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Maybe we really ARE in the Matrix.
That'll keep you awake thinking at night.
Salon once again has a great article on file
sharing and how the major music companies are missing out on a golden
oppurtunity. If only they would think logically, and see how sharing mp3's can
increase music sales, and then come out with a pay file sharing service. Course,
they already have some pay-for-sharing services out there, but with so many
restrictions to make them worthless. I'd easily pay $10-20 a month for something
like Napster, where you could find ANYTHING. And speaking of music, MTV is doing
something useful and selling it's Video Music Award nominee's music for $8.29 a piece. Unfortunatly all the
artists that I wanted, I've already bought.
I knew it! My male gym teachers trully didn't like me! Once again the Onion is
spot on with their commentary.
I went to the beach on yesterday and stayed overnight so we wouldn't have to go
back so late at night. The taste of sand is still in my mouth, but was a lot of
fun. I don't even really like the beach that much, but just hanging out
with friends and chillin is what makes it all worthwhile. I also came up with a
great idea while I was creating sand mounds (since I had nothing to make a
"real" sandcastle with, I just made piles of sand, same thing right? And then
some punk little 3 year old came and ran over it while I was swimming! Today's
youth, I'm telling you!) Anywho, since it never snows in Florida, people need to
have sandball fights instead. The sand at Clearwater Beach has about the same
consitency as dry snow, which while not the best snowball-making material, does
do it's job. So anyways, you make "snowball's" out of sand, and have sandball
fights. It's genius! Except when the sand gets in your eye. Or your mouth. Or
all over your blanket. Ok, nevermind.
I wanna clear water-cooled case too! The thing even has clear hard drives cases, now
how cool is that?
Yes, someone in Washington gets it right! One of
Bush's advisor's is encouraging hackers to find security holes so that they can be fixed.
Instead of punishing people for finding flaws in software, they should be
thanked. Note that hackers in this sense means "computer enthusiasists" and not
the "bad" h4X0rs of Mass Media (tm) fame. But as Slashdot said, "Bush Adviser
Encourages Discovery of Software Bugs" just doesn't doesn't have as much zing as
"Bush Adviser Encourages Hacking". And that my dear readers, is media
manipulation and spin at it's very finest.
And on a side note, that
story I linked to up above will eventually disappear from CNN's servers in a few
months. I discovered this while updating the archives, since all the CNN written
article's are still up, but all the AP articles are missing. So as a message to
the future, I'm sorry you wont' be able to read the story.
Warped Tour rocked! Me and a couple of
friends went to the USF Sundome to catch some of the bands, and it was a whole
lotta fun. Ozma was awesome once again
(like they were when I first saw them when they opened up for Weezer) and
Something Corporate (the main
reason I wanted to go) was incredible! I even got their autographes and bought
one of their shirts. I also caught MXPX, Good Charlette, Thursday, and parts of
bands that I have no clue who they were. Unfortunatly since it was held outside
and Florida weather is so freakin hot and humid, we left before New Found Glory
or NOFX came on, since that would mean 3 and a half more hours of $3 a bottle
water. I also picked up a $1 CD of various punk bands though, just cause well,
for $1 there's gotta be something good on it right? All in all a great
experiance for my whopping second concert ever (first was Weezer).
Incredibly useless program time! I created a tax and tip calculator because
well, I was tired of bringing up the calculator and figuring out it from that.
So instead I now can bring up a terminal shell, go to the programs directory,
and execute my super-handy-neato-cool program. Oh yes. Course it's not very
useful except for ordering pizza online, since I'd have to be on my computer to
be able to use it. But I'm not going to let a little detail like that stop me.
So without further ado, the Tax and Tip
Calculator.
Hmmm, 80% of
Hotmail mail is spam. Does this really surprise anyone? Back in the day
before they got bought by Microsoft I used to use hotmail as my main email
address, but thank goodness I have my own domain name now, because it gets like
50 pieces of spam an hour, no joke. I haven't logged in into my hotmail accounts
in ages, just because I know it'll be nothing but spam. And I love how you can
even create a random address, and within a day it'll be getting spam. Crazy I
tell ya!
2 weeks till college!
"I was quite surprised to find that none of the people here have names. It's
just forty thousand people all named 'Hey'." Ahhhh,
college.
Salon has a great article about Air
Jordan shoes and how the hype all got started. I personally always thought
they were really ugly and so I've never owned a pair, but it did start off a new
way of marketing shoes. Interesting piece anyways.
Can ya dig it?
The perfect definition of middle
school: "A place where the coolest kids reign supreme, where neary everyone
is miserable, where your body and your thoughts and ideas change every day. Also
a place where most girls are taller than the boys, hand-holding menas dating,
and people slow dance at arms-length. See also: A place I wouldn't go back to
for $1,000,000" It never ceases to amaze me how many people say that
middle school was the worst 3 years of their life. School starts
tomorrow in Tampa, which means lots and lots of extra traffic in the
morning. Fun. Thank goodness I'm finally out of Florida's awful K-12
system.
Anyone remember Minority Report? Or MIB2? Or Star Wars? The (now extinct) article brings up a good
point, the movie turn over rate is incredibly high, so even though a movie only
came out a month or two ago, it feels like ages. Open big, open high, and then
die. It's weird how some movies look really interesting when they're first
released, but 9 months later when they're out on video they don't look
interesting enough to even rent, and you can't even remember them being out in
theaters.
This is relativity. To import or not to import, that is the question. Unfortunatly I'll be up in
Gainesville without a Gamecube when Super Mario Sunshine is released, so I
won't be able to play it for quite some time. At least I'll have my PS2
though.
I had a lot of interesting, witty, and insight stuff to write that I thought
about at work the last few days, but now that I"m sitting here typing, I can't
for the life of me recall what I was going to say. Sorry bout that.
SomethingAwful once again comes up with pure genius, and profile's the
various types of DDR dancers. It's a bit scary how dead-on he is with the
various sterotypes, cause I've seen them all. I'd put myself under the
super-hot-geeky-great-dancer-nerdy-cool guy category, well I'd create one first
and then put myself under there. I think that's a pretty accurate assesment
right? Right?!?!
Ok, a few nerd quickies (which I shamelessly stole from Slashdot): First up is
that I finished Nerds 2.0.1 which was about the history of the 'net. Very very
good book, I suggest getting it if you're into that sorta thing. Secondly I
bought a book called "Time" which, you guessed it, is about time. So far I
really like it, it explains our time system came into being, with seconds,
months, hours, how we got the names of days, and lots of other related things.
And now on a totally unrelated note, the speed of light may not be constant
after all. I still believe that someday it will be possible to travel faster
than light. Sure it's impossible under physics AS WE KNOW IT, but as this latest
discovery has shown, scientific principles are always changing and being
refined. That's the beauty of science, the unadulterated pursuit of knowledge.
And finally, an algorithm has been discovered that can prove that a number is
prime (PDF or a higher
quality Postscript)
with 100% accuracy in P time (which means you don't take the incredibly long
method of plugging and chugging every single number into a prime number to make
sure it's prime). Before it was only 99.9999...% accuracy, but 100% just looks
nicer doesn't it? That's enough nerdity for one day I do think.
Who could forget old
skool Nintendo controllers? I used to have the Power Pad since it came with
my NES, and I suppose the Dance Dance Revolution mat is just an evolution of it.
And then the infamous "I love the power glove. Its so bad." line from The Wizard. I
wonder how many gloves Nintendo sold from that line alone.
Some days I just wish I were a hermit. Er, halfway
hermit, as I would need a net connection. I'm sure I could get broadband
in the middle of the woods... right?
My brother tried to kill me today by dropping a glass ontop of another glass,
right in front of my face, spraying glass all over my upper body. Luckly I
didn't get hurt, but there was glass all over my clothes and arms. I think he's
out to get me!
I picked up Something Corporate's Audioboxer EP today. It already has 3 songs
(out of 6) on it that are on it's "debut" CD, but it's a nice little CD and it's
also why impulse buying is bad. And on another bright note, a friend of mine's
boyfriend gave me and my brother some awsome Capcom t-shirts today when I went
to Software Etc. Very cool stuff indeed.
Way back in December I mentioned a
contest to decide the new animal for animal crackers. Well enough people weren't
cool enough to vote for the penguin, so instead the Koala won. It
was fixed I'm telling you, fixed! But on a related note, December 2001 and January 2002 are now l33t.
I went shopping for computer upgrades today, and came across some great deals.
First off I got 256 MB of SDRAM for only $25, which is a really really good
price. Back when we bought this computer 4 years ago, that 256 MB would have
probably cost $500 or something, as most systems were selling with 32 MB, and
high end one's with 64. How times do change. Then because my 20 GB hard drive is
sorta sketchy and I was running out of room for mp3's, I decided I should just
get a new one, and so I got a 120 GB Western Digital, with 8 MB of cache.
Unfortunatly I'm having some problems getting it to run right, I have it all
partitioned and it runs great on my secondary IDE channel, but when I try to
slave it on the primary channel, it freezes on boot in the BIOS. Not cool at
all. So I'm currently trying to figure all that out and hopefully I'll get it
working without too much trouble.
And finally I got a Microsoft Intellimouse, cause it was only $10 and I like it
more than my current mouse anyways. The reason they all came so cheap was
because of rebates, which means I get to fill out forms and follow very explicit
directions in order to have any hope of getting some checks in the mail. It's no
wonder so few people bother to redeem rebates once they buy something. Anywho,
the specs page is updated with the upgrades,
as well as the addition of my brother's "new" computer, a HP Pavilion. It's not
new and it's not all that great of a PC, but it does it's job good enough,
especially after some much needed memory upgrades. 64 MB just don't cut it these
days.
The New York Times has a
good article on coincidence
's. As I've always believed, most things that seem like a "sign" in
hindsight is just pure dumb luck. You only remember the rememorable experiances.
Anywho, the article brings up some great points about the whole 9/11 conspiracy
theories, and how with 280 million people in the US alone, even one-in-a-million
odds happen 280 times a day.
Only one more week till college! Can ya
tell I'm excited?
Day two of the great hard drive battle and it's still in a draw. It's looking
like my motherboard doesn't support drives over 32 GB, so either I have to flash
the BIOS or get a PCI IDE controller. I'm leaning toward the latter since
flashing the BIOS seems too risky, and with an IDE controller I can use the
faster ATA/100 instead of my motherboard's standard ATA/33 interface. Anywho,
I've got to get it working before I leave on Sunday, so we'll find out what day
3 brings.
Only in
Japan could you see people dressed up as the three biggest Nintendo stars in
full costume. Only 2 more weeks till the American release of Super Mario
Sunshine (and Super Monkey Ball 2)!
Raise the Roof yo!
Day four of the hard drive saga, and it's still not being nice. I bought an IDE
controller card, installed it, and it now reads the ID info from the 120 GB,
which it never did before on the motherboard IDE. But when I try to play a mp3
off of it, it freezes up my system in both Linux and Windows. At the moment I
have it set up so everything works, but it's sorta weirdish. I'm beginning to
see why some people don't like computers.
To celebrate the release of Super Mario Sunshine, Nintendo is going to create
the world's
largest pasta bowl at 2,700 pounds of pasta and sauce. They picked a good
company to make it to, Bucca di Beppo.
I happened to eat there last night, and they serve you HUGE quantities of food.
It is quite expensive, about $20 a plate for nearly everything, but it's so big
you can easily feed 4 people off one dish. Great food too.
How to hack Las
Vegas. Who better to count cards at blackjack than MIT students? And
considering they can make millions of dollars using math against the casino's, I
think I may have to get in on it :)
3 more days till I leave, and I haven't packed anything.
Today was my last day of work, and while it payed well and was pretty easy, I
won't miss it. I just couldn't stand staying in an office all day doing clerical
work for the rest of my life. And I hate phones. Anywho, I go back up to UF very
very early Sunday morning to start my second year, and I cant' wait. These last
few days are gonna be really hectic though, as I have yet to pack anything (and
my computer is strewn out all across my desk from messing with that freakin hard
drive!) and trying to say goodbye to all my Tampa friends since I won't be
seeing them for quite a while. I've really enjoyed this summer, and as much as I
love college, I will be a little sad to see the summer go.
Because one of my friends said all I talk about is computers on my website, I'm
going to prove him wrong and talk about tomatoes! Yes, the little red
frugitable that's oh so tasty on sandwhiches and in sauces. It's so red! It's so
round! It's so... so... tomatoey!
It turns out there's a "secret" history of the
diamond and how it was corporate advertising made it synonymous with love.
All I can say is that it was an incredibly succesful advertising campaign. The
associated Slashdot article is also very interesting, some of the comments are spot
on. Sorta scary to think that I'm getting to the age where people start to get
married. Still have a few more years, but it's coming up. Luckly for me I've had
like 5 girls tell me they'd marry me, so I just plan on skipping the whole
dating thing and going straight to marriage. Works for me :)
Today was the last day of my summer, and all in all it's been a great one. I've
had a lot of fun, and with all my working I can afford to do the things I like.
Tomorrow I "start" (classes actually start next Monday) my second year at the
University of Florida, and I've spent most of today trying to get everything
packed. So much stuff, so little room. I'm definitly looking forward to getting
back up to Gainesville, as I absolutely love college. It's just something about
being around 40,000 other people your own age and being able to do what you
want, when you want. I'm going to have a really cool roommate, Joe, who I met
last summer during my engineering program thingy, and I'll be staying in a brand
new dorm (and paying an arm and a leg for that privilage). So I'm mucho excited
about going back up and getting back into the college groove. It's so easy to
see why so many people say college was the best 4 years of their life, because
so far it has been. And I'd just like to do a quick one sentence pre-emptive
rant, in preperation of the coming year: I really, really, really don't like the
"I just like you
as a friend" line.
I finally got around to buying another watch to
replace the one that broke before school let out. It's a digital one as usual,
but it also has moon phases and surise/sunset times built in too. Muy
nifty.
One more day!
And at last I'm back up at UF! The new dorm is really cool, and has that nice
"new-dorm-smell" thing going on. It's got a huge walk-in closet, and lots of
room. I went to the meet-and-greet mixer thing today and met a bunch of really
cool people, ate good cookies, and totally destroyed the plastic cup I was
drinking stuff out of. The only really big downer of the day was discovering
that out of the two Hume building (each 5 floor each), I'm on the ONLY all male
floor. Everyone else is co-ed! And considering we picked the room, they could
have at least told us this! Girls are (as a whole) much nifter than guys.
Everything else is really cool though, and I think I'm gonna really like my
second year at UF.
Why cant' I get this stupid tape to stick to my walls? WHY!?!?!!
Reason #30493483 why I love college: Free Food!
Alright, just for Kristy, I'll update :) But being back at college means
sporatic updating once again, so, my dear readers, you'll have to do other
things on the internet other than check my site, as hard as that might
be. I suggest the Pikachizer
I went on a shopping spree yesterday at my favorite store in the entiretest
world: ThinkGeek. So I picked up some "Thinking Putty"
that not only streches and squishes, it also tears and even shatters. Also
finally bought the caffine shirt that
I've been wanting for a while, and then two stickers: one for my (future)
laptop and one for my case. Should come
in early next week.
GI Joe is now on Cartoon Network at 1 in the morning! Wootness!
You know those cute-puppy-dog video's CNN is apparently plastering all over the
news? They might just be a little suspicious. As the article
points out, this makes really really good war propaganda, stray dogs would not
look that good, Islam forbids hurting animals, and we kill thousands of dogs a
year in animal shelters (not to mention our own military does the same thing).
Mass Media sensationalism, gotta love it.
Finally, the perfect DDR
shirt. Soon to be mine in a few days :)
Reason #190302234 Why I Love College: 4 AM dorm-wide LAN gaming. Ended
up playing Return to Wolfenstein way into the night with some people on
my floor and two floors above me. Lots of fun, and it's weird how I've
already gotten to know so many more people on my floor than I ever did
last year. But just keep your door propped open, and it's all good.
It's way too hot in Florida. Definitely.
Walking home at 3:30 am, after watching a downloaded movie and eating $7 pizza,
it finally sunk in: I'm back at college.
Our TV that my roommate ordered finally came in today. I barely even noticed I
didn't have one, and now that I do have one I've barely watched anything at all.
Darn internet addiction.
Pizza is the bestest stuff ever.
For some reason the number of hits to this wonderful little corner of the
world-wide-web has gone up quite a bit. Now it's 25 people a day! W00t! 25
people being subliminly brainwashed by the hidden messages that I put in here
(and you thought that craving for a pickle pizza was natural....) MUHAHAHAHAHA
*cough* *hack* *cough* Sorry, dont' know what came over me.
Classes start tomorrow, and this week has proved what I've always felt: Classes
just get in the way of college. This entire week was nothing but hanging out,
and I've had a blast. I didn't even have a TV for most of the week, and I still
was never really bored. So tomorrow I go off to my very first class of my second
year, which happens to be Digital Logic & Computer Systems at 11:45. I'm going
to be taken a bunch of really cool classes finally, since I'm past gen ed's and
am now into my major. Physics 2, Computer Linear Algebra, Statics, and Discrete
Mathematics round out the rest of my schedule, meaning that all 5 of my classes
are math and/or science classes. The perks of being an engineering major
:)
And for all you college students, you can use the College Alarm
Clock to wake you up. You set each day of the week to what time you need to
get up for class, so you don't forget to change the time from one day to the
next.
Well the first day of classes has commenced, and it looks like a tough long
semester, but one with a lot of interesting classes. Digital Logic looks to take
the most time, but also be the most interesting. Physics is physics, and
Computer Linear Algebra is regular ol math. Discrete has possibilities though,
so far it seems like it'll teach me some cool stuff. One of the major
disadvantages to being a male engineer though is the severe lack of females in
my classes. Out of my 80 person Digital Logic class, there's 5 girls. In my 40
person Linear Algebra class, there's 1 girl. Why oh why don't more girls like
math and science and computers? WHY?!?!?! Tomorrow is my super early
class (8:30), that as I type this, I'm currently putting off going to
sleep for. So thank you readers for giving me a reason to stay up even
later, only to hate myself in the morning.
Alright, who let
Conker out? Gotta love a story that starts with "Squirrel's reign of terror
ends"
Every nerds dream: Am I BIOS or not?.
This one is
pretty nice; 6 PCI slots, AGP slot, and even a legacy ISA slot for kicks.
Mmmmmm. A dual processor and on-board SCSI would make it knock-out gorgeous
though :)
(Note: Please relieze I'm just kidding..... I think... )
My grandpa on my Dad's side died this afternoon. He's been sick for a few
months, so we knew he was fixing to go, and today was that day. Death affects me
weirdly, I don't really get sad per se, but I do feel something. Maybe it's
because everyone I know who has died has been relatives who I see a few times a
year, I was never really that close. So death just means I won't be seeing them
anymore. Maybe (hopefully?) I'll feel different when someone I know really well
dies, but it's almost like I don't feel "enough" pain that it seems like I
should feel from someone dying. And on the subject of death, I want people to
laugh at my funeral! They're much too sad, and being that I get through pain
with humor, I want people to remember the happy things and tell jokes and stuff.
Don't be sad I'm dead, be happy that I lived! I need to put something
like that in my will. Oh, and I want my organs donated. Course me
writing this on my website has no legal standing, but if in doubt, that
is my wish.
One of the best humor sites around (after the all mighty Onion of course) is shutting down.
SatireWire is a hillarious splice of cyberspace that I've been checking for
quite a while, but unfortunatly the writer no longer feels like doing it, and so
he's going stop updating. And then ironic thing is, it was actually one of those
Internet sites making money instead of bleeding it. It's sad to see it
go.
Mozilla 1.1 has been released. Lots of cool
stuff, and of course it has the ever handy built in pop-up ad killer. Well worth
a download.
Friday is suck. Long hard afternoon classes and a 20 minute walk home in
the pouring rain just isn't fun.
Apparently 49% of American's think the fundamental right to say what
you want goes too
far. I wonder how they'd feel if saying that they didn't like it was
outlawed. Another 43% don't think newspapers should be able to freely criticize
the military, because of course that'd be UnAmerican wouldn't? It's incredibly
unamerican to use the rights that our nation was founded on I suppose.
And in related news that may be crossing what some people want me to be
able to say, here's a interesting
political cartoon
For everyone who still doesn't know what DDR is exactly, here's a beginner's
introduction to the incredibly addicting and supremely fun arcade game. It's
sorta weird how I didn't start out like most players. The moment I first heard
about the game I wanted to play it, but it took over a year to finally find a
machine (this is back when no one had them, now they're almost everywhere). But
man was I happy when I finally found one. I'm wearing my spiffy DDR shirt as I
type this too, wooo
Today was the very first Gator football game of the 02-03 season, and we
throughly beat UAB 51-3 for the Zook's first Gator win. I have season tickets so
I get to go to all the home games, and this time we ended up in the end zone. It
turned out to be lucky seats indeed since I got ahold of a field goal kick (it
bounced off my friend, rolled around a little, and then I picked it up) and then
threw a perfect spiral pass to one of the field aids to give it back (I'm pretty
sure they don't let you keep the ball, and I wanted to throw it instead of
handing it to some cop later on). I always thought it was pretty cool when I'd
see that on TV, so to be able to throw an actual game ball was quite
nifty.
I've finally found the "car" of my dreams: A
Star Wars land cruiser! (that was on Ebay) It's a heavily modified but street legal Ford Escort
that looks just like the floating cruisers in A New Hope. Muy cool.
I said it's great
to be
A FLORIDA GATOR!
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