Beyond Occident

Just thought I’d let everyone know about Science Debate 2008. They are trying to organize a debate for all the candidates based on science and technology, all rather important topics for our country’s future. They need your help: If you support the debate, sign the petition on their site! And tell your friends too.

Good news everyone. I finished part 1 of 3 on my Legend of Zelda resolution. On Friday, I beat Ocarina of Time. I must say, the ending was such a buzzkill. And the final boss was so easy.

Ah well, it’s still one of the greatest games ever in my opinion.

I previously had this posted to my ’2008′ goals

3. Became a master Photoshop ninja (and by Photoshop, I mean Gimp, because ya know, I can’t afford Photoshop).

I changed my mind. I decided I am happy enough being a Photoshop peon. Maybe I’ll change it to be a intermediate Arabic speaking ninja. Speaking of Arabic, I got the text book today and it is awesome. It goes back cover to front cover like a real book of the Arabic origin. How neat-o.

And now that I’ve gone wildly off topic, I realized that every school year (or now school semester, since classes change every .5 year in college) I have one class that I really dread going to. Last semester it was Spanish. My senior year of high school it was every class except Visual Arts. This semester I have a feeling it’s going to be communications.

I’ll keep you posted.

Funny thing happaned today. I got on my Xbox and realized that a few months ago, I had downloaded Carcassonne for free from the Xbox Live Arcade. At the time, I really knew nothing about it. I never actually played it. Fast forward a few months and my brother recieved it for Christmas. I played it and thought “Wow, what a neat game!”. Well, it was quite the surprise when I realized I owned it already. It translates quite nicely into Xbox-land too.

Fantastical news. 2008 starts off fantastic as I finally got my flickr feed to work on the right sidebar. So everyone can check out my pictures from my new z1275. Rejoice!

It’s that time of year! Now is when we all make a big list of things we want to do, tell everyone about them and then fail in spectacular fashion a month or two after New Years. But hey, who am I to hate on tradition?

1. Beat every Zelda game I own for the Gamecube. That would be Ocarina of Time, Windwaker and Twilight Princess. Somehow, I haven’t beaten any of these yet I’ve played them millions of times. How sad.

2. Make a fantastical website. Domain was purchased. Now we just have to build a sweet looking blog.

3. Became a master Photoshop ninja (and by Photoshop, I mean Gimp, because ya know, I can’t afford Photoshop).

Sometime around me coming home from school for winter break, something terrible happened. It began slowly, infiltrating sneakily, like a ninja sneaking up for a kill. My Halo 3 skillz were gone. For twenty days, I kept fighting however, and I still did good every once in awhile, yet it seemed overwhelmingly disappointing.

So, since about a week ago, I put down the controller and didn’t play. Ironically, right after I did this, the Xbox Live servers seemingly went through hell and just recently they were up running correctly again. But anywho, I took a break. And it is glorious. It was starting to get stale playing which may have contributed to my losses. But now, I’m ready to return.

And just to prove it, here is a game describing the depths to which I fell.

Just found this story over on the Consuming Louisville blog. The Speed Art Museum has commissioned Argentinean artist Flavia Da Rin to create 10 billboards to cover Louisville. Flavia Da Rin uses photoshop to create fantasy type artwork that is “enchanting and disquieting”.

What is even cooler about this is that the Speed Museum has integrated a type of social contest into it.  When you find a billboard you can text the keyword that appears on it to the Speed Museum to unlock the billboards on the internet. Then once you find all ten, you can enter a contest to get your own work on a billboard by the Speed Museum around March. I’ll be keeping an eye out for them when I head back down to Louisville next week.

This is cool. Grab your mobile phone and dial up 202.683.7002 to listen to Andy Carvin talk on NPR about mobile phones and Twitter, among other things. Here’s the tweet.

First off, some may notice that my background header has changed. While I’m really not satisfied with it (the dark background clashes with the header), it will work for now. The background came from an excellent photo from Thomas Hawk, and I added a couple layers of gradients to it. I sort of feel like I ruined the original picture by screwing around with it, but I wanted to make it work better with the blog colors.

I got a Kodak z1275 digital camera for Christmas! It takes HD video (resolution of 1280 × 720) and boy, for a $200 camera, does a darn good job doing it. I’m planning on using it for all the terrific movies that we’ll be making through college. Be on the lookout for the next Julius Incrediblus Stupidus film as we should be starting it in a couple days.

In regards to actually taking pictures, I would describe it as merely average for a point and shoot. I went to Zips, a cheeseburger joint in Cincinnati, with my family a few nights ago, and it was quite the low light setting. I fired up my camera, went into manual mode (unchartered territory for me) and started playing around with things I didn’t understand. My goal was to take a decent picture without any flash. The picture that follows, of my niece, is of ok quality. Definitely would of been better with the flash, but I hate the flash on cameras.