http://rayne.woot.net Rayne's Journal engrish Copyright 2003-2004, Rayne rayne@woot.net 06/01/07 03:12 PM http://rayne.woot.net/archives/00000570.shtml I'm sure there's been a study on this somewhere, but I think it's interesting how spending patterns differ based on how frequently you're paid. The difference between getting paid monthly, bi-weekly, or weekly can be huge. From my experience, weekly paychecks lead to a steady stream of smaller expenditures, while monthly paychecks facilitate larger purchases. Lets say, for the sake of simple arithmetics, that I get paid 2000$ a month. I can get that either in 500$ installments per week, 1000$ every two weeks, or a huge sum of 2000$ each month. If you were looking at a balance graph comparison betwen weekly and monthly payment schemes, the weekly graph would be a much smoother one, while the monthly one would fluctuate a lot every month. In the first scenario, I've got a constant stream of (relatively) small amounts. This is probably good if I am constantly needing cash flow to pay bills, buy drugs, etc; but at the same time I don't have to watch my spending too closely because I know the next paycheck is just around the corner. With a monthly payment, I get very large sums at a time. This gives an immediate feeling of wealth. There's nothing like a 2000$ injection into the chequing account to tempt me into buying big ticket items. That xbox 360 seems much more affordable right after a monthly paycheck than it does after getting 4 smaller paychecks, having spent some odd percentage of them, and trying to save up. With 1 monthly paycheck, it's like the saving up part was done for you! This leads to the problem that, while I would feel rich after getting paid, by the end of the month, I would wonder where all my money went off to. 05/29/07 10:51 PM http://rayne.woot.net/archives/00000569.shtml or, The Library, as I sometimes call it. So I was really beginning to not have enough space for all my books, movies, and general "media" in the various places they were being held. My room and closet in particular were starting to get a little too jumbled with comix. So I decided to clear out the very small and cluttered home office to make room for my stuff. The result is 2.5 walls lined with all sorts of geekery. 1 wall with all my graphic novels and comics. The other with lots of movies and books. Aside from putting all the money I've ever spent in 1 room, I now also have a much more open bedroom. Also, I've been wanting to put my laundry basket in my closet for YEARS but have never had the space to... 05/18/07 03:27 PM http://rayne.woot.net/archives/00000568.shtml About to order a double turkey with cucumber, onions, green peppers, tomatoes, and honey mustard. My thoughts of deliciousness were rudely interrupted by the sandwich maker asking me “is there cheese on this?”. Confusion ensured. Clearly, there was no cheese on my sandwich. She had not put any on yet, why was she asking such a ridiculous question? Was she testing my occular faculties as a random service now provided by the friendly staff of Subway restaurants? Was it a philosophical query? Indicating that the cheese would be purely a product of my mind; I would think the cheese, and so it would be. Perhaps Subway had now developped some sort of quantum cheese with which they replaced the standard newtonian-cheese, whereby the cheese simultaneously did and did not exist on my turkey cold cut and settled upon a state only when I had observed it. Eventually, there was cheddar cheese on my sandwich. Which was better than the guy behind me who had decided that, yes, indeed, there was american cheese on his. 05/17/07 01:23 PM http://rayne.woot.net/archives/00000567.shtml I hate mother's day. Seriously. Not that I hate mothers; in fact, I love YOUR mother. But there's just something that rubs me the wrong way about a day where you are OBLIGATED to show someone you love them. All of a sudden, you have to go out of your way to do something special for your mommy even though you talk to her like once a season. Or maybe you talk to her every day and get along really great, but if on this day you don't have something great planned, you've somehow let them down. Not doing something special for mother's day has NEGATED all the nice things you've done over the rest of the year. Mother's day is the busiest restaurant day of the year. Busier than Valentine's, New Year's Eve, Halloween, or Patriot's Day. Why? Because if you don't take her out to dinner, you're a bad child. And the amount of extravagance lavished upon your mom on this day (and this day only) is directly proportional to how much you love her. P.S. I'm not in any maternal trouble or anything. 05/06/07 05:15 PM http://rayne.woot.net/archives/00000566.shtml And now I join that special circle of hell dedicated to screaming 14 year olds who make videos about their favourite characters. Oh well, it turned out pretty good. It's scenes from Superman Returns set to Here Without You. I loved the whole Lois and Clark thing in the movie and Superman's loneliness easily suggested itself to this song. What suprised me is how easy it is to make a music video. Technically. Its basically just cutting and pasting. You mark the "area" that you want to cut, and then move it to where you want it placed. So simple! The technology for video editing is much more intuitive and easy to use than I thought. What's not so easy is audio editing. The two speaking parts in the song stand out immensely and hours of working with audio filters hasn't really produced anything significantly better. It doesn't help that I don't really know much about waves and frequencies and all that stuff. So here it is. A higher-def version is available if you want it... just ask! 05/05/07 03:59 PM http://rayne.woot.net/archives/00000565.shtml So I've come up with a really great line/turn of phrase that I wish I could use. But, sadly, it only works in the context of a Peter Pan story. Seeing as I dont particularly want to write a Peter Pan story, I'll never get to use this properly. So i'll just give it to ya. Ready? "Fly! Peter! ... and never, never, land..." 04/27/07 05:45 PM http://rayne.woot.net/archives/00000564.shtml Phil posted that he thought professional yoyo'ers were the coolest thing ever. Well, I tend to disagree. Personally, those who participate in the circle drawing competitions are much more interesting. It's a much more elegant sport which doesn't need flashy music, artistic choreography, or subjective judging. No - circle drawing is all about pure, objective precision. Master circle drawers spend years training to draw lines that are exactly 2-pi-R in length, that encompass precisely pi-r-square space. These are not skills to be taken lightly. 04/05/07 04:58 PM http://rayne.woot.net/archives/00000563.shtml My first computer was a 386. It had drives for both types of floppy discs, 2 megs of ram, a “turbo” button and a math co-processor. The hard drive was 50 megs big. Games were considered big if they came on more than four 1.4 meg discs. Amazingly, many fit on just 1. At one point they cost about 1$ a piece, I must have bought hundreds of them. I remember playing with config.sys and autoexec.bat files to get “high mem” for certain games. I spent 50$ on 2 more megs of ram so I could play Simcity 2000; it entertained me for months. My first sound card cost hours in tweaking, but it was worth it to hear the digital voices in Dune 2 and the lasers firing in X-Wing. One of the first games to use polygons was Out of This World, it was incredibly beautiful and had a unmatched atmosphere of isolation and exploration. Back then, we didn’t have 3D acceleration, surround sound, or multiplayer. There wasn’t even an “internet”. All our 14.4kbs modems could do was dial up our friends so we could play the 1 or 2 games that supported point-to-point connectivity. And piracy! Dear lord, piracy was difficult back then. Dialling into BBSs to download required that you were able to connect in the first place, busy signals were obviously very common, and then grabbing what you needed might have taken several nights of slowly leeching one byte at a time. Today, well, today we have Crysis and torrents.