This is Ellie Goulding, the UK’s latest electro-pop sensation. I like her songs thus far, but I can’t help but notice how she is the antithesis of the modern popstar. Hoodies on stage? Banging drums? The most awkward choreography ever (not just live, but on her MV’s too)? She’s not bad looking (like a pre-op Lady Gaga), but she seems about as graceful as Meg Griffin. I doubt she can pull off being a popstar. This, on the other hand, seems like more her element:

Fortunately, with the right production she could be a more mainstream version of Bjork, I look forward to her new album.

Bonus: Mind blown

Put up new main website and tweak blog. I’ve pretty much put off being a web designer for now (until my fear of web design clients disappear), so bye bye portfolio site and hello basic introduction site. Also, let’s face it, some of the feature on this site is not used (flickr stream, tumblr blog, etc.), so time to scale back on stuff. While I’m at it, re-tweak the design to something more coherent.

Finish this lecture. Building Dynamic Websites. I’m a self-taught web developer and I already know most of the stuff in the lecture. While commendable, it leaves pretty significant gaps of knowledge that would have been filled in an academic environment. Thanks to Academic Earth, I can attend a Harvard lecture without paying for it or padding my college application. In general, keep up with my education.

Start running. Just because I’m tired of feeling like a slob everyday. This is the simplest way to exercise with some measurable metric of achievement. My goal this year is to able to do x-country distances.

Upgrade my stuff. I have a lot of crap I want, and I need the money to buy it. Shortlist includes computer part upgrades, an e-reader, a new car, a fedora, new shoes. Ultimately, I can have enough income flow to GTFO from home and live on my own.

Blog about all of this (and blog in general) Write more, write better, just keep writing. This is the only thing keeping me sane in this time. Can’t put it off anymore.

Notice gaming is not on this list. I’ve been doing plenty of that already. I could probably do less of that.

For some people, the ruling in Citizen United vs. FEC means the beginning of corporate domination of politics. The beginning? Was corporate money in politics not an issue at one point?

One of the biggest mistake many people and our elected legislators make is believe that their intentions matter. Like the current heathcare reform, the intention is to cover every American’s health insurance, even though it won’t and it explicitly bars illegal immigrants access. It’s the thought that counts.

Same deal with Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. The intent is to cap the amount an individual or corporation can contribute to a political candidate and party organizations and prevent corporations and other organizations from “electioneering”. Awesome. That’s exactly what will happen because I believe.

Thanks to BCRA, the money spent on presidential campaigns went from in 2000 $343 million to in 2008… $1.32… billion. Pat yourself on the back McCain & Feingold.

Waste of money in my opinion, as each additional vote became exponentially more expensive as a result. Still, as a libertarian, even intentions contrasting outcome does not bother me. For me, process matters.

What process deems a corporation like ExxonMobil to have less right to free than a corporation like the New York Times? But NYTimes is the press and they have freedom of the press. Clever, so what process determines that NYTimes is the press and ExxonMobil not the press? Whereas the NYTimes editorial board condemned the ruling on Citizens United, shouldn’t ExxonMobil have the right broadcast how they feel about Citizens United? What if they published a book on their position, is that a punishable offense? Rights matter, and they apply to all persons in America, including AIG executives and Pharmaceutical Reps, Teachers Union members, Non-profit founders… etc.

No, corporations are not persons despite legal president to the contrary, but its owners and operators are. So do New York Times journalists have the right to speech while ExxonMobile executives do not?

I believe there is none, which is why the Supreme Court ruled Citizens United accordingly.

As for the outcome of this ruling? If the passage of BCRA was any indication, nothing that would change anything. I hope, rather than spend large amounts of money secretly, this would allow more transparency in the process. And I doubt corporations can convince Americans to vote for a certain Senator as well as getting your fat ass to McDonalds. Others see corporate takeover of democracy, I see a massive waste of money that will make corporations look like Martha Coakley in Yankees garb.

In short, a victory for free speech,

FOX, give him money and The Simpsons

I’ve already covered how much I despised the little Fidel Castros running hosted server that caused me to almost quit the game. Now my ire is raised towards Infinity Ward’s matchmaking system.

How did I end up in a dozen laggy games in a row?

First of all, it’s about as transparent as North Korea. What determines who hosted the game? No idea, but they sure suck at it. How do I report cheaters? Let IW take of it, while I see the same cheaters in games over and over again. Patches? That may be happening, but there’s no way to see the changes.

Tens of thousands of gamers depend on a single entity to make sure games run smoothly. Might as well call it healthcare reform.

I think I prefer return to the thousands of little fiefdoms that are hosted servers. They can’t be bad? I mean mostly bad, but not all bad right?

Clients love zebra patterned lists and tables. They love it, something to do with readability. Whatever. With CSS3, it’s a snap. For instance, in a typical table:

table tr td:nth-child(2n) {
background:#eee;
padding:10px 0;
}

This will add a background and padding every even number of cells. N equals all whole numbers.

table tr td:nth-child(2n + 1) {
padding:10px 0;
}

And just to make things tidy, this is how to do odds. No need to add “alt” classes.

In the future, no longer will one exchange barbs with a client over the effectiveness of zebra tables. Just do it and collect paycheck.

My blog didn’t work on mobile until today. Let’s get that out of the way. I suck. Next.

Smart.fm needs an Android app. Congrats on the iphone app and the transition to a Javascript based app. But not only is Smart.fm slow as hell, it doesn’t work that well on the Droid. If this is true, then you should be already making an Android app.

Where is tweetdeck? Yes, they have an iphone app, I could use an Android app. Please?

It’s mobile, not iphone or pda. They’re not the only devices on the market anymore, so get your mobile names right Continental.

This shit needs to be charging all the time. Only took one day to realize I’m a power user. So now I have a charger in my bag at all time and a car charger in whatever automobile I’m in.

I can actually give accurate information to people who ask. Strangers like to ask me for directions in NYC for some reason. At least now, instead of leading them astray, I can give them accurate information. Yay strangers.

Google Navigation FTW. Garmin and TomTom are dead.

More to come…

Also, in order to have a productive life, I am trying to get other things done in between the 1-2 minute intermissions between MW2 matches. Yesterday, I managed to clean up my room… in like 3 hours. I’m planning to add some push-ups or sit ups.

Next segment, playing while on some sort of pharmaceutical. I was taking antibiotics last week but that was boring and nothing changed. I’d have to take something with some “effect”.

15 minutes a hit. This is the FPS version of “just one more turn”. Why rely on dedicated servers when IW has built the perfectly proportioned match? It used to be that I could enter a server, spend a few minutes wrapping up the match, and then decide whether to keep playing or do something else. Thanks to the new matchmaking system, 90% of the time I’m entering a brand new match that is expected to last 10-15 minutes, shames me into not leaving a 6-6 match early, and gives me sufficient time to tweak my classes before the next match. Seriously, even now at the office every time I exit Modern Warfare 2 I feel sense of lack of accomplishment which drives me back to the game. I believe in drug terms that’s called a “withdrawal”.

Put the popular weapons from COD4 as a high level unlockable I just unlocked the M16 at a mid-40 level. The AK-47, my favorite weapon in COD4, is a level 70 unlock. So yeah, I’m going there. Hard.

Attract the Counter-strike crowd. FAMAS? UMP? Aug? TMP? These are just the new weapons from MW2 that were in Counter-strike along with the Desert Eagle, AK-47, M4A1, MP5, P90, Uzi etc. from the first game. Even I noticed that MW2 plays a lot like CS more than ever. What was the point of adding the akimbo attachment to every pistol, machine pistol, and sub-machine gun other than that is was cool but underpowered in CS?

Lightning fast start-up time. As I pointed out before, the matching making system in MW2 is even faster than COD4. Makes entering a game as easy as popping a pill, or ten.

The only shocking thing is that IW didn’t decide to charge a monthly fee to its PC port. So unlike, WoW, there’s a chance that there will be an end-game for most players and they can go back to their families and jobs and education once again. Until MW3.

Some people may miss the community aspects of dedicated servers, but as someone who’s been screwed over by the judgments of these folks, I don’t miss it. In place, I get a match making service that was even more blazing fast than MW1. Somehow, with only a Windows 7 upgrade, the game is running on my rig just as fast as MW1 (thank you Microsoft?).

I am more than impressed by MW2 so far, and I will have a full impression later.