Big Fat Killer

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A recent report shares some startling news. America’s weight problem is about to become it’s #1 killer (in preventable deaths at least). As soon as 2005 obesity is going to pass cigarette smoking as the favored way for Americans to kill themselves. Which begs the question: is smoking/eating/drinking your way to death simply a slow form of suicide? Does thinking about it in that manner change the basic predisposition for Americans to let other Americans do as they please?

The study showed that America is curtailing smoking (as it becomes more socially unacceptable and frankly harder to find a place where you can smoke) while growing fatter by the minute. This amazes me amid the current low-carb craze that is sweeping the nation.

DEATH TOLL
Causes of preventable deaths in the US in 2000
Source: USA Today; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Tobacco Use 435,000
Diet/Physical Inactivity 400,000
Alcohol Consumption 85,000
Motor Vehicle Crashes 43,000
Firearms 29,000
Sexual Behaviors 20,000
Illicit Drugs 17,000  

URT 2004 Hurt My Baby

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[Aunt Jemima Voice] That’s right officer, it was that nasty ole game came flying off the shelf and smacked the fps right out of my baby! She used to be fast, ya know! Now look at her…. run baby! Oh why won’t you run! [/voice]

Up until about 1:34 am this morning I was extremely proud of my rig:

  • Athlon 2500XP+ OC’d to 2800XP+
  • MSI GeForce 4200 8x OC’d core @ 277mhz OC’d RAM @ 554mhz w/Zalman M80C-HP Heatsink w/ and old cpu fan being my Macgyver ZM-OP1
  • 1 Gig of Dual DDR333 RAM (in 2 sticks)
  • ASUS A7N8X-E MOBO
  • Seagate ATA100 7200rpm 160 Gig HD – System
  • Seagate SATA 120 Gig HD – A/V Disk
  • BTV 3.4 w/ Hauppauge WinTV Tunercard
  • Edition 5.0
  • WinXP Pro

    It was my gaming rig, a Media PC (supplimenting my Tivo), and a video editing workstation…. then URT2004 had to come along and burst my bubble. First let me say the UTR2004 is pretty. It blows the demo out of the water. Turning the settings up to the max @ 1280×1024 res (the max my flat panel supports) it was… AWESOME. I found myself not killing bots in death match so that i could run up to them and enjoy the detail… a far cry from Quake 1 running on my ipaq 4200 where you struggle to pick out the moving blobs from the background blobs.

    The painful part is this: while it was really pretty at these settings 15-20 fps just won’t cut it for anything other than going “wow look at that”. So i reverted to 1024×768 (which is actually my normal setting — i spend enough time squinting at small text for work… why do it for fun?) and thought everything was rosy. Well it was in single player mode. The fps would dip to the low 30s but didn’t seem affect my gameplay much. Then I tried to host a game… not a real multiplayer game but one against bots so that I could see what all i could control in setting up a map for real multiplayer play. Ouch. Playing the same map from the demo in onslaught my game kept hanging in order to keep the server going. To prevent this I had to go all the way back to the default settings and 800×600. Sad. My poor baby.

    One thing of note though. These painfully slow fps levels did occur w/ 2xAA on. I normally keep AA @ 2x because it is a good compromise between speed and image quality. You can REALLY see a difference between noAA and 2xAA… not so much with 2xAA vs the Higher settings AND 2xAA isn’t a huge performance hit unless you are a 1600×1200, fps is king, kinda guy. I mean until now I never had to turn it off to play any game, but apparently that is no longer the case.

    The really sad thing is that all this drove me away from URT2004 (temporarily of course) and over to pricegrabber.com to check prices on a new video card. Not to mention boning up on the latest reviews of said cards to find the new holy grail. And the winner is…… the Radeon 9600 XT. It has the auto overclocking feature that i really like in my MSI 4200, supports DX 9, and has a nice horsepower boost. Now if it could drop in price about $50….

    • Baby Got Book

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    Well, I don’t think this is musical POETRY but it is REALLY funny/great. Baby Got Book is a parody of a Sir Mix-A-Lot’s classic… a Christian parody, no less. Apparently a pastor/comedian created this as part of a comedy CD/multimedia presentation for a sermon… posted it on his website… and the rest is history.

  • Dan Smith’s Site: WhiteBoyDJ.com
  • Boing Boing: Another site with the lyrics and music video
  • Another Mirror You’ll need the free DivX player to view

    • Gotta Give Em Credit

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    ~5-7-98

    Ever wonder about why you can’t get approved for that credit card / car loan / ect? Here is some basic credit / credit report info I put together a while back to answer some basic questions.

    Credit Primer

    Today you can get your credit report online instantly (instead via mail which took up to 8 days) after answering enough questions to prove your identity. I personally like equifax’s reports because you can your FICO score which is what most lenders use to determine if and how much to approve you for. I tend to laugh at most credit protection “services” (out loud at the people offering them) that charge $50-120 a year to protect your credit and give you a “free” copy of your credit report (sometimes more than 1!) “OR” I say “I can go get my credit report for $12 (ah remember the good old days when it was $8 — damn Euro devaluing the dollar!) and take myself out somewhere nice with my money saved…”

    Checking your credit more than once a year is pretty much overkill… it often only updates every 3 or 4 months, but checking in every year or so is a good idea — just so any mistakes are taken care of in your free time and not when you really, really, really want to buy that new Porche 911 now, now, now! Not to mention the embarassment saved at your local Porche dealership. (ah the nouveau riche…)

    State Government Gets A Big Head

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    ~3-2-01

    This is old but it still really irks me that some people in state government thought it was a good idea if they passed a law giving them the same control over privately built structures surrounding UT as the buildings funded and built by the government that are in UT.

    I think I said it well here “It is sad that the same people that keep reducing funding for higher education are now trying to block private funding efforts to help UTC. If the government wants to control UTC’s growth they should FUND it! Controlling what happens with private funds goes against the wonderful free market economy that our country is built on.”

    I keep this up lest anyone forget the lovely people that tried to pull this off in the coming election… Save UTC