http://www.computeraddiction.com/
http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/features/video-game-addiction-no-fun
http://www.netaddiction.com/
http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/faculty/dgentile/SRCD%20Game%20Addiction.pdf
http://psychcentral.com/lib/2007/coping-with-video-game-addiction/
http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=41125
Test if you can ever live in New York.
Question #1: Is this funny:
Overheard in New York | Thanks — You, TooGuy is riding Vespa in bike lane, and girl opens her car door, nearly taking him out.
Girl: I’m sooo sorry about that.
Vespa guy: No, it’s my fault.
Girl: Well, fuck you, then.–Chelsea
Nobody’s as consistently good at evoking a full-blown LOL as Crystal:
Boobs, Injuries, & Dr. Pepper“You sniped the dog?”
“Mom, no, I’m talking to-”
“I know what you’re doing. I just like aggravating you because you’re a complete turd when it comes to that dog. I didn’t tell you to ‘let’ him out, I said to ‘take’ him out.”
Go read. Funny. :p
“It was an older post, but it checks out. I was about to clear it…”
Games from Within: Exploring the C Unit Testing Framework JungleOne of the topics I’ve been meaning to get to for quite a while is the applicability of test-driven development in games. Every time the topic comes up in conversations or mailing lists, everybody is always very curious about it and they immediately want to know more. I will get to that soon. I promise!
In the meanwhile I’m now in the situation that I need to choose a unit-testing framework to roll out for my team at work. So, before I get to talk about how to use test-driven development in games, or the value of unit testing, or anything like that, we dive deep into a detailed comparison of existing C unit-testing frameworks. Hang on tight. It’s going to be a long and bumpy ride with a plot twist at the end.
Nice round up of c++ unit testing frameworks.
Stunning…
Knowledge Is PowerCiti Merchant Services and First Data Corp has decided to implement their own form of gun control, refusing to process credit card transactions between firearms retailers, distributors, and manufacturers, according to a press release issued by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade association for the firearms industry.
Is that even legal?
…
I’m… yeah, I’m just gonna leave it at that.
Primordial Slack: Wherein I Resign From My Job
I’ve refrained from starting any post that way, “wherein,” but I’m so sick in the head that three minutes after I turned in my resignation, I saw myself writing the title just that way. I need professional help. And a job.
I know. First rule of survival: never quit a job unless you have another lined up.
First off, congratulations: You’re a full fledged tank paratrooper.
Second: I’ve almost never “done the right thing” as far as looking for work and YES it’s gotten me in to more than one sticky situation.
But I look at it this way: If you hedge your life thusly, you are going out of your way to prevent any of the normal chinks in the armor through which opportunity is wont to pass.
It reminds me of people who can’t be alone and start seeing people on the side as soon as they detect trouble. Best you’re going to find is a half-assed relationship anyway.
People don’t throw themselves in to the void enough.
Rocket Jones: Too Funny Not to Pass Along
I was depressed last night so I called Lifeline.
Got a call center in Pakistan.
I told them I was suicidal.
They got all excited and asked if I could drive a truck.
“Huh? A truck? Wait..Pakis…BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!11!1!!!!one!!”
Well now I’m on my SECOND business trip ever, back to Boston.
Although this time I’ll be here until Thursday evening.
And, while I anticipate blogging to be light I fully understand that every time I say that I end up with a flurry of posts like a little crack monkey.
But then there’s also the notion that if you take an umbrella out with you so that it doesn’t rain, not only will it rain, but your umbrella will break.
I don’t know what that means.
Ah, this reminds me of something perfectly unrelated:
Iranian Boats Harass US Navy Vessels in Gulf“Five small boats were acting in a very aggressive way, charging the ships, dropping boxes in the water in front of the ships and causing our ships to take evasive maneuvers,” the Pentagon official said.
“There were no injuries but there very well could have been,” he said, adding that the Iranian boats turned away “literally at the very moment that U.S. forces were preparing to open fire” in self defense.
He said he didn’t have the precise transcript of communications that passed between the two forces, but the Iranians radioed something to the effect that “we’re coming at you and you’ll explode in a couple minutes.”
Then, from the comments…
“we’re coming at you and you’ll explode in a couple minutes.”It was all a misunderstanding, they had a pronoun problem.
“we’re coming at you and we’ll explode in a couple minutes.”
Excuse me while I sit here and daydream happily about a relationship I fubared.
Ah, but for a time machine.
Remind me to tell you the monkey story some day.
A proposed California building code regulation would require new homes or homes that have changes made to their heating and cooling systems to be fitted with something called a “programmable communicating thermostat”. While that may sound innocuous enough, it’s not.
“But it’s for the ENVIIIRROONNMENT”
This crap has got to stop.
So how do you go about packaging and distributing a commercial Java app?
I’m sure I can create a simple runnable signed Jar, maybe even drop an installer package around it.
But what about the JRE? Does that get bundled with the app or do you send the user off to sun to download the thing.
Yes, I’m talking about commercial viability, so it’s got to be clean.
My Way News - Clinton Unbowed by Third-Place Finish
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) - Sen. Hillary Clinton, unbowed by a third-place finish in the Iowa Democratic caucuses, hailed a “great night for Democrats” and said the strong turnout pointed for sure to the election of a Democratic president in November. She said she would “keep pushing as hard as we can.”
BULLSHIT
(emph mine)
As I’ve commented elsewhere: I’d like to offer my sincere condolences to the families of Hillary’s staffers.
All kidding aside though, this isn’t good for the Democrats. It is however, deLIGHTFUL for me. See, Obama won’t be elected. His current popularity wave is scarcely more than race guilt and political correctness. While he’s certainly not a complete and total moron, he’s remarkably unfit for POTUS.
Of the four Obama supporters I’ve questioned, zero of them could tell me what it was they liked about him.
So if he gets the nomination, it’ll be the final nail in the Democratic chances to wrest the White House in November.
Unless of course Ron Paul gets on the Republican ticket, which is about as likely as…well…something remarkably unlikely.
I’m not going to start spending energy on this stuff though, not from the blogging and armchair guesswork perspective anyway. No matter WHAT happens, it’s going to be a really long wearying year.
Visiting Sears.com (and Kmart.com) a few weeks ago, I was offered a chance to join My SHC Community, for free, but what I received was, from a privacy perspective, very costly. Sears.com is distributing spyware that tracks all your Internet usage - including banking logins, email, and all other forms of Internet usage - all in the name of “community participation.” …
That takes some goddamn sand.
Citibank limits ATM cash in city
A jump in ATM fraud led Citibank to slash the maximum amount of cash available to customers from their accounts - a security move greeted warily Wednesday by its patrons.
The new cap on cash kicked out by the company’s ATMs began in mid-December after what Citibank called “isolated fraudulent activity” around the city.
The bank, with 134 branches around town, would not say how many customers were affected or how much money was involved.
One Brooklyn woman said she went to her bank branch on Christmas Eve and was unable to take out her normal cash limit, so she called customer assistance.
Yikes!
…”She said most New York customers were affected and she suggested I change my password.”
(emphasis mine.)
Anyone affected by this got the numbers? My ballpark guess is that they dropped the withdrawl number down to $100.
And people PLEASE, change your goddamn passwords every once in a while. It really matters. You people who’ve had the same pin for 20 years are BEGGING to get hacked.
What’s cute, yellow, eats snow and poops out bricks of ice?
Meet Yuki-taro, a Japanese robot built to quickly clear roads after heavy snows.
(h/t to SDB)
I’m looking for a device I know must exist:
I thought this thing was it: Gemini iKey Plus USB Recorder But on reading the reviews it looks like a one-off.
I’m looking for a portable recording device I can slip in to a pocket with the following features:
It’s got to exist. I may head over to Sam Ash after work and see if they’ll do something other than sell me some $1200 pro musician thingie.
Any musicians out there know where I might find such a doohicky?
For the last fifteen or more I’ve had a little New Year’s Eve ritual. I take all my journals and notebooks, bring them together and read through them all. Included are all my 3×5 cards, all of those things I write for my benefit.
Once together I read through everything I’ve put down, no matter where it takes me.
The idea of course is that I’d actually go and learn something from this process and make at least a minor tweak to improve my life.
Unfortunately, though perhaps predictably, it rarely works out that way. Usually it’s an interesting exploration certainly, but little more than that.
This year I was really quite looking forward, over the past week or so, to knuckling down and doing this yesterday. I wanted to see if I could find a decent correlation at least to the near complete absence of depression this year of any notable scale. Indeed I’ve not experienced anything of a funk that would be described as more than having been in a bad mood, and even that for a day or two at the most extreme.
Compare that with the past couple decades where I’d routinely get in to funks that would last weeks at a time.
So I started shuffling around my apartment on Sunday, picking things up and bringing it all together and I had a rather curious notion that grew as I went through my depth first search of the place: I wrote almost nothing this year.
In terms of personal journaling I don’t have more than five pages, unless you count my reading journal, which consists of nothing other than book read dates and reviews, so I don’t.
And I thought to myself, I thought: “Self? That’s unfortunate. You really let it slide this year. Imagine if you’d actually taken better notes you’d be able to see what it was you did differently.”
Now as I get older I know less and less about the world around me. But there is one thing that I’ve held on to and that has stayed with me for these 38 years: God is not without a very well developed sense of mirth and irony.
So I thought that to myself again. Then again, until I started smelling smoke. I went back and did some random sampling over the past 20 or so years of journaling. It was remarkably close to all about me trying to work out some depressive mood cycle on paper; iterating all the things I felt were gross inequities in my life while cheaply ennobling them by peppering the pages with various permutations of “mea culpa.”
In short: I’m of the mind that writing this crap down, under the very well intended goal of helping to work through them, had reinforced and cemented my own obsessive whinings in my life strongly enough to drag me down in to long term bouts of depression.
Now, it may NOT be true. After all it’s a fool who mistakes correlation for causality.
Experiments would be easy to do. Evaluate things over time with and without journaling, etc. Do it in cycles. blah blah.
But frankly? This is my life, and I’m not going to take the chance that it MIGHT be true to even run some personal experiments.
I’ve got an awful lot more about things of that ilk, what I’m going to accomplish this year and how. But those are still developing.
I’ve been a proud part of a truly liver punishing tradition for the last couple years, an event from which I’ve only just returned.
From my buddy’s email:
If you can’t remember the tradition, then let me refresh your memory:Since I was a little one, my family has this crazed out tradition where we visit friends & families homes on New Years Day BEFORE noon (we usually start around 8AM). The reason is to visit everyone in an attempt to bring them good luck / fortune to their household for the year. This involves a shot of alcohol (host and guests must participate). When we were younger, we used to receive money, but now it is just the shots. Some of the other crazy rules of this is that women must stay home until after 12PM for a few reasons (1) so they can welcome visitors into their own household and (2) because it is supposed to be bad luck for a woman to leave her own household and could even result in bringing bad luck to another household….
That’s the quick version of it……and last year someone was kind enough to point me to a similar tradition that is from Scotland:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-Foot
Seven stops, 8 shots (we doubled up on the 12 year old jameson at stop number…err… 5 I think.)
We were indeed done with the formalities before noon. But then we went to Balthazar for brunch, and you know what THAT means.
I’m going to bed.
