The Kansas City Blues

Has a nice ring to it eh? Well the Star reports today that Howard Baldwin (former owner of two NHL franchises) has expressed interest in buying the recently up for sale St. Louis Blues. Can’t say that I’m that big of a fan of hockey, in fact… I’ve enjoyed this last season more than most. However, considering St. Louis stealing all the money for the east side of the state in recent years for new stadium after new stadium, I would have to say that stealing their hockey team in return would be great!

However, for that to happen, it’s also noted that the lease to the Savvis Center would have to be bought as well, bringing the franchise pricetag to ~$140 Million. Didn’t the Mighty Ducks just sell for ~$80 Million? With Pittsburgh and a few other teams on the market, I can’t say the chances of this happening are likely, but damn it would be sweet! =)

Slashdot bans AvantSlash

I’ve mentioned it before on here, but AvantSlash is one of my favorite web apps and now it appears Slashdot doesn’t quite approve of it’s place in the world wide web, so they banned it’s IP. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, if you want to visit Slashdot on your low-resolution browser (PDA or cell phone), it’s great because it strips out all the pictures, ads, unnecesary links, etc… All it gives you is what you want, the stories and the discussion, perfectly formatted. While Slashdot does have their own “lite” version (link), it is pretty sub-par with it’s limited stories per page, 5 comments, etc…

Other websites have done similiar things before and sometimes limit the content of their RSS feeds (i.e. Slashdot doesn’t include the latest story with feeds), because after all, they own the content, and I’m fine with that. However, for the bastion of open-source and creative sharing on the internet, it seems rather hipocritical to take an action like this. Especially considering their stance on their stories (only posting “unedited” stories from users) and comments (”Comments are owned by the Poster”) it doesn’t seem right to now ban people from reading stories which you claim not to own or have any control over in the first place. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Luckily, you can still download the source code to running on your own server.

Gotta say, I’m a bit dissapointed.

Update: It appears that the ban has been lifted. I’m guessing that it was unintentional to begin with as they do ban users for hammering their rss feed. No exect word on what happened, but the avantslash site does say this…
“Two severe bugs crept into the 3.0 release relating to the way that AvantSlash handles requests for out-of-date pages and caching. Use of version 3.0 will generate excessive requests to the Slashdot server and get your IP banned. As such, it is highly recommended to update to v3.1 which resolves these issues.”

Video Blog #3 – Stormy vs. MonkeyPox

Ok, so this really hasn’t evolved into a “video blog” in the traditional sense, rather, it is just me throwing up a bunch of edited clips that I have stored in random places on my computer from weeks, months, and years ago. If you want a real video blog, check out here, here, and here for a couple. In the meantime… this one goes out to Heather and Justin who are living with a rather fat Stormy now. This was shot back when Stormy was a wee little kitten a bit over a year ago. So guys, at least you can look back on this video and remember the time when he weighed no more than a bag of catnip. The opponent in this battle royale is MonkeyPox, King of the stubby butt species of chimps.

Why “My Coco” as the background music? It was a request. Also, no more puppy/kitten videos, I just had to at least get these ones up here.

Pics of my new place

Was able to get some pictures of my new place while I was downtown today (which I wrote about a few weeks ago). Unfortunately, all I had was my camera phone on me, so the quality isn’t that great. The layout of the place might be a bit difficult to determine from the images, but basically it is a living room with an attached kitchen and a bedroom & bath on each side, totaling about 900 sq. ft.

You can find all the images here.

View from living room into kitchen

View from kitchen. 18 foot ceilings!

View out my window to the 909 Walnut building

View down to 9th & Walnut

More comedy

Last week I put up some of my old coding projects, now I bring you my animation portfolio. I hadn’t looked at this stuff for at least 4-5 years. The timestamps on the files were from ‘97 & ‘98. Ah… good ol’ 3D Studio Max R2. I think I actually may have done some of these on 3d Studio R4 which wasn’t even a windows program (it ran in DOS). Sorry about the crappy quality, I rendered these on a P3-333mhz system with probably 64 megs of ram, and they took all night long. If I bumped up the quality, that would have tacked on another week of rendering time.

earthrse.avi
Ever wonder what it would be like to watch the earth rise while on the moon? Well this doesn’t do a very good job of depicting it. Hah!

barn.avi
I have no idea what inspired this

rainstorm.mpg
Unfortunately I never really finished this one. I intended for it to be much longer.

duck.avi
This was a fun one to do.

mercuryg.avi
Another space one. Why I thought Venus was blue… I don’t know.

clacker.avi
Never did spend the time to get the physics right on this one.

I also used to do animations in high school for the video yearbook and the morning announcements. Damn I was cool.
banner.avi
evsbvnw.avi
evson.avi
hawk_watch_blend.avi

Steve Stone, eat your heart out.

My next pet…

Ok, now I feel a bit girly with back to back posts about kittens and puppies, but I came across this site the other day and realized exotic cats are the coolest pets ever. Even if you don’t like cats because they are wimpy and boring, how about a cat that weights 100 lbs and lives 35 years? That manly enough for ya? To add on a little more testosterone… apparently the best thing to feed them is raw meat. While it might get expensive giving them a KC strip every day, you at least get a bit of satisfaction out of it by owning a pet that you have to throw a slab of meat down on the ground and watch it go to town rather than feeding it a can of wimpy cat food.

Clawing your face off versus owning the coolest pet ever? Easy choice, get the cat. Maybe I’ll get a Liger to play with my new bobcat.

“So what if I don’t have any ears, you know how many chicks I get?!?”

I call this guy Simba.

This is what they can turn into

This also reminds me of the time at Rockfest ‘96, probably in between Rollin’s Band and Sammy Hagar, I think I paid $20 to play with this baby bengal tiger and have my picture taken.

Tamra, me, & TJ. God my hair was so awesome back then.