Author: galador

For those of you who don't know, Gaia Online is one of the Internet's largest communities.  In my experiences, it's also one of the Internet's largest concentrations of just plain dumb people.  When I first saw Gaia, I though, "Hey this could be neat, there's a huge community, maybe if I ever just want to have some sort of conversation or get some help or whatever, this'll be a good place to go."  Well, I was wrong.  Nearly all the posts on the first page of General Discussion are like: "ZOMG! I r g@y.  I5 n31 3ls3 g@y 2?" or "1'm EMO" or "1 l0v3 s3xorz."  And the computer stuff isn't much better:  "My computer's broke, fix it for me because I'm a lazy asshole who doesn't know anything about computers or how to fix them, but I expect everyone to know exactly what's wrong with my computer when I give you the most obscure problem and no technical information that you could use to narrow the problem down."  I know I've personally answered a thread about how to edit an MP3 or WAV file at least 4 times.  (And if you don't know, use Audacity)  These people are just plain dumb.  And then when you try to help them but it doesn't turn out right, they hate you with a passion and then make flame-wars about how you're stupid and you don't know anything.  

If you read this and would like to defend the name of Gaia, then by all means leave a comment telling me what I'm missing, and point me in the right direction.  Until then, I consider anyone who actually posts on Gaia frequently a gay emo kid who doesn't know anything about computers. 

*And I know I slightly exaggerated on the thread names, but other than that, it's pretty accurate in my eyes. 

This past week, I was off for Spring Break. I, of course, wasn’t fortunate enough to go somewhere cool like to Cancun or someplace like that, so I stayed at home and did pretty much nothing. I did go to a friend’s house just about everyday during Spring Break, so it wasn’t too bad. I did some work on DOT geek some and it’s coming along quite nicely.

I also went and saw two movies over Spring Break, UltraViolet and The Hills Have Eyes. Now, judging from the title of this post, do you think I thought they were good? Of course they weren’t.

First, let’s start with UltraViolet. This movie was terrible. The story was barely there and what little plot there was just caused the movie to become even dumber. The movie starts out, “I live in a world you may not understand.” And boy does that pretty much sum up the movie. Not only do you not understand it, you don’t want to understand it. The special effects were horrible, as well. Though there were some semi-cool fight scenes, nearly all of the CG looked “fake.” The movie just sucked altogether. I went with a friend and his little brother and his friend, and halfway through the movie, his little brother and friend just got up and told us they were going to go play video games in the arcade because, “this movie sucks!” Earlier, my friend had said, “Hey, this is a pretty good deal. For $24, we pretty much rented the whole theater.” We could soon see why no one else was in the theater.
Nextup for humiliation, The Hills Have Eyes. This one wasn’t much better than Violet, but it was slightly. This one is your standard dessert horror film. The cast is stranded in a desert, and they come upon a gas station manned by the crazy old geezer. Said geezer is under control of the local “mutated-radioactive-zombie-things” that kill all who come through the desert. It was very predictable. Another of my friends who went and saw this movie with me pretty much figured out the plot after 30 minutes, and almost got who would be alive at the end of the movie correct. And for the first hour, the action is so slow. Like, there’s so much story trying to get you attached to the hopless people stranded in the desert, but you just end up thinking, “come on, we know they’re going ot die, just get it over with.” Then when the killing does ensue, it ensues the violence and gore levle of this movie is well in the 8-9 range (out of ten). And there’s blood. Copious amounts of blood. Overall, it was like, “I know this is supposed to be scary, but they try too hard, and it just ends up being dumb.”

I think it was best summed up when my friend who went to both these movies with me said, “I guess we just can’t pick good movies.” It’s not us, though, it’s Hollywood releasing these crap movies and the 29th sequel to a movie no one like in the first place.

Well, our quiz bowl team won our regionals. W00t!

Ahem….anyway, we did excellently, as most of our scores were around the high-300’s (us) to mid-hundreds (them). And I ran (got all 10 right) a lightning round (answer as many questions out of ten as you can in 60 seconds). And this shows how much of a nerd I am…it was a Computer Acronym round. Oh well. Now we’re going to state!!!

Well, tomorrow (Saturday, 3-11-06), is our Quiz Bowl team’s regionals, and since I’m the “Music and Computers Guy, ” I’ve been having a major cram session tonight. First, I fired up good-ole’ Firefox and loaded Wikipedia. I did a quick seach for Symphonies and easily found a great reference. I did the same for operas and musical, and again, both searches turned out great.

That’s the beauty of Wikipedia. In normal encyclopedias, you wouldn’t find such lists that are great to start your research in, you would have to look up every composer, and even then, you probably wouldn’t get a list as detailed as the Wikipedia ones.

It took me three pages to find out enough information to fill out 111 cards… 111! Try finding 111 card’s-worth of information on sypmhonies, musicals, and operas on three pages in a regular encyclopedia set. I dare you.

So for those of you who don’t believe in the wondors of wiki yet *cough*Jason*cough* learn to love Wiki. Wiki is your friend.

I’ve always thought that those who worked at major retail stores (mainly computer retail shops) are the dregs of society. The retards of the world, if you will. Well, now I have irrefutable proof that this is true.

First of all, one of my computer’s motherboards went out recently because the capacitors expanded and bubbled over (a common problem with the generation of motherboards released with the Pentium IIIs). So I went to the local “mom and pop” store that the computer came from and got a new motherboard. While I was putting the processor in, the clip that holds the heatsink down to the CPU broke. The heatsink is a piece of metal that dissapates the heat, so that your CPU doesn’t catch your house on fire. (Or something like that. For a real definition look here.) It was about 5:00, so the mom and pop store would be closed, so I decided to go to Office Depot.

I didn’t really expect them to have one, but I didn’t want to travel an hour to get to the nearest CompUSA, and I had to do some other stuff, so I decided I would drop by and check at Office Depot. I decided to carry the broken clip with me, to use as a visual.

I walked up to the closest available Sales Associate, and asked him, in clear pronunciation and ennunciation, if they had “a CPU heatsink clilp” (in those exact words). I figured that even someone who wasn’t really very good at computer terms would recognize such key words as CPU and heatsink (at the least, recognize CPU). I even showed him the broken clip.

The man at first gave me a blank look, and then proceeded to do something even more despicable. He opened his mouth and these idiotic phrases proceeded to come out: “What do you use that for, to hold your paper?”

I proceeded to give him the “Are you the most retarded person on Earth?” look, and then explained to him (in the most low-level terms I could come up with while still in awe of how stupid this man was) what you use a CPU Heatsink clip was used for.

Luckily, another Sales Associate, who was fairly knowledgeable in the subject passed by, and the retard recovered himself slightly by asking the other SA for assistance. But of course, they didn’t have one, so I had to go through the ordeal with the retard for nothing. (though it did give me something to write about in my blog, so…whatever)

To remove any kind of sympathy you may have for this man, I’ll include a picture and ask you if you think you would use it to hold paper.

.

So, I returned to school today, after getting pretty much all week off last week, and boy do I have a ton of it.

In AP Calculus alone, I have around 50 problems, plus a take-home quiz, plus what we did in class today. In AP English, we were assigned Wuthering Heights to read in two weeks. And in AP Chemistry, we didn’t really have all that much, because our chemistry teacher had her baby. (Congratulations, Mrs. Russell!)

All my other classes are ones that we never get homework in, so that’s good.

Well, that’s all, I’m going to go do my homework for the next few hours or so. (Blast you calculus!)