Education and Religion

All the time I hear stories about Creationism vs. Evolution and the drama that unfolds in the arguments of the two. Today I saw a small taste of that argument, behold a 4th grade science quiz from somewhere in South Carolina. The identity of the quiz taker was blacked out thankfully. No wonder education in America is going down the tubes when schools are doing this.

I was bored today..

So I was bored and went looking around the White House petition site. I then went surfing to Wired and CNN and saw articles on what amounts to a trillion dollar fighter jet project having more troubles yet again. This inspired me, I decided to create a petition to "End wasteful spending on government contractors that can not deliver goods on time and to specification."

So lets see where this goes. It won't be visible on the public White House site unless it gets 150 signatures.

Well it's 2013...

After two weeks vacation for Christmas and New Years it's 2013. During that time I played a bunch of Skyrim since it was the game I decided to treat myself to over the holiday. Long live the Empire and death to the Thalmor! The Thalmor embassy elves living near Solitude will long remember the battle cry I borrowed from my favorite shaman, "IT BOUNCES! KILL IT!" My mage had fun dancing on their tables afterwards.

Drama Alert: My mage is an Altmer elf. >_>

Though to make penance for the elf thing I am leveling a Nord barbarian. If you want to know what will happen at the embassy with him, Google "Hassan chop!" and think of the duck as the elves.

Windows 8

So I tried Windows 8 today at work. The operating system is pretty zippy even though I'm running it on a virtual machine on Oracle's Virtual Box. That is about the extent of the nice aspects of Windows 8 for me. Once I got to the DESKTOP (This is a DESKTOP OS right?) it all went down hill from there.

The DESKTOP starts out as a bunch of tiles on a single colored background. The tiles are bright and cheery and there are no menus to use such as the old faithful Start menu. Installing applications just adds a new tile to the pile of tiles on your desktop and you have to page through things when there are more tiles then the screen can hold. (Swipe if you were on a tablet or phone.)

Using non-Metro applications causes Windows 8 to go in to a stripped down Windows 7 desktop interface. This interface has no Start menu and is just a very basic version of the Windows 7 desktop. This whole experience reminded me of OS/2 and how fun that was going between OS/2 applications and Windows 3 applications. Talk about RETRO for a modern operating system.

Finding standard Windows things took a bit with me. I shudder to think how my own mother would handle Windows 8 on her DESKTOP computer. She has a hard enough time finding things in Windows 7 and when she switched to that from Windows XP and the changes there confused her for months.

I hope Microsoft stops dorking around and actually puts out a useable DESKTOP operating system and not some stupid phone or tablet interface bastard child. Right now I consider Microsoft in the same light as Ubuntu Unity and Gnome 3 when it comes to DESKTOP interfaces to avoid. The only thing that makes Microsoft's offering worse then Ubuntu's or Gnome's is they want you to actually pay for the rotten thing.

When fan made is really damn good.

For being fan made this video is really damn good.

I downloaded the whole video from the site they said it was at and it's 2 gigs of awesomeness.

In other news I'm digging back in to my Java programming roots from college as well as my first job. I'm diving in to Liferay portlet technology for projects. Once I got over the initial brain fart hurdles it's actually quite nice working with Eclipse and Git. Mixing that with some PL/SQL programming is turning out to be even more fun.

As for pointless fun, I built a castle in Minecraft. Even has a working iron gate.

I like keeping the inside of my castle walls practical yet somewhat decorative.

Full blown village, garden, smithy, apartments, animal pens, and I even made a central market area with nice colorful stands. The melon patch where the melons and pumpkins grow is hooked up to a piston system that knocks them all off the vines at the flick of a switch making for easy harvests.

Voting and Voter ID States

So yeah there's this lovely little Voter ID stuff going around for a voter fraud problem that really isn't that big of a problem. The University I work at had to deal with this issue and it's not a fun topic. Check out the video...

PS. This new interface for doing up blog posts is kinda annoying. Oh well.

P.P.S. Oh yeah.. wake the F up.

Fancy Blog Title *Bling bling*

FANCY BLOG POST!

I haven't posted in a while, life has been going well I suppose. I"m taking care of my mother and feel like I'm kinda bleh.

Anyhow I've been working on beefing up my Java skills as well as getting in to Portlet development for new stuff coming in at work. Part of me likes PL/SQL work better because I don't have to deal with JAR FILE HELL! *Scary Music*

You see, when you do Java development you can sometimes use extra libraries to create your programs. These libraries are stored in files called JAR files. Now a project called Maven has made this less of an issue but it is still an issue over all. Anyhow much love to the Eclipse development platform, it's really great for doing this stuff.

PS. I liked the old blogger UI better for editing posts and managing the blog. I knew where everything was.