School’s been keepin’ me down for the last couple weeks, I’ve got tons to post about but it doesn’t look like today is going to be the day where I mount an offensive on the heap of good material that has been accumulating in my notebook, as I have yet another program due tomorrow.

On the plus side, Darth Vader has a blog.

David Sedaris is speaking at Cal Poly this weekend, and I will be attending. He stooped so low as to be interviewed by the Mustang Daily, which resulted in the following:

MD: Do you have any advice for college students? We need it.

David Sedaris: Right… I would just encourage college students to take drugs and have sex with as many people as possible because one day they’ll be old and right now they’re the perfect age for all that stuff. They might as well have fun now, and then they can reflect upon it later when they’re old.

MD: I’m using that as my headline: “David Sedaris says: Get Laid!

David Sedaris: Don’t leave out the drug part.

The following link is a video clip describing The Internet vs. Real Life from Red vs. Blue.

It’s funny.

The concept behind red vs. blue is to create an animated picture show, but without actually doing any of the work of animating, which, as Lauren can tell you, is hard. What they’ve done is esentially move characters around inside the video game Halo and then added their own sound.

At which point hilarity ensues.

Who says programmers don’t have fun. The guy on the right wrote the textbook for CSC 453, introduction to Operating Systems. And one of the other three guys in the picture is a VP at Novell. I’ll let you guess which one.

that’s hot

I recently discovered Paul Graham’s “What You’ll Wish You’d Known,” a speech that was originally written for a high school graduation ceremony, but that works just as well for those graduating college any time soon (For example: NOT ME ).

What do you want to do with your life?
“People are always asking you this, so you think you’re supposed to have an answer. But adults ask this mainly as a conversation starter. They want to know what sort of person you are, and this question is just to get you talking. They ask it the way you might poke a hermit crab in a tide pool, to see what it does.”

Or, as I’ve heard it put before, they’re not asking because because they expect you to have your life planned out, they’re actually looking for ideas.

You can dooo eeeet!
“Don’t get demoralized. Don’t think that you can’t do what other people can. And I agree you shouldn’t underestimate your potential. People who’ve done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart… In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they’d seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.”

This has been a strong belief of mine that many people are actually strongly opposed to. You tell some people that the student body at MIT is just like any other and there’s a good chance you’re gonna see some palm to face action in the near future. It’s like insulting a religious institution: “HAVE YOU NO SHAME,” they would cry as I am banished from society in the name of protecting impressionable young minds.

Perhaps my favorite tidbit from Mr. Graham’s speech is actually in the footnotes, in reference to the oft repeated high school teacher mantra…

Behave like adults!
“I wonder if they’d like it if you did. You may be loud and disorganized, but you’re very docile compared to adults… Imagine the reaction of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being told they had to ask permission to go the bathroom, and only one person could go at a time. To say nothing of the things you’re taught. If a bunch of actual adults suddenly found themselves trapped in high school, the first thing they’d do is form a union and renegotiate all the rules with the administration.”

While playing World Of Warcraft, an online only computer game that is very popular among those in the know, I discovered a bug. Specifically, one of the quests specifies you are supposed to look for a certain character in “Warrior’s Hall” which, as it turns out, doesn’t exist. I finally found the character in “Hunter’s Hall” and dutifully submitted a bug report so that other players would not have to suffer the same indignities that I was subjected to for asking people for the location of a non-existant building.

But then I had to go and end my bug report like this:

“I got flamed many times trying to find “warrior’s” hall and it was not
enjoyable, so if you could fix this type, I’d appreciate it.”

That’s right, I mispelled typo. I’m pretty sure I’m banned from the internet at this point.

“[Wal-Mart’s] $285 billion in sales nearly match the gross domestic product of Saudi Arabia.”
-From The Christian Science Monitor

Call me extravagant, but I would think if your company pulls in as much money as a country that just happens to be “the world’s largest net oil exporter…”, you’d be able to pay your employees decently and maybe offer affordable health care.

Me: Where’s Young taking off to this weekend?

Uncle C: She is going to Truckee with like 8 other gilrfriends for a Spiritual Women’s retreat.
…
Uncle C: I was actually San Jose last weekend for something similar with the Bible Study Fellowship organization. The only difference was that I was with 3000 of my closest friends instead of 8.

Me: What can you do, you’re just more popular than she is.

Uncle C: True, it is a gift, and sometimes it fills like a curse. But it is the will of the people to see me.

As Lauren was in town this past weekend, we went to see Sin City, which was a bit of an experience. First of all, if you’re not up for the most gruesome of the gruesome, this movie is not for you. As Jeffrey Westhoff so succintly put it, “You know you’re gone beyond run-of-the-mill movie violence when you need to use the plural for ‘castration.'”

Quite honestly, I’m kind of a wuss when it comes to violent movies, I like to think it’s because I’m too empathetic; when someone gets dumped at the junior high dance in front of all his buddies, I feel his pre-pubescent shame, so when I’m witnessing a level of gore that makes The Holocaust look like Woodstock, it becomes hard for me to stomach.

On the plus side, the cinematography and the general look of the whole movie was amazing, they even managed to make Elijah Woods scary. There was no shortage of humor, so long as you take your jokes like I take my coffee, black and bitter, with type O positive added for flavor.

Without spoiling anything, I’ve come up with a Litmus test to tell if this is your kind of movie:

“Downloading copyrighted music doesn’t give me the same warm, fuzzy feeling running over babies with a lawnmower does.”

-inspired by grub, slashdot idiot #11606

If you found the previous quote in no way offensive, and in fact humorous, Sin City is your type of film.

Me: good riddle

Eugene: do you get alerts?
Eugene: i just put that up

Me: No, I just check my website habitually when i’m bored

Eugene: so do i
Eugene: you need to update more often
Eugene: three times a day at least

Me: I thought you checked your website habitually
Me: and I was thinking
Me: you need to update more often

Eugene: how ironic.