I'm not much of a sports fan, and I know very little about sports in general. But one thing that I do know for certain is that the NCAA tournament is one of the biggest jokes in the entire universe. How can a team that performed as poorly as Duke did this season make it in, while a comparable NC State team, who knocked off number 2 and 3 seeds in the ACC tournament, be relegated to the NIT? The answer to that question has to be the word money, though I'm not quite sure of the particulars.

Regardless of all that, Duke lost in the first round. How awesome is that? And NC State won their first round game. Perhaps there is a little justice in the sports world after all...

One ill side effect of being a computer geek is a lack of physical exercise. My typing and mousing fingers are in great shape. Sadly, the rest of me has only gotten worse over time. In fact, I think I can safely say that I am in the worst shape of my life at the moment. The typical out-of-shape physical ailments seem to follow me around all the time: aches, pains, and a general lack of energy. Seeing that I can't improve this area by continuing to sit around, I've decided to (try and) do something about it.

Thankfully, my employer offers a nice deal (a small monetary bonus) to motivate physical activity. I signed up to participate this year, thinking that a little coin would provide that extra push I need to start exercising. How and where to exercise is my first major hurdle. I'd rather avoid a gym if I could, mainly because I don't want to (a) pay for a membership and (b) spend time driving to and from the place. I could avoid point (b) by using the gym at work, but I still have to pay. Buying a piece of exercise equipment for home would be cool, but I don't have the room at the moment, and most good exercise equipment isn't cheap.

So long story short: I've decided to start out by spending 30 minutes walking the paved trail around the gym here at work. I clearly won't be able to do this when it's raining, and it won't be the most comfortable when it gets hot, but it's at least a start. Some exercise is clearly better than none, right? Plus, the weather is just starting to get nice, so it'll be good to get a little fresh air. I also hope to walk over at Eno River State Park more often on the weekends, which should give me a substantially higher workout (since the trails are often quite hilly).

In what ways do you exercise? Got any tips for a newbie like myself?

An increasing number of links to photographs are making the front page of Digg, making an already weak collection of 'news' even weaker. There's a petition for adding a new photography section to the site, and that would certainly help keep these links off the front page. Most of the photographs that get linked to on Digg are nice, but none of them are front-page worthy.

On a photography related note, I will be making some upgrades soon to the photo album software I employ here at this website. Don't be surprised if the photo galleries are down for a while over the next few days. Some new features are coming, and I'm excited about them, so stay tuned for updates.

It appears that LucasFilm Entertainment is suing Digg Inc. over the use of the trademark "Digg." Strangely enough, LucasFilm claims that the Digg name infringes on their 1996 video game The Dig. LucasFilm has just lost all credibility; their glory days are truly over.

There's nothing that says "my career as a popular icon has hit rock bottom for good" more than shaving your head, getting a tattoo, and wearing a blond wig with gigantic, Cobra-style sunglasses. I've never had any respect for Britney Spears, so I'm really not moved by her latest cry for attention. What really makes me laugh, however, is the fact that semi-respectable people are saying that we shouldn't poke fun at Ms. Spears, since she's going through a "tough time" right now.

Get serious.

Everyone should be making fun of her non-stop. She has now entered the realm of Michael Jackson and Mike Tyson; everything she ever does from here on out will be a joke. I say that we get the most entertainment out of her while we can. Let the late night jokes commence!

It seems that Papa John's has "outsourced" the pizza ordering process. The past two times that I have called our local Papa John's establishment, I was connected with an operator at who knows where. She took my order like the local folks normally do, but she clearly submits the order via her computer ("let me key in your order here on my computer," she says). What clearly gives it away as a call center is the fact that the operator gives the actual address of the local establishment: "Do you want to pick up your pizza at [insert address here]?" The local folks never asked that in the past; it was simply "is this for pick-up or delivery?"

I'm not exactly sure why Papa John's would want to send the ordering process to a call center. Is it simply to hire fewer people? Was our local establishment doing such a poor job that the corporation stepped in to help?

Has anyone else seen this behavior when ordering pizza? I'm not sure if this is just something at our local establishment or if this is a wider spread change. Either way, it's very strange.

Mark Pilgrim just recently patched a long-standing bug in Firefox (the fix will appear in Firefox 3). Currently, there is no way a user can disable timed redirects through META refresh elements. This becomes a gigantic problem to blind users who utilize screen-reader software. By the time the screen reader starts reporting what's on screen, the page changes unexpectedly.

Beginning in Firefox 3, users will have the option of being warned when such refresh event takes place. A notification bar, just like the one used to alert the user of blocked pop-up ads, will appear when a META refresh takes place. The user will then be able to click a button to allow the event. Note that this new system will be disabled by default, meaning that everything will act as it does today in Firefox 2. Also note that JavaScript refreshes are not handled by this fix.

What I find most intriguing about this new system is that the notification bar appears just like an ALERT to assistive software. Mark has a blog post that goes into way more detail on the fix, so check it out if you're interested. It's really good to see Firefox making strides in this area. Yet one more reason that Firefox 3 will be super awesome.

The US Mint has once again released a dollar coin, although to seemingly mixed reviews. Will the dollar coins catch on? Though I don't care one way or the other, I'm inclined to say "No, they will not." Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea failed before, and these are likely to fail again (though exactly why is debatable). I always find it interesting, however, when people from the vending machine industry are interviewed on this topic. They always give this kind of response:

Reporter: So, what do you think of these new dollar coins? Vending Machine Guy: Eh, they'll never catch on. Reporter: Why do you think that is? Vending Machine Guy: Well, people never use them in these here machines, so we don't flip the switch inside to let them accept the dollar coins.

This kind of discussion appears every time dollar coins are launched (in fact, it appears in the story I linked to above). Do you see the idiocy of the vending machine guy's statement? They won't enable the mechanism to allow vending machines to accept dollar coins because people don't use the dollar coins. Maybe people don't use the coins because your stupid machines don't accept them! Are these people idiots or what?

I've been monitoring some of the upcoming games for this year, and here's what I've got my eye on:

Half-Life 2: Episode 2

Apparently Episode 2 has been delayed again. As frustrated as I'd like to be about that, I think I would rather Valve take their time and do things right than to rush it out the door (like so many games today). Episode 1 was phenomenal; just as good as Half-Life 2 itself (though it was surprisingly short). If they can keep the gaming quality bar set this high, I'll patiently wait for it.

The Elder Scrolls IV: The Shivering Isles

This expansion to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion looks incredibly awesome. I simply cannot wait for this to be released.

Silent Hunter 4: Wolves of the Pacific

I haven't played a submarine sim since the days of Aces of the Deep, but I heard great things about Silent Hunter 3, and installment number 4 looks good enough to draw me back into the genre.

Crysis

This next-generation shooter from the folks that gave us Far Cry (a really great game, by the way) is truly a sight to behold (large image warning). I'm not certain that this game is scheduled for this year, but I can certainly hope. If it can bring back those oh-so-cool moments from Far Cry, I'm sold.

A few other things are on my radar, specifically for my Nintendo DS Lite. Hotel Dusk: Room 215 has been getting good reviews and looks like a truly unique adventure game. Some other similar games are in the pipeline, all of which I can't remember at the moment. Anyone else looking forward to anything particular this year? If I can ever get my hands on a Nintendo Wii, I'll have that much more to look forward to.

I enjoy my job at IBM, but I also enjoy coming home and putting work as far from my mind as possible. To do so, I tend to escape to other worlds. The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion is one of my particular favorites. There's something about becoming another person in another world that's refreshing. I can completely forget who I am for a while, and role play if you will. Another realm I'm starting to venture back to is the world of Prince Valiant. I've just begun rereading the comic strip from the very beginning, and I thoroughly enjoy becoming entangled in the intricate storyline.

What are some of your means of escapism? Surely I'm not the only person who enjoys getting away from it all...

We got hit with a "winter weather storm" here in North Carolina, and it was a colossal disappointment. A forecast 1 to 3 inches of snow (with a 1/4 inch of ice on top of that) turned out to be a light dusting, most of which melted in a few hours time. It seems like every state in the US has gotten tons of snow this winter; it even snowed in the Arizona desert! But does North Carolina get anything? Not around here. It's like we're cursed or something.

The official 1.0 release of Firebug is now available. If you are a web developer, be sure to pick up this super-ultra-mega-cool extension. You'll thank me later.

Some time ago, my family tried out digital cable. We were thoroughly unimpressed at the 'digital quality' and subsequently dropped the service. But strangely enough, the digital artifacts that annoyed us so greatly are now showing up in the analog signal. We routinely see compression issues and dropped areas in the picture, and it only seems to be getting worse. Is Time Warner digitally encoding the signal before they send it out on the analog line? It sure seems like they are, but I don't see the benefit in doing that. Maybe it's cheaper on their end? Does anyone else with cable see this problem?

The new networking card that I ordered came in yesterday, and I installed it last night. I now get excellent signal strength in my room, compared to the 'poor' rating I was seeing before. Hopefully the slow down issues I've been seeing will disappear as a result. My computer boots way faster now, which seems encouraging (boot time had slowed to a crawl, and I correctly suspected that the wireless card was to blame).

An expansion pack for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has been announced, which means bad things for my productivity later this year. After having not played the game for some time, I've gotten hooked again, thanks to the Knights of the Nine expansion that I recently picked up. A few screenshots are available over at 3D Gamers, and though there are only a few of them, they look awfully interesting. The environments appear to be quite different from the game's current locales, which should be refreshing. I can't wait!

While working on my rewrite of Monkey Album, I ran into an interesting programming dilemma. In the past week or so, I've been introduced to the MySQLi extension in PHP. The current Monkey Album implementation makes use of the PHP 4 mysql_*() calls, so I thought I'd try out the MySQLi interface to see how it works.

MySQLi includes support for what are known as "prepared statements" (only available in MySQL 4.1 and later). A prepared statement basically gives you three advantages: (1) SQL logic is separated from the data being supplied, (2) incoming data is sanitized for you which increases security, and (3) performance is increased, since a given statement only needs to be parsed a single time.

It seems to me that the performance benefit can only be seen in situations where the query is executed multiple times (in a loop, for example). In fact, an article on prepared statements confirms this suspicion; the author in fact mentions that prepared statements can be slower for queries executed only once.

So here's the problem I face: the queries that get executed in Monkey Album are, for the most part, only ever executed once. So, do I make use of prepared statements just to get the security benefit? It doesn't seem worth it to me, since I can get the same security by escaping all user input (something I already do today). Does someone with more knowledge of this stuff have an opinion? If so, please share it.

A coworker and I were recently reminiscing about our elementary school days, and we brought up something that I hadn't thought about in years. Does anyone here remember "Swish Day" at their school? You know, the day when the teacher would bring out the big bottle of mouthwash, dispense it into little plastic cups, and make you swish it around in your mouth? They said it was "bubble gum" flavored, but in actuality, it tasted nothing like anything you've ever had before.

Searching the web doesn't yield many hits on swish, but I know it's something we did. Does anyone else remember this? If so, feel free to share your memories.

Over the holidays I had the chance to finally beat Yoshi's Island DS. I also got Meteos for Christmas, and have had a substantial amount of time with it. As such, here are my two short reviews of both games.

Yoshi’s Island DS (A-) This 'sequel' to Yoshi's Island for the Super Nintendo is faithful to the original, while adding enough new features to feel fresh. Introducing multiple babies for Yoshi to carry around (subsequently giving him new abilities) was an interesting idea that works well. My only real problem with this game was that a number of the later levels are ridiculously difficult. I don't recall the original Yoshi's Island being so tough, but I played it a long time ago, so I only have the vaguest recollection. I had to play through several levels 20 or 30 times to get past them. Needless to say, this quickly got frustrating. Sounds, graphics, and gameplay are all top-notch, however, so this gripe pales in comparison. Overall a great game, and worth your time. I only wish one could trade their extra lives for red coins, stars, or flowers in each level; getting 100% in some of the levels is nearly impossible!

Meteos (A-) This puzzle game is reminiscent of Tetris (as are most puzzle games), but it's use of the stylus is incredible. In fact, I consider this a 'stylus-only' game, even though you can play with the D-pad and buttons. The goal of the game is to launch falling Meteos back into space by lining them up in groups of three, either vertically or horizontally. Each planet that you play through has different gravity and so varying strategies must be employed to succeed. For example, some planets require that you create secondary ignitions of launched Meteos by lining up another set of three or more in the air. This game is fast paced, fun, and highly addictive. For a few days after I got it, I actually spent time thinking about ways I could line up items in the real world in groups of three or more. It's been a long time since a game has affected me in such a way, which should be a testament to how addicting this game is.

Does anyone have any recommendations for games I should get next? Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime is currently on my list. What else should I get?

I have recently been seeing some very strange networking issues on my home computer, and I'm not certain I understand where the problems are coming from. Because my computer is a long way from our cable modem, I make use of a wireless networking adapter (a Netgear WG311 v3, to be exact). The signal strength I receive is somewhat low, due to the adapter's tiny antenna and its lousy location at the back of my computer.

The actual problem I'm seeing is a severe degradation in performance over time. When I run the speed test at Speakeasy right after a reboot (or when I initially turn on my machine), I can consistently get ~4500 kbps down and ~300 kbps up. After an hour or two of usage, running the same test consistently gives me ~750 kbps down and ~50 kbps up (sometimes slightly higher; the numbers vary). None of the other computers in my house see this issue, and all are wireless.

Last night I flashed the latest firmware onto our DLink DI-624 wireless router (the one that was installed was really old), but I saw the issue again after I made the update. Seeing that this issue is limited to my machine, it makes me think of two possibilities:

1. It's a problem with my wireless card (though another computer in my house has the exact same type of card, and doesn't see the problem).
2. It's a software issue (something is screwing over the network settings system wide).

Does anyone have an idea of what might be going on here? I'm thinking about buying a new networking card with a better external antenna (this one at NewEgg is what I'm currently looking at), with the hopes that better signal strength will make this problem disappear. But I'm grasping at straws; this is driving me nuts and I want it fixed!

Welcome to the newly redesigned Born Geek website! We have shed our old clothes as well as our old habits. No longer are the pages at this site crafted by hand; we now use Movable Type instead. For those interested in how I was able to get Movable Type to run everything, a detailed article is available.

There are a number of new features to introduce:

Site Search

You'll note a new website search box at the top of each page. Want to quickly locate something here at Born Geek? Just enter your search terms and let us do the rest.

Breadcrumb Trail

A breadcrumb trail is now available on every web page (just below the navigation bar), making it much clearer where you are in the site hierarchy. Moving up the site tree is now just a click away.

Comment on News Postings

Make yourself heard on Born Geek news postings by submitting your comments. Do you have feedback for me concerning a particular news item? Just let me know about it by posting to the appropriate entry. Moderation is turned off for now; depending on how nicely everyone plays, I may or may not have to turn it on.

RSS Feed

An RSS feed is now available for news stories. Subscribe to it and stay up to date with everything that goes on here at Born Geek.

Since this is my first foray into the world of Movable Type, I do not doubt that there may be a bug or two still lurking around. The print style sheet is not yet ready, and Internet Explorer users may run into the odd CSS anomaly. The overall style sheet will definitely be tweaked over the next several days, so some settling may occur. As always, please alert me to any problems that you may encounter.

Note also that some content has been permanently removed. The Firefox 1.0 toolbar tutorial has finally been replaced with the tutorial for Firefox 1.5 and later. All of the old news archives have also been removed. Other goodies (such as my wish list) have not yet been posted; these will appear in the near future.

Several new software releases are on the horizon here at Born Geek, so stay tuned. Happy New Year!