What Is Real?

Speed Painting

Since Stargate Atlantis nor Lost are currently on TV I have been blowing a lot of time watching YouTube videos. It is horribly addictive because with every video, it recommends other similar videos. One of the things I have been spending time watching is Speed Painting. This is where someone records themselves painting usually digitally with Photoshop. Then they speed up the 1-3 hour video to about 8 minutes. You get to watch the development of a drawing from scratch in super fast forward. My favorites are from someone named Nico Di Mattia.

You can check out his YouTube page here.

Here is a video of him creating Spiderman.

US Patent anti-gravity vehicle

I was browsing a US Patent the other day and out of curiosity I did a search for anti-gravity. Surprisingly several things came up. One of the more interesting ones was a Space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state.

Here is the Abstract.

A space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state is provided comprising a hollow superconductive shield, an inner shield, a power source, a support structure, upper and lower means for generating an electromagnetic field, and a flux modulation controller. A cooled hollow superconductive shield is energized by an electromagnetic field resulting in the quantized vortices of lattice ions projecting a gravitomagnetic field that forms a spacetime curvature anomaly outside the space vehicle. The spacetime curvature imbalance, the spacetime curvature being the same as gravity, provides for the space vehicle's propulsion. The space vehicle, surrounded by the spacetime anomaly, may move at a speed approaching the light-speed characteristic for the modified locale.

Did you understand all of that? Here are a few images of the 15 attached.

I have seen the future

In 15 years Socialism has spread and destroyed our country. We will pay 80% of our salary in taxes, because of this 70% of the people will be on government assistance, and half the people in the country will die at home from common illnesses because they can’t get treatment due to lack of federal funding for healthcare. The snowball has already started.

Only then will we realize Ron Paul was our only hope.

World of Warcraft

I have recently been playing World of Warcraft. I also considered playing Guild Wars, but I do not think I can get past the 20 cap level limit. Thankfully they are changing this issue in Guild Wars 2. I also feel from reading about the game play that it lacks a since of journey. I am still gong to give it a try one of these days.

I am just a casual player since I don’t have much time devote to games. I have over the past three months managed to achieve level 56 Druid at the time of writing this.

My biggest gripe about World of Warcraft is not being able to play with other people unless they are on your realm (server). I have a lot of friends and co-workers who play the game, but I can’t play with any of them without starting over from scratch and leveling a brand new character (who has the time). I think they should have made the game instance based.

I really do not see a benefit of separating people into single world realms. They should have made each zone a separate instance. This would solve all kinds of problems. This would balance the zones and reduce "dead content" which is mostly areas and dungeons level 58-60 in classic WoW. You could simply have less copies of the zones that are less popular. Most importantly this would allow anyone with a copy of WoW to play with anyone else with a copy of WoW. In this case, different zones can be handled by different servers

I really can't think of a single flaw in this design.

The DirecTV blues

I recently moved and while I was having my services switched over I was told I could sign up for DirecTV and get Tivo service for $6 a month. My in-laws have Tivo and I LOVE it. It gives the user a rich user experience, the menus are nice and intuitive, and they never seem to have any problems. Since Tivo has priced themselves out of the market independently I knew they had ties to DirecTV.

It turns out DirecTV (basking in their own arrogance and stupidity) cut their ties with Tivo and thought they could make their own DVR. Later they find out their programmers are not smart enough and their designers not imaginative enough to make their own DVR. What did they do? They release the R15, DirecTV’s new and improved “Tivo”. Apparently DirecTV’s new approach to business is, if you can’t do it right sell a half-working, ill designed product.

I was a little upset that they pulled the bait and switch on me and when I called them to confront them they tried to tell me that “Tivo” is a verb meaning DVR and not a company or another product. No matter how I tried to convince them that “Tivo” was infact an actual product they would talk down to me as if I wasn’t “in the know” like them.

To top it all off I read a few days later Comcast (who I just canceled to get DirecTV) recently struck a deal with Tivo. Not only am I under contract with DirecTV for TWO years using a clearly inferior product, but I have to set idle while my old cable provider uses the tool that made me want to switch in the first place.

It is a cruel cruel world!