The Long Road

Archives: March 2006

Thursday, March 30, 2006

The fine line between courage and idiocy can often be defined by attire. Some examples.
Petting a pitbull: brave. Petting a pitbull naked: idiot.
Meeting your bf/gf’s parents: brave. Meeting your bf/gf’s parents naked: idiot.
Snowboarding for the first time: brave . Snowboarding for the first time while naked: idiot.
Climbing Mt. Everest: brave. Climbing Mt. Everest Naked: idiot.
Fighting the undead: brave. Fighting the undead naked: idiot.
Sun tanning naked: brave. Sun tanning fully clothed: idiot.

Posted by Rayne @ 02:53 PM EST [Link] [19 comments]

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

So after something like 4 months of research and looking around and pouring over each Thursday’s flyer delivery and constantly F5’ing redflagdeals and telling people that I wanted one, I finally gots me a laptop.

Here are the specs for it:
Acer Aspire 5672WLMi
Core Duo T2300 1.66 GHz
Ati X1400
RAM 1 GB
HD 100 GB
DVD-RW (+R double layer) / DVD-RAM
Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth 2.0 EDR
15.4" TFT WXGA (1280 x 800)

The only better deal I ever saw was a Toshiba M70-SR3 which had a weaker processor and an ass of a video card but was 400$ cheaper. I’m not sure if 400$ is worth the difference, but I don’t think I would be able to stand a machine that can’t even push Warcraft 3 at a decent clip. This laptop can do civ4 at 1920x1200 which is…excessive.

The specs pretty much speak for themselves, but one of the things I really appreciated about this machine is that it came with DVI output on top of VGA. I knew that DVDs looked like ass on my LCD and expected some kind of improvement using DVI but I was most certainly not ready for the huge leap in video quality. Gladiator has never looked better.

Something that Phong immediately picked up on that I didn’t was the lack of noise from the laptop. We’re used to having a constant buzzing of 4+ fans in our PCs, this laptop runs dead quiet in comparison. It also takes up way less space than a desktop so you can imagine that my desk looks at least a little less cluttered nowadays.

The main problem with the laptop is heat and ergonomics. The heat vent is on the right hand side where you would usually have your mouse. The area under your wrists and the touchpad also get a little hotter than they should. This mean that your hands may get uncomfortably hot whether you’re mousing or keying around. It’s one hot laptop!

The software that comes with the laptop can be troublesome. I nuked everything and started with a fresh install, but the drivers for things like the audio controller, wi-fi, and Bluetooth are always running even when you don’t need their services. Between the three of them, we’re talking about almost 100 megs of wasted memory(!). This doesn’t include the almost-dozen pieces of crappy proprietary Acer software that came preloaded (on a fat32 partition, no less).

Like the LCD, the laptop is something I wish I had during school. It would have been much nicer to move around with a laptop than it is with a box + CRT. And I could have brought it to class to chat on msn during lectures like so many people are doing now! I’m not quite sure what use I have for a laptop’s portability at the moment. As of now, the laptop is pretty much permanently docked with all kinds of things (4) plugged in and I don’t really move around the house with it or anything. I’m sure all find a legit use of its mobility one day, like blogging from the porcelain throne or something.

Posted by Rayne @ 03:13 PM EST [Link] [13 comments]

Saturday, March 25, 2006

I am firmly of the opinion that one can never have enoug desktop space. Or at the very least, I have yet to encounter a desktop that didn't run home to its momma once I was done with it. Here I present to you the evolution of Rayne's desktop. Exciting!

First we had my old 19 inch CRT Behemoth. I ran this guy at 1600x1200, an awesome resolution, no one else's monitor could really do this...of course no one else's monitor was the size of an adolesent elephant either. Here's what 1600x1200 looks like, and Here it is resized to something a bit more manageable.

In August, Dave got a 23 inch LCD which ouput 1920x1200. 384 000 pixels more than my CRT. Clearly, this challenge to my sense of excessive materialism could not be left unanswered. December saw my acquisition of a twenty-FOUR inch LCD which also did 1920x1200. (BIG, small). After owning a widecreen monitor for a few months, I have to say that this is definately the way Al Gore intended the intrawebs to work. There's nothing quite like being able to look at 2 websites simultaneously side-by-side. This would have been great for all those coding assignments back in Uni.

However, not content with merely calling his raise, I resaised him with the addition of a second screen (laptop) bringing my total desktop space to 1920x1200 + 1280x720. (BIG, small). And in case of needing even more space, there's always the remote desktop to my old machine.

Posted by Rayne @ 08:49 PM EST [Link] [14 comments]

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

"We can't see anything wrong with you" Those are probably the worse words to hear! I hate going to see a medical person (very rarely, btw) and being told that everything is fine. I only go when I have specific, and maybe dire, symptoms that need looking after and more than once have the doctors said those words to me.

It's infuriating because you KNOW that there's something clearly wrong with you and it's such a let down that they can't give a specific explanation as to what's going on. It's also not reassuring at all because while all the tests might say "normal", you feel everything EXCEPT normal and your heart might burst at any second yet the doctors tell you that there's nothing to be done because nothing's wrong. We need tricorders.

Posted by Rayne @ 04:23 PM EST [Link] [13 comments]

Friday, March 17, 2006

head flying high
nose going, going, gone
throat looking for trouble
i hate virii

Posted by Rayne @ 03:52 PM EST [Link] [3 comments]

Thursday, March 9, 2006

So our annual seal hunt seems to be always causing quite a stir. The McCartney’s are getting into it too this time, to the point where the Premiere of Newfoundland offered to have them come over and showing them what it’s all about. But really, the protesters have already won. Those little phoques are phoquing cute! All the activists really have to do is plaster pictures of these phoques everywhere and it’d be all over. This is why activists don’t activate against the millions of ugly, ugly salmon we kill. Really, salmon is an ugly beast, at least until you slice it into orangy-pink little rectangles placed on top of a piece of rice and then it becomes absolutely beautiful.

But I digress.

I think the Premiere had the right idea. As an officially registered image consultant, I propose that the best way to convince activists is to have them all over and show them that the seals are being killed humanely and not a scrap of their bodies gone to waste. An event should be made of the seal hunt; a larger event than it already is, that is. A sort of cultural event, maybe even a festival. The Annual Seal Hunt Festival. Or, for us bilinguals: Le Festival Annuel de la Chase aux Phoques.

They could have stuffed seals to sell, seal fur wear, seal bone knick knacks from locals, a seal cookout with freshly hunted seal thrown on the grill, recipes far and wide, a delectable assortment of seal to try out! Best of all, for a small fee, they could take tourists out to hunt their own seal! What an adventure that would be! A Phoqu'ing good time, I'd say!

Posted by Rayne @ 11:51 PM EST [Link] [13 comments]

Tuesday, March 7, 2006

Hard work pays off later, procrastination pays off now. True? To a certain extent. In the long run, hard work will provide a comfortable, maybe even early, retirement full of all the thing we enjoy enjoying. Procrastination lets us enjoy things NOW but at the price of knowing that hard work is coming up, and that’s where procrastination doesn’t pay off at all.

Whenever I’m goofing off instead of doing some work that I know I should be doing (which is, like, all the time), I can never truly enjoy myself. There’s always a voice, perhaps Christine’s, telling me I have better things to do, guilting me every instant, and reducing the amount of fun I could be having. Then once the half-hearted fun is over with and deadlines loom and work must absolutely, positively get done, it only gets half-assed done. Either time runs out, or time gets used up with lots of self-recriminating “shit, I should have started this hours ago”.

On the other end of the spectrum we have all the go-getters who do their work first. This is me at the start of a school term or of a new job. The shit gets done and the fun is FUN. It’s a tough mentality to stick to, when work starts to really pile on and get tough, my natural instinct is, counter-intuitively, just to slack. A mish-mash of catch-phrases for this side of the fence would go something like “work hard, play hard. In that order. And if you’re working, don’t play.”

There must surely exist some form of fun-equation for all of this. For example, the guilt-ridden procrastinators probably only experience about 65% of the fun they would be having without the upcoming work bogging them down but they get an extra X amount of satisfaction from having fun NOW (a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow) and spend more time having fun than working. The hard worker on the other hand enjoys 100% of his fun time and likely has a multiplier due to the increased satisfaction of having a good day’s work behind them. So without exact numbers, I’d wager the hard worker has more fun than the procrastinator.

Anyways, there's a lot more on this topic that I want to talk about, but I have to get back to work.

Posted by Rayne @ 06:20 PM EST [Link] [8 comments]

Thursday, March 2, 2006

In elementary school, I solved Tic Tac Toe. That is to say, that I sat down and thought out the best possible strategies and realized that the player who makes the first move has the advantage. Anyone who’s played even two games of 3T knows that the center is the most valuable position, I had formalized it a little bit and worked out the sequence in which first player should make his moves to win. At the same time, I strategized for second player and realized that under perfect play the best second player can expect is a draw. 3T became deeply flawed and much too simplistic; I never played it again.

Fast forward to last weekend. Etienne showed me Go Moku, it’s like Tic Tac toe except you have to make sequences of 5 instead of 3 and you play on a board that is 19x19 using a Go board and accompanying pieces. Because the board is so much bigger (I’ve yet to have a game where I’ve reached the edges) and you have to make sequences of 5, the complexity is vastly increased.

Doing a bit of research though, I found that Go Moku is even more flawed than TTT! It turns out that it’s been proven first player can always force a win if he plays perfectly! Even a perfect game from second player will lose. In TTT, player 2 can at least hope for a draw. This is just unacceptable! Go Moku has lost a lot of its luster this day.

In a more pragmatic view though, perfect play for a human is probably impossible. The game’s much too complex for that. Even after playing a few dozen rounds, I didn’t really see the benefit of the first played piece. It’s probably not until very high level play that one can recognize the importance of the middle position.

In Go, there is a similar situation. A large difference in skill levels will often be offset by a few (very few) pieces put on the board for the weaker player before the stronger player can make a move. It is very difficult to grasp that in a 19x19 board with games going for more than 200 moves how 5 extra pieces can be considered a handicap. Heck, Tic Tac Toe requires at most 5 moves at most from each player.

Posted by Rayne @ 03:32 PM EST [Link] [9 comments]

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