It took me long enough but I finally got around to buying Prince Of Persia for the Game Cube. I got enticed by the game when I went up to Mike’s last weekend for a meeting regarding the NSSF. After the meeting he showed me Prince Of Persia and I was hooked. It has a lot of the things I liked about Ninja Gaiden, but better. Ninja Gaiden seems to rely on overwhelming you with hard enemies. Prince Of Perisa as this too, but relies more on being aware of your environment and solving puzles within it. Much more of a thinking game. Kinda short though. I swear, this prince is a monkey. Run up a wall, bounce off walls, swing from poll to poll. Geez, I wish I could do the things he does (minus the whole unleashing the biggest evil the world has seen thing).
Beyond gaming I’ve been working my ass off getting the next registration system online for the NSSF. I’m a bit behind, but not my too much. I hope to pick it up tomorrow. I also picked up a new keyboard and mouse set. Because of the move I need a mouse without a cable, so I broke down and got the Logitech Cordless MX Duo. Nice set. Same keyboard that I had before, but the mouse is now wireless. The receiver is even a charger for the mouse. I can’t belive I finally replaced my boomslang. Took the industry 4 years to release a wireless mouse that could match it, but they finally did.
Arielle gets back from Aussie on Sat, not soon enough. Then begins the movin process, woo! For those of you not up-to-date I realized just how much of a ripoff college dorms are. I was looking for an apartment around school but that wasn’t working out too well. Plus Circuit Shitty in Reading was only giving me 3 hours a week - it was time to relocate. I talked to the manager at the KOP store, 5 minutes away from Arielle’s, and it seems like I should be able to transfer there next week. Woo. I’m finally going to get hours again. So, I’m going to be moving down to Arielle’s place and commuting to PSU Berks for classes. A lot of driving, but I drive it almost everyday anyway.
Thanks to good old Bush this is a big topic and will continue to be for the election. The following has been going around the net for the past few days. It is one of the best arguements thats puts those who use religion to descriminate against homosexuals in their place.
On her radio show recently, Dr Laura Schlesinger said that, as an observant Orthodox Jew, homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22, and cannot be condoned under any circumstance The following response is an open letter to Dr. Laura, penned by a US resident, which was posted on the Internet. It’s funny, as well as informative:
Dear Dr. Laura:
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. ...End of debate.
I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God’s Law and how to follow them.
- When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord - Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
- I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
- I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness - Lev.15: 19-24.The problem is how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women takeoffense.
- Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?
- I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2.The passage clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?
- A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination - Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don’t agree. Can you settle this? Are there ’degrees’ of abomination?
- Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?
- Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.19:27. How should they die?
- I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
- My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? -Lev.24:10-16. Couldn’t we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)
I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoy considerable expertise in such matters, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God’s word is eternal and unchanging.
Your adoring fan,
James M. Kauffman, Ed.D. Professor Emeritus Dept. of Curriculum,
Instruction, and Special Education University of Virginia
My current flash addiction has been the very entertaining penguin throw. The point of the game was very simple : hit a penguin with a bat and try to get it to go far. Somehow this turned out to be very amusing. However I still have not managed to beat Arielle’s high score.
Now I have yet another reason to put off doing work. Part three in this series of games has come out - seal bounce. The premise of the game is yet again simple: bounce a penguin off the walls to try and get it as high up as you can. They even give you some nice seals to help with the bouncing. My best score so far is 265.92 400.08. Beat that Arielle!
Time zones suck. Keeping track of what time it is in Ause is annoying. While looking around, I came across New Earth Time. Its a very simple and intelligent way to measure time. Its based on the rotation of earth, centered in GMT. Example - 12 midnight in GMT is 0° 0’ 0". 9:30am there is the same as 138° 45’ 0". One degree is equal to 4 minutes - with 15 degrees in an hour. I think this is the best universal time I’ve seen to date. Check it out.
NASA has come up with a way to speak words without actually speaking them. You talk ever so quietly to yourself, subvocaly, then this system analizes the impulses sent to your throat and tounge. From that it knows what is being said. Very similar to Ender in Ender’s Game. I could see this as a new cell phone technology - that way you can talk without annoying everyone around you.
In part two of the news today a company called Vocera has created trek-style comminicators. *drool*
That is, version 5 of my site was like it. What the hell am I talking about? NT SP 4 was released, and then very shortly after replaced with 4B because 4 just plain sucked. The version 5 layout for Forgotten Expanse has suffered the same shot-lived fate. Enter its replacement, version 6 - the nice new clean layout you are looking at now. I cut out a lot of sections - only keeping the ones I feel are worth-while. I’ve been working on it for a few months now and I feel its mature enough of a design to be released now. I may make a few changes here and there to touch it up but overall I’m very happy with it. Enjoy!
No, I didn’t die, and nor did my computer. My lack of updates has been due to it being that time of the year again - where I take a trip to a far away place to work on the NSSF Web site for their track meet. This time around its the Nike Indoor Championships. Mike came along with me this time, picking him up involved way too much traffic. Once I got him traffic was ok there were just a lot of Cops in MD. We got in around 11:30am on Tuesday and were set up by 12:00. Well, set up in the hardware sense. The hotel didn’t have an SMTP server so we couldn’t send email, only receive it. Mike had to spend most of the day making a VPN back to his system home network so we could route email through his computer to his network to comcast’s server. Pain in the ass. We went to dinner at some mexican place they apparently go to every year. Good food. Cedric decided to tell them it was my birthday (see photo). Yeah, only 3 months late, but its the thought that counts? After that got back and coded the night away on ideas for next years system.
Wed wasn’t too eventful, mainly coded all day. Woke up at a decent time - 10am. Stayed up till about 2am. Mike and I took a break in the evening to play a good game of StarCraft. I don’t know why, but the computers seemed to be way too easy, even on 2 vs. 4. Oh well. I also had to make a banner for a new cross country event. It was huge - took up one gig of HDD space. Came out really nice though.
Thursday started out the same way as Wed had been. Woke up around the same time and started coding away. Took a break for lunch and met up with Pete in the elevator. We all figured we’d go out to Panara or something. Was one of the best Penaras I’ve seen, very big - and of course good food as always. Later on in the afternoon we get an IM from Felicity. After talking for about five minutes we realize that we are staying close to her college. Turns out we were about 15 minutes away - so we took the evening off (since we had been putting in 15 hour work days the previous two days) and went to see her. The three of us stopped by at Burger King for dinner and then she gave us the grand tour of DC. It was pretty cool since I hadn’t been to DC since I was very young. Followed by sitting around and talking till about midnight.
Friday was the same as all the other days - lots of coding. We went to the track to make sure everything was working as far as net was concerned and it was. At least, for the moment. We had to run back and make some banners for the digital score board which worked out really well, at least considering we could only work with green and two shades of orange. We wanted to run out to Borders to pick up a book on .Net programming. We want to make all the future administrative parts of NSSF with a real application not a Web-interface, and .Net seems to be the best cross-platform way to do it. Its going to be a huge project, but it will be nice in the end. I have to email Borders though - the directions to their store off their site took us to a cul-de-sac in a residential area.
When we got there Sat we noticed that the net wasn’t working. Shit. Mess around for about an hour to make sure it isn’t us. We then tracked down the event staff and they called in their IT to fix it. About two hours later we were able to surf the Web, so the even staff assumed it was fixed. See, the only problem was that we had to be able to email and ssh too so we could work on the site. Once their IT staff left without making sure it all worked they didn’t answer their phone so we had half-working net to deal with. We had to pack up and head back to the hotel so we could use that net connection to work on the site. We made a few changes so the next day we would be able to update it with what we had at the track. While we were at the track I ran into my 9th grade english teacher from Henderson, Mr. Lott. We only got to talk for a few minutes because of the meet, but we exchanged emails so we can talk further.
Sunday we slept in longer than we should have, but we got to the meet on-time enough to not have any issues. We were able to get most of the work done we needed to, the upload speed was very slow so posting images was a bitch. The meet lasted a little longer than expected so we didn’t get out of there till around 5:30pm. Mike headed back over to Lehigh and I headed over to Arielle’s.
She is going to Ause (formally known as Australia) for the next week and a half and isn’t taking me with her *sniff*
I put up photos from the trip in the photo gallery so go take a look. Thats it for now - I have to go work on a coding project for Amy.
hmmm...says here that christians (specifically baptists) are significantly more likely to be overweight than any other religious group. the least likely? buddhists. strange, they’re the ones with the tubby deity.
Threat rating: High. The Bush administration is concerned that it may not get a second term. Therefore, we are going to change the rules so that each Democrat vote only counts as 0.2 votes because Democrat is a shorter word than Republican
What Threat To The Bush Administration Are You?Ya know, at first I cursed Apple for releasing the mini at the price it did. I figured who would want to spend $250 for 4 gigs when you can spend $50 more to get 15 gig’er? Well, apparently they hit it right on.
I also found the history of Apple’s OS attempts while surfing around today. Pretty good read. I remember the days of Mac OS 7. My dad was worried I might break the computer when I upgraded from 6.x to 7.x. Ha.
Ha, yet another reason to hate Microsoft. Not only do they try to get you to use only their software, they also fund companies trying to knock out their competitors. For those of you not familiar, SCO is a company sueing other companies that are using Linux under the claim that Linux and Unix contains proprietary code of theirs.
So far SCO has not been able to show what code within Linux is theirs, claiming it was a trade secret. Um, yeah, its open source, everyone has access to the code anyway fuckers. Yesterday seemed to be a good day for the battle against SCO because they were ordered to show the court the code which they claim ownership of.
Today a leaked memo was released on Eric Raymond’s Open Source site. It turns out that MS has been funding the SCO group in their efforts to essentially charge everyone licensing for using Linux. $86 million dollars has been given to SCO from MS. This helps to explain how SCO has been able to continue this legal battle for so long. So what, Bill’s idea is "if we can’t beat them fair and square by making products that can compete, lets help fund someone trying to destroy the competition?" Fuckers.
There is a new virus going around that I got a good laugh out of this morning when I opened my inbox. As you know I have my own email server set up, so this message just makes no sense:
To: me@forgottenexpanse.com
Subject: Email account utilization warning.
From: management@forgottenexpanse.com
Dear user, the management of forgottenexpanse.com mailing system wants to let you know that,
Our antivirus software has detected a large ammount of viruses outgoing from your email account, you may use our free anti-virus tool to clean up your computer software.
Please, read the attach for further details.
Attached file protected with the password for security reasons. Password is 88315.
Cheers,
The Forgottenexpanse team http://www.forgottenexpanse.com
Funny, I don’t remember outsourcing the management of my email server to a team. If you get a message that looks like this delete it and don’t even think of running the attachment.
