Sheep Dash and your reflexes

If you feel tired, but aren't sure of it, then this online game or test is for you. You know that you are tired (and need a coffee break) when you can't get past the Sluggish snail status. The site also has some articles about sleep.

Zelda and the Lampshade of No Real Significance

This is a well-made parody of the best role-playing game ever made. Unlike the real Zelda games, this one will only take you a few minutes to finish.

The Amazing Race 8

The Amazing Race, which recently won their third Emmy last Monday, will kick off its eight season next week. I am looking forward to this especially in light of the fiasco that was Rock Star: INXS. The Amazing Race is still the only reality competition where the winner, or I should say winners because it is a team-based competition, clearly beats the rest of the competition. It's never frustrating even if the team you're rooting for is losing because you can clearly see why.

SuSE Linux Day 2005

It was kind of boring, but I'm happy that I attended the SuSE Linux Day seminar sponsored by Dataworld, IBM, and Novell yesterday. The highlight for me was my winning a t-shirt that says, "Ruby Geek" for correctly answering a question on Ruby programming. At first, I was reluctant to answer because the speaker is from the same company as me. I was afraid that those who knew this fact would misconstrue it as unfair. I knew the speaker, but believe me I have never seen a line of Ruby code prior to that presentation. So I was reluctant to answer at first. But participant after participant answered incorrectly until nobody was raising his or her hand anymore. And so I raised my hand and got to answer. I deserved that shirt. :-)

Rock Star: INXS

I can't believe that J.D. won the competition. And he won it over Marty, too, and Mig, and Suzie. I guess dropping Mig in the middle of the finale was an ominous sign. I wasn't an INXS fan before this, and I think it will stay this way. INXS wasn't seriously looking for talent all along. They just wanted a summer-long (at least for those in the U.S.) publicity. What a joke!

I'm not just saying this because I'm a Filipino and was rooting for Mig who's also a Filipino. Even if Mig won I wasn't sure I'd be buying their album. None of the INXS originals that were played during the duration of the competition really made me like INXS. And it's not just because of the lyrics, the bigger reason is their music. It's just not what I dig. And now that their lead singer is J.D., I'm sure I'll not be buying their album, or even download an illegal copy of whatever single they're producing. I don't even like Easy-Easy, the single they premiered in the finale. I guess they deserve J.D.

Now if Mig releases an album, that would be another issue. He's not yet as rock a star as Marty or J.D., but I like his brand of songs (his lyrics) and his brand of rock. Now, if only he can get the house band to back him up they'd easily beat INXS at the charts.

Darn it

I forgot to vote in Rock Star: INXS. I, of course, would have voted for MiG. And it is not just because he is a Filipino, he truly is a great performer and singer. Whatever happens tomorrow night, I know he deserves to be in the final three. He did great tonight and I am surprise that he was in the bottom during the early round of voting. They need to have their ears checked.

SMS, connecting people

I tried to find a morse code learning software today. I haven't found a satisfactory one, at least not those which are free (freeware). I did find a simple text to morse code translator here. Of course the first word I tried was SOS. I immediately noticed that it sounded similar to the Special SMS alert of Nokia phones. So I entered SMS, hit translate, and lo and behold it is the Special SMS alert. I never knew this...until now. And guess what, the Ascending SMS alert (at least the ones for monophonic phones) is morse code for CONNECTING PEOPLE. Wow. I always found the Ascending alert weird. It's not the most melodic of phone alerts. I guess this is why they've removed it from the polyphonic phones (I don't know if it's true for all of their polyphonic models, but at least in mine it's no longer the Ascending alert). But now that I know it means connecting people, I wish they retained it. I wonder if the default Nokia alert is also a morse code message. I tried translating NOKIA, calling, human technology, hello, but it doesn't sound like any Nokia alert (ringtone). Maybe it's not. But if you do know what it is, please do tell.

New look

My friends Dondino and Eric are redesigning the look of their blogs. I got jealous and decided to redesign my blog, too. :-) I have always wanted my blog to look like this. Simple. Basic colors over white. I also renamed it to Carl News Network, the name of my webpage when I was still learning HTML and CSS in college. Ironically, too, during that time I was also trying to figure out how to automate the creation of my web pages. That was in 1999, I think. I thought of putting a textfile in a certain directory and then run a program to automatically incorporate it to my webpage. I never got around to finishing that program. But what do you know. Other people were thinking about it too. And their solution (blogger, wordpress, mtcomments) were much elegant than mine. I guess I wasn't the only one who thought of simplifying self-publishing.

One problem, though. I cannot change the URL to my blog. Actually, I can. But I don't want to. My friend's links to my blog will break. And so it will stay this way, smallerpicture.blogspot.com, the Carl News Network.

Edit:
My blog looks a bit clunky on an 800x600 screen resolution, but what the heck, I don't want to code in absolute sizes. I'm thinking of finding the middle ground, font sizes that are very accessible (readable) at 1024x768, but doesn't look gigantic in 800x600.