Ok, it's time for another rugby update.

Sadly, the Bears did not win the rugby world cup this season. The world cup is so-called because it's a contest between the (traditionally) best Canadian team and the (traditionally) best American team. They play two matches (one at each home pitch) and the team with the combined highest total score wins. I don't know why they don't call it the North America's cup, but hey, since we often win, I don't mind it being the world cup. Hey, how about we call it the world cup when the bears win, but north america's cup when the Thunderbir wins. Ok, so to get on with it,

The UBC Thunderbirds won the North America's Rugby Cup last Saturday, defeating the bears 26-17. It must have been a great match. You can read the recap if you're interested.

In more rugby news, the Bears will be demolishing Cal Poly this Saturday. It should actually be a pretty good match, with Cal Poly coming in as the #1 seed for Southern California, and, of course, the Bears as #1 for Northern California. Match details. The game's at 1 o'clock on Witter field, and you can sure expect to see me there.

In other sports news, I guess the baseball season has started. I don't know this because I pay attention to baseball, or because I happened to hear the match on the radio, or because I actually care, no. No, I know because, well, the radio has once again started talking about the scandal with the stupid performance enhancing drugs (and I don't mean the Levitra kind).

Look people, as a culture we worship sports heros. We pay them stupid amounts of money to be good at a game. If you don't want fools to do drugs to be better, stop caring so much about who's the best. Hell, go watch little-league or something, and find out which little kid works the hardest in practice, and cheer for her, or him, or whatever. If you do care about who's the best, go watch TV and see some drugged up dude hit the ball over the fence 44 times. Either way, enjoy, but stop clogging up public airwaves with your whining about moral decline and integrity.

I saw two weird things today as I walked to the grocery store.

1 I live next to an Italian/Pizza restraunt. It's a bit pricey, but very tasty. I recommend the pizza for two. Anyway, I noticed a flyer hanging from the front door of said restraunt (they're closed on Tuesdays). The flyer was for, get this, another pizza place! Anyway, I thought it was kind of funny.

2 In front of the grocery store are a bunch of newspaper vending machines (a new one showed up just a couple days ago, selling Yank!, sorry couldn't find a link), and anyway, I noticed a sticker on one. And on another. And on the garbage can down the street. And on the back of the bus stop bench. Reading:

Free Identity!
name: Chris Gunderson
SSN: some number
DOB: some date in the 60s

Weird. I wonder if it's a real person? and if this is someone with a vendetta, or just some random identity they found? Weird.

YES!!! My old gameboy still works! I was gonna type something about exectly why Microsoft's monopoly is such a BadThing, but instead I think i'll play tetris. At least for now.

So at work I'm helping my boss migrate from Mac to PC. Ironically, I'm using a Linux machine as the middleman for this particular transfer. I know very little about using the Linux command line, so I am looking for good (free) resources online to help me learn. I found this article on using bash and it seems to be directed at people familiar with Windows. Anyway, thought i'd throw that up there, although it's mostly a convenient way for me to remember the link when I go home and want to read more of the article.

It seems like, in general, it would be a lot easier to convince people to use Linux if there were more resources like this out there. All the help i've been able to get comes in the form of: figure out what program you want to use, then read the manual for that program (as an aside, I've found that reading the manual is sometimes pretty hard due to lack of examples). While this advice is very sound, as a Windows user I know my goal (for instance, unzip a file and put its contents into a new directory), but have no clue of what I should use. Does anyone know of a good listing that says, "ok windoze users, if you want to do x, the commonly used Linux equivalents are a, b, c, and sometimes d." Or am I going about this the wrong way?

So i've been reading some people's blogs, and damn, we're all about the organized sports! Specifically Samay and Jennie (and friends) have mentioned sports (baseball, hockey, basketball). Then I realized I recently made 3 posts in a row about Rugby. After some consideration, I have decided that organized sports are as reasonable a hobby as any (including one of my favorites, being a NEEEEEEEERD).

However, I certainly sympathize with Calvin's various complaints about organized sports. So, as an hommage to Calvin's ideology, I would like to present you all with Calvinball.

Thank goodness for friends. I'd been feeling lonely, and out of the blue, three different friends I hadn't talked to in a while contacted me. Yay friends!

Since I got all excited about EoTL in the last post, I wanted to try a link that did this: Telnet!

This one's for all y'all that ever logged onto that wacky Multi User Dungeon, EOTL.
Blizzard has just started up the beta test of their upcoming World of Warcraft (WoW). I took a look at the WoW info page, and I'll be darned if this doesn't sound an awful lot like EoTL but with pictures, especially in terms of dieing. Of course the info page probably only gives a small notion of what the game's really like. Anyway, I probably don't have time to play, but if I did I bet I would enjoy WoW as much as I did EoTL, which was a lot.

As an aside, EoTL seems to still be going strong (at least as of a few months ago). Some of the same people, a lot of the same areas, and all the same complaining. Interesting thing about that place, every time I go back I discover something I missed when I was there before. It's not as fun without a bunch of buddies playing, though. I heard rumors that Tim still hangs around there sometimes.

IGN insider has a collection of articles about Lionhead's upcoming release, Black & White 2. I really liked parts of the original, but it seemed like trying to be a good diety involved way too much minutia. However, when I wasn't constantly trying to water trees so my people would have enough wood to build enough houses to support the big population I needed to get enough prayer power to cast my spells to water my trees... Yeah, when I wasn't doing that, the game was pretty awesome. Maybe I'll pick up B&W 2 once it hits the bargain bins.

Ok, while I'm at it, what's up with suddenly seeing ' on lots of pages? Could be coincidence. I just assumed it was IE6 being lame, but I looked at webmonkey and their list of special characters didn't include apos; Anybody know what's up? And I know i'm supposed to be running mozilla or something, i'll get to it one of these days.

Allen recently pointed us to ongoing, and it had this bit about blogs. I liked it, so I want to share it with the world:
"Anyone who has a platform for daily venting is subject to temptation to daily venting about things that are at best ephemeral; and although this is one of the charms of the universe of weblogs, I'm going to try not to."

So I think i'm going to go for the Sapphire Radeon 9600. It's selling at newegg.com for $95.50. But then I looked at the performance jump from the 9600 to the 9600 pro for only 35 dollars more. But then I noticed rumors that the even newer 9600 XT comes with a coupon for Half-Life 2 for FREE! (but the card costs about 40 bucks more than the pro).

My info on the specs etc comes from a couple of reviews from Tom's Hardware (I hate the ads, but the reviews are usually pretty solid). About the 9600 series and 9600XT vs 9600Pro

So I think the conclusion I'm heading toward is the 9600 because it's cheaper and has no fan, so it won't create cacophony in my computer. Then again, for 75 bucks more I get a pretty big jump in performance AND free halflife 2 (when it comes out) (which could be years from now).

Ok, i'm looking for a fairly cheap graphics card to replace the one I have because i suspect it's causing me trouble. I'd like my new card to be at least a little better than my old one (ATI Radeon 8500 AIW), and to not be more than 100 bucks. Leave a comment if you have a suggestion, or if you find a web resource with info that would be useful. Thanks everyone!

Pictures from the past

Benjamin Files

Some funny quotes I've heard/read recently:

"Today people are already talking seriously about living on the moon and then on Mars. I hope that Ukraine will also be involved in this process. Ukrainians simply must travel to the moon! Not all of them, of course. Somebody must stay for the flight to Mars"
-Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, from a statement reported in this article

"Why is it not displaying? This is a Mac!!!"
-A frustrated post-doc trying to set up for a presentation using a Macintosh

"If you're a bad guy and you want to frustrate law enforcement, use a Mac."
-Dave Thomas, FBI, as reported in this column.

Ok, to be perfectly honest, two of those came from a 'neat quotes' bit in a magazine I read. But they're still fun/interesting.

This just in! The rugby national final four is at Stanfurd this year! I am so there.

Ok, this is just a heads-up for all you ruggers out there: Cal Men's Rugby plays in Berkeley this weekend at 1:00 pm [schedule]. All y'all are welcome to come have a beer or just hang out at my place before the game. Maybe we'll get some pizza or something. Let me know if you're interested.

For related news, click the pic.

There was a neato article in New Scientist about 3D microfabrication. They made reference to a lab at UC Berkeley that is working on designing 3D micro-structures using the principles used in pop-up books. I found the page of Elliot Hui, who was probably a grad student under the professor that got all the credit for the work. From the page, it looks like it was really Hui doing the research. Anyway, here's Hui's page for anyone interested.

The reason this all caught my attention was this awesome picture of a micro-scale model of UC Berkeley's Sather Tower:

The actual model is 1.8mm tall! And there are actual Roman Numerals on the clock face! So cool.

My former boss (with whom I currently work) has asked me to come troubleshoot a program I wrote about a year ago. I'm scared that i'll go and feel obligated to do hours and hours of work, but I won't feel comfortable charging him for that many hours... but at the same time, I don't want to give up my free time for, well, free.

On an entirely unrelated topic, here's a nice set of FAQs for anyone interested in learning about Multiple Sclerosis.