Axodys

Lists, lists… everywhere lists! Seems like everybody is coming out of the woodwork up with some list or other to ring in the new millenium. In that vein here is a list of lists:

• Slashdot has a list of new years resolutions from various people with some form of connection to their site.
• Here’s one person’s list of the top ten centuries of the millenium.
• If you want to keep on top of Y2K on an international level CNN has a list of worldwide Y2K sites.
• Wired has a list of their tech people’s predictions for the coming year.
• Suck has a list of comic strips they’d like to see go the way of Peanuts in the coming year and offer suitable replacements as well.
• Here’s a random list of famous people’s quotations.
• A list of the 100 most influential people in cinema.
• A list of the 100 most influential people in history and their religions.
• Almost last and certainly not least, here’s a list of cool stuff at Penny-Arcade, my own personal favorite local Internet comic!
• Finally, a list of all things Mahir related.

I’m thinking maybe I should come up with my own list. Hmm…

It’s the final countdown! Now if only I could get that old Europe song out of my head… Anyway I’m planning on staying home for the big change over myself. And with all the snow that we’re getting in Spokane right now, I’m betting more than a few people may change their minds about going out.

I’ve been going a little Python crazy lately. Last night while renting a few new years eve movies at the local Hastings I discovered they had a copy of Programming Python and snapped it up. I’ve pretty much decided to make Python my language of choice for right now. We’ll see how that goes.

Lest we get too full of ourselves with all the many accomplishments of the 20th century, Wired announces a list of the century’s most spectacular failures.

I started off the day by discovering my car was a little bit lower on gas than I thought it was. Still, it was far better to discover this while it was warming up than halfway through my drive to work. And luckily for me I was still able to catch a ride in with my girlfriend.

I know lips! Half the reason I ended my holiday hiatus today was to announce to the world that I managed to get five out of seven on this nifty lip identification survey I found on Turly Ming.

Boy, I take the day off from work and it just disappears on me. Of course I did do some reading for a while, but the biggest time eater had to be a certain couple first person shooter demos…

Got to see a new G4 first hand yesterday. My friend Steve’s dad picked it up as a little Christmas for himself. Very nice refined machine. I definitely prefer the graphite gray of the case to the G3’s blueberry.

Fast Company gives their analysis of five major web news sites (Slashdot.org, wired.com, RedHerring.com, and The Industry Standard) in concise table form . I only read two of the five regulary myself.

Another day, another weblog entry…

My friend Steve is in town so it’s time for some network computer gaming! He’s been talking up the Mac release of Heroes of Might & Magic III and based on Inside Mac Gaming’s preview it looks fairly appealing to me.

Tycho and Gabriel, two fellow Spokane-ites best known for Penny-Arcade, have a new take on Dickens’ Christmas Carol over at Gamespy. Amusing reading for the computer inclined as usual!

It’s looking like we’re going to miss out on the classic white Christmas here in Spokane based on all the weather forecasts I’ve been hearing and seeing online. For some reason I was expecting quite a bit of snow this year during the winter months, but it certainly hasn’t happened yet.

One interesting thing I noticed about Mozilla Build 12 for the Macintosh yesterday is that it seems to render font point sizes at the same size most Windows machines see things. I’m not sure if that’s a bug or a feature. It does make reading a surprising number of sites easier, Eatonweb being the first that pops into my head.

Looks like Mozilla Build 12 is finally available on the ftp servers (hasn’t been publicly acknowledged on the main page yet). I’ve heard good things, but I doubt it’s to the point where I can put away my current browsers. I can always hope though.

The repairs on the Hubble telescope begin tonight. Hopefully the procedure will go a lot more smoothly than the mission’s launch schedule did.

Looks like the Arizona Democratic Primary is going to be testing the Internet waters in March when it pioneers online voting. I think this is an important step in the right direction, as long as electronic voting is made secure with strong encryption. Whether that is true of the system they’ll be using remains to be seen.

Work today was totally dead. That wasn’t too bad because it gave me a chance to fiddle around with Python. It’s definitely a nifty scripting language.

Even cooler I stumbled across PUB (Python Universe Builder) a set of Python modules for creating interactive fiction games. I haven’t had a chance to experiment with the modules yet, but it looks promising. Probably not as rich and full featured as TADS or Inform, the two major IF oriented languages I’m familiar with, but intriguing none the less.

I’ve always wanted to create (write?) a text adventure along the lines of the classic Infocom games. Someday…

After an evening filled with shopping I am nearly done. Yes!

I think I’m finally just about recovered from all the shopping that I did earlier today. Thankfully, I’m much closer to being done as well.

My girlfriend and I had planned to go to today’s GU basketball game against Montana, but apparently too many people were free to attend the game this afternoon and we were turned away at the door. I didn’t mind too much since the Bulldogs had already beaten Montana once this season by 16 or so, and missing the game allowed us to do some additional shopping.

I just discovered an interesting cross platform XHTML related product over at mozquito.org. It looks like they have some fairly interesting stuff in the works there.

I succeeded in doing a little bit of shopping yesterday, and it looks like I’m about to do some more here. I still have quite a bit to get done in this coming week unfortunately.

I picked up The Iron Giant on DVD while I was shopping yesterday. In case you hadn’t heard, it’s a great animated film with something for kids and adults. It’s also one of the first films to fully integrate a CG character with traditional animation, and does it quite well.

While thinking about how unmotivated I feel about going shopping this afternoon I decided to put Google to use on the word “motivation”. Serendipitously I discovered that Duke basketball coach Mike Kryzewski has a motivation section on his basketball coaching site.

With it being the holiday season and everything, this piece by Brad L. Graham had to be included in my weblog!

I’m exploring the idea of moving Axodys fully into Manila. The main question I’m looking at is whether to have my site hosted by one of the new Manila oriented providers or to shell out the money and serve the site off one of my own computers. I can see advantages to both systems and will have to continue to mull things over.

Of course I may just decide to stick with pair.com and blogger for now too. It’s kind of a matter of figuring out where I want to go with Axodys. Any thoughts on the subject are of course welcome.

At last Friday is here! Work was pretty dead today (finals are over), but I got a really great meal (excellent value) at Cafe Roma, a local Italian restaurant, when we had a goodbye lunch for a staff member who’s leaving.

In gaming news the Mac Quake 3 Arena Demo has finally arrived. Download all 45+ MBs at your leisure. It also looks like the retail version should be available in early January 2000.

A Penny-Arcade solution to the UT vs Q3 debate!

Have you made your Y2K preparations yet? I’m planning to do full backups of our two main NT Servers at work before shutting them down for the weekend, but I’m not planning to be in the building that weekend. I heard on the radio this morning that 70% of people polled planned to stay home on New Years Eve and hotels have had to drastically discount the pricing on their holiday packages just to attract guests. Two weeks to go!