My photos are slowing being destroyed. How? I’m not entirely sure. But I’ve noticed that ever since I upgraded to Vista, my photos have been getting corrupted randomly. I’ll be browsing through them and notice that some have turned funny colors, or have lines through them, or a myriad of other distortions. And I’m not the only one. There’s a whole thread on Microsoft Technet of people complaining about the same problem.

I would bet that Vista is trying to add some kind of information (maybe some kind of tag? a reference to the thumbnail?) to the files and on some it just fouls them up. Really though, it doesn’t matter why, it’s still completely unacceptable to have my precious photos/memories screwed up by a piece of buggy software.  Oh, and it’s not just the photos either.  It seems as though several programs and iso files that I’ve been storing have been getting corrupted.

Also, I don’t know why, but most of my games seem to run a lot slower in Vista then they did with XP. And that’s with Aero turned off and only basic services starting. There’s no reason for it. I do not have a slow machine by any means.

Add to that the fact that while Vista looks nice, things have been shuffled around ridiculously. For example, it takes like 5 clicks and three different screens to get to where you can see your network connections. It only took 1 in XP.

Screw it. When I get home, I’m putting XP back on so I can be happy again.

EDIT:

I’m back in XP and my TF2 framerate went from an average of 25 in Vista to an average of 45…with higher settings even.  I cannot figure that out.

Maybe I’m not the first one to figure this out, but I didn’t find anything when I was googling for an answer yesterday.

So I was trying to do some conditional formatting in Microsoft Reporting Services…in particular, I was trying to change the background color of a cell depending on what the value in that cell was.  I could only find instructions on how to change the color for two possibilities.  I had three possibilities, and needed three colors.

The instructions that I found said to use an expression like this in the background color property for the cell:

=IIF(Fields!Whatever.value=”Yes”,”Green”,”Red”) (If the “Whatever” field contains the value “yes” then make the background green, or else make it red.)

That didn’t work for my three color option, since IIF statements can only do two colors…one color if it’s true, one color if it’s false.  Actually, now that I think about it, I probably could have used another IIF statement for the false value, but oh well, I like this solution more.

What I did was I added a case statement to my SQL query for each color.  It looked like this:

SELECT
CASE Some_Field WHEN ‘Yes’ THEN ‘Green’
WHEN ‘Maybe’ THEN ‘Yellow’
WHEN ‘No’ THEN ‘Red’
ELSE ‘White’
END AS ‘Color’
FROM Some_Table

I then set my background color for the cell in the report to:

=Fields!Color.value

It worked perfect.  I hope someone finds this useful.

I frequently visit Reddit.com to read news, comment on the news, and attempt to debate with other people.  I wrote this comment ealier in response to another commenter in an article about Barack Obama and some statements he made about having a nation based on the Bible.  I thought the comment I made would make an interesting read for anyone who sees this.  This isn’t the entirety of what I believe about the Bible, but it is a good summary.

Apparently you are missing point of the article, and really don’t understand the bible at all.

If you read the article, then you realize that Obama’s points make sense. The Bible contradicts itself several times, and is nonsensical throughout many passages.

That wasn’t his point at all. He was pointing out that while many Christians say that we need to follow the Bible, a lot of them don’t even know what parts they want followed. And it’s not a matter of contradiction….it’s a matter of how things changed from Old Testament to New Testament. The New Testament, very basically, says that the stuff in the Old Testament is no longer needed to absolve sin, because Christ did it once for all men with his death.

Calling such things contradictions is like reading the beginning of a book where someone is alive, then reading the end where the person is dead, and calling it a contradiction because the book said the person was both alive and dead. You have to read the stuff in between to understand what happened to make that change.

Honestly, though many parts of the Bible are beautifully written and expound beautiful truths, there are other parts that are just awful.

Here’s the trap that a lot of people, Christian and non-Christian alike, fall into. They see the Bible as an instruction book, when it’s really not. I blame the Christians for this, because they’ve been touting it as an instruction book for a long time.

The truth of the matter is that the Bible is a history book. It is a collection of writings from various ancient authors who recorded what happened. Just because something is in the Bible does not mean that it is good. Many evil things are recorded as having happened…as history is filled with evil things along with good.

Nowhere in the Bible is the reader commanded to do anything. The Old Testament is mostly history of the Hebrew people, prophecy, and some philosophy. In the New Testament, the gospel books record what Jesus said and did. The book of Acts records what the early Church was like. The books after that are the Epistles (mostly letters from the Apostles to various churches).  A lot of people read these Epistles as though they were written to them, and not to a church that existed 1700+ years ago.  Not everything is meant for us today, and it is left to the reader of the Bible to figure out what all of it means and what to do with the knowledge.

I bought some tomato hornworms (a kind of caterpillar) off of the internet to feed my bearded dragon Gus. Here’s a picture of one of the suckers. They’re flippin’ huge.  (The left side of worm is it’s real head.  The other side is a decoy head.)

Now here are the pictures of Gus eating one of these bad boys:

*burp*

This is an awesome deal that’s going on until May 16th perpetually, so if you’ve been needing a copy of Microsoft Office (or if you’ve been using a pirated version and you wish to go legit), this is the time to get it.  You can get Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate edition for $60.  It’s normally $600.  Heck, even the Student and Home edition is $250.

All you need is a .edu email address (alumni .edu addresses work too) and $60.  Go here to buy it: http://www.theultimatesteal.com/

I’ve never been able to use the Linux driver for my RTL 8185 in Ubuntu.  Instead, I’ve used Ndiswrapper with the Windows XP driver.  It works great.

Here’s the download for the XP driver: rtl8185

Once you have that, you’ll want to install NdisWrapper.  Open a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils-1.9

Once you have ndiswrapper installed, unzip the file you downloaded and change your terminal to that directory.  Then install the drivers with these commands:

sudo ndiswrapper -i net8185.inf

sudo ndiswrapper -m

sudo ndiswrapper -mi

sudo ndiswrapper -ma

sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

At this point, you should be able to use your wireless card.  If you type “ifconfig” in your terminal, you should see “wlan0″ listed.

This has worked every time for me, so I hope it solves any issues you are having with this card too!

EDIT:

If everytime you reboot, you have to run ’sudo modprobe ndiswrapper’ command, try adding ndiswrapper to your  /etc/modules file.

To do that:

Open a terminal and type:

sudo gedit /etc/modules

Add a line and type ndiswrapper

Save and close the file.

Reboot.

I was looking for an easy way to install Pidgin Instant Messenger on Feisty (since it’s not in the repositories) and found a site that has recent Pidgin .DEB’s available for download.

You can get them here.

Click the folder for the newest version, download the file, and double click to install.

From http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=622101

“We pulled a bad drive apart at work this afternoon. It had a nasty rattle to it before we opened it, but we didn’t expect this:”

If you want to install Windows XP on your Gateway MT3418 laptop instead of Vista, you can use the drivers from the Gateway MX3417 laptop.  They’re the same machines, only the MT3418 came with Vista and the MX3714 came with XP.   I successfully installed the MX3417 drivers on my MT3418, and XP is running smoothly.

Here’s a link to the driver page on Gateway’s site.

I just found this link to control web cams in a couple of parks in Eugene, OR.  Geek factor = 9.8.  Check it out.