FuzzyUnicorn's Randomation Blog

Ok, so I'm really lazy and didn't write my halloween post for almost a month. But I'm going to back date it and pretend I wrote it the next morning like I wanted to.

Halloween was a hit. I wasn't feeling very into it this year, so I decided to re-use the Satyr/Fairy costumes from Ez's first halloween. I had to make a whole new suit for Ez, and I made improvements all the rest.

First we went to the mall, and every shop wanted to talk to us about where we got the costumes, and Am was always proud to tell them I made them. The mall was really dead this year, there were only like 10 other groups while we were there.

Then we went to uptown. It was much busier than the mall but still not as busy as it usually is. People kept stoppping us to take pictures. Ez really liked all the attention. Every shop owner said we got the prize for best costumes of the night. Some even gave Ez extra candy because of it.

There's a picture and more story on the halloween page. More pictures if I ever feel up to working on it.

After 3 1/2 years I finally saved up enough money to buy a new computer. My old computer was an Athlon XP 1700+ with 512megs of slow ram (pc2100 I think) The new beast is a dual core Athlon64 x2 4200+ with 1gig of OCZ overclocking ram. (pc3200 aka ddr400)
Windows boots a little faster, but not much, and internet browsing doesn't seem any different. But ripping dvd's is way faster. It used to take me over 2 hours to rip and recompress a dvd with dvd shrink. It only took me 23 minutes to rip and re-encode the Dark Crystal with this thing. I was also able to watch 9 videos at the same time without slowdown, whereas the old system could barely handle 2.
I installed Ubuntu x64 on a spare 10 gig hard drive because I didn't have any room on my 250gig primary drive to re-partition. If I can save up any more money, I think I'll buy a 300 gig SATA II drive. 3.0 GB/s.
I wish software vendors would get with the program and start offering 64 bit linux versions of their programs (mainly adobe/macromedia with flash) Who am I kidding, just regular 32bit linux programs would be nice, but it won't happen. At least not til linux has a larger user base. Which won't happen until there is more software support. Damn paradoxes. At least flash 9 is supposed to be out for linux early next year. Only 6 months behind the windows version. Until then I'm just running windows firefox under wine for sites that require flash. (Like Ezzie's favorite: newgrounds) It seems to work fine. I wish someone would come up with an open-source format like flash, and then market the hell out of it until it became the standard. Then no-one would have to worry that a viewer wasn't available for their operating system. They could just build it themselves. Or leech off of others who actually know how to program.

OK, back to the new machine. Super Fast. Great for video editing. Gotta start making movies...

For the past week I have been under attack from some Spam Bot that requests my blog index page, and gives the referrer as some porn site. that wouldn't be so bad, but my bandwidth went from a few megs to over 225megs in a few days. It hit once a minute, each time from a different IP, with a slightly different url in the referrer. Sometimes it was mature-pictures.stupidsite.pl, sometimes it was forced-rape.stupidsite.pl. I don't want to give the real url, because I'm sure that's exactly what they would want. .pl is Poland for those who don't know, although I'm sure the site was not really polish. At first I tried banning the ip addresses, but there were hundreds of them.

Finally I found Referrer Karma. It's a cool program/script that checks the referring url, and if it doesn't have a link to your site on it, the person/bot gets a 403 forbidden instead of your site. I installed it and checked my logs to see that all of the bots were getting 403s. After 2 days of getting nothing but 403s, the bots seem to have given up. There was not a single one in my logs. Now my logs are nice and clear to see all of the people who aren't coming here.

Did I tell you penguins were evil or what? Here is video proof that they are comunists. http://subpop.dev.slam.cc/downloads/free/So_Says_I_-_Hi_Res248.mov
EZ seems to like the music. The animation is not excellent, but it's decent if a single person did it all.

So somehow I stumbled across this site with some crazy ass games. It was obviously created by a Japanese guy, as they always make very weird, extremely addictive games.

One of the games is called Grow. You take different objects, drag them onto this sphere, and they grow/evolve. The point is to do them in the right order to get them all to max out their growth. Then there is an RPG version. It's the same concept, but you grow a castle, a shop, a cave with treasure, etc, and then your little guy goes on a journey based on how well you levelled up everything. I finally beat that one. Still haven't beaten the regular version.

Then there is a wierd whack-a-mole and a game that's similar to the head switching mini-game in Mario DS. And then there is a shrubbery game called Vanilla. You click on a planter and a little shrub grows. Click the shrub and another one grows on top. You keep going and the shrubs tilt one way or the other as you click on them. The point is to grow it as tall as possible without hitting the walls. My best was like 20 feet. Crimtor got 30 something. From the height of the window you should be able to get at least 100 feet.

Over all some very awesome games, but probably make more sense on some sort of drug.

F.U.