Rotating bits, one shift at a time.
Holy Cow
So a few updates since last March, for sure.
First things first, (read: Gaming Related) I got me some Guitar Hero: Metallica. It’s a fun game if I need to waste some time and listen to some music and NOT be bored out of my skull. Gogo a waste of $100! Well, not really a waste, but you get my idea. I still play it every once in a while.
Oh, btw: Mass Effect 2 plzkthx.
And nextly: The girlfriend and I are going strong. We’ve had our ups and downs of course, but we’re still together so I’m happy about that. We hit our 3 month check point last week, and so we went out to dinner to kinda sorta celebrate. Don’t think I’ll do something super special until we hit the 1 year though. As in “Get her something more than a freaking card.” Which I actually didn’t get her this time because that’d be actually kinda stupid.
And nextly lastly: I’ve been working my ass off on a few things. First thing: I finished the school term. Dear god am I happy I got a 3 point something. Two A’s and a B. Yeah I was taking more, but I withdrew from Dreamweaver because it was a dumb-ass teacher ruining a perfectly good class, and I withdrew from “Introduction to Computers” because I tested out of a class that put “Learning how to use Microsoft Word” as one of it’s key learning points of the class. I prefer Google Docs and Notepad anyhow.
Now, I don’t plan on using Adobe Dreamweaver to build a site, but I do enjoy the prospect of using it to design a basic layout, and that is what I’m using it for. What was that? Oh yes, I do have Dreamweaver. It’s CS3, granted, but it puts out spectacularly clean code, and allows for elastic layouts to be easily and swiftly created. Be it with one big space, or a header and footer, or all three plus a column on either side. It’s stupendous. Oh and I’ve also with that mentioning, made a test layout To 1.) Test out how awesome elastic layouts are, and 2.) Act as a new design for the second part of this expose.
What’s this second part you may ask? Well if you followed the link, you may have seen the title called “Shifted Bits”. Now ShiftedBits is actually something (a CMS) I’ve been working on for a good while now. I’m almost at that stage where I wanna start actually fleshing it out and using it to build modules that use what I’ve written there. Now when I properly release it as version 0.1, I’ll post a blog here with an explanation on where I wanna go with it and thusly invite any developers to work on it. (Hell anyone can join in on it now, but you won’t get very far without me explaining to you what I’m gonna do, and I’m not doing that until I’m damn well ready to.) So yeah. That layout I showed you, is gonna act as a “ShiftedBits Blog layout (with maybe a few changes to the color scheme and all that). Looks kinda like WordPress, I know. But have no fear, I’ll be writing a news module BEFORE I start up that blog.
And then onto the third part: In case you have forgotten I am actually a staff member here at Napalm Riot (the sad part is it’s taking a LONG time for that to sink in for me). And as such, I signed up to be a PHP Engineer. Now what that entails is 1.) Spot telling me what to do. 2.) Me doing what he wants me to do, 3.) … 4.) PROFIT???
I dunno. I still haven’t turned in any time tables for how much I’ve worked and I’m actually pretty cool with that. Considering I won’t get paid until I do. Now I’ve been working on a few things here the last couple of months (more off than on, sadly, because of school and ShiftedBits) and most of what I’ve changed are gonna go into the new version of the site (because, get used to it, we’re ALWAYS gonna be working on this site), so you’ll hear about them in due time when we hit the final crunch stage for cleaning up bugs and pushing this thing out the freaking door. Terry or Spot will make the appropriate announcement concerning the new features and man, all I gotta say is “Fuck.” Gotta love it.
Oh, and Step 5.) Spot yelling at me because I did it wrong… >.>
And lastly, I’ve actually done a few horrid things: I’ve stopped my exercise regimen (kinda lazy), and stopped doing Judo (no longer fun at my current dojo). TKD has caught my interest and I’ve been thinking about entertaining the idea of maybe possibly starting it. That and there’s police training classes at my old dojo on Fridays so I may go in for that for the heck of it, once, to see what it’s like.
That and I’m looking for a cash-paying job. I’ve applied to a good 20 places and have only gotten rejection emails back from two. Yeah. So we’ll see what happens. Hopefully after my summer trip up to Canada I’ll be able to focus more on getting said job and actual monies to pay off my credit card debt etc… And with a job that actually gets me out of the house, I may just end up getting back into an exercise regimen again. I dunno. We’ll see what happens.
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Right, So…
about 11 months ago - No comments
I’m in class right now. Unable to do anything. Why? Because, mainly, I’m an idiot. In my laziness to get ready properly this morning (shower, breakfast, stretching) I remembered to gather up all my “bling” except for my keychain. Why? Because I’m not driving around today. Today, I ride the bus. However, one small problem: On said key chain I have my thumb drive. And on said thumb drive I have all my school work. Without said school work, I can’t do shit at school, except for research mathematical proofs and convert them into code.
Well that last part doesn’t sound too horrifying.
Anywho, onto other things. Like, my vacation that I took this past weekend!
It was up to Baltimore, the big whole idea of it was to see my brother graduate from Army A.I.T (Advanced Individual Training) because, well, I missed his graduation from Basic. Horrifying, I know.
So I saw that, Fort Meade is… well… a fort. Then on Friday we took the Metro into D.C. and saw the Library of Congress (whose reading rooms I can officially go into now, because I signed up under the pretenses I’d be researching there for my masters degree in 3d image programming). The main building (Jefferson, I believe) is absolutely gorgeous, and has all original architecture from when it was built back in the mid-1800′s. The main reading room is astounding, even if the selection of books on computer programming is severely lacking.
Then we went to the Hawk and Dove for lunch where I saw Senator Tom Daschle having lunch with his Aides. Didn’t talk to him, but my dad went “Woooaaaaah!”, twice, in amazement that Senators really are, in fact, people in their own right. I had a delicious pastrami and swiss sandwich on Rye bread, and then my family and I walked the mall till about 3, then headed back to Baltimore and got dinner. Mmm. That dinner was fun. VERY cute waitress, who I flirted with the entire time. I think she liked me. That and the food was good.
Anyways, I’m back, with brother in tow, and it hasn’t been a week and his room is already a mess, along with the car he and I share. Kinda disappointing, really.
Concepts of Law != Concepts of Reality
about 11 months ago - No comments
Originally it was perceived as such: She agree’d to let his likeness appear in the game, so what’s wrong? Is she REALLY that drugged up?
Now there are reports that she’s more or less upset about HOW his likeness was used within the game. This refers to the ability to use Kurt Cobain to sing any song in the library, and apparently one of the biggest offenders is having him sing “You Give Love A Bad Name” by Bon Jovi.
Now, as respectfully as I can, I’m gonna call this whole ordeal from Courtney Love and friends probably the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. Oh well, there goes the “respectfully” part.
Moving on, there was a post on Kotaku [link] discussing this, and it brought up another game called The Beatles: Rock Band.
Now if you read the comments of that article, there are many, MANY points being hit on. A lot of them are valid, a few are just dumb idiot trolls, but a lot of them are in fact, valid. There’s a few points I’d like to bring up though.
First, if Courtney’s Lawyer was good enough, this probably wouldn’t have happened in the first place. However there is no saying that Activision may have blurred the lines a bit. I haven’t seen the legalese behind it all, so I can’t say that with any definity. However, my initial point still stands, even if they did, and Courtney’s Lawyer was good enough, and Ms. Love of mind enough, they would have thought to implement a phrase that limits Cobain’s likeness to singing just his kind of songs (if not just his own.)
Secondly, there was a lot of back and forth about how the new Rock Band game for The Beatles serves as justification (or lack thereof) for how Kurt Cobain is used in Guitar Hero. This is utter stupidity to think that one game, developed for a completely different reason, can or would serve as justification for how another game works. The sole exceptions to this, are games that share middle-ware such as Havok or Unreal Technology. There are certain programming functions that can be used to say “Well if it was bad in this game, it can’t be better in this other game.” But I digress. The point here is, regardless of what The Beatles meant to millions and millions of people, Kurt had the same effect on his fair share of fans alike. The thing to take away from that, is TB:RB stands as a testament to The Beatles and their work. GH5, however, does NOT stand as a testament to Kurt Cobain and what he did, and meant, to a lot of people.
Guitar Hero 5, as much as it is a music game, it is a tribute TO the music that you can play, rather than any one band or person, like the latest Rock Band, or previous installments of both games (Aerosmith, Metallica for GH, and AC/DC for RB)
The thing that I’m trying to stress here, is that even if we don’t know the exact terms of agreement between the two parties, there is a style element involved here that people are trying to argue against. You can go ahead and rant about how great Kurt Cobain was, and how disrespectful it is to see him singing a Bon Jovi song, that’s fine. But until you realize that the way Guitar Hero was designed from all the way back at Guitar Hero 1 was to allow stuff like this to happen, you’re not gonna get anywhere, except for down farther and farther in the hole you are digging yourself.
Me? I’m not completely neutral on this point of view, obviously, but as far as I care about stuff like this, I’m just gonna enjoy both games, and be glad that the developers choose to recognize people who made a difference within the music world. Because honestly, since when was that not enough?
This is well past due…
about 1 year ago - No comments
So, about a week ago today, I got back from a trip up to the great white northern non-us state of Canada. I visited Elsie (innervoices), her family, and a mutual friend of ours who isn’t on this site. As some of you may have seen on my facebook account, I mentioned something about missing them already when I got home. This is for a very simple, and unequivocal meaning: THAT TRIP WAS AWESOME.
Ok, so that may have been an overstatement, but I had a ton of fun none the less. Elsie has 3 brothers living with her, along with her parents, and all of them are funny and awesome. So is her hubby, Mark, and Elsie’s just awesome in general. AND while I was there, our friend Laura was there and tons of fun, along with Elsie’s older brother, his wife, and their three kids. So yeah, packed three story house full of people (14, to be exact, 10 whose name I had to learn) certainly == much fun.
Now within the following week since, I have moved rooms in my house, and as such, had some… gro- er, moving, pains.Everything transferred over just fine with the exception of my internet connection. Since we don’t have any crawl spaces above or below our single floor house, we have to set up all computers outside of the study with wireless. Now, this worked just fine until my pci wireless adapter died. With this sad and untimely death I had to go out and buy a new one. My current wireless router is a wireless-g router, because when our old one died, none of us had any hardware to use wireless-n. So we saved a bit of money and just stuck with a new wireless-g. I now have a new adapter feeding into my usb port, that supports wireless n communication. It, however, works like shit.
With the old adapter, I could use WPA2 encryption on my network, to keep it more secure and have less latency. Apparently, not so with my new adapter. Every time I tried to connect to it with WPA2 turned on, I would get a “202, Unexpected Error, Error.” Which, if you think about it doesn’t that mean that SOMETHING is broken, that they didn’t expect? Hmm.
Anyways. So I kept getting a flash of a page that I determined was the page that had me entering the wireless key before it error’d out, thusly eliminating my chances of connecting with WPA2. So, knowing this, I turned off any and all encryption on my network, and tried again.
This is where I slam my head into my desk.
Yeah, it worked. However it still sucks and if anything is slower than my old adapter could ever try and be even if I tried to force it to be this slow. That and I now have to follow a few… certain rules… to keep myself online and not having the connection go haywire on my at random intervals.
First and foremost (and probably the most shitty) I apparently cannot use Skype. If I do, I get logged on for about 2 minutes, then auto-logged off. It will not auto-relog back on. I have to close skype first, reopen it after waiting somewhere between 30 seconds and 2 minutes (the time interval is random), before I can get connected back in again.
Secondly, if I want some privacy for my web browsing, such as my doing super sekrit things with my thought process and my browser, I can’t. Any time I try and open up an incognito window in Chrome, my ‘net fails.
Oh, and sometimes my Inbox takes 5 minutes to load up all my old messages because it has to download them from the server. Sometimes it only takes five seconds… Hmm.
Anyways, I’m off to dinner. (Keilbasa!) I may post something afterwards, I dunno if I’m done ranting and raving yet.
I’ll catch you on the flip side. (Damn, two movie references in one blog. I’m getting better at this…)
Moar things in my life
about 1 year ago - No comments
1.) Apparently I have a girlfriend now. Not an official one, yet, but she does call me every night before she goes to bed to wish me good night, and we end up talking for a good two hours (basically until one of us falls asleep.) Now Doc (Droakir, for those who don’t know), say nothing about this (as I have yet to confirm it) and I won’t have to kill you 
2.) I won my first online match in Halo Wars today. For those of you NOT on Facebook, you may not have caught my whole status update reading “Just because he resigned from the game doesn’t mean I won dammit. Oh wait, yes it does. That pussy.”
Now granted, I don’t know the extenuating circumstances. He resigned, and neither of us had mic’s in. Here’s the interesting part about the game though: he had (now get this) a HIGHER BASE SCORE then me. Serious. He had 700 something I had 600 something. I however, had a higher multiplier and as such won in the standings as well. Now, he had done basically everything right to set up a good solution against winning against a Heroic level A.I. Taken all the bases next to him, used his commander power religiously, but he didn’t develop his technologies. He invested in Vultures and Suped up Warthogs. Now, the common misconception about Vultures is that they are the Uber Unit and are therefore all you need. This is wrong. I had ODST’s. I found out, that no matter what techs I researched, if I had something ANYTHING that I could use to supply the front lines constantly without having a stream of vehicles/infantry/aircraft waddling over to them I can win almost anything. I took one base of his… ONE. And he resigned. I don’t know why, maybe he said “Ah fuck it, I’m gonna loose anyhow, might as well stop the pain now.” Maybe his mother was yelling at him to “Get off that damn cube 80 and go to bed!” I dunno. Either way, I won, but it wasn’t a FULL win as one would say.
3.) I finished reading the Cole Protocol today. Very good book. Not too much of a cliff hanger at the end, but enough to where you put down the book, sigh a contented sigh, and then start thinking about it. And then while thinking about it, you start to wonder…
“What did the author mean by THIS?”
“What about that, that HAS to be a hint…”
“Man, I wish this story could finish itself…”
Well, not necessarily the third one, because it’s generally followed by Halo: CE give another year or two in Halo Universe time.
4.) And there’s a reason I left this one for last, because it’s probably the least important of updates: I came down with a cold. While this happened, I missed a day of school, spent $350 on gear for my upcoming caving trip, delayed packing that, delayed filling out the health form that I need signed by a doctor tomorrow morning, delayed catching up on homework and basically done nothing but chill out, read, and talk with Laura (aforementioned Unconfirmed Girlfriend)
Oh, and I also found out that as much as it sucks not having money, it suck even more not having an influx of said money. To stim the length of time that is gonna be true for me, I have decided to drop my web development concentration for my associates (because all classes in that would be boring easy ‘A’s) and just focus on the Programming Concentration. This cuts me down to 8 classes left, and 2 terms. Now if I weren’t going on Vacation over the summer, I’d be able to finish and graduate by the end of fall. But oh well, I’ll just need to wait till spring. OH DARN! lol. 1 year is TOTALLY a shorter wait than 2, and so I’m just happy with the outcomes. Yay. Afterwards I’ll probably ending up going to UNM just for the ease of it (and less cost associated with it) instead of going back down to NMSU. This may take me two years to complete for my Bachelors, but you never know, but hey 3 years before I get a VERY decently paying job, instead of 4 or more, I’m definitely happy.
It Feels Like…
about 1 year ago - No comments
So, not much has really happened as of late, but a few things of significance. First, and most importantly, I haz a new phone! It’s the Samsung Alias. I switch to it from an enV, and I must say, it’s kinda cool having a flip phone and a whole holster for it and stuff. Though I miss the mass-text abilities from the enV. The Alias has smaller keys on it’s querty, so it’s kinda harder to type, that and the num-lock makes it weird to insert symbols and crap, but otherwise it’s a good phone. Nice quick and light.
The second most important thing is, I re-arranged my room last week. Why no photos and bragging until now? I had a project due last Thursday, and was book-worming it to finished stages, and then had to make a presentation on Tuesday. The sad part is, I used to HATE getting up in front of people, but I think I was the calmest of people on my team while we were up there. Kinda creepy. But we pulled it off, got an ‘A’. It was awesome. I got to design the building and layout of every thing there. Apparently I made a few mistakes. The meeting rooms are NOT to be in the back, and for god sakes I need to remember to put BATHROOMS in the building… Hmm. Also apparently it’s a bad thing to have a bigger break room than presentation room. But yeah, COMFY CUBICLES! Yay. I’m still debating on whether or not I should post those or otherwise. Hmm.
Third most interesting thing, I has a new watch. Still a quartz. Still a whatever. Looks nice, just need to get the wrist-band adjusted again. It’s still a bit loose.
That and yay classness. I’m meeting a friends parents tomorrow (Friday) and it’ll be awesome. They’re treating me to Chinese. I like Chinese.
TALLY HO!