Dear Loyal Reader,

I wanted to first start by thanking you personally for being a loyal reader of eNemesis. It's YOUR loyalty that makes this entire project worthwhile.

Now, you might be wondering why I didn't address this by name. I mean after all, if I'm going to go so far as to say that I want to thank you personally, shouldn't this letter be personal? Indeed it should, and I thank you for pointing this out, because it also happens to be the topic of my letter today, which is.... viewer/user feedback!

Let me cut to the chase here. We want to start expanding the website (yes, this website) and feedback from the user community would be the best for helping us decide in which direction to head at the beginning of our expansion phase.

I had some thoughts on developing some interactive web time wasters, or perhaps a more useful web-app that provides it's users with some type of information that is currently not so easy to get. This is where you come in.

Whether your name is Bob, Jack, Janet or something that I just don't know how to spell or say, I believe that you have the talent, experience, education and opinions that we are looking for when it comes to being as creative as possible in telling someone else (us) how to spend our time and money with the very direct and explicit goal of making you happy... or at least more complacent when it comes to deciding which website to waste your time at during the day.

That said, I'm going to go back to learning some PowerShell so that I can continue kicking ass and taking names at work.... (yes, I work for the most bad ass software company in the world, and I don't care what anyone says about them, I like picking up trash for them... I'm lucky to be a janitor!!)

Hah, yeah right... like I would mop up someone else's shit for a living... oh wait... FUCK!!!! *


-link

*(P.S.~ if you didn't get the last joke above, the "oh wait... FUCK!!!!" was a representation of my realization that each and every job anywhere on the face of the planet does and will always involve some form of cleaning up somebody else's bullshit..... in both the figurative and literal senses...)

Labels: changes, technology, thoughts, web development

Check out the source link below for a story from USA Today (I know, it gives you butterflies to think about USA Today... in a formal context), where they talk about this kick ass software that is being worked/released soon... some shit... read the story to find out more..

Basically, this software is capable of taking a series of photos and stitching them together in order to re-create a 3-dimensional representation of the space/area pictured in the picture... if that makes sense....


-link

Labels: current events, technology, thoughts, world news

I'm just going to let the readers read this and decide...

Check out the source link below, and then ask yourself... "how many steps away from an undetectable 'back door' are we?"


-link

Labels: current events, technology, thoughts, world news

So my buddy Ingrid had this posted on her blog, and I thought it kicked major ass!

Apparently this doctor invented a vest to monitor vascular health in his patients, then he converted it to a gaming device that's another step closer to virtual reality.

Check it out tricks!

-link

Labels: cool shit, technology

If you take a gander at the source link below, it will take you to a story which details Microsoft's plan to offer a kind of "hobby pack" for casual developers in the embedded software/hardware arena.

From the story: "For $200 to $400, a hobbyist or academic researcher can buy a package that includes Windows CE 6, developer tools, Visual Studio, and a hardware reference board from one of five hardware vendors."

This is going to kick so much ass!!!


-link

Labels: cool shit, current events, technology, thoughts, world news

So, I was going through some boxes and I found a mini disc player, an optical patch cable and discovered that my external Sound Blaster sound card has an optical out port on it.


I thought that just for fun, I would transfer some audio to the device using the old method of "dubbing" via the optical patch cable.


I'll let you know how it goes...


Check it:


Let me know if you have any cool ideas for the mini disc player...


-link

Labels: cool shit, technology, thoughts

So.. it's late at night, and I'm stuck on the fucking phone with a customer from my side business... who's computer is acting up and there isn't really anything that I can do about it.

I am walking this person through the most fucking basic of steps on their pc... I'm seriously about to kill myself.

I'm never agreeing to PC support again in my life... this fucking sucks. I am sick, tired and I want to go to fucking bed.

Oh well, I'm definitely billing for this shit... Definitely.... funny how $100 later I'm feeling great about this experience.


-link

Labels: stupid fuckers, technology, thoughts

I thought the linked story was pretty interesting, only because I swear that I thought this up when I was 7.

Basically, the idea is to use the kinetic energy that people normally displace, along with gravity and a magneto, to generate a tiny amount of electricity with each step. Imagine a floor that allowed this wherever you stepped... now imagine that same floor in a busy area, like a bus terminal, a mall, downtown streets, etc.

This, along with some of this would make for some nice, ambient, non-polluting energy production.


-link

Labels: cool shit, current events, technology, thoughts

Hey everyone, sorry for the lack of recent updates, I've just been working on building some websites for new customers and friends who needed them... you know, no big deal.

The new pictures announcement has to do with the pictures that drop in behind the navigation menu (you know, that weird box on the right side of the screen).

If you use Internet Explorer (sorry everyone who hates M$, and more specifically IE), you will see a transparent menu with images for the backdrop.

Recently I have added a few new items, some artistic, of some hot ladies that I "met" via My Space. Actually, a few of them showcase this girl's rear end... my fucking god, I have never seen anything so round in real life.

The others showcase another girl's perfect rack.... yes, so fucking perfect that I can't even believe it. I, quite frankly, am ready to hold onto them and swing around from titty to titty like I'm Tarzan of the mother fucking cleavage jungle!

Rather than refreshing the entire website over and over until you see them, you should just click here and refresh the page that opens up.

As always, thanks for reading...


-link

Labels: hot girls, technology, thoughts

Granted the article is hosted on the wikipedia.org site, but it does speak "volumes" about the dependability and future of free and open projects.


-link

Labels: technology

I thought the linked story was pretty interesting. It looks like this company, Nanosolar, has come out with a solar "sheet" that reduces solar production from $3 per watt to 30 cents per watt! This is huge!! You could cover your house with these (once they have something suitable for our weather here in the pacific northwest) and take a nice trim off of your power bill during sunny days.

Anyhow, I think it would be kind of cool to get an electric car and put these all over the outside. Depending on the part of the country, you would probably never need to recharge by A/C outlet unless you did a ton of night driving.


-link

Labels: technology, thoughts

So I was doing some late night work yesterday... or early this morning rather... and my fucking keyboard went out!!

I have an extra, and the keyboard built into the laptop... so I'm not totally up shit creek. I just bought the keyboard in question under a year ago, and already it seems as though keys have stopped working for no reason at all.

This keyboard I am talking about is the "Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 v1.0" and I really liked it until yesterday. If you click on the link, it will open in a new window so you can see which model to avoid.

Let me also say that normally, I really love Microsoft keyboards. In fact I don't think I have purchased anything but a Microsoft Natural ergonomic keyboard since I was 17. So for the last 10 years, I have been a loyal and valuable customer... and this is how I am rewarded.

Fucking A. Oh well, I guess life goes on...


-link

Labels: bitch killa, business is business, technology, thoughts

So I just got back into playing an old classic: Starcraft and Starcraft: Brood War.

I was checking out some Internet sites on the old pair when I found it's new sibling which is supposedly due around this time next year... Starcraft 2.

Check out the source link below which should take you to the website for the game and will also show you some screen shots as well. The graphics are insane and so are the units for the Protoss race!!! I know, I know... totally fucking sweet!!!

Check it out and post a comment to let us know what you think!


-link

Labels: cool shit, technology, thoughts

So I was chatting with my buddy Charlie about some computer stuff and he sent me the link to a picture of his latest home office setup:

I thought it was pretty badass too!! Here are some stats:

• Windows Vista Ultimate
• AMD Athlon 64 3800+
• 3 GB of RAM
• 2 260GB Hard drives with hardware RAID 1 mirrored redundancy setup
• 2 Nvidia Geforce 7100 GS Video cards, 2 monitors on each card
• All 4 monitors shown above are on one computer effectively extending his desktop

So, needless to say I thought this was a kickass setup and deserved some front page time, hence the eNemesis post.

Let us know what you think! Email me @ link@enemesis.org.

-link

Labels: cool shit, technology

The title? It's the new label for the new swap drive I just installed in my laptop.

It's a special solid state memory add-on that allows my operating system to take it's paging or swap file off of the physical hard disk and place it onto solid state memory. This change in operation offers a performance gain of approximately 8 to 10 times that of reading data from a conventional laptop hard drive.

• Solid State Memory - With no moving parts, a solid state drive largely eliminates seek time, latency and other electro-mechanical delays and failures associated with a conventional hard disk drive.
• Hard Disk Drive - A hard disk drive (HDD), commonly referred to as a hard drive, hard disk or fixed disk drive, is a non-volatile storage device which stores digitally encoded data on rapidly rotating platters with magnetic surfaces.

-The above definitions were stolen from Wikipedia.org

Now I did just lie a bit... It's not a special piece of hardware, it's actually just an SD card. It's only about 512MB, and I'm actually only using about 480 of those 512 MB. The feature in Windows Vista Enterprise is called "ReadyBoost" and you can read more about it at the "Source" link below.

The performance gains that I am noticing so far (based on personal observation, in no way am I being or acting scientific in my data collection methods) apply to the loading of Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc. All of the web Dev stuff that usually has a slew of libraries that it needs to load up front.

Long story short, I just added 480MB of solid state memory to my computer with a couple of clicks. I think this shit is great!!!


-link

Labels: cool shit, technology, Windows Vista

I came across this site today and wanted to post it for all of the PHP nuts out there...

I guess what's great about the timing on this article is that I just happen to be smack in the middle of a wordpress conversion for this site.

That said... have fun tricks...


-link

Labels: cool shit, technology

...just check out the source link below for a pretty cool picture.

If you know anything about Tesla coils, or really who Tesla is... you will enjoy this.


-link

Labels: cool shit, technology

I came across this story on ars technica, after someone threw it up on digg. I have to say it made me sad... but at the same time, I could see it coming a mile down the road:

AT&T willing to spy for NSA, MPAA, and RIAA

An excerpt from the article, which sounds right on the money:

The first step for AT&T is coming up with a technological solution that works: something that can effectively filter out illicit traffic while protecting its users' privacy. That's a tall—if not impossible—order. YouTube hasn't managed to do it even for video yet, and that's when customers are sending them entire files which they can scan at their leisure. Monitoring all the files sent through BitTorrent—which splits them into tiny pieces—could be even more difficult; doing it in real-time sounds both expensive and impossible.

Let me her what you think about this either via comments or direct emails.


-link

Labels: ass clowns, business is business, jackassery, technology

I don't even really know what to say about this one... you have to check out the linked news article by clicking "source" below.

From the article (ripped off from DIGG:

His reward from a state that heavily promotes alternative fuels: a $1,000 fine last month for not paying motor fuel taxes. He's been told to expect another $1,000 fine from the federal government. And to legally use veggie oil, state officials told him, he would have to first post a $2,500 bond.

So really, this is just fucking fabulous... I wasn't aware that you had to pay a tax to burn fuel in your vehicle. I can understand paying taxes at the time of purchase, and paying for tabs so that you can run your vehicle on the roads.

My thought here however, is that the tabs should cover the burning of fuel in your vehicle. I mean hell, what else are you going to do with a car on the road? Push the damn thing?

-link

Labels: business is business, current events, stupid fuckers, technology

The UI is quite simple, pleasing to the eye actually.  It's pretty much identical to iTunes (yeah, strange, huh?).  I like the look and feel of Safari just for the fact that it's functions are simplified, unlike Internet Explorer that buries functions deep in a hierarchal menu.  Everything you need is right there.

Bookmarks - we typically know these as "Favorites" - I personally like a lot.  It takes the same amount of clicks to access you links, so no difference there.  The way to your bookmarks is to just click the book icon and it lists all your bookmarks and bookmark folders.

If you are looking in your bookmark folders, they are automatically displayed on the right side of the screen with the URLs visible.  This is great for the times you find your duplicating bookmarks at different pages within a site.  You always know exactly where you are going.

You can also drag and drop links (like IE) into your bookmarks or links list (which is directly below the URL field.  There is also an easy "+" you can click for quick adding of bookmarks.

RSS Feeds - this is probably the one part I am not too fond of in Safari.  It took me a while to figure it out.  Unlike bookmarks, RSS feeds are not automatically imported to Safari from your Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Flock.

If you go to a site that allows RSS subscriptions, you can click the "RSS" button in the URL field and it will display the feed list, but not provide an option to subscribe.  You have to add the feed page as a bookmark.  At first I couldn't get it to work, but after reading the user guide, I found this out.  A bit of a pain, and I reported that as a bug, so hopefully that will be fixed in the full release.
Tabbed browsing browsing works the same as any other browser, except for one additional functionality:  if you drag a tab away from the tab bar, it moves the tab to a new window.  I liked this feature a lot.

Changing preferences is a simplified feature as well.  Go to Edit\\Preferences and it is a flattened menu with all the options right there.  When you click an option, it immediately changes it and if you don't like the change, uncheck it and it goes right back to the way it was.  There is no clicking "ok" 2 or 3 times like IE.  You just select what you want and it happens.  If you click outside the preferences, the changes are saved and you go back to browsing.

Another noteworthy item is that Safari can display almost all web pages exactly as they would in IE.  Firefox and Flock, for example, my Hotmail would always revert back to "classic" Hotmail format rather than the Windows Live format.  Not the case with Safari.  It looks exactly the same.

The only difference I found, was of course, with eNemesis.  In IE, if you look at the menu, you will notice it's transparent and you can see the picture behind it.  In Safari, it is not transparent, meaning you only see the menu items.  You can see the picture load initially, but when the actual menu items appear, the picture is gone.  Link said it has to do with IE Hooks.  I don't know WTF that means, but it's not a big deal to me either way.  That's the only flaw I could find.

Overall, I like Safari.  Especially the fact that I work at Microsoft and I'm using Safari out of spite.  It's entertaining, really.

If you want to see a demo or try it out, click the source link below.

Update: I found another kickass feature. You can stretch any text box to whatever size you want. So, for example, in this Blogger window I'm posting in right now, I can adjust to any size I want. I can make it stretch to full screen. Can IE do that? :)

Labels: software, technology, web development

It's been quite some time since I've posted links to news articles that I found interesting, so I suppose that it just might be time to give it another go 'round... and that brings us here:

• Self-Healing Plastic Skin (just what we need, self healing plastic... I guess...)
• Wibree is now Bluetooth's ultra-low power wireless standard (remember how Nokia Bluetooth devices never worked with anything else at first?)
• Deadly $2 'cheese heroin' aimed at teens (what in the fuck? Definition of Cheese Heroin here)
• 'Genius' or 'terrible'? 'Sopranos' causes split (I had to throw this one in there... talk about beating a dead horse)

Well enjoy fuckers... educate yourself or something... I mean hell, can you even imagine going another single day in this world without knowing what "cheese heroin" is? I personally would rather vomit in a used toilet and have it bounce back on a freshly laundered shirt... oh wait... been there done that... except the toilet wasn't used, and the shirt wasn't freshly laundered...

-link

Labels: current events, technology, world news

I came across this article this morning on Windows Vista and the overall pros and cons of the new OS. Click the source link below for the full article, however I feel like this sums things up:

However, I wouldn't recommend it universally. After all, a C+ grade (or even a B-) means there are still substantial flaws, and Microsoft still has a lot of homework to make up. While I'm moving all the systems in the Basement to Vista over the next few weeks, I'm not upgrading my daughter's PCs quite yet. For them, and for most users, I'd probably wait for the first service pack.

This appears to be pretty sound advice if you ask me. I personally feel like I just want my computer to work rather than having to tinker around with stupid service issues or driver incompatibility problems.


-link

Labels: business is business, reviews, technology

So I bought a new razor yesterday, the Gillette Fusion. You can click the source link below if you want to go to their uber-brain wash website where they teach you why their razor is so great that you will think Jesus is a guy on the corner who sells flowers on holidays and window washes every other day of the week.

No shit...

So far I really like it, having used it once...

I found the 5 blades to be super smooth, and the single blade on the back was great for doing tight trims. I was very happy to see that they kept the "wash through" design of the blades in effect. It's nice to be able to run water along the back of the razor and have it push all of the hair out through the front.

This pack also came with a travel case in addition to the normal plastic tray that it sits in. I dig the travel case because I happen to be going to Portland, OR this weekend, but also because every time I travel and throw a bunch of bathroom crap in my toiletry bag, something wet like the soap container, or the razor after it is/was freshly used, causes everything to get wet.

There is just something about getting my razor wet in "unknown water" that creeps me out... I certainly don't want to run it against my face after that...

I think however, that I might want to go get the power version, which I guess they call the "Phantom." I had the M3 Power (green one) and I really liked that, so it makes me wonder what I'm missing by having the normal fusion razor... I'm positive that there has to be some capitalist elite feeling I will get from having a wet razor powered by a battery. I mean fuck, I can't let the Jones' catch up with me... because then I'll have to hand out punches to the neck, and that shit always gets so dirty...

If I find out anything else about the razor that I like/don't like, I'll be sure to let you know...


-link

Labels: adventures in everett, business is business, fresh to death, reviews, technology

Seriously, what's up with online banking? All the banks have gotten their panties in a bunch and added way too much security on the account.

OK, I get why. You were getting phished like no other. I can understand that, but you seriously overreacted.

For example, my bank now requires the following if I am on my personal computer (only one computer can be authenticated at a time):

1. I go to the website, enter my account # (which is 55378008), and login.
2. It takes me to a secondary page where it asks me to enter my password. I enter my password (which is "fatmaninalittlecoat").
3. Then I'm taken to a 3rd page where it asks me to enter my secondary password. I enter "nancypelosiisarugmuncher".

If I am on another computer such as my laptop or work computer, these are the steps I have to take to see my balance or whatever:

1. I go to the website, enter my account # (which is 55378008), and login.
2. It takes me to a secondary page where it asks me to enter my password. I enter my password (which is "fatmaninalittlecoat").
3. The site then says "you're not on your original computer, please enter your pass phrase". So I enter "howdareyou!!"
4. A new screen pops up saying "would you like to authenticate this computer now?" I click "no".
5. Another screen pops up and asks the security question "are you annoyed yet?" So I enter "yes dammit, all i want to do is check my f&%$ing balance".
6. And that's it, I'm in!

This is such a pain in the ass. I don't understand why they didn't consult me on making their system more secure. I am the definition of someone who can protect their personally identifiable information. Idiots!

Labels: business is business, jackassery, stupid fuckers, technology

I have spent my fair share of time playing with web browsers, customizing them, crashing them, and being disappointed with the lack of functionality in them.

I've used IE5 through IE7, Firefox, and Safari in the past. My experience:

• Internet Explorer, while widely used, is a giant piece of crap. I like the look and feel of IE7, but let's be honest, it's just another half-baked product by Microsoft that is doomed in regard to security and stability. For example, IE7 crashes a good 80% of the time when I am trying to blog something. Quite the pisser if you ask me.
• Firefox is cleverly disguised as a fully functional, user- friendly browser, but in the end, it just sucks. There isn't really anything to it. The only cool feature Firefox has that stands out is the skinning functionality.
• Safari is kind of cool, but a majority of websites I view come out all funky, and last time I checked, Enemesis is one of the victims. I haven't had too much experience with Safari because, like all other Apple products, is completely proprietary and will only work on a Mac.

Well my friends, my problems have been solved. I have found the answer to my woes that is web surfing.

The fat lady has sung. That's right, it's all about Opera. This is a pimp browser. Fully customizable, all the functions you could think of such as flawless tabbed browsing (including the ability to work in multiple tabs simultaneously), integrated password manager, widgets (a fully functional HTML/CSS editor is one of them), notepads, file transfers, extremely user friendly.

If you haven't tested it yourself, I suggest trying it out. It's a quick download and you can get from the Opera website.

Labels: technology

I read this article, and there are some interesting statements being made about the future of the iPhone and really that Apple's closed platform approach is going to be the crushing blow.

Check out the source link below...


-link

Labels: mobile wireless news, technology