Month: August 2003
Schedule
Here are two images of my schedule so I don’t have to tell different people 100 times. If you want to know the teacher ask me because I do not want to post their names up for everyone to see.
First half:
Second Half:
Rechargeable Batteries
I was very bored today and wrote up a whole page on different rechargeable battery types, tips and explanations of that “memory effect”.
Traffic Signals for the Blind
White Plains is trying hard to meet the needs of the blind. They have installed those new crossing signals that tweet and chirp.
I have a lot of time to think of useless things such as these (hence this useless website) and realized that this new traffic thing is actually a really stupid thing. According to White Plains’ website, “The ‘chirp-chirp’ is for east-west crossing and the ‘cuckoo’ is for north south crossing. First of all, if you’re blind, how can you tell north from the south and east from west? How does a sightless know their directions? Secondly, most streets don’t go exactly north, south, east or west. So if you have a street going northeast and the bird signal is chirping, which intersection do you cross? Next, it costs like $6,000 per intersection to install this completely moronic device which is a waste of money. Finally, suppose there is a tree nearby and real birds are chirping the exact same pitch of the traffic signal? It happened while I was there and I was like “Wait those are real birds!” Honestly, it’s a wonder theses machines didn’t kill anyone yet (that I know of at least). I think a seeing eye dog will do the trick better then these sounds. I’m not blind and I still can’t figure these signals out (Even I don’t walk around with a compass) – imagine a blind person!!
I hope you do not misinterpret me. I’m all for technology that will help people live better lives and I have nothing against the blind. As a matter of fact, I’m trying to help the blind because this thing is going to get them killed.
Commander Keen!!
August 21, 2003
Games
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Portfolioso
What the hell is Commander Keen??? It’s an ancient DOS game that I randomly downloaded with old graphics and things like that. I used to play it in like 3rd grade on an old 386 somewhere and haven’t played it since. So when I saw that it was available for download I was like WTF. I highly doubted that it would work, but to my surprise, it did. The graphics may not be any good but this is a great game. (Hey, what do you want from 1990?? A Pentium 4??)
I tried it out on an old computer first but then got curious and tried it on Windows XP. It happened to work, which really surprised me. (Which tells me Bill Gates is a liar and didn’t delete the DOS shell in XP like he said).
Download the 4th game in this series (as a zip file) here:
Keen 4: Secret of the Oracle (573KB) (Sorry, removed dead link)
To play the game, unzip the file (using other software such as Winzip on Windows 98) or using the built in extractor in Windows XP. Once the file is unzipped, all you have to do is run the game straight out of the folder. No installation!!! Just doubleclick on the exe file (either keen4e) and play from there. Press F1 to learn the controls and creatures and things like that. If you are on an older computer, chances are the computer is too new for the game (as I highly doubt that people still have ancient computers from 1993 or older – so when I say older, I mean like a few years old.) and it tries to display ancient EGA graphics, what you want is SVGA. So if you start playing and its all screwed up and glitched, go into configure on the main menu, then go to options, then turn on SVGA Compatibility. Newer computers usually don’t have this problem because they automatically detect. By the way, the game is shareware so I’m not violating any copyright thingys by redistributing it. Even if I was (which I am not) not many people view this site anyway.
Wow, long post…