DRO HAZ JOB!
Dear Windows Vista: I Hate You
Ryan vs. Dorkman 2
This video is pretty old, but it is still badass and I’m afraid I’m sort of copping out today with a post. I has lots of homework, and new episodes of Dexter and House to watch. Sorry.
Oh my…
It bugs me that we don’t get stuff like this for commercials over here.
from: Japan Probe
At least there’s YTMND to cheer me up:
http://igotyouapresent.ytmnd.com/
The Internet Is Awesome.
The internet is a massive clusterfuck of all kinds of different people. But one thing always seems to pull them together, whether it is 4chan, a forum, Reddit, or a massive meme that stretches across all different areas of the tubes. That one thing is “pranks.” We fucking love them. Spamming a radio station with requests for Dragonforce, raiding a free online MMO with characters that block entrance to the swimming pool claiming it is “closed due to AIDS,” voting for the Spice Girls to add Baghdad to their tour list, sending thousands of free UPS shipping boxes to a guy who made it publicly known he was an asshole, etc.
The list really is endless, but there’s a new one: Greenpeace is adopting a whale, or something, and they put up an online poll so people could vote for the name of the whale. There’s a list of about 30 bullshit names like Sedna, Aiko, Moya, and Nurani. And, because it’s always fun to put something silly in an online poll, they included Mr. Splashy Pants as an option. This was posted on Reddit yesterday, with a request for everyone to vote for Mr. Splashy Pants. As is usually the case when a fun prank presents itself, the internet wasted no time:
I really do love the internet, and stuff like this just makes that love grow. The fact that the next most-voted name is “Libertad,” shows just how idiotic Greenpeace people can be. Who names their whale after a Velvet Revolver album?
More (Real) Reasons Dro Doesn’t Post Much
5. He played World of Warcraft for 5 months, which kills about as many brain cells as drinking a flask of Captain Morgan to yourself each night. Also, the 5 month number came from him, so you know he’s lying and played longer than that.
4. He doesn’t proof-read his posts before publishing them.
3. He doesn’t know how to write a decent conclusion to a post, which is akin to leading someone through a dark cave with a rope and then just dropping the rope and leaving them to figure out the rest.
2. He didn’t go to college and graduated from an art-focused high school, so he has no real English or communication skills.
1. He is the lead developer of a PHP framework, and thus has no life and nothing interesting to write about.
He’s basically like an autistic puppy….that pays our hosting fees. He also has more marketable job skills than me. My webpage-developing skills start and stop with this:
*takes a bow*
Dro’s Note: That amazing, centered line of text actually uses <blink>, the most annoying tag ever. Modern browsers (Safari, IE7, Opera) don’t support this tag. Tez is honestly that outdated.
Tez’s Note:
Why Dro Doesn’t Post Much
Ok, so it’s time to explain why I’m so bad at posting. No, it’s not sex, drugs, or rock’n'roll. It’s Kohana, the PHP5 framework that I ended up being the lead developer of.
Around May of 2007, some of the active members of the CodeIgniter community decided to fork CI. There were several reasons for this fork. The main issues were speed of development and how the community was being treated ignored.
We forked, and after a month or so of work, had fixed all of outstanding bugs that CI had, and asked EllisLabs (the creators of CI) to think about making our changes official. They promptly attacked us for trying to help, and more or less told us to GTFO.
Now, many months later, our fork has grown and matured. Kohana is now a very fast PHP5 MVC framework that has a lot of promise. Our first official release is out, and we are had at work on the next release. And it takes a lot of my time.
Pigeon Point Lighthouse Rocks.
Once per year at the Pigeon Point Lighthouse they shut down the weak insipid modern (presumably electric) light and switch over the the 5 kerosene lamps and fresnel lens of the original, as it was 135 years ago.
Click the picture for photo cred and higher res.
Happy Turkey Day
It IS today, right? I’m not good with dates…
Summer Glau is Hot, A Terminator!
I don’t know how I haven’t heard about this- the pilot was apparently leaked months ago. The Sarah Connor Chronicles is a new TV series based on the Terminator series, set between Terminator 2 and 3. It stars the hottie-queen from 300, Claire’s best/only friend from the first season of Heroes, and Summer Glau of Firefly/Serenity. The bitching part? Summer Glau is the god-damn Terminator. If you aren’t against torrents, I recommend checking it out, the first episode is pretty interesting. Otherwise, you can watch it (get canceled) when it comes on Fox in January 2008.
Flock (mostly) Rules.
So I have switched from Firefox to Flock recently. The reason is kind of interesting and ultimately ironic. See, I use(d) Netvibes as my start page for something around two years. Customizable, integrated podcast player, and handy widgets were the main reasons. I’ve heard people dismiss Netvibes as “too busy,” but for a guy with little-to-no life, I liked the busy feel. However, Firefox has some kind of bug or something- while Netvibes is loading the 50+ feeds across five tabs, if I try to do ANYTHING during that time, Firefox would crash. This includes clicking a feed item, changing tabs, marking any feed as read (something I started to do as I had less and less time to read all the feeds that I used to watch like a hawk when I was able to sit on the internet until 5 in the morning), opening a new tab separate from Netvibes, etc. It was lame, and it got on my nerves. On top of that, the memory leak problem (or fragmentation, or whatever) slowed my poor 1.4mhz Pentium M with 512MB of RAM to a crawl, and trying to do pretty much anything else after Firefox has been open for 15 minutes was unbearable.
I had tried Flock a while back and while I liked the idea, I didn’t think it was that great. But when I heard that the 1.0 beta was coming along, I decided to give it another shot. It had some new features, was supposedly more stable, and so on. So after using it for around two months, not only am I not going back to Firefox, but I don’t even use Netvibes anymore. Flock has managed to integrate almost everything I do into its interface. Here’s how/why I became a Flock convert: Read more
Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Rules for Writing Fiction
Boy, even when I leave an article in the control panel for Dro to post on Sunday, nothing happens. Anyway, here it is:
My dad sent these to me a few weeks ago. I had never heard them before and thought they were very good rules for writing, and I was surprised to find that I was violating about half of them in my novel. I’ve always believed in number 6, particularly since one of my favorite authors is Orson Scott Card and he puts many of his characters through the most hellish mental and moral situations possible, and it always creates excellent characters. I figured I’d post these rules here for your reading pleasure. Maybe you are a writer yourself and like me have not come across them before.
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
Hahaha, what?
Good lord, I’ve never really respected any of the mainstream news channels, but I never expected anyone to outdo Fox News. I stand corrected… CNN is the dumbest news station on the planet.
Dro Hates to Post - Caturday OVERLOAD Edition!
note: banner pic not related… to anything at all, ever
So I forgot to post AGAIN yesterday. Dro was extremely not pleased when I hopped on Gtalk on my cell phone to beg him to post. I’m not sure if he thought I was just being an ass and doing on purpose (for the record, I was not- though I can’t blame him for thinking so, since I am an ass), and thus didn’t post to spite me, or if he really just isn’t able to find anything to write about, or if he just forgot (in which case, SEEE?! It DOES happen!). Alas, he did not post. I guess he really doesn’t like to write. Anyway, tough love has prevailed, Dro, and I learned my lesson. And so, here I am in the totally awesome Dunn Bros. coffee house, sipping a (somewhat gross) Iced Mocha Latte and making a post. On, Caturday, no less! That means you, beloved reader, get a decent Caturday pic. BEHOLD! Read more
Wired Science… on PBS?!
Tonight I found out that Wired Science plays on PBS, in HD. PWN!
Goes back to watching Wired Science.
Oh, I almost forgot… I had to post because Tez “forgot” again. I think he found a usable excuse to make me do all the work….. he’s the writer you know… I’m just supposed to be the one that posts random stuff once in a while and keeps the website running… yah. STARE AT HIM! DO IT!
Super Mario Galaxy is Awesome.
So I spent a good portion of last night being unable to put Super Mario Galaxy down. This game is so much pure unadulterated fun it’s almost too much to handle. The graphics are pretty, the level design is crazy-creative, I love the gravity-based gameplay, and there are so many throwbacks to classic Mario music.
Above is a screenshot I found on the internets of the level I ended my session with last night, and probably my favorite “galaxy” so far. You go from apple-planet to apple-planet, stomping on blocks to make the worm pop out and create a winding bridge to the next apple. I’m suffering from serious withdrawl right now, and I’m desperately trying to get all my online crap done so I can go home and spend all night playing it again. I’d go into more details about the game, but I’m probably writing the Netjak.com review of it, so I’m going to hold most of my thoughts back aside from “It rules.” If you have a Wii, you should totally buy it. It’s the best parts of Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine with crazy level design.
Made For TV Movies Suck
So there wasn’t a post yesterday. The chain has been broken! Even though my campus was open for the holiday, apparently buses were not running to it, as evidenced by my spending an hour hopping between bus stops only to watch it cruise right past the campus entrance without stopping, followed by an additional 45 minutes to get home accomplishing nothing. I sort of tried to make contact with Dro and tell him to do a post, but I was in a bad mood and instead played Guitar Hero 3 for multiple hours. So, I’ll just blame it on Dro and move on to the post I have planned for a few days but never actually got around to writing until last night, which is me making fun of stupid made-for-tv movie trailers: Read more
Finally, An Explanation for Why Firefox Is Slow!
I’m cheaping out with another Reddit post. It’s not memory leaks, it’s memory fragmentation.
I promise my next posting will be something worthwhile. Sorry Tez!
Accident: The New Fragrance for Women
Saw this today via Reddit, and ran out of time to do that post that I was going to do… but it’s Caturday too, so I think I can cheap out.
Accident: The New Fragrance for Women. My take: this is pretty funny “new wave” or “viral” advertising. However, telling people not to talk on their cell phones while driving is obnoxious.
Sony, Microsoft Never Really Cared About Next-Gen DVD?
Last I checked, the inclusion of the Blu-Ray player in the PS3 was Sony’s attempt to emulate the PS2’s success. Millions of people picked up the PS2 because it was a cheap DVD player when the price on standalones had yet to drop. We’re in a similar situation now, where Blu-Ray players are pretty expensive, and a PS3 is a cheaper alternative for those looking for hi-def DVD players. However, a study showed that 40% of PS3 owners didn’t even know it could play Blu-Ray movies. Microsoft, sitting in the HD-DVD camp, has the HD-DVD player add-on for the Xbox360. It would appear that both Sony and Microsoft were using their consoles to promote their pick for the next-generation of DVD.
Or ARE THEY?
Read more