very obvious hard eye poke by Burns which sent Johnson screaming to the mat in pain.  The fight was called, but for whatever reason, instead of a DQ of Burns, they have it as a TKO to of Johnson, with Burns getting the victory, total BS, but Johnson actually was very classy about it, so he earned my respect a bit. I was very happy to see CB Dollaway put away Jessie Taylor in short order.  Kind of made you feel like it had went right having CB and Sadollah fight in the Ultimate Fighter final.

All told, it was the fans who won in a great night of MMA action!

Busy!

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So the last several days have been very busy!  Wednesday I fixed a laptop for a guy that had a monkey that knocked it off the desk. Cute monkey, but into everything! Loved my ponytail.Thursday a friend of mine went into the hospital for an operation, had to have him there at 6:30am. I am not a morning person.  He is doing great, but we been getting down to visit him daily which takes some time.  I have also been doing a lot of Computer repair the last several days. Actually, more just helping people work out the kinks on new systems and tweaking them to be the way they want then actually fixing I guess. It had been kind of quiet, then all at once I got several people at once needing stuff.. Always the way it goes I guess.

On top of everything else, my sons former Stepfather came down for a visit that has been planned for more than a month.  Has been kinda fun.  My sons half sister which I had never met, came down with him, and I want them to keep a family tie, so I figured this was an important visit.  So my son has been running around with them, Emmy and I have been running to the hospital, and I been running to help with computers.

Now, tonight, some friends want us to go out to dinner, which we just could not pass up, we always have a good time with them. We also have a UFC fight night on tonight which we are excited about, and we bought the Allifiction “Banned” PPV.  All of which should be awesome fights!  It is Afflictions first fight card, and it is stacked, so it should be awesome!  I just hope it runs smoothly, without to much time between fights, and without to many problems.  Always hard to tell with a new Promotion.  We have high hopes though!

Well, time to go visit my friend in the hospital! Later!

Does your Silver Paste have silver?

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Questions you should ask when buying heat sink from some places.. Anyone who has ever worked on a system has probably used some soft of heat paste.  It fits between the CPU and the Heatsink on the CPU.  The better brands have silver in it, or so you would think sometimes by the name,  and by the price. That being said, a  test has proven that not all Silver heat pastes do, regardless of the name. So when building a computer, or upgrading a CPU, or replacing a CPU’s fan and heatsink, you need to make sure you buy the better stuff.  I am a fan of the Arctic Silver brand anyways. If you read the article, be sure to read all of it.  Some companies do step up and correct things, and this was originally checked in 2004.

I found this interesting on many levels. First, I find it interesting that it actually took someone getting curious and testing it themselves to fix the problem.. Seems like we often assume that the government has some basic failsafes in place to prevent completely false advertisements like this.. Scarey to find out that is not at all the case.  Second, I found it interesting that a company immedietly tested the problem themselves and did a recall of the product. That earned my respect.

Husband Training…

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Saw this the other day on Fark.com, I actually like the idea of husband training.  For several reasons. One, I have always felt that nagging just annoys men and escalates a problem.  Repeatedly telling us stuff is not going to work.  After hearing it a few times, a guy is just going to close his mind when it is repeated the next time.  At that point, the guy will be thinking about other things.  Where as, if a woman does the least reward thing, he does something that annoys her, and she will react in a cool fashion.  Not bringing up the behavior.  Just not being as “in” to him as normal.. A guy gets the disinterested treatment, he will wonder why and respond more positively to the explaination, after he asks..

Of course, that is just my opinion, but it would sure beat the heck out of getting nagged.  I hate getting nagged, as I am sure most men do.  I think this method would work much better on me.  I want to make my girl happy, and have her interested in what I am doing and right there with me.  If I do something, and she shows no interest in what I am doing, I am going to be curious why. Of course, as a woman, you have to pick a man who is not so into himself that he will never notice you are not happy with him.. and it needs to be a healthy enough relationship and match to begin with that he is interested in you, and you are still “in” to him..  So I like the idea, but it has a whole lot of ifs..

Why do they think people are so far removed that the same basic things do not apply?  We all have basic emotions and instincts.. We are all programmed to react certain ways to certain things..  Why are most babies faces so cute, even to those that are not big on children?  We are programmed to react a certain way to certain things.. Babies included.  Many people will disagree, but instinct can be fought against, but the fact that it is something that has to be trained out of us says something.

Ah well.. Found the article interesting, hope someone else stops and thinks about it also.

Electric cars and renewable energy.

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I was reading about Elon Mush, the co-founder of Paypal.  He has multiple startup businesses, and I have a ton of respect for the guy.  He is investing in renewable energy and Electric cars and in general trying to come up with solutions for Americas problems.  Not bad for a guy who left S. Africa at 17 huh?

I am sure many people have heard of Tesla Motors in the last several years? They have a high end electric roadster coming out this year for about $100k.  They will only be producing about 1800 per year to start. A bit steep for the average guy, but, it is a start as far as Elon Mush is concerned.  He hopes to be dropping the price and improving the cars over the next several years.  He is convinced that as they build up the mass production, that they can produce more affordable cars that everyone can drive.  I hope he is right.  I like the idea of having a solar panel on my house that powers my car.

Sold off..Sold out… Move along!

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So for the last few years, the Linux Company I bought into early on, Lindows/Linspire/Freespire, sold out again.  Seems to be a pattern here.  First, they fight the good fight against the evil corporation Microsoft, getting users to invest in the companies lawsuit by selling lifetime memberships. Then, shortly aftwards, selling out to MS for 20million dollars.. I sort of understand, that is lots of money.. Good business.. but after promoting yourself as fighting the good fight, it felt like selling out..

Then later, they made a deal with MS that was basically blackmail money.  MS agreed to not sue them for supposed patent violations in the Linux Kernel, and Linspire agreed to pay for that protection.. Nice scam, huh?  We rattle our saber, and everyone must give us money not to draw it.. Pay the money, or we will come around to your place and have our thugs break things.. Pay us the money, or we will sick our lawyers on you for something that has not been proven.. All sounds like the same scam to me.. but again, Linspire sold out… (Hrm.. Reading over at Kevin Carmony’s blog, it looks like MS actually paid them… Odd.. Makes more sense that Linspire agreed to it now.)

Now, in their last act, Linspire sold out to who they touted as their competition, and spent so much time making sound inferior, Xandros.  Sad, annoying and frustrating.  I decided I had enough, and resigned from the forums that I have helped moderate for years.  I have been an Insider there, and was told at one point I had one of the earliest join dates they were aware of.  I even won the “contest” they had to come out there, see how Lindows worked, and come up with ideas how to improve communication with the Insiders. Had a great time, and met a lot of nice people.. Who have all lost their jobs (and their investments by the looks of it) in the last several years. 🙁  Although, they were all talented, so I suspect that they have all moved on to bigger and better things. Regardless, it is kind of an ending of an era for me.

After watching these last few years how MR (former CEO and main investor of the company) does things, I feel like he is earning money through lawsuits.. He seems to like taking things to court.. and it seems to have worked out for him over the years.. but I kinda lose some respect for people who use our legal system as a club.  It also started to give me the feeling he is a professional sell out. 🙁  So I will be staying away from his future endeavors, and would recommend the same to others.  They are just going to be there long enough to cause a stir with someone and then they will lose momentum and be sold off after the settlement. 🙁

Personally, I have moved on to using Windows Vista 64 for Gaming, and Ubuntu Linux for most everything else.  Linspire has been so far behind for years, that it is just annoying.  CNR seems like a really, really cool idea, but they did not go big enough fast enough with the idea.  They also started out charging way to much for it on the frontend which made a lot of people have a bad attitude about it.  They have just in the last few years started adding other distros to CNR, and I think it took way to long.  As a result of all of these things, which are easy to see in 20/20 hindsight, my thoughts have basically proven correct.. Although, they even sold off CNR, which I did not expect.

I still highly recommend Simpy Mepis, but now, I recommend Ubuntu as well.  Both very good distros, with a different feel to both.  Mepis uses KDE for a front end, Ubuntu uses Gnome. Gives them a different feel from each other, but they are still, both, solid distros!

Age of Conan loses something at higher levels..

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So I was very addicted to Age of Conan for a short time.. but I quickly started to feel like it was the same old thing around middle 30’s.  Turns out, there is a reason for this.  The starter area where you are at up till level 20 is the only area they let the Beta Testers into.. So it was very well balanced and tweaked, but the rest of it really had not been that well tested according to what Bleys has been reading on the forums.

Ah well.. I had bought Warhammer Online Collectors Edition, but after my disgust with Conan going to crap so quick, I decided to cancel it.  I guess they need to make some bigger leaps in MMORPGs for me to get interested in them again. 🙁  I really want a game that brings adventure.  Not just treadmill leveling and killing of monsters.  It gets old.  What did you do tonight?  Killed monsters and quested.  What for? So I could get bigger and get better equipment.  How come?  So I could kill more monsters and do more quests.  Huh, why do you wanna do that?  So I can get bigger, and get better equipment… Wait a minute… I see a pattern here.

I really want a game where there is true adventure.  Not just adventure for the sake of getting the best equipment in the game and getting bigger…..  I mean, true adventure.  I want it to be a challenge to cross a river through the strong current.  I want a piece of rope to be useful.  I want to be able to repell into caves, or to be able to climb a dangerous cliff.  I want to be able to do more then just kill monsters and click on an item.  I would like to be able to have a real profession, like Blacksmith, and be able to build a shop in a town and compete price wise against other player blacksmiths.  Or to be a miner, that does more then just walks around and hammer at piles of rock sticking out of the ground.. How about being able to build a real mine?  Or become an herb farmer?  How about magic that requires some components?  And make it so the components take some work to grow, not just make them impossible to find out in the wild so they become ungodly expensive?

Everytime I play a new MMORPG, I have such high hopes, then I play them, and quickly realize that they still fall way short of all my expectations. 🙁  Ah well. Maybe I will be lucky enough to see such a game in my lifetime?

Runs Ubuntu just fine!

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Well, seems to anyways. I did not actually install it, just ran Ubuntu on the live cd and it runs just fine. I did not try to setup the video or anything, or even check it. I was just happy that it booted right up. Not that it really matters, I doubt I will be running Linux on my Game machine any time soon.

I was sort of disgusted. The prices of Video cards have dropped about $80 since I ordered my card.. rather annoying.  Not that it really matters, I am still thrilled with my system, I just think we could have used that money for other things.  Ah well.  This system is still awesome!

My new system again…

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newpc

Firstboot

Ok, so I realized I have been posting about my new system, but I did not even bother to post pictures of it, which just some how seems wrong. So I thought I would post a couple pics that Emmy got right after I finished putting it together, and right on the first boot into Bios.

It was rather funny, Emmy was surprised at me for putting all the screws and everything in the case without even a test boot, but she was very impressed that it came right up and worked first boot. Which is probably why she took a picture!

Age of Conan

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Age of Conan is incredible now on my new computer!  I can not believe how much better it is!  I can actually play with my virus scanner and pretty much anything else I want running, and it does not even phase it.  This system is very impressive so far!  I am thrilled!

I am not sure what I am more impressed with, the system or the monitor.  Maybe it is just the entire system as a whole?  Heh! I am really loving it though.