Longklaw.com

Recently, I started re-reading a series of books called A Song of Ice and Fire. I first started reading them about 4 or 5 years ago, but I started again because the latest book came out last year and I just bought it last month. They fall in the fantasy category, kind of like The Lord of the Rings. The story is loosely based on The Wars of the Roses which took place in England during the 1400’s.

In so many of the other fantasy series I have read, you don’t see any permanent major misfortunes fall upon the major characters. Any misfortunes are usually made right in the end. George R. R. Martin books don’t follow that same pattern. His characters don’t come across any unnatural string of good luck. No matter how attached you become to them, they may die. No matter how much you hate them, you may start to feel sympathetic toward them. Early on when somebody died, I would always think that person was going to come back, much like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings. Now I don’t have those delusions. If you are a fan of the genre, check it out. The first book is called A Game of Thrones. The fourth book, A Feast for Crows, was released last year and there should be a total of seven in the series.

This November will see the release of the Transformers: The Movie 20th Anniversary Special Edition DVD. I remember that my sister took me to see this movie when I was young. It was the first movie I ever saw in a movie theater and I don’t think I’ve seen it since then. Yes, I am that old.

Now I recognize some of the actors that provided the voices (Leonard Nimoy, Judd Nelson, Robert Stack, Orson Welles) though I probably didn’t back then. I’m sure I’ll check it out when it gets released.

I found out about this on Slashdot or Metafilter I think. The picture below shows what longklaw.com looks like as a graph. The graph was created using an application located at http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph. I’m not sure it gives any useful information, but it looks interesting at least.

The following description of what the colors mean was taken from the website used to create the graph:
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Pearl Jam actually released a new music video. Is the world ending? The video is for the song “Life Wasted,” the second single from their new album. You can get it here for free until May 24. The video is being offered under a Creative Commons license. Interesting.

Update 5/24:
Now it’s free until June 1.

I went to an MSU graduation ceremony for the first time on Saturday. I got two degrees at MSU and never attended graduation. It was interesting but seemed to go on forever. And that was only one of the two ceremonies taking place that day.

I got up early Sunday to spend Mother’s Day with the family. I had lunch with my mother and sister and spent time with other relatives later in the day. It was great seeing everybody again since I hadn’t been home in a while.

I came back to Starkville on Monday. On the way back I picked up a copy of the new new Red Hot Chili Peppers album, Stadium Arcadium. This is a great album to own if you are a RHCP fan. It’s a double disk album. I haven’t finished listening to it yet and I already know I’ve got my money’s worth.

I finally got my CD called Pearl Jam by Pearl Jam. It came in the mail today, two days later than expected. I don’t know whether to blame Amazon.com or the US Postal Service. Oh well.

I really enjoyed listening to it this afternoon. I probably shouldn’t try to rank it against their other CD’s yet. The newness may give it an unfair advantage. However, I really do think it’s some of the best stuff they’ve done in a long time. Lots of rocking. They continued their tradition of beginning the CD with a fast, heavy-hitting song and ending with a slower, more mellow song. There’s even a reprise on it, which I haven’t seen often on rock albums.

That whole Coppermine thing wasn’t working out too well, so we had to part ways. I’m trying another option provided by my hosting service. If this doesn’t work, I’ll go back to what I was doing before I tried Coppermine.

The pictures are all there, I’ll have to go back later and add titles, descriptions, etc. You can check it out here.

Since I had a lot of work to do and I tried to be sociable in real life, I only got to play the Dungeons and Dragons Online trial for about 2 hours over the weekend. It’s different, but it was still fun to play. I liked the voiceovers describing what was going on around you. I wonder if that will get annoying.

Here’s an example of how little I know about D&D rules. I was duel-wielding a longsword and an axe and didn’t realize I was taking a major penalty for doing so. No wonder those kobolds were giving me such a hard time. Once I realized what was going on, things got much easier.

Yesterday, I bought a copy of the game complete with that handy little instruction manual. The first half of the week will be busy, but after Hump Day I’ll be free for a few days.

Update, 3:05pm
I forgot to mention this, but I’m a human paladin on Xoriat.

I have been a Netflix member for a little over 2 years now. I use it mostly for TV shows and movies that would be hard to find at Blockbuster or Movie Gallery. They opened a distribution center in Jackson within the past year, so for the most part the DVD’s get here faster than when they were coming from Georgia. Another positive is that I can keep DVD’s as long as I want to. I usually don’t keep them very long. It seems like a waste of money to hold on to a movie for an extended period of time. My biggest problem is that if you rent a lot of movies, you don’t get a high priority because they don’t make money off you. Google the phrase “Netflix throttling” and you’ll see what I mean.

I promised myself at the beginning of the month that I wouldn’t rearrange my queue for the rest of the month of April. The last time I rearranged it was on April 1. The problem is that I keep moving DVD’s to the top and I’ll never get to some of the movies farther down the list. The only thing I’ve allowed myself to do is remove DVD’s that I rented from Movie Gallery or Blockbuster. I currently have 355 DVD’s (a lot of them are TV shows with multiple discs) in my queue. I don’t know that I’ll ever see them all. Even though I haven’t really been tempted to break my promise, I’m glad the month is almost over. I’ve already planned out what I’m going to make my top 20 items when May 1 gets here. Some of them are made up of multiple discs:

1. Wonderfalls
2. Strangers with Candy Season 3
3. Aeon Flux
4. CS Lewis: Beyond Narnia
5. The Commish Season 2
6. The Rainmaker
7. Capote
8. K-Street
9. North Country
10. Rock School
11. Summer Lovers
12. Angel Season 1
13. Thirteen
14. Holes
15. Conan O’brien 10th Anniversary
16. The Dark Crystal
17. Mulholland Drive
18. Fun with Dick and Jane
19. Interview with the Vampire
20. The Shield Season 1

Weird, huh?

I am enjoying my time in Azeroth. Somehow, it’s better than Starkville. I like the paladin and druid equally at this point. My only problem is that sometimes I have trouble getting into the game. From what I’ve heard, that is a common problem.

I signed up for a one week free trial of DDO. I just have to download it. Unless it takes an incredibly long time to download, I’ll be playing it sometime this weekend.

It looks like Xfire is being bought by Viacom. I remember when I first heard about it on TechTV, back when it was still TechTV. It couldn’t have been too long after Xfire first started up. If only I could remember to run Xfire every time I play a game. If anybody uses Xfire, my screen name is longklaw.

I decided to try Internet Explorer Beta 7 for a little while. I know it sounds risky, but I wanted to try it. I’m ok with IE’s new look. It reminds me a lot of Netscape 8 for some reason. I’m really glad that it has tabbed browsing. That feature is the only one I wish IE6 had. Of all the web sites I went to, there was only one that looked weird when I viewed it using IE7. After using it for a little while I decided it was time to uninstall IE7 and course IE6 froze up every time I tried to use it. Thank goodness for system restore.

Final Fantasy VII – Advent Children finally came out on DVD yesterday. I went to Sam Goody and picked up a copy. I’ll probably be watching it in the next few days. The manager at Sam Goody told me that I had been shopping there as long as he had been manager there, which is a long time. He said that I was one of those customers he expects to see there at least once a week. Though that used to be true and I have started back shopping there recently, I don’t go to Sam Goody nearly as much now that we have a GameStop here in Starkville. Still, it was nice to know that he appreciated my bu$ine$$.

The spambots have found me in my new home. [sarcasm]I am so thrilled about that.[/sarcasm]