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Friday, December 26, 2003

Christmas Loot

Well I hope all you got what you wanted for Christmas. I know I did.

It's a Canon PowerShot A70 digital camera. It's a 3.2megapixel camera. I know it's not the highest resolution out there but I chose the camera because of the fact that for the price it's a very feature rich camera. It's also very small. Not as tiny as some of those digital ELPHs but still it fits easily into one hand and into a pocket with no struggle.

At 3.2mp it has the resolution to do 4x6 prints and even 8x10s although that's really pushing the limit. Since I mainly want a digital cam for posting pictures online I figured it was overkill to go with a 4, 5 or more megapixel camera. I would end up downsizing to 800x600 or 640x480pixels anyways so why spend the extra money on the unused resolution.

So now the only real thing I need is to find a good photo printer. The basic choice is between dye-sub and standard inkjet printers. The dye-sub technology is better because it's a continuous print method and not small dots like inkjets are. Plus dye-sub printers put a waterproof and uv protection layer over the prints.

I looked at the canon photo printers but wasn't too impressed. The color quality was a bit bland and honestly the prints seemed a bit flimsy. I'm just used to the nice thick prints I get with film cameras probably. I guess I'll just have to do some research to find a high quality printer.

Besides the camera I got the AniMatrix dvd and some belts (daily use leather belts and black and brown ones for dress). Besides that I got a Best Buy gift card, Dinesh D'Souza's book "What's So Great About America", X-Men 1 & 2 dvd set, travel organizer for holding toiletries, and the usual sums of cash gifts. In all it was a pretty good year. Maybe it was just a stressful year or I've matured but I just didn't want many things this year. It was a real struggle just to think of things to put on the list for relatives.

Well anyways it's just a few more days till 2003 is a memory and we move to 2004. Isn't it just so strange how time passes. Seems like I was just here wondering what 2003 would hold for me. Who knows what 2004 will!

Wednesday, December 24, 2003

Happy Holidays

 

Sunday, December 21, 2003

Bad Boys II

I watched Bad Boys II last night for the first time. It's an excellent movie!

Admittedly the plot is a bit thin and the movie relies a bit too much on fancy tricks and action but who really cares. I don't think anyone goes into movies like this expecting compelling dialog and intelligent, provoking story lines. It's all about the action and boy do they deliver!

Martin Lawrence and Will Smith didn't seem to have the level of chemistry the first movie had but the story is suppose to take place years after the first one and Martin Lawrence's character, Marcus, is having thoughts of getting a new partner because of the stress Will Smith's character, Mike, is causing. So I guess you could use that fact to give a believable reason for the lack of chemistry.

They have your obligatory car chase on a freeway. However they mix it up by having the bad guys steal a semi loaded with cars. So you get an over the top chase where bad guys are tossing cars off the back of the truck. This of course causes lots of mayhem and crashes and everyone but the two stars ends up in a crash.

Plus there's this cool 360 degree spinning shootout in this old house in the slums. The good guys and bad guys are in separate rooms and are back to back on the dividing wall that has two French doors on either side. They spin the camera around and around focusing on the center of this dividing wall. It's a very interesting shot but it does get a bit annoying after a while as you start to get dizzy and feel nauseous.

The action was great, the story while thin still made enough sense so you don't finish the movie and say "What the heck was that all about?". Best of all it makes really good use of our new surround sound system! Every speaker was working in unity to produce a symphony of directional sound that was pure bliss. Many movies barely make use of the rear surround sound speakers or use any fancy effects. Bad Boys II used it perfectly. In the heat of major shootouts every speaker in the room was rattling with gunfire but only when appropriate for the camera angle. This is one of those movies that makes you feel good for spending the extra money on a good speaker setup.

All in all I liked the movie. So if you haven't seen it, go out and rent it. In fact rent both and have a Bad Boys movie night.

Thursday, December 18, 2003

Le semestre est fini!

That's the last time I plan to speak French in my life! I just finished my last exam for the semester. It was for French incase you didn't catch the significance of the previous statements! With that class I've fulfilled my foreign language requirements and will probably never speak a word of French again. Ok that's not exactly true. The English language actually uses many French phrases and words but anyhow I don't plan to have any conversations in French again.

So I'm now free to goof off for the next 3 weeks. Then it's back to college for what should be my final semester. Oh how I hope so because I sure as hell don't think I could stand to take much more! Seriously folks, for all you highschoolers or freshmen in college, don't slack off! Stay focused and work hard. Otherwise you'll end up like me and be in school for 5 years pushing 6 if you're not careful. If you reach a point where your family asking you when you're going to graduate and you answer "I don’t know" you know you're in trouble!

Anyhoo, I'll be keeping myself busy over break. Going to start working on some long overdue projects I've been meaning to start on. Plus I'll probably start looking for a gasp job! I have Fridays off this next semester so I'll look into getting some part time deal where I work Fridays and Saturdays. Start earning some scratch so I can have a down payment for a car when I graduate. Although I'll probably just blow it on video games and new computer hardware.

C'est la vie. <- (That's a joke by the way)

Wednesday, December 17, 2003

100 Years to the day

It's been one hundred years to the day since that historic first powered flight by those Ohio boys, the Wright brothers!

It's just amazing how far we've come in that time. From that first simple flight that lasted all of 12 seconds and only went 120 feet to jumbo jets that fly around the world to rockets and the shuttles going into space. The Wright brothers curiosity helped pave the way for so much we now take for granted.

Sure there were others working on powered flight at the time but you can't help but wonder where would we all be right now if those brothers had never become so focused on what so many though was a silly project. Remember it wasn't just the powered flight, even afterwards many still saw it as a curiosity with no point. The Wright brothers created traveling exhibitions to demonstrate their airplanes and expose the world to flying. Without all that work they did would we have jumbo jets now? Would overnight delivery by UPS, FedEx, etc exist? Could you get fresh Alaskan crab legs in New York? Would we have gone to the moon? Satellite TV?

It's interesting to think about.

Sunday, December 14, 2003

Saddam Captured!

Well I'll be! Who would have thought this was possible. We've been chasing Osama around and never seem to be close I just figured Saddam would be the same. We'd be in Iraq 2 years later and still saying we're looking for him. To catch Saddam like this is just to say the least, surprising.

Hopefully this capture will give the people of Iraq some peace of mind to stop worrying about how they act for fear of Saddam coming back and punishing them. Everyone can now think about the future of a free Iraq and start working towards that goal.

This won't stop the almost daily attacks in the country and if anything will probably mean more attacks for the time being. You'll have Saddam supporters trying to do revenge attacks for the capture so I'd expect to see many, many more bombings. Not to mention with the rumors the Al Quida ramping up operations in Iraq you have to wonder what will happen. Will they back off now that there's no chance of chasing off America and getting Saddam put back into power? Will they ramp up even harder now to retaliate? With the capture of Saddam might they activate sleep cells in America and start doing suicide bombings in our streets and homes? It's hard to know and that's the scary part.

Politically this is pretty good for President Bush. The fact that the administration doesn't have to keep fending off questions why we don't have Saddam will do good for popularity and the '04 election. Of course getting Saddam to talk and tell us once for all if there are WMDs and where they are will be the big clincher. The anti-war groups have been saying "where are the WMDs?" since the beginning. If Saddam himself admits he had weapons of mass destruction the President and his administration get the proof they needed to start the war.

With whatever happens, at least for today we can celebrate that one of the two bad guys we've been after is in custody and will get his just deserts.

Friday, December 12, 2003

BlogShares is back!

Hey good news, maybe. It appears that BlogShares, the stock market game that uses blogs as companies to trade, is back from the grave. Apparently It's still in limbo right now though. The new owners have the site back up running but it's still running as bad as it did when it got shut down. Plus not everything is working yet. The forums for example are still down.

It's nice to see BlogShares get a second change. However I'm not sure If I'll start playing again. At first it was fun to play but the game was too artificial. The stock prices followed preset tracks and regardless of a blog once listed the stock price would go from 20cents a share to almost 40 dollars a share within about a week. So there was little fun in playing the market. Of course that was new blogs that no one bothered with. If you trying buying and selling in popular ones the price would fluctuate so wildly share prices could go from 50 dollars to 10,000 dollars to 10 dollars within a single day. The market really became stagnate and so the site operators created a whole new system known as Ideas and Artifacts. Based on number of incoming links to blog within an industry (category of the blog) the industry would produce these Ideas every so often. You could buy these ideas and when you had 10,000 ideas turn it into an Artifact. The artifact gave you special abilities such as causing a stock price to rise (hype it) or fall (public relations disaster).

The idea market become what the game was all about. Depending on number of Ideas produced and number of blogs in an industry the Idea prices could vary wildly. It became a competition for the top few players to fight over getting cheap Ideas and then waiting a day or two in hopes the price would skyrocket and sell the ideas. It was very possible for a person to turn a hundred thousand into a billion in short order. The problems came when the owner of the site created the ability for people to write applications to play the game. More people used automated tools to buy and sell than visit the website. Within about a months time the site became completely unusable. WebPages would take 2-3 minutes to load if they did load. It just got to the point where it wasn't fun anymore. It became work just to play.

Then one day the site crashed bad. The database just exploded. It was the second or third time it had happened. The site was down for several days before a message finally showed up and said BlogShares was dead. Well it's been a few weeks and it appears that some small web development company called Santa Cruz Tech has taken control of the site. I'll be keeping an eye on it. However, I really don't think I'll start playing again. So once they're up full steam if you're a player look me up and maybe I'll give you some free stock or something. I'm known as AB Investments, Ltd. and worth a little over 21 billion.

AB Investments, Ltd. (the owner of AlanBarber.Org)