bytex64.net

<evil> Some of you might say I've been neglecting my blog. Ha Ha Ha. How incorrectly you assume that I care. </evil>

I came across an article earlier on why Linux is not Windows. It's pretty good, if a bit long and prone to discussing tangentially related things like motorcycles and safes. I agree with the basic point, though. Linux is for people who want to tinker, and if you don't see the advantages of working on a largely experimental system, then you shouldn't use it. It doesn't matter that it's stable and usable, most stuff is just not production quality. And it's certainly not Windows-like. (In that Linuxy apps are usable but unfinished, and that Windows apps are polished but retarted.) As the article suggests, if you want a solid system that isn't Windows, you should probably get a Mac.

Ah, yes. Speaking of Macs, the new Intel-based Macs are out, the new G5 iMac, and the... *cough* MacBook Pro. Yeah, it's a pretty stupid name next to PowerBook, and I have no idea why they changed it. Way to throw brand-name recognition in the trash, jackasses. Also, before you say something about how the PowerBook has a PowerPC CPU in it, please remember that the PowerBook moniker was in use well before the debut of the PowerPC. Oh, well. I'm sure plenty of people will plunk down two grand for the thing, anyway.

I saw (the new) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory yesterday. It was pretty good, but when has the combination of Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, and Danny Elfman ever turned out a bad movie? (Oh, alright, Corpse Bride wasn't so hot...)

And now, for an astounding innovation in stupidity: Clickwheel. Clickwheel repackages webcomics into iPod friendly formats for viewing on the go, which is a great idea. I mean, all you have to do is find the comic in the Media Gallery, click the DISPLAY EPISODES button on the right of the listing, find the episode you want, click the download button, save the ZIP file somewhere, unzip it, transfer the files to your iPod, and view the files on your iPod (those last two parts are left as an exercise to the reader; I have no iPod). Wow, that's... not convenient at all. By my estimation, you're spending about 60 seconds of work for maybe 15-20 seconds of enjoyment. There's not even any advantage to doing it in bulk, since Clickwheel doesn't have any way of downloading more than one episode at a time. By the time I get one episode transferred to my iPod, I could have viewed the original webcomic plus three others. Good idea. Ass-backwards execution.

Speaking of ass-backwards execution and webcomics, I'm sure nobody has noticed my annual update at overclocked. it's good to see that some things never change. Like keenspace's (now comicgenesis) ancient update system. Not that it's a bad system. I'm all for awful kludges, but some people might enjoy a nice, well-thought out web administration system instead of having to upload files (for both the comic and associated commentary) to a FTP server. Maybe even build it on Rails with AJAX.

Ha Ha Ha.

Q: Lately, I've come across a very funny webcomic called Dominic Deegan: Oracle For Hire. You may find it cheesy, but something's been wheying on my mind. Many of the comics include egregious puns and outrageous alliteration -- and they're milked for all they're worth. Unfortunately, it seems that I find these puns hilarious. They're the cream of the crop, buttery smooth. Each one evokes a smile, if not a chortle or outright laughter. I don't mean to wine, but here's the question I've been mulling: If I face my friends, will they frown on my penchant for perusing prize puns? Will my parents prohibit my alliteration appreciation? Will I rise to this challenge, or was I just bread wrong? Does digging Dominic Deegan doom me to live life like a leper?

A: Yes.

Merry VFSmas, everyone! The low-quality version of Video Free Somethingrather Episode 3 is up for download right now, and higher quality versions are on their way to The Archive right now. One new thing we've got this time around is an external subtitle file for those of you who are either hearing impaired, can't understand us (most of you), or just have a psychological dependence on them (Yan). I'll be subtitling the old ones, too.

I did get some useful stuff for Christmas, including an 800MHz CPU for my video editing box and one of those $14 Steadycams. Expect camera shots in the next episode to be much smoother thanks to this beauty.

Oh, I almost forgot, three episodes means that the next one is a blooper reel! It shouldn't take long to put that together, so look forward to episode 3.5 in a couple of weeks. Maybe our new slogan should be: "VFS. It's just like Hak.5, except it's not as interesting, or as funny, and only updates half as often."

:-D *thumbs up*

I got an email from my mom today:

Wondering what to get your family for Christmas? A coupla bottles of spirits would be nice :-) Maybe one white and one red....

So what I'm wondering is, does she mean wine, or should I bring home a bottle of Grey Goose and a bottle of Aftershock? }:->

As I was testing out beatscape (as I've decided to call my beatmania sim), I came across one of the more peculiar things I've seen in a song animation. (Beatmania usually has animations that go along with the music. In the BMS format, it's actually a slideshow of BMP files. Don't look at me, the format was designed in freaking 1998.) The song is actually from a non-traditional BMS game called Ninja Agent Galli, where instead of hitting keys to activate sounds, you're a small Ninja Gaiden-style ninja, and you have to hit the falling notes with your sword and ninja stars. One of the songs they have is called "Showguts", which is a purposefully mangled romanization of "Shogatsu," or the Japanese New Year's Day. In the song is this little comic, which I have extracted and displayed for your pleasure:

That's actually the elder George Bush, which explains why he doesn't look like a monkey (as I'm sure you were wondering). The astute among you may have noticed that there are gaps in the filenames. This is because there were extra frames for the purpose of animation that were redundant when sitting still.

I give this comic 121 out of 10 points for political lampooning, hilarious engrish, and ninjas.

I just had the most bizarre dream involving a common man's trip to the near past going horribly wrong, and eventually nearly exploding an entire town with rapidly multiplying hamsters. The book was written from the point of view of several hamsters native to the town, and an appendix explained the proper procedure for time travelers to take when faced with a temporal fuckup of this magnitude. Apparently, the solution involves extending a hyperspace cube around the earth and then collapsing it, which somehow transmutes the anomaly into small blocks of Jell-O (as seen in the jiggly final chapter).

Yes, I'm well aware of how weird that sounds.

Last night I had the (dis)pleasure of helping Jen fix an old computer she was going to donate to some kids. For those who aren't regular viewers, Jen went home on Saturday. To Connecticut. "Just get on a goddamn plane and fly over here," she said. Uh, sure, I'll just hop in my private learjet and be there in a couple of hours... :-/

She had been trying to reformat and install Windows 98 (second edition!) on this old computer when the primary hard drive died. All she had to do was remove the bad drive, and switch another drive over to master to stick in there for its replacement. Oh, did I mention this computer had three hard drives in it? And two CD-ROM drives?

Jen: so, that entire time you were typing i was struggling to get the cover off
Jen: i see lots of wires
Me: Don't cut the red one!
Jen: NO! don't tell me that NOW!

After flexing my amazing powers of deduction (read: Googled lots of stuff), we got it working. Mysteriously enough, I just got a message from her saying that another 300MB hard drive seems to have appeared. I can only guess that it's actually a partition on another drive, but at this point, if you told me that the system is growing a new drive to replace the one that was removed, I'd probably believe you.

At work just now, I "fixed" a noisy chipset fan by unplugging it. After returning the computer to its normal spot, the owner came back in, saying that the network wasn't connected. Upon further inspection, the RJ-45 plug was coated in this... gunk... that I can only describe as earwax-like. It baffles my mind as to both what that gunk is, and how the plug was working in the first place.

Wonders never cease.

I had my "final" this morning, a presentation for LIS201. Despite the fact that I had no copy of "Final Countdown" by Europe to play this morning, it went surprisingly well. And on an interesting side note, all the members of my group happened to be super-seniors graduating in December. So with that out of the way, and assuming I passed the class (which is an entirely valid assumption), and the university doesn't realize something they forgot to tell me, I'm done.

With school.

Graduated.

I'm still far too zonked by lack of sleep to even ponder that, but I'm sure the ramifications will become frighteningly clear to me in coming days. Right now, it isn't really registering. Maybe it shouldn't. It's not like I'm leaving (just yet). I'll still have my job for a while. I just won't be taking classes anymore.

I have skillfully (read: haphazardly) deferred any life-changing decisions for at least a small time, hopefully until my current lease is up. After that, I'm free to do whatever I want, I guess. I just need to figure out in the mean-time what that is...

Erickson and I had a conversation earlier this week about his new glasses, and how they increase his "emo cred". I laughed at the idea, and said I would have to make a website for that. So I did.

Bienvenido a EmoCred.

...

Now, since most of you have IQs greater that of a square meter of blue paint with a lichen on it, I'll just go ahead and tell you that the site is entirely made up. Usernames? Songs? Randomly generated. The quiz? Well, you'll see. However, if any of you have friends with IQs below this level, I encourage you to point them to the site and laugh at them behind their back. :)

As it stands, the site is largely non-functional. While randomly generated user profiles would give me ample material with which to completely make fun of things like myspace and facebook, such a thing is far more effort than I wanted to expend. Consider EmoCred an electronic art piece, satirizing both social networking and the "Emo" idea. I did want to do more work on it, but I had to let it go because I have to make an actual mock-up website for my class, and time is counting down fast. :)

Listen up, bitches. I got your Christmas cheer right here: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Yes. You read that right. Santa Claus. And Martians.

Up on digg a couple of days ago was Public Domain Torrents, a site chock-full of B-movies and old black and white films that nobody would pay for. Which is good, since downloading them via Bittorrent costs you practically nothing. There's actually a few of them that I want to see, like Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space, the inspiration behind the name of the improbably obscure Plan 9 operating system. There's also a good selection of awful Kung-Fu movies, as well as Night of the Living Dead (which is also available up on the Internet Archive).