Gates wrongfully debunked
Remember when I said something about Bill Gates being #2 rich guy of the world? Well, according to one of those random links I found over at ShackNews, good ol' Billy Boy is still #1. It makes you wonder where some stories get their data, huh?

How could a gem like this go unnoticed?
I bet if it happened to Chelsea, those Conservatives would have made sure the world knew. :p After all, Clinton is the devil, and what he did while in office with those interns is the worst, worst, worst thing that has ever been done in the White House. Except the only difference between those Republican senators and Clinton is that Clinton got caught. :p

But I digress. Bush's underaged daughter has been caught with alcohol. Then again, isn't this normal for any college student?

There's snow in my backyard
What the hell is this? I take off from RPI and head home only to find lots of snow in my backyard? What a scam. I have a huge backyard (plus we own all of the land across the street, heh), and there's this big glacial chunk near the driveway. I'd say it's about... hmmm... about 25 feet by 40 feet, a couple inches tall. That's so not cool. It's almost May, for crying out loud.

My house is white with green shutters. Right now, there are no shutters on it. It weirded me out. Rumor has it that the house is finally getting repainted. Now I wonder what the plans are for remaking the back porch, which was totally wrecked when a tree branch fell onto it two summers ago.

And, go Penguins:
Former Penguins player Stu Barnes scored for the Sabres, who lost 3-0 in Thursday's Game 1. The Sabres are 0-15 when losing the first two games of a playoff series.

Site Patch 2 of 2
Almost two weeks ago, I said something about adding content to this page. I have been adding content for the last two weeks. I just never bothered to say anything about it. But if you haven't bothered to look, go ahead and search for the new stuff. It's oodles of fun.

And every NHL team I'm expecting to not advance to the third round won the first game in each of their respective series. Well, the Blues haven't won their game yet, but it's looking pretty promising. Is this a sign to things to come? Could the Penguins face the Maple Leafs in the conference finals? The chances seem pretty slim, but it would be pretty awesome.

In case you care (all 0% of you), I'm going home tomorrow afternoon. I'll probably be back at RPI by Monday afternoon. But don't fret! I'll probably still update the site, though, since I will most likely need to use the 'net and my mother's computer to write my parts of a final project paper.

My daily horoscope
I use Excite as my startup / home page, and I have my front page customized with all of the news I might care about, sports scores, weather information, etc, and I also have my horoscope displayed at the end of the page. I don't know why I have the horoscope there; I never bother reading it. But I did today 'cause I was bored, and this is what I get to look forward to today:

The Sun is in Taurus and the Moon is going from Gemini into Cancer. You've been hustling for the past few days.
Uh... no I haven't. The only tedious work I've done recently was that status check b.s. on Wednesday. In fact, I'm looking for stuff to do. I want to be hustling. It might make me feel important, heh. :p

You might even meet your deadline early.
Really? God damn. Since the word "might" is synonymous with "have a chance," this sentence is meaningless. Of course there's a chance I might meet a deadline early. There's also a chance I won't. Go figure. There's also a chance that I won't be able to find any of my pants tomorrow, and a chance I might find $20 in the parking lot.

That would be great, because you need a break. You need some luxury and a few sensual pleasures. Set it up.
My whole senior year of college has been one giant break. I am so unstressed right now. And stress doesn't effect me. I remember way back in my cognitive psychology class when the professor asked me for my definition of stress. I couldn't answer the question and enlighten all of my fellow classmates. Then I thought about it for a while, and it seems like "stress" happened to be one of the latest buzz words going around. If you had it, you were cool or something. Heh. Whatever. If I happened to be "stressed," I don't even notice. I just ante up and keeping going about my business. I'm really good with managing my time that stress shouldn't be an issue.

Speaking of stress, have you noticed that no one gets "stressed out" anymore? I wonder what the latest buzz word is.

Back to the original topic, horoscope writers must be the masters of ambiguity. It takes skill to seperate the world's six billion people and put them into twelve different groups and have a vague "fortune" as to how their day is gonna be.

Can you tell that I believe in this stuff? For the sarcasm impaired: Oh, wait a sec. I don't.

What the hell is this?
I hope this doesn't catch on like that AYBABTU façade.

Got a Dell?
If so, this set of links may interest you:

* Support.dell.com - They have this feature called a "system configuration card." Ever wanted to know what POS motherboard they installed in your system? Now you can find out. In my case, I seem to have an Intel SE440BX-3 board. Looking at the Intel site, it also seems that they don't make this board anymore. Heh.
* Dell Dimension Processor Upgrade FAQ - Learn what will work in your system, how to get 1 Ghz CPU in it (Dell claims you can't go over 850 Mhz), and general computer stuff.
* How to use your Dell case with a real motherboard - Dell cases are pretty money, but the small motherboards Dell likes to use can be a pain in the ass when it comes time to upgrade your board to... uh... an Abit KT7A-RAID board, for instance. Heh.

Misc stuff and links
No more classes for me. Ever. Unless you want to count that joke of a class I have to take for part of the summer. But since I don't actually have to show up to class (everything is done via email), it isn't really a class. :) I was originally thinking about going home today, but then I got lazy. And it turned out I had to have some sort of status check and have an "exit interview." Let me tell you, that was really exciting. :p Maybe I'll go home this weekend, shortly after my CANOS review session on Friday. Or maybe I'll wait until Saturday. I don't know. It depends on when I need to have my psych capstone paper done by and if there's any good parties going on this weekend.

I have some more random links:
* Life is tough in the .com world. In fact, some dead companies need to sell their logo to pay worker salaries. (Thanks Metafilter)
* Who wouldn't love to have the airplane seat next to you occupied by a dead guy? Yeeeaaah! (From Jon)
* Does this mean that computer viruses can't spread as easily? If it does, then it's kinda neat. But I think virus scanning software can already do this to some degree... (Swiped from CNN)

Just now some 13 year old girl added me to her ICQ list. wtf? *shrug* Whatever. At least she hasn't talked to me yet. The last 13 year old that added me to their list wanted me to make his website for him. Yeah. Right. I don't do that shit for strangers. Not for free, anyways. Heh.

In the news
Apparently, I'm in the news. But not in a good way. Jonny slanderously ravaged my name in a pair of stories (story 1 and story 2). Luckily, both of these stories were scripted, so I'm not really at large for anything. Yet. They don't know the real truth! :)

Go ahead and check the stories out. Then go ahead and "arrest" a friend.

"Why won't you talk to me?"
In case you didn't know, if you notice that I'm on AIM and I'm either "away" or have been "idle" for a while, don't try starting a conversation with me. You're 99% more likely to have a better conversation with a wall at that point. Why? Because I'm not at my computer! Hence being "away" or "idle."

Silly AOL-ers.

NHL first round playoffs are over
And it looks like I'm 5 for 8 when it came to predicting which teams would advance to the second round. I never made those predictions public, but let's just say no one expected the Kings or the Maple Leafs to advance, and I bought into the lie that the Sharks would beat the Blues.

And my guesses for the next round?

We got some neat pairings in the East:
* New Jersey Devils (#1) vs Toronto Maple Leafs (#7) - I'm not sure how the Leafs beat the Senators in four straight games. I'd love to see them beat the Devils just as easily, but I don't think it's going to happen. The Devils are the defending Cup champs.
* Buffalo Sabres (#5) vs Pittsburgh Penguins (#6) - as much as I love my Pens, I don't think they're gonna make it past the Sabres. The Sabres don't suck. The Penguins' goalie is on fire, but I think his lack of experience is gonna bite them in the ass eventually.

And in the West?
* Colorado Avalanche (#1) vs Los Angeles Kings (#7) - The Avs are too powerful for the Kings. They have too many weapons. They will meet the Stars in the conference finals. Only then will they have a run for their money.
* Dallas Stars (#3) vs St. Louis Blues (#4) - This is gonna be a good series. It'll probably last for six or seven games. I see the Stars winning the series because, well, it's the Stars! They always make it to the Final Four.

Living the ghetto life
Too poor (or too good) for one of those fancy scooters that seem to be all the rage as of late? Are you "2 X-TREME" for the standard-issue stunt machine? Fear no more, the Ghetto Scooter is here! The last pair of demo videos are worth checking out.

This link brought to you courtesy of Brian.

Ebayers suck
I was hoping to score a GeForce2 GTS card on Ebay tonight (I could use a replacement for my "it's getting old" video card), but I got screwed on two occasions. I was watching these two auctions very carefully. Bids for the first one were at $100 and it remained that way with about five minutes left in the auction. I waited until there were three minutes left. The auction went up to $110. Then I waited until there were two minutes left. No change. So, I made a bit for the card with a max bid of about $120 +/- $5 to cover any other people thinking of bidding with like one minute left. Heh. I was now the high bidder. Two minutes left. 1 minute left. 30 seconds left. The highest bid went up a bit, but I still held the maximum bid. w00t! 20 seconds left. 10 seconds. I refresh the screen when there were about five seconds left. The auction was over! But my bid was beaten by some ass monkey. Son of a bitch.

The second auction was for the same type of card, but the auction just ended ten minutes later than the other one. I did the same thing on this auction as well. I waited until there was about 90 seconds left on the auction, and placed a bid. Yay! I was the highest bidder. And I remained the highest bidder for the next 85 seconds. That's right, I was beat with 5 seconds left on the clock. Ass monkey #2 outbid me as well. God damnit.

Oh well. There will probably be some price cuts on Nvidia video cards taking effect shortly. I can probably get a new card at the price I could have gotten a used one on an online auction.

Heh, and now that the new P4 is out and Intel price cuts on the horizon, I might consider getting a better CPU as well. Time to check out Pricewatch.

P4 1.7 Ghz is out
Quick! Everyone needs one of these! Well, that's assuming you're going to be doing streaming video and audio type of stuff. Otherwise, stick to what you currently have or get an Athlon.

From a ZDNN article on the new P4:

The 1.7GHz Pentium 4 will sell for $352 when it debuts, with PCs incorporating the chip selling for just less than $1,800, monitor included. Price cuts on 1.3GHz, 1.4GHz and 1.5GHz Pentium 4 chips slated for the following week will drop the base price of computers using the chip to the $1,000 mark. A little more than a year ago, 1GHz chips alone cost $1,299.
[...]
AMD, which increased market share by four percentage points last quarter, will also likely feel a price pinch. CEO Jerry Sanders has said that the company will match Intel pricing for chips rated at the same speed. The 1.3GHz Athlon sells for $318, which means AMD will have to chop the price 39 percent to keep pace with Intel.

The price issue will also likely not abate. Although AMD has been able to equal and even best Intel when it comes to chip design, Intel far outstrips AMD when it comes to factory capacity.

AMD doesn't really have to play the megahertz game with Intel. With the exception of this streaming audio / video junk Intel is gloating about, that 1.3 Ghz Athlon is just as good as the P4 1.7 Ghz. Price cuts aren't even necessary. Of course, your everyday consumer is gonna see that 1.7 is bigger than 1.3, hence, it must be better. Hell, I've said that in the past in regards to the P4 1.5 Ghz. And if my words aren't enough to convince you, check out the benchmarking between the latest Athlon with this new P4 at AnandTech. There also seems to be a lot of other reviews linked here. I haven't had a chance to check them out yet, but I'm sure they tell a similar story to mine.

Only three days of classes this week
Thursday and Friday are study days, and next week is finals week. And then another week goes by and it's commencement.
I guess I will be going home a lot, dropping some shit off each time I go.
I only have one final, too; I think it's on the Thursday of finals week. I got some final paper due at some point, too, but I don't remember when. Heh.

It's friggin' cold in my apartment. And I don't know why someone put the air conditioner on.

And the Brisk iced tea I'm drinking has a "sell by" date of January 1, 2001.
I guess it's not a big seller in the vending machine on the second floor.
It doesn't taste bad, though.
Hell, maybe I'll get some more later.
Yum!

Troy, NY is burning down
A fire broke out in a local junkyard called Jake's. There's been a lot of smoke in the air for the last three or four hours. The fire still isn't under control, and the junkyard is full of gas and oil drums. When one of those things ignites, all of the windows in the neighborhood shake. Or so I've heard. Or maybe I'm a liar. Heh. But I'm sure it must be quite a spectacle.

I'm pretty confident that RPI and the roads I'm used to travelling aren't going to be engulfed in flames. I guess that's a good thing. There's plenty of bodies of water nearby and I don't think even fire can get make it through Troy's huge trenches they call "pot holes."

First person on Mars by 2020, says Russia
T'is another story I stole from ShackNews. Hey, it's been a slow news week. :p

Russia has overcome all main obstacles to manned interplanetary flight and should be ready to send humans to Mars “in the second decade of this century”, the head of a once-secret space science institute has claimed.
[...]
“Our engineers believe we can do this by 2020 and, from a medical point of view, there are no big hurdles left to hinder such a mission,” Professor Grigoriev said.

Russia has overcome all major obstacles, eh? Sure, they've had guys stuck on Mir for about a year, but doesn't it take nine months just to get to Mars? That's only when Mars and Earth are really close together, too. I wonder how often that happens. Serious shit can happen if you're stuck with the same people and zero gravity and the fact that you have to recycle all of your bodily fluids for ~3 years. Ick.

Check out the Times story here.

The computer to pass the Turing Test?
Not sure what the Turing test is? Search for it on Google or get a very high-level view of it somewhere in this article about the "talking" computer.

This is kinda neat. The people behind a company called "AI" have made a computer learn how to communicate through text messages and some basic learning functions.

The company behind this work, Dutch-based firm Artificial Intelligence (AI), caused a stir in technology circles recently by claiming to have developed a computer that had learnt language to the level of a 15 month-old child. At a research facility in Tel-Aviv, Israel, Artificial Intelligence (AI) demonstrated its computerised toddler -- named HAL -- for the first time and revealed that it is betting million pounds on the scheme. [...] In contrast to these previous attempts, HAL is designed to learn language for itself. Simple learning algorithms allow HAL to mimic different patterns of text characters. The real innovation occurring at AI, however, is that a child psychologist interacts with HAL, correcting mistakes and nurturing correct use of words and sentences.

Question, though: how do you "reward" or "punish" something that has no emotions?