Chopsticks

So many people always criticize me when I eat chips and other foods with chopsticks. Why do I do it? Well it's cause I don't like that greasy feeling all over my hands! I'd rather not get dripping sauces or leaky grease onto my fingers. They are just sensitive in that way. But apparently I'm not the only one that thinks this is good:

Ha so take that negative nannies that don't approve of my "strange" habit.

Windows XP

Don't you hate it when Windows XP does something like:

To be fair, it's generally Windows's fault when something like this occurs. A lot of it has to do with third party hardware and software that is running on the computer. Since Microsoft does not control what is being run on the computer as strictly as Apple does, many developers write sloppy drivers and whatnot that don't end up playing nicely together.

Random startup generator

Hey guys so I found a really funny site for great ideas for new startups! With all this startup fever going around these days people can't seem to stop comparing sites to other sites.

For example, Quora is the Yahoo Answers for the tech savvy. This site my friend showed me just produces all sorts of random mixes of "it's this for that". One example is:

Okay this one makes sense I guess. It probably already exists but if not I bet people would go there if they needed rush delivery. Clicking around some more I find some interesting ones...

Mmm... that might work. Send your laundry in, somebody picks it up, does it and returns it for you? Maybe some really lazy people would go for this idea! But how about:

Derp... uh what? Am I going on this site to buy collegiate Jewish women or am I going on this site because it's targeted towards them? Hmm... This is kind of getting ridiculous...

Hey! This one I might actually go for! Hopefully it's got more control so hopefully my sessions won't end up with some 13 year old boy flashing me all the time. This could be really cool! And I'm somewhat flattered too since the bot probably thinks I'm attractive. I mean it's got to right? Why else would it throw this idea at me?

Hey! Wait a second. Stop flip flopping around so much. What are you trying to insinuate huh? Stupid website!

There's also another site that produces a pretty legit looking website and randomly generates a startup name and idea for it. Not as random or as funny as the one before it though.

R.I.P. Guitar Hero

So as some of you may have heard, Guitar Hero is being put down to rest by Activision. Sure, after Harmonix left and started their own Rock Band series, the amount of these start-your-own-band music games surged. The oversaturation at this point has definitely hurt the series as there was not innovation in gameplay as much as getting different groups to join in.

There is a timeline of the Guitar Hero series (click to expand):

It's pretty damn crazy how many games came out in a short period of time eh?

What this decision goes to show is that Activision can and will make big decisions on some of its major labels. For those that do not know, Activision is the largest publisher behind EA right now. They own Blizzard (and all of its billion dollar franchises), Call of Duty, and many others.

Some people dislike their practice of aggressively buying out companies for profit. The aggressive commercialization of Starcraft 2 might have been at their hands but one never knows. Right now they want to take over Take 2 Interactive, the company that is famous for their GTA series. If they do indeed complete this take over, Activision might just surpass EA in size. EA had tried to buy out Take 2 before but the developers strongly resisted.

Crazy stuff. Bet y'all didn't know that the video game industry was this cutthroat eh?

Pikachu?!

Oh wait... Oh god... That's not pikachu! But it's so fricken cute! Awww... Animal cruelty? No it's just photoshop!

This is much better than those "real life pokemon" pictures they have floating around the nets. At least this guy is so adowable :3

Poor Mario

Ah Mario, that super human (though subhuman height) Italian plumber whose Princess friend constantly gets kidnapped. How woeful of a life he has in which any of the following things can kill him instantly (click to enlarge):

You'd think Peach by now would learn to stop getting kidnapped and putting her lovable Mario in danger so much... At least it allows us to play some fun games eh?

Clothing

Some clothing is so freaktastically expensive these days! Anybody ever buy a 100$ pair of jeans or a shirt for over 200$? Looking at you ladies! For a simple guy like me I have no clue what people go for such expensive clothing. Yeah I guess they look nice and ritzy but doesn't something that costs 75% cheaper feel just as nice?

A lot of it is catered towards extravagance and these types of clothing do look nice. But that in no way justifies this monstrosity:

Over ONE THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS for a torn up t-shirt that looks like it belongs on a homeless person? Seriously what the heck! You want nice shell ear rings? Go to the beach and pick them up for free for goodness sakes. There are some things that are just plain ridiculous in the world and this is one of em.

That fabric most definitely is worth about a dollar that means that selling one shirt would have made over 1500% turn around! Whoever designed this better have higher-plane-of-existence knowledge and made this crummy shirt cure everything including common sense. Okay I give up. I have no clue why people like this stuff. Somebody please explain to me why something like this can even get on the market!

For me personally since I was the youngest out of all my relatives and family friend's children, I just get all the hand me downs. Free tux? Can't pass that up. Free jeans? Why not. The shirts don't always fit but they do serve as nice pajamas every now and then. Fun stuff.

Will you marry me?

...JK

Some cruel stuff! I hope this never happens to anybody that reads this blog. I have no clue what this guy was thinking when he put these up cause this is the worst kind of let down out there. There is no information about how far apart these posts on the road were but it was probably planned for maximum damage.

Actually I think that something like this is way better than a marriage proposal in public like at a ball game or something due to confusion with names. "Hi Jennifer, will you marry me?" Is not very specific. There are probably a couple of Jennifers out at the stadium that day.

You know what, now feel like this guy might be pulling everybody's leg since Jennifer is such a common name. All the Jennifers that see this message will probably be scared out of their minds due to the lack of specificity of the message. Funny guy. Bad way of breaking up.

My desktop

Isn't it pretty? The gadgets I used are called "Geeklets" that can be installed on "Geek Tools" for OSX.

I spent quite a bit of time looking for a nice background. I like this one since it is very minimalistic with an appealing blend of colors. There isn't anything too garish or distracting either. Pure minimalistic bliss.

Edit: here is the wallpaper for anybody interested. It's called Galactica by stormMajki.

Psychic!

Today's XKCD is pretty hilarious. Somehow girls always know what guys are thinking about. Strange eh?

"It's not hard when you have the same thought like 40 or 50 percent of the time."

Derp

Couldn't help but post this one. It brought a chuckle to the people around me as well when I saw it. Is it just me or do people on the internet tend to think alike in terms of humor? For some reason this picture had a sort of cathartic release ... though at the expense of a poor someone who got this car into an accident.

Either way if you don't know what derp means just say it a few times really slowly and I think you'll get it :)

It's a trap!

I'm so glad it doesn't snow in California now :)

Faces around the world

Couldn't help but post this one. The follow picture shows the faces of women from various countries. What is special is that these faces are composites of many different pictures and then averaged together. Neat huh? You can really see the difference between some countries to the rest. What I find most curious are the oriental countries (China, Japan, Korea) that many people say they can't tell apart. The difference is pretty striking now though. What's kind of funny is that the picture for Taiwan and China are pretty much dead even. Probably because the divergence happened relatively recently rather than hundreds of years ago.

Family trees

I know that a lot of people know how bad the marriages between European royalty in the olden times were. People would constantly be marrying their cousins and relatives and that would be the norm. Still, it's hard to actually see what is going on without a picture:

What the?!?! The tree converged on itself? This is not how a family "tree" should look! And you wonder why the kings always made stupid decisions... Hopefully our own family trees don't look like this.

It's strange to think about your ancestors and all but it might be fun to trace where all your heritage started. Granted most people do not have the fame to have their family tree be so easily found like the European royalty, but I'm sure you can still trace back at least 3 generations if you try hard enough.

Randomness

My project team member is a troll. We have a website for CS141 that he constantly puts random javascript on! Yes, it is our fault that we do not sanitize our input but he keeps doing it! Whine whine whine.

Fun email I sent to Donnie:

Hello Mr. Redston,

I am slightly irked in finding out today, Thursday the 3rd of February of the glorious year 2011, that a promise that you, Mister Ronald Redston the Third, made to be yesterday, Wednesday the 2nd of February on the 11th year past the 2nd millennia, has been broken. On that fateful morning during glass my friends and I conversed about a certain "bib cat" if you do recall. We traversed the intertubes to find such an example of a "bib cat" and after painstaking work we decided to show you. It was during that time that you, the defendant in question, promised to put said "bib cat" onto your PowerPoint slides if I, the accuser, were to send you the picture of one "bib cat".

This internet mailing log shows my side of the transaction:

Subject: bib cat
Date: February 2, 2011 11:35:26 AM PST

One "bib cat" was sent to you by the internet mail and should have been received by you. If you do not take action and add an example of a "bib cat" to your notes, my fellow witnesses and I will not stand lightly to such a blatant disruption of our mutual trust. I hope you heed this warning and do not take it lightly.

Cordially,
The party for fair treatment of "bib cat" and "yak zap"

But yeah right now we're doing distributed file system stuff in class. It's going well, but there are still a lot of issues we need to work on.

ZOMBOCOM

Anybody remember this antique relic of the old websites? It makes me want to go dig up my Xanga with files hosted on Angelfire. I remember all the scrolling text that I imitated off of Yahooligans! Alternating caps in the title were the best too. Ah the old days...

XKCD 1/31/11

Randall Munroe could not have possibly been more right. Cept in the college life, there definitely should be a ramen box in there! I always tell myself that I should go and try to learn how to cook every now and then but I never get around to it. The main turn off is the few hours needed to go and clean stuff up afterwards :(

Probability and statistics

I am so sad that our prob/stat (Ma2b) didn't have fun examples like this one!

Technology

People these days take technology for granted. We always expect to be able to turn on our laptops and check the web for updates (to this blog right?) without fail. But the event in Egypt has got me thinking of what can go wrong. A government can just decide on a whim to take away an entire country's internet is just plain ridiculous! I honestly hope more people look and realize how atrocious this is but also how dependent we are on technology to survive.

Also, I'm just going to hate it when my paper runs out of batteries.

XKCD 1/28/11

New XKCD from today


Tagline: But the windows! What if theres a voyeur watchi -- wait now I'm turned on too.