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I have thought of the best super power ever conceived by man! Presenting...
With the awesome power to make the probability of any event occurring equal to 1!
It may not sound like an awesome power, but just think of all the possibilities! Want to walk through walls? Make it 100% guaranteed that your atoms would pass through solid objects! Need to fly up into the air? Set the probability that you spontaneously grow wings equal to 1! With this power, you could make ANY seemingly impossible event happen, JUST BY SAYING IT WILL!
I'll admit my knowledge of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is rather limited, but what I DO know of it makes my super power possible. If it's not, let me know how and I will promptly eat my (proverbial) hat!
EDIT: Dammit, I was thinking of Schrodinger, not Heisenberg. Oh well :/
Last night was another one those nights.
I went outside to lock up the cars for the night. A regular routine on a regular evening.
The truck was locked. I paused.
Something was...amiss...
...
It took me a moment to register what exactly it was that felt "off". It was everything! Everything was off. Nothing stirred in the dark, aside from the chirping of nocturnal insects. It was only midnight, but I couldn't see any of the regular vehicular or foot traffic that I would have expected to be out and about. A few cars snuck by on the nearby cross-street, but otherwise it seemed as though everyone had been swept off the face of the planet.
It would have been eerie if I hadn't been enjoying the silence.
...
Only six days before I leave?
Fuck.
I don't have much to say here, other than LOOK AT ALL THE PRETTY COLORS! After far too many months of white, black, and brown, I've decided to go with something a bit easier on the eyes. With some help from Jonas and Gelo, I was able to find a color scheme of blue with green accents that I thought would be easy on the eyes and a layout that was simple enough so as to not overwhelm the rest of the posts.
Speaking of posts, the layout of each has changed a bit. As you've seen, the title, date, comments link, and tags are all located at the top of each post. It's an unorthodox layout, but I like having everything consolidated at the top because it means less moving of the page and mouse to comment on something I've written.
And in honor of the fact that I'll be in Japan for a year, I've included the name of this blog in Katakana so that if any of my foreign friends make their way here, they'll have an idea of how to say it!
That's it for now. Posts may be sparse now, but once I leave for Japan on July 2nd, expect lots of new material!
Oh, that reminds me! To entice readers to read my blog, I've been advised that my posts should have some kind of hook, a unique angle that will set them apart from the many other "LOOK AT ME I'M IN JAPAN" blogs. That's why I'm inviting you, loyal readers, to throw some ideas my way as to how I should present new posts. Do you want me to focus on technology? The Tokoy nightlife? Japanese culinary culture? So long as its legal, I'll do my best to provide all of you with interesting tales and pictures that follow the themes you send my way. Help me give you something interesting to read; pitch me an idea!
Well, the school year's officially over. All that's left now is to pack and go home. The reprieve will be short, however, as on July 2nd I head off to Japan for a year-long study abroad! Exciting, huh?
In preparation for my upcoming adventure, I'll be revamping this blog. At the very least, I'll make some cosmetic changes and revamp the picture gallery; at the most, I'll switch out this old system for an entirely new one. I haven't decided which path I'll take, I guess you'll all just have to wait and find out!
That's all for now. Have a good weekend : )
I indulged in a gluttony of technology purchases within the last week. Last Friday, I picked up a Casio Exilim Z1080 digital camera for the low, low price of $195; I bought Mario Kart for the Wii on Saturday for $53; and today, I bought a 160GB Western Digital Passport drive for $75.
It's all justified, though; the camera's for my trip Japan (it's got image stabilization! I have a hard time holding a camera perfectly still for 1/600 of a second and I'll be damned if I come back from Japan with a bunch of blurred images), Mario Kart is fun, and the Passport drive will probably replace my current Passport drive, which will then keep all my important files at home while I'm away on my study abroad in Tokyo.
Gotta be prepared! ; )
I've discovered recently that I get a lot more work done when I listen to music through headphones. Just having the music playing out loud isn't enough; for whatever reason, I'm able to focus better when it's pumped directly into my ears. Go figure.
Work on WormholeFTP will continue tomorrow or Friday. Bugs keep coming in via friends on MSN, so the list of fixes keep growing. Right now, I need to fix a file size bug that crashes the program when files over 100MB are uploaded, and figure out how to handle Passive FTP connections. On top of that, I'm reworking the UI to allow for multiple upload locations to be configured and accessed.
This will be the weekend for advertising, too. The support framework is up, the EXE is in a stable, working condition, the price is right...Download.com and the SH/SC thread on SomethingAwful will be my primary targets for spreading the word and gaining widespread adoption!
Also Iron Man on Friday...that is all.
P.S. Yahtzee's updates on Wednesdays have me salivating like one of Pavlov's dogs
Sometime in the next week or so, I'll have an announcement so big it'll knock your socks off! I don't want to say anything more now, but if you just hang in there I'm sure you won't be disappointed :)
My new Vostro 1500 came in on Friday, four or five days before it's estimated arrival date. I really need to get into the habit of including pictures when I review, so I'll leave the lengthy discussion of the pros and cons of the system for when I'm not smack-dab in the middle of scholarship essays. Suffice to say it kicks a lot of ass.
Parting Note: This makes me sad. Just as I'm getting ready to go to Japan, the dollar has to drop like a mafia informant who sold out to the police...
Just a quick heads up, for the next week or so I'll be permanently AFK. I sold both my tower and my laptop to finance some new technology for Japan, and they just so happened to sell within three days of each other; the tower's gone out the door, and I'm typing this up on the recently formatted laptop that's due to go out in the mail tomorrow.
On the plus side, I have a shiny new Vostro 1500 being built for me by the "wonderful" employees working for Dell. Last I checked, the estimated ship date is the 29th of this month; with three-to-five day shipping, I'll probably be back up and running by next Monday.
Until then, it's lots of reading and face time with my DS. See you all in a week!
P.S. Autistic Mode has nothing to do with autism; it's a term used in Ghost in the Shell to indicate that someone has turned of wireless communications in their cyberbrain.
The annual UC Riverside HEAT concert went on yesterday night. Now, I'm not too keen for the concerts held here because a lot of bands playing are of the rap or R&B variety, and I just don't enjoy that type of music. This year's concert was very kind to me, though. This year, Moby came to UC Riverside and he ROCKED...THE...HOUSE.
Moby is a DJ who specializes in techno, house, and electronica music (don't ask me the difference between the three, I can hardly tell). Seeing him live in-concert is like talking tech with Bill Gates or Linus Torvalds, cooking alongside Emeril Lagasse, or doing some reps alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger. I had an entire hour and a half to rave it up to some of the best DJ'ing I'd heard in a while, and I took advantage of it.
Surprisingly, I heard none of the material I'd heard before; it was refreshing to see that he didn't fall back on the songs he's famous for and can keep his mixes interesting and unpredictable. And to think I wanted to stay home!
BTW, Richard Melville Hall was nicknamed Moby shortly after birth in honor of his great-great-great-great uncle Herman Melville (author of Moby Dick). Don't believe me? [CITATION SUPPLIED]
No tech post this week. Instead, I've been quite busy these last few weeks taking care of some important paperwork for EAP and trying to find time to get a new application of mine online to sell and pull in some side-income. The aforementioned paperwork has been submitted, so that leaves the whole online commerce affair to sort out.
The hardest part of the site, the secure downloader system, is 90% complete; now I just have to figure out how to automate purchases to allow people to download my program as soon as they purchase it. Luckily, PayPal has a system in-place that allows me to verify purchases. Once I receive notification of a successful order, my system will place the order into my download system and offer the purchaser an opportunity to download the program right away. Quick and painless, and most of all completely automated!
Yeah, so that's it. More updates as they develop!
I finally figured out a round-about way of disabling FKCEditor plugins based on the page the editor is being used on. As I mentioned earlier, I installed an autosave function that will preserve my new posts until I post them onto the front page; the problem I was having was that if I wanted to edit an existing post, the AutoSave would save that post's content over the saved new-post's content. What I needed to do was disable the auto-save script on the Edit Post page.
It turned out to be a fairly easy solution. Basically, I grab a GET variable related to the current page's function from the page's URL and load the AutoSave only when that variable is set to a specific value. On any other page (i.e. the Edit Post page), the auto-saver is not loaded. In the case of this blog, it was a rather small bit of code:
var windowCode = parent.window.location.href.split('specific_GET_variable=')[1] .split("&")[0]; //(multi-lined because it broke the layout) if(windowCode == 1) { //Load Plugin }
I have to call parent.window because FCKEditor is loaded into a frame. I also learned that if I want to grab the current page's URL as a string, I need to call window.location.href as opposed to simply calling window.location; window.location is an object, and it contains much more information than just the URL. After grabbing the URL, I split the string into an array using the GET variable I want to read as the point where I want the string divided into separate array elements. Then, I perform another split on the second element of the first array. The second split is performed to single out any other GET variables that may appear in the page's URL. I can then grab the value of the desired GET variable, which is stored in the first array element of the second split.
It's a simple yet elegant solution, if I do say so myself :P
Forums are great. BBCode in forum posts is great. BBCode in a blog backend is not so great. For almost a year, I've used a from-scratch BBCode system as the primary means of formatting the many posts I make here *cough cough*.
In any case, FCKEditor will now handle all the backend post composition. I came across this free rich-text editor at work during brainstorming of a new CMS system. The project flopped, but I learned a lot about how the editor works and decided that it was exactly what I needed to add some much-needed power to the whole posting process.
FCKEditor has it's fair share of plugins, including one I installed that functions as an AJAX auto-save system. Now, every 30 seconds (or whenever I hit the save button), whatever I've written in the FCKEditor window is backed up to a database and restored next time I pull up the "Create a New Post" page. This feature addresses one of the issues I had with writing posts, namely the fact that I didn't have a lot of time to devote to sitting down and writing these. Now, I can work on a post in parts and continue whenever I have a free moment. My upcoming year-long trip to Japan motivated this upgrade, as I wanted everything to be ridiculously simple for me to use when I'm abroad; I'd rather spend my time seeing the sites than spending a large amount of time writing new posts or trying to figure out why my BBCode interpreter is freaking out.
Speaking of freaking out, I'm going to tweak the CSS so that posts work a bit cleaner with the new editor; if you go back to a post before this one and the formatting looks all off, you now know why.
And before I forget, a belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all!
Will and I went bike riding again yesterday, this time around the quite mountainous areas of San Marcos, California. I, being the ambitious and most gung-ho of the two of us, decided that the best place for the both of us to start would be a monster hill leading into the back roads of the city. I mean, it didn't look that bad from the bottom and hey, there really isn't anywhere around here that ISN'T hills...
What I failed to take into account was the fact that neither of us had really gone on any long-distance bike trips in over two months. Long story short (and to get to the best part of the entire ride) we both made it to the top, all two miles or so up, when we both said "screw it" and proceeded to head down the hill. Well, Will headed down the hill, and I sort of just threw caution to the (rather biting) wind and cannonballed it down.
36 Miles per hour. On a bike that weighs no more than 25 pounds. Man, it was one of the single most craziest moments of my life, a mix between "oh-shit-shit-please-don't-hit-a-bump" and "fuck yeah, just a bit more and-oh, there we go, broke my record!" Before yesterday, the fastest I'd managed to go was 34.5 mph, and I know I could've gone faster yesterday if I wasn't wearing a sweatshirt during my descent.
But that's a record to be beaten on another day.
Also, grades came in, two A-'s and two A+'s...one more quarter conquered and thrown onto the pile. Bring on Winter quarter!
And lastly, The Grand List Of Console Role Playing Game Clichés. My personal favorites are 183 (and it's corollary, 184) and 190.
Man, this week has been one of the worst weeks in terms of free time. Why were my leisure hours in such small supply? Here's what happened in the last 7 days:
- I spent last weekend studying for a chapter test for Japanese class; I took that test on Monday and received an 87% (not my best but also not bad considering the fact that I neither took nor used [much] Japanese over summer).
- I had a midterm in Psychology yesterday that I studied for from Monday till Thursday. This involved catching up on the reading and defining a list of over 70 key terms...well, I managed to narrow it down to 60 or so, since some of the terms were pretty obvious (*DUR* WHAT IS AN INDEPENDENT VARIABLE? *DUR*).
Well, that was basically it. I'll spend today and tomorrow studying for an Entomology midterm on Monday, but after that I'm home free for the next week or so!
My birthday's coming up on Sunday the 21st, and I must say I'm looking forward to it. No more will I be a "teenager", for I will have transcended into the roaring 20's! I managed to get a bunch of friends together and we're going to go celebrate at Raxx, a restaurant that has some of the best ribs I've ever had, putting it into direct conflict with Tony Roma's and vying for second seat as my favorite restaurant right behind D.Z. Akins in San Diego.
My Golden Sun collection is now complete (again) after purchasing another copy of the first and arguably best line of fantasy RPGs for the Gameboy. It's sequel, The Lost Age, surpasses the original Golden Sun on so many fronts; that's not to say that one should start with the second, since The Lost Age continues the story from Golden Sun. I think I'll play through it again over the next week or so, for old-times sake.
The Orange Box launched! It is AWESOME! Portal had one hell of a twist, Episode 2 answered a couple questions while raising a few more, and Team Fortress 2 rocks my proverbial socks! Here are some score tables from a few games I played a couple days ago:

I used to hate Pyros, until I figured out hot to kick ass with them B)

Nothing like a medic with ubercharge and a heavy with a fully-loaded chaingun to take down three fully-upgraded turrets; CRY SOME MORE indeed!
Annnnnnd I'm spent; now where did I put my DS...?
College is starting back up. Sophomore year...wow, it's already my second year? My, how time flies!
I moved in to my new dorm last Monday; it's set up to be more like an apartment then a true dorm, which means I get my own room! I share the apartment with three other guys, two of whom I know from last year and one new guy I'd never met before. Everything's worked out so far, and hopefully we'll all be able to live without incident; a year is a long time for something to NOT go horribly, horribly wrong!
I've decided to take up cycling. After a summer spent pedaling back and forth from work, I grew quite attached to my bicycle; as a result, I've decided to practice and improve my stamina for some long-distance riding. Will, of Wolfram Studios fame, and I biked over 60 miles in two runs; our first run together clocked in at exactly 25 miles, while our second run took us on an interesting 37.5 mile run of the nearby back roads of North County. I completed another 20.5 miles yesterday; to my dismay, my right knee started acting up the ride! I'll have to take it easy for a couple days and see if it'll mend on its own.
Work on my new super secret project is going very well. I can't divulge any of the juicy details until I get closer to release, but suffice to say that it will contain a large degree of social networking.
Classes start in three days...I need to bone up on my Japanese! Of all the classes I'm taking, Japanese worries me the most; I hardly used it over summer, so I'm sure there will be a lot of stuff I've forgotten.
Aye, so much to do, so little time to do it in.
I'm in Colorado for the next two weeks, visiting family. You'd think posts would become more frequent now that I have a bit of free time...huh, funny how they don't.
More in a few!
First off, thanks to EER for taking the time to write about his (disconcerting) experience with 3D Mailbox. We all know I'm terrible at writing anything, or, when I DO write something, keeping with the technical theme I'd set out to follow all those months ago.
Ugh, this is frustrating. As I write this, I'm waiting for three other tabs to finish loading other Unleashed Creativity pages. For the last month or so, the site has gone through a few too many intermittent periods of slow or non-responsive navigation; I've narrowed the problem down to a MySQL database problem, although I doubt its something as simple as that: when the site fails to fully load, I can see the Tags and Last 10 Entries, but the main content (the actual posts or admin section) fail to appear on the screen. The page will continue to show as "Loading..." in Firefox until I close the page.
I've contacted my host about the problem, and they're looking into the cause. Hopefully, I'll hear something back from them early next week.
And yeah, that's pretty much it; I could tell you I've been doing since school got out, but to be honest, I wouldn't even want to read about it...it's been that boring, sadly.
In any case, stay tuned; I'll find something to write about in the next couple days, I promise!
A week has passed, and the adventurer pauses to get his bearings.
He looks down, and is pleased to see the progress he's made during his ascent of Mount Finals. The old man at the base of the mountain was a strange fellow and the first challenge; he spoke of nothing but double-declining balances and warranty liability and would not let the adventurer pass unless he answered the stranger's questions...
That was behind him, though; if he hoped to reach the top in time, he would need to face forward and focus on navigating the unknown and unforgiving terrain.
He tightens his safety line and climbs ever higher, every step bringing him closer and closer towards the sound of the taiko drums...
Week 10 has but started, and already Finals Week billows on the horizon, glistening banks of onyx against a sapphire sky. The brave adventurer pushes on, intent on completing his task by week's end. He knows he will have to venture into the unforgiving storm, but he fears it not, for he has worked too long and too hard to be turned down by something so trivial.
He adjusts his hat and continues up the mountain...
There are only a couple things more annoying than not being able to remember where you put something, especially if it was less than 12 hours since you had that something in your hands.
Take my keys.
After going out with some friends for a Saturday evening of food and fun, I returned back to the dorm and partook in some Super Smash Bros. Melee with a couple more friends. I know for a fact I had my keys with me then, because I used them to open the file cabinet that houses my more expensive goods (several hundred dollars of software, blank checks, and my Gamecube games and gear). I brought my keys with me when I went to play SSBM, and afterwards I grabbed them on my way back down.
This is where the "fuzzy" part of my mind kicks in and I can't remember 100% what I did with my keys. I know I made it back to my dorm room with them, and I remember using them to open the locked file cabinet again, but after that I don't have any idea what I did with them.
I scoured my room for them, looked in all the usual places, but still no keys...my dad's coming up tomorrow with some bolt cutters and a new lock, and probably a slap upside the head for being such a bonehead, so after we have lunch I'll find out for sure if my keys are in there.
In other more pleasant news, Starcraft 2 has been announced, and after watching all three gameplay trailers and the cinematic trailer (btw, Blizzard, how hard is it to offer up files for HTTP download, eh? I'm sick and tired of torrenting everything), I have to say I'm very "meh" about the whole thing. I've never really been much of an RTS guy, so I see a game like Starcraft and think, "wow, those are some pretty awesome graphics"...I'll try to get into it like I do with most RTS, but I'm just not sure I'll find the fun in this that many people who can handle micro-micro-management games will find.
I WILL, however, derive great pleasure from the new Super Smash Bros. Game that's coming out for the Wii. Super Smash Bros. Brawl promises new characters, levels, and items while retaining the familiar Gamecube control scheme we've all come to love. Nintendo announced its decision a year ago, as quoted from Joystiq's article back on May 10th, 2006:
Quote:
Life
Medium: Bits on Glass Platter(Matt, 2006)
Pure Nerd78 % Nerd, 39% Geek, 13% Dork
So Angry and I squared off in Jaykon Bacon: Source today at approximately 5:00pm PST, and boy, what a hectic hour and a half it was. We were neck-and-neck every step of the way, and we each had an opportunity to pull a win out from all the sneaking and sniping.
Round 1: Deathmatch
Winner: Angry
The first round was played in the eternally dark map hl2jks_svm_assault. Angry won this round, but not after getting spanked by me in the first 10 minutes. Once we figured out each other's tactics, though, the game's intensity increased and we were constantly at each other's throats. He'd snipe me, I'm obliterate him with my heavy machine gun, and he'd come back around with his insane-range-shot gun. He laid the final blow with a sniper from the opposite corner of the map.
Round 2: Deathmatch
Winner: Matt
The second round was played on the sunny-day map hl2jks_svm_aztec. This time around, Angry got the lead, but the real excitement was at the middle of the round. The map broke and started spawning us in the exact same area each time we died. Needless to say, we spent a good 5 minutes racking up seven or eight kills each. I laid the final twentieth blow with my trusty heavy machine gun, and it was off to round three!
Round 3: Snake V. Monkey
Winner: N/A
The last round was a game of Snake Versus Monkey. Basically, it was a game of keep-away with explosives and cardboard boxes. But these weren't your average boxes, no, these were cardboard boxes that made you invisible if you crouched under them. The goal of the game was for the snake to steal a pile of stuffed turtles. Don't ask me why, that's just how it works. Anyway, Angry admitted to being paranoid several times during this round, and I couldn't blame him: when your enemy can turn invisible and run faster than you, you have to be paranoid. Each role was well-balanced, though, with the Snake having a silenced pistol, flashbangs and the hide-box, and the Monkey armed with an SMG, sniper rifle, pistol, and several types of explosives. We were both convinced that this mode of play would be more fun with more Monkeys and Snakes, but we'll see where that goes :D
All in all, trash was talked on both sides, and in the end...I ultimately came out the winner, with my FIRST win yesterday ;)
Final Score: Matt 1 (1), Angry 1
[EDIT] Apparently, Angry has no sense of humor, so I modified the score to make him happy :P