I started off with just 404TechSupport. It worked well as I was very tech focused in my writings. Next, I spun off TechNoose. Its purpose was to be the repository for all of the tech news related things I was previously posting to 404TS. Instead, I wanted to focus on the niche and use a different theme that supported more frequent postings. I thought TechNoose was a very successful design. I liked the theme, I liked my arrangement, and the logo I created. It all worked very well. Unfortunately, I ran out of time to update it. Taking classes, working full-time, keeping up with 404TS, and personal life all became higher priorities. Thus, I decided to sell off TechNoose. The sale went well enough and it is off my plate.

At some point within the life of TechNoose, I also launched CriticIL. The plan was for it to be a site where I could review restaurants and other events in the area, or Illinois, hence the name. That kind of flopped. I liked the theme but it wasn’t something I was passionate about and just having another website to manage did not sound fun.

Since then, I have spun up Assume Awesome. This site has kind of the same purpose as TechNoose. Instead of posting a bunch of things here to Jason Off The Clock, they will get posted over to Assume Awesome. Its growth is slow but it spikes every once in a while.

So, the overall plan is to post more meaningful, personal things to JasonOTC. Reviews and such from CriticIL will land here as well. Entertaining, awesome things on the web will be on Assume Awesome and 404 Tech Support will continue to post technology-related articles while picking up some of the more ‘news’ posts that would have gone to TechNoose.

JasonOTC – Personal posts, rants, reviews, and whatever.

404 Tech Support – Computer support articles

Assume Awesome – Cool videos, products, pictures, and other things found on the web. Weekly Wikipedia has also moved here.

As you can tell from my post history, since moving things from here to Assume Awesome, I haven’t had a whole lot of things to post. Perhaps that will change but if not, it will be here when I need it.

Date it’s released in theaters – Title – DVD or theater-worthy - Description

3/22 - Olympus has Fallen - Theater? - It looks like a classic action film. Die Hard done right.

3/28 – G.I. Joe: Retaliation – DVD - It’s a sequel to The Rise of Cobra, which was so-so and this looks like more action.

4/5 – The Company You Keep – DVD - A thriller around a Weather Underground activist whose identity has been found out.

4/12 – 42 – DVD - The story of Jackie Robinson. Looks good but I’ll probably wait until it’s on DVD.

4/19 – Oblivion – DVD - Tom Cruise in one of the few “Alien war ravaged the Earth”-themed movies this year.

4/26 – Pain & Gain – DVD - Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson in this Michael Bay directed film about bodybuilders in an extortion ring.

5/3 – Iron Man 3 – Theater – The third in the awesome series and Avengers. He gets Extremis and fights Mandarin.

5/17 – Star Trek Into Darkness – Theater – The first of the Star Trek movies by JJ Abrams blew me away.

5/24 – The Hangover Part III – DVD – The first two were hilarious, pop culture hits. I can’t miss the last one.

5/31 – Now You See Me – DVD – FBI versus bank robbing illusionists. Count me in!

5/31  - The Purge – DVD – Sounds interesting enough. A family must protect themselves during a 12-hour government-sanctioned free-for-all thanks to prison overcrowding.

6/7 – After Earth – DVD – Will Smith and son on Earth 1000 years after everybody else left. Seems like sink or swim potential.

6/14 – Man of Steel – Theater – The next Superman movie with Zack Snyder as director. This could be what launches a Justice League movie series for DC.

6/21 – Monsters University – Theater – A prequel to Pixar’s Monsters Inc. that shows where it all began. Pixar is going the extra mile to make it belieavable…

6/21 – World War Z – Theater – Brad Pitt as UN employee trying to stop the Zombie pandemic.

6/28 – The Heat – DVD – Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy play FBI agent and Boston cop that are partnered up.

6/28 – White House Down – DVD – Channing Tatum in the same premise as Olympus Has Fallen.

7/3 – The Lone Ranger – DVD – The classic Lone Ranger comes back from Disney.

7/3 – Despicable Me 2 – DVD – The sequel to the previous Dreamworks Animation.

7/12 – Pacific Rim – DVD – Giant mechs face off against aliens.

7/12 – Grown Ups 2 – DVD – The sequel to Adam Sandler and other comedians reunion film.

7/19 – R.I.P.D. – DVD – Ryan Reynolds didn’t do so swell as space police Green Lantern. We’ll see if he’s better as an undead cop.

7/26 – The Wolverine – Theater? – The spin-off from the X-men just keeps going. First Class recovered from Last Stand’s flop. Will The Wolverine redeem Origins?

8/2 – 300: Rise of an Empire – DVD – A prequel to 300 which was action-packed and cinematically pleasing.

8/9 – Elysium – DVD – Matt Damon in another ruined-Earth film.

8/9 – Planes – DVD – Pixars sequel to Cars and Cars 2 takes to the skies. Cars 2 was a bit dull but perhaps Planes will be a step in the right direction.

8/16 – Kick-Ass 2 – DVD – Kick-Ass came in to bring superheroes to normal people. Will the sequel improve its legacy or ruin it? Jim Carrey’s role says improve.

9/27 – The Tomb – DVD – Sylvester Stallone in a Prison Break-themed movie.

10/4 – Gravity – DVD – Astronauts attempt to return to Earth after debris hits the shuttle.

11/1 – Ender’s Game – DVD – Based on Orson Scott Card’s novel, a gifted child is prepared for future invasion after, you guessed it, horrific alien war.

11/8 – About Time – DVD – Time Traveler’s Wife meets Groundhogs day, maybe?

11/8 – Thor: The Dark World – Theater – Thor was my least favorite of the movies leading to Avengers (not counting Ed Norton’s Hulk) but it’s still an ok ride.

11/22 – The Hunger Games: Catching Fire – Theater – I read the first book and liked the first movie. Will I read the second book in time?

12/13 – The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug – DVD – I read the book but didn’t see An Unexpected Journey and didn’t hear that much good about it.

12/25 – Jack Ryan – DVD – Another Tom Clancy novel turned into a movie. I’ve liked some so we’ll see how this turns out.

12/25 – 47 Ronin – DVD – A band of samurai set out to avenge their master in the 18th century with Keanu Reeves.

12/25 – The Secret Life of Walter Mitty – DVD – I liked the story when I read it in high school English class. We can see how it translates to film.

Unknown – Jobs – The story of Steve Jobs with Ashton Kutcher was delayed from April 19th for more time to advertise the film.

Project MKUltra, or MK-Ultra, was a covert, illegal human research program into behavioral modification run by the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Office of Scientific Intelligence. The program began in the early 1950s, was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967 and finally halted in 1973. It controversially used unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens as its test subjects. MKUltra involved the use of many methodologies to manipulate people’s individual mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.

The research was undertaken at 80 institutions, including 44 colleges and universities, as well as hospitals, prisons and pharmaceutical companies. The CIA would operate through these institutions using front organizations, although sometimes top officials at these institutions would be aware of the CIA’s involvement. MKUltra was allocated 6 percent of total CIA funds.

Project MKUltra on WIkipedia.

The experiments include: the deliberate infection of people with deadly or debilitating diseases, exposure of people to biological and chemical weapons, human radiation experiments, injection of people with toxic and radioactive chemicals, surgical experiments, interrogation/torture experiments, tests involving mind-altering substances, and a wide variety of others. Many of these tests were performed on children, the sick, and mentally disabled individuals, often under the guise of “medical treatment”. In many of the studies, a large portion of the subjects were poor, racial minorities or prisoners.

Funding for many of the experiments was provided by United States government, especially the Central Intelligence Agency, United States military and federal or military corporations. The human research programs were usually highly secretive, and in many cases information about them was not released until many years after the studies had been performed.

Unethical human experimentation in the United States on Wikipedia.

Queueing theory is the mathematical study of waiting lines, or queues. The theory enables mathematical analysis of several related processes, including arriving at the (back of the) queue, waiting in the queue (essentially a storage process), and being served at the front of the queue. The theory permits the derivation and calculation of several performance measures including the average waiting time in the queue or the system, the expected number waiting or receiving service, and the probability of encountering the system in certain states, such as empty, full, having an available server or having to wait a certain time to be served.

Queueing theory has applications in diverse fields, including telecommunications, traffic engineering, computing and the design of factories, shops, offices and hospitals.

Queueing theory on Wikipedia.

In filmmaking, the 180° rule is a basic guideline regarding the on-screen spatial relationship between a character and another character or object within a scene. An imaginary line called the axis connects the characters and by keeping the camera on one side of this axis for every shot in the scene, the first character will always be frame right of the second character, who is then always frame left of the first. If the camera passes over the axis, it is called crossing the line or jumping the line.

180 degree rule on Wikipedia.

The Gesundheit Radio, first seen in 1972, was engineered to sneeze, that is blow out dust, once every six months in order to keep things running clean and cool. Way back in 1972, this Gesundheit Radio was created by an experimental research group at Texas Instruments.

Despite the name, the Gesundheit Radio was not made in Germany. It was designed by the Attenborough Design Group – active in the 1970s and 1980s – an experimental section within Texas Instruments. Their first product was the 1972 Gesundheit Radio. Twice a year, the case would lean back, opening up its mechanical maw and use internal bellows to blow out the accumulated dust with the intent of protect early microprocessors from dust. This would ensure a longer life for the device, a feature at odds with today’s gadgets which are engineered to fail and be replaced in a relatively short time.

Users had the manual option of overriding the bi-annual sneeze, with a SNZ button being added for those days when you really don’t have time to give the feather duster a work-out.

Gesundheit radio on Wikipedia.

Bechtel Corporation (Bechtel Group) is the largest construction and engineering company in the United States, ranking as the 5th-largest privately owned company in the U.S. Its headquarters are in the Financial District of San Francisco. As of 2010, Bechtel had $30.8 billion in revenue and employed 49,000 workers on projects in nearly 50 countries.
Bechtel participated in the building of Hoover Dam in the 1930s. It has also had involvement in a number of other high profile construction engineering projects: numerous power projects such as refineries and nuclear power plants; transportation projects including the Channel Tunnel, the BART system, King Fahd International Airport in Dammam (the largest Airport in the world by land area), Hong Kong International Airport and the Big Dig; and other projects such as the Kingdom Centre and Tower in Saudi Arabia, Jubail Industrial City, the rebuilding of the civil infrastructure of Iraq funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the hauling and installing of more than 35,000 trailers and mobile homes for Hurricane Katrina victims in Mississippi.

The Bechtel family has owned Bechtel since incorporating the company in 1945. Bechtel’s size, its political clout, and its penchant for privacy have made it a constant subject of scrutiny for journalists and politicians since the 1930s. Bechtel owns and operates power plants, oil refineries, water systems, and airports in several countries including the United States, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.

Bechtel Corporation on Wikipedia.

In medicine, a nocebo reaction or response refers to harmful, unpleasant, or undesirable effects a subject manifests after receiving an inert dummy drug or placebo. Nocebo responses are not chemically generated and are due only to the subject’s pessimistic belief and expectation that the inert drug will produce negative consequences.

In these cases, there is no “real” drug involved, but the actual negative consequences of the administration of the inert drug, which may be physiological, behavioural, emotional, and/or cognitive, are nonetheless real.

Nocebo on Wikipedia.