John Makes Things

… turn and face the strain.

Here the strain may be on your eyes. I’ve made a few changes here, namely the blue to grey gradient here, and the checkered background:

The background is VERY temporary, and probably won’t survive the weekend. I’ve constantly got new ideas popping into my head while I’m driving to school so who knows when it’ll end.

One thing I know for sure is that the way that the website is designed right now there are WAY too many files to do the relatively few functions I need to do. There are rougly 3 files for each function (post, edit, and delete – for blog and guestbook posts). I need to compact these files somehow. I’ve got an idea of what to do, but it won’t affect any of you at all, this is all backend stuff.

I spend the better part of this afternoon testing to see if my videocard supported a dual monitor setup. I always suspected it did, but never knew for sure until today.

The first thing I needed to do was FIND a second monitor. I decided to use my TV in the other room, so I gathered all the rca cables I could find and connected them all together. Then I hooked up my videocard to the tv and after a bit of tweaking it detected the screen. So, I had successfully extended my desktop over 2 screens. Only problem was the TV is in another room, that wasn’t very practical.

So I setup my other computer with the ATI multimedia center software so I could watch TV on it, but instead of feeding it a cable signal I connected the RCA cables to it.

The next step will be to purchase a new monitor, a real one not a tv screen, and stick it beside this one so I can really enjoy all the perks!

I heard this word in my humanities tutorial today. And the instant I read it I realised what it was.

Recapitulate re·ca·pit·u·late – to summarize briefly.

What are the first 5 letters of that word? “recap”.

This was a very profound realisation for me, and I think its the only thing I really took with me from that class, the rest was something about some book by a guy named Darwin.

Incase you did or didn’t notice, I was up late tonight working one some java applet goodness.

Well, it didn’t TAKE me all night, i just started late. So, go take a look in the upper right of the screen for the clock! it moves now, yay…

I think today was the first time I actually was thrilled that I go to university… like actually THRILLED!

I went to a seminar hosted by Microsoft on Game Development with Managed DirectX. And it was probably the most enlightening thing I’ve ever participated in at school.

I was stunned at how simple it is to make a 3D game… well the simplicity is in creating and ‘painting’ 3D images on the screen, not at the actual game programming.

As a result of attending I got a free copy of Visual Studio .Net which is pretty awesome, and I got entered in a contest to win a copy of Halo2 (one copy per seminar is being given out, so my chances are pretty good).

All-in-all a pretty kick-ass day.

If you look to the upper RIGHT of this page, inbetween the two amazon item advertisements, you will see a new java applet that I created (its like 2 days in the making). I got lazy and impatient, so I never bothered to really LEARN how to make them properly. But now that its done I’m very pleased with it.

If you don’t see it, and you just get a black grey box, or a RED X head on over to Java.com and download the java runtime engine (JRE) so you can bask in the glorious world of java applets. Trust me, its fun!

Its a damned shame, but there is nothing I or anyone else (except for the NHL and NHLPA) can do about it. So, whining is going to do nothing.

So, as a pseudo-replacement of hockey for myself I started watching soccer. Both the Italian Serie A and British Premier League. I’ve been following Juventus in Serie A, and Liverpool in the Premier League.

Now, soccer isn’t really an adequate replacement for hockey because they usually only play on the weekends. So I’m still left with my weekday evenings (that could possibly be an oxymoron) wide open. Now, you might say ‘Hey John, why not do HOMEWORK?’, and my responce to you would be ‘Because homework is for suckers!’… so, I’ve filled up my evenings with tv shows.

Monday to Friday I watch reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Space: The Imagination Station

Tuesdays I watch Making the Cut on CBC AND Smallville on CityTV

Wednesdays hosts LOST, I don’t know what station its on because I haven’t actually watched it on TV yet. I’ve been downloading the episodes from Suprnova.org (and no, thats not a spelling mistake)

Thursdays is reserved for CSI, the ORIGINAL CSI not the Miami or New York spinoffs.

And Fridays, unless I go out, I am graced with the return of Star Trek: Enterprise… they were moved from their old wednesday timeslot. I’m hoping this doesn’t mean that they are going to get cancelled.

Well, I think thats good for me, 2 posts in one day. That should tide you over until my next post.

Wow, today was one HELL of a day.

I had full intentions of leaving my last class (5:30-7:00) today early to attend a mass for my grandfather, because it has been 1 month since he passed away.

So, at 5:30 I made my way to class. When I walked into the room I saw everybody looking over their notes. I thought to myself ‘hmm, this looks weird’, but I thought nothing of it, took a seat and started reading the Excalibur. Not even 5 minutes later the professor walks in with a STACK of papers under his arm. ‘A test?’ I thought to myself, ‘no way, its impossible’. But Lo and Behold, there was a test.

So I’m sitting in my seat, shitting BRICKS no less, wondering how the hell I’m going to get through this. Then I laughed at the irony, because no more than 12 hours earlier I had been laughing at my friend Andrew Braini because he had just found out that he had an 8am test the following day. ‘Thats karma for you’ I said to myself.

Well, I’ll spare you the gory details of the test. At the end I felt pretty good about it, it wasn’t too tough at all. But I might just feel that way because when I got the test I fully expected to fail it. Well, I’ll have to wait a few weeks to see how I did.

With the advent of the the new, reformed, semi-automated TheNoodleman.ca comes the death of one of my most favorite tools, the JohnsBlogTool. It was probably the FIRST useful program I ever wrote, and for a while it was the only until I started working really hard on the scripts for this site and VealOnABun.com. I have included the source code (created with JAVA) in the latest, and LAST, release of my blog tool. Now, for the 2nd order of business… I spent some time on the McFarlane/Spawn website today, and I found some AWESOME new music figures that they are making, have made and are releasing really soon! One being a 2nd Jimi Hendrix figure, and the other one (or group of figures) that I’m TERRIBLY excited about is the new Beatles Saturday Morning Cartoon series: I just can’t wait!

Hey hey hey

Welcome to The (REAL) Noodleman.ca v3.0, its not that crappy knock-off TEMP version you’ve been so accustomed to seeing.

I’m beautiful and I’m yellow and blue. I’ll need just a moment to get all the old posts viewable somehow, but other than that ENJOY yourself and please sign my guestbook!