Well this break from school has been pretty cool.

I've basically just been sitting around playing with computers or watching tv. Oh, and I guess going to stores with my parents. I've been updating that Halo 2 Stats program a lot lately and have made a lot of progress.

I've also been creating a webcam page as part of my Christmas present to my parents. My dad loves to see what's going on at school using the school's webcams, but they are constantly down or very slow. I bought a webcam for my parents and myself and I'm going to try and point my webcam outside my window so he can see what's going on. I'll probably post the link here too. I've made a program to save every picture the webcam takes so I think it'll be cool to see a slideshow of the day. I'll get that to work once I program some other stuff.

Yesterday and today I worked on installing and configuring Ubuntu Linux on my laptop. After reading how to configure my wireless card with Linux, which is what didn't work last time I tried to do this, I decided to try installing it again. The wireless works great now and so does CPU throttling which I didn't even know Linux had until I read more into it. I'm still fooling around with the settings, but I think I can keep the processor speed down below a GHz and everything will still work speedily. On Windows the processor needs more than that to do most things on my laptop. Maybe Ubuntu will help increase battery life.

Finally some good news regarding EA... except it isn't good news for EA. According to IGN the NBA was approached by EA for exclusive rights but denied them the rights.

Want to know why? Because NBA Live sucks, that's why. The ESPN series has consistantly scored better over the past few years. Wait, that sounds a lot like ESPN and Madden. ESPN has consistantly scored better over the past years.

In the end...

NFL = sellouts
EA = bullies

I've added a links table on the left bar. If you want your link added you can e-mail me and ask. I just quickly added blogs and links I had in my bookmarks so I probably missed people.

All the grades are in from school and I'm pretty happy about them - eventhough I knew almost all of them before I left for home. The websites doesn't have my total credits calculated right though, it left out four of them. I'm hoping it'll fix itself.

I've just been sitting around so far this break. I made a new version of the Halo 2 Stat program, which now gets all pages of main stats and only updates the file with the newest games since you last ran the program. If you want it you can get it here.

I ordered a 1GB usb flash drive right before I left school and it should be coming today. I don't know why I'm excited about that - I guess I just like it because it's so big. I will probably be storing all my homework on it which I couldn't do before because of the size of some of the programming documents.

This site is pretty cool.

I'm back from school until January 9th. I pulled of a good semester so I'm pretty happy about that.

In other news, EA and the NFL reached an agreement for the exclusive rights to use NFL players and properties in video games. This means no more ESPN Football, which I have been buying for over four years, for the next five years (when the agreement expires). This sucks.

Midway, the creators of many horrible games that no one actually buys, announced they didn't care about the deal. They make the game NFL Blitz, which the NFL has always been after and kept trying to tone down because of its big hits. Well now that they aren't bound by the NFL's rules any longer, they are making a game called "Playmakers" which features no rules and no association with the NFL. However, now they are including things that the NFL players do in real life (outside the field). It will feature "front office politics, excessive on-field violence, and drug abuse." Read more about it here.

The NFL deserves this. Last time I checked ESPN got better ratings than Madden for the past two years. Giving the license to one company will eliminate competition which eliminates creativity. So in other words: Madden fans - I hope you like your game now because it isn't going to change for the next five years.

I think this might be the third or fourth time I've used "Stuff" as my title, but I don't care.

I finished enough of my Halo 2 Stat program to finally post it on the site. I think it's pretty cool. You can type in a gamertag and it will go and get stats from Bungie's stat page and then put it in a file called stats.html. Right now it only retrieves the first page of Bungie's stat page though, but hopefully that will change later on.

If you want to download/read about it you can click here for the version's page.

Other than that, nothing has been happening here. I've gotten a few things back in my CS class, but nothing has been a surprise. We are having a group test for our last test in diff eq. though. I don't know if that is good or bad though, we'll see.

Oh, and I think comments might be published automatically now. Before they wouldn't show up unless I published manually. I'm pretty sure they work now, but who knows.