How often does this happen to you?

Now you know why a cruddy computer was able to put my ambitions from 2008 in the back of the freezer. It's that cruddy.

The old computer is back up.

And now it's running Windows XP, which I don't like as well as 2000, with the exception of a handful of programs running inherently faster. At any rate, I now have access to my ideas and ambitions of old, though they are amidst virtual cobwebs now.

***FLASH***
The computer just hallucinated that the shift key was being held constantly. Then it deleted everything I was typing and tried to navigate away from this web page. After logging out, logging back on was impossible. A reboot was necessary to neutralize the threat.


Sooooooooo. This kind of stuff is why I'm going to buy a Macbook. Plus, by the time I get stuff sorted out from the long period of downtime and the randomly corrupting transition to XP, I might as well have waited to get my own computer and hand-pick the stuff I want to transfer, enabling a fresh and uncluttered start. Such would also make it simpler to deal with the programs, etc. I have that are now a version or two behind.

Anyway, it's now at least possible for me to blog should I have the time and mind to, but I can't promise anything as my personal projects are still going to be on hold for the most part. I also apologize for all the stuff that I would have blogged when I couldn't. Some great (and original) material, from jokes to serious rationalizations, never made it here, but the moments have past and the most practical thing I can do now is just let the missed be missed.

On a personal note, my life in general has been in a rut for some time, but there are signs of it finally getting better. I mention this in part because one's psychological state has almost as much affect on blogging as computer issues do. To be honest, I envy the first months of my blog. I desire the state of life I was in then, with freedom and creativity flowing betwixt the banks of responsibility and well-being. I hope to arrive at that stream once more, but the mist from the mountains of college and adulthood change obscures my vision. A lamp dances through the fog, but I never find myself catching its guiding ray. The most solid object is that of a side-road that would bear me off to the detour of a fifth year in high school; and though I choose to walk it, I cannot now discern what the road is made of. It seems to shift as a gaze upon it, and at times I wonder if the distortion results from heat waves that would burn my feet. I'll take the burns if I must, trusting that a cool pond lies somewhere along the path.

(I am sick of American literature.)

Computers are even less predictable than my life.

So, I haven't been able to do ANYTHING blog-wise because the computer inexplicably ceased to connect to any secure sites. Now, all of a sudden, I can access any https AND the parental controls seem to have ceased restricting my browsing (if altogether I dare not explore, but I can get to some sites that aren't really bad but have been blocked for one reason or another -- like brawlsnapshots.com, for one).

Given that my life is too hectic to do any more than write up this little complaint and disprove rumors of my death, I am actually annoyed that it's now even possible to get on with organizing my list of "to-blogs." It's just another distraction at the moment!

SMB1 By Webcam

This is one of those things I've been meaning to post since ... before I started my blog, sort of. Anyway, this is clever if it's fake and awesome if it's real; such a thing is certainly possible. Judging from the physics of Mario and the behavior of the objects (blocks, in particular), I suppose he coded this mostly from scratch, which is quite impressive.

PS - The related video of level 1-1 in Line Rider is nicely done, too.

Squiggly, Green Underlines: I'm not sure what you wrote is what I think you wanted me to read.

Yep, sometimes I just can't ignore MS Word's grammar check. These occurred when I was typing my chemistry term paper some time ago.

A "3-D CD"

ZMaro, SCobbler, and I were chatting about video games at my late birthday party yesterday, and at some point ZM mentioned that the Playstation was supposed to be a "3-D system," yet there seemed to be as many 2-D games on it as there were 3-D games. "Well, those disks are pretty flat," I joked. "A true 3-D system would have some triangular prism that floats in mid-air and is read by lasers from multiple directions."

As many of our conversations go, this simple, witty comment shot us off on a whole different tangent as we began discussing how a three-dimensional "CD" would function.

SC, being a bit over-practical for the amount of sugar we were running off, pointed out that a pyramid would be almost impossible to spin like a CD and be read; a sphere would work much better. Before I could say more than "A sphere is dull," he added that a cone would be best, because you wouldn't have to deal with the inconsistent proximity of the sphere's surface to the reading laser. I wasn't sure what he was talking about at the time, although now I think he might have been referring to a single laser moving in a perpendicular direction to the sphere's spinning, like a CD player's laser moving from the inside to the outside. If this is the case, a cone would help, as the angle would never change. However, a cone would truly remedy the problem if it was spun on a tilted axis such that the side facing the laser was vertically straight, but if you went in that direction you might as well settle on a cylinder.

I, on the other hand, wasn't thinking of having the object spin whilst the laser(s) moved. I was picturing an object held in the center of a zero-G container rotating (though not necessarily spinning quickly) in any direction so that fixed lasers could read every area. However, I still didn't manage to communicate this because ZMaro took us completely off-guard by saying that the lasers would spin around the sphere. My dad kind of stabbed the idea and left it for dead by exposing the inefficiency of doing that. Then SCobbler practically discarded the whole anti-gravity part by suggesting "rollers" that would turn the sphere (of course, I suppose using a cone might negate the antigrav as well).

I eventually just verbalized the fact that a pyramid would be the coolest, but SC wouldn't go down without a fight. Thanks to him we began rationalizing the dilemma of where information is located. He said that a sphere or pyramid would cause issues with where to start reading and it would be impractical to have "directions" all over the thing to point to what to read next. "Hey," I said, "by the time this is done in the first place, data storage will be so advanced that it shouldn't pose a problem." I think we ended on that note, but it may only have been because ZM had to leave.

So we went from yakking about games to theorizing 3-D optical storage, and all the while our parents stood by watching and waiting for us to finish. As ZM said last night, "Sometimes I forget just how nerdy we sound."

I AM WINDOWS. I AM PERFECT.

WARNING: SPOILERS!



I saw the Star Trek Original Series (the remastered version, technically) episode "The Changeling" lately, in which the Enterprise encounters a computer probe designed to destroy, or "sterilize," all that is imperfect. Being impervious to everything they have to throw at it, Kirk and his crew manage to survive for a while because the probe thinks Captain James Kirk is Jackson Roykirk, its one-time creator. However, Nomad, the probe, eventually learns that although Kirk is his creator, he is also an imperfect "biological unit." Just when Nomad deactivates the ship's life support, Kirk finds a way to defeat the computer. He reveals Nomad's mistake of his identity, and that, coupled with the errors that Nomad did not recognize its mistake nor correct it by "sterilization," compelled the machine to eradicate itself on the grounds that it was imperfect.

Nomad didn't do this easily, of course. Its voice generators went screwy and it kept repeating "ERROR ... ERROR...." This made me think of the computers we have today, about how crummy they can be. Specifically, I found myself wondering how long it took people in the Star Trek universe to get past such annoyances as we have today. I can just imagine a Windows Nomad: "I AM WINDOWS. I AM PERFECT." And then Kirk convinces it to destroy itself: "PROCESSING. ESTIMATED TIME REMAINING: 3 MINUTES ... 6 MINUTES ... .73 HOURS.... WINDOWS REQUESTS USER VERIFICATION."

Don't beam the thing into deep space to explode, Kirk, beam it to Bill Gates' office.