Three things that I have learned to fear/hate/dislike (respectively): Video Game Addiction, Internet Explorer, and Facebook.

Video Game Related Deaths
Deaths caused by Video Games
More Deaths caused by Gaming
Guy Chokes Mother over World Of Warcraft

Video game related deaths should be in their own category. One of the biggest killers is World of Warcraft. This Cracked.com article titled "5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted" explains it quite nicely.

Video game companies were businesses first. Their primary goal is money, no matter what they tell you. They know all the tricks and methods of getting you to keep playing.

Video games are designed to reward you for your effort. Whether it’s memorizing the level and hit points of a hundred monsters, or the moves and nature of every Pokemon. It’s amazing how many people believe that studying video games is productive.

Ultimately, video games are a waste of time (unless you’re the one making the money). Guitar Hero can’t teach you how to play guitar. Crysis can’t teach you how to shoot a gun. The video game business is still alive because oblivious little lab-mice don’t fear the addiction.

So, Internet Explorer...

I got 202 as the answer, but I wasn’t really sure, so I checked it with this simple JavaScript program I wrote:

javascript:var count=0;for(var a=0;a<100;a++)for(var b=0;b<100;b++)for(var c=0;c<100;c++)for(var d=0;d<100;d++)if(a*1000+b*100+c*10+d==2010)count++; alert(count);

This program tries every value from 0-99 and counts the number of combination that work. It runs inside a web browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome), so I tried it out:

Firefox got "202" in a split second. 100,000,000 combinations should be nothing for a modern computer. But even after a minute in Internet Explorer, the script still hadn’t finished.

There’s a reason that I bag on IE so much. It doesn’t support web standards, it updates every half-decade or so. It’s dreadfully slow at everything. Security is non-existent. And most of all, websites look plain wrong.

I saw this other article on Cracked.com titled "5 Reasons The Internet Could Die At Any Moment".

A great and terrifying illustration came when this blog mentioned Facebook logins in an update. When (presumably old) people Googled "Facebook Login," the blog showed up in their results, bombarding them with thousands of people saying "IS THIS FACEBOOK WHY DOES IT LOOK DIFFERENT HELP I JUST WANT TO LOG IN."

Obviously, the commenters represented only grandparents and computer-illiterates. But if you actually read the comments that people posted, there were ones like:

I LOVE FACE BOOK CONNECTED W/PEOPLE I WENT TO HIGH SCHOOL W/ESPECIALY ONE CLOSE FRIEND.KNOW LET ME LOG IN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

and

My daughters&sons show me how 2 use facbook,Iwas confuse then now i’m really confuse just let me log in the old way this way really sucks!!!!!!!!

People will look back at that blog post ten years from now.. and laugh.

The t-shirt thing should be ready in like 2 weeks. Then, if you want, you can get one. I’m thinking about redesigning it, because it’s a bit plain as it stands right now.

Ughh, allan, I guess you win.
This song was stuck in my head during CASHEE on tuesday.. even though I haven’t heard it in weeks.
-_-

And YAY! for 7 on AIME :)
I really can’t think of a title for this post.. since it’s so all-over-the-place. So, I’m gonna use "untitled", which I, for the longest time, thought was pronounced "util-lit-ted". I have no idea why..

The first two pictures in this article..

A few days ago, I started working on a project named RogerBot. It’s an artificial intelligence chat robot that actually plays out the responses through your speakers.

So, you would talk to RogerBot the same way you would talk to your sibling. And you would hear a computerized voice reading out responses.

So, there were two parts to this program: generating responses and getting the computer to read them. Reading responses wasn’t hard. There were plenty of built-in API’s for that.

Generating responses wasn’t hard either; but rather, it was near impossible.

At first it didn’t seem that challenging. It might look for certain words like "hi" or "hey" and classify sentences as greetings. Perhaps it could have a casework tree of different sentence categories. And then, a random response could be selected for each category.

The alternative would be the self-learning kind of robot that you seen in movies.. but I couldn’t even fathom the concepts behind that.

I ended up giving up on Rogerbot, especially after I found out about Jeeney. This guy worked on his chat robot for >3 years, and it still gave me illogical responses when I tried talking to it.

Then again, talking to a robot.. Can I not find something better to do?

So, RogerBot will sound completely retarded at times.

If you want RogerBot to say something, type in "say" followed by your message.
Example: say RogerHub is awesome

So, I did an experiment to see how many people actually listened to RogerHub. And it turned out that after about 2 weeks, i had only 5 people who even bothered to use it.

The feature that causes me tons of headaches.. and nobody uses it.

Well, it’s not like RogerHub is your only source of music. You probably have your own music collection or ipod or something that you get your music from. If not, you have a radio right?

So, I’ve decided to discontinue RogerHub Mooosic. It’s still available if you want to listen to it (yeah right), but I’m not going to update it anymore.

If you want to listen, there’s a "RogerHub Mooosic" link in the RogerHub Services section of the sidebar.

And.. I just made this new music player addon for Boggert. Here’s an example:

So, you have three options for listening to a song: flash, HTML5, and native (using <object>).

Flash is what I’ve been using all along for Mooosic. So, the whole deal about Apple dissing Adobe Flash is old news. Even with the wrong intentions, Jobs had a point when he said that Flash was dying technology. It’s almost 15 years old.. That’s why I’m offering an alternative:

HTML5 is a very new version of the internet standard, HTML. It’s so new that a lot of browsers don’t support it yet. One part of this new standard is HTML5 audio which doesn’t rely on flash and such. So, don’t expect the HTML5 version to work for another few years or so.

Native audio is really really old. So old, that most browsers don’t support it either. But it’s there, just for.. uhh I don’t know actually.

ALSO. I fixed up RogerHub Search a bit.. even though even fewer people use that feature. It actually generates search results that look like, well search results.

I’m hesitant to rely on Google custom search engines, because, well, anybody can get one of those.

Passion is a wonderful thing. Creativity beyond the normal scope of uniform excellence helps define who we are as a person.

And that, is where the fault lies.

Basketball, Japanese culture, Computer programming.

Some people truly enjoy their passions.

But how does a non-Japanese person develop a elitist attitude towards everything related to Japan?

Some people have passion with the things they’re good at. Setting yourself apart and declaiming yourself as master of some art isn’t just pleasing. It’s overwhelming.

Maybe you’re passionate because of the challenge. The race to win against others, and moreover, the race to improve. To show the world how despite the way your limits, success can still be obtained.

Maybe you’re bored. Or rather, you don’t want to look bored; mindlessly occupying yourself with tasks that even you find uninteresting. Showing false enthusiasm as if being busy were a success in itself.

Maybe you’re searching for a reason to drag on. A trivial goal to entertain you while you search for another with a longer wait-time.

A common point of interest. Blending mixed feelings into a concrete opinion. Without these lies, groups would not exist.

If you’re passionless, none of this will have made sense to you. But to the large majority, try standing up a bit straighter.

*breaks the tension*

MONTESANO, Wash. —
Authorities believe a Washington man was killed by accidentally urinating on a downed power line after a car crash.
Grays Harbor County sheriff’s Deputy Dave Pimentel (PIM’-en-tel) said Monday 50-year-old Roy Messenger was not seriously hurt after he collided with a power pole Friday and called a relative to pull his car from a ditch.
However, family members found Messenger electrocuted when they arrived.
Pimentel says Messenger apparently urinated into a roadside ditch but didn’t see the live wire. The urine stream likely served as a conductor, allowing the electricity to reach his body.
Pimentel says there will be an autopsy but burn marks indicated the way the electricity traveled through Messenger’s body.

Ryan’s friend is a rapper, whose name I have forgotten (but he goes by KnapZ) and so I put one of his songs on RH Mooosic at the top.. so listen to it. :)

Tumblr.. the easiest way to blog. Hmm.

When I see a Tumblr, I think: what’s the point?

A picture of a bear hugging a tree; a lame quote from your math teacher. Does it really mean anything? Content is generally the same across multiple tumblogs.

Tumblr’s not a bad thing; it’s neutral at best. (for lazy people)

But maintaining a blog just means so much more.

Blogger, Wordpress, or even custom programs like Boggert. Layout-making, post-planning; Compared to real bloggi- actually, it can’t even be compared.

(6:47:47 PM): but its a TUMBLR meaning
(6:47:47 PM): its not realyl blogggigng
(6:47:48 PM): its more like
(6:47:50 PM): "KL:SJF:KLSJDFLKSJDLFS"
(6:47:50 PM): or
(6:47:53 PM): INSERT PICTURE HERE

I don’t mean unoriginal, prosaic, cookie-cutter blogs. But useful, creative blogs that actually require effort.

Web designing is an art-form that people rarely notice. The 20 preset-blogger themes are nice, but not personal. Blog templates themselves can take hours to create; it’s so easy to get sidetracked. *ahem* Innovative, novel designs that stretch the limits of CSS3 require actual planning and actual work.

Websites that make blogging "easier" are great; however, blogs that are "easy" have no actual meaning.

The fine line between blogging and pseudo-blogging is control. How much control a blog software gives you, and how extensively a blogger controls it.

Blogger is awesome. Why? Google’s got balls not only for allowing full HTML control over blogs, but also for providing a PHP Scripting environment to all of their bloggers. You really can’t get more controlling than that.

Wretch? ehh, it’s so-so.

Design is time-consuming. But layouts aren’t everything.

Saturday night at small group, I was helping a friend launch his new Blogger blog (which I hope to see active soon *ahem*). He literally spent over 5 minutes figuring out the first two paragraphs of his first post.

You might have an uncontrollable brain-hand typing scheme; typing paragraphs comes as naturally as conversation. But most bloggers will respect the rule of TLDR.

If something’s too long, nobody wants to read it. Proving your point in the shortest way possible; dry humor without it offending anyone; constant checks for grammar (not really), structure, and most of all, purpose. It’s almost like an essay..

Is blogging productive? Maybe. Webster says productive means "yielding results, benefits, or profits". I don’t get much profit from my blogging, but RogerHub yields a lot of results.

Blogging actually helps me think of words and phrases to say what I mean on the spot. It’s actually helping with writing and even conversation in general.

Other people tell me things about stuff I put on RogerHub. The love calculator, huge wastes of paper, funny internet memes. I can trace it all back to RogerHub.

A professional blogger told me about an interesting experiment he did with his blog. Adding trackbacks, social networking icons, a top-posts widget; things that are inscrutable to tumblr users.

I really wish people would recognize the value of blogging and why sites like Tumblr are doing it wrong.

Typing up that blog post.. that felt productive.

google translator Type in "lick". Translate it into Arabic. Copy the third one down in the verb column. Paste it into the area where you type. Translate it to English. I laughed. (props to waverly)

I’m sure you’ve stalked someone before.

Going through their tweets and poring over their pictures, just to see how close you can get to them.. anonymously.

But wait! Now there’s...

After just 3 days, I have finished the beta version of RogerHub Pulse.

Simply, RogerHub Pulse lets you stalk your stalkers. Here’s how it works:

1. You suspect that you have a stalker.

2. You sign up for RogerHub Pulse and get your very own RogerHub Pulse shim! A RogerHub Pulse Shim is a small gray square that is used to track visitors.

3. After putting this tracker in your website, when stalker-san visits your profile page for the hundredth time, your website notifies RogerHub Pulse that you’ve received a visitor.

4. You wait a day or two for your shim to collect enough information. Then, you go to RogerHub Pulse and check the data!

You can also read my super-awesome Pulse Tutorial, written, typed, and designed by yours truly.

Yeah, it’s still in Beta (see the footer?). Mostly because, well, I found like 10 bugs in the past hour. So, if anything doesn’t work, tell me.

So, I passed AMC :)

And I’m glad that WHS offered it, because I won’t get responses like "How do you pass a movie theather?"... well at least not from asians.

Well, I thought i faied 12A because I got a 88.5, but the cutoff was 88.5. Soo, if the cutoff for B is just as low, you actually only need 12 question right

And I got 100.5 on 12B, which is much better.

BTW, you can find problems/solution to AMC12 on AoPS. But they don’t have 12B up yet, (as of right now).

And if, in the past few days, I told you to click on a link that showed you a gray square..
See what it’s was for?

Link

-Roger

Stalkerr

Hmm.. I counted my code again because last time was only a rough estimate. 25 files total. And it came out to 5787 (half of which comes from one file).

Wow i waste a lot of time doing this -_-

Hmm, a dictionary if you need it.

These are all resized.. so tell me if you want the full-size versions for any of these.

Oh and I found this awesome web-designer blog called SixRevisions.com. But it might not be interesting to you unless you’re in to webdesign.

Hmmm, who’s ready to get screwed on wednesday? :[

Roger

Oh and I’m working on another new project which I will release.. in a few days. maybe.
It’s actually useful, unlike the love calculator thing which was just for fun.

So in my Torandoo post, I mentioned that it’s a bad habit to name your links "click here" or "download" or stupid things like that.

Specifically:

You know, there’s a supposed "rule" that you shouldn’t name links stupid things like "click here" or "download this". It’s because search engines (ie. Google) don’t pickup on those things, and they have no idea what you’re talking about. They tend to ignore links with "go here" in them.

So.. the big idea behind this is something called Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short.

You already know what a search engine is. You probably use it every day. I have one as my home page, and you probably do too.

Simply put, search engines index the internet. Google has huge databases of webpages, including RogerHub!

Now.. when you google "corny jokes", Google looks through its huge database for websites that might have corny jokes in them.

So if I had a website called http://www.awesomecornyjokes.com/, wouldn’t it be awesome if the search results came out like this?

Get the idea now? Well, lets talk about links.

Links generally have two parts: The url and the inside content.

<a href="the_url">inside_content</a>

Now, computers can scan a website for links faster than.. uhh nvm. just know that it’s really fast.

So, if a bajillion websites all have links that say "corny jokes" and point to my http://www.awesomecornyjokes.com/, then obviously, Google would think "Lol this roger guy must have AWESOME corny jokes. Let’s put him first!".. or something to that effect.

But.. what if their website looked like this:

Hey check out these hilariously corny jokes: click here

Google isn’t gonna pick up on what "click here" means. So.. my dream is ruined :(

Okay, that was my super-trimmed-down version of SEO and why you shouldn’t use "click here" in links.

And another thing, most people know that when a word is underlined, you can click it to go to a related site. By using unnecessary and obvious things like "click here", you’re insulting their intelligence. :) even if they’re not as smart as you are..

..

OH and the mooosic thing.

You’ve probably already noticed, but RogerHub Mooosic is acting retarded in Internet Explorer and Google Chrome. (But it works in Firefox/Safari. Go Firefox!!)

Hmm.. you can still listen to songs.. They just get cutoff sometimes and they don’t continue playing the next song.

But does anyone even listen to my mooosic?

I do at least..

Hmm.. lol. one-sided poll. :)

Okay bye
-Roger

Same place, three different angles. Which one do you like best? (and can you guess what those things are?)

So, the latest new Boggert feature: Full-size buttons!

Now, in the bottom right corner of every picture i post, there’s a button you can click to see the full size.. I hope this gets rid of the confusion

Example:

Painting..

Drying...

Sitting.. in front of my awesome computer.

Rounded

Squared

:D

Hey what’s this refrigerators name? I see him everywhere

See?

Don’t look this word up..

Hmm.. who else failed AMC?

Legend of Zelda!!

Hmm..

Hmm...

Hmmm......

If you don’t get this one, try thinking through it first.

Pretty cool... I did this like 5 times before I realized what was happening

I think one of the MU skits was based off of this..

I’m sure you can think of the other phrase...

Are they really like this?

This is only funny if you know what a relational database is

Hmmm... recently I stubled upon another hilarious (and awesome) website.. Go check out Dontevenreply.com. Or at least bookmark it for your collection of things-to-do-when-you’re-bored.

Sooo.. there’s a really nice and detailed infographic about the 2012 Phenomenon, which I believe to be utter bullshit.

Of course, I shouldn’t be taking because I’m not an archeology major. I’m not even that clear on the details behind 2012. But the infographic seems to be able to disprove every argument very logically.

Yeah, so I watched 2012 last year, and the movie sucked.. nothing else to say about it.

SPOILER - But one thing that caught my attention was when the hobo guy said that 2012 was synonymous with the Rapture.. Okay, he might have been just spewing BS there, but I just had to Google it anyways..

So, Google points me to a website written by some guy named Rev. JR Seabolt. (No idea what that means)

I really don’t think that the 2012 myth has anything to do with the end times. (but then again, I’m not in a position to say anything)

Specifically Matthew 24:36 says:

"No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." -Matt 24:36 (NIV)

So, my plebeian (lol SAT word) interpretation is - If nobody’s supposed to know, how could someone pinpoint the exact year and date?

More good reading

2012 Infographic

(going offtopic now.)

OH! I made business cards for myself that say like Roger Chen and RogerHub.com and stuff on them. If you want one, come find me and i’ll give you one. They look pretty awesome :)

☃
Awesome? Definitely

Okay.. bye
-Roger

EDIT:

Soo.. RogerHub has a new feature called LazyLoad. Because there’s so many pictures and things on RogerHub, my website loads a bit slowly.. especially if you’re on a slow connection.

So now, images only load after you scroll down and see them. You can get more info at the developer’s site. It’s fairly easy to implement.

Using "Safely Remove Hardware" as a title is kind of ironic.

Instead of assuring people that they can safely remove their precious external harddrives, this title actually broaches the idea that there’s a un-safe way to remove USB drives..

So this happens:

>> Hey gimme my flashdrive
<< Yeah, sure
(pulls flashdrive out of computer)
>> WTF dude, you didn’t do Safely Remove Hardware

Well, actually, this whole necessity of "Safely" removing hardware came from the idea of Write Caching.

It’s pretty obvious what write caching does.. it caches disk-write requests so they can all be performed at once.

Think of it like this:

You’re assigned an huge essay and you remember that you forgot your whiteout. Okay, no big deal. No mistakes, no problem. So, as you write, you already have the next two sentences planned out in your head before the pen touches the paper.

Okay.. really lame analogy.. but you get the idea.

So, you have two more sentences to write, and you already know word-for-word what you’re gonna write.

Then.. the teacher comes and takes your paper away..

Ahh crap, I should have written them down when I had the chance.

Safely remove hardware is kind of like a warning signal for you to stop making more sentences and to write down the ones you’ve got in your head.

If you’re done writing and the light on your flashdrive isn’t blinking, it’s safe to pull it right out.

Why? Well lemme tell you. Write-caching is disabled by default on flashdrives and removable harddrives. So what’s the big deal anyways? ﺕ

Q. What’s brown and sticky?
click here to show answer

Yeahh, I bet you expected something else :)

So, Boggert code has officially reached 3000 lines! Actually, it’s a lot more than 3000, since there’s a lot of snippets I didn’t count.

So, now you can add a URL when you post a comment. If you do, then you can click on the name to go to the website!

If you didn’t understand that, here’s some pictures to show you how it works:

Okay, so if you’re a RogerHub freak like I am, you might have noticed that when you highlight text, it’s a different color. (Does not show up on Internet Explorer)

Yeah, so this thing is part of a new standard of Cascading Style Sheets dubbed CSS3 (as in CSS version 3).

With CSS3 and HTML5, there’s a lot of cool new stuff like native-embedded video and drop shadows and stuff.

There’s only one problem, none of it works with Internet Explorer... but beyond that:

There’s a great article titled CSS3 Techniques You Should Know. If you’re not a web designer, don’t even bother, you wont understand any of it.

But it’s pretty cool. Just keep in mind that they don’t work in IE.

You know.. Boggert’s development team is kind of like a dictatorship.. with a population of one.

Open-source is great, but I don’t like waiting for code commits and releases.. It’s just faster if I can see my code live immediately.

Also, right now, I could probably port Boggert to a different location. It just needs the MySQL DB and a PHP host... and a lot of find "RogerHub" + replaces... But it’s possible.

Oh, and I never had the chance to ask this:

Well, when you’re in a rush, file names shouldn’t be a bother to come up with. As long as you haven’t used it yet, it’s fine right?

BTW, i finally found a new wallpaper that doesn’t take attention off my icons! I’m using Grassy Sunset which I found on InterfaceLIFT.

Some more pictures:

It wasn’t actually this bright, it’s been shopped.

Outside ECC. Who’s ready for the test on tues?

PEDOBEARRR

Toilet Camera

Bored? Not anymore

Okayy bye

-Roger

I still need songs for Mooosic btw.. don’t make me find them by myself :(

Okay, now go comment :)

EDIT: Sorry for the downtime. My host has been having some troubles..

This week has been going by pretty fast. Collegewood w/ Julian on tuesday, Spanish presentation (that i failed) on wednesday, and now I’m working on some new stuff for Mooosic.

Yeah, it looks like all the songs are gone. But don’t worry!

I’ve backed up the original configuration and now I’m trying some new stuff, in order to bring you:

• Faster speeds and lower file sizes!
  

• Better quality (bitrate)!
  

• More reliable streaming!
  

• More awesome MOOOSIC!!

Yeah, you know it’s awesome cuz it’s RogerHub.

Yeah so again, sorry that it’s not working right now. Gimme some time, and it’ll be better than before. Right?

Yeah I’m looking forward to taking off that "BETA" from the HD checkbox. :)

Okay, bye now :)

-Roger

Edit: