For those of you reading the news (like anyone reads anymore), or watching CNN, or following the stock market, I’ve found a bit of comfort: (or link) (note: it’s a bit cut off; click on it for the right tenth)

What does the above mean? The S&P 500 is an index of 500 different US companies; the index can be taken as a rough estimate of the US economy as a whole. As seen above, our economy isn’t actually as bad as it was in 2003-2004.

The comfort is hopeless, because we’re facing a sharper drop than before, and we’ll probably continue to decline, but, from this graph, we aren’t that bad yet. Although actually we are. So, for those of you who don’t care, we’re fine. For those of you who do, we are fucked.

Browsing around on hackthissite.org, I came across a tutorial on redcoding. That is, the assembly language of the programming-based wargame “Core War.” I had heard of this, briefly, while perusing the hive mind, but never really tried my hand at it. It has been featured in Scientific American, and seems to be pretty well known in the wargaming community. So, over the course of the next week/month or so, I’ll try my hand at a little slice of it, and report back on this blog. Obviously I won’t become pro in a week, but I’ll see how it is.

In a total side note, I have decided to start writing all of my posts using raw html in ScribeFire, instead of relying on the little link buttons. My html knowledge, 6 months ago decent, has devolved to googling everything. So, I’ll just do it by hand. In XHTML, no less. Beat that, rotting-hunk-of-meat-that-is-my-brain.

In other news, I got back from my defensive camp today with the rest of my football team. (The [sic] Championship Grading System! is thumbs up/down; truly, the System by which Champions are made) Over two-and-a-half days, the highlights and lowlights (shutup, k?):

• Highlights:

–>Ordering (virtually) everything on the menu at Sonic Drive-in (the watermelon slush makes my knees go weak)
–>Cracking my first (true) joke. So John Risko says “I hate people who think they are cool but really are not.” (possibly referring to me, or maybe someone else. I wasn’t really paying attention) So, sensing my moment, reply, wait for it… wait for it… “I didn’t know you were filled with such self-loathing.” YES!
I went there. TOTALLY OWNED. PWNAGE until kingdom come. Felt good, that did.
–>FINALLY playing tackle football again. Tackling other people, no less.

• Lowlights:

–>Getting tackled by big sweaty men.
–>Getting tackled by medium-size sweaty men.
–>Getting tackled by smallish-size sweaty men.
–>Getting tackled.
–>Smelling like ass and balls, blended into a refreshing mix at the same time, yet knowing that the next day, I have to put on those delicious-smelling pads for another day of camp.

Not that I’m complaining. It was pretty fucking awesome. Plus, I’m not a rookie anymore. (don’t even get me started)

In even less important news, I have a bruise on my arm which looks like a tattoo loosely meaning “03″. Double points if you can guess what that means.

Finally, the blog post has seemed to have published itself two-nay-three-nay-four times. Fucking scribefire.

UPDATE: wait, five times.

Technorati Tags: musings, josh stroud, football, recode, core war,

So, anyway, I was browsing zinio.com for interesting magazines. Zinio.com, in case you didn’t know, is a purveyor of magazines for both discriminating and undiscriminating tastes. But first, some background:

It started with a bang. I sat there in a cold sweat, feeling a lump in my throat. The computer screen gaped at me, a hungry void which needed to be filled. A shiver limped down my spine.

I pressed Enter, and the world collapsed from the infinite quantum states which could have been to the one which was. The world darkened. Flickered, as if the electric current wasn’t quite what it should have been. And went out. And I sat there, alone in this … place. Never before had I felt so alone. It was a darkness so complete, I felt nonexistent. I sat there, in a nonexistent chair staring out into the nonexistence with nonexistent eyes, contemplating a world which no longer existed. And I cried.

That was the prologue from my new novel, Atalkhaphur of Karabbabazabahaababa-La-Maltacair. (pronounced ah-TALL-khahp-furr & car-AB-ah-ba-ZAHB-ah-HA-ah-ba-ahba-lah-mal-tah-CAIR)

Anyway, so I completed a survey to the kind people of zinio.com, and recieved a freeeeeeeeeeeee! subscription to any one of their hundreds if not thousands magazines. So I searched for some of my fav mags. Wired, sure. PC Mag (kind of), yep. NewScientist, unfortunately, no dice. Then I tried Scientific American. Well, see for yourself. Scroll down a page for the, well, full effect. Scientific to perhaps a biologist (or Freud).

Now Reading: Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein, your mind.

Now That To Which I Am Listening: Not really anything new. See my zune card (yeah, I’m non-conformist. Suck my ****s)

Now Playing: Still Rock Band (since release). I’m broke so I can’t afford GTAIV or COD4. Pity me, I’m poor.

Now Watching: The Original Twilight Zone (series).

UPDATE: My Mom just informed me that she reads my blog. I therefore edited a specific part of it before she reads it (unless she already has and is informing me of her readership to basically tell me that I’m fucked screwed)

Probably one of the first to start blogging about Firefox 3 (2 in the morning). Well, the official release candidate is released today. Previously, it was FF3RC2, or release candidate 2. The past couple of weeks/months has been spent to iron out any/all bugs for the final version. And, today, (although not yet), you can download this NEW version. I’ve got to say, 3.0 is so much better than 2.~. Snappier, less memory, tagging, the new autosuggest thing (places, is it called?) is great. Plus, it imports all your old extensions, settings, bookmarks, etc from your old firefox 2 (if you have it [YOU BETTER]). The only problem is that some of my favorite extensions (Greasemonkey, Firebug) do not yet officially work with 3.0. Here’s to hoping, though. Scratch that. Just checked, and all of them have updated in time for the release. SWEEET.

Firefox 3 is here!

Build-up/Filler: Here I’ll outline another random writing tip which is extremely useful when you don’t know the exact name of someone or something, but will look it up later. Maybe you are too tired search for a name buried deep in your (horrendously messy, if you are(?) I) notes. Maybe you are without internet, as I am, riding a bus home from work (here as a programmer). Maybe you are in “the zone” and even the moment’s pause looking something up will break your concentration, and your work flow. Whatever the circumstance, this method makes it nice and simple for you.

Breakdown: Let’s say you are writing an essay on Pakistan’s prime minister (or president, or whatever), and you don’t know his name. You could just leave it blank, and then go through the document, inserting his name in two dozen different places. Or, just use a placeholder. Just a word or a phrase to let you (and the computer) where the name should be. I like to use NAME1, because then, if you need another name, then you can use NAME2, and also, the computer won’t confuse it with name, or Name. The trick here is to use the greatest of inventions, the “Find and Replace” dialog. Pressing Edit - Find or CRTL-F brings it up in most applications. Then, making sure to press “case sensitive,” type in NAME1 to find, and the guy’s name as the replacement. And, presto, all done.

First, in order to comprehend (vocab word of yesterday [heh its one in the morning]) the following, please read this blog post explaining the proper safety precautions. Or, just read the following quote:

What does this mean for you, the obviously not-very-beloved reader who I’m sure is stalking me right now (I assume one person will read this blog post; I consider myself popular). Usually, you can tell how much rambling there is by how many layers of parentheses, brackets, square brackets, etc. there are. Seeing as I hit three, ([{, I must be in an odd frame of mind. (compare this to my previous posts)

Wait… what? Oh yeah, heh. The IMPLICATIONS.

Thank you, and good luck. Well, good luck after the jump… (THE MORE HITS THE BETTER MWAHHAHAHAHAHAHHA MY DIABOLICAL PLAN IS WORKING) (more…)

So, until I find a better DNS service I have just a temporary forwarding from nostalgiaofthemind.com to nostalgiaofthemind.wordpress.com . This means that all those RSS feeds don’t need to be changed. Peace out.

UPDATE: I just realized I wasted nine dollars. I registered the domain name nostagliaofthemind.com, which, as you can see is not nostalgiaofthemind.com (moved the first “L”) Sometimes, you just want to bang your head against the wall…

ATTENTION

ahem…

Now that I have your attention, I am changing my domain name from nostalgiaofthemind.wordpress.com (the current) to just http://nostalgiaofthemind.com.

For those who would like to know, I spent like $12 for a year including a 2GB email account and private Whois lookup (no personal information yay). This was through 1&1.com (pretty decent prices). If I ever get around to it, I may use them as a hosting service for this blog, but for now, I’m sticking with wordpress hosting.

For all of you who have RSS feeds, I’m changing it tomorrow night, so get ready.

Sooooooooooo, I figured i would share my Gmail setup with the world. Because my printer doesn’t work ($51 for an ink catridge??? WTF!) I just email stuff to myself and print it all out at school. Because I email so much, I use a quasi-tagging system, which, combined with Gmail’s mad mail searching abilities, allows me easy access without having to borrow through the perhaps hundreds of documents I’ve sent to myself over the years. Also, you can use GSpace (firefox extension) or Gmail Drive (shell extension) for similar functionality, but I already have enough extensions, and Vista is slow enough as it is, without more shit crap running. More after the jump. (more…)

Right now, after having my ISO burning program crashing on my twice, I decided to switch to another burning program (fucking Vista). So, it’s installing right now, and hopefully I’ll finally be able to install Fedora 8 (whoopee) and get a server of some kind running in my basement. Wish me luck.