RandySmiley.COM ???

I’m over on Slash Dot (news for nerds); And I’m reading about Web Based Private File Storage. And I’m sure you could give three sh*ts and hooray about such nonsense. But it’s the author’s ramble that is rattling around in my effin head, because it doesn’t make any sense at all:

“I have personal stuff in Outlook folders that I would not want someone in IT to see if I suddenly dropped dead: emails to the wife, photos of the kids, that kind of thing. I also keep a journal at home that I save to a server; personal reflections that I never want anyone else to see, especially if I die.”

WTF? Why do you write, and keep a journal, if you don’t want anyone to read it? Law of the Universe #1: Even before things fall down; You WRITE TO BE READ, to leave something behind other than sh*t. Contact with a BRAIN, a PERSONALITY, your distinctiveness, your politics, your issues. Otherwise, you have no business owning a keyboard, or an email address. WHO ARE YOU KIDDING? This is a reporter telling us, he keeps a drawer of secrets that we’re not to touch if he dies? That’s not a lawn being fertilized, that you smell. (I’ll bet he wants to hide his porn).

As a long time, very experience blogger. I can tell you, it’s nearly impossible to drive traffic to yourself to begin with. So if you really don’t want to be read; Start a professional blog- because you’ll be amazed how many people on earth at this moment, don’t give a sh*t at all what you think, or have to say. It’s the same as being hidden in plain sight. Do it for free, and all your friends and family will be all over the place, but try and make a dime…

Worse off, because this article that I’m reading here, that really stirs the juices up, I’m suddenly shocked to find; Isn’t about offsite encrypted private storage services. But rather it’s about recruiting Slash Dot readers to tell him where the best place to hide his thoughts are.

Now you’ve already had my profession answer, here’s my personal; Shove them up your ass, you pussy! My opinions are exclusively my own, please don’t read them, particularly if I’m dead- fuck!???

Why, o why, would this happen to me? Here’s the deal on that: I’ve been trying lately, to be so good. To clean up my potty mouth, and be professional. Devoid of emotion, just state the facts as clearly as you can. Try and create personality with humor, on the turn of a phrase. But suddenly out of the blue, you run into something that just makes you scream; FUCK! @ someone! My point being, to those this offends, and turns off. This is the blog of Randy Smiley- it is a personal blog, not a professional blog. Please forgive the emotional outburst from my very real and genuine personality- but here I have the right to say what I want to say, anyway that I want to say it. If I were writing for you, this would never happen!

Do you think these guys, 3000+ years ago, wanted their party forgotten? Hidden away on a secret server or a drawer some where? Here’s history of the world’s first great party, that had EVERYTHING: Wine, Women, & Song. Does it get better than that? Couldn’t, they painted it on the wall for all to see- Now that’s bragging! Let us never forget, the GREATEST party of all time.

You WRITE to be READ!

Message sent, message received, even if you don’t read Egyptian. This is brilliant, unlike some people.

Yes, it’s the right place! I’m still here. I just changed the theme, and did some polish to some articles (so make sure to read them all, even the really, really old ones- ha, ha!). That’s right, nothing here is carved in stone!

Those who know me, know that sooner or later, I’ll have a fit of neatness, and chop these posting down to just the best 25 or so. So if you’re soaking me in, do it fast, or slow- you know I love to procrastinate.

To find Venus, and who’s not looking for her? You’ll have to work your way to the bottom. I got a comment on ‘Stones of Years’, in my spam filter, that made no sense as so much spam doesn’t. It was just very strange that it would have been posted from such a lost and lonely page?

This isn’t my particular favorite theme, it needs some work. But it was the best one I found at dynamically sizing itself to the articles and the screen size. Of coarse, to be honest, I haven’t given that a good test yet, either. But at my get a microscope to read this screen resolution, it looks good, as long as nobody bumps my elbow, to make the slide skip, that is. Dumb dog!

Lately, I have been on a kick about Natural Selection, which we know is so very popular with all of you (not). But it’s a topic that’s just been on my mind a lot, lately, just because it keeps coming up, even though it bores most of you to death.

I want to talk about the Hitch Hiker’s Guide, and DNA (Douglas Adams), and that stupid Disney Movie. I’ve have quite a rant built up on that. It is strange that one of the world funniest writers ever, would have written so many stories that just don’t have much longevity to them, due to no fault of their own. Just ever changing technology, and let’s face it, Hollywood rip offs. Anyway, that’s on mind, but you know how well these things make it to my blogs… so pardon me if I get side tracked, and forget.

My lost point; as if that’s unusual, is that I was going to add a category called “Life, the Universe, and Everything”, which will not be about Douglas Adams or his works. But rather, things I find interesting about Life, the Universe, and Everything (…there in, both physical and theoretical). The boring stuff!

I have changed something you might not notice here. The ‘Recent Posts’ on the right, now list 10 articles, rather than 5. It didn’t make sense to me, to list what shows up on just the first page, particularly since the second page often has my own personal favorite observations that have scrolled away to never, never land.

Nikon COOLPIX L100

This looks like one HECK of a bargain!
I own a Kodak EasyShare Z712 IS, which it looks a lot like. Clearly it’s to compete with my Z series, and frankly, I’m not sure why you would ever buy digital SLR, when these offer better zoom lenses (28-420mm). Anyway, this is 10 Megapixels, when I got 7.2. My complaint about the Kodak is that it’s slow at figuring out what you want to focus on, and sometimes will not figure it out at all. I hope that’s just a Kodak quirk! I’m not a Megapixels freak, and you really shouldn’t be either. Anything above 7 megapixels will take super GREAT 8×10 pictures, so it all comes down to price and features. This is loaded with many great features. I want one, myself!

The ‘camera picture’ is a link that will take you right to the L100 Tiger Direct page. The banner (top) will take you to their main home page. Merry Christmas to some lucky person!

Wait there’s more, the Canon Powershot SX20 IS

You want something even more Top Ended, and even a tick more professional. There’s the Canon PowerShot SX20 IS. x20 Zoom (28-560mm), and HD video at 30fps (normal TV speed), in Apple’s MOV format. It seems a little wimpy on highspeed ISO, so it will need a flash more often, but offers a real Hot Shoe for professional flash equipment, or the built-in flash. Take 4 batteries, which should mean longer life, than two or three battery cameras. However it’s the only camera I’ve seen with stereo microphones built in. Of coarse the Powershot is a little more expensive than the Nikon, but still in a $400 price range.

Why a point and shoot, over an SLR?
Bottom line, price vs. performance. The salesmen try to shit you into thinking it’s about the Lens. But a clear picture is a clear picture. There are more liabilities that go with interchangeable lenses, like a darker image, and therefor slow processing speeds. Never hear them talk about that now do you? And then there is the fumbling around of swapping out lenses, and the praying that you didn’t break or loose a $400 lens. The big reason; 6% commission on the $1000+ camera, only 2% on the under $400′s. Hmm?

Fact is that the digital SLR’s are a ripoff! We’re back to the same old PC problem, next year’s model will be twice as fast, even more pixels, more “photoshopping” built in, etc. And you want to lock yourself in with a $1000 at a time on that, for a camera you will be lucky to recover $200 on used, in two years? Digital SLR are a total ripoff for your average consumer. Special needs are about the only thing that should force you into a digital SLR, like attaching to a telescope or microscope, and that’s it! A good 12 megapixel picture is a good picture, no matter what machine took the shot. The old argument was about filter effects, but you can do ALL THAT with software these days.

28mm wide angle to 560mm Telephoto, is mind blowing. Try and get that in a single lens SLR, they’ll laugh you out of the building. Most SLR have only a 300mm lens for telephoto. I was always taught that normal human vision matches closest to 52mm, which is why most cameras came with 55mm lenses. Today, it’s normally a 28mm to 80mm zoom lens that comes on the SLR (if any at all). Explaining lenses, and image expansion and compression is beyond what I want to address. But, from the bleachers at a football game, you aren’t going to get a Sports Illustrated Quality close-up of your kid with anything less than a 900mm lens (which is a telescope); Unlike the impression they give you from TV ads. Mind you the one’s the real pros at sports events use, are so expensive, they’re all rented by the hour from the manufactures.

Why IS cameras?
Most all point-n-shoots are IS cameras. IS is Image Stabilization. In other words they know how much your shaking them, and try to correct for it. The more Zoomed in you are, the more SHAKE matters. This is why so many SLR cut off at 300mm lens. That about the max you can handle handheld, without some major image stabilization- the best being from a Tripod, even with IS. But read the specs, and most digitals are IS cameras today.

The best CHEAP accessories for any camera are…
#1 A good WIDE camera strap!
#2 Tall Tripod
#3 SD cards (2 gb, unless your making videos)
#4 Rechargeable batteries- (there are no rechargeable batteries- yeah right: Made by them!)

POWER TIP:
Use PowerPoint or a Paint program to make full page print out, name and address and phone number. Take your memory card out of your new camera, so it has to use internal storage. And make the very first picture in your camera, your address. So, if you ever loose your camera, it knows how to find it’s way home. Believe it or not; 98% of the time, it will! Putting your own picture on it, is a good idea too, to convince those people that think they are more honest than everybody else- they mean well!

I suddenly realized that I really, really, have to preface this: This blog is driven by WordPress, and you are looking at one of the “Themes” right now, that I’m about to complain about. I know; Bitch, bitch, bitch! I try not to, but sometimes they make it too hard.

WordPress Themes are frustrating and annoying.  I have yet to install a theme that worked perfect right off the download.  This is a HUGE SETBACK, to a really great blog system!  It’s not the blogs fault, it’s the  independent theme makers.  How can I recommend this for you, when I as a programmer have to dig in elbow deep, and fix every (theme) I download?

Here we are in heart of the holidays, and most of the best themes for Christmas don’t even show up.   How do you find them then?  I found most of them searching for ‘Red’ themes- no kidding Red themes.

The one I settled on here, is a Victorian Christmas Theme.  Still though, I had to get rid of the code that pulls up TAGS (at the top of the page), one of the most useless features of WordPress, once they are rarely used.  Categories are far more important, and Pages even more so.  To converting that box area for those was going to take some research time, I just was not willing to invest right now, so I just did away with all that code.  Just deleted it.  Then the description of the blog was in the body of the blog, and that’s just so wrong, I had to move it up into the header where it belongs, which took a lot of tweaking.  Half these themes leave it completely out, which is even more annoying.  Next Pages can have comments, but not the way the theme was written, so that had to be tweaked too.  This is far from a perfect theme.  I see that the side-bar is screwin the pooch too, and basically ignoring my setup, but I just don’t have time to learn everything about WordPress right now, so I can live with it.

Well, if it’s so screwed up, then why am I using it?  Because it was the best looking one I found, in spite of it’s faults.  Still I will be happy to get back to my altered version of Redline again.  Redline was almost perfect, but needed to be widened.   It’s just not the most stylish theme, I’ve ever seen.  But it is the one, that seems to understand the engine software best, and takes as much advantage of it as it should.

I think what it is that really grinds my bones is that it’s like; Merry Forkin Christmas to you hack!  I ain’t Jesus, you gotta earn it.  Oh, just so fitting to the season in this age, ya know? And it’s way to girly, but what you gonna do for something seasonal?

UPDATE: When I noticed my Donate button was gone, that was the last straw! Maybe Christmas week, you’ll see that theme again- not before!

According the update manager, it’s time to update the whole operating system. And your saying to yourself; “Yeah Randy, living under a rock again? Windows 7 is here!” But no, I’m not talking Windows, once I don’t DO Windows anymore. I’m talking Ubuntu 9.10. There’s a little check box in the Upgrade Manager program, that I’m just horrified to press.

See, I’ve had some nasty things happen in Linux upgrades. In one, they upgraded PostgreSQL server, and didn’t upgrade the existing database files- that was no fun at all!!! I had to roll back the upgrade, dump my databases, delete their files, and run the upgrade a second time, and import my dumps into new accounts. Basically starting from scratch. It was slow, it was painful!

Here’s the deal, I’ve got this color laser printer. And the NEW printer drivers SUCK! The original support programs that came with the printer, SUCK! So I upgraded to new printer drivers that SUCK, with better functioning programs. My prints look like shit now. I want my old drivers BACK, because I’d rather have good prints and bad software, than bad prints and good software- right? Back to the CD, forget what’s online. Roll back isn’t all that easy to do, because it may take away the programs, but leave the upgraded drivers behind, that I really want removed. So an UPGRADE of the whole enchilada, might not be a bad thing right now.

Then again, I just got my databases setup, and have mirrors of my websites… and my music ripped. It’s a lot of storage to backup before an upgrade can even start, that’s a little more tricky than Windows! SQL servers are best dumped into TEXT files, before rolling up a tarball.

I know, all your hearing is BLAH, BLAH, BLAH- I don’t want to really do it. But this is important stuff to do, even without an upgrade going on, you know? It’s just time consuming lost hours, that makes me want to procrastinate until something EVIL happens. And WE shouldn’t live that way, we should do our jobs, no matter how mundane sometimes.

My biggest fear though, is that an UPGRADE will not remove or fix my printer driver problem, backup or not.  And I’ll waste a day rev-engineering this thing, and that takes all the fun out of something new!