Well, as you might have noticed, I changed the layout of the site a little bit. It still remains mostly the same, but it’s not nearly as radical as some of the other layouts I’ve done. Hopefully I can have a better post up tomorrow since I have a bunch I can write about (it has been a while since I’ve updated mainly since it’s a pain to open up text files and edit them, then upload them. After creating dynamic sites for so long, you’d think I would’ve written one for this already. I figured it was easier to use something that was already written though, so I got bblog (see link at the bottom of the page) and plan to modify it to suit my needs. Currently the non-news stuff is hacked together pretty bad to use the older engine for the pseudo-dynamic pages, mainly the table macros so I wouldn’t have to type all that. That, and it made the pages a lot cleaner to write and look at.

Hope you like it. Now you can comment on the pages too, so I can see if you have to say anything.

fry_laser2k3 is coming along quite nicely, and I think I will leave it as that name and
have the same features that it does (two capture points, fall-through laser with +1
if you have the flag). It’s probably still going to be a bit defensive though. I also
had a playtest on fry_trap that Virus helped put on (getting a server and getting people
to come). Other than the “I’m confused” people because the map is mirrored instead of
rotated (and it is kind of confusing), and a few people leaving before it was over, it
went good. I don’t think that this map will be popular because it’s too long to get to
the other base, and it’s easy to defend. It was really designed to be a “fun map” anyways
so I’ll probably fix up the small bugs and release it as-is.

I’ve recently switched browsers to Mozilla Firebird away from IE. I still pop open IE
for small quirks like opening up movies without saving them, and the fact that certain
plugins don’t work properly. Apart from a few web pages, everything looks normal, which
Netscape 6/7 failed to do when I used them before. I used to use Netscape “back in the
day” when I still used windows 3.1, and really would prefer to use something else besides
Microsoft products because eventually I want to be able to make the switch to Linux from
Windows. I also think it has more features than IE does like the / search, and the download
history. It still has a bunch of little quirks, but I’m sure I can get used to it.

I feel bad waiting so long to update this page, but I’m lazy. So sue me. It’s not like
anyone reads this anyways.

Finals are done, and that means school is done too. When I started writing this, I had
just finished school, but now it’s a few weeks later and I’ve already got my grades back.
It was a fun semester and fairly easy because 3 of the classes (MATH 108, CS 028, and PHIL 060)
were very similar to each other, with each going over most of the same stuff at the
beginning as general knowledge and branching off to their respective areas for more detail
with MATH 108 going into more detail on proof, and then set notation and then more
detail on functions. And then CS 028 going into a tiny bit of set notation followed by
computer science related concepts like logic circuits, and recursive functions, and
langauges (i.e. regular expressions, finite automata, and grammars). However, PHIL 060
didn’t seem to go any furthur. It seemed the entire class was learned the first 3 weeks
in MATH 108, but with different symbols. MATH 102 was fairly easy because I had already
read a book about Number Theory before, and it was much similar although I didn’t understand
the book and taking the class made me understand it much better. CS 130 was also an easy
class because I had read The
Algorithm Design Manual by Steven S. Skiena, which is very in depth and the CS 130
class was a subset of the book. I was actually surprised that the class didn’t go farther
into detail on problems like NP-complete, and things like that. If you care about the
teachers I had, I thought Taylor (MATH 108) was a really good and entertaining teacher,
although I’m sure the dynamics of the other students in the class helped with that. Also
she gave good lectures, but I’ve heard that she’s hard (I didn’t really think so though).
Krovetz (CS 028) was very organized and a good teacher overall.

One thing I thought was interesting about CSUS was I thought I might see some people I
haven’t seen since high school, since I went to American River while most of the other
people in my class went either to Sierra or directly to CSUS. The whole semester I
didn’t see a single person from my High School at the college. I only saw one person from
American River that I had in a couple math classes there. Other than that, I did see someone
working at a place I regularly go to for food that went to High School with me (and I like
to think we were friends). Perhaps next semester will be better.

I finally got my PVR set up, and I ended up moving it into my room without a network cable.
My dad brought some long rolls of cable from Utah that don’t have ends on them, so I’ll
need to get some connectors the device that crimps them and feeds the wires in. I also
had to get a Svideo -> RCA connector at Radio Shack for $20 (wow!) since HSC didn’t have
any, and I didn’t want to make one myself. It actually works pretty good now that we
get more channels through Comcast since they converted service in our area (again), so
I’m really only missing out on Tech TV, a few others, and the movie channels without making
the IR blaster.

I’ve also been working on a new map, which I’ve tentatively called fry_laser2k3. Basically
the intentions of it were to make a 9on9 version of fry_laser, but I don’t know if I’ll be
able to do have all the gameplay additions without making the map too unbalancing for
offense or defense. It’s shaping up pretty well, with having almost all of the base
constructed except for the spawn, and potentially another small “buffer” room. So really
just the midfield and cloning the bases after that, so it shouldn’t be too hard.

Note: this was written on May 5th, but not uploaded until June 2nd
While browsing the infamous “Information Superhighway,” I thought about visiting
wilwheaton.net (one l, yes I know), so I did.
Wil Wheaton is the guy that played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation
if you didn’t know. Anyways, I remember seeing him on an episode of
The Screen Savers, and he was a really good host.
So I’ve tried to visit his site more often since he seems pretty interesting. I’ve thought
about sending him a fan mail, but I don’t want to have him have to bother with yet another
piece of it. Perhaps I should since I’ve started using Outlook Express instead of Eudora so that
I could try out the encryption stuff, and he requests that you send signed mail so that
it won’t automagically get put in the spam bin along with the requests to give you larger
and firmer breasts. I know I want some of those!

Back to the point. While I was at his site, I read about how he was publishing a new book
and wanted to know what the best way to advertise. Anyways he mentioned about reading an
article on kuro5hin entitled Tip Jar as a Revenue Model.
I read the article and it seemed pretty interesting. I do agree that it doesn’t seem like a
good way to get a lot of money compared to actually getting books published in “dead-tree
format” as he calls it, and that he probably got a lot more money than normally would be
generated because of how many people gave him money simply for being one of the first
people to try the method. I don’t want to repeat the article, so just go ahead and read
it yourself if you’re interested.

He put up the article not to give a plug out to his book, but I was interested since he said
that almost everyone that commented on the content of the book thought it was good. I don’t
think that he would be he would lie like that to generate revenue since you don’t have to
pay for anything if you don’t like it, so I did a little bit of sniffing around to find out
where it was and ended up reading the first three chapters before I went to bed and then read
the rest in the morning. In my opinion it’s a really good read, and I put $5 into his “tip
jar” via paypal. I’ll probably even buy a copy of the printed copy if it ever gets published
on say amazon.

PVR Update: I got mythtv working again on my new mobo but I still
can’t get the on-board video card working properly (it’s an s3 prosavage ddr). I ordered a
new GeForce2 MX with tv-out and it should be here within the week and then I’ll be able to
watch the stuff I’ve recorded. I’ve mainly recorded stuff on commercial tv because I haven’t
made the IR Blaster to control the DirecTV receiver I have. Actually my dad will probably
make it for me and ship it to me since he’s much better at making things than I am. I don’t
want to fry my motherboard :). Also the other thing I’ll need to get is an svideo to RCA
adapter/cable since I don’t have svideo on my tv or vcr which kind of sucks. Hopefully I’ll
have it done soon though.

I’m actually also thinking about swapping motherboards with the PVR box because it has 6 USB
slots and my computer only has 4, but I don’t know if the A7M266 board will support the
Athlon XP 1800+ CPU, or if the PVR box even needs the extra oomph of it and can settle with
my 1.333GHz Thunderbird processor. I really ought to put a comment box down here again so
I can get feedback on the stuff I write.

I’ve finally released the sparky <--> mirc thing
I announced a couple weeks ago.
I’ve decided to implement it using the new addon/plugin feature in sparky’s 1.43. Anyways,
you can download it here if you want. Read the readme
and don’t bug me if it doesn’t work. You probably need mIRC 6.0+ to get it working too.