| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Cookie Monster | ||||
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You know you’ve “made it” when Cookie Monster comes on your show… 😉
This is pretty funny, and fun to watch characters from my childhood interacting with characters from my adulthood…which is kinda surreal, really… Anyway, enjoy!
(…speaking of childhood…I was born 26 years ago…I’m old…)
Edit: See, I didn’t know this…but besides my birth, June 20th also marks when the patent for Morse Code was issued…fascinating…
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Cookie Monster | ||||
|
||||
You know you’ve “made it” when Cookie Monster comes on your show… 😉
This is pretty funny, and fun to watch characters from my childhood interacting with characters from my adulthood…which is kinda surreal, really… Anyway, enjoy!
(…speaking of childhood…I was born 26 years ago…I’m old…)
Edit: See, I didn’t know this…but besides my birth, June 20th also marks when the patent for Morse Code was issued…fascinating…
Wow, two posts in a day…after a drought of a few weeks… What’s the world coming to?
Penny Arcade had a nice comic up today, referencing Spore, a new game from the creator of Sim City, Will Wright, to be released later this year. I remember Stu bringing this game up a few years ago when its development was in infancy, but it’s finally coming together.
The idea is pretty straightforward: you design/create your own organism (and environment?) and watch it evolve through the millenia. As in, you can start it from the single-cell stage and watch it grow into an intergalactic powerhouse. It will be Windows and OS X compatible, but I thought I heard it would be coming to the Wii/360/PS3 in some form or fashion – just might be later than the projected early-September release date for computers…
The neat thing is that the game is fully adaptable and unscripted, so if I start up a single-cell organism the same way for two different games, it could end up evolving into two separate beings with two separate “views” on the world…which is crazy to think about, especially for people like Stu that think about the programming involved in having everything generated on-the-fly, rather than having it lined out on the DVD it comes on.
The “creature creator” piece was released a few days ago and the internet is abuzz about it, although I haven’t tried it yet. Perhaps this weekend…
Either way, I found the comic amusing… 😛
Wow, two posts in a day…after a drought of a few weeks… What’s the world coming to?
Penny Arcade had a nice comic up today, referencing Spore, a new game from the creator of Sim City, Will Wright, to be released later this year. I remember Stu bringing this game up a few years ago when its development was in infancy, but it’s finally coming together.
The idea is pretty straightforward: you design/create your own organism (and environment?) and watch it evolve through the millenia. As in, you can start it from the single-cell stage and watch it grow into an intergalactic powerhouse. It will be Windows and OS X compatible, but I thought I heard it would be coming to the Wii/360/PS3 in some form or fashion – just might be later than the projected early-September release date for computers…
The neat thing is that the game is fully adaptable and unscripted, so if I start up a single-cell organism the same way for two different games, it could end up evolving into two separate beings with two separate “views” on the world…which is crazy to think about, especially for people like Stu that think about the programming involved in having everything generated on-the-fly, rather than having it lined out on the DVD it comes on.
The “creature creator” piece was released a few days ago and the internet is abuzz about it, although I haven’t tried it yet. Perhaps this weekend…
Either way, I found the comic amusing… 😛
…and not “Chad” as in “a person”…but “Chad” as in “the country…
Firefox 3.0 was released mid-afternoon yesterday and the Mozilla Foundation is going for the Guinness World Record for most software downloaded in a single day (thus, it ends at 1:16 pm today). You can follow the downloads at Spreadfirefox.com.
I’ve been using the Beta and Release Candidate versions for over a month now and absolutely love it. I’d kinda like the new default theme for Vista and XP to be transferred over to Linux, but that’s a small gripe. Otherwise, it seems faster, is a smaller download (7 MB!), and is a bit less RAM intensive than previous versions.
So yeah, if you check this out before 1:16 pm today, go download it and help out! Or if you check this tomorrow, download it anyway! As of right now, they’re sitting at 6.7 million downloads!
(oh yeah…and the title reference…in the global map on the Spreadfirefox page, you can see how much each country has downloaded…and Chad has downloaded 1 copy…)
Edit: The final tally was over 8 million downloads…they were apparently shooting for 5 million… And Chad ended up with 6 downloads, in the end… 😛
Get it…Anderson Cooper 360…but it’s not a 360 (i.e. Xbox 360)…it’s a Wii!
Yeah, he got a Wii and Wii Fit for his birthday…
Now, don’t forget…my birthday is June 20th… 😉
I upgraded Ubuntu yesterday to version 8.1, “Hardy Heron” (which is awesome, by the way!). I ended up having to reformat that partition of the drive because Automatix had broken my system…at least, as far as global distribution upgrades go.
Anyway, in doing so, there ended up being some kind of problem with MySQL, PHP5 and Apache2… I could get WordPress installed, but it couldn’t access the database. I ended up fixing the problem with a somewhat “unsecure” workaround, but then found out that all my link and post categories had been lost. I’ve restored the links, but now I’ve got 350+ posts to recategorize to file…grrrrrrr…
Regardless, “Hardy Heron” is an excellent release. I’ve had it on my laptop since it was available to download and has worked flawlessly… You should all check it out, if you haven’t already!
So, in preparation for watching “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” Brooke and I watched the original trilogy over the last few weeks. Needless to say, those movies are still really, really good.
The movie takes place 20 years after “Last Crusade,” and Indy is still a professor teaching history. He quickly gets wrapped up in an adventure that will take him down to South America in search of the lost city of El Dorado (kind of…), where a “Crystal Skull” will give him (or the bad guys…the Soviets, this time around…) ultimate power. There are plenty of references to previous movies, especially onces Marian Ravenwood (Karen Allen) shows up with her son, “Mutt” (Shia LaBeouf). There is even a touching scene to tell us that Marcus Brody and his father, Henry Jones, Sr. have both passed away (explaining their absence from this film).
Somehow, I just don’t think the new one lived up to the originals. Don’t get me wrong – this was a good movie and is well worth seeing in theaters…and I will definitely be purchasing the DVD when it comes out…but somehow, it seemed like some of the original charm was lost in this new iteration. Most of this, I think stems from the integration of CGI effects, of which Steven Spielberg is well-known for. As in, it sure looked like half the movie (certainly once the intrepid party made it to the Amazon…) was done in front of a green screen…and it was blatantly obvious. And if I could tell now, I can’t even imagine how obvious it’ll be in another 20 years.
That’s what makes the originals so good to me, I think. In an age of special effects-laden films that will not stand the test of time, the action sequences from the original Indiana Jones trilogy were done with wires, thrown punches, real tanks, actual bugs/rats, etc. The CGI effects, while good in a “2008” sort of way, don’t strike me as “timeless,” which is different than I feel watching the original trilogy. I feel like I could watch them in another 20 years and they’ll still look just as good as it did when they were first released.
And the effects aren’t even touching the whole “story” aspect of the…um…story. I won’t delve too much into it, but the whole “El Dorado” angle would have been perfect for an Indiana Jones movie. But…an “artifact” from Roswell plays a prominent role in the film…which kinda shifts the plot into a place I’d rather not see it. It all kind of makes sense…but in a more “sci-fi” sort of way, rather than a “historical” sort of way…
So yeah, in the end, with all that said, it was still a good movie and worth watching. Maybe I’m being a bit too nit-picky…maybe watching the original trilogy just before seeing the new movie was a bad idea…but I just don’t think this one holds up (or will hold up) as well as the others have over the past 20-27 years…
At least it wasn’t as bad as “Episode I,” right?
So, I spent the week in Columbia helping Mom and Dad move across town. Thankfully, they were kind enough to a). have everything boxed up before my arrival, and b). paid a set of movers to do all the heavy labor (w00t!). So, we moved the stuff out of the old house on Wednesday (took ~5 hrs) and spent the evening there, as they were closing on both houses the following morning. We started moving into the new house on Thursday after lunch time (had to wait until the rain stopped…), and Mom, Dad and I were doing our best to facilitate where all the furniture and boxes were going to go. Most things were going in their corresponding rooms (i.e. furniture from “my” room at the old house would go in a specific room in the new house), but some things like exercise equipment were getting placed separately, and the living room furniture that was upstairs was now going downstairs (as Mom will want to get a new set for the new place).
Overall, I like the new place quite a bit. It’s got three floors, 3.5 baths, 4 bedrooms (one used for exercise equipment), a combination of wood/wood laminate and carpet flooring, a very wooded area, and plenty of storage space. The yard will probably end up being a pain, as the multitude of trees will translate into fallen branches (making mowing difficult) and leaves (which will suck in the fall). The carpeting inside probably ought to be replaced, as well, but that’ll be a project for a year or two down the road.
Anyway, it was good times. I’ve got pictures posted on Picasa for interested parties to check out (including pictures of the old house and new house).
I’m sure Mom and Dad will be hosting dinners sometime next week…you should invite yourselves over 😉
(oh, and they won’t have internet until sometime next week…as CenturyTel screwed up…don’t bother e-mailing Mom to get details…)
Ars Technica has a neat little blurb about a book that’s out by a psychiatrist titled “Video Game Play and Addiction.” In the blog posting, the writer highlights a few key points from one of the chapters that he finds “how gamers are different in terms of problem solving and how they approach problems and even social situations.” You can view the full list at the link above, but for now:
Gamers do not view a failed attempt as failure; rather, they view it as a critical step in learning how to succeed. This is a fundamentally different approach from that of prior generations that value success as the only option—an outlook that can paralyze the intent to learn.
These kinds of things have always intrigued me, mostly because while I do enjoy playing video games, I prefer playing the so-called “real-time strategy” games…as in, the ones that involve selecting military units of specific types to counter different onslaughts by your opponent(s). While many would consider this to be “just a game,” I would argue that it’s more of a “faster-paced chess” in that there is a large amount of strategy to consider and mastering such a game can take just as long. You also have to think well in advance as to which units you’ll need at a given time, which ones to build first and what advancements to obtain to reach your goals in the minimum amount of time.
I kinda think gamers tend to get a bad rap from those that think that “gaming is just shooting people,” when in actuality many games (arguably…) involve more thought than other activities (like reading?) that are generally considered to be “more worth a young person’s time.” I’m not saying that parents should allow their kids to play video games from the moment they get home from school until they go to bed, but it’s worth considering that there are games out there (examples: “Civilization” series, “Zelda” series, etc.) that can be very story-driven and engaging, yet also challenge the gamer to think about what puzzles they are completing or what strategies to undertake in order to accomplish their goals.
Just a thought…
