Rock on! (as it were)

VC and I went to Cambaz tonight… It’s a new Turkish restaurant downtown. Who knew you could have fun in Hackettstown? Now I’m not talking about one of the fine sports-bars in the nearby metropoli of Independance or Great Meadows (home to Bobalou’s Famous Steaks & Sports Bar and Stumpy’s Sports Pub respectfully). I’m talking right in the heart of Hackettstown, practically within sight of the famous Hackettstown Trading Post lion statues!

The atmosphere was welcoming. The owner’s sister came out and chatted with us about the table decorations (last time, the owner himself forced us to try some specials for free… the 5-hr baked lamb was good). The food was great, with a definitely authentic provincal tang to it. And the belly dancer was really good!

And of course, sharing the experience made it so much better! Heck, I probably wouldn’t have gone out to dinner if it weren’t for VC. And of course, a final thank you to my mom for getting me a gift certificate for the place for christmas!

Hurray for good eats!

TJIC mentioned that he made $250 betting that George W would win the election so I checked out the site. I’ve become fond of betting on the weather. It’s this nice mix of science, probability, and reading human reactions to the weather. And I’ve won some money.

Thinking of human reactions, I’m reminded of a chart I saw a long time ago about perceived dangers vs. actual dangers. There were tens of items on the chart but I can give you an example of typical reactions:

On a scale from 1 to 10, rank how afraid you are on a daily basis, of being killed by

1. a traffic accident
2. an airplane crash
3. a nuclear power plant disaster

Most people put traffic accidents low on the list and put planes and nuclear disasters high on the list. But statistics show that you are FAR FAR FAR more likely to be killed in a traffic accident than the other two. It’s that incorrect response to stimuli that I’m playing on when I’m making my bets.

A while back I was looking at Tradesports for the first time and said to TJIC something like, “Why can’t people be dumb so I can steal their money?” Well, at the risk of huge humiliation and loss of all the money I’m betting, I’ll say that there are such people out there. And here I come.

———————–
1-26-05 update. Oh, who am I kidding. The weather market on tradesports is so small that I can’t ever make any real money at it. And the larger the market gets, the more that damn free market equalization thing will kick in.

Picasa 2.0 kicks butt. I found the original Picasa a few years ago and loved it. I’ve only been playing with the latest version for an hour or so but it looks like they’ve cleaned up all the shortcomings of the original software and then some. And the best part is, it’s FREE! Google bought the Picasa company and is giving it all away. It looks like their strategy is to get ahead by being a part of the picture making process and being a preferred (but not required) vendor for some photo related services. Darn it, they hope to get ahead by being the best. And I think it might just work.

Get Picasa.

PS. I want to know who wrote the readme.htm. It is wonderfuly written. Uplifting, conversational, tremendously informative, witty without being smarmy, well laid out… The damn thing is a model of what a readme should be.

I include the readme after the cut.

Continue reading ‘Picasa 2: goodness’ »

Halflife 2 is an AMAZING game.

First, the realism is just… unreal. I could gush about that for a long time. The physics are so realistic and the texturemaps and polygons and… [gush gush]

The gameplay is terrific too. I’m occationally a little miffed that the game designers push me “down the tube” in a linear fashion, but I forgive them for the plots they put me into. I’m put in the place of a reluctant hero, struggling to survive and occationally kicking some bad-guy butt.

I’ve tried a few times to write a story about my adventures… but they just don’t hold a candle to the experience of actually being there. Yow, I just said that I was “actually” in a place that doesn’t exist. Metaverse, here we come!

Here it is. You can find new blog entries on my new blog.

I installed Bittorrent on my spenix.com account. I may be volunteering a little technical help in distributing this year’s Burning Man Screen Saver for The Burning Man Screen Saver Project.

I’m a bit excited since I submitted about 15 photos of my own to this year’s project. The Vault of Heaven screen saver is due out in April or so.

On a side note, if you have any large files you need distributed, I’m now your go-to guy!

4-10-05 update. The Screen Saver doesn’t need Bittorrent. Oh well.

This is why: http://livejournal.com/

Temporarily Unavailable

LiveJournal is currently down due to a massive power failure at our data center. We’ll provide updates at /powerloss/ as they’re available.

Continue reading ‘Why I run my own blog: Livejournal outage’ »

It looks useful. From w-a-s-a-b-i.com

I’m proud to present my first WordPress plugin, Words in Post. All it does is count up the number of the words in a post and spit them out. By sticking this code in the index.php template of WordPress, I can create a title line that looks like this:

Geekery � 49 words � lee @ 2:50 am

This is better than using the following simple grab that I had heard about here.

<?php echo(str_word_count(get_the_content())); ?> words

The preceding doesn’t grab anything past the <!--more--> and counts tags incorrectly.

Thanks to Nick Momrik for the inspiration.

1-15-05 update: Version 1.1. Thanks to Alderete’s suggestion, the function returns a number instead of echoing. See the php for instructions.

Download Words in Post plugin version 1.1 here. Rename it from .phps to .php and run with it.