Friday, August 24, 2007

Pink - Dear Mr. President

I heard Pink's Dear Mr. President on the radio a while back and I thought the song was good. I had no idea it was Pink singing it. I kind of mentally had her categorized as one of these modern pop singers that has no substance. However, eventually I found out who it was, and I really can't deny that this song is good. Most famous musicians wimp out of such politically charged songs, so I give her a lot of credit for singing it.

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Hitachi Hard Drive Equals Junk

A few years back, I purchased a 100 gigabyte Hitachi hard drive.... Little did I know how much trouble it would cause me in the long run.

The drive started off okay, it did well on artificial benchmarks, but it felt like in real practice it would occasionally hang briefly. I couldn't pinpoint it to being the hard drive's fault so I let it go and continued using it. About a month after I installed Windows on it, my Windows installation got corrupted. Fine, the weather was hot and I wasn't sure if some components in my computer were overheating, so again I couldn't pin it on the hard drive.

I reinstalled Windows and things seemed okay again for a while. A month went by and my Windows installation got corrupt again. I still couldn't be sure it was the hard drive, but I was starting to be very suspicious, because all the other components in my computer hadn't had this trouble until I introduced the Hitachi drive.

I decided to give it one last chance and reinstalled Windows again. This time it made it about 2 months before Windows was corrupted again. This time, though, I had had enough. I actually brought it back to Fry's Electronics, where I had purchased it from, and complained to them that the hard drive was defective and it had taken me this long to prove it. They were kind enough to accept the hard drive back in exchange for another drive of the same model even though it was well outside the store's warranty.

I figured the hard drive I got must have been defective. It happens to every manufacturer sometimes. So I gave the new hard drive a chance. It was noticeably better than the other one I had returned (in the sense that it didn't randomly cause my system to hang). I let my guard down a bit and started moving in (installing all my usual programs and stuff). A year later, I upgraded a lot of my components so I reinstalled Windows. I was still a little distrustful of my Hitachi drive, so I made it my boot drive where I kept my Windows installation and just installed programs (as opposed to my documents and data, which are far more valuable). It hung in there so I moved in a bit more and let it accumulate even more installed data.

I still thought of it as a temporary solution, though, because I was just waiting until Windows Vista came out so I could install that and enjoy the latest and greatest Microsoft had to offer. However, my plan was thwarted by Microsoft's need to play Big Brother with Vista. I decided not to upgrade to Vista and thus my Hitachi drive continued to host my Windows installation for another half a year.

It hung in there until today, when it died on me. After trying to resurrect it and reformat it and various other things, it still remained unusable so I had to give up on trying to get Windows running on it. Instead, here I am running Windows on a Western Digital drive that is about 2 years older than the Hitachi drive but has never failed me a single time nor has the file system on it ever become corrupt.

In summary:
Hitachi - 4 file system corruptions (including 2 drive deaths) in about 3 years.
Western Digital - 0 file system corruptions in about 5 years.

I have no plans to buy Hitachi drives in the future, in case you couldn't tell.

Friday, August 10, 2007

World of Warcraft Arena Team

I freely admit that I probably take video games more seriously than a person should. I enjoy competitive video games for the most part.

Not much in World of Warcraft makes me enjoy the game, but I finally feel like my arena team is starting to click. We achieved a rating of 1809 last night, which puts us solidly in the top handful of arena teams on Horde side on my server. It's also a pretty respectable rating, considering we are in Battlegroup 9 ("Bloodlust"), which is arguably the toughest battlegroup in the world. Battlegroup 9 is home of the most famous and arguably best arena team ("Team Pandemic") and it happens to be where a lot of top players from other battlegroups have been transferring to compete, which definitely makes it a lot more competitive.

Anyways... yay! We are hopefully on our way to making a dent in the arena system and representing Kilrogg well. Gogo PVE servers!

Friday, August 3, 2007

Unexpected Anti-gay Sentiments

Last weekend, I went rollerblading with some friends near the beach... well two of us rollerbladed, one jogged, one biked. We had to rollerblade from my friend's apartment down to the beach by going down a lot of busy streets.

Along the way down, some people in a passing car went by yelling various anti-gay obscenities at us. I guess rollerblading with friends is an exclusively gay activity, as opposed to the exclusively straight activity of yelling at such rollerbladers. Anyways, luckily, my buddy (who came here from France) didn't really catch what they were yelling, because at that moment I was pretty embarrassed about Americans.

We live in a pretty diverse area. There are people of all races and sexual orientations around. For this sort of harassment to occur here of all places really shocked me and disappointed me. If this kind of stuff still happens here, what must the rest of the United States be like?

As if this wasn't enough, we continued farther and another guy in a passing car also took the time to yell a simple "F__ you!" at us. I'm not sure whether his motivation was the same, but given the first car, I'd assume so.

Before you ask, no, we are not gay. It's so ironic, because my buddy happened to be pointing out a rather attractive woman on a motorcycle right when the first car went by.

Me vs. Blogs

I've long been very anti-blog, but I think that viewpoint stems from the fact that people place expectations on their readers. I had a big problem when I talked to people directly and they would ask me, "Did you check my blog? I put an entry about it there." That's utterly moronic. If a person feels like writing on a blog, he should go ahead and do it. However, it's not a replacement for talking directly to people who are talking to him.

Anyways, I find myself here starting a blog so I can rant about stupid crap. I'm not going to tell any of my friends this is me. I'm just going to write what I think here in anonymity. I feel like that's the only way I can get any sort of satisfaction from blogging.