Hey all, my birthday is January 7 (Sunday), and I wanted to throw a party here in Newport commemorating my 26th year (jeezus, I’ll be 26 with a 2 year old little girl… not quite where I thought I’d be, but nice nonetheless). Question: I heard there is already a bash on January 6 somewhere else? What’s going on and is there an evite? I had wanted to throw it that day, but would be just fine doing it the next weekend (January 13, Saturday). Any suggestions/answers/comments/ideas?

Back at Sun I had heard a lot about Solaris 10’s ZFS and how nasty and righteous a 128 bit filesystem is. I never really understood the magnitude of this or what it affords though until I read this. Now that’s pretty damn big.

Link

Oh my god, once one person tries this, they will surely comment. I will hold mine for later. Takes up to 110 seconds… Usually lots less. It’s good so try it… you will be raising your eyebrows for sure…

What’s up all?  Welcome back to work from the Holidays…

So I was forced to watch V for Vendetta over the Holiday weekend- let me start by saying that I really didn’t have any desire to see this movie but was extremely glad I was coerced.  It was AWESOME! 

This was honestly one of the 5 best movies I have seen in my life: great plot, great acting, great music, great action, it had it all.  Given the liberal idealogies possessed by the bloggers on this board, I think this movie will be well received by. 

To summarize, it is set in London in the near future, after a nuclear war has wiped out a good deal of earth.  The US is in anarchy and is no longer a world power, and the UK has resorted to total Fascism to maintain social order.  It is basically a fictionalized view of what the future will be if we (The Anglo-American alliance) maintain our current world policy.  It gets across an important message loud and clear without being preachy, which is difficult to pull off; all while being legitimately entertaining!

Greg gives it 2 enthusiastic thumbs up! Way up!

Link here

This guy is awesome and he is completely right!  Posting political views on public property is a constitutional guarantee.  The war is a lie, and you know it.

So I started playing chess again. Brian and I played through email before the holidays, and several nights we played two games per night. Sadly, Brian won the first six games, which was frustrating for me. [ I narrowed it down to drinking, and that drinking is bad if you want to win at chess. Especially taking vodka shots. Lessons learned I suppose.] Game seven I won, and I was kind of a dick to Brian because I could have mated him alot sooner, but I decided to take every single one of his pieces… I had to make up for lost time afterall. What’s funny is that in game eight, our last game, Brian decided to teach me a lesson. He had my King cornered and I could not move him. So then Brian decided to take all of my pieces, as I had done to him… basically to humiliate me. Well, he took my last piece (I still had my King), and since my King was unable to move, the game ended in stalemate! Just goes to show, win as quicly as possible, without attempting stupid crap like that. I think we both learned our lesson.

Anyhow, I was browsing Wikipedia chess articles, and there is a really interesting chess variant which I am excited to try. It is called Fischer Random Chess. The rules were formalized in 1996 by Grandmaster Bobby Fischer, and it is played the same as regular chess, except for the following variations:

The white pawns are placed on the second rank (a2-h2), as is usually done. The remaining white pieces are placed randomly on the first rank (a1-h1), with the following restrictions:

1. The King is placed between the two Rooks.
2. The Bishops must be on opposite colors.

The black pawns are placed on rank 7 (a7-h7) as usual, and the rest of the black pieces are placed equal-and-opposite to the random white layout. Thus if White’s King is placed on f1, then Black’s King will be placed on f8, and similarly, if White’s Queen is on c1, then Black’s Queen is on c8. This is unlike normal chess, in which the King and Queen are oppositely placed. Kings will never be placed on file a or h, because there would be no room for a Rook. Initial positions are determined by computer programs or the rolling of dice.

The purpose of this randomization “was to create a chess variant in which chess creativity and talent would be more important than memorization and analysis of opening moves.” In total, there are 960 possible opening layouts, hence the other name of the game: Chess960. Seems like a cool idea. Full article here, with instructions on how to roll dice to create initial positions. (Sorry for writing so much Chris, I know you like the excitement of unexplained links…)

Its late, but wanted to say Merry Christmas to all the people in McCrappyland.

Hope to see a lot of you on New Years or over the next week.

Well it seems like mid-twenties female teachers across this nation are. Now this is mostly likely the result of media blowing the situation out of proportion, but any reader of Fark knows how many young female teachers have been caught sleeping with students in the last year. The hardest part of the whole thing to swallow is the fact that many of these teachers get off with sentences far more lenient then their male counterparts. As concerned citizens, Fark’s readers have developed a series of internet web banners expressing their concern…

You can check out the article here that goes through the twenty to thirty cases that have popped up in the last year (with the great news headline of “’sexy substitute’ gets no jail time”).

Many of you are fans of Aqua Teen Hunger Force and they have this relatively new billboard out and about. They had one up that you could see on 93 South as you were heading into Boston, but I think it’s down now. Maybe some of you seen it, but at night is when it looked the best. Here’s the link to the company that installed it and has a compartive picture of it during the day and then at night. I would like to see more of these. Every time I drove by it I wondered how many people actually understood what it was.

I normally don’t like to post too many links to YouTube vids, since I could literally post 50 good ones per day, but this one is too funny. Colbert had me laughing my ass off. Apparently, Hawking is Colbert’s least favorite theoretical physicist. Super funny.

(Also, Aaron, can you *please* add a plugin that will allow McCrappy to post YouTube/Google/MySpace vids inline with the post?  The WYSIWYG editor strips out the necessary tags unless you get the plugin.  That way, the vid would be right on the McCrappy page, which I personally think is more convenient.)

Wow I feel like such a big boy!  To celebrate my induction into McCrappydom, which has rounded out the holy trinity of websites that help me get through a desk job (MySpace, Break.com, and now McCrappy!), I am posting a quality video from Break.com, which is where I get my mindless daily dose of humor. 

Ever since I have seen the Borat movie I have been haunted by the scene of Evangelical healers and how possessed they look, but this video makes me feel better.

http://break.com/index/let_the_bodys_hit_the_floor.html  (Does anyone know how to insert links in Blog Posts without typing out the site? I am a god damn lawyer not a CS major…)

Plus I find the song hilarious, in case I haven’t told you personally yet, I went to the first Bruins preseason game this year where a fight broke out in one of the corners.  Instead of the ref’s breaking it up, they ushered the two guys to center ice, where the two fighters waited to start swinging until the DJ cued up the same song as in this video “Let the bodies hit the floor”.  I thought it was a real step up in class by the NHL, probably to attract a more affluent clientele in light of their recent budget problems.  Also, in a recent Maxim poll, the same song was voted by the US Marines as the number 1 song to listen to whilst patrolling in Iraq, hmmm…

Been watching a bunch of episodes of this show on the History channels, its suprisingly REALLY good.  They cover many of the reasons why current drug laws are flawed.  They touch on things like the huge prison populations tied to drug offenses.  They talk about how unreasonable some things like marajuana laws are.  At the same time, they highlight a lot of the pretty negative effects of drug culture.  Overall probably one of the most neutral views of the drug debate I’ve seen.

Each episode basically covers one type of drugs and its historical evolution in US society, from the early discovery of opiates in the 17th and 18th century,  to marajuana, to modern synthetics.  They also cover the relation of illegal and legal drugs.  They also have a pretty detailed background of chemical effects, etc.

Worth checking out in a rerun if you see them on.

This is so awesome. The guy hurts himself plenty (three high falls) while trying to rob this liquor store, only to find himself trapped inside because of unbreakable doors… That people actually try stuff like this amazes me to no end.  Hilarious.

So a little while ago we had a discussion about music being a collection of existing patterns. Well this video is not that deep, but I find it interesting collection of similar musical patterns.

So I got bored and decided to do a google image search for McCrappy and see what came up. Here is the search:

google image search for “mccrappy” 

Interestingly, only one of those pictures really seems to deal with McCrappy at first, but if you dig deeper you’ll notice that all except the very last 3 images is actually hosted on mccrappy.com, and some mouch just cross posted. Two of them are random people’s myspaces.

This goes back to the discussion about McCrappy’s relevance in google. This must mean that we have high enough relevance that when someone searches for say “streetlight manifesto” it listed us high enough to show that image.

To test it I ran a google search for “streetlight manifesto” interesting enough it brought up a DIFFERENT myspace, that used the SAME crossposted link to McCrappy. People must be just grabbing the link sources from each other and spreading the name of McCrappy around the web. i wonder how many of those hits you see each month is stuff like this. It definately helps in terms of google though having those people include links to your site.