I used to read a ton of the GNU / Linux news and articles. Now I skim gobs of headlines to find the the diamonds in the ruff. Mixed in with a lot of useful stuff like tutorials, new technologies, informative news, etc. always lies the slew of articles that focus on speculation about where things are headed and what “needs” to happen for “this and that” to be true. What I’m getting at is that I am annoyed by all of the fluff that is published everyday about GNU / Linux. Like these authors know the definitive Linux agenda that should be. It seems that most of these are written from the perspective of GNU / Linux / Open Source being like a business with business like goals. GNU / Linux may indeed appear like a business with businessy like goals, but don’t be mistaken it is its own beast.

Open source is created by hackers who are creating solutions. Whatever the reason, drive, or motivation may be. There is a large pool of people who develop for the shear pleasure of developing or for the necessity of a solution to meet their needs. It really doesn’t matter if the only graphical user interface in existance was really “shitty” if none of these people get annoyed, care about having, or believe they have a shitty graphical user interface and do nothing to improve it. It doesn’t matter because everyone can do what they want, what suits their needs. Most likely if enough people/users/developers think that it is indeed shitty someone is going to come along and do something about it and hopefully not write a article about how it is shitty and how someone should fix it.

What would make me happy is if these authors directed their opinions towards something specific, a company, or a product (not open source). For example titles like: “Linux needs to improve this…..” or “Linux has this wrong….” should be something like “Red Hat should do this” or “Suse got something wrong”. What would make me even more happy would be these people seeing something that they think needs improvement and doing anything at all to help improve it, according to their perception of improvement. Then feel free to write about it. This is how things get created in the open source world, not by stating that someone else should do something because it needs to be so.

I did a hike up to Yosemite falls this last Saturday. It was really beautiful up there! It was a 3.4 mile hike each way, but was quite steep making it quite draining. Unfornately I forgot my camera. so these pics are from my phone. They are still able to capture some of the beauty.

I reciently picked up a cheap electrical toothbrush, the Oral-B Crossaction Power.

I was pretty suprised that I liked it and it seemed to get my teeth really clean. I have encountered one problem though. If you get your tongue in the way its possible to get it shredded up a bit. After it got a hold of my tongue I was suffering some blood loss and four days later it still hurts! You are now warned. :) I, however, have not quit using the toothbrush. I just keep the tongue at a safe distance. Its probably not a bad idea to invest in one of the sonic care ones, or whatever they are called.

Cruising reddit I checked out one of the links under “Hot,” Amazing 3-D Murals, and got a reminder of my University.

This optical illusion was created by John Pugh, he is an artist that does excellent trompe l’oeil (French for trick the eye) murals. Magazines wrote: “John Pugh’s trompe l’oeil murals are so lifelike they cause mishaps and confusion for the unsuspecting. In 1981, after the completion of his first major project, the mural on Taylor Hall on the CSU, Chico campus, several fender benders occurred because motorists were distracted by what looks like a gaping hole in the building.”

This anime forced its way onto my list last year. It had came out a few years previous, but I did not get around to watching it until I located the uncut version. I went into this knowing little to nothing about it at all, other than I had heard it is a must watch from a few friends. WHY it is a must watch though I was never told. I was not told what genre it was or even what the story as about. So I went into it with no real expectations, and honestly my hopes were not high since there had been a LARGE amount of bad animes being released. Or animes that I held no interest in at all. For those who do not know, in a period of a year in Japan there is typically 100 new anime series introduced. Sometimes many more, sometimes a couple less. Only a few are actual gems. Most are just the same ole thing with different characters.

Soo number 9: Gantz. The first thing that drew my attention when I put on the first episode of this was the quality of the artwork. It was exceptional. The animations on the characters were smooth, the backgrounds were detailed, and the whole theme and coloring of the anime had a much more realistic tone than most animes I had been seeing lately. It was not bright and colorful at all. The anime started with a run through a subway to what looked to be a high school student. As the anime passed people it showed what they were thinking about other people in the subway, mostly complaints or people worrying about being somewhere quickly.

(more…)

When I started watching this I knew nothing about it. It was one of the many animes that came out during an onslaught of titles during the release season. I had went through 9 animes before this and had seen nothing even close to impressive yet. Mostly they were just sports animes and unimpressive schoolkid romance/comedies. The title interested me but I was really worried it was going to be another romance comedy about people who try to get back together or help other people get back together. When I put on the first episode I was pleasantly suprised.

(more…)

I figured my first post on anime should be part of a series of posts going over my Top 10 preferred animes. Why I like them, the good and the bad about them, what other animes I almost put into that slot but did not make it. I have been an into japanese animation for about 10 years. Its not something I just recently picked up when DBZ aired on TV. I have followed it online since I first got into the internet, and watched it any chance I could while I grew up. I loved the japanimation week that the Sci-fi channel would have when I was much younger, but other than renting things that was about the only way I was able to access it when I was younger.

In 1999 I found a releasing group on AOL and thats when I got into it much more. Yes I know many of you cry foul when I mention AOL, but it was an amazingly easy way to get anime. You would go into a chat room called Animatrix and send a request to join a mailing list. Anytime anthing new was uploaded by one of the members in the group it would go straight to your email box and you could download it at your own leisure. In addition you could queue up downloads from aol and you always got full speed, reminescant of newsgroups. It was perfect for the time, as there was not the plethora of choices there are today such as BitTorrent, Newgroups, Direct Downloads, and more.

(more…)

I just finished watching March of the Penguins this evening. It has been on my list for a while but I couldn’t see how fat penguins waddling around was going to be as amazing as everyone makes it out to be. I was going to see it at some point though, just because I am a Penguin fan.

(more…)

I’ve been looking through all of the Oscar nominees and I am just not finding anything to get very excited about. Either there were just not that many great movies unleashed this year or I just watched a lot less films (which I did). I am definately rooting for Batman Begins for Cinematography. I had just watched it again last night and it deserves this award. That was a great one to see in the theaters.

Don’t have a competition of your own to compete in? You can cast your votes online. They definately made a good call getting John Stewart to host this year. I will watch it because of this aspect alone.

—————————–

Strange Family

On a different note I came to the definative conclusion that my dad is officially strange/disgusting. This is at least partitially based on his food concoctions. Yesterday I watched him create a deviled egg taco with ranch dressing and covered in a heap of melted cheese. This is disgusting.

How long can it possibly take to get some pictures off of your Treo 650? At least a day. How much longer? I do not know because I still have not managed to achieve this simple task!

A long story, ummm not short…. :)

(more…)

I went to the Cheesecake Factory with the fam for my mom’s birthday a few days ago. The food was alright. I recomend not getting the fish tacos, they are really bland and watch out for the burgers, the patties are overly thick and not cooked consistently. I hear that some of the food there is really amazing, though, and was given the “low down” for what to order next time. :)

Anyways, this post isn’t about the food, its about the menu. Aside from the tons and tons of options, they also contained full page advertisements! I was suprised because I have never seen this before and it definately increased my time to order because I kept finding myself staring at those ads. It seemed tacky, but probably a very good idea for advertisers because its very “in your face”.

More info on Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach. Just took some quick 20 seconds video clips of two things that I thought were pretty cool in the game.
The first is a spell effect that is caused by a Kobold Shaman. It is chaos sometimes. At one point there were six of these orbs of darkness all over at the bottom of a cliff and on the top of a ledge, people were falling like flies.

The second is of one of the traps in the game. Lots of different traps and I love it. There are nasty blades that cut people down, spikes, and then these contraptions. Thats not even talking about Acid, Fire, Force, and Lightning traps.

Just click on an image to download the video. Both are under 5MB and compressed using divx 6.1.1. Game settings are on the highest quality and the videos are pretty high quality as well.

I often sit and ponder time..  You know, where has it gone, how come I am not getting anything done in long amounts of time, why does time seem faster at some points and slower at others, and how does my perception of time change.

When time feels like it is moving slowly does this mean my brain is sped up?  Is this just my perception because I am just focusing on time more?  When I wake up in the morning, am really tired, and blink to find that 10 minutes has blown by is my brain really functioning that slowly? Maybe time has really spead up?  There is no indication that others think so.  Whats the deal when someone in a group says that time has dragged/flown and everyone in the group has the same perception?  On and on and on and my internal conversation never ends.  There is never any peace in the head of a strippee. :)

This article on the BBC News web site has some interesting information on time perception and sleep scheudles.  The really interesting stuff is the discussion about the man in a cave experiment.  Some dude that locked himself in a cave for two months and slept, awoke, and ate on his own schedule, without the influence of day/night or society.

(more…)

I made an appearance in Reno last weekend say bye to a friend, Chad, I’ve known since childhood. He got back from Iraq a few months ago and is now heading to Florida, I guess, to be closer to his wife, Tasha’s, family. We haven’t got to hang out that much in the last few years, but being on the same coast meant not having to board a plane.

The drive felt very quick and Neveda was looking ohhh so good…

And I was of course partying like a rockstar on on the way…. To fend off those bad bad sleep demons.

(more…)

First off, the main topic of this post was going to be on the new Nintendo DS. Yes, yes, all of you out there are going “But Cory, the Nintendo DS is not new, that is suuuuuch old news.” Not the one I am posting on. Nintedo has officially announced three colors for the new Nintendo DS Lite.

The DS Lite will be launching in Japan on March 2nd, and thanks to it being Region-free, unlike the PSP, PS2, Xbox, Xbox360, Gamecube, and all other consoles that means people locally can import it from somewhere like Lik-sang.com on the day it is released in japan and play all their NTSC games on a lighter DS with a brighter screen.

(more…)