Dear Toshiba,

In regards to your Satellite A200 notebook, I have but this to say:

Sincerely,
Someone Who Is Never Buying One Of Your Shitty Notebooks Ever Again.

Well the PC issues seem to have been sorted out.  The desktop is temporarily running a basic webserver app and operating as a torrent box.  So basically, whatever I download on there, I just grab through the server for my own use on the laptop (which is now the primary computer, remember) and if need be, just leave it there as well to continue seeding back from the desktop.  Pretty handy until I find a way to perfect the process.  Ideally I’d like to have the external drive that I download to accessible from both machines, but it doesn’t seem to like that idea right now, so it might take me a while to sort out the kinks.  In the meantime, here are some awesome pictures of the newly constructed Las Vegas Space Command Mobile Command Unit:

That huge metal slab there is the new 1 TB hard drive that I picked up. Please note that it is fucking huge. This is mostly because it’s actually two 500 GB drives bundled together in a wonderful little RAID drive. So it weighs as much as a small child, and sounds like a fucking jet engine when I power it on, but damn it if it isn’t the most awesome thing in my room right now. Also, it isn’t very easy to tell, but the laptop and display are both the same computer, and then that right monitor also switches over (via a functioning, but buggy KVM switch that I need to troubleshoot a bit) to the web server whenever I need to do something there. I am running two computers with minimum hardware, and it is most excellent.
Now then, why “Mobile Command Unit”? Well simple…as soon as I need to go somewhere with my laptop, I just unplug my USB hub and the KVM switch’s inputs. Toss the notebook in my bag and I’m gone. Anything I need to download is continuing to download on the Torrentbox, and will be waiting for me when I get home, unless I decide to just download it onto the laptop while I’m out. Pretty much the best computer set up I have ever had.
But anyway, I actually have better things to be doing. I am just so giddy about how much I love the new computer setup that I decided to show off a bit.

My beloved desktop, Heccputor, seems to be coming to the end of its endearingly problematic lifespan. Over the course of this computer’s life, it has experienced countless failures, and more than its fair share of miraculous recoveries. This time around, however, having given me its second Blue Screen Of Death in as many weeks a mere two hours ago, it seems like it might be coming to its final days. Or at least, its final days as a Windows machine. Let’s face it, the desktop computer is becoming a relic. With the advent of the notebook so far behind us that it seems like a distant memory, it’s safe to say that within a few years, desktops will be vastly overtaken in the marketplace by laptops. Sad, but true. So where does that leave me? Well, put simply, it is time for Heccubus to build a Mobile Command Unit and take Las Vegas Space Command on the fucking road.
The first steps in consolidating my machines into a single POD (Powerhouse Of Doom) have already been taken. I’ve obtained a USB 2.0 hub to replace the crumbling shambles that make up my current 1.1 hub, and a numerical keypad to hook onto the side of my notebook. See, I typically use that little wonder for just about everything involving numbers, and actually use that Enter key a lot more when navigating. So it’s something I’ll be needing once the MCU is up and running. So, then, the laptop itself is ready to go. I’ve experimented with hooking up a second display to it and it works just fine, with bugs that can easily be sorted out either with the notebook’s built in dual-display management software, or with my wonderful friend UltraMon. At this point, the only thing that needs to be obtained is a second external hard drive to house movies and software install files (for all of that perfectly legal stuff that I have installed here) and I’ll more or less be set to go.
The end result will see my desktop consisting of a notebook hooked up to a second left display, rather than having to deal with syncing two computers all the time. The desktop, as it stands, however, is in jeopardy. I have a few ideas of what I can do with it (file server, anyone?) but nothing’s too certain at this point. The only thing I can possibly see myself missing about it is that well… Laptops are fine and all but it doesn’t feel the same as sitting down in front of the warm glow of a big, humming machine. Plus my laptop’s soundcard isn’t as good, so it’s going to be an issue for me to record and whatnot. That can be easily remedied with a decent external soundcard, however, so it doesn’t concern me too much at this point. However, the fact that its current soundcard has inputs and outputs on the front of it for some bizarre reason, does bother me. I’ll have to put up with having my speakers’ cable jutting out from the front of my computer like some bizarre electronic penis.
Creepy phallic problem aside, however, the end is most certainly nigh for the once mighty Heccputor. Once I’ve gotten everything together that I need for the new setup, he’ll be going dormant while I figure out what I want to do with him. Scrap? Linux box? File server? At this point, anything is possible.

I refined the “Share This” type stuff at the bottom there. Instead of a big, clunky TwitThis link, you can now click the little logo for any of a number of sharing sites (Pownce, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc) and help spread the word about our tiny little web-nook here. If there’s any particular site you use that you want included down there that isn’t already displayed, let me know! I’ll see if I can add it on.

Back in May we sort of whizzed right by the official 5 year birthday of Heccubus.Blog (or rather, Heccubus’ Domain, as it was known at the time). So happy birthday, old sport. You’ve been keeping me moderately preoccupied for half a decade now.
Special.
Also, the three year anniversary of my purchasing heccubus.com has recently passed as well. So there’s also that.

I’m also thinking of returning to daily updates and making this into a sort of memoir of my time in post-secondary education. Mostly because it dawns on me that I am possibly the most hilariously awful student on Earth.

Anyone who has been around here for a few years now knows that I’m no stranger to speaking out against the collection of retarded celebrities that make up what is commonly referred to as PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which in my eyes should actually be PFTETOA but I suppose that doesn’t have as nice of a ring to it). A few years back I took it upon myself to try directing them towards real causes that they should be fighting against. Things like poaching, the chupacabras, and Smoggies.
This time around, I’m pretty much just pissed off with the complete lack of human emotion that they’ve exhibited around the recent murder / mutiliation / defiling of Tim McLean. For those not aware, McLean was traveling via Greyhound on July 30, and he was stabbed, beheaded, and then mutilated and partially consumed by a batshit-fucking-loco man named Vince Weiguang Li. Li then took a to-go bag (he was caught with a plastic bag containing parts of McLean) and was apprehended, and hopefully severely beaten by police. In an odd coincidence, Greyhound started an ad campaign centred around the phrase “There’s a reason you’ve never heard of ‘bus rage’” not long before. The campaign was halted on August 5th. I guess my question would be “Why did it take you nearly a week afterward to pull these things, exactly? One with half a mind might have gone ahead and dealt with it immediately, instead of just leaving them, but I mean…” but that’s a whole different topic altogether.
Somehow, in the midst of this horrible event, PETA decided that it was something they could capitalize on. They put together an ad that compared McLean’s murder to the slaughtering of animals for food.

I’ll let you drink that in for a minute.

…

…

Done? Good.
Now, listen you fucking assholes, just because Li ate part of a man that he just murdered, that doesn’t mean that he was hungry. It means that he was fucking insane. People kill animals to eat because that’s what we eat. Meat. We’re omnivores. It’s called the fucking food chain. Now I have no problem with people choosing to be vegetarian, or vegan, or mega-vegan or whatever. It doesn’t have much of an effect on me, aside from the fact that it means I’ll get more meat. So by all means, eat salad. See if I give a fuck. But when you decide to take your ridiculous cause and attempt to exploit a tragic event like this for your own means, you’re being a fucking dick.
I completely fail to even see any kind of thought process that could have possibly lead up to someone deciding that such an advertisement. As such, I have determined that there was no thought process whatsoever, and that the ad was created by someone with absolutely no ability to feel.
This is just the tip of the ice berg with me and PETA. I’d genuinely love to have someone responsible for this act of insane carelessness contact me so that I can inform them, precisely, of just how terrifyingly retarded they are. With cretinous idiots like this representing animal rights, it’s no fucking wonder the animals are losing.

Any who have had the pleasure of attending a social function with me know that I have a tendency to show up completely wrecked. Well tonight was really no exception. Tonight, you see, was the annual barbeque hosted by my place of employment. It promised (it is to be believed) merriment, food, and fun. Only one of the above was actually provided. You guess which.
So naturally, given my usual nature, I showed up with the wife, and a friend with his significant other in tow obnoxiously drunk. Having each consumed a minimum of six tallboys (NOTE: A tallboy, defined by Urban Dictionary: “Oversized beer cans that usually sell for $0.99. Usually drank by hoboes and rednecks.” So you can imagine the effects by your own means.) were well on our way to becoming a dictionary-defined example of what it is to be “shit-canned”. After spending the past hour watching “Tim & Eric’s Awesome Show: Great Job!” we were more or less in a state of giddy drunkenness that can only be equaled by, say, drinking a jug of whiskey while doing 100 on the autobahn. We were, in a sense, annihilated. So we stroll up, demanding meats, and the store managers in charge of the grill don’t seem to be entirely sure of how to deal with the fact that two of their employees have shown up reeking like a brewery and stumbling over their own feet. This is normal for me.
We proceed inside to find that some of the food is already available. There is cake. As the night progresses, I begin to realize that I have not had any cake. As I leave, I still have had no cake, but this is a moot point because I am sure that the cake was supplied by the store’s bakery department, and is therefore complete and utter shit. This is my own drunken logic speaking. Now, then… We immediately help ourselves to the free food. I eat a few strawberries from a plate of fruit, proclaiming “Fruit? Fucking….are you kidding me? I’m sorry I thought I was coming to a barbeque, not a weeping vagina party.” And toss the stems of the berries into the middle of the table. Soon after, I notice a plate of burgers. Grabbing two, I immediately dispatch myself to where my companions have seated themselves, ignoring the looks being given to me by my supposed co-workers. Somewhere in all of this, the burgers are garnished with ketchup. I’m not sure how this happened.
After about 30 seconds, I have decimated my burger. I am still hungry. There is no food left. I busy myself with a shiny blue ball that we found, and eventually decide that I am going outside for a cigarette. The store manager in charge of the grill at that point addresses me, asking “So how was the burger?”
“Ezzio, I’m not gonna lie. I drank six tallboys before I got here and I have one waiting for me in the car. I am not exactly a connoisseur of fine dining at the moment.”
He hands me a burger and a platter of sausages. I decide at this point that Ezzio is my new best friend. I take the food inside, finishing my burger before I get halfway to where the rest of my co-workers are convened. Soon after we finish devouring the sausages, we learn that they are beginning to auction off the services of management staff within the store. Basically, you pay a small sum of cash and get to order around whatever manager you placed a winning bid on for the duration of a shift. I managed to snag one for $12. So when I work on Wednesday, this particular individual is going to hate me. For the rest of his life, he will remember me as the guy who had him doing every single menial task imaginable. If I choose, he will have to clean the grout between the floor tiles with a toothbrush. It is destined to be a glorious day.
After assuring this manager that I will make his life a living hell, it is decided that we should leave, and my fiancee and I make our way to the car. The lesson in all of this? It doesn’t matter what kind of function it is. If I am invited, I will show up drunk, boisterous, and ready to reap my horrible vengeance on any who cross my path.
And that is my story. I’m sorry I can’t offer anything else at this time.

So what the fuck happened on Thursday?  Well it was my own fault, really, though I can also say that it is to partially blame a horrible web-based FTP client that I opted to use.
It all started with me logging in to try and install some new Twitter plugins for Wordpress, due to my insane displeasure with the most popular one (Twitter Tools) that I had installed previously. When I logged in, I noticed that there was a new version of Wordpress to install. So I think to myself “Well, this should only take five minutes. Why not?” And decide to go ahead and do the upgrade. As usual, I’m given all the “MAKE SURE YOU BACK UP YOUR WORDPRESS INSTALL” bullshit that I never really pay any mind to, since I generally know what I’m doing, and just start uploading things. Now, this is where it starts to get complicated.
See, I have a horrible memory. As such, I never got around to reinstalling an FTP application on my laptop since I last reinstalled Windows. I generally use Filezilla, if you’re curious. So, since the WiFi speeds at my school are generally awful, I found myself using a certain web-based FTP setup for the sake of uploading small files here and there. Since a total Wordpress install is less than 2 MB, and upgrading is about 1.5, at most, I decided it was still a good option for the given situation, rather than waiting 20 minutes for the .exe to install Filezilla to download. Now the only problem with this particular web-based FTP client is that you can’t upload entire directories. Well, you can, but you have to archive them first (.zip, .rar, or whatever file, for the retarded) and then upload the archive. The website then automatically decompresses the archive and supposedly creates directories with the archive name and places all of the files in that directory.

WRONG.

Instead of doing this, it just creates files with the intended directory name in the filename. So I now had a main directory that was filled with a bunch of useless, poorly-named files. So I delete them all. Somewhere in this clusterfuck of files was a very important file. That file was the ever-important config file. This file, as I’m sure you can gather from the name, contains the configuration info for Wordpress. The database name, login and password. So it pretty much is the backbone of the site. I’ve run into problems with this file before (I originally intended to switch Heccubus.Blog over to Wordpress about two years ago, but couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to configure it properly) and pretty much always wind up going to Nate for help. Because I’m stupid, and don’t take notes.
So naturally, with the config file missing, Heccubus.Blog ceased to function. It was a big, white screen. If you were lucky and stopped by within a two hour window, you were greeted with the message “Oops. You Bwoke it.” and a big image of the famous Windows BSOD. Thankfully, after a couple of hours, Nate came to the rescue and provided me with the database info I needed so that I could rebuild the config file and upload it. As soon as that was up, we just needed a quick upgrade on the database and here we are. The new, slightly improved Heccubus.Blog. Not a lot has changed on your end, but I can assure you that my Wordpress frontend is a hell of a lot more pleasant than that last monstrosity that they unleashed on me. You can, however, take note of the fact that each post on this site can now be posted in a special Twitter post by clicking that nice little “Share This On Twitter” button. The button itself is custom made (editing plugins is fun) but the plugin using it (TwitThis) is rather lovely aside from the incredibly ugly buttons that it uses by default.
Also, please note that the content on here is no longer nothing more than those ridiculous “The Day In Summary” posts that Twitter Tools generated automatically. For whatever reason, I thought those were a really good idea, and for that I apologize. Also, I will try to stop talking about nothing but Twitter and how wonderful I think it is on here.

Twitter.

But that’s about it. Because of my own stupidity, and my decision that this one time I would not have to back up my Wordpress install, Heccubus.com was officially M.I.A. for a few hours on Thursday. From now on, I promise that I will back up all files before upgrading Wordpress (which given their track record should be in about ten minutes) in the future so that you don’t miss out on the complete lack of actual content that I am so diligent about posting here.

• Someone is doing laundry, so I can’t get mine done yet. Waiting to use the washer & dryer is more frustrating that you’d think some days. #
• I am kind of weirded out by the fact that Ruffles brand onion dip comes in a sealed can that does not require refridgeration. #
• The new Black Kids album is kind of….meh. #
• Well how did I forget this? Happy birthday Alan Braxe! http://twurl.nl/jk733o #

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• Working from 2:00 until 10:30. Lame. #

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