Rankmaniac 2011 statistics

Hey guys, it's amazing to think that it has been two weeks since this project has started. I never expected this much traffic for the website that I whipped up to post random stuff I find on the internet. As some might guess from the title of this post, the Rankmaniac 2011 competition ends tomorrow. It's a bit relieving to have it all be done with! The listings can be somewhat psychopathic and arbitrary at times which makes this quite frustrating.

I've fervently been trying to scrounge up posts that people would find interesting as well these past few days but it seems like it's somewhat for naught as coming into the final stretch we're not on the top spot. Some of the practice behind Google's search results do not make sense. The TA's baseline websites have not been updated since they were created and these sites are still on top! That makes absolutely no sense.

For this post, I'll have the listings for various statistics and grades that our website has gotten using the analytics package that comes with blogger sites. Here's a cool milestone I saw from yesterday:



Woo! It's really hard to believe that this page has been viewed over a thousand times! Shout outs to Elaine for helping to advertise this site a lot :). The overall view statistics are as follows:



It's neat to see the spikes for the days in which we advertise the site on facebook. Sorry for the spam guys! I guess facebook is definitely a great way to spread things! Though I did get a few complaints for the spam :(. Here are the statistics for the people that have visited this site:



It's not a big thing to find out that most of the people are from the US. I do wonder how we have 6 visits from Malaysia and a few from Europe scattered here though! Weird stuff. Also there are some browsers that I have never even heard of that people are using these days. Crazy crazy! Last but not least, the ad revenue gained from the site:



Wowza! $19.25! How ridiculous is that? Too bad we can't cash any of this out until we hit $100 though! This definitely makes me want to keep on blogging and earn money from doing something that's enjoyable.

Cool, thanks for sticking with us till the end of Rankmaniac 2011. I'm going to let this post be the last one for now until the competition is officially over tomorrow. Wish us luck yo!

Edit: One more statistic, check out the posts that got the most hits:



This current post has the most clicks! And in second place is the Starcraft video. There definitely is a big correlation between the number of people that view a particular post and the number of people that link to the post from Facebook. Also, the pages that Elaine links to get more views that the pages that I personally link to. I guess she's way more popular than I am!

Obama's 2012 budget proposal

Wah quick post. This is very interesting and news that everybody should see: Obama's 2012 budget proposal!

The total proposal is worth $3.7 trillion. A big portion of that money is being put into research for clean energy and the budgets of many national research institutions are going to be dramatically increased. Crazy stuff! This will definitely benefit the future generations as this type of research is exactly what we need right now.

What I'm personally looking forward to is the huge increase in the amount given to education. This completely differs from what the Republicans in the House of Representatives were proposing for the continuation of 2011. There will be big boosts to NSF amongst other grants. Great for all sorts of collegiate students.

I feel as though Obama is taking a very good measure with these changes in pushing for a more research and education based budget... It's not passed yet so only one can speculate on the differences. We must note that the federal debt is as big as ever and I'm not sure if this budget is going to help it. Obama's vision is good, but how will it all pan out?

Source

Fan made video game movies!

Hey guys! A few days ago my friends and I were surfing around youtube looking for fun things to watch. We decided to spot over a few fan made video game movie trailers. I'd like to say that the production value on some of these are absolutely stunning. They also adhere much more to the storyline of the video game itself. So here they are for your viewing pleasure for those that haven't seen them before.

Here's one that's been pretty popular about Pokemon. It got a big uproar in the beginning when the only thing released was a big scrappy rendition of this fan made production. People ended up thinking that this was a real Pokemon movie! The only think I can't get over is how uncute pikachu is.



Following this are two Half-Life 2 productions. The first one is called Escape from City 17. Pretty good stuff. The surroundings look nice and realistic. One video has already been made in the series (the one shown here) but part two is nowhere to be found! 99% of the part 2 searches on youtube end up being 20 seconds long or rickrolls. Fun stuff:



Here's another Half-Life 2 short film. I feel that this one is better than the prior but also follows the video game less closely. Combine soldiers don't have swords! And I don't think resistance fighters would know capoeira. But whatever it's cool, has atmosphere, and is very well produced.



Alrighty, last one of the batch. Probably the best one too. It's made with actual movie stars and a bit of a budget but otherwise still relatively small project. It's about Mortal Kombat! The action is super gritty and much more down to earth than the craziness in the games. It is a complete reboot of the series and has actually been slated to become a real production! It's great but not for the faint of heart.



So after watching all of these, we had the question: why couldn't big name movie studios do something of this quality? These are FAN made with very little money or backing of any sort. All of these look fricktastically epic! While studio movies like Dragonball Evolution ended up being a stinking pile o' manure. I honestly don't know. Either way, I just hope these fans can keep making such epic productions.

Status update

Hey guys, thanks for the continued support for our Rankmaniac 2011 site. We're going strong into the final stretch right now. As some of you might have noticed this website has a few advertisements on them. What has been interesting is how the advertisements have been progressing.

At the beginning, the adverts were directly representing SEO (search engine optimization) and SERP (search engine results page). This is most likely because Google has already learned and seen the Rankmaniac query from the two projects that have preceded it. What's fun about that?

What we have managed to do is change the advertisements from these specific targets over to something thats different depending on the post (sorry guys, no pictures since I wasn't thinking far ahead for this). Since Zack posted a "buy new computer"-ish style entry, our ads have been for games and online gaming. Back when I posted the funny ancestry tree a while back, the ads changed over to ones for people who want to look for their family past.

Isn't that too easy Google? Are your ads really just mimicking the posts that we have? Maybe that's true. We'll find out. I'll do an experiment on this and post it later. As a fun fact we've gotten 11$ worth of ads for these two weeks of keeping the site up.

Otherwise, keep up the support! We are almost there.

Federal spending cuts financial aid

Fun stuff. Federal spending has never been a favorite topic of mine. Lots of politicians are single minded in doing what they can to get paid more or re-elected. It's an unfortunate truth in a capitalistic world where the corporations secretly deal in the background.

As many people know, the United States has a sizable debt piled on due to the recent wars we've fought. The House Republicans want to cut back on spending right now and have drafted up a spending bill for the remainder of 2011. What's the kicker? They are cutting down on the Pell Grant that provides financial aid to students such as myself and grants towards science research by 15%.

Such a cut would lower the amount of aid that the most needy people could get by nearly 850$. This would cause over 1.5 million students to be ineligible for this form of financial aid! I feel this is a terrible idea for a place to have spending cuts. Education is one of the most important parts of our society today. In order to preserve the future of our country, we need to keep the citizens educated and give them the necessary skills to tackle problems.

Surely if we spend billions of dollars fighting a downhill war, there must be some way to cover the few millions of dollars that would be saved by cutting such an important bill right?

Source

Also, for kicks, here's Representative Anthony Weiner (New York 9th district) calling out the Republicans for violating their own rules. I guess not all Democrats are spineless eh?

Looking to get a new computer?

Look no further! Anandtech is here to save the day. They have released a budget buyers guide (desktop computers under 750$). The will have guides for the high priced market segments when the Intel 6-Series chipset bug gets worked out.

If you're a gamer you'll definitely want to check out the page on GPU upgrades, or maybe wait for the more expensive build guides to come out.

Also check out how the author spelled his name wrong!

-Zack

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.

Real life FPS

There have been a huge streak of FPS games these days simulating "real" warfare. They are quite intense with lots of different guns, stages, and huge multiplayer action. For those that haven't ever played Call of Duty, here is a clip:



Pretty action-packed eh? The thing about these games is that there is a major detachment from what actual army fights are like. In the games, the player has no value for the life they are given. When they die they respawn and are given another chance later on. This allows the player to rush recklessly with guns ablaze with no real repercussions other than maybe losing the online match.

Here is a video of a first person perspective of an actual soldier fighting it out of a REAL ambush:



It may seem less "intense" but in real life you only get on chance. One tiny mistake will cost everything. Not only your own life, but you are putting your comrades' lives in danger as well. Once you realize that, this would have been one of the most intense clips you ever watch...

CEO of Japan Airlines

Who ever would have though the CEO of one of the largest airlines in the world would be so humble? He cut all of his perks and makes only 90,000$ a year. It's such a striking comparison to the heads of American corporations that seem to be in it for themselves.

For me, I believe a lot of the mentality comes from the Japanese culture that revolves around community and selflessness. The American ideologies are much different. Kids are taught from an early age to be independent and think for themselves. It's amazing how different two of the most advanced countries in the world can be eh?

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.

Status update

1000 views, and top mark on Google! Bing is still weirded out though - nothing has changed on that end. Thanks for the help guys, this project has been going great so far. There are only a few days left in the Rankmaniac 2011 project.

One of the groups had the good idea of writing down lots of synonyms as a post since Google likes to mark people based on similarities as well. I'm going to look up synonyms for the two words Rank, Maniac, and Mania and alternate in using them throughout a paragraph.

Here I go with trying do this:

In the year 2011 (twenty eleven or two thousand and eleven), there has been a recent madness in which the hierarchy of fanatic teenaged girls have started a craze for overly reacting to an assortments of loony fixations. Some fear that this type of delirium amongst girls in the range ages from 6 to 18 might be a disease. Doctors have pinpointed symptoms in which girls go into a frenzied formation of squealing madness that only the most psychopathic person can withstand. Common triggers for this hysterical behavior include 5'3'' tall 16 year old singers with swooshing hair, giant abnormally sized stuffed animals, and Barack Obama. Be on the look out for the overenthusiastic diehard extremist girls. They can go into a berserk state at any moment and destroy the echelon of any hierarchal civilization.

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?

Mubarak steps down

An amazing update from Egypt, President Mubarak has stepped down and passed power over to the military council! This is an incredible result after three whole weeks of protests from the Egyptian people. The revolutionary fervor has kept going and the Egyptian people got what they wanted.

But the road won't be easy from here on out. It's much more simple to find a common enemy and kick them out and its far harder to establish order after doing so. Hopefully other countries will help facilitate this process and actually make a democratic state that the Egyptian people can be proud of.

Some people might think that the military having power right now is a bad idea. However, in Egypt, the military is one of the most respected institutions. The common belief is that the military will always serve the people. During the protests the army had to come in to stop the police who were at times attacking the protestors under Mubarak's orders.

The excitement coming from the protestors as soon as they heard the announcement was amazing. Here is a video:



Let's just hope that Egypt can have a peaceful transition from here on out.

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.

The Perfect Husband

Wouldn't all the girls in the world just love a guy like this?
--
Several men are in the locker room of a golf club when a cellular phone on a bench rings and a man engages the hands-free speaker function and begins to talk. Everyone else in the room stops to listen.

MAN: "Hello!"

WOMAN: "Hi Honey, it's me. Are you at the club?"

MAN: "Yes."

WOMAN: "I'm at the shops now and found this beautiful leather coat. It's only $2,000; is it OK if I buy it?"

MAN: "Sure, go ahead if you like it that much."

WOMAN: "I also stopped by the Lexus dealership and saw the new models. I saw one I really liked."

MAN: "How much?"

WOMAN: "$90,000."

MAN: "OK, but for that price I want it with all the options."

WOMAN: "Great! Oh, and one more thing. I was just talking to Janie and found out that the house I wanted last year is back on the market. They're asking $980,000 for it."

MAN: "Well, then go ahead and make an offer of $900,000. They'll probably take it. If not, we can go the extra eighty-thousand if it's what you really want."

WOMAN: "OK. I'll see you later! I love you so much!"

MAN: "Bye! I love you, too."

The man hangs up. The other men in the locker room are staring at him in astonishment, mouths wide open.

He turns and asks, "Anyone know whose phone this is?"
--
Youtube rendition!



Great advertisement I'd like to say. But it's sad to think that there probably are people this rich that can just go about buying anything they want! As a student I'm pretty poor myself and am strapped for cash all the time. The only luxury I can afford is to go eat out with my friends on the weekend.

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.

Status update

Number one on Google for the query "rankmaniac 2011"! Woo! Thanks for all the help. We'll continue bringing in fun content whenever we see it on the net.



Funny thing is, bing doesn't have this blog on the same query. Nor many of Google's top hits either!



Weird right? We're honestly very confused as to what is going on with bing. *Cough cough* insert inferiority statement here *cough cough*. It definitely goes to show how different bing is at ranking things in terms of relevancy. We will continue updating as much as we can with cool stuff. Our strategy won't change from here on out. There is on week left but it's anybody's guess to see how Google posts things in the coming future.

Thanks for the support guys, keep it 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.

Starcraft 2

People around me all seem to love Starcraft 2. It's a great game with lots of depth and variety that leads towards an enjoyable experience all around. The game has gotten very hot recently because of all the high-profile tournaments they have running in Korea.

But! People take the game too seriously! It's only a game in which you are meant to have fun with. This guy is a great example of what you should be doing when playing Starcraft:



Remember kiddies, it's only a game. Have fun. Relax. And stop whining every other minute.

Engineering students

Fifty-th post! To celebrate, here's a joke I read off the nets:
--
Two engineering students were biking across campus when one said, "Where did you get such a great bike?"

The second engineer replied, "Well, I was walking along yesterday minding my own business when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike. She threw the bike to the ground, took off all her clothes and said, "Take what you want."

The second engineer nodded approvingly, "Good choice; the clothes probably wouldn't have fit."

Sushi

So I went to a sushi buffet today with my friend. It was the worst experience of my life. For people that don't know how a sushi all-you-can-eat works, you order all the sushi you want for a fixed price. However, you must finish everything you order (no leaving the rice ball behind either!) or else you pay extra for whatever you can't finish.

My friend and I were pretty hungry at the beginning. We ordered a lot of great sushi and it was awesome. When the time for seconds came around, we though we could go for more... Oh how wrong we were! In the end I had to stuff my face with sushi to a point at which I felt like I would explode. And my friend didn't want either of us to die so he decided to cut it short and pay for the rest we couldn't finish.

...Sad thing is this is the third time this has happened...

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."

Japanese Candy

Wow the Japanese have some crazy things! Here's an example of one. The "sushi" they are making consists of fruit flavored jello. The kids are meant to mix it all up and serve it as though it were actual sushi!

Man that's super cool. Sushi is a huge tradition in Japanese culture. Learning to be an actual legit sushi chef takes years upon years of proper training. I feel as though this product might corrupt the kids to make fun of sushi making, but I think the intent was to have them appreciate one of Japan's unique points.

Either way this is some cool stuff but I sure am glad that when I'm eating candy in America, it doesn't take 3 minutes to prepare!

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 :)

Rankmaniac

So some of you guys might we wondering what the Rankmaniac project is. On Google right now we're 7th (lots of shifting happens all the time!). The project description is as follows. We're a group of Caltech students taking Adam Wierman's CS144 class called "Ideas Behind the Web". Help us get ranked even higher and higher!
--
In this exercise you’ll try your hand at search engine optimization. Your goal is to create a web page that ranks highly under Google and/or Bing. To motivate you, we’re bringing a little competition and school pride to the table. Students at CMU attempted to do this two years ago as part of their course “Science of the web” – we expect Caltech students to ‘outrank’ their best efforts!

Background: Building a powerful web presence is becoming increasingly important to companies, organizations, and even individuals. Many of these entities have an economic incentive to attract high volumes of (relevant) web traffic to their web sites. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the traffic to a web site by improving its ranking on search engines for certain relevant keyword searches.

This project was originally designed by Luis Von Ahn at Carnegie Mellon University. Professor Von Ahn is famous for developing the Captcha and reCaptcha system that is used to stop spambots. Let's see if we can take down their efforts from years efore.

Your task: Working in groups of 2, your objective will be to create a page that will rank as highly as possible among the search results on Google and/or Bing for the query “rankmaniac 2011”. (The quotes are not included in the query.) You will be evaluated based on the ranking of your page for this search query on February 16, 2011 at 12:30pm. Note that we are giving you this much time because it typically takes a little while for a new page to be crawled and indexed by Google/Bing, so you’ll have to start right away!
--

Super bowl joke

A man had 50 yard line tickets for the Super Bowl.
As he sat down, he noticed that the seat next to him was empty.
He asked the man on the other side of the empty seat whether anyone was sitting there.
"No," the man replied, "The seat is empty."
"This is incredible," said the first man.
"Who in their right mind would have a seat like this for the Super Bowl, the biggest sporting event in the world and not use it?"
The second man replied, "Well, actually, the seat belongs to me. I was supposed to come with my wife, but she passed away.
This will be the first Super bowl we haven't been together since we got married in 1967."
"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. That's terrible. But couldn't you find someone else -- a friend or relative, or even a neighbor to take the seat?"
The man shook his head. "No, they're all at the funeral."

George W. Bush

Rant rant rant. Squabble squabble squabble. Uproar roar roar. Did you guys hear what happened to good old G.W. when he was supposed to go give a talk in Switzerland? A good amount of protest and political movement happened to try to force him to not come or to put him in jail if he does.

Why? Waterboarding of course! This form of torture that has been recognized by nearly all of the countries in the world was used on many occasions by the former president. He defended his actions in his memoirs and continues to say that this form of interrogation helped to protect the U.S.

The people in Switzerland did not want the former president to come into the country. They said that any other person that has openly admitted to torture would have been locked up and put on trial in the neutral country. George Bush did not want to be slammed into jail so he canceled his trip.

Now this brings up a good question. Does a former president deserve some sort of immunity from his actions taken while acting as head of state? Maybe so. The U.S. at the time did not officially recognize waterboarding as torture (Obama has changed that however) so technically what he did was OK in the U.S. However, the U.S. has taken part in the Geneva treaty to not torture any political prisoner. This is the notion that the people of Switzerland are trying to grill Bush on.

It's probably a good idea for Bush to lay low for longer. Ever wonder where he disappeared off to right after he left office?

Source

Status update

Hey guys, thanks for all the help! Right now we're on top of the listings for Google. Hurrah. Too bad results are fleeting and it will probably be very hard to keep this up. We'll see what happens. Stay tuned for more updates on randomness around the web!

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.

Windows updates

I officially hate Windows updates. The fact that they are so intrusive destroys the entire purpose of having a good user experience! Why is it that if I leave my computer on overnight to say, run a long job (or download some large items :D), and all of a sudden I wake up in the morning to find out that Microsoft forced updates on me and rebooted the comp? It's always hilarious when I see lecturers presenting with a powerpoint and then have intrusive popup for these updates take over the screen!

I like what Google does with Chrome though. A small notification appears that then tells you to reinstall. However whenever you restart Chrome it will auto install. Yes it's slightly intrusive but it does not do anything forcefully.

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.

Actual content #1

So... Actual content? Does this site have any? Sometimes. Yes. Most of the times, copied? Maybe. But I'm not entirely sure what actual content revolves around. Either way I'll just spew about my day today.

I got a matte screen protector for my mac today (thanks to the anonymous person who helped me order). It definitely makes the shinyness of the screen go down by a tad. Not as much as I would have hoped for but it seems that with a more matte screen the graininess of the protector starts to obscure the vision of the screen. Either way, it makes my macbook nicer to look at. No longer is it a 2000$ mirror!

I hope it helps my vision though. My parents from when I was a kid always found it really scary whenever I sat any sort of close to the TV. They thought that my eyes would deteriorate like a monkey and just go poof. I guess they never wanted me to wear glasses even though I do now for fun (ironic isn't it).

The main piece of software I've been using recently is focus booster. What it does is have a timer for 25 minutes in which a person is supposed to concentrate on doing a task. Then there are 5 minute break intervals for a bit of relief. This is known as the pomodoro (Italian for tomato) technique. It's quite interesting though I'm still having lots of difficulty trying to focus during that 25 minutes of time. I'll see how it goes and post more about it later.

Most exciting thing is that Rankmaniac finally updated! I wonder why it came up all of a sudden. The sister sites are going at it too but not anywhere close on the radar just yet. This project is still a bit wishy washy in my mind though. I don't feel much academic gain from it at all. Mostly just a side venture that I'm probably spending way too much time on. Though if I really do need a website later on it might help.

I also realized that with the keyboard protector on my mac that I type alot slower. The protector is nice though since it prevents my shiny Mac from getting infested with crumbs and bits that like to float around. And hair! Oh the hair is so annoying to get out. Hmm I think I've ranting too much right now! But my hair needs to be cut. Yup.

That's a good update of actual content thats probably insanely boring. Okay will post funny stuff later. Bye bye.

Huge status update

Wow the blog is on the second page now!! This is quite amazing considering the fact that it didn't even make the standings before! It does seem that some of the 2010 sites want to be competing in the 2011 standings as well.

Regardless support us! We're catching up :)

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...

Bing googling for results?

Theres a recent article going around that Bing copies Google's search results! How scandalous. The article does indeed prove that Bing has non-unique results compared to those of Google... What does this mean? Well it's kind of the same as making your own search engine and just scraping the data from Google.

Sure it might be a good thing to just learn off of the dataset that is from a different source but pure scraping is just shameless. This does actually put a new level of gameplay into the RankManiac though. It probably is possible to make Bing results appear the same as google's. But it's worth too much effort.

They say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, but seriously Microsoft, why not just make Bing better through effort? Taking the shortcut never helps!

Source

My short name

So my name is only four letters long. There are both pros and cons to this:

Pros:
-Huge time saver on standardized tests! You only need to bubble in a few letters
-Unique. Not many people have the same name as I do

Cons:
-People think my name is weird stuff, like Y.E. Lu
-I can't make a Google account with my name! Google requires 6 letters and I can only give 4 :(

The last point has bugged me for a while. I can only stick with my old screenname from sixth grade and have not had the chance to change to anything that works. Kind of sad eh?