hermiene.net

First, some IRC fun:

bloodymike

I think you'll love the symbology and the puzzles in [The Da Vinci Code].

bloodymike

And if it's condemned by the Vatican, you /know/ it's good.

Havard

Ooooh!

bloodymike

:-)

Havard

That's, like, the quality stamp right there: "Banned by the Vatican -- It's Gotta Be Good"

bloodymike

Well, they'll only ban it if it's true or scandalous, or both. It's win-win.

Havard

^_^

Second, Asimov was a hell of a writer. Sadly, I didn't finish as many books as I'd like to due to various distractions not under my direct control. The ones I did complete, however, are Robots and Empire, Prelude to Foundation, and Foundation. I won't spoil anything, but if you're planning on reading the series, you're in for a big treat at the end of Prelude to Foundation. I almost didn't believe it.

Third, distractions not under my direct control suck.

Fourth, and most importantly: Play StepMania. StepMania is an emulator for Dance Dance Revolution, a highly addictive game where the point is to hit arrows (either with your feet, as on the arcade machine, or with your fingers on the keyboard) as they pass a designated point on the screen. The more accurately you hit, the more points you get. Now, when you download StepMania, you won't have any songs; you'll have to download the songs for yourself and place them in the Songs folder where you installed the emulator (instructions on how to do this is included in the logically-named file Instructions.txt which resides in the Songs folder). A good place to get songs is Bemanistyle. You'll have to register, but I think you'll manage. The cool thing about StepMania is that it's fast and extremely configurable. Be sure to tweak all the settings you can! You probably won't understand what all the settings do the first time you fiddle around, but you'll understand when you've actually played the game some. Oh, and it uses PNG and XML. WIN!

There's now a books section on the Random page. I'm not entirely satisfied with the organization of it yet, but it'll do.

I will be away for about a week, at an incredibly dull place (read: Rural, computerless place). That won't be too bad though, because it will give me time to churn through even more of Asimov's work, making the trip less boring. Incidentally, while reading The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, and The Robots of Dawn, I noted that while the books feature a lot of conversation between robots and humans, I really missed conversations between robots. I was incredibly pleased to see that Robots and Empire contains a lot of that.

As for The Girl stuff, "bleargh". After a lengthy discussion about my conflicting feelings for her with my psychiatrist, we decided that the problem basically boils down to what can be poetically described as my heart saying "yes" and my brain saying "no". (Wait. Did he say psychiatrist? He did, but he didn't really mean it.) Let me make it perfectly clear, though, that there's nothing wrong with The Girl, but I believe we're just too different to ever be a good couple. We are, however, very good friends, and that's what I'll try to leave it as.

Play around with Meqon and RidigBody. It's great fun.

I realize that my site features a depressingly low amount of pictures, and while content is all yummy and such, I figure that a few pictures every now and then won't hurt. For instance, take a look at my neighborhood:

It's cold and icy, which means I'm freezing my butt off and can't do parkour, respectively. Here, check out my workstation:

To the left of my keyboard is my TI-83 Plus graphical calculator, which I wish were a TI-83 Plus Silver Edition (the former has a processor running at 6 MHz while the latter's runs at 15, making the rendering of graphs so much faster). To the left of my monitor is a bottle of Coca-Cola, which I really should be drinking less of. On top of my monitor are Elijah and Daneel, my two magical easter chicks who make sure that Fisher doesn't sneak up behind me and captures me while I'm consumed in my work, and who make sure that the gnomes residing in the walls of my house don't come out from the power outlets during the night and infiltrate my CAT-5 cable's RJ45 plugs, thus ensuring my computer its incessant connection to the Internet. No, it's true!

I've almost completely rewritten the About Me page, and it's now in a state which almost doesn't make me ashamed of who I am.

It's amazing to read Asimov's robot stories, because a lot of the events in them revolve around the Three Laws and the consequences thereof. In a particularly funny scene in The Caves of Steel, a character tries to strike a robot (whom it is very hard to distingush from a normal human being) in the face, and only partially succeeds; the robot moves backward, but doesn't entirely manage to dodge the attack. After that, the robot says That was a dangerous action, Francis. Had I not moved backward, you might easily have damaged your hand. As it is, I regret that I must have caused you pain.

I am (unfortunately?) becoming ridiculously good at StepMania.

Finished gathering quotes from Deus Ex. Most of them have already been there for some time, though.

Adam Guthrie has released his site! It looks very nice and I wish him the best of luck with it. :-)

dataportalen.com will be sold on June 1, and therefore it will no longer host my pages. This means I will have to find someone else to host my pages, but that's semi-impossible right now, so I will have to go with the alternative of hosting them myself. I was hoping not to, but the new canonical URL for my site will be http://havard.no-ip.info/, and it shouldn't be stable for more than a decade (at which time I expect I'll have bought a proper domain and proper hosting).

Incidentally, my E-mail address of pho@dataportalen.com will cease to work, and I ask that my new one, which is havard.skjaeveland@gmail.com, be used. All E-mail sent to pho@dataportalen.com will, however, be forwarded to my new E-mail address until June 1. This new address should be stable for at least a few decades, unless Google does something incredibly wrong. But that's highly unlikely.

Aggravatingly, my teacher gave up trying (before really trying at all) to get all teachers to agree upon a uniform format for the classes I take (you will remember my rant about our school's filthy intranet, it's:learning), reasoning that because she can't manage to get them to do other, completely unrelated stuff, this wasn't worth a try either. I was too depressed to pursue the matter any further, so I didn't.

I have permanently moved to Saneville. If you want, you can come join me. Otherwise, stay the hell away from me.

More people should read stuff from Asimov; he writes so extremely clearly and without ambiguity, it's almost scary. I picked up Counting the Eons, which is a non-fiction book, from my library today, to take a break from my reading-through of his Robot series. Listen to this:

"If the creationists had their way, this book and many others would be burned, and we would all be compressed into the narrow, narrow bounds of their tiny and unthinking view of the universe.

Well, I, for one, refuse to cower before them, refuse to truckle to them, refuse to compromise with them, and intend only to fight them—in order to preserve my simple right to think."