These are my links for November 27th through November 29th:
These are my links for November 26th:
Is it just me, or is Winamp getting old? I use it at home, mainly just to stream my music from my home computer so I can listen to it at work. What other options are there in Windows? Windows Media player? Seems fine but I can’t stream my music, afaik. Real player? Quicktime? Gag.
At work I use Amarok, easily the best music player out there. Of course it’s Linux only.
More and more I just want to drop windows for linux. My biggest problem is that I like playing games now and then. More and more people seem to be switching to Mac. When I went to the open source convention, I’d guess 70% of the people there were using a Mac. I’m just so used to my KDE desktop, I can’t see switching at this point. Setting it up is a hassle, but once I’m up and running, it does everything I want and need. Except play games, of course.
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I was floored when I read Sean Taylor had been shot yesterday. It was one of those moments where you read something, then have to read it again because you don’t believe your eyes. Then this morning on the way to work it was announced he had died from his wounds.
It’s sad, because it sounds like he was finally starting to get his life together, putting his troubled past behind him. Without a doubt, he was my favorite Redskin to watch. He played with as much intensity as anyone I have seen.
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These are my links for November 20th:
for the Redskins. We really blew it with the 6 turnovers. On the radio this morning, they were talking about how it was the right decision to go for it when it was 4th and 1 at about the 3 yard line. The Redskins were down 19-10, with not a lot of time left in the 4th quarter. They had just put together a 14 play drive, and decided to go for it, even though a field goal was a chip shot. I couldn’t disagree with them more. They were down 19 points - and even if you make a TD here, you’re still 1 more score from winning. Why not take the easy points now, knowing you’ll still have to score again later?
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My software team started testing the next release of our software at work today. One of the objectives of the release was to merge our inventory management software with our vending software, which required a merger of the product database, not an easy task. I assigned the task of testing the reports before and after the merge to one of the new guys. I gave him the instructions - any time you see a different number in one of the sales reports, submit a bug report.
After several hours of testing, I hadn’t seen any bugs come in from him, so I assumed it was going well. No news is good news, right?
Today a bug report comes in. The text -
Report Totals do not match AT ALL between Inventory Mirror and Inventory
Staging.
Guess that about sums it up.
These are my links for November 19th:
I’ve been playing a lot of Nethack lately. Been a while since I’ve played it, but it’s the game I just keep going back to. For those not in the know, nethack is a turn based RPG. There are several versions available, you can play with or without graphics - even if you do play with graphics, they look like something from 1990. I prefer the simple ascii interface.
When you first pick up the game, you inevitably die very quickly due to stupid mistakes - you suffer YASD (yet another stupid death). There are a lot of things out there that can kill you, and fast. Plus you have to worry about eating, I starved to death a lot in the beginning. To make matters worse, once you die, that’s the end, you have to start all over.
Once you learn the basics of not letting monster kill you left and right, you move onto accidental suicide.
That potion you just drank - poison. You die.
You’re riding a horse - you fall off and die.
You’re carrying too much and try to go down the stairs - you fall and die.
That floating eye you just attacked paralyzed you - now a rat comes up and eats your face off.
Over and over and over.
I’m finally able to get to the middle section of the game - clearing out the gnomish mines and completing Sokoban, so I’m running into tougher and tougher monsters. Last night I completed Sokoban and opened the door to the zoo (a room with 20 or so monsters and animals). I was pretty tough, and holding Excalibur, I figured clearing the room would be fairly simple, most monsters I met died in 1 or 2 hits. So I open the door - a giant ant steps out to greet me. One flick of the sword and he is dead. Then I see:
The wererat zaps a wand. The death ray hits the giant beetle! The beetle dies. The death ray hits you! You die…
Oh right. That’s fair. Irony was, my reward for clearing out that zoo would have been an Amulet of Reflection, which would have saved me.
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These are my links for November 9th through November 12th:
I’m going back to Firefox today. Flock just didn’t have enough to convert me. The blogging tool was nice, but I’m willing to bet I can find a Firefox extension to do the same thing. The main deterrent were:
1) No automatic updates. Maybe this doesn’t apply to me, using Gentoo, as updates with Firefox aren’t exactly seamless, either.
2) The search bar had lots of bugs. It would pull up random sites instead of searching where I wanted it to. And I really like the auto-suggest the Firefox search bar has, the one in Flock sucks.
3) The “Open Link in New Tab” was really buggy, and I use that about 100 times in any given day. Sometimes it would open it in the very next tab, sometimes in at the end of the tabs, sometime at the 2nd to last tab spot. Just put it at the end, that’s where I’m expecting it. And when you close a tab, it doesn’t always go back to the last tab you were looking at. Just strange.
edit — I just found ScribeFire, a Firefox Extension which happears to be bettter than the blogging tool Flock had anyway.
These are my links for November 6th:
I watched a few movies lately
Spiderman 3
Everyone I talked to said this movie was terrible, so I waited for the DVD. After an hour, I was thinking everyone was crazy. This movie is pretty nice, packed with action, developing tension, everything I wanted from a comic book movie. But then something happened in the 2nd hour. I’m not sure exactly what it was, the story fell apart, the acting fell apart, the story and lines all became cliche. By the end, I just wanted it to be over.
3/10
Into the Wild
This movie is worth watching. Great acting, beautiful scenery, and a story that makes you really think. In some ways, I think the guy is a complete idiot, but in other ways I really wish I was brave enough to do what he did.
8/10
District 13
A French sci-fi action flick. The action was amazing. The acting and story line, not so much. Still, if you like action movies, I highly suggest this one. The free-running scenes are amazing.
7/10
2046
I believe this movie was Korean. It got great critical reviews, but I guess I don’t have the patience for it. The themes the movie covered were interesting, but it just didn’t speak to me. Perhaps I’ll love this movie in 30 years after I’ve lived a bit more, but for now…
4/10
La Haine
Another French movie, this one was a dark comedy. The cinematography was fantastic. The script was hilarious, and the acting was spot-on. The plot concerns racism and prejudice in France, perhaps Europe as a whole. Since I’ve never been to Europe, it’s hard to say. But the message applies everywhere.
9/10
Rendition
I’m going to ruin this movie for you, so if you plan on watching it (which I don’t suggest) stop reading now. The theme can be summed up in 1 line - torture is bad. I’m most people would agree, though some people have trouble defining what torture is, and I don’t think this movie is going to change anyone’s mind. If you don’t think waterboarding is torture, seeing it on a movie probably won’t change that. Anyway, the director completly ruins the entire movie during the last 10 minutes, when we learn the 2 plot lines happening in the movie happened 1 week apart. Oh you tricked us. Good for you. But it’s not like a good trick, like in the 6th sense, it’s the frustrating kind that makes the movie one big pile of crap.
2/10
Blogged with Flock
These are my links for November 4th through November 5th:
Gave out some candy for Halloween last night. I think this is the first time we’ve actually done that. It was a lot of fun. Too bad not many people showed up.
8 Hands recently released a list of their 10 top scariest songs. They had some good and not so good picks, I thought they missed out on some obvious. Here’s my list:
10 Hon Juro… - Sigur Ros
9 Don’t Fear the Reaper - Blue Oyster Cult
8 Night on Bald Mountain - Modest Mussorgsky
7 One - Metalica
6 The Downward Spiral - Nine Inch Nails
5 The End - The Doors
4 John Wayne Gacy, Jr. - Sufjan Stevens
3 Paint it Black - Rolling Stones
2 Careful with that Axe, Eugune - Pink Floyd
1 Bela Legusi’s Dead - Bauhaus
Blogged with Flock
These are my links for October 29th:
