Ah well, it was about due time I started writing on this site again. Haven’t uttered a word in nearly three months, which is quite odd because I’ve had heaps to say, I just haven’t been able to figure out how to say it. Which is a odd, given the fact that I can be quite outspoken from time to time. As a gesture to me starting up again, I’ve gone over to using a new site layout, courtesy of Yusop.net. I think the layout is really nice, and is a design I really fell comfortable with. So please, if you have comments please share them with me.

My situation in life has improved somewhat, for those of you that remember my lung collapse last August, it has stabilized to the extent that it is back to normal operation which I’m thankful for. I’m still per definition unemployed, working the odd shift here and there at my old employer. Currently, I’m awaiting answers from two applications I’ve sent in. And the jobs could not be more different. One is for the Epcot center at the Walt Disney World Resort and the other is for a large Norwegian consumer electrics store. So it’s either back to waiting tables, working in a restaurant or doing maintenance work on computers. Either works for me, but one involves moving to another continent. Which means I’ll be trying to work abroad for the second time, and if it goes through, hopefully with better experience than with me little “joy ride” to Spain last year for those of you that remember that.

I hope that you will stay tuned and return here once in a while to read my rantings, and that you like my new theme. The rantings of a confused computer nerd is back! :) (PS: For those of you wondering if that picture is of my behind, I have to dissapoint you! :P)

I’m so depressed about the results from the last presidential election in the US. In the words of the British newspaper Daily Mirror “Doh! Four more years”. How could 59,000,000 Americans be so dumb?. I’ve never been a huge fan of neither father Bush, nor son Bush. I think he’s done an abysmal job in his last presidential period, going to war on Iraq on a rather shaky grounds and for worsening the living conditions for the common man in the US. During the last four years, the US has lost millions of jobs and the American economy isn’t exactly thriving.

I had a sneaking suspicion that Bush would win, because of the job his administration has done within the Christian community in the US. They’ve done a massive job of conveying propaganda to the Christian masses throughout the nation, telling them how Bush would continue to work towards a more moralist community taking pride in old traditions and family values. One of his key people reaching this goal is Karl Rove, which by many considered to be the architect behind Bush’s election win. His network relations to high ranking church officials and Christian communities throughout the US has been vital to their success. They got their message across, and won by this. This might have come as a huge surprise to many, since the turnout for this election was massive. Many new voters came out to vote, and many were uncertain as of how they would vote. Most people thought these votes would go in favour for the democrats, but unfortunately they didn’t.

One thing that really surprised me, was the fact that the electoral votes for Florida went to the republicans. Given the way the vote process went during the election in 2000, or should one say mishandled caused quite a stir. A stir I thought would go in favour to the democrats. It’s quite known that the Bush family doesn’t really care much for the minority groups across the US, which was proved well when Bush’s brother Jeb was elected governour for Florida. He was asked what he would do for the minority groups, and his answer was rather short and sweet; probably nothing. This of course ticked of both the African Americans as well as the Hispanic communities throughout Florida, which counts for nearly 30% of the state. But yet, the win goes to Bush. Truly shocking.

Not only this, but within the next presidential period the US supreme court will replace four judges and you can bet that Bush’s administration will do their best to make sure that conservative candidates will get a seat. My main concern is that the US will grow into becoming ultra conservative which for me is like taking steps backwards in time. They are crippling their own progression as a nation, and if they continue like this they might end up losing their role as the ruling superpower. The EU is growing faster and faster, with new nations fast becoming new members. If the EU as well as China get their act together, we will see the new era of new superpowers that will by far exceed in power compared to the US. A force to be reckoned with. In this age of globalisation and commercialism, the US is wrong by taking the steps they’ve taken by granting Bush another four years. I’m a huge skeptic to the way the US is being run, and only time will show if I’m right or not.

According to new science, it would seem that there are a few factors in life that makes us happier than others. Recently, a US psychology professor by the name of Martin Seligman published a paper on what makes us as human beings happy. He’s constructed a list that very much resembles the bible, as the list contains ten items which leads us to happiness. Items are ranked by level of importance, and a score to show how important it is. Score range is 0 to 5 with a .5 level accuracy.

• Good genes
  If you are born in to a happy family, chances are high that you are genetically disposed to be happy. (5 points)
• Marriage
  Marriage gives you more happiness than just living together with someone on a common-law spouse basis. (3 points)
• Friends and family
  Having good friends and connections to your family increases your happiness. (2.5 points)
• Being realistic
  Setting realistic goals for yourself and keeping your expectations down makes life easier. (2 points)
• Faith and religion
  Having faith in a god gives life a purpose and a higher meaning. (1.5 points)
• Selfless deeds
  Doing good deeds for others without any self interest makes you forget about yourself and your own problems. (1.5 points)
• Self appearance
  Ignore your own worries about appearances and just believe that you are pretty. (1 point)
• Wealth
  Give up your quest for money, material goods is not the way to happiness. (0.5 points)
• Age
  Do not fear age, elder people are just as happy as the younger ones. (0.5 points)
• Intelligence
  Be happy with your intelligence. It has little or no relevance to being happy. (0.5 points)

One thing that may come as a surprise to many, is that the lesser fortunate people in life tends to be more happy about life than those with good fortune. Poor people, homeless people and drug addicts were in many cases more content than people in middle class and upwards. Which kinda goes to prove what I’ve been saying for ages, is that materialistic wealth only leads to depression in the long run if it is to be considered a vital part of your view on your self happiness. If you believe that riches make you happy, the items you own end up owning you. Instead, what these people obviously do is cherish what they have. As should we all, if we ourselves can’t cherish what we have well then who can?

Life is all about what you make it yourself. I live by the motto ‘Carpe Diem’, also known as ’seize the day’. The day you are living today, might be your last. And you are always more fortunate than you think you are, you just need to take a few steps back and try looking at the bigger picture. If you just pause for a few seconds, and look at all the things you have in your life I’m sure that you will end up surprised. And if you’re thinking about the things you own, you’ve still not understood what this article about. Be grateful, live life to the fullest and keep smiling. The ones that keep on smiling are the ones that spreads joy and happiness around, and as they say what goes around comes around.

I’ve had quite a few problems connecting to the net via my cell phone, the Sony Ericsson T630. It connected nicely to the net, got its IP address from the DHCP server and right DNS settings. But it seemed that the requests didn’t go any further than the gateway, and stopped there. So all settings seemed ok, but the packets just met the wall.

After doing some research I finally found out why. Under the account settings for GPRS, the access point was meant to be ‘internet’ instead of ‘wap‘. After making that change, everything worked without a problem. Ok, I have to admit the speeds were terrible! Abysmal to say the least, but what else can you expect when you’re used to broadband on a daily basis. It’s not like speed are important anyway, the only reason you do connect via wireless is because you need to. You might be expecting an important e-mail, or you’re waiting to settle an important bid on an ongoing auction. The reasons could be many, and it’s nice to be able to do your stuff wherever you are, as long as you have your laptop and cell phone handy.

For quite a few years now, I’ve been a helper in the IRC channel #mIRC on the network Undernet. One of my privileges there, was the ability to help users on a daily basis and make a difference to users all over the world. Through my presence there, I’ve learned heaps about computers, administrated a bot network with services people have relied on daily but most importantly made friends that I care for very much.

Life has a nasty habit of changing, and so do the person living the life. Over the course of the last year my dedication towards the channel decreased drastically, and the passion slowly died out until I saw no other option than to leave. It’s been a great time, albeit at times a roller coaster ride. A great era comes to an end, and I find it’s time to go explore new grounds and broadened my horizon. I will most surely miss it from time to time, but it’s not like I’m quiting IRC. I would never dream of doing that, as I have many great friends.

I would also like to send out a thanks to all those that stood by me in this somewhat emotional decision. I won’t mention names, but I hope that you know if you read this.

Oh how I hate the net from time to time. On second thought, that’s not entirely fair. I do though hate some online businesses. I just recently bought a web hosting account to host a few new domains that I had acquired, and with the account there was also a domain name that came with it for a small price, so I thought what the heck. I signed up, and I was now the proud owner of yet another hosting account and a new domain name. All was fine and dandy.

But things were about to change, I found the control features of the hosting provider to be abysmal and horrid to say the least. I was not at all happy, but things were only to become worse. After having tried to getting used to the new account, I decided it wasn’t worth it and came to terms that it was about time to use the 30 day cash refund option. I canceled the account and got my money back. But what about my new domain name that I get with the account, that I paid for? The domain that is registered in my name. Of course I wanted to take this with my and transfer over to my main registrar.

Well, I logged into my account on Dotster to proceed with the transfer. As the owner of the domain, I got a mail asking me to confirm the move. Of course, I agreed and confirmed and just waited for the confirmation mail. Well guess what, the domain had been registered with a registrar-lock, which makes it impossible to transfer a domain even with the consent of the domain owner. This of course pisses me off, so I contact the registrar the domain was registered with and ask them to remove it. They tell me I have to contact the hosting provider to have them make the change. HELLO!? You can’t do changes to your own systems? That’s just great!

Well, I contact my former hosting provider to have them do the work, but guess what!? THEY WON’T, THEY CAN’T, THEY ARE INCOMPETENT! The only thing they can tell me, is that I have to wait until 60 days after the account with them was registered until I can do changes myself. What a load of shite!!! So I’ve now written an e-mail to the registrar they do business with (yet again!), and told them in short plain terms that;

• It is my domain
• I paid for it
• I want full control over it
• Stop tossing me around, I’m no freakin’ ball
• It’s your systems, your databases. Get it done!

If not, I’ll contact my .ro friends and have them hack them from here until oblivion!

Update:
In retrospect, I understand my frustration and aggression. But in this case, there was nothing I could do, nor the hosting company. After a domain has been registered, it can’t be transferred over to a new registrar for a period of 60 days. This is in compliance with the regulations set by ICANN, the governing authority on domain names. But it still pisses me off though! :) It’s still MY domain!

Ah man, last night was wet. Very wet, so wet that the government was close to sending out a flood warning. My cousin came by the bar, it was his first weekend off for quite some time. So after work some of my co-workers joined him for a few beers. Oh how I wish now it was only a few beers, but it wasn’t. It was far too many. And I’ve been suffering all day for it.

I’ve never really been a person that gets hung over, I don’t cease to function like many of my friends do. But today my body has pretty much been like so dead. I’ve never had the flakey nerves, shaky hands and the occasional sweats, but that hasn’t been the case today. By God, today has been hell. If I knew last night that I signed a contract with the devil, I would have ran away from that temptation island faster than lightning itself screaming like a girl calling out for mum.

So with these words I end my day off suffering and pain, heading off to bed hoping that the devil sees mercy on me and lets me start off tomorrow all fresh and fit for fight. Or else I will file for a lawsuit against the devil on the basis that I signed a contract on false grounds, I thought it was all going to be good fun. Hah, I guess he’s sitting in his warm comfortable hole in the ground laughing at me.

Damn bastard!

Ah well, it seems like Pierce Brosnan is stepping down from being James Bond and passing on the torch to someone else to keep James Bond alive. And from rumours on the street, it seems like MGM and UA has settled on who shall carry on the legacy of James Bond. The new James Bond is to be Dougray Scott, known from blockbuster movies such as Ripley’s Game, Mission: Impossible II and Deep Impact.

Other candidates were Clive Owen, Ioan Gruffudd and Eric Bana. I can’t say that I fully agree with their choice, I would rather have gone for Clive Owen which I think is a great actor. On the internet, he’s become somewhat of an cult figure starring in BMW’s effort into short movies with the series The Hire displaying BMW’s in all their glory. My personal opinion is that he has much more of what is needed to carry the current James Bond figure than any other, seeing as Pierce Brosnan is stepping down. But then again, Dougray Scott has this “evilness” over him that kind of makes you draw parallels to the original James Bond, Sean Connery.

Being the huge James Bond fan I am, I’m will be waiting in great anticipation for Dougray’s first Bond movie. I don’t think I’ll be disappointed, but I would have loved to see Clive in his shoes instead. James Bond will always be James Bond, none of the movies are really great. Don’t get me wrong, the movies are good but they don’t leave your breathless. Being a boy, you’ve always had this urge and dream of being a secret agent, having lots and lots of toys at your disposal and of course riding around in fast cars with a lady in every port. I think this also goes for many females, and this is the illusion that we all live after and make James Bond what is it. A semi believable adventure that we would like to take part in, and thus forget some of the flaws that the James Bond movies have. We still love him, and we keep on coming back. It’s James Bond after all.

Update
As it turns out, the rumours  that  leaked regarding  the new James Bond was, as many rumours tend to be, false. The new James Bond is not Dougray Scott, but Daniel Craig. A name not considered by many, but what I think might be a very interesting choice.

Even though I have quite a decent solution running on my mail server to catch spam, some spam mails still evade my spam filter. Quite often I find the spam mails I get to be quite entertaining, and outright amazing. The stuff you get offered would be a rater long list, but for those of you that don’t get much spam, here are a few of them

• Cheap Viagra
  Keeps you going and going and going. Pretty much like Duracell batteries.
• Penis enlarger/extensions
  Increase your penis to the size of an elephant’s penis.
• Get your hair back pills
  Got a bald spot? Fear not, these pills will get you hair which even the most hardcore black metal artist would envy.
• Refinance your mortgage
  Yeah by doing this you will save thousands of $$$’s, we’ll even throw in a free Ceiko digital sportswatch. (they were out of Seiko)
• Want to lose weight; just click here
  We’ll give you a range of pills which will get you slim in no time, when the package arrives on your doorstep it’s just a text book that tells you to get off your fat arse and get out to enjoy nature.

Wanna help out a poor fella; “man, I just lost all my money” or “I know this guy that lives down in XXXXXX who seriously needs some money” or some other really sad story that urges you to donate as much money as possible to help them out. Yeah right! You’re broke, but you still afford internet access do you? Hah, pull the other one.

But recently spammers have been offering stuff that I never thought possible. Spammers actually spamming trying to sell you anti spam software. Oh my, what nerve! I hope they burn slowly on an open fire when they get in hell for all eternity. Just today I received two of those.

When I thought I had seen it all, I get a mail asking me if I wanted to be a minister. If I enrolled to their engenious program I could become a minister within two weeks, and after passing an online exam I would be able to perform weddings, funerals, baptisms, forgive people their sins and what made me laugh so hard I almost wet my pants; visit correctional facilities. Now, just getting the privilege to visit correctional facilities almost made me get my credit card out and enroll to this great course. Just think of that, skip years and years of theology schooling and be able to skip to the fun part. Oh my, I’m sooo thrilled! Really, I am! NOT!

But here is where it starts to get funny, just the other day I registered a domain name for a friend of mine, as a gift. Just a couple of days after I had registered this domain, I receive a mail from a spammer asking me if I wanted to make money of my newly registered domain. As he so nicely put it; “I noticed through my searches that you had registered the domain ‘pumpingirony.net’ and I was wondering if you wanted to make some money on your domain”. I was going all like “what the fuck!”. Given the number of domains that are registered daily, no person is able to check up which domains were newly registered. So my bet is that the fuckers (read: the registrar) I used to register the domain leaked information to a spammer, which then again contacted me. This pisses me off. Spammers are the scum of the earth. If you are a spammer, and read this post I want you to know this. If I ever get my hands on one of you twats, I’ll cut off your balls and roast them on an open fire. That’s the least I could do.

Has the Mozilla team done it? Have they made a browser that will finally be able to take up the fight with Internet Explorer? In my eyes, they have and with great style. Their new release in the Firefox branch has in many ways swept me off my feet. It’s fast becoming the number one choice for web browsers, and with a good reason. Firefox is nothing short of revolutionary.

Being a blogger and also being a nerd, you tend to be concerned about your pages being compliant to current web standards. Meaning, you want your XHTML, CSS, RSS etc to be correct and compliant so that it displays correctly in most browsers. Not only does Firefox do a great job at being compliant to these standards, but it’s built in support RSS is awesome! Your feeds go into your bookmarks, and whenever you go to a feed in your bookmarks the feed is updated automatically. It’s never been easier to see if a site you’re watching has been updated.

The list of new features in the new Firefox is quite long, but I’ll list a few of them here.

• Live Bookmarks.
  The ability to subscribe to RSS feeds in your bookmarks. When you happen to surf by a site that offers RSS feeds, a icon appears in your statusbar. All you gotta do is click on the icon, and choose whatever feed you want to subscribe to.
• Improved find.
  You now have a find tool bar which appears whenever you conduct a search in the current document. And I gotta say, it’s awesome Never has it been easier to find something, and with its built in automatic highlighting of search matches you spend less time finding what you’re looking for. I love this feature, being a coder/programmer. And of course, the ‘type as you go’ find feature is still there for links.
• Managing Annoyances and Protecting Security.
  Finally the extension system blocks attempts to install extensions from all sites other than update.mozilla.org. If you want to install extensions from a site other than Mozilla’s official site, you need to add the site into a list of approved sites. If a popup is blocked, you now have the ability to open it if it was an “important” popup. God knows why they haven’t had this feature before, but at least it’s there now. Another feature that I love, is that it now changes the colour of the address bar whenever you enter a HTTPS enabled site. As long as you see that the address bar is yellow, you know it’s secure to transfer your personal details and credit card details when doing an online purchase.
• Strong Encryption For Passwords Available.
  Finally Firefox has support for strong encrypted passwords. Consider this situation, you use a computer in a place that more than yourself have access to it and use it on a daily basis. Previously, all the passwords stored by Firefox’s password manager were stored unencrypted meaning that anyone with a bit of computer insight could easily steal your passwords. Well fear no more, now your passwords are stored encrypted and each time you start up Firefox it will ask for a master password that unlocks the usage of password manager. If the wrong password is supplied, password manager just lies dormant doing nothing.

Well, all I have to say to Microsoft is; Fear Firefox. I have recommended Firefox to all of my friends for ages, and I ditched IE ages ago for being bloated and prone with security issues. By this, I’m not saying that Firefox doesn’t have any security issues, any program has security issues. But it’s all about the severeness of them that is important to me. Firefox just keeps on getting better and better, and is for me the only choice. If you haven’t tried it already, I suggest you head over to Firefox’s page right now and download it. You will not regret it.

I’ve embraced Firefox as my new favourite pet. Do yourself a favour, do the same thing.