Historical Archives - 2003

Maybe not so historical, but archives indeed

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Archives of the ages

Freitag, November 7, Thunderwalker Capture the Flag.

Long long ago, there was a marvelous game named Quake. This game was unlike most other games of the time, adding the feature to play over the internet. Shortly after the internet play was refined, and along came a whole slew of modifications. Among these was capture the flag, and it's other variants. My favorite version of this was a little mod called ThunderWalker CTF. They went along with the original mod and changed a good number of guns and added sounds until it had a completely wonderful feel. All of this goes around to say I've setup a TWCTF server currently running at thor.arrrr.com.

Along my quest to setup this server, I've encountered a major stumbling block. Ftp.cdrom.com no longer has a massive id section. Those of you around back in 97 knew that EVERYTHING quake was posted on that ftp site. With that said, most of the sites that have quake mods and levels and are still working for some reason, have all of their links pointed to 'ftp.cdrom.com' which makes the files useless. Apparently Fileplanet.com has all of this stuff, except they make you sign in, click click click click wait click again to get the file. (repeat for the next file) Fortunately enough IDSoftware has left their ftp.idsoftware.com mostly in tact, so acquiring the base CTF mod and Quakeworld were no real challenge. The next task at hand was the easiest yet. The ThunderWalker page has been hosted away from the gamespy monster and has all of their files as local downloads.

Among nicer things in the search, I have found a few backwards compatible enhancements to the quake engine and servers. Most notable of the findings is QuakeForge which runs wonderfully in Linux. It's a great thing ID released the source otherwise everyone would have to stick with the original server and client which someday may become completely obsolete. Since I was a big Team Fortress fan as well, I think it would be appropriate to post a copy of The History of TF according to the Speaker for the Dead. (Reference to the Ender series of Novels by Orson Scott Card).

For further info on my Quake server, visit thor.arrrr.com until I decide to write a quake page for this site.

Dienstag Oktober 7, Oktoberfest.

Ein Prosit, Ein Prosit. I was off in Fredericksburg last weekend celebrating Oktoberfest. I've still got the Oom Pah musik and Bier songs stuck in my head. The weather was quite nice staying below 80 degrees and mostly cloudy. The crowd was mostly older couples with a lot of people dressed in Lederhosen. They had a neat misty fog in the mornings which I took pictures at the Bed & Breakfast, 1, 2. After all that, I think I'll definitely have to return, maybe I'll actually make it to Bayern one of these years in Oktober.

The trip home was almost as fun, I managed to get two pictures of lightning. (Lit1 and Lit2) I'm impressed they turned out at all given taking pictures at 100km/h is a task in itself, not to mention the wind and rain along with this storm. Shortly after taking these pictures, I encountered a phone pole on the side of the road that had been struck and was on fire. My attempt at a picture turned out unreasonably blurry so I won't share that one. Turns out this storm caused a tornado in my city of Bryan around 6. The lightning didn't stop until after Midnight, and I'm also told it ruined the Kiss/Aerosmith concert in the Woodlands. I also got another picture of one of my favorite homes in Taylor on the drive west. I also took a few pictures of some old bridges along the way, one of which you can't drive across anymore.

Just when I get to Monday and expect another boring week, I got to encounter a Texas Coral Snake while doing some work by the Airport in Conroe. The little guy seemed pretty tame, and somewhat clumsy on the sidewalk, and didn't even strike at me stepping less than a foot away. After walking around, he found his way into the grass and slithered away. Pretty neat to actually see a wild one after having a few dreams with coral snakes over the past month. Everyone seems to ask "are you sure it's a Coral Snake" and usually mention a snake that looks like it. However, I am an expert at identifying Coral Snakes, so there is no doubt regarding the matter. As for killing the little guy, I had a few thoughts about making him a pet so he definitely lived. I would probably only kill one if they bit me, or I wanted their skin, no reason to kill the little guys just because you saw one.

Freitag September 19, Talk Like A Pirate Day.

Avast ye! The official talk like a pirate website set sail in treacherous seas this day. If I hear another person talk about how Ninjas are better than Pirates, I shal take out me cutlass and force them to eat with meathooks the rest of their days. As for pirate links that aren't sinking at the moment, you can have your pick of Swashbuckler's Cove, Piratesinfo.com, or Pirates of Brown University. Pirate activities of the day wouldn't be complete without plank walkings, maroonings, and other potentially treasonous activities.

Mittwoch September 3
I had an encounter with a Black Witch Moth in July after the Hurricane Claudette blew ashore. The moth was sleeping on the roof of the parking garage at the office, and having never seen such a massive moth, I took a picture of it. A few days later a story showed up about them in the Houston Chronicle. Today after digging through my pictures from the past months I posted the moth picture and came across a couple of articles about them. The First Article gave a rough rundown of the what happened, with a bit of background info on the moth. At the bottom it gives contact info to report sightings of the moths, so I sent in the details. A few hours later he replies with more info on the moth, It's a female, and a link to his report which he will update shortly. Contrary to some of the legends with the moth, I survived the months of Quintilis and Sextilis. Scott even survived his sky diving trips the weekend afterwards before we found out about the Aztec legends regarding the moth.

Montag September 1
School resumes this Labor day. Surprisingly enough we have had 2 Tropical Storms hit near me this year. This latest one just brought a night of constant raining, which is nice since sleeping to the dripping of rain is quite relaxing. These systems make a for a lot of interesting cloud pictures with all the different layers of clouds. I guess I'll miss Houston a bit after leaving this time. Got used to going out with a crowd on Wednesdays and Thursdays so I'll have to drive the 100 miles or so now to go see them every few weeks. At least I'll be able to continue my experiments in cooking. I tried taking a picture of Mars one night, but I can't seem to hold my camera still enough in dark settings. I'll probably have to RTFM a time or two before I can use it properly in really dark places.

I can not describe how wonderful it is to have speakers to use again. Leaving them behind all summer was a terrible decision. I'm not too fond of headphones because after wearing them for 30 minutes my ears get tired of them. To celebrate I did a traditional listening to 'Dub Driving' all night long. I couldn't find my Quake1 soundtrack so I picked that as my second choice, I've probably listened to Dub Driving for more than a month of my life. Just shows you what you can do in your sleep.

Donnerstag Quintilis 17, 2003
I guess this summer of movies has about wrapped up with Pirates of the Caribbean. My biggest complaint about it is that they didn't say ARRRR enough. 2nd complaint was the lady burned the rum. Even with those flaws, it's a great movie, so go see Captain Jack Sparrow when you visit the Theater next.

Watching the new flow of google searches 'how to make grog' leads me to think I should make up some sort of rum based drink to satisfy their cravings. I doubt many of them will make real grog with lemon sugar water and rum. Of course I could start experimenting with these drinks at some point. I'm tempted to say Bacardi 151 and root beer is grog, just because about anything with enough 151 in it will make you say ARRRR. I guess I made Grog enough as a kid when my cousins and I would find our way into the cleaning products of the Grandparent's house and mix them in a giant bucket. I guess written myself into some sort of Grog testing now. Stay tuned to the Grog Page for the details.

Samstag Quintilis 5, 2003
Notice that I have not decided to go with the standard Julian name for July this year. I'll probably continue on with my Roman Calendar names through Sextilis (Augustus' month). Unfortunately, February suffered the attacks of the Caesars and was pillaged until it only had 28 days and Julius and Augustus had their 31 days. There's my version of the story, you can find a vastly elongated version at webexhibits.org.

I've been showing off this gorgeous picture I took of Sara Thursday night. I think she's as astounded as I am with it. Too bad it was the only picture of the evening that turned out, but at least it turned out marvelous.

ARRRR news.
I've moved the registrar from gandi to godaddy. Dealing with gandi's lack of support and the unreasonable exchange rate to the euro (Currently $1.15 per Euro) sent me to a cheap registrar in the States. After about a year of ARRRR, I'm quite satisfied with it's current state. The 1 year date happens on Quintilis 10th for those of you who like knowing birthdays of websites.

Montag 9.6.03
Writing something, but writer's block took hold. Back on the next day, Summer appears to have taken hold around here. I've been playing my little brother's Gamecube lately. They managed to fix the terrible camera angle control from the N64 so spinning views around is nice and smooth. The graphics work out pretty well too. The games have more of a cartoon feel, which is nice because the characters don't have that disgusting anime look. My task is now to talk the little brother into getting The Zelda game for his Birthday soon. That one appears to be heading in the right path for video games. Why go for lifelike realism that won't ever live up to the real thing when you can go into the completely different world of cartoons where all the cool features are enabled by default. You don't even need unreasonable amounts of detail to make anything realistic so that's definitely a plus for laziness and successfulness.

It's nearing time for me to decide if I want to go anywhere this summer. I'm hoping someone will purchase me a trip to the Wagner Festspiele in Bayreuth. It appears to be some sort of famous people spot as well, but I could deal with their cockiness to enjoy the operas of Wagner. The typical trip to Mom's and Possum Kingdom Lake are still on my list, but I feel inclined to visit somewhere new. Maybe there will be a Continental weekend special ticket price to somewhere interesting, that you can see stars from.

The Slashdotting seems to have eased significantly since the weekend. I've fit the description for the poll option 'Grog (Arrrr!!)' and linked to the Grog page in the poll forum which in turn gave this web server a load average > 0 0 0! I'm equally impressed that they used the correct number of Rs (4) in their description as well. Too bad it doesn't quite fit their poll of Fictitious drinks since from western history it's really just watered down rum. I probably need to raid the comments and add them to the grog page.

Freitag 16.5.03
The Lunar Eclipse last night was a success. There wasn't a massive emp burst around Houston to disable the lights everywhere to make viewing better, but it was nice to see it. I made a frame by frame collage of the pictures I took last night. It took me long enough to get all of those pictures on one image, much less straighten them, so they're mostly crooked. Towards the end I had to change the brightness of the camera, so you see what looks millions of stars in the pictures. It would be an impressive camera if they were really stars, but unfortunately they're simple lens aberrations. I'm still waiting for someone to fly me to Iceland for the solar eclipse 2 weeks from now.

Mittwoch 7.5.03
This morning I woke up and watched the Transit of Mercury from the multiple webcasts worldwide. The SOHO site has been lagged pretty much since the end of the transit. They've got a video of the whole sequence which is pretty neat since the next one won't happen until 2006. Stardate was talking about this a lot on yesterday's program and probably said 'dark welders goggles' ten times. All of this Astronomy business led me to find out about a Lunar Eclipse which is going to happen on Thursday the 15th, around 10:15 PM. Even more impressive is the Solar Eclipse set to be visible in Greenland, Iceland, and Scotland on May 31. Anyone want to fly me out there to see it? It's not too late for me to back out of my Memorial Day canoe trip to see a Solar Eclipse.

Last night was pretty neat considering it was the first time I saw a lightning bug in more than 5 years. There was also a rabbit running around on the street at the same time. I guess those blinking bugs are making some sort of comeback since Mark Hayter saw some a few weeks ago. Reports from people in Australia also confirm their widespread existence, so I guess they're not in as much peril as the world thinks.

Sonntag 4.5.03
This is time to promote the Piggypalooza. It's in Austin on the 17th of May, so travel to Austin and view the first Piggypalooza in history. You can find more details/flyers at the site.

............................... UPDATE ...............................

Piggypalooza is probably delayed until later, don't bloody forget about it!

Reasons to go: "you at least have to see stab her til she dies.. just cuz of their name"

Sonntag 20.4.03
After an extended weekend around Houston, I returned to House Harkonnen this afternoon. Sometime on Thursday evening at a Pappasitos restaurant, I was admiring a BMW Z8 in the parking lot. When I decided to return to my car, I crossed the path between the Z8 and the waning full moon. I immediately tripped over the nearest curb landing on my ankle leaving it swollen the whole weekend. Let that be a warning to those who see Z8s around a full moon.

Back at House Harkonnen, I revived my primary machine. I had upgraded him to the 'unstable' branch of Debian named Sid, last week. I suffered a lilo failure upon the next reboot. Twenty minutes after I resumed working on it this afternoon, I had Gnome 2.2 running like a freight train. I don't think I'll be able to resist reinstalling Sid when I get a new harddrive for it, after the string of harddrive disasters last week. I'll take a screenshot of the desktop tomorrow sometime once I finish having fun playing the Gnome games in their Gnome 2.2 feel. The real test of Gnome 2.2 will be to see if the little gweather applet is finally stable. My experience with weather applets leads me to believe the whole concept is cursed.

Here's the SID/Gnome2 screenshot I promised. (930kB)

Donnerstag 3.4.03
Given that this metroid prime game has been out for a while now, one would expect a decent amount of screenshots to be available as everyone was flooding the world with screenshots and videos before its release. So I decide to look for some pictures of the metroids in it. What a hopeless mistake that was, the only crap I could find on the game was pre-release hype and the crappy reviews they gave. Eventually I tried some text files, to see what kind of metroids are in the game. I found out about these Fission Metroids that split into 2 whenever you damage them sufficiently, which just made me desire the screenshots even more. I guess I'll have to make do with Super Metroid while I wait another 6 months for more screenshots to build. Arrrr, Space Pirates, I forgot Ridley was one of those.

I actually did some sort of April Fool's joke this year. I didn't have Physics that day so I didn't have to think up some prank to pull on Dr. Welch. Whenever he promotes throwing chalk at him, and I finally acquire the chalk, he stops making mistakes so I don't get to throw it at him. As for the April Fool's prank, I changed theinternetsucksnow.com to the DOJ webpage siezed message. Then I called his house, and had his mom collaborate with the plan for when he returned home to think the DOJ had stopped by. So, he first noticed it in his computer class at school, and his teacher said, "looks like you're in a lot of trouble". With that done, missing the -9 magnitude Iridium flare that evening wasn't too bad.

Freitag 28.3.03
After viewing the Children of Dune mini-series, I propose we change the name of Iraq to Arrakis. The orange glow from the sandstorm looked pretty neat. If you didn't see it, pretty much any news website has them. I'd post some but Reuters might get mad and hunt me down for royalty fees. The change of name wouldn't be too much, it already sounds a bit like Arrakis and is already a desert. I dunno of anything there that would be as valuable as spice though, so we'll just leave it to be defined Arrakis, wasteland of the Earth. They supposedly have Death troops too, perhaps I should throw in a few Imperial Sardaukar or some Fremen Fedaykin to show the superiority of Arrakis.

I have recently noticed that the patent for the .GIF compression will expire in 77 days (June 20). Burn All .gifs will still have to insist on their demise until 2004 sometime when the European patent expires. There still appears to be the JPG patent worries but my guess is that company goes out of business if they try to enforce it.

Mittwoch 19.3.03
At last, after much anticipation, the first great Blitzkrieg of the 21st Century has begun. Following the strategy by the Germans in 1940s, American propaganda is being broadcast over Iraq with messages to surrender and the latest in Iraqi popular music. I haven't heard any of this Iraqi propaganda, but the Josef Göbbels Propaganda Machine is quite entertaining to me. After typing that ö I have been reminded about the pathetic non-universal font I'm using in my terminals which must be fixed at once. Hours later... Font issue fixed and the terminals no longer drop lines of text after the 8 bit characters. I found it funny that there were still people driving around in Baghdad after the air-raid sirens had gone off. You'd think even in a government such as that, that they'd get a day off from work when war is supposed to begin. CNN's website has been crippled to a giant three word headline to catch the eye of anyone who ventures too far towards their website. Now I return to tapping my fingers like the Baron Harkonnen in anticipation of the Blitzkrieg.

Montag 17.3.03
Classes have resumed after the spring break and apparently so has the pollen. It's easy to tell which cars spent spring break around Houston due to the yellow coat they're growing. It's nice having a little bit of humidity in the air after dealing with almost none for the past eleven days.

On March the tenth, this message was left on my phone.

Julio,
this is Antonio,
pick up the damn phone,
pick up because I'm damn sexy,
Julio?
Damn you Julio
Damn you to hell
		

The message was recorded into an Ogg Vorbis format. I didn't make it a mp3 because this is a little bit of my revenge to people who send me Microsoft movie codecs (.wmv, .asf, .asx)

For spring break I went out west to Fort Davis and visited the McDonald Observatory. I took a lot of pictures of the 2.7 meter Harlan J. Smith Telescope when they were working on it. I also went around the mountains and took a couple of pictures of some antelope and the electric windmills nearby. Now seems like a good time to plug the StarDate radio program since they produce it at the observatory. I was disappointed that they don't offer tours for the old 2.1 meter Otto Struve telescope which was finished in 1939. The tour guide said they house all of their administration in there and like to keep that kind of garbage hidden. After returning home last night, only the brighter of the stars were visible last night. The Orion Nebula which was so clear in the mountains, is barely visible. Oh well, just another reason to abandon cities and move to the mountains. Pictures will be posted on the photographie page when I upload them.

Later on St. Patrick's Day.
I have just found out about International Talk Like A Pirate Day. From what I've found so far, NPR interviewed the creator, John Baur in this story about it on September 19, 2002. Dave Barry preluded this story with his original article eleven days earlier. Hopefully this isn't the only 15 minutes of fame since John Baur and Mark Summers created this day on June 6, 1995. Now that the date has been set, the next step is making it a global holiday. Perhaps my idea for the Dr. Mario club at Texas A&M could turn into the ARRRR Day club. They already have howdy week, so it would not be too hard to ARRRR it into existence.

Mittwoch 5.3.03
50 Years since the death of Mr. Josef Stalin brings a rainy misty strange day in Texas. Most people probably won't care but people always seem to remember Hitler's birthday, so people might as well know when it's been half of a century since Stalin died. Fat Tuesday was yesterday, I didn't notice any google celebration for some reason, but I'm sure they got plenty of inquiries on subjects related to Fat Tuesday and girls.

I made another monolith so anyone who thinks I've forgotten about them is wrong. This one was discovered in Final Fantasy III somewhere on the Veldt. Go to the Monolith page to see the collections.

Montag 3.2.03 - Fun with Monoliths!
Today I was inspired by this cartoon. With such inspiration, I was forced to begin editing pictures with my mediocre skills to add monoliths. My first result this morning was this feeble attempt. About the same time, Nitekry was busy making his massive monolith. Hour or few later, I let Highland into the fray, and he claims to be making one, but I asked for an update and he said video games had taken priority. Not long ago I decided my attempt was utterly pathetic, so I decided to make Monolith #2. Plasmex had also jumped into the monolith club making one of Me and one of him. That's all the monoliths I have for now. If you have no clue what a monolith is, you need to view Stanley Kubrik's 2001 A Space Odyssey. If you'd like to make one of your own, I'd love to see it when you're done!

Twenty minutes later, Highland has thrown his submission in as well. All of these Monoliths will now conquer the world!
Twenty-five minutes later, Plasmex makes another one. This one appeared at a Denny's.
Twenty-eight minutes after the last one, Plasmex cranks out number three, which involves a Shelby automobile.
Eleven Thirty, The monolith enters the sky diving realm.
Later that evening, The monoliths show up to an illegal card game.

Samstag 1.2.03
So much for a great 1.2.03. Back when I was a little kid, I picked Columbia to be may favorite Space Shuttle because I liked the name, and thought that it being the first Space Shuttle made it the best one. Thus, all of my Space Shuttle toys as a kid were "Columbias". The news casters allowed to ask questions on TV should have their knees broken. I recall one interview with a Gentleman who knew about Heat Detection Satellites:

Thus, TV personalities are buffoons, and I'm hoping NASA gets a huge spike in funding, because it'd be fun to work there.

Less Depressing information:
I got a dog last night. He's part Australian & German Shepherd and weighs in at 12 kilos. The rottweilers next door haven't mauled him yet so things are looking good for the little guy. Yesh, I departed from the typical Dr. Mario icon for today because I felt Mr. Dragoon Kain summed up my mood a little better. I also saw the film 'Catch Me if You Can' today. Pretty good movie, but I liked it's intro the most. That seems like enough typing for now, I go. Don't forget to watch Groundhog's Day tomorrow.

Mittwoch 29.1.03
Four days until Groundhog's Day, I think I'll make it. My comments on the 'State of the Union' speech last night: "It must be Tuesday, He was wearing his cornflower blue tie." Those of you more privileged individuals will recognize that immediately as a quote from the movie 'Fight Club'. (that's enough politics for one year)

Shortly I will write a list of cartoons I wish to see back on TV (or some sort of broadcast). Most optimally they would be shown on KAMU for the highest quality reception by my cable company free house. Cox Cable Company doesn't seem to understand this policy, seeing we get crap in the mail from them every week addressed to "To our Future Customer at blah blah blah". To combat this, we have requested the post office return the letter to the sender for the reason Cox Cable will never have a Customer with these residents.

The Robins are flying through, It's nice to see them bobbing around the yard eating all of our bugs. I tried giving them some old piece of bread, but they completely ignored it. Later I find out they eat bugs and fruit, he he he. So some Cardinal flying through decided to eat the bread for them a day or two later. Friday I'll be getting a puppy. His name is Zeta, I'm not sure if it's Zeta written out or just the Greek Z. Should be interesting throwing a dog in the back yard with the neighbors 2 Rottweilers and some sort of white puppy. Those dogs still don't like me mowing and I've lived here for 6 months already. ... Four days until Groundhog's day ... Don't forget to watch the movie Groundhog's Day on Sunday either!

Freitag 17.1.03
Look here and note my exceptional placement for the phrase 'nail gun accident shot in the ass'. More updates to the FF2 section. More explicitly I added the Damcyan and Fabul sections.

Mittwoch 15.1.03
Further Pi news: I have found a copy of Pi which is 100 mB in length. If bandwidth grew on trees I'd mirror it here, but I'll have to stick to the 16 page version for my site. If you're still interested, it took me 23 hours to get it from here.
I'm changing the Final Fantasy II page format and adding monster stats. I'm sick of looking through the weblogs and having to pass through pages of image requests for a single search. Categorizing them by geography looks like it's my method of choice and you can see the Kingdom of Baron now.

Montag 12.1.03
Classes returned today with their normal proceedings. I'm not quite sure how I'll take this no class until noon on Tuesday on Thursday business. I ordered a Stetson Temple today, won't get here tomorrow so I can't wear it then but I should have it by next week at least. After noticing some wireless network stickers on doors, I am beginning to wonder how well this Axim X5 will work on those with a wireless nic. Plants all survived my winter holidays except the biggest leaves turned yellow and were ready to be plucked. After five concurrent sneezes, I have decided to halt this update.

Mittwoch 8.1.03
Once again the year ends, and this year we remove the last palindrome until 2112. Last year was also home of the Year XP, an oversaturated abbreviation to such product lines created mostly by Microsoft but also adopted by lesser companies trying to capitalize on the free XP marketing relationships. With classes resuming on the 13th, I need sneak off with my brother's digital camera to take pictures of H2O fountain and other interesting landmarks there. On Rubik's cube news, I'm down to two minutes and thirty seconds to solve the cube. I'd probably have it quicker if it wouldn't have been sitting in the back of my auto for the last week. I should be getting a Stetson Temple in the next week or two to add to my fedora collection. My black wool fedora has taken a considerable beating with me selecting it for my rain hat. It's still holding a hat-like shape, but is now floppy and easily crushed. Been looking at more visor caps, I haven't broken down yet and bought anything else off E-Bay, but that's always a dangerous possibility. Only two more days of wonderful lunches, then back to school where I can't eat lunch buffets or pasta bars at 5 star restaurants, quite depressing actually. I was pointed to Despair Inc. this week and feel everyone else should be pointed to it as well.

Archives of the ages

GoTo: | Entrance | Fotos | Monthly Foto | Messier | Fishtank | Grog! | Dino Riders | BMW | Author | Lunix Laptop | Ξ Marks the Spot

Duck you Sucker!
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