Josh-Kerr.com

Could Sephiroth beat Pooh?  I think not.

Yahoo News is reporting that Sony’s Universal Media Disc (UMD) movies are hurting, bad!  While I don’t own a PSP, and have no immediate plans to buy one but you never know, I have always found the device to be “techno savy” with its sharp display and variety of games.  However I could never see how people would actually buy movies for the PSP.  I’ve been to some stores where the price for a UMD movie was only 5 bucks less than the price of a DVD.  On the flip side I’ve seen some UMD movies 5-10 bucks more than the DVD!  Seroiously, who pays for roughly full price for a mini DVD with less video/audio quality and no special features just to watch it on a 4″ screen?!   It’s rediculous.  So long UMD, nobody will miss you.

I woke up today thinking to myself, “Today is going to be a good day.”  I hit no traffic despite the weather on the way to work.  Had a good day at work.  Even missed all the rush hour traffic on the way home.  Let my dogs out of the garage (weather again)  and grab some grub.  “Kingdom Hearts II here I come” is what I said to myself next.  What do you mean it doesn’t get released until tomorrow?  The release date is today?!  Every single store that I went to gave me the same reply.  “That’s what the internet says, but the official release date is tomorrow.”  Let me get this straight.  The official release date on the KHII website is March 28.  Every source I ‘ve seen online says that the game is released on the 28th.  But for some reason I, and the everyone else, have to wait until the 29th….  WTF!  Someone please explain that to me.

My father sent this to me the other day. I don’t know if he was trying to imply something or just sending it because he thought it was good. Anyways, here it is:

A couple had been debating the purchase of a new automobile for weeks. He wanted a new truck. She wanted a fast little sports like car so she could zip through traffic around town. He would probably have settled on any beat up old truck, but everything she seemed to like was way out of their price range.

“Look!” she said. “I want something that goes from zero to 200 in four seconds or less. And my birthday is coming up. You could surprise me.”

So, for her birthday, he bought her a brand new bathroom scale.

Services will be at Downing Funeral Home on Monday. Due tothe condition of the body, this will be a closed casket service. Please send your donations to the “Think Before You Say Things To YourWife Foundation,” Dallas, Texas.

Tell me this is a joke. Please for the love of God tell me that I’m seeing things. Dell, in all it’s wisdom has just released their new XPS system, the XPS 600 Renegade. What I can’t believe is that the starting price is $9,930. It’s got dual core over clocked processors, 4 Nvidia 7800 SLI graphic cards, Raided 160GB raptors, 2GB RAM, a great sound card, and a custom paint job. OK, nice hardware but 10 grand! I feel sorry for the person that deceides to buy it.

I’m still around, just been really busy.  I’ll have something meaningful to write about in the future.

I left the house this morning with my second Dell 20.1″ LCD plugged into my Gentoo box.  As of right now, I’m dual screening my gaming box.  After checking the forums again, drivers, etc I still couldn’t get it work.  I plugged the DVI cable into the other port and it didn’t even register.   My first thought was “Great.  Now I have a dead port.”  I powered off the machine, instead of rebooting which I’ve been doing all this time, checked all my connectors, and wouldn’t you know it powered up with the “thought to be dead” DVI port working.  WFT was the only thing that came to mind.  So I turn it back off, attach the DVI cable to the other port and turn it back on chanting “Please God work.  Please God work.”  W00T!  Dual 20.1″ monitors!  This now begs the question.  Why, if a gfx card supports multiple monitors, would I have to turn off my box to get multi-monitors to work?

Sorry for the long delay, I’ve been rather busy as of late. In my last post I mentioned that the site, or parts of it, would be down due to a large spam attack. After changing all my passwords, taking down the wiki, forum, calendar, and removing all cron jobs the spam seems to have subsided. Along the same lines I took down the contact me page just in case. To this point I don’t know where the spam was coming from. Most likely I was victim to email spoofing, at least that’s what my hosting company told me. I was skeptical because some of the spam that I received came from their server. Dreamhost, provides users with shell access if they want it which is uncommon for shared hosting. When you are granted shell access there are a couple of servers that you log on to. About half of the spam came from one of their servers. This is not a slap in Dreamhost’s face, it could very well have been a script that was exploited and the attackers gained access from it. The long and the short of it is I’m not 100% sure what happened but I’ll definitely be a little more precautious with the packages that I install.

In other news I have my Gentoo boxes up and running. Gentoo is a great Linux distro if you’re interested. It does have some draw backs, and pros, though when you compare it to other distros. First off you compile everything in Gentoo from source! There are ways to use some pre-built packages but for the most part you’re going to be doing a lot of compiling. When you compare this to Fedora, Mandrake, Suse, etc this doesn’t sound too hot. Don’t let if fool you! The packaging system in Gentoo is top notch. Portage, their packaging system, provides the most customization I’ve ever seen. I can install package A without installing package B and installing package C less than version x.x.x.x. It’s great! If you haven’t given it a try, check it out.

I have mixed feelings about this next topic. Recently I purchased another 20.1″ UltraSharp Flat Panel monitor from Dell. To quote a friend, “it rockers my boxers!” My original plan was to dual screen my main box. I have a Nvidia 6600GT with dual DVI and an S-Video port. I plug-in the new monitor and where did my multi display settings go? I checked my display settings, checked the NView software, updated the drivers and got nada. I played around with this for about an hour, checking out forums, checking driver settings, anything I could think of and for the life of me could not get it to recognize my second monitor. The more forums I checked out the more I realized that I wasn’t the only one with this problem. Not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing though. Eventually I replaced my old bulb monitor that my Gentoo box is using with the new 20.1″ and it works great. For some reason the DVI didn’t work but VGA works great. I guess it’s a good thing that I didn’t have dual 20.1″ monitors on my gaming box. That would suck to have a nice border right smack down in the middle of the game….

Last but not least, I’m working on a new theme for the site but progress has been slow.  I’ve been really busy at work so I haven’t had too much time to work on it.  I’ll get it done.  Might take longer than I want ,but it will get done.