I thought this was worthy for cross posting to my journal.

    For the 2012 election, the answer is easy.

        Write in JWSmythe!

        I promise restoration of the rights of all people, as protected by the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

        I promise transparency in our government, and open public audit of all government projects.

        I promise revocation of the Income Tax (25% of your income for most citizens), to be replaced by a 2% sales tax. This effectively gives a 23% raise to all working citizens.

        I promise increase in tariffs on foreign goods to be no less than 2% of the retail value, to encourage growth in the industrial sectors of America.

        I promise immediate closure of all tax "loop holes" to ensure all "big money" corporations pay in their fair share.

        I promise yearly "dividend" payments to the citizens of the United States on any excess tax paid by the citizens and profit from foreign tariffs.

        I promise health care in the form of open access doctors and hospitals to be no less than 25% of the total medical service field (at least 25% of doctors will be free for the citizens). You may still purchase insurance, and doctors may still provide special expert service, but for those who can't afford it, free services are available, and more positions will be available for both new and skilled doctors.

        I promise open borders, reducing the lengthy and confusing immigration/emigration procedures. Diverse and contridactory policies exist now, including Canadians who are welcome across the friendly open borders, but Mexicans who are frequently detained, arrested, or left to die in military style borders and checkpoints. This will reduce operational costs for enforcement agencies by billions yearly.

        I promise retiring the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, returning their duties to the appropriate intelligence agencies. This removes over $55 billion in yearly government expenses that are simply not necessary.

        And oddly enough, I'm dead serious. I'm not a billionaire, so I cannot afford the campaign. The estimated cost for the 2008 Presidential election was $1.6 billion per candidate. Neither established party back me. I would hurt their corporate interests.

        And yes, I am an American born citizen. I have traveled to the majority of US states, and both bordering nations. I don't know everything, but I know people who I can trust who are experts in their fields. No individual can run the country properly, but a good team will return the United States to it's prior reputation of the nation all others want to emulate, rather than the most powerful and embarrassing nation in the world.

I got a fun pre-xmas present, a new Phenom II X4 955. It's a 3.4Ghz CPU that runs very happily at 4Ghz. The previous occupant in that socket was an Athlon II X4 2.8Ghz, that ran happily for a year at 3Ghz.

    I spent an hour fiddling with overclock settings, and settled at 4.2Ghz (more or less). While sitting with just the browser open, Asus Probe (temp, fan, and voltage monitor) started screaming that the core voltage was above threshold. At about 6pm, there was a thunk, and everything went dark. I'm not sure if it was the power supply or motherboard died. I had ongoing problems with the motherboard since I got it, where bios settings would mysteriously change themselves after weeks of working normally. The power supply wasn't anything spectacular, but it seemed to work. I headed down to CompUSA, and picked up a new power supply, motherboard, and I decided that the drives weren't fast enough, so I picked up a pair of 1.5Tb SATA drives to run as a RAID0. Mmm. More speed.. :)

    I got home at about 8pm. I dismantled the whole thing, and had it reassembled in about 10 minutes. Now I have two blank drives in position (ports 1 & 2), the old drive (port 4), and the DVD player (port 6). I poke around in the BIOS a bit, getting everything set right, and setting the drives as a RAID0. I boot up to a trusty Linux CD to start the transfer. Blah, the RAID controller is really a software raid. I see both disks. There are fixes, I'm just not that far yet. I decide to just copy everything to the first SATA drive, and I'll RAID other parts later. My girlfriend would like to watch a movie with me, as I set up all my theater equipment in our new "theater room" (DLP projector, 8' wide screen, 7 speakers all properly placed and tuned +- 1dB). All I have to do is get the transfer started, and go watch the movie.

    dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc bs=1024k

    Seems simple enough, right? I switch to another console, and kill -USR1 $pid , to see where it's at. 2GB transfered. Great. The partition table should already be written. fdisk -l /dev/sda shows nothing. hmmm. fdisk -l /dev/sdc shows nothing.

    Aw fuck.

    It dawns on me, I'm not cloning the old drive to the new ones, I'm cloning the empty drive over my data! ABORT ABORT ABORT!

    Well, the partition table is gone, and presumably the beginning of the drive is overwritten, so none of that will be recovered. I think I have enough crap on there to fluff it a bit. My first and second partitions were Linux, which is easily replaced. The third and fourth partition hold Windows 7 and all my current work. The fifth partition holds all my virtual machines, which are my testbed for all kinds of fun things. Employment essential aren't a big deal, they're replicated at work, and on backups there. It's things like the 5,000 pictures that I took over the years, that I reacquired from various sources, which are now almost organized to store and back up, but I haven't finished. And a few videos including a 1hr 15min video of a live band that I'm including 400 stills into to make a good video of their performance.

    With tools on the TRK, I've been able to see the partitions to recover, but since I'm not totally familiar with the particular tool, it's been a slow process. Reading across a 1Tb drive, it takes hours. Even still, I'm not totally sure I could convince Windows to clone to the array, rather than using just one drive.

    So now, I'm starting off with a fresh Windows install. The Windows installer sees the array. I'm using 1Tb for Windows (2 1.5Tb drives RAID0 = 3Tb). Once I have a working machine again, and can play WOW with my girlfriend (she likes playing it), I'll be happier, and then can repair the messed up drive overnight on a few nights.

    The only real problems I had on the old machine were that it couldn't play Stargate: Revolution (crashes after a few minutes), and I wasn't totally satisfied with the drive speed. According to the "Windows Experience Index", my scores were:

Component
Processor 7.3
Memory (RAM) 7.3
Graphics 6.6
Gaming graphics 6.6
Primary hard disk 5.9

(current "max" score is 7.9)

    When I've looked at machines in the stores, this is way above any retail box. I just wanted to get the drive speed in line with the other parts. Dammit. So it'll take a few days to get it up and working properly. Until then, I'll be limping along on the laptop. :) No video editing on the laptop though, it just isn't fast enough, even though it's only a few months old.

Processor 3.2
Memory 4.9
Graphics 3.0
Gaming graphics 4.5
Primary hard disk 5.4

New JonesBlog update. Lockheed Martin C-5M Super Galaxy

Yo, Tom Hudson, I'm real happy for you and I'ma let you finish, but Breitbart is the greatest troll of all TIME!

New JonesBlog update. Louisville, Kentucky

We are starting out on a new collaboration on retinal research. Fun stuff.

I hate it when I put work into humor and no one notices, so maybe some folks will notice it here. :)

    There was a story a few days ago titled Giant Planet Nine Times the Mass of Jupiter Found

    Thread, segue, tangent, and a reference to Space Panda's, I doctored up
    this photo.

    Who can't love a cute cuddly planet eating space panda?

    Too bad we can't embed images into the comments, it would have been funnier faster.

    So, enjoy. :)

I'll never empty my list of freaks. First of all because Pudge is on there, and for him to un-freak me would require him to change his mind.

But of far more interest than that is my former brother-in-law. I hadn't forgotten that he showed up here when his crazy assed sister left me. Hadn't thought about him in a while. Was looking around some pages and saw his name on my freaks list. Then I remembered he was 'an hero'. And I laughed. I hope it hurt. It probably did, because for it to have been painless it would require him to do something right for once in his miserable life.

Cowardly chickenshit.

Jonesblog has finally made the transition to modern underpinnings. It is now running on Wordpress... Huzzah.

Everybody still having fun with APK? I notice that damned near every post I made last week has been responded to, questioning my educational bona fides. The hysterical thing is that some AC responded to his inquiries. Now, to about half of those, he responded, accusing me of being the AC. The really hysterical thing: I haven't visited /. since very early on Wednesday morning.

So APK spent a day or two running around and accusing people of sockpuppetry who had forgotten his existence hours before APK posted. Classic. How long until he goes all Hans Reiser?

FAIL! :(

New JonesBlog update. Experiments
 

I had checked out... The environment was so complete that for a discrete moment I had completely forgotten that we were still in the continental United States. Perhaps it was the smell of kebabs cooking or the sound of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan playing from the electronics shop that also sold pirated Western DVDs or the afternoon call to prayer coming from the tops of the minarets in the local mosque. It could have been the women selling bread, fruits or flowers by the side of the road or the Arabic men playing backgammon in the cafe with shisha pipes. Toyota trucks or bicycles being repaired in the roadside repair shops under Iraqi flags added to the realism along with a tangle of wires on poles carrying telephone and electricity around town with satellite dishes for television on rooftops were added elements. But the thing that completed it was the sound of Baghdadi Arabic from a gentleman greeting us as we drove through town.

Read all about it here. Medina Wasl with the 3rd Special Forces Group

New JonesBlog update. Sundance New Frontier 2010 and a Banksy sighting

I ran up to Park City for the Sundance Festival and to photograph an art installation, the Cloud Mirror by Eric Gradman. The point of the Cloud Mirror is to search out information on the Internet about visitors and merge that information with a real time image of the person on an LCD screen in front of them using computer vision to augment reality. You see yourself reflected back live, in person on the LCD screen in front of you with a thought bubble out of a comic book superimposed next to your head displaying all sorts of information that can be dug up through the Internet. The Cloud Mirror searches Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, IMDB, sex offenders databases and displays activities, relationship status, your favorite movies, books, music, any status updates you post etc...etc...etc... along with snarky comments.

I flew down to Las Vegas to do some work that I'll talk about here later. But while I was in town, I took two days to document Media Day and Shot Show 2010 for a number of sources including Wired, The Firearm Blog and other resources. There was some interesting new technology including a new pistol from Armatix that uses RF signals to disable the sidearm if it is too far from the wristwatch the accompanies it. Also new ballistics computers that are mounted on rifles are discussed.

New JonesBlog update(s). Shot Show 2010 Media Day

Shot Show 2010. The Actual Shot Show

and a little after party. AAC Big Bang Party

Sometimes, when I have a couple extra pennies, I buy something that just feels good to get, that is completely worthless. I'm no shopaholic, so these are usually simple things.

    I was at CompUSA and found that they had glowing keyboard stickers. Like, stickers to put over each letter, that will glow in the dark.

    I should explain, I've been touch typing for over 20 years, and can usually get 100wpm with 0 errors on most typing tests. I only slow down by thinking. People have watched me programming, typing emails or journal entries like this. A few have commented on it. I'll blaze through lines as fast as they can read, but I'll pause at spoken pauses (ummm, like commas), and when I'm thinking of what to say next.

    At home, I'm usually typing in the dark, with just the light of my monitor, and possibly a TV.

    So I got the yellow stickers (thanks everyone for asking). My shells are green or yellow text on a black background. It's enough to drive most people nuts, if they try to keep up with all my terminals. It's not usually hard. One running top. one tailing the log of most interest. one editing code, and executing it. I may have one with a man page up, and another logged into another machine to reference old code. Add one for a web browser for my email, and another for looking up something specific. So the browsers aren't green on black (except my themed gmail account is pretty close).

    I got glow in the dark bling for my keyboard. :) Ok, I'm easily entertained.