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 | 4/29/2003 |  |
 | Contributed by:Ben
We killed a squirrel yesterday. We didn't exactly mean to, but we're still satisfied with the outcome. You see, we've had a squirrel living in our attic for a few months now. We try patching up the holes he bores under the roof to get in, but he just makes more holes. So we had to take out the root of the problem - the squirrel. I suggested a rat trap, but my dad wanted to be humane and bought one of those cage trap things. The squirrel got caught in the trap sometime in the morning, and by the time we checked the trap at night, the squirrel was dead. The heat in the attic throughout the day must've killed it (it gets over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in our attic on a sunny day). For what it's worth, the squirrel weighed 2.8 pounds. That's a large sucker! My latest project is called MiniHack. It's a console-based game written in Perl. More info to come (possibly even the source). | |  |
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| 4/21/2003 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
I am so happy the break is over, even if it means going back to school. Why? Because I'm Jewish, and we celebrate Passover, and we had a whole load of relatives over. The bottom line is that I had less free time during the break than I do after school during a normal school week. Babysitting my 7-year-old cousin (without compensation, mind you) is no fun. Luckily, he can play some of the simpler games I play, such as the PlayStation2 game Gauntlet: Dark Legacy. And I'm glad I get my room back too - my aunt was staying in it. I'm sorry that I don't actually have anything new to talk about. I'm going to write two new short stories soon - one is about an incredibly spoiled boy who gets a "perfect" gift and fails to realize what it is, and the other is sort of an essay on philosophy in Herman Hesse's Siddhartha style. It should be interesting, but unfortunately you won't be able to read them because I want to preserve all of my first world publishing rights. | | |
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| 4/8/2003 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
I've been working on my latest science fiction short story, titled "A Deuterium Debacle." It's a bit shorter than my last story, "Shimmer", and also has slightly different origins ("American Studies" class rather than "Creative Writing" class). It will be going up on Critters tomorrow. I've been playing a great game recently called Wulfram 2. I played it awhile ago, then something happened and it vanished, but it made a comeback. The graphics are incredibly dated by now, but I still really enjoy the core gameplay: a hovertank battle between two teams composed of up to 32 players each. I especially like the base-building and ship-commanding aspects. I simple haven't seen an FPS as complex and engaging as this one, before or since. Anyway, I dug up my old Wulfram Strategy page (back when it was in version one), and you can check it out here if you'd like. And I have confirmed my enrollment to UMCP, as well as admissions to the Honors and Gemstone programs, as well as the scholarship. I simply couldn't pass up a totally free ride to college. | | |
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| 3/25/2003 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
I have some rather disturbing news to relate to whoever is reading this webpage that I obtained from a reliable source (one of my teachers). There is more going on than meets the eye in the case of Elizabeth Smart, the 15 year old who was abducted in Salt Lake City, Utah for nine months. She is a Mormon, though her abducter was in a different sect of Mormonism, the one that allows polygamy. The man was trying to get seven wives for himself by kidnapping them all. He made an attempt at snatching Elizabeth's cousin. And another thing the media won't tell you - Elizabeth was almost fully indoctrinated into the ways of the polygamist Mormonist sect. For nine months the abducter was persuading her impressionable young mind with tenets of his religion. By the end of the nine months, it really wasn't kidnapping - she was willing, if in a brainwashed way, at least. So it was only rape in the sense that an adult had sex with a minor, not that the woman was not consenting. It's understandable why Elizabeth's family didn't want this info to get out, because it puts her in a bad light, but nevertheless, here I am, reporting the truth. | | |
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| 2/27/2003 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
Random essay (I just wrote). Not for anything in particular, so here it is.I'm willing to sacrifice much of our "rights and liberties" for security. The Declaration of Independence enumerated our rights of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." IN THAT ORDER. Sacrificing liberty is worthwhile if it means saving life. If we prevent another large terrorist attack such as 9/11, so be it. It's worth it. There is no "right to privacy." If spying on people 24/7 is going to prevent loss of life, it's worth it. I'm not a criminal and I don't do anything illegal, so it wouldn't affect me. It would mean that people doing illegal things would be caught and punished much more often (Wouldn't it be great if all murderers/rapists/robbers were caught, not just some?!). And if it takes away some of the "rights of equality", so be it. People aren't equal anyway. If it means that every person of apparent Arabic descent has to be strip-searched before boarding a plane, oh well, that's too bad, maybe their "rights to not be profiled as a terrorist" are being violated, but also thousands more people will not die!! To me, 1984 is a dystopian future. That's one way total surveillance could end up. But I don't think our government is that corrupt. I think the increases in safety will be well worth the loss of some trivial privacy. You'd still have many freedoms, with the catch being that, if you do something bad with those freedoms, you are always going to be caught unlike the "sometimes" that it currently is. Isn't peace the ultimate goal? Peace != civil rights. To be peaceful, everyone who acts violently must be punished, not by being put to death, but by being locked up in jail. Wouldn't America be a much better place if you could go anywhere, free of the worries that an un-caught rapist or murderer is out there who might get you? With high enough levels of surveillance, Malvo and Muhammed would've been caught after they fired that single round into the gas station that missed. Instead, we value our "rights", and a dozen people died because of it. But isn't the right to life that those 12 people had violated more important than the right to privacy of many? No, I don't think it is. Remember the order in the Declaration of Independence: Life, THEN liberty. Thank you. | | |
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| 2/12/2003 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
My science fiction short story "Shimmer" is coming up for review today through the next week at the online writing workshop Critters. I'm very excited. While it is by no means the first (or even close to it) science fiction or fantasy short story I've written, it is probably my best. And this is the first one I'm not simply releasing online (read: relinquishing all rights to), as well as the first one I've actually shown to fellow science fiction writers and requested a critique on. Hopefully, it will be well received, or at least I'll get some good feedback. And maybe if I'm lucky I'll even publish! (It's not the money that I'm after, which isn't a lot, it's the "coolness" factor of getting one's own work published on paper that thousands will read). Maybe I'll start a career in this? Well, probably not. "Author" isn't the best of professions, and one really has to be good to succeed. But I can easily see it as a hobby-on-the-side of my main profession, be it computer programmer or astrophysicist. And as long as I enjoy writing these stories I will continue to do so, even if everyone else in the world thinks that they're horrible and refuses to read them (fame through infamy, ha!). | | |
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| 1/14/2003 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
Finally, I have located all of my old webpages and put them back on the net. What a trip through memory lane that is! I've been making webpages since 1997 - that's 6 years, during which the web has changed by a tremendous amount. Back when I first created Bigmack's World I was working on a state-of-the-art, $3,000, 150Mhz 16MB RAM computer! I first got on the Internet at the age of 10, and soon thereafter created my first webpage. I met an Australian girl named Alisa Campbell who was at the time 20; now she's probably 27 or 28. I haven't been able to contact her for years, though, which would be really cool. Anyway, by the time I'm somewhat through college, I'll have had a webpage online for over half of my lifespan. Now that is something few people can say!
Oh and by the way, I'm going skiing next weekend at Seven Springs Mountain Resort. I'll bring my digital camera and try to get some pictures of the slopes, but it might be kind of hard to prevent the camera from getting damaged by moisture or blunt impact trauma (I'm not the world's best skier, you see). | | |
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| 1/3/2003 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
Well, another year has come and gone. Overall, it was a bad year. We had continuing terrorist attacks (in Bali and Israel, among others), the stock market failed to recover, war with Iraq is looking inevitable, India and Pakistan are capable of and willing to wage a nuclear war against each other, North Korea is developing more nuclear weapons, the number of Arabs in Europe is steadily rising and thus increasing the amount of Anti-Semitism in Europe (France is by far the worst), and our environment is going down the toilet. I mean, the North Pole, which is geographically one of the two coldest places on the Earth, is a swimming pool! The ice at the North Pole has melted all the way through to water! If that's not proof of global warming, then I don't think anything else is.
We also have Raelians claiming to have created human clones. Whether or not it's actually verified as true, I don't care too much: I'm not religious and really have no moralistic objections to any of it. I've been playing The Sims Online since Christmas. It's not so much a game as it is an interactive chat room, though. So I don't recommend it to everyone. To some, though, it could just well be the finest computer game ever. I'm just pissed that the city I'm in, Alphaville, has proved to be unstable and has been offline much of the time.
Now, for website news, I'm really not sure what to work on next. Getting the Wiki Web up was the easy part, but without any defining purpose for its existence, it will continue to be little-used. I've been playing NetHack recently, though not anywhere close to an Ascension. I apologize if this site is turning into little more than a blog, but I'll admit, I don't have as much free time as I would like (Christmas break just wasn't long enough), and so I haven't been progressing very much with learning Perl or improving this website. But suffice to say, a much-improved, version 2 of this website is in the works, with a totally new on-the-fly page generation system to allow anyone to add comments to the site and have them updated instantly. That is all for now, please enjoy your time at Fyre's Domain. | | |
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| 12/7/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
Whew! I finally beat Final Fantasy X! After only 83 hours ... geez. And I didn't even do everything. Not that I'm planning to.
In case you didn't know, I live in Montgomery County, Maryland. We recently got a lot of snow. A hell of a lot of snow. It started snowing Wednesday night and late into the day on Thursday. School was cancelled both Thursday and Friday. So I've had a nice four day weekend available, and what have I done with it? Well, I beat Final Fantasy X, for one. I also played a lot of WarCraft III online, so I've updated the maps section. That leaves today and tomorrow free to do whatever I feel like doing, which probably won't include playing PlayStation2 games. So, I have some choices available. I could work on this website, I could write a short story, I could work on programming, I could work on learning Perl, I could totally revamp this website, and I could do a lot more other things. I'll need to figure out what to do though. For one, the WarCraft III maps directory is getting an insane amount of hits: over half of the entries into this website come through this page. Which is unfortunate, really, because it's just a directory listing of maps. So I'll learn a bit more about Apache and put some text and some links in there to make it more appealing.
I got some pictures of the snowfall early Thursday morning. We had over six inches and at the beginning everything was covered by snow, though by now a lot of it has melted away. I'll probably post these pictures at some point. I only have two more college apps due, one on January 1st, and one on January 15th, so I'll have enough time to procrastinate for now and get them done over Winter Break.
Okay, enough for now. Enjoy the season, I know I am! Look to see you soon. This is Ben, signing off. | | |
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| 11/27/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
And now, for some totally irrelevant news ... I've almost completed Final Fantasy X for PS2, after having not played it for a few months. I'm working on the Ultimate Weapons, I already have all the Aeons, and I've unlocked a lot of the Monster Arena. The funny thing is that Tidus' ultimate weapon, the Caladbog, wasn't difficult to obtain at all. It involves a really annoying chocobo racing minigame that is so hard all of the FAQs say it takes about 5 hours to finally get it right. Well, I was just messing around with it yesterday and I won, just like that! Tidus' ultimate weapon was sooooo easy to get. Well, that's all for now, sorry for the totally boring entry. | | |
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| 10/13/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
This website is really starting to get popular. As a quick visit to the Statistics page will attest, monthly averages are going up, up, and up. I've already uploaded 1.3 gigabytes this month and it's not even half over yet! Alas, I do see some performance hits on my Internet connection. Sometimes when I'm playing online FPS's such as Team Fortress Classic and Firearms my ping will shoot up to over 2 seconds, which makes the game unplayable. And sometimes I even get disconnected from WarCraft III and the like because of insane lag! Argh! Well, there's not much I can do about it. I'm looking at getting cable internet, which should increase my upload capacity by 8X from what I have now. But don't hold your breath; it could be a little while. The biggest increase in traffic has resulted in the hosting of the hundreds of Custom Maps from WarCraft III I've been hosted online.
What's next for this site? Honestly, I don't know. I've been rather busy lately, so I haven't had time to work on the Perl scripts and such as much as I would like. And the Java game I was planning on making, just forget about it. Maybe by the end of next summer. But for now, this site is going to stay mostly static, increasing the number of viewers steadily as more people link to this site (hopefully because they find it useful). Already, I'm showing up on the first page of results on Google for many search queries. Very strange. Not nearly as successful as my previous website, Bigmack's World (I might as well mirror it on here for fun, hehe). That's all for now. Enjoy. | | |
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| 10/10/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
Yesterday was just a weird day. I had school off, so I drove with my dad a little ways south to visit Saint Mary's College of Maryland. On the way there we saw many interesting things. Outside of the Beltway going south on Route 5 we saw a mess of police cars and ambulances (and even a fire truck) roaring down the left lane, but without their sirens on or lights flashing. Soon we came upon the scene of a domestic dispute from a day previously which involved someone shooting out windows at a motel and no injuries. Normally, this would be nothing, but because for some reason a link was suspected between that and the sniper shootings, the place was swamped. Not by the police, who'd already made their arrest, but by television camera crews. Two camera cranes were jacked up high above TV vans surveying the scene, and at least ten different news reporters teams were there. It was strange.
And then a little bit later we saw five police cars screaming down the read, and their lights WERE on. They surrounded a white pickup, with their guns drawn, ready to go into action. It was like a scene from Cops. I'd never seen anything like that before. The guy in the car was laughing incredulously, holding his hands up high, so I suspect he wasn't actually guilty of anything except some minor offense such as speeding. As my dad remarked, the police are really hopped up on testosterone in light of recent events.
Next we drove through La Plata (we didn't plan this route, it just happened, I swear). It is a Southern Maryland town that was hit hard last year by a freak tornado. Many of the buildings were still being repaired from the damage they had sustained. Apparently some of the buildings had just been given up on and were in an eternal state of destruction, waiting, I guess, until it became profitable enough to knock them down and use the land for something else.
And if you thought that's it, you don't know my quaint luck. At this rate we were going to be late for the appointment so my dad went screaming down the interstate at a fast rate. I guess we were lucky, because we saw at least two cars as they were being pulled over by State Troopers for speeding. And then we passed the Pax River Air Force Proving Grounds (where all of the latest plane designs are tested before put into actual military service). We saw a flight of two helicopters, on a training run I suppose, a cargo plane flying fast and at a low altitude, some miscellaneous civilian planes, and a strange double-rotored chopper sort of like the Chinook except the blades are a lot closer together so it looks like it's wobbling as it flies along. And then there were the decommisioned fighter jets sitting inverted on concrete pylons. Except when we came back later in the day they had moved. I guess they were on a rotating joint to slowly flip and rotate them throughout the day.
Some more weird stuff was witnessed by us, but I'm not going to spoil it by posting it for all to see. Yesterday was such a quaint, surreal day that I think I might reminisce back on it for all of my life. | | |
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| 9/20/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
The Week 3 Scenario of the MechWarrior Tournament last night was a blast. I ended up winning 1 (just barely), losing 1 (just barely), and the third one we didn't finish because two players had already gone undefeated, so it was irrelevant. Only 5 players showed up, so I stood a good chance of winning an LE, and guess what, I did! I got the LE Joust Tank. It's a very good unit and I'm planning on using for next week's scenario, along with the Mad Cat III I got from my lucky pull (So far I'm averaging 1 unique per 3 boosters just from weighing them in my hands; these odds are a lot better than the 1 per 6 in a full sealed case).
In my Creative Writing class we're really getting going. Some of the other people in the class are complaining, but I know I'm absolutely loving it, because my only problem is lack of motivation, and getting a grade is motivation enough for me. I suppose it's a form of exterior motivation, i.e. I won't do writing for just the fun of it, but I suppose some motive is better than no motive at all. I'll be posting my first story next week on Monday or Tuesday. It's the aforementioned story where a woman named Riaa lives in the near future, 2013, in a totally intellectual property rights controlled world. Maybe I'll post it to Slashdot ... and watch on in horror as Fyre melts down due to a thorough slashdotting. Eeek, this could be bad.
And tomorrow, my friend Barry Rosenberg is having his birthday party. I'm going to give him some MechWarrior miniatures as a present (He doesn't have any yet but we both played Mage Knight, so it'll work okay). I'm also going to bring Bahamut, my laptop running Linux, to show off the OS and a lot of the fun games at the party. LiquidWar in particular is a very fun, simple game that can support up to six players on a single computer.
Okay, and finally, site related news. I'll be posting my creative writing journal here (17 entries so far, 32 pages, that'll be a lot of typing, but I hope you'll enjoy all of my various science fiction short short stories). (And yes, that "short short" bit is not a typo; due to limitations of the journal, a story cannot be more than one entry, so a lot are unfinished and unsatisfying to me. I'll have to return to them later). Also, 3D graphics class is getting underway, and soon, hopefully sooner rather than later, I'll have some code for some 3D C++ programs to post (maybe games, maybe just tech demoes). Also, I still haven't given up on Perl or Java (not by a longshot), so expect some upcoming Java applet games and more Perl scripts like the Chessboard displayer and the comment submitter. I haven't played NetHack in a long time, and it's making me unhappy. It's so annoying that I haven't beaten that game yet, and I really want to. But I'm still too attached to recent(er) games like Firearms Half-Life and WarCraft III. But as soon as these bore me, I swear, I'm going to dedicate myself fully to NetHack until I finally beat that devilish game! | | |
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| 9/13/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
Okay, a few things to go over for today. Number one, I'm sick of all this September 11th stuff. You know it's getting to be too much when you can't even find local election coverage because the channels are doing 24-hour 1-year-after remembrance events. I had to wait until the NEXT MORNING in the newspaper to find out that Van Hollen beat Shriver in the Maryland Democratic primaries. It's not as if there's anything special or new about this September 11th stuff. They showed the plane footage again, some large commemerative ceremony, etc. I suppose a few people still care, but I certainly don't. Quite frankly I'm sick and tired of it, to the point of desensitization. On the night of the eleventh I couldn't even watch the Simpsons because Fox was doing there 9-11-2001 thing. That's sick. That borders on obssession. I even know a person who lost a relative in the attacks, and they said they've had enough of it already. And they've been affected in a way more personal than probably 99.99% of you out there. Oh yeah, another reason I'm sick of it, many of the Half-Life servers were shut down due to "Septemember 11th remambrance/observance." That's ridiculous: I want to play a game to escape all the crap on the TV, and all of the best servers are offline? Argh!!
Number two, I'm becoming hopelessly addicted to WizKids' new collectible miniatures game, MechWarrior: Dark Age [Fan site]. I played my first three games last night at my local gaming/hobby shop, Dream Wizards, in the week two scenario. I didn't win, but I came in second, and quite frankly, my army sucked because I don't have many units and I didn't know what I was doing. Despite that, I almost won, because there are a lot of other newbies as well (this game just came out). So this is one of the most fun times in a game's lifecycle: when it just comes out and there aren't any expert power players yet. This reminds me sort of when EverQuest was a good game, back in the closed beta days when making above level 10 was an accomplishment. So in the battles, I ended up using too many ranged vehicles, which quickly got tied up by cheap infantry units, and I picked a bad mech (The Elite Blackhawk). For 160 points, its attack values are good, but its main problem is that its two weapons are ranges 3 through 10 and 0 through 6. Since I was tied up most of the time, I ended up using my 0 through 6 attack the most, which was less powerful. Argh. Next time I'm definitely using a good melee mech.
So you might be wondering, what's so cool about MechWarrior: Dark Age? Well, it's kind of like Mage Knight [Fan site] except a lot better. For one, it's more balanced, and the three unique types of units: infantry, vehicles, and mechs, make for very strategic play. That, and the fact that it now uses three dice instead of Mk's 2, makes it a lot more tactical and less random, which was one of the faults I found with Mage Knight. Vehicles are generally ranged, and can be tied up easily because they cannot attack units that come into base contact with them. Infantry are cheap, maneuverable units good for tying up units. Mechs are pretty much good at everything: running long distances, attacking with ranged, attacking with melee (depending on which mech you use, anyway). And they can keep on attacking turn after turn, so long as they manage their heat dial. That gets pretty tricky. But enough of this MechWarrior stuff, let me just conclude that it is a great game, and I encourage anyone with interest to pick up a starter pack for only $19.99. You'll get enough units for a basic army; convince someone else to get one too and you can start playing battles.
That's all for now, Ben out. | | |
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| 8/21/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
Wow, what a strange week it's been. First, last Friday I officially finished my eight week long SEAP internship. The title of my research is Using Microarray Analysis To Determine The Effects of DHA and AA on the MDA-MB-231 Breast Cancer Cell Line. Here's a link to the Microsoft Word manuscript of my project. In the upcoming months I'll write a good paper for application to my school, the Intel science fair, and what not, but for now, just enjoy what I have at the moment.
Also, my Italian cousin Arianna and her mom Dixie left on Sunday. It was fun while they were over, but unfortunately, they had to go back to Italy less than a week after they got here. Oh well. I have a lot of pictures from SEAP, the cousin's visit, and a neighborhood block party that might be interesting. Suffice it to say, I live on probably one of the most diverse streets ever. Our little section of Windsor View Dr., less than 20 houses total, has got everything. We've got Chinese and Japanese. An elderly British couple. We have some foreign nationals from Belgium (who speak French) are living almost directly across the street. In my household alone we have Scotch-Irish and Russian Jews. And let's not forget the well-to-do African American grandfather living across the street, and the wife of one of the men who came from Italy and speaks Italian. Oh yeah, and we have lawyers, doctors, a lot of little kids, a college drop-out, many dogs, some cats, and a whole variety of street-going contraptions (bikes, roller skates, roller blades, scooters, tricycles, and other stuff I don't know the name of). There are undoubtedly many people I left out, but you get the picture. This street is only possible near Washington D.C.
The computer situation at my house is going well. All computers are present and accounted for (and getting OS'es installed on them). You can see the computers page for more information. In the meantime, I'm pumping out an impressive number of SETI work units, and soon I hope to even have my own Beowulf Cluster!
That just about covers everything. Except for the horrible news that school starts on August 28th. That's just a week away! Eeek! And I have two summer reading books to read by then, The Invisible Man by Harlan Ellison and Uncle Tom's Cabin (there's only one of these). However, I will get to be a senior, which is nice in a way. But it also means I have to worry about college applications and such. Oh boy this is going to get busy.
Also, I figure I've been playing Blizzard's excellent game WarCraft III so much, that I might as well make a webpage for it. I don't really like playing the normal game, so I'll be posting strategies and such. Here's a link to the page. | | |
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| 8/15/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
Today was sort of a big day in the Science and Engineering Apprentice Program (SEAP), run by George Washington University (GWU). It was also my last day at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. Too bad I forgot to bring my camera to take pictures of the people. For what it's worth, I'll take time to give a quick shout-out to the cool people I met while I worked there: Carrie, Cathleen, Brian, Nabarun, Chanaka, Lauren, Winston, Kathryn, Mary, my mentor, Dr. Rasha Hammammieh, and countless others that don't come to mind right now. It was a great eight weeks! A lot of fun! So now, tomorrow is my last day of SEAP, and I have to give a presentation down in Lisner Auditorium (On the GWU Campus). This should be interesting.
Here's a picture of my cousin Arianna.
Original Quote of the Day: "Give a man a wheelbarrow full of porn, and you satisfy him for a year. Give a man a woman to call his own, and you satisfy him for eternity." | | |
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| 8/13/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
Whew, the LAN party was a blast! We ended up playing mostly Quake III Arena (all sorts of mods such as OSP, QuickDeath, and Bouncy), some 3v3 Total Annihilation, a little bit of Warcraft III, and, oh yeah, Jon brought over his DreamCast and we played a lot of Soul Caliber. The preliminary pictures are up, but they're not weeded through yet, thumbnailed, commented, or anything like that yet. In fact, I'd wager that about 40% of them aren't even on-topic. Anyway, I'll clean it up soon, but in the mean time, let me just say that Total Annihilation must be the best game ever! I remember playing it more than half a decade ago, on my 150Mhz computer with 16MB of RAM. And now, playing it on a 2Ghz computer with 768MB of RAM, it's a little bit smoother, and certainly demonstrates it has the best staying power of any game around anywhere.
In other, site-related news, I've upgraded my site generation script to send entries in excess of five off to an archive page for separate viewing. This will immensely speed up the loading time on all of my heavily-updated pages as well as keep them up-to-date for search engines. You can get the open-source page generation script here. | | |
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| 8/10/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
Hmmm, let's see, what's new. I'm annoyed that the computers I ordered online STILL haven't come yet, despite them saying they would be here by the 6th of August. I have two 2 Ghz computers in the mail, as well as a laptop my aunt is selling me for cheap. All in all, the costs come to less than $1,000! And let me tell you, although these computers don't have monitors, that's about all they don't come with: they have nice memory, hard drive space, video cards, speakers, etc.
So, today I'm having a computer/LAN party at my house. Jon Edwards, Noah Teske, Barry Rosenberg, Anatoly Preygel, and Martin Katz, with his friend Chris Rowlett, are coming. That makes seven of us, playing computers in my "spacious basement," and whatever else. For two days. Geez, it's going to be wild. Anyway, I do have my trusty digital camera, and I'll be taking some pictures, so I might as well post them here and give you all a look at what a true computer nerd party should look like, if done correctly. | | |
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| 8/1/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
Mark my words, I have a bit of a prediction to make. It seems rather obvious, what with all the news and everything, that America is going to be attacking Iraq soon, right? Well I'd like to guess when that will be. I'm guessing October 12th, 2002. Don't ask for my reasoning, it's rather shaky, but I figure, why not, I'll throw a guess out there. And if I happen to be right, I can point to this entry and say, "Haha! I am psychic!". | | |
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| 7/29/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
Long time no update, huh? I'm sorry to say, there have been other things more important in life than working on this webpage (Sad to say, isn't it?). Among other things, I've been hanging out with Georges, I went to a Washington Freedom Women's soccer game (they won 1-0), I've been playing a lot of Firearms Half-Life RC2.6 (What can I say, I'm addicted), I've been hanging around talk.origins a lot, I've been taking a lot of pictures with my digital camera, and among other things, I've just started the simulation mode in Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec for the PS2 and it's proving to be enthralling. And nevermind that I still have an 8:00-16:00 day to put in at WRAIR during the weekdays. So you see, I haven't had much time to get around to programming neat Perl scripts for this webpage, or programming a new Java game (Which I really want to do), or what not. Heck, I haven't even been able to devote any time to my science fiction writing (I received a wonderful amount of critiques on Quantum Glitch, but I just haven't finished the second revision yet). Also, I have summer homework for school, I have to worry about applying to colleges, and I have this huge summer research cancer project that I need to put the finishing touches on. Eek! Work overload! I'm just so glad that I didn't sign up for any truly hard classes senior year. About my breast/prostate cancer research project: it's going great. The labwork so far has been tolerable, but what's really nifty is the data I've garnered. I have five sets of data regarding different time periods and which omega fatty acids the cancer cells were treated with. Let me repeat the importance of that: I have data!! Now, I'll just need to analyze the interesting genes ... though that will be tough on its own right. About this webpage. I need to upgrade the C++ page generation script soon. Why? Because when it "archives" old entries, it really isn't doing son: they're still on the same page. Since the main index page is already about 60KB and growing, I know I need to update the page generation script to truly archive the old entries and offload them to a secondary, archived page. By the way, Fyre's Domain is now being served on ports 8080 and 8007 in addition to port 70. This should allow more people access. Thus, any of the three URLs will yield this webpage: http://fyre.myvnc.com:70 , http://fyre.myvnc.com:8007 , and http://fyre.myvnc.com:8080 . Note that I've redirected the offical URL, http://fyre.zapto.org , to port 8007. For most people it shouldn't make a difference. | | |
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| 7/3/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
So many ideas are floating around in my head right now, it's driving me crazy. First of all, I have all of these science fiction short stories I want to write, but I just can't seem to find the motivation to do them! Please, if you can offer up some encouraging words, contact me! Otherwise, I'll get it done, but it might take awhile. Also, I'm thinking of all sorts of cool RPGs I want to code in Java. After the experience with TORPG, I decide I want to make a more traditional RPG (but without random battles and a separate battle screen), with a very innovative experience system. More on that to come as the project enters its beginning stages. For now, though, have fun on the Fourth of July! | | |
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| 6/3/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
I just got back from a two-day visit to Carnegie Mellon ... and I think it's looking pretty nice, although it is pretty expensive. I guess my list now looks something like: UMCP, Saint Mary's College, and Carnegie Mellon. Nothing special to report: the school year is winding down rather quickly, and it turns out I only have TWO finals to take at the end of the year. Once school ends and my internship starts, I'm really going to be able to start accomplishing all that I. This includes: maybe upgrading or buying a new computer for Fyre, writing some more stories, adding some nifty Shakespearean Perl scripting language things (Sort of like those word magnets you can buy where you put together an Ad-Lib sentence from the words they give you, know what I mean?), and heck, maybe adding some of my other interests to this site (Mage Knight and Final Fantasy X, for instance).
Today's Science News: A decades old question is coming closer to being answered. Scientific American has an article up about the creation of the Moon: specifically, how did it happen? The leading theories seem to indicate that it was created in a truly massive collision between our Earth and another planet-sized body. This is the only way to explain how much angular momentum the Moon has. The findings of this simulation have important ramifications for physics and astronomy - but especially for science fiction! I'd love to write a story explaining how, billions of years ago, alien intelligences were involved in the shaping of the Moon in very intriguing ways. Look for this story soon ... or never, we'll have to see how it goes. | | |
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| 5/17/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
Whew, AP week is finally over, and I think I did pretty well on my two AP exams: Psychology and Language & Composition. I've uploaded a program I made last year called TTriad (Triple Triad) that is written in C++, using the AP string and CMU graphics classes, and comes pre-compiled for Macintosh (grrr, I really wish our school used Linux computers). The sources are included, and with only some fidgeting around, you should be able to get it to compile and run on your system. It's based roughly on the Triple Triad card game from Final Fantasy VIII, but vastly different; one of my projects this upcoming summer will be to program a better Triple Triad game in Java for Linux. It's a strategic, puzzlish game that should be a welcome diversion after I finish TORPG (we're not going to totally meet my original expectations by the end of this school year, so I'll complete it on my own over the summer).
Project: After getting inspired at the Grove Park Inn to build a waterfall/sculpture thing (they had really nice ones at an art store there, but the price was several hundred dollars!), I'm starting to put together plans. I'll need a large sheet of shale rock, like the kind used for making garden walkways, which should be obtainable from Home Depot for a few bucks or less. And I'll also need a water pump, most likely of the aquarium-variety, that I can obtain at PetSmart for under $20. And the rest of the materials are basically free - nice smooth stones from a local stream, and some plastic device at the bottom of the shale to check the water. I'll also have to refill the water periodically as it evaporates. The point of this is to have something nice in my room that lets off a nice soothing sound (I'm really into nature), and also to entertain my cat. | | |
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| 5/15/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
I finally got back from the trip to Greensboro and Charlotte, North Carolina, yesterday. It was a nice trip: I got to see the Governor's Mansion, the town Cherokee (It was not what I was expected from Native American reservation), and a beautiful hotel in Asheville called The Grove Park Inn that we stayed at for two nights. I saw some cool sci-fi movies while there, and the landscape is second to none. It's like a dream: waterfalls and fountains everywhere, tunnels that look like treasure-troves, carved out of rock, with embedded shiny geodes and cool lighting, nice classical background music, and a whole fluid water motif going on. The place is just awesome, if you can afford to stay, anyway :-( Luckily my mom's work paid for the visit. It's the most beautiful hotel I've ever seen (they even had nice Chess sets sitting around on verandas, overlooking the landscaped gardens and moving water; to make it even better, I won a game against my dad!)
In Programming News: I've dredged up the source code for a Java fractal program I've written that produces Newton fractals. I know it works with Macintosh and Linux and I'm confident it should compile on Windows as well. | | |
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| 5/1/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
Something really bad happened to me on Monday, but it started off good. Right after school I drove to WRAIR (Walter Reed Army Institute of Research) for an interview with a SEAP mentor. Here's the good news: the interview went well, she's agreed to be my mentor, I get paid $1400 tax-free, plus the awesome experience of working with microarrays and prostate and breast cancer research and biochemical warfare research (Me working with anthrax, that almost scares myself). Getting into the complex itself was a somewhat scary experience: I was stopped at two different checkpoints, requiring verification calls to my mentor's office, and a thorough check of my driver's license, etc. This is a real military installation! There were the typical armed marines on guard across the grounds, and some soldiers doing push-ups. And now for the bad news - as I was leaving, I was informed of a big accident on the Beltway. "So what," I thought, "I didn't take the Beltway to get here and I won't be taking it back anyway." How wrong I was. A chemical truck had wrecked on the Beltway, spewing chlorine everywhere, and the Beltway was shut down, in both directions. It took me more than three hours of annoying stop-and-stop-some-more driving, just to get home, a trip that originally took me 20 minutes! I arrived home past 20:00, feeling really sick with a bad headache, and went straight to sleep. My mom joked, "Well now you've earned another chip on your license: rush hour driving." I wish I hadn't, but at least the 10 hours of sleep felt good ... | | |
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| 4/27/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
Nothing much has happened lately, besides the daily grind of schoolwork going on. I've finally tired of Grand Theft Auto 3 for PlayStation2 (After killing 3000 people, I realized I'd played enough of it), so I guess I'll try to work my way through Final Fantasy X. I can't believe how quickly the school year is going by! We have about a month and a half left, and that's all. Crazy. But there'll be a lot in between now and then - AP exams, SAT II's, normal class exams, Senior Research Project, etc, etc. Maybe during the summer I can finally do something awesome with this site, like making a better PHP or Perl generation script, or what not. For now, I'll leave the infrastructure alone, and just update the content. | | |
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| 4/20/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
I visited Saint Mary's College today, which is South of here, in Calvert County. It's not religious at all; in fact, it's a public college, and it just so happens to be named after one of the first American cities, that's all. It's one of two all honors public colleges in the country, so it does have some distinction. The seminar was nice, and some very funny jokes were cracked (though, that's not what I use to make my decision on what school to attend). The tour guide was nice, and we got a thorough tour of the campus. My favorite parts were the lakes and the paths through the wilderness - this is one nice campus! Students can check out sailboats and kayaks and rowboats for free, and some people like to go out into the middle of the lake to study. The WLAN (wireless local area internet) is pretty comprehensive and includes all parts of the campus, including the lake and other areas. It's also near Historic Saint Mary's City, which is a very scenic place. It's not very strong in computer science, but apparently it does have good biology (scanning electron microscope and a gene sequencer), and good artifical intelligence (a blend of computer science and psychology). Overall, a nice place, and YACICSMGT (Yet Another College I Could See Myself Going To). | | |
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| 4/18/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
A minor peeve of mine is: all of the sites grab certain information about your computer, like what OS it's running, what browser, etc. I'm sure that Yahoo, Google, MSN, etc.; all of them gather this info; heck, even I gather this info! What it means is that each you visit a webpage, you're casting a vote. If you visit with Microsoft Internet Explorer, you're essentially casting a vote in Microsoft's favor, which I'm sure you don't want to be doing. So if you have objections with Microsoft as I do, for being an evil corporate monopoly and all, take the little bit of trouble to cast your vote in favor of "the little guys." Make an extra effort to switch to Netscape or Mozilla, two superior browsers anyway, in my opinion. Better yet, switch to Linux altogether, that way you'll be casting an even bigger vote as you visit webpages.
I uncovered something random on the internet today: Civilization 1, about 10 years old now! My, has it aged ... I'm used to CivIII now, you see, and I just can't imagine how I ever played this. But it sure as heck made me nostalgic! For some excellent classic gaming action, you can download CivI from this very own website. Unfortunately, it runs most easily on Windows, but I'm sure even a semi-experienced Linux guru out there can easily get it to run on WINE. | | |
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| 4/17/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
I've uploaded Tern Overgul, a game I programmed with Anatoly Preygel a few years back. It's an applet and should run through your internet browser. Check out the readme here.
In Other News: An ant SUPERcolony has been discovered in Europe. It stretched 3,700 miles long. Is that even possible? Conceivable? Believable? Check out more at Sciam.com.
True Anecdote: Today, my mom came home from work as normal. She went out a half hour later to bring in the trash can or something, and comes back in screaming. "Ahhhhh! There's TWO gypsy moth caterpiller nests in my brand-new tree!" We've recently had our lawn landscaped, you see, and those caterpillers were absolutely going to destroy that small, fledgling tree. So naturally, my dad and I get to handle it. "Let's get out the flamethrower," I jokingly say, referring to the blowtorch we used in years past for this job. But, alas, we haven't seen any for many years, so we were caught unawares. Using a hose just spreads them around, and you can't do much by hand, so heat and flame is really the only way to kill them. It turns out we have some RAID lying around though, and some kitchen matches. Can you guess what happens next? Well, if you can't, here's what happened. We soaked the nests in RAID then lit them on fire, creating veritable fireballs in the tree in front of our house. Luckily my mom wasn't around at this point to see that. We continued spraying, making these huge fireballs. We set up an aluminum pan underneath the nests to catch the escapees; of which there were about fifty. After the nests were totally destroyed, and the surrounding wood of the tree charred, we turned on the mass of caterpillers in the pan, lighting them on fire and spraying more RAID at them, creating huge fireballs. If I had a digital camera, I would have gotten many pictures; you simply can't understand how much fun RAID and fire is unless you see pictures of it, or do it yourself. Long story short, the caterpillers in the pan were hissing and popping, and I think I even heard a few scream. By the time it was all over they were one huge charred mass of biomass, perhaps a delicacy to certain cultures, except they were doused through and through with RAID. It was a massacre tonight. Those gypsy moths didn't know what hit 'em. They certainly won't be threatening any trees anymore, that's for sure. | | |
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| 4/13/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
I've been addicted lately to a great PC game called Dungeon Siege by Gas Powered Games, which is led by Chris Taylor, who made the awesome game Total Annihilation. It's a really great action RPG, like Diablo, but so much better because you can control up to 8 characters and you don't have to click for every attack; they're autonomous and will hack at enemies with swords, cast healing if a member of your party gets low on health, etc. There are even packmules that can carry around a lot of loot, but I typically find that, if your party is full, it should be with 8 fighting-capable units, not some mule that sits around toting your loot. I've also been playing recently some of my PlayStation2 games: Grand Theft Auto 3, Final Fantasy X, Devil May Cry, Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec, and Metal Gear Solid 2. What can I say, these are some great games, I wonder if I should make a PS2 or Dungeon Siege page? Maybe only if I had some real content to put there.
Random Fyre Feature: check out the statistics page, which is an output of the program stats.pl that I just pounded out. It's updated every five minutes, so if you're playing on the public Nethack server or whatever and want to see if it's just YOU lagging, or whether my CPU is really busy or what not, just check out the page. | | |
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| 4/10/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
Today was very interesting. We had a half day at school and we'll have one tomorrow. My dad got this "genius" idea to go visit Goucher College directly after school, so we went, and 11 hours later, we finally came home. In the interim, we ate all sorts of junk fast food, wandered around on campus, got yelled at (figuratively) by the admissions office for not abiding by the 2-week-earlier contact rule for scheduling visits, and ALSO because they're swamped with seniors and don't want to have to deal with "mere" juniors now. But we made a covert plan with a philosophy teacher and we got into a seminar (normal class held once weekly on Wednesdaysfrom 18:30 to 21:00). It was very interesting, albeit a little long fora single class, but then again, it's only held once a week. There weresome nice people there and the discussion remained on a fairly high level(the topic seemed to be Marx and Hegel). Overall, a nice class, and Icould envision myself attending Goucher, which is A Good Thing. | | |
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| 4/2/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
College visits, day two. We spent the whole day visiting two collegs: Goucher College and Western Maryland College at Westminister. They're both liberal arts colleges located somewheres therabouts of Baltimore. We did the whole tour of Goucher, but only a quick peek at Western. Goucher I was mightily impressed with. It's a nice small college with a consolidated walking campus (i.e. no roads running through it like with Western), and it has nice woods and such, but it's very "in the thick" of things since it's so near to Towson, a big town, as well as the Baltimore Beltway. The dorms, classes, etc., are nice, as well as the other buildings. They have a good philosophy department, which I'm interested in, but they're not so strong in computer science. But here's the awesome part: you're allowed to attend one class a semester at one of their fellow colleges, and get this, Johns Hopkins is one of their fellow colleges, and it's only fifteen minutes away! Talk about the best of both worlds. At Goucher, cheaper tuition, a good chance of getting partial or full scholarship, a smaller, more "nurturing" community as my mom puts it, and then the opportunity to take courses at JHU without actually having to go to JHU! We also visited Western, but not so much in depth, and it still looks good, but not so much as Goucher.
I could actually see myself attending Goucher, more than I can say of any other college. They have some mostly PC computer labs with a few Macs ... if I were to come in there with a good Linux machine in my dorm room (FyreII?), then I could run a lot of unique services on campus ... that would be cool. Since the tech departments are a lot smaller, I'd have a better chance of working closely with the professors, and they do actually have a nice high-tech shielded 400Mhz NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) machine, which basically means they can actually do some pioneering chemistry experiments. The male-female ratio is something like 30-70, which is HIGHLY in any guy's favor ... | | |
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| 4/1/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
College visit, day one. We headed down to Johns Hopkins in the (relatively) early morning and returned home in time for dinner. Overall, my impression was somewhat favorable; I talked with the computer science people and they have a lot of good stuff there. Unfortunately, there are some negative aspects: a bad female-to-male ratio, very expensive tuition, and it's hard to get in. Plus, it's sort of focused mainly on biology and medical type stuff, which is what I'm not exactly into. And finally, it's a pretty hard college to get into (Although it's hard to improve on my SAT score of 1580). Overall, it's nice, but probably not one I'm going to apply to. Also, Pooya says its pre-med program is great, but not so much its computer science. | | |
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| 3/26/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben
Minor change today; I switched the server port from 8007 (a port I made up) to port 70, the old gopher port which really isn't used anymore, so it should function just fine for http. The reason I'm doing all of this is because my stupid ISP, Verizon, filters port 80; the default port for http, so every website you visit should more or less have the :80 at the end of the URL, but it's assumed by default because it's obviously the http port. I switched over because at my school only about 8 ports are not filtered by the firewall, but many of them I already use anyway, such as ftp, ssh, telnet, and ssl, which I certainly couldn't switch over to because my router already uses them for what they're supposed to be used for. But the school firewall doesn't filter 70, and I don't use it for anything else, so I'm switching apache over to that port, and it's two less digits in the URL anyway!
Unfortunately, changing the port made me lose the old counter numbers, so all the pages are starting back at one! Oh, well .... | | |
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| 3/20/2002 | |
| | Contributed by:Ben McIlwain
Yesterday was Fyre upgrade day; I got some RAM in from an online auction site. I bought two 256 MB sticks, one went into Fyre, and one went into my Windows machine. This server now has 384 MB RAM where it previously had 128 MB. Quite a marked improvement; I don't even use hard drive cache any more! Also, this computer has two 9.1 GB ultrafast SCSI hard drives. I have room for a third, so if I can find a reasonably-sized SCSI cheaply online, I'll buy that too. And finally, this computer runs on a *pitiful* Intel Pentium II 400Mhz, although I must admit Linux gets a lot more out of it than Windows ever did. My plans for upgrade include either getting another 400 Mhz, or more preferably, buying two already stepped-and-matched Intel Pentium II Xeon 500 Mhz processors, which are great for servers on account of the extra L2 cache. So, conceivably, this computer could end up being a great server - a lot of RAM, triple-SCSIs, and dual-500 Mhz's. Now all I need is the money :-) | | |
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