There is no combination of lights I can show you on this 10-pound chunk of glass, metal, and plastic that will make you any happier than you are now. Yet, I’m here every day thinking of ideas. Ideas that could be wonderful if they ever worked. Ideas that promise success and recognition as if some peculiar combination of lights on the crystal display will break this haunting premise. Conversely, you’re staring at this pane of falsehood and illusion for hours a day trying to attain the same impossible utility that I try for, but in a completely different way. We both spend a ridiculously disproportionate amount of time on this pinnacle of human innovation and we both forget: A computer is just a fucking tool. See, social networking principles dictate that the purpose of digital communication is to better communication in reality. Every single messaging protocol from RFC822’s Internet Text Messages to XMPP and IRC even TCP switching: it’s based on what programmers observe about communication in real life. The internet mimics what happens in reality and in certain cases, it replaces it. That’s fine and all, but not fine at all. When the Internet becomes the first, last and only form of interaction and everything is convenient, well that’s the end. In light of this, everything just sucks all of a sudden. Now get off the computer. I’ve got nothing for you here.

There are programs. Then, there are programs that help you make programs. Then, using those programs, you can create a program that will help other people create programs. I was reading about the pioneer plaque and, really, it’s amazing. So, on Pioneer 11 and 12, there are plaques with information about our human race in case aliens ever find the spacecraft. Assuming the aliens have some sort of mechanism to read and process electromagnetic light, they could gather information about our location and our intelligence, just by understanding the supposedly universal symbols on the plaque. But that’s the problem. How could anything be universal? Alien’s don’t know what an arrow is or what it means. They wouldn’t know who Pythagoras was but they’d know his theorem. They would probably use a different number system with different symbols and base. But not even aliens, what about just foreigners? Meaning like a Spanish guy living in Europe. Programming is definitely not universal. First off, programs are (mostly) written in ASCII, which is limited to Latin-based languages. Then, program interpreters are designed to read English. So what about an Arabic programmer? He doesn’t even know the alphabet, much less what programming words in English mean. So what will programming be like in the future? Let’s assume that the world doesn’t all learn Esperanto. Most likely, programming will stay in English. I just can’t see people typing code in Chinese: it’s just too slow. To prove this, even Spanish websites are written with their functions and variables in English. What about Iron Man? Apparently, you can engineer stuff just by moving your hands around and talking to your computer. Really, movies have to make programming look funner than it really is. But what about aliens? Maybe they’ve got like electrodes that you stick into your brain and you just visualize programming control structure and it comes out on the screen and whoops, lets change this here, and this here. Maybe they’ve got like 15 letters in their language and they’ve also got 15 fingers so they stick their 15 fingers into 15 holes and push their fingers down in different combinations to produce the different letters. It’s like playing alien piano. So we learn Spanish because it’s used in a whole lot of countries around the world and man, they drill those countries into your head almost as if they’re the ONLY reason to learn Spanish. (heh) But what if you’re like in another country and you’re in this English foreign-language class and the teacher’s like, well this is why English is important. Can you name all the countries in the world that speak English? I’ve got no idea, but hey, more important than everything else, English is the language of programming languages. That’s kind of unfair don’t you think? Programming languages are all written in English, forcing smart programmers to learn English. Then, when they make contributions, those are in English too. It’s like English has a monopoly on programming, which is great.

It’s raining right now. I was thinking how nuclear fallout can cause rain and stuff and then I thought about nationwide programs for this sort of stuff and then I thought about NASA and their publication about the bacteria that incorporate arsenic into their organic molecules. Did nobody else notice this? A few months ago, Obama cut NASA’s budget, forever destroying the dreams of 10-year-old astronauts. Then, NASA spent a ton of money trying to get public attention, spreading rumors about them finding organisms that completely redefine what we consider to be organic. I thought they had silicon-based life or something they found on another planet. But arsenic from Mono lake? Big whoop. Maybe that’s important to some people, but anyone would guess that this is NASA’s sucking up to Obama so that he’ll give them more money. Oh, you know what, I think I’ve been to Mono Lake before. Maybe I’ve got some pictures. Oh here look:

This was taken in 2006.

Compare the picture to this. Same rock formation and all right? I think this is Mono Lake. My memory’s hazy but theres a Mono Lake magnet on the refrigerator and my parents seem to remember. Heh it’s kind of cool, this is like CSI but with my past.

For the longest time, I’ve had this idea on my get-rich quick million-dollar programming ideas list but today I found out that someone’s already done it. Long story: Internet TV Streaming is fine and all, but it just doesn’t work, especially in the US because of the copyright crap. Centralized distribution of content is just a bad idea because, eventually, someone has to take the blame for it. So, I thought of applying decentralized P2P protocols to movies and TV which would be entirely possible. Let’s say there are 100 publishers with distribution centers around the world that publish TV content. While these guys are downloading content from the distribution server, they’re simultaneously uploading what they’ve got to other watchers. The video is encoded in a streaming-enabled format and sliced into bits. The earlier bits are given more priority and, with a few seconds of waiting, you can stream TV while sharing it over the P2P network. It’s Bittorrent without the wait. Youtube without the, well, youtube part. I assumed that this didn’t exist yet because nothing similar to P2P streaming is popular in the US. But holy crap, China has had P2PTV for like, ever. Why are we so slow to catch on? It’s amazing enough that someone had the brains to successfully implement this idea, and I mean successful as hell because even my parents use the crap. But what’s more amazing is that this isn’t widespread through the US. On the radio, I heard this white guy talking about American education and he was like, “it’s not like indians [the asian ones] are smarter than us”. (heh) But seriously, China is rising rapidly, not because of cheap labor or extreme education standards, but because they’ve got the balls to get shit done. QQ USA.

Would you do something for free? Like, no recognition at all, and it doesn’t soothe your conscience either. Think of it like this: Your friend’s about to die, but you have a way to save him.  It involves killing yourself, but afterwards, everyone will remember you as the biggest douchebag ever and you won’t even remember you did it, but he’ll live (still thinking you were a shitty friend). If you let him die, you’ll forget that you ever had a chance to save him. You’ll feel pretty bad, but come on, as bad as it sounds, your life will go on. “That’s dumb, NO way man, why would I do that?.” It feels awkward thinking about these situations, so we avoid applying logic to them. But consider it: Even the soldier getting blown up knows very well in his head that if he gives up his life now, he’ll be remembered as a war hero and he doesn’t want to deal with the guilt of abandoning a friend. Either way, the soldier is self-seeking. You can be selfless but self-seeking and this is exactly what it means. What do you do that’s truly NOT self-seeking? If you help someone out, you want people to see you as a saint. You want that person to see you as nice and maybe even feel indebted to you. You want to soothe your conscience and make YOURSELF feel good. You could say that helping others makes you feel good and that’d be completely accurate. But that’s like loving money when what you really love is the stuff money BUYS. Or is it? What can money buy that will make you any happier? You sitting there in front of your web browser reading this blog post. You’re already so well off that, in your mind, the point of money isn’t anything positive, but only to feed the necessities. I mean, money’s great for food and stuff. You like money because you’d be pretty bummed if you didn’t have any. But all this crap we do, society tells us it’s to make money right? Doing IB? That’s so I can go to college. College? That’s so I can get a good job. Job? That’s so I can make money. Money? That’s so I won’t go hungry and I can buy stuff. Stuff? Well that’s to make me happy right? What about happiness? What does that do for you? Well shit.

This isn’t a question of whether self-sacrifice is noble or selfish. It’s not a contradiction that both choices point to the same bad conclusion. If you do decide to save your friend, he’ll feel crappy too because his mistake ended up hurting someone else. That could be worse than letting him go. If everyone simultaneously refused to fight, this problem wouldn’t exist.

Now isn’t it a paradox that open-source software can exist? There’s nobody taking the credit for it. You contribute anonymously and you receive absolutely nothing. I just don’t get it.

Diaries are boring and messy, especially when we’ve got social networking bullshit to sate our narcissistic needs for attention. You can find real people to listen to your whining. Unreal right? Turns out, people love that stuff. I could make a program that would keep digital diary entries with dates and all that, but that’s just as boring as paper and pen. But ANALYTICS, now that would be cool. Trend-tracking and logistics about your life. Man, Zuckerberg didn’t even think of that. What if, somehow, a program could track your mood (happiness rating) or measure sarcasm and then graph it out, showing periods of depression, consistency, growth. It’s a journal that keeps track of what’s on your mind and how you’re feeling that day. Who knows, you could do a study and find out that weather affects peoples’ moods. Or China Earthquake drops global satisfaction rating 12%. This sounds bad, but blogging has that inherent burden of identity. The super-ego makes us act and talk in socially-accepted ways, because, ultimately, you blog so someone else will read. Of course, people that write diaries write knowing that it’s probable that nobody else will read what they write. So, some people write to get their thoughts together. Writing things down and forming concrete ideas from abstract thoughts helps a ton with messy situations. It’s always easier to make a decision as an observer. But what about this model: Every person keeps their own diary dataset, encrypted and secured on their own computer, while the entry analysis results (not the actual entries themselves) are anonymously published to an organization that releases aggregated data to the public. Something like this can potentially generate a huge amount of data, stuff that could lead to interesting conclusions. The entries get the benefit of anonymity as well as the reassurance of purpose. You know that it’s statistically impossible for anyone to hack (and read) your diary entries but you also know that you are contributing to the great wealth of arbitrary data and information. On a smaller scale, you can also see your own analysis data detailing periods of your life where things are good and bad.

The beauty of innovation is that people don’t even know they need it. Of course, the world goes on even without analyses of the state of global human society. It’s just hard to imagine a utopia without one of these things. Damn.

Giving up is just the stupidest thing ever. When things get to this point of sub-zero mediocrity, I really cannot do anything but sit, watch, and contemplate how something so stupid can happen. And now I’ve got it. There are two reasons why people give up, and only two: The first involves complaining, whining, basically a massive display of inferiority. The second is simply that you come to realize that the endeavor isn’t worth the time. I’ve got a ton of the 2nd one, and believe me, it’s much worse.

I’ve been sorting through my old stuff and failure reason #2 is written everywhere. It’s one thing to know you’re lacking fortitude and perseverance. Laughable, but not as bad as stupidity. I’ve got projects from games of snake to equation solving software to webcam chat programs to online question/answer forum software to video/audio converters to blogging software to photo sharing software to collaboration software to typing benchmarks to a program that’ll talk with you to a program that rates how attractive you are. And they’ve got one thing in common: I never finished them. Holy crap, I never finish ANYTHING. Even the software that I released wasn’t finished, I just settled. Settled for the piece of crap that came out because the time and effort needed to build a finished product was beyond what I had. Boggert wasn’t finished, no there were a ton of things I had planned for it that I never added. The NHSWeb software that runs WalnutNHS.com had a lot of stuff in the original plans that never got put in. I like to think that I have a lot of perseverance, but my record so far doesn’t reflect. I don’t ever quit from reason 1 but 2 just ends everything I make. Now I look back and see these thousand-line mini-projects and wow I had a ton of progress on these projects that will never be finished. Effort-wise, IB is really not much compared to programming. Because of IB, I’ve dropped my programming projects for the most part and I’m not starting any new ones so it’s really been balanced out. But I wanted to release some of the projects that are actually functional before they disappear from the indices of my file system.

(No warranty whatsoever incase you hurt yourself downloading some of these.)

1. Snake
This was made in VB.net and took around a day to make. I distinctly remember it was a Saturday and I had nothing to do. From the meta data, it was July 11 2009. I should have chosen a better platform, but this was probably the most completed of all my projects. Very sad, right?
Download

2. RogerAVC
An video converter written in VB.NET powered by FFMPEG. Thus, the title. Didn’t turn out so well because, well, I didn’t know much about video editing in the first place. Also, there are alternatives and I suddenly had other things to do (spanish bleh). Gave up April 23 2010.

What a great UI right? Though it doesn't work.

3. Equation Solver
Completely useless. I have no other words for this program. It’s got nothing that my casio can’t do. Built July 5 2009.
Download

4. Photowall
This was my first photo-sharing software. Very crappy, to say the least. I hosted it for a while on an apache box I had setup at home. My parents and grandparents would share the most random family pictures on it, and overall, I don’t even know. People are easily amused. Built in PHP/MySQL and contains everything in the ZIP. It’s fairly finished, albeit completely pointless. This took a few days. Finished March 6 2009.
Download

5. PHP Photos
My 2nd attempt at photo-sharing software. More complex with directories, password-protection, administration control panel. However, still very pointless, useless and replaceable. At the very most, it was a good lesson about directory permissions. Built in PHP/MySQL and contains everything in the ZIP. This went though a few revisions. Last revised December 9 2009.
Download

6. rogerLive
Intended to be like a conference chat room (video/audio/text) but I realized that NAT penetration was too tough and the bandwidth requirements put the project out of my capacity. So, it just ended up being like a mirror, which sparked the idea for another one of my failed projects. Written in VB.NET and there’s no real release or functionality that has any purpose whatsoever. No release here. Gave up August 8 2010.

7. theMagicMirror
This project sprung up from the last one, rogerLive. It rates the proportions, tone and shape of your face to determine your attractiveness. No huge obstacles until I got to the actual analysis part.. then I drew a blank. The UI is pretty good and the webcam function (taken from another open-source proj) works as a mirror, so you can use it for that, however impractical. Analysis is very minimal and scoring system is fake (placeholder, you’ll get the same score every time). Built mainly in JavaScript with flash components. No PHP whatsoever. *gasp* No  idea why I’m releasing this. Gave up November 16 2010.
Download

8. RogerBot
Don’t ask me why I made this. It was just made. It’s an attempt at an AI that talks to you through .NET’s computer-talking API. It was pretty obvious that it was never going to work, but fun nonetheless. Just the debug build is included in the ZIP. The DLL included is needed to communicate with the native API so you gotta extract that too. Abandoned March 13 2010.
Download

9. Project 24
Long story behind the name. This was a question/answer knowledge base forum thing software built in PHP/MySQL. The structure is so poorly managed and I’ve lost the database structure so all I can give you is a screenshot of the control panel of it (probably the only working page). Abandoned July 5 2009.

Admin CP that was made for this project.

10. Message Wall
This is pretty much my version of Google Wave, made a whole month before Wave was even introduced. I wanted to integrate email and internal messages in very much the same manner that Facebook is planning and Wave has already done. At first, it looks decent, but it turned out to be way too much work and beyond the scope of what I could do. I ran the code through apache and all I have is a screenshot because the database structure was lost as well. Built in PHP/MySQL. Abandoned April 12 2009. (Wave came out in May)

The login screen for Message Wall.

Here’s a screenshot that I took while actually working on the site a few years ago. Yes it looks a lot like GMail because that was just the best thing ever in 2009. One look at the picture will tell you how old it is.

Notice the browser UI.

11. TypeMaster
A program that measures how fast you type. I think I released this once before, but here it is again. Written in VB.NET. Settled for on July 8 2009. (I can’t say finished because, well, read the top part if you haven’t.)
Download

12. Boggert
The blogging program that ran RogerHub for its first year until I switched to WordPress. Man that switch was just great. But nonetheless, Boggert was my 2nd biggest project at a towering 7000 lines of code and it made me pretty happy during the first few moths RogerHub was online. Built in PHP/MySQL with heavy coding in JavaScript, components in Flash, some XML for configuration, RSS/ATOM if that counts, and basic web HTML/CSS. By the way, HTML/CSS was implied for every web-based application that I write, obviously. No source because it’s embarrassingly messy. This was in progress from July 25 2009 to November 12 2010.

I think this image captures it best.

13. NHSWeb
I made NHSWeb over Summer 2010 for NHS so that we’d have an awesome website. Even though it was pretty recently made, there were a lot of initial structuring and design errors I shouldn’t have made. First of all, I should have picked a database system that was faster. Even hashing and file serialization might have been faster. I put in most of what I wanted, but really, this project only made some progress because I was obligated to finish it. Otherwise, it would have been dumped along with the rest. At first, NHSWeb seemed so easy, I mean this was the prime example of a project that requires no experimental technology and no innovation. Because of this, NHSWeb was actually fairly complete compared to some of my other projects. Though, in the end, I had to do some research about scalability and large-scale deployment and HUGE time-wasters with email especially stupid Yahoo. This was built in PHP/MySQL. Started May 1st 2010 (I chose an easy date on purpose, listen up politicians/leaders and benefit future history students of the world) and launched October 21st.
WalnutNHS

There are more projects than these, but these are the major ones. Take a look and observe these failures, then contemplate what you’ve accomplished and compare. There’s not so much to complain about now is there?

Programming is just wonderful. It just saves you from doing all this busywork and just opens the possibilities and.. okay this is bullshit. I’m just horrible at writing these introductions to product launches and honestly, I don’t know how other people put up with it. It’s like Steve Jobs or that funny Indian guy at Google. On one hand, they’ve got everyone on the edge of their seats waiting for whatever groundbreaking crap their company is gonna introduce but on the other hand, they’re worried about initial reactions and the pressure is huge when you’ve been working with your development team in completely secrecy for months making this new product and then you start thinking how people will absolutely hate it or how it won’t be profitable or if you should slowly reveal the details or give it to them all at once. If there are people whose entire occupation is to read us the weather or news and stuff, shouldn’t there be people whose only job is to introduce products? But instead, they have the project managers and the lead developers go up with their socially awkward gaits, inaudible voice from being inside too much, and sagging cargo pants. Though, that’s not always the case. In fact, charismatic people are progressively filling the project lead positions in big companies now. But even so, there’s a dilemma here: On one hand, you want someone who can effectively communicate purpose, origins and impact. But still, you don’t want a complete dumbass going up there and doing it because, well he knows less than YOU do on about the project. Right now, the world leans more towards the stupid know-nothing representative and there’s a ton of protest against that because, well, it’s frustrating. They go up there, read their scripted introductions and stuff and act all passionate, and then they artfully avoid answering any questions, not because they’re evil and don’t want to give us the actually relevant information, but because that’s their profession. They don’t go and study science, or business, or law. They study how to talk their way out of any situation, which really shouldn’t be a occupation at all, maybe like a graduation requirement but definitely not a profession. That would be great if everyone was forced to take something like that because it’d replace these guys with people who are, more or less, competent.

Okay so the whole deal is, I just made JS Playground and it’s in the sidebar thing under Productions too. It’s really not a project since it took, maybe 15 minutes more or less, but it’s a no-install universal programming environment, well not really, all it does is run Javascript that you type in. But it’s better in my eyes just because it’s hosted on RogerHub O: Oh and I made an example program that approaches the Monty Hall paradox with programming (Aaron this was what I was trying to show you in bio) that you can see here. Just click the execute button and it’ll run. Cool right? O:

You know, I never noticed how closely Facebook represents the ideal society where all people are connected by a wireless, open, yet secure and intelligent infrastructure of communication. Except it’s not. I’m not saying Zuckerberg is the problem. In fact, now I realize he isn’t. It’s natural human tendency to want to know anything and everything everyone thinks about you, then take absolute legal and physical control of it and use it to take advantage of everybody and ultimately screw over the world. What’s life without a little atrocity right? Put anyone in that CEO’s chair and they’ll do an equally crappy job. Then, you remember that Zuckerberg doesn’t owe you anything. His goal is to make money and he’s doing a pretty good job with that. The problem lies in the fact that Facebook is a centralized, greedy, selfish business. Business itself isn’t bad, but having a business take over and close off all communication in your life is outrageous. I’m writing this because Facebook is making their new Facebook Mail (read: FMail, or F-ail for short) and things are getting too awful to ignore.

First of all, let me clear this up: Facebook is not providing some kind of new revolutionary way of sorting/filtering email. They claim that they’re not providing just another email service, but they are either stupid or they are lying (at this point, either one is equally likely). Since people just stubbornly refuse to use desktop email clients with the W3-intended SMTP/IMAP Network-Server-Client model, Facebook is trying to revitalize email (for profit, no doubt). They’ll try to integrate emailing, text messaging and instant messaging but they will, without doubt, certainly fail with that. They are also planning to provide @facebook.com email addresses and that will certainly catch on. Facebook’s new email service will attract mostly people in the Age 10-24, technology-unfamiliar demographics of the population, all other things indiscriminate (I think). Facebook mail will be discouraged simply because using a Facebook email address is unprofessional, though this could easily change in the future.

Facebook mail will drastically increase the success of email marketing and email collaboration. This last conclusion is heavy with logic and evidence: First off, Facebook mail will appeal to people who are either too ignorant or too technologically-incompetent to successfully manage their email. Because Facebook mail will target directly people who do not check their email already, it will be very efficient in reintroducing email into the average consumer’s life. Moreover, this also means that Facebook mail will hurt Yahoo Mail most directly and Hotmail second. With any luck, both Yahoo mail and Hotmail will fail. This is very unlikely given that Yahoo mail still retains a large active subset of non-Facebook users. Gmail will most likely be unaffected as Gmail’s user base is much higher up on the technology-competency ladder. Second, Facebook claims that it will be able to successfully filter through commercial and personal emails. This filter will certainly fail in the short run. Also, there is a large chance that Facebook’s email filter will cause more problems than it solves in the long run. Because of this, email marketing will be more successful. Email collaboration may or may not be more successful. This is primarily because most emailing lists and email-based collaboration groups are NOT based in Facebook. This fact, however, reveals something much more frightening: Facebook’s new mail service will be a HUGE reason for organizations to move ALL their strategy and collaboration talk to Facebook, something that Facebook will like very much (control and profit) while the Internet community will ineffectively protest. Again, Facebook is attempting to gain control of yet another 2 monumental parts of your life: Your professional collaboration methods and your email. When Facebook eventually fails and shuts down, these 2 things will only add to the chaos and madness that will ensue.

This is a tangent, but the key to stopping spam is NOT filtering. In fact, it is much better to eradicate spam filtering altogether. So if this is true, why does spam filtering still exist? Well simply because spam filtering equals PROFIT. Advertisements about spam protection and email scanning generate HUGE divisions of revenue for online security companies. Spam and spam-filtering will always exist as long as it is profitable. It is still profitable. See the problem? Well that’s not the problem. Profit is the reason why spam-filtering EXISTS, not why it must be eradicated. The problem is that sometimes, good email gets blocked. Now, even the Facebook public-relations video about their new email service addresses this directly, albeit very lightly. This is most definitely NOT a light problem. Facebook says “But if your grandmother, who only uses email, sends you a message and it finds its way into the [spam] folder, you can always promote it into your inbox”. But people don’t check their spam folders. They never have and they never will. A spam filter can catch 100 spam emails but if it blocks even ONE legitimate message, it has failed it’s only purpose in life and should promptly and quietly tie heavy stones to its hands and drown itself in the nearest data-river. You might think that spam-filtering isn’t perfect and it will never be perfect, but we should accept it because it’s the best thing we have. This is exactly what Facebook, Yahoo and other spam providers WANT you to think. (Again, for the selfish reason of PROFIT) Spam filtering does not stop spam, it only holds it off. Here’s what they don’t want you to know: The US Federal Trade Commission’s CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 orders that all commercial emails and emailing lists MUST have a visible and obvious option to “to decline to receive further commercial electronic mail messages from the sender”. At the bottom of most commercial mail that you get, there will be a Unsubscribe link or an Opt-Out link that you can click to get yourself off of their lists. If you don’t click it, then they are legally ALLOWED to continue emailing you as they like. If the email does NOT have a unsubscribe/opt-out link or if it violates any of the other conditions of the CAN-SPAM Act, there is a government organization “to pursue law enforcement actions” against spammers. More info about that on FTC’s Website. Okay, back on subject.

I’m actually liking the fact that Facebook’s email service will get people to actually check their emails once in a while. For everything else, it just sucks more than before. This is impossible but an ideal communication infrastructure would be consciously built with the idea that it should be impossible for anyone to get data that you don’t want them to have. It’s not the scare that Zuckerberg or some random guy you’ll never meet can look through your *ahem* questionable picture. Rather, it’s this notion that once something goes on the Internet, it doesn’t come off. Diaspora’s pretty close to something idealistic like this. Much closer than Facebook in the decentralized-open-full-control-obsessively-secure-you-own-everything criteria, but we’ll see what happens.

Okay so you’ve gone 500 years into the future and now, everyone has these little gadgets called vlo’s (Virtual Lens Overlay) and it’s like a pair of contact lenses and a device that you put in your pocket (kind of like a iPod). So, these contact lenses have a digital display that imposes virtual objects onto/next to/around what’s actually there in real life. These objects include like biography data next to people that you don’t know, encyclopedia data about places or monuments, to virtual projections of news and videos on flat surfaces. The lenses can communicate wirelessly with the device in your pocket. The device has a radar like thing that can sense out your environment as well as where your contact lenses are relative to the device. Then it renders all these virtual objects on its quantum processor and displays them in real time as you walk around and stuff. Inside its hardware, the vlo contains an exact simulation of your present surroundings and calculates the transformation and scaling of virtual content related to your eye position, angle, and lens (the organic one) focus. It’s also linked wirelessly to a network of overhead satellites that are spread out all over the globe and provide access to the Internet with absolute minimum latency. Your device also contains a storage device capable of storing data represented by the structure of chemicals in a tightly compressed container, boasting petabytes of data in a single chip. The contact lenses record anything and everything you see in lifelike 4K resolution with metadata about the virtual objects that are overlaid (past participle) in real time. You can then play this data back to prove that something happened, or find something that you lost, or replay somebody’s exact quote just to piss somebody off. The device also records sound, although it works much better if it’s not in your pocket. It replays sound by sending similar chemical messengers to the brain that contain sound data and identify themselves as signals from the ear. The contact lenses uses the blood capillaries in your eye to send and receive chemical signals from your brain. With a little practice, you can control everything about your device just by thinking about it. The device comes with a Linux shell that takes full advantage of your beastly quantum processor and comes with all the necessities of a hyperactive, self-obsessed teenager: an Internet browser, multi-protocol messaging client, and media player. For everybody else, the shell also contains a filesystem that takes advantage of the ridiculous storage capacity provided by the storage chip and support for 3rd party apps. To interact with your vlo computer, the screen is displayed on the best possible large, flat, surface and, to the uneducated consumer, looks just like a quality giant projection screen. Keyboard and clicking actions are controlled via the mind. Dictation is a lot faster than typing. For this reason, large companies around the world will use vlo’s in all their activities. Starbucks will be like a movie theater with coffee sold in the back and seats facing a large white wall so teenagers can stare blankly at the wall, using their vlo computers, rather than hidden behind their macbooks. Large companies will purchase software that takes over the user’s entire environment and simulates a virtual world where executives can hold conferences and interactively communicate by spontaneously creating objects and diagrams from the tips of their fingers, proposing ideas with 3d rounded MS Word style objects floating about. Game enthusiasts will visit virtual reality gaming facilities. A small room about 10x10 feet will contain a moving floor that automatically compensates for any physical movement while the gamer will be fighting goblins and trolls with his gamer-bros in a virtual forest with virtual bows and virtual arrows with virtual flames and virtual bloodspray. On the SAT, sneaky students will bring in their vlo’s and feel a bit guilty while reading the “Assistance from vlo devices is prohibited” clause of the rules. In the classroom, students can hold virtual chatrooms, making fun of the teacher and discussing things while ignoring the boring lecture. UAV pilots can control their planes as if they were really in the cockpit. Latencies are reduced to approach the speed of light as satellite relays become more robust and complex. Even the homeless on the street will nonsensically stare into the facade of abandoned urban buildings as they’re browsing around on earn free money sites. Quickly, the vlo becomes man’s best friend, and thus, it’s worst enemy. Wouldn’t that be cool? *pant pant*

Why do we have to learn about art.. in Spanish? If anything, he’s just teaching us how to use Spanish Google. Because who does analysis of art anymore? Especially online.. it just doesn’t mix. He probably sees some sort of big problem with the US education system and he’s trying to change it by teaching Spanish students about art. Then again, I could be wrong. I found one so far, and it was from a blog. Figures..

Video games are a drain on society. They give a fake sense of accomplishment to people who need it. That’s where the addiction stems from, not anything else. It’s because games have this system of merit, like the time (and money) you invest in a game is directly proportional to how much people like you. Then, these game addicts tell themselves that they can be game testers and game programmers when they grow up and that their addiction right now really isn’t detrimental, but actually beneficial because it helps their hand-eye coordination or prepares them for real life or some bull like that. The cycle self-perpetuates. But what about art? Or music? Or any form of expression. It’s not good to destroy all forms of creativity and expression, but those people who dedicate their lives to analyzing art, I mean, come on, what the hell, that’s like a ditch-all last-resort thing for people who have nothing to do. Art critics? What a joke. What do they contribute to society? They don’t create, they don’t labor, they don’t innovate. All they do is say you suck or you’re good, go waste MORE of your time doing this art stuff while I make money from judging you. Man the pressure must be huge, keeping all these suckers who think you’re the greatest guy ever, and yet completely suppressing the guilt that comes from judging everything. But really, you’ve got to be pretty smart to be an art critic. You’ve got to know how to make criticism profitable and how to make people believe what you say. I’m guessing psychologists make good art critics. Now, I’ve got to go back to finding 4 more reviews.

Does IB need a website? Like maybe a forum? That would be nice, because you don’t wanna bother people who are busy with questions, and unless we get busy signs or something.. Rather, it could be like a Ajax-based Question and Answer forum where it would be like, you would be on this website and then you’d be writing your Biology study guide and doing stuff and “pop” a question scrolls down “Hey what are we supposed to attach to the 6A lab for davies?” and then you’re like “Oh I know” and you like “type type type type” and press “Respond” and the clueless guy on the other end sees an answer scroll into his window and he’s like okay! And then I see the question and the answer and I press “confirm” saying yeah that’s what I heard too and then it doesn’t involve any page changing because of AJAX man awesome shit if this took zero effort to make and zero effort to maintain and actually worked but still, it’s like a absolutely-quiet study hall where you have telepathic communication where you can choose to mute out everything or something, I don’t know what to compare it to, but anything that’s unbelievably awesome. Then there’s the problem of getting people to use it because, for all I know, there’s some idiot crap on Facebook that does exactly the same thing. Though, it’s not awesome because it’s not made by Roger, but that’s a different’ story. Heh joking. Oh and maybe you could be like “I’m gonna open a new page where people can dump notes for the next history test or something and then it’s like a community thing, but that would suck because, actually, no it wouldn’t suck, it’d be pretty great. Then we can laugh at the AP people who are website-less and laugh at facebook just because it’s laughable and laugh at IE users cuz they can’t go on the site and laugh at our tests cuz we’re all prepared and laugh at how easy IB is but that won’t really happen unless.. see this kind of social.. I want to say social engineering but that means something else, though not completely unrelated. I thought sociologists had it easy but turns out this stuff is pretty damn hard.