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It's like there's a club in my shower!
2008-11-12 14:51:28 via »Kevinsnet.com
Tags: life, photos, shower


I'm really not sure what the saddest part of this is, but follow me on this.

First I thought, ooh, I'd like to listen to music while I take my shower today. Easy enough, right?

Speakers

But then I didn't want to be left to the wrath of iTunes to decide what I listen to and how loud, so I needed some way of controlling it. I have an Apple remote control for my MacBook but I couldn't get it in IR's line-of-sight from the bathroom. So...

CD

...I taped a few CD-Rs to the walls in strategic locations to make that happen for me :) But all good music needs mood lighting to go with it. So I grabbed my multi-colour LED flashlight and used that!

LEDs

This had a very nice lighting effect throughout the bathroom and shower!

Ooh, shiny!

This atmosphere was very much helped by the fact that my toilet paper dispenser is actually an expended glow-necklace hanging from a hook. (See first picture.) Despite the fact that this glow-necklace should have no longer glowed, as a result of the blue LED on my flashlight it appeared to be glowing anyway (the blue LED had an almost ultra-violet effect on everything in my bathroom).

And now, I'm going out to the store to buy a life, since it has recently dawned on me that I really don't have one, despite what I like to think...


(Picture) My internet connection is a bit busy today.
2008-11-04 17:16:47 via »Kevinsnet.com
Tags: election, television


Picture


Live coverage for election
2008-11-04 12:43:25 via »Kevinsnet.com
Tags: election, television


These two streams should be coming live from the US with the Election results this evening for anyone who wants to see it. I'd start watching at 9 or 10 PM GMT...

CNN World News Live Stream: http://www.cnn.com/video/live/cnnlive_1.asx

C-SPAN: http://play.rbn.com/play.asx?url=cspan/cspan/wmlive/cspan1v.asf


Perfect for the non-TV-license-holder since they're not UK streams ;) If anyone has any others, let me know!


Continuum: The Answer!
2008-07-30 23:54:28 via »Kevinsnet.com
Tags: stargate, continuum, scifi


CAUTION: Spoilers may follow.

I posed the question in my last post on the Talk:Stargate Continuum page on Wikia: Stargate, and luckily one of the guys over there was able to answer the question and save the movie for me:

I think Carter described this by saying that traveling through the wormhole protected them. They would have disappeared too, but because they used the Stargate at the time everything was disappearing, they didn't. Vala and Teal'c were just unlucky that they disappeared first.—Anubis 10545 21:59, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

..And that is absolutely correct, I find after rewatching it again. Dunno how I missed it..


Stargate Continuum
2008-07-30 17:18:25 via »Kevinsnet.com
Tags: stargate, continuum, scifi


Caution: Spoilers may be ahead.

So Stargate Continuum was released yesterday. And thanks to my epic preordering skillz on Amazon, I received it just as it was released yesterday (yay!). And I watched it. Twice.

Now I'm not going to post the plotline on here, because it's already available on Gateworld, Wikia: Stargate, and IMDB.

But I do just wanna go over one thing and post a question, because there was a big potential continuity error which is really bothering me, and I wanna make sure I didn't just miss something.

SG-1 + Jack O'Neill (yay O'Neill!) were at a Tok'ra extraction ritual, to pull the symbiote out of what they thought was the last Ba'al (although they were mistaken).

So as his failsafe plan, the real Ba'al goes back in time via the Stargate to 1939, aboard the USS Achilles. His goal? Destroy the Stargate so that no one can use it. He fails, but he does manage to sink it so that the USAF doesn't obtain it and get the SGC up and running. This begins a series of events in an alternate timeline. At this point,

Original Carter - Alive. Went back through the Stargate and ended up in the sunken Achilles on alternate Earth.
Alternate Carter - Astronaut. Dead in a space shuttle crash landing.
Original Jackson - Alive. Went back through the Stargate and ended up in the sunken Achilles on alternate Earth. Lost his leg to frostbite.
Alternate Jackson - Alive. Discredited author and archaeologist living on the fringes of society in Egypt.
Original Mitchell - Alive. Went back through the Stargate and ended up in the sunken Achilles on alternate Earth.
Alternate Mitchell - Non-existant. Ba'al killed Mitchell's grandfather aboard the Achilles, causing a grandfather paradox in which Mitchell does not exist.
Original O'Neill - Dead. Killed by a clone Ba'al at the extraction ceremony when he attempted to escape extraction.
Alternate O'Neill - Alive. USAF officer who does not believe the story that original SG-1 is trying to tell him about the original timeline and their origins.
Original Vala - Vanished. Disappeared from the extraction ceremony when the timeline was altered.
Alternate Vala - Alive. Host to Qetesh, Ba'al's queen and murderer.
Original Teal'c - Vanished. Disappeared from the extraction ceremony when the timeline was altered.
Alternate Teal'c - Alive. First prime to Ba'al.

So my question is this: Carter, Jackson, Mitchell, and O'Neill all continued to exist (or in alternate Mitchell's case, didn't) in their own ways in each of the timelines at this point. But why didn't Vala and Teal'c? Logically speaking, if there is an original and an alternate of each, then the originals should have stayed existent and not vanished (along with the Tok'ra who disappeared, and their buildings), while the alternates filled their roles as they should have. Except for Mitchell (as a result of his grandfather paradox), each one of them should've, at least briefly, existed twice simultaneously.

So why was the story written this way? It's a huge plot hole, and it's been bothering me, cause it's not the kind of detail usually left open by the team behind Stargate. So was there something I missed that explained this? Or was it simply dramatic license for good storytelling? I'm hoping it's not the latter, because I would be severely disappointed in a usually consistantly explained story. 

There's only one other detail of this magnitude I've ever seen them ignore for storytelling purposes. The first is the fact that much of the universe speaks English even though they should speak some derivative of Latin or Egyptians (since it all originally came from the Ancients and Goa'uld). And that one they even attempted to explain well enough for me to put it out of my mind.

So why this one?


Shorter URLs
2008-07-11 21:26:26 via »Kevinsnet.com
Tags: blog, website


The URLs on my posts are long, ugly, and nasty-assed, I know. But I didn't realise how bad it was until I saw one posted to Twitter by the auto-poster. So with that, the 'blog will automatically shorten my URLs, and then post them, which will redirect to the longer URL in a rather TinyURL-like fashion. Sorry for the ugliness before! XD


Website/blog updated.
2008-07-11 20:56:00 via »Kevinsnet.com
Tags: blog, website, code, gamecola, spam


I finally got around to do some stuff I've wanted to do for a while -- improving the blog (and some of the other underlying stuff) laying around on my website. It autoposts to Twitter and I'm not using a combination of Twitter & LiveJournal as my blog anymore (although they still do play a part in it). The RSS feeds have been fixed and there's actually a commenting ... thing now that was missing before.

I felt comments weren't necessary since my posts were being made through LJ and it was possible to comment on there but it actually proved to be more of a mess than I expected and I've gone and fixed it up a bit using what I'm going to be calling ColaBlog -- which is a multi-author blogging backend I wrote for GameCola -- and what I think I'm going to call ColaComments -- which, in addition to being poorly named -- is an ancient commenting system I wrote for GameCola that I've started overhauling (unintentionally -- it happened when I tried to integrate it into this site) to bring it to more modern days. It was written so long ago I look at the code and cringe. Because of limitations of GameCola's hosting provider (back then) it was originally written so that the PHP and MySQL stuff was hosted by me, and then everything was done using cross-site javascript (can anyone say document.write(); ?) to insert the comments and forms into their pages. Everything interactive on GameCola is pretty much done that way -- article ratings, comments, hit counters, everything. It's all done using PHP-generated-JavaScript cross-sitely. I know it sounds terrible, but I've found one HUGE advantage to it -- if the comments, and the comment form are NOT in the HTML when the page loads, and are rather written in by JS after the fact, spambots don't seem to realise they're there. As of yet, GameCola has yet to see any comment spam, and I have not had to implement any kind of captcha or other spam-challenger than that. The forums have been targeted with spam before, the comments haven't seen anything yet.

Anyway, so now that I've fixed up the backend stuff in my site a bit, and restyled the front-end a little, I'm going to have to take some time to update the content on some of the pages. That's next.


New blog test post.
2008-07-10 13:24:08 via »Kevinsnet.com
Tags: website, blog, code


This is the obligatory first post on the new blogging system I'm implementing for Kevinsnet.com.

I figure if I went through all the trouble of writing a blog for GameCola I should at least use it myself, so I'm cobbling together the old LJ-system I've put together plus this thing to try and make something usable, might integrate with Twitter somehow (although for now I've removed my Twitter feed from the normal blog feed) -- Wish me luck for all this, I'm gonna need it.


Cupid in Medford NJ
2008-04-21 04:40:00 via »LiveJournal


This is my little brother. I should be embarrassed, instead, I love it. You should totally go digg this, cause if you do, I'll love you forever. I promise. <3

read more | digg story


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Of Datacentres & Work
2008-03-08 13:57:00 via »LiveJournal
Music: Destiny's Child - Say My Name
Tags: work, website


I've been quite busy as of late dealing with Inerail work. We've had problems with our datacentre (or more importantly, their transit) going up and down while we're not looking. Usually the problems are fairly brief but sometimes they're quite drawn out. Even the brief ones hurt, because of what we do with VoIP. Makes things slightly annoying. Unfortunately, we're running out of capital and with a lack of stability we're losing customers, so we're not able to get our stuff somewhere more reliable yet. I've been racking my brain for a solution and I think between Chris and I we've finally come up with one, but we're still gonna need some money to pull it off. We're hoping for a small business loan of some sort.

There's not much else I've been doing really, I went on a WoW kick for a few months (level 47 Shaman yay!) but I've had to back off because I've got so much to do that things are getting hectic, so I haven't been playing that really, at all. I've barely had time to blog anything, so all my updates have been done by Twitter. I went LARPing last month, enjoyed it so much that I'll be going again next month after my trip to the UK.

Now that things with Inerail are starting to settle down at least a little bit, I'm gonna try to update my website, not another total makeover, but maybe just a facelift. The layout is just so boring and monotonous, I wanna do something slightly different with it but I have no idea what.

Ah well, we'll see. ^_^


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Changed my mind...
2007-12-27 06:05:00 via »LiveJournal
Music: Kaiser Chiefs - Everything Is Average Nowadays
Tags: website, code


...ended up downgrading back down to a basic LJ account. I still have CSS control over the main page, just not the individual comment pages. Good enough for me. Don't really feel like dealing with the ads. :P


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Updates, memories, travels, and jobs
2007-12-27 03:38:00 via »LiveJournal
Music: Me First and the Gimme Gimmes - Somewhere Over The Rainbow
Tags: work, life, website, travel, code


So I've just been redesigning my site to make sure everything renders correctly in IE (as much as I hate to, but I'm on the hunt for a job and having a broken site really won't help matters). And while I was doing that I decided it was time to make some updates I've been meaning to make, improve some stuff here, fix this, tweak that, make sure everything still worked smoothly after the migration from my old VPS to it's new home on Inerail's servers. During this I decided I wanted my LiveJournal to better mimic my site's layout, at least partially, so it wouldn't look to bad. Granted, I've got some nifty PHP that polls both my LJ and Twitter for posts and puts them on the site as well as RSSes them for combined output, but I still felt my LJ should look half decent. So I signed up for the ad-filled plus account (actually, the ads aren't all that bad. I was expect to have a sudden relapse to my DeadJournal days, the ads on there were horrible, but this doesn't even come close) and slapped in some custom CSS (some of which makes the ads slightly less ... intrusive?) that helps the LJ's layout to mimic that of my site, and if I do say so myself, it works quite well (at least in Safari and Firefox Mac, haven't tested it in any other browsers yet, but I will xX'). I'm quite pleased.

During this time, I got curious, and actually READ all my old LJ posts [most of the older ones being friends only anyway], which date back to July of '05. Then I also decided to read my old DeadJournal (dating December '01 to roughly August '03, with a few occasional posts afterwards). Man, was I an angry, pissed off, angsty, depressive cunt as a highschooler. How did I have any fucking friends?! :P To my friends from Shawnee? Thanks, I appreciate it. ^_^ ... some of that actually takes me way back though, I had a lot of fun reading all that.

For those of you who haven't heard, CompUSA is closing down. S'about time too, it's been long in the making. Everything must go, we're having a full store liquidation. We figure we'll probably be employed up until the end of January when they'll finally let us all go. It's kinda weird being in a closing store. The place is pretty much a constant state of "last day of school". Simply, no one cares. About anything. At all. It's great :P

On the other hand this has left me looking for a job. Got a few leads, hopefully one of them will pan out, been sending out CVs all over the place (yay for craigslist ^_^). I got myself a LinkedIn (some of my friends recommended that as a way to go). We'll see what happens. In the meantime, myself and a business partner have started a small IT consulting, hosting, software dev, and design company. Check it out: Inerail LLC. If you're my friend and you buy some type of hosting (VPS or dedicated or colocation or whatever), I promise you get a discount :P (There, that was my obligatory shameless plug.)

Unfortunately, CompUSA's closing put a rather large kink in my plan for education and emigration. I have to figure out how I'm going to go about these things (seeing as how the two of them were kinda tied together). With luck, it'll just have temporarily put them on hold, although I'm *still* looking for a better way to actually move country, without the pain and price of a 4 year education from another country. If that's what it takes, though, I'm up for it. Sadly, I hope this doesn't delay my plans. They're already taking longer than I would've hoped. By several years -_-. Ah well, we'll see what happens.

But no matter what, I'm excited ^_^ I'm packing currently (or, rather, have been supposed to been packing while I've been doing all these journal updates and readings and whatnot) as I have a flight in ~18 hours to LHR. I get to see everyone again, yay ^_^_^_^! I've missed everyone. I'll be "in town" from the 27th to the 4th, figured I haven't missed RF's new year's party since the first time I went over there, might as well keep a good record :P

Will this be updated perpetually from this point on? I hope so. I'm gonna try to put the effort in. This week you should expect a semi-longwinded post showing how I have absolutely no life that discusses two things very near and dear to me: technological standards, and science fiction. ^_^ Yah, that'll be a doozy, I know.

If you read this on my website's blog page I think you'll find that I keep a decently updated twitter feed that also blogs to that page, or you can hit that directly, but my website produces an aggregate RSS feed of my twitter and livejournal. My facebook status is also now synched to my twitter status.


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Leopard...feature?
2007-10-30 04:49:00 via »LiveJournal
Tags: apple



(click to enlarge)


...oh my god, I love it. Way to go apple, I think it's great :D some people seem to think it's rude or ugly. I completely disagree. I burst out laughing the first time I ran a windows box on the same network as my macbook, and I think it's absolutely wonderful.

...keep up the good work ^_^


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MSN/.Mac WTF-age?
2007-09-19 11:13:00 via »LiveJournal
Tags: apple


It seems that Apple have gone and reserved MSN addresses ending in 'mac.com' as I was just forced to change mine to kleacock@messengeruser.com (if you have me on your contact list, it *should* be updated automatically, but I may not be able to see you online until you sign off/on again) ... but what does this mean? Best I can tell, Apple have reserved the domain so they can setup a Windows Live IM server of some sort. But, it's not for internal business because A) they use iChat for that, and B) their internal domain is apple.com. Theory is they're setting up a MSN server for .Mac customers in conjunction with the AIM access? Maybe all-in-one (Jabber/MSN/AIM) messaging with the one .Mac address? That'd be kinda cool...ish...


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UK Pictures
2007-09-19 01:34:00 via »LiveJournal
Tags: photos


UPDATED: The link was incorrect and has been corrected.


Almost all my trip pictures are uploaded now: http://kevinsnet.com/iSharePhotos/?1677


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» This lemonade tastes like it only cost 35p...mostly cause it did, but still.
Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:30:26 GMT

» We baked the bread all over again from scratch, and it still won't toast! ;_;
Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:11:46 GMT

» o/` Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish o/`
Sun, 16 Nov 2008 23:10:59 GMT

» What do you mean take the pills on an empty stomach? I never let mine get THAT empty.
Thu, 13 Nov 2008 13:32:24 GMT

» New blog post: It's like there's a club in my shower! - http://kevinsnet.com/short/15 [I knew that I forgot to escape something somewhere..]
Wed, 12 Nov 2008 14:54:04 GMT