Category: Old Shit

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!)

Well, it’s official, everybody decided to pack as much school-related crap into this week as humanly possible. In addition to all the stuff I said yesterday, I had to go moderate at the Quiz Bowl Tournament our school hosted today.

So, from about 7:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., I was working the Quiz Bowl Tourney.

While we had some free time between matches, I also helped to set up Clent’s personal website, where he hosts his blog. You can see it at http://www.clentstracner.com

I’m also trying to get it set up where people can get blogs on DOT geek. For example, if I wanted to get a blog at DOT geek and my username was B_006, then I would go to http://blogs.daysofthegeek.com/B_006 to view my blog. However, the wordpress mulit-user version doesn’t seem to like goddady very much. Oh well, I’ll work on it some more, and maybe people can eventually have DOT geek blogs.

The tourney was pretty fun, I got to moderate (read questions) for 5 rounds, all of which featured a team from Parkview Arts and Sciences Magnet School. The first three games, it was Parkview B; the fourth was both Parkview teams; and the last round in which I moderated it was Parkview A. The winner of the tournament was Cabot A, so congratulations Cabot! The trophies we got for the winners were pretty nice. The first place trophy was huge!

I think that’s enough rambling for now. Whenever I come up with some more content, I’ll keep you posted.

Man it’s been so freakin’ long since I’ve written a post here, but it’s because I’ve been so bleedin’ busy lately. Like this week I think I’ve been at my house for like a total of 40 hours (including sleep). I mean on Monday, I went to school and after that, I had to go shopping for some new clothes to wear to the EAST Partnership Conference, which I went to on Tuesday-Thursday. (More on that later.) Then today (Friday), our school band had contest, so I had to go to that.

First of all, EAST forums is no more. The site is still up, but as soon as the contract for the hosting is done, it will go down. It has been merged with another site I set up with some friends, http://www.daysofthegeek.com, or DOT geek, as we like to call it, will eventually be a mainly media site with podcasts or vidcasts. The forums will be run by the same people who ran the EAST forums, so you know they’re in good hands.

EDIT: It seems Timothy took EF down for good, though I’m sure we can find a good use for the webspace until the contract expires.
Our band got a “One” rating overall, which is the best rating you can recieve for band in the system we participate in.

I’ll probably post some stuff about the EAST conference later when I have a lot more time. There’s so much to write about, I had a great time!