I just realized it’s 4:00 am… I stayed up way too late playing with SketchUp. I decided to give it a try after seeing the multitude of links to it on popurls (an awesome links/news aggregator). Did a few of the tutorials, then built this bizarre thing:

(857×638; 60 KB)

One of the neat things about SketchUp is that you can get the dimensions (in real-world units) for any part of your model. Height, width, radiuses, diameters, areas, whatever. Here’s my weird structure with some measurements:

(1008×679; 76 KB)

To think, someone could actually build that if they wanted to!

It’s a really fun program to mess around in. Maybe not quite as fun as Maya, but a heck of a lot easier to learn. It’s free and small (19 MB download); check it out.

I forgot to mention this before, but this blog turned five on the 23rd. It sure doesn’t feel like I’ve been doing it for that long. Anyway, I decided to figure out some simple statistics based on the age and number of posts…

• I make, on average, 135.2 posts per year.
• That’s one post every 2.7 days.
• At that rate, post #1,000 will appear Friday, September 12th, 2008.
• And this blog should turn ten sometime around post #1,352.
• Assuming an average life expectancy of 74 years for an American male, and that I’ll maintain this blog for the rest of my life, the last post seen here will be #7,479 (on Thursday, August 24th, 2056).

Kind of interesting, huh? Well, maybe only to me.

My crappy power supply started working again… just left it plugged in for a day, then hit the power button and — voila. But I’m having some stability issues (e.g. it completely locks up while I’m asleep and the event logs don’t register anything), so I’m definitely replacing it when the Antec 500 W gets here.

This article, In Praise of Loopholes, is pretty interesting. It’s pretty much about what it sounds like… I liked the bits about the Jewish eruvs. Hadn’t heard of those before. Here’s another article, totally unrelated, that I enjoyed recently: The Ryugyong Hotel. This one’s about a huge (1,082 ft.) building in Pyongyang, North Korea that a lot of locals pretend isn’t there. Great stuff.

I remembered I had a free domain registration left with DreamHost, so I registered IronManBloggingCompetition.com (IMBC.com is already taken by what appears to be a Korean television network). Oh, and I figured out how to host different dot-com sites off a single DH account without using redirection or mirroring (apparently you can only do it if you use their own DNS thing and I normally use NameCheap). Anyway, there’s not much there right now, just a logo basically. Might be of some interest to the current and former IMBCers though since I used screenshots of everyones’ blogs to make the background.

Have you heard that Nintendo’s calling the Revolution the “Wii“? What crap.

I got my desk arranged in the living room and set my main system up, but when I plug it in the power supply makes a weird high pitched, two-tone whine and won’t turn on. I figure ESD killed it, so I ordered a new PSU from Newegg. It’s a 500 W Antec SmartPower 2.0. Much higher quality than the PSU that came with my case (a 350 W Sunshine or Deer brand supply). 3-day shipping was actually the cheapest option at $6.99, so I got that.

Have you seen Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006 video? It’s kinda big (like 113 MB), but pretty cool. My favorite bit is when Walter from The Big Lebowski shows up for the “World of Pain” combo.

BTW, I didn’t mention this in the last post, but I’ll definitely be competing in next year’s IMBC. Of course, I’m going to try to get some of the rules changed and clarified before then… Like the “media content” bit — a bogus requirement, IMHO. The main reason the rules were so loose this year was because no one really wanted to work on them before the competition and I assumed things would be handled pretty informally. Personally, I don’t really care if someone makes their post a minute past midnight, but obviously due to some peoples’ tenacity a boundary has to be set somewhere.

Again, my battery’s dying, so I gotta go. Things to do tomorrow: Notify management that the bathroom outlets don’t work, request a new driver’s license with an updated home address, buy a hook to hang the ceiling lamp higher (so I stop braining myself on its edges), and get the last carload of stuff out of my old apartment.

Okay, so I’m officially out of the IMBC. I really appreciated the comments you guys left on my last post. In hindsight, I should have bribed the girl at the PC bang down the street to stay open an extra fifteen minutes. The PC bang is part of this neat strip mall (basically right next door to the apartment complex) that has a ton of little Korean businesses. I was suprised to see that the area gets pretty busy after dark — it’s always totally dead on weekday afternoons.

Long story short cxomcsasrt has screwed me and I am currently reduced to typing thuis post on my blackberry in under 7 minutes. As you can see, this keyboard is not easy to tytpe on. There will be many errors in this psot for sure. But I really don’t qwant to fail the imbc this way so I’m at least making an effort. I greatly apologi2 to any of ytouy trying to read this, I know it muist look incrdibly bad. But have you ever tried to type 300 wortds on a keyboared the size of 2 postage stramps? God damn this is a jnnightmarte!

Since I have no way to do a wordcount herew, I’m just going to have to typew as muich as possible *as fast as possible.

Dammitr itsd aslrewady 1158! Okay only abbout a minute or tweo to go. Crap. Aand I knoiw befy will be watching this thjing likke a vulturew waitriunbg fdoir me toi fail the post contwest and noiw thjetrewes onbly 1 moijnturee to go. I’m tgonna post this ankd pray theree arfe enouigh wor ds. Creap rcerap creap cxrap crap crap ffg f f f f. F f f f f f f f f f f. F f f f f f f f f

So my neighbors are still being twits. Well, actually, it’s just one guy. But the couple times I’ve run into the girl who lives there she’s been pretty unfriendly too. Finally moving tomorrow; won’t have to deal with the whiny wall-pounding anymore. Gotta pack some more boxes tonight… fortunately, I’ve already moved most of the bulky/heavy stuff in multiple car trips. Like the DDR pad and GURPS books.

Don’t really have much to talk about today… Tonight’s Scrubs episode wasn’t that great. The janitor is only funny in small doses and his narration didn’t amuse me. Still better than nothing though. I’ve tried to watch the new show that follows it, Teachers, but I just can’t get into it. The main character is likable and moderately droll (even if the writers seem to be trying too hard with his dialogue) and the cast is fairly decent overall (don’t care for the British woman), but the stories are lame. I have yet to actually finish watching an episode… I keep getting bored with it halfway through. Still hoping it’ll improve though.

Had leftovers for lunch, then frozen pizza for dinner. The DiGiorno four-cheese is pretty good.

Everyone seems to be talking about Kingdom Hearts II lately and I thought it sounded neat from the GameSpot review, so I’m going to rent it when we get settled in Federal Way. I could never play it (or the first one) before since I didn’t own a PS2, but Brett has one… I think he only uses it to play Amplitude. I’ll probably end up getting some PS2 games I’ve always wanted to play. Like Katamari Damacy.

Speaking of new electronics, Brett also has a nice big TV I’ll be enjoying. It’s a widescreen, like three feet across, and does HDTV. Pretty cool. He wanted to get the digital cable service so he could use the HDTV channels, but Comcast digital is incompatible with my TiVo. So we compromised… he’s allowed to set up a few season passes on my TiVo and we can get the basic extended package I wanted. It’s kind of funny, practically the only show we both like is Frasier… he mostly watches Unsolved Mysteries and Fairly Oddparents.

Watch this, it’s funny.

sinking.mpg (2.45 MB)