Kit's Blog

Our future... failing today

     Wow... this makes me so sad. I mean... good god look at this people... I hate that video so much.

You may have noticed that I didn't cache that video on my blog like I normally do with all my videos. That is because I despise it. This is not because of the video itself, but because of all the stupid shit it spawned, and the number of people who enjoy the song simply due to the fact that some fat dude sang along to it. Sure, it's a catchy tune that's a lot of fun to listen to once or twice, but GOOD GOD! CNN?! VH1?! AHHHHHHHH!!!!! PEOPLE! IT'S NOT THAT FUCKING GOOD! LET IT DIE!

And the sad part? More then likely I've got at least one more person hooked on this stupid shit just simply because I put a link to it on my page... sigh... I hate people...

Oh yes, and for those of you who may need it after listening to that, here is a relaxing 17 minute clip of video game music played on the piano. It's quite good.

Outlaw Star

Anime stole today. Not much else too it. I'm working on updating the Mystery of time and space, but it's a pain! The dude totally revamped it, so I have to download it from scratch. I don't like a lot of the "improvements" in the new version, so I'm gonna keep a link to the old one in the chat screen. Anyway, that's all I've got time for tonight.

Marvelous Manga Mangled

Zippy the PinHead does good

     Besides that? Well... I reported a bug for firefox today. Issue with frames. And can anyone tell me (firefox users only) if there's an issue with the domokun video? The issue I get is that if I press "What the hell?" firefox crashes. I need some more test run by people who use later versions of windows and windows media player. I'd also like to know whether or not this glitch holds true for other mozilla based browsers and other media players. I know that IE can handle it, but does not properly unload the earlier videos (see the fighting the frizzies entries). All in all I'm using fucking bizzare javascript mixed with video plugins in the first place, but it should be able to handle it.... shouldn't it? Oh, and any issues with any of the video entries (loading OR unloading) should be reported in the entry. It'd be greatly appreciated if you'd include your browser and version of said browser, media player, and operating system. And a mini-description on what goes wrong. Thanks for any help!

Domo-kun

Nothing much to say about him besides a video and some quick explainations:

     Domokun is an icon for a satellite news channel. He was a popular character and they soon made some stop-motion animation about him and his life. I haven't had a chance to watch it yet (I'm downloading it now), but I hear it's pretty good. He is recognized by 90% of japanese children, but he is most well known in America for this image:

And after seeing to much of that image, a domokun fan made this:

NOTE: The sound from the domokun video comes from this video.

Fudge for FIOS

     Today I got to experience the BLAZING FAST SPEED OF FIOS!!! ...Almost. I went to Mitch's house (because there was no school today) and watched the wrap-up of the install and helped with the router configuration . The bummer was that despite the fact that I brought my own comp, I had to crimp the ethernet cables myself (which is a painfully slow process) and then when we plugged into the router we found that when I plugged in, the internet died. We fiddled around and eventually just re-crimped the cables very, VERY carefully, and got both computers up and running. But we quickly ran into another problem:
     The router Verizon provides with the FIOS service is completely and 100% incapable of load distribution. If one of our computers downloaded at the full 15mbps, all other computers lost all connectivity. When we made simultanious requests we were rewarded with perfect 50/50 distriubution, but we were working on separate things, so that wasn't useful at all. What we ended up doing was bringing down a linksys router and setting it up. Then we really started to burn rubber.
     Unfortunately that was about six o'clock and so that was seven hours after I'd gotten to mitch's house. Most of which had been work on cleaning his basement and getting FIOS up and running properly. When all that was done we started doing stress testing to see how much of the alleged 15mbps we were getting. It turned out to be about 16mbps top speed max (which was 1 more mbps then we had bargained for, so AWESOME!), but we couldn't get any upload stress tests. Then we spent an infuriating half-hour testing his no-ip account (which was in perfect working order, but the person we were testing with couldn't see it for whatever odd reason (as a side note to Mitch, yes it's up and running. Sorry I had to delete so much of the image to protect what you're running)) and then I had to go home. So basically I got to look at it, and feel a little bit of it, but not really. I'll be back! AND I WANT IT TOO!

Note: EMERGENCY MESSAGE from MCPS.k12.md.us: 2/24/2005 at 11:09 PM --
An announcement about school operations for Friday, Feb. 25 will be made at 5:00 a.m. on Feb. 25.

Updating Scuzzstuff

     This has been a article-heavy week, you guys will survive one day with nothing. I'll have some good stuff tommorow.

Specifically I added inverse shoot 'em up and PixelField to scuzzstuff. Enjoy...

Blockbuster

     So I'm sure you've all seen those "end of late fees" commercials for Blockbuster, and I'm almost equally sure that you have heard this isn't the whole story. Well it's true that they don't give you the whole story, but I honestly it'll be a big convenience to those who wanted to buy something in the first place. The way the new system works is quite simple: You keep a video or game past the due date and they'll charge you for the video or game as if it were being bought used from Blockbuster. Now this implies that they will be charging a fair price for the unreturned goods, but they could just as easily charge you a million dollars and get away with it because the video/game you have taken is now practically stolen property. This is because they decide the prices of used games and videos in the first place, and so it is completely subjective.
     The only thing that makes me angry about their new policy is that they still charge late fees anyway! They've just renamed it to a "restocking fee." The only difference between the restocking fee and the late fee is that the restocking fee is the same price no matter how late you return it, whereas the late fee was directly proportional to the number of days late. The only issue is that because they charge you the price of the video and/or game (which can be charged to your account or credit card) they can't guarantee that you can be refunded for your purchase! If they charge your credit card, then there is no way to recieve those funds back, and you simply recieve store credit. But what if you never go back to Blockbuster? Or start using your local video store instead? Then all those store credits go to waste!
     Actually, come to think of it, there was one other thing that made me angry about Blockbuster's new "no late fee" plan. That was the fact that to get Blockbuster to divulge this information I actually had to sign up for a customer service account which required my email and name. Grump! That kind of information should be a part of my plan to use (or not use) Blockbuster when I first sign up! I should NOT have to sign up for anything to find out if I want to sign up for something. Damnit.

Welcome... to day 21!

I dunno (opens in a new window)

Tuberculosis ward

     So today was a great day in urban exploration for Kit. Mitch, Louie, and I all went out to an old abandoned tuberculosis ward up in northern Maryland (near Baltimore). It was all big and creepy, with the overlaying threat of some cops coming and telling us to get off the premises and getting asbestos based mesothelioma. We took a ton of pictures, and it turned out that my acient crappy aol camera's memory is getting all crappy and so when I got home my last couple pictures have these weird gray splotches. Anyway, here's the link to my photos. They're not really very good, but I'll provide a quick explaination of a couple:
     tbw_0001.jpg and tbw_0002.jpg: These were two little signs that said there was a fiberoptic cable running underneath that sign so no excavation. My complaint? Why does an abandoned TB ward get FIOS before me?!
     tbw_0003.jpg - tbw_0014.jpg: The power plant for said TB ward. Lots of old and nifty looking equipment
     tbw_0015.jpg and tbw_0016.jpg: Both overlaying shots of the TB ward (note: this shot doesn't include the staffing building, pool, or administrative buildings which we didn't make it to before dark)
     tbw_0017.jpg - tbw_0021.jpg: some weird house and garage that were just right next to the ward
     tbw_0022.jpg - tbw_0031.jpg: The washing room, a post office (damn glare!), and the clothing closet
     tbw_0032.jpg - tbw_0040.jpg: Just some rendom photos ("throw and catch" game!)
     tbw_0041.jpg - tbw_0045.jpg: more random crap and two names
     tbw_0046.jpg - tbw_0048.jpg: A bunch of animals came in to the ward and died. The vulture (or maybe a crow? I didn't look ver close) there on the stairs was actually dragged and propped up with its wings fully extended... gross.
     tbw_0051.jpg: Another overview
     tbw_0054.jpg: You can't really tell in this shot, but the dust on the floor was all paint... probably lead and asbestos paint
     tbw_0058.jpg: Ummmmmmm....
     tbw_0059.jpg - tbw_0078.jpg: The cafeteria and kitchen. The kitchen was full of old broken comps and there was a tree growing into the side of the building... as well as a dead cat.
     tbw_0084.jpg - tbw_0086.jpg: A hallway which had really awesome paint
     tbw_0089.jpg and tbw_0090.jpg: The outside of the projection room
     tbw_0091.jpg - tbw_0100.jpg: A theatre and the inside of the projection room
Yup.
     Louie claims to have restarted his blog and has a bunch of photos as well. His are way higher quality and he's bothered to flip them, but he also only has like 12. So boo boo booboo naa naa!

Katsucon 2005

Hooray for Domokun!
What more need I say ?

Garbage

     There was a news article a long time ago about the economy, and how garbage had an implication on how the economy was doing. It wasn't really a revelation in any way, the implications were pretty straight forward: More garbage, better economy, less garbage, worse economy. Pretty straightforward why this was true as well: more people producing garbage means more people buying things with which to produce said garbage. But this seems like a pretty bad thing altogether: we buy new things to replace our old things, but we waste our old things. We don't donate as much as we should, and/or we waste what we have by throwing it away. It was just something that makes me wonder...
     As a people, Americans are the most wasteful, and basing economic analysis on the amount of garbage we produce is a horrible thing. We use a huge percentage of the world's energy and produce a huge amount of the world's garbage, and yet we continue to import 7 million barrels (or more) of oil each day to meet energy requirements. For those of you who need a rough statistic, that's approximately 60% of the oil we consume each day is imported from other countries. I couldn't find any good exacting statistics on America's garbage production, but last time I checked (around 1997), we produced something around the tune of 70% of the world's trash. And sadly enough, many of our recycling efforts go to waste. Much of our trash nowadays are recyclables, and biodegradables produce things that, while not necessarily harmful to the environment, contribute to Environmental decay. Things like methane gas and other pollutants. So special chemicals and methods are used to prevent all decay in landfills, so being biodegradable is often an unecessary and wasteful practice.
     So what's to be done about our garbage disaster? Well that's a question for the ages. The most important thing to do right now is to cut huge gobs of cash from our military budget (allocate more to our troops at least and less to military development), and promote alternative energies. There's already a proven end to our ability to use fossil fuels (we're consuming them 100,000 times faster then they're being produced. As stupid as that may sound to some of you, the truth is that it is much more of a crisis then anyone has really made it out to be yet. Watch yourselves, and support politicians who are for alternative energy sources.
     Anyway, now that I've managed to get a good new rant for the day onto Anime! I watched a bunch more Tokyo Underground, and here's my thoughts so far:
     While the plot is rather clever and the power system is quite awesome, the love story is really crappy in the respect that it moves waaaaaay too fast. Mainly it's the fact that apparently way more then what your see happens in the seven episodes I've watched so far, to make it seem at least a little more legitimate that they're so in love. When the main female character does the self-sacrifice scene she says: "I've seen so many things up here..." then flashes back onto a whole bunch of stuff you never saw. I feel like all writers need to take a one week course on how to write love stories...

Lack of material, but more too come

     Sorry about the lack of material everybody, but not much has been happening. I got a whole new pile of Anime today, but it'll take me a while to watch through most of it. The series I got today are: Full Metal Alchemist, Tokyo Underground, and Ragnarock. I also got episodes 3-6 of Air. Anyway, I'll probably make two posts tommorow, ciao till then.

Blarg

Due to an angry mother the entry is just a song:

Ocarinas and Fiber Optics

     I'm looking for ocarinas, and it's turned out to be way harder then it should be. Most of the ones I really like are too big and can't play the high, light notes I'm aiming for. The other thing is finding the right kind. I want to aim for a four or eight holed ocarina, but I don't want it to be plastic, crappy, or a pendant. The shape I'm looking for is a sweet potato, but I'd prefer a stubbier one to a really long one. What I'm really looking for, is what they sell at Songbird Ocarina.com, but there are two problems. First: The painting is tacky! I want a plain color! No zelda crap! Second: Too large to play the high notes. If you check out the market town song you'll notice that it's quite a bit lower then the actual version. If you have any idea of where to buy a good one tell me please!
     FIOS... I want sooooo bad... I don't think I've ever wanted anything quite as much as I want FIOS. I'm not giving you a link cause it may turn out that you are in their network area and qualify in which case I'd have to kill you, but the point is that Mitch qualified and he's getting it on the 24th. I might end up skipping school just to wacth because I want it so bad, and I want to see what they do. Apparently you may have to sacrifice your copper phone lines to get it, which is a HUGE dissapointment on my part. The main idea is that they're offering cheap, incredibly fast internet access that no one can compete with, and when they add you to their network they want to eliminate all their phone competition as well. The other problem is that FIOS requires power to run, so if the power goes out for more than eight hours, you not only lose your internet, but also your phone. Bummer....

Sonnet and Scholarship

     Today I have to write a sonnet. Sorry about this entry being so snippy, but I was up until 2am this morning working of essays so that I could go to Japan this summer. God scholarship forms suck. 18 pages of just information, then 5 essays, and 13 pictures. Oog that was not fun. So this sonnet I'm writing has to be an "anti-valentine valentine..." I don't know why, but this seems a little too... overdone. Like the teacher thought it up years ago as a great idea and has refined it, but now she doesn't present it with enough bravado to really interest people. Speaking of Shakespeare...
     This year, Whitman is having a Shakespeare festival, and as my project idea, Jack and I are going to be wandering minstrels, but we need more people. Preferably people who play drumish and tamborinish parts. I could also use some good sites with some shakespearean music if anyone has the time to help me look. Thanks. (Note: entry into our wandering minstrels group is highly limited in the interest of being able to practice together civilly and playing good music, don't be offended if you don't make it!)

<3 <3 A Valintines day related update <3 <3 (someone needs to slap me tommorow for using those hearts)
     Smoking Man: "Life is like a box of chocolates. A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. So you're stuck with this undefinable whipped mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there's nothing else left to eat. Sure, once in a while there's a peanut butter cup or an english toffee but they're gone too fast and taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits of hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts. If you're desperate enough to eat those, all you got left is an empty box filled with useless brown paper wrappers."
     Harry (Hixon) can be awesome, but he has a tendancy to be annoying and violent. He has a blog which hasen't updated in a long while, but it's pretty good.

Whoa... Search engines?

     There seems to be an inordinately enormous amout of hits comming in this month, and I attribute it to search engines. So far, I've been hit by Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves, Altavista, Alltheweb, and maybe a couple others. I just submitted my site to dmoz, but I have no idea weather or not I'll be accepted. I've been partially scanned by google, and several others, but they basically only include things that were linked to by hrwiki. The only reason I really noticed this was because I have now recieved a substantially more enormous number of hits than usual.

A little exerpt from some bizarre little h*r QOD page that praises me.

     Besides that I think I may have found the best web-based proxy EVER. It's called poxy, and on occasion PHProxy. I found it here. Two reasons I give it ultra-super extra-duper high marks:
1) Encryption of the web address. When I visit http://www.ebaumsworld.com/helicopter.shtml, it won't show up in my records as that. Instead it'll look like I was browsing uggc%2Sjjj.ronhzfjbeyq.pbz%2Suryvpbcgre.fugzy This also helps avoid the reg-ex issue with the new blocker at school (which is just another way of saying: Those bastards made it so if I try and visit proxify.com/media.ebaumsworld.com it'll see the ebaumsworld and block it, even if I was only indirectly visiting it)
2) This one actually scans into flash, and is able to make flash cartoons come from encrypted addresses. How sweet is that? My old proxy app (well, technically still my current proxy app), would leave flash films alone and would therefore end up making so I couldn't visit flash game sites anyway! Booooo!

Yup, I know, non-crazy-hour posts: crazy.

End of talent show

     Well, talent show is done. I think it went pretty well. All in all I think our side did fine. I apparently was appreciated at some point cause I got this:

Me? greater than god? I'm flattered.
     Besides that, I also found this really nifty image. It's apparently a photograph, and it's absolutely stunning:

I found it here. I can honestly say that I did not believe this was a photograph. It looked so perfect... I thought it was a 3D image (the kind that I wish I could someday make)... But it was just a shot of under a bridge in fog... Wow...

Talent Show (again) and just some stuff to tide you over

Talent show has once again made me exaughsted. Here's some stuff to tide you over.

and as just some random link check out:

note: this is just a forum, and I linked you to my favorite part of this particular forum: the rules page.

Insomnia

     Since I slept all day I now seem to be incapable of sleep. God damn it must suck to suffer insomnia. I mean imagine never being able to wake up feeling energized. Imagine always feeling like you do when you have to pee in the middle of the night. On auto-pilot, never really getting the most out of life... bummer...

Sleep

I needed it, I'm getting it. I felt really fucked up today at school, so I went home early, and hit the sack, I'm soon to go to tech rehersals. Wish me not death... or luck, either one is good.

Talent Show

I'm drained from doing tech rehersals, but in the meantime, check out the "dialectizer." Whoa... did I really say that in redneck?

Google

     Well, you've all seen google. And why wouldn't you have? It's a fantastic site that provides quick, reliable searches that are normally very relevant to what you were looking for. They also provide a non-invasive form of advertising that many websites have found to be very profitable while not being in your face or driving away customers. They moved on to provide the same service in many languages, and translation services for many of those languages they offered. Google was, by now, well renowned for doing such a fantastic job while continuing to refuse pop-up and banner advertising. In fact, to make money, they developed a whole new kind of advertising. Text advertising.
     Text advertising was pretty much a completely revolutionary kind of advertising. Rather than getting up in your face about ever plausible thing you could ever not know you needed, it simply placed a clip of each companies philosophy, statement, advertisment, or relevent search information under a title describing the product. Despite the fact that it seems like many people would ignore and avoid these "sponsored links," but many people clicked through and found what they were looking for. Google spread this new form of advertising around. People could now include "ads by google" in their web pages, and be paid a percent of profits made by google on a monthly basis. Google started producing some real revenue, and became quite the superpower on the net. It became important to be ranked high on google's page-ranking system. Profits made by having high page ranks became evident to advertisers, and a new form of spam was born.
     Page-rank spamming is a generally new kind of spamming. It involves providing links through google's advertising programs to boost the page's overall rank on google. This new form of spam didn't become to common until blogs and blog spamming came to be. All the sudden you see a dark side to google's mounting power. Though google's advertising specifically was not a bad thing, links through regular spam to the same places was getting to be a problem. Fortunately, the internet's ingenunity blocks most of any kind of spam, and so this new form wasn't to much of a problem. But the tint to google's power was still there. Then came gmail.
     Gmail offered something that no other free email client could boast: 1 gigabyte of storage. Most free email services offered a much more reasonable amount for a free system. Hotmail offered 2 megabytes, and yahoo offered something similar. For those of you who need some perspective that is .002% of the amount of storage gmail is offering. But how could google plausibly do this? What could possibly fuel this juggernaut of a campaign? What did we sacrifice to gain this? Our privacy.
     Google's new Gmail service scans all your emails and displays relevant text advertising. Now, according to the terms of service none of this is read by human eyes before you open your email, but the fact that anything reads your personal and private messages before you do is a scary thought. Now although google garantees that no one will read your email and assures you that all the other email services scan you email as well there's something slighly more errie and unnerving about opening your email from your friend about personal issues and recieveing pharmaceutical advertisements. Even moreso when your friend writes a poem or something just for you and you recieve advertisments relating to it. And the fact that it could be storing any of this information for future reference is terrifying in and of itself. Already google keeps track of what you serach for, what's to say that they won't keep track of what you're emailing about?
     But all of this is just personal paranoia. I hate letting others know about my personal life. I like to have others know my ideas and what I will and won't stand for, but to have someone know what I'm using google for is just plain creepy. And even moreso than that, is having someone know what I'm emailing about. But what has really crossed my bounderies as to what google has been expanding into is google desktop. Google desktop is a new piece of software that allows people to search their own computer using the same trusty, reliable system that google has. Well what I'm concerned about is the fact that google's gmail, in it's terms of service agreement mentions government intervention THREE TIMES, and in their privacy statement, they also mention that they may disclose personal information. This meaning that any piece of information google has on you could be searched if google is requested to reveal that information from the government. And, as far as I know, it doesn't specify WHICH government. This didn't seem so threatening until google's software integrated with people computers. Google toolbar and google desktop have now made this internet juggernaut of power to frightening for me too keep silent about. I'm wondering what kind of monster we've produced, and will it take over everything? It now has merged with web.archive.org, and contains a huge database of old websites, it's bought out keyhole (and as a byproduct now contains a comprehensive image of the planet), and it offers email that no other company can compete with. Is anyone else getting a "big brother" vibe from this? Doesn't it seem like google may have been taken over by the government, and is now using it's power to monitor a lot more than it should? Seems like it to me, and that freaks the SHIT out of me.

Since you asked so nicely...

For Ben's information, that was just the intro to the game, which looks a hell of a lot more pot-smokery then any other pot... I mean part... Anyway, since he used PLEASE and THANK YOU, instead of FUCK (*ahem* hint hint) here's a clip:

Katamari Damacy: Awesome

     With the PS2 back in action, I went out and splurged on a bunch of games. One of which was Katamari Damacy. Which, is officially the most awesome pot smoker game ever.

Scuzzstuff

     Well, I've started making updates to scuzzstuff again, and I think it may be time to move scuzzstuff on again to another server. This time I was thinking about Free Nuke Hosting, but I have to try out their free service before I give the pay service a try. They offer a lot of really awesome features though, and so I'm seriously considering the possibility of switching. The only thing is that apparently FNH does not allow any kind of music files of the servers. Not even my own composed midi files?! awwwwwww... As a side note, the only reason I've taken such an interest in updating my games site is because more and more people are playing, and I feel like I should update. Hell, I even caught a teacher playing on it! How awesome is that? I mean, not only does that mean the games site was so popular a kid got caught playing it, but that a teacher thought it was so cool, he played it too! Sweet.
     Two more pieces of awesome news before I log off:
     1) I just got a refurbished PS2 back from Sony. Now I can finally get back into the gaming market. I just have to pull together all my cords and cables which, with the lack of a central "unit" to be attached to, have gone on to better places. Bummer... in the meantime, I'll be playing all those games I kept buying despite the fact I knew my PS2 was busted. I still have to play through kingdom hearts, That game seems like it's pretty good, but I also kinda feel like it's defiling the good 'ol Disney name. Well, it's a solid RPG, and I'll finish it eventually. I think I also have to restart several PS1 games and actually finally beat them. FF7 and Metal Gear Solid. I think I should also go for Chrono Trigger on the SNES. I dunno. Gaming.
     2) I just bought what may be the most useful piece of SWF-based software EVER. It's called: URL Action Edit. You can check it out at http://www.buraks.com/uae. I give it high marks, but really, if you want to be good at figuring out what actions you should edit, you really do need some software to view the entire script and see the actions in context. They offer a product called Action Script Viewer, but it isn't nessecary. I already have my own software for viewing full action scripts, so I didn't need it. Anyway, that's about it. Ciao.

An apology, explaination, and news

     I in no way intended to say that I do not support our troops. I commend them all for being brave enough to commit to something so enormous. I myself know that I'm to much of a pussy to ever join the army, and so to say that I'm insulting the army is a blatant lie. What I was refering to about Bush, was the fact that obviously we've needed continually more troops to win the war in Iraq, and the army needs to recruit more soldiers. The truth of the matter is that Bush's plan has, as you can guess, been failing, and so he's continually pushed the army to recruit more and more soldiers. The fact that an ad has been sent to a 16 year old (someone who can't legally join the army), just goes to show that despite their best efforts, they're losing a lot of men to Iraq, and it's a horrible tragedy that should have never have elscalated this far. And I never said that I I don't love my country, I really do love a lot of America (of course not all of it), but I think the fact that we may have to have a national draft just goes to show that even though soldiers are dying valiantly, Bush didn't have enough of a plan so now the army is being forced to recruit by mail. Please don't misinterpret me posting this as insulting it. And about the sarcasm with the two lines, it was simply because I'm very cynical about motivational statements, and the fact is that Bush has pulled the patriotism card about almost everything he's done. Yes, it is very patriotic to join the army, and yes, it is a great thing to do, even in a war you don't support to help keep America safe. But to appeal to someone not legally allowed, or fully rationally developed, to make decisions about their own life? That's low. I think that the soldiers are great people, but the ones doing the paperwork need to work harder at developing different strategies to win the war, not different ways of recruiting soldiers. And besides all of that, this was not a political jab, I'm simply documenting something interesting that happened to me that day.
     Now that we've gotten that ugliness out of the way, it's onto a new blog that managed to pass the 1 month challenge. Aymon! Good job Aymon! Congratulations! Here's the link. He did miss one day, but on average he posted at least twice a day, so I don't think we'll penalize him. Besides that, not much is happening. Sorry I had to make that apology, but when that guy said: "You deserve a hell of alot worse than you are going to get," I was a little disturbed. He seems very passonate about his country, and that's a good thing, but I think he blew my sarcasm out of proportion. Hope he's not too angry.

An explaination and some weird Bush related crap

     So like I said, I've had a lot of work recently (and by work I mean stuff related to the buisness section of kitkorp.com), and here' the reason why: The Black & White wrote an article about me and a couple others like Sam who've started their own computer buisnesses. It was really quite nifty. Here's a link:

Waring! Hi-Res file!
     Besides that, I recieved a rather disturbing piece of mail today, it was from the Army National Guard. Apparently they want me to "defend what I love most" and "be one of America's most powerful weapons." It seemed just a little off that they were sending it to a 16 year old Sophmore, but even more odd that in the application, it has a box labled "year of high school graduation." Perhaps this really is just a new strategy for recruitment? To try and catch high school students? If that's the case then I guess the "war on terror" really isn't going as well as it could, but even more disturbing is how it shows how close we are to a national draft. I have no excuses, as far as I know I'd just be another draftee. But how are we winning the "war on terror" if we need more people? It seems like the more we "win" the more we need people to come help. Why is this? What the fuck?! Anyway, here's the stuff:

Whoa wait... me? Army? What?

Inspirational... And yet... disturbing...

The top inside... Designed to appeal to "the proud"

Informing me that one person can make a difference so send in that prepaid mail!

I like that guy yelling "HOOAH!"

The form I need to fill out to join.

I hate Bush.

Work

     I will have an entry about the sudden increase in work tommorow, but in the meantime, here's some more music, and a C++ app I'm helping Felipe with because I'm tired, need an okay post, and don't feel like thinking any more today.

Cavalkaf: here it is: write a program that searches how many times, and where it it, a string that the user inputs Cavalkaf: so if the user inputs hi Cavalkaf: and the second word is hi Cavalkaf: it should say "The word hi is the 2nd word in the file." BigDog6700: wait, does the user enter in two strings? BigDog6700: one to search for and one to search? Cavalkaf: no Cavalkaf: one of them is a file BigDog6700: ah BigDog6700: okay Cavalkaf: a "search" feature BigDog6700: mmmmkay BigDog6700: well what it should do is this: Cavalkaf: my initial aproach was to get word by word BigDog6700: read a search string, deliniated by commas BigDog6700: 1st word, 2nd word, 3rd word Cavalkaf: what about lines Cavalkaf: ? BigDog6700: okay Cavalkaf: and spaces BigDog6700: hold on Cavalkaf: but I get the idea BigDog6700: let me finish explaining before you ask questions BigDog6700: okay? BigDog6700: OKAY? Cavalkaf: ok Cavalkaf: :D BigDog6700: so BigDog6700: the user enters in a search string, which will be severl different strings, delineated by commas Cavalkaf: right BigDog6700: don't worry about words, if they want to search for a specific word they can enter it instead of a string BigDog6700: next BigDog6700: it should take the search string, and splice it Cavalkaf: ok..... BigDog6700: String klcka[100]; int curstring = 0; do {      if(instring(searchstring, ",") != -1)      {           klcka[curstring] = sub(searchstring, 0, instring(searchstring, ","));           searchstring = sub(searchstring, instring(searchstring, ","), length(searchstring) - instring(searchstring, ","));      }      else if(length(searchstring) >= 1)      {           klcka[curstring] = searchstring;           searchstring = "";      } else      {           klcka = "error";      } curstring++; } while(length(searchstring) >= 1); //while the search string contains a comma... if(klcka[curstring -1] == "error") {      cout << "Please enter a search string";      return; } etc... Cavalkaf: ok Cavalkaf: so what does sub does? Cavalkaf: and instring? BigDog6700: I'm not sure what the names for those functions are in C++ BigDog6700: hold on Cavalkaf: ok Cavalkaf: anything yet? Cavalkaf: the approach I was taking before I realized the comma problem was to get every word to a temporary string, and compare it Cavalkaf: (using cin >>) Cavalkaf: however, when I realized this comma problem Cavalkaf: I started getting this characted by character, making a string out of it until it hit a non-standart character BigDog6700: string::npos is what find returns if it doesn't find the character Cavalkaf: instring does....? BigDog6700: String klcka[100]; int curstring = 0; do {      if(searchstring.find(",") != string::npos) //If there is a comma in the string      {           klcka[curstring] = searchstring.substr(0, instring(searchstring, ",")); //store the first string into the array           searchstring = searchstring.substr(searchstring.find(","), searchstring.length() - searchstring.find(",")); // lop off the string you just removed      }      else if(!searchstring.empty()) // If there are no commas and a search string remains...      {           klcka[curstring] = searchstring; // add the string to the array           searchstring = ""; // empty the string      } else // If it's empty      {           klcka[curstring] = "error"; // error      } curstring++; } while(!searchstring.empty()); //while there is still a string if(klcka[curstring -1] == "error") {      cout << "Please enter a search string";      return; } BigDog6700: replace "instring" with find BigDog6700: substr(x,y) makes the string from x, y characters example: s = "kit is cool"; s = s.substr(0, 7) + "stupid"; would make s == "kit is stupid"; BigDog6700: string::npos is what find returns if it doesn't find the character Cavalkaf: ok Cavalkaf: however, I wanted something that would detect any non-stadart character Cavalkaf: yours only does commas Cavalkaf: anyway, what does instring does Cavalkaf: wow BigDog6700: ? Cavalkaf: how did a bunch of stuff showed up in 1 second? Cavalkaf: your past 3 msgs BigDog6700: ummmm BigDog6700: I keep IMming you, but your connection keeps dropping Cavalkaf: ???? Cavalkaf: it dropped 2 times Cavalkaf: not sure why..... BigDog6700: neither do I, but I know the first time was me, and the second time was you Cavalkaf: ok Cavalkaf: :-P BigDog6700: but read through the new code BigDog6700: I explained a lot Cavalkaf: I just did Cavalkaf: I got what you did BigDog6700: kk Cavalkaf: however, I still need something that will get a string from the file and remove all non a-z characters from it BigDog6700: okay Cavalkaf: also, I wanted a better way to count the words in a file Cavalkaf: so it does not count two spaces as two words Cavalkaf: or a line with no characters as a word Cavalkaf: if the string has \0 (zero) on it, it is empty, right? Cavalkaf: any ideas? BigDog6700: yeah BigDog6700: hold on BigDog6700: I made an app like this last year BigDog6700: I have it in my folder somewhere... Cavalkaf: :-D BigDog6700: ispunct(char x) isspace(char x) in ctype.h Cavalkaf: ? Cavalkaf: how is the syntax? BigDog6700: you just #include <cype.h> then use if(isspace(char)||ispunct(char)) { spacecount++; } Cavalkaf: ok Cavalkaf: I see BigDog6700: but that is a C header BigDog6700: not C++ Cavalkaf: same in C++ Cavalkaf: just checked BigDog6700: :-D BigDog6700: I is smart, no? Cavalkaf: http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/ansi/hfiles.html Cavalkaf: yes

Here's the app I was talking about:
Dos app which can count and read input the way I wanted it to.
The source (if you know C++ you'll know why it's awesome)