bytex64.net/blog

I think I saw the perfect girl today. Well, except for the part about her being like three inches taller than me. It would be fruitless for me to describe her. She's not *your* perfect girl, so you'd just shrug and make a comment about my poor taste in women. Actually, now that I think about it further, it may have just been the glasses. The flowing dishwater blonde hair to the middle of her back, the genuine smile, and the C-cups probably didn't hurt.

Shortly afterwards I gave all my change to a homeless guy (I was out of bills). He actually said, after emptying everything out of my change pocket, "Can you spare a couple dollars?" I told him I didn't have any. I wanted to tell him, "Hey, don't get greedy." In the end, he wound up with more physical money than I did (My wallet's completely devoid of cash or change at the moment), but for some reason, the experience left me feeling depressed. I suppose the moral of the story is that sometimes everything you've got isn't enough.

Oh, the pump machine is fixed, so I sat around and watched people play that all day. (No, I didn't play. Cashless, remember?) I got some good footage of Darek and Kan Kan playing, but my camera's being balky now. I turn it on, and it shuts off as soon as I press a button, and stays that way for about 15 seconds. I have no idea why, but I suspect moisture (It's been raining all day).

And there are so many other things going on in my head and heart I'm really getting confused. *shrug*. C'est la vie.

So, I'm physically drained, emotionally sour, technologically useless, and I've got a lab report to do. Let's hope things look better tomorrow.

As a random thought, I often wonder why Albino Black Sheep's RSS feed lags their main page by nearly three weeks. It updated yesterday, bringing me the update that contained Quest Crusade. For those not familiar with it, this update was on April 1st. That's 19 days ago. Holy frick, people. Keep it together.

Nancy pulled a lab project out of nowhere for us, involving Raman Scattering. We'll be doing Raman Spectroscopy of gases, which in the book involved fire and lasers, making it super cool. I'm not sure if we'll get to play with fire, but hey, lasers are cool enough by themselves. Too bad I'm not building a gigawatt laser used to toast people from a 747.

My camera arrived today, but I wasn't here to sign for it, so I'm going to have to pick it up tomorrow. And then, massive video shenanigans will be unleashed on the unsuspecting earth! Oh, what shenanigans we shall have! It will be neat.

I have to do a presentation in one of my classes, and my topic is on how peer-to-peer is revolutionizing the way we distribute media, and in the process shaking up our notions of copyright. I've decided that my presentation will explain this in terms of the epic struggle between pirates, ninjas, and robots. I'll try to work in Europe's "Final Countdown," and how the only way to destroy the RIAA is to hit it with the moon. It's gonna be pure awesome.

You heard me right. Frames should be outlawed. I got into a discussion with Kan Kan today about webpage design. Arguably, I should have realized what a minefield this topic was, considering her website uses about 40,000 frames. I'm not going to go into detail about how I feel about her page, because I have this tendency to be, well, unfeelingly abrasive, and I don't want to run roughshod over my friend's sense of style. Judge for yourself. It occurs to me that I kinda insulted her whole design, and I'm sorry for that. But what can I say, I'm an uber-geek. I stand by what I believe in, even in the face of (to borrow a phrase from James) t3h h4wtn3ss.

My main complaint with frames is that they destroy the locality of URLs. Say you've got a frameset, and you click a link in one frame that opens in another. You can't describe the frame configuration you've just entered with a URL. The closest thing you can do is to go to the original URL and click that link again, or just link to the frame content itself. Ugly.

My second complaint is that frames make it really easy to make non-functioning webpages. For an example, just visit a random yahoo/geocities/tripod/etc. site. Chances are, you'll see the classic navigation/content two pane system. (I'll admit, I thought it was pretty slick back in 1998, but I've moved on.) More often than not, the navigation pane is neutered so it cannot show a scrollbar, making it useless on small screens. Even worse, the navigation pane size is usually specified in pixels to match the background size, making text wrap awkwardly if the font isn't the same size on someone else's computer (and if you're using X, like I do, it's almost always different).

Admittedly, frames can be useful. For example, Google Image Search uses it to show the thumbnail for an image while simultaneously showing the webpage. But if all you're going to do is use it to separate functional parts of your webpage, you're really better off using a templating system. I like PHP a lot, mainly because it's actually a programming language. (If you'll notice, everything on this site is written in PHP) If you don't have server-side scripting capabilities, tools such as WPP can pre-process templates into static HTML, turning a 5 hour copy-and-paste effort into a 1 hour just-write-stuff effort. (For an example of a page created with WPP, check out my overclocked comic)

So, kids, try to be nice with your webpage designs. After all, some of us still like using text based browsers. And I guarantee you, any webpage that uses frames probably won't work on a cellphone browser. Heck, most well-designed webpages look like crap on a cellphone browser. Put some thought into how people access your website, and I won't have to break your knees. }:->

I bought a video camera on eBay today, stage 1 in my plan for world dominance in the arena of internet video shows. Stage 2 is in the works, courtesy of Google and Downhill Battle.

Recently, Google's little-known Google Video Search has started a project to store and search user-contributed videos. Yes, this means you, Joe Schmoe, can submit a video to google, and millions upon millions of people wil have the opportunity to view it, for a fee if you wish. I think that google is catering to two main groups: people who want to post their own video content, but have no space or bandwidth to do it (me), and networks who want to experiment with digital distribution of their shows, but just aren't wise to the possibilities.

On a different tangent, Blog Torrent promises to simplify the sharing of large files over BitTorrent coupled with RSS feeds. This will allow you to create syndicated video feeds, so people can use something like Videora to snatch your video as soon as it's posted. Both ends of this make something like TiVo's Season Pass, allowing people to subscribe to video content in the same way you can use RSS to subscribe to text and image content.

These technologies promise to open the internet to useless, boring, video blogs in the same way that the likes of LiveJournal and blogger opened up the world of useless, boring text blogs. And I'll be right there with my 15 year old video camera, paving the way.

Oh, my show? It will be the world's first internet cooking show, called How To Burn Food Without Really Trying. So far the budget is the camera plus my cooking hardware, which I think is currently less than $100. With a budget like that, what do I have to lose?

Watch out, Alton Brown.

UPDATE: It turns out the software I saw on slashdot was "Broadcast Machine", which isn't actually released yet, but they're working on it over at Participatory Culture Foundation, an offshoot of Downhill Battle.

The IIDX recruitment effort is going well. Yan and Ed are now showing up nightly to play, and Doukas and Kan Kan came over yesterday to give it a spin. She actually approached me about it! Ha! She probably won't be nearly as interested now, though. (See below.) Lauren (another DDRer) wants to play, too. Apparently, she's cosplayed as one the DJ's from beatmania, and is pretty good at 5key. Yan's even made a group up on facebook, "People Who Play Beatmania @ Chip's Place or will play in the future!!" Oh, yes, the army is growing...

In other news, the company that owns the crappy DDR machine got bought by someone else. Eager to renew its image, they're refreshing our collection of games in the Union. I helped unload them today. :D We've got a brand spankin' new Pump It Up Exceed 2 machine. We actually unpacked it from the box, and removed the protective styrofoam. This shit is fresh. Kan Kan and Darek were fawning over it. We also got an electronic dart board, and an ultracade cocktail cabinet (The kind with the trackball). No, there wasn't a IIDX machine, but I can hope that someday, there will be.

Someday.

[yan] says so the plan is
[yan] get everything DONe
[yan] then play IIDX
[me] ... then I'd have no time to play IIDX. :)

Ok, so IIDX is very shortly going to ruin my grades, my college career, and my mom's hope of me ever buying her a Chrysler 300C. But fear not! I have a plan. What's that you say? No, it doesn't involve being responsible. All I have to do in order to stop playing it so much, is to get my friends addicted, too. I've only got one PS2 that can play the game, one copy of the game, and one controller, and we *all* can't play it at once. So the more people I ruin get involved, the more time I'll have to do other things, like homework.

C'mon, you know you want to play...

Alright, this is a call to beta testers for my fun new web application: WCDS. It's web chat, and I want to hear from you if anything doesn't work. Ok, almost anything. First off, I know it doesn't work in Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer is broken. (It doesn't support the CSS functions in DOM Level 2. Yes, I could work around that, but I don't use IE nearly enough to warrant such an effort.) So I don't want to hear "Oh, it doesn't work in IE." I know that. I've tested it (somewhat) in Firefox 1.0 and Safari (whatever comes with OS X 10.3). Go forth, and test!

[>>yan>>] are you the only the reads my blog

Yes, Yan. I am the only the reads your blog.

I was wrong. Xanga does have RSS feeds. They just don't advertise it, or put in a link tag or anything. I guess members are "in the know," but that probably assumes they read the documentation, and tell their friends. From the outside, I don't see any way of finding out beyond divine inspiration. Or google. I googled for "rss site:xanga.com", and got about 270 hits of the style "www.xanga.com/rss.aspx?user=...". Well, what do you know, a valid RSS feed. So Xanga is off of my shitlist, and on to my shit probation list. With good behavior, they'll be out in 6-12 months.

... There was supposed to be an apology in there somewhere. Oh, well.

My friend Yan finally got a blog the other day. He was going to get one on Xanga (No, I'm not even going to bother linking to them). I told him if he did, I'd never read his blog. Not that that's a very large concern for him, since we see each other in person almost every day. It wasn't really an elitist snob thing, either. The simple fact of the matter is, Xanga doesn't have RSS feeds. LiveJournal does. Blogger does. My site does. Numerous other blogs do. Xanga? Nope. So if you have a blog on Xanga, I'm not going to spend the time to go read it, because loading a separate page for each blog is a greater amount of work than just loading up something like Gregarius, and reading everyone's blog at once. Ok, I guess I am being a bit of an elitist snob, but the fact is, I've stopped reading my friends' Xanga blogs. Ok, so I do have that converter script in my code section, but it's horribly buggy.

Moral of the story: Xanga sucks, because they have no RSS feeds.

In other news, the MCS concert was freaking awesome. It was my first time seeing them live, and it was definetly worth the money. Here's how it went down:

First band: Somerset. They were pretty good. Probably on par with the Red Hot Valentines or Plain White T's.

Second band: Communique. Technically good, but I didn't really dig them. Probably because they're from the bay area in California. Occasionally they sounded like a mixture of Phantom Planet and The Cars. They would probably be good music for a long drive.

MCS brought the house down. I can't really describe it beyond that. It's exactly what you'd expect, and in a bizarre twist, that's what made it so good.

Notes:

• Yay for emo chicks. (I <3 black glasses)
• Boo for emo guys that look like emo chicks.
• Get into the jumping, pushing, and yelling area (can't really call it a mosh pit if nobody gets hurt) before the end of the show. At the end of the show, the experience is something like being in a washing machine with a bunch of wet, sweaty socks full of meat. Fun, but disturbingly squishy.

Oh, and I'm deaf, but you probably figured that. :)