Tag Archive for 'me'

Tagged

Published on October 17, 2007 in Memes. Closed

TAGGED!
Once you have been tagged, you have to write a blog with 10 weird, random things, facts, habits, or goals about yourself. At the end choose 10 people to be tagged, listing their names and why you chose them. Don’t forget to leave them a comment (you’re it) and to read your blog. You can’t tag the person who tagged you. Since you can’t tag me back, let me know when you’ve posted your blog so I can see your answers.

  1. I still write music now and then.
  2. I have a blue-tip (almost full blue) belt in TKD. I can kick your ass in Korean and English ;). Blue Tip
  3. My favorite music has bag-pipes. Rory Campbell
  4. I’m the founder of the Berkshire Linux Users Group. BLUG Logo
  5. I live in MA but am still a 3 hour drive from Boston (Mind boggling, isn’t it?).
  6. I’ve named all my personal computers after various gods of dischord, chaos, and change: Loki, Pan, Eris, Tyr, Enki, and Coyote.
    All my employer’s servers are named after Final Fantasy summons: Asura, Shiva, Ifrit, Ramuh, Valfor, Phoenix, Firebird, Titan, Hydra (ok not a summon, but it’s really ten machines acting like one, so the name fit), Golem, and Carbunkle.Final Fantasy
  7. I really love to play Go, even though I’m not that great at it (19 kyu).Go
    I’m part of the Northern Berkshire Game (Design) Group (link). We play and make up games. It’s cool!
  8. Books that have changed me: Recently: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance by Robert Pirsig and Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman. When I was a kid: Elfquest by Wendy and Richard Pini.
  9. I work from my home for a bunch of bodybuilders. Sortof ;)
  10. I’m working on getting Italian citizenship jure sanguinis. That means because my Great-Grandparents were born there they’ll recognize I’m still Italian (hopefully). I’m waiting on some very slow searches to finish, but then once the paperwork is done I’ll be a Dual Citizen. Italy

The next victims of this malicious meme:

  1. Jen - Because I love to share the love
  2. Sarah and
  3. Rachael - Because even though you’re my sisters, I still don’t know enough about you :)
  4. Pip - Because I’ve lost track of him, and want to know what’s up
  5. Seth - Because he’s hilarious
  6. Jeff - Because I really don’t talk to my friends enough
  7. Joe - Did I mention I don’t talk enough?
  8. Neal - Because even though I know he won’t do it, I had to try ;)
  9. Brannon - Because he never blogs about himself
  10. Bryan - Because he seems a likely target for meme crossfire ;)

D&D Ability Scores Test

Published on March 27, 2007 in Gaming, Memes, Tha Intarweb and Travel. Closed

According to This D&D Ability Scores Test, These are my character stats:

STR: 10
DEX: 16
CON: 13
INT (pt1/pt2): 17/18
INT: 18
WIS: 15
CHA: 12
And no, I didn’t cheat; although you could pretty easily by reading the javascript running the page.

Btw, anyone in MD, I’m here for the week. If you want to hang out, drop me a line :)

Personality Profile

Published on November 29, 2006 in Meta and Science. Closed

So while I was down in MD for Thanksgiving, my Mom had us all take a Myers-Briggs (or Jungian) Personality Test. I came out as ENTP. Mom’s book called the ENTP profile the ‘Inventor’ profile. A brief summary of my type:

Creative, resourceful, and intellectually quick. Good at a broad range of things. Enjoy debating issues, and may be into “one-up-manship”. They get very excited about new ideas and projects, but may neglect the more routine aspects of life. Generally outspoken and assertive. They enjoy people and are stimulating company. Excellent ability to understand concepts and apply logic to find solutions.

A detailed description of ENTP.

If you’d like to determine your own personality profile, I found what looks like a pretty good test. Let me know what you come out with! You can get your own short summary at this site.

Green Belt Test

Published on November 22, 2006 in TKD. Closed

So, last Friday, I had my third Tae Kwon Do Belt Test. I was testing for Green Belt, which is the 5th level at my school. The test involved marching (responding quickly to commands given in mixed Korean/English), Forms (Through Do-San / Tosan for me), One Steps (I know through #14), Board Breaking (4 12″ x 12″ x 1″ #2 pine boards), and Sparring. Additionally there was some general fitness stuff like push-ups and the like.

Everything went well! The hardest part for me was one of the breaks - I had to try and break a board using a hammer-fist technique (your fist comes around behind you, up, and down like a hammer). I hit the board very hard, but the thing wouldn’t break! Later I heard that if you snap it more the board will break. I went first on breaking so I didn’t hear that advice, ah well. I broke that board with a spinning back kick instead (which is a somewhat more advanced technique). I ended up breaking with a front kick, a skip side kick, and a spinning back kick.

I think I most enjoyed the sparring, it’s very improvisational. I got to spar Max, a young red belt. I have a pretty strong advantage size-wise, but he certainly outranks me by a fair margin. I did pretty well though, or at least everyone said I did ;).

All in all, I’m really glad to be studying TKD. It’s awakened something in me that I never knew I had before, and has made me a much stronger person. I really like my school, too–they push me to give my all.

All About RSS

Published on May 24, 2006 in Memes, Meta and Tha Intarweb. Closed

RSS stands for Reallly Simple Syndication. It’s basically just a standard file format. What it allows is for websites to publish a standardized feed that RSS aggregators can consume and present to the user in a standardized format. Everything has a unique timestamp and global id (guid). These let the clients keep track of exactly what a user has or has not read and what’s new etc.
I read a lot of RSS feeds. It’s where I get most (if not all) of my news, in fact. In my opinion RSS was the best thing to happen to the web. I no longer have to keep a list of bookmarks, go check them all and try and figure out what’s new on my own. Instead I use a RSS aggregator that looks at each feed and keeps track for me of what I’ve read or not. I use Akregator, which IMO is the best client ever, but it’s Linux only. Windows people I know have had good luck with RSS Bandit. Mac people have Safari and a whole slew of other options. There’s even a RSS screensaver for the mac ;).
I thought it would be interesting to share with everyone what I subscribe to. If you want to import all my feeds at once into your agregator, here’s my feeds.opml

  • Slashdot (feed): It’s Slashdot. If you’ve never heard of it, get out from under your rock! ;) It’s the oldest tech news aggregation site out there. While I feel that it’s perhaps getting a bit old and slow, when a story I’m interested in does make the site, I know the reporting will be thorough and the discussion meaningful.
  • Digg (feed): Digg is sometimes labeled the Slashdot killer. I don’t think it’ll do away with Slashdot, but I love the fact that it’s a democratic reporting model. I see more interesting news faster on digg than I do anywhere else. The one drawback is there’s more noise sometimes than signal (damn mac fanboys). It’s always worth my time though to at least skim the headlines.
  • Nectarine News (feed): This is the newsfeed for one of my all time favorite internet radio stations, Nectarine. They play demoscene music ’round the clock. If you don’t know what that is, there’s a reasonable explanation on Wikipedia. The news here keeps me vaguely apprised of what’s going on in the scene in relation to music.
  • Virt - music releases (feed): Virt is a simply astounding composer. I’m constantly amazed by his work. This feed lets me know when he has new stuff out.
  • Daniel Beck.net (feed): A friend’s blog. He has some nice photography and art, as well as interesting essays sometimes :).
  • Inkberry (feed): Inkberry is an organization around here that’s dedicated to forwarding reading and writing. They often have interesting or entertaining free readings and lectures, so I subscribe to this feed to keep apprised of them.
  • Post Secret (feed): Every week people anonymously send in artistically rendered postcards containing secrets they’ve had. I think postsecret helps people more than anything else I’ve seen online. There’s great power in opening up what you’ve kept locked inside.
  • The Official Google Blog (feed): Google lets us know what’s going on with this blog. As a techie (read: dork), I like to stay on top of what the world leader in tech is doing. There’s often cool tools they let us know about on there too! :)
  • Cute Overload (feed): OMG!!! PONIES!!!!!! everyone needs some cute :)
  • Yahoo! User Interface Blog (feed): I was going to use some of their API to do some ajax stuff, but it turns out that it kinda sucked. I’m almost ready to remove this feed, but they do occasionally have some interesting info about ajax usability.
  • IPac (feed): IPac is a PAC (political action committee) committed to ‘preserving individual freedom through balanced information policy.’ I tend to agree with their goals, so I like to know what’s going on with them.
  • Comics:
    • Goats (feed): Goats is one of the longest running webcomics, and it’s somehow managed to stay funny that whole time. The stories can get drawn out, but I get drawn into them so I don’t mind :)
    • Diesel Sweeties (feed): Combine pixel art, robots, satire, and a good dose of just plain strange and you might begin to approximate Diesel Sweeties. They have awesome t-shirts too ;)
    • User Friendly (feed): I think everyone in this strip works for an ISP.. it’s been so long I don’t remember anymore. What I do know is they’re mostly a bunch of geeks and that it’s usually pretty funny :). Did I mention it’s also been around forever?
    • The Joy of Tech (feed): This one gets a bit mac heavy, but there’s entertainment there too ;)
    • Sinfest (feed): I’m not sure how to generalize Sinfest, except to say that it’s da Bomb. The art is cool too.
    • Dilbert (feed): What can I say? It’s Dilbert :)
    • Penny-Arcade (feed): Gaming news, graphic style. Sorta. If you don’t already read Penny Arcade, I don’t think you’ll get it.
    • Ctrl Alt Del (feed): Yet another Gaming comic. I didn’t used to subscribe to this but I was linked to it too often to keep ignoring it. It’s about 60% my book :)
  • CmdrTaco’s Journal (feed): CmdrTaco started Slashdot. This gives him special geek powers, so reading his journal is often useful.
  • Overheard in New York (feed): It’s what it sounds like. Another 60%.

coolest webapp I’ve seen in a while

Published on January 31, 2006 in Art, Memes, Meta and Tha Intarweb. Closed

this site Spells out whatever you want using images from flickr! Damn cool!! Here’s my name:


Btw, MYSPACE SUCKS!!!!! ARRRRG I had to fight it for like 10 minutes to get this dam thing posted!!!! people shouldn’t use this crappy site! :P

New Site

Published on September 15, 2005 in Meta and Tha Intarweb. 3 Comments

I’ve been redesigning my website, and I’m really happy with it. Stay tuned, I’ll be switching over to it as the live site soon!

Odds, Ends

Published on June 13, 2005 in Art, Books and Computar. 2 Comments

ok so I was messing around the other day and finally got my webcam working in linux :) http://haven.loki.ws/joshcam/wc.html is the link.

Not alot new going on, still trying to decide about house(s). It’s been really hot and humid here the past few days, so that tends to stifle everything. Been reading Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Trilogy, which has been very good. Jen has become interested in deviantart.. check out her gallery, it’s got some really great stuff :) http://jmulcahy.deviantart.com
(mine is http://raynyskie.deviantart.com)

not much else going on I guess, at least nothing breathtakingly important to the rest of the world ;)

First Post

Published on January 18, 2005 in Meta. Closed

So, this is my first post to this new blog. I figured it’s be a good idea to put one up, as much to remind myself what I’m thinking as to allow anyone else a peek inside my skull.

What to expect? who knows! I guess we’ll see. Past usage rates for blogs / journals / what have you have been pretty low, but maybe this one will be different! ha right ;)