August 2005 Archives

Several of the levies and pumps that are responsible for keeping New Orleans out from under the sea are broken beyond the scope of easy repair. Some of the proposed solutions include air-lifting huge concrete blocks, sinking a barge in place, weighted cargo containers, etc. Based on the amount of water that is traveling throught the area where the levy used to be, it's a huge problem to try to stop it now.

My question is this: why? Why bother trying to repair the levy? The city is already demolished. There are a lot of lives in jeopardy as we speak. Spend time and effort evacuating and housing the people displaced by the hurricane. Then abandon the city.

Seriously. I really think that it would probably cost less in the long run to abandon the city and relocate it somewhere where the ocean doesn't lay claim. It's not exactly something that could have been done proactively, since everyone had huge investments into where the city used to be. Now that we're all going to be paying to rebuild it through donations, federal aid, and insurance premiums, we might as well have a little say in not repeating the mistakes of the past, no?

Imagine if Loderunner, the first video game to ever sell more than a million copies (and one of my favorites of all time) were to be updated, to include a ninja, bombs, and rockets. That would be this flash game. Enjoy.

Not as such, anyway. I believe in Biblical Creation, the notion that God created the universe in six days and rested on the seventh. Not new information to most of my readers, no doubt. But why the title, you ask? Because Intelligent Design is a really watered down idea these days, especially with the advent of the flying spaghetti monster (which, for those who haven't heard, is a mechanism invented by atheists to mock creation).

Intelligent design envelopes ideas ranging from aliens coming to earth and engineering life as we know it to Almighty God speaking life into existance. In other words, while it is convenient to have a common cause, it is not at all specific about what one actually believes.

So I'd like to go on the record as saying that I'm a Creationist. Not a believer in Intelligent Design, a rather amorphous idea, but a believer in Creation, a very specific idea.

My World of Warcraft character hit level 60 this weekend, which is the current level cap. I've been playing the character since the game opened last November. As you can see, I've taken my sweet time getting to level cap.

I actually attempted to hit *exactly* the amount of experience required to hit 60, and no more. I overshot by six, which is admirable, given then the average monster is worth 400-1200 experience.

Since Melissa and I are going to be closing on our house soon, we need to have homeowner's insurance in place for the home. I want to get the best deal that I can, where "best deal" means prices relatively low compared to the competition, but customer service that is something better than abysmal.

Is there some sort of priceline.com sort of thing for homeowner's insurance? Can I put my info into one "reputable" sort of place, and have several companies submit bids to me for my insurance?

Failing that, has anyone else price shopped for home insurance lately, and found one company to be better than others?

Ten years ago today, Microsoft released Windows 95 to the world. I remember reading in depth reviews of the subsystems present in PC Gamer magazine, of all things. Boy did I drool over that article. They used to be a lot more techinical, back when people had to understand PC's and Dos to really make their games play well.

Anywho, that's your history lesson for the day. Viva la win32. :P

An interesting page on McSweeney's Internet Tendancy with a bunch of interviews with people who have had interesting jobs. Kinda neat in a human interest sort of way.

Today is Melissa's and my 3rd anniversary. Yay! (:

I've very pleased that Melissa is my wife. She's a wonderful woman, and I'm glad to be hers. Here's to the future! And my sweetie bought me an anniversary gift. It's very slick. Thank-you wifelette, and I love you!

I'm not sure if I've blogged this before, but I joined the Indy Ultimate Frisbee Summer League this year, and I've had a blast thus far. My team (short bus all stars :) has only lost one game, which doesn't hurt the fun factor, but overall it's just a really fun bunch of people to play with.

Yesterday was one of the last games of the season, with the final games being Saturday. Sadly, I straight-legged a landing on my left heal after coming down from a block (three blocks and one score last night, w00 w00!). While there is no discoloring, I must have bruised the heal pretty badly, because I can't put pressure on it at all without fairly significant pain.

So, as seems to be the case with me fairly often, I won't get to play the last two games of the season with Short Bus. ):

Well, good news friends. Melissa and I bought a house yesterday! It's near Greenfield Indiana, and it's about 25-30 minutes from work. A little bit on the long side, but doable.

Now comes the fun task of aquiring a mortgage, homeowner's insurance, inspections, etc etc.

Regardless though, home is good. I'll post a picture of it later today. (:

Update:

Outside Picture
Our favorite feature

Normally when I link to videos, they are annoying, odd, gross, etc. This time that is not the case. You owe it to yourself to view at least the first video of this guy balancing rocks. It's just far too cool. Good musical choice to, by the way.

Link via Boing boing.

Everyone loves a good ( http://english.pravda.ru/mailbox/22/101/399/15927_tsunami.html ) whack-job conspiracy theory on a Friday afternoon, no? Da comrade. In Soviet Russia, Tsunami Bombs you! (edit: I decided not to link the story, given how factually horrible it is. You can copy-paste the URL if you want to read it. No clicky for you.)

(summary: USA planted a nuclear weapon in the Sumatran trench to generate the tidal wave that killed over a hundred thousand people. Why? Apparently to improve a sagging US economy??? (I suppose if your worldview includes a Navy controlled by wall street, then this makes sense))

sidenote: as with any good conspiracy, the author of the article died about two months after he wrote the above article. Obviously, there is a coverup here.

Also, one might be interested in photos of stuff piled on cats.

Last night, Melissa and I paid off the last of the credit card debt that we'd accrued during my unemployment. Better still, we finally have enough of a savings that we can make a fair downpayment once we find a home.

w00t.

Yesterday, Penny Arcade linked a free games site. One game in particular, Torus Trooper is really, really good. I recommend a download. (:

I feel a tad stupid for not knowing this already, but I really didn't know about this before I saw it in the code I was working on yesterday. It was so clever that it made me smile:

enum fruits { banana,
apple,
pear,
tomato,
fruit_count };

By having the last member of the enumeration be a count for the enumerated objects, the count is always correct, automatically. Too cool. It's things like this that I miss out on by studying mainly embedded programming. In other news, I'm working on a windows app at the moment.

Yes, you may all now point and laugh at me.

Since I remember blogging about this, I might as well do it, so that the memory is true. I remember sitting right where I am, looking at the list of port addresses on my other screen, listening to Norah Jones....

So many oddities. I specifically remember how odd the dream was for several reasons... First, one of the monitors in the dream was a laptop screen and the other was a CRT. I just recently changed my setup so that I can dock my laptop with the screen open and do just just. The dream was odd because I was listening to music with itunes, which I never used to use. I do use it now, mostly for ripping CD's.

The event that actually triggered re-remembering all this though was trying to decide if I should rename the classes I'm rewriting, or just reuse them? I'm basically taking a project written for another (similar) piece of hardware and translating it for some other hardware... I suppose I will probably do it right and translate all the names, but still... Such an odd thing, when deja vu happens.

...if I cut you off when you accelerate to fill the [large] gap I'm going into after I turn my blinker on. Your reprimanding honks only warm the hackles of my heart.