Dan Dickinson: The Primary Vivid Weblog

As you may have guessed by the general lack of my presence online, this week is Spring Break. And yes, for the third straight year, Katie has come up to join my in the lovely Ithaca area. Spring Break is always quite hilarious because the weather before (and generally after) Spring Break is terrible, while the week of break tends to be beautiful and warm. And this week it has been for the most part, getting up into the 50′s. Although today has been a little bit chilly… During Kate’s stay here, we’ve been out to eat two times, seen 5 movies, listened to a good amount of music, and watched gobs of TV. Capsule reviews thus far (on my new -3 to +3 scale of rating things – isn’t this exciting?): The Boat Yard Restaurant (Surf and Turf / American) +2 Kayuga Restaurant (Japanese) +3 (as always) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Second viewing) +3 Before Night Falls +1 Almost Famous +1.5 Wonder Boys +2 Clerks +2.5 More will probably come later, unsurprisingly. A large majority of my friends are off in California sunning themselves - although I’m curious how they can get tans and be online so much. Oh well. Ben and Sablingbling went to Georgia for the Coca Cola Museum, god knows why. Nidhi is somewhere remote on a COE trip, and Neil is sticking around in good ol’ Ithaca. I will return to my dormy hole (get it? dormy? I live in a…oh never mind.) on Sunday, so please don’t expect huge response times from me before then. Till then, enjoy your time away from me

The review – god only knows how I typed it out right now – is up here.

I’m taking down the calendar page, not because it was a bad idea, but because I didn’t have an easy way to update it. I’ll be looking into other manners of reporting what’s going on soon enough.

As you’ve probably heard me bitch by now, this is another hell week. Today is the large bump in the middle, because after today, things get better. Here’s the joys I’ve been through: Monday – 417 prelim in the afternoon. Tuesday – CS222 prelim in the evening, CS417 problem set to do immediately after. Wednesday – turn in CS417 problem set, complete CS418 Programming Assignment #3 today/tonight. Thursday – work, give presentation for CS418 PA3, CCC production meeting, OR435 problem set in the late evening. Friday – turn in OR435 problem set. As you may have guessed, I am currently stuck in the lab. Hopefully we will get out sooner rather than later.

I just went digging through my archives a bit (to put up the January archives, no less) and noticed that my first news post was one year ago as of Tuesday. So that makes this site officially one year old. And to think, I really haven’t had anything in the way of a major makeover for the site yet. If you’re reading this, the chance seems to be about 90% that you already know me. So keep coming back, because I hope to provide enough entertainment and boredom-curing links to make you people happy. If you’re in the other 10%; hope you find something you like here. Besides a couple tweaks here and there (contacts, RemyHoo, 3 old photos I dug up), and the ever-present Linkpad and Newspad features, the big addition for today is the BPM Database. Since a small group of us are trying to get our foot in the DJ door, I decided to move my database from MacBPM to one of my own design. This is better because: - It has more than 4 fields. - More people than just me can view/work on it. - It’s a good time killer. Anyhow, the link is in the toys section, because it doesn’t directly relate to the mass of humanity that makes up me. Or something. But wait, there’s more – a history lesson first, though: As of January, I have been online for 6 complete years. January 1995-January 2001. In that time, I’ve had a web page in one form or another up for most of that (since August of 95, for you nitpickers). I’ve had the page on 3 different hosts – Lightlink, Cornell, and Csoft. I’ve gone through roughly 7 major revisions of my page, including but not limited to: “Remy’s Home Page”, “a lot like life”, “Minute Of Decay”, “remy.net”, “The Dan Dickinson Foundation”, “More And Faster”, and of course, this one. In those years, I’ve had countless side projects that I’ve reached various levels of success with. TCS Central Schools, Numblocked Systems, Remy.net IE Channel, Repent!, The Loose Kanons Archive, Go, the Undernet #wrestling page, The Taughannock Stone Man, and the Woodstock report, among others. Needless to say, I’ve always been overly ambitious about what I can actually get away with on the web. (Fun fact: Did you know the first thing I said I’d do with this site is database the quotefile? It still hasn’t happened.) But now, I’m handing you the shovel, dear reader, and letting you dig for treasure – behold, the graveyard. i have created near-perfect mirrors of both my Lightlink and Cornell web spaces. You can now dig and see many of the remains of all my old, shitty web pages. And if I can find it, I’ll dig up some more of them over Spring Break. Enough web page crap. What’s been happening with Cornell? Business is about to pick up, as I have two prelims, a project, and two problem sets due next week. After that, it gets nice and easy, with the Bela Fleck show on the 12th (tickets still available! Call Ticketbastard.), and my official break begins on the evening of the 15th. Kate is making the trek up here for the third Spring Break, and we’re going to have plenty of fun while everyone else blows $400+ to go to California. I’m sure something wacky will happen, most likely with the added bonus of making me question the sexuality of one of the group members. Woo-ee. Other than that, life moves slow around here.

See Gil. See Gil’s house. See Gil’s house throw a party. Party, house, party. See Gil’s digital camera. See Gil take pictures with the digital camera. Snap, Gil, snap. See Gil try to put the pictures on her website. See Gil run out of disk quota because Cornell only gives a piddly 5 MB. Cry, Gil, cry. See Dan. See Dan have so much disk space he doesn’t know what to do with it. See Dan offer to host the pictures for Gil. Host, Dan, host. See the pictures.

So as many of you read Memepool regularly, or talk to people who do, you’ve probably heard the phrase “All your base are belong to us” over the past few days. Perhaps you heard the techno song. And you’ve probably scratched your head and said “WTF?” Let me explain - Back in the early 90s, games that came over from Japan suffered tremendously in the section of translation. Some games were okay, but most games got hit somewhere – normally the manual. One such game is Zero Wing, a happy little side-scroller shooter ala Gradius. The Genesis version had an intro story line, which got COMPLETELY doctored in the process. Observe the Engrish version: As many people find broken English (aka, Engrish) funny, this got a giggle. However, this meme was founded in the unfortunately depths of SomethingAwful’s forums. So it got photoshopped onto a million different images…and then someone made a techno song about it (look in Napster)…and then there was a music video. And so the dementia continues. Two tidbits I can offer that no one else can – the techno song actually contains some of the melody from the first level of Zero Wing…and here’s what the arcade ending has to say (png format): I hope this clears things up.

I’ve replaced the OR350 quiz with a Mac Gaming Quotes quiz. Match the quotes to the Mac Gaming person and win fabulous prizes that don’t exist! Link is off to the right, as usual. It’s been a week since I was at Kate’s, and I really am missing her right now. Anyone want to give me some money so I can get a flight down there for next weekend? Please?

Once in a great while, a class gives an assignment involving making a 3D animation. CS 418 is one such class, and Holy Wars is one such animation. It clocks in at ~11 MB, and is encoded in such a way that it doesn’t play on my Mac. But it’s a fun 34 seconds or so of fun.

First and foremost, I’m rather annoyed right now that AppliedTheory continues to blow, thus cutting me from the sweet sweet AOLIM. So if you need me, and I’m not on IM, email will have to be your primary method of getting ahold of me. Yesterday was a terribly exciting day, what with getting my Underworld DVD at last, and the XFL game, and the Maxie’s run…let me break it down in the UNKLE style. The Underworld DVD is godlike. 90 minutes of concert footage, 90 minutes of concept art, program your own concert, and more DVD-ROM content than you can shake a stick at. Highly recommended. The XFL game was interesting. While it wasn’t a terribly good game of football, it was entertaining. It was to the point of being just ridiculously zany. While we didn’t watch all of the game, I think the defining moment I saw was when someone on the defensive line jumped the line of scrimmage and just clotheslined the hell out of the Quarterback. I couldn’t stop laughing. In any case, while the press is poo-pooing it, the majority of the fan opinion I read said they enjoyed it, so I’ll wager that it’ll be around for a while. Maxie’s was good as always. Wish their food was a little cheaper, but hey, good food isn’t cheap, and cheap food isn’t good. Well, most of the time. Today, I will probably get stuck in the graphics lab some more, and hopefully my IM connection will come back up. Next weekend, I’m driving down to Katie’s house for a little visit. Other than that, it’ll be a hectic work week. Watch me stress out live via my webcam! Till whenever.