revanad

I am so very tired right now. Really, I've been feeling pretty tired and weird all week so far. I think part of it is due to staying up too late working on some attempts at starting a little programming project and continuing with not getting to work nearly as early as I'd like (and consequentially having to leave later). Tonight I'm not working on that, and feel pretty fail in general. I watched a video of a conference talk on social networking for developers by a programming blogger I follow and was convinced that I really need to start a programming blog now so I can talk about problems I have and solutions I find, etc. This of course led me to the insurmountable brick wall of A NAME for the blog. Also, I was going to make the blog on Blogger, but then thought "what if it eventually became popular, a Blogger blog isn't that great for that, I should have a blog hosted somewhere with its own URL". Argh, life is hard, etc.

I've been messing around with Google Chrome tonight, now that I switched it to the developer build instead of the release build. This is because the release build is completely unusable for me because it has no mouse wheel click scrolling! The horror! No one else seems to actually use this kind of scrolling except me though, which is strange considering it is so awesome.

Anyway, other than having a bit of a difficult time adjusting to the differences from Firefox (it seems I can almost click the Refresh button in Firefox without thinking, because I try to click it in Chrome and it's not there), I'm finding Chrome nice to use.

( More stuff about Chrome )

Tomorrow is Friday, and casual Friday and we're having catered Chinese food for lunch at work! I'm kind of excited about that, though I'm most excited about leaving work tomorrow. I'm looking forward to a fun weekend! I'll need to do some cleaning in my apartment though, I think....

As happy as I am that it's Daylight Savings Time now, this evening has me seriously confused. o_O

I think I need a new phone. My current phone's battery seems to be going to crap, as it was fully charged yesterday morning and then, after not using it all day, it ran out of battery in the middle of a conversation on the way home from work. There's too many options for what to get though. I feel like getting another "normal" phone now would be kind of stupid, because smart phones seem to be the next thing and it might be cool to get one of those. Of course, my current provider doesn't offer 3G I don't think, so... bahh, I don't know!

Edit: So today, I left the phone off all day, and it still cut off during a conversation!

Edit again: New $10 phone is ordered. I should be getting it Friday!

Driving home tonight, after getting off 66, I saw a stopped police car up ahead with its lights on. In the middle lane. Weirder still, upon passing it, I saw another car, also stopped in the middle land... facing the wrong way. Since the cop was in front of the car, it probably must have been stopped there already....

I was down in old town Alexandria on Saturday with my family, visiting stores and seeing the sights. At one point, while I was waiting around in a small shopping arcade, I heard some music playing from a short distance away. It sounded nice, but I didn't think much of it. Since I was waiting for my family to come out of stores, I decided to wander over and listen. When I got there... then I was surprised!

It turned out that the music was being played by one guy... on WINE GLASSES. He had a table with a large number of wine glasses of all sizes arrayed on it, each tied down tightly and filled with a certain amount of water. There were very large glasses on his left, and very small ones on his right. The songs he played sounded really good... he played as many as 6 of the glasses at the same time. I remember him playing, among other things, the Star Spangled Banner and set of Korean, Japanese and Chinese music including that Japanese traditional song Sakura.

It was amazing!

I wonder if people actually know the meaning of "terrorism" any more....

I was just reading an article that has this quote:

In a recent video clip from MSNBC, McCain asked a rally, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" In response to McCain's rhetorical question, a voice from the crowd can be clearly heard to shout in response, "Terrorist!"

Who is it here that is trying to make the public fear Obama by suggesting that there are dark secrets that he has hidden away? Is it ironic that a vague fear of "terrorists" is constantly being played upon as a means of influencing people politically here?

http://prope.sega.jp/letstap/

LET'S TAP
LET'S TAP
FUTURE
TAPPING
GAME

Wow, that was some serious rain to drive home in. Could hardly see.

Also, SPICED CIDER.

Here lies a long crappy post about Code Geass and its protagonist in which the point is probably not communicated very well but I'm tired and don't feel like editing it.

( CODE GEASS CODE GEASS CODE GEASS CODE GEASS CODE GEASS CODE GEASS CODE GEASS CODE GEASS CODE GEASS CODE GEASS (code geass) )

Well, my apartment finally has a TV again (thanks to Kevin for buying it)! It's a nice 42" flat screen. The TV console I got for it to go on totally wasn't the one I thought I was getting, but it's ok. It's set up with the TV mounted on a built in pole a few feet above the console itself, which is neat. I need to get the cable wire running through the pole so it's less unsightly, but I think I might need a longer piece of cable for that. Also, I got a sofa that will be delivered by the end of the week.

After getting that all set up today, I was able to hook up my laptop to the TV to watch the final episode of Code Geass R2 on a big screen! Unfortunately, I still can't figure out how to get the computer's sound to go through the TV. Anyway, final episode of Code Geass! The plot had lots of holes and issues all through the series, but it was such a grand series with such an incredibly magnificent bastard for a main character (see icon) that it couldn't help but be fun to watch. The last episode was a great and fitting end for the series, in my opinion. I'm sad it's over... no more Geass Sundays. =(

Stack Overflow just opened its public beta today (or rather, yesterday). I've been reading Jeff Atwood's blog Coding Horror for a while and had been interested in the concept, so I took a look around when I saw his announcement.

The goal of the site is to be a community managed repository of good answers to specific questions related to programming... to eventually eliminate having to find answers by sifting through tons of crap on various forums and other such sites. People ask questions, other people answer those questions. Both the questions and answers can be edited like a wiki to make everything as clear, understandable and correct as possible. And answers can be rated, so that eventually the best answers will be at the top and it will be easy to see what the community considers the best among all the other proposed solutions.

There seems to be a huge amount of activity on there, which is great. The reputation system whereby you get more and more powers on the site as you gain reputation from having your questions and/or answers up-voted seems like a good thing, even if it tends to encourage some people to throw up an answer that isn't really the best quickly in hopes of getting the first up-vote(s) or even getting the answer accepted for extra rep.

I was encouraged to get an account (or rather, use my existing Yahoo account as an OpenID) when I saw a question that I had a good answer too. My answer to that question has been rated up a couple times and got a couple comments of "great answer". That really made me *glee*... deep down, I'm a praise whore.

Anyway, I think this site has a ton of promise and I'm really excited about it. I hope to contribute to it and use it to find answers to my questions a lot in the future.

I guess I should preface this by saying that I built myself a new computer last week. It is awesome and I love it (two 24" monitors... *glee*). I'll probably post pictures and talk about building it later sometime... for now I'm still busy getting everything on it set up like I want.

Anyway, I got Windows Vista Ultimate (64-bit). Yesterday, I was thinking about symbolic links in Linux, which I knew you couldn't do in Windows XP (at least not fully), and I decided to do a google on them in Vista. What do you know, you can make symbolic links in Vista!

A symbolic link is in a lot of ways like a shortcut, except that when anything that works with the computer's file system encounters a shortcut, it treats it as a file (which it is), whereas a symbolic link is generally treated as actually being the thing it points to. A shortcut can let you open a directory somewhere else by double clicking on it, but a symbolic link can BE another directory, and nothing will know the difference.

The main reason, at the moment, that this is exciting to me is because my computer uses 2 hard drives... a super-fast 300 GB main hard drive that runs the operating system and programs, and a 1 TB normal-speed hard drive that I want to put as much data-type stuff as possible on (including documents, music, video, source code for programming projects, etc). It always bugged me that wanting to store those things on another drive or in a different way precluded the use of Windows' default user folders like Documents, Music, Pictures, etc.

What I can do now is create a folder on the secondary drive called Documents, delete the Documents folder on the primary drive, and create a symbolic link called Documents where the deleted folder was that points to the folder on the secondary drive. Everything that wants to save to the Documents folder will still think it's saving to C:\Users\colin\Documents, and navigating to that folder and opening documents in it will work just like normal. But the actual data will be where I want it!

Edit: It turns out that while this works for the other folders, the Documents folder doesn't like being deleted. It also turns out that there's another way of doing this without having to create symbolic links, which is to change the Location in the properties for each folder. Doing that caused some strange stuff, but it worked in general... plus I was able to point the folders from 2 different accounts to the same folders.

Now where did I put my crowbar....

WHAAAAAmbulance -> QQsha

Wow.

It's 9:40 PM and I'm at work. I've been having major frustrations figuring something out, and have no way of knowing whether it'll work or not until tomorrow, when at 9 AM I have to take a long-ass trip to another place to test it.

God I hate this week.

www.fantasticcontraption.com

This Flash game is really fun. It's a puzzle game involving using wheels and connectors to get an object or objects from a starting area to a goal area. I think the neatest thing is just the sheer variety of contraptions you can make from the few types of parts available. I haven't done a whole lot of them yet, and I've already made carts, a thing that swings an object, a sort of trebuchet-inspired thing, and my favorite yet: a conveyor belt/bridge (and its refinement).

DIABLO III!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Edit: Clearly not enough exclamation points yet.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So I got to work today and the parking lot was empty and the entrances to the building roped off. "No Power!" My supervisor didn't answer his cell phone either, so I'm taking this as an unexpected day off. Now that I'm home again, it would certainly suck to be told that the building is open and I should come back out there though.