Rar!

My desktop computer has died, at least for now. Windows encountered several serious, unrecoverable errors. In a time of tight expenses, I now get to get a copy of Windows XP so I can wipe my c: drive and reinstall it fresh.

Fortunately, it looks like the problem is with my c: drive, so my picture and video archives should be safe. I hope.

In a case of cruel irony, I am typing this tale of woe on my laptop, while my roommate watches an episode of Lois & Clark. In it, Lois Lane recounts the tale of a pathetic computer nerd who was her secret admirer in college. She, of course, was not interested.

But in happier news, the Nevada basketball team has won the first two games of the WAC tournament and now faces the #2 team in the conference in the finals Saturday night at 6pm. It should be a good game. The winner gets an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. Nevada is widely regarded as a team that will get an at-large bid if it fails to get the automatic bid, but Utah State has to win to get in. If Nevada wins, they go into the NCAA tournament with a 14-game winning streak, the second longest in the nation.

Utah won in Reno, Reno won in Utah (by a much more convincing margin). Utah has a good sized crowd in Reno, and they are loud. Reno fans are individually quieter, but there should be many more of them.

Special Needs

Have you heard about the boy with autism that loved basketball? Whose coach put him in his first and only game for the last game of his senior year, with 4 minutes to play with the team up by 20? How he missed his first two shots? How he then rattled off a record 20 points in 3 minutes?

No?

You should read this story. And watch the video if you can.

Geek Humor

He said: "You've committed one of the classical fallacies of message boards..."

I said: "Pardon me, but would that be Post blog, ergo propter blog?"

New Layout

I changed my links. Added some, and added some organization. If I overlooked you, or if you have things you'd like to add, let me know.

Exciting? Hardly.

On a Lighter Note

Can you name the five members of the Simpsons family?

Can you name the five (I count it six, personally) protected rights in the First Amendment?

You should read this news story.

In a survey of 1,000 Americans, it was determined that one in a thousand could name all five rights. (which means only one did, but there was a +/-3% margin of error)

Roughly 25% could name more than one right.

Over 50% could name at least two Simpsons.

And about 20% thought the right to a pet was guaranteed in the First Amendment.

Speech, assembly, press, petition (to redress grievances), no state establishment of religion, and no prevention of the free exercise thereof (the final two lumped in as one in their tally); Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. But we already know I'm a freak. I may as well wallow in it.

Tough Week

Bet you can't guess why. But it's a bet I expect to lose.

Let me just say if another girl ever tells me how nice, sweet, smart, great or admirable I am in the same breath that she tells me how she just doesn't think about me "like that," I might just scream.

She did say that she really appreciated the flowers, but that she was disappointed there wasn't any follow-up, and she was expecting that. I didn't say that, in the absence of the events of the past couple months, I had intended to do that this year - flowers with follow-up. The past couple years, one reason I didn't follow up was that my then-current job was not one I thought I could support a family on, and being able to do so was important to me before pursuing anything further. Now that I have a good career job, that wasn't standing in my way. But, you know. I'm a really nice guy, but she just doesn't think about me like that.

That's a rather common opinion, though. I think it'll take a miracle to find one who does. As Rich Mullins said, "Love is a miracle; it's a miracle if you can find it. And miracles are hard to come by these days."

Regrets

Looking back on the remains of another failed attempt to have a girl think of me as something other than a nice, sweet, smart, guy that no girl would ever think of dating has made me nostalgic [But I have to add that things at least reached the best conclusion they can when a guy is head-over-heels and the girl has absolutely no interest in him. She let me know where she stands, but had waited for the chance to do so in person, because she was honestly concerned with being as gentle with it as possible.]

Specifically, I regret the times when there were nice girls who may have been interested in me, but I was too busy chasing after somebody else to notice. I can be a very one-track-mind sort of person. I was once watching an advance screening of The Green Mile with a group of people at UNR. It had been arranged by someone in advance, and I had to leave early to go to a Bible Study (where there was, of course, a girl I was interested in. But I also was leading worship on the guitar, so I really did have prior commitments). But shortly before I had to go, they had the botched execution scene. I was sitting next to a girl from a group I was in at the time. During th flaming death scene, she grabbed my arm. First, and only time that's happened to me, and I really didn;t know how to respond. Mostly, I just wish I did something other than leave 10 minutes later.

But that, too, is now water under the bridge.

More Fun With Hyperlinks

This is a post I ran across at work Friday. I browsed the rest of the site, and was generally pretty amused. If you've read Alice in Quantumland, you may appreciate the blend of science and humor that I enjoyed here.

Here's an article that explains the benefit of private property in an Economist's mind, as opposed to public goods. It was posted Valentine's Day, and I thought was funny. But, I'm an Economist. I laugh about jokes about Adam Smith and Karl Marx going into a bar. I'm just unusual like that.

In other news, the Your Corner Coffeeshop blog got some updates. The idea is, I'll put up some contiguous passages of Scripture. As you [yes, you. The person reading this right now.] read the passage, let me know what it makes you think of. Questions, ideas, challenges, expository teaching. This blog is meant to be a discussion among various parties on Scriptural topics. If you're interested in becoming an admin to post new threads, please just let me know.

Interesting Links

Things you should read if you get as bored as me:

An interesting article about the hoopla concerning the operational control of 6 U.S. ports being aquired by a company in the UAE. Even more interesting is the profession of the person who wrote it.

Were your Jr. High science fair projects this interesting? Neither were mine.

A link of slightly more value: The Food Bank of Northern Nevada. I'm interested in volunteering here. It's practical, it's local, and it's (I assume) pretty easy. Anyone else interested?

Grinding

In the world of Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), grinding is where you do mindless, repetitive tasks over and over and over in order to gain experience to advance your character's skills, abilities, experience, etc. It's what drove me away from the one that I tried - I play games in order to accomplish things, but as a way of balancing large multiplayer games, achieving the very highest levels requires a lot of persistence. Most people I know learned ways to massage the system. I always just wanted to be able to do the task at hand.

Most grinding becomes almost absurd. To gain weaponmaking skill, you might just make 10,000 pistols, and destroy them all. The in-game markets become flooded with people trying to sell their worthless items, before they realive there's a thousand other people doing the exact same thing.

This comic made me laugh. But you need to know what grinding is for it to make sense.