Raz's Domain

12:38 am - Bugs Turn Me Into a Kid Again

Whenever we've got a visitor or I come across and interesting bug I don't just ignore them like most people might.  At most, I think, people will quickly evaluate whether they should feel threatened and then don't pay any more mind.

Not me, though!

Even at age 28, I still get a kick out of bugs and worms and animals and will go out of my way to interact with them.  I'll follow the squirrel around the tree a little while and get a laugh at how he tries to stay on the exact opposite side of the trunk, or I'll bend over and watch the 3 inch slugs we have out here ooze their way across the sidewalk.  There was a 5 inch sucker I came across on a hike that I even plopped down a ruler I had next to it and photographed it.

Tonight I found myself being yelled at by Nerf, who had discovered a little invader that she wanted me to retrieve for her: a black jumping spider with a neat red spot on the abdomen.  Out of all spiders, jumping spiders are my faves.  When I was a little kid and I found a jumping spider I'd bug the hell out of them because, unlike most spiders, they actually SEE you.  Wave your finger at them and they'll react to it, unlike just about any other bug.  Jumping spiders turn and look at you or at your hand and sometimes you can even get them to strike a ninja pose that might seem threatening when done by other spiders.  They're also fuzzy and have two big eyes, which is how they see you so well.

All that being said, this 28 year old man has just spent a good 10-15 minutes of this evening playing with a fuzzy jumping spider and getting a laugh out of the reactions he was able to elicit from it by waving his fingers or moving his hand around like a very large spider (which worked very well and made him actually back away as if in fear).  No ninja pose, though.  I actually got a jumping spider surprise in the mailbox yesterday and was able to get the pose from that one.  This might even be the same one, unwittingly carried into the house with the mail by my arachnophobic wife.

02:48 pm - My hair!

Got a haircut.  No big deal.

Till I really looked at it while I combed it this morning and I realized that my scalp is a lot more visible than it was the last time it was cut.  My hair is thinning and I'm not even 30 years old! 

Not a lot of baldness in the family, so I probably won't be going majorly bald, but one side has a hairline that's pretty high on the head and the other one was a little bit worse.

Hopefully it proceeds a little slower than my grey hair.  I really like my grey hair but I'm not too keen on possibly losing hair, especially so soon...

12:22 pm - Using SFML and Eclipse C++ Development Tool (CDT)

There is a woeful dearth of tutorials for a variety of things you can do with SFML in general, and there are a woeful dearth of helpful guides for Eclipse's CDT.  This is an attempt to plug at least two holes with one stone... if that clumsy modification to the metaphor can work.

09:29 am - Straight A's for Spring 2009

Well, this is (maybe surprisingly for some friends and family) the first time it has ever happened: I got straight A's across all my classes this term!  Getting good grades was not really an interest of mine in school, and if it ever happened it was because the teachers fudged my grades because they knew I was smart and they knew I probably already knew the material before they even taught it.  One of my early elementary school teachers told my mother that I'd start doing homework someday and that she shouldn't stress it too much.

Well, that never became true.  I really only did homework because I was about to fail a class completely.  I spent high school tuning out in class most of the time, doing fabulously on tests (most of the time), and then barely scraping by because I never did homework.  Even the accelerated classes were boring, but there was even MORE homework in those classes so I did even worse.  Once I got moved down to "normal" classes school got even easier and I got my C average.  Barely.  I had to take an extra term after graduation to get one class re-done.

Even my visit to college for a year and a half in 2003 didn't go much better, where my grades went south enough in the last two terms that I got disqualified from receiving financial aid.  Somewhere along the way, though, something changed and here I am with a term that, if I could take it by itself and ignore the 2003-2004 flailing about, would be about 3.77 (on a 0-4 scale).  Two terms on the PCC Dean's List and this term on the President's List.  I don't really know what has changed.  I don't really care much more about my grades now than I ever did the rest of my life, but I guess I take the fact that I'm wracking up thousands of dollars of debt a little more seriously this time around.  Maybe?  I don't know...

03:22 pm - Uh...I made a Firefox Extension... yeah

Some folks on a very popular awful forum "jokingly" asked someone to make a Firefox extension to put "side animals" into their posts for them so they didn't have to type out all the IMG tags.  Side animals are random images of animals that the forum puts next to the banner ads at the top of the page.

So that's what I did.  BYOB Side Animal Tool arrived on the scene a month ago.  It's a pretty simple thing to do so it seemed like a good opportunity to learn how FF extensions are made.  I've never really done Javascript, never made an extension, never really had to know the HTML DOM and how to use it... so there was a bit of learning to do.

( Read more, in which I ramble about the development process a bit... )

01:08 pm - FedEx Failure (again) - Electronics + Rain = Good Delivery

We've had perishable foods left in summer heat and direct sunlight by FedEx guys before, and this time I've been waiting patiently to hear the doorbell or knocking to announce that FedEx had delivered our Digital Converter Box.

I randomly checked tracking to find that it WAS delivered!  The kind FedEx driver left our parcel sitting out on the porch.  In the pouring rain.

03:48 pm - Jury Duty

Yep.  My time to shine has arrived!  I'll be jurying it up like a motherfucka!

11:57 am - This Is My Milwaukee Update Nov 24th

HTML comment added to the front page..

...
</body>
</html>
<!-- http://www.youtube.com/14251612181818198HD -->

The user profile at that URL is pretty borked up and provides no info but this video posted by that account continues the theme of the flax seed bulb and has a code at the end.

12:33 pm - This Is My Milwaukee - New ARG?

I'm a big fan of ARGs and feel they're an awesome and creative approach to marketing something.

Visit This is My Milwaukee and watch the video!  It could be just someone having fun and trying to get their production company noticed (ala-Lasagna Cat) but the addition of legitimate e-mail addresses and a phone number you can call (with live people on the other end) is very similar to previous ARGs.

No idea what the heck an ARG is?  Read up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game

Or, alternately, click these links to read about specific ARGs you may or may not have heard about...

The Beast - (for the movie A.I.) Sort of where it all began
Art of the Heist - (for the car Audi A3) Also see a presentation from the creator: http://www.mckinney.com/A3_H3ist/
I Love Bees - (for the videogame Halo 2) Considered an example of a hugely successful ARG

04:39 pm - Let's Play: Xenosaga II

I've tried going through Xenosaga II several times, but ultimately I can only handle so much of the combat before I finally quit. Not to mention the incredibly long boss fights.  A game with great presentation and a pretty interesting story bogged down by terrible fundamental game mechanics.

Fortunately, someone else already did it for me on an internet forum!  Thanks to Zutaten at the Somethingawful Forums.

( This is mostly for the wife, but this is something you'll probably want to look through if you're like me and wanted to see how it all turned out.... )