Dujodu Blog

I went to a web development meetup last week and it was pretty cool. If anyone actually reads this and is interested in web development, you can check out its page at meetup.com (which is a pretty evil website, but that’s where the group started). They used to be free, but now they charge like $20 / month, which is a total rip off unless you have a big enough group for everyone to chip in. My friend Martin (AKA Rich Greenfield) told me about it and was able to give me a ride home because I am a carless bum. Martin has a one man improv show, he performs as “Rich Greenfield” and he has some videos up on video.google.com if you want to check them out. This Martin fellow kept raving about this “rooibos” that is similar to tea, but without caffine. I decided I would give it a try, it’s a South African “tea” (it’s not really tea, but most people call it tea or red tea or red bush tea). I got some really cheap bags of it just to try it out while I wait for a shipment of genmai cha, and I must say that it is pretty awesome. It tastes like it would really kick ass iced, so I’ll be sure to try that out. Anyway, the web meetup was at a pretty cool multimedia place downtown called bytestudios. One of the guys there had an amazing screensaver (yes, I realize how insanely geeky that sounds) so I downloaded it immediately when I got home to replace some default lame-o Windows XP screensaver. The screensaver is called “Electric Sheep” and is named after the book “Do Andriods Dream of Electric Sheep” by Philip K. Dick, which I haven’t read. The cool thing about the screensaver is that it’s ever evoloving, and it’s pretty fun to watch how it changes. I’m not exactly sure how it works, I THINK that while it is running you and everyone else running the screensaver are helping to render the movies that the screensaver plays. The longer you use it, the more complex and flowing the screensaver gets. It uses random seeds based on your hardware configuration to morph the sheep (that’s what they seperate videos are called), and you can use the up and down arrows on your keyboard to rate the sheep. If you are using a boring screensaver, I suggest giving it a try. View more for some screengrabs of it in action, the variations are ridiculous though, so they don’t really represent the real thing. (edit: for a better explination of what the screen saver does, check out this tour from the website or this 5 page PDF)
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If you haven’t seen “The Corporation” you should. It’s an awesome documentary about… corporations! Right now it seems to be on http://www.video.google.com/ for some reason in it’s entirety, so if you want to check it out (albeit in low quality) you can at least get a preview of it there. It would probably be better to just rent it, buy it, or obtain it somewhere else though.

You can find a screening on their website. I was suprised by how many screenings there are in the milwaukee area, at least one per day for the launch week and they are all free! There are screenings at MATC, UWM, and one of them at a coffee shop like 5 blocks away, so I’ll definitely check it out at some point. You can view all U.S. screenings here. By the makers of Outfoxed.

I finally got my computer up and running and everything was going great. Then, out of nowhere, my main hard drive failed! How annoying! Thankfully all of my data was on my 320 GB drive, and I did not lose anything important. I’m running off of a 60 GB drive right now, the one that I used to have mandrake installed on. I’m kind of worried about the quality of this hard drive since I’ve kind of been beating the crap out of it while installing linux, I’ve probably reformatted it like 4 or 5 times in the past few weeks. I don’t know if I should just wait it out or get a new one. Anyway, I’ve been kind of busy lately so the blogging has slowed down. I recently started an internship with Discovery World, and school is starting to pick up a bit. I also spent an entire day playing Fahrenheit, a new action/adventure game with some very original twists. It was pretty good, the story got kind of ridiculous toward the end but overall it was a very fun gaming experience. If you aren’t into hitting keyboard combinations in a weird digital “simon” type way, I would suggest getting a console version of the game. I didn’t really mind it that much, but I know there are a lot of people that would hate those parts of the game. Check out the review for more info. I’m also happy to report that the new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm is about to start. I was never a Seinfeld fan, and I still am not, but I really love Curb Your Enthusiasm. Larry David is as funny acting as he is writing, and the combination can’t be beat! Look for it on the 25th, you won’t regret it!!!
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