a line is a curve

Welcome to home stretch of the year! Just a little bit more to go until Presents Day! I mean Christmas Day. I just looked at my post count and observed that I posted more last year than this year. And this blog was only started halfway through last year! Sad. So sad. Then I realized that I've had this layout for about a year now. I guess that means you all should be looking forward to a new layout around the New Year. I don't have a single clue what the theme will be this time though. Suggestions?

So my post a few days ago about fast food got me thinking about eating hamburgers. And so in the spirit of this comic [Sorry I don't know who to credit] I shall now talk about methods of eating a sandwich/burger. So I'll let you collect your thoughts a moment; how do you eat a sandwich? To be more precise, in what order and in what way do you bite the burger?

I shall now present two possible ways of eating a sandwich. I'm not sure if there are more ways, but these two seem to be the most obvious to me. I shall also present the pros and cons of both methods. Unfortunately, I do not know of a perfect way of eating a sandwich to eliminate all cons. If you know of a way, I would be very much interested!

To be consistent, I will propose that the sub/sandwich/burger of interest shall be a round hamburger. (Why it's called a hamburger when there is no ham is something I still have not looked into.) The shape of the food item does not affect these techniques, however. But just so that we're all on the same page here, imagine, if you will, a round hamburger and not a square sandwich.

---

TECHNIQUE NUMERO UN
- Olde Fashioned War -
This method is where one eats in a linear fashion. To describe the stages of hamburger consumption:
Stage 0: Hamburger untouched.
Stage 1: A few bites have been incurred.
Stage 2: An approximately half-circle shaped hamburger remains.
Stage 3: The hamburger begins to take the shape of a half moon.
Stage 4: Very little, and soon, no hamburger remains. Straightfoward-eating-jutsu success.

---

TECHNIQUE NUMBER NI
- Guerilla Flanking -
This method is where one eats the burger around the edges, closing in on the meaty center for the final kill.
Stage 0: Hamburger untouched.
Stage 1: Begin trimming away outside perimeter.
Stage 2: Continue to do so until only the meatiest center remains.
Stage 3: Devour the remainder.

---

I just noticed that I zero-indexed the Stages. *sigh So anyway, those are the two approaches that I've come up with in my mind. I tend to prefer the second method. I guess you could say I'm the kind of person who likes to save the best for last. Now I shall present the pros and cons of these two approaches.

Technique 1 suffers from a lack of a satisfying finish. It is possible for you to finish off your sandwich with only bread left. I find this very unsatisfying. A sandwich is supposed to be meat encapsulated by bread and therefore meat should be the main event of the sandwich. Having no main event left at the end of the meal is poor planning.

Technique 2 alleviates this negative aspect of Technique 1. By first eliminating the possibility of ending up with nothing but bread, the center of the sandwich/sub/burger is left with the most ingredients in one place. (Unless people place their condiments in a circle around the center of their sandwich [but that's just traitorous]) However! in the act of alleviating the prior dissatisfaction, a new issue arises! The very fact that the center of a hamburger is the most dense in terms of collective ingredients, the issue become of how to neatly dispose of the final bite. Oftentimes the meat starts sliding around and the lettuce and the tomato and the pickles start to get out of alignment with the bread pieces.

That is to say: there is no longer sufficient bread to control the movement of the main event. It becomes difficult and can become very messy when dealing with large burgers that have all sorts of yummies placed in them.

There is a method I've devised to try to compensate, but it is far from perfect. Instead of eating from the normal orientation (bread on top and bottom). The final morsel should be rotated so that the pieces of bread become walls to the meat instead of floor and ceiling. This sometimes helps with keeping the innards from shooting out when one bites into the final moments of hamburger.

There you have it. This has been my opinion and musings about methods of eating a hamburger. Stay tuned, for in next episode, entitled "Apples", I shall discuss the approaches of eating an apple.

Yeah maybe not. But I would argue that the same two techniques could be translated into Apple Skills. Eating a full circle around the apple? or eating entire sides of the apple... anyway, I'm starting to get hungry.

Until next time! Enjoy food! And life! Because both are of utmost importance!

!

life is beautiful

Autumn is ending and winter could already be here. I like the word Autumn over Fall. What do you think? 'Autumn' has more of a sophisticated air to it. I think it better captures the essence of the season. Sure, the leaves do fall; but they do so ever so gracefully in the wind. Autumn makes me want to sit outside and watch the leaves float in the wind. The rustling whispers of dry leaves can be so soothing, don't you think so?

Sure, the impending starkness of winter can be a downer - the falling of leaves could be seen as death and a loss of color from the world. But doesn't the color disappear in style? Radiant Reds, shining Yellows, brilliant Oranges fill nature; a complete contrast to its previous Green and upcoming White. I think Autumn fits this view better than Fall. I love all seasons and in a conversation with a dear friend of mine it was said that, indeed, all seasons have their beautiful moments. For me, I love Autumn the most.

It looks like those topics I had in mind a few posts back will have to wait some more. I don't wish to ruin the mood of this topic.

For those of you who celebrate, Thanksgiving is a perfect time to enjoy life. Yes, reflection and giving thanks may have become cliche; but that must mean it's important enough to be reiterated so many times. If not, I hope that you occasionally find the time to slow down life and take a break to breathe in, absorb, and enjoy life as it is - the bads, the goods, everything.

spiral

Well, originally this post was going to have a title that would have been a continuation of the last post title... but let's just have a brief side-step from that line of thinking. (Extra points if you can guess what the next post title will be... points for what? I have no clue. But wouldn't you be happy knowing that you got points!)

So the topic for today's post shall be: fast food. Ah yes, the convenient and cheap(?) form of sustenance(?) that is Just Another Name for Corn [wired.com]. Why the "(?)"? <-- (doesn't that look amusing?... I thought so... nvm, back to the topic). Well, these are the things I feel like talking about. Fast food as a source of sustenance is questionable for reasons quite obvious already - mainly its lack of nutritious content. Anyway, this isn't the main topic. The main topic is the prior (?) item.

Fast food is toted as cheap by some. But I just can't see it that way. (I'm beginning to think this post is pointless because I'm just going to be highlighting the obvious).

At work, I often see people go get McDonald's or something every day for lunch. That gets me thinking... how do they do it? I mean, money probably isn't a problem for them, but isn't it such a waste? That's like at least $5USD a day. At least. Say they have it 4 days a week. That's $20. Looking at grocery shopping, I'd say $20 would last me an entire work-week for both lunch AND dinner. (But I suppose I'm taking certain things for granted, like rice and seasonings, but whatever).

Am I being cheap? Probably. Is this post completely unorganized? Probably. I guess I started off with the idea that I wanted to ridicule the human nature of defaulting to convenience over money (and even health). Would restaurants and fast food places go out of business if everyone were like me? Probably.

I'm sorry this post was a mess and hard to follow. Hopefully my next post will be better and more planned out.

Why do I care about organization on the internet - where poor grammar and spelling abound? Maybe school has really done its job of engraving proper (to a certain extent... I do take liberties with ellipses and fragments) writing etiquette into my brain.

Do you ever get the feeling that you're being pompous or cocky when writing in proper grammar in comments and forum posts? I can't help feeling that my comments will be conveyed as condescending sometimes. But is that really my fault? Or is it the fault of those who don't care about their grammar. i.e. Is it because I'm attempting to conform to proper grammar that causes this feeling? Or is it because doing so sticks out like a sore thumb from a sea of poor spelling and oftentimes incomprehensible "1337" abbreviations. Something like... you cannot understand the extent of happiness unless you know sadness; how can you measure the brilliance of a mind without knowing stupidity; when bad spelling and grammar are passed by as normal - as in the online world - even the shortest of comments stick out like a sore thumb when written properly. That probably didn't have anything to do with it - but at one point when the thought was forming in my mind, it did.

Look at how side-tracked I got there. I don't even know how I went from fast food to online comment practices. I think it's time for me to end this post before it gets any more convoluted. Hopefully my next post will be more structured and won't cause you to re-read any parts. I hate when that happens - reading something, and then realizing that none of it registered due to poorly formed sentences.

Oops, I almost got side-tracked again. Until next time - enjoy life to its fullest.

Oh I'd just like to say, that even though I complained about fast food - it's ok from time to time.

just open your eyes

Hello everyone. I'm just going to post something as if this month or two never happened. And from the viewpoint of my blog (if it were a sentient entity), this is pretty much true right?

See, I just started typing this post, and I have a few bullet points I wanted to flesh out, but now I'm starting to get lazy and do not want to work it out. I want illustrations to go with some of the bullet points. So I think I shall just talk about one thing and then leave the rest for another post when I have more motivation to find/create the appropriate illustrations for it.

Let's talk driving to work. There are two quirky things I've found about driving to work. The first is the time at which I arrive at the office seems to be fixed no matter how I vary the time I leave the house. I usually leave at 8:10am and arrive at 8:30am. However, if I leave at 8:15am, I still arrive at 8:30am. On some days, because I, for some reason, feel productive and wish to get to the office earlier, I leave the house at 8:05am. Guess what time it is when I reach the office... 8:30! I will return to this subject somewhat after I continue with the next topic.

I have noticed that there is a certain volume of traffic that is related to which day of the week it is. Hump day truly is a hump if you would graph the volume of cars on the road as a function of time (day of the week). See, normally you would see a graph accompanying this... but I am lazy, so therefore you must use your imagination.

Now, I surmise that there may be a correlation between these two topics I just outlined. Perhaps days where I feel productive, others do as well and everyone leaves just slightly earlier than usual. This causes the time spent on the road to increase due to increase in traffic. Unfortunately, this does make much sense because that would mean people feel productive on Wednesday - the middle of the week - hump day. That seems counter-intuitive.

Maybe when people are feeling lazy, they are much more so than I am, and therefore leave their house later than I do. Thus allowing me to leave a little later, but not encounter as much traffic resistance. This may be plausible as it seems I see the least traffic on Monday and Friday.

However, an explanation for lack of traffic on Monday may be hangover symptoms from the weekend. And an explanation for lack of traffic on Friday is that people are taking a 3-day weekend; or simply do not have to work on Friday.

Yes many of these assumptions I've made are very nfinite-centric. i.e. It's all about me; but whatever.

I think I'm done just typing out whatever comes to mind. This flow of consciousness is now shutting down for the night - even though the time of this post does not indicate that it is very late.... and it would be correct. Because it is not very late.

Remember to enjoy life, no matter what it throws at you. Take care.

-nfinite

Things left on my bullet list:
- new coke bottles
- google screensaver
- autumn
- code indentation protocol

turkey spam

So I checked my mail this morning and saw "Alissa is waiting for you" as a subject header - and I was like whoa... I have a secret lover? Wait... this is GMail, why is secret lover emails getting into my inbox! So just for kicks, I opened the email.I don't know about you, but this amused me. Especially the part that says "But you have to click!" Don't tell me what to do, you spam mail. You're not the boss of me. I don't have to do anything at all. You know what? I'll click something alright - "Report as spam." Good bye Alissa~

So then I came on to Blogger to talk about this random thing. And I see I've been spambotted on here too! Look! The Chatbox!

Ok that is all, Enjoy life!

unlucky

Just a chain of unlucky happenings have occurred since the end of the great Europe adventure. Yes I had a ton of pictures taken - ~4100 images at about 7.5gigs from just my and my dad's camera. I have yet to get the pictures from my sister's camera. Anyway, I don't feel like publicly linking the album I uploaded, so just message me if you're interested; there are some very pretty pictures taken - some of them, I'd say, are wallpaper-worthy! And that's not just me boasting about my photography skillz (of which I have little).

Anyway, let's start off with the first unlucky thing that happened. So we got back to our house from the airport; a relative drove us home. My dad had brought the keys to one of our cars. This we could use to open the car in order to open the garage door. There was one problem. My dad had taken all the garage door openers and put them inside - for fear that someone would break into the car and thus have access to the house. What did this mean? We had the keys to the car, but no garage door opener! Panic! Didn't bring the front door keys either! Lame.

So what happened next? Well... I got to break into my own house. Busted a panel from a window, reached inside to unlock the window, lifted the window, and climbed in. So now we have a piece of paper taped over the hole in the window. This is very bad because it's been like this since Sunday. It's going to rain tonight. I'll update you with an after-picture if it does rain.

Misfortune #2: Before I left for Europe, I had wanted to reformat my laptop. Fortunately, after some research, I found out that Dell has a nifty Dell PC Restore utility - which is basically a way of re-imaging the disk through Norton Ghost. So I'm all for it! Backed up my stuff, and set it to do its thing. I come back later and lo and behold "Disk Read Error \ Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart". Many expletives ensued.

Fine Fine. I'll reformat and reinstall windows and reinstall drivers the hard way. After doing that, I found the wireless internet to be slowwwwww as balls. So I wondered if I did something wrong. So I tried that re-imaging thing again - only this time manually. Had to find my boot disks, had to mess with the boot record, got into Ghost, everything is restoring just pea...ERROR 36000 INCONSISTENCY DETECTED... *crash*

... This resulted in many more diagnostics - disk consistency checks, disk integrity checks, ghost image consistency checks, ghost image integrity checks. Everything was fine. It turns out, it was actually the version of Ghost that was causing the problem, so I found a new version and everything worked like a charm.

WIRELESS IS STILL SLOW~! After troubleshooting this, I found out that a neighbor had recently set up a wireless network... on the same channel. It was causing interference. I changed our router's wireless channel. Problem solved. Still annoyed that it took 2 days.

Misfortune #3! I started up my Xbox360 today, popped in a game, 360 froze. *expletive* Turned off 360, turned back on, froze at startup Xbox logo. *expletive* Took apart Xbox360 (since it's modded). Saw nothing wrong. Started Xbox with case open. Freezes. *expletive* Puts Xbox back together. Turns Xbox back on.

*expletive* *expletive* *expletive* *sigh* I need to go to the store now to do the X-Clamp replacement. The 360 is such a difficult creature. On one hand, it has an amazing lineup of games and is a pretty good media center. On the other hand, from the hardware perspective, ITS A PIECE OF CRAP.

My misfortune rant is over. Maybe next time I'll have a slideshow of my attempt at fixing the RRoD and see if it works or not. Until then, Enjoy life and all the CRAP that it throws at you!

eurotrip!

Ok, nfinite shall be leaving to go to Europe for the next two weeks... Not that it makes a difference to my posting schedule.... right? *ahem...

Sorry to those who I didn't get a chance to say bye to; I'll catchya sometime around the 17th when I return. Don't miss me too much now ;)

I shall return bearing pictures!
Until then, Enjoy Life!

{"PC" ∪ "Mac"} == { ? }

Something that always irked me was that people seem to differentiate between a Macintosh and a PC. Think for a moment... do you see what does not work here?
If I'm not mistaken, PC stands for Personal Computer. Is a Mac not a Personal Computer? It is a computer. It belongs to persons. It must be a Personal Computer then! Still, when someone says 'PC', they are usually referring to something running Windows (or even a Linux based OS) - but not something running OS X. Funny how that works huh? Apple really knows how to market a product properly so that it becomes a class of its own. (like people replacing mp3 player with iPod - though I don't think it's nearly gotten to the prestige of Band-Aid or Kleenex, it's close). And then the price gets jacked up 200%+. *sigh, trendy stuff blows. (and yet I own an iPod, such a hypocrite I am)

There's another ambiguity that I never really figured out either... do you call a laptop a PC? In the strictest sense, it certainly is a personal computer. But saying PC seems to imply desktop PCs. I guess Macs have the same issue huh? When you say Mac, do you mean desktop? or laptop...

Oh yeah! You know when you have a serious brain block, and the word you're looking for just doesn't come up? It's like, you know there's a term for it, but the term is prancing away from you at a pace slightly faster than you can run... In the previous post, I couldn't think of the phrase "Off limits!" and thus I settled with "Out of Bounds" -- which sounds retarded.

That is all, I figured I needed to update and post something, so there you go!
Enjoy life!

awkwardness

Summer school is so weird. The shortness of the session freaks me out. To think that there are only 4 substantial weeks left in the semester is awkward. Especially when you've only taken one major test in each class. Which leaves 2 or 3 more for the final 4 weeks. Which most likely means there will be a test or two every week from now until the end of the semester. Fun.

On to the main event: so let's talk public transportation. Specifically, the metro (or, as in the Atlanta area, the MARTA rail lines)... I have a few things that I've noticed. One of these niennerz pointed out at one time a long time ago (I think). If there's a newspaper laying on an empty chair, no one will sit in that chair. Even if there are three empty chairs around it, no one will sit in that general area until the train starts filling up. After which, the seats around it will become occupied, but the newspaper will still act as if it were a passenger. No one makes an effort to move it. They will stand rather than toss the paper aside.

I wonder what this tells us about human psychology? I think it all boils down to the fact that humans are innately irrational creatures. Despite all the advances towards becoming more rational, there are some things we cannot escape. No one makes an effort to move that newspaper in order to have a seat. Instead, they like to stand and do their metro-surf (where people wobble back and forth attempting to keep their balance) which expends more energy than if they were sitting down. Move a newspaper vs. metro-surf... I wonder which expends more energy.

The awkwardness factor. No one wants to be the one who's seen moving a sheet of paper just to get a seat. Why? Because other people might think them lazy! In order to prove they are not lazy, they will stand. Because sitting implies that you are lazy, right? Maybe... But I guess another thing is that it is always awkward to sit down directly next to someone (Same thing happens in bathroom stalls, but that's another story). The more subtly you sit down next to an occupied seat, the less awkward it is. To move a newspaper would immediately destroy any subtlety of trying to sit down. Automatically means that seat is off bounds. No longer shall anyone occupy that seat until the janitors come around.

NEXT TOPIC! Drifting walkers. No, not like a car drift, but more like a wandering walk. Let's first define this drift-walker. Have you ever walked behind a person who was traveling in the general direction that you are, but at the same time includes random lateral movement? Let's say you and this drift-walker are walking in a line, you behind them. The drift-walker will regularly stray from the line, either slightly left or slightly right. The problem is, unlike drunks who have exaggerated movements, these drift-walkers' lateral movement is so subtle that it becomes unpredictable. Do you now know the type? If you don't, it's you. JUST KIDDING! So why did I spend a paragraph explaining this? You shall see.

So every day I take MARTA to get to class. It's not exactly fun, but it's cheaper than using the car and gas these days. Here's the situation. Coming from the parking lot, I need to get to the stairs to go up (yeah, it's not exactly an underground metro, but an above-ground train system) to the platform. There is a lady in front of me. Issue #1 that I have with her placement. She is directly in the middle of the walkway. Do you ever have those moments when you are walking along and someone else is walking in the other direction and when you meet you're not sure if you should pass on the left or on the right? (I hate those situations too) Most of these situations could easily be avoided if people walked in the same manner that cars drive on roads. Directional traffic should be designated as either the left side of the walkway, or the right. Back to the situation. This lady walks kind of slow. And the MARTA train has been sitting at the station for a good while - meaning it should be leaving soon - I need to get to the train.

I need to pass this lady who is walking slowly to get to the train. The problem is that people have comfort zones (Have you met people who insist on standing completely too close for comfort? They're all up in your face and they don't seem bothered by it, but you are. They are making you feel uncomfortable) I try to respect this comfort zone even when walking - especially when there is no one else around (It'd be odd to walk right next to someone you don't know when there's a lot of extra space around). Thus, I come up in my mind the quickest and least awkward means of passing people when I need to. (Am I anal?.. I swear I'm really not, I'm just really bored sometimes. Lookie, I'm not the only one who does something like this!) Sure sure, everything would be absolutely peachy. Except now the Chekov's rule comes into play.

The problem is that this lady is a drift-walker. I can no longer predict where she will be going and thus I cannot assess the best possible path to take in order to keep myself distanced from the comfort zone. So, three things come together to form this awkward situation. One (1) She was walking slowly. Two (2) She was walking in the center of the walkway (whether that was by choice or if she accidentally drifted into this area - I don't know). And Three (3) The drift-walking throws off all predictions of where she may be by the time I start to pass her. Awkward situation alert! I have been obstructed and foiled. The only choice I had was to just pick one and go for it. I'm not even sure if it was a 50-50 chance of success or not. Is it? If any of the 3 factors was not in effect, this situation would not have occurred. *sigh

Sorry I wasted your time. I ended up taking the path on the right even though it was longer because I figured that she was heading towards the stairs as well, thus closing the gap available on the left. The right was the more rational approach to the problem. Until next time. Enjoy life!

gen

So it's been a month with no update. I did think about posting to the blog - it's the thought that counts right? ...Yeah, I guess not. So anyway, many GTA IV sessions have passed, I'm now back home in the ATL with summer classes in session. It's actually not so bad (I say this in retrospect because whenever I'm actually in class, it really is bad, but I'll get to that in a bit). I originally thought I had classes everyday (which I will eventually) but it turns out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday classes are for the short summer session which starts in mid-June. THUS! I have 4-day weekends until then! It's quite amazing - 2 days of classes out of 7.

The only problem with summer classes is that they're SO FRICKIN LONG (insert "that's what she said" here). I can handle interesting subjects for 1hr 45min, but monotonous and uninteresting subjects are just that - monotonous and uninteresting... for an hour and 45 minutes. Take for example my math class Applied Combinatorics. I thought this would be an interesting class because of its description:

Elementary combinatorial techniques used in discrete problem solving: counting methods, solving linear recurrences, graph and network models, related algorithms, and combinatorial designs.

That sounds pretty interesting right? At least for a math class, right? No? I'm just a dork? Ok. You're right. The other day we spend half an hour on proving the existence and the uniqueness of a "Division Algorithm" aka we learned how to divide. Needless to say I lost interest 5 minutes in. I'm still hoping, however, that the course will become more interesting. Which leads me to the class following: History. This class has no hope of becoming more interesting. The prof talks for an 1hr45min non-stop. I kid you not. No breaks, starts on time, ends on time. It's unbelievably sleep-inducing.

Now that you've read about my school life, let's move on to the more interesting stuff? Like that kid and his male guardian figure I mentioned... a month ago. So I was at GameStop pre-ordering GTAIV and while waiting in line I overheard this conversation going on between this kid and this dude. It went a little something like this:

Dad: ....but you already have a two-hundred and fifty dollar gaming machine at home, you don't need this
Kid: but...
Dad: Do you see this price tag? It says one-hundred and thirty dollars . This is not as good as your two-hundred and fifty dollar one you have at home.

At first I was wondering what they were going on about, but then as soon as he stated $130 I knew what he was talking about. He was puttin' down my DS, my and our beloved DS, as inferior to the PSP on the basis of price alone. I felt like walking up and saying: If you're going to lecture a child, do it properly and with your facts straight. While it's good you're teaching the kid he doesn't need two portable gaming toys, the reasoning behind your logic is ultimately flawed. But I supposed I'm biased and partial towards the DS. BUT!, my partiality has logic behind it. By the following table, I shall support my reasons for knowing that DS > PSP.So there you have it, DS clearly is better than PSP. Even though the PSP is two-hundred and fifty dollars it is ousted by the one-hundred and thirty dollar gaming machine. Take that two-hundred and fifty dollar gaming machine! And take that Mr. Swayed-By-Price-Of-Unit. People who think they know things that they don't annoy me. You are distorting that child's mind! He shall never know the joys of a DS! But whatever, you bought him a PSP in the first place. He better be happy with that.

Onto the next subject! What's up with all these game journalists using the term 'next-gen' to describe the 360, PS3, and even Wii. This very much annoys me whenever I see it used to reference one/all of these consoles. The term is blatantly inaccurate.

next [nekst] Pronunciation Key
–adjective
1. immediately following in time, order, importance, etc.: the next day; the next person in line.
5. on the first occasion to follow: when next we meet.
Courtesy of Dictionary.com

What's this? 'Next' means coming up? What a concept! Wait, how are our consoles 'next-gen' if they're already here! This term may have been fine when the consoles were in development, but why has the term stuck? I dislike things that are inaccurate but become trendy.

Aside: Back in my Guild Wars days, there was a team build that was named IWAY. The build name was coined because its cornerstone key skill was called '"I Will Avenge You!"' Thus the name fit appropriately. Its amazing success however, had many other builds INACCURATELY mimicking the name. Builds such as Flare-way, Monk-way, hell, I even saw some people have the audacity to call Necro spikes SS-way (for the skill Shadow Strike) and many others (of which I've forgotten names, it's been a while...) that I didn't care to remember since they were so lamely copied.

Get a clue people, these consoles are no longer 'next-gen', they are 'current-gen'. I suppose describing the graphics in a new fangled game as current-gen-graphics doesn't have the same luster to it ("The graphics in [insert game] are very current-gen~!" vs. "The graphics in [insert game] are very next-gen~!") but next-gen-graphics falsely implies that the graphics are of quality that can't be seen today. I'm sorry for being picky, but the term annoys me. I suppose stating that the technically correct way of referencing this current generation of video game machines as 7th generation wouldn't get the same message across either... *sigh.

That is all for this time. Until the next, enjoy life!

night activities

So I was in the shower yesterday (and other days too, yesterday was not a special occasion) and I turned on the water. The water flowed out of the tub faucet and I inserted my finger into the stream to test its temperature. Then a thought crossed my mind. I wonder how much water is wasted by people who do the same as me. All that unused "warmup-period" shower water just goes down the drain - the majority of which never gets the chance to grace your body. Poor water.

That's when ideas started popping into my head on ways to preserve this taken-for-granted water. At first I thought - maybe there should be a middle option on the faucet that let's less water out. Since, right now, there's either shower head or FULL BLAST WASTING WATER (unless you're about to take a bath - different story). They could design a 3-state lift arm on the faucet; all the way down means you're going to take a bath, midway means you are warming up the water, and all the way up means you are in the process of taking a shower.

Then I thought to myself, this would still waste water - thus, not completely dissolving the issue at hand. So, my next idea was a intermediate basin of some sort that can re-circulate unused water. This way, the unused water would not go down the drain, but simply get warmed up by incoming water. For novelty's sake, you would be able to stick your finger in the basin to test the temperature - yeah that's right, it could have a sensor to do this, but that would be too technical; some things are just better the old fashioned way.

Come to think of it, this could be expanded to sinks as well! Maybe it's not as big a deal though. Still, some people wait for water to get hot before washing the dishes, right? Dishwasher? What's that?

I guess this all boils down to older houses though since their water heating systems are not as snappy as new homes... All of these thoughts crossed my mind from simply waiting for the water to get warm for a shower.

In gaming news, approximately 7 days and 5 hours until I get my hands on Grand Theft Auto IV. I'm mega stoked and I'm devouring any article that has to do with GTA IV and it's frustrating me even more. How come they get to play it before us and then tease us with tidbits of information - marketing is such a devious operation.

Yes, I do not plan on sleeping Monday night - or Tuesday morning - or whatever you want to call it. I went last Friday to pre-order it at the closest brick and mortar store - it happened to be GameStop. I heard the most ridiculous conversation between a dad and his kid. That story, however, will be left for another time as I'm too lazy to write about it now. (At least that's my excuse to give me some time to carefully organize my plan of attack).

So, next time, look forward to Dad vs. Kid and also a look into what the phrase "next-gen" means to me. Until then, enjoy life.

be like sex machine

I'm going to continue posting as if this last month and a half never happened. Whaddya say? We'll call not posting at all in March my April Fools joke that also extends a few weeks into April. Ha Ha! On a more serious note: I seem to have the mindset that something worth posting should be fairly lengthy. So every time something amusing comes up in my mind and I tell myself I might want to blog about it, the following happens.

Ha ha, that's amusing; maybe I should write something about it.
How much can be written about it?
Oh, I guess it wouldn't be very in depth at all.
Oh well, I guess I won't post about it.
That's generally how it goes. But I'm trying to see if I can make micro-posts now. So here goes:

My PayPal account information needs to be updated because there's been some kind of unauthorized activity, but I have more important issues at hand. Apparently, I'm no good in bed - most likely due to the fact that my penis is too small, or due to the fact that I have no weight at all. Thus, I need a guide on games in bed or I could be like sex machine.

Did I lose you yet? Awesome. Ever get these spam emails? I feel sorry for the people who take them seriously, but have you ever taken the time to sit down and actually examine these things? If you're bored and want to be amused, just take a brief read of them.

First up, my PayPal account is under attack! (Yes this is an old email, but my April Fools joke got in the way of sharing about it)
Step 1 of making a proper spam email: Have bad grammar and bad spelling. Well isn't this pleasant - they failed at Step One. This must be the real deal then. Still, they make a pretty bold comment to say there will be no more future problems with the service. Wow! But oh dear! I only have 2 days to update my information! Panic!

Wow, that link they gave me looks pretty official doesn't it! Even better is that official email address in the From line. It looks like PayPal doesn't have enough money and must use a free email service like Yahoo. Tsk tsk, I may have believed the authenticity of the email if it had been servce@gmail.com, but alas, I have seen through their ruse.

Now, we travel to my university email inbox. I have three emails that catch my eye!

• From: Marty Perkins - Subject: No weight - no problems


• From: Mel Tatum - Subject: Smart in bed games


• From: Fritz Davila - Subject: Be like sex machine

Holy crap! I'm suffering from "no weight"! I need to check out this first email:
Never late to try.
Watch details attached and know more.
... this must be written in code. Never late to try? Is this their attempt to introduce colloquialism to make me feel more at ease? Ok, I guess I need to stare at the attachment and the solution to my problems will hit me. Or not.

Next email. I suppose I've been doing dumb in bed games. I need to learn smarter ones.
On top all night
Please look attached file and know MORE ABOUT THIS!
What does being on top have anything to do with games? What a let down, I was expecting better tips. Please look. Attached File. Yes, I see an attached file. "MORE ABOUT THIS." (Unclear Pronoun Reference -5pts). You fail email.

Ah, but I still have hope. Even if I can't do smart bed games, I can at least be like sex machine.
She wants you more now
Please look attached file and know MORE ABOUT THIS!
Wow! This must be a magic email! She wants me more now. Amazing! I wonder what the secret was that made her want me more. ... hey wait a second ... deja vu? Please look. Attached File. Yes, I see an attached file. "MORE ABOUT THIS." (UPR -5). You fail email.

For those who want to see the content of the attachments, I have carefully retrieved its contents. (Disclaimer: If you are susceptible to epileptic seizures, do not view the following image. Ok, just kidding, but seriously... wtf)

That's all I got for this post. But before I go, I want to share a video that made me smile. Some of you may have already seen this - as I found the video on digg - but this is just one of those videos that needs to be shared.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42E2fAWM6rA
After watching that, I hope my usual end note can be more significant for you.

Enjoy Life.
-nfinite

conformity I say!

Hey, it's the 29th of Feburary! I had to post on this day because it only comes once every 4 years right? This might be the only post *EVER* on this blog to have 29 February in the date header! Savour it! (Not to mention this gets me to the average of a post a week for this year thus far). じゃ、はじめましょうか。

You know what annoys me? Discrepancies between companies' touted specs and user-end interpretation. What am I talking about, you may ask? There are two prime examples of this: a) Internet Service Providers and b) Storage Device Manufacturers. First up, time to bash ISPs - aside from them screwing you in the butt with their prices.

Why do they still insist on using the bit representation of throughput speed? It's a capitalization issue as well! I hate it when people say "oh yeah, wellz, my internets is 5mb/sec! Uber fasts" Now you need to determine a few things:

• What does the other person think is fast? This greatly influences whether or not they meant "Mb or MB"
• Are they somewhat tech savvy? Do they know the difference between the two?
• Using that information, which sounds more reasonable? "Mb" or "MB"?

I hate having to clarify myself on which term I mean when I'm chatting with people. There should be one standard that everyone should follow. I shouldn't need to say: Oh, I'm getting 6Mbytes/sec or almost 50Mbit/sec. It totally defeats the purpose of having an abbreviation "KbKB, MbMB, TbTB" for the concept of size. The only reason these stupid companies still use the bit scale is so that they can sound like they're offering faster services than they really are. They're targetting the average user who doesn't know too much about technological terminology. This pisses me off. 5Mb/s sounds much better than 0.64MB/s right?

Aside: It's like all of those $1999.99 TVs - it's not $2000.00, but $1999.99! That one cent makes a psychological difference to the audience. The same thing applies here, except much worse - at least with pricing, there's no conversion issue. It's like saying to an American that the TV is only £500. Even with this example though, it's not too difficult. Roughly multiply by 2 right?

With Mbit to Mbyte, the conversion is so much more "difficult" in that people don't normally divide or multiply by 8. This confuses some people when they see their service stating 15Mb/s service, but when they're downloading, the file transfer speed shows "only" 2MB/s. Abbreviations of terms should be consolidated. Don't get me started on the imperial vs. metric system.

Along the same lines of company specs vs. real world usage are those storage devices. 1TB SATA HDD! 750GB! 500GB EXTERNAL USB HDD! These manufacturers are even worse with respect to number manipulation. There's no subtle difference as with ISPs - no, no, when dealing with these companies, we don't get the luxury of deciphering the nuances of capitalization. These manufacterurs blatantly state their specs in large, bold, ^and misleading^ letters. I remember the *verrrrrry* first time I installed a hard drive into my computer - with the help of my dad, since I was probably 7 or 8. I can still remember him telling me "The red striped on the IDE cable will always be closest to the molex power cable". But I digress. At the time we were still in the age of the megabyte, so the displayed number on the HDD matched fairly closely to the one reported by Windows (95!).

Later on in life, when I installed my first 20gig hard drive (I was so happy: I went from a 1gig compressed to 1.5gig HDD to a 20gig (Does Windows have the option of compressing an HDD any more?)), I thought, "WHERE THE MONKEYS DID A WHOLE GIGABYTE GO!" So the next day I went to the school library to look up on the internet why this was happening. (Because school internet was faster than dial-up at home [remember those days too?, lego.com took forever to load at home, but it was flippin' awesome at school]). And sure enough, the answer was that the manufacturer was trying to screw me over.
1GB according to manufacturers is 1000MB
1MB according to manufacturers is 1000KB and
1KB according to manufacturers is 1000B

The only problem is (as brushed briefly before with the internet speeds) the computer uses 2^10 as the conversion factor between abbreviations. Now we've got metric versus binary. According to the manufacturer, their conversion rate is logical. According to the computer, its conversion rate is logical. According to the user, the manufacturer is manipulating numbers.

For every GB listed by the manufacturer, we're effectively losing ~50MB. Doesn't seem like too much?
For every 100GB listed, we're effectively losing 6.8GB.
This trend gets progressively worse with larger sizes. Each time you go up a tier, you're adding another multiple of 1000/1024 to the conversion.

Almost 70GB is "lost" in that translation! (I don't have a TB hard drive to know what real-life results are, but the numbers don't lie too much). That's just a little ridiculous dontcha think? This manipulation of numbers also applies to other manufacturers of devices that use storage: MP3 players, memory cards, USB-stick drives, ... if the device stores stuff, manufacters will find a way to manipulate the numbers to make themselves look better.

Consumers need to rally for a standardized system for manufacturers to adhere to when listing their product specifications. There's too much trickery and ... well I guess it's called marketing. I would glady support a company who reports their product specs in a way that conforms with practical and daily-use numbers. I don't care that the drive is "100GB" if I can't use in the "practical" sense - as in what I see reported to me by the computer - all 100GB.

This would ease confusion. I don't like being confused. I don't like it when others are confused. This is no excuse for not researching the product you are purchasing; but that doesn't mean manufacturer's should be free and able to distort the truth to their benefit. Perhaps I'm just fixated with organization and standardization. It's your call on what you think about my views. Have fun with life.

doodles of emails?

So it looks like I won't keep up with my resolution of getting one post per week for this month of February. Whatever, we'll take a month to be 4 weeks and sum February and January's post together for a total of 8 posts. That'll even out to 4 posts per month right? Good.

Lately I've been running a lot of tests at work - it's all about making sure nothing is completely busted and observing all possible cases. That's what life is about right? You're constantly changing, but you always need to make sure you're on the right track and that you didn't screw anything completely. If you did, corrective measures are taken, right? So with all this testing, and a discussion with nien, a diagram was born.

This picture was designed in the ever so high-end application that you all should be familiar with. After being around for so long, this application has undergone surprisingly few changes! Come to think of it, Paint from way back in Win3.1 wasn't much different! For some reason I remember it even had a feature the current one doesn't: selective color erasing. Or maybe I'm confusing it with another application - I very well could be... I was, what... at most 8 years old when I was using Win3.11. Anywho, back to the topic at hand.

I was at work when this masterpiece was created; as you can see, it even includes transparancy of the two colors at the region where they overlap. Truly, MSPaint is a powerful application. This chart basically is concerned with Doodle Time - time at which one may constructively doodle without interfering with any form of legitimate work whatsoever. Thus, the diagram says. All code compile time is doodle time and all test time is only sometimes doodle time. I'll let the impact of that settle in.

What do I doodle? There's no real trend. Lately I've been imagining what kind of ofice/manroom/entertainment room I will have when I get a house. I began some rough sketches of that:But I didn't get very far. It's quite confusing, but I'm too lazy to go into explanations. Next topic!

---

This post deserves a horizontal rule line break because I believe this to be a fairly thought provoking matter - unlike the previous topic. Have you ever written semi-formal emails to people? The reason I thought about this was because sending emails around to co-workers / supervisors causes this issue. I do, however, encountering this issue when emailing my Japanese professor. I emphasized what type of professor due to some issues that I'm going to explore.

The body and the footer of these emails are the easy part. The body contains what you need to say, it doesn't truly need an introductory paragraph or anything because it's only semi-formal. The conclusory paragraph : same thing applies. The footer is easy, "Sincerely" is an accepted standard. If you're feeling like mixing it up, "Regards" will work as well.

(There is most probably a guidebook or handbook or set of rules that govern what I'm about to explore, but bear with me. This is just something that irks me.)

Now, the issue is... you guessed it, the header. What should the very first line be? Let's say we're writing a letter to Bob. I will now explore a few possibilites.

To whom it may concern,

Straight up wrong. You know who this email is directed towards. It's formal, but not useable.

Dear Bob,

This just feels weird and out of place in an email, don't you think? Plus, this is a person you know, and whom you see fairly regularly. It doesn't feel right to me.

To Bob,

Again, this is an email; the person already knows that it's addressed to them. After all, they're the recipient of the email! No good.

Hey Bob, / Hey Bob-san,

This works in cases where the recipient is on friendly basis with you, but this does not work with people who require respect - if only a little. Take the case of your professor - some may be completely fine with this address. Try it with the Japanese professor and you're in rude-territory.

Bob, / Bob-san,

This feels weird to me. I can't pinpoint why. But here's my attempt. These semi-formal emails are akin to talking to the person... in person. This is the best solution I have to my uneasiness about headers in emails. It works in the all the situations that a semi-formal email entails, but I still don't like it.

[Blank]

There's also the option of leaving the header blank and immediately starting the body. This... sometimes works, but I always feel uneasy doing so. There's the "rude-complex" that I have. It just feels rude to not address the person you're "talking" to.

With that said, there should be some kind of universal passive-feeling word that is not rude, but does not feel weird in a semi-formal situation. Something like... I dunno... "Fortu Bob," The only problem with that is getting the word into circulation and everyday use. The word needs to be instantly recognized as an addressal, but cannot be offensive at the same time.

I think I've wasted enough of your time. I do hope that the topic made you think a little. Until next time, take care and take it easy!

shrtct

Not much along the lines of creative thinking for this blog has happened in my mind as of late. Guess there are just some days that are more conducive to random thinking than others - the past week or so has not been so. Still, I find myself feeling like I need to post something - no reason really. Not too many people read the blog regularly, so there really isn't all that much of a point to post. Still, it gives me something to do, I suppose.

On the computer, I'm all about the shortcuts and things that make navigation and manipulation easier. The right-click menu is awesome. What's not awesome, however, is unconformity with natural trends. -- That sure did sound like a load of BS -- What I'm trying to say is, different programs doing different things with context menus that one expects to be globally the same. Even though I said "what I'm trying to say is..." I still didn't get any clearer in what I was trying to explain - I'll need to work on that.

So, I like to use "Right-Click -> Close" from the Start bar a lot. It's very convenient, you right click the item and move the mouse just a tad and then left click. Simple! Yay! Window DESTROYED! Very satisfying. This kind of thing seems very standard, does it not? I would venture to say 90-95% of windows applications use this convention. By now, it just looks natural, right? Sure there are other weird ones that don't have a maximize button, or a downsize button. But the "X Close Alt+F4" option is still in the same place.

What gets me is those non conformers. I'm all about freedom of expression and creativity and all that jazz. But when it comes to something as structured and mechanical as a computer - some things are better meant to be universally the same.
What happened! AAAAAAH! Here are some examples of where things start to break down.

• I'll go to close WinPAR: BOOM new selection list. What? No, that was supposed to remove things from my screen, not add stuff!
• This next one irks me off very much and very often. (cygwin does the same, which I suppose is because it uses the same Windows shell interface.... or something) I go to close a command window, and whaddya know! A properties window pops up! Again, the opposite effect that I was expecting. Window close vs. Spawn window.
• And then there's the old-fashioned Help windows. Yeah yeah, things have moved on to different types of help windows... Why do we need to know ABOUT the help window? It gives us help when we're retarded-imean stuck.
  
• I don't have it any longer, but the old Creative Surround Mixer utility did the same thing as the Help window I showed. Information about the application - whoop-dee-doo.

That's all I have for today. I was going to talk about why single stall bathrooms still need a female or male sign on the door. Especially at a work office where the majority of employees are male. It just seems counter productive to have the same amount of "female" as "male" bathrooms when the inside of the bathrooms are exactly the same (Ok, so maybe half are the mirror image of the other half. big deal.)

Until I think of better things to share. Enjoy Life!

Command n Conquer. Cookies n Code.

Parentheses (Is that how the plural form is spelled? It looks weird.) are destroying me today! It's like Left Parenthesis said, "Yo, Right Parenthesis, wanna screw with nfinite today?"

And Right Parenthesis replied, "Hell yeah!"

Ok, so they only screwed with me twice. They even had the nerve to call up Mr. Semicolon to aid them in giving me grief. What's all this about you may be wondering? I had a bad time coding today. I needed to change an implementation of a linked list into a circular buffer. (For those who know programming, you don't need those links, so I'm not trying to be condescending; just trying to educate). We started having memory leaks due to allocation and deallocation of each node. We knew exactly what was happening and why the leaks where occuring, but there was nothing we could do without restructuring a lot. To protect my employer's intellectual property, I shall now generate an extended analogy to the issue we were having - with COOKIES!

Let's say we have a queue of cookies. If we create this queue as a linked list, each time we add a cookie to this queue, we have to make a box to hold it. It's then placed on the conveyor belt and sent on it's way to YOU (yes, you, this is getting personal now. You are getting fed cookies, you should be happy!). Everytime you eat a cookie, you dispose of the box by means of recycling.

Now, sometimes you need to stop this conveyor belt for various reason (maybe you're too full and need a break from cookies... weakling). When this happens, a GIGANTIC MONSTRUOUS EPIC PENDULUM OF COOKIE STOPPING swings down and blocks the cookies. The problem now is that this GIGANTIC MONSTRUOUS EPIC PENDULUM OF COOKIE STOPPING occasionally swipes a box of cookies - resulting in the box to go flying into the depths of nowhere, never to be found. THIS IS BAD! We do not want cookies to get lost! (This was the memory leak that was occuring).

So instead, it was my task to go in and create a circular buffer. You can think of a circular buffer as an escalator (the linked list was the conveyor belt with boxes). For our purposes, the escalator is extremely sanitary. Each step of the escalator is a platform for a cookie. In this way, we don't need to make boxes for the cookies anymore. You are at the top eating the cookies as they come up, and the cookies are getting placed on each step starting at the bottom. The steps can be reused after they are cleaned of their cookies by you. Now, when the GIGANTIC MONSTRUOUS EPIC PENDULUM OF COOKIE STOPPING comes down, the cookie is small enough to avoid being swatted away. (See, the box was getting hit before, but since the cookie was in the box... ok my analogy is starting to break down here... but whatever! just know that there are no more memory/cookie leak problems with this approach).

Now that you understand the importance of ensuring no cookies are lost, I move on to coding the escalator - which is where Mr. and Mrs. Parenthesis start to toy with me. (They must not like cookies...). I hope I don't lose any of you at this point. It's gonna get a little more technical than eating cookies. Again, I am simply going to tailor this code to the cookie example. Take the following code:

That's basically the pertinent stuff. That should be straightforward except for (add_cookie_step+1)&COOKIES_MODULO. Each step is numbered 0 through 511 (for a total of 512 steps). This snippet says, if we go up one step and it's 512, the number will wrap down to 0. Basically it repeats counting 0-511 for us. So I compiled the thing and BOOM Right Parenthesis has an issue with me.

line 12: error: expected a ")"

I could not find a problem with it for the longest time. ALL THE PARENTHESES ARE MATCHED! There are the same number of left as right parentheses! I went to a fellow cookie-meister and he took a look at it and thought it was screwy too! What was the problem? If you found it right away, congrats. It's a lot harder when the code is ~1000 lines long. Apparently, Mrs. Right Parenthesis was having an affair with Mr. Semicolon. COOKIES_MODULO was defined as (MAX_COOKIES-1); This means that, to the compiler, line 12 said:

while ( (add_cookie_step+1)&(MAX_COOKIES-1); == remove_cookie_step )

That semicolon in there is a big no-no. It seems it didn't care about the following line though.

remove_cookie_step = (remove_cookie_step+1)&(MAX_COOKIES-1);;

Fine, fine, whatever. Problem solved.

I was going to explain the second problem that I had, but I would need to extend my analogy even more. I don't want to do that anymore. Just know that the code did not do what I expected it to do. I forgot to add that there can be multiple escalators. What happened, however, was that you ate only cookies on Escalator #0, but none of the others! "WHYYYY WERE YOU ACTING UP!" I asked myself.

if ( (Cookie->EscalatorNumber)&Escalators_To_Eat_From != 0 )

This line basically asks if the cookie is edible by looking at a designator of EdibleCookies (We can't eat bad cookies. We don't want to eat bad cookies.) Basically some order of operations mumbo jumbo happened. This line needed to be

if ( ((Cookie->EscalatorNumber)&Escalators_To_Eat_From) != 0 )

So when I didn't need parentheses, the compiler complained at me. But when I needed them, it didn't say a single thing.

I Hate You Mr. and Mrs. Parenthesis. Oh and Mr. Semicolon too (because I always seem to forget to add you to the end of lines, and then Mr. Compiler throws fifty million errors for the lines that proceed /rant).

Ok, I'm done, I hope you want cookies now. I sure do, but I don't have any. Sad day. Well, maybe Rainy has some cookies. She better, it's like a house-warming party. Since her blog is "reopening" (or something) she needs to give us cookies.

I know I said there would be pictures this post, but this post has gotten long. So I guess ya'll will just have to wait until next time! Stay tuned for sexy video cards, sexy keyboards, and sexy cars.
Stay sexy!

BOOBIES!

I'm not dead yet, honest. I've just been lazy. Those are two different things you know! Unless, you're so lazy that you might as well be dead - but that's not me. I feel bad for not updating, but I'm too lazy to sit down for 45mins to flesh out the things on my mind.

When I first heard about the whole Mass Effect controversy on Fox news, I was going to go into a rant on the matter. I was going to take the entire debate with Fox vs. Keighly and break apart each and every claim and "rebuttal" that Fox offered. Everything they said was flawed, all of their evidence was skewed, and they had no idea what they were talking about. I was going to take each line and show why and how it was completely wrong. But, while I'm still perturbed by Fox, I'm too lazy to do it. Plus, the "expert" they hired to argue with Keighly offered an apology for her incompetence - er, I mean, lack of research. I'm not sure whether she was being sincere about it, or just trying to cover her butt - in either case, I'm just mad that there are people who watch this stuff and believe it to be true. If Mass Effect has full frontal nudity, then all beaches in the entire world should be off limits.

I've played the game; and I've seen both scenes in question. The first, I would never have encountered because it required following the "evil" track. The second was only through "hard work" of completing the love story with one of the other characters. To be honest, it's a very cinematic (in the plot sense) progression. You get to know the said love affection-character throughout the game, fight with them, and talk to endless NPCs with them. It's only reasonable that before the finale - the final battle - that your character and their love interest get a little something... But wait, what's all this fuss about! Mass Effect is rated M. The equivalent in movies is R. Both are for ages 17+. Take the movie 300. Just before the King goes to battle, he and his wife have at it - OMG BOOBIES! -- Mass Effect: NO BOOBIES! OMG THIS IS BAD!

I will venture to say that it is harder to play a game through to get to the "sex scene" (a very mild one in comparison to movies and even TV these days) than pop in a comparably rated movie just to get at some nudity. I guess I couldn't help ranting about the ordeal despite saying I was lazy. There's more to be said, but there is one point that completely shuts down any possible intelligent argument. Mass Effect is rated M. "but but! kids are seeing this!" ... Your point? Are they supposed to? Porn is meant for 18+. I don't have statistics, but with the advent of the internet... Hell, even movies depict kids with porn mags as if it's daily life. My favorite quote is, "I went on the website today. I clicked on a lot of different trailers. I tried to learn as much about it as I could before we did this... It's interesting: when you click on it, it asks you your age. It says you must go through a scanning process. So I though, ugh, this is going to take forever. Ok, so I put in my age; and then Boom you're in, no problem. So that is a pretty screen to get past."

Wait, was she trying to make a point of something? Wait, is she trying to say that a 10 year old could do this? Wait, let's up that age to 13. Wait, oh my god! Wait, she's saying that a minor could be getting into a restricted site! Wait, they're getting access to potential nudity?! Refer to one of my older posts about this age verification subject. I felt pretty good that I had already made her look stupid, before she put out the idea. There's free porn on the internet that's much worse than a video game site.

Anyway, I'm done with that. I got a new keyboard today; I'll probably share pictures next post. I also went to the Wash. DC auto show yesterday with some friends yesterday too. So stay tuned for those as well. Nothing too exciting though. I'm sorry there were no pictures in this post and it was just a long string of text. Tomorrow is Monday! Enjoy the new week. *cough*

little green man

I know this is so last week, but I was too lazy to blog the moment I found out.

YODA IS GOING TO BE IN SOULCALIBUR IV FOR XBOX 360!

Now that I'm done sounding like a complete marketing advertisement, I'd just like to reiterate how ecstatic I am about the wicked green short guy doin' his thang in ソウルキャリバー IV. Doesn't he look badass? You know how you smiled the first time Yoda whipped out his lightsaber in Episode III? Yeah, this may not be a rehash of that moment, but it is still smile-invoking nonetheless. Oh yeah, Vader is on the PS3. But honestly, envision the fight between Yoda and Vader; it wouldn't last very long: Yoda would school him all while taunting him with anastrophes like "Suck, you do." and "Slow you are; Catch me, you cannot." So since I'm an owner of a 360 and I like to dish out the PS3 hate:

Yoda > Vader :: 360 > PS3.

Hopefully Project Soul manages to incorporate these characters into the game and maintain balance. (Because let's face it, if it were my choice I'd just say: Yoda enters match. Yoda automatically wins because he's Yoda). That aspect aside, another thing that bothers me at the moment is: Lightsaber vs. Metal Sword. I haven't followed the Calibur series nor have I played any of them, so if I'm wrong about the fighters' weapons being made of metal, I'm sorry.

I don't know about you, but that picture looks unrealistic. (Ignoring the fact that there's a Vader and lightsabers exist). I've read a few Star Wars books in my time, and from what I can recall, no material resisted a lightsaber. Sure there were huge thick doors and walls and things; those just took more time for a lightsaber to cut through. So, how are these fighters are going fight against lightsabers?

... Maybe their swords are made of mirrors. Or they're "mirror-plated" metals. Because, mirrors reflect light right? I just had a revelation. Why don't these futuristic people wear armor made of mirrors? It'd be like chain mirror-metal armor or something. That way, laser guns would ricochet and lightsabers would reflect off! Genius!

Moving on to the next subject without any sort of transition at all; and completely leaving no conclusions to the Yoda-SoulCalibur train of thought... I finally got around to playing Call of Duty 4. Got it Saturday afternoon and I beat the single player campaign today. Overall, an enjoyable experience though I was slightly unnerved by the disconnected empathetic atmosphere of the game. They tried to get the point across that war is a major pile of suck through random deaths of squad mates who you really don't get a chance to be attached to. I suppose that's the trade-off in having a short but intense game. If it was a longer game with more character development/interaction, the intensity would have faltered.

Returning to my point of disjoint empathy, this game is paradoxically humanistic. War should teach us to value lives, but this game throws so many enemies at you that you end up mowing them down without a second thought. "Man that mini-gun!" "Grab the detonators on the second floor!" The best example of this is the mission where you man the guns in an AC-130 gunship. The enemies show up on your monitor as small specks (in a sense), and the larger guns you fire send these buggers flying. The 25mm gun obliterates the enemies in a shower of black and white pixelated blood and dirt. The comments by some dude in the plane make it even worse. He has a very lazy manner of commenting. "kaboom." "Good kill, good kill." "Light him up." It just isn't right. Here's a link to a video on gametrailers to see what I mean.

It's a fun game. There's no doubt about that; but it unnerved me morally. The reason I was originally going to talk about Call of Duty 4 was that I was surprised at the number of invincible monitor screens in that game. I went around shooting LCD panels and none of them died. It just left a huge bullet hole in an otherwise unchanged still image. With so much attention to detail in other places, I wonder why they didn't short out the monitors when you shot at them. I took a picture of what I'm talking about, but I can't find it anymore...

I think I'm done yapping.

Enjoy hump day tomorrow!

-nfinite

settled in

So I'm pretty much moved into my residence for this semester. Which do you like more: unpacking or packing? My guess is that you chose the former. Me too! Some parts of unpacking are actually pretty fun, right? You can call me a dork for this, but I get a feeling of accomplishment after unpacking my possessions in an organized manner - especially my desk. Scratch that last thought, I guess I should clarify that my desk is essentially the computer and peripherals. With so much moving back home, into the dorm, back home, into a different residence, back home, into dorm, etc., I think I'm gradually forming a routine to unpacking. (I only with packing was as streamlined) First is the monitor, then the PC, then the keyboard and mouse, then the speakers, then the router, then extra peripherals. The most important part would be organization of the wires.
As you can see, this part of the step doesn't go too well. At first, the wires are organized. However once you start adding more peripherals, it starts to get hectic. You try your best to use the twisties to keep the wires from being too long, but there are just too many wires! Still, despite how convoluted it looks, I still was satisfied with the result because I know how much worse it could be. *Smiles at self* - Ok that was depressing.

Time to discuss road configurations.

Let's talk about "WTF-inspiring" roads. Since I'm Vietnamese and since I'm near the DC area, I had to visit the Vietnamese niche around Falls Church - namely the Eden shopping center. It's located on one of the corners of this intersection/area called "Seven Corners". This place is confusing as balls. Take this from someone who lives near a highway group nicknamed Spaghetti Junction. At least spaghetti junction looks natural and symmetrical. What the heck happened with Seven Corners? It's like they contracted 7 different people to build 7 different portions of road and said, "Hey, let's meet in the center for fun!". Yeah, I needed to get to a left branch, so I was in the left lane. It turns out I needed to be in the right lane in order to go over and stuff. I don't even know if this could be called ordered chaos. It's just chaos.

This was pretty fun leaving too. I haven't seen this kind of road setup before. I needed to merge into the main road from a side road. The thing is, the side road was a 2-way street. It was a big game of "how did the chicken get to the other side?" Answer: By facing on coming traffic with a simple Stop-Yield sign.

Now for a complete change of direction.

I was sitting on the can today at work - couldn't hold it 'til I got home. And I was examining the toilet paper. What else are you supposed to do? There's only so much Staring-At-Wall I can take. You know how places that try to save money use that really crappy toilet paper? You know the kind that's thinner than hair and makes printer paper seem soft? Yeah, and then you end up reeling out the stuff so that you have enough paper that won't tear. To give my work office some credit, I think they went a little fancy on the TP. They had non-standard size sheets. They weren't square like most of the TP I've encountered in my life. I'd even dare to say that the individual sheets might even have been perforated to make rectangles with the golden ratio.

All of this, however, is background information. This leads me to my revelation. Why is toilet paper perforated into small sheets anyway? Do you use one sheet? If you do, I need to study on your wiping techniques - because I would surely end up dipping a finger through the TP. ... that's pretty sick actually... My first thought was, toilet paper designers should find the perfect length of toilet paper that can be folded into a sturdy wiping utility. But then, I brainstormed some more and thought: why don't toilet paper makers simply roll up pre-determined and researched wiping sheets. You could still keep it on a roll (to keep the essence of toilet paper) but make it so that each individual sheet is thick enough to withstand... pressure. But also make it the right size! Personally, my ideal sized TP is a square TP sheet folded in half. If the TP makers researched how to make the thinnest possible TP, I'm sure they could perform experiments on ideal TP size and thickness.

Too much information? ...your fault for reading it.

May you enjoy all the thinking time you have available to you!

Welcome to 2008!

It's too bad that I didn't finish my layout, tweaks, and additions until this morning. It would have been nice to have this post on 01.01.2008! I hope everyone welcoming the new year in style and with good cheer! First thing's first; as I'm sure you have noticed, the blog design has been updated! This took me a good day of interspersed work to complete. These were the things I accomplished:

• First and foremost: new banner and background!
• Updated CSS template to go with the updated graphics.
• Fixed an issue where line spacing would revert to no spacing after an image or list; This was a pain in the butt for readability since everything was scrunched together. I had been meaning to get it fixed, but never got around to it.
• All pictures now have opacity applied to it with mouse-over effect. Simple, but sleek.
• Incorporated Lokesh Dhakar's LightBox javascript so that images will appear in a popup preloader. I had always wanted to do this. Sometimes in previous posts I would make an image link appear in a new window, but I got lazy sometimes and it would simply load on the same page.

The first bullet point caused me a lot of distress. Wait, scratch that. It should not have caused me any stress. Rather: INTERNET FRICKIN EXPLORER caused me stress. The banner, as you can see (if you're using FireFox or IE7) is nice and transparent - 80% transparency. At first, I remembered that IE6 and prior had issues with alpha transparency (or opacity) of .PNGs. However, I needed the background to be completely transparent. A .gif would not do since it would be horrid trying to make the banner background (non-text) transparent. PNG it would have to be. So I set about setting the opacity of the image.

Great! Firefox worked! FAIL, Internet Explorer still rendered pure black.

So then, I made some modifications to the CSS and HTML. Great! Firefox worked! FAIL, I.E. had jaggies out the butt! Well, I'll give it just a teensy bit of credit; IE at least made the logo transparent. ...At the cost of the thing looking ugly as balls.

After much searching, I simply gave up. If you're still on IE6 or below, make the right choice and update your web browser to Firefox. If you insist on being a IE fan, I guess IE7 will have to do.
Don't get me started on the CSS Block and Float models... Still, despite how long it took, at least Internet Explorer is headed in the right direction.

That last bullet point took me the longest to do. Not because it was hard, but because I was dumb. I had done everything properly, but the image would not load in the LightBox. It would show the loading.gif image but image would never load. I tried all sorts of things. In the end it turned out that the automatically generated url path of the image when uploading to PicasaWeb by Blogger was a little off. Basically, all I had to do was change the image path from "../../s160-h/... .jpg" to "../../s160/... .jpg". Stupid '-h'. So basically, nothing was wrong with the lines of code. It was just a misdirected link.

So, with this new year, I have two Blogger-resolutions.

1. Post at least once a week. (This is more reasonable than my previous goal of 2 or 3 a week).
2. Keep up good formatting practices. Prior to this, I was too lazy and just left bad looking paragraph formatting as the browser tried to render it. Now, I'm going to try and make sure everything looks neat.

Onward to the main event!

So I found out that Picasa can integrate with Blogger now. So here it is, a guided-tour album of my entire holiday break. If you wish to see pictures of me, you'll have to message me in person. No way are those going public. Please don't turn off the comments since they provide valuable information into the album. Enjoy the full screen! (But don't click the 'X'!) Oh, and if it doesn't look like a slideshow, refresh the page. Sometimes the album and not the slideshow loads.