Håvard's web site — Full Archive

I added sorting to the Essays and Short Stories.

I'm reading Richard Dawkins' latest book, The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, which is an anthology of essays or extracts from books written by scientists themselves about science, as opposed to written by non-scientists, and it's excellent. So excellent, in fact, that I've taken the liberty of linking to "On Being the Right Size" (Haldane), "One Self" (Nicholas Humphrey), and an extract from Man in the Universe (Hoyle). As I continue reading, I'm sure I'll add more. (I also added another Gould essay not from the Dawkins anthology, "Size and Shape".)

I've split off the Gaming section of my Links page because it's getting crowded. I added a section for Emulation, and added links to PlayGuy and Gens, a Game Boy and Sega Genesis emulator, respectively. At first I abused the save states something fierce, but I soon discovered that the games are much more enjoyable if one doesn't do that. As a gesture of defiant anachronism, however, I'll continue using my 360 controller, because God damn it, it's such a good controller and I don't care what anybody says. I also added a link to GameFAQs, something I should've done a long time ago.

Oh, and that whole Chrome thang. I added a link to that too.

Did you play Spore yet? I was immensely disappointed. It's sort of interesting at first, but it hypes itself up and then doesn't deliver. No, give me GTA4 instead.

"I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."

Good news!

I now live with Even and Uy, two of my best friends. We live on the upper two floors of an apartment (a lady and her child live on the first floor) and have been living here for a week (getting settled in can take some time). Even has pictures.

After many failed attempts I've now gotten RAID set up on my computer! (It was failing to boot. I tried using a secondary RAID setup program in the BIOS, I tried flashing the BIOS, and I tried removing all disks but the ones I was going to set up. After a week of this, that last thing succeeded. So if you are trying to use RAID, the key insight is to remove all disks but the ones you plan to use for RAID. Maybe this is basic knowledge, but it kept me busy for a week, so I can't imagine I'm the only one wrestling with this.) I have two 150 GB WD Raptor disks in striping. Striping means that you split every file into as many parts as you have disks, and distribute them on all the disks. Since I have two disks, an 8MB file will be split in two and while the first 4 megabytes of the file is fetched from the first disk, the second 4 megabytes is fetched from the second disk. The result is blinding speed, but at the cost of risking loss of all data. (If one disk fails, half the data is gone and hence every file will be corrupted. If I had more disks I would use a parity disk, and the magic of XOR gates would solve all my problems.) Now to set up triple-boot with XP, Vista, and Ubuntu.

I've greatly looked forward to Geometry Wars 2 and it does pretty much everything right. In particular, I'm still amazed that it's possible to make a song that is exactly three minutes in duration!

The Links page has three new links: Bjørn Lynne (music), Aural Planet (music), and Encyclopedia Hiigara (encyclopedia). The Computer page was getting stale, so I removed it (the next time I do a complete rebuild of my computer, which I can't afford to now, I'll give it a cool name and a shiny new page).

Amazingly, I've read a book. It's the well-known The Prince by Machiavelli, and I didn't particularly like it, for about the same reasons I don't particularly like the Old Testament. Admittedly the OT is like throwing a hundred kittens into a blender while The Prince is like throwing only one, but that doesn't make it a nice thing to do.

To my delight and surprise, there are two new Wilburers, and in quick succession at that. If you don't know what that means then I suggest you go spelunking.

"Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses."

I bought an HTC Touch cellphone and noticed that my site looked horrible on it, so I whipped together some CSS to make it somewhat readable. It succeeded, but only browsers that obey the "handheld" CSS media type gets it. Aggravatingly this excludes IE. Thankfully it includes Opera Mobile.

I made this update with the phone's stylus, and now my hand hurts. I don't recommend it.

In my long absence I've been reading a lot, and in that course I discovered quite a lot of neato Essays. They are "Politics and the English Language" (Orwell), "The Dragon In My Garage" (Sagan), "Twelve Virtues of Rationality" (Yudkowsky), "The Median Isn't The Message" (Gould), "September 11, 1901" (also Gould), "1967" (the name was given ad hoc since it was Russell's last and he didn't name it), "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (Nicholas Carr), "A Godless Ramble Against the Ditherings of Theologians" (PZ Myers), and "Planet of the Hats" (also Myers). I've also read a lot of short SF stories, some of which I've transcribed and linked to in Short Stories: "If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth...", "History Lesson", "Expedition to Earth" (all three by Clarke), and "Counter Charm" (Peter Phillips). As for books, I've read The Zombie Survival Guide and Expedition to Earth (an anthology book from which I took the Clarke stories).

I cleaned up the Links page a bit, culling dead links and adding some new ones (tools, a deviant artist, The Jefferson Hour, and Cave Story Deluxe). I did the same with my books; I deleted reviews that were only descriptions and didn't contain a recommendation. Sometime I will have to re-read all those and make proper reviews.

As for games, Shadowgrounds and its sequel Shadowgrounds Survivor are awesome (and cheap), available from Steam. The first game has a truly unconventional ending and the second one has interesting protagonists. Apart from that, virtually all my gaming time has been sunk into Ninja Gaiden II. I have all the achievements for it except the one for clearing the game on Path of the Master Ninja. (Which is unfairly difficult. You will have to try it to understand and those who have will nod their weary necks in painful recognition.) So I've updated my little Ninja Gaiden Miscellanea section.

Finally, there's a new item in the Random page's Fun section, Trace Elements. Feel free to send me corrections and suggestions!

Here are some pretty pictures.

• A wren (Malurus cyaneus).
• A Yellow-winged Darter (Sympetrum flaveolum).
• Pretty parrots!
• An MV-22 Osprey refueling.
• A cluster of mountains in Helgeland, Norway called The Seven Sisters (De Syv Søstre in Norwegian). There are actually quite a few geographical formations in the world called this. For instance, some chalk cliffs in England.

"The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."

I rearranged the webcomic links into sections of update frequency. A lot of them fell into Haphazard.

I added alexiuss and Philipstraub to the deviantART section of Links.

Joy! Behold the new Readings section, visible in the navigation bar! I put all books, short stories, and essays into databases, making maintainance super easy. You can sort them by author, title, or publication year, and adding new methods of sorting is a breeze. I kept my rather arbitrary categorization into science fiction, other fiction, and non-fiction (I culled manga since I don't read it any more). It's convenient, but I might change it in the future. Who knows, maybe my reading habits will eventually cover more branches of literature?

The books I've read since last time are Halo: The Flood, Asimov Laughs Again, The Life & Fables of Aesop, The Truth About Chuck Norris, The Portable Atheist, and 50 Short Science Fiction Tales. That last book is a compilation of SF short-short stories and I transcribed the ones I thought were awesome and put them on the shiny new Short Stories page. I have a few more I want to transcribe, so if you like the ones that are there, watch the page. I also added three new essays, "SF Words and Prototype Worlds" by Eric S. Raymond, "Thoughts of God" by Mark Twain, "Gaps in the Mind" by Richard Dawkins, and "Why We Need Academic Freedom to Question Newtonism" by PZ Myers. Speaking of Myers, he is funny, thoughtful, and hilariously entertaining, so I linked to his Pharyngula.

I've sunk a lot of my free time lately into playing the various Ninja Gaiden games. The payoff? Not much: Ninja Gaiden Miscellanea, which should only be interesting to you if you're as obsessed with Ninja Gaiden as I am (Ninja Gaiden II can't get here fast enough).

I added a new section to the Links page, Gaming encyclopedias, and shuffled things around a little bit. I've also read a couple of books, but I'll wait with those until I've fixed the sorry state of my Books page. (The pieces of data on that page are ordered exactly as typed. That's right, no database. The manual nature of it makes me cry.)

I've linked to lots of things.

For essays, there's "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" by Theodosius Dobzhansky, "Philosophy of science 101" (PDF) by Massimo Pigliucci, and "The Awful German Language" by Mark Twain. I love how many essays are just delicious little nuggets of enlightenment.

For the Links page, there's Point of Inquiry, Rationally Speaking, and AskGLaDOS.

As for Books there's only Kjetterbibelen which I bought on a whim and which turned out to be merely OK. I'll try to read more books. (I've been really bad at that lately, in favor of articles, essays, and podcasts, most of which doesn't even make it on my site.)

With that out of the way, I should really be more of a producer of information instead of a consumer. I'm sorry, but the world is just so darned interesting and most of the time I just want to gaze and marvel, with my drooling tounge on the floor, at the stupendous awesomeness of everything. Yes, this is a poor excuse.

"Lead us, Evolution, lead us
Up the future's endless stair:
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us,
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us nobody knows where."

Happy birthday, Darwin.

I fixed two egregious mistakes that have been lurking in my archived news' navigation for too long (it would link to non-existent posts from 1969) and I cleaned it up a bit and made it more navigable while I was at it.

Sad news. I broke up with Marie.

I made several mistakes. Chief among them was jumping into the relationship before I got to know her (we only dated for about a week), but I also put off ending it way too long (I started to see it would fail and didn't do anything about it as fast as I should have). I blame myself. I managed to delude myself into thinking Marie was everything I wanted her to be, just as I did with my previous crush, Yvonne (except in that case my delusion wasn't wholesale wrong). Apparently this is the way I learn: By painful trial and error. I'm just inexperienced, I think. A good painter would see the novice's mistake. A good martial artist would see the better way of beating that guy in the bar fight (a good diplomat would find a way to avoid the fight altogether).

Someone experienced in the art of girlfriendery would easily spot my mistakes.

Marie is sweet and well-intentioned, no doubt, but she's not the girl for me. We're on different sides of the bell curve and I believe we're incompatible for chiefly that reason. I guess I'm not exempt from delusion and I hope I've been badly enough burned by this to not put my hand on the wrong plate again. Anyway, I've dug myself quite the emo hole and it's time to begin my slow crawl up from it.

I majorly redid the Links page, shuffling things around and removing several links that I didn't use (most notably many web comic links and all the Half-Life single player modification links), in addition to rewriting the whole thing.

I played around with Facebook; I've got an account. It's sort of fun, I admit.

I have added Beyond Belief I and II (symposia), Galbadia Hotel (OSTs for anime and games), SIW (tool for figuring out what your computer is made of), and PolishPanties (a deviantARTist who did an awesome commission for me) to the Links page.

I have read (well, listened to) Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things, and with it I created a new status for my books, Audio (which means I've only listened to the book, not read it; I have several books that I both read and listen to, but the "read" statuses trump the "audio" status).

I bought a BenQ 24" LCD monitor which handles a delicious 1920x1200 resolution. I've only hooked it up to my Xbox 360, but this means that I finally play my games in HD, not SD! However, HD monitors have lower resolution than the real world; I can't wait till we have, say, SHD (super-HD) and 100 Hz (24, 25, 29.97, 30, and 60 are all jokes) for consoles. (There is a chance, given the history of giving acronyms to screen resolutions, that we'll buggle them up. Who wants WQUXGA-HD?)

So, with my delicious HD monitor in hand, I played and finished Halo 3 and Mass Effect. Halo 3 was what I expected it to be (less of the bad things from the prequels, more of the good), but Mass Effect absolutely blew me off my feet. It has a deep story, excellent voice acting, interesting characters, and a new conversation system (instead of reading through all the text you want your character to say you simply choose a general reply from a wheel which then cues up). I've finished it once, striving for Paragon, and I now want to play through it again, walking the Renegade path.

I've spent much of my time lately with my girlfriend, which sort of explains why this update is so late. More on that later.

Well, it looks like it tilted the right way. You geeks have fun with your Companion Cubes; I'll keep my Companion Girl warm, and not by throwing her into an incinerator.

Hello again, Internet.

This update was due a couple of days ago, but I've been busy. With what, you ask? With being in love, I answer. I've been dating for a few days, and the girl (whose name is Marie) is very sweet. I don't want to prognosticate on the outcome (it may tilt either way, but I hope and think it will tilt the right way), so in the mean time I'll stick to geeking it out.

When I started working at Datakjeden, things were a huge mess in the back (where there's a repair shop for laptops, desktops, and miscellaneous other things that the store sells). Things are still a mess, but orders of magnitude less so. I don't think I can attribute this to any Herculean effort on my part, but I hate mess and love order, so it's natural for me to want to reduce chaos and increase neatness. Also, little birds are whispering to me and they tell me that things really were a whole lot worse before I came. I don't know whether there's correlation or causality going on here, but in any event things are getting neater and that makes me happy.

I have two new intellectual heroes! Massimo Pigliucci (a biologist) and Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard (a theoretical astrophysicist). Maybe I should make a list of real heroes, to mirror my fictional ones?

My Links page now has drastically smaller images, because I realized that links, not images, should be the stars of that show. I also added two new sections, Cerebral (into which I created Science and moved Books) and deviantART (which links to individual artists that I like). I also added pinouts.ru (a huge repository of pinout schematics for electronic components), richarddawkins.net (a fan-driven site for the biologist and author Richard Dawkins), Growing Up in the Universe (a children's lecture on evolution by Dawkins), Decorum (a web comic), Charles Darwin Online (a repository of stuff written by or about Darwin), and talk.origins (a very good explanation of what evolution is, and the details and history of the evolution/creationism debacle).

As for books, I've read The Human Body: Its Structure and Operation by Isaac Asimov, Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor by, uh, Isaac Asimov, Flatterland by Ian Stewart, and Sphereland by Dionys Burger. As for essays, I've read a couple of more.

I haven't had all that much time left for gaming, but I did play (and finish) Assassin's Creed, and I'm now working on the achievements. It's a very good game, but the story gameplay is repetitive. It's a good thing that the general gameplay is good and that the achievements are fun. I haven't yet played Halo 3 (sorry), but I will.

While making my life easier by messing around with PHP and the Links page, I learned that PHP doesn't support function overloading! However, it does do default values for arguments. Here's how it works. Well, here's how it doesn't work:

function func($foo) {
  func($foo, true);
  ...
}

function func($foo, $bar) {
  if ($bar) {
    ...
  }
  ...
}

Uh-oh. Overloading the function with a different signature won't work. Oh, fie. Here's another way of getting the desired result, with default values:

function func($foo, $bar = true) {
  if ($bar) {
    ...
  }
  ...
}

Now you can go ahead and call func('Shizzle') or func('Shizzle', false) as if it was overloaded. Still, real overloading would be more fun...

Hello, Internet.

A few of my friends are wondering where I am. I'm right here, so don't you worry. This should probably be the first and only "I'm still here" update, and I only do it because you're impatient. But as previously established, don't you worry. Stuff is coming.

I added four more essays. I only have a few more to reread and add, and then I'll start reading totally new ones (I have a few of those, too).

I've read Asimov on Numbers and The Relativity of Wrong. I read the standalone essay online a few years ago, and now that I have the book, I see that a sizeable chunk of the essay is missing in the online versions! (Well, all the ones I could find, anyway.) This was insufferable so I painstakingly and meticulously transcribed the essay from my 1989 Oxford University Press paperback edition of The Relativity of Wrong and linked to it in the Essays section of the Books page.

I have a new E-mail address, havard@awegasm.net ! This is much better than the longer havard.skjaeveland@gmail.com , but the former address still forwards everything to the latter (I love GMail).

Here, have some Wikipedian eye candy. (Click for larger versions.)

• The Kata Tjuta mountains in Australia.
• Lake Fryxell in Antarctica.
• Osprey landing in its nest.
• The Amundsen-Scott station in Antarctica under an aurora australis.

I added some more Essays, and I have a bunch more I'll add later (I want to reread them before I do). There's tons of stuff to do at my work, and therefore I'm working way more than I should, and this cuts into my free time. (A neat thing about language is that excuses can be cast as explanations, and these sorts of casts occasionally turn out to be true.)

However, Portal was just released, and I managed to play it. It blew me away. In recognition of this I've changed the description of my link to Narbacular Drop to recommend Portal.

"Now these points of data
make a beautiful line.
And we're out of beta.
We're releasing on time.
So I'm GLaD. I got burned.
Think of all the things we learned
for the people who are
still alive.

Look at me still talking
when there's Science to do.
When I look out there,
it makes me GLaD I'm not you.
I've experiments to run.
There is research to be done.
On the people who are
still alive."

I added LibriVox and Project Gutenberg (under the new Books section), and Bad Astronomy, to the Links page. I also added the Essays and Short stories sections to the Books page. I've read a lot more than those which are already on there, but those were the ones I could think of off the top of my head (I'll add the remaining ones as I remember them).

I bought the entire Commander Keen series and also a small indie game called Gumboy Crazy Adventures (which is superbly excellent) from Steam. Online delivery of games (particularly indie games) is wonderful. The corollary, of course, is death to brick-and-mortar software stores!

I've been playing a lot of N lately. I immediately realized it was long, but I had no idea (I'm currently at Episode 59 out of 100). It's wickedly fun, go try it.

My site has moved. Thanks to Alexander Krivacs Schroeder for hosting it all that time, and thanks to James Blair for hosting it for me now. I appreciate it.

Just as I got into 360 gaming again, I got the deadly three red lights and now I'll have to send it in for repairs. Great.

I've read Asimov's light-weight Words from the Myths.

My Xbox Live account has been fixed! I don't know when this happened, but it must have been when I wasn't looking. The Contact page now correctly reflects my new gamertag (Hermiene).

I downloaded (and am now hooked on) Boom Boom Rocket.

Maybe I should stop this punctuated equilibrium style of updating and go back to something resembling a sane update schedule? That all depends on what you want.

First some house keeping. Links: N (a ninja game), EDuke32 (an emulator for Duke Nukem 3D), Xerxes Music (downtempo electronic music), Launchy (handy application), Spamusement (web comic about spam), and Legorobot (web comic about unstable people). Books: The Epic of Gilgamesh, God is not Great, The Demon-Haunted World, and The Great Scientists. I've been reading lots of non-fiction lately, as you can see. I should read a fiction book every once in a while.

Since my school (NITH) closed down in Stavanger (where I currently live) we were all supposed to move to Oslo and continue there. I should have started there by now, but I decided to take a year off to work so that I don't have to take up a huge loan when I move. I work at Datakjeden where I lurk in the back, fixing computers. I've actually been looking for an excuse to learn lots more about computer hardware. I guess I found my excuse. Since starting there I bought an MP3 player, and it's so neat. I can't see how I ever lived without one. On the bus to work I can listen to music and read books, or listen to people talking (I've been having fun at richarddawkins.net's audio archive lately).

I've also played Ninja Gaiden Sigma a lot. It's a remake (and exclusive rerelease for the PS3) of Ninja Gaiden Black, which was itself a remake of the Xbox version of Ninja Gaiden (which was a spiritual sequel to the three Ninja Gaiden games for NES; mmmm, titles). It's very, very good. First of all it's in HD, and it's got shinier graphics. Second of all it's got the Dragon's Fang and Tiger's Claw. Thirdly, you can run and fight on water. The only downside is playing as Rachel. While realistic jiggling is pretty fun (you can't deny that), the combat soon gets repetitive as her only weapon is the Warhammer (a slow and unwieldy axe).

BioShock. Yes. Let's just say that it doesn't disappoint. Not one bit. It's not nearly as scary as System Shock 2 (mainly because it's so scripted, I suspect), but it nails the feeling of total isolation. It's also very pretty.

My site needs an overhaul, and it needs a new house. And the pages itself need to be worked on. I'll get working on that next. And I'll try not to leave you in the dark so much this time.

"We can pray over the cholera victim, or we can give her 500 milligrams of tetracycline every twelve hours. (There is still a religion, Christian Science, that denies the germ theory of disease; if prayer fails, the faithful would rather see their children die than give them antibiotics.)"

Write Articles, Not Blog Postings by Jakob Nielsen contains good advice.

My site has been down for a little while, but I've fixed it (it was an IP issue).

I've read Pale Blue Dot.

I added Ballance (a game), Ebon Musings (a collection of articles, links, and book reviews), and Mindstalk (a personal site) to the Links page. I've read Unweaving the Rainbow. The Full Archive now has a reverse chronology feature.

Some time ago when I went to the pharmacy to buy some medicine (I'm asthmatic) I picked up an organ donor card, and I carry it around with me in my wallet. It feels good to know that in the event of my death, someone else can make use of my organs. My heart is an engine forged from the remnants of a dead star, and there's no reason to hog it.

In slightly more exciting news, I'm translating f8d to Norwegian! The author tells me that my link was the first he saw, and was one of the things that inspired him to keep writing. Working on the translation is fun.

I just finished watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos and I shed a (decade late) tear for his demise. He was such a good educator.

Well, that sure was a hell of an update drought, wasn't it? I have a bit to show for it, though.

As always, more links are to be found on the Links page: Online Etymology Dictionary, f8d, Dresden Codak, Big Science, and Proverbs.

I've read a few more books: The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, A Devil's Chaplain, The Satanic Rituals, and Age of Spiritual Machines.

I played through System Shock 2 again, and extracted quotes along the way. It's still a great game.

You should watch Beyond Belief 2006. Those guys are idea ninjas.

I watched the entire (first) season of Firefly along with Even, and now I've joined the ranks of the lamenting fans that Glench talks about. It truly is a jewel.

I've solved a bunch more Project Euler problems, recorded on Random.

When reading Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker I was inspired by his description of a program that tries to generate the phrase "METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL" by both single-step chance (all tries are separate) and multi-step selection (if a try is slightly similar to the target phrase it's bred from in the next try), so I whipped up my own little test (it's immensely inferior; Dawkins' program reaches the phrase in around 40 generations, while mine does so in, on average, 10,000 generations). I might make it a Java applet, when I learn how, but if you want you can try to decipher it from the source. I'll try to explain how it works. First it generates a totally random string of equal length to the target phrase. It then breeds children from it (ten by default), and each child has a small chance of having one of its letters changed to a completely random character. The children are then rated, and the one that's most similar to the target phrase becomes the parent of the next generation. It goes on like this until it reaches the target phrase.

It could probably be made much faster by using sexual reproduction rather than asexual reproduction, by having mutation shift a letter slightly up or down the letter array instead of mutating it completely at random, and by tweaking the parameters (number of children, mutation rate).

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

I updated the Contact page. Also, age++. Happy arbitrary day for me!

"Does that make sense? Be honest."

Greetings and salutations. I had better update my site, because Even threatened to cast various curses on me and a bunch of my friends if I didn't. Now, I'm not one prone to take the mystical workings of arcane magic seriously (you know, because of the lack of evidence), but if you were to gaze upon the face of this acquaintance of mine I'm positive you'd agree that... Well, let us just say that his eyes have a mesmerizing effect on your psyche, and frankly, I'd not take any chances with that guy. I'm afraid that his basement walls are scribbled with incantations to Baphomet and various other minor demons with the blood of brutally slain goats, or something. I really don't want to know, and (I hope) neither would you. So here you go!

I've read Shadow of the Hegemon (a military thriller masquerading as science fiction), The God Delusion, Built to Last (A Creation book, no less), and Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. My Books page is getting bigger, and for every book I finish I learn about the existence of ten more. This is a good thing because it ensures that I'll never be bored. (I was aware of this before I started reading seriously, because that concept is far from limited to books. I'm sure you can come up with examples.)

I cleaned up dead links in Links! Hopefully there'll be no more 404s. Or 403s. You deserve only 200s. If there are still broken links, please let me know. I also linked to Shyguy's Cave of Death, a Java game by my good friend Alex Spurling.

I flirted with Vista, but I discovered that the relationship can't go on unless she shapes up. She's pretty and she does her core jobs well, but after a while the sex gets boring and you want her to do practical things such as scanning stuff (like paper) and running stuff (like games). She currently fails miserably at both, but I suspect it's partly the fault of her burly friends, Canon and NVIDIA. Sorry, Vista. Come back when you've convinced your friends to treat you nice, and we'll give this thing another shot.

I briefly mentioned that my school, NITH, is closing in Stavanger. NITH gave those interested a free trip to Oslo to see the campus there, and (naturally) I attended. It's very nice. And large. I also met a few of the lecturers, and they seemed like an interesting bunch. (Out of pure whimsicality I'll mention that one of them looks a little like Christopher Walken; he even talks somewhat like him! It's uncanny, but awesome.)

One last thing: Check out Jones Avenue, the web comic of one of my recently-acquired IRC friends. It's hilarious at times.

It's been a little over a month, but so what?

I spent a few consecutive days watching the archive of Ze Frank's the show on recommendation from Glen. It's awesome, and I lament Ze's decision to let it end this March.

After two failed starts, I've finally finished Ur-Quan Masters! In celebration you, my dear reader, will be treated to some quotes. Happy reading.

As seems to have become somewhat of an informal tradition, I've read two new books prior to this news post, too: Children of the Mind and Ender's Shadow. I also managed to find a new quirky web comic, Nearing Zero. The Internet is a deep well of amazing secrets. It's a house with infinite levels of basements. It's a can of fun without end. It's an unsolvable and enticing Megaminx. It's a sea in which you can't get lost. It's anything but a superhighway, although that metaphor has the speed thing going for it.

As for my slow updating, I give no apology! I've spent some time tending Llamaphobia (this is an explanation, not an apology), but in any case my site is here for the long haul. There's no hurry.

Doodle is dead, and rightly so, but its spirit lives on at Llamaphobia! Yes, I'm pretentious enough to call it a full-fledged web comic. And look, I even made up for missing yesterday's strip by including it there. Yay! Thanks to relsqui for the comic's title and James Blair for hosting it.

I increased my Geometry Wars score from 23M to 24,937,870 and regained my rank at 27th place. Why is it that I can only increase my score a few million points at a time?

I'll miss today's comic, but only because I'm working on something sweet and awesome. And by the way, I have a buffer of comics, so it's not like I haven't been working (I have!). I also retroactively removed the two comics I have already made from my news posts. I realized that posting them like that is the first step down the slippery slope to a tumblelog (it's already bad enough that I refer to my site as a blog rather than a personal web site, which is what I'm trying to make it into).

More later.

Two new web comics added: Cyanide and Happiness and Kittybot. I swear, the crazy thing isn't that there are twenty-seven comics being linked to. It's that I actually follow them all.

I also read two books: Xenocide and Letter to a Christian Nation. The latter made me want to read its predecessor, The End of Faith, which I'll definitely buy on my next Amazon spree.

Doodles! Say hello to Doodles, our newest member. (Now dead, replaced by Llamaphobia.) I plan to post small doodles every Monday and every Friday, without fail. I'm not at all inspired by xkcd. No, sir!

I read a Dawkins essay called The Real Romance in the Stars, and a quote struck me:

"Note, accordingly, how little it means to say something like 'Uranus moves into Aquarius'. Aquarius is a miscellaneous set of stars all at different distances from us, which have no connection with each other except that they constitute a (meaningless) pattern when seen from a certain (not particularly special) place in the galaxy (here). A constellation is not an entity at all, not the kind of thing that Uranus, or anything else, can sensibly be said to 'move into'."

And indeed, it can't "move into Aquarius." Using the power of modern computers and a mountain of astronomical data, I have put together a little demonstration with the awesome program Celestia (I recommend you check out the effect for yourself in real-time 3D). Here is Uranus as viewed 100 kilometers from its surface. One can just make out the Aquarius constellation. (Click for larger versions.)

Zooming out to about a million kilometers, one can see the orbits of Uranus' many satellites.

At one astronomical unit (the distance between the Earth and the Sun) above the surface, the orbits of all its 27 satellites are visible. Some of the stars in the Aquarius constellation are visible.

At 120 AUs, the whole Solar System is visible, and Uranus' orbit is highlighted in red.

At one light year away from Uranus, our sun is still visible, but its planets are not.

At 50 light years out, we see the sphere that Celestia uses to draw constellation borders. It's completely irrelevant now, of course, so the next picture will have it removed.

At 300 light years out, the illusion of a constellation as a coherent entity completely breaks down, and one is left with imaginary (and ultimately meaningless) lines connecting the stars.

What can you learn from this? "Astrology is bunk" is a good lesson. "The charlatans who steal weak-minded people's money using astrology are fools" is another good lesson. Again, the effect is much better seen in real-time 3D. Go download Celestia.

I got a part-time job at the local water park! This translates into a positive stream of monetary units into my bank account. I spend most of my time at work telling grown men how to behave themselves ("Sir, please don't climb the slides"). The fun part is that they accept my authority over them because I have a shiny uniform and they don't. (The same applies to jocks. Revenge, if not sweet, is at least appreciable.)

Bad shit going down. NITH Stavanger is closing its doors next summer, so that means I will have to move to either Bergen or Oslo to attend the school. If I move (which seems the most realistic option) I'll move to Oslo. I hate things which unnecessarily complicates my life, but from what little I've seen of the city, I like it, so moving should only be mildly annoying.

I've read and linked to no fewer than three web comics: Sinfest (which I read a little bit of a long time ago, before I started linking to web comics), Gone With the Blastwave, and Dueling Analogs. I also linked to Airbase, something I should have done a long time ago considering I've bought all their music. I also linked to Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection (I've fallen completely in love with Net; thank, relsqui!). My Links page seems more and more like a virtual supermassive black hole, except instead of light, it sucks your time.

I've read Ender's Game and Engines of Creation. The next update should see several more books.

"I'm a lean, mean pattern recognition machine."

I've only solved one more Euler problem, but I've increased my Geometry Wars and Mutant Storm scores! I increased my Geometry Wars score from 22M to 23M, getting me one rank up to 27. Next time I'm aiming for 80M. I will get there. My Mutant Storm score (single player adventure mode) is now 7,972,660. I visited Niels-Henrik's place and we managed to get our two player adventure mode score to 8,902,120 despite not playing seriously. There's much potential in that one.

I've read Ender's Game, and now I want to read more books.

Seen the Episode 2 trailers? For all I care, the 21st century will start when I get my hands on that awe-inducing game. Everything Valve touches becomes pure, undiluted gold.

"The more I see, the more I do."

I solved a bunch of Euler problems, a lot of them with BigInteger. It's a bit like biking uphill backwards, chased by angry goats, only your brakes don't work and your gears are covered in syrup. But I managed.

Music with good lyrics is still elusive, but I managed to hunt down a few! Artists, make more songs with awesome lyrics. Best regards, Hermiene.

Alexander K. Schrøder made SVG versions of some of my PNG insignia. Go vector!

"I am happiest when my lasers hit things."

My site is now 70% less pretentious! I removed a ton of Big Quotes (quotes by Important People) from my random quotes list and repopulated it with obscure ones. I'm in a whimsical quotation mood, you see. I also fixed my favicon. Before, I had two files, favicon.ico and favicon.png. I had done something wrong when I made the .ico one; it discarded transparency information from the source file. This new one keeps transparency information, so the favicon should appear nice everywhere.

I've linked to True Launch Bar. It's an awesome little tool, and my desktop looks shinier because of it.

I've only solved one more Project Euler problem. There are a few of them that I know how to solve conceptually, but all of them require manipulation of Really, Really Big Numbers. Java's BigInteger class handles arbitrary-length numbers, but it's a pain to work with. To add a number to a BigInteger object, for instance, you have to go obj.add(obj2), where obj2 is also a BigInteger. God forbid Java should support operator overloading so that one could go obj + 5. Sigh.

"Just because you are unique does not mean you are useful."

I've solved more Project Euler problems.

"A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them."

I've solved a few more Project Euler problems and read Ringworld.

A friend at school showed me operator overloading in C++. It's so cool because it lets you use arithmetic operators for whatever you want to, not restricted to arithmetic expressions. What does it mean to multiply a string by an integer, for instance? You could say, "concatenate this string n times with itself" so that "abc" * 3 results in "abcabcabc". Or it could mean, "produce the next three characters in the sequence and concatenate it", resulting in "abcdef". This might be illogical, but the point is that the behavior is entirely up to you. A more realistic example would be that of adding items to an inventory in an RPG (incidentally the example I was shown). Instead of doing something like Inventory.add(sword, shield, arrows) you could go Inventory += sword + shield + arrows. It would be so neat if Java supported operator overloading.

Java does support method and constructor overloading, which make things more powerful. It also has explicit constructor invocation, which is totally awesome.

I'm a web comics junkie, I know! Now, before you start scheming that intervention, check out Simulated Comic Product, Soup, and The Pretentious History of Everything, which are now linked to. I've also linked to Jim Wisniewski, who promptly became a Wilburer. (The first one in a long time. Who's next?)

"We don't like it when the city pigeons break wings. When the pigeons break wings, then we can't get down."

I've read Stranger in a Strange Land, and I implemented the Sieve of Eratosthenes. That's not a big achievement, but it's a small victory. I want to learn lots more about algorithms; they look pretty.

"I like your tactics. They are similar to mine."

My Geometry Wars record has made two jumps: The first was to 13M, and my current score is 22,084,965, making me the 28th best player in the world. Whooo! I'm slowly climbing the leaderboard; I'll be happy to reach top ten.

I'm doing Project Euler again, and this time I have a section for it for bragging. Yeah, I realize there's not much there to brag about. Yet.

I've linked to Pure Pwnage and Ask A Ninja. I also killed PHP Alacrity. It never really went anywhere, and the code was anyway ugly.

Java annoyance! Specifically, its lack of nextChar() in the Scanner class. It has similar methods for int (nextInt()), float (nextFloat()), and boolean (nextBoolean()); is full primitive types coverage too much to ask for? On September 25 I claimed that in Java, methods are called functions; that was wrong. Mea Culpa. Apparently subroutines in classes are methods and subroutines elsewhere are functions. And then there's that whole thing about distinguishing between functions (which return values) and procedures (which do not). Thankfully Java doesn't do that. In any case, I prefer the term function; it describes the structure very well, and if further clarification is needed I'll qualify it as necessary, thank you very much.

I rewrote About Me. It's shorter now, but also denser. I'll write about miscellanea later.

Even made me a new banner. Thanks! It looks awesome.

My Ceometry Wars score has been increased three times. The first was an increase by about a thousand points, which didn't even earn me a better rank. (Consulting this list of enemies, you'll find that 1000 points is ten Green Squares at 1x multiplier, or one Green Square at 10x multiplier.) Then, I played a very good round at Even's with his awesome (and HD) projector; I got just over 6.5M points, and not on my profile. Joy. But lo, things got better: I eventually managed 9,200,060 points, which lands me just under rank 100. It seems that my break (however brief) paid off.

I've completely ditched fenixs85@hotmail.com and I'm now only using havard.skjaeveland@gmail.com (both for regular E-mail and MSN). Death to anachronisms.

Java programming has started for real, and I now think I have a pretty clear understanding of what OOP really is, though I'm sure there's a lot of black magic to be unlocked. I've noticed that a few of my classmates (those who haven't done any sort of programming before) are having trouble understanding methods (or functions, as they're really called). I think I know why: We're taught about classes and object before going into the syntax and uses of functions. How is one supposed to grok methods when one doesn't understand what a method call is?

I'm still working on site stuff, though not as rapidly as I'd wanted to. In any case, I've linked to XPize and there's the new Fictional heroes section of the Random page.

Life is a juggling competition. At least, mine is.

Between getting set up at NITH, improving my TrackMania records (both Sunrise and Nations), and playing, uh, Sokoban, my days recently have consisted mostly of trying to beat my XBLA records (in particular those of Mutant Storm and Geometry Wars). My thumbs are almost bleeding, so for now I'm satisfied with them and will take a break from them. Mentioning it makes this semi-official.

I also feel sort of bad, now. I was supposed to work a whole lot on the site, which I haven't done due to aforementioned distractions. I'm sorry. I will shape up, really.

My Wing Chun training has started up again after a few months' hiatus (we use a school's gymnasium and have to follow their schedule), and starting up again is awesome. I finally feel like a non-newbie! To be sure I don't yet know anything particularly cool, but what I do know I feel that I can master. I think I'm also starting to get the hang of feeling the opponent's motions when in contact, which I'm told is important as one progresses to the more advanced stuff. I need lots more training with this, to be sure, but I at least understand it conceptually now.

Whooo! I beat my Adventure Mode record in Mutant Storm Reloaded by just over a million points. It's now 6,922,900.

I went through all the single player levels in Mutant Storm Reloaded's Tally Mode and improved several of them. My new score is 20,342,880, which places me around place 60. I tried and tried and tried, but neither my Mutant Storm Reloaded Adventure Mode high score nor the Geometry Wars one has been beaten. Why are those games so damned hard? If my bragging annoys you, please recall my shameless braggard policy.

I cleaned up the Links page a good deal by removing the Internet radios section (I don't listen to them anymore) and rewriting a lot of stale things. I also added Sokoban++ (a puzzle game), War§ow (a first-person shooter), and Dinosaur comic (a comic about, surprisingly, dinosaurs). I think Links is becoming a pretty comprehensive archive of cool and interesting links. Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about my other pages.

I've started my first week at NITH (the Norwegian School of Information Technology). I'm eager to start doing real programming, which starts next week.

I've gathered a few new music quotes and added an Antiquity section to my Quotes page. My Links page's Gaming section gains even more weight: Enigma (a huge puzzle game) and Warning Forever (a manic 2D shooter).

As if anyone actually cares, I'm ridiculously close to the six million mark in Geometry Wars: 5,993,910. This places me among the two hundred best in the world. Before you accuse me of being a shameless braggard, remember, I already admit to this.

I recently changed my nickname from Håvard (which is derived from an old Norse name and which is my real name) to Hermiene (which is an old German female name and which is not my real name). By a funny coincidence, a Harry Potter character happens to have a name that is not similar to Hermiene at all: Hermione. Get it? This is not a reference to Harry Potter. Admittedly the fact that my facial appearance is close to that of Daniel Radcliffe does make the correlation seem stronger, but the truth is that I didn't even know of Hermione until people started harrassing me about it. (If you want to know what it's really a reference to, contact me.) Until next time: Learn the subtleties of spelling.

Scant five days have passed, and lo! An update.

Part of what prompted me to update is that my Geometry Wars score is 4,848,820, very close to five million, and this needs celebrating. (Some people celebrate by eating a cake. I celebrate by updating my site.) Also, a new section has appeared on the Random page: Xbox Live Arcade scores. I'm just a shameless braggard. The numbers don't really mean much by themselves if you haven't played the games. The important thing, rank, is omitted for obvious reasons (it changes, and I can't be bothered to update it every time someone climbs over me).

The other part of what prompted this update is Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture, which everyone interested in freedom, culture, and copyright should read. Some parts of it are dryly written and in Lawyerese, unfortunately, but that's not important.

Parts of my site's visible and invisible architecture need an overhaul. I'll get working on that next.

This concludes the first of many timely updates.

Greetings, fellow netizens. I return from meatspace bearing lots of news.

My parents generously invited me to move back in with them, and I accepted. Living away is really fun, but I can't afford to now that I'm done with my civilian service, which paid for my apartment. I'm not really a fan of burning bridges nor of invocations to the Devil, but I suspect Satan played a role in putting me there. Drafts are idiotic in the first place. If a nation can't muster the patriotism among its citizenry necessary to defend it, it doesn't deserve a standing army, and an alternative to military service is really no alternative at all.

Religion bashing time again! This time it's the creationists' turn. A meme I've only recently seen (but one which I suspect has been in circulation for some time) got my attention and it goes like this: Evolution is a dangerous philosophy (philosophy?) because Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot used it to justify their atrocities. It's completely irrelevant! It's like blaming the theory of gravity for murders committed by pushing people off high places. In other words, totally nonsensical. Watching creationists debate biologists is somewhat akin to watching a paraplegic compete in the Olympics. Ken Miller is my new hero.

Moving home involved the end of the trial period, if you will, of 1080i 360 gaming, so I bought my own 360. Here's a cool thing: When you retrieve your gamertag you also get to download everything you've paid for again. This is the way it should be, but it's neat that it's actually implemented. The only regression is SD, and SD sucks.

I bought and framed three prints from deviantART: Apollo, Pepper by the window, and Scythe Dancer. I love 'em.

I pulled myself together and fixed the sorry state of my music's metadata. Every file now has shiny ID3v2.4 metadata attached to it, and I used foobar2000 to do it.

My Links page has had enough stuff added to it to make a neutron star envious. The most noteworthy updates are in the Gaming section: 3D Logic (thanks Joakim Næss Lea), TrackMania Nations (thanks again Joakim Næss Lea), Gridlock, Tiltilation, Neverball, Hamsterball, and Narbacular Drop. There's a link to foobar2000 too, naturally. In the Reference material section there's Unwords (a dictionary of invented words) and The Phrontistery (at which you can learn what rhochrematics and grammatolatry are). The Online comics section has seen two updates: xkcd and Dungeons and Denizens (thanks Alexander).

Books have been read. The Satanic Bible, Accelerando, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Alchemist, and the Rama series, to be exact.

I also played and finished Prey, a game that makes you feel like you're walking through an Escher painting. It's very good, but it contains almost zero puzzles! Oh, the potential.

Yes, my updates will be more timely from now on.

Even coaxed me into buying Trackmania Sunrise Extreme (well, he was more of a catalyst than an instigator since I'd already been blown away by the demo) and I am sold. It's like Stunts, Wipeout, and Rollcage had a baby, only the baby was a ninja high on crack. On fire. Running through a hospital (which is on fire), wielding dual katanas and a wakizashi from its prehensile tail, slaying evil samurai-nurses. Something like that. The point I am clumsily trying to get across is that the game kicks utter ass. I love untraditional racers. I'm sure Gran Turismo and its ilk are cool if you're a professional driver in the Carrera Panamericana obsessed with automotive mechanics (or even an adolescent gamer with the same inclinations), but realistic racers have never been my thing.

I hereby declare myself to be operating under Crocker's Rules. I have been doing so, implicitly, for as long as I can remember, but now it's explicit.

Blasting geometric figures to their constituent edges in a blaze of polychromatic glory upon a malleable blue grid floating in the black void of space may be more fun than it sounds. So yes, I've been playing a certain amount of Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved lately. Some would say an insane amount. Others would say an appalling amount. I would say copious or ample or not enough. This game is just too challenging and fun to put down once you've tried it. Niels-Henrik (Aemanther) and I (Vossil) have also played Mutant Storm Reloaded's Tally mode something fierce, and are (at the time of writing) at 21st and 22nd place on the Xbox Live leaderboards, respectively. This means that we are the 21st and 22nd best players in the world. It's only an obscure arcade game, but who cares? :-P

Here's something I can do without: Reflexive idle European anti-Americanism. What I mean by this is Europeans who are idly and reflexively anti-American. I'm talking about you people who, whenever something, anything, about the US (or even vaguely related to it) is brought up, reflexively recoil in disgust and blurt out how much the US sucks, without specifying exactly what. Is it their foreign policy? Their president? The general citizenry? The culture? Their laws? Stop leaving me guessing like this, please, and just say what you mean without falling back on your reflexive anti-Americanism. Also realize that the US isn't a monolithic entity, and maybe you would sound less like a God damned idiot.

Let me take a moment to laugh at religious idiots: Ha ha ha! In particular, I want to laugh at Christian doomsayers relating to Tuesday: Ha ha ha! This Tuesday will be 2006-06-06, and the Rapture is near; all true Christians will transcend the flesh, ascend to Heaven, and have eternal joy by God's side, leaving non-believers behind. Let's just forget about the unfortunate fact that 1906-06-06 didn't happen. Or 1992-10-28 as predicted by Korean Christians. Or 1998-05-31 as predicted by Marilyn Agee. Here are my predictions for next Tuesday: Our planet will continue to orbit our local star, religionists will continue to believe weird things, and I will continue to mock idiots whenever the opportunity presents itself.

I've made a new and improved back end for my site. This means I can now manage key parts of my site (like adding, modifying, and deleting news posts) from anywhere in the world. (Well, anywhere with a computer and Internet connectivity, but this is a given.) It's also a lot more clean this time around. In other site-related news, I've linked to Google Earth Hacks from under my Google Earth link.

I applied to and was accepted into NITH. Woohoo!

Worked some more on the Gaming Glossary page and did a thorough typo-sweep across my site. Many were killed.

I should mention that Niels-Henrik bought an Xbox 360 some time ago. Coupled with his awesome projector, it's capable of 1080i. These two wonderful pieces of electronics are both his, but I'm given more or less unlimited access to it so long as he's not playing. What a sleek console! I especially like Xbox Live Arcade, games on which I've been playing an insane amount of lately. Xbox Live Arcade is like an emulator; you download trial versions of small games (even some coin-op classics like Smash TV) and can pay a trivial amount of money for the full game. The cost/entertainment ratio is insanely low. Games I've bought are Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved (you're a ship that shoots hoards of hostile geometric figures, all with different properties), Marble Blast Ultra (you're a marble that collects gems and avoids danger), Mutant Storm Reloaded (you're a ship on drugs shooting… mutants, I think), Wik and the Fable of Souls (you're a frog-man that saves little green creatures), and Bejeweled 2 (which should be familiar to anyone with an Internet connection). Upcoming games include Pac-Man and Sonic the Hedgehog. You know what would rock? Rayman HD, yeah.

I don't play much multiplayer except Marble Blast Ultra, but if anyone wants to play with me my gamertag is Vossil. I'd really like to try Halo 2 co-op.

My Links page has seen some updates. I was again bitten by the imaginary Half-Life bug, looked at the mods section, thought “Eeew”, played through them, culled bad ones, added a good one (Visitors), rewrote it all, and took screenshots. The Exploration section, which is a celebration of virtual exploration, is also new. In addition I replaced dictionary.com's link with a link to Hyperdictionary because of dictionary.com's obnoxious ads. And because of Hyperdictionary's ‘hyper’ qualifier, naturally.

Added an Invented words and phrases section to my Random page (it's actually been there for some time). Niels-Henrik is very literate and we have a lot of fun with words. It may be a little esoteric, but hey, it's called Random for a reason, isn't it?

Wing Chun is so fun. Training is hard, but not physically hard. The hard part is coordinating your movement, both with regards to yourself and your sparring partner. A neat thing about Wing Chun is that it's a so-called soft martial art, as opposed to a hard one (such as Karate). As such, getting hit in the face is like getting hit by kittens. Not that I have ever had a feline youngster impact me, but if that event were ever to take place, I am sure that the two would be roughly equal. And to think, I've not even touched the cool stuff, the stuff the advanced guys are doing.

Fuh-hay-nally finished reading the PvP archive in its entirety and linked to it. There's just so much.

These past days have been spent almost exclusively playing The Ur-Quan Masters. It's a port of the 1992 game Star Control 2, a space exploration/adventure/combat game. It's so freaking good. The dialog is rock solid, the controls are good, and even though there's a fair bit of grinding for minerals (at least in the beginning), it's totally rewarded by the sheer number of different species you meet and the tasks they give you.

I've read Starship Troopers. More are coming very soon, I promise.

Finished a little writeup of the Deus Ex series.

Behold my new Gaming Glossary page! You may consider it a companion to the Games page. As I say on the page itself, I'd really, really, really like to be corrected in all errors, minor or major; I'd hate to be the author of a poor glossary. (More example images for the definitions will appear.)

I bought and finished Tomb Raider: Legend. It actually stays true to the series while making gameplay more intuitive (especially after the flop that was Angel of Darkness). Miss Croft's movements are very Prince of Persia-ish, but then again, the areas she needs to traverse do require the moves. I love games that celebrate 3D space (curvaceous 3D space, yeah). There are also a heap of unlockables in the game, including outfits. I'm a sucker for virtual dolls, I guess.

Celestia is sort of a computerized orrery. Or an astronomy tool. Or perhaps an orbital plotter. I think I'll go with the umbrella term “cool”. Be sure to download objects from The Celestia Motherlode for a more accurate and complete view of our beautiful universe.

I've linked to Hybridized (an insanely huge collection of free DJ mixes) and Press Start to Play (a web comic).

I finished two writeups for my Games page: Max Payne and Half-Life.

I fixed a couple of embarrassing typos on the Books page (and wrote a short summary of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), wrote a little about my political views, and threw together a little writeup of the Prince of Persia series. I think I'll finish writing about all the games I have in the pipeline before I start taking anymore screenshots from them (I get horrible framerates).

My StepMania skills are now probably better than they have any right to be. As an example, P8107 is no longer a challenge, and I can AA Lawn Wake IX. Proof:

Allow me to state again that you must play Ninja Gaiden (preferably the Black version). The controls are so responsive, the enemies so cleverly designed, the moves and combos so well balanced, and the weapons so well differentiated that you feel like you are Ryu. Did I mention that the game is insanely hard? Just keep at it; study the combos, the enemies' movement, and definitely try out all the weapons. And remember: Reverse Wind, Flying Bird Flip, and Block are your best friends.

I've started training Wing Chun Kung Fu, a martial art, and I really like it (see Little Idea Wing Chun). What sets it apart from other martial arts, apparently, is that it's close-range, focuses more on efficient techniques than aesthetics, and is supposed to be learned quickly (although I have no illusions about it being any easier because of that). In our training sessions we're divided into two groups: novices (of which I am naturally a part), and intermediate. It's wickedly fun watching the intermediates spar.

I'm still learning C++, but it's going to take some time before I can make anything useful in it. Here's a thing I don't understand: why is function prototyping and function defining done in two separate steps and not in one? For now, I've filed this little conundrum under Things That Will Make Sense in Context Later.

You should really, really, really play Ninja Gaiden (the 2004 Xbox version, not the 1988 NES one, of course). This game's combat system is so advanced, it's ridiculous. Everything just feels so right. You have to play it for some time to get into the controls, because button mashing absolutely does not work in this game. But once you've "mastered" (or become proficient with — the amount of things you can make Ryu, the protagonist ninja, do seems to have no end) the controls, you will most positively kick ass. Until the next boss, of course.

Speaking of ninjas, The Adventures of Dr McNinja is well worth a read.

In book news, I've read Hackers & Painters and Inversions. (Should I offload book-related news to the Books page? I'm a little skeptical to the idea of per-page news.)

I changed the styles a little bit to make things easier on the eyes. For instance, the underlining on headings is gone.

I added four new links to the Links page: Angry Zen Masters (a web comic), VGMix (a web site dedicated to remixes of video game songs), Loading-Ready-Run (incredibly funny sketches), and Ronald Fedkiw's simulations (amazing simulations of cloth and liquids, among some other things). In addition, all the links under the Online comics section now have images.

Go read Jeff Bigler's Tact Filters. It's so very true. Also go read John Walker's Trek's End, a sweet science fiction short story.

I've read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 2061: Odyssey Three, and 3001: The Final Odyssey.

Happy Winter-een-mas!

Perhaps monthly updates are a bad idea. I'll try to make it bi-monthly, at least.

I've added two new links to the Links page: Falling Sand Game, a fun but not overly realistic particle simulator for sand, water, salt, and other stuff, and Planarity, an insanely fun and addictive graph game. (I'm on level 12, but some of my friends, who shall remain nameless, are on higher levels than that.) I also added some more things of minute interest to the Random page.

Behold the new Parkour page! There isn't much content yet, but as with everything, I plan to fix this with time (in this case, I plan to practice more parkour as weather permits).

I only watched one anime series since the last update: Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid. I think it's an incredible improvement from the first season.

I continue to read books, of course, and I've finished Flatland, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and 2010: Odyssey Two.

Last weekend Even and I did a 24-marathon where we watched the entire first season. I really like this series. Here's what I've learned from it:

• You never have to say “good bye” or “talk to you later” when hanging up a phone. It's always implicit from context when a telephone conversation is to end.
• Females are laughably easy to abduct.
• Everyone has a goal they work actively towards, and you can be sure that their goals run perpendicular to your goals at least half the time.
• If you think you have the situation under control, think again. Even the most fool-proof plan will have at least one unexpected consequence when executed.
• Cameramen will film you from different angles, from the most awkward positions (like from the inside of a toilet stall). Oh, and tripods are non-existent.
• Kiefer Sutherland is a badass. And he has a damned sexy voice.
• If someone acts even a tiny bit suspiciously, that person is guilty of something. Otherwise, everyone behaves perfectly rationally and you need not suspect them of anything.

Allerca is my personal lord and savior (I'm allergic to cats). 2007 can't get here soon enough.

“Sweet little bumble bee,
I know what you want from me.
Dub-i-dub-i-du da-da,
dub-i-dub-i-du da-da.
Sweet little bumble bee,
more than just a fantasy.
Dub-i-dub-i-du da-da,
dub-i-dub-i-du da-da.”

Almost a month, but not quite. I do have something to show for it this time, though: Check out the brand new Anime page. In other site-related news, I've linked to Concerned, a web comic about Half-Life², and Tile World, an emulator for the tile-based puzzle game Chip's Challenge which I used to play a lot when I was a child. Also new for the Links page is smaller images. I have slowly realized that not everyone runs 1600x1200 quite yet.

In meatspace news, I've been running dual monitors for some time now, and it's wonderful. If you do the same, I recommend you check out UltraMon which lets you customize your monitors to your liking.

I have read two books and one manga series since last time. Check Books if you're interested.

I've been hanging in two IRC channels for some time now. One is #swhack on irc.freenode.net which has its own web site, and the other is #bilge on irc.talkcrap.net. The former is composed of a conglomeration of nerds of all types, and the latter is composed of the same, only in fewer numbers and focusing more on game development. If you enjoy reading my site, then head over.

Speaking of my site, I'm well aware of my recent blogging trend. One explanation is that I'm under the firm conviction that almost everything and everyone in this world are almost infinitely more interesting than I am, and that accordingly I should speak little and listen much. Some of my friends think I should update more often. I'll certainly try, but the fact is that I don't have overly much to speak of all the time.

There are two games that you absolutely must play, and those are Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones and F.E.A.R. PoP: T2T really saved the series for me. Now, I didn't particularly dislike the previous game (Warrior Within) like a lot of people did. I disliked the Prince's badass attitude and all the stupid backtracking that you had to do, but I welcomed the revamped fighting system after Sand's of Time's monotonous combat. The fighting system in T2T is more or less the same as in WW, but with an added stealth element: If enemies aren't aware of you, you can silently dispose of them by sneaking up to them and, in an animated sequence, hitting the attack button at just the right intervals. That's very nice and all, but it's too easy, even on the hardest difficulty. It would be awesome if, on the harder difficulties, there were multiple buttons to hit, corresponding, perhaps, to the different angles at which the Prince attacks the enemy in the animated sequence. Still, the game is incredibly fun, and if you like Persian ninjas, you should definitely play it.

The other game you must play, F.E.A.R, is just unashamedly badass. Some of the levels are pretty ho hum, but it's more than made up for by a sweet, sweet AI and the liberal use of expletives. (“Fucker's got an appetite”, a phrase describing the cannibalistic nature of the game's antagonist Paxton Fettel, is my favorite line.)

I'm learning C++ from Steve Heller's C++: A Dialog because I can't call myself a geek and not know how to program. I do know PHP fairly well, so I already know some concepts (like variables, functions, and scope) while others currently elude me (I still have no idea what object-oriented programming really is).

The web comic project will unfortunately be put on ice until further notice. We have some sketches and meager attempts at inking and coloring (which I think are quite nice), but not nearly enough to start the comic. In apology for this, here's a sketch of my alter ego, Akil, that I think turned out fairly well:

I have read no fewer than three web comics (Comedity, GU Comics, and Hellbound) and two books (Use of Weapons and A Mathematician's Apology) since the last update, in addition to watching two anime series (Full Metal Panic! and Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu!). This means that I have been having a lot of fun, while at the same time having no original content to show for it. I also want to apologize on Even's and my own behalf for not having worked much on the comic. This is partly due to our scanner's malfunctioning, but mostly due to our reluctance to do anything about it. I should feel bad, and I sort of do.

I somewhat arbitrarily split my Books into four sections: Science fiction, non-fiction, manga, and other fiction. I realize that this is a very shallow categorization, but it's due to my not having read diverse enough genres. I also realize that the summaries are really short and look like blurbs. This is due to my not having read enough books. Both of these situations will rectify themselves with time.

I polished the Links page some more. There are new images and a new section, Physics.

Oh yeah. My personal site.

A lot of things have been happening since my last news post.

I have bought a ton of books, but have only read two of them: The Player of Games and Foundation's Edge. As for the ones I've bought, they're in the Books that I want to read section, indicated by their parenthesized status.

Go read Chugworth Academy. It's on the Links page together with a new image of Faye, the new Games section, and the new Art section.

Check out Bathsheba's Large Scale Model. That's a model of a 100 megaparsec cube of matter. A parsec is an astronomical unit, and it's approximately equal to 3.26 light years. A megaparsec, then, is 3 260 000 light years. To put this in perspective, our galaxy's diameter is roughly 100 000 light years, which is about 3% of a megaparsec. And this model is of a 100 megaparsec cube of matter! I've ordered it.

Fahrenheit is an excellent game, so much so that Even and I pulled an all-nighter to finish it. Speaking of Even: He and I are maybe — maybe — going to make a web comic. But don't hold your breath. If it becomes reality, Even will draw it and I will write it. I've read enough web comics to know what makes them good, I consider myself a competent writer, and Even's getting better and better at his drawing. I think we can pull it off.

I finally survived P8107, and here is the proof:

You wouldn't believe how much more easier it is to play StepMania when you've mastered the Art of Two Hands. Suddenly you're able to obliterate arrows almost twice as fast, but your brain also has twice the number of fingers to control.

As an avid gamer I feel it is my responsibility to write something witty and degrading about Jack Thompson, but I think everyone else has already done that more than sufficiently. So just let it go on record that the sooner everyone recognizes him as the lying, misleading, fear-spreading, unpleasant lunatic that he is, the better.

Yes, I should really do more site-related work. I'll be getting to that next, I promise.

Check out Alex Spurling's spiffy new site. There's not much content yet, but we all have to start somewhere. :-)

I made nice, alpha transparent PNG images of some of the characters from the web comics that I follow and a spiffy, new 1600x1200 image of my desktop for the Computer page.

Michael Wilcox kindly notified me that my RSS feed wasn't working. It's fixed now.

You know what makes me sad? That supposedly intelligent and enlightened people of the 21th century lead lives so devoid of content that they need to believe in stupid things like astrology, clairvoyance, healing, reincarnation, and other abominations. As George Carlin puts it, “What are you, fucking stupid?” I don't mind that they believe it, really, but talking about those things as if they were true makes me really sad.

I pulled myself together and fixed a heap of stuff that was making IE puke, and my site looks half-decent in it now. I also removed the IE nagbox.

Check out Alex Spurling's Wikiknowledge, his repository of knowledge that he has gained from reading Wikipedia.

I killed Essay: Bases and Essay: Graphs & Functions. They were stale, the writing was completely off, and it didn't delve into the subjects deeply enough. Perhaps I'll remake them some day. I also linked to Games. Yes, I realize that there isn't much there now. That will change. At first I thought it would be a good idea to make the whole page first and then release it, but it obviously takes more time to complete than I thought it would.

I rearranged the navigation bar a little. I hope it makes more sense now.

I decided that 1280x960@60 Hz is abominable, so I bought a 22" flatscreen CRT monitor and I now run 1600x1200@85 Hz. Yum-sing!

Three new people and one new reference site are on the Links page: John Walker, Eric S. Raymond, Paul Graham, and HowStuffWorks.

Are you a neurotypical? Seek help today.

Every reader of science fiction should read SF Words and Prototype Worlds.

Yes, I'm working on a sudoku page. Yes, I'm working on a CSS page. Yes, I'm working a games page. But web comics, BloodRayne 2 and StepMania are too fun!

I'm back from Oslo, and, of course, all my organs are intact. Oslo is cool; it has an extensive metro system, two Outland stores that both are much larger than the one in Stavanger (and thus sporting more shelf space), and one Outlandish store called Avalon (which, as far as understand, is Outland's main and only competitor).

While walking in the city, a lunatic with flyers approached me and wanted me to oppose abortion. I told him he was crazy and continued on my merry way, of course.

I got to mess around with Mr Schrøder's Linux installation. It definitely seems to run faster than Windows. I promise to mess around with my own installation, eventually.

I've read two books since last time: Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks and Robot Visions by Isaac Asimov, and all the summaries of anthologies now has a listing of contents. I have now read 36 books in total, and 17 of those are Asimov's. If you do the arithmetic you'll find that 47% of the books I've read are by him. Perhaps I should, uh, read more by others.

Excerpt from Our Intelligent Tools:

“Eventually, if we learn how to make a computer sufficiently complex and sufficiently large, why should it not achieve a human intelligence?

Some people are sure to be disbelieving and say, ‘But how can a computer possibly produce a great symphony, a great work of art, a new scientific theory?’

The retort I am usually tempted to make to this question is, ‘Can you?’”

This, of course, was incorporated into the motion picture I, Robot. Hee!

Let me take a moment to tell you how utterly stupid our workstation setups are at my work. First, the computers we use are slow. Second, we do all of our work through the Remote Desktop Protocol (or something very similar) on servers in Oslo. I believe these are very slow, or the connection is slow, or a combination thereof. In any case, it's a serious bottleneck. Third (and this is not really a technical flaw), the people who use this system (Lotus Notes) suck at it. Not only do people not use the database when making lists of people in, say, a certain group, they also embed images in PDF and DOC files, which in turn are embedded in so-called notes, stashed away in illogical places so that you are sure not to find what you want, when you want it. It is stupidity wrapped in evil inside incompetence.

If you haven't already, go check out (and play) NationStates. It's an online game where you create your own nation and rule it. It's not so much simulating as it is role-playing (for instance, there's no way to declare war on another nation, or initiate trade, or any such stuff except as role-playing via the forums), but it's still wickedly fun. The game is primarily made to promote Max Barry's new novel, Jennifer Government; the book is, of course, in my little list. Advertising can be effective, if it's targeted correctly. Go on, check out my nation, Mr Schrøder's nation, and Niels-Henrik's nation. I aim to be capitalist, Alex aims to be socialist, and Niels is… despotic. He may claim to be aiming for it, but my guess is that despotism just comes naturally to him.

I'm going to this country's capital city, Oslo, this weekend to meet up with Mr Schrøder. I hope he is the sweet misanthropic socialist geek that he claims to be, and not an eccentric 60-year-old lunatic whose interest in me revolves around my internal organs and the well-being thereof. Because if you are, I swear to Athe, I know Kung Fu!

Here's a thought: if we assume Sturgeon's Revelation to be essentially true, and that the amount of stupid people around the world is a direct result of it, things wouldn't be that bad, because the amount of smart people would increase proportionally as there will be more and more people on the planet. The problem now is just finding them. Speaking of which: I don't endorse overpopulation. In fact, I think we should slow down a little. This has been repeated by several intellectuals over the years (not that the general populace ever pays any attention), and so I'll repeat it: humans have an enormous advantage (well, several) over the other animals, in that we can plan what happens to our species. Whereas the other animals reproduce wildly until natural measures are taken (this usually involves starvation because of lack of food or being eaten by predators because, well, predators need food, too), we can plan ahead and make sure that this doesn't happen. If we continue this wild orgie, we'll start seeing resource wars, and although I've never experienced one (and I never will), I submit that it will be, shall we say, unpleasant. I don't want that. I like my species, and I would like to see it survive into space, and that can only be accomplished if we are sensible.

This is one of the reasons I refuse to procreate, by the way. Another, more immediately pragmatic reason is that children are noisy and require enormous attention, and that would seriously cut in on my fun time.

Unfortunately and unwillingly, I have started saying “1337” and “n00b” whenever I see something that rocks or sucks, respectively. I apologize to all who are affected, and I will shape up. I blame Pure Pwnage.

Go play Sudoku. It's similar to Nonograms (in that it is grid-based and Japanese), and I might very well make a Sudoku page in addition to my Nonogram page.

“Audio, video, disco!”

I made a status column for the table of read books so that I can keep track of which books I've borrowed from friends, from libraries, and which books I own in hardcover or paperback, and the summarized books now have fragment identifiers. I bought Frank Herbert's Dune series from Outland (except Dune Messiah, which they didn't currently have), and they're in the books pipeline.

Check out the new Fun section! Expect more ultimately pointless, yet fun, stuff to appear here.

I have made a web interface for myself that enables me to painlessly add and modify news posts, add new abbreviations, and add new random quotes. Hey, I'm human, and humans will gladly spend hours of hard work in order to make their lives just a little bit easier and a little bit more convenient. I have also split the books section off the Random page and made it into a full-fledged page of its own. Incidentally, I have read Fantastic Voyage and made a summary. Yes, there are no fragment identifiers on the headings, and yes, the summaries are short. I will work on that.

I discovered the proper name for the alternative to military service. It's not community service or civil service, but civilian service.

I have read through two web comics, no less, since the last update. They are Piled Higher and Deeper and Machall and both are hilarious.

I'm becoming more and more proficient with Dvorak, but switching between Qwerty and Dvorak is a hassle (I use Qwerty at work).

I have played probably insane amounts of StepMania. I now survive Heart of Asia and Rhythm and Balance with an A on both. I considered these impossible only a few months ago, and I now consider P8107 impossible. (How long before I can survive that?)

During the weekend, when I wasn't home and couldn't be informed, No-IP.com decided to revert the IP address to the one of the computer on which I temporarily hosted the notice stating that my site would be down during my move. Uh-huh. It's back to the real one now (evidently).

I re-watched The Fifth Element and re-realized how beautiful it is.

My web comic rampage continues, and the victim this time is Questionable Content. A link is as usual on the Links page.

I've finished Fantastic Voyage II, and there is a short summary.

Read the essay What You Can't Say by Paul Graham.

“The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know.”

Mr. Schrøder is working on something which gets abbreviated to BS, and is not bullshit. The reason I'm writing about it here is that I'm looking forward to it and I want him to finish it.

You should play BloodRayne 2. This game is pure fun and the attitude of Rayne (the protagonist, a female dhampir) is badass. (Don't bother with BR1 unless you're curious; most of what they did wrong in BR1 is culled in BR2 and everything that made BR1 fun is even more fun in BR2.) If sucking blood from the neck of a punk, cutting off his head, and impaling him on a sharp object is wrong, then I don't want to be right. The level design is so awesome, and on par with that of, say, Max Payne 2. (In fact, I suspect that BR2 is heavily influenced by MP; there's the NPCs' banter, the slowmotion camera when you finish off an enemy in a cool way such as throwing him off a high vantage point, and a slowmotion view with similar post-processing effects as those in MP2.) The art is also fantastic, and the design of your opponents is simply beautiful. One of the things that makes this game so fun is the death traps into which you can thow your enemies. My favorites are a fan that you encounter very early in the game, and Tesla coils (the scream they produce when you throw them into a Tesla coil is simply classic).

When you finish the game, it unlocks, among other things, several new outfits for Rayne to wear, among which is a schoolgirl uniform complete with a short skirt (feminists would object), a penguin backpack, a dangling cellular phone, and katanas instead of the normal blades. This is truly dolls for geeks, and should give you an incentive to finish the game.

“How is living away from your parents,” you say? Infinitely better, of course. I can't believe you even had to ask.

Friction burns like a hot fuel rod cannon.

I have moved! I now live in an apartment together with Niels-Henrik. So instead of being a disgruntled nerd living in his parents' basement, I'm now a disgruntled nerd living with a slightly less disgruntled nerd. This place is technically underground and beneath a fellow human being's dwelling-place, but I prefer the term “apartment” over “basement” (even though in reality, it is both). Because of this, my site has experienced a rather extended hiatus, and for this I am sorry. I expected that the apartment would have Internet connectivity relatively quickly after we moved in, but this was not so. Still, the hiatus was caused entirely by my own incompetence; I should have thought ahead. My site is now hosted by Mr. Schrøder, and I am extremely grateful for it.

I've read Forward the Foundation and The Alternate Asimovs. Foo and bar. I have also made my very first book purchase, and the books I bought are Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, Use of Weapons, Inversions, Look to Windward, and Against a Dark Background, all by Iain M. Banks. Now I just need a book shelf upon which I can neatly position these newly acquired items. I bought them from a store called Outland, which sells all kinds of esoteric artifacts ranging from science fiction books (obviously) to manga comics to kung fu movies to board games. To my knowledge, this chain only operates in Norway. Do these kind of stores exist in other countries? I hope so.

Halo 2 is utterly fantastic. The only complaint I have is the Cortana makeover, but that's overshadowed by the sheer coolness of getting to play as a Covenant Elite.

Site-wise, the random quotes are sourced, I have a web comic pipeline that I will eventually churn through, I have a new favicon, and I've actually gotten around to working on that page I promised. Have patience. I'm getting there.

Thomas Sydorowski asked me to do a social commentary. I can't comment on much when it comes to “social stuff” (see, even my otherwise massive vocabulary fails me her