My semi-conscious stream of consciousness

I stumbled across this today, basically allows real time monitoring of all the visitors on your website, what pages they are viewing, even what portion of the page they are scrolled down to. It’s way too cool.

http://chartbeat.com/

Oh, it slipped!

School terms at Kettering seem to always draw my attention away from things like this blog, but last semester was particularly nasty… so here is a brief rundown of what I’ve been doing for the last 4 months or so.

I completed my Sophomore 1 term at Kettering. It was by far my most difficult term at Kettering, and there were many times during the term that I felt that I might be at risk of failing some of my classes. The term was so stressful that I actually started smoking rather frequently during the term (I have since quit, and am going to try to avoid starting again next term). Overall I ended up doing rather well, with finals going smoothly. I haven’t received my grades yet but I should be in a few days.

The stress of the school term also caused me to go back to MMO gaming. I reactivated my EVE Online accounts, and started playing again, more serious than ever. However I quickly got tired of this again, and deactivated my subscription a few days ago and picked up a fairly new MMO, Fallen Earth.

Fallen Earth is a post apocalyptic MMORPG/FPS set in Nevada. The graphics engine is not incredibly detailed, but for an MMO it is very good. I also enjoy the way that they implemented tradeskills as well as ‘classes’. You don’t actually have a defined class, but your role is defined by stat and skill distributions that you put points into using ability points, which you earn 2 of every 1/10th of a level. What has diffidently sold me on the game though is how incredibly vast the game world is. There is no ‘fast travel’ system, and you have to ride everywhere on horse or the motor vehicle mounts that you can get. I have been playing 4 days and have probably seen only 20-30% of the first area or sector. And there are 3 sectors currently in the game. In addition the developers have the game planned out to go up to 9 sectors, each one very large, with the last 4 sectors being completely empty and designed to house the player cities that are planned for endgame. I highly recommend you try this game if you are looking for a new MMO as it currently has a free trial.

My birthday was yesterday

I’m a year older now. I don’t feel older though…

I finally got around to updating my portfolio,  located on the root of this domain:  http://www.spazghost.com

Redid some of the text and put up new pictures.

Fun stuff.

My birthday is this Sunday, I’m getting old.

Wow, it really has been a while since I’ve updated this.

A lot of things have happened in the last 3 months. I finished my Freshman year at Kettering University, and was actually able to survive my Freshman 2 term, and raise my GPA in the process (not bad considering some of the classes I was taking last term are hellish in difficulty).

I’ve been getting much more involved with photography lately, invested some of the money I’ve been earning doing freelance PHP development into some new equipment. I purchased a new lens, a Sigma 17-70mm Macro lens with a focal length of 2.8-4.5. It’s a really great lens and for 350$ it was an excellent upgrade from the kit lenses that I was using previously. I also had the good fortune to become friends with Jack Stewart, the founder of the Ohio Gamers Organization. He also runs a modeling group called the D20 Girls Project, which he has given me the opportunity to do photography for, despite my lack of experience with professional studio photography. With that opportunity combined with the fact that I’m the primary photographer for Sigma Nu Eta Mu chapter and that I’m beginning to do photography for the Kettering school paper, The Technician: Photography is slowly becoming more than just a hobby for me.

I mentioned above that I am the photographer for Sigma Nu Eta Mu chapter. I had the good fortune to meet the members of the chapter my Freshman 1 term at Kettering, and last term I become a brother of Sigma Nu. I’m looking forward to where things go in the coming years as I take on the role of Recorder and Historian for the chapter. Photos of Sigma Nu related events can be found on my Flickr, and later on the Eta Mu chapter’s own Flickr account once I take the time to move the photos over from my own gallery.

Other than that, and dealing with school, I’ve been keeping busy doing application development. I started working with C++ more, and have been messing around with the Second Life™ client source, mostly working on the Emerald Greenlife client with the other members of the Modular Systems team. Emerald can be found at the Modular Systems website.

I’ll try to keep this blog updated for the 2-5 people who actually read it (if even that). So look for some more updates in the next few months.

I decided to post a list of the software that I use. Most of this software is open source, and basically all of it is free. Enjoy. Read more

I was greeted with a rather humourous email this morning. I was added to the contact list of drawbelly on Flickr. Curious of who this person was, I went to see their profile and saw that they had over 2,300 contacts. Then I began to read the names of these contacts, and saw something very funny… every single person was either named Richard, or had Richard somewhere in their name.

Honestly I don’t know whether to be honored or to be scared, but either way it’s very humourous.

Check out his contact list yourself if you like.

Edit: Seems this guy is no longer active on Flickr.

I had Monday and Tuesday off from work this week, so I used that time to get some work done that has been sitting on the back burner for a while now. One of these things was to put together a web portfolio, so I had some content to put on the root domain of spazghost.com.

It didn’t take me long to put together the site, since It’s really only two pages, and they both use the same stylesheet. In fact the most time consuming tasks were writing the stylesheet and making the graphics for the page in photoshop.

I really like the way it turned out, and I feel it is very effective at communicating what I want without being too fancy and cluttered. Feel free to take a look at it here.

I just received a very humorous email hoax chain letter from one of my co-workers. Funny not because of what it describes, but because of the language it uses.

Here is an example of the type of language they used:

It is a virus that opens an Olympic Torch which ‘burns’ the whole hard disc C of your computer!!!!

And:

This virus simply destroys the Zero Sector of the Hard Disc, where the vital information is kept.

Okay wait, those two statements, which are describing the same virus, are very contradictory.

The first quote, is insinuating that the virus will destroy all data on the partitions of the hard drive, sectors 1 through n. However the second quote insinuates that the virus destroys sector 0, otherwise known as the Master Boot Record, the sector of the hard drive located before the partitions which tells your computer what to boot to. How can it destroy the partitions and the master boot record, since they are completely different things?

I love emails like this, especially how they try to use fancy terms to make people think they are legit.