Respect Sakura

Just thought I’d give the heads up for all you peoples anxiously awaiting my next move. Basically, I’ve been in the process of getting myself into the Apple iPhone developer program, and intend to sell apps under the “Respect Sakura” banner. What kind of apps, and when will be announced at a later date.

I intend to rejig the entire Respect Sakura site, and replace it with something a little more appropriate. Unfortunately, entering into the world of corporate whoredom means one must censor themselves, and not do things like call members of other companies things like cum-guzzling assbandits. Oh hay Brandon. :D

So, yeah. Expect things to change around here. Coincidently, if you’re a member of my wide circle of friends and you’re looking at developing iPhone apps in your spare time, gimme a buzz.

I normally don’t respond to trolls, but sometimes - just sometimes - I feel the need to put the ignorant sycophant pigfuckers like Brandon LeBlanc in their place.

In addition to paying actors to fake buying notebooks, and complain about how Macs are a gazillion times more expensive than cheap, shitty, crapware infested shitboxes like AMD-based notebooks with no battery life and underpowered hardware, they’re now waving this whitepaper around by some guy they paid to write, like it fucking means something. Let me reiterate this for those in the audience that may have trouble dressing themselves in the morning: It’s tantamount to me stating “Hi, I wrote this totally unbiased comparison of the costs of cheap ass PC’s to expensive Macs that’s totally unbiased, fair, and not judgemental in any way, and oh yeah - Microsoft paid me to do it”.

Not to call anyone’s integrity to question, but Roger L. Kay, the author of this whitepaper, is A FUCKING LIAR, and Brandon “I enjoy cocks weekly” LeBlanc is A FUCKING LIAR AND A SHILL. Now that we’ve got that little disclaimer out of the way, lets see how the argument of these worthless faggots fails to hold water like Brandon’s mouth would fail to hold all that sperm he ingests daily.

Continue reading ‘Tonight on Mythbusters: The mythical Apple Tax’

After my last home server project ended with tears, I decided that my next system was going to be somewhat smaller, portable, use significantly less power and have no more than four or five drives.

However, money has been somewhat tight for me of late, and I’ve had to make do with no home server to store all my crap, or have the benefit of daily C: backups for all my Windows machines. I had all my media stored locally on my main PC, and backed it up weekly to my trusty Thecus N5200. I read somewhere that it’s possible to hack these things to run a slightly more powerful Linux, when it suddenly struck me - low power, 5 drives, small and portable. Okay, the 600MHz CPU kinda sucks, but damn. It’s almost all I need.

So I did it, and according to my somewhat extensive Google-fu, I think I’m the first person to actually succeed.

Continue reading ‘WHS Hacks: Installing Windows Home Server on the Thecus N5200′

When you can’t copy your competitors’ shit well enough, and your latest product is perceived as a joke by the public at large, then it’s time to do the ol’ IBM marketing strategy of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

First, Ballmer fired a warning shot off the bow by stating Macs are too expensive, then their marketing agency went to work with this little gem, about how some woman wants a 17″ notebook for $1,000 USD (that’s about 1.4 grand for us, down under). She winds up with an unnamed “HP Pavillion” for $699 USD, and while the specs aren’t advertised, I expect it’s something along the lines of this.

Nice work, Lauren. You just netted yourself a slower, more power hungry notebook, with - what I’d imagine at that pricepoint - a smaller sized battery to boot. That Best Buy site reports that you’ll get 2 & 1/2 hours of battery life out of that, and because we all know that manufacturers are liars, I’m sure you’d be lucky to see even 1 hour of that. And what’s with the 17″ screen? Okay, she wears glasses so I can see the whole “I’m blind lol” aspect, but my girlfriend has this issue as well, and doesn’t have a problem with her 13″ notebook. Lugging a 17″ sonofabitch around is so patently ridiculous that she should have just went for a desktop, instead. Gee, for just $300 more in her budget, she could have been cool enough to have a not-so-painful keyboard to type on, more portability, and ~3 hours more battery life. Not to mention the added performance of not having a CPU and architecture that sucks.

If times are so hard that you can’t muster up $300USD extra for a notebook, if the extra dosh is such a difficult thing to come by, then what the fuck are you doing buying a notebook in the first place? Do something productive, like tackle your credit card debt or put additional money on your mortgage. Stock up on beans, and get yourself a shotgun for the impending collapse of modern society as we know it. It’s irresponsible fuckers like you that got us in this mess.

So once this rolled around, it was obvious that Microsoft are out to spread yet more FUD. This fellow is named Giampaolo, and he’s after a notebook with portability, battery life, and “power” for $1,500. So naturally, he gets this. A 16″ notebook, that weighs 7 pounds (3.2kgs), and while they don’t list the battery life, I can imagine with the dedicated video card, the 2.4GHz processor, the fingerprint reader, the Altec Lansing Dolby-up-the-arse super duper speakers (with a subwoofer!), and all the other needless shit, that it’s somewhere between 2 hours and fuck all. But that’s all okay, because it’s got a 9600M GT with 512MB of VRAM, and a 500GB hard drive, meaning it’s going to be great at playing games - when sitting at home, connected to AC.

It’s kind of like the end of the third Terminator movie, when Skynet apparently goes out onto the internet on every computer on the earth, and then begins firing nukes at cities and residential areas - where all these computers reside. To paraphrase Yahtzee, they couldn’t have missed the point more if they were facing the opposite direction, and the point was in another country. If the guy wanted something portable to play Far Cry 2 on, he should look into buying a Shuttle PC.

This is not about what these people want - it’s about what they can afford. Microsoft are taking advantage of the fact that every one’s spooked about the current economic shitstorm to spread FUD about their competitors, and the whole thing reeks of Ballmer. They’re taking misinformed, uneducated people off the street, who are only looking for one thing - the thing with the biggest numbers attached to it, for the least amount of money - as opposed to someone who really knows that when looking for a computer, you start with the most fundamental ideal - what do I want this thing to do for me?

So usually, my spiel on any kind of computer recommendations (PC, or Mac) usually starts with this: Who are you, and what do you want to do with it? What kind of history do you have with computers? Are you interested in doing Office work or playing games? Are their any specific software requirements?

That’s how you start hunting for a new system, ladies and gentlemen. Purpose, first. Price, second. Additional wanky features last.

Yeah, I’ll get onto this soon. Life’s been one hell of a motherfucker lately with work, relationships, moving, and all sorts of stuff. I’ve been quite literally so distant from my home PC (my beloved arachnocore), that I just haven’t been able to keep this site up to date.

This all changes. I’m intending to be a lot more active in future, and I shall continue to thrust my opinionated self upon those not clever enough to get the fuck outta dodge in the first place.

So.. um.. yeah. More to come.

So I really suck at this whole regular blogging thing. I’ve a few ideas of things I’d like to write up on here, and I will get to that at some stage - but for now, I figure I’d subject the audience to my personal life yet again. It appears that the universe is likely to implode, because one of the universal constants that has been around for at least 8 years now, appears to have been violated. This is, of course the constant that jS = 1, or in other words - Jaymz is always singular.

Yes, yes.. I hate it too how intolerably smug a person often becomes upon becoming acquainted with a significant other (looking at you, Scuzzy), and how frustrating it is when they feel the need to tell the whole goddamn world all about it. So it’s a good thing for me that I loathe my fellow man so very, very much - as I take great delight thrusting my smugness upon you, the reader, by mentioning that my current partner no longer consists of just four digits and a thumb. If you happen to resemble my previous state, then all the better for me. :keke:

Naturally, due to privacy and the sheer idiocy of the fact that I gave her the URL to this site, I really can’t go into much more detail. Suffice to say that, while I’ve been quite content, and somewhat pleased with my life thus far (of the past few years or so), I’m not really sure I’ve been quite this happy. I guess I want to try be a bit more sensible this time around, and not rush into anything so it’s all I’ll really say in regards to that.. but despite my worries and concerns, I feel this is a good thing. I mentioned to a friend earlier, that I saw this potential event coming like a freight train, which carried all sorts of implications and complicated matters - but I was far too stupid to avoid it. On reflection, I’m very glad I didn’t - regardless of where things will take me next.

And finally, to that certain someone reading this. I can’t promise I’ll stop being a worrywart and think of various concerns and worries, etc.. but I can say I’m truly happy things worked out the way they have, and above all - I’m happy being with you. Happier than I’ve been in quite a long time, and I only hope I can make you as happy as you make me.

So now that all that sappyness has left me with a load of excess bile, I’d just like to take this time to mention that the rest of you can go and choke on a bag full of dicks.

Hello there! You might remember me from when I used to write blog posts for Respect Sakura so very, very long ago. Okay, so maybe that’s a bit of hyperbole here and there, but it has been over a month that I’ve been waiting for my internet connection to come into fruition. What happened? Well, here in Australia, our telecommunications industry sucks ass. Essentially, we have an ex-government approved monopoly known as Telstra, and we have a few slightly smaller companies like Optus who compete against them.

Now, you can’t spit in Australia without it landing on someone who has all manner of bad things to say about Telstra, so you’d expect that the best way to compete against them would be to have a company that doesn’t follow Telstra’s guidelines on dealing with customers, and actually provide a good service, be easily contactable, and will bend over backwards to help you with enquiries or issues you may have. Right? Right? Well, unfortunately it appears that Optus are so smitten with the notion of doing everything better than Telstra, that they’ve gone out of their way to not only emulate Telstra’s wonderful customer relation policies, but take them to the next level of ungodly asshole-ness.

So I get my phone and internet service through Optus. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the phone - it’s purely there for the internet service. I arrange to get them transferred to the new place, and with Optus being such absolute pillocks, I prepare myself for the fact that the internet connection may lag behind the phone connection. I’ll be moving on the weekend, so I tell them to disconnect my service on the Saturday. What do they do? The second that 11:59PM, on a Friday night, rolls around - fucking BAM! Phone line and internet service is dead. Okay, so I was hoping that Saturday would mean, like.. that Saturday night, or sometime during Saturday, and not when I’m spending my last few hours playing WOW on the Friday night. So the precision of “Saturday” was most unexpected, but hey.. if they’re that picky about this, then maybe I’ll be fine in regards to the phone and internet getting hooked up. Right?

Sure enough.. the Tuesday I specified as the date to get it put on rolls around, and they connect the phone line up. I’m a little alarmed, because my DSL modem reports that there’s no DSL synchronization whatsoever, but hey.. maybe that comes later. A week rolls past, and I’m wondering what’s taking Optus so long with my internet connection. I ring them to find out. A few hours later, I get on to somebody, give the pertinent information, and they draw a blank. They can’t find any records, or they do find records stating I disconnected my service back in some arbitary month, last year. Kind of odd, seeing as I was using and paying for it still, just a bit over a week ago. To cut a long story short, they seemed to completely lose all record of me ever wanting to transfer my internet service, and probably did so because I was so insistant that I’d keep my original bandwidth limits, and not this bullshit “10GB flat with uploads included” plan they were going to slap me on.

Fair enough. Maybe this is a good opportunity to go with those awesome plans TPG have at their disposal. I inform Optus very politely that they can go fuck themselves, and immediately get in contact with TPG. TPG tell me they’ll have me connected within the week. Sure enough, a week later - I get an e-mail whilst at work, stating the work on the line has been done, and when I get home, I’ll have lovely, lovely internets at ADSL2 speeds, and with TPG’s significantly higher bandwidth limits (100GB a month, and only shaping down to 256k when I go over).

Thing is, when I get home - not only is there no internet, there’s no more goddamn phoneline. In fact, when I try calling my number - some guy named Tom picks up the line, and tells me his phone number is nothing like mine. Awesome. I wait until the next day to promptly call TPG, and inform them of what went down. They play the “Oh, it’s a problem with your phone line, call your line provider” game, obviously not wanting to own up to the fact that whoever “connected” the line obviously had a case of the passion fingers. Fuck it, then.. I’ll give Optus a call. An hour of waiting on the phone with Optus later, and I get on to somebody. They then inform me that

1. I have to wait a week or two.
2. That I will most likely have to pay for the tech to come out.

Naturally, this has me seething with rage. After this, I make two more calls. The first, is to the TIO with a complaint against Optus’s behaviour, and a statement that I want them to fix it by today or the next business day, and to not charge me a contract cancellation fee when I change providers, as they have routinely failed to provide me service, or actually do what I request of them (the internet transfer, for example). The next call is to Telstra, to get my phone line ported back to them. This all happened on Friday of last week.

Monday afternoon, as I’m coming home - I get a call. There’s going to be a Telstra technician waiting for me when I get home to re-install my phone line and internet service. So, there’s something to be learned in all of this. When your ISP or telco try to pull some kind of bullshit on you, demand proper service from them. When they come up with a bullshit excuse as to why they won’t, take it to the TIO. Be sure to post all about it on places like Whirlpool, as well or do your best to make your ordeal as public as possible (ie, this blog post). Morale of the story is that when your ISP or telco hands you a pile of shit - you don’t have to take it.

So I’m somewhat of a latecomer to this whole Muhmorpeger thing - at least, in regards to WOW. I have, of course, played other MMO’s in the past, such as Neocron and Ragnarok Online, but really just found these sort of games to be more addictive, and not really all that fun. I could never say why I played them, when I never enjoyed them, I guess it’s kind of like why I go to work every day, despite not really enjoying that, either.

However, seeing as I’m actually gainfully employed now, as opposed to being a student slash jobless dole bludging bum when I played the two forementioned muhmorpegers, you’d think my grind quota would be taken up by doing the same boring crap, day in day out at the company who’s name shall not be named to protect the innocent (i.e., me - from being fired). However, WOW isn’t so much grind.. it’s kind of like playing an older style of RPG, like.. y’know.. Neverwinter Nights or something, only with a fuckton more people playing with you, and without the boring statistical bullshit that would give dice wielding nerds raging erections. You don’t have to worry about which stats do what, and for what class or whatever - WOW does a good job of allowing you to not worry about that sort of shit.

That’s not to say it’s not dumbed down for ‘tards like me, if you have a hard on for Excel spreadsheets then WOW can suit those needs as well. But the important thing for me, is I don’t feel the game penalises me for not caring about what stats go where, or any crap like that. I just continue to get experience for killing the local populace of monsters for stationary lazy-ass dickwad NPC’s. Being a rogue, all I need to worry about is things that affect my stamina and agility, putting points in the talents that interest me, and if I poke things in the butt, it really fucking hurts them.

The point I’m trying to make is that WOW is fun for me. I guess it’s also because I’m currently playing and levelling with a friend that keeps it interesting. Not sure how long it’ll last, but the whole running-around-the-countryside and killing-x-amount-of-crap-for-some-lazy-dickhead is still fun for me, and this is no doubt simply due to my inexperience with the game, and once I’m more familiar with everything in it, I’m sure I’ll be as jaded as the rest of you.

Note: This posting has a bunch of links to sites trying to sell you shit. I’m not trying to advertise anything, but just to show the sort of prices floating around. If the notion of linking to a shop’s website is offensive to you, go and fuck right off then you may wish to skip past this post and read something else.

Astute visitors may have noticed that I updated the hardware page a couple of weeks ago, with the purchase of 8GB of RAM for my beloved-yet-sometimes-temperamental Mac Pro. No, that’s not sticks of RAM to bring her up from the default 2GB to 8GB.. that’s 4 sticks of 2GB DIMMs, with the original 1GB DIMM pair slapped aside into a box, awaiting the day I pull my finger out and sell it to someone needy.

Interesting thing of note, was that when I purchased the crap - 800MHz FBDIMMs were impossible to get in this country, so I went to Other World Computing and bought it there. I even threw in the most expensive shipping offered, in order to get it in roughly a week after placing my order. Sure enough, it arrived fairly quickly and without incident - costing me a whopping $600 odd AUD.

Today, I found that ePowerMac, an Australian Mac vendor, are now selling 800MHz FBDIMMs via their website. How do they compare? Well, see for yourself. $900 odd for 4×2GB sticks (I think, their site is a tad confusing in that regard), or a whopping great $1,600 odd for two 4GB sticks. Jesus. However, ePowerMac aren’t the only ones to do this. Just two 2GB 667MHz FBDIMM sticks for the previous Mac Pro models from MacOnline will set you back just shy of $600, and that’s for a grand total of 4GB. Almost what I paid for 8GB from the states… with postage.

But, this isn’t just shops suited for Apple products that are getting in on this. Even my old time favourite PC component store, AusPCMarket, has the price way up the bum. You can do some more price comparisons on Shopbot, with Abit being “a bit more like it”, neglecting the fact that it’s for 667MHz stuff with heatsink spreaders not suitably designed for the Mac Pro’s unique cooling needs. Futhermore, they advertise their stock availability as “Ask”, which often translates to “Months” or “When Hell freezes over” in computer shop lingo, whichever occurs first.

So, that’s the state of RAM here - at least for FBDIMMs, anyways. Maybe there’s some kind of anal importing tax, or there’s some financial reason that I can’t understand which causes it to cost so fucking much, or just maybe they have shitty suppliers who are bending them over a barrel and assraping them - but I fail to see why buying it overseas, and getting the most expensive shipping one can, still works out to be half the goddamn price than what people are trying to pass it off for over here.

Feel free to add your own thoughts to this goddamn shitheap.

Hay guys, whats goin on in this internet community?

Well, it’s been a long time coming because every time I tried to upload forum code onto the site, Transmit would bomb the fuck out and die somewhere in the middle of some horrendous directory tree, making resuming the transfer next to impossible. That, and every time I ran into this issue, I’d yell at the top of my lungs, delete everything, and walk away for another day/week/month/whatever.

So, everything’s now up there. I’m getting ready to recreate things under a similar vein to the beloved AusAnime of yore. It’s pretty much blank right now, so for the love of God, please visit, sign up, and start posting goddamnit. I’ve also put up some rules to abide by, and an awesome starting collection of avatars, some of which you’ll recognise as being picked randomly in the blog comments for those who haven’t signed up with gravatar.

In any case, check it out and let me know what you think.