It’s My Birthday, Internets!
You have permission to commence the party-time. Also, yesterday’s caturday.
Merry Freaking Christmas.
Bah humbug!
Actually, this holiday season is turning out quite well for me and has me in a pretty jovial mood, despite being stressed out with a lot to do in not much time.
I went through most of this month broke, but now I have more than enough to get me to the beginning of next semester. Good news, since I’m spending most of that time away from home, on the road, and hitting the streets with old friends. Starting tomorrow, I’ll be spending a week in Minneapolis (a place to sleep is pending), where I will hang out with friends I haven’t seen in ages and celebrate my birthday on the 30th, followed by New Year’s Eve - then fly off to Chicago on the 2nd, where I will then begin a trek up to Milwaukee to see my mother and sister (visiting at the same time from L.A.) until the 9th, when I fly back into Minnesota, hop a bus home, and start my first day of work on the 10th, with school starting the Monday after.
ALSO! I got to see my kittie again today (shown above, charging her lazers). It’s always nice to see her again and be reminded of how freaking much she sheds. It’s a tradeoff that I’d like to have the option of again, but as long as I’m in a house with three other cats, she’ll have to stay with her brother. *le sigh*
Oh well. 15 days of vacation and fun await. I doubt I’ll have much opportunity to blog, but I hope all (two) of our readers have a happy holiday and a fun new year. 2008 looms.
Candidate for Best Web Host
Today I discovered WebFaction by way of the CodeIgniter IRC chat. They came highly recommended, and their main selling point is that they offer 1-click installs of Rails, Django, Trac, SVN, and PHP, among many others.
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: they are about the same price as DreamHost. I’m thinking about moving my personal domain over there.
Most forced smile ever?
Sarkozy meets the Pope… must have been real awkward.
PS: Why does the pope always look like he might suddenly pull a small animal out of his robe and eat it alive?
Passing The Time Post: Why I Miss My Internet
There are a lot of reasons for me to miss having internet at home: Being able to do schoolwork from my bed; news and forums are a click away; late night chats with friends who sleep during the day; Guitar Hero 3 online battles; torrents of everything; but the thing I miss the most is an MMO I only got a meager taste of: EVE Online.
God, I miss EVE Online so much. Basically Homeworld mixed with business economics, it combines strategic and beautiful space battles with running an interstellar business. Upgrading from a tiny scout to massive battleships, conducting raids with your other company members, all the different stats and item upgrades… building the business up to having it’s own spacestation, defending your resources from pirates… BEING one of those pirates and just cruising the solar systems causing chaos… I MISS IT. And I only played it for two weeks, so I barely had any kind of decent character. If there is one thing that has me chewing my lip, looking for a way for me to get the internet back at my home, it is this game. I want it back. So bad.
WHOA, IT ARE CATURDAY!!
Why the hell did I write an actual post today? I should’ve just thrown this up and gone home. You got lucky today, internets.
Google Knol - FFS, Google…
News started to spread this week of Google Knol, Google’s latest doodling in their mission to organize the world’s information. When I first heard about it, I thought it basically sounded a lot like Wikipedia, but with ads. Then I started to hear even more about it, and comparisons to About.com came to mind. Then I read the official news about it, took a look at the preliminary screenshot, and drew my own conclusion: This is much more like Helium with some wiki tools and visual cues from About.com
Basically, it takes the idea from Wikipedia that anybody can write an article about whatever they know about. But, where Wikipedia utilizes mostly-anonymous users making edits with official editors going around deciding what’s good enough to keep, Google isn’t going to be policing Knol; it will be left to the users to decide what is good and what isn’t (still similar to Wikipedia, since you can nominate stubs for removal, etc). If you look at the full-size screenshot, it’s pretty easy to understand how comparisons to About.com came up. Visually, it feels very similar. Users who write articles are out in the open, including credentials, and put their reputations on the line when they write. I like this because it means Knol will be less prone to idiot-edits and vandalism that runs rampant on Wikipedia and makes it generally untrustworthy.
So up until this point, I felt largely apathetic about Knol. We already have these tools, why combine About.com and Wikpedia? It seemed like Knol would just be a repository of junk information or reprints from the web. And while I supposed organizing the world’s information includes organizing all the junk as well, I just couldn’t see the point. Then I looked a little closer, and saw that the footsteps Knol was following the closest was one of my favorite sites, Helium.com
Music Review - Daft Punk “Alive 2007″
Daft Punk’s latest release, a live recording from their latest tour, is a lot of things to a lot of people. For most, it’s the latest DP offering since Human After All was released in 2005. It’s much more for fans of the group in Paris, Daft Punk’s hometown: it’s the first live show performed in the city in a decade- sort of a strange fact. Either way, the album release is from their (naturally) well-received Paris performance. Read more
Laser Cats 2
GAMES GET.
So after trading in some games, I had about $70 of credit. So I grabbed both Trauma Center: New Blood for the Wii and Disgaea for the PSP. Both are awesome, and responsible for me not posting that Daft Punk review I mentioned earlier. After the break, early Caturday bonanza as apology. Also, the token banner for the death of Happycat. Have a nice weekend, internet. Read more
POST GET.
Okay. Nothing to really blog about- I’m getting ready to go cram with an accounting tutor so I can finish my big final project that’s due tomorrow. :\ But, thanks to the magic that is “leeching off a neighbor’s wifi signal” I managed to snag the new Daft Punk live album, Alive 2007. I’m going to do a little write up on it tomorrow when all my big finals are out of the way, but the early verdict is it rocks. As a $9, DRM-free download on Amazon.com, you really can’t go wrong.
In other news, I’m trading in Super Mario Galaxy today as I’ve beaten it twice and there just isn’t a lot of replay in it after that. I’m debating whether or not to trade it in for Trauma Center, or a new PSP game.
Exciting stuff, yes? Maybe next time you’ll know better than to ask me to post more.
Good Photoshops are Good.
This makes me wish I had the time and energy to devote to photo manipulations in Photoshop again. *sigh* Click for full view and photo cred. Also, dopey comments by people that think it’s a real shot.