Affirmative Action
Mood:  chatty
Topic: News
Here at Eric's Binary World we believe in equal opportuinity for all, therefore, here is a wonderfully funny page making fun of Kerry's "tendency" to flip-flop.

http://johnkerryads.websiteanimal.com/

Quotes!!!!
Mood:  chatty
Now Playing: "I Be" - GRITS
Topic: Quotes
Once again I empty my profile quotes into the blog so that I can put more quotes on my profile.

"Never forget the ABCD Law. It's bigger than Maxwell" (gasps from students) - Prof Pollock

"ABCD Law is like religous law - accept it with blind faith." - Prof Pollock

"Women should be obscene and not heard." - John Lennon

"It was the big MS marketing juggernaut and money spent up the ying-yang...We were thinking 'Geez, how are we going to compete with this?' Fortunately, the products sucked beyond our wildest dreams" - Ed Colligan at Palm 1996

"I want a bag of rice, 1lb of meat, some rice, and 28 boxes of Viagra" - lyrics to Viagra by Oro Solido (Merengue band)

America The Audiobook
Mood:  chatty
Topic: books
I recently started listening to The Daily Show's new book about America. So far I've finished the first chapter and I find the book to be hilarious. Not only is it funny, but it's funny in a smart way. I found myself thinking that if I wasn't such a history buff that I wouldn't find nearly half as much stuff funny. It's definitely worth checking out. I'll probably write some more about it when I finish the book.

The Evils of Computer Simulation
Mood:  caffeinated
Now Playing: "Warp Factor Five" - Bleach
Topic: School Stuff
Now I feel for the guys who recently simulated the entire universe from "just after" the big bang* (apparently a few hundred thousand years out is no biggie compared to the age of the universe - and any engineer will agree) until present day. That simulation involves a TON of variables. Even on a mainframe computer equivalent to 20 or 30 times the best Alienware computer, it took a week for the simulation to run. It then takes another few days or so to interpret the results. When I read the article they hadn't gone through the results yet. So, what if it turns out that they are wrong? They'll have to painstakingly go through all of their code and assumptions and then run it for another WEEK! So it could easily be on the order of a few months before they have a working simulation.

I'm currently doing a simulation that is nowhere near the magnitude of theirs. I'm just simulating a Bipolar Junction Transistor (BJT), which may sound daunting to the uninitiated, but is really pretty simple. Well, it's supposed to be simple. I've been at this simulation on and off for a few weeks not, trying to get it to work. It's really annoying because each time I change something and want to see what the result of the change is, I have to wait about 5-10 minutes. Then, if it's not right, I have to figure out what I'm doing, make a change and try again. It's quite annoying.

In comparison, I really miss my Java programming class. Every time I tried something new I would compile it and in less than two minutes I had a few errors that I could work on or if I happened to get it right, the program would run. Not only that, but a Java program, at least on the level of what we were doing, is a piece of pie.

Well, the simulation is giving me errors now, have to go deal with that.

---

*= I'm not arguing in favor of the big bang, it's just what they are researching. I think I have some posts about this, just not the time to go through my 500ish posts to find it...not right now anyway

Help Superman, Lois has been taken Captive by Lex Luthor!
Mood:  sad
Now Playing: Superman Theatrical Release I Theme Song
Topic: movies
It is a sad month for Hollywood. Last week Rodney Dangerfield died and, in my opinion, the SNL tribute was great. Now, Superman is dead: Christopher Reeves died yesterday. He was a Cornell Alum and, during his Senior year here, he was able to convince the dean to let him spend his Senior year at Julliard and still receive a Cornell Diploma. His roommate at Julliard was none other than the up and coming Robin Williams. According to all of the news reports, they were the best of friends. He graduated from both schools and became an actor. He was in some 1970s Soap Opera where he got picked up for the 1978 Superman movie. He starred in many more movies, some of then great and some flops. In 1995 he was thrown from his horse and was paralyzed. Once he established that he would survive, he began acting again. He was in a 1998 ABC remake of Rear Window which he directed. I saw it, and I thought he did a really awesome job. Most recently he was, appropriately, the advisor to young Superman in Smallville on the WB in the US.

He was 52.

"The one true superman has been taken from us but your red cape will fly again"
Steve Harley

Here is a link to the BBC news story on his death.

Benefit of Re-viewing Movies
Mood:  chatty
Topic: movies
I was watching Pulp Fiction again after watching Kill Bill Vols 1 & 2 and it seems to be that Bruce Willis uses a Hatori Hanzou sword when he fights Zed and the shop owner. If Quentin is setting up a Tarantino-verse, (and after all Vincent Vega is the brother of the crazy Vega in Resevoir Dogs and he was even going to make a movie call the Vega Bros that was a prequel to both) then how does this make sense? I mean, Hanzou swords aren't a dime-a-dozen.
*****SPOILER WARNING: If you haven't seen Kill Bill you may not want to read on ************
Well, here's my theory: when Bill goes to warn his brother about The Bride coming to kill him, he angers Bill by saying that he pawned his sword. At first I thought he was just saying that to hurt Bill because it seems that sometime in the past they had a fight. On his sword it says, "To my brother, the only other man I ever loved" so I thought he was saying this to spite Bill. Afterall, when the girls are fighting the sword is there for The Bride to use. Here's my revised timeline. The movie makes it seem as though The Bride shows up that night. Whether she shows up that night or later on, we still don't see what he does in the meanwhile. I content that his character had indeed pawned the sword to the owner of the store in Pulp Fiction. Afterall, PF takes place in LA and KB must be near there because Bill flees to Mexico. So after Bill warns him, he goes back to the shop. The owner is dead and his sword is lying there since Wallace's men would have had no need for the sword and wouldn't know what it was worth. He picks it up and then dips out.

Wow
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: random
A lot of people just have gone home for Fall Break or something because, for the first time since school started, I can see from the top of my buddy list to the bottom. That includes all of the group titles - because I have people very oragnized on my list. Real topics to come soon...q;o)

Terrorist Technicalities and The Presidential Debate
Mood:  chatty
Topic: News
According to this BBC news story, an Indonesian Embassy in France was the target of a bomb attack. Whether it's a terrorist attack in the most recent sense of the word (Al Qaeda-ish) or just a civil act of terror is currently unknown. But I was wondering about a technically based on material I've seen in movies, tv, and books. In my understanding, an embassy is technically the territory of the country it represents. This is why one can take assylum in an embassy because technically they are no longer in the country that the embassy is in. So, since I don't know for sure if this is true or to what degree it holds, let's assume that it's true. Does this mean that the terrorist attack was against Indonesia or France? You may think it's trivial, but it really isn't. If, hypothetically, Indonesia doesn't care about terrorism and it's an attack on them, then it doesn't matter. On the other hand, if an attack on France, then it doesn't matter what Indonesia thinks about terrorism, it depends on what France thinks. If anyone knows the answer, I'm very curious to know.

In other news, all of the Tv News pundits are calling Bush the winner of tonight's debates. I think that Kerry was the winner. Kerry was more eloquent and made better points. Bush was always jumping the gun, interrupting Charlie Gibson, and gave a bunch of gibberish answers. I'm not quite sure what they are basing Bush's win on. Maybe they feel sorry for him and want to say he won to even things out in the polls. Maybe that want to prove that there isn't a liberal bias in the media. Or, maybe it's because they focused on all kinds of random things like how he stood, what he did with his hands and his jokes. Frankly, I didn't like his jokes, I felt that they were a little disrespectful to the format. I also thought that most of the questions posed by the audience favored Kerry. So maybe they were rewarding the president for not doing poorly considering the questions he was given. At any rate, I don't agree with them at all.

mozilla or IE? the battle is ON!
Mood:  chatty
Now Playing: "I taste just like Candy" - Foxy Brown
Topic: computers
Well, on the ACCEL computers at school I've been using Mozilla Firefox for the entire semester. After reading an article that drew my attention to the fact that IE remained stagnant while other browsers were evolving I decided that I'd install it on my machine. I was using the internet when the first browser wars were going on and I remember that every few months either Netscape or MS would release new updates to their browsers. It was a very exciting time. Then MS won, and it ended for a while. But now, others are starting to make a comeback. I'll use Firefox for a week or so. If I like it better than IE, she gets to stay. If not, then I kick her to the curb and go back to trusty, if decadent IE. There IS one thing that I like a lot more in Firefox - tabbed browsing. It's the reason why I downloaded Netscape 7.1. But for some reason Netscape doesn't know how to view a few pages made for IE where Firefox has no problem. So Netscape is just "collecting dust" in the e-version of the term because I haven't used it in ages. I also like the toolbar that isn't just google, or yahoo, or MSN. It's all of them - you just click on a button to change. I just used dictionary.com's toolbar to double-check that "decadent" meant what I remembered it meaning. Yeah, I could just go to dictionary.com and search for it, but it's such a CPU cycle saver for it to already be at the right page. I don't need to waste my time loading up the main page if I don't have to. That's why I've been using the "run" command in windows o launch web pages instead of loading up the content-heavy MSN.com. Tune in to see who wins...

Test it yourself by getting Firefox @ http://www.mozilla.com

(Hopefully this week with Fall Break I can catch up with my school work and do some more substantial blogging)

I hope you finally get some respect...
Mood:  sad
Topic: movies
Rodney Dangerfield, actor and commedian best known for his tie and the line "I don't get no respect...", died today. He had become such an icon by the time of his death that he was even parodied on The Simpsons. We'll miss you tons! My prayers and thoughts go out to his family.