Checksum Arcanius

Surfing Digipen‘s site, because I happened to link to in in a previous post, I ran across Bontago, the winner of a rather prestigious-sounding award for computer games. So I downloaded it and started playing, and found that its quite fun, once you get the hang of it.

The idea is that you try to capture flags by expanding your territory by building blocks up. The higher your blocks are, the more territory they capture, but the easier it is for other players to topple them using earthquakes, rockets, and tilting the board.

Take a look at the screenshot, then go download it yourself!

According to this article, Michael Moore’s Farenheit 9/11 leaves much to be desired. The whole Carlyle group thing didn’t bother me too much, but the plane trips thing did, and it is interesting to see that the claims that these flights were illigetimate were fabricated and that the person who approved the flights was none other than Richard Clarke, now an outspoken critic of Bush.

It doesn’t change, of course, the Patriot Act or the Iraq War vs. The Afghanistani War, but it does make you wonder about the rest of the claims in the movie. If Moore had simply left all verifiably false stuff out, then the entire film would gain credibility. But instead, he leaves it in and calls all the content into question. Of course, without the claims addressed in teh above article, it would have been a pretty short film about mostly Iraq, and we’ve all had enough of that.

I love my job. I didn’t make it in until 10:30 today, and it wasn’t a problem. I improved my barcode program by changing it so that the images are output directly to the browser, instead of saving it to a file and then outputting it in the browser, but this had the interesting side effect of forcing me to elimiate all the whitespace from outside of the php tags. Even one space or linefeed would cause the output image to become corrupted.

After work, I picked up Brian and we headed to Robinswood for Ultimate. A guy from the Thursday game showed up, and we had five to six on each team the whole time despite the less-than-perfect weather. It wet grass did make sliding considerably more fun. And the curse really does seem to be broken. At 9:00, my team was down 16-17, having rallied from more than 6 down after Joe showed up. Fortunately, the other team agreed to extending the game until one team was up by two, and my team scored the next three, putting us up 19-17. However, we extended one ore time, saying the winner was first to 21. The final score was 21-18, with my team prevailing (kinda).

Life is good. TRC hack session tomorrow. Shai, 1337 computer programmer extrodinair from Digipen, will attend, as well as Bob and hopefully some members of the TRC as well :-).

~Arc out

In case you happened to be trying to access SilverFir.net sometime over the last couple of hours and experienced connectivity issues, the reason for this is that I kept unplugging its network cable. “But why?” you might ask.

And I would boldly answer you, “Because now its connection to the router isn’t wireless as it was for many months; its not even via a Category 5 cabelstrung between the windows of the house, as it was last week. Now it is connected via genuine cable certifiably exceeding the Category 6 standard. Installing the cable took up most of the day (its hard to stuff 4 wires down 3/4” conduit). Kudos to my dad for spearheading the project and showing me the tricks of the trade.

And although the project isn’t entirely complete yet, I should soon have a gigabit connection into my brother’s Apple G4. Then there will be no stopping iMovie and Final Cut Express from tearing through footage like nobody’s business on my RAID array. Among other things.

I have three cat6 cables down to the router area, and one to my brother’s room for the gigabit hookup. Now, there should never be a lost packet too or from SilverFir again. Whatup!

Happy Forth of July! To celebrate the 228th anniversary of our nation, I created an extremely short video (3,5 MB). Watch Fireworks, or, Cruelty to Children today!

Today was actually rather lazy for me. I woke up earlier than I had to, but then I was sleepy the rest of the day until I slept for hours in the afternoon. And now, of course, I’m wired. After church and sleeping, I went to the City of Bellevue public Fireworks display (where I flimed the footage in my short movie), then I went to Cougar Ridge Elementary (in unincorporated King County, where this is legal) to light off what few fireworks I had left over from last year, because I didn’t make it to any stands this year. It was a good time.

Today, I woke up at 6 and ate breakfast, got up again at 7 and revisionist blogged until 8, folded until 9, worked on the lawn until 10:45, Played Ultimate (my team finally won!) until 1, worked more on the lawn until 2, showered, and participated in the third hack session until 5, helped prepare for a partay until 6, partayed with glorious food and friends until 8, met with the TRC leadership until 9:45, then saw Spiderman 2 until 12:30.

Yikes!

Today after a wonderful day at work in which I ended by successfully generating on-the-fly a control barcode for the Flic barcode scanner using code written from scratch by yours truly, I went with Maneesh
to see Farenheit 9/11.

My first reaction to the release of this movie is that I would not see it. This because Michael Moore is an avowed leftest, and I didn’t want to support him, his propoganda, or his causes. But then, after some reflecting and reading of reviews, I decided that watching it would be useful. I wanted to hear oposing viewpoints, if for no other reason than knowing what they were. While I went in with more than a grain of salt, I also tried to keep an open mind.

First, since it is a movie, I think visuals should be discussed. Large parts of the movie consisted of footage blown up from TV quality images. While it was bearable to watch, anybody who gave it a high score in visuals is retarded. And there were plenty of people that did just that on Yahoo! Movies. ‘Tards.

The attempts to direect the audience emotionally were well done. I’m not terribly emotional to start out with, and I had to grimmace to make it through the emotionally charged parts still keeping my wits about me. The hardest were the mother who lost the son in the war and the Iraqi woman who lost some family members.

The large array of factual evidence presented is the most convincing. For example, the military commitments to Afghanistan and Iraq were oppisite of what it sees they should have been. Fewer troops went to Afghanistan than police patrol the streets of New York. More than ten times the number committed to Afghanistan are in Iraq. It tooks months for US forces to penetrate Afghanistan, and only days for Iraq. Its not to hard to believe Mikey, then, when he suggests that this is the reason Osama got away, and Sadaam got caught. It is also fairly easy to believe, with the other evidence presented, that the Bush administration took on Afghanistan out of neccesity, whereas Iraq was the prize they sought, with 9/11 as the means to that end.

And that became the most disturbing theme in the movie, because of how true it seemed upon personal reflection. September 11th was used as a justification for agendas that existed long before. Take the Patriot Act. It was very telling when Michael Moore was interviewing a congressman who said that members of congress don’t actually read what they turn into law, because to do so would take too long. So Mikey decided to go and read the patriot act to them. If it takes someone whose job is to legislate too long to read a single new law, how in the world are the rest of us, who have real jobs to do, supposed to read all the laws that we are supposed to abide by?

Other interesting tidbits

• the Afghani pipeline for natural gas
• the tactics of Marine recruiters
• Only one member of congress has a child overseas in the service
• Members of congress don’t like the idea of getting their kids to sign up for the Army

Overall, seeing the movie was a good experience. I just wish there were a conservative version of Michael Moore, so we could have an equally skewed version of this sort of commentary from the right. Maybe then people would realize how screwed up the system really is. While the rest of the movie went on to try to paint Bush and Cheney as unique in their ties to Enron and Haliburton, one truth remains. If you filmed anyone in politics for 4 years, you could make them look any way you wanted, because they will certainly provide enough ammunition. Unfortunately, the truth is that most of our government is corrupt and its not getting any better. Sure, its called politics as usual when senators get contracts for their home state and they get campaign contributions in return. But pretending that is somehow different than bribery doesn’t make it any less harmful.

In the end, this movie reaffirmed rather than challeneged my core beliefs. It did shift my perspective on Bush, but it didn’t rule out my voting for him. It certainly didn’t make me any more likely to vote for Kerry, even though an old lady wearing a Kerry for President pin tried to get me to register to vote (I am already registered). But it still seems clear to me that the government which governs least governs best. Government started the War in Iraq for a number of legitimate and probably a number of illegitmate reasons as well. But government also supplied and supported Hussein and Bin Laden in the first place. Imagine the lives and money that could have been put to better use had government just stayed out of it all.

Vote freedom first.

Peace.