Everybodies favorite search engine Google will be releasing a new tool soon: Google Print. I happened upon it while checking out Bloogz, which seems to be driving a lot of traffic to my site. Either that or it’s a really crappy program that keeps showing up in my referral logs. Anyways what’s interesting about this google print is that it’s basically the same service Amazon was offering earlier but has seemingly since taken down – the ability to search for text within books. So while amazon has launched a product search in competition with Google’s Froogle, Google has shot right back with a venture into the online book selling market. Very interesting. I wonder how long it will take before Amazon removes google’s quick search from their site and all out war is declared. Enter in the third contender Microsoft and you’ve got a real battle royale brewing. I suppose in our capitalist society we, the consumers benefit from this competition, but I have a feeling that before this ‘battle for control of the internet’ is over many, many innocents will have perished in the slaughter. There can be only one! 🙂

I love music. Maybe not as much as Wally, but at the same time I do appreciate music and what it does to people. I’ve never contributed to the musical world ever though, having absolutely no technical talent, however on Saturday Wally and I set ourself a goal of making a song in an hour, which we did. Sure it took another hour to clean it up and add a little snaz, but I’m very impressed with the results. Although Wally did most of the work I really felt that it was a collaborative process and we together produced this musical ‘sketch’.
Check it: wally_glutton_and_chef_quix-4.mp3
I like it, but then that may be narcissism.

I was reading some of the fascinating comment in the 21 grams thread and just had to respond with a full out post. I love this stuff. I live and breath this stuff when I’m not conquering the galaxy or making crappy webpages. So after taking my sweet time coming up with an intelligent response I figured I’d do the lazy repost for all of you not following that thread. Be aware that we’re discussing the philosophical nature of souls, so some may not want to tread. 😉

Continue reading Complexity, redux →

Yesterday was my birthday and for the first time in years I managed to get myself quite drunk. The venue: a bar with the basement taken over for a work christmas party. The people: good friends in the service industry. The kicker: the ‘speakeasy’ room where for the first time in months I was able to partake in the holiest of ceremonies – an indoor cigarette and a pleasant joint. There was a vibrant atmosphere, possibly due to the illegal nature of the festivities, more likely than not though the casual camaraderie between people who have to deal with other people for a living.
I quite enjoyed myself and as I mentioned before, managed to get quite drunk in a short period of time. This is an unusal activity for me because for the last three years I’ve been trapped in the suburbs, forced to drive myself and my friends around as we hit the town. The responsible citizen that I am usually requires a limit on alchohol intake. So it was a rare treat to be able to get smashed and not have to worry about a thirty dollar cab fair.
In other news, I’ve decided that I’m going to have to redesign my site and add a righthand sidebar to keep track of hot topics, otherwise known as pieces that I’ve written that are still generating quite a lot of comments. This would also allow me the opportunity to really start piling on the links – I am a man of habit and would quite enjoy having all of my daily links in one place.
In the meantime, I’ll simply present some of these pieces:
21 grams
Ghettopoly

*clears throat*
Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me,
Happy birthday dear Cheffy, Happy birthday to meeeeeee.
(I apologize for this crappy entry – I promise I’ll start delivering on the goods again)

Even though I try to avoid politics on the basis of principle, I sometimes get drawn in by the cacophony of praise that Mr. Bill Whittle receives every time he writes some pro-America / pro-republican / pro-war litany on his e..e..e.. site. I’m not sure what I’m going to comment on his current piece but I can only hope that it will draw much ire from the legions of cronies who blindly follow the slop bucket of rhetoric dispensed from e..e..e… These threads often go on for days, I just hope I’m not too late. I am probably being a bit harsh really, there is some interesting perspective presented, and obviously there is a large percentage of people able to elucidate their opinions in a clear and logical (at least from their perception) manner.
In other news, I attended my dads Phd candidacy today which went very well. I would talk more about it except that I don’t think many people are interested in harmonic domain analysis of power systems elements with non-linear or repetitive switching compents (Yes that is the title). I can’t say that I understood all of what he was talking about but I take comfort in knowing that I wasn’t alone… I’d say my dad’s a bit of a crazy genius, he’s sort of invented some new math involving matrices to analyze systems purely in the harmonic domain. I don’t doubt he’ll be in a signal analysis textbook someday. But enough of this for now.

There’s a general misconception that seems to be on the rise with the general public in regards to violence and video games. Let me clarify this: I believe it’s a misconception, but I have no actual proof besides some thought experiments and some violence statistics. Well, actually no links to speak of, but I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that violence is in a decline over the past decade, something around 13%. That’s pretty significant if you think of them as numbers and not just a percentage. Say there were something like 10 million violent crimes in 1993, and in 2003 there were 8.7 million – 1.3 million less instances of needless pain, anger and sorrow. Yet if a kid picks up a rifle and starts picking off people in a manner that’s characteristic of a video game, suddenly video games are causing violence in children.
Something’s not right here.

Continue reading Violence and Video Games →

I love these quizilla Quiz’s…

You are Proverbs.

Which book of the Bible are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
I don’t know about this… I like to talk. I rarely find those ‘comfortable silences’ when I’m around other people, so I like to fill the quiet with chatter about this that and the other. At least it’s entertaining – most people usually tell me I think too much as opposed to talk too much which is sort of interesting. In fact, of the four flights I took to get to Ottawa (Winnipeg to Toronto, Toronto to Ottawa and vice versa) I believe in 3 of the 4 conversations (lengthy ones – the only way I can get through a flight is if I’m talking to someone) that I had I was told I think too much. I say you can never think enough.

I often get into religious debates with the different denominations of religious folk who frequent TGM, my favorite forum. You can only talk about a video game demo for so long before the conversation topic wanders, so religion and U.S. politics are frequent flashpoints of controversy. In one of the the latest debates (I didn’t chime in until the 4th page), an interesting facet of Islam was brought to my attention. Apparently the Qur’an is can be modified, or at least added to. Check it:

I don’t know what it is about being on vacation, but I really don’t want to do any writing. Maybe I am a little useless if I overindulge in the spirits and herbal treatments. I wish it were otherwise, I wish I had motivation, but right now I’m pretty happy; maybe it’s unhappiness that drives us to speak our minds.
Ok so first of all I’m getting the royal treatment. Meals that I want, activities and music that please me, the works. It’s been a very pleasant vacation so far. As it stands, I’m a little too content to be bothered to do any work whatsoever. Now before the kitty pipes up ‘what work’, I will admit that I don’t do much productive work generally speaking, but at the same time I have faith in the quality of my work. At least until the software stops working, or the program stops running.
So anyways, that’s really nothing about nothing. I think I’m going to head to bed. 😉