Four Island

Recently, I was read Bluemonkey's Blog and found a not-so-recent post on the English language and its usages. Yes. That's what I'm going to be talking about now. Run, if you're scared.

Chtspek, teh so ann0yng. Itz imp0sib13 t0 red and teh d4mages pryde. Lyke, y cnt u jst us nrm4l ingles?

Ok.... maybe that was a bit over the top, but chatspeak annoys me. Like, alot. The English language was created for a reason. I don't know what that reason was, or how it relates to this debate. But I do know that, as Bluemonkey pointed out, the ability to read and write used to mean something. If you could do that, you were wise, intelligent and rich. You were powerful, you could do stuff and you stepped on people with your ability to spell "CatDog" correctly.

Now a days, if you're not using abbreviated English on your phone or IM, you're "uncool" and "wasting money" and "going to get sued" or something along those lines. I still stand by my belief, though, that you should use full English for every word you type, even though it may be for an SMS message or an IM conversation.

However, everyone's a bit of a hypocrite. I do, for some reason, continually spell "text" as "txt" when sending an SMS. :)

Recently, I was looking through the SweetCron source code when I found the MY_Controller.php source file. Along with this snippet of hilarity:

    function Auth_Controller() {
        parent::Public_Controller();
        //OMG WHO R U
        if ($this->data->user === FALSE) {

Ok, what? Those SweetCron developers must have been on cupcakes when they were coding that.

That reminds me of the Rubiwin glitches. It has always amazed me how strange glitches can be introduced into programs due to a series of coincidences.

However, this glitch had nothing to do with an amazing series of coincidences. The funny glitch was this thing with the switches, that if a block fell onto a switch in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, it would turn into a picture of a furnace with a hole in it. If a block fell into it, it would turn every single empty space in the area into Super Furnaces.

WOE???? It was very weird and I couldn't understand how that could be a glitch. However, upon re-reading the code, it turned out that I had actually put it in there! OMG! I must've either been half-asleep, or temporarily insane because it was really funny....

Anyway, there's my rant about SweetCron, Rubiwin and OMGs.

Ok, I think I'm going to have to make a tag for "rants" because this is another one. :)

Anyway, while you're all enjoying Christmas, I'd just like to make a stupid rant on some Christmas songs. Not all of them. Some of them are great. Like Do They Know It's Christmas Time by Band Aid. However, a few are just strange.

This rant is on rock-n-roll'ized Christmas songs. You hear them all of the time on the radio, things like "Yo, Frasty was totally a snaman with a LAVA jolly soul-man!" The thought of such a thing is not only hilarious, but kind of bothering.... :)

Anyway, that was the short Christmas rant from yours truly. I hope that gave you a chuckle and now enjoy Christmas!

Recently, I was going through some of my old stuff and I found this play I had written. Goodness, I must have been very young when I wrote that because it's very silly. However, some of it is stupidly hilarious, so I'm going to go through how sane I may or may not have been at that age by analyzing Kirby's Slippers, revision 3.

Kirby: Oh, today has been so boring. Nothing has happened. Voice: Hi, my name is Kirby's wall. That's Kirby. (Kirby leaves stage left)

Kirby's Living Room

Ok, what? Kirby's wall talks to him and he walks away as if nothing strange had happened? ....weird.

(Kirby says some random things and reappears up stage left in his PJ's) Kirby: I'm so tired. (ISAC Representative enters up stage right) ISAC Representative: Excuse me, but is there a Kirby in the house? Kirby (startled): Um, yes. I was just getting ready for bed.

Kirby's Living Room

So.... A random stranger, representing some random organization, walks into Kirby's obviously unlocked house and catches him getting ready for bed? That is just weird. Like, a lot.

ISAC Representative: I am from the ISAC. I was sent to tell you that the conference takes place tomorrow. Kirby (surprised): Uh, ok. ISAC Representative: The ISAC are great people and expect good behavior from you and the other person from Dreamland. See, the others are foreign. Kirby: Oh, great! I love foreign!

Kirby's Living Room

....what the negative? There are so many random things wrong with this that I'm not even going to bother.

ISAC Representative: Goodbye. (ISAC Representative leaves) Kirby: I need to go to bed. (Kirby trips on chair and tumbles over it) Kirby: Ouch! (Kirby leaves right stage)

Kirby's Living Room

Ok, that's the entirety of Scene 1, "Kirby's Living Room". I'd like to ask, A: How likely is it to trip over a chair? And B: Who on earth is Kirby talking to? The wall? ....actually, it could be possible, if you think about the first snippet....

Let's continue with the second scene, "King Dedede's House". It's a little longer, but there's only two snippets I'll be posting:

Kirby: Let's watch a movie! King Dedede: I'll get the candy! Kirby: I'll get the popcorn! (Kirby leaves stage left) (King Dedede leaves stage right) (Sound of getting things)

King Dedede's House

S-s-sound of getting things? ....I'm just going to.... um.... walk away.

All: Later.... King Dedede: Hey, come on! What's taking so long? Kirby: I'm getting my coat on, but it stuck to the dresser and now I'm wearing a dresser instead of a coat. (Kirby reappears left stage with coat on)

King Dedede's House

giggles

Ok, time for Scene 3, "ISAC Meeting House".

Kirby: Hurry up, we don't want to miss it! King Dedede: I'm only walking so slow because I brought all of the peanuts!

ISAC Meeting House

....in this play and the other I found (maybe I'll post about it sometime), there are a lot of references to peanuts. I really don't know. Such as this one:

ISAC Representative: Hi, glad you could make it. Come right in. Kirby: I'm so hungry. King Dedede: Have a peanut. (Kirby & King Dedede sit down)

ISAC Meeting House

This next part is implying something strange....

(Lights turn off) Kirby: Aaaaah! The lights turned off! King Dedede: Look, I think I see someone over there! (Lights turn back on and Kirby's slippers are gone) King Dedede: Look! Someone stole your slippers! Kirby: OHNO!

ISAC Meeting House

Why does Kirby have his slippers at an international conference? I mean, really. And Captain Obvious to the rescue with Kirby's first line there.

ISAC Representative (talking into microphone): I guess the party's over. Maybe there will be another meeting next month. King Dedede: But at least there will be another one next month. But what if it's also short? And they need another next month? What if there is a chain of meetings all the way until December? Would they all add up to 1 annual meeting? But what if that one is too short for short? Is there are a never-ending chain of meetings when they are too short? I guess a P.O. box could in theory break the chain....

ISAC Meeting House

Oh dear, I've ripped off Spongebob. Next, let's examine Scene 4, "Church". There's only one snippet I find amusing:

(King Dedede enters) ISAC Representative: King Dedede! Come on here! Voice (softly): You may now kiss the bride. ISAC Representative: I love you.

Church

Not only is he yelling during a wedding service, the ISAC Representative has spontaneously come out of the closet. This is getting pretty strange.

There is a quote or two from scenes 5 and 6, but they're mostly impulsive decisions and peanut quotes and this post is getting long. However, the play ends with Scene 7, "Creative Castle", and it rather amusing.

ISAC Representative: I just remembered! ISAC stands for International Stuffed Animal Conference!

Creative Castle

....not only have they been saying ISAC the entire play, he works there too and he only just remembers? However, this play ends with the funniest quote in the play:

Kirby: I want to take a vacation in Saudi Arabia! King Dedede: That's too far away. Kirby: So? I have airplane insurance. All: The End

Creative Castle

LOL. Literal lol.

Thank you for enduring my rant about my childhood and the randomness ensured. I've transcribed the entire script to HTML for easy viewing here: Kirby's Slippers v3. Have fun!

You must be looking at this post and thinking, "Ok, what?" Yes, probably. I really don't know.

Anyway, this is just a rant. And it's about my iPod. It's a new (well, two months new) Chromatic (yellow and pretty) and works pretty well. However, randomly, during arbitrary songs, the music will suddenly STOP.

And then, you know you have to hurry if you want to keep listening to that song. When that happens, I have to rip the headphones off of my ears and unlock (take out of HOLD) the iPod. At that moment, the iPod will make a very loud noise. So loud, you can hear it quite clearly even without the headphones on. "Oh, goodness," you should think to yourself, "I just saved my eardrums."

Immediatly after I do that, the music starts playing and the pause button doesn't respond for a few seconds so I miss some of the song. :( This is really annoying, and I don't know why it happens. Does anyone know? Knowing Apple, is it a feature or a bug? :)

Anyway, yes, you can say it.

"Ok, what?"

Um.... not really. Just trying out another Nonsense script! Well, I guess it's the teensiest bit relevant because Four Island went down.

Don't blame Linux you peoples! It was actually my fault. Yesterday, frustrated with Debian's.... um.... not-up-to-datedness-with-packages thing, I stupidly added the Ubuntu APT repository to /etc/apt/sources.list.... and tried to sudo apt-get upgrade. Oops.

The upgrade broke halfway done because it tried to install a package that used "Breaks", which Debian's old dpkg couldn't handle. So I was left with a mutant system, half Debian, half Ubuntu, completely unstable. I was afraid that if I turned it off, it'd never turn on again.

Exasperated, I backed up all of the data, downloaded Ubuntu 8.10 Server Edition, installed it and here we are! Four Island is back and better than ever! Ubuntu always used to work for me before I got a dedicated server and it seems to be working fine now.

And yes, I am a lazy person to the extreme. I'm sorry to everyone that I forgot to write the final article of Kirby Week 2008 :(. So instead, I'm just going to redirect you to a previous article.

I wrote an article entitled How To Implement Pingback a while back (in fact, on June 17th 2008, though since I changed time zones it says June 16th) that explains how to implement Pingback on your blog. You should do that because Pingback is a very useful thingy and I'm crazy about it. :)

And to end off, I'm going to include a few more results from that Nonsense script I mentioned:

Tamasys destroyed Color Pencils
W. B. Sarel thinks Wikipinia is thick sticky
The Fourm is taken over by Chofox Hudper
Tamasys wants to have plagurized Smiley
Four Island is parodied by Color Pencils

The last one is disturbing as Gryphic (or Drifty, as she now calls herself) actually has done this. :) However, she's purged all articles on her site before Four Island finished its extended downtime, so I can't link to it. Sorry! :)

This always seems strange to me. Why do most people on the internet that provide software packages, such as Linux packages that do not have standard distribution formats, or PHP sites like Wordpress, always distribute their software using gzipped tars? As in .tar.gz

I mean, really. Bzipped tars (.tar.bz2) are a much better way to compress things. Bzip2 is a much more effective compression algorithm than Gzip. I always use bzipped tars to archive my data.

Or wait. Is there some kind of deficiency with the algorithm that I don't know about? Am I going to wake up one day and find all of my backups useless? Oh dear, now I'm scared. :)

So, what is with bzip2? Is it just that people can't be bothered to switch to it, or is there some huge bug that'll eat Four Island?

While I did write this post four months ago, and this post was written within the last week, I loooove Pingbacks.

One day, a few weeks ago (read: four months ago), I was reading an article about blogging on I Help You Blog. A link on this article led me to Freelanch Switch, where I found a great article about how to get the most out of your memory stick. On this article, I found a link to a wonderful mini-suite called Tiny USB Office.

Tiny USB Office offers all you could want in a portable office at 2.5 megabytes! Some of the most interesting things it carries are a Notepad replacement (with more features than Notepad itself), an MSN client, a web-server file-sharer, an FTP client, a secure file shredder, a vector-image editor and more!

Try Tiny USB Office out. It's great. You won't regret it. Promise.

This post is the first day of VisitorGrid Week. For more information, read the post linked to right there.

A few weeks ago, I was cleaning my room up, preparing for the move back to America. I looked up on top of my bookshelf and found a big stack of papers I had completely forgotten about. They were old papers, stories and drawings I had created years and years ago. One that I found I particularly felt I had to share with you:

I drew that picture a verrrrry long time ago. Yes, quite a long time ago. That's right, it is a four. In fact, it's the original Fourie.

I had named it Fourie back when I had created it, but I had thought that I had lost it ages ago. But, now it's found again.

The interesting thing is to compare it with the modern Fourie. The original Fourie had a more angular body, while the modern Fourie has a curved one. (Actually, I have a strange way of writing the glyph 4 that other people seem to think is a U, a 9 or an h) Also, the original Fourie had dots for eyes while the modern one has vertical lines.

All in all, I'm happy to have found this old relic again, as well as the rest of the sentimental junk I found in that pile upon my bookshelf.

I've been reading a blog recently called Lorelle on Wordpress. It's a blog about blogging, and it's UBER GOOD. I don't know why, but it's like a jinxed book. I can't get off of it, there's so much good content on it.

Even if you do not have a Wordpress blog (like me), I'd still suggest Lorelle on Wordpress. Not everything posted there is strictly Wordpress related (like the title of this post, for example). A lot of it is just blogging in general.

And that brings me to the second point of this post. Dually inspired by Lorelle's "Blog Challenge" series (a type of post challenging you to post something belonging to some criteria on your blog--besides being fun, it gives you post ideas) and the comment thread of Dream Weaver's Entry 2 - "Are all Angels bad?", I've created a challenge of my own. But, since I don't want to copy Lorelle completely, I've decided I won't do a blog challenge. No, I'll do a comment challenge.

I want you to find a post on some blog (not on your own blog!) with some content that you can really reply to. Write a very long comment on it, like the ones on the DW post. Make sure you fill out the "Post Comment" form with your website's address in it, because when you write your comment, you need to comment on this post with the URL to the blog post you commented on and the username you are going as. Then, if your comment strikes me as particularly well thought-out and long, I'll post a link to your blog on my blog.

This challenge expires in exactly one month. I think it'll be interesting to see who actually cares enough about getting their blog linked to to actually manage to complete this challenge within the time limit. After the 30 days are up, I will take a day to judge, and then I'll post the results the day after. And comments posts exactly 30 days after this post will be rendered invalid.