Category: Side Notes

Merry Christmas

Once again we find ourselves celebrating another Christmas. I really don’t have much to say about the holiday other than I hope you’re enjoying it regardless of what religious beliefs you do or don’t hold. Whether you’re celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, the winter solstice (which was technically four days ago), Yule, Hanukkah (which has already technically concluded), Kwanzaa, or nothing more than the excuse to get together and drink with friends and family members I wish you good times. Now I leave you with Gwar, because it’s the most appropriate holiday video I could think of:

Making the Big Leagues

Well it has finally happened, I have finally received my first death threat via this blog’s e-mail address. Overall the threat was a fairly standard affair, consisting of the same tired ramblings one has come to expect from gun control advocates:

Dear Christopher Burg,

How does it feel being responsible for the death of children? Shit stains like you are directly responsible for Sandy Hook! It’s time somebody put you gun fucks in your place. Your [sic] pretty fucking stupid putting your real name on your site. I live in Minnesota as well and I’m going to find you and fucking kill you. Your days are numbered asshole. Its [sic] open season on NRA shills!

I will give my secret admirer some credit for having decent spelling in grammar. A few points must be deducted for the misuse of your instead of you’re and its instead of it’s. These are rather minor issues though and are commonly made by individuals who haven’t yet entered a 6th grade English class. Benefit of the doubt regarding his age will be given to my secret admirer as I don’t want to discourage an inspiring writer.

With that said I think my secret admirer will be relegated to writing canned vampire romance novels. I say this because he shows a remarkable lack of creativity in his threat. That shouldn’t discourage my secret admirer though as the sales of canned vampire romance novels such as Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey have been phenomenal. One doesn’t have to be a genre defining author to make money. With that said if my secret admirer is reading this and wants to be a genre defining author instead of a writer of canned vampire romance novels I have some advice. First he needs to drop the NRA shill remark. Advocates of gun control have been using that line for ages now and it demonstrates a lack of creativity. Spice things up a little bit. There are other gun rights organizations out there. He could refer to me as a Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) shill or a Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership (JPFO) shill. Better yet he could stop basing his insults on organizations appearing on my blog’s side bar and try writing something entirely his own. A truly creative writer shouldn’t be playing follow the leader, he should create his own games.

I would also recommend he reduce his reliance on the word fuck. He probably believes it’s a very edgy word to say right now, and at a young age it certainly is, but such an over reliance is generally off putting as it makes writings appear unintelligent. I’m sure this is a problem that will correct itself with time.

Overall I give my secret admirer a seven out of ten. It’s far better than a majority of death threats I’ve seen posted by other gun rights activists but could certainly stand some improvement. I hope my secret admirer takes the criticisms I’ve made in the spirit they’re meant and not a personal attack against his character. I would be interested in seeing more death threats from my secret admirer in a few years to see how much his art form has improved.

12/12/12

Although it’s almost over today is 12/12/12. Being the last instance of a day where the day, month, and year will be the same for quite some time I believe it is my duty as a Discordian pope to demonstrate how this most unique of days relates to the undeniable Law of Fives.

If you add 12 to 12 to 12 you get 36. The result of dividing 36 by 5 is 7.2. When you subtract 2 from 7 you get 5. This proves that today, 12/12/12, is like all other things and complies with the Law of Fives.

This Blog Delayed Due to Weather

Everybody who lives in Minnesota is well aware of the slight snowstorm that descended upon the state Sunday. Due to the storm it ended up taking me five hours to drive from Southeast Minnesota back to the Twin Cities (a trip that normally takes two and a half hours). It also took me a little more than an hour to drive to the Eluveitie concert in Saint Paul (which kicked ass) and another hour to drive back home. This morning it ended up taking me two hours to drive to work and another two hours to drive back home. All in all I spent roughly 11 hours driving in this shitty weather during the last two days.

The weather problem was made worse but the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MNDOT) and the absurdly high number of incompetent drivers. MNDOT is in charge of plowing the major highways, which it appears to not have done. Since the snow stopped on Sunday night the major highways have remained in an almost unusable condition. I can honestly say that denizens of Minnesota would get more value from their tax dollars by taking every cent that was appropriated for snow removal and using it to build a bridge to nowhere. While the bridge to nowhere will be relatively useless there would at least be something to show for that wasted money.

The other issue are incompetent drivers. I cannot even begin to estimate the number of dumbasses I saw stalled in between two lanes on the highway. That’s right, not only did they stall on the highway but they stalled in between two lanes, which managed to take major sections of 694, a three land highways, down to one lane. Numerous individuals were in the ditch and there was a notably high number of fender benders. I really wish people who are unable to safely or competently drive in this weather would just stay at their fucking house. They’re a danger to everybody else on the road and slow everything down to an almost unbearable crawl.

In summary fuck this weather, fuck MNDOT, and fuck incompetent drivers.

Krampus

My friend Dean alerted me to what is possibly the most metal mythology to surround the Christmas season. Behold, the Krampus:

Krampus is a beast-like creature from the folklore of Alpine countries thought to punish bad children during the Christmas season, in contrast with Saint Nicholas, who rewards nice ones with gifts. Krampus is said to capture particularly naughty children in his sack and carry them away to his lair.

So this most metal of creatures goes around terrorizing wicked children and even goes so far as to kidnap the exceedingly wicked ones so it can drown them, eat them, or send them to Hell. In our society people worry that scary stories will cause psychological damage to young children. The ancient Germanic people had no such concerns and decided children should have the living shit scared out of them at least once a year. I leave you with this creature and one of the more bad ass representations of it:

The Divine Conspiracy

This will likely be the last update for today since I spend last night (I usually write my blog posts the night before and schedule them to automatically post the next day) fighting with my laptop again (which is the system I keep material I’m planning to post). As far as I can tell I managed to anger some deity somewhere because the headaches I’ve been experiencing with my laptop can only be describe as a divine conspiracy.

A few weeks ago I started experiencing problems waking my laptop from sleep. Due to the amount of time it takes me to get my system booted and setup the way I want it I usually put the laptop to sleep instead of shutting it down. This hasn’t been a problem until recently. Instead of waking from sleep my laptop has begun to randomly go into a state that I can only call undead. While the fans come on, indicating the system has powered up, the screen says off and the keyboard and mouse appear to be unresponsive. The only way to bring my laptop out of this state is to hold the power button for a few seconds to turn it completely off. Upon restarting the keyboard and mouse will usually remain unresponsive until I power cycle the laptop again. If I manage to power cycle the laptop before the decryption prompt appears I can restore the system from the sleepimage file (it’s the file that stores the contents of random access memory (RAM) when OS X goes into sleep mode).

During these last few weeks my procedure for bringing my laptop out of sleep has been to cross my fingers open the lid, and breathe a sigh of relief if it comes on or curse all that is holy if the laptop enters the state I mentioned above. If the laptop awakens to it’s undead state I power it off and hit the power button a few times before letting the decryption prompt appear.

After numerous hours of debugging I eventually determined that the problem is most likely hardware related. Due to the rather odd nature of the problem I believed the issue had to do with either the RAM, logic board (the term Apple uses for the motherboard), or the hard drive. I ruled the hard drive out because the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) stated that the drive was fine. That lead me to test the RAM.

The reason I believed the RAM could be the culprit is due to one of the times I booted the system up only to have it report 4GB instead of the usual 8GB available. Doing some searching online I found a couple other people who experienced the same issue and ended up having to either replace a RAM module or the logic board (which is how the logic board became a potential culprit). I ran memory tests on my RAM overnight only to have the testing software report no issues. Thinking the problem may be missed by the testing software I removed my 8GB or RAM and replaced it with the 4GB that the system originally came with. I ran the system is this almost crippled state for six days without any issue. Believing the RAM to be bad I ordered new modules. The day the new modules arrived my laptop experienced it’s undead state again (obviously some deity was having a spot of fun at my expense). At this point I lost all hope as it appeared my logic board was going out.

It appears that the logic board may not be the issue since the hard drive appears to have died last night. Out of the blue the system almost entirely froze up for several minutes whenever the disk was being accessed. After I powered the laptop off I was unable to power it on again (granted the hard drive continued to run and wasn’t giving me the click of death, it just wasn’t accessing data). Fortunately I keep a spare drive around and have relatively effective backups so this problem is more of an annoyance that a major problem. Unfortunately swapping drives and restoring the new drive from my backups is time consuming and ensures my laptop remains in an unusable state for many hours.

Hours of Amusement

Perhaps I’m just easily amused by I find myself uncovering amusement wherever humans gather and interact. A social phenomenon that fascinates me are arguments in social groups over what does and doesn’t belong to that social group. To amuse myself I often find myself transversing Reddit. Reddit is where you can find many lengthy and epic arguments about nothing of importance. Do you want to join in my amusement? If so it’s easy! Go to Reddit and do the following:

Watch atheists argue about what is and isn’t atheism in /r/atheism.

Watch anarchists argue about what is and isn’t anarchism in /r/Anarchism.

Watch libertarians argue about what is and isn’t libertarianism in /r/Libertarian.

Watch metalheads argue about what is and isn’t trve kvlt in /r/Metal.

It fascinates me how much time is spent by self-proclaimed members of the same social group arguing over what their group does or doesn’t stand for. I’m left wondering what percentage of the Internet has been dedicated to arguments over what social groups do or do not stand for. It’s likely a mind boggling large percentage.

Slow Day

This weekend was exceedingly busy so I didn’t get time to write any posts. On the upside I believe I’ve finally tracked down the issue with my laptop that’s been giving me grief for the last several weeks. Let me just say bad random access memory (RAM) modules can manifest themselves in very mysterious ways. Furthermore a RAM module can be bad even if every piece of RAM testing software you’ve thrown at it says otherwise.

To atone for my sins of not posting new material today I leave you with a hilarious tale of a man . It really goes to show how a little determination and vodka can go a long way.