• Take two new “collector’s edition” coke bottles ($1.50 each, way too expensive).

• Remove label, add water.

• Add 6 drops red food colouring.

• Make a second blue one for mana.

• Add backlighting to picture for neat transparency effects.

• Make various other colours, in case you get poisoned.

Goal:
5.1 output from my PS3 through my computer.
Why? I don’t have any other way to output to 5.1 from it without spending money (receiver + different speakers).

What I have:
First gen PS3, HDMI and TOSLINK cables.

Monitor has HDMI -> analog stereo output
Problems: Constant low hum (monitor has bad quality output) and only 2.0 sound. This requires the monitor to be on HDMI output to passthrough audio as well.

This motherboard. It has a Realtek ALC888 chip. I also have the separate bracket for TOSLINK in.
Problems: This can do stereo but no DTS/Dolby, but it fixes the buzzing problem. It can also play when the monitor is on different output.

And a Creative X-Fi Extreme Audio card.
This has S/PDIF in, but I am not spending $100+ on the options they have to actually use it. Instead I am trying repin the gigabyte bracket and have it connect to this card. It does have DTS/Dolby decoding

So, the gigabyte manual says that the bracket has three pins.
1. red – Power
2. yellow – SPDIF_I
3. black – GND

So I switched black and yellow to match up with this pinout diagram of the creative card (top left, +5V, GRN, SPDIF0 IN)

Plugged that in and… nothing. I can hear feint popping when I switch audio output devices on the PS3, but the Creative card never shows a signal (“Unknown or invalid signal”, just like when disconnected).

Any help or insight would be appreciated, thanks.

P.S. I think I may have destroyed any input on my sound card by fooling around with this. My microphone no longer works on that sound card

This subsequently feeds the whole silliness thing and makes the accent grow even more ridiculous.

I don’t think this is a problem but it might get me in trouble someday.

How did you get here?

This post is meant to be read from the top down.

Why has Rogers decided to charge to text for Incoming text messages?

We’ve reviewed wireless practices in other countries and in Canada and see that charging for text/sms messages is a fairly common business practice amongst major carriers.  We continue to offer our customers attractive text plans and bundles and recommend that our customers consider subscribing to one of these plans that include text messaging to save money and continue to receive unlimited incoming messages at no extra charge.

In short: we don’t need the money, but everyone else is doing it so we thought we should too.

Why does this matter? Well if you don’t want to run automatic updates you can make a note of the second Tuesday of every and just run Windows Update then instead of always having a background process.

Restroom: If anyone things their resting while in there, I have to wonder what I’ve been doing wrong. I think this word is much more appropriate for a bedroom where you can get some real resting done. This really isn’t appropriate in language today.

Bathroom: Does it have a bath in it? About 50% chance in a house, no chance in a restaurant. Are you going to use it? Maybe 20-25% of the time in a given day but I usually don’t need to actually say “I’m going to the bathroom to have a bath.” when it is much simpler to say “I’m going to have a bath.” and location is implied. (Note: I don’t take baths, but I don’t want to call it a showerroom either.)

Washroom: Yes, it is part of the process. A very important part I might add. And you can just do a wash by itself. But it does NOT represent the majority of the going ons in the “washroom”. But this does seem to be the best choice to describe the room while still avoiding all the actual subject.

Why do people do this? Protection. So that their gadget still looks good after a few months of use.

But what ends up happening is the case starts to look horrible. It scratches easier than what it is protecting in the first place. I’ve seen cell phones and ipods with screens you can’t even see anymore. So you end up with a terrible looking unusable device.

The only thing worse than this is leaving the plastic covers on that devices are shipped. This is most evident on HP Laptops. These are generally dirtier than the device because they’ve been through the factory. They have bubbles under them. They sometimes are half off and people still try to keep it on… Next time I see one of those I’m ripping it off.

Update Dec 2009: There are many new computers at work with that plastic film that I have been able to take off. It feels great!

I got my own name though, and that’s very nice. Favourites so far are facebook.com/Default.aspx and www.facebook.com/index.aspx. Many that I expected to be gone are still not taken, like facebook.com/Satan but I have a feeling those are disallowed somehow.

I also know a bunch of people who have yet to jump on this at all, get on that internet friends!

ARG *HEADDESK*

It’s just as humourous as when I was a kid except now you know if someone was being a jerk and randomly changing things. And then you report them and they get banned. Oh, and you can play like 15 games at a time. Definitely going to keep playing around with it until I get bored.

Second chat? He started with “Electric boobs and fallopian tubes” and just went downhill from there. I won’t get into the details but I had to tell him to see a doctor… and then a vet. -1 for Omegle.

My third chat started with him saying “cyber?” and ended with me saying “notnx” rather quickly. -1 for Omegle.

And my last chat? It went absolutely nowhere, neither of us had anything to talk about. No points either way.

Should you try it out? sure, it’s worth 5 minutes. Just don’t expect to gain anything at all from it.

At first it was just fading out and I could compensate for it but a few hours later I was totally deaf in that ear. It was probably the biggest loss of body control I’ve ever had. And these guys on the bus were a very horrible reminder of that.

I hit 75 last Sunday night and that felt good because now I finally have the shadowpriest ability that allows me to do massive AoE damage while still in shadowform. Since 65 I’ve increased my haste and SP considerably but I’ve dropped about 10% in crit chance. Now I get more consistent damage which is nice. Here is my Apocryphai’s stats if you want to check them out, I’m a Blood Elf Shadowpriest on Mug’Thol.

The game feels like a repition of the same sorts of quests for the most part, they’ve thrown a few cool ones in there but everything else I could mindlessly solo. It does feel like I’m making progress though, so I’m happy with that. I keep reminding myself that the real content begins at 80 and I’ll just have to hold out til then. For a game that I’ve already put $120 and almost 200 hours into it had better pay out!

Apart from that I’ve been trying to start FEAR2 but I keep getting sidetracked by WoW or by generally being busy. I’m about 2 hours into it but I’m not feeling the pull that I had with the original FEAR. I’m still going to finish it but there are a few things about it that I don’t quite like but can’t pinpoint yet.

And I’ve been reading. Or attempting to read. Between all that WoW and the other things I’ve been up to I have barely had a chance to start my books. Currently on my to do list is: Diablo: The Sin War trilogy, Ender’s Game, V for Vendetta and Watchmen. Diablo is just some trash fantasy that was supposed to get me back into reading when I picked out a few other books but it’s just been piling up while I try to get to 80. Once I get there I’ll be able to give it more time and burn through them in a few days so I can hit the real books.

1. An insignificant but arrogant and obnoxious young person.
2. A silly, insignificant, or contemptible person.
3. The hair style owned by characters such as Dennis the Menace, the Family Circus kid and Shaggy from Scooby Doo. Specifically that little bit of hair coming off the top.

I was just thinking about it recently. Every person who has ever been called a twerp has one of those. Just thought it was interesting.

Nothing more to say, I just genuinely had fun with a group of people for the first time in a while.

Today every single person failed me.

The first lady totally ignored my order the first time. She just looked at me a few seconds later like nothing had happened and I had the awkward moment of having to say my order again. After that she asked if I wanted it toasted and I said yes. And that’s all that happened. She didn’t toast it. I had to ask for it to be toasted again.

I told the second lady exactly what I wanted on my sub 4 items at a time. Lettuce, tomato, pickles and cucumbers first. She put on lettuce, pickles, tomato then reached for green peppers. I had to interject otherwise I would’ve had some nasty crunchy peppers on my sub. Then I asked for mayo, honey mustard and salt and pepper. And after honey mustard I almost got some green sauce.

And the last lady… This really isn’t her fault but when I was giving her a $20 I kind of lazily reached over and she didn’t quite grab it. I was confused for a second but then I realized she was only 5′ tall and actually couldn’t reach and farther. I had to keep moving my hand forward slowly pretending that I was going to do it all along. That one was kinda my fault.

Apart from this I had never really had bad service at a Subway this won’t stop me from going there again. I just find it very unfortunate how many times I was failed in one attempt.

What do you do when a single, drunk girl walks into your room? I continue playing Guitar Hero.

And what do you do when a single, drunk girl walks into your room and sits on your lap? I continue playing Guitar Hero.

And what do you do when a single, drunk girl walks into your room, sits on your lap and tries to kiss you? I continue playing Guitar Hero.

Eventually she got fed up and left saying my favourite line of first year, “And that’s why you’re still a virgin, Mike.”

You see, I don’t do drunk chicks.

And thanks to this little incident conversation has been akward with her ever since. She keep trying to talk to me on MSN which I kind of brush off. It’s not like I have anything to be afraid of from stalkers, I’m a 6’6″ guy.

Normally this is a very strange thing for someone to do but for a Waterloo mathie pink is the colour to be. From the normal pink ties that are given out ever year to the giant pink tie we hang on our math building’s wall.

So I, like a bunch of other people who do so every year, decided to die my hair pink. Partially because of peer pressure, partially because of the total awesomeness.

The first try was with a much lighter pink, roughly how light it is right now, but that washed out without leaving any colour whatsoever. Then I had to try a darker pink which I wasn’t really a fan of at first. It was more vibrant and not the bubblegum pink I wanted in the first place. On our tie which is a gradient this year it is on the very tip of the darkest end.

The pink has done about half the dye’s life cycle now and it’s still just as soft as it was before for anyone who is worried . It should be gone by the end of next week and then I’ll just be the 6’6″ blond guy instead of the 6’6″ guy with pink hair.

Here we go:

5. Finding panties behind my bed a few month into first term.

4. Staying up until 4 a.m. and waking up at noon – for 4 months.

3. Playing Dungeons and Dragons with 2 separate groups.

2. A girl picking me up on my way home from playing Dungeons and Dragons.

1. Having a girl leave my room saying “And that’s why you’re still a virgin, Mike!”

Other good bookmarklets I’ve come across are:

• BugMeNot for getting past registration quickly on large sites.
• is.gd for making urls smaller, similar to tinyurl except an even smaller url.
• You can also download videos from youtube and other places with this link (not a bookmarklet)

It’s from the maker of Firefly, Joss Whedon. and has Neil Patrick Harris from How I Met Your Mother among other things, Felicia Day who I know from The Guild, and Nathan Fillion from Firefly.

And no, musicals are still bad.

True story.

for x in $(ls -1 .); do
mount -t iso9660 -o loop $x temp/;
cp -r temp/* .;
umount temp/;
done;

Which did the job but was horribly messing on doing it more than once with tons of errors and stuff.

When I came home I decided to make it much better. I even included how long it takes to do the whole process, which was harder than the process itself.

So right now it looks like:

before=$(date +%s);
mkdir temp/;#tempdir
for x in $(ls -1 ./*.iso); do
echo Currently unpacking $x | sed -e ‘s/.\///; s/.iso//’; #remove extra output
mount -t iso9660 -o loop $x temp/; #mounts iso
cp -ru temp/* .;
umount temp/;
done;
rmdir temp/; #cleanup
after=$(date +%s);
elapsed=$(expr $after – $before); #time calculations
((hour=$elapsed/60/60));
((min=$elapsed/60-hour*60));
((sec=$elapsed-hour*60*60-$min*60));
echo “Elapsed time: “`printf “%02d” $hour`”:”`printf “%02d” $min`”:”`printf “%02d” $sec`;

Which does everything I want it too, even the pain in the ass zero-padding of the times. Remember to chmod +x <filename> if you want to use it .

Edit: Well, I messed up a few things, I only tested in under one minute times and the shell on that server only contains sh and ash. Here is the revised edition:

#! /bin/sh
before=$(date +%s);
mkdir temp/;#tempdir
for x in $(ls -1 ./*.iso); do
echo Currently unpacking $x | sed -e ‘s/.\///; s/.iso//’; #remove extra output
mount -t iso9660 -o loop $x temp/; #mounts iso
cp -ru temp/* .;
umount temp/;
done;
rmdir temp/; #cleanup
after=$(date +%s);
elapsed=$(expr $after – $before); #time calculations
hour=”$(expr “$elapsed” ‘/’ ’60′ ‘/’ ’60′)”
min=”$(expr “$elapsed” ‘/’ ’60′ ‘-’ ‘$hour’ ‘*’ ’60′)”
sec=”$(expr “$elapsed” ‘-’ ‘$hour’ ‘*’ ’60′ ‘*’ ’60′ ‘-’ ‘$min’ ‘*’ ’60′)”
echo “Elapsed time: “`printf “%02d” $hour`”:”`printf “%02d” $min`”:”`printf “%02d” $sec`;

And now I know that sh is *really* annoying to do math in.

<there was a day break here>

So it’s 2:30 now and I have another final tomorrow. But that one is at 12:30. I think I’ll be fine. Wake up at 9ish, couple hours of studying. Hopefully actually sleep before 5:30. And my other 2 finals at at 7:30… p.m. A good last weekend.

Then one week free and then I start working at IBM, ever CSers dream job, you know, back in 1970!

It was just after 10 when class finished and I headed back to the Mac labs. All the guys were still there but some girl had taken the seat where I was 3 hours earlier so I sat a bit farther down. She looked rather tall, she had nice full brown hair slowing over her shoulders and was obviously doing the same math assignment as we were.

After about 20 minutes she asked us for some help. She needed to transfer some files from her laptop to a computer in the lab so she could print it. She tried emailing it to herself but I had a better solution. I had a solution that was so simple most people would never think of it.

I gave her buttsex.

I didn’t even think about what I was doing while I was doing it. Most people could never accept a solution like that but she took it.  She took it with pride. Afterward she sat down at her computer for a bit then left the room.

She was obviously still thinking of buttsex. It’s like she took it with her when she left the room. All the guys laughed about it. They couldn’t believe that I had just given her buttsex right then and there. Shortly after she reentered and printed off her lab. She came back after that and did something that everyone had expected.

She gave me buttsex right back. And thanked me while doing it!

She left without another word. I barely saw her face. She barely spoke. I will probably never see her again. I don’t even know her name. But that is the most memorable moment in the labs I’ve ever had.

Buttsex is the name of my USB flash drive.

• Office Space
• V for Vendetta
• Wayne’s World
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• Men in Black
• The Matrix (all 3, I don’t care what people say, finish the plot)
• Anchorman
• Charlie Wilson’s War
• Pulp Fiction
• Sin City
• Thank You for Smoking
• Superbad
• Back to the Future
• At least 3 Bond movies
• Happy Gilmore
• Rush Hour
• Billy Madison
• A Beautiful Mind
• Fight Club
• LotR (skip to the battle scenes)
• Memento

And there’s probably more but that should keep you busy for a few weeks. Not every movie is as totally awesome as the last one, but they are all required movies to watch.

How often has x been googled over the years? Good for at least a half hour of fun! As a CS major, part of the math department, it is amazingly entertaining to look at trends of things, especially internet memes. Want to know when lolcats started? Rickrolling? It’s right there.

You can see when large historical events happened, who is more popular in the results (Obama). Compare HD-DVD to Blu-ray searches, see how things get more (emo) and less (My Chemical Romance) popular over the years. Porn searches vs. free porn? The possibilities are endless.

It’s like googlefight but over time as well. Extra dimension means it’s infinitely better. Go spend a good half hour at least amusing yourself.

You can thank Mark Miltenburg for this blog, he made me write it.

It is this day that we must honour one of our most valuable number. It stands next to e and root(2) and hold its own.

A limerick in homage of pi: (from limerickdb)

If a pendulum’s swinging quite free
Then it’s always a marvel to me
That each tick plus each tock
Of the grandfather clock
Is 2 pi root L over g.

I went out for dinner with my family to a local restaurant that my brother had previously worked at and where my dad does the odd thing to help around. They both ordered a Guinness, I was content with my Pepsi. My brother even joked about taking me out to the bars later. Why?

Last night I went to a party where much drinking was involved and I had a great time. Sober. And I’m going to remember the whole thing. Beat that ya damned teenagers. Get off my lawn!

The snow was beautiful, perfect for building large standing objects out of. And it would rain the next day, icing our beautiful shaft in place.

We decided on the nearby soccer field for our monument to manliness. Large areas of field covered in the finest packing snow I’ve ever built with. Fairly out of the way but if you go to the nearby park you will be able to see the statue.

And thus we started the behemoth which would be documented throughout its creation. Pictures of the step by step process were taken in order to demonstrate the massiveness.

And so we walked away, letting our monument stand for all we stood for, being hard and tall.

The majority is dialogue is done in song. I really don’t know why this is so appealing. Not to me I mean. The people who regularly watch musicals. You can display much more precise emotion in dialogue than in song. It may be less exaggerated but in a musical it seems that everything is over exaggerated.

And the protagonist and antagonist seem to sing together. Merrily. Perhaps a bit of dramatic irony. Perhaps a bit of “Hey, let’s make them sing together because that’s what a musical is about.” You should never ever change your content to fit the medium. Change the medium to fit your content.

Less singing.

My message? Tell people that they are going to a musical before they get in the car so they can make a shitty excuse to get out of it.

Except there is something different about my mac. It can’t watch those videos. It’s too damned slow. It’s a 7 year old ibook running a G3. It can’t watch youtube video. It has troubles with word processing at times. Which is why I’m only using TextEdit.

Single core, PowerPC, 500MHz. 320MB of RAM, 10 gig hard drive running 10.3. Slowly. At best. But it runs. And it was cheap. And it’s a laptop.

In CS 136 today the prof was looking for someone with a PPC mac and I was the only person to have one. At all. And I know like 4 people with macs myself.

It takes over a minute, and it has been timed, to load the app we do our programming in. That’s quite the commitment just to try out a simple line of code. The temptation would be to keep it running at all times but if I keep it open all the time everything else will be even slower. Even the app to see how much memory and CPU I’m using takes more CPU time than it’s worth. 20-40% just monitoring itself.

At least I won’t get viruses right? right? Well since after typing in some programs and looking at the screen I can see the rest of my sentence come out well after I’m finished I’m tempted to say it has infected itself.

And it does crash, no matter what the commercials tell you. Programs randomly crash, the OS itself has frozen on me several times saying “an error has occurred, please restart your computer to fix it.” Better or worse than a BSOD? I like to be able to debug my problems.

I think I’ll stop the mac rant right there. It’s pretty but it doesn’t live up to the ‘perfect’ machine that everyone expects. Maybe better than windows, but not perfect.

I wrote this on my mac.