An orange in an apple orchard
Do you believe everything has a scientific explanation?
Submitted By mesnyder_92
Live Journals Writer’s Block
I believe that virtually everything has some logical explanation if you are willing to look long and hard enough to find it, but you just might have to be Dutch in order to understand it.
(and no, if you don’t get it, I’m not going to explain it lol)
sigh, woke up a bit early compared to normal, and still about an hour left until it is time to leave for work :-/
It’s starting to get around that time, when I know it’s time to go to bed… I don’t feel like going to bed, because I know it’ll be a while before I fall asleep, and just a bother period. Even worse, there’s nothing left to do that I can get done without being up all night, and I’m to tired for that.
It’s some what alarming for me, that I really haven’t been writing much code this past week; I’m usually happy when writing lots of code or trying to evade misery for a spell. Either way, it usually works out more positively.
Projects of current interest, namely are furthering the development of my command line interpreter (shell) and experiementing with OGRE. There are also several projects on the fore and back burners (comparatively), but these two are the most interesting right now. And I’m to tired to code right now :'(.
I’m not fairing the nights very well lately, things are getting worse in my opinion. Days, eh; hard to tell sometimes. I really need a very long rest, with nothing to trouble me, but the odds of seeing that, oh… are probably closer to the odds of Earth getting slammed by a lethal-sized asteroid in my life time. For some strange and sick reason, an old expression comes to mind, and I spit on it. There just seems to be no relent, from the way things are here; and I struggle to find logic in it. Also coming to mind, is a very old form of torture: have a man dig a hole, them fill it back up, repeating it endlessly.
Hmm, I’ll never understand how I can write a journal entry, and see as I type: in my mind little wikipedia [1] like references to memories in my brain :-/. Maybe I just spend to damn much around computers…
time to crash to pillow, be it for better or worse.
When we got to work last Wednesday, the person we work for wanted Ma to take some clohs home and iron them; this time ma decided to use their iron because it is supposed to work much better.
As such, I was ordered to put the iron in the basket in a way that it wouldn’t leak over the cloths; easy enough, although what kind of asshole wouldn’t drain the thing first 8=).
Ma has left it sitting there until today, Tuesday.
Guess what, the iron leaked all over the cloths ^_^.
In response to her trying to pawn the blame off on me, I told her that no one told her to leave the damn iron in there the whole time.
and her technical incompetent still continues to annoy me. I don’t have a problem with people that don’t know better per say, but I do dislike *leeches and assholes*.
Nearly caught on a rendezvous (before any fun), and had to fast-talk myself out of trouble; one virtue of dream-land, your powers of persuasion can easily approach the level of a Jedi-mind trick :-). Later on, I dreamt of being betrayed by a giant insect like ‘mech, that actually looked like a modern rendition of an old Power Rangers villain from the 1st or 2nd generation lol. Ahh, good thing it is easy to dream oneself a cache of rockets hehe. Only later to be ambushed by a squadron of Imperial Storm Troopers while traveling, and afterwards trying to sneak past their regular army troops with a friend; before being cut off and chased around the city by hordes of the flood before making an escape to medical facilities to regroup; and then being involved in a car chase…
I think maybe, I am playing to many action games on the PC of late lol.
Been playing more of Quake 4, and enjoying the storm of heavy strogg; a company of tactical transfers backed up with a platoon of Iron Maiden, Light Tank, and Gladiator units for all intents and purposes.
I’ve noticed that Quake 4, kind of like DooM of old has a “Flinch” like pain chance for different kinds of enemies. You hit them, they feel “Pain”, and are momentarily stunned; typically causing a pause in their movement and potentionally curbing their attack rate.
It has made fighting the Light Tank much easier actually, keep just outside punching distance but to close for its other weapons to be practical, and hose the thing with the Hyperblaster until it goes down. Especially since light tanks in Q4 love to try close in and use their brute force, it is a very effective technique when terrain permits; IMHO someone must’ve been thinking/watching Judge Dredd when they designed that Strogg. Also during the network node segment, I was pinned to the wall by a light tank…. but it went down before I did, due to pouring massive amounts of plasma into it lol.
Those Iron Maidens however seem to have a much lower pain chance, the lighting gun and hyperblaster are useful simply for their fire rate, although I wouldn’t suggest bringing the lighting gun to bear versus more then one Iron Maiden lol. The hyperblasters use is purely due to damage rate, it won’t cause enough pain to prevent them from shoving a rocket down your throat. The best weapon to deal with those things seems to be the trusty old rocket launcher, fire a salvo rapid fire and bingo—its lights out. Up close and personal, the shotgun also seems to be very effective when combined with double taps hehe.
Generally I’m not a fan of the Mega-hero with at least ten guns, more ammo then a dump truck can carry, and hordes of enemies that can each suck up as much fire as an Abrams school of game design, but Quake 4 has a nice balance. Most threats can be easily neutralized with suitable kit, Iron Maiden, Light Tank, and Gunners are not hard to bring down; a Gladiator on the other hand will warrant a big freaking gun! The real danger comes with numbers and terrain, plus like most games in the “Classic” style of level design: you will get loaded up with supplies before the real big nasty fights happen. Of course, this is almost always so close to the build-up to a pulse pounding, kick a hole in the wall, and pass the shotgun shells kind of brawl , that it ruins the suspense. Some games however can keep that suspense factor going, by shaking things up, so you really won’t know what is coming up, unless you play the game a lot or have a good memory (I do) for such things. I actually liked how in F.E.A.R. the replica troops that make up most of the games enemies are very easy to neutralize, almost realistically so; and there are only a few threats that are “Heavy” enough to make you nervous.
That being said though, a boss fight should always be expected to be worth a speed run and challenge you to complete it successfully, hehehe.
Congratulations! You won a million dollars but you have to give it all away. How will you distribute the money?
Live Journals Writer’s Block
Hmm, if I had to give away a million dollars… the first thing that comes to my mind is the charity promoted by vim: ICCF Holland – helping children in Uganda. Vi Improved has changed the way I work and live for the better, like no other piece of software has… and as such, I’ve always felt that donating a large sum to said charity would be a good “Thank you”, if I ever struck it rich. The second thought that comes to mind is papering the SAS 22nd Elite Virtual Regiment with enough cash to last a decade of server hosting. For all the time I have spent around [SAS}, I have never donated money; if I had the steady income to spare, I truly would. As such, they have to make due with my occasionally work-until-need-to-be-stopped-or-pass-out-cold nature… lol.
Beyond that, around 10-20% of it would likely be donated to various churches (of several denominations). Whatever’s left after that, would likely be spent for “Good deeds” so to speak: helping people that I know could use some serious assistance (and won’t piss it away).
Then again, these are things I would want to do anyway, if I ever became a multi-millionaire; but if I was filthy stinking rich, I would also make sure to become properly invested and a couple of other things for myself along the way lol.
Tonight I got a bit of a rare treat, The Man Who Came To Dinner was on tonight. It seems that TCM has been doing Bette Davis all day, and I’ve missed some of my darn good movies :'(.
The man who came to dinner, is one of those films that is not on, but you just have to make waves to sit down and see it when it is! Sheridan Whiteside as portrayed by Monty Woolley, I feel is one of the best cantankerous characters I’ve ever encountered on the screen. Whiteside is the ultimate and supreme bastard, and one selfish mean old son of a bitch to say the least. It’s like take every chipper and nasty thought you ever had, roll it into a big tight ball, and let it roll on over everyone else kind of a part to see. Yeah, you could say I’m a “Nice guy” that envies such a bit lol. What can I say, the villian is always more fun then the hero, until the end of a story >_>.
Every time I watch the film, I always crack up, it really is deliciously funny. Oh, and when the sarcophagus shows up at the end…. mahuhauha! Although I would have to say, the thing wraps up in a hugemongus feat of deus ex machina; it is still hilarious. The second it arrived, my brain clicked, “Hmm, hey why not …”, and sure enough they did xD. I generally have an exceptionally fine memory for cinema compared to most of my peers, but this is a movie I get to see maybe once every year or three, so I can’t remember every single nuance of it, without a little jogging. And of course, the finale is a perfect and fitting ending to the whole scheme hehe.
And an excellent summery of just how nasty the old bastard is, here’s his Nurses parting words after friend Banjo chases her off:
Nurse Preen: I am not only walking out on this case, Mr. Whiteside, I am leaving the nursing profession. I became a nurse because all my life, ever since I was a little girl, I was filled with the idea of serving a suffering humanity. After one month with you , Mr. Whiteside, I am going to work in a munitions factory. From now on , anything I can do to help exterminate the human race will fill me with the greatest of pleasure. If Florence Nightingale had ever nursed YOU, Mr. Whiteside, she would have married Jack the Ripper instead of founding the Red Cross!
and that is an understatement 🙂
In reading around Wikipedia, as I usually do before adding an IMDB link to one of my blogs; I’ve learned that The Man Who Came To Dinner was written by the same people that wrote another of my very dear favourite films. Which of course as it so happens to be, is also an uproarious comedy in its own right xD
[21:55] my friend: Millions of Women Find Sex Unbearable
[21:55] me: They must have overweight husbands
During recent discussion this week, it occurred to me that creating a Mail User Agent (aka Mail Client, like Outlook Express, Thunderbird, etc) would be a fun project to pass time someday.
Some thoughts of what they would look like, assuming it was designed to be a MUA that I would *actually* use myself hehe.
Likely there would be a scriptable mail shell, some what reminiscent of the old unix mail program in practice. Most interesting stuff like sorting and threading, would likely be implemented through a set of post processing modules (user serviceable). That is, in effect virtually anything it does would likely be implemented as an external and easily replaced component lol. I like software that works out of box, has hooks, and gets the heck out of the users way.
A graphical user interface would likely be provided for working things in a more traditional manor, and quite surely would provide simple message view/edit modules if the toolkit offered suitable widgets. I know Qt privides very nice text editing widgets, and since 4.3’ish has even included a Webkit module that could likely handle HTML mail. Although personally, I would just feed it into my web browser instead hehe ;).
I think it would be a fun thing to build someday, maybe even as an exercise in learning Common Lisp or some other interesting language. The big thing though, is it would likely be focused on IMAP initially and skip POP3, and should we say…. that while I love to use IMAP based mail systems, I also completely and utterly hate doing any programming that involves that protocol what so ever! It is just a royal pain, especially if the language has a low level interface to it, which means you really don’t gain much over rolling sockets by hand. That being said, PHP on the other hand, does likely have the least painful API I’ve encountered for IMAP. I’m not sure if that is a compliment or a vex….