Splinter Cell: Sam Home Late

Sam Fisher has been out drinking too late with the boys. Now you have to help him get into the house without waking the wife.

Splinter Cell: Sam Home Late

Butt-plugs

Butt-plugs is the first thing I've seen in many years that made me laugh out loud when I was by myself. It's priceless.

Spy vs Spy

Method Studios has a couple of neat little commercials for Mountain Dew starring my favorite spies: white spy dude and black spy dude.

The Tale of The Painted Breast

The Tale of The Painted Breast is another funny tale of a would-be scammer who got his comeuppance.

Old Spiderman strips with new text

Old Spiderman strips with new text

These are a riot!

Hit refresh for another one.

Psychic?

The Mormon Name Generator

My Mormon name is Seven Friends Forsaken !
What's yours?

The Fast-Food Syndrome: The Linux Platform is Getting Fat

Great article over on OSNews.com called The Fast-Food Syndrome: The Linux Platform is Getting Fat.

I'll give the highlights here:

Consider these memory requirements for Fedora Core 2, as specified by Red Hat: Minimum for graphical: 192MB and Recommended for graphical: 256MB Does that sound any alarm bells with you? 192MB minimum? I've been running Linux for five years (and am a huge supporter), and have plenty of experience with Windows, Mac OS X and others. And those numbers are shocking -- severely so. No other general-purpose OS in existence has such high requirements. Linux is getting very fat.

I appreciate that there are other distros; however, this is symptomatic of what's happening to Linux in general. The other mainstream desktop distros are equally demanding (even if not as much as Fedora, for example Arch Linux or Slackware run Gnome on 128 MB, but not very comfortably when you load 2-3 apps at the same time), desktops and apps are bloating beyond control, and it's starting to put Linux in a troublesome situation. Allow me to elaborate.

Recently, a friend of mine expressed an interest in running Linux on his machine. Sick and tired of endless spyware and viruses, he wanted a way out -- so I gave him a copy of Mandrake 10.0 Official. A couple of days later, he got back to me with the sad news I was prepared for: it's just too slow. His box, an 600 MHz 128MB RAM system, ran Windows XP happily, but with Mandrake it was considerably slower. Not only did it take longer to boot up, it crawled when running several major apps (Mozilla, OpenOffice.org and Evolution on top of KDE) and suffered more desktop glitches and bugs.

Sigh. What could I do? I knew from my own experience that XP with Office and IE is snappier and lighter on memory than GNOME/KDE with OOo and Moz/Firefox, so I couldn't deny the problem. I couldn't tell him to switch to Fluxbox, Dillo and AbiWord, as those apps wouldn't provide him with what he needs. And I couldn't tell him to grudgingly install Slackware, Debian or Gentoo; they may run a bit faster, but they're not really suitable for newcomers.

Now, I'm not saying that modern desktop distros should work on a 286 with 1MB of RAM, or anything like that. I'm just being realistic -- they should still run decently on hardware that's a mere three years old, like my friend's machine. If he has to buy more RAM, upgrade his CPU or even buy a whole new PC just to run desktop Linux adequately, how are we any better than Microsoft?

To some people running 3 GHz 1G RAM boxes, this argument may not seem like an issue at present; however, things will change. A 200 MHz box used to be more than adequate for a spiffy Linux desktop, and now it's almost unusable (unless you're willing to dump most apps and spend hours tweaking and hacking). In those times, us Linux users were drooling over the prospect of multi-GHz chips, expecting lightning-fast app startup and super-smooth running. But no, instead, we're still waiting as the disk thrashes and windows stutter to redraw and boot times grow.

Gone are the days when we could advocate Linux as a fast and light OS that gives old machines a new boost. BeOS on an ancient box is still faster than Linux on the latest kit. And to me, this is very sad. We need REAL reasons to suggest Linux over Windows, and they're slowly being eroded -- bit by bit. Linux used to be massively more stable than Windows, but XP was a great improvement and meanwhile we have highly bug-ridden Mandrake and Fedora releases. XP also shortened boot time considerably, whereas with Linux it's just getting longer and longer and longer...

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

Yetisports 5

That's right, your favorite Yeti and his penguin pals are back in Yetisports 5: Flamingo Drive.

My best score thus far is 1384.

AGD Interactive

Let me tell you a little bit about AGD Interactive.

These guys are hot.

They've remade two of the greatest games from my childhood, King's Quest I and King's Quest II in (somewhat) more modern graphics. They're not the prettiest games, but the essence of the originals are still fully intact, let me assure you.

They're currently working on Quest for Glory, which will be a real treat since that's one of the few Sierra Quest games I never got to. I did play King's Quest I, II, III, IV, and V, Space Quest I, II, and III, and Police Quest I and II.

You can download the two they've finished, for FREE. Yeah.

Korean Popeyes commercial

The advertising in Korea is slightly different than here in the states.

Korean Popeyes commercial

Tokyoplastic 2

Tokyoplastic part 2 is out.

Put your sound on 10 and sit back and watch this amazing piece of flash madness.

(For those of you who have forgotten, Tokyoplastic part 1 was the famous Bongo Sound)

1 out of 6 ain't bad

The Life Line

I don't believe in this sort of stuff, at all, but it's still fun to read your horoscope to see just how vague it is today, or whatever. Same holds true for this online palm reader called The Life Line.

My reading was *way* off.

Steve Ballmer Selling Windows 1.0

The year was 1986. Microsoft was a small company trying to market their (stolen) operating system, called Windows.

The second in command after Bill Gates was Steve Ballmer. Some of you may remember him from such classic videos as developers or dance monkey boy.

Here, looking and acting much like a used car salesman, is Ballmer Selling Windows 1.0.

Kitty Balance

Every once in a while a game comes along that shows you we don't always need cutting edge graphics to make games fun, or addictive for that matter. Kitty Balance is one such game. Give it a try, you'll be happy you did.

I wonder how well this works...

I just wanted to test the email posting feature.  Not that I'll ever use it.

Fugeddaboudit

If I were to tell you I were disappointed in the season finale of the Sopranos, this wouldn't just be a normal understatement, but would in fact be a monstrous understatement of Biblical porportions. If for example, you were to say that the Grand Canyon was a small mediocre ravine. That sort of understatement.

Where to begin?

Ok, first the good points. Best line of the show? "All the things your uncle has done for you, must I give you examples?" I also thought it was interesting/ironic that his session with Melfi is what drove him to kill Tony Blundetto. Well, that and the painting of Tony/Napoleon.

Funny thing about the scene with Tony and Johnny Sack is that Tony didn't even give Johnny a heads up about the Feds. (Kinda like the old bear joke about not having to be faster than the bear to get away, just have to be faster than the guy next to you)

But that leads me to my first bad point, which is that had Tony waited a couple of days, he wouldn't have had to whack his cousin at all, because New York would have their hands full with the Feds. I know this isn't a failure of the episode, and it was in fact exactly what the writers wanted to accomplish, that despite all of Tony's attempts to make the correct choices as Boss things never quite work out like he wants them too.

Then again, Tony must have gained some serious props with his Jersey crew. Tony B had put the entire NJ family at risk, and almost everyone thought he deserved what he ended up getting.

This is a bit nitpicky, but.... I was a bit puzzled by the weather. Couple weeks ago, they're holding a party outside for Carm's Dad. It's nice out. In this episode, AJ holds a party outside - no snow on the ground, everyone is out in regular shirts, no jackets. Then all of a sudden, there's like 6 inches of snow on the ground, people are plowing, and Johnny Sack is getting sacked at 6:30 am with tons of snow on the ground.

But of course the most disturbing part of this season finale is that it didn't feel like one. The Sopranos has ended big with each season. In the first season, Tony almost got whacked by his own mother and uncle. In season two, Tony killed his best friend. I don't remember the end of season four, but last season ended in Carmella leaving Tony. And here we are at the end of season five, having been built up all season to a purported war between two rival families, and we get nothing. We were expecting ACTION, and instead we got a lot of slow moments.

It just ended so anticlimactically.

If I had a hammer ...

Remeber those old "Whack the mole" games you'd see at Chuckie Cheese's? Tontie is a webgame based on that, and it's very well done IMHO.

You use your numpad (the group of number keys on the far right of the keyboard) to play. Each number corresponds to the nine positions in which the little one-eyed aliens (moles) pop up.

If you see a little hut pop up—it kinda looks like Bag End—be sure to hit that because the game features an upgrade buying system. Upgrades are very expensive however, so buyer beware and all that.

By level four things start getting crazy because you'll start to see objects pop up with numbers on them, but here's the thing, the numbers don't correspond to the number they're sitting on. In other words, it you see the number "5" you have to convince your brain to hit the 5 on the keypad instead of the position it actually sits on. But then if you get a reward by hitting it in time, you have to hit the correct position to collect said reward.

It's quite a mental task, let me tell you.

Ambigrams

Look at the picture of "wordplay." Now turn your head sideways and look at it upside-down.

Crazy.

Calligraphic-style words that can be read forwards, backwards, upside-down, etc. The link above goes to one of the subpages, but more examples can be found by following the menu links at the top of the page.

Most of my ambigrams read the same when turned "upside down," or rotated 180 degrees. If you were to climb up on your desk, walk around behind your monitor and lean way over so you could see the screen, you'd be able to read "Wordplay" just as easily as you could sitting in your chair.

HumanClock.com

The internet is filled with various types of clocks. There are cable clocks, alignment clocks, woodblock clocks, and my personal favorite, the Industorious clock.

But my favorite clock of all is humanclock.com. This website consists of about 2500 pictures, each representing a single minute of the day in some shape or fashion.

There are three clocks. The analog clock is a true "human clock" if there is such a definition. These photos don't change as much since there is a lot more preparation involved in creating analog clock photos.

The digital clock is the most popular clock on this site. It has about 2,000 photographs covering about 1250 of the 1440 minutes in a day.

The text clock is a clock made out of staight ASCII text...so you can even view the clock on a text browser.

Black People Love Us!

Don't ask me.

This is the strangest website I've seen in a long time. The name says it all, www.blackpeopleloveus.com.

njam

This is easily the hardest webgame I've seen this year.

It's kinda like Simon combined with DDR. Sort of.

You have a sphere with four colors you have to rotate to catch the different colored balls that shoot out from the four corners of the screen.

It starts out easily enough, but by the fifth level it's just crazy.

njam

Kerry honored at communist museum

Senator John Kerry is honored at communist museum. His photograph hangs in section devoted to war protesters. Makes you think, doesn't it?

Visual Cognition Test

Do me a favor.

Unfortunately, I had read an article on this experiment before watching this video, and thus the experiment was tainted from the start. But you probably haven't, so if you have broadband, go to the following link, and count how many times the team in white passes the ball. Then watch the video a second time while not counting anything and let me know the results.

Visual Cognition Test

My Memorial Day Weekend

Well I hope you had a good Memorial Day weekend. I certainly did.

Saturday we took Antonio to the pool, which was great. He really enjoys playing in the water. He still hasn't quite figured out that he shouldn't drink the pool water however, so you have to keep an eye on him. Also made it by the CPS fair downtown where we took Antonio on a couple of the kiddie rides, which he also enjoyed (mostly).



On Sunday Valerie's mom gave us these car shades for the back windows in our SUV. They are designed to keep out the sun from baby's eyes, and they're made by a well known company called The First Years. The shades are excellent and work quite well, but while installing them I couldn't help but notice that their logo, while cleverly disgusied as representing the three stages of infancy, is in fact a picture of two babies jumping on a third baby.

Poor third baby!