Bing Sucks

I have been using Bing as my default search and start page for about two months, and it just doesn’t feel right. But I’m switching back to Goggle.  Most of the time I’m looking up definitions for words and proper spellings, but Bing doesn’t support the [define: <word>] function like Google does. And doesn’t always “suggest” what word you meant to write when you can’t spell it proper.  Bing is just not as intuitive as Google.  Now perhaps Bing DOES have a [define:] function but I’m not aware as to what it is.  I’ve yet to see a “Hack Bing” page that explains all the advanced search tricks and tools like we all have seen for Goggle in the past five+ years.

Blue Mars bore

I got an invite into Blue Mars, and I don’t like it so far.  The UI is cumbersome, controls behave slow, and i can’t even maximize the window.  I can’t tell if I’m chatting or walking.  Walking is cumbersome with a constant audible chime that you here every time you take a step.  It also uses CHAT BUBBLES which brings back nightmares from there.com.  It’s cute but you’re gonna miss nearly everything people say if you’re not looking at them.  it’s hard to express how frustrating this game is.

Sure sure it’s BETA but but for fucks sake, didn’t any of the other MILLINONS of video games from over the past 15 years of 3D games give the devleoper of Blue Moon a CLUE as to how NOT to make a cumbersome UI and control setup?  Why does it seem like every time some developer creates a new virtual world they have to essually IGNORE how other simular games/services function?  So they have to start from ground zero and start with the most akward and cumbersome UI and controls ever.

When i was setting up my avatar’s apperance on the WEB PAGE, I sware to GOD I chose to have RED hair, and when I came into world, I was a blonde.  There are virtually NO customizations to your avatar, other than a small handful of hairstyles, and clothes.  You can’t even alter the shape and appearance of your avatar.  Everyone has exactly the same body type.  The only big-deal thing you can do is customize your face, add all kinds of make up effects, as well as draw on warpaint.

There’s this place called the “waterfall level” it’s a lush tropical island with waterfalls all over the place.  It’s very pretty.  You’re sitting in a flying craft that bascailly hovers.  Again this is where the controls fall so short that you’d think that other flight sims were never created before.  Or at least the developers of Blue Mars never played other flight sim games.

When on foot, there is no camera control, which is very there.com like.  But at least with there.com the camrea follows your avatar in a predictable way as any 3rd person game does.  In this you you can turn  and steer your avatar around the world as it walks but your camera view is fixed in whatever direction it was left in.  I’ve not tried first person yet but considering how clueless the developers of Blue Mars seem to be they will likely mess that all up and ignore status quo.  Sure it uses WASD for most of the avatar navigation, but not your camera view.

It has a lot to work to be done on to even come close to even the level of UO.  Graphically it’s nice, UI is rather ufly, some issue with text, and the controls are just gives me a headache. It’s a shame that the developers of Blue Mars seem have to ignore the features, functions, and progress already made by other MMOs and videogames, and have to start at ground zero.  If this truly BETTER than SL, then why isn’t it?

XstreetSL

My spaking new Freebie Penis (v3) has been out for about a week now. I recently posted it as a freebie on XStreetSL and it’s already gotten a 4.3 star rating!  I’m also starting to create my own content to sell on Xstreet, as well as vendos in Morken.  XStreet is a great way to get your products out there and to make some money, and it’s FREE to use! The only thing you really have to spend on is if you want any promotions for your sales to appear on the front page when you get onto XstreetSL.

This is a lot better than the auctions that there.com has that nickels and dimes you for every little thing you post for sale.  You have to pay a wholesale fee for EVERY copy made, meaning if you want to give it away for FREE, you still have to pay for EACH copy you give away.  Auctions on there.com don’t last for ever, at most a couple months.  Xstreet items remain online indefinably, which can lead to things getting very cluttered. Xsteet does take a 5% cut from every sale, which I find reasonable considering they give me an online store front that lasts forever for free!

Couple of problem with XstreetSL that bug me is that I constantly have to keep re-logging in. It apparently can’t REMEMBER me if I close my browser and open it up again and go back to Xst.  But what’s EXTREMELY annoying is I have to CONSTANTLY keep telling it to enable mature content, so  I can just see the things I’m selling!  Maybe it doesn’t like FireFox or something?  They really need to re-do the web design at XStreetSL and make it more intuitive, and smart enough so i don’t have to keep doing the same things over and over and over.

Another thing XstreetSL needs to do is do away with the separate money balance.  You still have to depost money into XStreetSL before you can buy anything. Also when you sell items the L$ dosen’t drop into in-game L$ balance as you do with all other transactions.  You have to go onto the XStreetSL website and withdraw.

Green Life Emerald Wish List

I love Emerald, it has so many great features that I actually use!  But there’s always room for more things to add to it.  Here’s my Wish List:

• Ability to activate a group by double clicking it on your groups list, INSTEAD of it opening group chat window, which I rarely need to use.
• A real color picker, that works on ANYTHING on screen (i.e. avatars), not just whatever RGB values an object was given, while ignoring it’s texture.
• 64bit viewer for Windows and Linux
• Better pop-up spam protection so my viewer doesn’t lag to the point of uselessness
• More robust mute function so the viewer disregards EVERYTHING (objects/scripts) owned by the muted avatar (read griefer)
• Ability to export LMs as SLURLs and have it available on the login screen so I login to said locations.
• Ability to log out of SL with out the viewer closing, so you can do a quicker relog, or login with a different avatar.
• Able to abort a login with out having to Quit the viewer.
• Support for flexi sculpts and other prim shapes (cool viewer)
• When inspecting an object, don’t disable the “flycam” (allowing you to freely control your camera as you normally would)
• Hot-key to toggle double-click teleports.  Often I double click on UI menus and end up teleporting! hate that!

Well that’s all I can think of ATM.  The only problems with Emerald I’ve been having is running two instances or more (-multiple) though it might be due to Windows 7 (64) and how it handles memory as well as video memory.  Often I get messages from the video drivers (nvidia) saying it’s recovered from some kind of failure. Usually results in the Viewer being totally useless, so I have to force to close/kill the app.

My take on health-care reform

I think it’s very hard to disagree that this country has NO MONEY to spend on free universal heath care, or anything else for that matter.

This is why everyone is in a panic since if the US’gubment offers free health care would totally undercut private medical insurances. This is why these companies are going apeshit at town-hall meetings during the congressional summer break. They just can’t compete with that.  But then again most of these larger private companies are just as evil, corrupt and incompetent as any government ran institution.  So would the net result be moot?

So, the medical care we would end up with would be rationed, since everyone’s health care would consolidated into a single administrative body, which sounds like a clerical/administrative nightmare to organize.  Talk about prime opportunity to expose incompetence, and exploit fraud.

What DOES need to be done is health care REFORM, to get the ridiculous costs down, and THEN maybe we can talk about free universal health-care.  But Obama wants to do this on one fell swoop so he can be put into the history books that he did it (yay!) and not take the time to fix the economy first, which he won’t be able to do even if he does serve two full terms. So he going all for broke… literally.

All these talking heads keep throwing the phrases “universal health-care” and “health-care reform” as if it’s exactly the same thing, IT IS NOT! I wish people would make this distinction more clear to everyone.

Linux Distros are still a pain in the ass

Wanna know why windows is so popular?  because when you want to download and install an app, or a plugin/addon to an existing application you have, it just works.  Trying to do the same thing in a linux environment is damn near impossible.

I have an Asus EEE PC 900, and I hate it’s stupid linux install.  So i tried Windows XP, but it’s a bit too large for this little 4gb C: drive.  I had been using Windows 2000 for the the past 6 months or so, but it’s a DEAD OS now. The apps I want to use depend SO MUCH on newest version .net bullshit that the newest .net installer refuses to install on anything less than XP. It’s exactly like Linux where whatever you download either won’t do anything since the OS has no fucking clue what the file does, or the dependencies aren’t satisfactory.  What kina bullshit is this?

With Windows, you just download an installer, and it installs every thing you need.  Some installers are smart enough to download the files you DO need while it installs, and guess what it RUNS.  Why do i have to go though so much BULLSHIT with Linux and it’s umpteen zillion distros that are so fucking particular about every little thing that using this as an every day OS is practically worthless?

Yes I’m a linux noob, but for fucks sake how long has Unix/Linux been around vs Windows, or even Microsoft it self?  At least Microsoft shed it’s user-unfriendliness legacy DOS baggage 10 years ago.. why hasn’t linux gotten the same thing.  Could it be the fact that there is a zillion difffrent distros all trying to do thier OWN THING, while at the same time pretending to be “open sources” and interoperable when they ARE NOT to the average home user.  Sure if you’re a fucking unix NERD you can recompile apps to work on whatever distro you’re using, but when it comes to Joe Average tryng to install FUCKING FLASH pluging.. you’re SOL.

So I’m trying this Ubuntu Netbook Remix on my EEE PC 900.  IT SUCKS.  It has a nice looking UI that it calls it’s “netbook dekstop” that has all the apps you need to use right on screen, but it’s so fucking SLOW.  MY mouse skips and studders making me over shoot the icons of the apps I want to launch.  Ironically it looks like some kina bogged down FLASH GUI animation, since the icons pop when you hover over them, but it just makes my netbook choak. Fortunately you can turn this POS off and just get a normal GNOME desktop that doesn’t make my mouse stutter across my screen.

It comes with FireFox preinstalled (3.0.8) but it doesn’t come with flash plugin. So trying to download the flash plugin for it doesn’t work for the exact reasons i mentioned above.  No point surfing the web with out flash.

So I’m at a loss here.. what the fuck can I run on this shitty little netbook with it’s ANNOYING LOUD CLICKING FAN!  Man I sure did waste $600 on this little pile of shit.

UPDATE: Ubuntu updated it self allowing me to install Flash into FireFox. And the installer applet was then smart enough to install any dependancies it needed, and it installed fine. Yay!  From there I was able to also install Second Life, but it runs horribly on this little lappy. Next I’ll try QuakeLive.

Now for something completely irrelevant….

LL has done it again, introducing a new service that you’ll never need.  AvaLine!  No it’s not perfume for your avatar, so he/she will smell nice to other avatars in SL; something just as equally useless.  Voice over IP on Second Life.  For only L$ 1500 a month (~$5.80 usd) you too can get incoming voice calls from people on traditional phones/cell. But wait there’s more!  You do NOT get your own phone number! People call a local number of only about 40 cities world wide (so you’ll likely be calling long distance) and THEN dial a personal ID code to actually call the person. If they refuse the call or aren’t offline, they also offer voice mail, which is just an attachment sent via email.

”What an incredibly useless service!”                                   ”No more LAG! I won’t have to have Skype installed lagging my SL anymore.”
– anonymous avatar — anonymous avatar

Why use traditional phone and cell phone services anymore? Who needs Magic Jack, or Skype when you can park your ass in front of your PC and sit online Second Life camping for 3L$ per hour at in some sim no one shops at, let alone visits, so you can accept your AvaLine phone calls.

You don’t really need mobility, most of us SL users are fat-assed slobs who never go out side anyway.  You won’t mind being tethered by a head-set to your PC or laptop so you can accept incoming calls from people you met online.  You can impress your friends (if you have any) by showing off a long distance phone number + ID code, in an IM to that cute girl newbie you met today, who’s probably just another fat slob. The new service dosen’t support dial-out calls from this service; but you don’t have any friends anyway.

FireFox and Windows 7

For years I’ve been using a little backup app for Firefox called MozBackup, so every time I reinstalled my OS for whatever reason, I would simply back up FireFox and Thunderbird using this app, export out everything I needed (including cookies, plug-ins, and so forth) allowing me to switch over with no problems.  I didn’t have to remember all my logins/passwords to every site used, all my email history was intact, everything i used regularly, and was important to me was flawlessly transferable.

Then Firefox 3.5 came out. When I updated my browser it broke all by plug-ins and extensions I had for FF.  I started getting mass pop up ads for porn sites, and banner ads I normally wouldn’t have seen.  It was a nightmare to use, and it felt like I was on some strangers PC who was still using IE.  At first i thought it was some incompatibility with Windows 7 64bit.  After all Win7 has two separate folders for program files.  \program files and \program files (x86) for old 32-bit apps.  This is where Firefox would install in.  Every time I tried to install a plug-in there was an error during the install, and it would refuse to install.  I even switched back to FF 3.0.x and I STILL had the same problems!  GRR!

I thought the folks at firefox would fix it, but it’s never did happen with FF 3.51’s release.  I have more than one PC, and on my 2nd PC I’ve had windows 7 (64) running since the beta was out (now running RC).  But i never did get around to installing FF on it since I don’t use it much. I guess for months I made the false asumption that FF 3.5 plugins werne’t compadible with Windows 7. Until i realized I never tested it, and would only take moments to test.  Low and behold it ran fine, all the plugins I downloaded installed just fine as they should.  The only difference this time is I never restored my MozBackup on this.  I’m assuming MozBackup broke something in 3.5 when it restored particular files, or settings so plugs weren’t found in the proper place, even after downloading they wouldn’t install. So it looks like I need to do a “fresh” install of FireFox on my main PC to get everything working properly.  I hope i can still remember all my logins and passwords.  <sigh>

At least now I can start out clean, even some quirks will be cleared away, and I just need to export my bookmarks to HMTL and I’ll be fine.  I’ll likely keep using MozBackup when I transition from Windows 7 RC, to the final version released this fall.  I’m also gonna give Bing a whirl as my default search engine, and see how that works out.

The 912 Project

I recently started watching Glen Beck on Fox News, and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC.  These two shows are complete polar opposites over the same topics and it’s really hard to filter out the bullshit.  It’s like matter, and anti-matter, put them together and you get nothing!  You’d think there would be some truth left over when you do that, but these two shows contradict each other to an extreme. You’d think my DVR would blow up from having these shows  recorded.   The other show, a podcast, I like to listen too that seems to balance this out is “The No Agenda” podcast. But keep in mind, I am a registered Republican, but I voted democrat in the last two presidential elections, since Ron Paul never made it far enough.

So anyway I read up on this 912 project, I thought it had to do with 9/11 as if something special happened the next after after the terrorists attack.  But no it’s just a list of statements where only two things I have an issue with.

#2

This is something a modern society needs to just get over.  There is no God that cares; please get over it.  Stop trying to do things in God’s name when he dosen’t give a rats ass.  He has no agenda anymore, but everyone makes it out as if he does, yet nobody knows what it is.  It’s like some asshole’s personal agenda hiding under the guise that it’s the “Will of God” when it obviously isn’t.  Last time people did this people lived in monarchies, where everyone had to obey Kings and Queens because God spoke directly to them, and ordained them as rulers of the land is if God was to do so himself.  Maybe if religious nuts would focus on real issues, and not vague impressions and twisted meanings of the Bible; the world would be a better place. You don’t have to be a religious person to know what’s right and wrong, good or bad.  Spirituality is good if you need it, but far too often bullshit “religious agendas” gets in the way real life, and starts the problems and the cataclysms that the Bible it SELF warns about.  Get your head out of God ass people, thank you.

#6

I understand that’s how it is right now, but I believe equal rights SHOULD be guaranteed.  That is something the world has been STRIVING for for millenia. You don’t have to be a bleeding heart liberal to understand this, and want this for the world at large.  We could have this if resources were easy to obtain and unlimited.  But wait… isn’t this already guaranteed?  Isn’t that what the bill of rights is about?  The Constitution? All those old documents they wrote over 200 years ago that founded this country?  Should we disregard documents written so long ago (cough!)The Bible(cough!) just because it’s old, written by dead people, and just try something else that isn’t proven to work?

I believe equal opportunity should be guaranteed, but if you make bad choices (or lack there off) in life, then all bets are off.  Everyone should be guaranteed this, regardless of what neighborhood you live in, or what last name you were born with (or changed it too).

All these talking heads on TV, like Glen Beck, like to talk about Hitler and Socialism and how we SEEM to be heading in this direction.  However #6 is probably the most socialistic statement I’ve ever heard from this guy.  #6 can be seen to mean that equal rights only belong to the people who deserve it, and yet he warns us about socialism?

With that said, it’s nearly impossible to make a guarantee.  To do so means that if one person wasn’t given equal rights, that person will be given something else of equal value; that’s what guarantees do.  Like if you buy a product that’s has a defect, you’re guaranteed for it to get fixed, or you get your money back.  But how can you apply a guarantee to equal rights?

The rest of this 912 Project document is all common sense.  If it wasn’t for #2 and #6, you could say that perhaps a moderate, or even a liberal wrote this.

GreenLife Viewer AWESOME!

Green Life Emerald viewer (or just Emerald) is the BEST client EVER!

It has:

• Awesome built-in radar function
• double click teleporting, perfect for when the sim lags and you just wanna move across the room
• Temporary texture files for TESTING, so you won’t waste 10L every time a texture dosen’t look right.
• “Show look at” targets show avatars name
• OTR IM encryption, and authentication
• Even less camera restrictions allowing you to zoom way far out
• No sky ceiling, when flying up into the clouds.  You can hold PAGE-UP indefinitely with out using a flight script.
• 13 skins to choose from, instead of the boring TWO in the official viewer.
• Alternate voice chat server ability
• Built-in Shield protection (not sure what that does)
• Auto response to IM based on criteria like if a user is on your friends list or not, etc
• Command line style functions in local chat that let you do stuff
• Customizable “effects” when you’re selecting/editing objects.  Create your own symbols.
• Build menu has extra preset shapes!
• All kinds of little tweaks and changes to the client I haven’t figured out yet, or don’t know what they do.

GO install it!