Aaron's online journal

Fake Links

2005-12-09T10:37:00.000-06:00

Time for some promotion of stuff I'm working on:

T-Mac Streetball
mPulse Mobile

These link to jobs I'm working on, these are actually here so someplace on the web, there is a link to them, not so you guys can go check them out. So don't bother, they're no fun for you!

2005-11-29T15:22:00.000-06:00

Run 6
Dist: 3.5 m
Time: 0:45
Route

60 degrees(F). Overcast. Nice route with an odd mix of small and large houses. On the lake. I would guess this will be the last warm day this year.

New Blog - The Lazy Skeptic

2005-11-29T00:39:00.000-06:00

I've started a new blog, The Lazy Skeptic. I'm going to try and put out some simple news posts about what's going on in the world of skeptic investigation and reason a few times a week. Hope to see you there.

2005-11-25T13:43:00.000-06:00

Run 5
Dist: 5 m
Time: 1:00
Route

It was ~30 degrees(F) today. Chilly, but I was suprised how much I warmed up after a couple miles. Still need to buy better jogging sneakers.

2005-11-20T10:39:00.000-06:00

Run 4
Dist: 6.6 m
Time: 1:18
Route

I must learn how to tie my shoes. My right foot hurts now, maybe my show was too tight. Good run though, I'm still overdressing.

2005-11-16T15:41:00.000-06:00

Run 3
Dist: 2.5 m
Time: 0:45
Route

Snake Hill Rd seems to be the unofficial dumping ground for Ayer residents. Lots of old TVs and appliances.

2005-11-13T23:59:00.000-06:00

Run 2
Dist: 6.7 m
Time: 1:15
Route

Feel better after this one than the last one. Ran around Ayer, MA.

Road to the marathon - Run 1

2005-11-06T16:45:00.000-06:00

Run 1
Dist: 5.25 m
Time: 1 hour
Route

First jog in a long time. This should be a good winter project. Couple of blisters but i'm in for the next run.

Revolution Controller

2005-09-16T10:01:00.000-05:00

This is very interesting. It turns out to be nothing like what any of the speculations I saw.

Hard Drive Crash

2005-08-28T23:32:00.000-05:00

Big hard drive crash. I was able to save most of my files, but some are corrupt. Does anyone know how to salvage possibly corrupt Open Office docs?

Trash

2005-08-08T18:32:00.000-05:00

"Trash is a 3D RTS based in a post-apocalyptic future. The surviving humans, mutants, and intelligent machines are the three races battling for control of the primary resource: Trash."

Catapulting T-Shirts!

2005-08-03T19:56:00.000-05:00

This is funny. :)

Critical Mass, July 2005

2005-07-29T22:17:00.000-05:00

I joined in Critical Mass Chicago today. About 25 miles around Chicago with a couple thousand people on bikes is really fun. I recommend it to anyone with a bike. If you are on a bike, it's a friendly environment where everyone generally yells "Happy Friday"

Little Mass

Critical Mass!

Super Ride 01

2005-07-24T17:26:00.000-05:00

I Made the Super Ride. And it turned out to be longer than I thought it would be. I won't include the mileage here, you'll find out at the end of the story.

Here is the final map of the paths I took. Everything north of where is says "Loncolnwood" is the North Branch Trail. Everything on the lake is the Lakeshore Trail. Everything else is city streets.

My original plan was to just ride up and find the start of the trail. So a big part of my trip was just going up the streets. I found a great way up, nearly a straight shot is a street called Elston, which also happens to be almost all bike-friendly with dedicated (small) bike lanes. This was great and made the trip easy. For parts of this ride, I was beating the cars too. They get backed up at stop lights and when it turns green I'm at the head of the pack, even though some of them pass me, by the next light, they're stopped up again and I pull up to the front of a new pack.

I took it easy for the entire trip, knowing that if I were going to survive such a trip, I couldn't really push myself in any one part. Even so I was going about 20mph the whole way up. Maybe the cars made a nice draft for me or maybe I've gotten stronger.

This is the map at the base of the North Branch Trail. As I was checking out the map, a guy rode up and asked if I had ever ridden this before. I guess it was his first time on the trail too. We talked for a bit, his name was Dylan and he was going up to meet a friend and camp out or something. I guess he also fixes up bikes and sends them overseas for people without bikes. Seemed like a cool dude; I said I hoped to see him at the top, and I took off.

Soon after I got onto the trail, I noticed just how much it isn't like the other park or trail I've ridden in Chicago. It's semi-dense forest which occasionally breaks out to find a crosswalk over a major road. The whole trail had me ride by two golf courses.

This is a little more than half-way up the North Branch Trail. The sign quality is lacking. So far I've only seen about 20 people, which is very quite compared to the Lakeshore path. I've passed a lot of green spaces where there were people having BBQs or what-not. Looked like a couple big parties, and several smaller groups enjoying the parks.

I didn't really read the signs or maps, but I learned that I want to follow the red arrows. This pole is right next to the sign in the above photo.

The red arrows (or rather my lack of sign-reading) has led me astray. After riding on some crappy dirt road for 10 minutes it started to rain, I found my way to this place where I called Nathan to give a status report. He tried to help me find my way to the Botanic Gardens, I knew I was pretty close.

Looking at my situation later. I was in fact this close. You can see "Me" and "Botanic Gardens" in the map and a shear .4 miles between them. It the time I spent on the crappy dirt road, I could have found the Gardens and taken cover under their overhang instead of getting soaked. At the time though it was sort of fun to get stuck in the rain. It was an epic adventure after all.

I did find the Gardens after a while. But totally forgot to grab a picture of the front entrance. This I took on my way out. After I got there I pretty much turned around immediately, but before I left, Dylan and his friend came riding in! What timing. It was funny to see him again and this is actually where I first learned his name. Perhaps I'll see him again on the path someday. (I didn't get a picture of Dylan, I thought it would be weird to ask a stranger for such a thing.)

I got on the right path this time, and started making my way south. It doesn't look it here, but the rain has completely stopped. This is all mist that's rising off the path. It looked really nice.

When I stopped later up the road to take a picture, I noticed Nathan had called. I sent him a pic to confirm my status/mileage.

I still felt pretty good up to 60-65 miles. It was the last few miles after that where things started really hurting. My neck and legs really started to get sore. I was afraid to stop for too long lest my legs seize up or something. I also had to stay on the seat or else blood would wake up my butt and then that would start hurting too.

It was bitter-sweet to finally get home. I made my way into the shower pretty quick to get all the dirt and bugs. I tried to have some food but thought might throw up, so I settled for some water and went to bed. Good ride.

This is the next day. I'm surprised I can walk, in fact I'm not much worse for wear. I went about cleaning my bike and re-lubricating the working parts and generally finishing my ride chores. Here is proof of the final mileage. 74.35 miles! It was an awesome ride, and something I look forward to doing again.

The horses that did the work. Can I call legs "guns"?

---------------------------
For more photos, check out the photobucket page.
---------------------------

Super Ride

2005-07-22T22:17:00.000-05:00

I mapped out this ride, it follows two bike paths and ~30 miles one-way. I'd love to go for this one day. It starts at my place and ends at the Botanic Gardens in north Chicago. If I actually made the ride, there's no way I could actually enjoy the gardens and then make it back. 60 miles is a huge undertaking for me and the stop at the Gardens would have to be a refueling stop.

Super Ride

Revenge of the Sith: The Abridged Script

2005-07-21T21:34:00.000-05:00

              SAMUEL L. MOTHERFUCKING JACKSON
           Ian, you're under arrest for being
           a manipulative motherfucker.

                      IAN MCDIARMID
           I got a threshold, Jedi. I got a
           threshold for the abuse I'll take.
           And right now I'm a race car and you
           got me in the red. I'm just saying
           that it's fuckin' dangerous to have
           a racecar in the fuckin' red. It
           could blow.

Revenge of the Sith: The Abridged Script

Top 10 Web Fads

2005-07-21T17:08:00.000-05:00

A few golden oldies here. I got a big kick out of seeing Ellen Feiss again.

read more | digg story

What's the Deal With "Cat Ladies"?

2005-07-20T10:18:00.000-05:00

What's the Deal With "Cat Ladies"?: "A Virginia judge declared on Monday that 82-year-old Ruth Knueven is unfit to own pets, after animal-control officers seized her 488 cats."

Garry's Half-Life 2 Mod

2005-07-19T15:55:00.000-05:00

This is the best sandbox mod for HL2 I've seen. It's very easy to use and lets you build just about anything.

Garry's Half-Life 2 Mod

Lychee Drink

2005-07-18T09:59:00.000-05:00

"Refreshing? Pretends, then strikes"

:-)

Lychee Drink

Gmail Compose link

2005-07-12T07:30:00.000-05:00

I hacked up a bookmark to launch a gmail compose in a new window. Try it out.

Save the following link as a bookmark: Compose

Update:
I've improved the bookmark. Now if you have text selected, it'll add that text to the body of the new message.

Bookmark this new link for the extra functionality. Compose

Improv Everywhere

2005-07-11T07:12:00.000-05:00

"Improv Everywhere causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places. Created in August of 2001 by Charlie Todd, Improv Everywhere has excecuted over 40 missions involving over 100 undercover agents. The group is based in New York City."

Photos: Taste + Nextfest

2005-07-07T01:17:00.000-05:00

A couple weekends ago I went to the Taste of Chicago and the negatives the next day. I had my new camera phone with me and took many poor small pictures.

I didn't get to many pictures from the Taste, as it's sort of silly to take shots of people walking around eating food... So there are shots my friend Sonya and the park.

10 pics...

I took a lot more pictures at Nextfest where I hung out with Matt & Nerissa. There was a lot to see there. I'd say there were probably equal parts cool stuff and flim-flam. After Nextfest we went out to lunch and walked around Millennium Park, which is a lot nicer when there are people inhabiting the place.

92 pics...

セガトイズ「ニャーミー」 (robot cat)

2005-07-06T12:27:00.000-05:00

This is a creepy robot cat, Sera is much better.

Near Me

THE.SCENE

2005-07-06T02:19:00.000-05:00

Very good show, it's got everything a good drama needs. Lots of characters, intruiging story with lots of twists. I think it also captures a part of net communication in a way I've never seen before. Lots of movies have some bullshit stuff involving the internet, it looks like they don't do anything that's really not possible. For starters there is hardly any dialog, most of the show you're just watching a computer screen and the various conversations going on between the people involved. All in all, it's very smart.

THE.SCENE

Bikini-Clad lady falls through Bubbles

2005-07-04T23:58:00.000-05:00

This is astounding. Why have we used Shockwave for anything less!?

tetka.swf

(originally posted on Frank's blog)

20Q.net

2005-07-04T18:32:00.000-05:00

This is pretty cool.

20Q.net

And the scientific bearing is...?

2005-07-04T15:16:00.000-05:00

CNN.com - Astrologist sues NASA over crash - Jul 4, 2005: "MOSCOW, Russia (Reuters) -- A Russian astrologist who says NASA has altered her horoscope by crashing a spacecraft into a comet is suing the U.S. space agency for damages of $300 million, local media has reported."

Star Destroyer Built Before Your Eyes

2005-07-04T14:56:00.000-05:00

Slashdot: "'These people spent 10 hours constructing their very own Imperial II-class Star Destroyer from LEGO and capturing over 7000 frames of the process with their webcam."

SAD SAC

2005-07-03T15:33:00.000-05:00

I can't believe this isn't a joke. Support SAD-SAC today.

IDEA Awards

2005-07-03T13:58:00.000-05:00

Industrial Design Excellence Awards 2005. Some really neat stuff in here.

Link

Google Technology

2005-07-01T18:26:00.000-05:00

Now we can learn ways to subvert Google search engine.

Pigeon Rank

Upgrades

2005-06-28T17:19:00.000-05:00

I'm upgrading my computer today. I've got two shiny new sticks of Corsair 400MHz ram for a total of 1 GB. I've also got a shiny new Seagate 7200 rpm 200GB Barracuda.

First things first, some baseline benchmarks. Right now I'm downloading PCMark 05 and 3DMark 05. I'll run both of them shortly to get some baseline results. Then I'll replace the RAM and run both tests again. Later I'll replace (read: put OS on Barracuda and use old drive for backup) the harddrive and run both tests. The RAM goes first because it's so much easier to change out than a HD + software. I'll post the results when I get them, so check back.

Baseline
Click on a link to see the results at FutureMark.

PCMark 05
Total Score: 2381 PCMarks
HDD - General Usage: 4.01 MB/s

3DMark 05
Total Score: 2559 3DMarks

+ First upgrade: RAM 512 MB -> 1GB
PCMark 05 test 1
Total Score: 2372 PCMarks (99.6% of baseline)
HDD - General Usage: 2.46 MB/s (61.4% of baseline)

It's really weird how the HD dropped so much! I should have run two tests of the baseline config to get an average. Since there is such a discrepancy, I'll run the test again to see if the HD score changes.

PCMark 05 test 2
Total Score: 2422 PCMarks (101.7% of baseline)
HDD - General Usage: 4.01 MB/s (100% of baseline)

This is more what I expected. Which is to say marginal improvements. These tests are mostly CPU and HD intensive and there isn't a dedicated RAM test. It was odd how the first HD test was so off. This HD test matched the first one exactly and I'm happy to keep it as final.

The largest areas of improvement from the baseline were Web Page Rendering (1.39 Pages/s -> 1.6) and Multithreaded Test 3 / Memory Latency - Random Access 16 MB (5.8 MAccesses/s -> 6.35)

3DMark 05
Total Score: 2573 3DMarks (100.5% of baseline)

This was also fairly expected. I didn't notice one way or the other when I ran the baseline for this test, but this time, I did notice something nice. There was zero significant HD access during the tests. Only during loading, after that, it was nice and quite. Quite is something I'm not used to with my noisy IBM. It'll be even quieter once the new Barracuda is in. There were no note-worthy improvements in any particular section over the baseline.

I'm going to be swapping the HD soon. My predictions are thus. PCMark scores will improve by 10% - 20% over baseline. 3DMark scores will not improve any significant amount.

+ Second Upgrade - HD IBM Deskstar(80GB) -> Seagate Barracuda(200GB)
After a long night backing up files and swapping hard drives, the Barracuda is installed. All in all it was painless. Though everytime I make a hardware change like that, I half expect something to pop when I power up again. Seagate has some software that works wonders, probably similar to Norton Ghost. It duplicated the entire system onto the new hard drive. The whole process was fairly transparent, i.e. no reinstalling. I'm keeping the old hard drive in the box because... why not. I'll also keep all the old files on it for at least a while to make sure everything came over okay and un-corrupted. After a while, I may even roll it into a Linux boot drive, that would be fun.

PCMark 05
Total Score: 2474 PCMarks (103.9% of baseline)
HDD - General Usage: 5.58 MB/s (139.1% of baseline)

Not much of an overall improvement here, but the HD speed is faster by about 40%. One stat I havn't kept track of that has seen a 100% improvment is noise. That old Deskstar was like a dishwasher! This Barracuda is whisper quite and it's sort of weird not geting aural feedback when the HD is working, I'm sure I'll get used to it.

3DMark 05
Total Score: 2575 3DMarks (100.6% of baseline)

No real change here, as expected.

Final Results

The gains are not extreme in these examples. The true benefits will appear in more real-world examples. I'll be able to run more programs with less HD access to swap between them. HD access will be faster and quieter. Even though 3DMark didn't show significant improvement, real games will benefit quite a bit. Load times between and during levels will be reduced by a lot. That alone could be worth the upgrade costs. The 200GB capacity will mean I can delete less, which was hardly a problem before. I was fine with the 80GB, I can't imagine I'll ever fill up 200GB with what I do. I'll check in later after I've put the drive through it's paces.

King Kong

2005-06-27T22:58:00.000-05:00

Looks hot.

King Kong :: Large

Gotta Get My Stuff Done

2005-06-27T17:13:00.000-05:00

There is so much stuff to get done before I can really get my stuff done.

Link

Whatever: Cracking the Flag-Burning Amendment

2005-06-25T23:04:00.000-05:00

"The 13 red and white stripes represent the original 13 colonies of the United States -- but what's this? One of the stripes has gone flaming pink! Clearly it's the stripe for Massachusetts. But whichever former colony it represents, we don't salute the pink, white and blue. Use this one to mop up vomit after a Socialist Party USA beer bash!"

Originally posted on Frank's blog.

Whatever: Cracking the Flag-Burning Amendment

Nextfest

2005-06-25T20:51:00.000-05:00

Was fun. I'll post more pics later.

Gigapxl Project

2005-06-24T10:14:00.000-05:00

This is totally bad ass, a four billion pixel camera! This would be used for slightly ignoble purposes if I ever got one.

To consider: how many years till small handheld cameras can take a picture from half a mile away and capture your face without any problem!

Image Gallery

Sudoku

2005-06-09T04:12:00.000-05:00

Apperently, everyone is doing it.

Beginner's Problem of Sudoku

Monk 2025

2005-06-07T01:55:00.000-05:00

Monk of the future.

Not really, something about super-concentration. But is all that concentration any good if all you do is contemplate meaning?

Biology News Net: Biology - Meditation skills of Buddhist monks yield clues to brain's regulation of attention

Capital

2005-06-07T00:23:00.000-05:00

This is the PHP game I've been working on for the last half of my PHP class. It's not very functional right now, but Katie and I are going to keep building it and making it awesome. Keep checking in on it and I'll post about major developments.

Capital

Click Red

2005-06-05T10:12:00.000-05:00

Pwned Frank's score.

2005-06-03T17:54:00.000-05:00

WTF!? I just want to make a new screen name.

Featured Desktop 02

2005-05-29T22:58:00.000-05:00

A nice picture from a colleague at the paper.

Bike The Drive 05

2005-05-29T11:39:00.000-05:00

I participated in Bike-The-Drive this morning, a Chicago-Land annual cycling event where Lake Shore Drive is shut down between 5:30 am and ~10:30 am and instead opend up to bicycles. I was up around 6:30 and had a sandwich before heading out. First I had to hit the Festival and grab my rider number and free (read $35) t-shirt. I started the ride going north along Lake Shore Drive (3). It was fun to be riding on a 4 lane road with several thousand other riders. I wish I had my cyclometer, but it's still in the mail, so I'm not sure of my total time or average speed. The way up was fun; I could easily push up the hills and pass people. I always feel cheep, somehow, passing (seemingly) hardcore riders early in my trip. I just assume they must have already ridden a lot and are pacing themselves. I feel much better about passing people when I’m tired.

At the top of LSD, about 5400 N. (4), there was a turn-around point. I never noticed the hills while riding on the bike path, but once on the road, you can tell there are long shallow hills the whole way. After hitting the mid-way point, which is back at Buckingham fountain where I started (3), there is a little jog around some of the streets where the Festival is. I just skipped it and kept heading south. From the mid-point South was probably the most enjoyable part of the ride. I was feeling strong and going at a great pace. My legs were starting to burn a little bit, but if I just eased off it went away quick.

The hills are still very shallow, but a little steeper than going north, which turned out to be fun. If I had good momentum going into a hill, it's almost too easy to keep the speed going the whole time up. On some of the hills, I was zooming by the other riders. Actually, I'd say I was passing about 99% of the people out there. A couple small groups of riders cruised by me and this one crazy dude on a mountain bike was hauling ass. His tires where so loud I heard him 30 feet back. He was the first person to pass me in a while and I got inspired, so I pushed to catch up with him and when I did, I was going fast enough I just cruised by. Then he just drafted me up half the big hill we were on and I eventually couldn't keep the pace, so crazy mountain bike dude, took the lead again and disappeared.

The second turn-around point is the Museum of Science and Industry (5) at about 57th Street. You sort of ride though the museum cul-de-sac and there are a bunch of tables with free bagels and Gatorade and stuff. Lots of people were chilling on the lawn. Again I didn’t even get off the bike, just cruised by and started going north again. The temporary slowdown in pace was enough of a rest for making the trip back north without any trouble, which was made sort of easy because it felt mostly downhill.

I passed a dude with a tricked out bike. All blinged out, and a radio mounted up front playing tunes. Speaking of music, there where are couple times I passed people playing beats on the side of the road. The first time was going north, I passed under a pedway where a bunch of people were playing bongos and waving. The second time was going south where a small group with an accordion and guitar were doing something.

Getting back to the Festival (6) happened faster than I though it would. I did stop at this point, grabbed a free bagel and walked around the party a little bit. After about 10 minutes I started to head home but I remembered hearing something about the Bean being partially uncovered, so I went to check it out (8).

Rode back home… Now I’m just waiting for my legs to get sore. It was a great ride and I’d do it again next year if the opportunity presented itself.

The ride was approximately 32 miles.

Update (10:52 PM):

That ride must have done a number on me. I was falling asleep all day right while working on stuff. I kept waking up in the chair or on the couch. It was nuts, I'd wake up long enough to think, "this couch is sort of uncomfortable", then I'd fall asleep again. Oh well, I'd do it again. :-)

Reboot

2005-05-27T14:02:00.000-05:00

I hate these things.

Featured Car 01

2005-05-23T21:24:00.000-05:00

1998 Nissan Silvia S14. Class: D1. 225hp 206 ft-lbs. Curb Weight: 2,859 lbs.

0 to 60 mph: 6.6 s
0 to 100 mph: 16.4 s
Top Speed: 141.3 mph

Driven 221.06 mi to date.

I love this car, it was my first purchase when I started the game and I still use it up in the endurance races. It's only power upgrade is a modified exahust that give an extra 5hp. Otherwise it would get bumped into the next class up. Stock weight and tires. It has some new aerodynamics and suspension.

It's a great Class D car and easily handles all the Career class D races. As long as I keep the car from slipping in the turns, there's a ton of speed for the class. With the added downforce, I can take sweeping corners at very good speeds.

The paint scheme has gone through a couple iterations. Right now it's a base of beige with green hilights. Featuring the number 01 for my first car and green lines. It also bears a green Knight chesspiece on the hood and rear bumper. It's not my most extreme design, but probably my favorite right now.

Firefly

2005-05-20T18:12:00.000-05:00

Just saw the first episode I've ever seen of the firefly series. It was really good! It's great to see good sci-fi that's actually modern. Looking forward to the rest of the episodes and then the movie.

Work

2005-05-20T13:15:00.000-05:00

Chair Comfort: 5. Blanket Comfort + 2.

Breakfast

2005-05-20T09:34:00.000-05:00

Yum.

New bike

2005-05-17T23:00:00.000-05:00

My Trek was stolen recently, right from the middle of downtown. Big suck. Since I can't go without a bike, I picked up this beauty recently, with a very big lock. I'm not used to a road bike's raw speed, and I can't wait to get a cyclocomputer on it to really test myself. I'm sure I've been well over 80 mph. It really is a lot of fun to ride, I'm looking forward to longer rides when I have less to do.

Got a new bike, Specialized Allez Sport. It's crazy fast.

Another view.

Close up.

Featured Desktop 01

2005-05-17T16:47:00.000-05:00

A Ferrari from PGR3.

Picture testing...

2005-05-17T16:42:00.000-05:00

Just testing the image posting system. This is a new mustang I saw parked out front one day. First of the 05s I've seen in public.

Raiders Adaptation

2005-05-13T23:34:00.000-05:00

I just got back from Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Adaptation. It was amazing. It's hard to even start going into how clever the whole project was. The movie was a great time even at a relatively steep $10. I laughed a lot more than any comedy I've ever seen.

Big projects

2005-05-02T19:51:00.000-05:00

I've got three major projects I'm working on, two of them have a deadline in 4 weeks. I'll break it down.

-Columbia Chronicle new site design.
This is a big one, and it needs a lot of grunt work. You can check out the new site here.

-PHP Final Project.
Class final project, going to be designing a large online multiplayer game that runs in a web browser. I'll keep this page updated with info as that project progresses.

-Freelance.
Got a freelance job doing stuff I'm familiar with, just more work that I had planned on doing while I had so much other work to do as well.

The plan is to get everything done in a stellar fashion.

Trains will pwn you.

2005-04-26T18:55:00.000-05:00

Peace to those hurt by the Japanese rail crash.

Beautiful day in the neighborhood

2005-04-05T07:54:00.000-05:00

It's a meeting of two facts. It's warm outside. I don't have some huge project due tomorrow (or if I do, I certainly don't know anything about it yet.) I'm going for some bike-rides, while I contemplate how Blogger and Google have such cool rich-text web interface tools.

I've been adding stuff to Wikipedia more often lately. I've started four articles so far, none of them real big, but someone may come along and add to them.

Now that the bulk of my school work is quelled for at least a few days, I can start really getting some work done for the new Chronicle site.

Hoooer!

First week back

2005-02-21T03:47:00.000-06:00

The first week back to school just came to a close, and I feel like I've done more in one week than any given 4 from last semester. I went to the One-Man Star Wars show, droped and added classes, went to a job fair, went to the Chicago Auto-Show, went to some seminars, went to a luncheon and awards ceremony, went to Dear Friends (an orchestral concert), and worked my ass off on the newspaper website. If I were this productive every week... I'd probably be awesome by now.

And I just cut myself.

Two new games

2004-11-22T20:02:00.000-06:00

Between Halo 2 and Half-Life 2, things are pretty good, and I mean, when placed seperatly, and one stands in between, goodness can't help but enter the scenario.

I got to hold a Nintendo DS today. Initial reactions... I really like it, feels sexy, looks sexy, not sure about how well it plays games yet, only looked at the intro screens. It's fairly expensive, but I might have to indulge if it drops in price. Could be great fun since it has wireless gaming ability.

I think I'll add it to my Amazon wish-list, in case anyone actually checks that thing.

Promotion

2004-10-26T14:46:00.000-05:00

Looks like I've been promoted to lead Webmaster at the Chronicle. Should be interesting.

Santa Fe: Super Chief

2004-10-22T13:13:00.000-05:00

Today I added a new car to my expanding Lego Train collection. I already have the engine to the Santa Fe, and now I have a second car, currently being used as a cabus or some kind of breakfast car. The car has two other versions, that's three full sets of building instructions. It also added a healthy number of bricks to my collection, mostly grey.

The $300 Star Wars Star Destroyer keeps teasing me whenever I go in that store. It's probably a good thing I couldn't manage it on the bike ride home from the Lego store. The allure of getting the largest Lego set ever made is a strong one, and it would provide an incredible number of bricks for future Brick Wars games or other lego projects. Lots of mini-figs too! I have been holding myself over with small sets like the little buggy shown in the picture. I think several more of that type of set is in order.

Annoying Commercials

2004-10-11T01:18:00.000-05:00

I see a lot of annoying commercials on these days. There are a few categories of dumb gimmicks that just get used over and over again. I present them in three easy categories so you can identify them easily.

They are, the Repeaters, the Headcrabs, and the Barneys.

The Repeaters are by far the most annoying, since they just kick you in the face till you're bleeding. A lot of ads do this, from PETA to Presidential campaigns. You can immediately recognize them, because they contain anywhere from 4 to 80 people all repeating each other nearly word for word. I recently saw a Suzuki ad using this technique. Three people in a row all said the same thing, then a fourth laughed about something, and now I'm supposed to buy a fucking Suzuki!? I think of a repeater ad as something like a jackhammer for the ears. In case you were not leaking the second time they said the same thing, you will be by the 7th.

The next two are benign, they're not really annoying, just silly and over used. The Headcrabs (named after the cute little guys that turn you into a zombie, from Half-Life) are the commercials that have shit floating over peoples heads, these are pretty easy to spot too. They were cool the first time they came out, but now several products are using these and it's getting cliche. Some examples of these ads are Verizon, Earthlink, and now some pill about cholesterol. They involve people that are either in the right (and have shit glued above their head) or are wrong/ignorant (lack of shit.) They're not really annoying, just silly. I think Earthlink started the trend, and they even have the class to make fun of it now in one of their recent commercials, where the woman which the hovering Earthlink logo calls it a "marketing gimmick."

Also harmless, but silly, is the Barneys, named after the famous purple dinosaur, these commercials involve people dressed in goofy costumes. There are a ton of these on TV today, from car ads to alcohol. It even seems popular to have them dressed in cheep looking suits! I don't think I really need to say much about these. You can decide for yourself if you like them or not.

These are really the major annoying groups of commercials out there. There are of course other annoying commercials, they just don't fit into these catagories.

Of course, there are a lot of top quality commercials out there as well. I'd say Geiko just keeps putting out funny and quality ads. There parody series is great! They always catch me off guard when I first see them air, but it's good to see them making fun of pop culture these days. Like their reality TV spoof ad. I also enjoy the Carrot-Top ads. They all say the same thing, but somehow they're entertaining.

~Aaron