Machinima

Lately I've been checking out a couple of Machinima series. What is Machinima? I think wikipedia can sum it up better than I can, but basically it's making movies out of video games. The most well known series is Red Vs. Blue, created using Halo. Red vs. Blue is often quite funny but it's been around a long time a it's hard to get into if you don't know the characters.

Another Machinima series that I've recently gotten into is the Strangerhood, which is a relatively new series created using The Sims 2. If you'd like to find out more about Machinima, head on over to machinima.com.

Treasure hunting

So today I found a major score. On my daily travels in Arlington, I found someone that was giving away a free computer. That's right a 6-7year old pentium III with 128 MB of Ram and a 30 MB hard drive. Who the hell wants that? I do. Believe it or not, that's actually newer than the linux box at work. So how well does linux run on a machine that old? Let's be honest and say the bigger desktop environments for linux (e.g., KDE and Gnome) run pretty slow on these machines. So I installed a linux distro built almost specifically for older systems, VectorLinux. I've never used VectorLinux before but I am pretty thoroughly impressed. It is a very well documented distro; I was able to answer every question I had with their built-in help. Anyway, I now have a total champ of a computer that I can take to work and replace the one rotting on my desk. FYI, I also have a $1500 Windows XP box on my desk. Guess which one I use to write papers and which one I use to check my e-mail with? You might be surprised.

Speaking of work, for those of you perhaps working on your research I'd pass this along. Two USGS WRD folks wrote this on-line statistics book which is available for free. Hands down, it the best applied statistics book for the natural sciences i have ever seen. Be careful about printing it out though; it's about 300 pages.

Lastly and probably most interestingly, here is a funny movie I found on ye olde internet about the purpose of the internet. Probably not safe for work but not really vulgar or anything either.

Back in the Saddle

Sorry I disappeared there. Becky came, her family came, we went to Washington and Baltimore, then everyone left. Now I'm trying to get back into my old schedule.

So I'm back. In my ever present quest to save money I was convinced there was a cheaper way to call Becky. The answer is Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP). Basically that's speaking over a computer line. There are several free options out there. Yahoo and Google both offer VOIP services as part of their IM software but both require Windows OS, which I don't have. So I gave Skype a chance. It runs on Mac, Linux, and Windows. The only hardware necessary is speaker and a microphone. Most laptops have both. We've tried it a couple of times and overall it works well. I just sit at my desk and talk towards my laptop. The really surprising thing is that it works with dial-up, although it tends to lag a bit. The only real catch is that both you and the person you're talking too have to have the program installed. FYI, it also works as IM software. So if you're cheap like me, check into it.