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Very little has happened to me in the past few days… Well nothing exciting anyway…
Here is a quick 10 second update:
• I-many tried to unsuccessfully poach me
• I saw X-men 3: it was pretty good
• I saw my first firebrat
• I’m almost done watching Star Trek: Enterprise
It has cool games and all, but it has so much more potential. This of course means nerds like myself would love to hack it up and make it run all sorts of other software. It would also be nice if the games still worked.
This brings back memories of the last Xbox. The last Xbox had what appeared to be an impenetrable security scheme. It used encryption that would take billions of years to crack burnt right into a chip. It was only a matter of time, of course, before someone found a flaw in a specific game's save routine that opened the door. The complex tech failed.
This time Microsoft has gone a bit low tech. They've encased the boot rom in a blob of epoxy! Amazing, isn't it.... all the complex encryption of the xbox did not stop me from modding it, but a small blob of epoxy on the new one will probably prevent me from ever modding an Xbox 360.
Thanks for the picture Gizmodo.
I'm back in LA. It was an OK drive with little traffic thanks to an early end to my work day (and Winnie's).
The odd part is that I was just here two days ago for a technical evaluation of a product for Yahoo!
Anyway, this trip should be interesting. No plans set at all. We're hanigng out with Winnie's cousin... let's see how it goes. Looks like another adventure for us.
I might switch to this from perl for all my quick hacks. It's called Whitespace and it's, by far, the best programming language ever!
And yes I am trying to increase their anchor text on these critical words. Help me google bomb them :)
Isn't it nice how light traffic is on Bike to Work Day? It makes it, ironically, a good day to drive to work.
On the topic of US patents: here is a juicy one. A patent for a crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Do we need reform of patent laws? oooh yes we do.
Reading a US patent is kind of like reading the first few books of the bible: There are really interesting nuggets, lots of text that dosen't seem to make sense, and enormous ammounts of repetition. Where the bible says 'begat' a half million times, a US patent will have blocks where every other word is 'Preferably' or 'Claim' or 'A method by which'.
Maybe lawyers aren't evil?
One of the funniest wikipedia articles I've ever encountered:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_hanger
Here is an excerpt:
A French ship called the Chasse Marée was wrecked off the coast of Hartlepool. The only survivor was a monkey, wearing a French uniform (presumably to provide amusement for those onboard the ship). On finding the monkey, some locals decided to hold an impromptu trial on the beach; since the monkey was unable to answer their questions, they concluded that it was a French spy. The animal was thus sentenced to death and hanged from the mast of a fishing boat...
I've offended people before by mistaking their nationality, but I've never mistaken a monkey for a Frenchman. Those silly british.
Yes, are indeed no fun at all. I’m on the second day of my first infection in 2 years. I seem to get some kind of mild virus every 2 years in the spring almost like clock work. Luckily it’s just some wussy wimpy virus this time unlike the influenza virus I had last time.
Since I’m sick very rarely, I seem to forget how boring it is. When I was first getting sick a couple days ago I was thinking, “This won’t be so bad. At least I’ll get to relax.” This was, of course, a stupid thing to think. Yes I have been resting, but the rest is not very restful. I was hoping to catch up on my web hobbies, such as importing ancient blog entries, or having some fun reading. This would have worked, other than the fact that my mind was so muddled and confused that I haven’t even been able to type properly until a few hours ago.
On the bright side, I have lost 5 lbs. :)