I listen to this fellow named Dan Miller. He’s a pretty smart guy and has some great insight in helping me to find the work I love. As such, I registered a new domain name: http://www.48dayspodcast.com. I’m a pretty picky person when it comes to audio quality so I “remastered” Dan Miller’s podcasts for my own personal use. Yet, I really want to share them with others, so I asked Mr. Miller if he would permit me to do so; if not, I’ll just create a site that basically links back to 48 Days.

TECHNICAL GIBBERISH
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A few days ago I downloaded iTunes to listen to a few radio broadcasts that I like to catch. Well, I can’t really say that I liked it. Sure, it’s pretty nifty, but it’s got a lot of stuff that I neither use nor care for. So while I was at Davis-Kidd with Amelia, I decided to pick up a book to kill a bit of time since browsing bookstores is not my idea of fun, they only have books that I don’t want, or if they do, books that I can’t afford. It was about podcasting. After reading for a bit, it mentioned a program called iPodder. I tried out this program a few years ago when podcasting was a relatively new idea but was fairly unimpressed. Now, it’s impressive, just like Linux, this little puppy is developed by its users. iPodder is now known as Juice. Check it out, it’s free.

This has been a test of the emergency broadcast system, had this been an actual emergency you would be S.O.L.

Well I moved my blog from bear_beats.livejournal.com to here. I’ll be moving over the old posts and eventually deleting my livejournal account. I was frustrated by the lack of customization available.

*Edit*

I’m not deleting my LJ account. I just installed a crossposter plugin.

I’ve decided to host my own blog since I’ve got my own domain name. It can be found here at bearsunderland.com

*Edit*
I turned off the auto-play jazz ’cause it was starting to annoy my wife.

It seems that each December I have a bad tendency to burn my bridges and run, though the burning and running is purely coincidental, the effect is the same. Almost exactly one year prior to this past December, at a job that I liked I made the terrible mistake of replying to an email that I should have ignored and/or reported. It just so happens that this reply contained a foible with something to do about my affiliate website http://www.coinsales.net. Naturally, I didn’t expect that the email would go through, but nevertheless, it did, and boy was that a mistake.
If I were to have sent this email out of malicious intent, there are several things I did that I would not have done. Namely, use my legitimate website, use my legitimate IP address, and use my legitimate email address. Later that day, when checking my email, there were thousands of reply emails from everyone and their monkey’s uncle asking to be removed from a non-existent list. I think the real problem was when I sent another email, not replying to the original message but to the originally targeted email address, saying, “Spammity spammity spam.” So, later that day I received a phone call from a fella from the IT Security team that I used to work so closely with. When he first questioned me about it, I played dumb, then after about 20 seconds of prodding, I confessed. Of course, it did me no good, apparently there were several rumors flying around that I hacked into the server using my access and set up this terribleness to do what I did. It was of course, a rumor, yet I had nothing to disprove such allegation. Naturally, because this caused all kinds of havoc, the (then new) head honcho was apparently ranting and raving and wanting to fire me, and rightly so, I did something stupid, though, it would’ve been nice to have been given the opportunity to make amends.
I was asked not to come back.

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Here are some interesting statistics from the data found at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/04in34tr.xls

0.82% of the population earn an average of $1,134,091.34 and pay 30.03% of the federally collected taxes.
1.33% of the population earn an average of $ 297,026.42 and pay 10.29% of the federally collected taxes.
1.85% of the population earn an average of $ 179,246.68 and pay 7.04% of the federally collected taxes.
0.02% of the population earn an average of $ 154,667.25 and pay 0.05% of the federally collected taxes.
1.64% of the population earn an average of $ 142,875.26 and pay 4.97% of the federally collected taxes.
6.28% of the population earn an average of $ 105,542.01 and pay 10.53% of the federally collected taxes.
7.68% of the population earn an average of $ 77,927.52 and pay 6.29% of the federally collected taxes.
15.16% of the population earn an average of $ 77,661.69 and pay 17.47% of the federally collected taxes.
39.51% of the population earn an average of $ 41,299.26 and pay 12.47% of the federally collected taxes.
2.60% of the population earn an average of $ 24,363.95 and pay 0.17% of the federally collected taxes.
1.02% of the population earn an average of $ 22,324.30 and pay 0.04% of the federally collected taxes.
21.95% of the population earn an average of $ 18,435.92 and pay 0.62% of the federally collected taxes.
0.11% of the population earn an average of $ 13,970.83 and pay 0.04% of the federally collected taxes.
0.00% of the population earn an average of $ 7,137.90 and pay 0.00% of the federally collected taxes.
0.01% of the population earn an average of $ (24,573.61) and pay 0.00% of the federally collected taxes.

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Well, I finally broke down and did the LJ jazz. Since keeping in touch with my friends seems to be a nigh impossibility, you know with the whole working 70 hours per week (including transit time). Plus it gives me the opportunity to be an über-geek without annoying Amelia (as much).

[geek]Here’s my chance to get all the annoying geekiness that’s been consuming my brain power the last few days (don’t laugh, I stick my finger in the electrical socket to get charged up every now and then) out. So, like the other 0.08% of the world’s population I play World of Warcraft (doesn’t sound so popular when put in that perspective, eh? it’s ~five million people). Well, there’s a new trading card game that’s based on WoW that certain chase cards give online in-game features (the secondary reason I’m interested, the primary being that one of my favorite artists, Greg Hildebrandt, of the the Hildebrandt brothers is doing some of the art ((they did the old Tolkien artwork for those without a clue)))

Anyhoo, here’s the facts about the TCG
“Currently we are looking at 5 different rarities, each color coded based on how items are color coded in the WoW MMO. Common is white, uncommon is green, rare is blue, epic is purple and legendary is orange. There will be a little over 20 epic cards in the first set and will include the Thrall card and about 100 rares. The epics are printed at twice the rarity of a rare so you can expect around 3 epics per booster box. The Legendary cards are on a slightly different system. One is about as rare as a rare, so you can expect to see one in ~4 booster boxes, one is about as rare as an epic so ~1 Case and one is about twice as rare as an epic so ~2 Cases. Booster packs are packed out as 1 rare/epic/legendary, 3 uncommons, 10 commons and 1 Hero card.”

Here’s what that comes out to: there is a 1:12 chance of pulling any specific rare/legendary(rare), 1:24 chance of pulling any specific epic/legendary(epic), and a 1:48 chance of pulling the über-rare legendary. So for a greater than 99.99% probability of pulling the rare it works out to 114 packs which is 4.75 boxes (so ~4 boxes, closer to 5 but hey, I’m not the UDE/WoW marketing guy); for an epic it works out to 234 packs which is 9.75 boxes (so ~ 1 case/12 boxes); and for the über-rare legendary it works out to 471 packs which is 19.625 boxes (so ~ 2 cases) so it lines up nearly perfectly with the facts. Here’s the kicker, since it’s impossible to have 100% (unless one bought every single pack of the game made), the trick is to find the point at which the probability of pulling the über-rare doesn’t change much after reaching that certain number of packs. Now, I’m probably more obsessed with this than the average person, but I’m limiting myself to 4 boxes (really I just fear Amelia breaking my knees if I go over that), which in turn yields 99.98%, 98.32%, and 86.75% probability of pulling any specific rare, epic, and über-rare legendary, respectively. That’s not bad! So, the way I figure it, if I don’t get the über-rare legendary in 4 boxes, I’m not gonna get it.[/geek]
Ok, now that I’ve gotten that out of my system…back to what I was doing.