Category: technology

Blue Moon Syndrome

Every few milennia, something happens that one will probably not see twice. This is what as known as “things going as planned”. My 1 GB stick of RAM arrived today, and I was totally expecting it to be entirely incompatible with my current two sticks, which are all DDR 400, but would inevitably have different timings and voltages. Lo and behold, however, this was not the case. I’m happily chugging along with my 1.54 GB of RAM, which has pretty much transformed my computer into the monster it was meant to be. I’d never understood why my computer so consistently failed to Alt+Tab efficiently in any kind of application, but it was indeed the RAM causing the issue. The blame could also be placed on Windows / M$ for their inefficient event handling, but I only have so many fingers for pointing. Some fingers must be left available for playing Oblivion.

In any case, I was indeed pleasantly surprised to see this work. Perhaps it’s just balancing out how utterly screwed I am because of Mr. Briegle’s antics (or lack thereof), but whatever the reason may be, I am pleased. The end result is that I can finally play Oblivion at maximum settings without ripping my hair out every time a loading area appears. I still have to keep the grass distance down, but, I don’t really care at this point.

Other things are on the radar, however. Such as the fact that I’ve got a whole lot of work to get done in a short span of time – the marking period ends soon, and I’ve been lazy. And now, /. wisdom.

“Anyone can learn these tricks at any time anywhere. They don’t need to go to a school to find them. If you think someone going to a boot camp is going to become some 1337 h4x0r, well you might as well also start advocating destroying the internet.”

“Agreed. I’m about to cost these bastards lots of money by giving away their secrets. Gang, listen closely. First, watch the film Hackers a few times and try to dress as they do. Nothing shows up a non-hacker faster than one out of uniform.

Next, install any CLI-based OS. DOS, Linux, doesn’t matter.

Now that you have a command prompt (with the blinking cursor, nothing else will do), you can hack anything! Type in a command like “reroute airtraffic > Boise” and watch all of those jets turn around. Steal the latest hollywood flick with “download harrypotter.movie now” Want to make your idiot neighbors power blink in and out, spelling “I am t3h fag0rz” in morse code? Go right ahead. You’re only limited by your imagination.

DISCLAIMER: I am not responsible for the misuse of the preceding information.”

“Wouldn’t you also need a keyboard which beeps with every keystroke and a monitor which projects shapes onto your face as you work?”

“What about the exceedingly slow save program?

I want to make sure that whenever I save a file it goes extremely slowly and show’s me every percent along the way.

Oh, and it has to flash every bit of data on screen as it saves. I’m sure it’ll work out some sort of proper layout too.

Otherwise, how would I know it’s actually saving the proper data?”

Who Saves Daylight?

I hate Daylight Savings. Not because I dislike the extra hour of sunlight, but because of how it forces me to adjust my aural sense for time. My sense of time generally relies on the color of my wall as seen through the top left corner of my left eye, but that is no longer a reliable source, forcing me to turn all the way around to my clock, which is occasionally obfuscated by various objects.

Daylight Savings royally screwed me over last night, too. I was exiting Oblivion expecting the clock to read 2:00 AM, providing for a full 7 hours of sleep prior to Church. Nay, it was 3:00 AM, forcing me to sit down and watch cartoons that had been dubbed with fart sounds most hilariously (it was an April Fools thing).

As for April Fools? I’ve taken a liking to the internet version of this holiday. Generally I hate April Fools, but this year, it did not fall upon a school day, and waking up to a world of bizarre news was rather exciting, until I realized it was indeed April 1st. What I find more amusing about April Fools is what is unintentionally interpreted as a joke. But then again, Snakes on a Plane is quickly coming.

Speaking of movies, I saw Slither last night, as a sort of birthday doodad with Christopher and Jonathan. Akin to movies such as Army of Darkness or Bubba Ho-Tep, this movie, whether because it really was hilarious, or because I was just in the mood, had me laughing the whole way through. It was really, really gross, through. I’m no fan of gore, especially the visceral, intestiny kind that Slither had, but I still managed to find it really hilarious.

I won’t bore you with Oblivion details right now, but rest assured, it’s coming.

Along with a gig of RAM (should be here Monday or Tuesday).

Oblivion, lol

[geek]

I am now taking a short break to give you some preliminary (after 30 or 40 hours of playing) thoughts on Oblivion. Eventually, I’d like to do a nice, extensive review with some of my personal favorite screenshots and whatnot, but for now, I just want to jot down some interesting things.

The first being, the graphics, and my computer’s rendering capability. I am ever so close to being able to max out the settings in every category. My main limitation lies in the speed and capacity of RAM. PC3200 is standard, but contains no capacity for overclocking, and combined with the mere 512MB (hopefully being rectified tomorrow), my computer is unhappy with Oblivion’s extensive use of textures.

I’ve been running the game at 1024×768, with HDR enabled, and all other settings set to maximum. Because Oblivion uses floating-point HDR (Half Life 2 and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory use an “interlaced” version that is much closer to Bloom than true HDR), anti-aliasing is off by default. I have not yet tried forcing AA on, but judging from the performance I got with Bloom and 4xAA, I do not expect a strong display of computing prowess.

For those of you that do not know, HDR is a lighting system that attempts to simulate the intricacies of the eye – moving from dark areas to light areas results in greater brightness for a period of time, which is inversely true for the reverse situation (that is, moving from light to dark results in a very dark environment). However, the lack of native AA almost makes Bloom (what is generally referred to as the “cheap knockoff” of HDR) more preferable. I took some comparison shots which you can see here.

Anti-aliasing becomes a serious issue when I’m faced with large patches of grass. Much of Oblivion is covered with truly spectacular fields of grass that will make your computer commit seppuku if you are not properly prepared. I have not sufficiently played with the settings to rectify this situation, but that will come soon. Playing with the settings can be rather frustrating when you have to restard Oblivion for any kind of major settings changes.

As for the game, I can safely say this is the best game I’ve played in years. Is it the best game I’ve ever played? I don’t know, but it just might be. More to come later.

[/geek]

NO WAI!

Many things to report! The first of which, are my grades. They are good enough (I don’t know the GPA) to justify coming back, but I still have work to do. In fact, I have a programming project that’s now 3 days late that I need to finish for Monday.

So, the grades are like this:

English: B+ (one bad quiz and poor attendance)
US History: Pass
Math: Pass (bad homework, that’s because i have no calculator still, so i can’t do it)
APCS: A- (gonna fall with this next project)
Physics: B (i keep forgetting the homework! argh!)
CIM: B (poor attendance)
Digital: Pass (one bad test, keep forgetting homework, terrible attendence – it’s my first period class)
PE: A

Funny story with Digital – I walked in 30 minutes late one day and they had actually taken bets as to what time I’d get there. Mike was the winner with 8:20. When I say they took bets, Mr. Peters actually wrote down the bets on the board. The worst part is that the only scolding I got was from Mr. Briegle (read: he’s not even the teacher of that class). Digital has improved since like three people dropped the class a few weeks ago, though. Much, much improved.

I’ve basically been getting NO sleep. Generally around ten hours for every five days of school – this isn’t really because I’m playing games or whatever, it’s because I fall asleep when I get home for an hour or two (I’ve been walking home recently, so I get home at 4:00), and somewhere between two and three days a week I now have Judo. Keep in mind, this isn’t me complaining. I’m actually thoroughly enjoying finally taking on school and doing something with my time. I’ve pretty much adjusted to the sleep thing, and I’ve found I actually feel much better with 3 hours of sleep over 5 or 6. Moving on, though.

[semi-geek]

Several things have changed about my computer recently, which I think concerns each and every one of you. Firstly and most earth-shatteringly, I’ve switched to Opera. Opera, you ask? Opera was once the ad-laden alternative to Firefox, but has recently been purged of such foul inventions. Opera is, in general, significantly faster and less laden with “memory leaks” (I don’t care what you call them, Mozilla Foundation, if it sucks up 100 MB of my memory, it’s a memory leak). It’s, in general, just more awesome. It has some issues with AJAX/Flash, but it works just fine in general. The biggest selling point for me was that it played about 50% more YTMNDs natively than Firefox did.

The only unfortunate part is that the widget support (AKA extensions) isn’t as large as Firefox’s was. I’m using the 9.0 beta, which is the only version that supports widgets. The widgets themselves are more akin to the Konfabulator I once used, which is now called something else under Yahoo’s ownership.

[/semi-geek]

Other things I’ve gotten into? Last.fm is in there, which I had previously ignored for lack of knowledge of its radio-doodle. I’m now frantically trying to catch up with Zach and Paul in their track counts, which, considering my current Winamp stats, won’t take too long, but it will certainly take time. I cheated last night and left music on overnight (with the volume off, silly), but I probably won’t do that again. Note “probably”. Ahem.

[geek]

Most importantly, is the fact that the world will collapse in on itself with the arrival of Oblivion in a SINGLE WEEK! A SINGLE WEEK! AHAHA! I’ve not been this excited since the arrival of Halo 2! I scoured the internet for scans of the March 2006 OXM review of it (9.5 out of 10!), to no avail. Luckily, we get an early dismissal on the Thursday of that week, as well as a day off Friday. Truly, the heavens are aligning to accomodate the arrival of this magnificent piece of game.

/glare

I’m so white I can’t even see.

I demand money. Lots, and lots.

I can’t believe I do this for free.

[geek]

For those interested in what went wrong, it was in fact Windows’ fault. Apparantly something I installed triggered the desire for Windows to start the IIS services (Microsoft’s version of Apache), which are highly magical and almost virus-like in the way they operate. They do not show up in the Task Manager’s process list, nor do they display as using any ports in the command prompt. Yet, in fact, they were hogging up port 80, Apache’s default port. After turning off the services and dozens of installs and uninstalls of Apache 1.3 and 2.0.55 (2.2 has no .exe available yet), Apache wouldn’t add itself to Window’s service list, probably after its run in with IIS.

I’m working on a bug with the PHP at the moment, but otherwise, things are just dandy. I may redo the graphicals over the break next week, but that is a mere pondering. Yes, a mere pondering.

[/geek]

Just like your mom.

EDIT: Just so none of you get this crazy idea that I like you fools, I didn’t read anyone’s blog unless they had an RSS feed. And even those times were sparing, as my lacking presence over at the place that’s serving the roast duck, with the mango salsa, for those silly cavemen.

SIlly, silly cavemen.

You Are SO Not Invited.

I’m surprised that up to this point, not a single person has noted the lack of explanation of the asterisk lying in wait in the header. Once upon a time, before what I dub the “Great Harddrive Failure of 2005” and the resulting “Dark Age of the Internet”, I had utilized this asterisk to note something of extreme importance. The issue here is that I have absolutely no idea what I had noted. I had originally planned to make a footer (the things that go below everything, thus why they are called footers, unless you’re a CommuNazi). Nonetheless, I am nauseated and disgusted by your skills of examination. So much so that both my eyes are filled with angst, also known as blood.

So, I woke up this morning to my eyes telling me “we hate you”. The meaning of this I didn’t understand until I started experiencing exponentially increasing aches in the area of my head, and by third period, I had been informed that both of my eyes were completely bloodshot. After confirming this fact via a quick run to the mirror, I took my first visit to the nurse’s office of the year, and slept rather peacefully for thirty minutes until my dad got me. The ride home was rather painful as the sun was out, and light to my head was the equivelant of mating in the manner of moose and rams (that is, to repeatedly bash your head against a hard object…not…the other things rams do…). After decorating the house a bit (i now have my silly mini tree in my room, it emits about 25 or 30W of happy), I again went to sleep, but not before playing a rousing game of Age of Empires II, which I’m sure most of you are familiar with. For those of you who aren’t, skip this next part.

[geek]

It’s amazing how poorly memory serves to accurately define a staple of my youth. The game is ridiculously easy – I remember finding the computer insanely hard to beat even on the moderate setting, but using the Goths (whose special unit is the Huskarl, that has like 15 piercing armor, costs like nothing, and can be created in less than 3 seconds) I’ve managed to completely own without even a question of my authority. I generally just create my entire army of 100 in less than two minutes, and sweep the entire map in one or two runs. Before I have the resources for the massive recruitment, I create only enough to defend my base as well as my ally’s. Whether this strategy would work in a real game, I don’t know.

I now have the yearning to play Starcraft again – if I get any minor amounts of money this Christmas, I’ll be certain to get the combo. It’s probably down to ten bucks these days.

[/geek]

Various things (no bulleted list here, i’m afraid):

My parents somehow miraculously got me signed up for Ski Club, past the deadline. This is a highly good thing, as such a proliforous amount of people were going this year (as opposed to last year), missing out on the fun would just be no good.

I’ve finally, after like three months, gotten back in touch with a few of the people from camp. Christina and I have sent a few back and forth, and I got in touch with Zach, although I have still left the entirity of Ohio behind. With time, I’ll get there, but for now, I’m a bum.

Things of humor (sorry, no bulleted list again):

If you check out Colette’s Xanga, you’ll see a post concerncing some silly face recognition software that compares your face (hur, hur) to that of a bunch of celebrities. I am proof that this thing is entirely broken. Just look. (grumble)

Two or three posts ago, I gave a little plug for Facebook, encouraging people to sign up. So, they did. I friended these people. And you know what happens? A pentagram, apparantly. My network of friends is one step away from symbolizing the devil. Ryan is the only thing stopping this. Insert fear here.

And finally, let’s have some good times. The next gen is here, and everybody is celebrating. If you don’t get that, I suggest you go watch four hours of press conferences from E3. Like me! I’ve been listening to the song from that thing for at least an hour now, it’s so good.

Now, because cliches are in, I am creating a new status: the conventions of standard English in the titles. As long as cliches are in, there will be a conventions status monitor, which I will create for your pleasure tomorrow. Images shall be included! As soon as cliches are out, however, the status of the conventions will be neither in, nor out. As you can see, the conventions are obviously in (read: capitalization, grammar, punctuation). Dance Katuragi, DANCE!

As a wise woman once said…

“These are like therapy.”

Obligatory Bash.org quotes! Seperated into geek and non-geek, and more offensive ones are just linked.

Warmaster_Horus: But some of the stuff you can do with mayo is good
NiTessine: Yes. Like assassinations.
Mithran: You assassinate people with mayo?
NiTessine: Nobody ever suspects mayo.

Sefy89: God my mom wont stop yelling
Dested: wat did u do this time?
Sefy89: i called her lazy and told her to get up and do some work
Dested: …doesnt your mom have a broken leg?
Sefy89: thus the noise

McKhaos: this guy asks me
McKhaos: how many people work in your company ?
McKhaos: my answer
McKhaos: about a third

Chronic Munchies: imagine if anne frank had a BLOG instead of a DIARY
Chronic Munchies: currently listening to: nazis pounding on the door
GenAmonX2K: Current Mood: concentrating

donchongo: i wonder what possesed some one to invent play-doh and silly putty
Wildfire: poop dries out to fast
donchongo: that really put a screeching halt to my thought process

* Porter is now known as PorterWITHGIRLFRIENDWHOISHOT
Strayed: he shot his girlfriend?

testman: i asked my girlfriend to come home to watch the last samurai
testman: and she answered “i’d like to, but i didn’t see the first ones”

hahacornut: I need visual aids for my presentation tomorrow
Narcissus: go to visual africa

[geek]

* Mapionetka then wonders what the hell he is going to do with his 32mb mem stick
ginji: stick it where the sun doesn’t shine Mapionetka ?
Mapionetka: in my computer room?

DmncAtrny: I will write on a huge cement block “BY ACCEPTING THIS BRICK THROUGH YOUR WINDOW, YOU ACCEPT IT AS IS AND AGREE TO MY DISCLAIMER OF ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, AS WELL AS DISCLAIMERS OF ALL LIABILITY, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL, THAT MAY ARISE FROM THE INSTALLATION OF THIS BRICK INTO YOUR BUILDING.”
DmncAtrny: And then hurl it through the window of a Sony officer
DmncAtrny: and run like hell

tdo: i was helping my tech teacher out a few days in july or so
tdo: and i got some calls
tdo: from potential customers
tdo: and one of them was this little boy who couldn’t have been more than six or seven
tdo: and he was almost in TEARS
tdo: “everything i type is in caps what do i do my moms goinng to kill me”

[/geek]

http://bash.org/?577458

http://bash.org/?576018

http://bash.org/?575362

http://bash.org/?572066

Delicious Delicacies

EDIT:

I forgot to mention this, but I hope you’ve all seen what Katrina’s done, it’s really amazing. You hear about floods all the time, but this really is on the scale of the damage the tsunami did. Obviously not on such a huge scale, but considering how few natural disasters damage the U.S., excepting Florida, this really is noteworthy. I know God is working through this, despite all the death and destruction we see. That’s my two cents.

As you can see, changes are in progress. Things are happening. It’s basically reverting back to the old template, but, it should look marginally better, if nothing else. If I just get too frustrated, the old template is coming back. I’m not keen on redoing all the JS I had integrated into this.

Last day of work is tomorrow. I slept in today, on purpose. The nice thing about being payed by the hour is you recieve your own punishment for being late, so I don’t mind too much. All it means is I have to work a little harder for the parts. Which reminds me. Let me tell you about them parts.

[geek]

So, the parts I put in the day the HDD broke (which I didn’t back up) were these:

The PSU, CD-RW and DVD-R are all black, fitting the theme of my computer. This racked up a tidy total of 155 bucks (including shipping). That puts us at a total of about 225 bucks, thanks to mister case.

The next round of parts will be:

Bringing that to a total of 715 dollars. With shipping, about 720. The motherboard is black, too, and quite an awesome price. I don’t want SLI since there’s no way I’m spending money on two 7800GTs. The gravity of this video card is immense. I hope you all understand that. That card is the second best thing you can buy. It’s quite a good price considering the free BF2, which I was going to buy anyways. It’s gonna be hot. That will bring the total under 1000 dollars, which was the goal. There’s a bunch of other things I’d like to get if possible (maybe for Christmas or birthday) that add up to about 300, speakers, a sound card, new headphones, that kinda stuff. A new HDD is definitely in order, I don’t know what that will be on the budget, but before all the extra goodies for sure.

I’ll order that once Mom and Dad get back from picking up Jonothan (the paycheck won’t arrive until after they leave, and they’re the ones with teh monay), at which point the metamorphosis will be complete. I’m excited, to say the least.

[/geek]

So, that’s about it. I’ll keep doing improvements on the template and such, it will regain its former glory with time.

The One Redeeming Quality

Something I’d forgotten over the past few years is something about Ithaca that redeems most of the liberal extremists, leftist tree-huggers, and drugged up hippies.

During my daily checking of Slashdot, I came across an article about video game violence, written by a student who went to Columbine during the shootings, and was friends with the shooters and the shot. I’m always on the hunt for good backup for the day when I’ll have to defend myself against someone who doesn’t understand what I do for a hobby, so I checked it out, and also read the comments on the article on /..

The sole blessing of Ithaca is the fact that as a high school student, I can be who I am, and I am not going to suffer in any way for that. Seeing stories about ignorant parents who take away their child’s computer permanently and news about geeks like myself having their only defense against the sucky world that is high school taken away, really strikes home. God has blessed me with parents that know and understand me enough to see that the tube I sit in front of all day is not a handicap or an escape. Knowing that other parents are foolish enough to give into the public hysteria that is the mainstream media pains me.

I am comforted to know I don’t have to deal with real rednecks and jocks.

Not that I’m stereotyping or anything.

But it’s not like they’ll find out anyways, being rednecks and jocks.

That wasn’t a stereotype either.

Another Quickie…(O.o)

[geek]

Happy, Gwen?

New case is wonderful – far quieter and sexier than before. I’ve set my next goal on what to buy – 150 dollars is the required amount this time. CD-RW, DVD/CD-ROM, Arctic Silver, HSF, PSU. Should have that before the end of the month – this is aesthetically the biggest upgrade – the drives will be black, the computer will run slightly faster and cooler, all that jazz, which will be rather nice.

[/geek]

I had the interview with Sho’s dad on Friday, which went rather well – I didn’t actually know it was an interview until Sho scolded my Army shirt near the end of school. It went well either way – it’s exactly what I’d hoped for. That, plus the 7 bucks an hour makes for a very good job.

[geek]

When I got home I promptly ripped apart my computer as Karel watched in laughing horror as I recklessly constructed the beast. My mistake in the building process was in not putting the seperators (my mind blanked on the actual term…) between the mobo and the case. Thankfully my ‘Power Supply’ brand PSU was smart enough to stop before frying me and my hardware. I didn’t know this at the time, and the squealing noise emitting from the PSU scared me witless. After spending the entire night laboring over the mess, I gave up assuming the power surge that day had shorted the PSU, which fried the motherboard and processor.

The next day I was severely distressed – I’d gone a full 18 hours without a computer, and I was beginning to crack. I retreated to my dad’s computer, when available, to sort out which parts to order, which added to 600 dollars. I obviously don’t have 600 dollars on me – I was set on loaning it from either Karel or Christopher. Dad was DEAD set against me borrowing from Karel, and spent all of Sunday arguing with him over the phone and bargaining with Christopher to get him to loan me the money. The other choice was to wait 12 days (actually more than that – about 20) for my Dad to get home to order them for me. Truly, a stressful situation.

[/geek]

In between all this, Paul, Ben, and Zach spent the night Saturday, after randomly appearing as I was going out to mow lawns (at the time Kerry and Julia were there too). Thoroughly mocking my biking gloves, they felt absolutely no mercy for my ego. I didn’t go to church the following morning even though I was ready by 9:15 – Mom didn’t get back from dropping Dad at the airport until almost 10:00, and Paul was still around, so I decided to stay home.

Today, I got myself a grand olde haircut (which I rather like, as per usual). I think I like this one enough to replace my :-O picture. Ye shall see.

I also watched Gladiator two or three times over the weekend. Possibly my favorite movie.

I’m Not Convinced (O.o)

I am recovering from running 11 laps (including the various running outside of PE, I ran 3 miles today). It hurts. It’s interesting how critical people are of me for actually doing what we’re supposed to be doing in PE. When I try to explain why I run, nobody gets it. They get this blank look on their face, and quickly switch back to their sarcastic mockery of an activity they probably aren’t fit enough to do. And now, a rant.

[geek rant]

As I opened up my Google homepage, I noticed a /. article that piqued my interest. So, I checked it out. What I found was an article that was a poorly disguised troll to stir up the standard mockery of M$ and the owner thereof. In general, the Slashdot kind of geek is smart, wise in the ways of science and/or programming, and is a faithful user of a linux variant. This also usually entails a deep, close-minded hatred of M$ and Bill Gates. This ticks me off, a lot.

Whenever anyone mentions M$ (I use the acronym simply because I mock them, and partially because Microsoft DOES make a lot of money), Linux geeks appear from nowhere and make the most horrific generalizations and accusations that are mostly wrong. They complain about the GUI (which you can change), BSODs (which disappeared since NT), poor UPnP, horrific networking capabilities, the list goes on; anything that was bad about Windows 95, they will mention. Honestly? Comparing Windows 95 to the current versions of Linux is retarded. Linux doesn’t have security issues – why? Because there are practically no programs for it. At least Microsoft TRIED to provide programs to use (Internet explorer, windows media player) instead of just saying “it’s not OUR fault nobody is using our superior OS!”. So what if IE and WMP suck? At least they get the job done.

Here comes a typical response: Microsoft forces people to pay for their disfuctional products. They didn’t get where they are now by making completely disfuctional products. Consider this: half the reason using computers and software is so much more streamlined is only because computers are infinitely more efficient, faster, and easier to make and utilize. Most crashes, in my memory, were caused by just overloading the system – that’s a hardware issue. Don’t try to tell me Linux wouldn’t have crashed – that’s a hypothetical nobody can prove. Just because it’s your favorite thing since sliced bread doesn’t make it perfect.

Point is: I’m tired of hearing Linux geeks talk about what Windows used to be. Right now, XP is a stable (it has almost never crashed on me), secure (I’ve never had any kind of virus of adware), and most of all: easy. You have to do next to nothing to get Windows to do what you want. Every now and then I find myself frustrated by having everything in a GUI – there are virtues to doing everything manually, but most of the time I look to my computer as home, not work.

[/geek rant]

So, Zach got his PSP, which I have yet to see. Eventually, one day, I will walk home with him and Ben and see this marvel of technology. For now, I shall stick to my cookies, sour cream & onion chips, turkey, and chicken that I picked up yesterday when I went to the store with my mom. I tell you, my mom does not get the right quantity of food unless I provide specific directions. 😛

Left, Right, Cut, Back, Down! (O.o)

I have opened begun a post almost every day this week, and just, got distracted. What have I been doing, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you!

Tuesday I went to Crosswalk with Daniel, and afterwards went over to his house for a couple hours. Went to Bible Study, spilled strawberries RIGHT in my lap, embarrassing innuendo followed.

[geek]

The entire purpose of this week, the sole purpose, the only reason this week exists, was E3. I honestly did next to NOTHING this week but watch over 5 hours of press conferences, game demos, and trailers from E3. I stated that I was firm in my faith with the Xbox 360. I am here to tell you that it is not such any longer. The PS3, has by far outclassed the Xbox 360 in hardware, and if some of the rumors are true, games. The sheer power of the PS3 is astounding – they ran a full demo using the Unreal 3 engine flawlessly. The 360 definately can’t do that. However, the 360 carries multiple franchises I am attached to, and several upcoming games I am interested in. The deciding factor here? FFVII. Sony demonstrated a tech demo of astounding quality, of the first scene in FFVII. Rumor has it that the cutscene was a part of the remake. No announcements have been made thus far. Speaking of FFVII, Advent Children is scheduled for September 13th. w00tl4r.

Personally, I need to make myself an empirical comparison of the PS3 vs. the Xbox 360. More for me than you.

PS3:

      ++ Automatically a/b/g wi-fi enabled

 

      ++ Approximately 2x pure processing power w/Cell

 

      ++ Broadcasts up to 1080p

 

      ++ Comes in black, looks nice

 

      + Heavenly Sword

 

      ++ Final Fantasy

 

      + Killzone 2

 

      + Metal Gear Solid 4

 

      ++ Significantly more powerful GPU

 

      + Utilizes Blu-ray

 

    ++ Utilizes Unreal 3 Engine

— Akward controller!
— Fewer good franchises/hopeful games

Xbox 360:

      ++ Automatically online enabled w/Live (which is probably better than other online services)

 

      ++ Better controller

 

      + Blue Dragon

 

      + Comes w/remote?

 

      ++ Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

 

      + Fable 2

 

      ++ Halo 3

 

      + Ninety-Nine Nights

 

    + Perfect Dark Zero

— Half as powerful on the proc side alone
— Less powerful GPU than the RSX
— Semi-ugly appearance

At the moment, PS3 looks to be ahead. We’ve got a few months until November. We’ll see. As a side note: Gothic III comes out this year, as well. I’ve posted a couple random movies I enjoyed on the server. And by the way, that Killzone 2 demo is not reflective of what the game is actually like. In most senses of the word, it’s not real-time.

Linkage

[/geek]

Other than that, I’ve watched another whole blob of movies. I finally got around to watching the two Harry Potter movies (the second and third). The third wasn’t too shabby, though the second kinda sucked. I also rewatched portions of Revolutions, for old time’s sake. I saw Episode III last night, which was refreshingly good. I liked it better than I, II, and IV, it was quite worth seeing.

Today, I cleaned the attic. I didn’t rearrange much (a few signs, some of the chairs), but I vacuumed it up, washed the windows, ping pong table, foosball table, and the snapple machine, and fixed some of the lights, and lastly replaced some of the tacks with nails. And fixed the fan’s positions. And spot-cleaned the carpet. Ahem.

And now I must make sure I wake up tomorrow, for church, as my parents will not be here.

Das War….ein Gutes Spiel! (O.o)

I just spent my entire day at Mike (Langenbacher)’s house. What was I doing, you ask? Not feeding ducks, to be sure. Our German class is doing this group (ours was Mike, Matt, Julia, Ryan, and myself) project for a book we read – paraphrase the movie in the form of a play, and you can do it in a movie. So, we did the movie thing. We shot the entire thing in about 5 hours (5:00 – 10:00), with about 9-10 minutes of actual footage. None of us actually memorized the lines – we’d shoot short sections (like 30 seconds) and just memorize right before. It was spiffy. I died about 5-6 times throughout the movie, which was thoroughly enjoyable. I hope Mike does a good job splicing it together, since I think it will turn out well if he does.
Various events worth noting:

  • I watched the Matrix Reloaded again Wednesday night. I’ve forgotten how cool some of the action scenes are – despite being a poor movie as far as the plot goes, I thoroughly enjoy the fight scenes and car chases.
  • I watched Black Hawk Down again Thursday night. I saw it a couple years ago, when I was in 6th grade. Another good action movie, a nice, realistic portayal of Rangers in action. I was unaware until watching some of the credits that Ridley Scott directed it. Man-points for him.
  • I may be getting my braces off Thursday. It depends on how much they like me. That same day, I will be taking the permit test.
  • I was cleaning out the car that will eventually be mine, (the green Ford Explorer in my driveway), and found much phat l00t throughout it. Jonothan never cleaned it out, so there’s all kinds of stuff about.
  • Benjamin and Nolan are spending the night tomorrow, as well as staying over pretty much all day. Their parents are out of town. Hopefully, Benjamin and I will be able to get this other box running on SuSE and have it serving all this stuff more reliably than it is on here.

Among the important events, Christopher will be coming to live with us (as in, in our house). He’ll be out of the military in a couple weeks, and pretty much has nowhere else to go, but home. His plans for the future are ambiguous, but he’s thinking about taking some courses to finish up his degree (he has at least 2-3 years worth in credit-hours from all kinds of random places). This is cool news.

[geek]

The Xbox 360 was unveiled about three days ago. If it holds up the Xbox tradition, this will be the hardware I’m getting. I don’t like Sony much at all – the PS3 is not appealing to me, even though I haven’t even seen the specifications or capabilities yet. The wiki on it is more extensive than anything the mainstream sites will give you. To sum it up, though, the Xbox 360 does everything and anything you want it to – it can handle media across the Live community and from external sources, like mp3 players, cameras, digital and video. It’s completely wireless enabled, so LAN parties no longer require hubs or cables, and the controllers are wireless. It has customizable plates, detachable 20 GB hd, it just, man, it looks sweet. The games are not worth speculating on – when they’re here, and they’re good, I’ll say something. But the list is nice – Fable 2, Halo 2, Perfect Dark Zero, Blue Dragon, Elder Scrolls IV, and Ghost Recon 3. It’s some crazy stuff. The graphics look incredible for all the games currently along in development. I don’t want to be a raving fanboy, but I hope I can save up enough for this thing. It’s sweet.

And Nintendo? The DS and Gamecube prevent me from trusting them until the deliver. I’m still hurt from the dissapointment of Project Dolphin. I remember the screenshots of the Zelda that was to be on the Dolphin. My heart ached for a long time.

[/geek]

Time to pick a movie to watch and clean up the room.

Deceleration, and the Lack Thereof (-.-)

I stayed home sick today, and this will be my last sick day for the year. Only 25 days left to go. I worked on the title image, finally got the text AA’d. I realized that GIFs don’t support color-to-transparency, so it’s a PNG again, and IE users get to suffer. Beyond that, I mowed a lawn (I didn’t stay home to do that), went to Scouts, and just got more rest. It was nice.

You know, I was gonna write more. But, something just came up, and has taken away every desire to make a post at this moment.

24 is Not Enough (O.o)

I swear, whoever decided on making days only 24-hours needs to remedy this situation immediately. I’ve spent this entire week staring at this screen and at books, my head hurts, I’m learning way too much. I finally got the motivation to start up with PHP and Javascript, in lieu of my blog changes. In addition to this, I got a different C++ book from my Java teacher, which I’m not sure I like better than the one I have. I’ve probably spent a total of 40 hours doing work on the blog and blog-related locale so far, with more work to do still. I desperately need time, I keep finding myself looking up to find the clock at 11:30, with my homework still not done. It doesn’t help that spring is now here, and mowing customers are calling. Speaking of which, I have to mow a lawn in a few minutes, so this will be fairly short.

Let me know what you think of the changes – I need suggestions. I’m really liking the improvements thus far. It feels a lot more professional and organized to me.

The Halo 2 playlist update and ranking reset was today, but I haven’t been able to touch Halo 2 for three days. Gotta get to that tonight.

Oh, He WENT Home… (^^)

I am still sick, but functional to a minimal level. Just thought you should know.

In recent events, my grades have finally “gotten to the dog house” as some would say. I present to you my postulates on the report card.

  1. German 3H: A- (“Tim! You’ve improved so much! You’re being so responsible! I’m impressed!”)
  2. Math 10H: B- (straight from the grade book)
  3. Principles of Engineering: A (guess)
  4. Global 2H: A or A+ (I got a 101 on the last test, did the extra credit…it’s cool)
  5. Programming 2: A or A+ (I’ve gotten A+ on all the projects, with one C- on a test and one A elsewhere)
  6. English 10H: B+ or A- (102 journal grade, 90 on the test, 92 on performance…)
  7. Chemistry: B (this is pending…right now, it’s a B-, after tons and tons and tons of work, up from a 50%, to at least an 82, not sure on many things right now, but at least a B-)
  8. PE: who cares?

In total, I’ve raised my grades by about a proportional 300%+, a literal 175+%, by a magnitude of 2, take your pick, it’s big.

[geek]

Beyond this, I’ve downloaded Eclipse. This doesn’t effect you, but, it’s cool for me. It’s the open-source version of Visual Studio.net Enterprise. Supports Java, C, C++, and all web-based and database languages. I’m really, really lost in the interface, but it’s one of those things that’s powerful enough to take the time to learn, and you’ll be better off in the end. I also picked up this book on C++ Paul gave me eons ago, and will probably start meandering through that (I already started into some of it). I need to figure out how Eclipse works first, though. Otherwise, I can’t compile any of the programs I write. Yeah, shup noob, so I can’t figure out how to debug and run the programs. Nobody cares.

[/geek]

Today consisted of final work on classes (technically the last day of the marking period, meaning teachers start taking grades to apply on the next period, but some stretch the rule). I was running around school too long and ended up missing my bus, so I got to spend extra time on classes. Except, not. None of the teachers were around. I kind meandered around after calling my parents (couldn’t give me a ride, I was really tired and hungry), but I decided I’d make the best of it and sang my way to Center Ithaca, got some pizza and a coke, and read the newspaper for 30 minutes. I don’t know why, but that’s a really nice way to spend an afternoon. I dreaded walking home alone, but strangely enough, it was just plain nice. It’s a relaxing time to just get to think, and enjoy the magnificent day we had.

I got home, and the Epinepherine wore off, and I could not speak coherently, or stay in my chair. It was most hilarious. I ate the last of the chocolate roll (oh, so, very, good), and proceeded back to school to see the newest musical, “My Favorite Year”. The list of attendants includes: Scott, Naina, Gwen, Amy, Mollie, Katie, me, Ryan, Matt, Ben F.. I’ve gotta say…for a high school production, this musical was insanely good. The mains actors were extremely good. I mean, really good. The timing was superb, everything went generally like clockwork. Often the term “good” is thrown around when involved with high school productions, mostly despite many disqualifying traits, such as poor scenery and prop movement, costumes, poor synchronization, or other non-essential traits that boost the believibility of the production. No such thing here.

Amd here we are. For those who care, I stuck my music on the server. That’s a lot less than all of it, but feel free to dig in if you so please. I stuck it on there mainly to listen to while in programming at school. It gets awful boring when you’ve finished all your stuff and have nothing to do but sit. I still have to rip Paul’s Cake CDs (he gave me some for my “surprise” birthday party).

I need sleep, and I’m awesome. But not that awesome. Just a little awesome. And hacked. Cracked, even. With no skillz. But cracked none the less. Pwn. *shnickerh* *cough cough* *HACK!* *wheeze* cough. wink wink. Nod. Smile. Pwn. I am t3h n0ne l1137.zzzzorz. Daniel is a pansy. ‘Cause. Jesse is amused by a simple fan and cheese balls. And kleenex. zzZZZZZZzzzzZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ LET THE COUNTDOWN BEGIN!

BOB plus 1 equals 1 (O.o)

That, my friends, is all you will ever need to know. This is a very geeky post. Consider yourself warned.

Benjamin came over today, and we just spent all day doing random stuff. We played some Chaos Theory (boy is he bad at that *ducks*), took apart the old Linksys router, which was pretty cool. It was just standard hardware stuff, but it had random colored blinking LEDs, making it more cool. We also played around with my network (and the lack thereof….man, i am good), but I got it fixed now after taking a second try with the Netgear router. How did I do it? I didn’t use their stupid setup CD. O, foolish self, thinking that automated configuration would surpass that of manual setup.

Beyond that, we did a little PHP stuff, set up Apache and PHP on my computer, poked around with code provided by the wonderful users of PHP.net, none of which did we get working, and that was our day. Jesse was gonna come over too, but homework/grades forced his presence elsewhere. Time to go get owned in online Chaos Theory.

While I’m Gone…(O.o)

I’m headed to Colorado tomorrow, I’ll be back Tuesday (not next Tuesday) or Wednesday. I didn’t get to all the site improvements I’d hoped to yesterday, and I probably won’t get to them today. I’ll conduct a list of all I did for you, not that you care. 😛

  • Aligned top sidebar border and top post border
  • Made the main column wider.
  • Moved main column higher
  • Divided sidebar into 3 sections.
  • Added Profile section to sidebar.
  • Removed that dumb blogger image at the bottom.
  • Changed title from “Of Tim” to “And The Lack Thereof”.
  • Made IE generally happier.

I also have a list of things I’m planning on doing in the future! Again, not that you care, but…

  • Get the profile area done.
  • Clean up my code a little more, it’s good as is but could be better.
  • Find a new place to put the comments. I’ve found that the current place it out of the way, and easy to miss.
  • Improve the color I have set for the post dates and blog title.
  • Test out some different border styles.
  • Improve for IE, again.
  • Get a better statcounter.

And a little bit further in the future, once I’ve learned PHP and javascript…

  • Set up a server and host the blog on it.
  • Remove the archive.
  • Bring back the multiple style sheet interface (the red, green, and blue templates)
  • Make an option for automatically emailing new posts to you.

I’ve got a lot of hope for this thing, I’ve been really enjoying slowly improving it throughout time. I’m glad to see how much I’ve improved this thing. It looked pretty darn horrid back in the day.

Anyways, I have some packing, and some burning to do. I need some music for the trip, and I don’t have a MP3 CD player (I really need one), so I have to convert everything to .wav and burn it, which just isn’t cool. Oh well. While I’m gone, go check out Aireline, Built to Spill, Muse, and Sunny Day Real Estate. Good stuff. Off I go to pack.

Set to the Tune of “Commercialization”

The TV is currently spewing out various noises and images related to football and commericals, as I download techno and talk to the few people on IM. I’m not a huge football fan – I can enjoy it in good company, and I know how the game works, but I don’t take time out of my days to watch it. I’m at least into it enough to be able to have a short conversation about it with the pizza delivery guy.

[geek] I spent all of Friday and Saturday building two alternate styles for the Boy Scout website I’m helping with. They wanted some alternate ideas for design, but I was faced with the issue of sorting through code I hadn’t written, and doing it in VI under the unix file system (which I wasn’t very familiar with). It took me about 12 hours to do, since I had to learn how to use chmod (all the files I ssh’d over to the server started with no read/write privilages), and then because of some confusion with the divs and paragraphs, it took me a few hours to figure out the percentages I needed to set (which were never really up to snuff). I also had to figure out a lot of stuff in GIMP (aka Photoshop), as I’ve never really been proficient in that. My second style didn’t work due to some problems in the PHP (that’s all I could find to be the problem in the 20 minutes I had to finish it). Definately fun though, learned a lot of stuff. [/geek]

Nothing else of astounding importance has really happened, though. I’m downloading a whole LOT of techno right now (14 different albums, amounting to about 30 or 40 tracks). During this process though, I’ve noticed something really, really creepy. All the techno forums (where I download the techno) are like…robotic, sort of like a ghost town. So far even the forum formats are the same (they both use phpBB, but the same style, different colors though). I’ve been 4 different places, all the same (including di.fm, which is the general go-to place for techno). All the music is in the same format – one track for each “CD”, with a 2 kb CUE file (i can’t figure out what these do), and usually there’s an option for a torrent or for direct dl. Maybe it’s just the industry standard, I don’t know.

Colette burned me the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack. She had me listening to it on the bus home from ski club, it’s pretty good. Some of it’s a little too…singy, but it’s not bad as far as musicals go. Ski club was pretty good, it was nice and warm, so there was room to have some fun. They had signs up telling people to hug the people monitoring the ski lifts. I was running around stealing everybody’s poles (mostly Colette’s, cause she was the easiest to steal from :P).

And, I can’t think of much else interesting to say, so I shall return to looking around for Superbowl commercials.

At the End of All Things (-.-)

The title refers to the final chapter of Lord of the Rings. Today’s been a rather active, mentally and emotionally. After the Math A (piece of cake) I went home, and watched the last 3 episodes of Fullmetal. I watched 23 episodes last night (that is, Monday, as this is 1:16 AM on Wednesday morning) in a row. Having finished it, I am wholly reminded of endings, particularly, the end of good things. Books, movies, shows, I hate getting to the end. If the media did the job correctly, I am left with a gaping hole where it once stood, and I grasp for something as a replacement. This is especially painful with this series, as the character of Edward Elric was…incredible. No, I won’t spoil anything for those who valiantly choose to watch it on TV, and by valiant, I refer to the utter frustration you will want to wreak on your television set when each episode ends, and another does not begin. And yet still, I feel the desire to wreak havoc upon my surroundings in the futile hope of recieving another episode.

Besides finishing Fullmetal, I jumped into the job of helping create the Troop 2 Scouts website. Benjamin’s doing the PHP, Daniel’s doing the CSS, I’m doing the content, and the three of us together decide what’s happening graphically. It’s a fun project – I’ve learned a lot about the Unix file system, SSH, and vi.

The true point of this was to express my utter…helplessness to the feeling I have after finishing Fullmetal. I just, argh, when something that good ends, I just wanna scream, and there’s nothing to replace that empty feeling I have. It’s no surpise, really, as I filled my last week’s nights with watching the episodes (heck, it only took me 5 days to watch 51 episodes, so less than that). I should stop ranting at this point, I suppose.

Monday was the first time I’ve been back to Boy Scouts for a good many months, they were rather happy to see me, and my timing seems rather good, considering the rather…inparticipative older scouts (coughBRANDONcoughPETERcough). I’m sort of obligated to go on the next two camp outs, I guess. I wish I hadn’t said yes for the most recent one, as the timing is inconvenient, but backing out would be rather, shall we say, detrimental to the amount of trust placed in my motivation to show up.

I think I may go re-watch a few episodes now, I’m not sure, but we’ll see.

The Chaotic Theorum (O.o)

I’ve experienced a rather excellent week, and next week promises to be equally excellent, as it is Regents, meaning two days lacking anything related to school, and two short and relatively painless tests.

After a full 2 weeks (approximately 150 hours of downloading) I got the first 31 episodes of Fullmetal Alchemist downloaded (I uploaded over 50 gb worth of data), and I’ve watched them all (it only took me 3 days), and the next 29 episodes only have 43 hours more left to go (keep in mind, each episode is 175 megs, it makes for 9 gigs total for the series). I introduced it to Daniel last night when he was over (he strolled in as I was watching it) and he ended up watching 12 episodes (remember that these things are 25 minutes each). I have deduced this to be the best anime, and even show ever created. The unique and creative genius of the plot, characters, and the world is astounding. The animation style and quality is akin to Trigun (which I should also download). Sick of the parenthesis yet?

I’ve also gotten around to playing Rome: Total War, and it is, to my delight, the best strategy game ever created. Ben and I keep talking about playing online, but we never get around to it, but it isn’t as if I don’t have things to keep me occupied. I still have yet to beat Neverwinter Nights, and all those SNES games.

In the mean time, I’ve also been tracking Splinter Cell 3 and Elder Scrolls IV (three new screens came out today, in fact). I had been on the look out for Jade Empire and KotOR II, but after having played KotOR and NwN, I’m not sure if the same formula of game would still be all that fun, as I tend to get over-manipulative of the system. I’ll stop talking about games now.

I was thinking to myself earlier about Macs in general – and why they’ve become comparable to PCs in the recent year. I did myself a Google, and discovered a number of things, from reading the most intelligently disguised Mac-PC flamewar, on a Linux forum.

Linkage

I have long argued over the inferiority of Macs compared to PCs, but recently much of my argument has blown up in my face, due to the de-retardation of Macs. It still hasn’t answered as to why I find them so awful (I use G4’s at school on a daily basis, just so my experience is not in doubt EDIT: apparantly my experience is in doubt. i’ve also used powerbooks on multiple occasions, and OS9’s fairly regularly, but i admit that i have not used a G5). A number of posters on the previously stated site brought up extremely valid points as to why the experience varies.

  • Macs are preferred for the software capabilities. PCs are preferred for the hardware capabilities.

An owner of a server put it quite well. His needs do not revolve around multimedia. His three PCs don’t even have sound cards, and use very low end video cards. In place of those, he needs massive storage. PCs allow you to do that infinitely, they don’t have a cap on how much of what you need. Macs cannot be built from scratch (technically it IS possible, but the amount of work and experience involved surpasses that required for a PC by far), you have to buy a pre-made from Apple. You CAN upgrade it, but that does not allow you to specialize in certain areas, but not sacrifice economics. Macs simply have superior software. Some of their formats have better, faster, higher quality compressions and decompressions (for video or pictures). That’s always been true.

  • Macs are inevitably more expensive for those who have special wants or needs.

Because you cannot just sacrifice in one area to add to another, you have to go for the more expensive package. PCs end up being cheaper for those with special needs. PCs may or may not be expensive when it comes to a rounded-out machine. Generally, if you build a PC from scratch, it’ll be cheaper than an equivelant Mac or pre-built PC. Macs have been known to be more expensive since the beginning – this has been studied dozens of times, results are neutral according to bias, but for the standard machine, Macs will cost more.

  • Benchmarks and power comparisons are inconclusive.

I’ve had several people tell me that the newest Macs would rip apart a Pentium 4 – this is meaningless, as the power of a P4 can range immensely, from < 1.0 to 5.0, and the clock cycles per operation between mac and PC procs vary as well. This also doesn't consider that AMD chipsets are far faster the P4's, (I have the evidence to back me up), and most benchmarks are run on Dells, which certainly do not run high quality hardware. Anyways. Skiing was cold. It was about 5, possible 0 degrees out, with a wind chill of like -5 or -10. Fun, but cold. The bus rides to and fro (the irony has just now struck me) are actually one of my favorite parts, I have to say. I was wearing so many layers – I had 6 on my body, three on legs, two pairs of socks, two pairs of gloves, two goods, a turtleneck, and earwarmers. I still froze. I had no goggles, so every snowblower was like “OH SWEET HEAVEN THE PAIN! AHHHHHHHHH!”, but was otherwise, just cold.

O.o

Measuring the fame of a game is a hard thing to do. Everyone has different opinions, good and bad. But I think I’ve found a way to really get a basic measurement on a game’s fame. I call it the google. Measured in millions of search results, you can quickly find exactly how famous a game is. The key to this is using the exact phrase operator – “(insert query)”, it automatically removes all the DEFINATELY unrelated search results. For example, it changes the query ‘half life’ from 11.4 to 3.61. Those other 7.79 all just contained the word half or life. Obviously unrelated. But on to the point – I’ve measured all the games I own in googles, and some of you may find the results interesting. What you see (excepting the colon) is the exact query, only without the “_” operator.

Halo: 2.54 (see comments)

Total War: .929 (“Total War” game OR PC OR RTS OR rome OR medieval OR shogun)

Ninja Gaiden: .306 (“Ninja Gaiden” game OR xbox OR tecmo OR team OR ninja OR ryu OR hayabusa OR nintendo OR microsoft”

Fable: .667 (using “Fable” game OR xbox OR molyneux OR lionhead)

Dead or Alive: .551 (“dead or alive” game OR xbox OR fighting OR nintendo OR playstation OR Ultimate)

Grand Theft Auto: 1.92 (“Grand Theft Auto” game OR ps2 OR xbox OR PC OR tommy OR vercetti)

Starcraft: .7 (using “starcraft” Blizzard OR RTS OR PC OR game OR protoss OR terran OR zerg OR brood OR war) (also remember this thing was made in 1996, so the popularity of it faded before websites were as easily made/maintained)

Warcraft: 1.34 (“Warcraft” blizzard OR RTS OR game OR PC )

Rainbow Six: .749 (“Rainbow Six” game OR PC OR xbox OR FPS OR tom OR Clancy’s OR ubisoft)

Splinter Cell: .904 (“Splinter Cell” game OR xbox OR PC OR ps2 OR gc OR gamecube OR sam OR fisher OR stealth OR ubisoft OR tom OR clancy’s)

Final Fantasy: 1.85 (using “Final Fantasy” game OR playstation OR ps2 OR PC OR square OR RPG)

Keep in mind that some games don’t work under this method. Ex: Mario. That will give you approximately 11, but the vast majority are about actualy PEOPLE, so you can’t count that as accurate. Halo and Half Life both have a healthy chance of being inflated, due to the names. Halo is gonna bring up stuff about, well, halos, and Half Life is gonna bring up sites on chemistry and radioactive substances, so it evens out, essentially. Here are some other interesting queries I did.

Half Life (as a note, this did also include the hyphenated form of the name, so those weren’t omitted): 2.76 (see comments)

Zelda: 1.33 (using “Zelda” game OR link OR miyamoto OR Nintendo OR gamecube)

Metroid: .486 (using “Metroid” prime OR samus OR Nintendo OR gamecube OR game)

Diablo: 1.21 (using “Diablo” game OR Blizzard OR PC)

Gran Turismo: 1.15 (using “Gran Turismo” game OR ps2 OR playstation OR racing OR cars)

Myst: .562 (using “Myst” game OR PC OR xbox OR ubisoft)

Metal Gear Solid: .986(using “Metal Gear Solid” game OR ps2 OR playstation OR snake)

Resident Evil: 1.47 (using “resident evil” game OR playstation OR ps2 OR PC OR gamecube OR gc)

Unreal Tournament: 1.27 (using “Unreal Tournament” game OR PC OR FPS)

Let me know if I left any big franchises out, I think I got most of em. I didn’t try Doom because of the horrid innacuracy it will bring up, there’s too much other stuff you can pull out of that. Just on the first page of results there were two unrelated links.

EDIT: I’ve changed all the searches with said queries, I think it really represents everything MUCH more accurately.

O.o

To my utter dismay, I’ve found the Internet explorer is screwing with me again. I swear, if IE were a real person I’d kill him/her so many times, it wouldn’t even be funny. No, I’m serious. The incompetence it must have taken to produce such a crappy product is mind-boggling.

My greatest apologies to you Internet Explorer users. Among the errors that IE has with my page, here they are, including but not limited to:

-Text is screwy, displays too large or too small, depending on resolution and IE settings.

-Sidebar and Header are not aligned correctly despite the fact I have them correctly calibrated with precentages.

-Header is covered partially by the overhead Blogger bar.

-Various issues with text formatting (will often make entire blog posts bold or italicized).

I’m really sorry, but I’m done with my blog-fixing phase, I put a whole lot of time into it over the summer, and it looked great before, but if you really want it to look correct, go get Firefox and become a better person. Once again, my greatest apologies, but I don’t have the energy to fix it.

O.o

I’ve had a full weekend + Monday. Today was kinda getting back into life. I mowed two lawns (30 bucks!) which took 3 and 1/2 to 4 hours, argued with Mom about her attempts to try and make me look lazy and incompetent, same old, really. I’m happy about the Philmont crew getting back, I haven’t had enough people to chat with online as of late. It will also be nice having more people back at church.

And I’ve just now been informed I have a dental appointment tomorrow.

Poop.

Sunday was fun, we played Ultimate Structure Ball Tag at Belle Sherman with a bunch of people, with limited injuries. Sho, Mike, and Sam came to my house afterwards and we chilled. Saturday I walked 5 miles with Paul, Zach, and Ben to get Ben a ball for Ultimate Structure Ball Tag. It was a special ball. It was a long walk. I also went to Sam’s garage sale for a few hours that morning, and we sat around and mocked the people we were ripping off sold things and he showed me True Crime (he just got it recently), which didn’t look bad.

As for today, I’ve started to plan out my new computer (I will build it, of course) to be purchased next summer. It will probably end up being about 1500 dollars, depending on whether or not I buy a new moniter. If I do buy a new moniter, it will be afterwards. I’ll just take the moniter from this one (as well as the woot-tacular speakers) and just stick the moniter I got from Sam (I bought an old P1 233 mhz w/moniter and printer for 30 bucks) which is semi-decent on here. Currently the specs of this new computer are as follows:

»Black Full-Tower ATX Case (with acryllic case window and 420W PSU) – $91

» AMD Athlon 64 3400+, 512k L2 Cache – $293

» Western Digital Raptor 74GB 10,000RPM SATA Hard Drive, Model WD740GD – $170

» Sapphire ATI Radeon 9800Pro Video Card, 256MB DDRII, 256-bit, DVI/TV-Out, 8X AGP – $289

»2x Mushkin 184 Pin 512MB DDR PC-3200 – $150

» ASUS “K8N-E Deluxe” NVIDIA nForce3 Chipset Motherboard For AMD Socket 754 CPU – $144

» Western Digital 80GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive – $117

» Sony Black 52x32x52 Internal IDE CD-RW Drive – $29

»Black Logitech Keyboard – $11

» Logitech Red Performance Optical Mouse PS2/ USB, Model “MX510” – $43

»Windows XP Pro (w/ SP1) – $140

That adds up to about $1550, including shipping. The moniter:

NEC/MITSUBISHI LCD1760NXBK-1 17″ LCD Monitor

That adds about $25 to shipping, bring it up to a little bit above $2000 dollars. That’s almost exactly where I wanted to land. Woot.

O.o

So Paul helped me out a whole bunch today (and it did take all day) to make this blog even more neato. In case you haven’t noticed, you’ll randomly see one of three themes = red, green, and blue as the appearance. They all look the same at the core, it’s just different colors. We’ve both put plenty of effort into it, and I think we did a good job. Huzzah.

I also created a poll, at the bottom of the sidebar. I’m interested in what everyone prefers. Go. vote. And comment. Vote and comment. 😀

IN ADDITION….

I’m being forced to–err…I’d like to apologize to Gwen for speaking the truth being mean and exercising my rights asking her not to comment so much. It was very brave wrong of me and I have no regrets about it whatsoever shouldn’t have done that.

I am actually sorry though. 🙂

Come baaaaaaaaack!