This is a test of the new method for photo entries. Please ignore it for a while if it goes wonky. Looks like it’s working. Hooray for MT. (A sample post with the new photos-in-blog method.)

Not to insult M or anything, but the “Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About” seemed a lot less hilarious and insightful three or four years ago, before we got married.

Another massive construction project: Chubu International Airport (more on Wikipedia)

I now have one new gmail invitation available. If you want it, or know someone who knows someone who wants one still, first come, first served.

OMFG. The Half-Life 2 preload begins. “Purchase options will be released soon.”

Be sure to keep an eye on the Steam Network Status page (specifically the yellow line on the bottom graph). Will Steam be slashdotted?

Just some quick comparisons of benchmarks of my old machine (Athlon 800) and my new one:

I certainly don't think I have the most beastly machine in the world (Nomad has more memory and a pair of RAIDed SATA drives, for instance, and at least one person I know at work has a Radeon X800), but I'm amazed with how much faster this machine is than my old one. I guess that's what happens when you wait 5 years between upgrades.

Update 08-28: 3DMark 2003 benchmark for the new machine: 3811 3DMarks.
Update 08-30: Doom3 High Quality timedemo: 30.4 fps (I couldn't run Ultra Quality because I only have a half-gig of memory)

Long, but fantastic trailer for a movie that won’t exist: Grayson. Years after Batman’s death, Dick Grayson returns to his role as Robin to find the killer. Fanfilm at its finest, and it only cost Untamed Cinema $18,000 to make.

Movies that take place in an alternate timeline are dangerous, especially when DC Comics is trying to jumpstart a new series in their Universe.

I wish I had had the balls (and the legal argument) to respond this way when I was served a Cease and Desist.

Heh, I just noticed that it's the same law firm as my C&D. I should find it and scan that thing in.

The Tricks of the Trade

“I found a digital camera in the woods”, Blair Witch for the Internet. Keep reading a few pages.

Science and Industry is a teamplay based modification for the game Half-Life. I was an active part of the community for a couple years, running a server, working on some applications, helping with testing alpha versions, etc. Eventually, I became a full-fledged member of the development team, helping PapasNewBag out with the coding for the mod. Many of the visual enhancements included in version 1.0 were my contributions.

Working on S&I was a fantastic experience that I will treasure forever. </corny> Honestly, the entire team is friendly and brilliant, and their hard work is evident in the quality of the maps, models, and replayability of Science and Industry.

Here are some of the behind-the-scenes screenshots I took and sent to the other dev team members, showing what I was working on and what problems I was having. These images were all taken between January and April 2002. Also included is my history of S&I — A Mod’s Life — written February 2002.

For those of you having problems with VPU Recover errors with a brand new Radeon 9600XT (and the future me, the next time I reinstall), this page has the solution to all your problems. Turning off AGP Fast Writes and flashing my BIOS worked for me.

Update 20 Feb 2006: After getting a new motherboard and updating all of my firmware and drivers, I started having problems again. I found this page and tried some of the things on it. Setting AGP to 4x, in particular, seemed to help a lot.

I don’t miss this car one bit. Okay, maybe one bit, but it’s a 0.

I was doing research into hard drives for my new computer, since I’ve determined that my ancient Deathstar is really holding back everything. I saw good reviews about the new Hitachi Deskstar, and I happened upon this great deal. Check out the option dropdowns at the bottom though. Since “No” or “None” is the bottom choice on all of them, they’re all set to a non-free option by default. Click “order” without changing them all, and you end up with $346.90 on your bill, not $63!

I discovered Crux Linux exactly when I needed to. I was getting sick of Redhat’s big-endian-ness. Upgrading was always a challenge, and the complexity of the boot scripts made things really confusing. Based on a BSD-like “ports” system, Crux is a built-from-source Linux in the tradition of Gentoo. But it’s far simpler, and for the first time I really feel like I understand how Linux works, from one end to the other. There’s only very weak dependency support (an advantage, in my mind, over having to run rpm with –nodeps three-quarters of the time), and it’s not for newbies (you need to partition your disk by hand, and compile your own kernel), but I’m in love. I was a ports maintainer for several months.

Yeah, it’s twelve years old, but it’s an Olympic story that still moves me: Derek Redmond and the 400-meter. (Aside: Which is worse, reading something at work that makes you cry, or something that makes you laugh out loud continuously?)

“[W]hen an American mouths off about French military history, he’s not just being ignorant, he’s being ungrateful.” A war buff defends French military history against Internet jerks.

Rosi’s work on InLiquid.

Update 08-23: Since I was just about on my way out the door, I didn't look too carefully at these pictures when I made the post. Looking at them now, they're phenomenal. I love the style, and they're obviously framed and developed by someone with a great eye and a lot of patience. These pictures are part of Rosi's thesis at The University of the Arts. Congrats to Rosi.

Alton Brown’s sorta-blog, updated every couple weeks or so. See his March 5 post in particular.

First, you hear about free iPods, and it’s an obvious scam. Then you read a Wired article about how it’s not so much of a scam. Then you read other things about the deal. Then you check it out, and you realize that, well, it is a pyramid scheme of sorts, but not the kind where it necessarily costs you money. Give freeipods.com a spam-filtered email address, give AOL a credit card number and don’t let them bill it, and get five of your friends to do the same. Seems worth it, and if Wired says it’s legit, I’ll go along with that.

Please follow this link to freeipods.com if you’re considering doing it, so that I get your referral.

(See also freeflatscreens.com)

Slashdot's ten millionth comment sums up the whole thing very well.

• Post 1M on Jun 15, ????
• Post 2M on Mar 1, ????
• Post 3M on Feb 13, ????
• Post 4M on Aug 2, 2001
• Post 5M on Jan 2, 2002
• Post 6M on May 20, 2003
• Post 7M on Sep 18, 2003
• Post 8M on Jan 16, 2004
• Post 9M on Apr 28, 2004
• Post 10M on Aug 18, 2004

• Post 4M to 5M: 153 days
• 5M to 6M: 138 days
• 6M to 7M: 121 days
• 7M to 8M: 120 days
• 8M to 9M: 102 days
• 9M to 10M: 112 days

At a roughly constant rate of posting, it will take 3 years to post 10 million more comments, or about 27 years to get to 100 million.

This is the only thing I’ve ever wanted.

Building a new computer can sometimes be a challenge. Not only do you need to know a lot of terminology and understand how everything goes together, but you also should do a good amount of research ([1], [2], [3]) into what’s most reliable and has the most nifty features. That’ll get you 90% of the way to a nice new machine on which you can play Doom 3.

The other 10% is luck. When you get your new Mobo, CPU, and RAM, and go to put it into the computer, and you discover that your 5-year-old ATX power supply is not the same thing as what your motherboard manufacturer means when they say “ATX power supply”, that’s not a good thing. Just to increase everyone else’s luck factor: newer motherboards (those for Athlon 64s and some XPs, and Pentium 4s) require a 4-pin “+12V connector” in addition to the standard 20-pin ATX connector. Here is the best information I’ve found on the matter (including how to decide how big of a PS to get!).

Update: Got a cheap POS from CompUSA. They have a lot of power supplies there.

Once in a while, when trying to debunk an urban legend, we can all forget that sometimes they’re true and get a mouthful of liquid nitrogen. Or is it this story that’s the urban legend? (Hm, shades of The Rocket Car)