Broken = Broke
May 23rd, 2008 § 2 Comments
The summer was off to a pretty good start until last Wednesday. I had my new bike, I was getting better and better day by day, the weather was wonderful, I had my PCs back at home for rainy days, and my camera was on order for taking pics on pics.
After my shift on Wednesday, I headed to my bike to wait for my lift to drop by and bring me back home. I started messing around with 180s, and to my surprise I was now able to do the entire rotation, even a little 20 degrees over what was needs. I told myself that I could probably land it with a rollback if I get enough speed, so I give myself a little boost, going about 10 – 15 kmh, not excessively fast, lifted off and gave myself a big ass spin. I sure spinned a lot, and pretty up high too… but then my rear wheel landed first, wayyy too early, and I go flying. Bang on the pavement, my arm shoots out towards the ground to absorb the impact, my entire left side takes the shock, while my right leg hits the pedals.
At first, I thought my leg was the worst thing, because I have several time been hit in the past weeks, to the point where it was kinda bluish and swelled. Turns out that 15 minutes later, my wrist is hurting like crap, to a point where I can’t move it. I think it’s just muscular, but the day after, it hurts even more. Later the day after, I get rushed to the hospital in Louiseville, where I get some X-rays taken, just to get transfered to my hometown hospital. That’s where the doctor breaks it to me: fractured scaphoid. See what wikipedia has to say about that.
It can be slow to heal because of the limited circulation to the bone. Fortunately, it is relatively difficult to break, but is the most commonly fractured bone in the carpus, particularly because of its unique anatomy and position within the wrist. Approximately 60% of carpal fractures are scaphoid fractures.
Fractures of the scaphoid must be recognized and treated quickly, as prompt treatment is the key to proper healing. Delays may complicate healing. Even rapidly immobilized fractures may require surgical treatment, including use of the Herbert screw to bind the two halves together.
To say that my dad didn’t want me to go to the hospital… lol. So as a result I’m 1 month in a super-stiff fiberglass cast, and the doctor who inspected me wanted me to stop working and biking for 8 weeks. That’s two months. That’s also 2000$.
Considering the fact that I already did a deposit for my camera, that I still have this month’s phone bill to pay, and that I’m out of work without invalidity insurance, I’m back to living off my parent’s wallet again. This means two things: first, my dignity has been badly shattered since I am no longer financially independent and can’t do half of the things I used to do alone, and second, I’m shit poor. And when I say shit poor, I mean, SHIT POOR. Like, “I can’t even pay my domain renewal which is expiring in less than half a month” poor.
Oh, and it also means that all my projects are also either put on hold or on slow-mo: migrating this forum to PHPBB3 and modding a theme for it? Not with only one hand to type with. Prepping, painting and modding my Rocketfish case for project Bloody Bridget? I think not. Updating both of my blogs more often. Ha. The only thing I will be doing is photography, and that’s if I get to mod my cast to act as a pseudo-tripod for holding my camera. No swimming. No biking. No showers, only baths. Can somebody say gay summer?
That said, my thoughts go to everybody living with a real handicap. This little incident has made me think about what it would be like to live with a serious injury or medical condition. I can’t ride my bike for half a summer, people who lose an arm in a work accident can’t ride at all. If I’m depressed for such a small injury, what would it be like to learn that from one day to the next, you’ll have to live with a severe injury and every complication that it brings? People who live as normally as they can with a physical handicap, those people are the true brave, and should be taken as an example. Shout out to you guys.
The last paragraph was edited because it contained badly written material which may have offended some people.
Photography, Here I Come!
May 17th, 2008 § 1 Comment
It was inevitable. Geeks like expensive toys, and beautiful stuff, and what more beautiful and expensive than photography? Every single geek that I know is into photography somehow: Francois-Olivier Bergeron, one of my oldest friend’s brother and bigtime tech enthousiast has been sporting higher end Canon DSLR stuff for over a year now, Mark Langenfeld, an ex-coposter from Dream.in.code (sadly, I stopped posting there 
) also is into urban photography, let’s face it, I was doomed to start taking pictures myself.
Of course, I’ve been taking pictures for a while now with the Sony DSC-S500 that my parents bought me a couple of Christmases ago, but the camera just ain’t cutting it anymore. I need some more high end stuff.
I’ve been looking around for a camera for about 2 to 3 months now, but it’s really only 2 weeks ago that my choiced landed on the Nikon D40. The infamous DPreview gives it an excellent rating, and for a noob like me who is looking for a quality entry DSLR, it’s price tag and feature set is awesome. I’ve also seen some wicked sample shots on Flickr, everything to prime me into buying it.
This afternoon, all I was supposed to buy was a cap. I ended up, partially dued to my own hast of buying and some pressure from the salesman, I ended up buying the D40 kit, which includes a Nikkor 18-55 lense. I cannot find the correct words to express how hyped I am about this camera… I sense this is the beginning of something great. One of my dad’s friends who is a pro photographer AND fully Nikon equipped also said that I could probably borrow some lenses once in a while, so that’s a plus too. According to the salesman, it’ll be here by friday of next week. Just look at this thing.
I’m having the impression that this camera will induce a lot of other expensive purchases: filters, lenses, a tripod, the Peleng fisheye I’ve been looking at…. eh. You gotta put your money somewhere, right?
In those times, I’m happy to be a Flickr Pro user 
.
International Time Sync Day, How About That?
May 6th, 2008 § 1 Comment
Yesterday, I went through a stressful situation that happens so frequently that I didn’t notice how irritant it was until much later, and it took me another couple other hours to realized that the incident could have been avoided. It went something like this:
1:20 PM, 40 minutes to my yearly evalution at McDonalds, which happends to take place somewhere roughly 30 minutes away from my place. No stress, I’m posting on some forums and chilling. My dad, aka lift, is trying to clean up the workspace next to my desk. I tell him to get ready, 10 minutes to liftoff, and continue browsing till 1:30. I tell dad to get ready, he responds by informing me that he still has 5 minutes left on his watch. I go upstairs for a glass of orange juice, I look at the microwave for the time, it reads 1:36. I look at my cell, it reads 1: 31. I give another holler to dad, take another glass, and by the time we’re in the car, it’s 1:43 on the car radio, but 1:37 on my cell; either way, I’m sure I’m gonna be late. I arrive at my workplace at 2:04 cell time, only to find out that the time given by the restaurant’s central system is 1:58.
You can call me a moron for stressing about being 4 minutes late, but behind the story, there’s a point. In this world people call frantic, restless, and where every second counts, why can’t we get accurate time reading EVERYWHERE? Until all time telling devices are equipped with atomic precision and automatic daily wireless updating, people need to act.
Wouldn’t it be cool if every first Monday of May, we’d all gather around one of many giant public OLED clocks and sync our watches to THE correct time? Better yet, and less costly, what if everybody took advantage of switch to or from DST to syncronize with an internet timeserver? Any of the latter would make people in general much more punctual, and probably less stressful too.
Just a thought… In the meantime, I encourage you to sync your own time at least twice a year, and invite your friends and relatives to do the same thing. If the world can pass around with mouth to mouth, maybe we can go somewhere with this.
PicLens Makes Browsing Media Beautiful
May 2nd, 2008 § Leave a Comment
I got a link from the nVidia newsletter saying that they had released some new app called piclens, which according to the newsletter “transforms your browser into an immersive, full-screen 3D experience for photos and videos on the web”. I didn’t get it at first, but now that I’ve used it, I don’t know how I lived without it.
Piclens is an awesome piece of software by Cool Iris, that comes in the form of a plugin for the three most popular browsers, being Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari. It adds unique functionality to media-rich sites like Youtube and Flickr: the ability to browse search results or photos in a page in a “3d wall” format which not makes browsing pages and pages of content much easier, but also very enjoyable. All you have to do is press the Piclens button on your browser’s UI when you have reached the target page (Youtube search result page, Flickr set’s page), and you can browse around the thumbnails and select which pictures you want to close up on.
What I really like about this is the ability to see the thumbnails before loading the entire thing, which greatly speeds up search. In Flickr, I’ve search for a pretty common tag, say cats, and loaded what looked like hundreds and hundreds of pictures without a glitch, all the thumbnails loaded very fast, and not once did I have to click a “Next Page” link. When I found an interesting pic, I’d only have to click on it and zoom on it with the scroll wheel to see it in ALMOST full screen. At any time, you can visit the selected picture’s page with a link just below.
So far, only a couple of sites are officially supported, but you can implement PicLens to your site with their developer howtos, or make your own slideshows with the PicLens Publisher, which you can then add to your site with either XML or regular HTML. It makes for kick ass slideshows. They even have a WordPress plugin which looks pretty kick ass, but dued to the fact that I rarely blog with pictures (I should do it more often), it doesn’t exactly yield extraordinary results.
In any case, browsing in tons of new web media just got fun.
Discovering The Classic Geek Movies
April 27th, 2008 § 1 Comment
My parents always keep reminding me how lucky I am to be born in the Information age, and how back in there time, they calculated with abacuses and bla bla bla… However, if I could change something in my date of birth, I’d drag it back to the 70s, back when computers all started. There are some things that I feel I missed, and it deeply saddens me, stuff like hand soldering my hardware to repair it, owning a Thrash80, posting on BBS’s and jacking up my parent’s phone bills by downloading text files, backing up my crap on cassettes, all these things leave me begging for a one way trip aboard the time-traveling Delorian straight back to the 80s.
However, I realize now that I’ve missed way more than just all of the above, when there is no reason to having missed it: geek movies. Sure, I’ve heard about movies like Sneakers, Wargames, and a couple others on IRC, forums, but I’ve never had the balls to actually go the the *cough* video rental store *cough* and dust up the old cassettes.
My days of ignorance or over. Thanks to Marko who compiled a kick ass list of more than 17 geek cult classics, I can now use “hack the gibson” while actually knowing how and when it was originally used. Some of the stuff is pretty old, some even date back to the 80s, and may be hard to find, but adequate use of search features on certain sites is sure to find a copy near you.
Check out the entire list,
Flickr to Offer Short Video Hosting
April 11th, 2008 § 1 Comment
I jumped when I saw that the Organizr no longer refers to the content of sets and collections as photos but rather as things. I could smell something was cooking up.
That’s when I read the announcement at home page:
Video! Video! Video! The rumours are true and “soon” is now. We’re thrilled to introduce video on Flickr. If you’re a pro member, you can now share videos up to 90 glorious seconds in your photostream.
90 seconds? While this might seem like an arbitrary limit, we thought long and hard about how video would complement the flickrverse. If you’ve memorized the Community Guidelines, you know that Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of “long photos,” of capturing slices of life to share.
90 seconds? Pro members only? Not that I care about the pro only part, I’ll probably be a Pro user till the day that I die, but I think permitting the upload of little low quality clips isn’t exactly along the lines of the Flickr philosophy that I thought I had decoded, being “we host your pics in high res till you spill your guts”. Do I really want to see random videos of some 16 year old pose myspace-style with some of her friends and post it on Flickr as “precious memories”? No, unless she’s very hot, and even then. Is this going to steal the disk space that I was supposed to use for photos? Is it going to slow down Flickr servers to Youtube speeds? And 90 seconds? I just can’t see this catching on.
Yup, a tad overdone. Stick to pics, Flickr, noobs can all go and post on Youtube anyways.
[OCN] Small guide to Folding on Linux
April 2nd, 2008 § Leave a Comment
Do you want to start folding for the cure under a linux OS? It’s a fact, all machines run work units fast on tweaked linux, so what are you waiting for?
I have compiled a small guide in my free time to get you folding, SMP or not, under linux in less time that you can read this article. Feel free to leave comments.
Twice I’ve had experiences with folding and Linux: once on an older, slower system where the PPD difference was barely noticeable (2 x 0 is still 0), and another time on Annabel, my new Core 2 based server, in which I made the FAH implementation much cleaner, and I thought I might as well spead the word to y’all. I thought about making an FAQ with this article, but since I don’t yet have enough rep to post in the FAQs, I’d figure that I would type it down here until the FAQ’s replacement (wiki?) hits the streets.
The Life and Times of a Shift Worker
March 25th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
This past weekend was pretty hardcore work-wise. I had asked my bosses to do a little bit more night shifts, as to rake a bit more bacon on my paychecks (this bike ain’t paying for itself), and they didn’t do things half way: next thing I know I’m scheduled for 2 8 hour night shifts on the easter weekend, back to back. My parents were somewhat disappointed that I was assigned these shifts, because after all THEY get the dirty job of waking up at 6 AM to ride me back home, but at least it’s less annoying than those half-night shifts where I finish at 3.
Anyways, my first shift was on Friday. I went shopping on Friday, so I was woken up early in the morning by my parents, spent my whole day like it were any other one, and went to my shift at 10, and turns out that night shifts at our newly renovated restaurant aren’t all that bad. Lots of drunk people, but it just adds to the entertainment. I even got to plug in my iPod to the restaurant’s sound system, so we rocked out to my music while doing our stuff. Thanks to the ever so tasty can of Hype MFP X2 I had bought beforehand (gotta love the 550 mL cans), the shift went smoothly despite my 45 minutes of overtime, and I was out of there at about 7 am.
The second shift however was another ball game. I sleeped from 7:30 to 3, but I woke up tired, and the sleepiness just never went away for that whole day. I went to my shift anyways, too it easy… everything went well until we had a rush at 2 AM, 9 cars all lined up, 4 people per car, all drunk, even the drivers. Can you say rush? Anyways, finished at 6:30 without my second break, and near the end my Amped gave me an uber caffeine down (taurine 1, caffeine 0), and by the time my shift was over, I was pretty much as lively as a 90 year old with 24/7 intra-venal morphine.
Thank god I didn’t have any school on Monday.
Despite, the fact that I took it easy on Monday, I could still feel the effects of this lack of sleep today… pretty freaky ones too. I felt ok, like not tired, but there are times where my body would just act weird. I’m walking in the hallway, heading to class, then BAM!, total blackout. It’s like my brain totally disconnects from the rest for a couple of seconds, than I get waked up by somebody shouting something next to me or somebody bumping into me, and then I wonder what happened. That and sudden loss of strength while doing stupid everyday things. I’m opening a door, I just snap and fall face first on the door, and everybody including me is like wtf. It’s starting to freak me out.
I know I should probably sleep more… but everytime I try to go to bed early, I feel bad afterwards because I didn’t watch the evening news, didn’t post on my forums, or didn’t help a buddy with the Joomla he’s setting up. So little time and so much to do… would that be a part of the nerdlife?
Getting a Tech Job: Am I Really Bulletproof?
March 16th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
It’s been almost a year since I started working at McDonalds. Although it was somewhat tough in the beginning, working there turned out to be a fun, profitable experience, and still is. However, dued to several factors, which include pressure from parents and friends, I have decided to slowly start looking for a job that is more closely linked to my interests, which obviously means a job that concerns technology.
There’s no problem at all FINDING that kind of job in Trois-Rivieres, as it is big enough to be the home of many PC repair shops, retail stores and specialized businesses, but what the major issue is the condition I’m in. If being a geek where the only prerequisite to say, working at Future Shop (local Best Buy owned big boxer), there wouldn’t be a problem, at least not if your definition of a geek looks like this one, but there are other things to take in consideration.
First of all, my age. Despite the fact that most people I work with keep thinking that I’m 18 and inviting me to pubs and bars that I am not of legal age to go to, the fact is that having 1992 on your application as date of birth never looks very appealing to an employer who is used to hiring people in their early 20′s. People must give me a couple of years above my age because several things I guess, the way I talk, act, think, look, but sadly, those details are things that even the best resume in the galaxy can’t duplicate. I’d love to actually go to the damned store and interact with whoever is responsible of hiring, but sadly it’s something that Futureshop’s online application forms don’t really allow. The result? To them, I’m just another pimply teenager who plays too much Counter-Strike and therefor thinks it would be cool selling computers and stuff. Already, my chances are slimmer than a Macbook Air.
My next biggest problem is my lack of eduction. Not that I’m a dropout, but a big retail environment, you rarely see people who haven’t completed their high school (Quebec’s high school, which is grade 11 equivalence), so being on the way to completing my 10th grade isn’t really impressive. What the employer doesn’t know is that like all the nerds of this planet, I’ve been schooled by the internet, and I know much more than your average teenager. Everybody who know hardware has had a laugh in a retail store at least once, I’ve had a couple of experience myself: “this 1300$ AMD-based laptop can run COD4 on high”, “this 8800 GTS 640 is better than the GTS 512, because it has more memory”, “I don’t know what STP cables are”, and I’m not listing them all. I don’t want to be cocky, but I’m confident of my skills, and I think that I’m on par with the average sales person, to say the least. Again, they don’t know that. To the big boss, I’m your average noob who thinks their 3.8 ghz P4 is better than any Core 2 Duo.
I used to think I was bulletproof, but I thought about it for a while, and it seems that my chances of working with computers at my age aren’t all that great. All I can do is hope for the employer to take a look here (I’ve linked my blog on my resume), maybe even my posts or blog down at OCN, and to consider my CCNA letter of recommendation. I haven’t applied yet, but I’ll be doing so soon… wish me the best of luck.
I Lapped…
March 14th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
I’m such a whore. A temp whore. I finally did it: I lapped Annabel’s e4300. The temptation had been strong during Fr0stbyte, but I crapped out just thinking about it, probably dued to my modder e-cock not being fully grown at the time. Sanding down a 300$ chip (yeah I know I payed too much for it) and potentially bricking my new rig was a very scary idea to me back then, but with Annabel it’s different. I have seen plenty of lap jobs on forums and such, so I figured that I might as well go for it, specially considering that the warranty was already void and that I got it for less than a hundred bucks. What’s a nerdger gotta do to shave off a couple of degrees off load temps? The following.
Grits 320, 600 and 1500 were used… don’t know if I’m going to do any more. Turned out pretty well, everything went smoothly, and the finish on the IHS looks much better than on a stock chip. If you’d want to test it out, check out this guide from the OCN forums, and my worklog for Annabel. I can’t test it yet due to my tube of Arctic Silver 5 being empty, but my guess is that I’ll probably loose a degree or two, probably 3 if I’m lucky. Either way, I’ve never had so much fun with 5$’s worth of sandpaper.
