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How come things that happened back in 1997 only seem like they happened 2 years ago? I'm getting old... and I'm
just entering my 20's....
Want to place a long term bet that something will happen? $50 and at least a $200 wager and then you can.
Very interesting idea, and very interesting bets. As for my predictions, I think that a computer will pass the Turning test by
2029. The others I'm not so sure about, but it will be interesting to see how they turn out.
Think shaving with a pink razor isn't manly? Think Again.
Add some tin foil wings, plastic army men, fake blood, googly eyes, and write some manly phrases on it with a black marker, and
it is no longer some prissy girly girl razor, it is DESTRUCTO: DESTORYER OF HAIR razor. Razor companies really do take advantage of us
though, there is no way razor blade replacements cost $17 to make. The only solution is to boycott shaving! Let your hair run free!
Don't take up a razo... er wait, ::writes in special exemption for females:: But MEN, let your beards grow! Er wait, me..
with a beard... ok, nevermind. ::hands over $17::
And now for some interesting geek stuff. Here's how to implement a
low bandwidth DoS attack by
exploiting the complexity of data structures used in a program. Using a O(n) complexity can definitly prove to be a lot
better than O(n^2) or worse, as with carefully selected input, it doesn't take much data to slow a server to a crawl.
Very worthwhile piece if you're into that kind of stuff.
Today marks my 20th birthday :) (count them, 20 candles on a strawberry cake
with no icing. Just the way I like it)
I got a very cool digital camera for my birthday, a Sony DSC-P72 3.2 MP.
I've been wanting a digicam for a while now because otherwise it would be almost 2 months between taking a picture and then
seeing how it turned out. Now it's instantanous and if I don't like it, I can take another one quickly. Very handy indeed :)
So what this means for you, dear reader, is a lot more mindless picture updates. For instance, here's a shot of me and
a few friends from lunch today, and a closeup of the penguins
on my monitor, or even what I had for dinner. Yeah, I may have gone a wee bit overboard....
One other neat thing that my new camera lets me do is do a sort of once-a-day webcam. Much like the rest of this site, it's
entirely useless, but might be somewhat interesting. Maybe. Anyways, here's the picture for
today, which will supposedly be updated every day after this with a new one. Well see how long that lasts though, until it
degenerates into once a week updates. Anyways, it's AnthonyCam: All Anthony... All The Time
The other new stuff is coming a bit slower than I expected, so it probably won't be ready till the end of the week. I was
hoping to have it done in time for my birthday, but alas it was not meant to be. I also have the pictures I took
over the last few months developed, so I need to get those on here as well.
Matrix: XP You knew it had to happen sooner or later... a
Matrix spoof was created by some very cool people over in Germany and they did a really good job with it. It doesn't spoof
the entire movie, just a couple of key scenes, but it's really funny. It's amazing what people can do with too much
time on their hands.
And speaking of the Matrix, the Animatrix was released today and it was very very cool. I also got that for my birthday, and
it really adds a lot of the backstory of the Matrix and makes a few things make more sense. My personal favorite would have to be
Beyond.
Ok, most of one of the major updates is complete. You'll notice a new button off to your left for the
archives. I've finally updated all of 2002 added some improvements to the
archived months to make them easier to navigate. If you find any broken links, especially ones that link to stuff
on this website, be sure to tell me.
145 pictures in 2 days. But at least 75% of those were "Ooo, let me take a picture of my speakers. Why did I just take a picture
of my speakers. Delete." so there's only about 20 I've actually kept, and maybe 4 that I plan to get printed. One of them
being this picture of a late night visitor in front of our house.
Proof your signature doesn't matter. As I've always suspected,
there is no good reason to sign your credit card reciepts after you get them, because no one ever looks at them anyways. The
guy who wrote it decided to test that, and wrote down fake names, no names, scribbling, random lines, or even just an X. I suppose
the only good reason would be in case something in court came up, and then they would check the handwriting to see if you
signed it or not. And I've actually had one cashier ask for ID after thinking my signature didn't match the one on the
card (which it didn't, I wrote it in a hurry).
And yep, the cam has it's own page now.
I think I'm an obsessive compulsive picture taker. It can't be good when you take over 400 pictures in 5 days and you delete 95%
of them because you relieze you just took a picture of a floor tile. Digicams are just too much fun... but
the novelty will wear off eventually... I hope... Unless I keep discovering new things, like various picture modes:
Normal Computer
Negative Mode
Negative w/o Flash
Sepia
Black and White
Solarize
Maine has created the world's largest scale model of the
solar system. Maine has just officially become
cool.
I wrote my first bit of PHP the other night, to organzie the cam archives. It now creates the page on
the fly without me having to continuously update it. PHP pretty cool
little language, and very useful for some of the stuff I wanted to accomplish. Plus it's always fun to learn something
interesting.
Speaking of fun, I was thinking about what makes things "fun" the other day. That what I find incredibly
exciting and fun to do, other people hate and vice versa. I was having a blast messing around with that PHP script at 3 in the morning,
while shopping at the mall for clothes is something I try to avoid as much as possible. And for other people
it's the exact opposite. It all seems pretty arbitrary to me. I guess that's why I'm a big fan of doing whatever
floats your boat, because as long as you're having fun (so long as no one else is getting hurt in the process), what does it
matter what you're doing to have fun? Those guys dressing up as Star Wars characters for
Star Wars movies, or playing paper RPG's are pretty cool in my opinion, because they aren't afraid to have fun however they like it.
And as long as they're having a good time, all the power to them. Or mabye it's just because my idea of fun is pretty out there
sometimes and I'm trying to justify it :)
Oh, the webcam can be found under Stuff if you want to keep up with it.
I went to the Florida Aquarium today with some relatives from Texas
who are visiting for the week. I hadn't been in a few years, so it was nice saying Hi to all the fishies once again.
There were a TON of 8-years-and-younger kids though as part of summer school field trips, who would squel "THERE'S NEMO!"
when they saw a clown fish. Not that I didn't think that to myself either... no not at all.
Finally got pictures developed, for the last time in a long while, so here's some of the highlights:
The dorm at UF
More dorm shots
My desk
All the posters on my wall at UF
Me playing Frequency on my roommate's Courdaroy
Me with one of my best friends and her roommate
And some shots from home...
The CarCam
Work
Human stupidity really does know no limits. I do have to admit seeing
CD's explode when they're rotated at 35,000 RPM is pretty cool, but it's still stupid to do this in your own home with
minimal protection gear (or no protection gear for the first trial). Crazy kids
The truth of divorce court and men.
They really do favor women, though the article is awfully harsh on feminists in general, instead of pinpointing the
crazy extreme one's. I don't think it's so much feminism, as the
ingrained notion that women are better caretakers for children then men are. Stay-at-home Dad's still get a
weird glance or chuckle, and society as a whole still sees it as "her" children since she birthed them. Some
changes definitly need to be implemented however, as the laws are unfair to males in a lot of respects.
Remember cursive? In a few decades it may be
completely gone as everyone uses keyboards these days,
and cursive is pretty much only used for signitures (which as the article I linked to a few days ago points out, aren't
very useful anyways). I remember most of my cursive, but I always print because I find it more legible and faster. And then I
type whenver I can, because of the wonderful tool called "Spellcheck" (which I really ought to run more on the stuff I type on
here...) There can be a case made though for handwritten letters, there's nothing quite like it. While email is
super convinent and useful, sometimes it is nice to see something in handwriting.
Happy Fathers Day!
It's been a busy week with my cousins visiting. Went to see the Kennedy Space Center on Thursday which was a
lot of fun, and I still want to be an astronaut. Then Saturday we went to Busch Gardens, which was also fun and wasn't
near as crowded as I feared it would be. Their new Haunted Lighthouse show is fairly good, though the theming is
horrible, it looks like a plain regular movie theatre inside. And I've been having a lot of fun the with digital camera,
I never reliezed how many pictures I would take now that it's so easy and essentially free. 80 pictures goes by like nothing.
I did get some good shots though, including a very cool burst shot of the Tidal Wave ride, which is the big boat ride where it
slides down and get everyone soaked on the bridge above the water... most every amusement park has one. Anyways, I created an
animated GIF of it, though it's a bit large. But anyways, it's worth it
and if you ever go to Busch Gardens you'll see how I was able to get that shot without getting my camera soaking wet :)
I also finally had some of the pictures I took printed out like regular film, and the results are really good. They look
pretty much just like regular film, except for one or two pictures that look a little spotty when viewed up close. It's
definitly an acceptable substitute though, and I don't forsee every going back to film again.
I need to get a GBA
Never underestimate the stupidity of the American public. According
to a new poll 1/3 of Americans think WMD's have been discovered in Iraq, and 22% think they were actually used by Iraq
during the war. I mean that's just sad. But at least it's semi-understandable with short attention spans and with the media
always going crazy with every new alligation, while the actual truth *cough*mobile-chemical-labs*cough*
gets stuck on page A19. And of course with the incredibly conservative TV media with huge pro-war bias
it's also little suprise that the actual facts get lost in a sea of rhetoric.
Google might be running out of numbers. With almost 4 billion web pages
to search through, each with a unique ID number, it will eventually become too large for a 4-bit int number to hold. Yet another
example of not thinking further into the future, such as with IPv4
addresses running out. Even though IPv4 supports several billion IP addresses, with all the cell phones, appliances, and sheer
people on the internet we're running out of room, so slowly but surely we're switching over to IPv6. Which with 2^127 addresses, means
that every square meter on earth gets 665,570,793,348,866,943,898,599 individual addresses. Don't think that will be running
out anytime soon.
Oh, and here's some belated pictures of dorm life this past semester. I'm gonna miss these guys.
Not sure what's going on here
The Going-Away dance
One last group shot of most of the guys
Kjell: to make someone uncomfortable through dancing.
Caffine is your friend
Brick War
One last picture
Perhaps having a really freakin huge SUV isn't so useless after all.
After having his store robbed, the store owner decided to go after the theives in his Hummer, caught up with them, and ran
over their car. Like a monster truck rally in real life. Now the question is whether he'll get charged with vehicular assult,
since it was no longer self defense, but taking the law into his own hands. It's a cool picture though!
I was reading up on MySQL databases today and found a page where it was describing the various
routines and datatypes that MySQL uses, and it starts talking about the
"blob" datatype. How can you not love a language that has "blob" as a data type? It also has "tinyblob", "mediumblob", and
even the "longblob". See, this is why I like programming, because we get to play with blobs :)
Want to know jow to make ice cream in 30 seconds? With liquid nitrogen
of course! From the article he says it's extra smooth since ice crystals don't have a chance to form. Maybe I should become
friendly with the physics department and try to get ahold of some...
I got this a while ago, but just in case you ever wanted to see what mail from a tiny South Pacific island looked like,
here's a picture. It's from my friend who was in Vanuatu for about a month this
summer, and it took about 11 days to get here.
The USB 2 you see advertised might not be USB 2 at
all. Apparently because of demands for USB 2, the USB Implementation Forum decided to call the MUCH slower USB 1.1 (which
has been out for a long time now, and universially known as USB 1.1 which tops out at 12 Mb/sec)
the same name as the real USB 2 (480 Mb/sec). To get around the little fact that it's completely fradulant, they designate the
12 Mb/sec USB as "USB 2 Full Speed" and the 480 Mb/sec USB as "USB 2 Hi-Speed". How something can be more speedy if it's already full
doesn't make sense to begin with, and because people just zero in on the USB 2 part, everyone from manufacturers to consumers
don't relieze what's happening. Hopefully they'll get in trouble for this, but until then, if you want to make sure you have the
real USB 2.0, be sure to specify whether it's "Full Speed" or "Hi-Speed" USB 2.
I don't remember ever hearing about Funky Fries
so I guess it's little suprise they've done so poorly. I mean who wouldn't want to try a chocolate flavored french fry? Or one
that's blue? It's like that awesome green ketchup that they used to have, where you could make your hotdog/hamburger into a canvas
for color. No one seems to have fun with their food anymore.
Speaking of food, if you're ever hungry, you've gotta try to Pizza Sandwhich. It's a sandwhich... and it's a pizza! Is there
anything better? (the answer is no). Anyways, there's a more formal recipe around the net, but I personally just lightly toast
two slices of bread, add some mozzarella cheese and you're choice of topping (my favorite being pepperoni) and then
thrown on a hot pan or press until the cheese melts. You can also add tomato sauce, but I didn't like it with it on.
By popular demand (1 person) here's an update.
The 5th Harry Potter book goes
on sale tonight at midnight, which will make several million people very happy. I probably won't pick up a copy
immediately, might just try my luck at the library in a few months as that's how I read the other 4. If you haven't read
the books, you really need to because they are very good and I haven't heard of anyone not liking them after reading them. And
don't base the books on the movies, as I didn't like the movies much at all, but absolutly love the books. If you're too lazy to
go to the library, you can just fire up your favorite P2P software and download text
files of them. It does mean reading it on a computer screen though, so it'll be worth heading out and borrowing or buying them.
My favorite store on the web came out with some new stuff recently, including
the ever popular Resistance is Futile shirt, and a simple
geek shirt. If had "nerd" I think I would get it. What we really
need is a word that combines both, like neek or gerd. See, isn't making up words fun?
Is it ever going to stop raining? That, by the way, is the 1000th photo I've taken with my digital camera,
which is probably 10 times the amount I've ever taken in my life, and all done in a little over 2 weeks.
Alright, I admit it. I went out at midnight to buy the latest Harry Potter book. I went by Barnes and Noble first just to see
the goings on there. It was REALLY crowded, by far the
most people I'd ever seen at B&N. Some of the cashiers dressed up and
I also got my first look at the infamous boxes. They ran out of books to sell to
non-pre-orderee's, so I went to everyone's favorite store: Walmart! Got there around 11:50, and found a
long line waiting for me. I was behind a 10 year old kid and his dad, so
we talked some, and waited for the books to show up. Finally around midnight they brought them out to the front and people started
grabbing them. After about 5 minutes I got up to the front and got my book.
$17.31 later and it was in my hands.
And it's REALLY good, another awesome Harry Potter book. Yep, I've already finished reading it, all 870 pages. I have a gift
of being able to read really fast (the trick is not to read words, but whole sentences/lines at once), so I could read through
it at 115 pages an hour, so it took me a little over 7 and a half
hours to read it all. Which I stayed up till about 4:30 AM, and then didn't get much sleep and woke up early. Harry is definitly
changing, and it's definitly the type of book that you just can't put down, you keep wanting to see what will happen on the next
page. And yes, a major character does die, and some new truth's about Harry are discovered. It sets up for the 6th book
nicely, and hopefully it won't take so long to write as the 5th one did.
Here's an article on The Big Texan, a
famous resturant in Amarillo where I used to live. If you can eat a 72 ounce steak plus sides in one hour, then it's free. Otherwise
it's $50. I've seen the thing in real life (and even went one time while someone was attempting it) and 72 ounces is HUGE. No
way I could ever do it. They have the best salads I've ever tasted though.
I'm off on a 7 day trip through the Smokey Mountains starting tomorrow. We're going to be visiting relatives in South Carolina and
then over to Gatlinburg, TN for a few days. Also going to include some stops in
Dollywood and Biltmore Estates. So what does
that mean for you? It means no updates for a whole week, and I have an excuse this time! So head on over to
Slashdot or Fark (which is where most of the links I
put on here come from) and pretend you're me. And expect a picture update once I get back. Never been to the Smoky Mountains,
so this should be fun :)
This is sorta cool, two of my favorite pieces of art in my camera's negative mode:
Deep Blue Calm
Earth and Green
Killer Coding Ninja Monkey's do exist. Oh they do.
Be back in a week. And if you don't believe me, check the cam picture.
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