I’ve pretty much given up on this blog; the design, the content, everything. That’s not to say that I’m not going to replace this one. I’m in the process of working something out so that I have a bit more control over the layout of my blog, among other nice little features.

It shouldn’t be long before I have a new version of DIAF up somewhere, I’ll make the news available here when it happens.

I’ve really got to stop with this whole updating-once-a-week thing. I keep finding all of this stuff I’d like to mention, but when it comes right down to it, I’m ridiculously lazy. For those of you who didn’t know this, take note: I’m ridiculously lazy.

Over the past week or so, I’ve had a bit of a “computer renaissance”, if you will. I’ve been finding a lot of software and other computer-related goodies that I can’t believe I ever lived without. I’ll mention a few of them:

1. Pidgin

Formerly called ‘Gaim’, Pidgin is an open-source IM client compatible with tons of IM protocols (AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk, ICQ, just to name a few.) All together, I think Pidgin supports something like 13 different protocols, and more are planned to be included in future releases. I mainly use Pidgin as a replacement for AIM, which has really turned into a piece of garbage since they released Triton. I was using AIM 6.0 before I switched, and although it was ‘usable’, it was terribly buggy and it wasn’t uncommon for me to have some really annoying problems with it. I assure you, Pidgin is a much better choice. Pidgin supports plugins and also includes most of the features available to you in AIM. Rather than praising it, I’ll just point out a few complaints I have with it. First, there’s no away message window, ala AIM. If you receive an IM while you’re away, you can choose to either have it pop-up normally, or it will show up in your taskbar. Not a big deal, but I always thought the away message window was convenient. The only other thing is that you can’t send folders to other users, only single files. This isn’t too big a problem, seeing as you can simply zip a folder and send it, but I’d still like to have the option. Despite these very minor issues, if you’re not happy with AIM, or you’d like a client that can handle all of your different IM services, Pidgin is definitely the way to go.

2. del.icio.us

What was I thinking. Seriously. I can’t believe I never used del.icio.us before this. I was in class the other day in a computer lab on campus and I realized the need to access my bookmarks from another computer. del.icio.us is the solution. I thought it would be some crummy web-app that would be terribly inconvenient to use, but I was completely incorrect. If you’re using Firefox (which you have almost no excuse not to be), there’s a great extension del.icio.us supports that completely integrates the service into your browser. You can import your bookmarks directly into del.icio.us (which are automatically tagged, although not necessarily well), and a del.icio.us menu completely replaces your bookmarks menu in your browser, although this is optional and you can still have both simultaneously. Now whenever I need to access my bookmarks from another computer, I can just head straight to my del.icio.us page and see all of them. The extension that I mentioned earlier even makes it beyond easy to tag a new page with the ‘Tag’ button that is conveniently placed into your Navigation Toolbar.

Quick plug for iGoogle and Sage (the green leafy looking icon). Both are excellent services that I use regularly.

3. Joost

Until just recently Joost was an invite-only application, but they’ve now opened it to the public. Joost is an app for sharing television shows and other forms of video over the web, and surprisingly, the material streams very fluidly and comes in great quality. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not HD, but I was pretty impressed it. At this point it’s still a beta release so a lot of the material offered isn’t great. I couldn’t really find much of anything I wanted to watch on my first quick browse, with the exception of the pilot episode of The Big Bang Theory. However, Joost is slated for an end-of-the-year release and should offer some better material by then. At this point, it’s not a bad idea to go check it out. Hey, it might offer some shows that you’re interested in that I’m not. After screwing around with Joost just a bit, it’s safe to say that I’m pretty excited for the end of the year to roll around.

I feel like I have a lot more to mention, but I’ll save it for another post; perhaps tonight even.

I also have two side notes. Halo 3 kicks ass, and Blog Action Day is quickly approaching. In standard ‘me’ fashion, I have yet to choose a topic. Worry not.

So Halo 3 was released tonight, and a few of my friends and I went to Wal-Mart to pick it up. Unfortunately, the nearest Super Wal-Mart (the only one open 24/7) was about 30-40 minutes away from campus. We made the car ride interesting, to say the least, and also left the store with a nice promo ad that Wal-Mart apparently didn’t need anymore. I haven’t played it yet myself, but I’ve watched my friend play a bit, and it looks ridiculous. Everything about the game is absolutely amazing. He screwed around a bit with the multiplayer replays and then moved onto some Campaign, and I can honestly say that I wasn’t disappointed at all with any aspect of the game, so far at least. Everything was brilliant. I can’t wait until I get a chance to play it for myself (the copy of the game we picked up isn’t actually mine, it’s my roommate’s.)  One of my other roommate’s ordered the Elite edition of the game and apparently didn’t receive the video diagnostic disc that should’ve been included with it, but said that the helmet that came with it is almost big enough to fit on his head. Maybe a smaller friend of mine can squeeze into it.

Speaking of Halo helmets, I came across this very well-made Master Chief costume. I can’t even imagine the work that went into that, but how absurdly nerdy is the payoff? I hope that guy doesn’t wear that thing around his house or anything weird like that.

I decided to show up to my calculus class for the first time in about a week today, and my professor really wasn’t too happy with the fact that I’ve been absent lately. He says both my roommate and I have missed 7 out of 12 of the classes so far this semester, which leads the class. At least I know that if I’m not getting good grades, I’m still winning at something, right?

Another little interesting tidbit I came across is that you can prepare your own double cheeseburgers for less than the $1 double cheeseburger from McDonald’s. I’m definitely an advocate of the McDonald’s double cheeseburger, seeing as you can basically have an entire meal while only paying with the change in your car’s coin-whatever-it-may-be. Just think: two double cheeseburgers and a cup of water for only $2.16. How can you possibly beat that? Well apparently this guy has figured it out, and wrote up a great article about how you can make your own double cheeseburgers for less than $1 each. I suppose that at the very least, you can eliminate some of the guilt that comes with eating a double cheeseburger from McDonald’s; I know I feel bad every time I have one.

I still have some pretty interesting college stories to jot down at some point, but I’m going to cut myself off where I am right now. As a last little note, I’ve started using Windows Live Writer to manage my blog. Really the only thing I like about it so far is that I can write posts while offline (or laying in my bed in this case) and then upload them at a later date. We’ll see how it goes.

A search engine referred someone here after they searched “how to make someone die in a fire”. Odd, but I’ll take what I can get.

Looks like YouTube had a change of heart and decided to change their comment system back to chronological ordering rather than using a thumbs up/down rating system. You can still sort comments based on rating, which is actually decent, so it looks like they’re not abandoning the idea entirely.

In a recent post in their blog, they say that they’re going to allow video creators to enable the ratings system instead of the chronological ordering, but they haven’t put that into place yet. Oh well. It’s probably going to be worthless anyway. How great is it going to be when I look at one video and the comments are chronologically ordered, and then I look at another and the comments are sorted by rating. Probably pretty awful, that’s how great. Of course, I’m sure there are some relatively simple ways to solve this problem that they seem to be having, but seeing as they overlooked how terrible their ‘great’ idea was going to be last time, I’m not really expecting them to get it right anytime soon. Perhaps I should just be optimistic.

On a side note, Rush, the greatest band of all-time, celebrated two birthdays over the weekend. Saturday was the 20th anniversary of the release of Hold Your Fire, arguably the best record released during their ’synthesizer era’, and Sunday marked the 25th anniversary of the release of Signals, the album that basically kicked off the synthesizer era. Both are excellent albums, I highly suggest you give them a listen. You probably won’t like them though.

After about a week of being at college, I’m finally almost entirely settled in. However, I haven’t really had much time recently to post anything at all. I don’t see why I won’t have a lot of time now to write some (hopefully) interesting stuff, and there’s a lot going on here at the moment to give me some ideas as to what to write about.

As far as college goes, my only thought right now is that people are complete idiots. Not everyone. Just… most. I had a horrible time getting all of my shit together for classes, and still haven’t really hammered everything out (my mail is still being forwarded to my house, wtf.) Maybe I only have the topic of idiocy on my mind because it’s Thursday, and if you’re a college student, at least where I go to school, you’re getting trashed tonight. Now I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with that, but do you seriously have to sit outside of my window at 2:15 AM screaming with your girlfriends about what a slut you are and how drunk you got tonight? No. No you don’t.

On a side note, dark sunglasses are the way to go. I’ll elaborate later. Perhaps.

Quick post today.

I was sitting here Stumbling and found the Wikipedia entry on Tupper’s self-referential formula. This formula really has no significance whatsoever, but I thought it looked interesting and apparently it’s introduced sometimes in Computer Science and Math coursework, although I’ve never heard it mentioned. Basically, when n is set to a specific (VERY large) value and n < y < n+17, the graph of the resulting equation will look exactly like the equation itself.

Graph of Tupper’s self-referential formula

The Wikipedia article is both short and fairly interesting, so it’s a decently respectable waste of five minutes or so. Who the hell thinks of this stuff?

I StumbledUpon a neat site/event today that I, rather surprisingly, hadn’t heard of until now. It’s called Blog Action Day, and the idea is to have as many blogs as possible post about the same topic on the same day. Apparently the creators, who you can read more about here, are planning on making this an annual event taking place each October. This year’s event will take place on the 15th and the topic, the environment, is a seemingly broad topic but I think the option given to the blogger to approach the post in so many different ways will result in some interesting articles. So far over 2,800 blogs are registered and their posts will reach an audience of about 2.8 million readers. If you run a blog and have some knowledge pertaining to the environment, you might want to register your blog. If you’re still curious, they have a mildly interesting promo on YouTube, or you can just check out their site. If you don’t have a blog of your own but would still like to help, they are accepting donations which will go to an environmental charity of your choosing.

I’m fairly certain that I’m going to register my blog, but I’m going to try to think of an environmental issue that I’d like to write about first. I took an Environmental Science course last semester, but apparently I didn’t do a very good job of storing the information long-term, so I’m afraid I’m going to have to do a bit of research. Nevertheless, I’m sure I’ll throw in a quick word about Blog Action Day every few posts leading up to the event.

Any rejoicing done by any Syracuse sports fan the other day is about to be squashed by my reminder that the NCAA Football season is starting, and once again Syracuse is going to be miserable. No bowl game this year, folks. A college football journalist on PTI or something the other day was talking about how South Florida is the sleeper team in the Big East this season. WTF. You’re telling me Syracuse is going to get their ass kicked by South Florida? Again? Again again? They lost to USF last year 27-10, and were destroyed 27-0 the year before that. I don’t care what anyone says, South Florida should never beat Syracuse at any sport. Ever.

As if I wasn’t sick enough of all of the worthless shit showing up around Facebook, I go to YouTube this morning and see that they’ve begun comment rating, similar to the system Digg uses. I have no problem with Digg; in fact, I use it quite often. However, their comment rating system works for Digg, not YouTube. Now I’m going to end up reading the same garbage everytime I go to watch a video. I thought YouTube had a great system with the chronological comments. At least when I would go to watch a favorite video of mine, I could have the satisfaction of reading the usually stubborn opinions of fanboys, or perhaps the ridiculous, often close-minded sentiments of your typical redneck. Now comments like these are going to immediately be sifted directly to the bottom, never to be seen again by the general public. Unfortunate, really.

I took a look at the YouTube blog to see if I could find any mention of these new changes, but as of right now nothing has been mentioned. However, they do mention plans to incorporate ‘InVideo’ ads into some of their videos. I heard a bit about this the other day, but wasn’t particularily interested in it. I’m not quite sure what they plan on doing with this, but they do mention that they’re doing this to “improve the experience with [the user] in mind.” I feel like it’s too early for me to even have an opinion on the decision, but I don’t like it.

On another note, Syracuse fans rejoice.

DISCLAIMER: The title of this blog does not serve to make fun of any fictional/non-fictional character that has/has not at one point died in a fire.

DIAF is an acronym my friends and I have adopted. Essentially, if someone is an ass hole, you tell them to DIAF. For example:

“Hey, do you want to hang out today?”

“DIAF.”

Quite simple. Further questions on the topic will be addressed in future posts.