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Parents, are you concerned that your child
may be a 3v1L h4X0r? Then watch out for the warning
signs. They include wanting to not use AOHell, spending more than 30 minutes
on the computer, or even using "Lunix". We must protect the children!
Quicktime recently celebrated it's
10th
Anniversary of bringing multimedia to the home computer. Yes, it was the
father of video on the PC, but even ten years after its' creation, there STILL
isn't a Linux client. Come on Apple, get with the program! Other than that
though, you gotta hand it to Apple for creating such a marvalous piece of
software so long ago.
Remember those new top level domain names that were created way back when? Well
.museum has gone live. Check out that site
for the full listing of all the .museum names that have been registered, and
contemplate how entirely useless that TLD is. A .sucks or .kids would have been
a lot better. Course .com is here to stay as the prefered TLD though, at least
in the minds of the average person. Too bad in my case .com was already
taken....
Mommy Mommy! I wanna be a Pikmin
when I grow up! I wonder how much they got paid.
Do you believe in freedom? You may be aiding
terrorists then by defending it. Or at least that's what Ashcroft says.
Apparently being able to speak an opinion about something is Un-American now.
What a country.
Tom's Hardware has a good article
about consoles from the 2600 to the Gamecube/XBox. Doesn't go into much detail,
but it's an interesting read none-the-less.
Speaking of gaming, Wired has a story about gaming
addiction. I don't have it (Internet addiction is a whole other story
though....) but I knew a kid who played EverQuest every waking hour he could. I
wonder though if a kid got hooked on Math Blasters, if that wouldn't be a good thing.
KMPG. Oops, not supposed to link
there. They sent out a letter to a webmaster
who linked to them, telling him he couldn't do that. Of course, if every company
did that, the web as we know it would not, could not, exist. Corporate legalieze
is funny.
8. When your parents ask about grades, you sing the Cookie Monster song "C is
for cookie, that's good enough for me."
Yes, it's that time of the year: College Finals Week. I only have two for the
first semester of my Freshman year, Chemistry and Chemistry Lab. Everythign else
either didn't have a final, or I didn't have to take it since I had high enough
grades. But for all those students trying to make up for a semester of
laziness, remember that caffeine is your
friend.
Own and still use Windows 95? As of November 30th, it is no longer supported by
Microsoft. It reached the end of it's lifecycle, and while MS still can charge
people for buying Win95, it will no longer release any updates for it. Windows
98/SE is scheduled to be executed on June 30, 2003.
Wanna be the most 133t person on your block? Then you gotta get the binary watch.
Everything else is going to 1's and 0's, so why not telling time? Interesting
idea, but I don't think I'd want one.
Well I'm now back at home for my month long Christmas break. I think I miss
college already. Moving the computer back home also ruined my 9 day, 6 hour
uptime I was working on.
Of course there is fun stuff to do at home too. Like put stuff in
microwaves. Sure everyone has done tinfoil, but a lightbulb? Soap? The
amazing properties of a toothpick? Good stuff for the michevious little kid in
us all.
The infamous Tourist Guy has been found
at last. It's a man from Budapest named Peter
Guzli. So now the greatest internet phenomena since All Your Base Are Belong
To Us has an originator. Anyone have any good guesses on the next net
fad?
CNN has a good section about the 100th Nobel Awards, including
descriptions of all the awards won. I wouldnt' mind winning one of those
someday.
Yet another huge gaping hole has been found in Internet Explorer. Do they
ever stop coming in? This one lets a malicious website execute
anything it wants by tricking a user to think it's just a simple txt file or
something. And the scary thing is that Microsoft has known about this
vulnerability since November 19th but thanks
to "Security through Obscurity" it hasnt' been announced to the general public
until now. Who knows what other holes in IE or Windows Microsoft
isn't announcing? Anyways, until a patch is released, the only way to be
safe is either to stop using IE or else disallow all file downloads. I
hear Netscape isn't too bad...
Google now has 20 years of Usenet posts on it's servers, and it has compilied a
list of
noteworthy posts. Some of the more interesting ones are Linus's "pet project" which would eventually turn into Linux, and the first Usenet post from an AOL user. Yes, back in the day AOL users couldn't connect to
the internet as a whole, but had to stay in their own little AOL universe. If
only that could still be true.
Well I spent all today backing up my D: drive, because according to Windows
Setup, it has a jiggillion errors and won't let me install Windows until they're
all fixed. It took 18 700MB CD's, and a few hours, but it's now all safe and
sound on some CDR's.
I think one of my hard drives is fixing to be going to that big hard drive in
the sky. And it's the one I least want to fail too, where I have all my mp3's
and files and such. But everytime I run scandisk on it, Windows finds a bunch of
weird errors and fixes them, then next time I just get more errors. Not to
mention at the end of one scandisk it found like 2,000 surface errors and then
told me to backup everything because the drive would fail fairly soon. So I've
been looking up prices on new hard drives, and have been pleasantely suprised.
For $20 less than what I paid for my 20 GB hard drive 2 years ago, I can get an
80 GB hard drive. That's less than .0018 cents per megabyte. Back in the day
(around 1994 when we got a first computer) it was $1 a megabyte. How times have
changed.
Also while reinstalling stuff after reinstalling Windows, I discovered that Trillian .70 has finally been released. I highly
recommend that everyone get it, because it is THE best IM client on Windows. It
supports AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, and even IRC. And now has file transfer support,
the one thing missing from previous versions. And it lets you rename contacts,
so instead of "supergooeyboy" or something you can just see "Bob". So go check
it out, you'll love it.
Some scientists in Britian have discovered a new
key component in Quantum encryption. With quantum encryption, codes will be
uncrackable, and the reciever will be able to tell if the code was intercepted
between the sender and reciever, based on the laws of quantum mechanics. Of
course, I'm not so sure how happy the government will be about this technology
(at least for the public, I'm sure the military will love it for themselves),
but it certaintly is interesting.
I hate this mouse!
The first webpage I ever created, "The Bad Site Page", is now forever gone. It
was hosted on the now defunct Xoom.com, which was bought out by NBCi. For a while though my account still worked, and
I would put mp3 files on there for my friends. But alas, I checked it again
today on a whim and it looks like it is no longer up. I created that page way
back on February 6, 1999, and it grew and changed into what you're seeing now.
The page was really funny too, as I talked about how utterly useless and
craptacular my site was. I could have sworn I
backed up the page somewhere, but I can't seem to find it. Rest in peace my dear
old webpage.
Are you insane?. I lasted about 2
seconds.
I want this job (which is no longer up, and I don't even
remember what it was). Playing and hacking videogames for a living, does it get
any better?
Wired has a very interesting article on linking Autism to
Geekdom. Apparently there are higher than normal levels of autistic children
in Silicon Valley, which may be the result of slightly autistic adults marrying
other slightly autistic adults. For the ability to focus in on code, or any
other kind of technical object, is what makes a good code monkey, which Silicon
attracts. And mild austics would excell at being able to do that. It's been said
that "It seems that for success in science and art, a dash of autism is
essential." by the man who discovered the disorder. Could some of the best
coders today have a touch of autism? Doesn't seem that outlandish to me.
Anyways, it brings up a lot of interesting ideas and theories.
The guys who make Animal Crackers are going to introduce an new animal for it's
100th anniversary. So I'm going to suggest voting for the
penguin, in honor of the Linux mascot Tux.
It's the coolest choice anywho.
Adcritic.com, the place where you could
download videos of commercials, is no more. They ran out of funding and couldn't
pay for the bandwith anymore. Sure it may seem stupid to want to watch
commercials, but there are actually some pretty interesting and entertaining ads
out there. The Superbowl ads were the best part of the site. It was nice while
it lasted anyways.
Re-live a Year of Linux.
Looking back it's amazing how much has changed and evolved over the course of
2001. The 2.4 Linux kernel isnt' even a year old.
2,509 spams a year. That's the national
average. That's amazing amount of time, bandwidth and storage space lost
each year to junk mail. And it's only expected to get worse.
Gotta love MIT. In celebration of the Lord of the Rings opening today, they put
a ring around
the Great Dome of MIT. It's just one more of the many hacks that MIT students have done through out
the years.
Went and saw Lord of the Rings this
afternoon, and I must say it's a really good movie. Even though I don't like the
genre (fantasy and wizards and stuff) I still throughly enjoyed the
movie.
Two pieces of Windows news today. One is a new worm to look
out for. The second, and much more shocking one, is a Huge security
hole discovered in Windows XP and that also affects Windows ME and some
Windows 98 computers. Due to some buffer overflows in how Windows XP treats
raw sockets, crackers could take control of your computer and do whatever
they wanted to do with it. The truly shocking (or non-shocking if you know how
MS works) is that this hole was discovered 5 weeks ago, but Microsoft only made
it public today. Security through obscurity at it's best, which relies on
hopeing (praying?) that no one else discovers the hole before MS announces it.
Because millions of people are out there unprotected and they have no idea that
they're vulnerable. So if you're one of those affected, get the security patch as soon as possible.
Had a busy weekend this week. Went to Pleasure Island on Friday, then SeaWorld
Saturday, played some DDR 4th and 5th Mix Saturday evening at Orlando, and then
went bowling late Saturday/early Sunday. Keeps me almost as busy as
college.
The much discussed Time Person of the Year was revealed today as New York Mayor
Rudy Giuliani. Most of the controversy centered on the possibility of naming
Osama bin
Laden as Person of the Year, since despite what the general public believes,
it is not a civic award, but a designation of the person who had the greatest
influence that particular year. And few could argue that bin Laden did not have
a very big influence. However most people think that it has to go to a "good"
person, hence threats of cancelled subscriptions.
Google has a very interesting end of the year
"special" on search
terms for events throughout the year. The parallels between news events and
search terms is amazing. One thing that suprised me though was the huge increase
in searchs for "cnn" after the 9-11 attacks. Do people not relieze that typing
in cnn.com takes them to CNN? Do they really have to go to a search engine to
find the homepage for CNN? Apparently so.
A new type of squid has been reported, that lives about 3 miles below the surface of the
ocean. What's unique about this one though is that it has 10 spidery long
appendages that are 20 feet long. Who knows what else is under the sea as
well.
Merry Christmas!!
Hope it was a good one, like mine was. I got the main stuff I wanted, which was
mainly a RioVolt
mp3-cd player. Also got some gift certificates to Bennigan's, a Gamecube controller, some candy,
and other various small gifts. My brother got a Gamecube, Super Smash Bros
Melee, and bought Waverace Blue Storm. So it's been a busy time of listening to
music and playing lots and lots of videogames.
A website set up to study what makes people laugh has found some interesting trends 3 months into
the project. What men and women find funny are different, and where you are from
also affects what strikes someone as humourous.
And as a special gift to my readers, the mp3 list
is now updated. Ok ok, so it's a really bad gift, but YOU WILL LIKE IT!
A friend of mine (Hi Kathryn!) found a site I'd been looking for forever: AwayMessages.com. It has away messages for
every sort of situation you might need. Quite the handy little site
indeed.
The AP put out an interesting story on the commercialization of the net. Just 14 companies control 60% of web surfers time as of March
2001, and it's only going to get smaller. It also talks about how slowly but
surely corporations have learned to strong arm their way onto the net, and to
grab ahold of it with lawyers and money. No wonder so many yearn for the days
when the net was still smallish and before it was over run by giant
coporations.
Check out the pictures
of a Great White shark jumping out of the water. Absolutly amazing!
The ultimate error page.
If only real Internet Explorer error messages were as funny.
Nintendo Classics is a neat site I
recently discovered, that has a bunch of flash movies of old Nintendo games,
with a twist. My personal favorite is one where Bowser finally figures out a
good way to defeat
Mario.
Tomorrow is New Years Eve, and I'll be at Epcot for the second year in a row.
Gotta go to bed early tonight to get up in time to get into Epcot, and then the
park is open till 1 AM. Last year I had a blast, so I'm hoping this year will be
the same. Happy New Years everyone!
Hope everyone has a Happy, and safe, New Years Eve.
And finally, for some good trivia, here is the Midnights
of countries across the world. So celebrate New Years 24 times today!
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