I have been working on a web comic for a bit. Here is the first one I ever did, feedback would be great.

Warning! Contains adult material. Please only follow this link if you are the appropriate age. 18 in the US. It's Probably fine in other sane parts of the world.

Yup, I sure am. My little niece was born Thursday morning. Now all I have to do is live up to being a crazy uncle.

1,000,000 channels and nothing on?

Browsing google video is kind of like trying to get a splinter out with mittens on. Only by pure accident did I discover how to find something to watch besides 'lonely girl' or 'angry cats', pfffft.

I can't remember what the original search was, but the result turned out to be “Kiss meets the Phantom of The Park”. Wowza, I haven't seen that in a while, and the kicker as to why it's on video.google, well it's Public Domain.

So that led me to try something, why not just search for public domain? Muhahaha.

Seems my search paid off, so far I have found:

Night of the Living Dead -need I say more.

The Last Man on Earth – I have been looking for this for quite some time. Its based on Richard Matherson's classic that was later remade with Heston as The Omega Man, but this version stars Vincent Price, scary to be sure. It was made in Italy, so it's a Spaghetti-horror I would assume, making it more obscure and almost impossible to rent or purchase.

Hercules – Staring Steve Reves, Dr Frankenfurter would be proud. The cool part about this is there is another link that costs $1.99, doh!

Godzilla – the original 1954 atomic age freak out by the Japanese, can you blame them?

And a ton of old cartoons, shorts, and more movies then you could watch in a weekend.

Still I can't find Metropolis – fantastic film, and the basis for my cartoon Gerold and Robot Girl, so if you know where it is, drop me a line.

Bon Appétit!

I need a new Router for my small business , which one is best for me?

A good question to be sure. Before though I point you to computer super land to pick out a the latest n-blah router with gigabyte support, let's think about some of the more important features you would like in a router, and what is going to function the best for your environment.

You want the most features for your money, but you also want reliability. Routers are designed to work in any given situation, but we all know that sometimes they just don't do what you want them to. Trying to troubleshoot a normal consumer router is almost impossible, with nothing more then a configuration web interface to utilize. We need a full fledged OS, with all the bells and whistles that go along with it, but we also need it to be steady as a rock. The answer here is Linux.

On some consumer routers a chipset is used that allows flashing to a 3^rd party firmware. Ever wanted to add more forwards to internal machines than what you were limited to in the normal interface? Add as many as you want with iptables, a kernel module running on the new firmware. VPN support, auto time set via ntp , watchdog support (auto reboot in case of failure), auto DNS sync (for dynamic IPs), and pretty much everything else you can think of is accessible after the flash with the new firmware.

Linksys released their firmware via the GPL sometime ago, allowing a community of developers to embrace the sturdy WRT54G and make it a thing of techno beauty. Before the upgrade that Linksys made to the hardware, this was my router of choice. Available nearly everywhere, you could flash this little router and have it doing things that a usually only a full fledged server could do in a matter of minutes. Linksys however did something nutts, and decided to go cheaper on the hardware (WRT54Gv5+)so it would no longer support a full fledged install of my favorite OS then splinter the support for Linux to another model that I can't find in any store (WRT54GL). There died my dream machine. I have moved on, and decided that I would find a replacement that I could have on hand available in any computer or electronics store in America. Then, I decided to look beyond those routers, and for a little more money I found more memory and greater speed, with decidedly better functionality. So the solution is a daddy router that can be easily replaced while your waiting for the larger more powerful replacement to arrive via mail. Did I also mention its less then $70? Eat that Cisco.

The WHR-HP-G54, better known as the Buffalo AirStation, is the router I located at BestBuy and is my choice for a backup in case of failure. This router is no slouch, and is the router of choice from the guys who created my favorite firmware distro DD-WRT. They sell the router on their site, modified to suit your taste. Of course I also sell it on mine, pre-flashed and ready to go, and I am located in the US.

The BUFFALO WZR-RS-G54, is the pick I made for the main router in your office. The 300mhz clock, coupled with 64mb of ram (16 on most other routers) kicks it up a notch. Once flashed with DD-WRT, this router becomes a monster, VPN connections via pptp are rocksolid. the VPN tunnel usually lasts days at a time. I currently support shops of 30 people on this unit, and I get no complaints. Also available from me pre-flashed.

The Asus W500GL premium is quite a unit. Out of the box it supports unattened FTP, and filesharing protocols. Where does the data go that it downloads? Simple, to the built in usb that you attached your external drive to. That's right, its a NAS ( network attached storage) and a router. I got a few of these little guys lying around for my next project, a 'mimicIT Collaboration Station'. Its a VPN tunnel with a NAS so you can have two people share files without a dedicated server. Although not a pick by me for your main router, it has its advantages. You can buy it here ready to be used to coloaberate over the net.

Make sure to check out my main site, or drop me a line if you have any questions.

Here is my second tutorial, it goes right along with the first. If you have been following along and built the 1u server, now you can load the OS with this howto.

PXE Install Tutorial

Like warm fudge in your ears.

If you ever wondered what it would be like to have a P.H.D in pop music, Ron "Boogiemonster" Gerber has the answer. Last week I listened to his Thomas Dolby interview show and was blown away by the amount of insight and material he could gleam from a pop star that shimmered on the horizon. The collaboration between p-funk and Dolby was raw, and the 'old stuff ripping off new' was quite cool with some hip hop bands bitting She Blinded Me With Science until I was ready to go blind, with science, ahem. Ron's interview did prove without a shadow of a doubt that Dolby was nerdier then me, a sequencer out of a disco light control rig, good lord man.

The name of his webcast is Crap from the Past, and if you take the time to listen, you will find some audio clips that will surely amuse, most likely confound, and with out a doubt annoy even the most experienced audiophile. See if you can find the live clip of Elvis caught in the middle of a giggle fest while trying to belt out Love Me Tender. Or what about the 'Interview with Jaws' mash up from the late 70's, classic. The amount of content available on the site is staggering, and the visual BBS style graphics (it says dos, but I had a C64) rock.

Do your self a favor, enjoy more Crap from the PAST!

I just completed a tutorial on how to build a 1u server. This is the first in a series of articles I am going to do that will hopefully explain how to do things the mimicIT way. That is, the most stable, and easiest to support configurations for a small business that does not break the bank. Enjoy!

Build a 1u server tutorial

How to buy a notebook, woe unto the new laptop.

Nothing really upsets me more then trying to find a new laptop for someone else. Usually when faced with this dilemma for myself I choose the lowest price, but most reliable, contender for my purposes. What are my purposes? I use it for field work, troubleshooting, and just having a computer to tote. I do not expect it to play games, thats just silly. I bring along my psp for that. Why the lowest price? Read on.

The question is what do other people expect from their notebook. Well, everything. They expect their notebook to 'be' their computer. Performing every nuanced task that they could think of, attaching every device and do-hickie (yes that is a technical term) until they a have a hiking pack ready with all of their extras needed to run.

My clients tend to want this. They want a dual core amd 64 that can run vista and god knows what else. Why? Why?Who knows, they don't listen to me of course. Simply put they are not the ones who have to work on the bloated POS that they want for the least amount of money as possible. It wouldn't matter how much money they spent on it. It would still be a bloated POS that will overheat and break down in a matter of years. It will then be un-fixable junk with no resale value (not that any PC has resale value lol). Proof? I sold 5 broken laptops at my last garage sale, I have 2 more sitting on my to-sell pile for next time.

If there is an answer, it is heat. The more power you generate, the more heat you generate. The more heat, the better cooling you need. If you reach the point of thermal overload, the computer will wisely shut it self down. However, each time you turn on the beast, you expand those delicate pieces that are ever so carefully packed into a space just so. Then you turn it off, and those same pieces move a little bit out of whack. The net result, the laptop fails, you then bring it to me. I may be able to get it to boot if its a simple failure, more often then not though if its almost ready to die, my machinations will kill it. By that time the unit is usually falling apart, physically. I am good at putting delicate hardware out of its misery. Bottom line, if you are lucky, and treat it well, your laptop will serve you well for a few years, thats about it.

When choosing a laptop, the most important thing is compatibility.

The absolute first thing you are going to want to do when you get it home is strip it clean an re-load it. This removes the bloatware that is inevitably installed by the manufacture. More then likely they will have provided you with a partition of FAT space for you. This is where you will put the drivers that you download from the manufactures site. Each laptop manufacture uses chips from various vendors to supply functionality to the system, this includes sound, video, and motherboard functions. Some manufactures used proprietary versions of the drivers for their specific notebook, shun these notebooks. Make sure that you can download the chipset drivers direct from the manufacture of the chipset. Case in point, Conextent sound drivers. Go to the Conextent site and try to find the AC-link drivers. You won't, they are not there. In fact, they don't even admit to making audio chipsets, go figure. When you are able to find all the chipset drivers from the manufactures site, and they all work, thats a good notebook that you will be able to easily change in the future. Now you can get all the proprietary drivers for the buttons and other accessories that are on the notebook. Those will go in the FAT partition in case of a failure of the operating system and you need to reload it. I would also back them up into another safe space.

Upgrading the memory can make you insane. I recently put 2 gigs of ram into a brand spanking new v3010us compaq, and installed windows xp. Everything ran great. I proceeded to install all of the software for my client, still ran great. Gave it to the client, spontaneous reboots and shutdowns. Back in the lab my theory was the HAL and the type of ACPI that windows decided to use on the install. It said Multprocessor ACPI, which was correct. I switched the ACPI type to an older type, and it switched up the IRQ's etc, it ran better. It still however froze. Grrrrr. I threw on Prime95 to torture it. It ran for 24 hours without a problem. Hmmm. I booted and ran memtest, no issues. I ran many other bench tests, I could not get it to fail consistently. I reinstalled the operating system several times, and ran the various benchmarks. It seemed that the sound was the culprit. I could not find the drivers for the chipset on the manufactures site. The only drivers I could use were the ones from HP. It was looking like a hardware problem. It would not lock under the bios, or under benchmarks not running under windows. I had seen this all before on systems that I was overclocking. It was a memory timing issue to be sure. The bios however had no settings for memory timing. After crying for a bit and my brother telling me it was the memory, I took out the extra memory in disgust, and now, well it runs great with no issues. Intermittent lockups on a computer are the worst possible problem to diagnose because it takes so long to see if each of your solutions holds water. I pity each person out there who has to fix one of these issues. I had 2 in two days. My karma sucks.

Bottom line, you will get a better deal if your laptop is a generation behind. You will have a bigger community of people to support it, and better support for drivers and mods (like a better bios for the motherboard). Take that money that your would have spent on that beast and buy your self a mini PC that you can work on, and a one generation back laptop to tote. You will be happier by far when your laptop goes tits up and you can have another PC to help you diagnose it.

Don't set it flat on the carpet, or your bed, or anyplace else that it can't get proper air flow, like your lap.

Don't expect it to be your only PC, your asking for it.

The battery will die, work this into the cost. You will probably loose the power adapter in your travels, buy another one and store it someplace.

As far as my impressions of the Compaq V3010US, its a laptop. It can't play games worth a crap on its geforce go. My Emachines works just as well, plays movies, and has 100% support from all the chipset vendors. Its 3 years old, it can't play games either.

Price, you can by an Emachines like mine for under $500, your paying $1000 for the Compaq. Nothing about this unit really impressed me. The dual core was nice, and maybe if I would have been brave enough to get Vista working , or XP 64, but who would try such a risky venture with such shoddy chipset support, not I. It looks pretty, but the speed and the performance gains are not worth the price on what will eventually be a unexpandable paperweight.

Games People Play, Yeah I am talking to you EA and DICE.

“Games people play, you take it or you leave it”--Alan Parsons

How long have I been playing video games? Early eighties, real early. I played space war on some NCR equipment that my dad had in his shop. Vector graphics rule. Yes I am kind of old. 35 years on Monday in fact. I had an pretty much every console I could afford, and every computer. That fad has long ago left me, along with my free time. I look for games now that stimulate that feeling of urgency, and make me feel as if I am honing a skill with my weapon. As of late that game has been BattleField 2.

Do I like BF2 as much as the crack before it, namely UT ? No, simply it does have the fast paced in and out, kill imperative that made UT so much fun. Its not just the style of the game either. Its the code. Try to get on BF2 for a 'quick' game, it ain't gunna happen, the multiplayer menu sucks. I mean it sucks to a point it makes me not want to play the game. I just do not have the time to bend over backwards to make the experience of this game better. I have tried launching to servers from the command line, and using web-based menus to find servers, but man, why? Why not just code a decent in game browser for the game that I can scroll while its loading in. As it stands, it just lags the machine right out, it becomes really unusable. This is the situation on a decent machine, SLI, so I can't even imagine what other people are going through. Ugh, the load times. Do I really need 10,000 rpm RAID0 to get load times under a minute, good lord.

This rant however is about greed. I was really wanting to try out 2142, the upcoming Battlefield game. When I saw that they released a Beta, fantastic, I was ready. Could it be that they learned from their mistakes and fixed some of the problems that made BF2 crappy? I wouldn't know first hand, because they made the Beta a Fileplanet exclusive. That's right. They didn't send me an email, even though I bought the last game, to let me know it was happening. I called my brother who has a subscription to Fileplanet to learn that he was playing it. On his Dual SLI machine with a 10k rpm drive, it took him almost 7 minutes just to get into the game. Does the in game browser still suck ass? I don't know, I should have asked him. I was just seeing red from the fact they want to make me pay to play a beta. New behavior for EA? Hardly.

EA is a company that makes its users pay for mods that it develops for its games. For those veterans of UT this seems like them kicking us square in the nuts. I remember when the UT would have addon packs , new maps, new stuff, and it was like a christmas present. Every 3 to 4 months we would get a free upgrade and it would change up the entire game. I got everyone I know, including my wife, playing CTF in UT. Now, every time EA comes out with content, it wants 10 bucks. A kick in the nuts. Now, they have a beta and they want me to pay FilePlanet.Kick to the nuts. 2142 apparently suffers from the same lackluster performance and bloated code. Boot to the balls.

Well screw you EA. Last straw guys. First off, you have an opportunity here to switch from the old model, namely content as a closed system that you pay for, to the new model, content driven by users and advertisements. Look, the commodity that you produce is easily replicated, that is the code can be copied at little or no cost to you. Why then are you treating it like a pop corn maker, making me pay for each accessory that is hand made in China? It's so obvious that it makes me sick. Sell advertising in your game. Easy. I'll say it again. Sell advertising in your game. You already have an established base, just toss up some billboards in the towns, or product placement, hell even a commercial before each round. Why are you dropping the ball on this? The more popular it became, the more money you would make. Remember, this is a 'beta' you are making money from. This should really appeal to you EA, making money from a beta. Thats what you were trying to do with FilePlanet right? Well next time do it with Pepsi, I am sure they would be more then happy to provide the mirror for you. The only reason I even suggest this is the fact that I no longer watch television. I canceled my cable 3 months ago. All the advertising dollars that these companies are spending on trying to make me buy their crap, well its going where crap belongs, down the toilet. I am the target demo. They are missing me completely. All these game companies are missing out on the revenue stream. I watch people play WOW for 24 hours at a time, until their eyes bug out. Why the hell isn't there a free version with advertising? I am sure there are smarter people than me that have devised this strategy before. I am probably missing the obvious flaws. The bottom line, I am not going to buy 2142. Thats it, game over. I bought two copies of BF2, but I am not buying 2142. No to 2142. Unless somebody buys it for me. For my birthday.