All Your Base Are Belong To Us — The Kip Lange Homepage

I’m a little behind the curve on this one — I actually didn’t realize this until three days ago when the excellent webmaster over at South Park Studios brought it to my attention — but the tenth season of South Park resumed last Wednesday night with the hilarious airing of “Make Love, Not Warcraft” (a must-see for RPGers).

If you’d like to catch a re-run of it, check out the Comedy Central South Park schedule over here.

The next episode, “The Mystery of the Urinal Deuce”, whose name suggests great and wonderful things, airs at 10 PM this Wednesday, October 11th.

10 years and South Park is still going strong. Hats off, I say.

Okay. Far be it from me to not give credit where credit is due. Miami did a pretty damn good job going after the Patriots, which doesn’t make me think Miami is a juggernaut, but on the other hand, they came back against a 13 point lead to get damn close to winning the game, enough for my pulse rate to go up and me start worrying.

What is with the Pats, anyway? Out of all the teams in the NFL, I see the Patriots the most as one of those teams where you don’t know which particular team is going to show up on the field — the former Superbowl champs, or the former Superbowl *chumps*, you know?

Playcalling hasn’t been amazing, either.

Yeah, I said it. Fuck the Dolphins. I got so sick of the pre-season hype that had them winning the Superbowl with Daunte Culpepper, of all people, who had possibly the worst season ever recorded by any human being playing sports last season. Culpepper may not even play, they may go with Harrington, and that’s fine with me, too, because he also sucks.

The betting line in Vegas has New England as ten point favorites — just recently pushed up from 9 1/2, if you’re bored and you check these things often like me.

The only disappointment for me is that I have Ronnie Brown on a fantasy team, but I’ll take a real-life shut-out of the Dolphins over a few fantasy points any day.

They will lose, mark my words.

Well, there we go! Another one bites the dust! The eminent Mr. Shah has proposed to the love of his life, Heidi, and ceremonies are due to commence next October. To all the friends of Mr. Shah, and to Mr. Shah himself, huzzah! I was wondering how long it would take you!

The few remaining members of the herd of bachelors — I invite you to a private session where we will, without threat of female reprisal, while we still can, pass gas (or make fart noises with our hands), tell crude and sexist jokes, eat legions of Hostess cupcakes dipped in beer, watch football, and generally deride married life until we skulk home to empty beds and suffer another night of existential anguish.

Aw, hell, it ain’t THAT bad.

Seriously: CONGRATULATIONS TO NIGAM SHAH AND HEIDI MATTHEWS!

I still get to be Supreme Galactic Overlord, though, that’s in all the contracts.

Okay. So we didn’t have any sort of massive implosion again with the Pats this week. This is welcome news. Running backs are actually running, and the Pats seem to have realized they should focus a little bit more on the running game. The defense played very well, and the team as a whole didn’t have that terrible soggy feeling they did last week.

Yeah, I’m a fair weather fan. Sorry. I still split my loyalties between the Patriots and the Raiders, although this year there certainly isn’t much of a decision involved in who to root for.

Strange Goings On have been reported to me from Named Sources, yet I cannot confirm or deny any allegations until I figure out what the hell is going on. This has nothing to do with sports, by the way. Well, I suppose it does. Everything has something to do with sports. Football in particular.

Oh, and big NYAH to the gambling community who had Cincinnati as 5 1/2 point favorites over the Patriots. We covered the spread on THAT one, ya wankers.

Yes. Listen carefully. Do you hear it? The wails of anguish and pain?

Those are people like me. People who had fantasy football teams that had high draft picks.

People who used that high draft pick to draft Shaun Alexander.

People who have now found out Shaun Alexander has succumbed to the Madden Curse and suffered a broken foot.

Oh, the humanity.

Okay. Let’s clear things up and call a spade a spade. The Patriots stunk against the Broncos. Why did they stink? I have no idea. They came out as flat as I’ve seen them come out in seven years and they never got any better. The offense, at least. The defense had a little fire, but not much. The offense hung their heads, shrugged onto the field, and played with no intensity or emotion. Brady’s stats may look good tomorrow, but he lead the charge of flatness — shrugged shoulders, passes so bad local pundits are speculating he might be injured, and zero passion. When a quarterback is that flat, it’s hard for an offense to rally around him. Never mind our rookie kicker’s missed kick. You want someone to make you feel bummed out in that game? Just watch Brady’s body language.

This was simply horrid. I’m a Patriots fan, but I’ll say it: the Broncos deserved that win, and guess what, they deserved to win even bigger, because on that side of the ball, players were playing with intensity. Tatum Bell alone had more testosterone in his veins than our entire offense.

What a sorry excuse for a game. The Pats better shape up, or they’re not making the playoffs, and nobody’s going to shed many tears over it, either.

Okay. Just found this lurking around. Eudora must have thrown this poor fellow in with my spam filters, and he deserves more than a two-month old post about fixing your firewall with a filed called sharedaccess.reg. And he deserves a response.

His name is Molinar and this is what he had to say:

Just passing by, but this post makes me shiver: if a program requires me to do this kind of stuff and open up my PC like this, it’s not getting into my ‘puter, to peer or not to peer.Seriously, applying semi-random changes to the registry? From a file found on the internet? and furthermore it requires your firewall to be disabled? Sheesh, hell no.Or maybe I read it wrong. I hope so.

Okay. First, I’ll clear a couple of things up. Sharedaccess.reg is, I believe, the original, clean version of your registry settings regarding your firewall. And you only are going to be using this if your firewall is malfunctioning. My particular version comes from a fairly legit Windows tweak site (read the hyperlink, follow it). If your firewall is up and working or up and not working by choice, then don’t download this file. But it saved me. That’s all I can say. I do not doubt your approach as a purist, Molinar. Purists make more money than me and end up managing networks much faster than I do, I’ll tell you that. But the simple answer to why I posted this is: I am not a purist. By default, if you’re getting a patch from my site, and I don’t say it’s from Microsoft, you better check it. A purist does that. I just fly by the seat of my pants. I get my desktop hijacked 8,000 times and have purists tell me over and over that there’s not solution except reformatting and reinstalling the OS and I just LOVE the problem and I sit there for hours until I have erased every trace of the hijack/trojan/worm/nasty thing.

Okay. That’s beside the point. The sharedacces.reg file works. I’ll vouch for it. Sure, tweaking your computer without really knowing what you’re doing is dangerous. But you can’t debate the fact that some legitimate Windows software can be more dangerous than a lot of innocous spyware out there. 🙂

So, point taken. Caveat Emptor with the file. It worked for me and it continues to work. But I like playing with fire — as an explicit example, I hardly ever use a firewall (go ahead, hack me, I’m not worth anything). This patch *will* restore your XP firewall to its original settings. But if you’re worried because it’s doing gnarly things to your registry, don’t worry, just look somewhere else. My one goal in sharing the file is to help people who fell into the same problem I did and needed a fix. So I took advice from ANOTHER board somewhere else that referenced this and decided to share it. I take no responsibility if it turns your powerful high-end PC into a toaster with a LCD screen.

Here’s a topic that’s always bugged me. Read all about different people’s takes on cleaning their LCD screens over at this fellow’s blog. Personally, I’ve broken the golden rule and used Windex and paper towels before, but generally I, myself, take a damp cotton rag, wipe the screen down as best as I can, and dry it with a piece of flannel or a dry cotton rag.

Frankly, for all the outcry against Windex and paper towels, I’m guessing that unless you want your LCD monitor to outlast you, it’s not the end of the world to use them. But that’s just my opinion with no disclaimers. Windex has ammonia in it, and ammonia is some nasty stuff.

Okay. It’s finally here. The first update for Madden 2007 rosters. Now, I don’t know where you go to get it for a PC version, but those of us with consoles — just log in with the network adapter and it will download them automatically. Be sure to save.

There are still some problems, like, say, Deion Branch is still starting for the Patriots, but at least it’s better. Trust me. Would I lie to you?