every word of it.

Today’s Video of the Day is The Cardigans – “You’re The Storm”, from their criminally overlooked 2004 release Long Gone Before Daylight. It’s today’s video pick because Long finds the lead singer, Nina Persson, scary, with the dark eyeshadow and everything. Me, I’m the complete opposite. Also the video is nice if you like the whole “abandoned roller coaster in a barren wasteland” motif.

As you know, The Cardigans are from Sweden. Sweden was one of my World Cup semifinal picks. See I don’t know much about soccer/football, but I do know that I like Sweden. They gave us The Cardigans, Kent, Jens Lenkman, The Wannadies, Ericsson (as in Sony Ericsson), Volvo, Saab, and IKEA.

My other picks for the semifinals were also based on similar criteria (Do I like your music?) and not really goal scoring and ball kicking. My picks were: Sweden, Australia, Netherlands, and France. If you know me at all, you’ll notice that England is missing. And eventhough I love England a lot, they let me down. They were supposed to beat Sweden, hold them scoreless so Trinidad would advance to the Second Round. So as there punishment and to show that I was cross with them, I replaced them with the Netherlands. Honestly, I don’t think I know any bands from the Netherlands, but I believe in their dikes, tulips, windmills, and The Hague.

I have a quick little quiz for you people today, only 1 question

1. Which of these 2 symbols is associated with Nazism?

a)

b)

Take your time…

The answer is of course b, the Swastika. Hopefully this wasn’t news to you, unlike the 2 youths at Walgreen’s yesterday who gave me guff for my Communist Party tshirt

Yep, these 2 kids took a break from chatting up the cashier to ask me if my tshirt was “Nazi” and then after explaining it to them, accusing me of not thinking before I bought it.

Trinidad & Tobago then Dallas

All in the same day

Yes, June 15th has come and gone, signifying my first month as an Associate Software Engineer.

It’s been a great month. I really enjoy my job. The kind of enjoyment that makes me excited to get up between 6 – 6:30am. Though I still find it hard to fall asleep before 11pm. I’ve tried with and without the TV, but I can’t win. If I try to fall asleep without the TV on, my mind starts wandering and I don’t fall asleep. I’m much more successful with the TV on, but there’s always a chance I’ll stay up cause I love the guest on Letterman. And there’s Woot. Blasted Woot. What if I miss something good? It’s what keeping me up at night.

I spend a lot of time driving to and from work, the road is my 2nd home. And you know what I hate more than anything on the road, Cadillacs. I mean really, could there be a more uglier brand of car? If you gave me a Cadillac, I think I would pee on it and then try to sell it cause I hate it so. Another company giving Cadillac a fight in the ugly department is Dodge. Who’s standard operation procedure is to take a box, stick some wheels on it, and put the biggest fucking grille on the front they can fit. Except for the Sprinter, I saw one of those a few weeks ago and if I had a need for a cargo van, that would be it.

As a side note, I’m finally starting to see a trickle of RAV4′s now on my drive. Still haven’t seen any Flint Mica Sport models. Nor have I seen any V6′s. I’m like a snowflake.

Situation: You’ve installed Wine onto your headless Linux server with the goal of using DVDShrink. Afterall, the server is mostly idle, must use those cpu cycles for good! After following the instructions, you get to the setup portion and what do you see,

But if you connect the server to a monitor, Wine works fine. So what’s the problem?

Problem: Seems when using Wine with trusted X11 forwarding, like FreeNX uses, on MacOS X, text isn’t being rendered. I couldn’t tell you the reason, I’m just stating the facts here.

Resolution: Edit the user.reg file in your ~/.wine folder and add these lines,

[Software\Wine\X11 Driver] “ClientSideWithRender”=”N”

And problem solved,

I have finally found a replacement desktop for the super cute picture of Kristen Bell playing a Nintendo DS,

And yes that was painted by Bill Sienkiewicz.

The Venture Brothers Season 1 DVD was released this week, and I finally finished all the episodes with commentary and the extras. And you know what I got from the commentary, Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer are pretty awesome dudes and apparently double espresso’s pass right through Doc. It’s always nice to know the people who make the cartoons you love aren’t dweebs.

Reason #284 Why The RAV4 is the Best Car Ever, 188.3 miles / 7.199 gallons ~= 26 miles per gallon And yes, that is in rush hour traffic

Also, I found a kicking rad shortcut to work. It’s the best shortcut in the history of mankind I would say. It’s so good, I fear just typing the name of the street on this blog might ruin it. But it survived a bridge closing, and I owe it to you all for not updating in days.

Normally, I have 2 routes to go to work. 360 -> 183 -> Regal Row or 20 -> Spur 408 -> Loop 12 -> 183 -> Regal Row. Both routes are pretty close in terms of distance and time. Also, they both share the same bottleneck, Texas Stadium

So I got rid of the bottleneck, and now I exit on Shady Grove/Regal Row from Loop 12. This cuts my time down to 40 minutes, even in the densest of traffic. What’s great about Regal Row is that once I exit, it’s almost no stop lights until I get to work. The speed limit is 35mph on Regal Row, but that doesn’t stop everyone else from going 55. I try to keep it under 45 and I succeed most days, but I’m not going to against the flow of traffic if you know what I mean.

It really is clever

And speaking of awesome roads, Spur 408 has to be my favorite piece of highway ever. It is so refreshing after coming off the hell that is Loop 12. Almost always it’s light traffic and you can drive 60-70 all the way through.