Florida

So, I live in the world of beaches and sun now, tomorrow will mark my one month anniversary of moving down. Everything here is strange and different, but in a good way. The weather is fantastic, the winter here is like spring or summer up in Pennsylvania. I'm told that the summer will be unbearably hot and humid, but I've never been one to complain too loudly about such things. The plants and animals are all odd, there are squirrels, but just as many lizards, the palm trees out number normal trees, and there's spanish moss hanging off of everything, giving the scenery a hint of the exotic and ancient. The sunsets are fantastic, and even the crappy beaches have a hint of clear blue water. Living between the gulf and the bay, I see water all the time.

The people at work are all great, I haven't had a bad experience yet. Things are hectic and the politics are at an extreme because there is a lot of upheaval going on, but everybody is still nice. People down here are nice in general, except when they are behind the wheel. Everyone has this friendly, laid back sort of attitude in the city. (I hear it isn't so in other places nearby) I just ate at The Chattaway, which is this adorable 'best burger in st. pete' type place. I've never ate somewhere with such an interesting and comfortable setting. On the way there, I passed my neighbor, Moe, and her husband, who asked if I was going to "the chatty", since it's only 3 blocks from me in an otherwise residential area. The guy I ate with is my new beach volleyball partner, V, a truely nice guy. We ate and sat by a firepit type thing and talked about life and relationships, then chit chatted with a couple who were also sitting by the fire.

Charlie, one of the guys from work, invited me out to play beach volleyball, and got me totally hooked. I played for the first time on tuesday, and I've probably logged 20 hours since then (thursday, saturday, and sunday). V wants to train me for a co-ed team and participate in tournaments. Apparently I'm a natural beach volleyball player, I'm picking it up much quicker than I did indoor volleyball. I blame martial arts and wallyball for my quick reflexes, and the scenery and company for my enthusiasm. Everyone I play with is really cool, and spending hours out on the beach can't be beat. Between games, you get to lay back and watch the boats go by on the water, or the sunset. I should have a dark tan in no time, which is odd for me, since I don't have the patience to lay out.

The nightlife down here is odd, it's all beer, wine, and music. There's a lot of jazz and blues down here, and most of the places have live music, then there's First Friday, where they shut down a couple blocks on Central Ave and have a band playing out in the street. Everybody drinks beer all the time. I'm assuming that it tapers off in the summer, when beer becomes heavy, but I wouldn't be suprized if people just switched to wine. It's very vacationy. Even people that have lived here their whole lives remark on how it's like a vacation everyday. (I think this is where the laid back attitude comes from)

Anyways, I just wanted to chat about my thoughts on moving to Florida. I like it here very much, I'm keeping myself busy seeing new places and trying out new things.

Google Calculator and Suggestions

(Woo, Trebuchet is my favorite font. == happy with new dashboard)
So, I just noticed today that if you have Google suggestions turned on, like in my search bar in Firefox, you can do the calculator stuff, and it will pop up as the first suggestion. I use Google for a calculator, spell checker, and thesaurus all the time, this just makes my life two buttons easier/faster.
If you're not familiar with the calculator stuff, check this out. You can type stuff like "1440 minutes in hours", and the conversion (=24 hours) will show up as the first suggestion.

One Picture A Day

So, apparently there was a one picture a day video making fad that I completely missed. (I think I miss them all, and that's okay by me.)
At any rate, this is definitely worth a minute or two of your time:

http://www.oldeenglish.org/podcast/one-picture-every-day

It's especially worth a couple minutes of my not cramming studying for exams time. 22 hours from now, I'll be done with all of my undergraduate studies forever! Woot.

Wacky Google and Saving $

1st of all, Happy Belated Birthday to me :)

I haven't posted much lately, I have a backlog of wacky web findings - I think I found something about DNA barcodes? - and also google not only now owns blogger somehow but increasingly the rest of the universe - but I'll have to dig them up at a time when I'm not just procrastinating. For now I will only indulge my bargain-hunter-ness :)

A certain thoughtful and generous Mossy Blog owner got me a thinkgeek gift certificate for the Bday! a Whoo-hoo event enough already, but then in the process of trying not to pay for shipping and googling for coupons, I ran across this.

http://www.bigcrumbs.com/crumbs/frontpage.jsp?r=tamarwhite

At first I thought, this has to be a pyramid scheme? But I googled into it further, and it appears legit - and makes a lot of sense in the context of affiliate marketing.
Internet marketing is a wacky, complex, and often expensive business, it even makes a business out of advertising *itself*. Basically banner ads and ad-blogs and all sorts of permutations thereof exist.
I gather the idea here is, instead of paying a banner advertiser etc per click-through or per purchase, bigcrumbs pays *the customer*, and also lets the customer profit from further advertising.
And they gave me 6.3% cashback from my thinkgeek purchase. With a giftcard to pay for it, it's not just cash back, it's free money :)

Apocalypto

I was quite entertained by this movie, I would recommend it, but then again, I've always like Mel Gibson movies. (No, I didn't watch Passion of the Christ).

At anyrate, the movie opens with this quote:

"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."
- Will Durant

which I think, along with the general plot of the movie, is quite fitting for this day and age. Go Hollywood and your social commentary.

Tom Bihn shopping

One of the things I take most seriously in my life are my bags. I'm not your standard purse toting sort of girl, and after putzing around with some canvas bags from the local army navy store, I bought a bag from Tom Bihn. The Medium Cafe Bag is awesome, it just fits a folder with my papers and one or two small books for class, as well as gum, cell phone, pens, flashcards, and wallet.

Now that I'm looking at finally getting my Mac Book Pro, I'm turning again to Tom Bihn for my laptop case, and found this interesting tidbit that has me completely sold: Apparently some of the bags have a
Treason Tag, which hides the statement "We're sorry our president is an idiot. We didn't vote for him." hidden in French amongst the washing instructions.

Happy Halloween from Indiana Jones

My halloween costume this year was Indiana Jones, which was remarkably easy to do since I already had boots, slacks, a button down shirt, a whip, and the hat. I went out and bought a couple belts and a Indy looking bag, and all was well.

Overheard in State College

Girl 1: "What are we going to do if the party is cancelled?"
Girl 2: "What party?"
Girl 1: "The one with all the floats."
Girl 2: "The parade?"
Girl 1: "Yeah.. the parade."

Ahh, homecoming, how I will not miss you at all.

Railroads will save the world

I was very excited this morning to read this article in USA Today. I spent all day excited about it, and even showed it to some people, who were decidedly Not As Excited (tm) about it. This is probably the best news that I've heard all month.

The article is talking about Norfolk Southern Railway, which is updating some railroad tunnels and bridges as part of a new rail corridor from Norfolk, VA to Chicago. Points to take home with you from the article: The federal government is paying for over half of the project out of funds earmarked for highways. (Various state governments are also contributing money to the project.) The new corridor can handle trains that are double stacked with standard size containers (the same ones used for shipping all over the world), saving shippers around 500$ a container. With double stacked trains, Norfolk can actually make money. One train "replaces about 300 trucks".

Now, why are trains so important? Trucks are a terrible and inefficient way to transport goods. (By inefficient, I mean both physically and economically) Trucks get involved in many accidents on the highways. Trucks cause congestion on highways. Trucks damage highways to the tune of millions of dollars a year: one truck driving down the highway does the damage of 10,000 cars (Schwartzman). [Think about this: 1 Train = 300 Trucks = 3,000,000 Cars = lots and lots of your tax and toll money saved] Tires on pavement are way less efficient than wheels on tracks, not to mention that you're basically moving each item separately and with a diesel engine. Trucks pollute orders of magnitude more than trains, especially when you look at pollution per pound of goods transported, and in light of global warming, this is especially important. Trains are cheaper than trucks, these days, cheap transportation is everything.

Really, I'm mystified by the fact that we don't use trains much more than we do, in fact, we use trains even less than we used to. It just doesn't make sense in any way. Trucks should be limited to local delivery, the rail infrastructure should be updated and expanded, and something really has to be done about Amtrak. At any rate, you can see why this made me so happy. I hope this is the beginning of a new trend. Thank you, Nick Rahall, keep up the good work.

Princess Layla the Bubble Killer

Just a quick post, to introduce Layla, hunter of bubbles. She has to catch every one, and we need more bubble solution to help burn off her excess energy.

This is one good photo I took out of 40. She decided to play Blur the Picture.

I think it might be a favorite game of hers. Others include:

• Steal Stella's Shoe and Prance Around With It
• Chase the Ice Cube
• Run Flying Puppy circles Across the Room for No Apparent Reason
• Leaping Lick the Face
  and
• Wrestle the Kitchen Rug.

Now all we need is the flying cars

The future is now! As we were just saying on the phone :D

First of all, Philips introduces "Lumalive" Fabric, which is just, as a concept...

0_0

There's also a youTube vid.

Now if only they could crank up the resolution... but still.


So as I was saying - the future is, kinda, now. Ipods have finally gone way down in price, *and* are with video. In 2003 my parents paid $500 for a 3rd gen 30GB! Playstation 3 and the next Nintendo system (HTH does one say "Wii" and not sound like an ass..?) are actually finally COMING OUT. Wikipedia is for better or worse becoming the effective repository of all human knowledge, which gives me oddly giddy geek I-told-you-so feelings for some reason, and mapquest and maps google have totally changed the way everyone I know navigates. And you can zoom in on your HOUSE. Our neighbors have some crazy pools apparently. Suddenly *everyone* has a site on the internet, thanks to MySpace & co., no matter how Ba-Dong the design can be.

Google has become a freaking VERB.

And of course there's the Best ScreenSaver EVER - Electric Sheep.

Now you don't even have to download nuthin to see check it out, although personally I think in terms of sheer *pretty* the current flock WAY outstrips these videos. I just found that some of the sheep guys are now on MySpace - They have some youtube stuff, and some google vids. (Tons of free video and image hosting - yet another flyingCarsIsm.) Also hifisheep.com did what *I* was wishing for all along.

Creator of Electric Sheep on MySpace


He also has a google vid somewhere where he did a lecture at google, it was lengthy at an hour long, but so very informative. It answered a ton of questions I had about the sheep.

Awesome Sheep designer's myspace

Opposite of a desert tree at sunset

Opposite of a desert tree at sunset
Originally uploaded by Kusmeroglu.

I've been looking through pictures tonight, a little cruise down memory lane, and found this one, which I always meant to put up somewhere. I think it's a unique sort of play on the familiar desert tree picture. The background is the shops along college ave, picture taken in a winter storm twilight at penn state, 2005.

Research Project

I'm doing an undergrad research project on combining social bookmarking information with internet search. I'm trying to determine if adding tags to search results speeds up the process of finding the page you are looking for. Please help out by filling out this 5 minute questionnaire, I need all the responses I can get.

Thanks!

Aikido

I've taken a couple Aikido sessions with Penn State's local Aikido club, and I have to say that it's a lot more interesting than I originally thought. I've always been big on cross training, but Gung-fu always has the sweet spot in my heart. Gung-fu and all the other circular arts resonate with me much more. (I guess I'm just not a brute force linear kinda girl) At any rate, Aikido seems to have perfected the circular-ness of martial arts. It's so good, that even having some experience in martial arts (though I'm still very much a beginner), it still seems like magic when you execute a move right, and your partner just falls over. (Likewise, when someone gets a move right on you, and you find yourself on the ground) I also really like Aikido manner: they don't have any aggressiveness to them at all, no hands up in guard position stances, they just chill out and wait for the attack to be their opportunity. I'll have to drill breakfalling more, so I don't break any more collarbones, but I definitely suggest anyone that's into martial arts to at least try Aikido out, or practice with an Aikido student and let them show you what it's all about.

Disturbing things in the newspaper

I picked up a copy of USA Today to browse over lunch. (Apparently the new policy of not eating or drinking in classrooms means that people aren't leaving newspapers around for me to read second hand) It's been a while since I had the time to look in a paper, and I was surprised as some things I found in there. The article on higher education statistics, for one: The US only has a 35% college participation rate, and a measly 17% completion rate. 17%! I assume that community colleges and the like are a larger part of this than Penn State, but that still seems like such a low number, especially coming from my point of view. Craziness.

The other thing that I thought ridiculous: A book review of 'World War Z' by Max Brooks (review by Deirdre Donahue). I've never heard of the book, but zombies are always interesting, unless you say this about the book: "Brooks' clever premise is that a virus has turned people into the undead. Hordes of flesh-devouring zombies roam the earth, hunting down and infecting the living. Governments, armies, doctors, economies collapse in turn." Wow, how original and clever! Wait.. I must have missed something, that's the same premise of every zombie story I've heard of. (Doctors collapsing?) I'm going to go ahead and assume that Brooks' way of telling the tale might actually possess "more creativity and zip than entire crates of other new fiction titles", but still.

The strange thoughts one has late at night

So, I've been really sick recently, one of those colds that hits you hard and takes you down before you realize what's going on. Also, I can't sleep. I'm a night person, so I'm actually feeling pretty good right now, and not sleepy at all.

Anyways, I got to thinking about drugs, which led to thinking about yuppies, which got me to thinking about the idea of 'normal'. I don't know if this is a phenomenon elsewhere in the world, my thought is that it's localized to the good old US of A. Now, everyone has different reasons for this, but I've never met a person who thought they were anywhere near normal. (If you don't believe me, name one person who doesn't think their family is crazy) I think this is the secret behind the Power that the Media has over people (Americans?). All these trends and things, the crazy stuff people will believe, people following the big names in entertainment closer than, well.. anything important that's worth following, you get my drift. It's just a whole bunch of people striving for some non-existant normalicy, which the Media will apparently show them, with the zeal of moths to flame. Okay, it's kinda obvious, but the key here is Yuppies, damnit. Or maybe it's the Tylenol PM.

Google Maps version 2

In a previous post, I complained that google maps only displayed points on one world map tile at a time, so if you had it zoomed all the way out, and scrolled around, the points would dissapear from one view of the world, and reappear on the next one over. They fixed that, so as you scroll across the pacific ocean, the points migrate themselves over at an appropriate time. It's nice, I like it. Actually, I really like everything they did in the version 2 API, at least as far as I've worked with it.

Hopefully my mysterious problems where the maps only seem to work reliably on my own computer will also go away.

Paul Graham: How to Do What You Love

Good article on .. how to do what you love. Okay, obvious bits over with, I've always liked Graham's articles. I wish more people understood that liking what you do it extra important. Especially this bit: "You have to like what you do enough that the concept of "spare time" seems mistaken."

It jives very much with the fact that I just finished the Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (also, very good).

No Updates?!

Ah, it's been a while. I think I wrote a couple posts, but it must have been in my dreams because they are certainly not up here. Oh well. Life is busy, but good.
Python, my dearest, I have not forgotten you! (Even if I'm not dragging my butt to Texas for PyCon) Still letting that R.A.T. idea simmer in the back of my head.
In other news, Halo 2 is addicting.
In further, and also other news, I'm trying to muster up some inertia for a webcomic. I know you guys think I'm joking, but I'm serious. If these guys can make their own decks of cards, then there's gotta be some left for me.
Back to studying latin..

I worry sometimes

Things like this, and more obviously the increasingly terrible "grammar" (I use the term very loosely) used in instant messageing make me worry for the future. Now, I know and openly admit that I can't spell at all, nor am I very good at grammar, so this affects me more than others. I'm like a bad spelling and grammar sponge. Think of our kids, and the next generation, growing up surrounded by all sorts of errors and misuse. Oh the terror.

In other news, that A List Apart site is a really good read. I stumble across it looking for css and javascript (blech) solutions everyonce in a while, and always stumble away feeling more knowledgeable.

Nasa.. UFOs... Doinks... Oh my. O.o

So I'm googling along, minding my own business, and I run across this in a search for NASA space images on images.google -

... 0.o ?

Here's where it comes from - it's basically about how you can't trust things like image processing in the wrong hands (or possibly even the right ones..?). Brain not doing so hot without the sleep, so further commentary is sluggish in the forthcoming...

So, having basically not slept at ALL last night, I I'm thinking to myself, "Self, does this not strike you as ... more than just a tad odd?" (Yes, sadly, an actual quote from my stream of conciousness. Le Sigh.) My brain is not fitting pieces together so good just now. I'm not sure I can put more coherent thought into it than that at the moment, as fish-mouth-eyed (?? o_0 ??) as I feel right now, and plus I have actual, honest, cross-my-heart work that I need to Google for space photos for (oh, the irony).

But... Well, here goes nuthin'...
I'm having odd thoughts about the persistence of the UFO mythology / whatever - I think mostly about the possibility of some deeply rooted Jungian archetype type racial memory ... So maybe the reason people around the world see UFOs is because of media exposure and already having heard stories, or maybe it's because they're really "out there" and swinging by now and then to give us The Meaning Of Life or perhaps as crazy college-kid-aliens swinging by and playing pranks on us on weekends, or maybe we have some kind of UFO idea embedded in our psychological makeup to begin with. That would certainly make us look for the things regardless of whether they're there or not.

..Which of course, if our species is wired to believe in not only dragons and heroes, but also UFOs, would have all sorts of possible explanations by itself, and certainly doesn't exclude the first two possibilities.

The whole ideal of a racial memory does beg the question of external interference anyways.
My favorite example would definitely be the Vorta from ST:DS9 . (Unbelieveably insanely awesome show... dang do I miss it...) They were genetically engineered to believe that the species that altered their DNA were Gods.

Overall, odd and creepy thoughts to be having while this low on the sleep-o-meter.

Hawkgirl & Mystique - Halloweenies

First of all, I can't resist but point out the following delightful incongruity.

This photo is of Linden from this Halloween, who *wrote the post preceding this one*:

If you have the slightest familiarity with the Marvel universe, you probably recognize Mystique. (also here's a more succinct & faster loading article on Mystique)

Here's us together, I'm Hawkgirl from DC's Justice League (the Bruce Timm animated cartoon network version). I really, really just adore her, and the Green Lantern - they're both just so non-corny and overall kick-ass characters. We prove our geek street cred, yes we do! ^_^




I just moved, and I was about 1/3 unpacked at the time of this photo. That's why the messy background. :)

The wings I did in about a day, it was pretty nuts. I really still can't believe I pulled that one off. The mace I did in a flurry of late-night insanity, and I sorta accidentally made a real weapon out of paper, hot glue, and a styrofoam ball... how *do* I manage these things?? I didn't think you could make a dangerous *mace* out of craft store supplies... but I guess if anyone would do it *by accident* it would be me...

Here's some more of our pictures, with bonus costume switching ; )

Computers make the world go.

I've been mulling over a project in the back of my head, and thinking about computer/human interfaces in general recently:

The thing that we (and I'll presumptuously speak for all mankind for a moment) want is computers that do more automatically for us. The whole point of a tool is to make things easier. Sometimes I wonder if tasks are actually quicker, now that we have computers. They are, but not as much as people would like to think. There's all the buying, learning, upgrading, and dealing with quirks, bugs, and crashes. I would love to spend less time on that, and more time reading The Fountainhead.

The problem with computers doing things automatically is that we never want quite exactly the same thing. Even if computers do learn to automate a series of repetitive tasks, the second we want something slightly different, we run into the problem of how to tell the computer to do something different. As an example, when you pop a blank cd into a mac or pc, it realizes that the cd is blank and pops up a little dialog asking you what you want to do with the cd. There's also a little box you can check if you want it to always do the same thing. If 99% of the time you want to burn a music CD, you can tell it to always do that, but it's not simple, if not impossible, to tell it to stop doing that when you want to burn a data CD. Thankfully, that doesn't lock you into anything, you can always close the music burning software and open something else; but it's a good example.

So, the problem is finding an intuitive way to represent automating tasks, one that isn't in your face like so many Microsoft Office tools are. We are all gradually picking up this terrible JustClickYes syndrome. I think I might have something with the R.A.T. idea, where the burden of teaching the computer what you want is hidden behind an artificial life interface. The limitation of that is that I wouldn't want any sort of rudimentary (or advanced, for that matter) AI actually making changes to any of my files. Maybe there could be some sort of visual, but simple, task/activity monitor that keeps track of any sort of automated changes the computer made, and allows you to roll back in case you didn't want something to happen.

... kind of like version control systems. Ooh. Wouldn't that be something. Like a more complex and better looking Photoshop History, but with logic similar to Subversion. Then, the computer can run around and do whatever the hell it wants, and you won't mind, since you can always easily and quickly undo anything it gets wrong, but meanwhile, it will save you time. Time is of the essence and all that.

Gotcha: Google Map quirk

Since I've been doing nothing but playing with google maps recently, I discovered an interesting little quirk. You can zoom all the way out (or almost all the way out) so that you can see the entire world, but repeated to the right and left, which allows you to scroll and look at the pacific ocean. If you have a set of markers displayed on the map, it will only display on one world tile at a time. So, consider some markers located in Australia, and some markers located in Alaska. If you attempt to scroll so you can see both, you will only see the markers in Alaska, or the markers in Australia. At least in my case. Interesting little quirk though.

Comic Art Community- Leia By Bruce Timm

Woah. How cool is this?

Very Cool. (In case you weren't sure)
Bruce Timm, btw, is the artist whose style is the one they used for the Batman and Justice League cartoons. He is my hero.

Rodent Aggregate Tool

Take a Lookie!

This is my new project, which I'm really excited about. (This is one of those projects that came to me about an hour after I went to sleep) The more I think about it, the more I like it! (Also, I'm much happier on the inside now that I've made the decision to go Mac only)

The current development plan is to do it in Pygame and use PyObjC to handle drag and drop to/from the OS. Python makes me happy. Doing development on my Ti makes me happy. Lots and lots of drawing and scanning and animating to do, which also makes me happy because I've always wanted to try my hand at animating things.

The only things that make me unhappy art that my mac isn't internet connected right now, which stems from the fact that it doesn't get wireless signal where my PC does; I don't have a proper desk setup yet (pending on moving issues and money); and I have like no time right now to work on it.

But I am still excited about it. :)

'Magic brush' paints visual world

This BBC news article is an interesting little tid bit. Kimiko Ryokai invented a brush that has a camera in it for picking up color or movie clips, and a electronic canvas for painting on. I think kids' response to it was really interesting, turning a painting into a story.

Can you play Sudoku with your fingers crossed?

So, I'm trying to segway myself out of posting stressed-out rantings. Towards that end, I'm walking around with crossed fingers this morning. This is mostly because I have to help move an ungodly heavy mattress across 3 states today. And guess who I'm moving it with. I'll give you a clue - I'm related to them, and they don't have mossy blogs. : (

But since I have drafted my Extra-Large-And-Awesome Michael to help on the NY end, I'm hopeful that things will not be a disaster. It's good to hope, right?

So here's the good news:
I found a free sudoku site! on the web!

http://www.websudoku.com/

I can live with not being able to leave notes in the squares, what with the cross-platform-ness and free-ness and everything.

Breathe, that's the key...

... I feel the need to, I don't know, almost apologize, or something, for what I just posted below. Rereading, it was a bit incoherent.
Plus, angry, with ugly text.
Eh.
Maybe not apologize, but calm down.
Even though my stress level is through the roof, I can still function and stuff, I guess.

..I'm just gonna stop and take a few breaths.

Sheesh, I started typing random subjects into random places in the post, so that roach issues are both longer than and above my brother's mysterious headaches and chronic vomiting issues.

Well, all I can think of to say right now, is that we come from a long line of highly intelligent and deeply stupid people, and hopefully we're some kind of mutants.
Or something.

I think I'll just pick up the remains of my brain and scurry off to non-blog activities now.

*facepalm* BLEH! *best myDad impression* 0_o

So now we're getting spam in the comments.
Magnifico.
Spendiferous.

Less sarcastically,
*UGH*.

There's so far chandaliers, and some nonsense about lumber or something.

DAMmit.
*shakes fist*

In Other News, I've been having a rather intense couple of days of BS, smack-myself-in-the-face-inducing stress, and frustration. Spose I'll vent here.

The bold & intense blue text thing reflects my mood, I guess.

Roaches are crawling out of the woodwork and then dying in my apartment.
I hope an exterminator never comes within a 5 mile radius of me, ever again. Mostly I just get hives from the poisons, *especially* Borax, & can't take out the garbage because the shute closet is filled with it, and get the roaches IN MY APARTMENT rather than in the garbage shute.
There's really nothing like finding roaches belly-up next to the surge protector, next to the couch, in the middle of the floor, on the rug, to brighten your day.
Mysteriously, those unobtrusive RAID or whatever traps actually seem to work magic whenever I have used them, including in apartment buildings - of course, provided that your neighbors don't do dumbass things like leaving OPEN, still-liquid-having orange juice containers in the damn garbage closet. Then they just come back eventually.

My family is supposed to go on a "vacation" (more like a "torture-by-senile-psychotics") next week. NO idea what's going on there... well, because. partly...

Last night my brother just had a spinal tap. And yes, I mean the actual spine-puncturing test, and not the movie.
I have no idea so far if this was a wise precaution or just more medical BS.

Because of this and (even more) other assorted crap, I'm just a twitchy mess at work.

Ok, I feel midly better now...

shhhcards.pdf

Check out these cards (requires a pdf viewer). What an excellent idea. Temptation to use these, very high. :)

Whose Fish

No idea who the Coudal Partners are, but they have a mighty fine puzzle in their blog. Apparently Albert Einstein made up this logic puzzle, and claimed that 98% of the people in the world could not figure it out.

There are five houses in a row in different colors. In each house lives a person with a different nationality. The five owners drink a different drink, smoke a different brand of cigar and keep a different pet, one of which is a Walleye Pike.

The question is-- who owns the fish?

Hints:
1. The Brit lives in the red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The green house is on the left of the white house.
5. The green house owner drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Malls keeps birds.
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhills.
8. The man living in the house right in the center drinks milk.
9. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
10. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the one who smokes Dunhills.
12. The owner who smokes Bluemasters drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Princes.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.

I figured it out, can you?

Fonts

I remember back when you could see all the major fonts from Arial to Helvetica in one pulldown menu on a 800x600 pixel screen. Those were the days. (of simplicity and easy font choosing)

Electric Sheep - Best. Screensaver. EVER.

It's all your fault, Linden.
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it...

I was just about getting around to actually making some more art recently, playing around in Photoshop like I did in days of old. And then Linden posted this link here.
So I started googleing fractals again, with the end result of doing to my hard disks the very thing you feared - filling them with thousands and thousands of fractal renders. 8 )
Now, I have stumbled upon something truly astounding, whose time has finally come:

http://www.electricsheep.org/

Best. Screensaver. EVER.

Screensavers nowadays are both totally unnecessary, and in a golden age of coolness. Modern display technology, for the most part, doesn't need screensavers - even the TVs starting a few years ago have built in display saver graphics (bouncing brand logos, etc).
However, they've evolved into a refined art form of animation and programming.

My previous favorites were the OS X screensavers Fracture and Fluid, which I actually use in combination on my Spiffy Super Upgraded Smurf Machine. I've sung their praises before.
But, I have to admit - for sheer coolness, they can't touch electricsheep. It combines (open source!) flam3 fractal animation with an online render farm approach, and add an interactive element, where you get to vote with the up or down arrow keys for the sheep you like. Those sheep go on to MUTATE and REPRODUCE. As in, the patterns change over time, and the more you vote for a particular "sheep" the longer it survives on the server to reproduce!! You can also cast a negative vote, if you think a pattern is less than attractive.

I'm way, way too tired to properly explain the extra uber cool phenonmenon that is electric sheep, so I'll just cop out and yet again link to them, they explain it so much better than me.

If you have a high speed connection and even a decent amount of power in your system, you MUST try this. It worked for me with no problem whatsoever with a Windows XP Home service pack 2 2.3Ghz Dell with 512 RAM, I have no idea about older systems, or anything with less RAM.

The only not-so-cool thing about the electric sheep screensaver is that the Mac OS X version was really buggy. Things that haven't happened to me in forever started up - Unexpectedly Quitting and reloading the Finder - In short, one unhappy Smurf. But it's open source, so if you have the talent, knowledge, and/or inclination, you could maybe do something about it! Yay, open source!

So I guess my two Dells (shut up, I got the newer one on ebay for 300$) can run electric sheep, and I get to not feel so bad about the Smurf not contributing to the sheep-rendering effort.

So.. well, if only I could stop staring at the frelling thing... I have, like stuff.. to do... Ooo, purty...
0_o

Grim Fandango

"A Epic Tale of Crime and Corruption in the Land of the Dead."
What a good game.

I've always had a soft spot in my heart for these kind of adventure games. I played Myst again recently, and my boyfriend insisted that I try Grim Fandango and Obsidian.

Obsidian is ridiculously hard. I firmly believe that someone had to think in a certain way to solve all the puzzles, and its not quite the way that I think. I got a bunch of them, and most of them I could solve with just a hint to get me started. I think the biggest problem is that they set up a puzzle in such a way that you know its a puzzle or part of a puzzle, but you have no idea what to do to get started, or how it fits in the big picture, or what your name is. You really just know nothing for some of them. For the rest, you know exactly what to do, but the puzzles are very long and complex. Despite the toughness factor, its a very interesting story and fascinating puzzles.

Grim Fandango, on the other hand, is just the right level of hardness with an overabundance of fun. The game is put together with such attention to detail that I was blown away. (The credits have two pages of Quality Assurance Testers) Made in 1997, the graphics aren't something to ooh and ahh over, yet you can't shake a fist at them either. For the tools and computing power they had, they did a very good job. The land of the dead is just as pretty and strange and cool looking as you'd expect. The characters are awesome, and the voice acting, of which there is plenty, is great. The main character, Manny Calavera, always has a witty quip for everything, items, people, stuff you can activate, conversations. Everything has a sort of Mexican feel to it, from the voices to the storyline and the music. Speaking of music, the soundtrack is amazing too, I wish they sold a cd of it. Everything about this game is wonderful. 8 years later, and its still one of the best games I've ever played. Definitely the best adventure game.

I'm tempted to hunt down the team that worked on this and beg them to make another game. (You hear me?? If you still exist, make another game! You are amazing, and godlike in your game making skills!) For the rest of you, if you can track down a copy of this game, I highly recommend it.

Update: OMG, you can download the music. *le faint* Lucas Arts still has a good website up for this (Amazing, considering it's hard to get Maxis to admit that they ever made such a game as Sim Ant), and you can download 3 of the music tracks. *love* Lucas Arts will always have a little spot in my heart now, no matter what they do.

Hmmmmmzt..

*grin* sorry, just had to share that.

Fridge Idea

I don't know if they have this (I'm assuming they don't because I've never heard of it), but I think that they should have a power socket inside fridges. I suppose this would lead to people doing stupid things (like running their computer in there), but I think it would be really useful for other reasons (for instance running a small fan or air de-odorizer). For all of us not buying this new amazing fridge, they should make a air de-odorizer (possibly with fan) that sits between the light socket and the light. You might have to mess with your door opening thing to keep power flowing to the whole assembly.. or better yet, a air cleaning thing with fan, bright LED light, and motion sensor to detect when you open the door so it can turn the light on. That shouldn't be expensive, so I can afford it and stick it in my fridge, which stinks.

Evil

It used to be that the word 'Evil' seemed to be reserved for stories and cartoons and the like. You know, fiction. You had your bad guy (the best of which rated as the 'evil bad guy') in your made up story that takes place in the distant past, or the remote future, or in a galaxy far, far away.. you get the point.
Maybe I'm imagining it, but it just feels like people are using 'evil' in reference to the real world more and more recently. The fact that this has happened so much that I'm noticing it through the sleepy daze and general not knowing what is going on-ness that is me disturbs me just a little. Again, I could be completely off base here, but what with the "axis of evil" (I can't help but give that a halloween leer when ever I say it in my head - as terrible as that is), Google's pledge not to be evil, and 'evil video games rotting our children's heads', it's like evil is everywhere. I almost feel like using a permanent marker and lableing a couple things as 'good' to balance things out.
Someone tell me that I'm just being wonky on a monday morning.

The thing about no power

Having experienced 2 weeks of not having power in my apartment, here is a list of things that I both liked and disliked about it. (Normally, I would not post this, but it might serve as a happy reminder of an almost forgotten world, minus the stinky fridge)

+ Candles

• Playing with fire, always fun


• Reading books / writing by candlelight is an interesting experience. Candles are definately a mood setter. Do it the way they did it before electricity, and be glad for lightbulbs.


• Playing with wax, also, always fun. (Less fun when the lights do come back on and you find it everywhere)

- Flashlights

• Large Maglights are blinding! I worry for the eyesight of my various pets


• Depending on the flashlight to find the matches to light the candles kinda blows when you forget where you put the flashlight

+ The Sun Rises and Sets

• Being forced to plan events that require good light around the natural cycle of the day is also something I'd recommend trying out. It's kinda cool to actually pay attention to the sun, and revel in its wonderful brightness every once in a while.


• Everythings quieter with no electricity. Listening to the crickets and such at night, and the birds in the morning is really relaxing.

+ No Computers

• Of course, I had access to the internet at work, but you don't realize how chained you are to your computer til you can't turn it on.


• Doing all the stuff you've been neglecting, noticing the thousands of projects that you meant to do and have completely ignored in favor of the thousands of computer projects that you keep meaning to get around to. (procrastinate much?)


• No monitor glow fatigued eyes

- Stinky Fridge

• If anyone knows how to get the smell out a fridge and freezer thats already been scrubbed with baking soda and 409, with more baking soda strewn about for good measure, let me know.


• Cleanup's a pain

Python and Puzzles

Amongst my recent searching for something pythonic that I don't remember, I stumbled across this:
The Python Challenge
which is based off of this:
The Riddle - notpr0n
(which I must investigate at a later time)
Also, in my googleings, I found this
Python Puzzles
which looks interesting as well.

I started the python challenge, and got through the first couple, spending only a couple minutes on each (less for the first one). You basically use the riddle given by the page, and put the answer in the url for the next puzzle. (You can also see the long explaination of the solution to the last puzzle) I have to admit that my solutions were a bit simpler than theirs (such as using 'chr( ord('k') + 2)' as opposed to some mapping scheme using a string.trans() that I didn't see the documentation for in the python quick guide), but everyone's different. If you know python, or any programming language, check it out. (The faq says that only 2 of the challenges are python specific)

Interesting Finds

Its a bit technical to explain, but if you have a *nix computer, and you look around in your named service config files (/etc/named.conf), you'll notice that 'localhost' refers you to a file at ( /var/named/chroot/var/named/localhost.zone) which contains the following information:

$TTL    86400
$ORIGIN localhost.
@              1D IN SOA       @ root (
                               42           ; serial (d. adams)
                               3H           ; refresh
                               15M          ; retry
                               1W           ; expiry
                               1D )         ; minimum

                1D IN NS        @
                1D IN A         127.0.0.1

Note the line with the number 42 and (d. adams) in the comment.
I find this highly amusing..

In case of Fractal Obsession, break glass.

Now, that is a nice Fractal. My next step should be to determine what program created that and make sure that Rachel never gets her hands on it, for the sake of her hard drives.

Juicy Opera Tip

I was just given an awesome tip: In Opera, in order to find things on the page, go to a website and type "/" followed by your search term. A little box pops up in the bottom left corner showing your search term, and it will highlight the first match on the page. Using F3 or Ctrl-G will cycle through the matches. Hitting return if the match is a link will follow that link.

Very useful, nifty little tool. I'm feeling more and more liberated from my mouse as we speak.

Opera Review, Part 3

Fifth Day

I've noticed that I'm not using all the nifty and keen features as written about above. I'm reading a review of OS X 10.4 on Ars Technica, and what I want to do is keep opening links in new tabs (I mean pages) in the background, but I keep forgetting that I can until after the fact. This leads me to believe that more than a week is necessary for my Opera tryout. Also, I still notice that the UI is using much more space than I would like. This isn't helped by the fact that I can't seem to get Opera to keep track of the fact that I'm registered. (UPDATE: I realized when I used my laptop at home that Safari always opens new tabs in the background, which is why I'm not used to specifying it.)

Also, in this article (which is very good, if you are interested in OS X reviews), I find that even though all lab PC's come with QuickTime installed, Opera doesn't seem to recognize this fact, and prompts me to download and install QuickTime all over again.

Sixth Day

I like the way Opera displays forms. It’s nice and rounded. (This may be a property of the skin that I'm using) I appreciate browsers that attempt to make things a little nicer looking.

www.mac.com doesn't display properly either. I sent did the report a site problem thing, but I find it discouraging that this is the second major site (also www.blogger.com) that does not display properly. I doubt that the .css or html for the sites are wrong, so it makes me question Opera's rendering engine.

Seventh Day

I noticed today that Opera highlights the little website icons in the quick links toolbar as you scroll over them. It uses a transparent shade of yellow which looks decent for most icons, like Slashdot and ArsTechnica.

I also noticed that loading psu.dailyjolt.com/courseevaluator.html causes Opera 8 on Windows to die horribly and quit unexpectedly. This will be fun when Opera comes to PSU next year. I submitted a bug report.

Another thing that I've noticed is that Opera opens pop-ups within the Opera window, instead as a new window, which is nice 99% of the time. It definitely helps me keep things organized, which I like, and it keeps popup pages from getting away from you. Pop-ups also get their own page, so they are easy to track down and close. Also, I’ve noticed that Opera does an excellent job of not allowing unwanted pop-ups. Although it doesn’t notify you when it blocks a popup (not that I’ve noticed, at least), I haven’t gotten any unwanted pop-ups yet.

While we're on the subject, Penn State's WebMail service uses a pop-up to browse and upload attachments, but in Opera, it loads as a new page instead of a pop-up window, which is rather disorienting, and may cause users to get confused.

Finally, I'm loving the fit to width option. Basically, Opera does its best to eliminate any sideways scrolling. (Much of this is lessened by css, but it still happens enough to want a feature for it.)

Conclusion

I like Opera. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it does have a couple features that make it worth using over other browsers. Judging from my first week of using it, it would probably take a month before I started to take advantage of all Opera’s features, but the first week has been positive. Overall, I like the idea of Notes, fit-to-width is a very nice feature, I like the way Opera implements tabbed browsing, and Opera feels secure and professional. Area’s for improvement: the GUI could be put on a diet, and the RSS Feed section could use a makeover.

Opera Review, part 2

Second Day

Woah, cutting and pasting a URL dug up a cute little gem: Paste and Go. There's even a keyboard shortcut for that. I can feel myself being more productive already.

Sadly, for some crazy installed on lab computers reason, I lost the fact that this copy was registered and it looks like I'll have to reregister it every time. Hmm, must look into this further.

I like the fact that each tab has its own close button.

Trying to make this whole thing into a blog entry is a mess.. the blogger.com page for posting loads all wrong and the buttons don't work. The little BlogThis popup seems to work okay though. I did a Report this site thing, so maybe it'll get fixed, considering blogger.com is used by a lot of people.

Third Day

I discovered that you can open a new link in a new page (Opera's term for a tab), and you can also open it and have it load in the background, which is the behavior that I always want. I usually browse a page, and open interesting links for looking at after I'm finished with the current page.

Fourth Day

Searching a page for text was kind of disappointing. One of my favorite features of Firefox is that the page search was integrated into the bottom of the window, which reduced clutter and meant that nothing was covered up by the search window.

I've also decided that I like the fact that the navigation bar (with the reload, stop, address bar and google search) is below the tabs names. Visually, it links the navigation bar with each tab individually, which is more appropriate than other browser's behavior which has the tabs as the lowest bar before the page.

Opera Review, Part One

Intro

I work at Penn State University, as a Computer Lab Consultant. Next year, PSU is making an agreement to make Opera available in the labs, plus a free license to every PSU faculty, staff, and student; so some PR from Opera came and gave a presentation to those interested. I went, got an overview of the Opera browser, a free mouse pad, a free t-shirt, and a complimentary registration card.

I figured, I might as well learn Opera, since users next year will no doubtedly have questions, and it has some interesting features. Since I have a sad, sad blog that sees no action, I'm going to do a write up about it.

The browsers I normally use are Firefox on Windows and Linux, and Safari on OS X.

First Impressions from the Presentation

The folks at Opera had a fancy poster up claiming "The fastest browser on earth." We asked about this, thinking maybe they had some insanely fast rendering engine or something, but the presenters admitted that they had just been wondering about that themselves. They decided that its not necessarily faster rendering than other browsers, but it definitely made the user more productive. If that is true, then Opera is definitely worth my time.

Sessions seem really cool. (I know that you can get those in Firefox, but I'm not one to go searching out cool plugins and install them, I have enough to do)

The fast forward and backward buttons are intriguing. If the fast forward actually does a decent job of slideshowing stuff (I look at a lot of galleries), then that would be awesome. If the fast backward skipped you to the first page you saw on a particular site (determined by domain name), that would be sweet, but they gave me the impression it took you to the first page viewed in that particular tab.

Built in RSS feed support might be very useful, since I look at a lot of blogs when I have free time.

I was impressed by the application size being small, and the interface looked pretty clean.

The trashcan seems like an excellent idea, as do the Notes.

They claim to work closely with w3c, I asked about what their goals were for rendering pages: according to how w3c says they should be rendered, or according to how designers meant the pages to be rendered, using any of their hackish css and html tricks. They said they strive to do it right, you can also report a website as being rendered incorrectly.

Bookmark nicknames, and a easy to use bookmark search looks useful.

Day One

Downloading took a minute, because I had to find a server that wasn't already too busy. Installation was clean, quick, and easy.

Registering took me a while, since I had to search the opera site up and down to figure out that I should put "---" for the organization, otherwise the serial number on the card they gave me wouldn't work.

Importing Bookmarks from Firefox. Under File: Import, they have options to import from IE, Netscape, Konqueror, and a couple others, but no Mozilla or Firefox. What the heck? Since Netscape looks like a repackaged Firefox, I choose Netscape, and it seemed to import my Firefox bookmarks fine. Now to recreate my bookmarks toolbar and get rid of Opera's default bookmarks. The trash thing is pretty handy, but where are the bookmarks that are just in the Bookmarks menu, and not organized into folders? It took me a while to accidentally click on the grey area underneath the trashcan, which shows the top level.

Bookmarks incident aside, my first impression of the GUI is that its kinda bloated, which is something that I hate. I'm very picky about my screen real estate, especially because I need to keep an eye on a chat client for work. I messed with the toolbar settings and got rid of the Main bar. Also the Start bar, which is really annoying when it pops up underneath the address box. I think I'm the only person in the world that actually uses the Status menu regularly, so I enabled that, but its almost twice as thick as it needs to be. Curious if I could find a skin that minimizes the size on these buttons, I downloaded Freestyle, which does help a lot.

Cruising right along, browsing some of my normal pages, checking the mail, I stumble across something else.. Ctrl-T, which I'm used to opening a new tab in other browsers, prompts me to save a bookmark. What’s the keyboard command for opening a new tab? Search of the Opera help tells me Ctrl-N. Makes sense, but this reminds me of OS X changing some of finder's keyboard shortcuts around.. its going to take a bit of getting used to, particularly if I continue to use Safari at home.

I tried signing up for an RSS feed, drunkenblog.com, which went relatively well, although the fact that Feeds seem to use the same app as Mail, but there are two different menus for them is odd. In fact, I'd rather that Feeds have their own simplified app that doesn't feel like the mail app, or at least doesn't have a quick reply and mail icon.

I also checked out some mouse gestures, which are cool.

All and all, the interface is going to take a bit of getting used to. I like some of the features I see, but its odd to me (especially when Firefox made such an effort to be easy to switch to) that I have to re-teach myself how to do some things. Maybe the effort will pay off with increased flexibility.

Burningbird - A Speck of Dirt

Burningbird - A Speck of Dirt is an amazing little story. Definitely go read it.

Sayin"hey" from the edge of the world (AKA Brooklyn)

Checking in from my long absence, so long in fact, I totally forgot my login. Oy.
So now I have a job, at the link above. I photoshop their images together on a background I whipped up, tweak ebay titles, do html, data entry... ebay research... you know, just all the Stuff Rachel does.

Ahh, yes. A job.

Oh wait, now I'm free-time-less.
Crap.

So I have been heard from sparingly indeed.
Some madness has happened in the interim, like Linden going to Pycon : ), and I'm starting to eat only raw food.
Yes, this sounds totally insane to me too. But it makes me feel amazingly better after only one day of doing it. I forgot to take my Oh-crap-I'm-itching-all-over-again pill, and nothing happened! o_o
More info on my latest health/diet madness:

www.eatraw.com

I bought a bunch of their stuff, and it's all a bit odd but definitely tasty and filling so far. I bought this absolutely bizarre-looking green bar they have, made of "spirula" algae (!!), and I have yet to work up the bravery to try it.
I found out about this crazy phenomena of raw food because of Mike's contant O'Reilly watching. Carol Alt was on there (was a VS model, supermodel, etc - I had no idea who she was, but Mike & Tony knew plenty *sigh*). She wrote a book called Eating in the Raw, and was on promoting it a while ago, & eventually I picked it up on half.com.
Now, there are definitely a few things she says that are out-and-out wacky (ie, it's a short drive from NYC to PENNSYLVANIA to buy raw dairy from the Amish!!), but the science sounds, well, sound, because she co-wrote it with a couple of doctors. And so far, I feel amazingly great!

In Other News,
I came up with a TOTALLY INSANE tetris related idea. I don't want to go into details here because I have this odd feeling it'll get jinxed, and I want to keep my invention in the family, as it were, at this juncture. (I have no idea if ANYONE else would care anyway, but I want to sit around secretively thinking to myself "Eeeexcellent" *steepled fingers* for a bit longer. Yet more evidence that I am simply cracked... )

MyCatHatesYou

MyCatHatesYou dot com
Good site for some laughs. Plus I love cats.

PyCon DC 2005 Home Page

PyCon this year was great. We showed up at about 4pm the third day of sprinting, so it was hard to attach ourselves to a group, however we jumped in with Bruce Eckel's Adapters and Interfaces Sprint. Having read the PEP's the night before, we all talked about what we thought they were, why we would want to use them or not, etc. Plus we got to meet some very smart people (more on this later).

The con proper was great. We managed to make it to all three keynotes (waking up at 6:30 in the morning, yawn) and of course the SubEthaEdit crew were back, with a couple newcomers. There is something very satisfying/fun/educational about taking notes in real time with other people. I heard people say that notetaking using SubEthaEdit at conventions is common, but PyCon takes the cake for number of people/quality of notes. (The Google keynote notes were not going to be published online, yet we easily transcribed his slides, took note of what he said, almost word for word, got all the audience comments and did an excellent job of the Q & A session) All our notes can be found at Ted Leung's site here: [http://www.sauria.com/~twl/conferences/pycon2005/]. If you've never used SubEthaEdit, the coloring of the text corresponds to who typed the text. (I was light blue for the Google talk) Notice how collaborative it is. People form kinda unspoken rules of SubEthaEditing, usually a couple people will line their cursors up in order, ready to take the next lines of notes, one or two will go back and spell check or fix organization, someone will fill in the quotes section or links section if needed. It's super cool.

A [supercool] group of us are working on Fuse (maybe this well be renamed), which will be a cross platform Editor similar to SubEthaEdit. The project info can be found on the mailing list, wiki, or the BerliOS site.

Anyways, my general feelings on PyCon are that the conference is a great way to meet people and learn a lot of stuff, the python community is really awesome, in general, there is a lot of fun to be had. Unfortunately I always feel so stupid when I go. Almost everyone there is very, very intelligent. Most, if not all, seem to be involved in open source (which takes some intelligence to begin with), plus they use/helped create python (which also makes you smarter than the average joe), plus they're coming to the conference. So I get to mix in with the cream of the cream of the crop, which is a little depressing to me because, although I love Python dearly, I'm in college and hardly have the time/chance to use it, and I don't have anywhere near the experience in programming that the others have, and I've never worked on an open source anything (besides my dinky game which is released as open source, but I wrote by myself).

Ah well, it's still a lot of fun, and I'm not about to let a lot of really smart people deter me from going anywhere. :) [maybe by next year, they won't have such a step up on me]

Google SMS

Google SMS is also hella cool. Basically you send a text message like "movies: showtimes 16801" to 46645 (GOOGL) and get movie times back. Check it out the link for different examples.

Infra Red Webcam

Infra Red Webcam is amazing. Even if you're not interested in the process, check out the photos at the end comparing things.
I want to do this sometime..

Jef Raskin - Robot Rules the Rugs

A cute article by Jef Raskin, who passed away recently, about the Roomba (Rachel, this is for you). He also wrote a book called "The Human Interface" which dad bought and I skimmed, but would really like to read, and was Employee 31 at Apple.
Something that warms my heart is that he graduated from Penn State. (See?) :)

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Photo Gallery (See-Through Loo)

(See-Through Loo)
Hahaha.. :)

Cabinet National Library

What Craziness is this? Its some sort of harebrained idea by some guys with magazines, but its really cool. Next time I'm roadtripping, I'll make sure to go there.

Octopus Arms May Point Way to New Robot Designs

This is a fascinating article. Basically the idea is that an octopus has 8 long arms, and the way that they control them easily and still do complex things without getting tangled may lead to designs allowing robots to have long flexible arms. (Like Doc Oc of Spiderman)

An interesting thing is that once an octopus grabs some food, it makes the arm into a "semi-ridgid structure that bends to form quasi joints. Just as a human arm has joints at the shoulder, elbow, and wrist that allow our arms to bend and rotate, the octopus bends its arm to forming three segments of roughly equal length."

Thats pretty cool.

Technology just isn't as cool as it used to be..

I was playing with Jim's old school rotary phone the other day, and I was wondering what it is about rotary phones thats just so cool?
I think its because they engage the senses much more than phones (and other tech) do today. They have a cool dial thing, and its heavy, and you spin it, and it makes a sweet noise as it spins back. These days, everything is a keys and a screen, maybe a mouse, nothing feels cool, or sounds cool anymore. Nothing is fun to use.
Maybe thats why I like Apple products so much. Their hardware is different, appeals to some of my other senses. They have cool mice that are a single button in themselves, you can wring the neck of the iMac G4s like a strange looking goose, the first iPod's wheel would spin and click. They're not just another hunk of black plastic.
One of the coolest cell phones I've ever seen rotated open, instead of flipping open, and had a cool joystick like button on the keypad. Little stylistic designs made it cool without even knowing what the capabilities of the phone or the games included were.
Its possible that this is just a by product of growing up. Maybe I just miss toys, which are designed to be more engaging of the senses. *le sigh* Anyways, just a thought I had

The Governator Needs Open Source to Run California

Open Source is sweet. So is this articles title.. the Governator!

Shoes... Drama... icons...

...exhaustipation. Shoes and mom and oy.
...but in the midst of all the... whatever, I remembered that I want to put up the link to that nifty lil pic-file-generating app:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/icons_screensavers/pic2icon.html

I use it daily, saves soo much annoyance, my pics are so much more easily searchable, I just scan through them visually. It has blurryness/aliasing settings of some sort that I haven't touched in a while, but they rule. The only problem I've ever had is when I drag a truly INSANE amount of big files onto it, it can get hinky. But yes... muchly useful app.

...i think I'm going to sleep now, and have nightmares about shoe sales.
Yeah, you heard me. I'm gonna have nightmares about *shoe sales*... me...
sign of the apocalypse and/or Mom Involvement.
Meep.

New Year's 2005 - NYC

Here's a better gallery of the pictures. Better?
Please email me complaints and picture removal requests. :)
I also put up two movies of the party here and here. Unfortunately, spoiled by my camera's auto rotate function, I shot both movies sideways, and I can't figure out how to rotate them again. If anyone knows of a share/freeware way to do this, please let me know.

New Years Photos

WEB0004
Originally uploaded by Kusmeroglu.

I'm working on a good way to share all the great pictures I got.. at first I thought I'd just throw together some html, but then I realized that I might be doing this more often, now that I have a camera. I'm between using iPhoto/mac.com's automatic gallery making thing or this flickr thing if it works out.
What would be ideal is some sort of gallery that me and Rachel can add comments/descriptions below the pictures, and is automated.
Any Ideas?

Hair cloning for baldness? *blink*

...am muchly tired, checkin email before frantic Xmas packing tradition commences. WebMD as usual has flooded my inbox with crazy mostly-hypochondriac-sounding email newsletters. I keep it coming, though, cuz occasionally I get stuff like this:

http://my.webmd.com/content/article/96/103836.htm

*blink*
Hair Cloning. For, like, replacing lost hair..?

I think I'll just let it go, & get to the frantic packing...

Programming Issues

I'd just like to say that the inability to stop typing piece as 'peice' is really annoying. I even did it there. Grr....

[Also, working on a laptop for any length of time with a bad desk/chair is hurtful on the neck and back]
Back to hacking..

Game Pieces

Here's a teaser. I spent 5 hours last night hacking a program to create all my tetris pieces for me, with any size, colors, and shapes I want. It even rotates it and draws the shading on the bevels correctly. PyGame is great. (It would have taken me much less, but I spent like 2 hours fiddling with a couple different math modules trying to get it to rotate a 2d array.. should have paid more attention in CSE 485 before I dropped it ^^)
Anyways, this piece is one of the new tetraminoes, thats going to be worth 3x the points, because it forces you to have a hole.
[For anyone interested, the script to make the peices is underdocumented and here]

SolarWolf

This game is going to scratch an itch.
In explanation: I just finished exams and this semester (woohoo, and thank god), so I'm trying to decide what to do with my 3 weeks off with the requirements that it involves coding in python. I've been meaning to write a game for a while, with the major setback that Blender doesn't seem to work on my laptop (but it does on all other computers, annoyingly). Blender was going to be too much of a learning curve anyways.
So, in a fit of Not Studying (tm), I played SolarWolf on Jim's Suze computer. Long story short, I was impressed by its cleaness, quickness, prettyness, pleasing to the earness, and other important things (like good gameplay). I immediately wanted to find out what it was made with, and to my pleasant surprize, found out it was written with pygame. [Well then, dad, you win.] My initial impressions of pygame, based on a quick download of one of their demo games was that it was clunky. This was a long time ago, and I think I was grouping it in with my initial impression of pythonCard, which was definitely not what I was looking for as a GUI solution (but now looks a lot better than I remember as well, and I recomended it to someone for some project they were doing).
To all those who worked on these projects: Great job, and thanks!
After reading an article on getting into game programming, now my plan for x-mas break is writing a Tetris clone. (muahahaha) My unique (maybe, probably not) spin on it is going to be a library of other pieces you can choose. (meaning other than the standard tetraminoes) I'm definitely going to build in a highscores thing so me and Rachel can battle to the death.. (still haven't come up with a name though)

Sharkey 2: the Revenge

Why is it that as soon as I mention him here, the next day he goes and pulls a Haxor DaVinci?
0_0
I'm quite sure that one has nothing to do with the other, but, dangit. Now I'm linking to a etis rorrim.
.yllaretiL
What's funny is that knowing him, the site may be back to normal tomorrow, or gone. (yet again.)

Sharkey, himself as ever

I revisit Sharkey's site about once a month, since he's not exactly posting real fast. But always, I come away entertained. However, this is the first time I have ever spewed hot chocolate all over my monitor. (In any context.)

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=0&cId=3137105

..He starts off with a mouse pun halfway down the page, quickly veers into Gremlins humor, then Buddhism, and speeds up from there. It actually made me want to wander around in EQ2 being a wiseass. Looks like fun. I'm sure I could think of something. I don't know how detailed the EQ2 char creation thingie lets you be.
I wonder if it's possible to cobble together a Ferengi...

And as usual, the rest of his site & random links are also fun.

Mechs!!

They made mechs![TOYOTA.CO.JP] Woah! And they look cool, and anime like!
Woah.. !

Exhaustion & X-Men make me giggle

Not really the X-Men themselves, I guess, but more the minor characters.
I stumbled across this site:

http://jerome.galica.free.fr/marvel/X-Men/x-men.htm

I was addicted! It's like an encyclopedia of chibi Marvel characters! Or rather, I guess that's what it *is*... ^_^
Some of the lesser-known characters have such ridiculous names/premises... there's the weird copycat ones, like theguy that's a Kingpin clone - but wearing a fez, or the guy named Orbit who has lil jawbreaker lookin things orbiting his head, or the lady who has no shoulders, named Venus Deemillo! o_o
And you get to browse them and watch the little surprise GIF animations and look at bizarre versions of Wolverine & giggle.

Or at least, *I* giggle.

Prolly the Tilex fumes...

Woof! ... Seriously??

Technology progresses in some utterly crazy directions.

Like Dog Translators developed by the Japanese...
brought to you by Sharper Image!!

some of the description...

Dog owners are convinced their dogs talk to them, right? It's true! And now Bow-Lingual, The Dog Translator can help you understand exactly what your "best friend" is trying to communicate. Bow-Lingual was developed by Dr. Norio Kogure, a PhD in veterinary medicine at Tokyo's Kogue Animal Hospital.
Working with leading scientists at the Japan Acoustic Laboratory, Dr. Kogure recorded hundreds of breeds and analyzed thousands of voice (bark) prints. Their intensive observations and analysis led them to categorize canine communication into six emotions — Happy, Sad, Frustrated, Needy, Angry and Assertive — and to create the first Animal Emotion Analysis System (AEAS), which is the sophisticated technology behind Bow-Lingual.

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Seriously??
We HAVE to get someone this for Xmas! We have to!!

Neato desktop

I've just realized that my desktop is rather spiffy. Since OS X came out, I've been fiddling with icon mods, and other stuff, and currently this is the end result:

Spiff, no? ^_^
The background is generated by Fracture, a screensaver that generates fractals and lets you shuffle the color scheme while it's generating. And you can save the images you like! (I was impressed enought to pay for it.) I made the Fracture folder my desktop images folder, & it shuffles fractals randomly every 15 minutes. ^_^
Plus, I have this OTHER amazing screensaver, called Fluid. It's so cool. And adjustable!

And thank god, Mike's Dell is no longer Frelled. I un-frelled it. Much misery and dell-phone-support-incompetance was discovered, but I did it. yay, me.

Lycos Anti-spam plan overwhelms sites (BBC)

Interesting thing I found from Slashdot. Basically, Lycos made a screen saver that (instead of helping find aliens, or further genetic research, or something cool) sends packets to the websites of spammers to try to raise their bandwidth costs. Well, it was rather popular, and the spam websites are getting shut down by what amounts to a DDoS attack. (Lycos says that they were trying to just slow down, not shut down the sites) I have mixed feeling on this. Its cool that someone's trying to target the spammers, but who gets to say what the targets are? (these guys say they were innocently attacked by the screen saver after an actual spam company linked to pictures on their website)

Overstock.com: Worldstock

Overstock.com, save up to 80% every day! Woohoo!
No, but seriously, I read this article about Amazon.com being sad in Q3 and Q4, and it mentioned that online shoppers might be going to places like Overstock.com (which is pretty much on online outlet.
The interesting and bloggable part of this is that they have a thing called Worldstock, which is a section selling "handcrafted goods from around the world"(TM). You can shop by country, including Ghana, Brazil, China, Tibet, and Nepal, to name a few, or you can shop by category (jewelry, rugs, home decor, etc.). They have some really neat looking things, like Cool Chinese Caligraphy, Chinese Jade Fish, and Rattan Head Pillow from Thailand. (It looks uncomfortable, but I think its similar to what the japanese used while sleeping on their mats on the floor. I'm fascinated by this, and always wanted to try it..)

Gorillas and the Blue Screen of Death

There has been an overriding theme to my week:

ARRG.

So much, in fact, that I should get a T-Shirt.
Too bad my particular Screen of Death doesn't have a shirt of it's own.

And that's *on top of* blogger refusing to let me log in for over a damn week.

*sigh*

I've given a name to my pain, and it is Batma- er, rather, What The Frell Is Up With Mike's Dell. It's frustrating enough to have have given it a really long name, Spanish nobility Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez, Chief Metallurgist to King Charles the Fifth of Spain style, with capitalization and everything. 8 ( The Blue Screen of Death is becoming an increasingly frequent event, and windows take forever to open! "My Computer" opens five minutes after I click. ARRGH.
So I started doing some research, about the processes running in the Task Manager, thinking maybe spyware was responsible. Ctrl-Alt-Del should NOT be so freakin familiar, dammit. I can't remember the last time I had to force-quit something on a Mac! *ahem*

Anyway, It turns out that (as far as I'm concerned, anyway) it's WORSE than spyware - there are all sorts of legitimate-yet-nasty things that run at startup.
This page has been insanely helpful:

http://answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm

Apparently, Creative SoundBlaster and in fact all Creative software, drivers, etc, that are installed with the Creative soundcard and run the processes Devldr.exe, Devldr16.exe, or Devldr32.exe, cause so many problems that, well, it seems best to simply uninstall them. Here's an excerpt from that oh-so-helpful page:

Found on Windows 2000/XP. It really does not matter how Creative call this task/service, DEVLDR, DEVLDR16, or DEVLDR32, it is a thorough nightmare whatever its name, and DEVLDR does not disappoint. What does this task do – we do not know, it is such a frustrating task we care little about what it does.

And even further:

As one website puts it "Rumours that Creative's driver team is composed entirely of gorillas enthusiastically beating on their keyboards with their feet have not been confirmed !".

So that's what I'm in the process of doing. I have to scour the C: drive for any Creative or evil "Devldr" stuff, restart, and install windows-default soundcard drivers and software. In short: ARRGH.

In Other News, I have an idea about Xmas gifts that are brought to you by the # 400 and the letter S.

Mr. Buchanon on Story Telling and EA

The school of IST at Penn State likes to show off their new and shiny building by having lots of interesting speakers come in. One of them was John Buchanon, from Electronic Arts, speaking on the gaming industry.

Funny Quote: "We turn pizza and coke into games"

He gave us the usual consoles drive the industry bit, and gave some interesting information about how much it costs to develop a game (which is to say, A Lot), but they have a short shelf life. This is the major reason why game companies are consolidating.

One of the interesting things he talked about was how gaming is built into our culture, the new generation being people who are ~41 years old and younger. (so, in 20 years, we'll be making games for the 60 yr old demographic).

The majority of his speech was about storytelling. He asserts that our culture is built around storytelling (you ask people how their weekend was on Monday morning), and that the draw of playing a game is that its an experience that can be turned into a story. Since many people play a game, you know have a shared memory that allows you to connect to these other people. He also talked momentarily about the problems with 'interactive' storytelling in games, which is that you have to be led eventually along specific plot points (or 'portals') or else there is no game. I wish he had gone into this in more detail, but his entire speech was cut down to fit into 45 minutes.

Factoid on Language: 90% of conversation (non business and school) is gossip. There is a theory among linguists that Humans developed language because we were bored.

Bunny

Bunny is a webcomic that is just cool. Its updated everyday (so far, exactly), the art is awesome, the characters are simple, and it has that cool humor snapshot feel to it. I particularly like this one, because zombies are classic (and are also the theme for the month).
In the computer labs where I work, they put up new posters advertising yet another stupid portal. The poster has a horde of groundhog looking things with sharp teeth and weird googly eyes. One of them is saying "We're here for the brains". The PR person for the website said they were 'interest creatures', but what it means to me: Penn State is pro-Zombie. (!) o.O

Puzzles and other fun things

This has been the cause of my not Bloggingness last week. I found it in a flurry of puzzle doing that was kicked off by this.
That, and the fact that I've been completely obsessed by plants. This all started with that terrarium idea, and has accelerated into a side idea of raising bonsai and selling them. (!) I've been walking around staring at the ground, looking for interesting moss (yes, thats right, interesting moss), ferns, and other small plants that I can harvest before the dreadful snow hits and covers everything. I told poor Jim to save a bottle for me so I could raise a little clover looking plant in it til I get my terrarium going. (I was planning on removing it via chopsticks o.O )
I've even decided that I'm going to put some salamanders in there once I get it up and running (my terrarium, not the bottle).
So, am I crazy? Isn't this step one?
(does it mean something when you can reference your own blog more than once in a post?)
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o.O <- I've practiced this smiley in the mirror, so I could see that is humanly possible, because I have need for the expression so much.

DrunkenBlog: This one goes to eleven

DB at it again, with his good points. As you can see below, I was all "oooh, ahh" when the iPod photo came out.. and I wanted it, but just because I'm pretty materialistic when it comes to anything Apple, not because I actually want it. I especially have no need for it because my digital camera broke almost a year ago (cry).
Speaking of iPods, I think my 5 gig battery finally died.. either that, or walking around in the cold weather with it in my inside pocket somehow drained the battery the last couple times I've used it. =What to do about this? And my poor digital camera (cry again) How I miss taking pictures..

CNN.com - 'Brain' in a dish flies flight simulator

This is just crazy. I have more faith in the human race - we can get mouse brains to fly planes! Such crazyness. Wow. Whats really cool is just the sheer power for it to learn, we took some brain cells and stuck it on a plate with some electrodes, and it just organized itself, hooked up and went! I have more faith in my rats (Brouhaha, Gala, and Spree).
(Crazy, I say!)

Politics and Orcs

I didn't get to be Chun-Li. I couldn't find the costume bits anywhere! And resewing was just not an option. It was just too much this year. :-(
However, Election Day and our Election Night party more than make up for it. Mike & I went out with Mike's dad (Bill) to Applebee's for lunch, and that was fun because not only is Bill fun, but he's never been to an Applebee's before.
Mike, myself, Tony, Manny, Mike B & Gillian were at the party. It was a good balance of opposing political views. ^_^ We watched the election coverage and argued with each other. And laughed at the TV wackyness. Some very wacky stuff happened on TV - we caught Al Sharpton verbally taking off people's heads, apparently he's more vicious when sleep deprived. And his delivery was even more indescribably bombastic than usual. He said something to the effect that if Bush wasn't ready to go once he lost, Sharpton was gonna show up at the White House with his boys and some moving vans! *ROTFL* some of that may be TonyReinterpretation-ism though, he has a way of rephrasing things to make them even funnier. Also, apparently Dan Rather said the following: "if a frog had side pockets he'd probably wear a handgun".
o_0
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WTH??
If anyone happens to read this and has some clue what that may mean, lay it on me. The bafflement is killing me. ^_^
My dad was disappointed that we didn't invite him, even though we're separated by three states. ^_^

At any rate, the best part about this election to me right now is that it's over. Now all I have to worry about is the people that own Madison Square Garden producing commericals against building a football stadium in Manhattan. That doesn't seem like the smartest idea to me, considering NYC's already amazing traffic problem, but those commericals are damn annoying. You can only tell who makes them by the nearly illegible eeeety-bitty text at the bottom of the screen at the end.

Back in Rachel's Costume Obsession Land:

These people are about as crazy as me. They decided to make a Moria Orc. We have procedure in common:

Step 1: Realize that you are crazy.

Now you may proceed.

However, these next guys are on a totally different level. They're an actual special effects house, and pretty much their whole site is amazing to look at. Plus they have a fun front page.
But their Ring Wraith and Witch King... dude... the *actual really armor* armor, not just fake rubber armor... 0_0


In Other News, Ipod Photo Explodes my mind.