Here it is!

And lastly, the funny finale:

I keep reading various places do articles on the coming World Series but I wish to interject my views (primarily as to why/how the rockies should do well.)

* The Rockies may play in the NL but they came from the NL West, which had 3 "contenders" for the post season and had 4 teams in total that were good. The dodgers were contending well up till being swept by the Rockies at the end of the season. The Rockies played well in inter-league play, even beating the Bo'Sox mid season while being a ".500" club.
* The Rockies hitting is "fearless" when facing good pitching. They are young and could not care less if an opposing pitcher is supposed to be good.
* Clint Hurdle has setup the roster to be able to alternate right handed and left handed hitters.
* Todd Helton has been basically anemic so far this post season, look for him to step up to the forefront this series.
* Their good defense has been great this post season inspite of being such a young team. I (as a fan of CR) hope this continues at this the biggest stage.
* While Brian Fuentes has a tendency to combust, at least now they have Manuel Corpas to bail him out of trouble.
* Herges has been great, and Latroy Hawkins has yet to @#$! up this post season.

That's my perspective of the Rockies, as a fan so to speak. People say the Red Sox are a good team, I'll say what I said before the NLCS: "I have faith that the Rockies will continue to dominate."

Would you stop running beta tests on the live server!!! Pulling shit like this gives you zero credibility!

Oh yea, go Rockies! Who wants to bet on Kaz Matsui and Yorvit Torealba getting their post season batting average up to .500?

That's the ending to an entry from the 6th of August in Journal of a Trapper, originally written by Osborne Russell. This was during the years 1834 to 1843 while trapping near/in the Rocky Mountains. He had one previous entry that is a very timely entry right on the 4th of July where they were fording a river and barely escaped but is much to long to try to type in here. Suffice to say it is an excellent read though almost always bad grammar with usually simple entries on where he was traveling. I have already come across one very interesting thing: he makes special note continually of the Blackfeet Indians as being especially mean spirited - this is not present in their Wikipedia entry or other online resources I have read about them. A similar book, which I read when I was younger was The Log of a Cowboy but I don't remember much of it and will have to re-read it.

The Rockies have just this weekend swept the San Diego Padres and are now only 1.5 games behind the Padres, while the Philadelphia Phillies are .5 games back. The Rockies only have 6 games left to play so I hope they stay as hot as they have been. In case anyone missed it Matt Holiday is injured and will likely be sitting out for a while. How this may or may not affect his chances at the NL MVP I don't know.

A friend of mine picked up Rapala Tournament Fishing for the Wii this weekend. Definitely a fun game, depending on your viewpoint on fishing games.

Currently doing a bunch of work with WCF, C# and so forth. Spending more time with databases than I prefer to :-( All in all I think it's a worthwhile technology (WCF and friends) but you can't help but wonder if this stuff couldn't have been easier to work with.

Waiting paitiently for the new Metroid. Also picked up the earlier Gojira album "The Link" recently as well as As I Lay Dying's "An Ocean Between Us". The Link is absolutely amazing, progressive metal is where it is at. An Ocean Between Us has a very wierd vibe, sort of like what Power Metal slammed into Metalcore might sound like. Not because of solos but the same fast melodies every time with similar feel from song to song. Metalcore in retrospect is dead and dying - and probably has been for a couple years or so. Not to say it won't get more popular; metalcore seems to be getting more popular yet. What I'm saying is musically I think it is empty and I personally am not going to expect anything interesting to come from the genre anymore.

As for my "musicianship": it is coming along slowly. I still do not play much per day since my callouses are still quite weak. I will say I am getting better and am making strides continually. Does anyone have any suggestions for pickups for the Ibanez? I am thinking at this moment a Seymour Duncan Jazz for the neck, and a Dimebucker for the bridge (though maybe a Bill Lawrence L-500XL.) I will be honest the stock Ibanez bridge pickup is decent but the neck one sucks compared to the S.D. '59 I put into my Les Paul. Btw Ibanez RGT42* has the INF1 and INF2. They don't seem to make my model anymore though.

Thompson is now "in." Ron Paul is doing well but the media keeps repeating their stance that he is an underdog, fringe, etc. I would call this a lie but perhaps they have learned from the republicans: that if they keep saying something is so it "becomes" the truth.

Did anyone else find the Porch Monkey part of Clerks II interesting? In South Dakota, where the main minority is Native Americans, I had never heard this term before and was as such surprised at its connotations. Do any of you (readers) agree or not? I took the word for its face value, i.e. anyone that might be lazy.

It is not fair to just think Black people are lazy as the Whites ... especially down south ... can be lazy with a vengeance. Growing up I didn't see much racism so for me people are just people. I always say to my friends I am an equal opportunity racist and will hate on any people if necessary. Hell; my name "Noble" has an English background and the English, probably the most of any 'ethnic' group, deserve massive ridicule. In the end: racism can often be in the eye or words of the beholder so all of my thoughts are basically pointless.

On an earlier discussion on commercialism in games somone/people brought up the Guitar Hero games as being an advert for Gibson; from the PAX photos it appears there might be a new Fender Stratocaster based design.

Random wikipedia reading lead to this:

Doesn't that seem rather high? Is all of the UK/Britain like this?

Quick link to a blog post I put up recently.

This is just a small update on the sql training. MS SQL Server isn't really all that bad, and my sql knowledge in general has improved slightly but it was mainly a refresher on things. Which is of itself good since it's so easy to space off or partially forget this stuff when you don't deal with it every day. The main thing that I notice is that there is so much stuff that is only available with Enterprise which is like, $20K per processor or something like that. One such thing is an Index on a View, another would be online index adjustments. Here is one comparison list.

There are a lot of XML features which is incredibly wierd since XML in SQL is fundamentally wrong. SQL doesn't allow arrays as an entry, so why XML? It is as if they bent over backwards for XML when at least theoretically they should've said no. (Strings don't count.) This array issue is even discussed early on in Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties.

I finally picked up a good pedal. As per previous discussion I decided to get the Boss Metal Zone MT-2. From what I heard of it on Youtube and so forth I liked the sound. I changed the "Mid Freq" setting and lowered it to the same level as the "Middle" which left them both at about 10 o'clock. While the gain was cranked and the High and Low were set to about 3 o'clock. This is close to the Heavy Metal sound they recommend but there was just too much mid to what they recommended. I also set the Low/Mid/High on the amp to about 3, noon, and 2. I recently purchased a Marshall MG50DFX which I haven't even been able to turn up that loud, this thing has mucho power.

At first I thought the Seymour Duncan JB in my Les Paul was much better than the stock Ibanez INF2 but now I am getting used to the sound the Ibanez puts out. The 'Paul with the JB sounds much more "full" but the Ibanez does great for a typical metal sound. I am now thinking that I'll leave it stock. I wanted to try out a Seymour Duncan Dimebucker and a Jazz in the neck, but that will have to wait for a different guitar on a different day ... or year. The only thing left for me to do is practice, a lot. My rhythm and timing could definitely get better but for now my callouses are taking forever to return to my lame-arse finger tips.

For all of next week I will be in SQL training for work. It is supposed to be fairly advanced so I should learn a lot! Which is nice because I didn't really learn much SQL while at the university.

It has come to my attention that Microsoft is breaking its own rules when it uses the Microsoft (Office 2007) Ribbon UI on their own Office Online website. One of the main "MUST" requirements for a Ribbon UI, to conform to the Ribbon License, is that it be able to resize nicely. Regardless of whether this Microsoft License is even enforceable, they do not even follow their own rules! The License is as of yet confidential, but this deserves peoples notice.

I have recently been totally immersed in youtube. It has a wealth of live performances and such; but I don't know how i missed Eric Johnson? His melody on some of his songs is amazing. I am a big fan of Metal, the Ozzy, Metallica, Slayer, Fear Factory etc type of stuff but Eric just blows me away. Watching this great music being played on Youtube is a great reprieve while I wait for my callouses to build back. I hope some day I become half as good. One more link: Zakk Wylde doing a simple ballad lead I had never heard before.I hope my weird Journal Entries on music don't annoy people, let me know and I will stop.

One last thing, my Linux box (an AMD XP 1900+ I have had forever) is dying. It will be needing its 3rd power supply soon :-( I would decommission it, except with 1 gig ram and 2x40gig hard drives it still performs fine. Having an open source video driver (ATI Radeon 9200) makes running Linux a charm so all things considered I will probably fix it.

I finally got sick of Fedora Linux, not so much itself but it's horribly maintained Repositories. It is pretty bad when the repo state is so bad you can't upgrade to latest. (This was on an XML Commons package.) I have had this happen in the past, but this time i'm done and am not gonna try to put up with it. I installed Ubuntu which went ok. I had a LVM so the process was slightly not painless. X didn't figure out my 19" widescreen, and there was a few bumps down that road but it is working now. I still have several things left to do but it is late and I better try to get to sleep. The sad part is that I really like fedora linux. I like how it works, and I like the idea behind it ... but it's repo state was and almost always will be utter shite.

Life so far with the new vehicle is going great. Goddamn I love the sound of a V8. I read that the hypertech chip gives the Ford 5.4 (modular) V8 30 horsepower and 50 foot pounds of torque. I don't plan on doing this until the warranty runs out ... oh yea, and until I have the money to rebuild a tranny if (or more-so when) this would cause a big ouch. My little sister liked driving the pickup more than I do. She has one year of Uni left so she shouldn't have to wait long for a nicer ride. Hopefully this coming weekend I can head out and do some prairie dog hunting or something.

Oh yea, in case anyone missed it what is with HR 3155? WTF!!! From Section 5: