So we've probably all seen time-lapse shots of various space shuttle related things, like leading up to the launch, or the crawler making its way to the launch site, or the space-toilet getting cleaned, but my friend Cameron sent this one to me, and I just had to share it.
This is a time-lapse of the shuttle, running just under 4 minutes, following the shuttle from the hangar, onto the launch vehicle and the crawler, down to the launch site, and then a brief launch sequence. Pretty sweet.
Check out ~3:00 when the building gives the shuttle a hug before it leaves! So cute!
Oh! And if the video below makes you watch a commercial about Arkansas before the actual video comes on, check out the blonde in the red dress when the narrator mentions "Stunning Scenery". Yeah... now remember that 65.6% of the people in Arkansas are overweight or obese.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
Return of the Blog
I've been blogging since May of 2000. Since then we've discussed a plethora of topics, made a few new friends, and gotten hate mail from a lot of single mothers. We've all changed over the last 10 years, and I thought it was time for a little bit of a switch to commemorate 10 years of wasting time with a new site, and a new look.
Now I am by no means a designer, so I've tried to keep things simple and clean, and focus on the thing I do provide: content. I'm using some of the latest standards, such as HTML5 and CSS3. If you don't know what those are, don't worry, they're not important, but do your part to spur innovation by using a browser that does support them:
Those will make this site, and lots of others, all nice and pretty for you.
Now I am by no means a designer, so I've tried to keep things simple and clean, and focus on the thing I do provide: content. I'm using some of the latest standards, such as HTML5 and CSS3. If you don't know what those are, don't worry, they're not important, but do your part to spur innovation by using a browser that does support them:
- Google's Chrome 5
- Apple's Safari 4
- Mozilla's Firefox 3.6
Those will make this site, and lots of others, all nice and pretty for you.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
The Silent Treatment
It's not that I don't blog every day. It's that you've been bad, and I'm giving you the silent treatment.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
7 Year-Old
The usual disclaimer applies here. Please do not read the following, as it is offensive, and wrong. Choosing to read on indicates that you'd like to be offended, and probably have something wrong with your head, so stop it here, and go exercise or throw around the pig skin or whatever it is normal human specimens do.
Again, I encourage you NOT to watch the following video, and instead to go outside and do something productive:
If you're still reading, you didn't heed my advice, which I respect.
A friend of mine posted this on Facebook, with the following text:
"Ok, I have a problem with this. These girls are good dancers, but they are also 7 years old, dressed like hoes, and doing dance moves that I couldnt even watch without feeling awkward. Someone please verify my feelings on this..."
Some people then proceeded to debate whether or not they were good dancers, but the general consensus was that 7 year-old girls shouldn't be dressed up like hookers and then instructed on how to shake their asses for a video posted on the internet. Except one broad who said, and again, quoting:
"Look at the video again from a neutral perspective. They are talented but misguided. There is more there than just crap."
This was in response to me saying that the above video was crap, as the astute reader may have guessed from the last line.
There are several ways this can be hit. My favorite is that the wrongness of this only comes from the viewer's perspective, which I believe is what the dame who was stupid enough to argue with me was getting at. For example, a little girl takes her shirt off in public. Is this because she's a slut? No. It's because wearing clothes doesn't make sense to children, so they strip naked and run around like it's party time. So it's innocent, and the parents, and everyone at the fucking World of Dance are just misguided, right? Right. And you're ok with that. FUCK YOU.
Let me lay out what happened here, in plain english so everyone (who speaks english) can understand the exact steps and thought process here:
1. Some parents decided to dress their 7 year-olds up like prostitutes and have them train day and night to dance in essentially the same manner that drunk girls do at a sleazy nightclub so that they could win the World of Dance competition.
That's it. One step. I didn't miss anything in there. Do you know what a 7 year-old should be doing? Because it's nothing even vaguely fucking related to what I saw in that video (for the record, I did not 'look at the video again from a neutral perspective' as was suggested to me).
Another angle on this I love, is that if you've really got the balls (or ovaries, or guts, or ability to use a computer), watch the video again, and tell me how fucking marvelous you think that dancing is. Tell me how amazingly choreographed it is, and what amazing fucking talent you have been lucky enough to witness. Now take a look at ANY fucking Michael Jackson video, and go hang yourself in a closet for being a moron. Is the 7 year-old girl video live? Yes. Are they young? Yes. Does that make it amazing? No. Nobody goes to a fucking soap-box derby to scout for the next Lamborghini engineers, and I'm not about to give any extra credit to these girls because they're live or young or whatever the crap excuse you want to give them. I give credit where I see quality, and if my mommy beat me hard enough, I could have been out there on that stage in nothing but a banana hammock parading around too.
To be perfectly honest, while I think it's tacky, it doesn't really bother me how they're dressed. The issue here is that as far as I'm concerned, these girls are abused, because there is no logical explanation for having them performing like this. Nobody this age wakes up and decides they'd like to train for months for an elaborately choreographed dance piece, and then self-studies how to shake ass and tits. These girls are trained, just like you or I would train an animal, pure and simple, and from the video, I'd say their training does indeed include ass and tit shaking. They're trained how to walk, and they're trained how to smile. This is sick shit.
I could go on. Why am I so passionate about this? I'm not. But this is a big part of what's wrong with this country. Why do people defend this type of shit? If you have nothing better to do than defend people who abuse children like this, you should go die in a hole somewhere, because you're obviously not helping anyone. That's my ten cents for the night. I love you all.
Again, I encourage you NOT to watch the following video, and instead to go outside and do something productive:
If you're still reading, you didn't heed my advice, which I respect.
A friend of mine posted this on Facebook, with the following text:
"Ok, I have a problem with this. These girls are good dancers, but they are also 7 years old, dressed like hoes, and doing dance moves that I couldnt even watch without feeling awkward. Someone please verify my feelings on this..."
Some people then proceeded to debate whether or not they were good dancers, but the general consensus was that 7 year-old girls shouldn't be dressed up like hookers and then instructed on how to shake their asses for a video posted on the internet. Except one broad who said, and again, quoting:
"Look at the video again from a neutral perspective. They are talented but misguided. There is more there than just crap."
This was in response to me saying that the above video was crap, as the astute reader may have guessed from the last line.
There are several ways this can be hit. My favorite is that the wrongness of this only comes from the viewer's perspective, which I believe is what the dame who was stupid enough to argue with me was getting at. For example, a little girl takes her shirt off in public. Is this because she's a slut? No. It's because wearing clothes doesn't make sense to children, so they strip naked and run around like it's party time. So it's innocent, and the parents, and everyone at the fucking World of Dance are just misguided, right? Right. And you're ok with that. FUCK YOU.
Let me lay out what happened here, in plain english so everyone (who speaks english) can understand the exact steps and thought process here:
1. Some parents decided to dress their 7 year-olds up like prostitutes and have them train day and night to dance in essentially the same manner that drunk girls do at a sleazy nightclub so that they could win the World of Dance competition.
That's it. One step. I didn't miss anything in there. Do you know what a 7 year-old should be doing? Because it's nothing even vaguely fucking related to what I saw in that video (for the record, I did not 'look at the video again from a neutral perspective' as was suggested to me).
Another angle on this I love, is that if you've really got the balls (or ovaries, or guts, or ability to use a computer), watch the video again, and tell me how fucking marvelous you think that dancing is. Tell me how amazingly choreographed it is, and what amazing fucking talent you have been lucky enough to witness. Now take a look at ANY fucking Michael Jackson video, and go hang yourself in a closet for being a moron. Is the 7 year-old girl video live? Yes. Are they young? Yes. Does that make it amazing? No. Nobody goes to a fucking soap-box derby to scout for the next Lamborghini engineers, and I'm not about to give any extra credit to these girls because they're live or young or whatever the crap excuse you want to give them. I give credit where I see quality, and if my mommy beat me hard enough, I could have been out there on that stage in nothing but a banana hammock parading around too.
To be perfectly honest, while I think it's tacky, it doesn't really bother me how they're dressed. The issue here is that as far as I'm concerned, these girls are abused, because there is no logical explanation for having them performing like this. Nobody this age wakes up and decides they'd like to train for months for an elaborately choreographed dance piece, and then self-studies how to shake ass and tits. These girls are trained, just like you or I would train an animal, pure and simple, and from the video, I'd say their training does indeed include ass and tit shaking. They're trained how to walk, and they're trained how to smile. This is sick shit.
I could go on. Why am I so passionate about this? I'm not. But this is a big part of what's wrong with this country. Why do people defend this type of shit? If you have nothing better to do than defend people who abuse children like this, you should go die in a hole somewhere, because you're obviously not helping anyone. That's my ten cents for the night. I love you all.
Wednesday, May 05, 2010
F the GRE
In the interest of full disclosure, let me begin by saying that my GRE scores seem to indicate I should have followed the career path of 'Male Gigalo' as was recommended to me in high school.
I took the GRE on Tuesday. The first thing they make you do is copy down this paragraph in CURSIVE about something to do with not telling people things. I don't know what the hell it actually said, because I was so busy trying to remember how to write in cursive that I didn't have time to focus on the content. Do you know how to make an 's' in cursive? Here's how I do it: s
Regardless, I'm sure the paragraph was important, and they confiscated my wallet and Sonic receipt, and stuffed my things into a locker so that I could not use them to cheat on the test. The center I went to was actually really nice, quiet, and the people were really cool. The only downer was I had to take this freakin test.
So I didn't study for the GRE, but I did do this sample test online which completely faked me out because it was super easy. My results online? 29/30 and 30/30. My results in the actual test? Substantially lower.
Here's my gripe. I'm a university, and I want to determine the quality of my applicants. How do I do this? Make them pay $100 to answer math questions without a calculator, and identify the meaning of words which no intelligent human being would use? Yes. Yes that is exactly how I would do it. Because both of those are reasonable tests of intelligence. If my applicant doesn't know the relationship between the words Turmulescent and Grouchodiseistablishment, then how can I expect them to be a good computer scientist? And what if the entire world gets nuked and every calculator and computer is either melted or runs out of batteries and is not solar powered? How will they be able to do the complex math necessary to keep from being eaten by wolves?
Anyway. I think it's really more of a test in putting up with bullshit. It weeds out the people who don't care. If the test is crap or not, those who really want to get into a masters program will blow money on it and try try again until they get it. Of course perseverance, dedication, stubbornness, and stupidity are pretty much interchangeable for that purpose. I fall into at least one of those categories, because I'll be taking the GRE again.
I took the GRE on Tuesday. The first thing they make you do is copy down this paragraph in CURSIVE about something to do with not telling people things. I don't know what the hell it actually said, because I was so busy trying to remember how to write in cursive that I didn't have time to focus on the content. Do you know how to make an 's' in cursive? Here's how I do it: s
Regardless, I'm sure the paragraph was important, and they confiscated my wallet and Sonic receipt, and stuffed my things into a locker so that I could not use them to cheat on the test. The center I went to was actually really nice, quiet, and the people were really cool. The only downer was I had to take this freakin test.
So I didn't study for the GRE, but I did do this sample test online which completely faked me out because it was super easy. My results online? 29/30 and 30/30. My results in the actual test? Substantially lower.
Here's my gripe. I'm a university, and I want to determine the quality of my applicants. How do I do this? Make them pay $100 to answer math questions without a calculator, and identify the meaning of words which no intelligent human being would use? Yes. Yes that is exactly how I would do it. Because both of those are reasonable tests of intelligence. If my applicant doesn't know the relationship between the words Turmulescent and Grouchodiseistablishment, then how can I expect them to be a good computer scientist? And what if the entire world gets nuked and every calculator and computer is either melted or runs out of batteries and is not solar powered? How will they be able to do the complex math necessary to keep from being eaten by wolves?
Anyway. I think it's really more of a test in putting up with bullshit. It weeds out the people who don't care. If the test is crap or not, those who really want to get into a masters program will blow money on it and try try again until they get it. Of course perseverance, dedication, stubbornness, and stupidity are pretty much interchangeable for that purpose. I fall into at least one of those categories, because I'll be taking the GRE again.
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