Cheesy Quintessence

I now have a 2 GB Kingston DataTraveler USB flash drive with something interesting I’d never heard of before: U3. U3 is an interface for portable applications, allowing developers to write programs that are effortlessly carried from computer to computer. Amazingly, it’s actually agreed upon and used by multiple manufacturers, such as Kingston, SanDisk, and Memorex, and is openly available for more manufacturers to use. The drive contains a ROM portion with Windows autorun information to get the U3 tray icon menu going.

This is a pretty interesting concept, I’d say, and the developers think it could evolve the way we compute. I like the idea of being able to store all my favorite programs and data in one spot and take it with me everywhere. With the absence of a registry, it would make archival extremely simple–I could just make a copy of the flash drive. However, I see one major problem: constantly rewriting to the device is bad for its health, so how will we truly be able to use any sort of program on a flash drive?

I started my latest college semester today to find that my classes have been placed in classrooms where I can’t pick up on the Wi-Fi hotspot located at the town library, which is across the street from the school. Oddly, I used to be able to get a little bit of signal on the far side of the school, but now can’t get signal even in the middle of the school. I guess maybe they lowered power.

It’s frustrating to be unable to gather information relevant to the classes I’m in, since I’ve been doing that in the last five classes I’ve been in. It might help if I had more powerful hardware, since my crappy laptop has no PCMCIA slot, no built in Wi-Fi receiver, and I have a cheap USB Wi-Fi stick by Airlink. I’d build a cantenna, but I’d have no way to use it since my Wi-Fi stick has no place for an external antenna. I hope to get a decent laptop soon, however, so it may only be a short period of time before I have a big, ugly can sitting on my table in class. That will be hilarious.

Today, for the first time ever, I went with a friend to play a game of laser tag at Main Event in Austin, which uses a Lasertron brand system. It was pretty entertaining, and my team won by over 72,000 points. Unfortunately, the game was only 15 minutes long, which seems awfully short considering how much it costs to get in. Additionally, I don’t know the details of what I did because I got the wrong player sheet in the end; the display on my vest had so many broken LEDs that I couldn’t read my player number, so I got somebody else’s. Again, as much as it costs, surely they could maintain the vests a little better. If I am correct in guessing that my player number was actually 16, I was one of the poorest players in the whole game. Figures. Oh well.

Today is my 20^th birthday, and already I am feeling the love as I am wished a great celebration of my oldness. In fact…

Subject: Happy Birthday from WebHostingTalk Forums
From: “WebHostingTalk Forums” <moderators @webhostingtalk.com>
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated
X-Mailer: vBulletin Mail via PHP
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:01:04 -0400

Hello Wild Bill,

We at WebHostingTalk Forums would like to wish you a happy birthday today!

It seems that technology has advanced so much that vBulletin message board software is capable making a community of thousands of people I’ve never talked to care about my birthday. This is so touching.

Despite the fact that I have one of the most dead blogs on the Internet, on Friday night I was hit with a lot of inspiration, and decided to redesign it and this site. I’ve been working on it most of the day since then, and now it’s ready for the world! I’m still working on it, so a few of my pages are currently unavailable or unstyled, but I still think it’s a lot better than what was here before… especially for Internet Explorer sufferers, since I’m using only CSS that it can handle natively. Does this mean I can finally blog for the mainstream?

This new design utilizes a really cute JavaScript I found recently: Nifty Corners Cube. For where it can create a desired effect, this script solves all of the existing problems with making rounded corners on web pages, such as junk markup and tedious, redundant CSS. The only major downside is that it requires JavaScript, but I don’t think that’s a huge issue, because images can fail to load as well, and rounded corners certainly aren’t a requirement. Nifty Corners definitely gets my seal of approval!

Any thoughts and suggestions on the new design would be greatly appreciated!