Why do sites still use “www” in front of their domain names (ie. www.mysite.com)? I’ve noticed many sites, if you leave out the “www”, it will redirect to an address with “www”. Try it out, go to scottrade.com. It will redirect you to www.scottrade.com. Same thing with eBay. “www” is very unnecessary. In the old days companies would have servers for each service. One server was for file transfers and it was called “ftp” (ie. ftp.mysite.com). Another would be for e-mail and it would be called “mail”. “www” was for web traffic. But now we don’t need that, we can have lots of subdomains on one site, like me.mysite.com, you.mysite.com, potatoes.mysite.com, etc. “www” seems to be a replacement for no subdomain at all.

Part of me thinks using “www” is good for consistency. If I had www.ricklord.com and mybiz.ricklord.com I could programmatically look at the first part before the “.” to determine the subdomain. But if I have ricklord.com and mybiz.ricklord.com the results would be ricklord and mail. There is definitely something to be said for consistency. Hmmm…. For now though, I do the opposite of eBay and Scottrade. If you go to www.ricklord.com, the redirect will remove the www. It’s redundant. I have no subdomains. If I did, perhaps I would use “www” for consistency. Or maybe I would use something more clever such as MyWholeWorldFitsOn4GB.ricklord.com.

My mother often says to me “there is is no such thing as luck”. Her reasoning is that everything that happens is God’s will, luck has nothing to do with it. But luck is “a combination of circumstances, events, etc., operating by chance to bring good or ill to a person”. The good or ill doesn’t just happen, so even if it is God’s will, the circumstances and events leading up to it were His will. So by definition it’s still luck. Is it not? Of course I say the circumstances and events were generally my doing, due to choices I made so I alone am responsible. But still, by definition it’s luck, good or bad.

Many argue that we should not allow same-sex marriage because it goes against traditional marriage. That’s a good argument and in the spirit of that argument I think we should only recognize traditional marriage. Traditional marriage is a marriage between men and women of the same race, where the women is considered to be property of the man. Therefore interracial marriage should be banned. Also, polygamy was common in tradional marriages. Oh yeah, divorce was illegal too so we should ban divorce.

Who’s with me?

I have been searching for a motorcycle for my wife for the last couple of weeks and I am thoroughly frustrated. It seems most classifieds sites think that if you are looking for an older sportbike or cruiser, you probably are also interested in ATVs, dirt bikes, trailers, and maybe even boats. WTF? Most of the time there are only a few, if any ads that match what I am looking for but i have to wade through 100s of ads for dirt bikes and other irrelevant crap to find what I want. Some of them have basic search features that let you filter by price, or if you know the model, by model. Problem is I’m not searching for a particular model, and my price range is in the same price range as most of the dirt bikes. One site has decent search capabilities now. I complained to them a few years ago and they didn’t seem to care. Now their search is similar to what I recommended. Problem with that site is the advanced search doesn’t always work, their ads don’t seem to be up to date and it costs money to post there. That severely restricts your potential results. I have my motorcycle for sale on their now. I paid $49 for the ad. Recently I wanted to reduce my asking price, so I filled out their online form for changing your ad. I did it several hours before the deadline (takes a week for the changes to show up). Next week, no change. The following week I filled it out again and it was finally updated. What is the point of having an online form for changes if they don’t use it?

Unlike most of the time when I complain about something, I think this time I will do something about it. I plan to create a free classifieds site for motorcycles. It will have good search capabilities so if you are looking for a street bike you won’t be bombarded with childrens dirt bike ads. There will be photos to go with the ads and if you want to make a change it will be immediate. It will be perfect! Now I just have to find the time to do it.

We went shooting again. What a pain in the ass. We usually go to Ben Avery range. There is no good time to go there. If you go on the weekend traffic isn’t too horribly bad, but you should plan to wait for a table. During the week, traffic is awful because apparently they think it’s more cost efficient to have six cops direct traffic during rush hour than to put a couple of freakin traffic lights up there! If you get there when they are directing traffic, at least you can get through. Otherwise you have to hope someone has the heart to let you through or you’ll sit there forever. Ok, enough of that rant.

After waiting for 45 minutes we finally got a table. We had to wait another 15 minutes though before we could put our target out, so we sat there and watched all the idiots pretend like they new what they were doing. There was one table with about five people. None of them had eye protection. Whatever, why should I care? What did kind of bother me is they didn’t know how to handle their weapons. One guy looked like he had his thumb on the slide of his semi-auto handgun. And he was trying to teach a new shooter how to shoot! There were many people there who thought nothing of pointing there guns down. There are signs everwhere that say keep muzzles up. If you point your gun at the concrete table and it goes off, someone is likely to get hurt. The people next to us had no eye or ear protection. What the hell are they thinking going to a shooting range without ear protection? It’s only 50 cents for ear plugs there! I was wondering why they kept leaving the table when I was shooting my .308. Oh yeah, the other thing I don’t like about ranges like that is my brass ends up hitting people. My .308 shoots the brass violently upwards and to the right. So it would go right over the screen next to us, bounce off the roof and hit our neighbors in the head. Too bad they didn’t have eye protection.

Anyway, the purpose of this wasn’t to rant about stupid people. My AK that had jammed the first time I shot it, was still jamming. I had thought I had fixed it, but apparently not. That added considerably to my frustration. So since I couldn’t shoot my .308 without hitting people with brass, and my AK kept jamming we brought out the AR. That thing feels so good after shooting the .308. It feels like a bb gun. The AR was fine for a while, but then I had a case get stuck in the chamber. At that point I decided it was time to go home. We were there for about 2 hours and spent less than a half hour shooting.

After all of the frustration of Ben Avery I decided we either had to join a club with an indoor shooting range or find some place in the desert to shoot. We found a place in the desert and went there yesterday. Oh yeah, Sunday night I fiddled with the AK some more and thought for sure I had it fixed. Wrong! Son of a ….. Jessica forgot her ear protection and there wasn’t a place to buy some for 50 cents, so I shot alone and didn’t stay long. My first AK I built worked great. The other one of course was a jam-o-matic and my AR kept getting stuck cases. I’m really hoping that the stuck cases are caused by the cheap-ass steel cased ammo I was shooting. As far as my AK goes, I was out of ideas. Until I got home of course I had an idea. Now it will have to wait until next week before I can find out if it works. That really sucks because I wanted to refinish it this week, but I want it functioning properly before I refinish it. Nothing like grinding on your shiny new finish.

I read a post on another blog that brought up the question of whether next weekend means this upcoming weekend or the end of next week. Apparently some say “This Weekend” and “Next Weekend” mean the same thing, depending on when it’s said. WTF!? Do poeple actually put any thought into what they say? This weekend means this upcoming weekend. Next weekend should never mean this upcoming weekend, but the next one after that. And if it is currently the weekend, this weekend means this current weekend. Duh! Anything else would be like saying Sunday is the first day of the week, but that’s another rant.

Jessica and I went to the movies yesterday to see Aeon Flux. Overall a pretty good movie. I always like to see chicks in tight clothes kicking ass. One thing I don’t like though is scenes where the laws of physics apparently don’t apply to the characters. You see this in a lot of Chinese martial arts movies. Don’t get me a wrong, I love a good fight seen but they don’t involve cables.

The other thing that kind of bothered me is that Aeon decided that she needed to blow up the ship. I’m trying to word this in a way that won’t give away much of the movie. If you saw it then you know what I’m talking about. She decides that she needs to do it right now. Not, I’ll give it a day to think about it, or I’ll let the poeple decide. She decides for 5 million people that it’s the right thing to do. I disagree with that.

Since it’s my mission in life to convert the world to using UTC time (For those that would hold that against me later, I say that with a little bit of sarcasm) I’ve added a UTC date and time clock to the sidebar of this page.

We went to a Trans Siberian Orchestra last night. It was far better than I expected. The lights and lasers were incredible. They played all their popular Christmas songs first. When that was done I thought the concert was over. That was only the first half. Then they started playing the good stuff. They played some Beethoven and some other classical stuff. The lead violinist rocked! She made the violin look hot! She was running around like a Heavy Metal Guitarist and she sounded as good too.

I noticed some interesting things about the way people act too. For instance, people will clap and cheer at the wrong time or over the stupidist things. For instance, before the show they shut off most of the lights and everyone cheered. There was nobody on stage or anything. A couple minutes later they shut off the rest of the lights and there was more cheering. Still no one on stage. Also, whenever there was a long silence during the show it was guaranteed that someone would shout out. There was also cheering whenever one of the performers did something remotely impressive. The first time I noticed it was when one of the guitarists held a note. That is nothing impressive but everyone felt the need to cheer. One of the vocalists held a long note too and everyone started cheering. That gets frustrating, I was there to hear her sing, not to hear a bunch of idiots cheer.

The biggest thing that bugged me was that some people seem to think that it is ok to talk through a show. Especially the bitch (and I mean that the nicest way possible) behind me. She talked through the whole frigging show! How selfish. She was really starting to piss me off. I almost said something but I didn’t want to cause a seen.

Anyway, the show was great, the people were stupid and the food and drink was overpriced. But overall it was a kick ass show.