xsamplex

After having lost a loved one to cancer, a couple of weeks ago, there’s something that needs to be told:

There’s no cure for cancer.

For years, I’ve been thinking that cancer could be treated but, now, I’ve finally become aware of that I’ve been living in an Oprah world. Or make that a StarTrek world. Or ER world. Whatever you fancy. Sure there are several succesful-looking leads to treat cancer, but the net result is still 1-0.

I wonder if we could put all those billions of dollars spent on war machines and armies into cancer research.

The daily xsamplex will resume shortly.

Just a word of caution: do not attempt to heat a pop-tart in a microwave for over 2 minutes. Don’t do it. There are other things you can do with those things: like making them light-up and well, eat, I suppose.

For the once that cannot wait to see what happens, eventually those things will smoke like hell. Mine did. And they get hard as a brick too. Imagine seven pop-tart ninja fighters.

The worst Star Trek movie comes with the best line. When confronted with an entity that is supposed to be a supreme being, Kirk poses the question and gets, well, beaten up by a lightning bolt. It’s hilarious and the only scene that makes the movie worth watching.

Earlier this week, ‘Cellular’ (starring Kim Basinger) was released. I wouldn’t be discussing that one here, if I hadn’t heard a CBC reporter literally making fun of the movie. It’s apparently that bad, and I guess you should have picked the movie ‘Hero’ instead (well, if it plays in your nearest theater then, alright?).

Besides peeking at the TV, I finally decided to install Service Pack 2 on my laptop. Oh, come on: the only new part intermediate Windows users see is the Security Center. And yes, it pops up with a message saying that ‘you should really use a virus scanner’ (and it sends you to a link where you can buy or retrieve virus scanners). Halleluja Microsoft! Oh, and IE seems to have improved, but I don’t use that. Lets see how the development tools work tomorrow.

Thinking back to that event three years ago (missed it?) there’s a couple of things I remember vividly. Besides the horrible footage, I remember the anger and the feeling of ‘revenge’ in (what I expected to be) educated people. ‘We’re going to kick some ass and we start in Afghanistan’.

Now in 2004, reading back the comments, the arguments and the heated discussion, I’m glad to see that some of them have found their wits. What took them so long?

Today I noticed that Sybase is giving its ‘developer and production’-ready Adaptive Server Enterprise for Linux away for free. Well, there are limitations: you’re only allowed to run it on a single processor with 2 GB RAM. And the maximum size of the database can only be 5 GB.

As somebody who was first introduced to Sybase, I think this is a step in the good direction. It’s free, but not yet open-sourced. Additionally, I think Sybase should offer more than that 5 GB. Postgres’ size (for example) is unlimited.

For me personally, I’ll be figuring out if I can get it to work on one of my servers. That will be fun.

If you’re a soccer fan you may just as well sprint to your local Staples depot and buy a copy of Euro 2004. They go for sale for as low as 10 dollars. Buy yourself a genuine ‘dual action controller’ (what’s in a word) too.

That said, somebody could have told me that Euro 2004 didn’t come with the original Dutch team. No sir: the faces in the team slightly look like the ones in real life however without the names. Apparently, EA couldn’t seal a deal with the Dutch Soccer Association. A scandal, I would say: I mean, deciding to take out NED 13 while you actually meant to take out NUMBER 13 can make quite a difference in your final game against, say France. Trust me. Kicken!!, as they would say in Dutch-land.

Disclaimer: I don’t consider myself religious. First of all, I don’t think I deserve to live in any paradise your god has to offer. Secondly, that’s it.

We saw ‘The Passion of Christ’ last night and there were a couple of things that grabbed my attention. I was impressed with the foreign languages spoken in this movie: Aramic and Latin (that is Classical Latin), but I had the feeling something was terribly wrong by the use of the two ancient languages. This is hard to explain, but imagine somebody shooting a movie situated in the Fifties and the main characters cursing typical words that would fit perfectly in our times. Wouldn’t that look weird?

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I was called by the local (previous-Philips-owned) video chain that my movies had arrived. Both of them, so I’m now the proud owner of ‘A thin red line’ and ‘Empire of the sun’. I have seen them both too, but wanted to have them in my collection, probably for sentimental reasons.

While going to the Globe’s site for a change, I noticed that they changed from an ‘all our articles our available’ to a ‘registered user-only’ site. That’s no fun.

Also, I’m back at my 133t PHP coding skills, after upgrading two computers to Debian ‘Sarge’. Work. Busy.