Jaded Omega

Prop 8, Religion, and Dinosaurs

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 23:58:00 +0000

Ok, let me start by saying in the interest of full disclosure. I’m not gay. Nor am I a dinosaur. I do, however, have a gay brother. I’m also a believer in god, though I belong to no organized religion. I’m not pro gay, in fact I’ve told my brother about my distaste for his life choice. I believe it is just that, a choice. But, no matter what, I don’t believe anyone should be punished or persecuted for a life choice. I don’t have to like it, but I do have to respect any reasonable desire of a human being so long as it doesn’t harm or endanger other people. Gay marriage does not harm anyone at all except perhaps the IRS and insurance providers.

For the uninformed, Proposition 8 was a measure brought before voters in the state of California to ban gay marriage. Why? Well, because the state supreme court decided that there was no rule anywhere in the law that said only members of the opposite sex could be married. So, gay couples that were married in San Francisco were allowed to stay married and receive all the rights of a married couple.
Outraged, religious groups began lobbying the state government and poured large amounts of resources into getting a proposition to voters to add an amendment to the state constitution banning gay marriage. Despite the violation to the United States Constitution that states there must always be a “separation of church and State,” law makers allowed the proposition to go to a vote. With all the lobbying on both sides of the argument, the bigots won a victory against human rights on November 4th 2008.

The first thing that comes to mind here is “how they hell did that even get to a vote?” I don’t know, and I don’t care. But every politician and lawyer that was involved in that should be removed from office and disbarred. Politicians take an oath to uphold the constitution when they are sworn into office and every one of them violated that oath. Lawyers have an obligation to the law as it interpreted. People using their office for religious purposes is despicable. Religion drove the politics of the middle ages and many horrible things happened ; it seems that nobody pays attention to that anymore.

There are a great many number of arguments against gay marriage. Almost all of them related to religion. And those that aren’t are related to money. But in the end it simply comes down to a bunch of stupid people that have nothing better to do than push themselves onto other people. As far as I can tell, there’s really only one way to get rid of large amounts of stupid people; natural selection.

Humans have no natural predators and with diseases being cured all the time and wars becoming very infrequent, there are simply too many people out there to educate properly. That being said, the only thing worse than a complete idiot is a half educated person, people that know enough to speak but not enough to make informed decisions. This is the majority of the world at this point. Humans are a very frail species and the only thing that gave us an edge on the food chain was our wit and team work abilities. Now.. imagine if human beings had some predators. Our greatest strength would be our intelligence, and as such the weakest link would be our stupid people. Natural selection rids us of the worst of our kind. Which brings me to our final solution; dinosaurs.

Now, I realize it’s funny. And it’s supposed to be. Dinosaurs being on this planet would drastically change how the human race survived. Hoodlums from ‘da hood’ would try to act tough with a raptor and would get eaten alive. Score one for the human race. Stupid people would die in droves and genetics would take over. Of course there would be some stupid people that survived, which would be ok. Balance is needed. But in a world(especially in our country) where everything is planned for stupid people, this is the only real recourse that we have. I’m serious.. I get teary eyed when I watch Jurassic park 2. Not because it sucked so bad(which it did), but because it’s my dream to watch a T-Rex tear through the U.S. Now please don’t mistake this for an approval of terrorism. I’m simply talking about natural selection at work.

Now I know this isn’t going to happen. But I think that’s the best place to start is to let disease and hunger take their place among the world and get rid of some dead weight. Human rights is one thing, let men earn their right to live how they want. But if they can’t cut it, there’s no reason to lower the curve for them.

This is my question for you all: Why do you think humans do things like passing Prop 8? And what would you do to make sure that a gross violation of rights doesn’t happen in our country again?
Please post your responses in the comments below.

How to get out of a traffic ticket(most of the time)!

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:36:00 +0000

A police officer pulls a guy over for speeding and has the following exchange:

Officer: May I see your driver's license?
Driver: I don't have one. I had it suspended when I got my 5th DUI.

Officer: May I see the owner's card for this vehicle?
Driver: It's not my car. I stole it.

Officer: The car is stolen?
Driver: That's right. But come to think of it, I think I saw the owner's card in the glove box when I was putting my gun in there.

Officer: There's a gun in the glove box?
Driver: Yes sir. That's where I put it after I shot and killed the woman who owns this car and stuffed her in the trunk.

Officer: There's a BODY in the TRUNK?!?!?
Driver: Yes, sir.

Hearing this, the officer immediately called his captain. The car was quickly surrounded by police, and the captain approached the driver to handle the tense situation:

Captain: Sir, can I see your license?
Driver: Sure. Here it is.

It was valid.

Captain: Who's car is this?
Driver: It's mine, officer. Here's the owner's card.

The driver owned the car.

Captain: Could you slowly open your glove box so I can see if there's a gun in it?
Driver: Yes, sir, but there's no gun in it.

Sure enough, there was nothing in the glove box.

Captain: Would you mind opening your trunk? I was told you said there's a body in it.
Driver: No problem.

Trunk is opened; no body.

Captain: I don't understand it. The officer who stopped you said you told him you didn't have a license, stole the car, had a gun in the glovebox, and that there was a dead body in the trunk.

Driver: Yeah, I'll bet the lying s.o.b. told you I was speeding, too!

The Day the Earth Stood Still made me want to stand up.

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 02:07:00 +0000

Ok.. so I went and saw the "blockbuster" from Keanu Reeves yesterday. And it had all the same features that made "The Happening" such a fantastic success. Oh wait.. that movie tanked.

The entire movie has a ton of plot holes in it. Not just one or two.. but a whole bunch. The special effects were good, but not good enough to make you ignore how retarded the casting director was. I can't really go too much into detail about the plot without giving the whole story away.. but I'll say this. Think about "The Happening", replace plants with aliens and you have the story. Oh, add an interracial marriage as well.

I was really really disappointed by the movie.. it could have been so much better if hollywood would stop pandering to these retarded teenagers that have no attention span. We can have real plots.. people will listen. If they dont, just hand out adderral at the door.

Musician of the Moment: Kevin Rudolf

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 21:36:00 +0000

Time for this the first edition of Musician of the Moment. For several weeks now I've been picking up those free downloads on itunes cards from Starbucks every Tuesday. Well, this morning I picked up one for an artist called Jem.. well I'd heard of here a few years ago but still, a free download from her new album sounded nice. Good song it was too..
There was one of those "If you liked that you might like this" link below it. The first link I clicked on took me to a completely unrelated style of music from a fairly new artist. Kevin Rudolf's debut album "In The City" is one of the more unique compilations put together this year. The debut track "Let It Rock" features Lil' Wayne and is tearing up dance floors across the country. The rest of the album has a different feel to it than this single, but it's still good

Mixing hard and dirty electric guitars and electro instruments gives each of his tracks a distinct feel. And while I can't say I enjoy every track on the album, I do like quite a few of them and that's why I've given Kevin Rudolf the Musician of the Moment title for this week.

Lets throw shoes at Bush!

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 04:00:00 +0000

An Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at Bush today at a press conference in Iraq.

What amazes me the most is how slow the secret service was to react, I mean, come on.. he's the most hated man on the planet.. why couldn't they have got to him faster than that? I really hope they take better care of Obama.

Things you can look forward to

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 22:44:00 +0000

In an effort to share the wonders of the web that I find on a regular basis, I will be having a few things that I share regularly. Here's some that I've thought of already. And I'll add more as I go along.

Images of the Week:
I always find awesome images on the web as I'm looking around. Sometimes they are photographs, sometimes they're pieces of art. So I'll pick the top 10 images of the week and, when possible, give their creators a high five.

Musician of the Moment:
Someone that is skilled at doing something musical. This could be a coverband, an acoustic artist, a singer, or an electronic producer. I'll only post about somewhat unknown people that I find. This will be semi regular, can't promise I'll find one every week.

Darwin Award of the Week:
I've always wished for dinosaurs to eat stupid people. But since there is no dinosaurs, I just have to rely on stupid people to kill themselves by being stupid. Natural selection claims victims of stupidity all the time. I'll post them up and let us all know that we can rest easier with one less idiot.

I'll try to stagger the days on which I post those.. so there's something new regularly. Stay tuned for the first of them, soon!

Connections and dreams...

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 20:12:00 +0000

So... I joined Twitter.

Anyone that wants to follow my crazy antics or wants to pass along crap to me. Feel free to add/follow me (twitter.com/incrediblejack).

I've been reading and practicing my photoshop skills and practicing my sketching abilities. I've almost completely given up on drawing humans. I can copy just about any human figure from a picture or the likes.. but creating my own is somehow impossible for me. It's fine for me though, I rather like scenery. Urban environments come to me easy and they are fun to draw. I can't wait to get a scanner so I can start working with them in photoshop or maya.

That leads me to what I'm doing now. I've decided to go to DigiPen for Game Design. It took me awhile to decide what I wanted to do, but in the end I had to figure out what was wrong with my life to begin with. A lack of passion. I've always half assed everything; relationships, projects, skills. I've pretty much narrowed the issue down to not caring about anything. The one constant though was always my desire to create worlds for people to exist in. Sometimes that flowed over into my day to day life causing problems. So I've decided to take that passion and put it into a career. I love gaming, more importantly I love creating experiences for people that I game with. Originally, I wanted to be a programmer. And I was damned good at the programming I learned. But that's not the creation process I'm interested in. After working with Maya and starting to get my brain flowing with story writing and sketching, I finally know that in order to have a good life I need to stop worrying about which job pays the most and instead start worrying about how passionate and happy I am about doing it.
I've burned alot of bridges on my journey to that conclusion, so now it's time to start designing and building new ones, as scared as I am to do that.

Arts and crafts for Zelda fans!

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 19:48:00 +0000

So... I was jumping around the internet today and I found this awesome little print out that you just have to fold and glue and you get your own paper model of Link :)

I'm super stoked and I can't wait to print it out and try it for myself.

For those of you that are interested the link is.. (sorry, it's in Japanese)
http://www.siliconera.com/news/0604/linkpc02.jpg

On a side note, wouldn't it be awesome if life was like Zelda.. where you could open up shit and get a nice fan fare if you did it right. Or if when something important happened that you weren't quite aware of you got the little 'puzzle solved' music played for you. Alternately... just running into buildings and smashing the shit out of every container in the building with no consequence.

Ahh.. that would be sweet.. unless you were the guy who had to make pots. Then it would suck.

The Great Comparison:Part 1a - GUI

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 05:02:00 +0000

Well, I've finished my Silverlight Interface for my project. Here's what I grade it.

Time to Develop: 35 minutes - Grade: 4
Difficulty to Develop: Easy - Grade: 5
Community Support: Enough - Grade 4.5
Fun : Fun for the first time - 4.5

Average score: 4.5

Explanation:
Well, Xaml certainly is fun to work with, a little complicated, but still fun. Part of the GUI was creating basic functionality for my buttons, such as click effects and roll overs. This is where the fun stopped... I build a generic button componant to cut down on the tediousness of placing them around. I also added a list area, though with no list control, I'm a little worried about that section. Over all, it was fairly quick, and the UI looks nice.

The great comparison!

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 04:50:00 +0000

Ok, so I decided to test for myself whether or not to continue learning silverlight, since all I seem to run into is problem after problem, and after the problem.. a stupid work around because a certain feature isn't implemented and blah blah blah..

So, I decided to put it to the test with Flex from adobe.

Starting today, I will build the exact same program, an mp3 player that pulls a playlist from a local xml file, displays the download, play progress, and preloads the next track; in both Flex with Actionscript 3 and Silverlight using C#.Net. I will grade each section of the project for both technology as I build them, one piece at a time.
Topics to be graded are:
Time To Develop
Difficulty to Develop
Examples/Community Support
Fun

I will rate all topics from 1(lowest) to 5(highest) and explain why I gave that grade.
Since I'm already moderately proficient at AS3, I'll add 10% to all times, to equal it out.

Let the games begin!

Another fun bug in VS:Orcas + Blend

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 05:52:00 +0000

Seems when you create a Silverlight project in VS: Orcas, it generates XAML that will not render in Expression Blend. Funny, right? Great part is that if you create the project in Blend, modify the code to look identical to the XAML in the VS project.

This is the basic start up code in VS: Orcas. (New Project->C#->Silverlight Project)

Now when you right click Page.xaml in the solution explorer, Blend loads up and gives you this lovely little screen.

Now, lets start up a new project in Blend, which still doesn't offer me the ability to make a 1.1 project. Tada, the Xaml renders... amazing.

Well apparently there's something up with that code that VS:Orcas creates for us.. or is there? I'll copy the code from the VS:Orcas project and paste it into the Blend project. Surely it will fail.
Wait...

What is this?! It works? Oh me oh my. Why could it be? This is one of the multitude of little annoyances that I'm finding in the tools. Not to complain that much, certainly a bit more fun than my previous encounters with Coldfusion and Dreamweaver. I just wish when I posted my questions on the forums I could actually get a useful answer.. even a "it's broken, we're looking into it" would be nice.

Two steps closer!

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 06:28:00 +0000

Finally, I've got Expression Blend August Preview installed, it's pretty buggy but still a fairly intuitive tool. I've also got Visual Studio "Orcas" installed with the Silverlight controls add ons.

Though I still can't get Blend to create C# SL projects, nor can I get the C# projects to open in Blend, I'm happy with how they are right now.

I've built my first button. it's a basic play/pause button that has a rollover effect and a mouse click effect. Basically, I took the super useful quickstart at silverlight.net , converted the javascript to C# and then extended the functionality. It was really quite a good learning experience, I don't have alot of experience with C# so I got to learn a bit about casting and the likes.

The installation process is a pain in the butt right now, but I suspect MS will iron that out before long. Though all things aside. I think Silverlight is a good fit for the next generation of RIAs.

The journey here.

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 01:06:00 +0000

Well the purpose of this was to post my advances on my projects and get some correctional feedback. Though, I think I'll probably post just about everything that seems worth posting, from my ridiculous rants about stupid people to my opinion on the latest movies.

Mostly, this blog will document my workings with Microsoft technologies as I learn them from the ground up. I currently have a good understanding of java, coldfusion, and AS3 with flash. But I'm only moderately skilled at Java, and coldfusion is simply too expensive for the independent developer. Flash is nice, but I find myself wanting to work with something new that I can possibly get a job with later without having a 9 page resume of skills. I loved the object oriented nature of the languages I already knew, and the incredible speed of building a coldfusion app, so I decided to look for a platform that could offer me some of both. First, I thought Ruby.. after looking at the syntax and feeling like vomiting, I decided against it. Next, I went to cobol. And after finding that there are pretty much no learning resources for that ancient language, I moved on.
I remembered that I once wanted to build games with c++, so I decided to see if there was a web implementation of that yet, which led me to C# and ASP.net. I really enjoy the technology and now that they've added C# to the languages that you can write Silverlight in, I'm hooked.