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One more month has passed.
I've just found the coolest online radio station. It's called Digitally
Imported and it has some of the best trance I've ever heard. It also has some cool Euro Dance stuff too. Check it
out if you're into that kind of stuff. And on that note, the online radio page was
updated with it.
Slashdot has released the first part of a book they are releasing called Voices From The Hellmouth. It's a facinating
trip into the depths of the world of the geeks, nerds, and other social outcasts. I can identify with a lot of what is
said in those comments, and I definitly agree with a lot of the criticism of the media. Mass media is one of the worst
things this country has.
Today was interesting. I went to the Tampa Cybershow where they had some awesome
Quake 3 LAN play. I was the second best person there suprisingly. They also had some nifty goggles that you put over
your head to simulate a TV screen. And I got to the the PS2 up close with some 8 player Madden. I still say it's
comparable to the DC's graphics, especially when you are "really" playing, and not in the replay mode.
And then Friday night I was at Gameworks again playing Dance Dance Revolution. Some people actually
did decide to start trying the game out, maybe about 5 or so, which is more than
the 1 there is usually is.
George
Bush is supposed to be in Tampa tomorrow at the Bucs football stadium, so I
might try and get out there to see him. The odds aren't looking good though. I
hope he wins though in the presidential election Tuesday.
And finally,
Mandrakeforum.com had some cool
things you can do with your Keyboard LCD
lights.
Tomorrow is election day! Now if only I could vote for Bush..... Also
to help you out, is a chart of technology issues that each of the
canidates filled out. And finally, since I live in Tampa, FL, we are considered to be the ultimate swing section of the
state, and the way Tampa votes could decide the election. So my parent's vote is going to count a whole lot.
Tomorrow is also the day Shenmue and Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 come out for the Dreamcast. I'm just
going to be picking up THPS2, but Shenmue looks amazing too. It's almost sad how little recognition it's getting in the
general public, considering some people are calling it the greatest game ever created.
And finally, read Heart of Darkness
by Joesph Conrad, like I'm doing right now in English. We are picking apart the book, so I'm going to be taking a ton of
notes on all the literary techniques used in it. Whatever happened to reading for fun?
Heh, it's almost like i"m updating this every 2 days now instead of everyday.
For all my international visitors, or for people who never watch the news, listen to the radio, or read the newspaper,
the United States presidential election results STILL aren't known. 24 hours after the polls in Florida (the
state I live in), they are recounting votes to figure out who won. Due to the way our electoral process is set up, it
has ened up that whoever gets the majority of votes in Florida wins the US election. The "unofficial" count puts Bush up by about 1,700 votes out of 3 million cast.
However they are currently recounting, and there are still a couple of votes in the mail that were mailed in from US
citizens located in foreign countries. The recount is supposed to be done by Thursday (Nov 9) evening, so hopefully
we'll know who won the election by then. However if it's still super close, the votes coming in from foreign countries
don't have to be in till Nov 17th, so it might be 9 more days before we know who won.
The other interesting aspects of this is that Gore won the US
popular vote, meaning that out of all the votes cast he got more than Bush did, by about 200,000 votes. But due to our electoral college system, the
popular vote doesn't matter one little bit. Hopefully the attention brought to this will lead to the electoral college
being abolished, so that the American
people can directly elect our president. The other twists in Florida is the
usual cases of missing/tampered/fixed ballot boxes that you find when a race is close, but also in Palm Beach county,
the way the ballot was set up was semi-confusing to the old people who live there, so apparently quite a few of them
accidently voted for Buchanen instead of Gore. However as far as I've heard, there isn't much that can be done about it,
although some citizens have brought a lawsuit against the electoral supervisor about it.
For being the first presidential election I paid close attention to, this is one exciting election. I hope Bush can pull
it off.
The Florida vote is still being counted with a recount. At the time that I'm posting this (8:15 PM Eastern), Bush's lead
is only 225 votes, with 2 counties still left to return results, according to the Associated Press. So it's
INCREDIBLY close considering that almost 6 million votes were cast in Florida. This is just amazing.
Linux 2.4 is expected to be released in December. I'm
looking foward to it.
The Florida ballots were fixed! The ballots you saw in the newspapers and online are not the ballots given to the people
of Palm Beach county, where there is current disagreement going on. I have
managed to acquire the two different (yes, 2 different kinds, in order to confuse further) ballots through an email, and
I have posted them to my website. The First Ballot and
the Second
Ballot. As you can plainly see, the ballots given to the people in that
county were confusing and devious.
In other news, I'm off to Islands of
Adventure tomorrow. I'm gonna play some Dance Dance Revolution, and ride some of
the rides again. It's my favorite theme park in Florida, and since i haven't
been in about a month and a half, I figure it's time to get over there before my
season pass expires.
And I forgot to mention I bought Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2
for the Dreamcast yesterday. It's one awesome game. I loved the original THPS,
and this one is even better. I highly suggest any DC owner pick up this game,
along with Shenmue.
Wow, Islands of Adventure had a Dance Dance Revolution USA Mix, so I played that most the time I was there. It's so much
better than the old 1.5 mix, as it's got a ton more songs and the way the difficulty level works makes more sense in
this one. It also seems a lot easier than the old 1.5 mix, as I passed just about everything, and got A's on
performances that would have given me D's and C's on the old mix. Suposedly the USA mix is easier and cheaper to get
than the old mix, so maybe you'll see it in an arcade near you in the future.
Also at IOA, they were having the NBC Soap FanFest for all of their soap
opera fans. So not only was there soap opera stars signing autographs in several locations throughout the park, but
there was also a giant 6-ton bar of soap on display. This bar was probally about 5 feet tall, and 6 feet wide if I had
to guess. All I know is that it was really really big.
Netscape 6 has finally been released. It's pretty cool, and
a giant leap over Netscape 4.x. Some of the neat new features are skinability, integrated AIM, "My
Sidebar" (yes, some people actually do like it amazingly enough), best web standards support of any browser, and it's
pretty darn customizable. Even if you hated Netscape 4.x, you should try out this latest version of Netscape since it's
vastily different than the old Netscape.
Here's a cool 3-D Maze made out of Java to play on your
browser. It's not really that difficult to complete, but it's a cool concept none-the-less.
And finally, thanks to the Weather Channel you can find out what the weather is
like on Mars. So if you're planning a trip there anytime soon,
I suggest you pack warmly : )
Today I found out my English teacher is a serious diver, who has gone diving all over the world. Her husband also wrote
a book about sponges, and so she is also an expert at that too. Teachers can be amazing at times.
It looks like good news for me in regards to Calculus. Due to our class having
trouble with Calc, my teacher was considering totally dropping BC Calculus and
putting us in AB Calculus. BC is the harder of the two, and covers more stuff. I
personally wanted to stay in BC since I feel like I can handle it, it's really
helpful for my math competitions, and I want the AP credits (4 extra hours).
Plus I love math, so the more I learn the better : ). Today he said he was going
to split the class in two, so that the new AB kids would just review over the
stuff we've already learned (since we learned everything required for the AB
kids this semester already), and would teach the 5 of us still in BC. Then at
the semester break, he'd try to work our schedules to get us all in one class by
ourselves for the second semester. I'm not sure how it's going to be done, as
our schedules are really tight, but I hope he can do it.
Netscape has
set up their theme park
to download skins for Netscape 6. They got some cool ones there, and once people
start making their own, it should get interesting.
Computer Specs page is updated because we added a 45 GB hard drive to the new
computer. And we bought a router to hook up both computers to the internet.
There is a metor shower this weekend
over North America, so you might want to check that out. I'm up early anyways, so I'm going to try and see it.
I'm going to be over at Disney all tomorrow showing my cousins around. So don't expect an update.
Unfortuanatly it's was foggy this morning, and it's going to be cloudy tonight, so I won't be able to watch the metor
shower that I told you about yesterday. Too bad we can't control the weather.
We started watching Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in government today, and the movie seems pretty cool. Rent it tonight!
Disney was pretty cool. They started their HUGE Christmas light display
at MGM for a sneak preview for annual pass holders. And they also let us bring
one guest in for each ticket holder, so we got our relatives in to see it too.
And they gave us all you could drink/eat hot chocolate and cookies. Disney sure
knows how to treat its guests. As for the lights, they have set up some 5
million lights to totally decorate every square inch of everything in MGM's
backlot. They have a bunch of houses back there for use as props in TV shows.
But right now they let people walk through the street looking at the
lights.
The election mess in Florida is still going on. Bush has unofficially
won, since with a recount and with all the ballots in, he leads by 930 votes.
However Gore is trying to make the state accept manual recounts in it's
reporting. I personally trust an unbiased machine, then biased, mistake prone
humans, and so I'm against this hand recount. The whole thing will be decided
Mondy when a court rules if Florida has to accept the hand recounted votes or
not. If not, then Bush wins. If they have to include those, then it could be
another week before they get everything counted a new tally is figured out.
Regardless of who wins, they won't be able to get hardly anything done in office
anyway.
ICANN, the organization
created to help regulate internet names, has issued 7 new domain name suffixs.
You can find all 7 of them in this CN
N article. However according to Wired, these domains names will have special
restrictions like .biz requiring a real business, and it will cost more than
a dotcom name. I personally liked dotdot :)
Ah, a 5 day weekend. Woo Hoo!
And to use this 5 day weekend productivly, I'm going to be reformating and totally redoing my computer. My parents
finally have everything set up on our new computer, so this old computer is now officially mine to play around with. I
have 40 GB of hard drive space to put stuff in, and at the moment I'm trying to figure out how to best partition it all.
I plan on installing 4 operating systems: Linux, Windows ME, FreeBSD, and BeOS. FreeBSD 4.2 was just released today, so I have good timing. As I
said, I"m still planing out the partitions, and then I have to make sure I save everything I want off the old hard
drives before I totally wipe them clean. Hopefully I can get all 4 OS's working before my long vacation time is
up.
And not only do I have a lot of computer stuff to do this weekend, I also have to read Dante's Inferno, and
write a 5 page essay on Texas vs.
Johnson (about flag burning). Plus I need to be studying for my SAT II test on Chemistry. I'm going to be
busy.
Linus Torvald, creater of Linux, had a baby girl, Celeste Amanda Torvalds, last night, at 8:25pm pacific
time. She weighs 7lbs 5 oz. Yea Linus!
I installed the free Personal Edition of BeOS last night since it doesn't require repartitioning. It's pretty cool, and
extremelly easy to set up. I dont' see myself using it too often as so far I can't find an IRC client for it, but the
browser and mp3 player are neat. I suggest downloading it since it's only 44 MB and doesn't harm anything on your
computer.
Today I baked the turkey and the pies. You've never experianced cooking until you've massaged a turkey with
butter. Fun fun fun! : )
New must have song of the moment is Robin Fox - I See Stars
HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
I ate way too much today, but that's OK. The turkey I made was really good, as was the pumpkin pies I made. Plus they
had a lot of good movies on today, so I've been watching those all afternoon. I hope your Thanksgiving was good too.
Anyone living in the Tampa area please diregard the next few sentences....
Best Buy is running some great specials for tomorrow's big shopping day. Stuff like
$9.99 CD's, free USB videocameras for the computer, free CDR's, $9.99 portable CD players, and $14.99 Dreamcast games. I
highly suggest you check the Best Buy flyer in todays paper for some specials that you'll like. Just be sure to get
there really early.
Mp3 list is updated, as is the long neglected linux
journal.
So much homework, so little time. I procrastinate way too much.
I went to Disney again yesterday to show my cousins around Epcot. It was pretty fun, except that it was also sorta
crowded. I also got to eat super over-priced Mexican food in "Mexico", which was definitly not worth the $20 it
cost.
The Xerox PARC people (the same who brought us the GUI) were at it again over the summer, this time hacking Microsoft's ActiMates Barney. Now you can have Barney say
Super-dee-duper whenever a print job is done. : )
I have now installed Linux on the SCSI drive, so I'm starting totally fresh with it.
The election mess is still going on unfortunatly. Bush is the certified winner of
Florida, but Gore is contesting the results to force some more hand recounts. I think it should be
over now, since Gore was "officially" lost, but now it's still got to go through the courts. I have
an even lower respect for Gore now than I did before. Of course, the Republicans aren't all
that great either with their lawsuits.
Tampa finally has a good rock station. Before
all there was, was 98Rock which is absolutly
terrible. But now that a good one has finally come to Tampa, my prayers have
been answered. The only problem is that the reception I get on my radio is
horrendous, all I get is static. The reception in the car is better, but still
not particulary good. But it's better than listening to that crap known as
98Rock.
The screenshots page has been updated.
If you view this before 6, you can listen to one of the last Smashing Pumpkins show via internet
streaming. This is a great chance to hear that great band play one last time live.
And this is a freaky story about four-color (tetrachromat)
vision. A very interesting read. I've always wondered what the world would be like if we could
see more colors, and these people have that oppurtunity.
Hopefully you caught the awesome Smashing Pumpkins concert last night. I had to go to bed before it
was all over with, but the stuff I heard was incredible. It'll be a sad sad day on Decemeber 2nd
when SP plays their last concert ever.
Tomorrow is Physics Day, so all the people in Physics classes are going to Busch Gardens tomorrow. It
should be a lot of fun like it was last year. It sure is nice living next to a great theme
park.
NASA is launching a space shuttle
tonight to dock with the International Space Station. I'm should be able to see it from Tampa, so
I'll be watching outside at 10:06 PM Eastern tonight.
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