It started all of a sudden last night, upon awakening the computer. My PC is right around 3 years old.

I'm pretty sure it's the fan on my video card. I don't play video games anymore [altho I couldn't resist checking out that online Wolfenstein thing and playing that for a while one night] so this one is just the mid to low end of nVidia's "business graphics" line of cards. (So maybe I don't even need the fan?)

I vacuumed it out as best as I could with what I've got (large extension on a huge Hoover), but no change. It wouldn't be so aggravating it if was at least constant in its new loudness.

Anyone reading this know if this can be fixed? Should I go buy some compressed air and try it? Or is it probably just some (cheap) bearing(s) going out? I had a new fan noise in my computer about a year ago, but it was just a dust bunny in the CPU fan I think, and it stopped making noise once I sucked it out.

Is there a way to re-lube these things (that's not going to end up dripping oil on the rest of my system/scattering graphite dust when in place!)? I could take the card out and take it into the Geek Squad or something, if the labor charged was not near what a new card costed.

On weather.com tonite:

"Got Kids? -> Find Delicious Lunch Recipes"

* No, but I have some ham that I could use some ideas for.

* The other "other white meat"?

* "It's a cookbook!!!"

p.s. Too swamped with work to write any kind of substantial JE right now. Been taking work home nights and both days on the weekends for the last 3 weeks, and I'm getting a little burnt, but for the positives, 1) this week should be the last/this next weekend should be my first free one, and 2) it sure beats the flying crap out of having too little. I'm one of the lucky ones in America right now, and I'm oh so grateful. I stressed way more when I *didn't* have a job.

Starting from what we know of the newest going backwards, since that's just the kind of guy I am:

5th Generation

MY2013 Restyle

The bulbous nose adopted/adapted from the recent GT500 looks ridiculous. I think it's the absurdity of the schnozz rising higher than the brow over the eye that makes it look so clownish.

The hood vents on the GT make it look even worse, reminiscent of "Corvette Summer".

However the main headlights look cool, and the while the fog lights are still too big, they're downsized a bit from earlier. The tail lights look pretty snazzy, but I've never been a fan of the black matte plastic plate inserts between them, and same for below it for the licence plate area. Below that is an improvement over earlier, however.

Finally, like the rest of this generation, it continues with the front and rear overhangs being grossly out of proportion. On the plus side tho, as shown that blue ("Deep Impact Blue") of a gorgeous quality somewhat similar to mine (plus just a hint of purple) is returning.

MY2010 Restyle

A high-point in front styling, with the "power bulge" hood and the non-smiling lower fascia of the non-GT and 2013. The rear end tail lights are supposed to have been controversial, but I like it, esp. the sequential lighting of them. Gray plastic lower fascia makes it look cheap, like a GM product.

Best color of this restyling was the first-year-only, luxurious Sunset Gold. I've been a sucker for gold/bronze/pewter cars since the 70's, starting with the JimRockford-mobile.

Worst color was their sky blue. Gag.

MY2005 Restyle

Four headlights of the same size in the same row across makes for a drab front end. Vast, plain hood needs a scoop to break up the sea of monotony. Over-sized, plain tail lights look equally bland. Giant, ridiculous medallions are only cool if that's where the gas goes in.

So I go get an oil change on Friday after work. I take it to the place I've been a few times before, a Valvoline Instant Oil Change place that's not real close to where I live but where my apt. used to be. So I'm familiar with the area.

The guy looks at my sticker and says oh, you only put the good stuff in (full synthetic). Yeah, that's because the synthetic blend had become hard to find someone saying they had in stock (in 5W-20), including your stupid place, I thought to myself. So I've resigned myself to continue on with it, even tho the owner's manual calls for a blend. Hopefully it doesn't hurt.

The guy also alluded to a (now I know fake) computer glitch and my previous info is gone and I need to fill out my name and address and whatnot again for them.

So I'm paying and looking at my receipt, and it's listing some Castrol motor oil used. I didn't think much of it, but later I see that the company on the invoice is now Synfast Oil Change. Castrol has a domain name for this that they say is "coming soon".

Valvoline's quickie places didn't get bought out, there's still a lot around. Including now just down the street from me, with their site saying "EZ Lube is now Valvoline". WTF?

Are these places independently owned and they just hang a sign up for whoever's offering a better price on bulk oil that year?

I wish I knew how to change my own, or knew someone who could show me. I see ads for DIY oil changes somewhere like Pep Boys or something like that. Presumably you just rent a bay for 20 minutes and jack up your car and they dispose of the old oil and filter. I wish I knew anyone (well enough) who was even slightly auto mechanically inclined.

I thought at one time about investing in some ramps and a jack and jackstands and trying to do it myself, but I live in a condo complex with a single-car garage that's narrower than normal and I have only a couple feet of "driveway" outside of it. And mine is the garage in the middle of the three to a building, so I'd be blocking somebody, necessarily. So I never did.

Oh well, I guess we'll all be driving electric cars soon, so this ability won't matter. Then I'll just be left with wishing I knew how to do my own brakes.

p.s. I watch 'em, and see oil come out and oil go in, and an oil filter come off and an oil filter go on, but have no idea if they aren't just the same things they took out. Or even if I got new oil, if it was what they said it was in those unmarked pitchers. But, I guess no different than taking it to the dealer to have it done while you wait, and about every other time they drive it around the building to allegedly bays on the other side and prolly just park it there and then give it back to you in an hour later.

p.p.s. The Synfast place wanted to sell me some rear end service. I only have 25K miles on my car and they showed me what they said was my pumpkin drain plug or something and that it had metal shavings in the fluid. Shit, they could have a can of metal shavings down there in the below-ground area that they use, and that plug could've been for anything. At least I'm pretty pissed about it as much as I believe that it was mine. I don't know that they should be fishing around back there. I don't even know if you're supposed to be opening those things, just on a lark.

I was going to chime in last night on the discussion on bringing back the 40 hour week (in the JE, not the general discussion area), but I noticed that a blast from my past that I hadn't seen since it came out was about to start on TCM I think it was, or whatever non-premium cable network it is that's left that doesn't do intra-movie commercial breaks.

In my early to mid teens during summers my (stay-at-home) mom used to get me out of the house by giving me some money and dropping me off at the local movie theater. In my early adolescence I had friends, but starting around jr. high my age-peers began to leap ahead of me socially (and still are), and except for a couple of heavy golfing summers with my neighbor across the street whose back fence led down to an 18-hole course, I didn't have anyone over and didn't go over to anyone's. I was a stay in my room and play Legos and listen to my stereo with my door closed kinda kid.

So the local theater complex would have summer matinee specials where moms could drop off their kids for several hours and they'd show us a double feature of things like the Benji movies and other such adolescent fare, and have clowns and balloons and such entertainment between features, and presumably keep an eye on us during that time. (A less litigious and "OMG danger lurks everywhere for my precious spawn!" time.)

One of the (very) few memorable ones was 1981's and then last night's "Clash of the Titans". IMDb's featured quickie summary is pretty good:

Perseus is the favored son of the god Zeus, but he has unwittingly ticked off the sea goddess Thetis. Just to make things worse, Perseus falls in love with the lovely Princess Andromeda, who used to be engaged to Thetis's son. Soon Perseus is off on one quest after another, with Zeus helping, Thetis hindering, and lots of innocent bystanders getting stabbed, drowned, and squished.

Basically, you know a movie's good when within only the first 10 minutes of it it's uttered "Release the Kraken"! :) (I like movies that get right down to the good stuff!)

The lettering of the opening titling looked like movies out of the 70's, which was not that far off then. And the music was almost like old B&W movies -- very humorously overly-dramatic, throughtout the movie. According to the ending credits, courtesy of the London Symphony Orchestra. Hey, this movie had Laurence Olivier and Burgess Meredith in major roles in it, and according to the TCM host guy it did very well thank you very much. It was also neat seeing the MGM lion moving and roaring in that old studio's logo at the beginning.

But the best ripples of nostalgia were the ridiculous standing in front of a giant screen/superimposed over a large background, where the foreground person is completely differently lit (!), and that wonderful stop motion animation. In a single event they'd switch back and forth between the actor made up as the cursed son of whatever god, and the figurine of it moved and posed in that characteristic jerky motion. Man I just love that kind of stuff. For any "youngun" reading this, think Wallace and Gromit, with about half the frames. (And if you're too young for that to mean anything, then what are you doing still standing on my lawn!)

So from seeing it 31 years ago and as a young lad I found I hadn't remembered all the parts and creatures. There was a two-headed wolf creature to be defeated before facing Medusa, that I don't remember having seen before at all, and I should've because it was pretty cool. Yes, the movie kinda goes like how this and the summary above suggests, a la a campaign in the D&D craze at the time.

I didn't really even remember much of what the Kraken in this film looked like, to me now mostly like a demonic sea monkey. But the Medusa was totally as awesome as I'd remembered. Even her lair, with the pillars and the red torch lighting. And the goo that (after an inexplicable delay) came out of her neck stump was an uber neato touch.

I know I saw Star Wars in the theaters, and that that preceded this movie, but I don't recall picking up before on how that stupid mechanical owl was whistle-talking like R2. I like to think that the cheesy comical antics of it didn't amuse me even as a kid.

Pegasus was okay, but the cursed son's (I can't remember his name) giant vulture was freakin' awesome. They had it all fidgety and moving like a somewhat high-strung bird. How it would come in the middle of the night to pick up the princess's spirit, and squawk so loudly while waiting for her spirit to separate from her sleeping body and walk out to the balcony and get in the golden bird's cage that it transported her in, without anyone in the entire castle waking up and wondering what might be going on, I can't figure.

Lots of other cool stuff like gods' faces appearing on statues and talking, like at Disneyland's Haunted Mansion ride, and Zeus's clay models of an arena and certain notable humans and effecting certain things thru the models. And the gods on Mount Olympus talking about their relevance going forward at the end of the movie, and referencing the pertaining constellations, was a nice post-tale finish.

I haven't seen the remake of it that came out a couple of years ago I guess, but I do plan to. At least I recall it looked pretty cool from the previews of it (unlike for example that Conan remake).

In the first half (give or take) of my career I was a Windows C++ programmer. I was a UNIX and Macintosh guy in college, but I only got as far as shell scripting in UNIX (i.e. no application development), and as for my semi-serious Mac programming skills (in Pascal, C, and also 68K asm), jobs for those were few and far between. So I started out accepting a job QA'ing Windows software out of college, since I graduated during a recession and jobs were few and far between period. And then eventually moved into Windows programming. Because Windows was virtually a universal platform, and there would likely always be jobs, and plentiful, in it.

And things have changed, in a number of ways regarding this. While C++ development on Windows seems to have largely dried up leading up to and then being finished off by this recession (excepting a few jobs requiring major experience in C++ on UNIX as well), Windows remains ubiquitous on PC's as desktops and servers, and on laptops. Hence my needing to switch to from C++/MFC/Win32 to C#/.NET. There are more C# jobs than even Java jobs in my area (southern California), and I personally think Java is dying (not helped by Sun letting the language stagnate) while C# is growing (helped by continuing language improvements). So to me .NET has/had become the main platform for desk/laptop computing and servers.

But then there's the mobile world. Of which, BTW, I'm not (yet) a part of (I don't think my Window XP netbook counts), so my views are from someone fairly ignorant of it and looking at it from the outside. There is no one main platform that you can develop for and cover 90-some percent of the market like on PC's. To program for the iPhone/iPad, I'd have to learn Objective-C and their platform's API. To program for Android I'd have to learn Java and their platform's API. To program for Windows Phone 7 I think it's Silverlight (C# and .NET and WPF's XAML markup language I guess).

And just in recent tech news reading, Apple wants a fortune to participate in their applicaton space, Google demands that you use their payment processor (of which they get an additional cut), and apparently Android has not-insignificant compatibility problems even within the platform. And it looks like MS is letting Silverlight die (like Adobe is seeing the writing on the wall and seemingly expects prolly the major reason Silverlight was developed, Flash, to die), with Windows Phone 8 to have yet another separate programming platform.

But capitalism abhors inefficiencies. MS, seeing that they don't, and in fact are far from, being the gatekeeper of the only major platform in this space, are spanning and connecting/associating what they own and what they don't with their forthcoming Metro GUI, and making it (introductorily) programmable with HTML5/CSS/JavaScript (where prolly then to do some really powerful stuff would require delving into their new WinRT platform and it looks like C++ or maybe also C). And now Mozilla is pursuing their Boot to Gecko platform, which sounds very much along a similar line:

"Mozilla believes that the web can displace proprietary, single-vendor stacks for application development. To make open web technologies a better basis for future applications on mobile and desktop alike, we need to keep pushing the envelope of the web to include --- and in places exceed --- the capabilities of the competing stacks in question."

I can imagine developers/companies getting tired of making mobile apps having to be ported to other platforms, esp. when web apps have already begun gaining favor over local apps due to avoiding many of the nightmares in installing/updating and configuring/compatibility with each instance of the target environment. And I think as HTML becomes more powerful, with native application like capabilities, there'll be less of a need to tap into lower-level single-vendor API's. These are like plugins in HTML, which are dying today -- the point at which you leave the virtually universal platform for that kind of computing machinery, is where you start inviting in these potential nightmares.

Back at my second job in 1999 towards the beginning of the dot-com bubble, my career was at a crossroads of sorts, in that COM had become very important on the Windows platform, and I had migrated from C to C++ and had gotten comfortable enough with it to be able to understand COM's concepts, but (now "classic") ASP and web programming had been booming too. I could have gone/focussed on either way, but fate at the time was that the other (non-supervising) developer at our tiny company was further along in learning COM, so he was tasked with pursuing that and I was tasked with learning ASP. Since COM mostly died when .NET settled in, tho I was jealous of my coworker at the time, I think it was better for me.

We're starting the next version of our product at work, and it's a major departure from how it previously worked, and thank goodness the dev team is also doing a major departure from resubmitting the page for everything to heavy AJAX and jQuery usage. I've got some more review of current tech that I want to do for this year, but next year I plan to get another hard drive for my PC and put Windows 8 on it, and get my first smartphone, also with Windows 8, and then delve into the HTML5 and CSS3 business that's picking up steam, and hopefully will be a little further along in compatibility/interoperability/standardization a year from now. Ditto for the JavaScript changes/enhancements/whatever based off the ECMAScript 5 standard.

Scott McNealy once said "the network is the computer". Sort of. I say the future is the web platform, on your computer (in whatever various hardware forms your computers take). We already have a nice separation of structure, presentation, and behavior with this platform. (Which reminds me, also for me to learn next year: ASP.NET MVC.) Beyond this I offer no judgments on whether or not this is the technology that *should* prevail, just that I think it will. Look for language improvements for easier keeping of larger amounts of JavaScript logic under control, and improving IDE help with this like with the more serious languages.

p.s. As a meta comment, the old Slashdot interface for starting a JE doesn't seem to be available anymore (?), but I got to it by choosing to edit my newly-created JE. And it's in this legacy interface that you can actually choose an icon for your burst'o'brilliance, and get the three choices for how far it's shared instead of just the one inscrutable choice of the new.

A project I'm working on has a bunch of methods that take an ADO.NET DataRow that use the square bracket/array accessor notation on it to get at the actual value for that particular column (of that row (from the database)).

I needed to add versions of these to instead take an ADO.NET SqlDataReader. In doing so I noticed that it uses the same array accessor notation, so the bodies of these functions turn out to be identical to their DataRow counterparts.

To refactor away these duplicates, I would've thought to make them take a common base class that defines the indexer (for that array accessor notation), but I already know that they don't have a common base class (well, besides Object). (And this is perfectly understandable, really, because they represent two entirely differently working data access models.)

So my thought was to make these, in C++ parlance, function templates. C# has generics including generic methods, so I try.

End result: No can do.

The MSDN documentation dodges this obviously desirable capability by only giving sample code using the generic type T as a black box, in a swap function. No sample showing it actually calling a method on T.

It looks like you can do this if T will always have a base class B in common, that has the called method defined, and then if you use the optional add'l constraint syntax to instruct the compiler of this. That's worth something, but is missing the really powerful benefit.

Dynamically typed languages like JavaScript (and Smalltalk from my long ago readings of the GoF book) let you pass any object into a function as a parameter and if that function wants to call a method on that object, it waits until run-time to see if the actual object that is passed in has that method.

Statically typed languages like C/C++/C#/Java need to be able to verify at compile-time that that method will be there, for any object that might possibly be passed in as a parameter. The C++ compiler figures out what objects you're calling that generic function with, and auto- stamps out for you a version of it for each such one that's actually being passed in. Thereby satisfying its own requirement, as a statically typed language. [Please forward any complaints about this "bloat"ing out the code to the Windows recycle bin.]

What the C# compiler does is generate only a single copy of the function, with simple placeholders to be filled in later. That's why you can't use the generic argument in any ways that you can't syntactically spoon-feed assumptions about it to the compiler. And it won't compile if it cannot make sufficient assumptions about it.

This is fine for for example generic container classes. Like in C++ how std::vector doesn't need to know anything about the type it holds, neither does System.Collections.Generic.List<T>, because List's functions never call methods on the T or anything like that. That's great, that I can declare a strongly typed container that won't take anything but a certain type (or descendants), rather than always just a container of Object that requires a bunch of casting and if you mess up can readily accept objects of different, unrelated types. But generic programing is capable of so much more.

<sidebar>
I've heard that Java's generic handling still has the container taking Object, but just does all the casting for you. I.e. C++ > C# > Java.
</sidebar>

So in this case there's no difference between C++ and C# in how many functions are generated in the end (there's code that uses them all), the difference is that the other half of them *I* had to generate. Lame.

p.s. It seems with this new JE interface you can no longer make an edit after preview and expect an immediately following preview to show the update yet. Even lamer. How come it's always amateur hour in the dev area of the Slashdot office? Cuz they only hire FOSSies? What if MS Word didn't show the latest version of the document in its print preview, unless you gave it a minute or three and then tried the print preview again?

The Slashdot fortune from an hour ago:

Q: What's the difference between a JAP and a baby elephant? A: About 10 pounds. Q: How do you make them the same? A: Force feed the elephant.

A hat-trick of maleficence that came to my attention individually today:

• Waste,
• fraud,

• and abuse.

I wouldn't, because I'm against that. Our debt is the actual problem, of course. If we were currently debt free, this year's deficit would be absolutely no problem. But given how much debt we have, even if we balanced the budget this year, we would still have the exact same-sized problem. So our problem is independent of the deficit, so focusing on that is just what the big-spending political class and their supporters (the neocon wing of the Right, and the entire Left) hope they can keep most of us conned into doing.

Our national debt is $14.9 trillion, and our just-ending federal fiscal year encompasses $2.3 trillion in receipts and $3.6 trillion in outlays for a shortfall of $1.3 trillion. Scaling these absurdly astronomical and uneasily grappled-with numbers down by a factor of 28,750,000, that's like your household having a (net) annual income of $80K but spending over $125K for the year, adding over half your annual income onto your credit card debt that's already at a balance of $518K!

And most of the time it's not even expressed as in the title of this JE, but more often in the terms of "bringing down the deficit". To continue with my example, with your spouse playing the role of the big-spending political class and their supporters, she urges you to not only not focus on the over half million dollars you owe on your credit cards (albeit at the low interest rate of 3% (FY2011 interest on the debt was $450 billion)), but to not even focus on all of the shortfall that's getting added to it.

So how did we get into this mess? We've been living beyond our means, borrowing from the future to do it, for quite some time. Both parties have wanted to keep govt. spending high but to keep taxes low for what is stereotypically considered each's respective voting constituency. And "compromise". The Left wants to grow govt. a lot, the Right doesn't want it to grow at all, so we end up with the compromise of govt. growing a little. Year after year.

Earlier this year during the so-called budget crisis I had to hear about how spending cuts weren't enough, we had to compromise, and have some tax hikes as well. The problem with that is that I don't believe the problem is too little govt. spending, but too much. Not only do I believe that such a household as in my example above doesn't need to be spending $125K every year, but it doesn't even need to be spending all of the $80K that it takes in, but ought to be able to live comfortably on about $60K after taxes, and be able to put about a fourth of its take-home pay towards paying down that massive debt. That would be on a schedule of paying it off in 26 years, which is entirely reasonable, as it's like the timeframe of a traditional home mortgage.

But Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan got me thinking that I am actually willing to compromise on this. Half of all American households pay no federal income tax. I believe everyone should have skin in the game. Everyone uses and benefits from our infrastructure, the enforcement of our laws, etc., so everyone should be paying for it. It's time the 51% pay their fair share. They're not contributing to the federal kitty via the income tax, so I guess they can do their part via a federal consumption tax. Whatever, either way, I'm willing to compromise my usual no tax hikes stand and strongly support raising taxes on the freeloading half of us (and I'm impartial on the economic strata included in this), from the zero (or *less*) that they're paying now, and thereby adding a revenue increase component to the mix, as urged by the Left.

As for cuts, notably in the news Ron Paul released a plan. I've always kinda considered him a fraud, talking dispassionately about limiting govt. while with fervor and at length about our militarism and imperialism. He's always struck me as a Lefty trying to masquerade as somewhat of a libertarian. Not unlike a few Slashdotters I've encountered here. He calls for eliminating certain dept.'s completely, and freezing the budgets of some others, which is all music to my ears, but I question some of the picks. And why just freeze or eliminate, and not also go with the option of putting some on a gradual downsizing path.

And therein lies the problem with this approach. How do you decide, and justify, who gets cut and who doesn't. That's why I'm for an across-the-board cut. That would be just as unfair to one political interest as another. My example household above ought to be able to live okay on $60K per year, which translates to a federal spending level of $1.725 trillion per year, or about the 1999/2000 spending level. Let economic growth fund any expansion of entitlement spending, but keep paying down the debt $575 billion a year, and be on a path to have dug ourselves out of our hole by 2037. And for those who for some reason care about (or claim to) teh dephussit, that'll be fixing that too.