Was in Vegas with a friend this weekend. Didn't do too much gambling, mostly saw a couple shows and watched a lot of anime on laptop. (Only true geeks would go to Vegas and spend half the trip in the room watching anime.)

My last hour in town I did my only real gambling. I laid down $100 at a roulette table. I followed a couple of ad-hoc strategies like splitting between two numbers across the board and selecting birthdays and anniversaries (which I hit on a few times).

After the dealer told everyone zeroes kept coming up at her previous break, I denied my instinct to bet on them, and of course they came up. After that I kept laying a stack across zero and double zero every spin. Finally 0 hit and my pile of chips was up to $165.

It was at this point I decided to place the most exciting bet of my life thus far. The entire time I was at the table red came up 3 times and black about a dozen, and every time I bet on red I lost. So to the dealer's dismay I enjoyed slowly pushing my entire enormous pile over to black. I wanted to vote red the whole time, but it just kept failing me.

It was a calculated risk and I had no delusions about any magical ability to entice black to come up. (Though I was stupid in thinking that there is some kind of a trend to consider. I reminded myself later: It's completely random, stupid!)

So as you can probably tell by now, that little ugly ball landed on red. I wasn't shocked, nor upset. I simply had a big smile on my face as I stood up and walked away knowing it was a great gambling experience to look back on. (At least I lost to red instead of a zero!)

Roulette's really fun. I can't wait to go back and play some more, but next time with Charms so I can really have some fun. (I missed her terribly. )

This is from the Vallejo Times Herald:

Dolores Aguilar, born in 1929 in New Mexico, left us on August 7, 2008. ....

Dolores had no hobbies, made no contribution to society and rarely shared a kind word or deed in her life. I speak for the majority of her family when I say her presence will not be missed by many, very few tears will be shed and there will be no lamenting over her passing.

Her family will remember Dolores and amongst ourselves we will remember her in our own way, which were mostly sad and troubling times throughout the years. We may have some fond memories of her and perhaps we will think of those times too. But I truly believe at the end of the day ALL of us will really only miss what we never had, a good and kind mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. I hope she is finally at peace with herself. As for the rest of us left behind, I hope this is the beginning of a time of healing and learning to be a family again.

There will be no service, no prayers and no closure for the family she spent a lifetime tearing apart. We cannot come together in the end to see to it that her grandchildren and great-grandchildren can say their goodbyes. So I say here for all of us, GOOD BYE, MOM.

Wow.

Now everyone, shhhhh, because Charms doesn't know where I'm taking her, but we'll be in Vancouver, British Columbia for our anniversary in September.

So I'm wondering if any of you Cannucks would be interested in meeting up with us for a little VideoSift meet-and-greet. We'll probably be free after 7:30pm-8:00pm on a Tuesday night and the location doesn't matter.

If anyone's interested, reply here or send me a profile message if you want some discretion. So who's with me?!

Anyone? Anyone?

The acronym I coined 2 years ago has finally made its way to the official pages of the urban dictionary. Yay!
Now everyone knows the secret.

The funny thing is I have actually caught myself literally using the phrase in real life and stopped myself to correct it with "laughing my ass off" because it seems it feels a little funny at first. Then you slowly ease into it.

To top it off I have a custom license plate being made for my car that reads:


I'll have to post a picture of that some time.

Update:
I finally got my new license plates:
http://blog.videosift.com/lucky760/I-Love-LMFAHS-My-New-License-Plate

A strong, lengthy earthquake just hit near Chino Hills in southern California at 11:42am local time. It measured 5.6 5.8 5.4 and lasted for what felt at least 30 seconds.

I could actually see the building around me swaying to and fro. Whoa.

(Thank goodness this isn't China.)

Never heard about it before but google just launched Knol, a site that could overtake Wikipedia. The big difference: Knol allows only known authors to create entries in areas of their expertise. Other members can make comments and suggestions, but control of the contents are held firmly by the author.

This is in stark contrast with Wikipedia who, as you probably know, allows anyone even anonymous people (and even bots for that matter) to create and edit entries to contain whatever "facts" they want. Sounds like a very interesting idea and as a matter of fact very similar to something Fedquip has described before.

I think it'll be a great first resource to hit instead of Wikipedia, assuming someone has written about your topic of desire of course.

Invisible Carpet Idea Close to Actual Invisibility
Eric Bland, Discovery News

July 17, 2008 -- Invisibility cloaks are cool, but an invisibility carpet is more practical.

That's according to scientists from Imperial College London, who recently published a paper detailing the creation of a material that would be the first to hide objects in visible light, something no cloaking device has ever achieved.

"We've given a prescription for how to cloak something in visible light," said John Pendry, who, along with Jensen Li, wrote the paper that appeared recently on ArXiv.org. "It will be difficult to make but it is also practical."

Cloaking an object requires structures, often referred to as metamaterials, that channel light in a specific way.

The only way to channel light in that fashion is by using structures smaller than the wavelength of light being used to detect an object. In 2006, Duke University scientists cloaked an object from light centimeters long by creating a metamaterial with structures millimeters in size.

To cloak an object in visible light, which has a much smaller wavelength, around half a micron, scientists would have to create structures nanometers in size, which, according to Pendry, "requires some clever nanotechnology."

That nanotechnology would come from combining special layers of common silica and silicon, each of which reflects light differently.

"It's a lot like a mirage," said Pendry. "The sun heats the air above the desert and creates a temperature gradient, so when light from the sky comes down the graded refraction bends the light and it enters your eye and you see a mirage the looks like water."

....

Read the rest of the story at Discovery News.

So I just discovered this weird little service called Twitter. Do any of you use this thing?

For the uninformed, it's basically a quite simple thing where you can send updates (via website or cellphone text message) of up to 140 characters describing what you're doing right now. Then anyone who is "following" you (which sounds kind of creepy and stalkerish) can be informed of your update.

I just signed up last night and it seems pretty useless to me. Anyone else able to make any use of the uselessness?

760 out.

Wow. This is unbelievable. I just found this story about a small community of all Black people who have been denied running water since 1956!

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- Residents of a mostly black neighborhood in rural Ohio were awarded nearly $11 million Thursday by a federal jury that found local authorities denied them public water service for decades out of racial discrimination.

Each of the 67 plaintiffs was awarded $15,000 to $300,000, depending on how long they had lived in the Coal Run neighborhood, about 5 miles east of Zanesville in Muskingum County in east-central Ohio.

The money covers both monetary losses and the residents' pain and suffering between 1956, when water lines were first laid in the area, and 2003, when Coal Run got public water. ...

Read the whole story at CNN

Just wondering what HD format you support in your home. In your home is there a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player? Or perhaps do you have both? Also, do you use it? Do you enjoy it? How many movies do you have for your format?

I ask because I finally just received my set of 5 HD-DVD movies to which I was entitled for buying a laptop with an HD-DVD drive (which is now non-functional since I upgraded from Vista to XP), and I'm trying to figure out what to do with the packages of coasters.

Maybe a VideoSift contest (that, obviously, only HD-DVD owners or gifters will want to participate in)?

After continuing problems with our old Jeep Liberty, we rid ourselves of it and found a great deal on a new 2008 Mercedes Benz C300 Sport Sedan, so I bit the bullet and got it for Charms. It has black interior and metallic blue exterior. We're extremely excited and just wanted to share our glee! Below are a couple of the photos I snapped. (View all 10 at flickr.)

... more inside ...

Here's a sloppy, quick video of Charms driving past me outside our humble abode.
(Pardon the shaky cam and blockiness.)


WHOOPEE!!!

It's a topic of much debate among scholars, so I thought of broaching the subject for discussion among the VideoSift intellectuals.

The question is: What would you do to survive the zombie attack that is obviously imminent? Also, do you plan on preparing for the attack or do you intend to wait for it to begin and simply react?

When considering the issue, you must keep in mind that the zombie attack will not likely last a single night; it could go on for days, weeks, months, or even longer. It'll also be likely that the zombies will not be immune to sunlight (that's just silly vampire nonsense), so waiting for dawn won't help.

So, I ask again, how would you survive?

Here's my plan:

... more inside ...

These are my initial thoughts. What are yours?

This doctor was cracking chicken eggs while making breakfast and found a surprise in one: a dead gecko.

Read the full story.

Apparently this image of Jesus with tears streaming down his cheeks appeared in a window somewhere and remained for a couple hours before fading away.
... more inside ...

Who gets pulled over for driving a bumper car on a public street?

I guess it's called "jowling," but what it is is a person (or animal in some cases) shaking their head in a manner that causes their facial skin to stretch and flap, and having a photo snapped during the shake.

It's harder to describe than to just look. So take a peek at http://www.jowlers.com for some examples. There are some pretty funny shots. I especially like the "Best Hair Jowl" award on this guy who seems to illustrate the definition of a stoner:

this "Pet Jowl" award of a dog who looks like he was just hit by a train:

and this "Crazy Intense Jowl" award of a guy with exceptional timing on Splash Mountain at Disneyland:


I don't know how many of the photos on that site are accidental, as I'd guess most all were strictly intentional. Not a groundbreaking site but definitely worth a chuckle.

It allows you to predate your emails and automatically mark them read or unread in the recipient's mailbox. They just keep getting better and better over at Google.

Apparently you can use it an unlimited number of times every time you send an email, a maximum of ten times. Of course all the other gmail-wannabes will probably be following closely behind with their own, lackluster ripoffs, but here is the original.

Read more about it here: http://yuarel.com/gmail_custom_time

It's a small "experimental" project I put a little work into. It's available just for some simple fun, if you want a little privacy, or you want to link someone to a page with a very long, complex address but you also want a meaningful URL to pass along.

E.g., instead of giving someone a long, sloppy, meaningless URL like:
  •  http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=10051&langId=-1&catalogId=10053&productId=100095394
and instead of creating a shorter URL, which is just as meaningless, with a service like tinyurl:
  •  http://tinyurl.com/39mz3o
you can create a clean, short URL that actually means something:
  •  http://yuarel.com/home_depot/Heavy-Duty-Shelving

If you head over to yuarel.com you can create your own personalized web addresses that link to anywhere else on the web that you want.

For example, here's my very first Yuarel URL:
http://www.yuarel.com/video/Teh-Cutest-Adorable-Kitty-Evar!!!

So, please, start using it as much as possible and tell a friend. Better yet you can tell two friends, then they'll tell two friends, and they'll tell two friends, and so on. Spread the word! And if you have any ideas how to help popularize it, I'm all ears.

[update]
I added the ability to masquerade so instead of a simple redirection the real URL's contents will be displayed at your fake URL.

As I mentioned in my last post about my Sudoku game, I was working on this GoMoku game a couple of years ago. It has decent AI for single-player games, but the best feature is the network play ability including chat. This allows you and a friend to play against each other over a LAN or the Internet. (One player first "listens for clients" then the other can connect to the first one's IP address.) A third person can also connect to observe the game.

Here are a couple of screenshots:
... more inside ...

There are a couple of minor bugs mainly involving the network capabilities, but it's definitely very functionally kickass imho.

Give it a try and let me know what you think! Just download NetGoMoku.zip then unzip the game anywhere and start playing!

I was just reminded of a Sudoku game I was working on a couple of years ago as a fun project during my last semester in school. It's what I'd like to think is a pretty decent Sudoku game for the PC. (Sorry Mac users.)


There are over 4.2 billion puzzle possibilities numbered from 1 on up so you can try the same one multiple times if you'd like. You can just click the "random" button to let the computer select a random puzzle number for you.

There are five difficulty possibilities: easy, medium, hard, extreme, insane. I doubt anyone would be able to solve on insane.

Once you start a game a timer starts so you can track how long it's taking you to win (or lose). You can pause the game while playing, but if you do the puzzle will be hidden so you can't cheat.

You can enter up to 6 possible/placeholder values into a cell when you're unsure which it might be. To decide on a single one, just enter it by itself and hit the enter key. You can also use the arrow keys to move around from cell to cell.

Every five moves you can hit the "Progress" button which will tell you how many of your entries are incorrect, if any. If you're desperate for some help you can use the "Hint" button to allow the computer to randomly fill in a blank cell with the correct value, but doing so will add a 1 minute penalty to your time.

If you give up you can click "Solve It" to allow the computer to fill in the puzzle with all the correct values. Or you can use "End Game" to just quit where you are.

If you're in the middle of a game and just close the game, when you reopen it, it will pick up where you left off, so you can continue as if you never left.

There's also a statistics window that shows the history of all games you've played, including puzzle number, play time, and win/loss.

I'd love it if any of you Sudoku fanatics would give my game a shot and tell me what you think. No one except me has ever played it before, and the last time was 2 years ago.

Download: Rommel's Sudoku and just unzip it anywhere.