Monday, September 10, 2007

any mechanical turks out there?

I got this email for some new hits, and this one seemed really cool. there are six days left on it and i will just let you read part of the email i got. i am not a big mechanical turk participator, i beleive that my time is worth more than it is willing to pay (i think i have like 96 cents in my account). I have already downloaded google earth because of the new space feature and the flight sim easter egg so i am going to try it out, man that program is so cool.

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Subject: Help find Steve Fossett, missing aviator

Greetings from Amazon Mechanical Turk,

On Monday, September 3, 2007, Steve Fossett, the first person to fly a plane around the world without refueling and the first person to fly around the world in a balloon went missing in Nevada. An airplane he was flying failed to return. No one has any idea where he is. Click on the following link for the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Fossett.

Through the generous efforts of individuals at several organizations, detailed satellite imagery has been made available for his last known whereabouts.

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they give you a kml file that updates the images in the area they want you to search and a list of coordinates to check out, you flag anything interesting and they might find this guy. this email is already a couple days old, I didn't open it right away because I was like, " great, a chance to make 25 cents per hour". I wish i would have opened it sooner, there are still a few days left so i am going for it.

Saturday, September 08, 2007

ugh i hate computers

I had this idea for a cool web page but needed to learn PHP and SQL. No problem, I spent a few weeks reading PHP tutorials on the internet and got no where so i went out and bought a book. it seemed like a great book and had instructions for projects that were similar to what i wanted to do so i bought it. I had already signed up with a web host a year or so ago so all i had to do was read the book and i would be able to build my idea. so a few weeks goes by and i am at chapter seven, "please install this other thing" well shit, my web host didn't have this installed, so i checked some other hosting companies, nobody uses this package. well hell, i got pissed and started learning Microsoft programming and after a few weeks it was time to upload my project, only problem is that Microsoft hosting is like twice the price of regular hosting, and every host has crazy limits on access so none of my projects would work!

so i say fuck it and install a web server on my computer, oh wow now my computer is compromised. uninstall remove corrupt shit. install VMware, learn LINUX. it has now been 3 months and I still haven't learned any PHP because everything with computers is such a pain in the ass. the good news is is i am functional with Linux and am learning a ton of shit i should have learned a long time ago, not much longer until i can get back to programming.