If anyone is interested, you can sign up to have Obama's VP choice emailed or texted to you the moment it's announced.

my.barackobama.com/vp

Today, we bought a house.

Or at least, we signed a contract saying that we're going to buy a house on the 7th of October.

It is a 1280 sq. ft. ranch on a .42 acre lot with a half-finished walkout basement, and it's pretty cool. It's very well maintained and in the first or second best school district in the state (lists on the internet can't seem to agree on that bit).

Also, I finished my thesis today, so as long as I can convince some professors on Tuesday that I'm not full of lies, I'll graduate with an MA at the end of the month.

Unrelatedly, check out www.itog.com! Months of work have finally paid of and we've pushed a giant megaton of new code live. Our site looks way better on the front end, and is much more extensible and easy to work with on the back end. In addition, we're going to be part of the orientation programs at Wash U, Truman State, Western Illinois, and a few other universities, so we should see a wave of new users in the not too distant future.

Finally, GenCon is in a matter of days, and I'm pretty excited about that. It's consistently a good time, and I could use the vacation.

I was honestly disappointed at the lack of alien invasions last night. This may or may not be because I just watched Independence Day.

Also, earthquakes remind me of how dangerous it is to live on the surface of a planet; why do we still do that? We'd all be much safer on space stations.

I finally managed to replace my 6 year old computer with something slightly more up to date.

My new computer, highlights:

-22" Widescreen monitor with 2ms response time and 700:1 contrast ratio (3000:1 DC)
-AMD Phenom 9600 quad-core processor
-4GB DDR2 1066Mhz
-500GB Western Digital SATA HardDrive
-GeForce 8800GTS 512

That last bit is on the excessive side, but I got a great deal on it using new eggs


On another exciting note, I'm running Debian GNU/Linux as my primary operating system, thereby fulfilling one of the goals on my list. I'm dual-booting with Vista as a gaming platform (mainly because I doubt Wine will be able to run Starcraft II or Spore), but so far Linux is spectacular and I wish I'd switched earlier.

I give 3 to 1 odds John McCain is the next president.

On an exciting note, ITOG won the Olin Cup, a business competition at Wash U, so now we get a $50K investment for the company. This means that I now have a job through GenCon at least(its fun that I still measure time partially in terms of GenCon; speaking of which: anyone from Wisconsin who hasn't gone in a few years want to go this year? Its a good time and I am someone who has a great hotel room reserved in the Hampton that you could get in on). Our goal is to raise additional $ that we need between now and the end of August, but I'm really happy with our progress so far. For anyone who wants to check it out, its www.itog.com

This also means that I can afford to buy a new computer soon now that I'm guaranteed income through the summer. I kind of want to wait until the new versions of the Phenom processor come out and more manufacturers make AM2+ motherboards; the current selection is suboptimal.

Several things just finalized and solidified my support for Barack Obama. I know this isn't the most widely read journal or anything, but please take a look at this (its really just the tip of the iceberg of good stuff about Obama), pass it on to anyone and everyone you think could benefit from it, and post any comments here you want to talk about any aspect of things politically.

First, Obama's main strength as a leader is the intelligence with which he approaches every issue, and the lengths to which he goes to ensure that he gets it right. As an example, when it came to crafting technology policy, he didn't talk to random lobbyists or Microsoft execs. He talked to Lawrence Lessig. This even got him an incredibly rare endorsement from Randall Munroe, who incidentally summarizes much of my opinions regarding Obama quite nicely.

Second, Obama is currently the target of Carl Rove-esque tactics from Clinton. This worked for Bush for eight years, and you know its bullshit. Pay close attention when people say things! See this video for a good perspective.

This is how it works: You're young until you're not, you love until you don't, you try until you can't, you laugh until you cry, you cry until you laugh, and everyone must breathe until their dying breath.

This is how it works: You peer inside yourself; you take the things you like and try to love the things you took, and then you take that love you made and stick it into someone else's heart, pumping someone else's blood. And walking arm in arm, you hope it don't get harmed, but even if it does you'll just do it all again.

This is one of the better geography quizes I've seen online. It checks to see if you can recall the names of areas by simply seeing an unmarked map.

The hardest parts about Asia are 1) remembering how everything is spelled 2) noticing that they want you to name special administrative districts of the PRC 3) notice that they want you to name the palestinian territories 4) pick up on the political commentary of making you type Taiwan 5) finding all the tiny countries in Asia on map.

I can name 53 Asian countries in 4m 9s

Click here to Play

I liked HP7 quite a lot. Probably not my favorite of the 7, but its up there. Of all of the summer entertainment releases I was looking forward to, it turned out to be the best. It wasn't disappointing like various movie releases; it was just as entertaining and interesting as I expected it to be.

Maia and I will be in Chicago this weekend, and there is a very good chance that we will be going to the Bristol Rennaisance Faire. If anyone from up that way would like to meet us there for hanging out (either saturday or sunday; details need to be finalized), that'd be great. Just let us know!

I am, as always, in a perpetual state of busy. Its pretty fun though.

Also, I will soonish need a new computer. My current one, which I built over 5 years ago, is gradually imploding under its own age. Oh well.

Finally, ITOG is going great. Anyone who hasn't checked it out definitely should (www.itog.com - invite code ALATARLJ). We could really use the feedback and the increased traffic!

So several months ago I wrote about ITOG, the website I've been working on with some friends. ITOG lets users rate a wide variety of items, from films to books to songs to drinks, and gives recommendations based on these preferences. It also creates an environment in which users can review and discuss all manner of items and form communities of individuals with similar interests. Its been keeping me quite busy for nearly a year, but we're just now ready to go fully public.

We had our open launch last night, and things are going quite well. If you're reading this and want to try it out, just go to http://www.itog.com/user_register.pl?sc=1;sb=1;code=ALATARLJ and sign up. Definitely tell all of your friends about it who are interested, and have them sign up as well!

For everyone who's already been signed up for our closed testing, go check the site out if you haven't in several weeks; we've added a ton of new features and really cleaned it up and improved functionality. We've also added a variety of item types, including soft drinks and alcoholic drinks.

If anyone thinks that the site is awesome, you can invite other friends to join either using the link I provided, or by going to the Help ITOG Grow link once you sign in and sending invites to your friends. For anyone who really wants to help us out and has the ability to post on a high-traffic site, I can create a unique link for you to use that tons of users can use.

Thanks for checking it out everyone! I'm really excited about it.

I've been trying to post something every day for the past week or so. I'm very busy, but I figured that this was more in line with the spirit of livejournal than my usual "post nothing" tactic. The posts started out with several ideas for organization or theme, but I'm not sure if I'll keep going with that. Anyhow, is this strategy working out for me? Or is it annoying?

One knows one's busy if one must upgrade from a To-Do list to a To-Do spreadsheet...

Today I played D&D all day. It was exciting.

I today discovered a powerful application for Excel: calculating XP in D&D.

Tonight we had a delicious potluck to which many awesome friends came. On the RPG front, Jim is starting a Star Wars campaign, John a short term D&D lvl 12, and my long campaign is about to start. Should be good times all around.

We also decided to start a Taboo league, which will keep statistics of everyone's Taboo-playing skills. Individuals will have a lifetime Taboo average of accurate guesses garnered as readers. We will also attempt to keep track of mis-speaks and guesses of other people's clues. A good spreadsheet is in order.

Today I learned that typing ability and connections are a good combo.

Robots are sweet. Maia's Mom and Woof got us a Roomba from iRobot, which is a pretty sweet company. It works incredibly well, and for the price, I see relatively few reasons for anyone to ever buy a new, non-automated vacuum ever again. Also, its cute and makes me happy as it does its little spinny-cleany dance.

Today I discovered that our cats flip out when they can see and hear rain. Since our air is out, we had the windows open, and the sounds of rain outside made Sisko run back and forth repeatedly looking first out one window, then another.

Today I learned yet another reason why I'm glad I live in the United States in the 21st century. Our air conditioning broke and its stupid hot and humid.