🏷️ nerd

THIS IS THE NERDIEST I HAVE EVER BEEN

Yahoo! vs. Google


Yahoo! vs. MSN!


Yahoo! vs. Google

I'd like to have a game of RISK! tonight at my house (GOOGLE - 244 Sanders Road, Buffalo, New York 14216) The game will start at 8:00 to allow the babies a chance to fall asleep, there will be beers, chips and well.. RISK! There will/should/can be some Rockband between turns for the ADD kid in you too!


I know this is a little impromptu but really how much preparation does beer and your RISK! 'A' game take to get ready?

There's only 4 extra slots, and I'll only go forward with it if at least 2 of you peeps sign up by 6:00pm. If RISK! is a bust I guess I'll be resigned to XBOX Live Wednesday.

I'm calling the blue pieces. Uh, sign up by replying to this post (Meggy you have to sign up too since other will be calling their armies colors by posting replies and it's only fair).

WARNING: I uh, get a lil silly when I play the RISK! Tonight I'll be donning the personage of the Baron, should the RISK! commence.



I'll leave you with a quote from his lordship:

"The armies of Anthonia will march on this eve, and the blood of her foes will flow in rivulets down the plastic faces of those who dare appose her. Avast! yon heritic! May Anthoinain steel hurry you to a meeting with your heathen maker!"

--Baron Clubfoot Von Bictchburg Master Sargent Domo Lord and Vassel of Our Lords Lands of the Raging Blue Solider, Her Majesty's Anthonia

Ok that could have been, Holy Cow, but I think I'm going to coin a new exploitive. I'm at work looking for some you tube videos to finish up a project and I came across this.

@terry and I were talking about this stuff just the other day. We made wolves in to puppies and look at what we're doing to the friggin' cows

buff assed cow


yummy.

This post might just as aptly be titled, "As the CO 2 levels in our atmosphere rise so do the irregularites of Tonys brain" or "Microhoo! bamboozled me again!" or "My overzeloulness has undone me for the last time" or... just read the damn post.

Yeah Porn industry way to give into BuRay.

Ok so we're on the brink of Sony actually winning one of it's many failed attempts at buying a starndard. Not scince the day so of the walkman has a Sony format been so widely accepted. @PMT I'm sorry for stearing you down such a faulty path. You'd have been so much happier with a PS3, and you'd have had your BluRay by now.

This issue has me perplexed and dismayed for many many reasons.

Tax season is upon us and the possiblity of the Big Assed TV (which will be refered to as BATVHD) is skullking in the rafters, but why would nerd of my ilk want a big assed TV?

I'm rather social. It used to be an odd thing for me to miss an (e:strip) social event or any such event in the past (I just missed MGMT in toronto this weekend and I'm not even sad about it anymore, it's just a matter of course with is kinda pathetic), but things have changed. I have a bundle of joy and a bunch of women who need me to love and entertain them constantly. So, being the realist I'd like to consider my self I thought, "well Tony... you're not leaving the damn house anytime soon, " an attitued of defeat that I think is at the core of this perplexing delima. The social parts of me are crying out for relase lately and I fear I will do something irrespsoible if I don't find a decent outlet soon.

The Meggasaurs and I were talking about it this weekend, and it was easy to get her to agree with me on many parts of my argument. We has a few tussles about me not wanting her to buy me anything for Xmas or my birthday since I was saving up for the BATVHD (something about me being selfish for not wanting to let someone else buy my stuff, I get it I don't buy it, I digress). So, have support for the boob tube but I don't think that this TV wil really make me any happier. So she's down for the TV and for the PS3, but I don't' want that many nintnedos in my life. Especially when I'd rather hang out with peeps, and the nintendo that was supposed be like hanging out while playing nintendo dosn't really cut it. (I mean both of my white boxes of nerdiness. The XBOX w/ Live especially, but you have to invite people over to play Wii... and while it's cool if it happens to be there isn't not very cool if that's the point of a visit)

Eventually everyones gonna have to have a BATVHD but by that time they'll be reasonalby afforadable. I've been considering selling all my stupid nintendos (I have this love hate relationship with videogames), but with the HD Star Wars Animated series, and the Force Unleashed game just around the corner all this seems silly until you consider this amazing tid bit of information...

(@mrdeadlier sit down before you read this) I think I'm over StarWars.





::crickets chirpin::





Yeah e:mrdealier and I were talking about it and even he's having troubles staying excited for next big thing coming for the Lucas camp... so that game, Force Unleashed, which will be released on a silmiar device that plays more quitely, has decenty customer support, wont' eat your disks, and isn't owned by a company doing dumb things to compete that aren't effective (Yahoo! Seriosuly?) anyway.

So what does a nerd like me do? Tell you what. If I could work out more often, and go out and do thing I won't have done any of this, but I've made my bed, now I have got to sleep in it.

On a positive note I have about 70billion games I haven't even started playing or that I'm not even half way through. (I just got star #52 in Mario Galaxy... exciting news, I know), and the Meggiebyte got out and did some Meg stuff this weekend finally (she took some photo's round town while I stat with the girls on Sunday, I told her to call you @jim ... well, after the fact, but I told her and she'll go again I'm sure).

So porn, which by the way has become so avaliable on the web that maybe I shouldn't have had any faith in them picking HDDVD. What more is I should have just not had faith in either porn or Sony to stand on any moral highgrounds since now you can get your porn in BluRay too.. Moral of our story here... even when you'd like to get excited about porn you just end up with a bigger mess on your hands than you'll ever feel comfortable with, so just avoid it and go hang out with real people.

OK something cool did happend this weekend. I saw an inconvient truth, which unlike 2 girls one cup gives me hope for humanity. Not because I think Al Gore can stop global warmiing as easily as he intevented these here internets, but because a person like him can exsist. It makes me feel like I'm living in an Asimov novle, and pretty darn proud to be a human. Even if we're all gonna die in storms big enough to turn cows into milkshakes.

peas
e:muja

PS this post is not spell checked because I wrote it in Safari on PC, silly but true.

Ok, so paul asked me to comment on why we've...ok I've abandoned ASP and well it got really long in the tooth. I figured I'd just post a blog and link it so I could come correct my typos later. If you want to comment to this post just go back to @paul #40711, yeah... here' um my Response:

ASP classic (not .NET) is not a complete web language. There are things that PHP address and can handle that you need to code in a "different" (Visual Studio 6 at least, which is very similar but not the same at all) language to do in ASP classic. To boot you at times need to create server objects and install them which makes your code only work on that (friggin' expensive) box and and which just ruins your flow.

Ok, don't get me wrong, I'm not an ASP hater. I have much love for the language it's cute and quaint and how I started to learn progarmming, but I'm gonna throw some more darts atit right now.

ASP is kinda dying. A language is only as usefully as it's ablity to solve problems for you, and if you don't know how to accomplish those goals off hand you have to find the documentation to help you. Yeah, It's horribly documented. If you ever need to find anything about it that's not in an outdated overpriced bargain bin book that's likely out of print the best places tend to be fringe web sites that are dying one by one. The best of which 4GuysFromRolla have been slowly sliding off of the Classic bandwagon and into .NET land, so soon the language will be completely dead.

The language is horiffically dated. It came about well after OOP was invented but somehow didn't see the merit of becomgin fully OOP. It has some OOP qualities, but ASP is really not an OOL. You can instantiate classes, and it's a lot easier to organize your code this way but the language is not designed for it, nor is there any IDE that will let you take full advantage of it (even so much as Zend does PHP). As a result you end up spending more code on small tasks which in part ruins the fact that the feature is even there.

Really, PHP is isn't even as good, as ASP is bad. I'm not flaming ASP classic, it has it's uses, but it also has it's limitations are there are far too many, namely that's not as well suited for the web than languages that have come after it and that were competing during it's height. I don't think that you need to go to PHP to move ahead with web development, but certainly can't stick with ASP or even ASP.NET. If you check out the history of the language you'll see that it has always been a last ditch effort by MS that was never fully realized. I think they (MS) bought it off of an 3rd party to compete with SUN or someone when they come out with a web language that could be run on servers other than Windows, and was never fleshed out until .NET which is still not a very good web language.

The earliest versions of ASP.NET are completely different animals than the later, which leaves you with quite a bit of abandon work that you had to pay $500 to develop at each stage. because this language is the first attempt by MS to put a full fledged product for the web into the wild.

Their primary goal was to promote their flagship platform, the Windows desktop, for a very long time. Coming around to web centric thinking was hard for a company the girth of MS, what's worse is they didn't want to abandon their years loyal customer base or force the army of developers who were making their companies by a suite of windows products from servers to desktop applications, etc and so on. So what did they do? What does ASP.NET smack of no matter what language you program it in? (You can use c#, j#, or ASP for the .NET web platform) Desktop computing. They tried to allow desktop programmers to use their current skill set to program the web, which is stupid. I like to compare desktop and web programming like I compare American and International Football. Both are sports, you need to be athletic for both, but players from either sport would do poorly in the other. No amount of equipment /.NET will help you play well enough. You just need to retrain and

All of the "features" of that platform are if you pay much attention to it (and, ok most of this is opinion, but look at it your self and tell me what you think) capture to desktop programmers. Most .NET coders don't ever get to see HTML or JavaScript (weird right?). They didn't even get AJAX in their platform until it was past fad, which is absolutely crazy since MS was the company to first include the XMLHTTPRequest object (or what ever its' officially called). I've watched other developers senior to me who've tried to stick with MS get lost in the quagmire of what it'd like to present to the world a cutting edge web tech.

The web and the desktop and 2 different animals. MS is learning that the hard way, don't get left behind with them.

Dom responded, and his response was awesome check this out!

Very cool science show. They seem like they know what they are talking about from the little bit I listened too. These new HIV drugs aren't really vaccines exactly, but it sounds like they have great potential.

The question of "is it good for humans later" is pointless as far as I am concerned. Nature is a cruel master. Civilizations have developed to help cope with nature. We build shelters to protect us. We build social structures to help us get food and water. We build medical systems to help keep us healthy. We can do these things because we have evolved these capabilities. To not use those abilities would be stymie - ing evolution.

Mitchondria came from a symbiotic relationship between bacteria and eukaryotic single cell organisms. This infection happened before we evolved the ability to fight infections...

Suppose we did not treat HIV. Like the story says, there are some people who have a specific mutation in the CCR5 receptor that won't allow HIV infection. If everyone gets exposed to HIV, only these people and others who have other sorts of protective differences ("mutations") will survive. Now, a couple hundred years later, humanity is more "fit" because evolution ran its course concerning this one thing - HIV infection.

Good in theory, but will not happen exactly BECAUSE of evolution. Bald eagles almost became extinct because of a chemical that came into their environment (it doesn't matter that we were responsible for this point) which made their egg shells more fragile. The eggs could not support the weight of the parents that sit on them. so the eggs would collapse and the parent crushed the young. Eagles are not smart enough to realize that maybe they shouldn't sit on their eggs any longer. They are not able to build nice warm, cozy incubators for their eggs. In fact, if we had not removed the chemical from their environment in the 70's (DDT, I think) they would very likely be extinct right now.

Humans, on the other hand, have evolved such abilities. We are not wild animals and we could not survive for long without the social structures we have put in place. Why should it be OK to deny the use of a drug like this to help against a viral infection, but not OK to no longer allow trucks to deliver food from rural farm areas to cities. How would all those people in NYC eat?

There is another argument: Let's say there are some mutant eagles that build super strong eggs, so they don't crush their young. All the non-mutant eagles die off after a few generations, so now the species has evolved to have only these mutant eagles with super strong eggs are left. The chemical in the environment is not threat to these remaining eagles. Only 2% of the total original eagle population had this mutation. Luckily, the eagle population was large enough and varied enough for this mutation to be a possibility. But now, the genetic fitness of eagles is dramatically less. The population has lost 98% of its variation. What happens if another challenge comes along that these eagles can't handle? The genetic variation for many, many generations of these eagles will be so small that is it highly unlikely they would be able to survive another challenge like, let's say, an avian HIV. Maybe all of the eagles that had a mutation in CCR5 that could have saved them from avian HIV. Unfortunately, none of them had the super strong egg mutation so they all crushed their young and died off.

The exact same concepts would be applied to the human HIV story. If we let it run its course, and part of the population survived and that population is now somehow better able to withstand viral attacks because of this evolution, the genetic fitness of humanity would be much worse off.

So, my point is that evolution gave us the ability to protect ourselves and to not use those abilities is to ignore evolution. You could extend my theory to the n'th degree and say that eventually, nothing will be able to kill us. Where do you draw the line between benefiting from the abilities you have evolved, and actually interfering so much with evolution that you destroy the concept altogether? In a way, this is already happening. There are people with genetic mutations that would normally kill them before they were old enough to breed. Medical interventions now allow them to live long enough to breed. They do. Now there are more people with these mutations that would have been winnowed out without medical intervention.

I am not sure I have the answer for "where do you draw the line?". I've given this very little thought, but I think you draw the line at changing the genetic material of the gametes (sperm and egg). I think this would be wrong. But maybe it is not so simple as that. If you could take two people with cystic fibrosis, and fix the single mutation that causes the disease, I would say we should do that. These people could live normal lives with normal lung function. The gene would only need to be fixed in specific cells in the airways. In fact, some of the very 1st gene therapy experiments were to do exactly this. But what about when those two people get married and decide they want kids? Should we fix the bad gene in their sperm and eggs so that their kids come out normal?? I don't think so, because now you have pushed the line....how far do you push it? People with sickle cell anemia, which could theoretically be fixed in such a way, are resistant to malaria. What if cystic fibrosis people have some benefit we don't recognize yet?

Anyway.....I have to get back to work.

No, I don't know anyone studying bone density.

Ok... I listen to nerdy podcasts all the time. Video games, tech news, science. One of which is a podcast called "the naked scientist". I know, weird.

I also have made decent friends with a scientist at Roswell. He researches cancers, obviously, but I bug him with my science questions and tell him about my excitement in current research all the time cause he's more likely to give a hoot... but then what about you lot.

Here's the email I sent him. I'm busting with excitement, I think you should be too.

Subject: More Scientist Stuff

Body:

I swear I'm going to break down and go back to school so I can do this all the time.

Check these two things out.

They've found an chemical HIV vaccine, it was reported on this British Scientific Podcast called "The Naked Scientist". I know weird. Here's a link to the iTunes store for it and a link to the web site. They have enhanced podcasts so if you have iTunes you can scrub the progress bar until it's the title "New HIV Drugs" shows up, it's even easier on your iPod the sections are divided into bars. Relatively early in the show.

But then there's always this sort of thing where just because it's great news for humans now, is it necessarily good news for humans later? I think I emailed you a link to this podcast before. It's a sci-fi story about weather it's good that we destroy diseases since it may stymie evolution link . Think link mitochondria are some of the largest bits of debate weaponry that creationist scientists use against evolutionists (sp? bad terms?), but that's not what this is about. Figuring weather we should stop viruses before we've learned to live symbiotically with them and they improve us is, if that's what they're up to.

....ahhh. Ok, I'll stop bugging you. Really though, if I'm just pestering you let me know. I'd hate to be a nescience. I just get so excited.

Hmm, last question. I have an idea for a study but it has to do with bone density. Do you know a scientist that's in that kind of research?

It's no mystery that Paul is the super fantastic and it's hard to even stay in his wake without falling over sometimes, but I have to say for being some who's directly under the brunt of it it's perdy outstanding to behold.

So, I hate blogs, which you'd know if you read any of my first few, but um, I like people, so that's why i post here.

I'd never do a blog on my own, but my collegue and good friend Paul has writen some perdy darn sweet bloggin' software that I"m sure you're all aware of, but that's not much news.

I have owned enknot.com and some real server space for quite some time and haven't done anything with it since I was really green at all this stuff when I bought it, but I've been turning over a new leaf.

I plan to do a lot of stuff with the site but I won't flap my jaws until I have something to show, speaking of, I figured if my site was gonna have a blog I would just use this one, so I have. @paul 's got an API up there to the left w/ the turtle and such and I figured I'd pop it on my site for good mesure.

Yeah, seems maybe kinda lazy, and sometimes I feel like he's got too many people riding on his shirt tails, but the way I figure it if he puts something out there to be used, it's for reason. Since I'm back there too I try to be as much of a help as i can, so hopefully someone using this chunk of functionality from his site will be worth while to helping make the site better, and the traffic I generate (if my page and @ejtower 's page ever get done) will add to the fun here too...

If you have your own site and a journal here, help him out and use this api, he wrote it for you! Least that's how I figure it.

Ok the sabers are on in under an hour and there's much preperation to be done.

As Yet Unstyled

I have never been to Conneticut, but I think I could even convince @vycious to go to this. It's called Play! A Videogame sympyhony.

After watching one of his lil videos I just wanted to find out who composed that Mario Brothers music (cause it's really amazing if you haven't noticed by now, try playing any of it on any kind of instrument you would hurt your self), and I wound up finding about this concert series that is touring the world with the best videogame music of all time played by a real symphonic orchestra.

I'm sort of a band geek from way back as well as a button masher, so this would prolly make my balls explode! Hell one of my favorite albums is the Actraiser soundtrack. If you ask iTunes it'll prolly say I've listend to that record over 200 times.... I mean if you ask me it's perfect programmer music. Most programmers are ex or current button mashers, the music was desinged to play in the background while you did complicated things so you can listen while you program, and it's complex and beautiful, as soon as you get humans to play it it's overwhelmingly ..... oh gawd I'm such a nerd.






















and if you liked that you dirty dirty nerd
you get a little more dirty
and a lot more nerdy
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