Last week I finally caved to the pressure and got myself a cell phone. Let me tell you, it was a difficult decision. I had been holding out for some miraculous and entirely unexpected leap in American technology that would suddenly put us on par with the rest of the world in handset technology, but sadly my dreams went unanswered.
I bought a phone that instead is no better than the one I bought four years ago in Japan.
As far as phones go, it's all right. It makes calls, it receives calls, it gives a company an excuse to totally rip me off. I have to say that after a few days of playing with it, it's nice enough, but only last night did I discover its greatest flaw: It has no strap loop.
A "strap" is a little phone accessory that is wildly popular in Japan. For the first couple of years in Japan I'd held out on buying one because I thought they were pointless and distracting. Then I realized that there was an incredible variety of cool stuff specifically made for dangling from a phone. Fast forward to January 2008 when I last spent time in Japan, and you'd see me buying up every cool one I could find in anticipation of the long dry period ahead in which I'd be forced to live in the States.
Fast forward again, and you'll find me discovering that the phone I'd just bought doesn't have a space (in the form of a little hole/loop in the shell of the phone) for a strap to fit. I was, as you can imagine, devastated. So devastated, in fact, that I have considered exchanging the phone for another model.
It sounds idiotic I know, but sometimes it's the small things that keep you afloat. I really wanted to use those things!
I've made a big move from one hosting provider to another. With any luck, everything will go smoothly without any sort of loss of this page.
If you see anything weird (particularly in the images area, I'm still working on ironing that out), please let me know.
Look forward to a photo gallery and summary of my just-past Korea trip!
In response to Pete's excellent rendition of a Saturday pick-up game of bad football, I made my own version. It's quite a bit different, regardless of the fact that the base footage is the same. Take a look and I guarantee you can't help but crack a smile.
Turn up those speakers and prepare to be rocked.
Because YouTube can't seem to get basic video encoding right, I strongly recommend you choose either of the files below instead of the YouTube version:
http://www.shock-e.com/media/confusion_bowl_remix.avi High Quality, 85MB
or
http://www.shock-e.com/media/confusion_bowl_remix320.avi Low Quality, 30MB
Failing that, you can always watch the YouTube version below. Be warned, you're missing out on the entire point of the video, as the audio sync is slightly off.
A few weeks ago a group of ALTs in my area played a game of tag football. It was the most unorganized event in recent memory. Thus, The Confusion Bowl I was born. Please enjoy the following "promotional clip," filmed and edited by none other than the infamous Peter Weber.
Stay tuned for my own take on The Confusion Bowl...perhaps even as soon as today!
My favorite movie of all time is being produced as a brand new cartoon series. This could be absolutely fantastic or absolute offal. *Praying...*
For a while I've been thinking about trying to come up with a Japanese-language journal for the sole purpose of practicing my Japanese. They say that cataloging your day in a foreign language is a good way to fill in holes in your vocabulary.
In the spirit of that, I've opened 武勇伝(buyuuden: brave story) to frightening public scrutiny. I'm wondering if any of my Japanese friends are on the internet enough to actually take a look at it. Here's hoping.
Anyway, those of you who are into that Japanese-language thing, please do go take a look. It's by no means anything special, so keep that (and my bad Japanese skills) in mind, and try to keep the temptation to condescend at a bare minimum.
NOTE: Since the whole purpose of 武勇伝 is to learn, of course I welcome any comments correcting my Japanese.
Last week was E3 madness. If you don't know what that is, it's some big video game hooplah whose real name I don't know. Everyone was excited about what was coming from Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony (listed coincidentally in order of most to least interesting).
This guy made a short and funny article about probably the least interesting (yet funny because of that) games on the show floor. Check it out for a chuckle. After all, how can you go wrong with video game names like Sandbox, or Casual Game: The Game?
This is a purely geeky endorsement, but I have been waiting for something like this for a long time. Finally a great programmer has enabled me to entirely ditch the bloatware that is Apple's iTunes. Now I can stream any audio from my PC to my Airport Express router, which is connected to my stereo. If you have an Airport Express and Windows and don't like using iTunes, give this app a try immediately. This is very helpful if you use a vastly superior playback program like Winamp.
I'm making this post in order to support (or screw with...I haven't decided yet) IbaDaiRon's freshly-minted experiment in hitcounts at various search engines. Geeky I know, but something to pass the time.
Feel free to write something about Infotechnicalization on your own page, thus feeding the flames of armageddon.
Original Post:
IbaDaiRon Blog � Blog Archive � Infotechnicalization
Last week I posted with my first six (five ,really) pages of my translation of the popular Japanese comic Keroro Gunsou. I've added three more pages. This week starts out at page 7.
It's hard to find good places to stop until my next posting, so page counts will vary each time I make an addition. There's also a lot of prepwork to be done to get everything looking decent enough, so please have patience!
Mail me if you are looking for the original Japanese scans for comparison or study. Or of course if you really like the comic, go and buy it!
Notes:
- It's in your best interest to remember that "Gero" means "ribbit." Keroro Gunsou says it quite a bit.
- Shiiiinnn indicates a long silence.
Enjoy!
There's a comic series here in Japan that's very popular with children ... and me. It's called ケロロ軍曹(Keroro Gunsou: Frog Sargeant) and actually only became popular as an animated television series. Both are hilarious, cute, and generally awesome. A perfect combination, I thought one day long ago, for learning Japanese.
Unfortunately the language used is more difficult than I expected, because the frog character (hereby referred to as Gunsou or Keroro) speaks in kinda old military-speak. But I've been making slow progress when I have time to be sitting for long periods of time with two dictionaries and a notebook. A quick web search reveals that since there is already substantial fan work being done on translating the animated series, no one seems to have bothered with the printed comic. I prefer the book and I need to learn to read, so why not?
Notes:
- I left the scans in Japanese format, which means you need to read right-to-left and up-to-down. The first two pictures in the gallery are "instructions" pictures. If you're not familiar with the Japanese reading style, make sure you check out those two pictures. They should help a lot. Above each picture you get a detailed description of what to do.
- I also left all Japanese sound-effects intact. I translated them literally and placed the translation next to them. Hence you get some strange effects like my thus-far personal favorite, "Bafusuu," which mysteriously represents the sound of bedsheets being ripped from a bed.
- Quick and dirty pronounciation tip for above-mentioned sounds: Consider that the vowel sounds in Japanese syllables are typically long. Thus the A in "Ka" sounds like the A in "Car" rather than "Cat." If you have any real questions about it (can't imagine you would) you can comment or mail me.
Here you are, the first six pages which just gets to introduce you to the main characters. Enjoy!
I know I'd sworn off of frequent link-posting, and since I haven't posted a link to a news story in quite a while, I think I can get away with squeaking this in.
I am utterly amazed by this article. I hope you enjoy it to the same capacity that my attention was captured. It's about "cybernetic" hearing implants ... directly in your skull.
To the oppressively tiny Japanese reading-and-writing subsection of my limited readership, I pose a question:
What is your most trusted method of remembering kanji? Rote memorization? 部首(radical)? Something else? How, for example, do you remember 詰める (which is easy to remember but good for my example), whose radical has absolutely nothing to do with the act of filling or plugging?
Additionally, what percentage (if you will) of importance would you place on visual recognition versus ability to write? I instantly recognize 教える for instance, but often forget how to write it.
What say you?
I've always been put out by the myth that Daddy Long Legs are spiders that are so venemous they'd kill you in a single bite but were unable to bite you. To me it seemed ludicrous because they're not even spiders. I even heard the myth for the millionth time while back in Western Massachusetts. So today I decided to take a little time and look it up. Simple enough.
And there you have it.
Many of you probably already read Slashdot so you may have seen this. But if not ... wow. This is the coolest keyboard. All of the keys are little self-contained displays, so they can be changed to whatever! Neato.
Last night I got the latest release of Gallery 2 up. It isn't entirely pretty yet, but quite functional. Basically it's a way to set up a place on my site where people can get their own account and share pictures. I see it as a great way for groups of people (for instance, our group that went camping, each person with his/her own camera) to share pictures of a shared experience.
It's a very cool application because so-called albums that users set up may be restricted so that only certain people or groups can view them. I like this feature because it means I can remain true to my self-imposed rule not to publicly post pictures of people.
If you want to take a look at it (and I hope you will, and sign up for your own account in the process), you can find it at www.shock-e.com/gallery2. I'll be posting some sort of guide to make it easier for you to make a gallery. For now, the only rules I have are to restrain pictures to 800x600 size and under 600KB. You can set both restrictions when you import pictures into your album. The application is full of stuff to play around with, so experiment! Oh and keep it semi-un-pervy so as to preserve my good name. Or something.
I think iLemmings is the coolest term that has ever graced my screen to date. Interesting article on Steve Jobs' so-called "genius."
One of my previous students alerted me to this very cool video starring Darth Vader doing some fantastic scratching/cueing tricks with the Star Wars Imperial March. You must see this.
Note: There are problems reported with the above clip. If it doesn't work well for you, try this Alternate Clip.
It comes from here:
Keltech strikes back, star wars scratch video, empire strikes back
This is pretty damn cool. If only this could happen in the U.S., by far the most consumptive of all the nations of the world.
Sigh.
Wired News: Brazil Schools U.S. on Renewables
"Brazil generates 43.8 percent of its power from renewable energy sources, including hydroelectricity, ethanol and biodiesel, according to Agencia Brasil, a government communications division. By contrast, the United States produced only 6 percent of its power from renewable sources in 2003, according to the Department of Energy's Annual Energy Outlook 2005."
New Harry Potter coming, trailer, blah blah. Never thought I was a fan (since I don't read the books) but I do enjoy the movies.
Shameless.
I have for a long time had a particularly virulent hatred for Apple. There was a reason, but I couldn't articulate it well. This does it for me, and reminds me why Apple gets my goat: blatant lying. Any company that goes so far out of its way to manipulate the consumer pisses me off. Yes, they pretty much all do it, but this is so far out of line it boggles my mind.
Apple does have awesome design, a great Operating System, and great media applications. It also has ripoff prices, underperforming hardware, and a warped sense of reality. Eh, I lost my steam. I don't buy the stuff anyway, just thought it might be an interesting note for those who live by the word of Steve Jobs.
Note that if you do go to read that article, it is filled with those annoying "sponsored links" that are showing up these days.
Hardware Analysis - Apple cooks the numbers, again?
"Apparently Apple conveniently ignores the very basic principle of benchmarking; you should be comparing apples to apples, or at least make an effort to do so. This not only invalidates their scores but it makes Apple look particularly amateurish; clearly they don't know the first thing about fair benchmarking, or simply went out of their way to have the new PowerPC come out on top."
Found an awesome pictoral summary of the great movie Spirited Away.
This is absolutely stunning. You must click on the thumbnails for bigger pictures. Amazing! Thanks to www.dottocomu.com
If you know what any of this means, you are a geek. If you know what it means, live in Japan, and are excited, then you are me, or you are a lucky geek.
Yep, as if I didn't know it all along. All the Apple fiends' talk about benevolent underdog Apple "thinking different" becomes more and more a big stinky pile of poo. The fact of the matter is, they're no better than good ol' Microsoft. All the more reason for me to stay the hell away from iTunes, which is a shitty program to begin with.
Boing Boing: Apple steals iTunes customers' paid-for rights to stream
This seems remarkably similar to several years ago, when AMD had a better CPU product than intel and intel was running scared. Just like before, AMD has a better product (Athlon64). Instead of trying to innovate and make a better product and let customers decide who has the better product, intel yet again resorts to blatant threats and market manipulation to get what they want. Nothing pisses me off like a spoiled corporate crybaby.
As expected, I am Sake (Salmon). What kind are you?
You need to have a basic understanding of asian emoticons - for example, a western "smiley" is :) and an asian one is (^-^) - to get through this, but ganbatte, you can do it!
Thanks, as per usual, to BoingBoing (Link to post of many sushi thingies).
Made some minor revisions to my CSS code to make things a little cleaner. You probably won't notice any real changes unless you comment. The commenting interface was ugly as hell before and I was too lazy to change it. Well I do think it looks prettier now.
This entry was done from my keitai. やった！
Can someone please explain to me why these things are popular? Not only does it look stupid, but it's $50 and all it does is hold your iPod.
This further strengthens my theory that Apple products contain subliminal messaging that commands you to buy more and more pretty-looking but relatively useless swag to match your pretty white Apple boxy thing.
Mitsubishi Launches Mini DLP PocketProjector @ CHAITGEAR
Mitsubishi PocketProjector is a tiny 14oz powerhouse of a projector. A unit small enough to fit in your hand, run off batteries or car adapter, yet create a 20″ screen with only one foot of throw.
Last night, the handset of my phone fell directly on top of my computer. As a result, one of my USB ports is sadly broken. It makes things a little more difficult, since I have about 5,000 USB devices I use and only one port.
My solution, as I guess I have come to expect of myself, was to take the computer apart to fix the port.
In retrospect (okay not really retrospect; I realized this around the time I broke one of the keys on the keyboard), this was a really stupid thing to do. With a desktop PC, you break one thing, you just have to replace that. Good luck with a laptop if you break something. I should've just sucked it up and bought a $20 USB Hub or something.
But in a geeky sort of way, it was fun. Kind of like how pulling teeth is fun.
So, as previously posted, I had sent my assumed-to-be-defective iPod back to the service center to be "serviced." As predicted, they did a "reset all settings" and assumed nothing was wrong with it.
But the problem remains. Most songs on the thing sound great, especially with $140+ headphones. But then there are some songs that sound like absolute crap. These, at first, I noted with embarrassment that they were songs I had ripped from my CD collection. I thought perhaps I had ripped them from CD and coded them badly. That would make my entire Apple-bashing platform moot.
So for the hell of it, I tried normalizing an already-coded song that I use as my "test song" for "the crap effect." Normalizing didn't help. On a lark, I decided to try the same exact song from Apple's iTunes Music Store. I figured it absolutely had to be encoded well if they were selling it.
The problem remains. In sections of heavy bass, the sound distorts like crazy. I am using the EQ function, and the only way to remove such distortion is to use the "bass reducer" preset. Most songs sound great, but I am somewhat of an audiophile and distortion really drives me nuts, even on a few songs.
My question is this. I know a few of my readers (well, casual glancers, at least) have iPods. Has anyone had a problem with something like this? Does every song sound crystal clear?
The last post has singlehandedly broken records for comment-count on my lonely blog. I should bash things more often.
As for the iPod, I agree, I got a crappy one. My other hunch is that Japanese buyers tend to have lower standards of quality, I think. This goes along with the fact that you cannot return anything. So basically Japanese consumers have learned to suck it up if something is broken or not so great. You bought a $5000 stereo and it sounds like ass? Oh well, better get used to listening to ass, cuz you ain't returning that.
My theory is this: knowing this, Apple thought they could off all of their poorer quality hardware in Japan. I happen to be the recipient of a Japan-bought iPod with a crappy screen and even crappier sound. Instead of replacing it, they are going to "fix" it. Highly unlikely conspiracy theory? Yes. This one is more of a beef with crappy Japanese consumer tactics since in the States I believe they'd just replace the thing.
As for the Airport Express, there is no excuse for this one. I've read a lot on the internet about it and even Apple-people aren't particularly pleased with it. That is what I'm really pissed about. Such a piece of crap shouldn't cost more than $100. That is one damn expensive wireless router, considering comparable ones (with better features) cost five times less ... This isn't a matter of me having a bunk one. It's a matter of everyone having a bunk one.
But enough about that, simply put don't buy a Mac Mini without expecting something to crap out within a year. To be fair, you really shouldn't expect to buy any computer for $500 and have it work well.
I just can't stop thinking about the hard drive shitting itself in Ryan's $2000 (correct me if I'm wrong) iBook ...
... for delivering yet another lousy set of products to the consumer.
All the talk now in the computer world is about Apple's new iPod Shuffle and Mac Mini. Both, I am assuring you, are absolute pieces of crap. I don't have anything remotely resembling real evidence to back up my claims, other than my experiences with two other rather popular Apple products: iPod and Airport Express.
Macheads tend to go on and on about the stability and reliability and good design of their beloved white thingies (read: Apple's current design is everything-white). I beg to differ. The first day I had my iPod I realized something was wrong with it. The screen is screwed up and so is the sound. Where is my iPod now? Being "serviced" i.e. someone looks at it long enough to see that it hasn't been broken in half, calls it "okay" and sends it back to me.
Shortly after the iPod disappointment I was rewarded with the Airport Express disappointment. I warn you, if you are thinking that this product is cool (Ryan, this means you, if you are reading), do not buy it. I know a guy who has two of these things and neither of them works right. Mine certainly doesn't. The entire point of the thing is to play music wirelessly. However, I can't play jack so long as I am doing anything else on the internet. This includes merely having a chat application open. That doesn't even mean I'm chatting with anyone. So the options are play music and do nothing on the internet or do something on the internet and don't play music. Boy does that sound handy. I can do that with a $20 wireless router. Boy do I wish I had one of those instead of a $120 Airport Express! Believe me I have tested everything you can test on this thing. What a waste of time.
Don't get me wrong, Apple has great ideas. The iPod is awesome, if only it worked correctly for me. The Airport Express is also a wonderful idea, but very poorly executed. Even looking beyond the crappy inability of the thing to play music (its main selling point), the interface is clunky as hell, and doesn't exactly give me many options. So, I get back to my long-standing Apple complaint: The sole reason their products continue to sell well is that they look cool. The next time I hear of someone who has an Apple product that doesn't crap out, please let me know. I'm dying to hear about it.
Maybe geek is more the word I should use. Since buying it, I have always wondered about how to make my own fantastic little moving wallpapers for my dandy W21SA mobile phone. I tried (in vain) animated GIFs but that was a step in the wrong direction.
Quite by accident, I discovered it was Macromedia Flash that powers most animation on the phone. This enables one to make some pretty damn cool backgrounds on your phone. When did I see any American cell phones do that? Oh right they can't.
So if you own an AU (KDDI) keitai and want to make some pretty cool stuff for it (I think you can even make mini applications if you're good enough at Flash), go on over to the Macromedia Flash Lite AU page to grab the Content Developer's Kit (of course you need Flash MX). I've already made three kickass backgrounds for my phone, and I'm the world's worst Flash designer ...
ASIAN POP The Gadget Gap / Why does all the cool stuff come out in Asia first?
It's a little bit of a long read, but I have always wondered why the US was so far behind in terms of cool gadgetry. Now you know!
It all comes down to Schoolgirls. Why am I not surprised?
The Importance of...: The Obsessively Annotated Introduction to the INDUCE Act
Ernest Miller puts in his more-than-two-cents on the new INDUCE act being set forth by Orrin Hatch. This law is idiocy, and Miller undeniably (at least in my eyes) proves it with wit, sarcasm, and a whole lot of good thinking. Good read, if you have the time.
Here's a link to the Original News Story.
Why the FCC should die | Perspectives | CNET News.com
This is an interesting geeky article about the irrelevancy of the FCC. I never really thought about the FCC; it has always just been there. Does it need to be there anymore?
Some notes on the "Who wrote Linux" Kerfuffle
Andy Tanenbaum on Linux Torvalds and the creation of Linux. A good read if you follow anything *ix.
Sharp V602SH & Sharp V402SH - Mobile Gazette - Mobile Phone News
The minute I get to Japan I'm getting one of these. Hopefully there's a model without the stupid dog bark translator.
But a TV tuner, radio, SD memory slot, and a 1.3MP camera with optical zoom? Yeah. I'm sold.
Y'all suckers can keep your crapass American phones!
R505GCP and booting from firewire - www.ezboard.com
I bought the PCG-R505GCP VAIO subnotebook from my friend Dan for a very good price. Dan's would make a pretty bad used car salesman, because he actually gives good deals.
I was so excited to have this new notebook. It's very light, battery life is fantastic, and it's speedy. Everything I wanted, and I didn't want to pay for the overpriced dock that Sony sells with the thing to get CD/Floppy access.
Every time you get a used computer, it's not a bad idea to reinstall the Operating System. This one was in fine condition, but there were a few missing admin tools that I wanted back. So I decided to play with Partitions and Recovery methods and in short, blew up the computer. All partitions ended up deleted and the machine was a $600 paperweight.
Hopefully this mini-article (I call it a "How To Not" as opposed to a "How To") will show up in some search engines so others out there won't go through the agony I did with this thing. My first piece of advice is DO NOT think you can boot from Firewire. The ONLY firewire device you can actually boot from is the dock CDrom (which actually is a firewire device) or some other very proprietary Sony devices. I attempted using a Sony external DVD burner, to no avail, along with three other external Firewire devices.
Don't bother trying to boot from Firewire, it is impossible, even though the BIOS says 'boot from i.LINK.' A sham, I tell you! The best you can do without the dock is to get your hands on a USB floppy device and load DOS and then the Firewire drivers. Sounds fun, no?
Even better: you can only boot from certain Sony USB drives. They cost $80. You have to get the VAIO specific bootable floppy drive. Good luck finding that even on ebay for less than $60.
A nice little workaround is some older TEAC USB floppy drives are bootable. I have one sitting in front of me, model number FD-05PU. Unfortunately, it's hard to find these, since the one I have at least is an iMac version (go figure a Mac product will work with a Sony, the most stubborn product on the planet).
Unfortunately nothing promises to work with this thing. My suggestion is to go to your local computer geek retailer, make sure they won't charge or deny you if you try to return something, and buy a USB floppy drive. If it works, huzzah, that's how you're going to have to reinstall. If not, return that shit and grumble.
Oh, and another thing. Attempting to network boot using Microsoft Windows RIS is also an exercise in futility. The Network Card in the VAIO is proprietary and you need special drivers, and RIS can't make a valid image out of the Sony Windows XP cd. Go figure.
Chalk it up to a run-in with the company that makes some of the world's coolest products but has the world's worst support.
It has become accepted fact that I have a knack for pointing out social trends that will sooner than later become the mainstream. Witness metrosexuality (yes I so had my finger on the pulse of that one before it got out of hand and South Park made fun of it) and the pre-wrinkled shirt thing. In fact just monday I pointed out to Kristin and Nicole the prevalence of pre-wrinkled shirts.
Hearken to me, unbelievers, for the time of reckoning is nigh. I have predicted the next fashion trend, suffice to say it won't be long now before it comes to pass. And what, you may ask, is aforementioned next trend? I'll tell you.
Dorxuality. Yes, that word is definitely plagiarized from Ryan's vocabulary, but rightfully so. Geeks will be the next gay. And I don't mean Gay in a bad way. I mean the trendy fashionable gay that permeates today's society.
The trend has already started to seep into society bit-by-bit. Note the thick-rimmed black plastic glasses you see some guys wearing. It's no longer a style relegated to guys who think they are being "mod" or "indie" or whatever. Note also my undeniably geeky hairdo I've been rockin lately. I have gotten more hair compliments with this geeky hairdo than ever before, seriously. In light of this new trend to geekiness, I have worked out the next phase of the geek movement, something that will be snapped up by the masses who don't even know what it means.
I'm absolutely sure someone else must have come up with this idea, but I'm the one with the cool illustration:
Some of you may not even know what this is a spoof of. Well, have you ever heard of that uber-trendy brand "French Connection UK?" Well their new (insanely popular) marketing shtick is the acronym "FCUK." You can't walk down trend-central Newbury Street without seeing a shirt that says "FCUK Him" or "FCUK it" or "Hot as FCUK." Cute huh? Vomit.
If you're a hardcore geek you probably instantly recognized that "fsck" is the unix-based hard disk checker-upper. If you're not, well, I just told you what it means. Being that my site is light-years away from even remotely sizeable readership, I can get away with spoofs like this. Thank God for that.
Ask yourself what you can do with all of those really stupid pictures of yourself that you don't want anybody seeing.
Answer it the way Josh Wrisley put it: "Justin, this would make a great Guinness advertisement!"
Without further ado, I present to you my take on what you can do with all of those stupid pictures. Hell maybe Harp Brewing Company will pick me up as their next big thing! Just go over, take a look at the first picture in each ad (there are two ads), and make sure to click on the picture itself for the conclusion to the ad.
HA. Enjoy!
I've occasionally expounded on the benefits of RSS feeds in my news section, but for those of you who are still in the dark about what RSS really is, here's a little "tutorial" on how to get started in the wonderful wide world of syndication.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication, not Really Sexy Sluts as Dan suggested) is a way for you to aggregate a whole bunch of information into one point rather than having to go search all over the internet for it. Any webpage that is syndicated (has an RSS feed) will send updates to whatever program you choose as your "News Aggregator." The Aggregator will be your new point where all of the news that you have linked to (via the RSS feeds in pages) will gather. Get it? So for instance, in my aggregator, I have BBC World News, Boston.com news, New York Times, Ryan's Blog, Boing Boing Blog, Slashdot, and a whole veritable assload of other feeds. Instead of having to navigate all over the www and find all the headlines I want, I have everything I want in my aggregator. The best part is that I don't have to wait for pages to load or read articles I don't want to read. I simple text headlines that load in no time flat as soon as they are put into the feed, and I read whatever I choose.
That was probably confusing. Let's learn by example, shall we?
Say you think my page is downright kickass and you want to know whenever I update (which, admittedly, in the past was rather ... uh ... infrequent but is now more frequent than anyone thought possible).
-
1) Go download and install a news aggregator client like SharpReader or NewsMonster or any one of the other million aggregators out there. Unfortunately, SharpReader (like many Windows aggregators for some reason) requires the .NET framework from Microsoft, which is a 20MB download in itself. NewsMonster on the other hand, requires Mozilla, whose Firefox project I've been pimping on my website for a while anyway. As I said there are plenty of other aggregators out there. I use SharpReader, personally.
2)
There are other ways people choose to display RSS feeds. Ryan displays his feeds like this:
Most commonly, RSS feeds will show up as an orange XML icon, something like this:
For any one of these display methods, what you need to do is get the URL of that feed. So you can right-click on the link/icon and choose "copy link location" or however it is worded in your browser. You may also click on the link and then copy the URL from the addressbar in your browser.
Paste into this field the link that you copied above. If you hit enter, you will see the current headlines for that site. Somewhere in your aggregator there will be a "subscribe" button. If you hit that, you will be subscribed to the feed, and you won't need to do this process again. Every time you look in your aggregator, you'll have new headlines (if any have been made)!
Now go out and start feeding, Soldier!
P.S. the feed on my site is http://www.shock-e.com/index.xml
Copy and paste into your aggregator, and you're set.
Those of you who may have seen me in the past few weeks might recognize that I've been having some "interesting" hair days. I can't say "bad" hair days because inevitably due to severe laziness I have those days almost every day. But I finally realized what it is I am shooting for with this haircut-hiatus.
Yes, you may find it awkward and mildly embarrassing that I seek to emulate a cartoon character. I, too, find it mildly otaku. But what, seriously, isn't there to like about this guy? He's badass. He's lazy. And he bears a striking resemblance to me, aside from the fact that he's a cartoon character, better looking, smokes, and lacks anatomical correctness. Nevertheless, we could be twins!!!!!!!
Taken from a promotional Cowboy Bebop Poster
A recent photo (any resemblance to past photos is strictly coincidental)
Simply astounding, no?
Ever since discovering it, for the past two days straight I have been playing Boom Boom Volleyball in every spare moment I can muster.
Warning: This game is highly addictive. As I said, I have been playing nonstop instead of doing much more productive things like writing, cleaning my room, packing for Ireland, or doing my job. I have also managed to get Ryan addicted as well. Three cheers for simple internet games! If you manage to start playing this game and figure it out quickly enough, be forewarned: you will be sucked in. This is like oldschool Nintendo games that were quite simple but immensely fun. To this day, MegaMan 2 is the most fun video game I have ever played.
I think the goal of the game is to eventually beat Level 5 so you get to "play topless" or something, but I can't really see the appeal to that other than just the fact that you beat it. I don't really see that tiny digitized boobs would be all that exciting. Then again, the wacky world of hentai (Japanese animated porn) does appear to be quite popular.
All I want for Christmas is one of these.
I've been yammering for one of these for a long time, saying iPod is overpriced and overrated. Until I could play my favorite movies/music/whatever on the subway or in the plane, there was no way I'd be updating from my old NetMD. And here it is!
This is serious drool-worthy geekware. And for once it's not from Apple! We'll have to see if it stacks up though.
Probably anyone coming to my site lately has noticed since I upgraded to the MovableType system that there are some text rendering problems associated with vertical scrolling. In short, if you scroll up and down, text lines will disappear or run into others. It's basically the fault of Internet Explorer, so this may be incentive (doubtful though) for you to check out Mozilla Firefox. Basically, Internet Explorer is a shitty web-browser that may be fast but doesn't comply to international web standards. I refuse to put into my code hacks that look something like this:
width: 760px;
\width: 780px;
w\idth: 760px;
All I should have to put in my CSS is width: 760px; but Internet Explorer requires the other two lines to display correctly.
The good news is that all you have to do to see the text correctly (should you refuse to download and use a vastly superior browser) is drag-select the text (as if you were going to copy/cut), and voila, the text will display properly. I'm sorry it behaves this way, and if I can figure out a way to make IE behave without adding ridiculous code like what you see above, then I'll do it. Who knows, maybe Microsoft will get their ass in gear and make a standards-compliant browser, but for some reason I doubt that. After