mount /dev/hda1 /DORK

<sigh /> … it’s true.

Name:The Gripper

Cost: $8.00

Ingredients:
1 hotdog, wrapped in bacon and then deep fried
topped with home-made chili, onions, bacon, ham, cheese, mustard and a fried egg
served on a plain white hotdog bun

Results:
Stomach ache, nausia, dizzyness, shortness of breath
(results may varry)

Location:
Tubby Dog - 17th Ave SW

4.5 / 5

Christoper Nolan (also directed ‘Batman Begins’) is quickly becoming one of my favorite directors thanks to this movie.  Set in turn of the century London, this is a movie about 2 rival magicians and their drive to stop at nothing to out-do eachother. It was absolutely amazing. I loved this movie. I think everyone has a little bit of a fascination with magic and finds themselves asking “how’d they do that?”.

I actually don’t know what to write about this movie, since I REALLY don’t want to spoil the plot for anyone. All I can tell you is, it’s a thriller with a great and twisty plot that will keep you interested. David Bowie -  yes, that David Bowie - is cast as a real-life historical character, I don’t want to say who because  I don’t spoil it for you. If I had one complaint about the movie, it would be that it is 2 1/2 hrs long. But that didn’t really make it less awesome.  If you read or contribute to Stupideverything, please go see this movie at your earliest convience!

Well, since youtube has gotten all weird, what with the removing of all the excellent vids and all, I thought I’d figure out how to grab the ones I like so that I can have them on my server. This would have been great for the South Park WoW vids, but alas, I was too late.

Anyway, what I did end up using works really well. It’s called YouGrabber and you can grab it by clicking on that useful link. A little make; make install; action, and you’re all set. You run it by just giving the URL you want to download as an argument.
That gives you a weird .flv file, but most media players seem to understand them. I tested it out by grabbing an interesting rant by Joe Rogan about DMT. Check it out, it’s worth the time.

I decided to pick up a tablet input device to help me in my quest to master graphics programs. Well, that’s what I told myself, but really, they’re damn cool, and the mouse just isn’t … natural. So, I picked up the Wacom Graphire 4, from my friendly neighbourhood retailer - I picked the 6×8 size. In silver, no less.

I have 2 computers, the first being a linux workhorse, the second a windows gaming machine. At the time of tablet purchase, I was upgrading the windows box, I had it booted into Knoppix to diagnose some partition problems. Don’t worry, that fact will become most important as this article progresses.

I tried the tablet on my FC5 box, and it worked in the sense that X saw the device and loaded the drivers - and in that I could right click and scroll. But I couldn’t get the pen or the mouse to move very well. And by very well, I mean that the cursor basically didn’t move. So, for fun, I threw it over to the machine running Knoppix, which noticed the tablet right away and both pen and mouse worked like magic. But why?! Well, after a bit of research, I found out that FC5 is running Xorg and Knoppix is running the old XFree server.

That was the start of what would turn out to be a good 5 hours of debugging to get this thing working, so I thought I’d share the final solution with you. Basically, the best resource is the wacomlinux project - and their docs are pretty good. Also remember your good friend google - check your Xorg.log.0 (or similar) log file for the relevant error, copy and paste it into google, and VOILA! Solutions.

In short, all I had to do was edit my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and add 4 sections for the tablet (here’s my current config file) … and then it worked! The problem was the docs saying to use /dev/input/event0 - which really should have been written to say it’s the device that the computer things the tablet is hooked up to - so eventX, where X is the one that corresponds to the wacom, or in my case, just /dev/input/wacom. Easy to check which device with the wacdump program (ie wacdump /dev/input/event{0,1,2…} until you get the right one) - when it’s the right one, the wacdump will show you all sorts of great information about the tablet - the other inputs won’t show you anything (look specifically at the vendor info). I know that sounds a bit whack, but you’ll see what I mean when you start playing with it.

After restarting X, it all worked perfectly. So, I hope that saves you some time, should you go that route - and for the record, I totally love this thing, I think it was worth every penny.

But not as much as these guys.

Also, in international news, Nerf has released a 3 foot sniper rifle, which is capable of accurately shooting 35 feet! Their Nerf Tag looks pretty cool too, I’ll have to jump over to Toys R Us and check it out.

First, there was the Prince of Nothing. Then, there was The Warrior Prophet. And finally, I just read the Thousandfold Thought.

This is the last book in the Prince of Nothing trilogy, which aims at finishing the story of … the Prince of Nothing. You probably figured that out before I explained it. I made the mistake of going into this book expecting all the plot points touched on in any of the 3 books to be resolved, but they weren’t. At first this bugged me; at the end of the trilogy I expected everything to be tied together, much as it is in just about every other series out there. But, no, Bakker took a different approach, and I’m glad he did.

By the end of this book, you’ve really gone on a very interesting journey as the Khellus (”The Prince”) leaves his people and finds a purpose to his life. Granted, that’s a pretty cool story. But the end also leaves you with some pretty big questions as to what happens next. For example, one of the big questions poised early in the first book is the coming of a “second apocalypse” - and I assumed that would be resolved by the end of the 3rd book as the concept of the entire world being destroyed seemed like a big plot point. But, no, really it wasn’t. Not to mention all the different character dynamics that were introduced - they pretty much keep going. I suppose that’s just like the real world, though.

At the end of the day, this trilogy was very different from other series I’ve read, and that makes it worth reading. I hope Bakker comes out with some complimentary stories that touch on some of the other events that were unfolding through these books. Apparently, I need some closure on those topics.

I’ll let the episode speak for itself, but if you’ve even heard of WoW, this episode of South Park is worth watching. There are 3 parts, I’ll just link the first one here. I have no idea how they did the WoW work, maybe Blizzard was nice enough to let them play with the gaming engine.

And here is Part 1

As many people know, on the 16th of September, Brent and Jen were married. Don’t they look the happy couple?!

I was lucky enough to attend the wedding, which was held up in the NE of Calgary. It was a fantastic night, with excellent food and tonnes of great people - which is always a compliment to the two being honoured. It was very easy to see how happy both Brent and Jen were, although I imagine their cheeks were getting pretty sore by the end of the night from all the smiling.

There was lots of dancing to some excellent music through the night, but I’d have to say the best dancing was done by Brent’s brother - who totally stole the floor and had the whole place rockin’ out. To put it another way: Props to the man ->

I don’t know really how to describe this, other than to say that it happened, and I have evidence:

Thanks to both Brent and Jen for the wonderful night. I wish you all the best.

I’ll leave off with some pics of the people who were dipped. For some reason it seems appropriate to sign off with people dangling in the air. Why is Brent dipping Josh? I don’t know either, but it was awesome.