Author Archives: InV4d3r

Runner’s sickness

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After a long period without sports caused by some rigid laziness and a week of simply being sick I finally made it back to the gym and some tough and rough training sessions. I say tough and rough because this is going to last till my long awaited vacation (hell, am I excited) and it will be four weeks, to be exact and offers no room for longer rests or pauses. It’s five times a week, two hours and a half of merciless training every morning. According to the fact that I haven’t been to gym for such a long time I will stick to these conditions only for these four weeks because more of this training plan could and will cause serious injuries to me and my body. Like I said, there’s no time for longer rests except the weekends. I try to watch my nutrition more carefully with a focus on protein rich food. Hopefully I’ll loose 4-5kg in these four weeks and my overall body condition improves.

I already found one big disadvantage of this training, because I got to know the runner’s diarrhea again. Fortunately does it not affect me too hard but my digestion is definately disturbed and is not functioning very well. I can’t deny that I have an overweight of around 10-15kg which is one cause for this digestion thingy. Another cause is a loss of blood in the digestive tract because, logically, the blood is needed elsewhere when I run for like 30 minutes. The regeneration phase takes about 10-16 hours after the training and everything is fine again. I’ve also did some research on this and it is said that this kind of runner’s sickness disappears after a while, mainly when the whole circulation got more comfortable with the “act of running” and can provide the correct amount of blood everywhere. Hopefully…

Why are his feet so high?

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Sometimes life goes curious ways and punishes you that you feel the naked slap of life’s bare hand in your face without a doubt. I did some research on A/V receivers for nearly six month now and finally found one that suits my requirements perfectly well. Like I said, it took me nearly six month to find the one for me. Everything was planned in detail. The receiver was found and the speaker set as well but I missed one very important point, the god damn measurements of the receiver. Actually the whole thing should fit into the TV rack where everything is situated right now but who could have know that its feet are that high, that it can’t be placed within the rack. This truely makes me suffer and a kind of sad because this whole set was my birthday present and I am not able to use it right now. I’ve found this cool rack on the one and only true platform when it comes to modern interior – IKEA. Benno is a simple rack with a slight modern look, without these shiny silver things that you can find on so many other racks and it is made without any glass. Benno rules. Benno could fit my needs. Well, some day… till then I keep looking on my receiver and the closed box with the Teufel speaker set.

Back to the core

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Because of various problems with my Fedora machine I finally decided to give another distribution a chance and my first two targets were Ubuntu and Linux Mint. Linux Mint wasn’t an option because of the lack of an alternate installer routine that allows me to create and manage software RAIDs and LVM. I always use to run my /home on a mirrored RAID system. What was left was the latest Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with alternate installer routine. Well, actually I chosed  Kubuntu instead of the Gnome variant and, well… yes, it’s working and there’s a lot of one-click routines and the system itself does a lot more “automated” than Fedora does BUT it left an unfinished fell on me. A lot of options in customization in KDE were missing even though I post-installed a lot of KDE stuff and even the praised Gnome desktop looks like a ghost town to me.

Another thing I can’t get comfortable with was the sudo feature and curiously the apt tool. I was using Debian a few years ago as a “hacking machine” and I loved apt because before that I was only using SuSE and never felt homish with yast and RPMs and stuff. Though Fedora is using RPMs as well and the yum package manager isn’t mostly something entirely different than apt, zypper, yast and merge, the yum system is for me personally the best. Maybe it’s only because I finally got used to it after nearly one year and a half of using Fedora. Anyhow, Kubuntu was easy to setup but I personally missed some customization and some, you know, nerdiness in the system. What finally happens, I took a closer look on my hardware settings, did some error detection, fixed that and reinstalled my Fedora again. The only thing that’s left to do is to fix the PulseAudio vs. Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi configuration, which was handled perfectly well under (K)Ubuntu, but I fixed this once and I can surely do this twice.

eBay and the curse of the retarted

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Guess ’twas probably the last time that I sold hardware and stuff on a web platform like eBay because what I recently experienced over the last weekend was the worst case in handling hardware by an unskilled user. First things first, I’ve got a lot of old hardware laying around at home so I decided it could be worth it to sell some and make some money. I decided to sell two old motherboards, on pair of registered RAM and one access point. Yes, this access point, or should I say the buyer made me angry as hell because of his progressive stupidity.

I am not a true believer in mans intelligence but this guy was a real pain in the ass. The access point he bought wasn’t reset of course and it was a pure and simple access point without any routing, DHCP or whatever features. There was also a new firmware installed so the access point itself was up to date. All this guy had to do was to reset the hardware, take a look in the online manual for the factory default settings and configure it. Of course did he not take a single look to the manual and so he was bothering me that he can’t configure the access point. He tried to access the AP’s webinterface on 192.168.1.1 BUT the AP’s actually adressed to 192.168.0.231. He was also wondering that he’s getting no IP adress from the access point. Christ? Seriously? As mentioned above, it was a pure and simple AP that serves the user with nothing else than a WiFi.

He even made it to write me twice after I have sent him the link to the online manual which explains EVERYTHING to get things done. Obviously this guy’s got some serious problems with reading or a deficit in spending attention to something. But at last he did not reply to my last mail that explained the whole procedure in detail which is disrespectful for me personally. You help someone where you actually do not have to help someone and he finally kicks your ass. Stupid fucking retarted.

Bring me the guts!!!

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Finally my conclusion was made that all my colleagues are braindead zombies and remote controlled. Maybe this conclusion was made because the amount of oxygen in my bureau reached a point far beyond point zero and my brain’s dead, too. It’s a heck to share a room with a bunch of freaks that are afraid of opening the fucking window wide open to get the mentioned oxygen. Damn it, my head hurts. So whatever, I wanted to talk about something completely different.

Over the past few years the genre of zombie games gained much popularity and me too is a big fan boy when it comes to brainless hordes of human being that wants to be hacked and slayed and get their bloody head chopped off. A liked “Stubbs the zombie” a lot though the gameplay was a little bit boring but the sense of humor in this game was totally mine. Right after this “Left 4 Dead” got released by Valve and I fell in love with a game for the bazillions time. Yap, I am getting pretty emotional when it comes to games sometimes. Sooo, hopefully my new love will come to visit me by the end of this month, which is called “Dead Rising 2”. Unfortunately did they not release part one for the PC and I don’t want to buy a stupid Xbox 360 for just one game. I’ve seen nearly every trailer, preview and developer diary that was released over the past few month. Yaaaaaarrrrr, zombies, come get some!!!

-Zombie-

Which leads me to my next topic and reason for a lot of excitement. The Duke’s acoming!!!! I couldn’t actually believe it when I read the first announcement made by the new publisher Gearbox Software. I’ve heard a lot of yelling in the forums and comments of different articles that this is not going to be a real Duke Nukem because it’s not a 3D Realms game, but who the hell cares? Those whiners are simply a good inspiration for birth control. For me personally it’s so glad and nice to see that another vaporware is finally going to be released and that it’s hopefully not wasted. If anyone remembers “Prey” it was declared to be dead too but then it finally returned, got released and was a great game, though. I bet on Duke.

One little foot note at last, after playing a paladin to level 80 in WoW I’m currently working on a death knight which at level 65 at the moment and will hopefully enter Northrend.

More sports

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As you may I am stuck in a vicious circle that makes it nearly impossible for me to go to gym again. Well, a friend of mine noticed this problem too and so she asked me if she should give me some kind of a kick and join her for some company in the gym. I am pretty sure if I just licked some blood in gym again and can fall back to my daily habits everything will be fine again. It’s pretty necessary for me to get a little bit more sporty again because after this relatively long period without sports I feel a kind of rusty (back hurts sometimes, etc. etc.)

We’ll hit the road to gym in nearly two hours and I am much excited about how I’ll make myself in gym again. Hopefully I’ll not completely fail and the muscle ache will not be too horrible.

Reporting for duty

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Nothing really special happened within the last few days except some nerdy things. The holy equipment for my paladin in WoW is nearly completely epic and I look forward to my first instances as a holy paladin though I have no idea how it actually works because I am a tank since level 25 or something. Probably will I use some non-hero instances to learn before I kick the real shit (yap, yap, yap… the overheal will shine over my healing failures). On the other hand I am busy in WoW with some crafting things that I left on the way while hardcore leveling my paladin. Damn, I hate it when a game turns to a work like thing. I used to start a priest and a warrior for some twinking. The priest plays a little bit lame in low level but the warrior totally rocks and I guess I will play it more often from time to time.

Besides all this were I working on my media center again and it’s in a kind of RC state now. Windows 7 was by far the better choice compared to Linux Mint, though Linux has had a fine performance but due to some screen tearing issues and the complexity that comes into play when using a dual-boot system as a media center, it had to leave the hall. The media center choice itself fell on XBMC. The Windows Media Center is a kind of a rude joke from Microsoft which is absolutely useless in all kinds of ways. The third choice was Moovida but I finally missed some customization features so I switched to XBMC which is more complex in the beginning but very easy to use in the end. I finally made to import all my TV shows correctly to the media library and my movies were found and tagged as well. It’s pretty easy to use and it looks great. I use the standard theme but I guess I’ll give some of the other themes a try in the future.

If you’ll ask yourself what’s up in project “Straight Edge 2.0” can I tell that I follow every rule except the sports rule. Unfortunately. I don’t know when I will do some sport again, probably next week or if everything works perfectly well this week, maybe this weekend. Gladfully am I stuck on a weight around 97kg and it does not increase (Yeah!). So, that’s it for now…

A pain in the ass

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…and on the eighth day God created the game industry and he saw that it was good.

…and on the ninth day God gifted the game industry with paranoia and greed and he saw that it was good…

Seriously? As you may know I am a game junkie and I love video games. I have a collection of nearly 1,400 games for different platforms and unfortunately I do not have time to play them all through. So is comes natural that I order a few games here and then like I did two days ago. I found some very cheap offers on Amazon, some games for around six bucks. One of these games was “Peter Jackson’s King Kong”. Though this game does not look nice compared to nowadays standards I really wanted to play this BUT thanks to the paranoia of the gaming industry the game was protected with my so behated copy protection called StarForce. First of all, the game got installed, then you try to start it and receive a message that you have to restart your system to apply and complete the driver installation. What the fuck?

So, ya, I restarted and something that I already expected happened. My Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit ran an automated recovery and failed. After that I decided to choose the last known good configuration and the system booted. So far, so nice. After login I noticed that I wasn’t able to connect to the internet though my network settings were correct and haven’t changed them for a couple of month. I also needed to reboot to apply some new network setting. What the fuck? Why the hell does a copy protection affect my network adapters?

I tried a few different things to fix the problem but nothing really helped. Not even a crack. After finding no solution I decided to simply uninstall the game to get my old running system configuration back. I also uninstalled to StarForce drivers manually to completely ensure that there’s nothing left of this bullshit. Well the game was able to start but it crashed right after starting the campaign. Now, after uninstalling everything my system works perfectly fine again and I wasted six bucks on a game that could have been good and enjoyable but thanks to copy protection mechanisms I wasn’t able to play it nor to enjoy any other game. Ladies and gentlemen of the game industry, do we really need such a strangulation of righteous gamers? Do we, the gamers, truely need to get such a pain in the ass by buying a game? Isn’t it enough to bugfix the game? Do you, the game industry, really need to implenent such factory default bug in your games? I don’t think so.

…and I saw, that it was bad.

I need a jog

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Nothing special used to happen for the last few days so there’s nearly no good reason to write anything BUT my mood has changed badly since being back from my last vacation. I took the whole vacation for me as a chance or a way to find out how it will go on in many ways in my life. Those two weeks gave me the opportunity to free my mind from everything and reach something like a distant view on the current status. Never mentioned this before but I’m thinking about leaving my company for nearly nine month now and even change my residence. Watched from a distant view and regarding my overall mood and mind condition I’m more than sure that I need a change so badly. Right now I am totally unsatisfied with everything in my life because nothing seems to fit anymore. Imprisoned is a the word that describes my feelings and emotions at its best.

I first thought that this whole emptiness that struggles me comes from the fact that I haven’t had a vacation for such a long time but now I can say that I was completely mistaken and I can definately say that the whole job itself pisses me off. Like I said, I need a change and this change should be a kind of massive. My entire performance and capability decreased drastically over the last few month and I am not able to solve this simpliest tasks so far. To be honest, I haven’t changed a server config for nearly six month and the thoughest brain thing for me is to do a toner change in our laser printers.

-can't break the silence

This whole job thing affects my nearby environment as well. I ain’t in the mood to visit friends any more and I actually lost interest in my relationship as well and it often comes to my mind that I should quit. The problem is that my girl works in the same company so the company is even chasing me in my free time and this finally leads me to a furious kind of hatred for my job and the people I have to work with. On the other hand, I can’t stand nearly 90% of the people that I work with in my company and I consider most of them as narcissistic egocentrics or just stupid dumb fucks.

For a long time I said to myself that it is not as rough and hard as it seems and that I should go and carry that weight but now I am more than sure that the limit is reached and that it is time to break out. I also think about quitting my job without having an offer or a contract agreement for a new job, just to stay at home and having the chance to do something for me and my own needs. Well, now after writing this I feel an urgent need for a jog to get these nasty clouds out of my and free my mind. Sure thing is that I will quit this stupid job this year and that I’ll change my residence within the next nine to twelve month. This can’t go on like this…

Why can’t it all explode?

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Today’s like one of the most miserable days since a very long time. Actually I’m not pretty sure why, but I should have stood in bed and kept on sleeping the whole day. Last weekend wasn’t as exciting as I expected it to be because  if you’ve just visited a city like Paris a city like Dresden comes by like a small village in the middle of nowhere. Another horrible thing was that I devastated my media center and it wasn’t running the whole weekend. For some reasons the system was not bootable after I switched over to a single boot system and deleted Linux Mint. I had to install Windows 7 from ground on and on the other hand I had to re-initialise the RAID system where the OS was installed and my bunch of HD movies was stored, so the movies are lost.

Terrible thing today too is the fucked up weather outside. Dark, grey, pale and cloudy and no god damn summer in sight. I wanted to start off with gym today but I only made it to the bathroom where I picked up my toothbrush put it back and wandered back to bed. Though I am motivated to go to gym I am able to make it to the gym. I feel like I am stuck in a vicious circle and I can’t the portal which I have to break to get out of it. Seriously, I want to make some sport but I can’t get it done. Once again, tomorrow will be another try because I am pretty, pretty sure that I will not find the willpower in the evening today to grab my bag and go to the gym.