2004 April

Beatles + Metallica = Beatallica

Oh man, I thought it was great when the Grey Album came out that combined Beatles’ White Album with Jay-Z’s Black Album, and even cooler when someone made a hip-hop version of Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Vs The Pink Robots album (see this post). But now even cooler is Beatallica, a combination of Beatles with Metallica. If anything, you should listen to Hey Dude (Metallica version of Hey Jude). It’s pure genius, and fantastic production quality from an amateur outfit.

Two Bad Feelings

Not much happening with me lately, but I thought I’d point out two really bad feelings that I experienced tonight:

Bad feeling #1: Starving, and watching a movie on TV, when suddenly in wafts a terrific odor of hamburgers grilling through the open window. Dinner options for me? Tuna fish sandwich, Chef Boyardee’s canned ravioli, or Kraft’s macaroni and cheese.

Bad feeling #2: Opening the bathroom door, and stepping on something that gave an audible crunch. Turning on the light reveals I had stepped on a huge cockroach. Thankfully I had socks on.

NVIDIA GeForce FX 6800 Preview

My young padawan (actually he’s pretty old), Brian, has posted his preview of NVIDIA’s latest flagship video card, the GeForce FX 6800, over on 3DGPU. He has done well without my watchful gaze and advice, even the typos are at a minimum. The 6800 looks exciting, but at the same time, disappointing. The FSAA implementation is the same as previous generations, and nothing was mentioned on anisotropic filtering levels, so I assume it’s not 128-tap yet. Maturing of the drivers will definitely make the card even faster, and it’s impressively fast as it is in this early stage. The card was tested on a system using an Athlon64, which will be the standard system for gamers when this card is in its prime, so it’s good to see how it fares with it.

I think I’ve become jaded over the years though, raw numbers just doesn’t do it for me anymore. I’m interested in one thing only - how does it play with my games? Can I leave 2x FSAA on all the time? That’s something I can’t do with the Radeon 9800 Pro, with games like Lineage 2, Far Cry, and Battlefield Vietnam all choking at key points of the game. I can’t stand the slightest stutter in my games, it has to be perfectly fluid. Perhaps I just need to upgrade my Pentium 2GHz CPU first and get another stick of 512MB of memory.

Comment Spammer

A comment spammer flooded the comments on this site with his advertisement of a website (which, of course, I won’t post on here.) He posted over 50 comments on 50 different posts with the same message. Thankfully I have MT-Blacklist which makes it easy to delete his “comments” and add his IP, Name, and Website to the blacklist so he can’t post them again. Of course he can always use a proxy to bypass the IP ban feature, but he can’t post the website anymore. The more website he uses, the more I’ll add them to the database so others will ban him too.

I’ve submitted the relevant info to the MT-Blacklist Centralized Blacklist Database. So if you’re using Movabletype, you may want to install MT-Blacklist, grab the latest blacklist update, and that way you can prevent these spammers from infecting your blog.

This is a massive problem, that will hopefully go away when the TypeKey authentication services is unveiled and developers start using it in their applications. For now though, I’ll continue fighting spam, the lowly scums won’t get by on my watch.

Easter Weekend With The Family

I spent the weekend up in Jacksonville with my family for Easter. My little sister, who is going to college at University of Florida, drove by and picked me up since it was on her way to Jacksonville. It was the first time I ever got to talk to her alone as adults and learn what kind of person she has become now. I really think she’s amazing, and I’m extremely proud of her and how she was able to earn a scholarship at UF and wants to major in Business Management. I’m glad we got to talk, it made me feel a lot closer to my little sister.

The family is pretty much the same. We had grilled hamburgers and bratwursts, with macaroni and potato salads. It’s been years since I’ve had grilled bratwursts, and they were really good. Not the way I like it though (cooked in beer first, then grilled with lemon juice squeezed over it.)

I also finally got to see The Passion of the Christ too. It was as I expected it to be, extremely powerful and emotional, making me think about a lot of things I pretty much avoided in the past. I even think the movie is changing me as I type this, because I question the truth, as I always have, but now I’m just delving a little further to find out the answers in life. I think the movie has such an impact because my generation grew up on movies. The Bible worked for the past generations, because they didn’t rely on movies to have something conveyed to them, but a movie has a much more powerful effect. It made me feel I have a better personal understanding of who Jesus is, and what he means to us.

The people griping about the movie being too violent, or even anti-semitic, are focusing on the negative more than they should. Jesus wasn’t about negative, only positive. So by focusing on the negatives, they’re essentially ruining the whole beliefs that he stood for. The only negative the movie gave me is that it made me want to punch Satan in the face, if I were to ever meet the punk. I just think we should focus what the movie was about, the sacrifice Jesus made, the changing of the world from that point on, and the basic human common sense to love one another, no matter what religion, creed, skin color, or opinions any person may have.

Needless to say, it was an interesting Easter weekend, that didn’t yield any chocolate bunnies.

Designtopia And Web Design

I’m not sure if I mentioned it on here, but I have created another website, one that can provide me freelance web design jobs. The website is called Designtopia, and I’m extremely proud of it. When designing websites over the years, I’ve encountered final results that either made me feel really good about how it ended up, or I’d feel uncomfortable with it. This site, Good Blimey, makes me a little uncomfortable. It’s not a bad thing, but this site was designed when I was teaching myself web standards, CSS, and accessibility guidelines. It served as a playground to test code out and get a feel for newfound knowledge. There may be some rough holes here and there, and unconventional codes, but it works, it’s efficient, and it’s clean. That, I am proud of. I may redesign this site when I get the urge, but for now, it’ll suffice.

Meanwhile, Designtopia just feels good to me. The color is soothing, the layout is clean and smooth, and the content is concise and helpful. While it’s not a full-time job, it does allow me to pursue my web design passion, whilst at the same time being paid for it. The whole site has been lovingly coded by hand in Notepad, and I think it’s a shining example of just how excellent web standards truly is.

By the way, WeblogReview.com reviewed this site, and they gave a very favorable review. I agreed with everything they said. It did make me proud of this site too. I’m horrible at tooting my own horn, but I feel I deserve it just this once.

Hooray For Vicodin

That stupid abscess tooth I had back in December is back, and it’s infected again. I was hoping it was gone for good, but it looks like that’s not the case. I’ve been in immense pain for a couple of days now, but thankfully I had some Vicodin saved up from my last ordeal with this tooth, so I’ve been taking them to help weather the storm. It looks like I can’t put off going to the dentist and have it taken care of. Right now the Vicodin is working its magic, and I’m real thankful that it works so well to cut out the pain. I just wish it didn’t make me feel all weak and light-headed.

I’ve been in a stage the past few weeks of not wanting to interact with anyone. I haven’t talked to anyone, gone out, or anything of that sort. I’m not sure why, but all I’ve been doing is reading up on web design, fixing my computer, playing games, watching movies, sleeping, and the past few days, grimacing in pain. I’m hoping it’s a stage that will pass, because it’s no fun to have no motivation to do anything. My family is wondering why I haven’t returned their calls or emails.

I think even my brain is telling me to get a move on in life. I had a dream of going to Las Vegas to attend some tradeshow and having a blast. I even ate sushi in the dream (oy!) It was an interesting dream because I was telling this game it would rock if they would make an online RPG game based on the Cowboy Bebop series. Now that would be an interesting game.