The Robot's Thoughts

Blogger has been down. I've been meaning to post, but I haven't been able to update my blog at all today. According to their status blog, the maintenance is done, and the problem is fixed.

So if you can read this, expect to see updates. The kind of updates that will rock your face off.

Here's a video of my kittens fighting. Quicktime 7 or some kind of H.264 codec required.

What a great, lazy weekend.
First off, I saw Borat. Borat is both the most intelligent social commentary and the dumbest thing of all time. It made me laugh my ass off and wanting more, but at the same time, I felt that this kind of comedy is going to get dated pretty quickly. Its hilarious and worth seeing, but at the same time, this criticism (see below) from somethingawful.com can sum it up:



Its funny how ignorant we are of the world, and Borat proves it by showing how just by saying "I'm not from America, I'm from some country you've never heard of" and speaking broken english, how we suddenly act like they're some kind of savage.

I don't want to to change anyone's pre-conceptions of the film: see it. I don't want to hype it up too much simply because I was told a lot of "best movie ever" from word of mouth, and while I found it "off-the-hook hilarious" I kinda felt like "that's it? that's the best film ever made?" at the end of the movie.

A Steelers win against New Orleans was definitely solid entertainment. As was watching the WVU game.

Other than that, it was mostly a "cleaning day", which the apartment sorely needed. I cleaned up my hard drive, paid my bills, and lounged around on the internet.

I also saw the 1996 independent film hit, "Swingers". I'm amazed to see Vince Vaughan as thin and NOT looking really, really tired.

I also picked up the game "METEOS" for my DS and "Need For Speed: Most Wanted" for my gamecube. I bought NFS:MW on the advice of my friend. For a game by EA, its not bad. I find the lack of variety in the cars and the graphics to be a little weaker than NFS:Underground for PC, but that's to be expected -- gaming on console doesn't compare to gaming on the PC in terms of graphics. The gameplay is solid, and I find it to be a pretty fun racing game. And while it has a veritable "endless" amount of missions, some that are police chases where the cops chase you, its broken into a plotline: the #1 street racer sabotaged your racing car, and then took it and used itto get him to the top of the "blacklist". He also got you stuck in jail. After your release, you're working your way up the "blacklist" -- the semi-secret list of street racers that are so good they only race for pink slips. Each racer is pretty much like a "level", and there are some "sub-missions" you need to accomplish before you have enough "rep" to race someone on the ranked "blacklist". This means I hopefully won't have something like 290 some "missions" as they did on NFS:Underground.

I also have Legends of Arcadia. If you've got a gamecube or dreamcast and you wish there was a game very much like Final Fantasy 7, then its worth checking out. Its got a similar story line, of a young kid taking on an evil empire, which also involves great weapons of mass destruction, airships, magic, "materia-like" devices to put on your weapons, turn-based combat, unlockable power moves, and the ever so famous "random encounters", its worth checking out. It has a special place in a lot of gamer's heart. I was 60% done when I called it quits with my dreamcast, and this time, I intend to finish it.

A lot of people are talking about yesterday.
A lot of people are going to remember yesterday.
History was made.

I'm talking, of course, about the fact that I found and (with the help of an awesome coworker+1) fixed three bugs in an open source project, Zebda which is an AJAX framework used in form validation. It just happened to have a few incompatibilities with Internet Explorer 7.

It not like the biggest thing I've ever done, but it felt kinda cool. It gave me the confidence to hit the gym harder than I have in months. It just had me stoked. When I fixed the bugs, and had nice, clean, easily validated forms for my project, I just felt a lot of stress leave my body. I've been taking my work too seriously, and I've been finding myself doing the ultimate sin of engineering: thinking about work while spending time with friends and family.

I had a problem, it was getting stressful, but through teamwork and tenacity, I managed to persevere. Programming really is a team sport when it gets tough. And it feels good to be a contributor.

The Mystery Method.

I've actually read Neil Strauss' book, which is the classic "rise to fame and power, then watch it tear us apart" story. Its a love story of a guy who goes geek to gallahad, and finds out the one who really likes him, and he really likes, prefers the geniune article as opposed to the pre-rehearsed self.

I also like Strauss' other books. He's written one about his two years on the road with Marilyn Manson, and another which is a confessional, tell-all book about Jenna Jameson. He's also written a lot of articles for Rolling Stone.

Enjoy.

I love Somethingawful.com's "Fashion SWAT". Mostly because they rip on wannabe hipsters. But I really love their Halloween Swats. They always pick the most horrible costumes, and take it overboard.

I'm tagging this as NSFW, so read at your own risk if you're on one of your corporate overload's machines. There's no nuditity or anything, just an lot of "the naughty language".

A (work-safe) preview:

Dr. Thorpe: Doesn't this dick look like one of those business-school fratboy "retire-when-I'm-30" types who takes out a huge loan to start his idiotic business and uses half of it to buy a Mercedes and then lives way beyond his means, racking up debt for two or three years until he starts talking about filing bankruptcy like it was some genius idea that he'd had all along and it's gonna save him a ton of money in the long run? He's got "small-claims court" written all over him.

And:

Dr. Thorpe: Do people seriously say "you know what would be a fucking boss Halloween costume? Magnum PI. I wonder if they make that in a kit so I don't have to expend the fucking minimal effort to do it myself." This thing is basically just three things you can buy at the costume shop anyway, plus a hat explaining what they mean when they're put together.

Zack: "I don't want to have to remember what Magnum PI even wore, I just want them to do everything for me."

Enjoy!