Russians test my stupidity.
Posted on March 8, 2007 at 3:12 pm.
I just had an interesting experience.
A Russian man had contacted me over ICQ (an instant messenger) and asked my permission to ask me a series of questions to test my erudition.
When I wanted to know the purpose of this exercise, he related to me that he is testing the fact that all Americans are stupid. This is common wisdom in Russia, in case you didn't know.
To his credit this man at least tried to test the odd hypothesis instead of simply believing it. I wonder, how dim does one have to be to accept as fact that the most prosperous and powerful nation on Earth has more stupid people than other nations? Moreover how exceptionally dim does one have to be to attempt testing someone for stupidity by asking them trivia?
While there are stupid people everywhere including the United States, the notion that Americans are more stupid than anyone else is so apparently ludicrous that it need not be rebuked. On the other hand, why would someone think that not knowing the first emperor of Russia or the name of the first man in space - constitutes stupidity?
I have no answers to these questions.
Another thing that I thought about is the sad fact that many Americans feel the need to apologize for being American, while abroad. I have seen it myself and I know others who witnessed it as well. Apparently it is ok to be proud of who you are and where you are from, unless you are from the US of A.
Weird.
The saddest part is that some Americans are beginning to believe that they are stupid. This is the real damage, everything else is just a joke.
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Book - The Dark Side.
Posted on March 6, 2007 at 3:07 pm.
I just finished reading "The Dark Side" by Max Fray.
Meh...
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Brain controlled gaming?
Posted on March 5, 2007 at 2:45 pm.
I found an interesting site today.
This company advertises a device that picks up user's emotions and thoughts. They say then plan to create a controller for gaming.
While this is probably a hoax of some kind, imagine how cool it would be! Not only is this hands free gaming, but the possibilities for the use of emotions in gaming are mind-boggling.
In an RPG game for example, if you get angry during a fight, your attacks could become more powerful, but have a higher chance of missing.
Basically, I will believe it when I see it, but I still really want one of those!!!
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Duck Tales DVD.
Posted on March 4, 2007 at 9:12 am.
Yara and I were talking about what cartoons we liked as kids and it turned out we both used to love Disney's Duck Tales. We decided to see if we would still enjoy watching these series, so we went to Best Buy and got us a DVD with episodes 1 through 27.
We then watched about 5 of them.
Although it is not as awesome as I remembered, we still had a good time. McDuck is the best! He is one of my favorite characters ever!
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Bug fix.
Posted on March 3, 2007 at 1:24 pm.
I fixed a bug where the comments to a blog entry would be displayed out of order if their quantity passed a certain number.
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Book - Time of the Beast.
Posted on March 3, 2007 at 1:21 pm.
I just finished reading "Time of the Beat" by Vyacheslav Shaligin. Not too bad although many of the descriptions are difficult to visualize. Perhaps the author had a clear picture of what he was talking about, but it didn't seem to survive the conversion to the written word.
Overall the book seemed rather unoriginal, but it was not unpleasant to read. I can't recommend it because there are far better books out there, but I also don't suggest avoiding it on purpose.
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Daylight Savings Time.
Posted on March 3, 2007 at 10:00 am.
I am supposed to investigate the new WTF that is the change in the Daylight Savings Time and patch all of the servers, workstations and devices.
Fuck you Benjamin Franklin for inventing DST as a joke.
Fuck you German Government of WWI for first implementing it.
Fuck you to all the morons who followed suit.
Fuck you the US Congress for fucking it up even more this year.
You are all a bunch of idiots, because guess what? There are no energy savings due to DST. All it is is a huge inconvenience and nothing more.
Those of you interested in learning more about the abortion that is DST read this Wikipedia article.
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At work blues.
Posted on March 3, 2007 at 9:58 am.
It is Saturday and I am at work.
Alone.
Naked.
Well, not naked, but I might as well be. There is nobody else here.
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Jade Empire SE for PC.
Posted on March 2, 2007 at 8:56 pm.
I bought Jade Empire Special Edition for PC.
Right now I am at the end of Chapter 2. So far my impressions are the following:
Visuals: suck. This game reeks of being a console port. Graphics are vastly inferior to what one has come to expect of PC games. Fonts, interface, polygon counts - everything sucks. One thing that I liked is the native wide screen support.
Controls: inadequate. Once again its a console port and not a very good one at that.
Story: as generic as they come. You are an orphan who knows nothing about himself. Growing up in a very secluded community you are taught by a wise old master... You know the rest.
Overall: this game is what Star Wars KotOR would have been if it was made by some Russian company and not BioWare. It is essentially the same exact game only poorly made. The fact that it was actually made by BioWare is mind boggling.
I will play it some more in hopes of seeing a sudden increase in the quality of storytelling, but so far I am very much NOT impressed.
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A global warming funny.
Posted on March 2, 2007 at 5:23 pm.
Minnesota Public Radio forum on "global warming" was canceled.
Because of a blizzard.
By the way, it appears that Mars is warming up as well. Unless you are willing to believe in Martians just so you wouldn't have to change your tune, you'd have to admit that the warming is quite natural and NOT man made.
Article here.
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Saying 'I could care less' is improper.
The correct way is 'I couldn't care less'.
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