William Reardon’s Blog

Hail me as your king and bring me the finest meats & cheeses in the land. Tonight, after a 10 year break, I once again took Blanka all the way to the top.

Playing Street Fighter on Xbox isn’t too different from playing in the arcade during the 90s and it’s funny how some things came back and others don’t. Against Zangief, I remembered all I had to do was jump up & down, but for the life of me, I had the hardest time beating Ken and his freaking dragon punch.

But it’s over now. Blanka finds his mother again. He learns he was lost in a plane crash over Brazilian rainforst. That his real name is Jimmy.

In other news, a patch was released that hopefully will solve some networking problems related to playing online. Now I’ll be able to beat up Rick & Jimmy (my brother, not Blanka) more often.

Ugh.

I went to Fry’s yesterday & picked up an extra gig of RAM for my desktop, plus a larger external drive for storage. Prior to yesterday, I only had a half-gig, making it hard to run XP, play World of Warcraft, and have Firefox open, all at the same time. It wasn’t a bad deal — about $90 for the gig & about $90 for 300 gig of storage. I also had a new DVD-RW drive that I bought some time ago but never installed.

So I set about installing everything yesterday afternoon. I decided to use the existing 2nd hard drive as a backup of files. I had to jump through some hops, but basically spent the day:

• Installing new one-gig DIMM (by itself first)
  
• Removing Grub, the Linux boat loader, so I could replace the existing 2nd hard drive
  
• Discounted old DVD drive
  
• Inserted new (now third) hard drive
  
• Copied everything on old 2nd drive to the new drive
  
• Deleted stuff I didn’t need backed up off 2nd drive
  
• Copied stuff I wanted backed up on primary drive to 2nd drive
  
• Moved stuff not needed on primary drive to new 3rd drive (to free up space on primary)
  
• Disconnect, label & store away old 2nd drive
  
• Move third drive into old spot of 2nd drive
  
• Insert new DVD-RW drive
  
• Install old half-gif DIMM to see if it works with one-gig
  

I left out a few optional steps I pursued, such as misconfiguring the jumpers, attaching the wrong cables to the wrong drive, finding my XP cd, figuring out how to get in emergency mode. I rebooted between each step, as I learned long ago, troubleshooting is a lot easier if you minimize the number of things that have changed from a working instance to a broken one.

The long part was the copying around of files, but that wasn’t so bad as I started the longest jobs & then went over to Khayman & Laurel’s for dinner. I got back around midnight, and thought I’d be able to finish up in a half hour. The problem with troubleshooting, however, is your sense of time goes out the window. When I was finally done tweaking & troubleshooting, I was happy it all worked. For about 2 seconds. It took about 2 seconds to confirm the machine registered all 1.5 gig of ram & could see all the drives, before my eyes drifted down & to the clock.

4:30 am.

Ouch.

Okay, so Pluto is no longer a planet. The reason why is

The scientists agreed that to be called a planet, a celestial body must be in orbit around a star while not itself being a star.

It also must be large enough in mass for its own gravity to pull it into a nearly spherical shape and have cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.

Pluto was disqualified because its oblong orbit overlaps with Neptune’s.

Okay, so Pluto is not a planet because it hasn’t cleared its orbit of Neptune. I get that.

What I don’t get is, if that’s the criteria, and Neptune hasn’t cleared Pluto of its orbit, why is Neptune still a planet?

Something else I wonder: If I had never lived with Neb & Misa, would I have liked this video as much? (Hat tip to Jeremy.)

The other day at work, Chris & I decided to conduct our own Diet Coke + Mentos experiment in the Yahoo! courtyard:

Granted, it wasn’t the bellagio fountains, but it was fun never the less.

Some have asked why we’re doing that fruity dance in the last picture. No, it wasn’t part of the theatrics. (Although I do find the thought of a choreographed dance of software engineer & diet coke fountains amusing.)

Rather, dropping mentos in diet coke is a bit like a game of chicken.

There’s a direct correlation between the number of mentos dropped in & the height of the geyser. You want the geyser to go as high as possible, hence wanting to get as many mentos in as possible.

But as soon as that first one drops, the Diet Coke starts to fizz like something you’ve never seen before, showing its wrath & anger. You have, maybe, a half second to keep cramming in more before the fountain is in full effect. Not wanting to be on the receiving end of the angry soda (and hence wearing it contents), you instinctively jump back & start back pedaling as quick as possible once the eruption starts.

The splash radius is actually surprisingly small, so if there’s a next time, maybe we’ll look better in the pictures. Or have a full dance number ready. Either way.

No review of Snakes on a Plane is needed. You already know if you like this movie.

If you still want one, theis one sums it up:

Overall Grade: A+
Story: F
Acting: D
Direction: D
Visuals: C

It’s m*therf*ckin’ awesome.

From b3co.com!

They’re actually missing Vienna’s.

The source of my super powers have been revealed:

Hot Dogs May Cause Genetic Mutations

In a pinch, I can actually use a corndog, but those are harder to find in Los Angeles. (And Vegas. Seriously, corn dogs are the one thing you can’t get in Sin City. Not from anywhere. Try it next time. You’ll see.)

Why does all blog software suck? I don’t mean the server-side, like MT & WP, but rather the client side, the part in which one authors posts.

I’ve tried a few clients — iBlog, MarsEdit, etc. — but they all suck & only had a subset of usable features.

My wants seem pretty straight forward:

• WYSISWYG
  
• Reasonable keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-B to toggle bold, etc.)
  
• Spell checking
  
• Embed graphics & handle them intelligently (e.g., allow me to point the original source or copy them locally to someplace logical like /blog/img.
  
• Save drafts
  
• Integrated publishing to my blogging platform (e.g., MT, WP)

None of this seems too demanding, especially by modern standards. For fuck’s sake, Microsoft Word has a theme functionality and a dancing paper clip. Is there something I’m missing or is there just no market for it?

Go tell the Spartans, travelers passing by, that here, obedient to their laws we lie.

The Roman empire falls. The Greeks thwart and, later, defeat the Persian empire. History tells us how things end, but in a good story the adventure is in the journey, not the ending.

Such is the case in both Gates of Fire, a tale of the battle of Thermopalye, and Eagle in the Snow, the story of a fictional general, Maximus, on the outskirts of the Roman Empire during its last days. Maximus is left a single legion to defend against an ever growing assorted hoard of barbarians — Gauls, Vandals and others. They wish to cross the Rhine and spread into the lands on the other side of the river. However, lacking the sophisticated engineering talents of the Romans, they are unable to build the needed bridges to do so & instead must wait until the dead of winter — when food is the thinnest & survival the most difficult — for the river to freeze & cross. Of course, on the other side stands Maximus and his troops, who are set on preventing the crossing at any cost.

A lot of the tension is built up around the freezing of the Rhine, along with the hardships on both sides, and, of course, the ultimate battle. The story can slow down in a few spots, but overall it’s a good read.

Upon being told that when the Persians loosed their arrows the sky went black, the Spartiate Dienekes rejoined “Then we shall fight in the shade.”

Any story of the Battle of Thermopalye is going to have to to have some fictionalized. At least any story told from a Greek vantage, as they where all killed, down to the last man. They went knowing they would die. Each of the 300 Spartans selected had to have a son to carry on the family line, so certain were their deaths. After all, it was 300 Greeks going to fight a Persian army of 2 million. That they died is not surprising. What is surprising is they held the Persians for seven days, and while all 300 died, they took 20,000 of the enemy with them.

That, in of itself, is a great story. Any story of Themorpalye is going to be a bit like panning for gold in a jewelry store. Still, Pressfield does a stupendous job. I could say this book is great, but it would be more fair to say that when asked what my favorite books are, this is one that immediately springs forth. Apparently I’m not alone as 516 people rate it a 4.5 on Amazon. Both Rick & Brandon told me this was a great book & that I should read it right away. I can’t do anything more than pass on that same recommendation.

Anyway, time to take a break from Greek & Roman warfare, as I’ve recently picked up Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book, Bait and Switch. Having previously written Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, where she explored life as a blue-collar worker, her new one is about life as a white collar worker.

Like most rich people, it turns out that Al Gore does not live a very green lifestyle. Which boils down to one of chief complaints with a lot of Democratic politicians: The do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do hypocrisy.

True, a lot of Republican politicians indulge in environmentally unfriendly lives as well, but then again, in most cases they don’t profess to, let along make a movie exalting such activities & promoting themselves as such. As Malcom X said, “I have more respect for a man who lets me know where stands — even if he’s wrong — than one who comes up smelling like an angel and is nothing but a devil.”