Lack

Sentences escape me...so here's a list:

1. Aerial assault squadrons of [squirrels + C4].
2. The phrase "...trying to put a square peg in a round hole." What if the round hole is much bigger than the square peg?
3. The Tuition Refund Plan -- which guarantees 60% of tuition back if I withdraw from school for a mental illness.
4. George W. Bush calling homosexuals "sinners" and saying marriage is only for a man and a woman (Note: If you hadn't gotten the theme of the list yet -- it's absurdity)

I hope you enjoyed the list; It was a fine list in my opinion. Here, have a quote too:

`I quite agree with you,' said the Duchess; `and the moral of that is--Be what you would seem to be--or if you'd like it put more simply--Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.'

`I think I should understand that better,' Alice said very politely, `if I had it written down: but I can't quite follow it as you say it.'

`That's nothing to what I could say if I chose,' the Duchess replied, in a pleased tone.

Amazing

This man burns more energy in the first hour of his day than you'll burn in the entirety of your day.

Rarely, if ever, do I become obsessed with an athlete. I mean, frankly, I'm just not the type to do so. So, because I am in fact, obsessed, with an athlete...I must share it with you.

So we have Lance Armstrong here. He just won his 5th Tour de France in a row. FIFTH. FIVE. That's insane. If you don't know much about him, you should go read a bit about him. Or, if not him, about cycling in general. These guys are on 15,000 calorie/day diets, drink like 10-15 litres of water a day, and cycle at least 100-150km day.

I would like to mention that I sleep for over 14 hours/day. BEAT THAT LANCE.

:/

The Green Fairy

So, I've been trying to track down Absinth(e) lately, and it seems all I can find is cheap wannabe shit. Except for the bottle that Nina has...but she won't open it. She got it in the Czech Republic when she went over to Prague. "It looks pretty" is not a good excuse either -- I could easily replace it with colored water that looks quite the same.

The drink above, while not Absinth(e) was quite painful. 3 shots Bombay Sapphire (Dry Gin), 4-5 shots worth of that upside down 7-up shit. Crazy headache after that.

Let's Play Money Making Game

TRUMPED!!

This is the funniest thing I've seen on CNN in a while.

ROOOOOOOOAAAARRR!!!

I want to be your friend!

Just a little something to brighten your day. I think you could milk venom out of this kitty's fangs.

13%

I'm not sure if anyone is watching the Tour de France like I am, but if you are: holy shiet.

For those who don't know, the Tour de France is a bicycle race across, yes, France. It's 27 days long and is 22 or 23 stages long. So, with the exception of 3-4 rest days, these guys ride a stage per day with the average stage length around 200Km.

There are about 160 people left in the race (started with 198), and most noteable are Lance Armstrong and Jan Ullrich.

Now, this is all great, but you *still* may not realize how fucking insane this race is. For example: Yesterday on a stage that was only 47Km (it was a time-trial speed stage), Lance Armstrong lost 15lbs and finished the course in just over an hour. I can't imagine what that feels like -- to have 15lbs of weight leave your body at the rate of .25lbs/minute. 15lbs is 13% of my body weight. I would end the race 87% of the person I once was. Fucking nuts.

Edit: And yes, I understand that some ridiculous amount of the body is just water mass (80% or smth..i forget and too lazy to google), and that when you work hard, you sweat, and water comes out. It's not so much the fact that he lost 15lbs...it's the fact that he lost 15lbs in such a short amount of time.

Hmmm..

Our loveable and hugable Dan Greuter:

Our loveable and hugable Prime Minister:

You make the connection.

I Wanna Be Like Mike

Two can play at this game.

The ball is in your court, my friend.

(I apologize for the sucky image quality. I would have taken another one with the flash off, but I feared flying off the corner of a hill that was quickly approaching.)

BAM! POW! CRACK! CRASH!

Holy marketing machine, Batman!

"Introducing the PowerMac G5 -- the world's fastest, most powerful, personal computer."

I love the Apple hype machine. It makes me tingle inside. The only improvement would be instead of just using Goldblum for voice overs, for them to have him re-act the jurassic park scene with the T-Rex, except with a giant G5 chasing him.

Progress is Good

Ahem. From this:

Global summary of 14.40 seconds:
100.0% 269 Received ticks
0.4% 1 Received GC ticks
1.1% 3 Compilation
0.4% 1 Class loader

to this:

Global summary of 1.33 seconds:
100.0% 32 Received ticks
9.4% 3 Compilation
3.1% 1 Class loader
3.1% 1 Unknown code

This is what I like to call h4x0ring code. Mind you about 15% of that runtime is not mine...so my code runs in about ~1.16seconds now. Being that it used to run at that 14.40second number above, this is a good improvement I'd say. It makes what I am doing worthwhile versus stupid.

Flying Disc

I played an assload of frisbee. On the order of 4-5 hours on flagstaff hill. I'll take a picture next time i'm out there, but it's just this awesome hill where lots of people come and be active. It's quite enjoyable.

Anyways...we were playing frisbee for about 1.5 hours when this random kid who goes to CMU. He stopped and played frisbee with us for the next 3 hours. He was a very "knowledge-sunk" person -- by that I mean he had lots of information in his head that normal people don't. He's an engineering grad student, but he knew quite a bit about politics and history. So we ended up talking politics while playing frisbee. I felt like I was stretching myself in too many directions at once.

After frisbee I came to Alok's lab to get some work done on my previously mentioned Midtown Madness project. I am glad to report that so far things are looking good. The next step in the process is going into the game and taking screen shots of the map until I can stitch together a complete map. That should be time consuming; I am anxious to get it done though, as I'd like to try out my code on the whole map rather than just a section (as I have been doing).

Enough. Goodnight friends (and sworn enemies).

Night on the town

Just got back from the street fair in Southside. It was pretty neat. It was Alok, Anthony, Anthony's g/f (Jen I believe), and myself. I was pimpin' it out with my Sega Dreamcast shirt (the ladies wouldn't leave me alone) and my cool dorky glasses.

Things of note:
1. Fried Oreos -- They were ok. I mean...it tastes like what you think it would.

2. $3.50 Cigar -- Smoking cigars is lame. I tried it, hated it, will never do it again. At least I can cross it off that "5 million and 1 things I want to do before I die" list that everyone seems to have.

3. Throwing fire crackers out the window of a moving car -- l33t!

And now I work. Need to start doing some image processing junk for Midtown Madness 2. If anyone cares I'll explain, otherwise, whatever.

What Not To Do On a Laptop

So, I have the preview release of Panther (OS 10.3) installed on my PowerBook. It has some new "secure' features -- one of which is emptying the trash "securely" through your choice of 1, 10, or 35-pass deletion. For those not tech-saavy, this means that to delete a file using 35-pass deletion, the file entry is deleted from the index table, then, and this is the key part, the space the file occupied is written over 35 times with random data. Now, this is all cool when you delete "allmypasswords.txt," but when you have a 800mb CD image in your trash can, and your roommate goes to "35-pass deletion" you are in for the longest wait of your life. So approximately 30gb of random data needs to be written to your HD. This is on top of any other activity you may be currently doing, and not to mention, for me, was on my laptop...which wasn't plugged in to the wall...which is now down to 30% battery life (down from, yes, 100%).

Anyways...it was more funny than annoying. But, the thing I find interesting is that even with 35-pass deletion, there are still (expensive) ways to recover that data. So when the FBI comes knocking at your door to get you for w4r3z distribution, don't even worry about trying to clear your HD -- I recommend a torch-welder.

The Humpty Dance

I post this link with the knowledge that my weblog should be more than me linking you to shit I find funny. I do not want you to miss out on the fun, however, so I present this link for your approval.

Sorry Honey..

Uh-oh.

Because of this news, I will be calling the wedding chapel in Vegas that was to perform the ceremony and the Dairy Queen that was providing the cake to cancel. I was really looking forward to the chocolate crunchies too. :(

But really, I think this guy is full of shit. He acts like marriage itself is the cause to some effect; you know, not that *maybe* women are more interesting than, say, writing a paper titled: "On a New Method of investigating the relations of Surfaces to their Normals, with results respecting the Curvatures of Ellipsoids"

Language Barriers

I just watched a Chinese guy who's "ok" at English try and speak to a Russian chick who is "not so ok" at English. That was just the funniest shit ever:

"What rice you want with chicken?"
"No, uh, chicken.."
"No, you want rice with chicken?"
"No, chicken...and sauce."
"Steamed or fried rice with your chicken?"
"And sauce."

This went ad absurdum. I wish I had a camera.

Battle Royale

Stalin Vs. Hitler

I urge you to guess who wins before you read it. There hasn't been a battle like this since the Dark Knight himself took on Superman.

It Always Rains on Me

Anyone living in Western Ohio or Eastern PA also going "WTF!?" at the weather? It's been like storm-central here the last 4 days. So much that my dad and I had to put in a new drainage system (Drainage System 2000 I call it) in the backyard because water enjoys pouring in our basement.

I'm also about to start some PocketPC development for part of my whole GPS thing I'm doing for work. Should be interesting; haven't programmed for a PDA platform before. Wish me luck. Anyone with pointers feel free to post a comment.

I should start posting some pictures. Maybe for the sole reason that each is worth 1000 words. At that rate, I could have a novel in under a day. Text is so...yesterday.

St. Anger (Revisited)

This was originally to be a comment over at the newly established Beefworks, but it got pretty long, and figured it could benefit from more than just an MT comment:

***Begin Metallica-fan comment***

Ok. A few things. It's raining like a motherfucker here and I'm up @ 4am bailing water from a window well to keep all of the outside from coming inside. Anyways:

1. St. Anger has some pretty...shallow...lyrics. In fact, it has some pretty shallow *sounding* guitar. I'm not sure why they tuned down because if you watch the DVD of it, their fingers are doing some wicked shit...you just can't hear it cuz it's all muddled and low. As for the lyrics...there are some good ones in there..

2. If you're not a metallica fan like me, then this album is not to be listened to straight through probably. Initially, I told people (Dan) to do this...but now I realize that's just too much JAYMZ for most people.

My song recommendations:
1. Unnamed Feeling
2. Sweet Amber
3. Dirty Window

Those are 3 songs I think have some good guitar shit going on, and the lyrics don't make you want to clinch your teeth.

***End Metallica-fan comment***

Filling Space

This post is purely to fill space so that my sections on the right take up only their section and do not invade my blog's "entry space."

So I must ramble.

I went to dinner tonight @ Rachel's Steakhouse. It's was pretty good. Shoulda got the filet though..

Went and saw Jaclyn painting at her cousins. She's doing a Jungle Book mural for her cousin's daughter. It's being put on the wall in the daughter's playroom downstairs. Looks exactly like the book, but I get the feeling Jaclyn is bored with it. Unchallenging I assume.

Also been working on the color scheme on this page for a while. It's very taxing on my clicking finger to make a change, hit save, hit rebuild, hit rebuild again, then realize Safari cached that rebuild page and really rebuilt nothing -- so then clearing the cache, hitting rebuild, then rebuild again. Ugh. It will be over soon...I hope.

Think Different.

Think Different.

The above is very inspiring to me. I hope you'd at least read through it once.

..And thus begins my new weblog. I will be updating the look of the site, etc over the next week or so. Just stick with me through the changes.