Michael R. Barrick's blog
Sat, 2007/02/17 - 9:48pm
Last Monday I did another shoot for the Port Moody Wearable Art Awards. I got to try out some new gear, including a wireless slave flash (the optical slaves I normally use are no good in daylight) with some interesting results. |
Thu, 2007/02/15 - 10:55am
If 95% of the people on earth right now were to suddenly die, the total population of the earth would still be higher than it was in the at any point prior to a thousand years ago.
Put another way, in the last thousand years the total number of humans living on earth has increased twenty-fold.
Mon, 2007/02/12 - 5:21pm
Just once I would like to have a tech support experience with a major
vendor that does not:
1. Involve an automated telephone system that takes ten to twenty minutes
to navigate through to then spend an hour on hold for what inevitably ends
up being the wrong person. The only people these systems provide a
conveniece to are the vendors who don't have to pay for operators plus the
added advantage of the unknown number of people who get frustrated and hang
up before reaching a human.
Sun, 2007/02/11 - 3:28pm
I had to replace he old computer I was using (a PII-350 purchased in 1998) as a spam filter. It had become too slow to deal with the volume of crap I get. Not only do I get the usual barrage of spam that everyone gets, but for nearly a year now I have been getting a heinous amount of backsplatter from spam-zombies using spoofed @gothic.bc.ca return addresses. The latest crudtastic tactic of putting the advertising message in an image is what put the poor little box over the edge after nine years of valiant service. Adding OCR slowed the processing down enough that messages were coming in faster than they could be processed. Time for a new spam-pig.
Given that I was replacing a PII-350 even the most bottom of the line machine out there now would be orders of magnitude more powerful, so I went looking for just that - bargain-basement last-year's clearance models. The clearance model I went with was configured for Canadian French. Not needing the keyboard nor giving a rat's ass about whatever OS was preinstalled since I'd be wiping it off anyway, French was not a problem.
I couldn't resist firing it up as-is though, and I was greeted by this très amusant welcome:
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Vancouver is not transmitting. I have the Victoria transmitter tuned in, but it doesn't come in well. This is very odd.