Wednesday, December 31, 2008

I stumbled on this, this morning.

I really do hate this kind of crap because once you figure it out, it's just a trick.

No matter what, your getting D. It starts with a math trick, pick any number, you end up with 4, which equals D. There are not a lot of countries that start with the letter D, I think Denmark may be the only one. Then there are not a lot of animals that start with k, and there is only one fruit that I can think of that starts with the letter O.

Although I will say, I picked kitten, then nectarine, and felt pretty proud that I forgot about the most obvious choice, kangaroo.

But the point is that the whole thing is trying to trick you in to believing you picked a random number and you just happen to think the same as everyone else. It's stupid, I hate when people try to play tricks on you.

I hate when I got to the grocery store and see something labeled 2 for 4$, that if I just buy one, it rings up 2$...

Why didn't they just price it at two dollars then? They're trying to trick you in to buying two.

Bad business practice... this day and age, companies really need to "win people over" especially with the fact that a lot of customers have an easy option to get digital products for free. You have to treat your customer like your friend, and help him/her get your product easily, and not with so much confusion.

Saturday, December 27, 2008

this dream

I had a dream last night. I was strolling along the Pakistani border when an American military official approached me, he said, "Son, we're going to need your help."

"Me?"

"Yes, the president's plane has been shot down over Pakistan and we need to get in there quick."

"ok..." I said, pondering the dangers ahead.

"The problem is, we have a uav up, a predator drone, but the only thing controlling it is this mouse and keyboard. We simplified the controls, but you need to be able to jump between modes so you may end up allowing the vehicle to fly by itself while you operate it's weaponry."

"Now, you'll have to understand that the drone is rather far away so there's a little bit of 'lag' in between what you see and what's really happening..."

I interrupted him right there, "Don't worry about it, I got this."

---

it was a day dream. It's interesting how the military and video games have found a meeting point with unmanned aerial drones.

It's no wonder that America's worried about other countries hacking our systems, never mind building your own army, just take over the one your trying to invade.

That's a scary thought, but what a great video game idea.

---

The hitbox lag is a joke about Battlefield 2. The game has a poor net code and that's just how it plays:



At first it can be pretty annoying and is a turn off for a lot of gamers, but for some, it's a challenge and feels good when you have a lot of skill.

---

I went to future shop yesterday. I've always loved shopping there, because that's where you can buy the future.... but at what cost, future shop? What cost?

Tomorrow will come and we'll be like, where is it? Oh yeah... we sold it... in a shop.

at the future shop.

I got myself an 80 dollar headset for 20 bucks!

:D

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

9863 days = 27 years

27 laps, the Earth revolves the sun at an astounding 30,000 mph. So strange that we can't feel that. I wonder if life would lose it's serenity if the universe flashed by us...

Everything seems so slow, when it's not... The sun, carrying us, flies around the galaxy at 485,000 mph.

That is insane... If we break our land speed record of 763 miles per hour, it's like, which direction in accordance to our orbits was the vehicle traveling?

In relation to our galaxies black hole, it could have been going around 500,763 miles per hour.

That 763 miles doesn't seem to be that big of a deal anymore. Here, in relation to our Earth, that seems so fast, and yet our entire galaxy is traveling towards some "great attractor", passing a thousand kilometers in a single second. Our galaxy covers what that vehicle does in an hour in a second.

I wonder what life would be like if we could actually feel or see just a bit of that speed...

Would we ever have a moment of peace?

I've had the pleasure of witnessing 27 laps around our sun, but that's only like 1 millionth of the orbit around our black hole.

A small fragment in time. They say our sun has traveled around the galaxy 25 times since it's birth, but I wonder if maybe there were a few faster rotations in it's earlier days, maybe it's more like 27

that would be epic.

And yet, it doesn't really mean anything... I wonder what life would be like if we lived in a binary star system and our planet had some kind of complex figure eight rotation, one that's always changing... How would we keep track of anything?

What would it be like if our days and nights were always changing? 7 hours of night here, 10 days of light there.

That would be weird.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

The world as I see it

By Albert Einstein

"How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people -- first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving...

"I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.

"My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude..."
"My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality... The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

"This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."

Saturday, December 20, 2008

wind turbines on buildings

Check out this article.

best band/clan name ever

I was thinking, if someone was losing himself to dementia, is it like an alternate demention?

Demention

I was like, wait, that's not a word... best band name ever though... look at it, so robust and conflicted...

Is he trying to spell dimension? Does he mean De-mention, like trying to take back something he said? And the word sounds like demon, but it's spelled men, so that just adds like 4 more dementions.... lol

demented...

lol, I looked it up, some techno band was over that shit.

Demension with an S looks available... if this is your band name and you make it big, you owe me buddy.

Sunday, December 14, 2008

best bf2 videos

Now for something entirely different:

My favorite videos from bf2



This is one of the oldest bf2 videos of a guy named Redux from Europe. In Bf2, the chopper was meant for two people, but the game was very action-orientated, and you could switch seats on the fly. When you jump to the gunner seat, you can use the machine gun and tv guided missle, but the chopper spirals "out of control". Or rather, the developers programmed it to spin in a clockwise motion.

You can control this by how you're flying the helicopter when you switch seats. This led to an extremely engaging experience that I doubt the developers ever intended.

Redux was the first person that I've ever seen to take this flying style in to tournament play.



This video is from another chopper enthusiast that must have spent a huge amount of time gathering his footage. A lot of the shots are not just against fast rolls or slides (hard to hit), but also around and through objects.

The one thing I loved about BF2 was that there were so many firsts. Like, first time hitting a jet with your helicopter missles. In this video you see him not only hitting jets, but hitting them as they go under bridges and through tunnels, something extremely hard to pull off.

I wish I could have recorded more of the things that I pulled off. I never had a computer that could handle it.



That shot is like threading a needle while hitting a dust particle that's passing by on the other side.



Here's another old one with 20id, one of the best teams of bf2. What I loved about 20id was how creative they could be. Clever usage of pixel shots is shown in this video.



Here's a video with me in it. I come in around 5 minutes in. (my nickname is Hatchet)

I used to play for a team named crack clan. I was invited while playing CSS and discovered online tournaments through them. When Bf2 came out, I jumped all over it. Here was a great teamwork based game where so many different things can happen. I left crack clan over some disagreements. They would have these crazy plans that I thought were just plain stupid and I was always one to voice my criticism. I went over to a team called "Network of exceeding Tactics" and flew with a guy named Irish. We tore a lot of teams up and at one point, no one could touch us. What we were especially good at was killing a lot of ground targets, fast. We were a terrifying force. Irish was a good guy but had a terrible temper.

I forget exactly why I left Net, I think they just became inactive in bf2 after a while and I joined Team Dynamic. It was around then that I teamed up with Zman, a younger guy from Texas. This kid was amazing with the tv missle. When we were on our game, no one could touch us.

We climbed to the top of the 2v2 chopper ladder and stayed there until it got boring.

There's a couple other videos that I remember were pretty awesome and if I can ever find them, I'll try to update this post.



Snarf dominating with c4 back when you could chuck it. They later patched it so you couldn't do that because it was just too damn powerful.

Life is a prison

I talked to a man once, he said he attempted to commit suicide and flat-lined for a minute.

He mentioned that it seemed much longer then that. He told me that he woke up in an entirely different form in an extremely unusual luminous world.

Some thing bright and formless spoke to him and said, "Congratulations inmate #99s7, you have served your time."

It was then that he remembered everything, before his life on this Earth, he was an awful man. Thinking about all the torment and despair he had to endure on Earth and not knowing anything, he felt terrible for what he did. All the time being stuck in a meaty body trapped with other prisoners and not having any purpose or understanding...

He explained that it was only through suicide, can you escape your prison term.

My friend couldn't take this, he attacked the form that was revealing this information to him, and before he knew it he was waking up from out of a coma, in this world.

---

Hi, I made up this short story to illustrate a few points.

A lot of religions either intentionally or unintentionally teach that life is suffering, that there is something much better out there waiting for us.

When I was a child, I sincerely believed in heaven and one of my first questions was, "why don't I just kill myself?"

And this thought, like a seed, lingered throughout my teenage years.

Common sense (cause well, pain sucks and pain = death), and "Christian" logic, like saying "thou shalt not kill" includes suicide, prevented me from doing anything stupid.

Nevertheless, I wanted to die. Sometimes people wonder why teens start smoking...

Suicide is a result of firmly believing that this moment, right here, the one your experiencing right now, is garbage.

It's taking a made up story like "life is a prison" and believing it.

When for all we know, this moment is the best there is.

Saturday, December 13, 2008

bionics

if you could would you ever install memory chips in your head so your memory never slips?

I've been enjoying this ask500 site a lot, and asked this question recently. It's been an interesting subject to me because I don't think we are that far off.

Other things to think about:

"What would it be like if you had a calculator that you could access with your mind, giving you perfect instant mental math every single time?"

"What about GPS? How far will google maps go? Could you get a satellite image of your position uploaded to your mind in real time?"

I don't know if I would do it. In a way, we're already plugged in to computers, recording information that's stored in the computers memory so we don't have to.

Remember a time when you had to memorize phone numbers?

Now we have our phones do that for us. It's not plugged in to the brain, but it's hooked up using our "natural" plug-ins, our eyes and ears.

How long before we're implanting tiny blue tooth headsets in to our ears?

Thursday, December 11, 2008

sigh...

"A groan of tedium escapes me, startling the fearful"

As I drove my beaten up small pick up truck to work this morning, I got to see a pair of sundogs, only emphasizing the weatherman's dismal warnings of a cold future.

Working outside in a Winnipeg winter wouldn't be so bad if it was just the feeling of the cold. Tools freeze, gloves make everything clumsy and everything becomes slippery and dangerous. Frustrated, I wanted to put a couple boards on the roof really quick and didn't feel like nailing down a board to keep me from sliding off.

That was a mistake. When I started walking on the roof, my feet started to slide, I tried to do the "fall flat" technique which almost always works. This time, I just kept sliding. There was that moment where "oh no, no, no", turns in to, "this is happening."

Know what I mean? When denial of the moment turns in to acceptance.

Luckily, I landed in the right way and in some snow to cushion the fall. No injuries, so I just went right back up the ladder and finished the job.

On the way home, I passed this semi truck and seen that the light ahead was turning red so I started to coast. Some douche bag behind thought that I wasn't coming up to the red light fast enough for him, so honked at me, passed in front of the semi on my right and jumped in front of me only to slam on the brakes at the light.

He was staring at me the whole time, saying some shit that probably wasn't very pleasant.

I just stared right back, in such a blank way. I almost wanted to antagonize him just to see what he would do. I was in one of those state of minds where I just don't care...

"Is this a test? It has to be. Otherwise I can't go on."

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

nine something something

I have a lot of stuff that I've been meaning to write about. It's strange because I have no idea who I'm writing to or 'when' I'm writing to. A strange notion that came to me when I thought about the difference between writing on the internet vs. writing in a book.

The internet could be around for a very long time...

It's very likely that people from the future will be studying our old blog entries and messages to one another to try and understand the past.

So every time I write something, it's like, what kind of audience do I have here?

The reader could be someone from facebook checking to see how things are going in my life, or it could be someone from the year 2320 trying to see why a half-black president was such a big deal to us, or why didn't react to the Canadian party decision in a different way.

(Why is there such a big transfer of power at the same time of the United States anyway?)

There's the conspiracy theorist in me again, lol.

So I think to myself, who do I write to?

Then I freeze up. I know I should have a voice that speaks to everyone, but I'm not quite sure what that is.

In the end I know that something is better then nothing, so I'm just going to type.

I remember reading about a man that would try to write without thinking so that his mind just flows on to the paper.

I've been thinking about brain theories after seeing this video. It's interesting because we all have brains but it's not very often do we stop and think about how they're working.

I was thinking about how we lose our memories because generations of brain cells didn't teach younger generations that information. Think about a really old memory, like when you were a child. A lot of times the memories that come up are ones you've thought of before. In your body, there are only a few cells in your eye and brain that stay with you your whole life, the rest is being replaced on a constant basis.

So by thinking of recent memories, your teaching younger cells to hold on to those ones.

Now, how much information can be stored in these cells? I've heard of people that can remember everything they see. Maybe they've just found a way to train their cells better.

Generation after generation of cells that are getting stronger and stronger.

But then, I've heard of someone that has a perfect memory but a poor imagination.

Here's a guy that argues that the brain has a central "controller" that determines how the brain works.

...

We all forget things, all the time. Computers have given us contrast, (and allow us to 'store information' without putting the effort on our cells). We can see how weak our minds are.

Or is being able to forget things a benefit?

If someone told you something like, the sun sits still.

So you believe for your childhood life but then decide through logic and reason that that statement is false. You need to forget about it, how would we ever handle any new information if we didn't discard the old?

This has probably all been discussed and I should take some time to educate myself on the subject so I can catch up.

The reason why I write it is because I have a lot to say and despite the audience, I should write more often and quit letting all my good ideas disappear.

In a way, passing on information to younger people is a lot like how our brain works.