Category: Random

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Lots of things going on here!
I have so much classwork, it is absurd, but I wanted to drop a line in on the ol’ Blog.

Emily posted this a few weeks ago, and I finally got around to watching it.
Remember (high school people) how I forced everyone to watch Troll 2 at one point or another? (Also: Shout out to the Sion kids who introduced ME to it) It seems I was not the only one who became quasi-obsessed with it:

“You Can’t Piss On Hospitality,” still remains, even to this day, the greatest line ever spoken in cinema history. So check out the documentary if you’ve seen Troll 2.

If you haven’t seen Troll 2, send me an e-mail, and we’ll figure something out.
Speaking of other silly things I forced on people back in high school, remember eat poop you cat?!
Now you can play online.

Ian and I were reading the news when we came across a news story concerning Jessica Simpson. She went to the hospital for something so… whatever. However, closer inspection revealed it to be another classic proof of what I’m quickly terming Noble’s Law:

Despite the noteworthiness, importance, or stature of any item of interest on the internet, the comments will always be more entertaining.

Exhibit A:

I will try to post more examples of Noble’s Law in the future.

Ian and I are also avid fan’s of Howie Mandel’s Deal or No Deal program. Or at least we the online flash game. A lot. Probability dictated that about 26 games later, this would be bound to happen, and reality followed suit:

Another fun thing I was referred to not just by Ethan, but by WordPress, is Stuff White People Like. This blog is essentially the tell-all of the upper echelon of mod-hipster-indie-types. The frequency with which I come across a given article that perfectly describes either myself or someone I closely associate with is… disturbing.

On a final note:
Humans vs. Zombies has started. The outbreak is here, in Kirksville, and no one is safe.
(Least of all me since I smashed my foot into my desk and occasionally pick up a little limp.)
Expect the next few blogs to be largely zombie-oriented with crazier music than usual if I manage to survive long enough to type them. If I don’t, except a full account of my tragic death, and perhaps a summary of my zombie exploits following the game.

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So I’ve been sitting on some pretty crazy stuff since I last blogged.
In truth, it’s just a bunch of random (pretty funny) things that have happened in the past few days, with actual news at the bottom. So here we go:

I’m a big fan of the Nintendo DS platform… or at least as much as I can be without actually owning one. Lizz has one, and on it she has one of the ‘Nintendogs’ games. These are pretty fun, becuase you kinda take care of stuff and so if you’re into nurturing or whatever, it’s a game for that.

There’ve been several spin-offs for horses, cats, whatever.
But this just crosses the line (CAUTION: The noises on that site are really loud; I had headphones on and nearly went deaf).
But for real: how messed up is that? Virtual Child-Rearing? From the looks of it, you feed them, wash them, change them, dress them, and so on. I just don’t see the market for such a game. Also: The babies all have E.T. faces.

You also seem them naked at one point, only to find that they are simply anatomically incorrect, described by this IGN review as akin to a naked Barbie Doll.

So yeah. All kinds of strange.

Speaking of strange, I’m going to drop the quote of the week on you guys:

The application is called Spark, and its with the Social Profile thing. Actually I think this random girl from high school was number two [...]. Facebook wants me to play for the other team, how embarrassing! Anyway.

First: ‘Play for the other team’ is the BEST euphemism for being gay I have ever heard.
Second: This ‘spark’ application intrigued me, so I gave it a spin on the ol’ Facebook.

It is TERRIBLE.
The statistical run down says it all:

“Would you date Tom?”
YES 2 votes 28%
NO 5 votes 71%
Total 7 votes

You are more desirable
than 76.16% of people
Another 189,423 people are at your level
Your global desirability ranking is 14,445 out of 26,401,177 people
Last week: You were viewed 2 times and no people expressed interested in you

Wow. That has to be one of the more disgusting ideas I’ve ever come across. An application custom tailored to make you feel better/worse about yourself based entirely on how many clicks you get from these (pardon me if I’m talking about you…) sick people who have nothing better to do than to sit around and think to themselves, “I would/would not hit that!” and click the corresponding link.

That’s just… wow. Also, the numbers are staggering to look at. With 28% positive, I am more desirable than 76% of the other people? That’s insane. Especially when you consider the fact that people see THIS:

I mean… wow.
What a world we live in.

Speaking of Facebook, in an effort to get more people over here reading the ol’ blog, I’ve installed a little application called Wordbook on both Facebook and WordPress. This just syndicates all blog posts here on my Facebook page, and hopefully people see it in the news feed as well.

I’m not really into Facebook or whatever, but a lot of people are super-into it, and on it all the time, so I figured I’d take a little stab at publicity and see if we can’t get more people stopping by the blog. This new syndication outlet is part of what you could call a small ‘Point Release’ of Schödinger’s Blog. Version 2.1 includes now not only this Wordbook outlet, but I also upgraded to the brand-spanking-new WordPress 2.5. It’s pretty fancy. They overhauled the interface, added a lot of new media features (which I used to insert the images in this post; I’m not sure if I’ll use it for everything from now on or not though), and made it more secure.

I also decided that Schödinger’s Blog is probably due for a major upgrade in the coming months. I’m shooting for this summer (before or around our two-year mark in August) as a good time to make some changes for what I’m tentatively calling Version 2.5. Feature list right now is short, but like I said, I’m still in the formative stages:

• Fixing the Feeds-
  They still don’t show the date like they used to, and I’m pretty sure I can fix that.

• New Design-
  I have some cool ideas for how to update the button console, but it’s going to mean exporting this job. I’ve finally come to grips with my graphic-deisgn incapability, so I’m probably going to come up with a concept, and have a real art-person put together some templates for me that I can tinker with, but are still way better than anything I could’ve thrown together on my own. That’s the plan anyways.

• Rooftop Update-
  I haven’t been keeping this that current, and so it could probably use some work. Additionally, I want to get the videos that are there uploaded to YouTube, and condense that down to fewer pages for people to view more easily.

So those are the ideas I have right now.
We’ll see how well they pan out in the next few months.

On a final computer/upgrade note I downloaded the fourth beat release of Firefox 3. It was pretty cool. They’ve tinkered with the interface a bit, and made it quite a bit faster. However, none of my extensions worked that well with it, and I use those a lot more than I thought I did, so I downgraded back to 2.0.0.13. While I was doing that though, I got some new extensions, which I can recommend:

-FireFTP, which lets you run FTP from a plain old tab
-Download Status Bar, which gets that pesky download manager condensed into a little progress bar at the bottom of the screen

I dunno. I’m into webrowsers.
What can I say.

There’s actually more things to talk about, but I figured, why not leave them for next week.
It’ll give the illusion that I’m posting more consistently.

On one final note, I had some time tonight, and so I also posted our second radio show.
If you missed parts or all of either, please check out radio.schrodingersblog.com and get caught up!

[The show still lacks a name. I need to get on that!]

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This entry is going to be all about fun!

Recently, I’ve been hitting the YouTube a lot harder than I would say is typical for me. I mean like… really hard. Towards the end we’ll talk about my YouTube hall of fame, but right now I just want to share a few movie-related items I found.

Speed Racer’s Hollywood Treatment:

I am SO excited for this movie. I’m really hoping that me and my dad can go see it together, because even to this day he still tries for the occasional Speed Racer joke. I never get any of them, because I saw Speed Racer for a grand total of probably… 3 episodes, but I know the characters and the story well enough to know that this film is going to be amazing.

Aside from all that: Christina Ricci is Trixie:

Wow. Have I still had a huge crush on her since Casper? Yes.
Is she the entire reason I will be seeing Speed Racer come May? Almost.

I guess I just like that America has a sortof cultural mythos building up. We take ideas that originated from a long time ago, which have long since run their course, and we paint them a different color scheme, hire some new actors, and it’s done. The entire push to movie-ize classics from the comic book medium is a really good example of this. The point is that this stuff is cool. Example: X-Men. When that comic started up in the sixties it was awesome becuase the guys had costumes and powers.

Today, costumes and powers aren’t all that “cool”. So they took the X-Men and made them more interesting people with better costumes and better powers.

I guess I wonder if I’ll live long enough to see this stuff revived again, and should that happen, will I shake my head in dismay, convinced that my generations iteration was in fact the correct one, or… perhaps… will I get really excited about seeing something cool get made cooler? Who knows.

I should ask my father. He liked the original Star Trek way back when it was first in syndication, in the sixties, and now, this!

Sure, it’s a lame teaser trailer, but this Christmas, we’re going to have a brand-new, very shiny, J.J. Abramized Trek Film, which, if successful, will probably serve as a complete reboot for the film franchise.

How old is Star Trek?! 40 years old! I’m just amazed that things can have such staying power. The Original Series (TOS, to those in the know) was so hokey; (SEE: Constantly the Enterprise crew found themselves journeying to 20th Century for god only knows what reason…) how come we still just eat it up year after year?

I suppose none of this should really come as a surprise though. People still read Homer’s Odyssey (and that’s older than Pavel Chekov’s wig), and that stupid movie about Beowulf came out a while ago. It just scares me that sometimes I feel like there are no new ideas. Everything is simply a permutation of another archetype, repackaged and resold to people who don’t understand that it’s all been done before.

Some people feel like this as well, perhaps a little too strongly. I’m sure you’ve met them before. They’re the people who saw all three Lord of the Rings films at midnight, only to complain every evening that “the book was better.” My question to such people is this: Where the hell do you get off?

But why deny them that? Why deny kids today things like Star Trek and Speed Racer simply because those stories had runs decades ago? Why would you stifle such movements to reinvent stories in different media for different audiences?! Especially, as was the case for Tolkien’s books, you can make them better?!

Tom, how could you say such a thing?! You can’t knock J.R.R.!! He’s a legend. Those books are beloved by fantasy-readers worldwide, for decades! How dare you speak such-

I know, I know. I’ll probably catch a lot of flack for saying that the film was better than the book. Whatever. To you, I say: think about all the people who will NEVER sit through a Tolkien book. I’m in the middle of my second go at the LotR set, and I had forgotten how terribly boring they were sometimes. They’re books about walking somewhere. Every so often… something minutely important to the overall plot happens.

There’s an entire chapter about getting lost in a forest. Entire paragraphs explaining how tired the hobbits were after a days walk. And the songs. Good night the songs. Why?! It’s lost on me. I am entirely unknowing of their value… Perhaps that is just a ramification of my hatred of poetry as a medium (Why? I wish I knew.), but whatever.

Case in point: It’s got a terrific plot. It’s an incredible story. However, there’s a lot of people who are far less willing than I am to simply shake their heads and shrug at the overabundance of lyrical verse in the Lord of the Rings, who will never read that behemoth of a novel. The film version does an amazing job of conveying the emotion and environment that made so much of the story what it is, partially because of the media. Ten pages about trees suddenly becomes a 15 second pan of a spooky forest. Granted, that’s a simplification, but so efficiently does it convey descriptional aspects, I’d wager it tells the story better than the written word does.

So yeah. I’m a big fan of using movies to get stories out there.

I digress though, today’s entry was supposed to be about fun!!
What’s the most fun thing I’ve heard about recently? A Veteran of a Foreign War- Voytek. He’s a Bear that fought in World War II. A Bear!!

So lesson learned Nazi Germany: Do Not Anger the Polish. They’re like Ben Kenobi: strike them down and they shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. Ian and I are eagerly awaiting the film treatment of Voytek’s heartwarming story of heroism, entitled “…Like Any Man”, taken from the article quote which I find completely and entirely unbelievable:

“He liked a cigarette, he liked a bottle of beer – he drank a bottle of beer like any man.”

How?! I don’t understand. I can’t imagine that bears even posses that level of motor function! However, it would make hella good CGI, and John Williams could all write the score and such.

Paramount, MGM, Universal? I’m looking at you. Watch out for this summer’s breakout indie-screenplay-to-get-made-into-a-big-film, “…Like Any Man”.

SOLDIER
“WE NEED MORE MORTAR ROUNDS!!!”

BEAR
“RAAAAAAWWWOOOOOAAAARRRRRRRRRR!”

SOLDIER
“AWESOME! THANKS VOYTEK!”

[Excerpt pilfered from a forum entry on the subject; read the discussion at your own risk]

So that’s it for fun entry. Political entry to follow.

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I took a little break (Past Three Weeks), but now I’m getting back into the swing of things. Finished my first week of the Spring Semester, which is shaping up to be quite an undertaking.

• Modern Physics-
  We’re gearing up to pick back up where we started. Seems like things should be more applied though, which suits me more than the crazy theoretical stuff.

• Mathematical Physics-
  By some miracle, I’ve seen everything on the first half of the syllabus for this class previously. That should help to offset the fact that we move at break-neck pace, and Taner “…likes to give hard tests.” ehhhh….

• Ordinary Differential Equations-
  My mathematics professor from last semester’s husband is teaching my math course this semester. How odd. This stuff seems difficult, but it is probably my last hourah/foray into formal Mathematics, so I can’t help but be a little excited.

• Intermediate German II-
  Another final surge in a given discipline, this is my last German class. Thank god. I’ve progressed too far and learned too little… eventually they’re going to figure out that I don’t belong in there. Hopefully I can keep up the charade just a little longer.

• General Chemistry II-
  Speaking of “last time I will ever do this ever”, this is a similar case to the above. My last formal Chemistry course, and I don’t know quite enough to be in it. I have about a month’s worth of material to self-teach myself before I’ll be comfortably caught up with the class, by my estimate.

  Also I haven’t done Chemistry in seven months because I hate it.
  I like the new teacher though… Dr. Baughman makes the occasional Star Wars Joke, which I to respect, regardless of how it’s executed.

So we were eating some meal a few days ago, and I noticed some ROTC kid in his camouflage (a word I still rely on the computer to spell correctly for me…), and I noticed something that had kinda been bothering me for a while. When I was growing up, camo looked like this. It’s all big and blotchy, and in non-military settings, tacky as hell. (SEE: Every third patron of the Kirksville Wal-Mart…)

This guy though… he looked like he fell through a PhotoShop hackjob. His camo was all pixelated. Which seemed odd to me. I know the Army was all about being super high-tech (Thanks, Don Rumsfeld), but digitizing the camo seemed a little excessive to me, if purely for the sake of. However, a little research revealed that this is not entirely the case.

There’s apparently actually some advantage of looking like a blown-up thumbnail image, so good for them.
I still think camo’s ugly, but if it gets them less shot, maybe that’s an acceptable trade-off.
[I would like you to note here my support of the troops, for future political purposes]

In other news, since coming back with my guitar, Ian and I have been working on some songs. We’re putting together a pretty rockin’ Radiohead cover set that spans nearly all of their albums. I’m really excited about it. If we do a good enough job, eventually at the end of the semester, we’re going to give recording it a shot.

After that, who knows? At this point, the premise of our musical endeavor [please note the lack of the use of the word "band"] is do this Radiohead thing. If that goes well, we might pick another artist, and pick our favorite stuff from their catalog, and cover it. I’m really excited for it to work, plus it’s got me playing guitar regularly for the first time since before I left for college, which is a skill I’m glad hasn’t deteriorated too terribly. Not that I rocked that hard before, but I do enjoy playing.

Tonight was the Nevada/South Carolina double-header of the Primary season, which was pretty anti-climactic. I turned the TV on at around 8:30, and everything had already happened. Go Hillary, because I think you’re awesome, and you won! Go Huckabee because you’re a hillarious tool who almost won! Go Rudy Guliani for phoning yet another crucial primary in!

But more on that later.
I’ve got a gigantic political segment brewing, chronicling my journey to Iowa Caucus earlier this year, up through the present when I post it. It’s been tumultuous and pretty fun to watch, and I’ve got plenty to comment/complain on, so get excited.

Sorry for the delay again.
Once I get that next entry out, we should be getting a good pace started for the new year.
Or at least I’ll try.
Becuase it’s worked so damn well the past six years I’ve tried to make that a New Years Resolution thing.

[For future reference: This year's goals were to remove a certain curse word from my vocabulary permanently (it's a bad one I hardly ever say, but feel terrible when I do, and it never gets the hilarious reaction I'm going for, so off with it!), and to floss more, as well as previously mentioned: blogging more.]

ALSO: If my grades are really awesome by mid-terms, I’m thinking of applying for a job that I could hold through the summer when I’ll be here for additional classes. In case you were wondering: THERE ARE NO TOWER CLEANERS IN KIRKSIVLLE.

…thank heavens…

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So, all types of things going on recently. I would make some excuse that I’ve been busy, but it would be a lie. I have about as much free time as ever, I just do not blog too often. As per usual, I am working on fixing this.

Tonight, I chose to work on that at 2 AM.

Our first order of business will be that I have accomplished a lifelong dream.
Please check this One Webcomic I Read to fully understand the gravity of the situation. It’s like that.

If I permitted myself to title my blogs things non-song-titles, today’s would be called “Eigenblog”.
You know not what that means, for I doubt anyone has ever said that word before. It’s OK, becuase I am going to explain: In math there are these fancy things called eigenvectors and eigenvalues. They’re special because:

If you “operate” on an eigenvector, you will always get the eigenvector back, multiplied by some number, called an eigenvalue. It’s still lost on me where this slick math business comes from, but eigenstuff is very useful. *halt: why are we talking about eigenstuff?*

It is a lifelong dream of mine to learn a single thing that will be applicable in every single one of my courses in a given semester. Think of a given semester, and try to imagine what you could POSSIBLY learn that would be the same in all classes. Crazy, huh? Well it’s always been something I wanted to happen.

Last week, it did.

Linear Algebra: We learned the formal approach to eigenvectors/values. Basically, how you make them work with matrices, and expand them into eigenspaces and such. [Refer to Wikipedia's exhaustive Eigenspace article for more information. Isn't it odd how irritatingly formal and lengthy their math/science articles are? I feel it is so.]

Modern Physics: Technically, I first learned of eigenthings in this course. They are useful in determining if a given wave function is well-behaved for a given operator. [A poorly behaved wave function is not an eigenvector, and thus gets no eigendinner before it goes to eigenbed.]

Vibrations and Waves: I think this is the first place where maybe I can make you understand about eigenstuff. Say I have three masses, linked together with springs. Say I pull one of them back, and let it go. Eigenstuff tells me how they will all slosh back-and-forth… which is useful is you’re into that kindof thing. [I am not, but that's cool, becuase the semester is almost over]

German: Eigen is the German word for “correct”, or “true”. Eigentlich is the word for “actually”. This is said frequently in German class.

At this point, you may still be like “whatever.” Some weird German math guy named this thing in German. It’s used in science. That’s gotta happen often enough, right? So why should you be impressed?

Political Science: We are learning to do linear regression analysis, which is essentially creating a line of best fit. If I have all these points in roughly one shape, what is the line that is closest to all of those points at once? A regression line. I asked one day, “What if the pattern isn’t linear. What is the distribution is parabolic, or a cubic function?” Answer? “Well, that requires matrix algebra manipulation using something called an EIGENVECTOR, so we won’t be doing that for this class.”

Flawless victory. The same concept in ALL five of my classes this semester within a week. Like I said, it was something of a dream that is now a reality, and I’m glad I could share it with you.

After that amazing sequence of events, I went home for Thanksgiving. It was good, all-in-all, but kinda weird. I wanna say “Thanks,” to everyone that came over to my house for the Plaza Lights! I like keeping that tradition alive, even if everyone seemed kinda worn-out this year. I’ll make a point to plan activities next year. Also: the mayor’s Christmas tree lighting was neat too. The tree is all wicked-tall and from Oregon… as most wicked-tall things are.

Aside from that… things are all different back home. Not in like a really awful way, but it’s just not the same. I was really trying to cling to the notion that when everyone got back from college, it would like quasi-high-school again. That expectation is now completely lost, and probably for the better.

Things are different now.
Saying more than that would do the situation an injustice, so I’ll leave it at that.

I am right now in the middle of reading a webcomic. This is a pretty bad time for me in truth. Auf Deutsch, this would be called “meine Tage,” which is a German euphanism for a woman’s menstral cycle. I guess I just mean to say that I am not entirely myself during this time.

I read a single strip from a comic, like it, and hit the “return to first” button. Next thing I know, I have 6 years of 3-comics-per-week to make it through before I’m caught up to the regular pace of production. You simply can’t take that all in one sitting. But you certainly can get sucked in for an hour or so, which is dangerous. Especially when by “or so,” I mean “three hours,” which is not something I’m really proud of.

It’s called Achewood. I really, REALLY enjoy it.
Lizz cares for it less, because she dislikes the style.

Thankfully, I am almost caught up. It has caused most of my sleep-lacking evenings.
I must also apologize if my rhetoric, vocabulary, or cadence seems off.
Reading stupid comics for hours on end gets me talking all like the characters and such.
[a personal favorite]