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 Thursday, December 1st, 2005 - 8:00pm - [Direct Link] I need to create my "links" page some day. Until then, I found a new webcomic (of sorts) that's quite neat. I'll just link you to one specific comic, and you can look around It's got a lot of really interesting and fun stuff, so look around. Clickie: Tailsteak  Saturday, November 26th, 2005 - 4:00pm - [Direct Link] It's been about two years, but I finally got around to sorting my Horizons screenshots. I even added a few to it that I took recently while participating in a 14-day trail they opened up. The highlight of my screenshots is a poorly documented story (through intermittent screenshots and file names) of my journey to game coordinates 0,0. The trip there takes about two hours, most of it walking through ... well... nothing. Though there are some interesting highlights, especially for those that play the game. For example, one-time quest NPCs are usually stored at 0,0, among other things. As a reference the coordinates 0,0 are the Southwest corner of the game. Back in beta (if I recall correctly) the most Southwest corner of the actual continent is around the city Sslanis and is 15000,15000. (Currently it is still 15000,15000, but is an island. Sslanis is around 20000,22000. So I'm either confused, or the tectonic plates really drifted in the past few years.) The land point furthest Northeast are around 27000,40000, making a total of about 12000x26000 "meter" land area (except for all the water between the islands, so cut 1/3rd or so out). Anyway, it's a long walk to 0,0. Roughly equal to walking from one corner of the world of Horizons to the other. It is no longer possible to make this journey on foot because the water actually kills you when you drown instead of forcing you into a cancelable recall. Anyway, here's my Horizons screenshot directory: http://stickman.mach5.org/0/Screenshots/Horizons/  Friday, November 4th, 2005 - 11:00pm - [Direct Link] I got a job! Well, two of them. This is going to be interesting. I haven't had a "real" job since ... um... ... four, four and a half years ago? One is software testing for Microvision on their portable "flic" barcode scanner (if you look up info on Microvision, check out their Nomad portable headsup display), and the other is testing the XBox 360 and game titles for it. Both have very flexible hours, so I should be able to get by without many conflicts. On that note, I'm working from 1pm to midnight today, and then from 8am to 4pm tomorrow. While scheduling conflicts may not kill me, the schedule itself might. My greatest fear about XBox 360 testing is that I'm going to get Oblivion spoiled for me by seeing it ahead of time. If it really is delayed, then that shouldn't be much of an issue. Oh, and I'm under an NDA, so don't even try to get anything out of me or I'll be in legal trouble.  Monday, October 31st, 2005 - 7:00am - [Direct Link] My friend at Mad Rants (that's his blog, or whatever the technical term is) likes to post the stats of search terms that bring people to his website. He gets some really interesting ones, but mine have always been boring. Finally, however, I've gotten some interesting ones! So I'd like to post some of them. Top search terms this month were: Normal search terms: Odd search terms:  Thursday, October 27th, 2005 - 8:00pm - [Direct Link] A while back when I was waiting six hours at the DMV to renew my tabs I decided to browse a book store and found "The Chronicles of Naria". This book had been recommended to me, and it was going to be a movie soon, so I decided to read it. During my trip to Utah I managed to read most of the seven books in the series, and I recently finished off the last book. Just wanted to mention that this is an excellent book, and I have no faith that Hollywood, with their movie mentality, is going to do the book the justice it deserves. I highly recommend reading the series before watching the movie, as the movie will likely dull the experience of the book very much.  Friday, October 21st, 2005 - 11:00pm - [Direct Link] I got home from my "weekend" last night. That was a Thursday. Let me give some more details. The purpose of the trip was to pick up a car in Northern Utah my dad had bought on eBay. The plane ride there was uneventful, and lasted maybe an hour and a half. My uncle picked us up from the airport and we drove back to his and my aunt's house. We visited for a few hours and then my brother and I, eager to get home and handle all of the tasks we had waiting for us, went out and saw about getting the car in working order so we could drive it home. The car was (note the past tense) a 2005 Nissan Sentra. From the look of it, it was somehow hit at an angle, from the front, on the right side. (An accident while turning left, maybe?) The right front fender (fender is the piece between the wheel and hood) was missing, the right front door was crunched and the glass was broken out, the right rear door was obliterated (pushed in about a foot or so), and the right quarterpanel (that's a "rear fender") was rather in the same condition of the door and had some nice sharp metal pieces pointing at the tire. It looked like when the car was hit on the right it was shoved into a guardrail on the left. Most of the damage on the left was on the quarterpanel. Both bumper covers were missing, as well. We used clear packaging tape to cover up the missing windows (prevents the wind, but not much of the noise), covered up the missing right taillight with red tape, took a crowbar to the right quarterpanel to make it less tire-pokey, and took it for a spin. There were two problems we noticed in the spin we took it for. First, the right quarterpanel was still scraping up the tire whenever the car bounced at all, and second, the rear end was swaying a few inches back and forth as we were driving down the road. For those of you that aren't very familiar with cars, I'd like to try to explain the "rear end swaying". I've experienced the sensation before a time or two, usually on icey roads. It happens when the rear tires lose traction and move back and forth on their own accord, without the front moving similarly. The problem with this situation is that there was no ice, and we were moving very slowly. It felt not entirely unlike trying to drive a fish. After driving the car back into the driveway (we only made it half a block before it was obvious this car wasn't going from Northern Utah to Northwest Washington), we took a look under it to find out why it was swaying. Front wheel drive cars don't have a rear axel. They have a rear beam. Looking at a cut of the car on the back tires, it would be something like this:
------------------
|____ car _______|
shocks> \ o==== /
|-| \ \\ / |-|
| |--------------| | <tire
|_| ^ ^ |_|
beam mount
Please remember that I'm not very good with cars, and learned everything I know about this particular situation simply by being in it. Now the problem we had with the car is that the brackets that hold the mount on, and the mount itself, had become mangled, and the weld points had broken off, and some things like that. The mount is able to bend, so when the shocks do their bouncing thing, it will bend, too. It's also apparently the piece the keps the tires from moving side-to-side, because that's what they were doing. 
(Click to enlarge) My brother called around and managed to find a new rear beam. It turns out that the 2000 through 2005 have the same body style, and the only beam in the state we could find was a 2000 Sentra, so we ordered that. We picked it up on Wednesday morning and had a lot of fun getting it installed that day. It was actually the first time I'd ever worked on a car before, besides a little fidgeting here and there. Not that I did anything really major, most of it was my brother's doing. We finished replacing the beam Wednesday evening, and then we set off in the car for home Thursday morning. Ten minutes later we were pulled over by a police officer. The rest of the trip was rather uneventful. The part I enjoyed the most about my vacation was the stresslessness of simply existing without responsibilities. The part I disliked the most about it was living in the immaculate house of my aunt and worrying about leaving anything out of place.  Friday, October 14th, 2005 - 10:00pm - [Direct Link] I'm gone for the weekend. I'm picking up a car in Utah (I'm in Washington) with my siblings. We'll visit some relatives we have there, maybe see some sights, then drive for 14 hours to bring it home.
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