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This story begins in 8th grade. It had snowed the night before, and as we were coming back from lunch someone decided
to throw a snowball at one of the guys who loved picking on me. He of course thought it was me, and promptly threw a
snowball right at my face with enough force to snap off one of the nosepads along with severly bending them out of shape.
Thus I got new frames (paid for by him, heh) and figured I would get another pair in a year or two as that was what I was
averaging since I kept breaking them.
Flash forward 6 and a half years. Still have the same frames as in 8th grade because I miracously both didn't break them,
nor did my eyesight ever get any worse. I get a letter saying I need to schedule my annual eye appointment again, and
being I've had these same frames for almost 7 years I figure it about time to get new ones. So I got my best friend to
take me over to the doctor's office where I found out I still have the same 2500/20 eyesight (I can't see the big E on
the eyechart, so they hold up fingers for me) but this time I got my friend to help me pick out what new frames
I'll have for who knows how long. We looked around and went to a few different stores but settled on the pair back
at the doctor's office. Got the lightweight lenses, along with this stuff that makes them reduce glare and look a lot clearer.
A week later I went with my dad to make the purchase, and then yesterday they finally came in. And while it's not a
HUGE change since they're still black wire frames with the same basic shape, they're a lot smaller. So now when I
put on my old one's I'm amazed I stuck with them for so long since the new smaller one's look a ton better.
Put enought backstory, here's the pictures for your viewing pleasure:
My old glasses
New glasses!
The only disadvantage of the smaller lens is that when I look down it's no longer in focus since there's no lens there. So my
peripheral vision isn't as good, but I suppose that's the price you pay to be in style. Oh, and here's a shot of the
comparison between the two.
Just how much of an internet junkie are you? BBSpot has a Web slogan
quiz to match the slogan to the internet site. I got them all right except for BBSpot, probably because I don't visit that often
except for links from Fark. Pretty cool test of your net-culture.
Fast food is really really bad for you. Wow. If you eat fast food a lot, I suggest you don't read those nutrition fact things and actually
read how much fat is in a Whopper with mayo and a large fry.
This page is interesting. Turns out the biggest movie flop of all time
is Town & Country by losing a little over $100 million dollars. And I have a feeling Donnie Darko will easily make it's money back
now that it's on DVD and has great word-of-mouth working for it. I know quite a few people who own it, but only one of them
saw it in theatres.
And now for some ranting, no particular reason, just reading various things in the paper that I want to comment on.
First up is a New York Times article on
schools "giving up" on students. Giving up in quotes because it was the students who gave up on school in the first place. To
quote from the article "School officials had already called her and her mother in to discuss her frequent absences, her suspension for fighting, her pregnancy."
And then she's mad that she got kicked out? She deserved it! Let the people who WANT to learn stay in school, it's girls like
her that made high school miserable for everyone who went there to actually learn. Treat it like college, that's one of the
number of reasons why it works so well. If you goof off and skip classes, you will fail and you will be kicked out. Simple. And
while something like that would be a little too strict for high school, I really don't think this girl has any right to complain.
Also on the editorial page of the Tampa Tribune the other day, some smoking advocate was writing in that 73% of the
voters voted for the Clean Air Act last November that bans smoking in almost every establishment. But because not all eligable voters vote, that
works out to only about 37% of the population, so he was saying it wasn't a majority and hence unfair. Well if people would VOTE
then they could have something to complain about. But if you sit on your butt all day that Tuesday, you have no right to complain.
Apparently all these hidden smokers who love breathing horrible air were too busy buying another pack of cigerettes instead of
voting against it.
I've discovered to very cool and highly addictive internet games in the last few days, just in time for the start of school! How
convinent. Anywho, remember that Lite-Brite from your childhood? Now there's an online version.
It's actually fairly simple to code, but it's still really cool. Check out this KICKEN RAD Gator I
made last night.
I also discovered the fun of Dismount, a game where you try to inflict as much pain on a
computer dummy by either pushing it down the stairs or running a truck into the way. Unfortunatly it's Window's only, but
you can submit your scores online and it's just fun to try to get as many points as possible my running over the dummy or slamming
it against the wall. And it makes a good point for seatbelt use. If you put the windshield up (ie. buckled) so the dummy stays in the cab of the
truck, you don't get as many points as if there is no windshield (ie. unbuckled) and the dummy can right out the window.
Now when you get a call starting with 999 you'll know why. Takes the guess
work out of figuring out where an area code is located.
And finally, I've updated the bio page with some updated information (like my age) and a new
"myself" picture to replace my 4 year old driver's license picture.
What's in a name? For one thing how popular it is. Turns out Anthony is the 22nd most
common name according to the 1990 census. Of course I know of only one other Anthony, and that was a friend of a friend. Chris and
Matthew on the other hand seem to be all over the place, I easily know at least half a dozen of each personally.
So how much is the Iraqi war REALLY costing the US? Well at least only another year and a
half before we can get a sane president.
And finally a cool new helpful feature with Google, adding a tilde
(that squiggly thing that looks like this: ~) to a word searches for that word as well as its synonyms. Once again if
they weren't in Silicon Valley, they'd be my dream company. They even name their buildings (0, 1, pi, e, and now phi) after
mathematical terminology! How cool is that?!?!
My dad got a new laptop in the other day, making us a four computer family. It's a
Gateway 450XL with a
1.7 GHz Pentium M (Intel's new Centrino processor, it runs much faster than the low GHz number would suggest) and 1 gig of RAM.
The full specs can be found on the specs page if you're interested.
I myself will be getting a laptop (as a very very very belated graduation present) just as soon as ATI's Mobility Radeon 9600 comes out, which, *crosses fingers*, will be at the
end of the month. Of course it was announced back in March and was expected to be in laptops by May, but noooo, it's taking it's
sweet time. So the second I can
get my hands on one of those in a laptop with all the other stuff I want is the day I buy it. Which my setup will probably be pretty
much the exact same thing as my Dad's, only with the new videocard.
I finally got a TI-89 yesterday, after about 4 years of wanting
one. My brother needed a graphing calculator for school, so I just gave him my old TI-83+ and got this one for myself.
And while I'm still learning how to use it, I can't believe how much this thing can do, even compared to my
TI-86. Factoring, integrating with variables, complex numbers, even math in binary or hex, how did I ever live without this thing? And I get to pass on the nerd tradition to my brother as I taught him how to use my old one, as well as how to get
games, as everyone knows the kid with all the games in math class is the coolest nerd there is! I did keep my nifty cool
coloured slide cases
though.
Only one more week until I go back up to Gainesville for my 3rd year of college. One more week.
The anit-flashmob crusade has begun! I always thought
flash mobs were sorta cool in a "weird but fun" way,
but at the same time it can only be cool for so long before it just gets stupid (and some would argue it was always
stupid).
And speaking of stupid, the governor's race in California is growing wackier by the day. Now with
115 certified canidates with a potential of
up to 247, it makes national news when they select the alphabetical order of all the canidates. Heck for $3,500 and a scant
65 signatures, it would be almost worth it just to say you ran for governor of California but lost. Something to tell the grandkids
at least. I mean really, 65 signatures? They should make it a few thousand at least.
If you're running XP or 2000, and you get a message that the computer will reboot in 60 seconds, you've got the latest and
greatest Windows worm. On the other
hand, this hole has been known since mid-July and was heavily publicized, so it's sort of your own fault if you get it. Check
Windows Update every other day if you don't have it on automatic update. It'll save you a ton of headaches later on.
Only one more day until I start my 3rd year of college at UF. Dorms open up Sunday
and so I'll be up there bright and early to get moved in and see how much the campus changed over the summer. I've really
missed it, the freedom and the fun of it, over the last few months, so I'm anxious to get back up. And over the last few days
I've found out that Chicago, Bowling for Columbine, and Spirited Away are going to be playing at the
student cinema and I got tickets to see Yo Yo Ma, Rent, and Miss Saigon
for $10 each for this coming year thanks to cheap student tickets.
Ahhhhh college.
As if Google couldn't get any better, it's now not only a search engine, but also a
calculator. It adds, divides, does trig, and can even
do conversions or
tell you the mass of the Earth. Is there
anything Google can't do?
This is cool, a Gameboy game using the sun.
Based on the sunlight level, the enemies will become stronger or easier, which fits the vampire theme of the game. The gameboy
manages to innovate once again.
Being a guy I don't really notice girl stuff, but my friend was wearing this incredibly cool nailpolish the other day that
changes colors! I've never seen anything like that before and it was
so mesmerizing. It changes colors as your hand moves around, creating this really cool effect of shifting light. So if you're a
girl reading this site, check this stuff out, it's really really cool!
I think I finally settled in up here at Gainesville. Thanks to some new policies by the dorm internet administrators, they
put up some VERY aggressive filters to block P2P file sharing and anything even remotely related to that. It's really quite a system,
though of course for dorm residents it's really bad as there have been problems galore with it. I myself got it set up in
Windows just fine, but I've spent the last 4 days struggling to get it to work in Linux. Luckly though the help of the
actual people in charge of the network and not regular tech support I managed to get it working somewhat, though it's
still a bit sketchy. A LOT of people are having problems though. Though of course that ever lovable w32.Blaster worm
is causing all sorts of headaches. I know at least 10 people personally who got it, and heard many many stories about others.
I have to admit though, a lot of people haven't turned on their computers all summer and so weren't patching them, hence
the second they turn them on when they get up here they get blasted. Even a guy with a brand new computer got it within
30 seconds of booting up. And since our internet access is blocked until you go through that long registration process, there
was no way to get the fix or patch for it unless you had a friend with it already on a disk. Yep, fun times in the dorms.
But moving on, I got moved up here just fine otherwise on Sunday. My roommate didn't appear till last night however. It's been a
surprisingly busy week, as I've been meeting up with friends every night basically and having a blast. Not to mention all the
tons of free food that are always at Welcome Week events. And UF built a new bookstore, which was finally completed about 2 weeks
before I moved up. It's REALLY nice it's a lot more spacious than the old HUB.
And finally, making use of the digital camera!
Packing up stuff
The untouched dorm room
So much to unpack
My new dorm room
Classes for Fall 2003 start tomorrow, and I think I'm almost ready. Maybe. I mean my classes sound fun and everything
(Operating Systems, Solid State Systems, Microprocessors, Numerical Analysis, and Statistics) but I've managed to
find things to do all week without ever being really bored and I didn't even have a TV and my internet was down half the
time. How do I fit classes into college?
In preperation for the Mars viewing on Wednesday here
is a shot of what the Earth looks like from Mars'
viewpoint. It's been modified of course if you look at the fine print, but it's still a cool picture.
Google really does have the
answer to everything.
As the insistant urging of my friend, here is a long delayed update. Not hard to tell I'm back to the very very very busy
college life is it?
And speaking of college, it's been a very busy weekend in UF sports. I went to two volleyball games yesterday, and also to
our women's soccer game, and then to the football game tonight. And what makes it extra fun was that we won all of them.
It always bothers me that most people just focus on football, when we have LOTS of other great sports teams on campus. Our
volleyball team is awesome and has won 12 straight SEC conference titles, but most people have no idea.
Anywho, I took a few pictures of the football game, so if you've never had the chance to see a game in the Swamp, here's what
it'd look like:
UF Band and the Gators coming out
The new addition
GO GATORS!!!
The Swamp
Record crowd of 90,011
I was getting bored...
65-3. I like it!
An Enders Game movie? I'm not sure how they'd
pull it off, but if they could make it good, it'd be REALLY good. If you haven't read the book, I highly recommend it.
This person is my hero. Unless of course he photoshopped
in that he was on AIM nearly a year.
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