For some reason, I tried to leave a comment here on Slashdot and was given a rather rude message:

"Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, comment posting has temporarily been disabled. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner."

Now, I'm looking over my past 24 posts here (also noting my "Karma: Excellent" tag) I see that 3 were modded as troll or offtopic. The offtopic one is squarely in my corner as I posted something before actually reading the article...yeah, I know, unheard of here at Slashdot.

One "troll" modding was for me complaining that I'm sick of people saying "Apple is in the Hardware business". I'm still sick of hearing people say that.

But my last posting here was a critical review I gave to "Second Life". I basically said the same thing I said a few weeks ago when I got an "Interesting" modding. This time I got a "flamebait" modding and I hardly changed a word! I look at it now and I see I got a 50% flamebait and a 50% interesting on that last post.

So I have to ask, why am I banned from posting on Slashdot? I don't want to be some conspiracy theorist, but do the guys here have some financial stake in "Second Life" or something?

Oh well, I've been on Slashdot for years now, which you can tell from my 178166 user number...while not totally low, it still shows how long I've been here. I've had excellent karma that whole time and now I'm banned from posting because I was modded (wrongly as far as I'm concerned) 3 times. What gives?

I want my old UI in Slashdot back. I want my old Slashdot back as it seems the really interesting people that comment here have gone somewhere else. That somewhere else doesn't seem to be Digg either as the comments there are neither insightful nor informative. They're also way too hard to read over there. The threaded system here at Slashdot has always been better. But that old Slashdot is gone...

Now we're on what, day 3...4....on updating my wife's machine to Service Pack 2 on XP now. Well, it got down to now 8 times now of booting off of the Windows CD and running CHKDSK /r to repair the machine.

Now I'm just installing a whole new /windows install from scratch and not even trying to save the old install. I've yet to resort to reformating the entire HD...yet. But I'm so so close. I'm also so so close of dumping MS totally and installing Gentoo...but since there is a ATI 9800 Pro on the machine...and ATI isn't exactly Linux friendly...I'm holding off on it.

So far, the pain in the ass continues....

I run Gentoo Linux on my machine and ONLY Linux on my machine. No dual booting for me since last November. I have 100% totally gone over to Linux and I LOVE it. Also, I built this Athlon 2500+ Barton system from scratch and paid all together around $500 bucks.

Now, my wife has a Pentium 4 Gateway machine that is running XP. Yesterday, service pack 2 raised it's ugly head and says "install me now". So, we install it. 18 hours later, I "think" we have it installed and ready to go.

The problem? Well, the NTFS file system on the machine needed some major major major chkdsk done to it for some reason. Now, this computer actually has been running fine since day one...two years ago. The only thing that isn't stock from Gateway when we bought it was a new ATI 9800 Pro in it. Everything else is exactly how it came from Gateway.

We've kept up with the patches, and run a virus scanner but that's all. It it hooked through a hardware router and for the most part, everything has been fine with the machine. But boy it didn't like Service Pack 2 at all. Finally, I had to boot off the original install CD and run the disk rescue and "chkdsk /r" 3 times....and each taking over an hour to complete. Finally it was able to boot and let my wife log on...at 4 in the morning today.

Yes, I know there are people out there that have no problems at all with Service Pack 2 and blah blah blah. It didn't work too well in the Gant household. I was "this" close to reformating the entire computer and bringing my wife over to Linux too. But she wants to play Sims 2. Yes folks, Sims 2 is the deciding factor here. No, I don't get it either but hey, either you get it or you don't. And I don't get it. It makes her happy though so who am I to stand in the way of a little more joy in her life?

I do owe her a new keyboard though as during the Service Pack 2 fiasco I slammed my fist down on the keyboard and broke one of the little stand thingies that props it up. And no, I'm not a violent person in any way shape or form...but that's how much this got to me.

I've learned that any talk about religion will bring out the best and worst in people. It was fun seeing some of my posts being modded from funny to troll to insightful to flame-bait to interesting to overrated. It was much like a ping-pong match.

But one thing I did learn was the concept of "cognitive dissonance"...a psychological phenomenon that refers to the bad feeling one gets when a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation from someone else. Religion usually falls in this framework when two people who are on opposite positions begin discussing and get further and further away from true understanding one another.

This doesn't fall under religion exclusively either, almost any aspects of life can become deeply held beliefs that we don't want to let go of when something new comes along to upset the apple-cart.

Click here to learn more about Cognative Dissonance

Just re-emerged xorg-x11 when I finally got my head out of my ass and put in the USE flags for mmx, sse and 3dnow that xorg uses and now kde flies.

I've been using kde 3.3.0 after switching from gnome 2.6 to it. I'm one of those "grass is always greener" kind of guys. I like kde a lot, and it doesn't use as much resources as gnome did...and it feels faster. I also switch over to enlightenment and fluxbox from time to time also. But kde is running tip-top here. I don't see what other people say about "bloat". No bloat here. I can see if I was running with only 64 or 128 megs of RAM or something...but I have a Gig of RAM since it's so so cheap now. Why wouldn't you have enough RAM?