bytex64.net

I'm sure all of you have heard about the new name for Nintendo's next game system. The... Wii. I, of course, had the same initial reaction most people did -- which is to say that I thought the name was retarted and that Nintendo had finally gone off the deep end. I have to admit, though, they were right. The name is growing on me. It's still rife for many a penis joke which I shall mercifully spare you.

Regardless of the strangeness of the name (and indeed, perhaps enhanced by it), everyone is talking about Nintendo right now. Not the bugs with the 360, not how the PS3 is going to be a year late and $600, but how and why Nintendo decided on such an oddball name. It's pure PR genius. And they're right, people will get used to the name, and the game system will be awesome regardless of what they call it. People will be standing in line for their Wii, smiling as they unwrap their Wii, and playing with their Wii into the long hours of the night.

Whoops, I lied, that was a penis joke. *sigh*. They're just way too easy.

So, I guess, I accept the name. But my brother and I agree, they really should have called it the WRYYYYYY!

Q: How many activists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None, activists can't change anything.

Today's RocketBoom had Amanda sitting and saying nothing for nearly five minutes. While I'm aware of the point of the protest, I'm sure that many people weren't, since there was no indication given in the video at all. It's sort of pointless to protest if nobody knows what you're protesting about, isn't it? But that's not even what bothers me.

I downloaded, and watched, this not knowing I was going to have my time and bandwidth wasted. Next time, maybe just a warning at the beginning that "No, Amanda will not be speaking, so if you don't want to watch her sit and do nothing, stop your player now." And then maybe also put dayofslience.org on there. I don't mind your activism, but don't waste my time with it. I understand that your liberal arts degree makes you more or less useless in the job market today, but don't take it out on me by wasting my time with your rhetoric. That does nothing for your cause.

I dunno, I haven't been feeling right today, anyway. I've been chasing a white rabbit at work over some kernel patches, and I just got fed up with it and left about an hour before I usually do. I'm functional, but I've got this awful feeling in the pit of my stomach like something bad is about to happen. Maybe it's because I had rice w/wasabi furikake for breakfast this morning. *shrug*.

Oh, I played IIDX 9th style earlier, and passed Quasar (on Light7) for the first time. Other newnewss comes in the form of a couple of anime: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and Ouran High School Host Club. I'll have to explain those later, this post is getting long enough as it is.

The final interesting bit is that I got my license back, so I'm able to buy alcohol again. I'm now officially in the market for a car, too, and right now I'm eyeing an 80's VW GTI. Too bad there aren't any for sale. *sigh*.

So after today's Glove meeting, I wandered around to see how many friends I could meet randomly. "How many?" you ask?

Seven. James, Sachin, Ed, Jen, Kan, Yan, and Nancy.

People say this is a big campus, but it's smaller than you think. You meet friends all the time, because in reality, the number of places people visit are pretty small. The Union is a huge focal point, walking the halls there for fifteen minutes will almost certainly find you a friend (especially if your friend is James). Jen, Yan, and Kan were clustered at Yan's house, where I was led by Jen's mostly-useless clues. ("It smells like fish.") And, of course, Nancy was at her lab, where she asked me to explain to her "everything there is to know about programming." I'm still not certain if she was joking or not.

Yan is trying to explain to me that Olivia Munn, a new host on Attack of the Show from G4CrapTV, is hotter than Morgan Webb. Yes, Olivia is physically attractive, and yes, she speaks Japanese (poorly), but I don't think Yan understands the True Hotness of Morgan Webb. Allow me to explain:

While Morgan is a reasonably attractive woman, her looks fail to set her apart from any other female TV personality. So what's so attractive about her? Well, quite simply, she's an unabashed geek. When she talks on TV, I don't get the feeling that she's just eye candy reading the teleprompter. I feel like there's a real human being behind those words, like I'm talking to my sister. (And, in fact, my sister does resemble Morgan quite a bit) She doesn't just talk about video games, she plays video games. If I met Morgan Webb in real life, I wouldn't feel intimidated by her, because, well, she's just another geek. Plus, she did a "switch" commercial... about switching to Linux. I don't think Olivia whats-her-face can top that.

*sigh*. Morgan...

Apologies for the following. If you're not in the mood for a misanthropic rant, feel free to skip this one.

*sigh*.

One of the more distant members of my friend graph is having a bar crawl tonight for her birthday. The good news is that I can go, because I thought it was on Saturday. The bad news is, I don't want to go. Well, yeah, I want to go. But here's how it goes:

I want to hang out with my friends, I do. It's Friday night, and I probably won't get much chance to do this tomorrow, since Dana and Patsy are coming down to visit and celebrate Patsy's birthday.

But I don't feel like partying. Why?

• I don't feel like crawling bars. Mainly because the idea is inane. "Oh, man, I just drank two double rum and cokes! Now, let's leave, go to another bar, possibly pay cover, and drink two more double rum and cokes!" Seriously, I'm confused as to exactly where the fun lies in this activity.
• I don't have a driver's license. Had to post it as bond for the ticket I got in the wreck, and haven't cared to get it back, yet. While I do have ample proof that I'm over 21 in the form of an expired military ID, so far the only people who have realized that this is, in fact, a legal form of identification has been Bar Louie. I'm not in the mood to haggle with people over "Yes, it's expired, but if you'll notice, it expired when I #*(&#! turned 21!"
• They're most likely spending the bulk of their time at Joe's. What's not to like about Joe's? Well, I'll wind up paying a $5 cover, to pay more for overpriced bar drinks, followed most likely by shitty club music in their shitty little "dance floor," where I'll scream to be heard and be compelled to dance. Look, a dancing area is not automatically good because it has vertical poles in it. Yeah, that's right, I said it. Fuck Joe's and the pole-dancing sluts that frequent it. (And by "sluts", I mean all sluts, male and female)

For those of you who I've been to bars with, especially Joe's, and are confused now: I was being nice. Loud, obnoxious gallavanting in a smoke-filled, dark establishment, where I'm struggling to be heard or move my arms is just not fun, OK?

And to my friends who feel I've ditched you, well, I did. I apologize. I wouldn't have been any fun to hang out with, anyway, so I've saved you all the trouble of trying to cheer me up. I'll try to be more socially amenable in the future, but right now, I just don't feel like it.

But if you're looking for your daily dose of awesome, look no further than Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006!!!

Because an idea this awesome was too good to just let sit, you may now point your web browsers to THE DOMINION OF AWESOME. Our first act will be to draft up a Declaration of Awesome, then start filling in the necessary members of the dominion. Care to become a member of the Dominion of Awesome? Erickson is currently looking for a few awesome men and women to fill out the Dominion's government. Applications may be filed on Erickson's blog. Preference will be given to those demonstrating a proficiency in something awesome, but all are encouraged to apply. :)

I was talking with Jen the other day, and we decided that the university needs a College of Awesome. The Dean will, of course, be none other than Chuck Norris. The college will offer many awesome courses through its awesome departments, like:

• AWES 101 - Introduction to being Awesome
• NINJA 225 - Stealth, Teleportation, and Invisibility
• AWES 210 - Explosions
• HERO 324 - Defying the Laws of Physics (Also cross-listed under PHYS 324)
• AWES 250 - Awesome One-Liners
• VILN 248 - Evil Grins, Cackles, and Laughs
• PIR 227 - Swashbuckling
• HERO 328 - Heavy Firearms
• VILN 350 - Deception and Revenge

The college will be on the University of Illinois' at Mars campus, further emphasizing its awesomeness. The campus will sit on a martian plot of land gifted to the state of Illinois, and surrounded by razorwire, concrete barricades, and autoguns. How awesome is that? Answer: very awesome.

The college will also serve as training for the leadership of Erickson's new world order, the Dominion of Awesome. For those not destined to lead, the College of Awesome offers great job opportunities to its graduates. I mean, who wouldn't hire someone with a B.S. in Ninja from the College of Awesome at the University of Illinois at Mars? (B.S., of course, carries the special meaning of "Bad assssssS.")

Come visit the College of Awesome today!

Adding a buddy with Jabber works on the idea of subscription. When you add a buddy, what you're doing is asking them, "can I subscribe to your presence notification?" This means that if someone doesn't want you to know when they're on, they can disallow it. You're still allowed to send messages and put them in your list, but you're basically shooting in the dark. Even after you've authorized someone, you can later disallow notification temporarily (shown as a "Hide Temporarily" feature in GAIM), or remove it entirely, having the effect of removing yourself from their contact list.

One other feature, sorely missed from the days of ICQ, are offline messages. Jabber servers are not required to, but often do allow messages sent to you to be stored on the server if you're not online to read them. When you next log on, these messages are sent to you. Further extensions to the protocol allow querying and selection of offline messages (which depends on your client, I guess. GAIM doesn't do it). This means that if you're kicked offline, or just away for a while, you won't miss a thing. This is a common problem with network outages on AIM. Messages sent between the time your network dies and the time the AIM server realizes it (commonly a few minutes) just get dropped. Because of this, "Did you say anything?" is a common phrase to hear after a friend gets booted.

Jay Tamboli, enterprising person that he is, has already found me using Jabber on bytex64@bytex64.net, so I may as well tell the rest of you that it's up and running.

While searching for an alternative client, I came across what I'm guessing is the most popular pure Jabber client, the nimble but unfortunately QT-based Psi. It works very well at being a Jabber client, and it even has tabbed chats. Unfortunately, when I tried Ctrl-Tab, it just didn't happen. The closest thing I found was Ctrl-PgUp/PgDn, which besides taking my hands off of the home row, does not mimic the handy "jump to next unread message" behavior I love in GAIM. Psi, you fail it.

Another interesting client I found was moJab, a Jabber client for your J2ME-compliant cell phone. The project is in heavy alpha right now, and it turns out my phone doesn't support the required socket:// protocol, but the idea is tantalizing. Yes, I'm aware that most phones have the ability to do AIM nowadays, but this is commonly done through SMS, which for me, is 10 #*!$&@* cents a message. Data, on the other hand, costs me $6.99/mo for 1MB. So, 70 messages (SMS is 10 cents for sending and receiving), or whatever I can fit inside 1MB. I'm guessing data is the better deal, how 'bout you?

If you're reading this, then your DNS servers have switched over to my new address. I've moved from my old hosting (graciously provided by Henry Goffin) to a shiny new plan I just bought from Dreamhost. The mad awesome statistics of this plan are too lengthy to mention here, I recommend you check out the list yourself. Also, use the special code HAK5 (from everybody's favorite homebrew hacking show Hak.5) for an additional $25 off. It was a deal I couldn't pass up. A few of the hilights:

• They have a DNS manager that does all of the fun parts of afraid.org , so I can continue to have hostnames for my home computers.
• They have a jabber server. Soon, you will be able to find me on bytex64@bytex64.net. (Yes, I am that vain)
• ZOMG 60GB OF DISK SPACE AND 1.6TB OF BANDWIDTH

That last point will be handy for a couple of things: Faster distribution of VFS episodes, and a new idea I'm working on called Museology. (This is a working name, it may change in the future) Museology is basically a hybrid between an art site like Deviantart, and a wiki. Right now, artistic collaboration online happens mainly through shite-awful webboards, email, and scattered web hosting. Museology aims to collect this into an online workspace where multiple people can work on a project and keep it organized. Revisions and derivations are tracked, and the relationship between objects and their commentary is maintained. Actually, now that I describe it, it's a lot more like CVS for art. Anyway, coming soon, as soon as I pound out some suckage. (if that makes any sense)

You may also notice that there is no tracker link up at the top anymore. Two reasons for that: I haven't used it lately, and dreamhost prohibits anything Bittorrent. Draconian, I know, but I'm still more than able to run a tracker elsewhere, so the link may return if needed. Also, with its removal, the site is again 100% written by me. :)

I think that's it, let me know if anything borks.

From my brother's away message:

One thing people don't realize is: Gunbound is a turn-based calculate and blow up people, sort of game. Not the poor-man's Match.com.

OMG WNAT 2 B MY GF?
No, I want to play Gunbound.
U MEAN HAK BAN LOL

Bastards...

I present to you, via Dom of megatokyo fame, what might possibly be the most awesome t-shirt in the entire history of man. Rocket-powered penguins on a ground-bound suicide course, while the shirt screams "GENOCIDE!" I'm not advocating genocide, but that's just awesome. Unfortunately, the shirt costs some $30 to begin with, and I don't see any way I can get it shipped over here, so I'll just have to ogle it from afar.

One shirt I did get, though, is a "Bomb the Blogosphere" shirt from Questionable Content. All of you know my position on the farcical "blogosphere," so this shirt just screamed out "buy me!" Plus, I like QC a lot and wanted to support Jeph in his awesome comic. I have to wonder, though, does my desire to bomb the "blogosphere" imply that I believe in its existence? If I had a shirt saying, "Decapitate the Tooth Fairy," would that imply that I believe in the Tooth Fairy? I dunno. I think I'm just going to leave that one up in the air, and move on to other disturbing things.

Oh, speaking of disturbing things, Amanda Congdon used the word "vlogosphere" on RocketBoom yesterday. I'm sorry, Amanda, it was good while it lasted, but I just don't think this relationship is going to work out. No, it's not you, it's me. I just... I just need space.

Morgan Webb, you're still the only female video personality for me. :)