Posted 1:10 AM by Col. Dubois

"Haven't seen you since the lube job"

The title of the last entry is from an episode of a show I only recently started to watch again. Actually the show The Family Guy only started in re-runs fairly recently so it wasn't really my fault. This line was from the character, Peter Griffin, he was drunk or something and telling jokes. At least I think that's what it was. Can't remember. The Family Guy is actually quite a wonderful show and very under rated. You can now find it Monday night through Thursday night at 11:30pm on cartoon network. And that line is very funny. Not to mention accurate :-).

And in the breaking news section...

Two hits! I received two hits in 24 hours! Wuhoo! One of them was from the "General Electric Company" domain at 5 in the morning. Now why would someone at General Electric Company be looking at my blog at 5am? Why would anyone be reading any blog at all never mind at 5 in the morning? Who reads blogs at 5am in the first place? Am I the only one wondering this sort of thing?

Tonight I watched an episode of Whose Line is it Anyway? with Richard Simmons as a guest star. I don't think I have ever seen a studio audience or Drew Carey laugh quite as hard as in this episode. I've never seen anyone act quite that gay on that show either. There's a lot of mock-homosexuality on that show ya see. But usually it's the cast members merely acting trying to get a laugh or whatever. Only Simmons was a little more convincing. Because he is gay obviously. The way he acted though it was extremely funny. Lets just say he was a little enthused.

So to update on my computer situation I think I have it either mostly or completely solved the problem with the high temperatures. First I should mention there's a new link at the left labed "my puter" that will link to a list of images I took of, you know, my 'puter. As you may have noticed the fan is in the wrong spot. Well I haven't changed that part actually but I did turn it around to it was blow into the case. And look the idle temperature has dropped by 6 degrees to between 47 and 50 Celsius. I suppose I should have guessed that that's the way it should have faced. I bet I didn't even need the new heat sync. But if I ever move the fan to the right position directly over the cpu I’m sure the cpu will be cool enough I can over-clock it. And isn't that what we all want? No? I guess the processor is only $100 these days, online that is. At CompUSA for example it's only about $170 at the time of this writing. Add sales tax to this and I'm still wondering why anyone would be go into a CompUSA and buy that processor. I guess if wanted a professional to install it than it would make sense. But if you're buying a processor by itself wouldn't you know how to install it? Well you should. So even if the stupid legislature bastards actually try to pass a sales tax (no, this isn't constitutional, and yes, I'm sure) on Internet sales it will still be cheaper to buy off the Internet. I'm not exactly sure why there is such a discrepancy in prices. Internet sales tax, something to rant about!

Now you may be saying something like "how can an Internet sales tax be unconstitutional, there was no Internet 1776" or even "why shouldn't the Internet be taxed? After all it's only fair to quote level-the-playing-field unquote so why shouldn't there be an Internet sales tax?". Well I have answers to both these statements or questions.

First of all an "Internet sale" isn't really any different than any other sale if you really look at it. All you're doing is typing in your credit card number into a computer and sending this information over phone lines to another computer which then clears it with your account or whatever it is and the company on the other mails the product to you. If you were to say, oh I don't know, order something from a catalog or off home shopping channel you would pick up the phone, use the phone lines to communicate your credit card number over the phone lines to a person on the other end who then enters this into a computer, is cleared with your account and the product is shipped to you. Or...you go to say a computer store and pick out some software, you go to the register and take out your credit card, swipe it, sign off on the purchase and wait for it to go through. By transmitting over phone lines. To your bank to clear it with your account. Sound familiar? But transactions via catalog or home shopping network don't have sales tax if you're buying an item out of your state (so far as I know). So why pass an Internet sales tax?

Second, on the "leveling the playing field" front, this is not a valid a contradiction as it's I think merely a euphemism for socialism. Maybe it isn't fair CompUSA has to compete with sales tax while all those Internet sites don't have to. But then CompUSA (and I'm only using this national chain as an example) has lots of advantages over the Internet sellers not to mention the options of doing both by either creating their own online brand or partnering with an already established online retailer they can have both worlds. Besides which "leveling" any playing field would only work to stifle competition which is the whole advantage these days.

Lastly this is unconstitutional because in the constitution there is a specific clause about regulating the trade between states, as in congress shall not do it. And as demonstrated above if your trying to charge sales tax on a transaction across state lines you are in fact breaking the law. Of course constitutions haven't seemed to slow politicians down lately, nor have much of any laws for that matter. I can't link to the exact place in the constitution at the moment as it is 1 in the morning and I'm a little tired. A simple google search will however yield you the results of what I am looking for.

Posted 7:13 PM by Col. Dubois

"What's the difference between porn and art?
A government grant!"

The title from the last entry is from and episode of Married With Children delivered by the infamous Kelly Bundy. Some how this line just stayed with me. I don't think that show had that many quotable lines like this. For context I think she had just arrived home from work or something and had had a bad day of some sort. I'm not actually a big fan of that show. Sometimes there's nothing else on though.

As is what usually happens I have all these great ideas for my blog until I actually sit down to make the entry. Then my mind goes blank and I end up prattling on about stupid stuff instead of being clever and witty. Err whatever. I hate it when that happens.

I did see an episode of South Park last night. This time the show was exploring the newfound ability to use the word "shit" on basic cable. And the plot revolved around a TV network president using the word to increase the ratings via the shock of it. As this was happening there was this counter in the lower corner counting the number of times "shit" is said in the episode. They got up to about 160 times. No reason really, just to be able to do it I guess. Not sure about that show sometimes. Sometimes it's really well written and funny and other times it's just disturbing/disgusting/really reaching for a shocking moment. Still better than The Simpsons though.

Yesterday I spent much time submitting this blog to various blog directories. So maybe I'll have visitors sometime in the next 24 hours. For those of you who care enough to click the counter at left you'll not a lot of hits for the "winfirst" domain. Yes, that'd be me refreshing the page trying to get it to look right. Just so everybody knows. Outside of me I've had literally about 3 or 4 visits. And all but one of those was from people I know.

In my last entry I brainstormed an idea for this story and/or NWN module I wanted to start writing. Well I've started an outline of what that may look like. I'm not going to share it though :-). Not sure if this is turning out to be easier or harder than i would have imagined. I haven't done any creative writing in a really long time, only writing like this (whatever comes to mind and nearly always made up as I go along) or as an assignment (also made up as a go along). I don't even know if I'll ever finish it or what the story will look like. Of course I don't do much fiction reading either. I think that'd help get me into the whole swing of writing fiction, reading some fiction. Actually I have the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy novel staring at me right now, I just haven't picked it up yet. I also ordered the first two books in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "Trilogy" from Amazon, but only because I think it's required for computer people like me.

I did start reading a book though. Only it's about writing. It's called Writing in Flow. Basically it's a description of the state of mind some people go into when they're doing something creatively and all sense of time is completely lost. Which also coincidently describes how sometimes a driver will lose sense of time driving at night just watching the center yellow line and then snap out of it and not know where he is. This was explained to me as a form of hypnosis. But to creative types apparently it's "flow". This actually happens to me all the time. Usually it takes a deadline and some amount of pressure for it to really happen though. Or sometimes I'm just really into what I'm doing. For example I took this writing class as a "distance learning" (I watch the teacher live on TV from 50 or so miles away and talk to him via class room microphone) class and the teacher let me submit my writing assignments via HTML formatted document instead of printing it out and sending it in. While I was preparing the HTML I just kept tweaking it and tweaking and fixing and tweaking it and going and going...until it had been about 5 or 6 hours. I wasn't even thinking about the time. I didn't sit down and say "ok, the next 6 hours is reserved for this stupid set of HTML documents!" or anything. I just had to get it to look right (or i probably wouldn't sleep but lets not talk about that :-) ) and I kept working on it until I was more or less satisfied with it. So far as I can tell this would be "flow". But I didn't have to go through any process to go into this on purpose. Just took me being neurotic and obsessive-compulsive enough to keep on it until it was done.

I also did this for my first English class (not the one I spoke of in an earlier entry) for the 5 to 7 page term paper I had due. I did lots of procrastinating as usual until the very end of the semester. Of course I had to turn in which topic I was planning and a detailed outline (it was very, very detailed) but I didn't start researching or writing until about 3 or 4 weeks before it was due. I did the amount research required (cited sources from print, newspapers, the Internet) and finally just started writing. And I knew I had to have it done by a particular date. As I said I have kind of an obsessive-compulsive streak in me so I had actually been "looping" what I wanted to write and say over and over in my head the entire semester so when I started writing it's like I was on the 50th draft by then. But I was surprising myself in my writing. Where was this coming from? How did I come up with putting the thesis in the second paragraph like that?! I've never done that before. And again I was writing without noticing any amount of time passing by. Oh and I was still working on that essay the very last day possible for it to be turned in. Like 3 hours before the deadline I was still writing the conclusion. That was my only draft and I didn't proof read the whole thing before I turned it in. Well I got an A on the paper and an A in the class. I did have some typos though. It seems I kept using "cite" and "site" in the wrong contexts. But those were the only mistakes to speak of...that the teacher caught. Actually it was quite biased and only proving a foregone conclusion I had already made up my mind about. Kind of like CNN does... But the standards seem relatively low for an English 1A class for some reason.

Why can't everything be like that? I want math to be like that! But oh no. I'm horrible at math.

*Step

All right I think I am finally going to talk about LiteStep. It is after all referred to in the title. First I will try to introduce it and describe my personal experiences with it. Of course very few readers will understand what in the world I'm talking about. But that's only because this program is extremely difficult to describe both accurately and in terms everyone can understand. This is a problem with in every instance of technical writing when a difficult concept has to be introduced (don't get me started on pointers in programming for example).

First of all I will point to you to an article written by someone else who attempted to accurately describe this in a way everyone can understand, entitled "LiteStep Explained" by Jalist (new window) over at my other abandoned-looking site dedicated to LiteStep (ok maybe it is abandoned, I just don't want to admit it). Jalist seems like a pretty good a writer and the explanation I think is clear.

Next I can point you to this site: http://www.velocityart.com/?page=archive§ion=litestep (new window) which many "themes" for LiteStep along with screenshots. If you click the various thumbnails you get a full-screen view of it. This should hopefully give you an idea of what this program does and some of the features. If you don't feel like clicking those links and/or are intrigued enough about it then read on...

Day Tripper, Lite Stepper

In computer terms LiteStep is what is currently called a "shell" for MS Windows (all versions from 95 to XP/Server 2003). Now some of you are asking "what do you mean by that", some are asking "what's a shell" while still other sarcastic pukes are saying "shells are command line programs for MS-DOS and UNIX derivatives, what kind of puter-person are you anyway?". If you're one of those last people I'll get to you later. As for everyone else I'll try as best I can to use metaphors to describe what a shell is. First let me mention that your interface in MS Windows is already a shell. If you're a little more advanced than the average you may have heard of "shell extensions" or "shell utilities". The most famous of which is probably TweakUI, part of the MS PowerToys. This shell, you'll find it on your C: drive as Explorer.exe, is very simply an application that provides the user a friendly interface complete with start button, desktop and access to a file manager called "My Computer". If you look at your list of running applications (use task manager or ctrl+alt+delete depending on your Windows version) you'll note the Explorer.exe program running. Try ending this as a task and you'll note the computer gives you the shutdown dialog box (at least in versions 9x and me, haven't tried NT, 2k or XP).

So basically a "shell" is like the dashboard and steering wheel inside your car. Imagine the steering wheel inside your wasn't the right size, the shift stick was in an awkward place, you could barely reach the clutch and breaks and your knees barely fit under the steering wheel. All these things are the main control interface to an engine in your car. The other features found on your dash of this imaginary car may include all the dials telling you stuff like RPMs, how much gas is left, the oil light blinks making it not of much use and all the others, all these features giving the status of the system. A very kludgey "interface" to the engine of your car. Now imagine you could easily change out this annoying dashboard/interface and replace with something custom-fit to your liking. You still have the same engine, it's still the same car with the same gas mileage, just the manner in which you control the car has been changed. This is basically what a "replacement shell" such as LiteStep is supposed to be providing for you. I sure hope that made sense.

Now what if you're satisfied with your dash board? What if you fit in your seat and your oil light works? Well maybe someone going to show you a better way but there's only so many adjustments you can do. Well to me this is Explorer. Sure I can put in lots and lots of shortcuts and download programs to make Explorer more personalized and stream lined. I would still feel like I have a bunch of obstacles to jump over just to get where I'm tiring to go. Like the whole stupid interface was designed around getting in my damn way...But I digress. If you have had similar experiences and you are fairly intermediate to advanced than LiteStep may be right something to try.

Shell If I Know

Now on to those arrogant people trying to tell me LiteStep can't be accurately described as a shell (everybody else skip this section). Well it is. So there ya go. Alright maybe I should make more of case than this. Well in MS-DOS and UNIX you literally set a parameter in a text configuration file naming the shell you wish to use. This setting loads up this program when the system starts up and provides an interface. This is exactly what is done in MS Windows in the case of Explorer.exe and LiteStep. Sure in these two cases the programs are graphical interfaces, but what difference does that make? Both are programs specified to start up when the system starts to provide the user with a way to interact with the Operating System. So why does a shell have to be a command line interface? And indeed if you find any computer term dictionaries on the Internet at no point in the definition of a shell will you find a reference to command lines only. Now this may still have not been a case for many of you. The shell will be a command line till the day you die. Well fine! But I'm telling you these programs, Explorer and LiteStep, fit every definition and attribute you can think of when describing what is commonly known as a shell.

Well this is the first part of my multi-part attempt at describing this program LiteStep. There will in fact be more parts to this forth coming. Maybe not in the next entry, maybe it will be in the next entry. No way to tell really. But stay tuned!