Living in the 90's
Hmm.. according to this commentary, the infamous PHP web design language will phase out Perl in approximately two years. And after reading this, I wouldn't be too surprised if PHP did so. I used to think that PHP is pretty much the same thing as Perl. PHP can be embedded in HTML, though? That's freakin' sweet.

If PHP can do that sort of stuff, why the heck are IT majors here at RPI taught the ins and outs of Perl? Sure, if you know Perl, learning PHP is a snap, but one would assume that if I was able to say that I knew PHP to companies I get interviewed by instead of Perl, I'd be that much further away from getting a rejection letter in the mail. We're still living in the prior millenium. :p

But then again, this is just a commentary. It is someone's thoughts as opposed to be being the ultimate truth. Hell, perhaps ASP and/or XML will be the only used language(s) in a couple years? I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Netscape 6.01
Making sure I stay a few days behind the rest of the world as far as news coverage goes, it looks like this past Wednesday that AOL Time Warner made a feeble attempt to make Netscape 6 not suck. Ha. Good luck in trying to get me to use that, especially after I said a few words about the greatness of v 6.0.

IE is not as horrid, but it does a few things that still piss me off. I wonder if Mozilla will be any good once v 0.8 comes out.

So... slow...
I'm not too impressed with BlogVoices's super-slow message forum addition to Blogger. In fact, unless things start looking up at... oh, I don't know, now, I'm gonna give that "feature" the axe until things get a lot faster. A site with some text and only two pictures totalling up to be almost 16 KB of space should not take more than .5 seconds to load up, never mind ~20 seconds. Bah.

Speaking of slow, it'd be nice if I heard from Dell more than once a week. I'm getting tired of using this almost-as-slow-as-BlogVoices laptop when I could be pirating mp3's or something on a much more capable machine. So far, they've sent me an email asking if I tried everything on a list of 6-7 things, I said I have and then some, and all I want now is just a name of some guy in the area I can see and let him or her confirm my computer's ineptitude. Hmmph.

My portable mp3 / cd player is also giving me some amount of grief. For some reason, it is now starting to cut the last three seconds of almost every song on an audio cd. I don't think it did this before. Grrr...

Heh, I orignally thought I was going to write about being bored, but now I feel bitter. Great.

I need a hit counter
One that will block my IP so I can actually visit my site without incrementing the counter.
And it can't be a CGI script of some sort.
Know of any?

Vikings' Smith Retiring at Age of 28
That ain't fair, I want to retire in 6 years, too!

Looks like the Vikings don't have a running game anymore. Did they ever have a running game? Hmm.. they must have had something if this article claims Smith led the NFC in rushing this year. Oh well. I guess Culpepper will have to throw long bombs to the impossible-to-catch-up-to Moss and the I'm-getting-old-but-I-still-own-you Carter until they find a suitable running back replacement.

Open for business
Yay. Changes! I was getting bored of the old site layout. I got a new site name and everything.

Well, I think this site is good enough to release to the general public, so here you go! Not everything is functional right now (which you will be able to tell by the lack of links to some parts of the site... the only exception lies in the survey archive), but they should be some day. I wanted to have the guestbook up by now, but it looks like Geocities decided to change the way they're going to handle hosted guestbooks. I signed up with Geocities mainly for the web space and the fact that I could customize things like the guestbook any way I wanted to. Now, they have this gay little cookie-cutter form I can fill out so my guestbook can look like everyone else's. That's b.s.

Besides that being on an indefinite hiatus, I should have almost everything else up shortly... the survey archives would be the only exception. It's going to take a lot of time to convert that to this new layout.

For the things that aren't up yet, you can navigate my old site and find the section there.

This site can take a long time to load depending on when you visit (3 pm to 7 pm Eastern most noticeably), but please be patient. If it is really bad, please tell me so via email or in a message forum or something. I'm still using my 133 mhz laptop, so everything seems really slow. :p

And fill out the survey while you're here. A link is on the left somewhere.

Incident Blotter
You gotta love RPI's incident blotter. What people have in brains, many lack in common sense. There's almost a guaranteed amusing incident each week. And as long as that is the case (and as long as I remember about it), I'll try and feature that incident here each and every Wednesday.

This week's winner:

Crockett Hall: Larceny: Washing machine stolen from basement laundry room sometime between January 25 and February 1.

HOW THE HELL can someone steal a WASHING MACHINE in a dorm that holds 150+ students AND GET AWAY WITH IT?!?!? A WASHING MACHINE!!!! Crockett Hall is also surrounded by 8 other dorms holding at least 150 students as well, and the perimeter of the building is pretty well lit. And no one saw anyone leaving with a huge coin-operated ugly yellow washing machine? That's funny as hell. I wish I was there just to see the theft unfold.

There's plenty of other good incidents if you click on the link above.

It's coming... yes...
I am Hell's angel. The time of the purification has come.

Later today, cool things are going to happen... yes...

Shadowbane enters its first beta stage
Some time on yesterday, Shadowbane finally entered its first beta stage, which is essentially a 50-person alpha test.

w00t!

Spam of the day... or week... or whenever I find more amusing spam
I was checking out my hotmail account today to see if I got any email there that might be worth reading. No dice. However, I did get this one piece of spam for a product to help alleviate this really bad snoring problem I don't have. Jesus... shouldn't they send this stuff to people who it might apply to? Sheesh:

FOR A RESTFUL, SILENT NIGHT'S SLEEP FOREVER!

! Clinically Tested And Proven To Work Effectively or your Money Back
! Revolutionary Patented Process
! Safe, All-Natural, Vitamin & Oil-Based Spray
! Great-Tasting Peppermint Flavor
! Three Quick Sprays Last All Night to Help Eliminate Your Snoring Problem
! Satisfaction Guaranteed or your Money Back.

If you snore or live with someone who snores, stop suffering! More than 90 million Americans have a snoring problem and it can cause sleeplessness, headaches and a lack of energy. SnorEnz, the safe all natural formulation of vitamins and oils, silences the snore all night long so you can get a good nights' sleep! The amazing patented process is the safest, sensible solution for the best night's sleep you've ever had. Three quick sprays of the tasty peppermint flavored vitamin-based spray lasts all night so you wake feeling more refreshed than ever! By spraying the back of the throat and uvula with SnorEnz, the soft tissues are coated and lubricated throughout the long night hours. SnorEnz can help you feel better and be more productive.

I love hotmail... almost as much as I love a kick to the face.

<Insert lots of snow here>
Up here on the hills east of the Hudson River in upstate New York, a big snowstorm is supposedly going to drop about a foot of snow by midnight. There should be 12" to 18" on the ground by the time I go to class tomorrow. Classes were cancelled today after 3 pm. That's pretty awesome. Well, allof my classes were over by then, but the snowfall is awesome. This winter so far has been a joke in terms of coldness and snowfall, we need this Nor'easter for my own sanity.

Here's some random things I forgot to mention this weekend:

* Snatch was a pretty good movie. Lots of blood, Mafia-like events, and you don't know what's going to happen next. If you're like me, you'll probably need to see it more than once in order to figure out what the hell is going on. It reminded me of Fight Club in that sense.

* There was a good X-Files episode last night. And what was weird is that Mulder AND Scully didn't play a role in the episode. Actually, Scully wasn't even in the episode. The episode was about a case that Mulder conducted in the past, so there was still some backstory scenes with Mulder in them.

Uh huh.

Not much going on
My computer continues to give me stupid errors that won't go away, I've decided to say the hell with it and wait until the peeps at Dell give me new parts and/or tell me how to fix my problems and/or hook me up with a name and address to some licensed Dell guy to take a look at my nonfunctional POS.

In the mean time, I've been spending most of the day working on this site, trying to integrate each site section nicely. I've gotten a good amount of work done, but if you know what I had working yesterday and what's up today, you wouldn't think so. The attention has been on the details. :)

I think my plans for the rest of the day will be just continuing my progress on this joke of a site, with frequent intermissions to play Madden 2001 and letting people on ICQ pester me. Plus I have homework and some cleaning to do. Fun fun fun!

The XFL, will it sink or swim?
It's times like this that I wish I had some sort of discussion forum feature associated with every message that I post. Unfortunately, Blogger doesn't do that yet and I don't have CGI access so I could make my own messageboard. Damnit.

In between bouts of changing cdrom jumper settings and seeing if I can my computer to break, I watched most of the first half of the NY/NJ Hitmen vs Las Vegas Outlaws game. I have to say, it was pretty damn cool. It wasn't too different from your typical NFL game. The camera angles were different (some could use some work), and it was nice to see a bunch of drunken fans cheering for their team. Some of the cheerleaders were pretty damn hot and I like how fireworks go off each time a touchdown is scored.

The "no fair catch" rule didn't make an impact in what part of the game I watched (rumor has it that even though there are no fair catches, the punt returner has a 5-yard "halo of protection" until he catches the ball), but I liked that the only way to get a point after a touchdown is to run or pass it in from the 2-yard line (like a 2 point conversion in the NFL). Plus, I think the XFL will be similar to college football: the games will be high scoring since (arguably) XFL players are not as skilled as NFL players. After all, look at how much they are getting paid? :p But that's a good thing, actually; it's nice to see meagerly paid players play for the love of the game.

Personally, I think this league will do pretty well during its first season, and I'm looking forward to what "tomorrow's" games have to offer.

Yeah, it's Sunday. It's still Saturday to me.
My computer is still ain't doing any better. I took out my faulty CDROM drive and replaced it with the server's, and if you shake my old drive a bit, it faintly sounds like an Etch-A-Sketch. That can't be good. Dell is going to be hearing from me (I love warranties). Now my problem lies in trying to get the computer to read from the new CDROM drive. For a long time, the drive wasn't even given a letter. I somehow managed to get that straightened out, but now when I try to get a list of the contents of drive E (the letter assigned to my CDROM drive), I get a CDR101 error. Totally unprofessional. I've tried to remedy this several different ways, but to no avail. *cries*

I'm far from being a hardware guru, but I would say that I have mastered the art of removing a CDROM drive. I only had to do it about 300 times today, and I can do it in about a minute, assuming the case and everything is on the computer. Bring it.

I hope I make better progress "tomorrow."