I hope you're not afraid of the dark.

So I just bought a used copy of "Chronicles of Riddick: Assualt on Dark Athena" and lemme tell you, I was extremely excited to get it. Before I go on a little rant I want to explain the concept of "Gamer Achievements" to those of you who don't have an Xbox 360. Built into the games are meta-awards called achievements. Once you complete or "unlock" an achievement you get the requisite number of points added to your Xbox Live account. So if I've played 5 games and gotten 2,000 points worth of achievements, that score is posted on my Xbox Live account and all my gamer friends can see what ahcievements I've unlocked in what games and how many points I have total. So, these don't have any functional use, they're mainly for your own sense of accomplishment and perhaps bragging rights. They look like this (like one of my last posts).



Now all your gamer buddies can see that you've been philandering.

Some of these achievements can be very straightforward, like "complete the first level of Star Wars: force unleashed."
Some of these achievements are quite devious like in Half-Life 2 the acheivement: "targeted advertisement." Use the Cross-Bow to pin an enemy to a billboard.

And the achievements vary in difficulty and value.

Aaaaaaanyway, I looked up the achievements for Dark Athena and you get some nice points for beating the game on the hardest difficultly. I can do that. Thought I. I've played for about 4-5 hours now and I can tell you, it's really fucking difficult. Why is the game so difficult on "hard"?

1) whenever you pick up a gun dropped by an enemy, you apparently reload the gun with semi-damp cotton balls. Thus, when you shoot an enemy with said gun, the enemy says, "Oy, you got my armor slightly damp. Now you shall die." And the enemy then shoots you a single time and since his gun is filled with depleted uranium rounds, you quickly explode.

2) If you manage to pull of a head-shot (which is a little tricky given your life expectancy when you enter the same zip code as an enemy, the enemy dies. If you don't shoot him in the head and instead, for instance, put 27 rounds into his chest, he simply snickers a little, then shoots you in your little toe, which causes your face to implode.

3) The point I'm at right now there are these little fuckers called Spider Turrets. These are robots, the size of a typical paramecium, that attach themselves to the walls. A good way to discover where these turrets are is to breathe. Once you breathe, the turrets lock onto your nearest vital organ and perforate it for your dying convenience. I honestly have no idea how to get past these things.

4) I'm sure there's going to be a #4. I mean, I'm about a tenth of the way into the game and already I'm bitching about how hard it is.

*edit*
#4) I forgot to mention, the enemies have really fast reflexes. If you come around a corner and there's a guard there, he'll shoot you before you can even turn. If you're hiding in the shadows and you take careful aim and shoot a guard in the head with an assault rifle, he'll still have time to shoot you before he dies.

XKCD

For those of us without iPhones

Google has an extremely robust set of queries you can send via text message (that's txt msg for those of you under 18). You simple text your query to 466453 and instantaneously (usually) you get a text message back with the information you want.

Google SMS

Usual text fees apply, but if you have an unlimited texts plan, I would highly recommend checking this out.

Uses: last night, I was playing Rainbow 6 and I got this word in my head. The word was "inimical." I texted
"Define: inimical" to 466453 and immediately I got

unfriendly: not friendly; "an unfriendly act of aggression"; "an inimical critic"
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

This is the first definition if you would have typed "define: inimical" into the google search engine. Pretty rad, no?

home is where the Xbox is

So it's been a great week in Columbus, OH. I've been living a life of leisure, playing videogames, watching movies, and reading two great books: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami.

The Xbox games that own my life right now:

Rainbow 6: Las Vegas 2
Burnout Paradise
&
Crackdown


Between those and assimilating the arguments against intelligent design, I've been pretty "busy."
Can I just say, here and now, that Evolution is one of the most brilliant discoveries in the history of mankind.

Just a "come on" from the whores on 7th avenue

Tomorrow I turn my steering wheel towards Columbus, Ohio.
I used to make the drive from C-bus to St. Paul in one fell swoop, but as I've grown older and possibly wiser, I've decided to take it in two fell swoops. So I'll be staying in Bloomington, IL for a night and then landing in Glenn Ave. on Tuesday.

Things I miss about home:
My Xbox (two weeks worth of downloadable Rockband Content to peruse)
My bed (although those bastards at Howards Inn in Madison still haven't called me back to tell me they found my pillow)
My girlfriend (no, leave the glasses on, they get me hot)
My grocery store (I know exactly where they keep the dr. pepper)
My motorcycle (freedom on two wheels)

I'd like to give a huge shout-out to Mr. & Mrs. Gubbins for so graciously hosting me this past week plus. Also a big thanks to Gubbins Jr. for teaching me the true spirit of christmas.

SP out

clouds

Fuck you, Windows(R)

I decided to copy The Fighting Librarian and purchase a netbook for myself. For those of you unfamiliar with the now supersaturated market of "ultra-portable" computers, these are, simply, very small laptops with limited processing power.

Let me start by saying I love my Asus EEE PC. It's little, it's light, it's got a battery that will last past judgement day.


<---Actual size.




The Catch: It comes preinstalled with Windows XP.
I'm not a fan of Micro$oft, as most of you know, but I was going to swallow my pride for the sake of ultra-portable internet bliss.
So I get everything set up and I was surfing the web while watching a little Band of Brothers. And right as the courageous members of Easy Company were being shelled by the Germans while foxholed during the Battle of the Bulge...I got a virus. I got three viruses.
Windows informed me of this in the most annoying way possible. Three pop-up windows that could not be minimized or hidden. These windows informed me that my computer was infected and that I should click this link to clean the computer. The link brought me to a website proffering some anti-virus software for only 59.99. "Bullocks!" I exclaimed. I can live with a couple of viruses. exempli gratia: people live long happy lives with HPV.
So I close the pop-ups and go about my business. The thing is, these windows keep popping up. Literally every 20 seconds, these same three windows would pop up and obscure my entire screen, rendering my machine useless.
The thing is, the application sending these annoying pop-ups was hidden somewhere on my computer. I couldn't even find it and delete it. This process took me a long time since I would need to stop the search every 20 seconds to close those damn pop-up windows.

Eventually, I threw up my hands and decided to wipe that ungodly operating system from my hardware.

The solution:



Linux, sweet linux. Ubuntu is beautiful. Ubuntu is virus-free. Ubuntu costs nothing. The GUI is simple, efficient, and did I mention that it's free? Did I mention that it comes with a copy of OpenOffice which can open and edit word documents just like Windows Office? Did I mention that it's free?

So, I'll let you know how it goes, but so far so good. The installation wasn't exactly foolproof as my computer has no optical drive. I needed to install Ubuntu on a usb drive and make the drive bootable.

I gotta run, I'm in Luck, WI right now at West Denmark Family Camp. More on that later.

Sprocketplug Out

it gives you insomnia™

So it's finals week. That means a few things. It means I have to endure the begging and pleading of students: "But I'm only 15% away from an A, can't you do something?"
It means I have to grade hundreds of pages of exams.
It means I drink Red Bull.
It means that after I'm done grading at 12:00am, the residual caffeine in my blood keeps sleep just outside my grasp.
It means that as I write this I am semi-conscious and I am listening to Ingrid Michaelson's The Chain, a beautifully mellow song that ends in a lovely round:

So glide away on soapy heels
And promise not to promise anymore
And if you come around again
Then I will take, then I will take the chain from off the door

Plan for the summer:

1) Workout (for reals this time)
2) Learn French (a lá Rosetta Stone)
3) Play my newly bought (but not yet received) Rock Band 2
4) Film a movie following students about to take the Statistics Qualifier Exam

So the question is: What should I name my Rock Band? Here's the shortlist:

Rachel and the Lady Killers
The Stoic Unicorns
The OCD Elves
James Taylor Overdrive
Civil Hands
One Man Down
Challengers of Change
Aphrodite's Itch
Temporal Fugue
Inebriated Koala
The Sprangettes
Madrak and the Holy Rollers
P and the Values
Starbuck and the Vipers
Circular Logic


What would you call YOUR band?

His blood ran cold...

Yesterday was the second time that I've given a double red cell donation at my local Red Cross.




For those of you unfamiliar with this newfangled process, it works thusly. For a regular, whole blood donation, you give a pint of red goo straight from your vein to the bag. The three major constituents of blood (excluding white blood cells) are the red blood cells, plasma, and platelets. Without getting into too much detail (read: this could be bullshit I just made up), the plasma is the fluid, the red blood cells carry oxygen, and the platelets are an important factor in producing blood clots.




So, when you give a double red donation, you give twice as many red blood cells as you do during a regular donation...but you get your plasma and platelets back. No, they don't give you a doggy bag filled with icky yellow liquid, they run your blood through a centrifuge, spin out the red blood cells, which should be heavier (hemoglobin has iron in it, right?) than the rest of the junk. Then they give you back your platelets, plasma, and they throw in half a pint of saline solution at no extra charge. Wonderous, isn't it? They pause the donation at three separate times and give you back your fluids. It goes back through the same needle and you can't even feel it! The best part about the donation is that your blood can get to another person much faster because it doesn't need to hang around to get separated.

So, my first time through, I was sitting there, marveling at the wonders of modern science when my lips started to tingle. No worries, I thought, it's just nerves. But them my stomach started to twitch a little bit and I started to tremble. I couldn't figure out what was going on. I've given gallons of blood in my lifetime and never had any adverse effects. The donation ends and I need to sit for a good 20 minutes before I feel like moving.

I thought about it for a while and then I came up with a hypothesis (later confirmed by Sprocketplug Senior, Doctor of Medicine). It turns out that I was cold. Why, you ask? Well, during the return, they gave me a little more than half a pint of saline solution. That's just salt water, but it was being stored at room temperature, let's call it 67 degrees Farenheit. Normal body temp is around 98 degrees so that was a little shock to my system. I didn't recognize the feeling, because I've never gotten cold from the inside out. Weird, right?
Anyway, the second time was better since I brought a heavy sweatshirt and winter cap, but I still got the same trembly feeling. I might go back to just giving a pint of whole blood, but we'll see.

Sprocketplug out.

blogger ennui

So, I've been thinking about this blog quite a bit recently. I don't really know what I should do with it. I feel like I want to post more. Lord knows I can wax whimsical with the best of them...but I don't really know where to go.
I've thought about several things:

1. reviewing video games i've been playing
2. reviewing girlfriends that i've been sleeping with
3. talk about my life as an educator
4. discuss, in depth, the relative usefulness of foam vs. gel shaving cream
5. make fun of fast eddie

one idea that will come to fruition is this: for my birthday, which was last week sometime, Fast Eddie and wife gifted me a year subscription to Parents Magazine. On the usefulness scale, this gift ranks somewhere between partially chewed pen cap and 100mL of lukewarm hamster vomit. Not that the sentiment wasn't appreciated.
I've received the latest issue as well as two back issues and all I can think about is how I can defile it. you know, cut and paste ransom letters, mix and match pictures that imply vile and disgusting things.

Just thought I'd muse aloud (so to write) a little.

-Sprocketplug

Bistromatics

Yesterday, my friends and I spent a delightful evening at Dewey's Pizzeria in Grandview. When we were ordering pizzas, two friends, Roland and David, each ordered a small (eleven inch) pizza. The waitress said, "It would be cheaper if you bought a 17 inch pizza and split it."
I pondered, cheaper, maybe, but would they get the same amount of pizza?
So I pulled out a napkin, grabbed a sharpie, and did a little bistromathics.

It was a simple calculation, finding the surface area of an 11 inch pizza and comparing that to half the surface area of a 17 inch pizza*, but the activity drew a few exasperated sighs.

I say, why accept a premise on faith when you can prove or disprove it with a few simple mathematical tools? If we let enough of those moments slip by, we become slaves to hearsay and speculation.

Sprocketplug

[dictated but not read in the penthouse of an ivory tower]




* circle with diameter 11 inches has surface area
= π * r^2 = π*5.5^2 ≅ 95.03 in^2

circle with diameter 17 inches has surface area
= π * r^2 = π*8.5^2 ≅ 226.98 in^2
So half that would be approximately 113.5 in^2

It's coming.

Outlander

Space Dragons, Bitches!

iPod Shuffle

New iPod Shuffle

This, to me, seems like a giant step backward in terms of user interface.

The Onion posted this a while ago and seems to be more than a little prescient.

The Onion's MacBook Wheel

Yes.

Are Violent Video Games Adequately Preparing Children For The Apocalypse?

facebook

For those of you unaware of the change in the terms of service that was recently revoked...
They tried to slip this in:

"You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof."

Meaning, basically, they own any and all content you put on facebook. And if you cancel your account, they still own every piece of material you put online. There were protests and groups formed against this change in policy and due to the outcry, Facebook backed down. The creators said in their blog:

"Many of us at Facebook spent most of today discussing how best to move forward. One approach would have been to quickly amend the new terms with new language to clarify our positions further. Another approach was simply to revert to our old terms while we begin working on our next version. As we thought through this, we reached out to respected organizations to get their input."

Translation: We didn't think you would notice what a bunch of dicks we are, but since you did we're going to back down and say the terms of service need a change of "language."

And then on the facebook bill or rights group, the creators say:
"5. We apologize for the confusion around these issues. We never intended to claim ownership over people's content even though that's what it seems like to many people. This was a mistake and we apologize for the confusion."

As if they didn't have a dozen lawyers drafting the language.
It's almost enough for me to bail on Facebook. This is the age of privacy rights and we have to be vigilant.

Outlander

Finally a movie with a concept even better than Zombie Strippers.

....

What roller coaster ride of action and emotion. This movie has it all: stoic hero consumed by revenge meets beautiful local girl who knows how to wield a sword (if you know what I mean). Will she soften his heart and help him exorcise his troubled past? Local warrior/heir to the throne is skeptical of hero at first, but camaraderie in the heat of battle forges a deep and lasting friendship. I don't want to ruin anything by giving away more of the plot (and I use that term loosely), but I will say one more thing: Space Dragons. Oh hells yes: SPACE DRAGONS!!!!

Check it out one time, won't you.

Sooooo good!!!

http://www.hulu.com/watch/55259/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-wed-jan-28-2009

Great interview with Neil DeGrasse Tyson!! Check it out!

"Who are we training to land on that thing with nuclear weapons?"

Even better:

Oh yeah, baby.

Look what's coming to Sprocketplug's house tomorrow!!!




Oh 1080p Matrix. Will you as beautiful as I hope you will?

For the last time...

The world is not going to end in 2012. Seriously.

So say we all.

Dudes and Dudettes,
Well, it's time for my biannual blog. Since last I wrote I've been to a party celebrating the 75th anniversary of the repeal of prohibition. I've been to California, to Boston, and to Florida. I ended Fall quarter and started Winter quarter. I designed a time-travel device only to have my future self travel back and destroy it before its first run. I have loved, lost, and played a crap load of Left 4 Dead on the Xbox 360. Corporations have crumbled, economies have tumbled, and Solstice has passed. I learned the true meaning of christmas only to have woodland nymphs (dryads) steal the memories from me (or so I was told).

I bought a new phone, a new TV, and a new spleen. I think Graham Crackers are underrated. I spent 15 minutes watching Dr. Phil simply because the HD picture was so amazing. I'm looking forward to Joss Whedon's new show Dollhouse, I am looking forward to the X-Men: Wolverine movie. I am looking forward to playing Fallout 3.

here are some photos.













P.S. I love Starbuck.