The Mind Of OverlordTomala
All in an Overlord's day / Work

You know it’s a good day when you have to explain “Buy one get one free” to someone.

Seriously. I had a customer shopping for trousers/pants, and he wanted to know how buy one get one free worked. So when I told him quite literally “when you buy one, you get another pair absolutely free” he was pissed off that he wasn’t getting a half off discount from the free pair of pants. After going over this with him for about five minutes it eventually sank in.

:headdesk:

Oh, on another note I confronted the main man in charge who happens to not like my blue hair, informing him that the situation will be taken care of. I could see the fear in his eyes. He’s the type of boss that doesn’t like confrontation. This’ll be interesting.

Uncategorized

FCC proposes free wifi throughout the united states. ISP’s no likey.

The FCC wants to create wifi that can be used all over the US, even in the most rural areas. Even companies like Google, Microsoft are in favor of it as this could generate innovation and all kinds of other good stuff (oh, and Google getting more data about users but that’s besides the point 😛 ).

Of course Internet Service Providers aren’t too happy about that as this could cut into their profits. I think this is good for people who can’t afford broadband or don’t have any form of access to it. I hope this passes.

All in an Overlord's day / Shopping

Expanding my mini home studio a bit more.

A few months ago I looked into purchasing a DAC so that I could make use of my microphone under Ubuntu since my current box was unable to function (Creative Drivers under linux seem to vary depending on what you want to do), but I ended up giving up on that search since all of the alternatives seemed out of price range for something that I was merely doing testing under.

After reading the article I posted the other night I decided to revive that search. When DAC’s seemed out of reach to me I ended up looking for a Shure X2U, after all I have a Shure SM58 and why not get something to match it? I read enough to understand that it worked fine under linux. The downside was the $99 price range, and while on sale they were $78 which I still considered to be too much for what little I was doing at the time. So while searching amazon last night I accidentally tripped across this little pre amp.

I did some digging around and found people have gotten it to work with their Shure microphones, and even better they got it to work under Linux! So after a couple margaritas and a couple hours of research I decided that $69 was the perfect price for this unit (giggity). The only downside I really found was having to turn up the audio pretty high so you could be heard through your headphones. But I can boost that with the equipment that I already have on hand, and if need be small amplifiers and EQ units are cheap.

Another nice thing about getting this pre amp is that I’ll be able to take it with my laptop should I ever require a portable studio (personal voice acting on the run among other things), or just recording random chat in good quality.

I bought a couple XLR cables tonight, as soon as stuff gets here there will be more testing in my future. Then I’ll post the results.

Are you fucking serious?

Get ready to laugh. HBO is telling teh google to get rid of HBO from their search engine, well sorta.

This is just comic gold.

The request was made on behalf of HBO by a company called DtectNet, which is the anti-piracy arm of MarkMonitor. It asked Google to remove links to the Eastbound and Down section of HBO’s online store, but it wasn’t just their own site they were after. HBO also demanded that links from MTV.com, IGN.com, and Pinterest be removed. None of the links to these sites had any content that violated copyright laws, and were just news stories and reviews of HBO content.

Are you fucking serious?

Fuel companies are still making good profit.

Of course I’ve cut down on fuel in my own way, not wasting my money on a car in a small town. Here’s a link to the article.

Even though Americans are cutting down on how often they hit up the gas pump, as a country we’re paying a higher percentage of our incomes on gasoline than we have in the last 30 years. The Energy Department said in a new report that U.S. households shelled out an average of $2,912 last year for gas, or about 4% of their pretax income.

This just continues to become more and more unreasonable. For example vacations, depending on your income you may end up spending more on gas than the actual vacation.

Are you fucking serious?2

Microsoft doesn’t want you to know about this.

Gabe Newell was (and still is) right. Windows 8 is dead set on killing off gaming for PC.

In an email to XNA/DirectX Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) yesterday, Microsoft gave notice that MVP status was being phased out for program members. According to the missive, this is being done because “the XNA Game Studio is not in active development and DirectX is no longer evolving as a technology.”

Are there alternatives? Absolutely. But Microsoft’s developer support was a key factor in the Xbox 360′s early success over the PS3. There are other options for game development besides XNA, but there’s no data on what current XNA devs should plan to do if they want to develop games for the Xbox 720/Durango. Even if D3D is still in development, calling DirectX moribund isn’t exactly positive. It’s not like D3D itself couldn’t stand some major improvement; the API’s overhead in the PC space is a huge part of why consoles are able to effectively keep pace with PCs years after their internal hardware is thoroughly outdated.

Microsoft blames AMD and Nvidia for some of this. AMD and NV blame Microsoft. End users are stuck with bottlenecks and communication on resolving said issues has dwindled to nothing. At this point, it seems as though even Microsoft has no real idea how XNA users and cross-platform developers should think about the future of game development in Windows beyond “Let’s roll it all into one package.” It’s ludicrous to think the company would jeopardize its programming advantages ahead of its next-generation console launch, but absent better communication, that’s the way things look.

Microsoft is trying to push everyone into their walled garden. You want any newer games on your current Win 7 setup or below? Well tough shit. Win 8/XBox or GTFO.

I hope developers go the OpenGL route. If more people pay attention to linux as a gaming platform (among other things) think of all the good things that could be provided for it.

A war be abrewin’.

Are you fucking serious?

If you think higher education is too expensive, try ignorance. It’s much cheaper

A big part of studying these days goes beyond the libraries and textbooks. More kids are finding themselves studying in public places such as McDonalds since they can’t afford proper internetz.

Cheap smartphones and tablets have put Web-ready technology into more hands than ever. But the price of Internet connectivity hasn’t come down nearly as quickly. And in many rural areas, high-speed Internet through traditional phone lines simply isn’t available at any price. The result is a divide between families that have broadband constantly available on their home computers and phones, and those that have to plan their days around visits to free sources of Internet access.

I have this problem, only backwards. I have an internet connection, but can’t afford college. trolololol. :trollface: