[19:05] mrja: what’s goin on
[19:06] neb: just makin all my one dollar bills say bONEr on the back
[19:12] *** “neb” signed off at Wed Oct 07 19:12:55 2009.
If it hasn’t been pounded into your skull yet that Nintendo is overachieving, selling hardware and software at alarming rates in Japan and the United States, maybe the Kyoto-based company’s quarterly results will make it clear. Nintendo posted net sales of 1.3 trillion yen (about $12 billion USD) for the nine months ending on December 31, 2007, up about 85% from the year prior. For the full fiscal year, up on March 31, Nintendo is expecting 1.63 trillion yen in sales, unsurprisingly a big gain over the previous year.
Net income as of the end of the year, also known as the Bottom Line, was an impressive 258.9 billion yen (a bit over $2.4 billion USD), an impressive near-doubling of profits from the same period prior.
Nintendo pointed to strong sales of the Nintendo DS, which sold 24.5 million units worldwide in nine months, and the Wii, responsible for 14.29 million units sold. More staggering numbers, if you can stomach them, are available at the company’s Investor Relations page, as is a Mario sprite in a business suit. Enjoy!
I’ve taken the liberty of beating David Ashley to the punch with Debian Etch irssi packages since I just upgraded my machine from Sarge and wanted to clear out as much as possible in the way of pending sysadmin taks in the wake of the warpath of updates and fixes as a result of the distribution upgrade. The Debian patches from 0.8.10 have apparently been committed to the upstream source tree, so these .debs are essentially what you’d get when you compile from source (with the Debian-proper prefixes and such, of course).
With the loose hopes that Google will connect this post to someone that wants them, here you go:
irssi-dev_0.8.11-1etch1_i386.debWell, here you have it. According to the New York Times, the world CAN be distracted, at least for a little while:
Today, ‘arry pottah is more interesting than sex.
Wait, what am I missing here? Maybe I should read the series.
I was awarded a free beverage on my next visit for informing the barista about Statler and Waldorf.
I rule.
I feel the need to audibly appreciate why the Internet is great. This is why the internet is great.
Funny as it is, I believe this guy just sold me on his blender. Watch the rest of his videos, they’re priceless.
We get American Idol. I want this:
Jun 28
http://www.daveswebsite.com/software/gsync/
It Just Works. It was $10, but it’s FAR better than anything else I’ve seen for less than that. Far better than anything I’ve seen that was more than a ten spot, too.
Just so we’re clear I did try the Sourceforge project remotecalendars at http://sourceforge.net/projects/remotecalendars but it just didn’t work with outlook 2007… and I’m impatient. Besides, this daveswebsite.com guy made such an elegant interface I was convinced immediately. I’ll definitely check his site for future tools.
This is a great theme that Careerbuilder.com has going. Unfortunately I can’t embed this and no other sites with longevity seem to have this commercial published. It’s worth the click to Youtube, however. 
So, this morning I receive an e-mail from Amazon.com announcing their New Way to Shop from Amazon.com:
Endless.com! A new way to shop for shoes and handbags!
Somehow, and I know I ought not to be profiling here, but somehow I’m sure the inclusion of Men’s and Kid’s products is a funny joke written in the margin…
Check out the skark homepage. It’s designed to be an aggregation of all the information the skark commune has business with. Currently it deals with a number of IRC and IM related topics, and links to some other statistics. Check it out.
For the most part, I’m trying to scroll the hunt off the front page. So check out the next post soon!
F it, I say.
Here’s some of the recent skinny:
- Received a Sony PSP for my birthday!
- Brought my Brother to Manny’s for his first Tier 1 steak!
- Bought a big memory card for PSP, installed amazing firmware that lets me do stuff like control my XBox XBMC from it via home-brewed software! (amongst other things…)
- Purchased Super Paper Mario, Marble Mania
- Joined Twitter, which seems neat.
2007 Treasure Hunt II - Today’s clue
Posted: Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2007
Don’t go mental, just head for Central
Lexington Avenue will show you the way
Your spirits won’t sag when you see the big flag
Into the trees you want to stray
Well I’ll be…
Don’t turn up your noses at the city of roses
The home of the park that you seek
It’s just north of town so come on down
Our hunt is not for the meek
I’m dumbfounded.
2007 Treasure Hunt II - Today’s clue
Posted: Monday, Jan. 29, 2007
A famous singer and a diamond dinger
Might put you oh so close to the spot
With the whites of your eyes you should look for the prize
Within this convenient plot
Over hill and dale hit the trail
With a handy locating device
Fulfill your wishes like loaves and fishes
And put your victory on ice
2007 Treasure Hunt II - Today’s clue
Posted: Saturday, Jan. 27, 2007
A walk in the park can be a lark
If cell phones are left at home
Heed the siren of your desirin’
And do not revolt against this poem
2007 Treasure Hunt II - Today’s clue
Posted: Friday, Jan. 26
Success on the third clue will never do
We had to stash a second
Round you go if you seek to know
Where swatters of orbs are beckoned
Look, a new clue!
Posted: Thursday, Jan. 25
2007 Treasure Hunt II - Today’s clue
If you’re thinking big you’re sure to dig
Near flora with growing pain
Winter or summer is never a bummer
A menagerie of fun wild or tame
So, by the Third clue, a past hunting peer of mine named Jake had pulled a $10,000 chunk of ice out of Hidden Falls. Absolutely fantastic work, Jake! I usually don’t even leave the house to look until the Thursday of the hunt!
http://www.twincities.com/…./treasure_hunt/16529938.htm
With this record breaking feat of skill, zeal, and a little luck, a flustered Par Ridder announced to the mob during the awarding of the giant check to Jake Ingebrigston:
“In 1953, that was the second year of the Treasure Hunt, and the clues were written by my great-uncle Dan and my great-uncle Robbie,” said Ridder, holding the same small weathered chest his uncles once used to stash their prize. “What they did in 1953 is what we’ll do this year.”
At that precise moment the second medallion was being tucked away safely somewhere. They must have known I hadn’t taken the opportunity to look yet and felt bad.
2007 Treasure Hunt II - Today’s clue
Posted: Wednesday, Jan. 24
Congrats to the finder, to all a reminder
To hunt hard from first to last clues
Medallion I is history. Now a new mystery
Begins — strap on your hunting shoes
To some its demented, for all unprecedented
But hunters’ thirst must be quenched
Tell sister and brother we’ve hidden another
In a park where a body can be benched
Our 2nd prize? Don’t laugh — 10-thou cut in half
So get out there even if it’s snowy
And as a special bonus — some might say an onus –
A meal with our own Clueless Joey
Good hunting to you, let this be the first clue
Think of a woodsy retreat
It won’t be so hard if you channel the bard
You’ll get warm and smell pretty sweet
Clue #3
Posted: Monday, Jan. 23, 2007
Hunters can be surly but in clue-time it’s early
Be safe, friends, and in the hunt revel
Near land that is high the treasure is nigh
Vagueness rules and that’s on the level
The dangerous clue #3! Let’s take a peek inside!
Clue #2
Posted: Monday, Jan. 22, 2007
Boreas’ vast realm can overwhelm
Even diggers used to the long haul
So here’s advice to put your hunt on ice:
Look no farther than good old St. Paul
Well this analysis comes a little late (page updated after clue 3!) but it’s early, I’d been working for 12 hours, and I thought I’d get the site’s neat tag system functioning especially for this hunt before I start trying to think about what I should write. On the right column and at the bottom you’ll see “tags”. Tags are the newfangled way of indexing articles on the Internet, if you haven’t seen them yet, and apart from some of the features which I may tone down a bit, like the resized/colored text, it’s a really neat idea. Take this next lnk:
http://www.matthewanderson.com/tag/medallion-hunt-2007
You can bookmark the above link and any posts I make which I ‘tag’ appropriately will be listed when you visit it. However, http://www.matthewanderson.com/tag/medallion-hunt will catch all posts involving the medallion hunt (both links would show the same stuff until next year or other non-relevant medallion hunt information surfaces). Tagging improves with use (incentive to keep writing!) so over time it will provide an interesting index where simple ‘categories’ end up massively cluttered and difficult to search.
Enough of that mumbo jumbo. however. On with the hunt!
Clue #1
Posted: Sunday, Jan. 21, 2007
Welcome ice and snow and temperatures low
There’s no time for cold feet!
For searchers’ pleasure we’ve parked the treasure
Where nature lovers each other greet
…here we go…
Corryn, Wek + Mrs. Wek, Ron, Keith, James, and I all froze to death for the midnight Burning Crusade launch at the Richfield Best Buy. It got to a blistering 1 degree F in line.
Shortly after we got home and posted our complimentary maps of Azeroth on the wall, my super awesome paladin with his super awesome blues from BRD has conquered the dark portal along with everyone else!
Over the winter I’ve finally taken the plunge to overthrow the Blizzard interface entirely in favor of community addons. Before this site existed I mused about how neat some addons could get if some good project organization were to occur. This seems to have come true as the valuable and well made addons are organized very well, most using a nice code repository, like SVN. What this means for the enthusiast is that addons authored in such a way are presented in a fashion where they can be aggregated automatically whenever a new release has been prepared– no waiting for the author to upload the package somewhere. Let’s face it, most programmers aren’t the best publishers and in a world where it’s usually one or two people working on an addon it’s a pretty Good Thing to have such technology at one’s disposal.
Cue my personal mix of Addons:
Hit the photo above to get at the fullsize image along with a gallery with other images.
I figure I’ll keep populating the blog with some brain candy. This is for Windows users, who can often find themselves in trouble when dealing with their mysterious DNS client.
If you’ve been testing out a new domain or subdomain and have somehow queried it (by ping, using a browser, or some other method) before it comes active on the master nameserver, your system’s DNS client will cache the “nope, no host by that name” response it gets until its default expiration time passes, which is usually five minutes. Even if you use nslookup to check the result, and it comes back favorably, the Windows DNS client will cache the NXDOMAIN answer and none of your applications will be able to access it. Assuming the host should be working at the current time, flushing your system’s DNS is a good step you can take towards checking for problems or saving that five minutes so you can continue work right away. To do so on Windows XP:
- close *all* web browser and e-mail clients.
- hit Start, Run…, and enter into the text field ipconfig /flushdns
- try your lookup again.
If after this attempt you’re still having problems, you’ve eliminated your workstation’s cache from the problem and can use nslookup or other tools to check your resolving DNS directly.
Another way around this, though usually not recommended, is to shut off the caching system entirely:
I’m just adding a few things to the site that might provoke me to use it more often. This latest addition lets me insert Google Maps information anywhere and everywhere. See, here’s the House of skark:
Well, since I’d recently assembled a Wordpress site for a friend, I figured I ought to upgrade my installation as well since it was quite old. Interestingly enough there seems to be a rather robust spam protection plugin included that I’ve switched on. Hopefully it works well and I can turn off comment moderation!
I’ll restate my mission statement for this site by saying, “I’m one of those guys who generally hates blogs but has one anyway.” This is to say that I think I have some neat stuff to talk about and if there were more people that followed my interests that kept a site like this, I’d probably hate blogs less. Thing is, I’m lazy when it comes down to keeping a log of my activities and so are most others that follow my interests. I’ll continue trying to be a part of the solution, not the problem. 
With that, here’s one of those items that I said I was going to publish for the kind visitors last summer. I give you the skark poker table.
PuTTY Tray is a version of the mighty PuTTY terminal emulator that includes some community patches and custom streamlining, overall introducing a few more “modern” features:
Try it out here!
Well, you all know how much I hate blogs. That’s probably why I haven’t written anything in 4 months. In the meantime, you could listen to the music player! Good music occurs there!
However, I’ll be posting a small flurry of stories to cover the past few months of What I’ve Been Doing. Stay Tuned!
June 2, 2006 - The factual evidence of the redesign of the Gameboy DS has been sacked since the time of writing. Obviously people know that the newly redesigned DS is currently selling in the US as of this message. Nintendo sucks for thrashing this posting back and forth.
Well, I’m glad I didn’t buy one yet.
INFO HERE
read more | digg story
Given the story that WAS here was about how the Nintendo DS was potentially being redesigned soon, I felt it appropriate to remove that story since it was denied by authoritative sources.
What a better way to remove that story than to replace it with news that I got a DS from Corryn as an early valentine’s gift! Guess what her early valentine’s gift was? Guess who the better racer is at Mario Kart??
Okay, so I wanted a way to share a handful of tunes with everyone in a lazy manner. I’ve got an audio player up that you should be able to find. It’s going to get better over time, but for now it’s pretty decent.
For more information…
Read more
Okay, now I’m upset.
As if I didn’t have enough other [audio] stuff I wanted to buy, I had to find out about this. Welcome to the new generation of the DJ performance. After speaking to some of my audiohead friends we came to the conclusion that the next Good Thing would involve a great hybrid mixer that allows you to connect whatever existing gear you had (turntables, cd decks, etc.) with your favorite DJ software (Traktor in my case), with your MIDI controllers abound for a crossfader, EQ knobs, and maybe jog wheels.
Well, take that and add a contained computer audio system, fully routable internal and external send/returns, optical in/out, internal and external MIDI in/out, and that’s about what you have pictured. This broke my mold for sure.
Basically, one could get a riggable mixer rack and mount this in it with a tight keyboard & touchscreen LCD behind it, connected to a rackmount case mounted in a lower bay of the rack with all the disk/CPU you could want. You might want to use hotswappable drives in a RAID array if you travel with it often so you don’t crash and burn when a disk fails. This PC could be loaded with Ableton Live, Traktor, and all the VST/DX/et al effects you could dream of. Given the number of tunes you could load onto a drive, combined with all of your personal edits and bootlegs, and all of your new compositions, you have one piece of work loaded into this box.
I want one. I might design something to the above specifications and try to market them. Done correctly I don’t see how anyone who depends on DJing to live would want anything but this.
In a fantasy life I would be bragging about when this will be shipping to my door. Unfortunately my current status suggests I start saving pennies, or become a mercenary.
I’m available for night jobs and weekend raids. Assignments requiring lethal force are not preferred, but will be considered for the short term. Fee is $25,000 per 24 hours with 40% paid in advance.
This is just neat stuff. Picture link opens the washingtonpost.com article.
It’s inevitable that one will make mistakes while doing whatever it is they do for their job.
However, take situation A:
Harry America is working on Joe Customer’s old car. Harry needs to perform maintenance on Joe’s carburetor. While monkeying with the fuel jet, Harry drops the nut that holds the carburetor together down the manifold into the engine block. Harry is, for the most part, screwed. He really should have taken the carburetor off the manifold before working on it. Harry does, however, have possible retribution for the mistake, however ugly and time consuming it is.
…now, compare situation A to situation B:
Matt…err, we’ll call him Max. Max Henderson, the mighty IT administrator. Max is making adjustments to Joe Important’s database systems, where the database importantdb is chugging away, doing important things which Joe relies on 24 hours a day.
Max is given the charge to expand Joe’s empire and creates the database importantdb2:
create database importantdb2;
A few minutes later, it is concluded that importantdb2 should be somewhere else, not on the same system as importantdb.
So, Max removes importantdb2:
drop database importantdb;2
..whoops! Max was typing too fast and made a small error. It should have been:
drop database importantdb2;
The result of the misplaced semicolon instantly trashes Joe Important’s extremely valuable database. Weeping and gnashing of teeth occur. Max prepares for seppuku. Max is, without a doubt, completely and utterly screwed. He really should have been typing a bit more carefully. There is no chance for retribution.
…
I should have been a mechanic.
Out of the awesome gifts I got for Christmas, including some fuzzy socks, a multi function ladder, Thing Hands, and Goodfellas on DVD, I got these items of massive cheers:
The complete Calvin & Hobbes
I was actually not aware of when the series started (1985). I have been wanting an archive of C&H for as long as I’ve read the comic, and now I’ve got it! I win! The quality of this collection is absolutely stunning. The weight of the paper, the binding work, the coloring, and the layout (each comic’s original run date are footnoted on each page) are all top notch… I suppose it would have to be that way, considering most, if not all of this collection could be generated by way of the component books we’ve seen for years. Best comic EVER.
The Tivoli Model One
I won’t talk much about this one. Have a listen to one to hear what I mean. This is by far the best built, nicest looking, and best sounding radio of its class. Thank you, Corryn!
This place is a good one to statically bring up neat Firefox widgets I come across and use.
The latest one I’ve found to be invaluable is ‘Viamatic foXpose‘ which lets you hit the shortcut it makes in the bottom left of the frame or hit Ctrl Shift X, which brings up a navigation menu full of whatever tabs you have open in your particular browser window.
It’s pretty great. If you use Firefox, you should try it. If you don’t use the browser yet (v1.5 just recently released!), then try Firefox itself first.
I’ve turned up a LOGD (legend of the green dragon) game on my webserver. I have named it ‘Sauloth’ (eventually I’ll configure this to be the name of the endgame dragon thinger.).
Find it here. The keys underlined on the left are actually keyboard hotkeys; you rarely have to click.
Plug in your ZIP to find out who has the Xbox 360 upon launch, and in what quantities!
If you’d like to buy me one, here’s the link to use!
http://xbox.clambert.org/55423
This is some insane stuff. Scored by the Trans Siberian Orchestra, here’s quite possibly the most technically astute set of Christmas lights to date:
OK, OK… This may appear as “OMG I have a blog let me post to it now” but this tidbit is extremely cool. I can’t believe I’ve not been privy to this info until now.
I don’t really want any gifts simply because it’s the holiday season, but if you feel like you’d like to buy me something, I can’t complain. I might edit this a few times if I can think of any big winning ideas but just about any generic gift I would list that doesn’t cost many thousands of dollars can be found at one of the following links.
[my newegg wishlist]
[my amazon wishlist]
Also gladly accepted:
I’m one of those guys that doesn’t like blogs but has one anyway.
Ding ding ding…