Sanity Free dot org

The windows in our office building (the windows I sit right in front of) look directly out over Campbell road in Richardson. Its a fairly busy road (three lanes on each side). The company relocated to this office space around March of last year. Since that time we've seen people run into light poles, get in a few finder binders, and come really close to smashing each other to bits, but today took the cake.

Around 5:30 or 6:00 PM people are quietly working away trying to wrap things up, or playing a round of pinball at the office pinball machine, when all of the sudden you hear a really loud BOOM out on the street. There was no screeching tires, no horns honking, just a loud thunderous crash sound. Our office is one big room, everybody sits at tables looking at everyone else, and we all popped up to take a look outside.

All three lanes headed east are bumper to bumber. There seems to be four or five cars seemingly fused together. There's a large SUV (I'm guessing a ford explorer) missing most of its "what used to be a hood / engine area of the car", the guy inside is hidden behind a wall of air bags. Four cars seemingly fused together (at first it looked like much more because of all the traffic) end to end.

The poor sod at the back was the red SUV. He had plowed into the back end of a huge suburban, who had then managed to get up under the bumper of the buick sedan in front of her, who then ate the back end of a nissan.

The gal in front faired the best with what looked like a banged up rear bumper.

The buick sedan who was next was firmly supplanted on the hood of the suburban looked to be done in.

The suburban looked pretty much unscathed except for the transmission fluid which was now starting to leak from the car at an alarming rate. It had taken the brunt of the (assumingly) 45 MPH impact of the SUV. I can only imagine what would have happened to that poor buick had the suburban not been between them. The force of the impact was so strong that it had smashed the Suburban's transmission causing what looked like a large pool of blood (transmission fluid is red) to seep from beneath it.

The people involved started to get out of their vehicles (except the guy in the SUV) and try to figure out what the heck just happened. It was a while before anyone made any calls on their mobile phones (like to call the police), but the Richardson police have a pretty heavy presence on that road and it wasn't long before there were teams of cops blocking off traffic and getting things sorted.

That pretty much killed the rest of our work day, and provided us with some (albeit morbid) entertainment.

I snapped a photo with my phone (which totally doesn't do it justice, but its a crappy RAZR and the shots where I zoomed in, ended up actually just being cropped pics of this one).

I've needed a new monitor for a while now, but have been putting it off... My current monitor is getting so hard to read so I decided it was finally time to break down and get a new one. With that purchase I decided I may as well pick up vista, so I did. We're making the upgrade at work later this week too, so I figured I'd push it at home as well.

Tonight I was looking around at the vista section of microsoft.com, and I noticed a chart that described the upgrade path for various operating systems migrating to vista. Wouldn't you know it, xp x64's (the OS I run here at home) upgrade path is a "clean install"

Man I just love microsoft... I may as well "upgrade" to a mac! What a bunch of crap!

Well, for the longest time I resolved every new year, never to make a new years resolution. That was very successful for quite some time, so I have a nearly perfect record. This year, I decided I was getting way to inactive, so I decided to buy a membership to a gym.

When I was in high school, I was on the swim and diving team. I'd typically warm up by swimming 500 meters, then do various types of strokes / kicks for about 2000 meters, then warm down with another 500 meters. I signed up at a particular gym because there was a facility near my work and home, and they both had pools. I figured I could swim at lunch from work, and after work near home.

Last night I swam for about an hour (probably closer to 45 minutes) and after 100 meters, my arms felt like they were (jelly, and) about to fall off. It took me the rest of that hours time to finish swimming something close to a 500 meters... It was after the 100 meters when my arms lost all strength that I realized how far I'd really gone. All the pictures of me looking like a whale had somehow gotten past my "fat" radar, but my first 100 meters in the pool caused a huge blip. That night when I got home and had to do two breathing treatments for my asthma because it was such a shock to my system. I got home around 8 pm and it wasn't till about 10 that my heart rate got back to normal.

This afternoon I went at it again. This time I was able to swim much longer without folding up. Minutes after I got out of the pool my heart rate went back to normal, and my asthma didn't act up. So hopefully it gets easier as time goes on.

I took the dive (got a kitchen pass from the wife) and pre-ordered Battlefield 2142 yesterday! I cant wait, 19 some odd days left (from when I wrote this). I guess since I'll download it and play it the moment its released, I should just go ahead and take the day off to play it all day... (I can always dream anyway).

We've been in the middle of the biggest drought Dallas has seen in a long time. Every day has over 100°F and my asthma's been killing me. My water bill has been only a little bit less expensive my mortgage payment lately, and every time it rains (uhm, I mean both times it's rained, [this summer]), the rain seems to hover about 2 feet off the ground just before it runs off down the gutter. It's so dry my boss recently lost a golf ball down a crack in the ground at the golf course (how would you score that btw)... I think you get the point.

This afternoon my son wanted to go over and play at my wife's parents house (who live directly behind us), so he and my wife took the long trek across the alley to go play. Just after they left, it started "coming up a flood" as they say here in Texas (which loosley translates to a "torrential downpour"). After a while I went over with an umbrella so they could come home with out getting soaked. While we were over talking w/ my father in law, it thundered (and lightininged how ever you'd say that, at the same time) the loudest I've ever heard it. We laughed and said how close that one was because there was no pause between the flash and the boom.

As we walked across the alley back to our house, we smelled wood burning (this seemed odd for such a hot afternoon). Looking down the alleyway we could actually see smoke low to the ground like fog in the early morning. My wife took our son back in our house as I ran down our street to see if I could see what was burning. As I walked down the street, the smoke grew thicker and thicker. Some of my neighbors were out, and we all started running towards the smoke (joking about how much help we would all be: wearing our rain soaked "flip-flops").

That lightning we'd heard had actually struck our neighbors house! There was dark smoke billowing out of their attic vent, and a few people were standing out in front of the house across the street from the one burning. The fire department was just pulling up, and you could see fire starting to peek out of the roof of their house. It didn't seem like much at first. The firemen quickly (though it seemed like forever) got hoses hooked up and went into the house. All of the sudden the vent where we first started seeing smoke pouring out, erupted into a big ball of flames. The fireball was literally inches from the neighbor's house.

Minutes later what was a tiny hole in the roof of the house had turned into a big black void where the roof of the attic used to be. The entire roof had flames shooting up 15 to 20 feet from the top of what used to be the crest of the house. The whole scene was surreal.

As I watched--in horror--my neighbors house burn, I couldn't help but think that this could very well be my house disintegrating before my eyes. We do, after all, have the tallest house on the block. At one point the ceiling in the master bedroom fell through, and you could see the fire burning uncontrolled through the bedroom window like the glass of a fireplace shielding the raging fire that you typically build to keep warm in the dead of winter. I felt so sad for these people though I didn't know them from Adam. I can't imagine what it must have felt like to so helplessly watch everything in your life go up in flames. They had escaped from their home with their lives... and nothing else. That's a pretty harsh reality to come to terms with. I still find it very difficult to go to sleep thinking about it. Everything smells of smoke (the damp night air has a lot to do with it I'm sure), and serves as a constant reminder of just how fortunate we were today. Fifteen minutes was all it took for that house to completely burn to the ground.

It was the longest fifteen minutes of my life.

God help us all.

Well, as you may have seen, there is now a Microsoft Certified Professional logo on the site...

Personally, I think these certifications are crap and would never take the time (nor expense) to get them on my own. However, the company I now work for, needs to have a couple of MCAD's or MCSD's for points to renew their certified partner status, so they told us to go get the certifications (at their expense).

After taking a few of the MeasureUp practice tests, I just knew there was no way in hell I could pass these stupid exams, so I took ONE anyway, and oddly enough, I passed it. Since studying for it (if you could call it that) took the greater part of a day, I thought I'd look stupid and put the logo's on the site as I got them.

Anyway, one down, 2 (or 4 depending on whether I go for MCAD or MCSD) to go...

Wish me luck (or email me the answers :D)



UPDATE January 13 2006:

Passed the XML webservices test today! This just goes to show that these tests are pointless, because I honestly shouldnt have passed. The whole test was like reading greek.

one more to go...



UPDATE January 24 2006:

Passed the 3rd test, and got the mcad. I'll probably finish up the last 2 tests for the mcsd next month.

This is a little departure from my typical topic.

To cut a rather tedious and boring story short, I play Battlefield 2, which has a cool stats service that folks have been hacking with outside of the game (the game has a stats board built in, which stats board uses some pseudo web-services to obtain game statistic info).

There are a multitude of server hosts out there that generate dynamic signature images with your game stats in them, so that you can look cool and show off how much time you actually waste online gaming, on every forum you frequent.

I decided to join the masses and write a script that pulls my users rank and score from the stats servers and returns an image that can be used as an avatar on most bulletin board systems out there. I had a size restriction on the server I wanted it for, so the images produced are 80x80 and less than 6k in size.

Using the avatar script is pretty easy, you direct the image source url to the server where you install the script (or you can just use the one here)

html
<img src="http://www.sanity-free.org/bf2rank/?pid=45647367">

bbCode
[img]http://www.sanity-free.org/bf2rank/?nick=[OinK]_MadHatter[/img]

most bulliten board systems have places for you to link in a remote avatar, and one would add this same url w/ a name just as you would a normal image.

One annoying thing about most bbcode systems is that they require a valid image extension (.png, .jpg, .gif ... ) on the url inside the [img][/img] blocks (otherwise it just shows text inside the img blocks). To get your rank image to show up if you're having troubles is to simply add an &avatar.jpg to the end of the url. The php code will ignore it, and the forum will think its a valid image and will show it correctly. Another way is to use the simple url described in the forums here.

The resulting image looks like this:



You can also specify a couple of options.

• adding &score will display your global score at the top of the image.
  ex:
• adding &no_text to the end of the url will keep the text from being written on the image.
  ex:
• adding &delta to the end will show the difference in your progress between your last rank and your next one.
  ex:
• you can also combine any combination of them as well (this one is using &delta, &no_text, and &score options).
  ex:

EDIT Feb. 15 2006: since the last patch, I havent updated this article source code. HERE'S the most recent version of the script. you can download the package and copy that over the script provided.

EDIT March 20 2006: I updated the code to include nick name resolution (using searchforplayers.aspx). the link to the code above has that change in it. so you can use your player nick again instead of trying to find out your player ID.

EDIT June 30 2006: I removed the source code from the article and repacked the download with everything you need.

EDIT July 18 2006: I've added "easy url's" for the rank avatars. for more info on that--and if you'd like to add them to your server--take a look at the thread in the forums here.

Here's the code for the script (the download has a true type font that needs to be located in the script dir w/ all the image files which are also referenced, so make sure to download the script pack):


Download source and resources here.

When it comes to pc games, I don't typically stray too far from counter-strike. This past week, I've been altogether impressed and distracted by the newly released battlefield 2. I've never played any of the battlefield series, but co-workers of mine wouldn't stop sending me clips of the game, so I decided to pre-order it. Having now played it, I believe I'm going to be distracted from counter-strike for quite a while. this game is awesome!

My biggest complaint of most first person shooter games is a lack of team play. That's one of the things I love about Counter-Strike. Battlefield 2 takes team play to the next level. It allows you to form squadrons and has a commander who can help direct the battle as it happens. When in a squad, you can choose to re-spawn around your captain as opposed to spawning back at a base. The game has a great mix of player categories, and gives you enough (when a squad has the right mixture of players) to totally sustain yourself long term in battle.

I have a fairly old system (athlon 1.3 thunderbird / 1 gig ram / FX5600:128 / sound blaster-live) and didn't expect much in the way of smooth game play. In fact, my computer fails the minimum requirements in several areas. I was surprised when on medium settings it played as smooth as counter-strike 1.6 (far more smooth than CS:Source or any HL2 based games).

This game is packed full of goodies (rolling fog, amazing lighting, smooth looking player models, realistic sounds and the list goes on). I'd definitely recommend this one for purchase, you won't be disappointed. If you don't want to take my word for it, download the demo and try it out.

Last Friday on the way to work my windshield was hit by some loose cement from a cement mixer.

We were the only cars on the road at the time. I called the company who owned the truck and they gave me their insurance agency's phone number.

So last Friday they filed a claim. All week I called the insurance company to see when I was going to be able to get my windshield fixed. Well... I finally got to talk to someone today, and low and behold the agent in charge of my claim hangs up on me...

I was livid!

I call back to speak with her supervisor, and he tells me that cement trucks dont throw rocks... hrm... what a genius! a supervisor for a insurance company knows all about cement... maybe its all the years I worked in construction that sent the nagging feeling of contempt for this company, this manager and this rude agent, but I know how cement is mixed, and that it does contain rocks, and on top of it all, I WATCHED A THREE INCH ROCK SMASH MY WINDOW!

so a week later, I still have a cracked windshield, I have no more promise of getting it fixed as I did before I contacted this fraudulent insurance company. I sat on the phone for about an hour while my agent attempt to contact them (and actually made the same comment online--which in *my insurance* company are recorded conversations--that nobody seems to show up for work). After my agent got frustrated--leaving messages with everyone she possibly could (after all, this is what I've been doing all week)--she gave me my options from their perspective.

by the way. I ADVISE THAT NO ONE EVER USE EMC Insurance Companies, and if you do happen to get Sherry McEwan (ms "quick to hang up on you") or Eddie Wood (Mr. knows omniscient supervisor), you'd better just contact you're attorney, because that's their preferred method of operation.

They're a bunch of incompetent, rude and all around pain in ass the bunch of people. I've reported them to the better business bureau and to the local investigative news agency.

Let's hope they get theirs (cause I have a feeling the're not going to give me anything).