NEWSFLASH! THE ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST IS COMING!
LIMA (AFP) - Villagers in southern Peru were struck by a mysterious illness after a meteorite made a fiery crash to Earth in their area, regional authorities said Monday.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070918/sc_afp/peruhealthoffbeat
UPDATE!
More news of the revivification of the dead!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20838944/
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,297145,00.html
So, being laid up with my toofs all fucked up, I decided to find a nice timesink to help keep my mind off the donkey kicking me in the jaw. A quick search revealed that people are going shit over a new game called BioShock. I'll let Wiki explain what its about.
I'm a member of the Steam network, primarily because of Half Life 2, which is one of the best games to come out in the last ten years. Steam is a "content delivery network". It is designed to... deliver, uh, content. And that content is primarily game related. You can currently purchase and download Doom 3 for 15 bucks. Not too bad. If you like the dark.
So I saw that BioShock is up on Steam for fifty bucks. I haven't bought a game in a long time, so for a little good karma I decided to go ahead, on the strength of its extremely high ratings and one video preview alone, and buy it. A few minutes later and its downloaded on my machine and ready to go.
First thing I notice when I try and run the game is that I have to run an installer for something called SecuROM. Oh, shit. Turns out its some fucked up DRM program that puts shit all over your machine and, apparently for me, fucked up my DVD drive. Now I'm starting to worry. I start playing the game, which looks fine and runs about how I'd expect on my Dell XPS 1210. However, after the opening cut scene, I lose all sound. Some web searches and trying this and that reveals that there is no fix for this issue. K. Time for a refund.
So I go to Steam and start looking for how to start the refund process. And thats when I find out that there is no way to get a refund for Steam purchases. And they will suspend your account (and thus fuck all your working games) if you stop payment on them.
I'm what you would describe as being fucked.
So now I'm deleting my local content and researching how to unfuck my system from SecuROM. I tried, guys, but I think I'll be downloading cracked games off Usenet BEFORE PURCHASING for some time to come.
Just got my wisdom teet yanked out my friggen head, so please forgive me if I'm a dumbass from now on.
The perfect word to describe the feeling of a perfectly healthy, tho somewhat hard to brush and floss, tooth being pulled from a skull is "disturbing".
If you haven't had yours out yet, here's the skinny. The following is a list of the worst parts of the procedure, number one being the worst:
1) The crazy overdose of novacane shots makes you feel like your mouth is full of water and completely obstructed. I spent most of the procedure breathing deeply in order to convince myself I didn't need to throw up.
2) The crazy overdose of novacane shots. About fifteen of them. Not fun.
3) Stitches. My lower jaw feels like a football with the amount of lacing in there. And the fact that I can feel them with my tongue is, again, disturbing. The process of putting them in took awhile. About twenty times the doc had to run a needle thorugh my virgin gum, yanking through a yard of gut which he had to keep taught. I felt like a tennis racket being strung.
4) Broken toofs. All my teeth were fine (not impacted), so it was only a matter of yanking them out. However, due to my inability to keep them clean at the gumline they had a few cavities. The uppers were good, but the lowers were almost fully buried in the gum, which meant they were weak halfway up the side where the doc had to grab them. Consequently the last one broke the top off. When a tooth breaks during extraction, they have to cut your gum, drill in to give them some room, and then use brute force to lever the remaining tooth bits out of the socket. This results in more disturbing. And it also makes your jaw sore as a mofo the next day.
5) Soreness. Today my jaw has been very sore. Oddly enough, the upper right tooth, which came out cleanly, isn't sore at all. This leads me to believe that if the tooth breaks, you will hurt. If not, you'll be fine. Although I do have cuts and drills and stitches, the only pain I notice is the soreness. It feels like I've gotten kicked in the jaw. But at least its not as bad as I thought it would be.
6) Root extraction. The most common break I had (two out of four) was a bit of the tooth's root breaking off. The only way to get it out is to drill for room and then use a pick to yank it out. My upper left tooth had a bit of root that needed to be pulled out, and it is noticably more sore than the upper right, which came out cleanly. The lower right tooth had much more root and took much longer to get out, and its extremely sore.
7) Normal tooth extraction. The first one that came out surprised me with the ease with which it left. I thought the doc was still prepping it for removal when he told me it was out. Although its still bleeding a touch, that socket doesn't hurt one bit.
I'm on shake-style meal replacement for the next couple days. But I have to say the whole thing worked out pretty well. These butchers have gotten the teeth yanking thing down pat. Tho I think I'm gonna stick with brushing and flossing for awhile. Or at least until they figure out how to get the roots out fine 100% of the time.
http://www.uniqlo.jp/uniqlock/
Uniqlock (not UniClock, but UniQlock) is my current screen saver at work. Its pretty simple--a clock counts away the hours to death, distracting you at set intervals with dancing Japanese chicks. Its a little bit interpretive for my tastes; I'm more of a pop-and-lock aficionado. But you can't deny that it isn't compelling in some indescribable level. It might be the man level; I'd have to do some research on it. I'll get back to you on that one later. Oddly enough, it seems to be a viral for polo shirts. Too bad most virals fail hard on levels so much below this masterpiece.
The reason why this screen saver rises from a casual mention to a full-force blarg post is that it supports multiple monitors. Big deal, right? Yes, it is.
I've got a dual setup at work, otherwise I would have never seen this. What happens is that the clock-ticking happens on both monitors simultaneously, but when the dancing interlude starts, you get different views on the different monitors. Sometimes its the same dance routine from two different perspectives. Sometimes its different locations but, due to the nature of the dance, they are synchronized. Sometimes they are even doing the same motions in different locations and different monitors.
If you have more than one monitor, please check this screensaver out. You will be pleasantly surprised.
(Note, to download you have to wait until the bar completely travels across the bottom from left to right. Then a menu is available on the left side of the screen.)
First Beauchamp and now this. Fags. Lol.
BTW, I'm a slack. But I have reasonable good reason. I think the programming side of this blarg is going to be bailed on. I can't deal with combining the two, because I utterly hate it when other people do. So I think I'll split this and start a programming blarg with actual real programming blarg stuff. If I ever get around to it.
That means this one will go full lulz. Politics, awful youtube videos, that kind of shit.
BTW, I'm completely disgusted with myself that I missed the opportunity to post on Ace's blarg . Holy fuck, just thinking about it makes me sick.
CLICK THIS LINK RIGHT FUCKING NOW
http://seoblackhat.com/2007/01/29/do-it-fucking-now/
DO IT FUCKING NOW!
In other news...
Been busy playing with ScrewTurn's ASP.NET wiki. I'm using it to create a single repository for knowledge in the development department. The idea is that you put it in the wiki, we know where it is. Have some spec docs? Put a link to their location in the wiki. Found a great article? There's a links page that contains links to outside resources of interest. Or, you can be a theif and just copy the article into a new page of the wiki (I've even got a snippet you can use to identify the fact that the page is stolen). Its definitely a cool wiki, and I'm pretty damn happy with it.
"Multi-Skilling".
Multi-skilling? What the fuck?
Ever try to design a webpage? Seems simple. You have a set number of elements you wish to place on the page. You place them on the page in a manner that seems appealing. You review your work.
It looks like shit.
How the hell do you take your content, organize it, size it, and place it on your webpage in a way that looks even slightly good? The first step is to read this article, "Grids are Good":
http://www.subtraction.com/pics/0703/grids_are_good.pdf
This is the best tutorial for web design that has ever been made. Read it, learn it, live it. I don't need to tell you to love it, because you will.
