nickchanger's blog - Archive: 2009

Another update here in the middle of the holidays.

First, the League of Legends tournament. We lost our first match and was therefore out already after the first round. But we played well. It was a fairly equal fight most of the time, but the other team was just a bit more prepared with a greater strategy. We also did a couple of stupid things where one of them even led to a complete whipe, which the other team used to push one of our inner towers. I have not played much LoL since then because of all the holiday stuff, but me and Døng have started a new website which will feature LoL statistics - more on that at a later time.

Both Steam and Good Old Games are having large holiday sales and this year I treated my self to a few games from gog.com. Duke Nukem 3D, Duke Nukem Manhattan Project and the two Earthworm Jim games are now part of my game collection. Sweeeet.

Nothing else new have happened - big surprise :P - and my next blog entry will most likely be in the new year, cya then.

Happy new year and all that.

Holy crap its been a long time since my last entry :o . I had planned a couple of entries but I have been too busy to actually write them :( . So this is just an update basically to tell the world, like it cares, that I am still here :P .

So what have happened since my last "update". Not much actually. School have taken up a lot of my time since we are only two in my group this semester and we are still writing almost as much as we did on any other semester, where we were six people. We plan to finish next Friday so we can relax in the Christmas holidays. This year, I will be going home to my parents, what a shock, and stay there for Christmas and new years. As far as I know we will spend Christmas eve in my brothers apartment, we did the same four years ago in mine. Last year we abolished gift giving, but instead added the game known in Danish as "pakkespillet", translated to "the gift game" I guess. We play it with cards which means that in turns we pick a card that tells us what to do basically. Usually the game is played with a dice that when you get a 6, you can pick whatever gift you want. This game of course means that I have to bring several small gifts, as it was not hard enough already :/ .

The same day I wrote the last blog entry I also started played League of Legends. The DotA clone game that does it much better than both DotA and HoN. It is well structured, clean graphics, and kind of fun. Together with some guildmates from my World of Warcraft guild I have been playing several premades over the last few weeks. We were supposed to participate in a tournament last Wednesday but it was pushed because of patching and problems that followed. So now it will start on Monday instead.
I expect we have a chance to win the first match but will most likely loose the second. The reason is that we still have not really figured out a good strategy (champions, lanes, jungling, items, etc) that fits us well yet. I doubt any of our opponents are reading this but I still wont be telling more until after the tournament :P .

As my time was not limited enough already I have also started to re-watch Gilmore Girls. Stupid, stupid, stupid :/ . But I pretty much had to since I have already re-watched Family Guy, American Dad, How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, Coupling, Firefly and Futurama this fall. I have also started to regularly watch The Daily Show, great fun and a bit of news.

So... incoming cheesy effect: Merry Christmas ... and all that stuff.

The title is not some fancy metaphor that uses the shell of an egg to describe something clever. It's simply about how to peel an egg.

I eat a lot of eggs. I love them! Fried, scrambled or just hard boiled. In the last case there is always the trouble of getting the good parts of the egg out of the shell. Usually I just smash the egg against something hard, like my sink, and then starts to peel. Most of the times the shell have been broken in to many very small pieces which makes it difficult to remove it all without standing almost minutes just picking at it. This is the only bad thing about eggs I can think of.

A few weeks ago I woke up late, and tired, and turned on the TV. On TV2 Zulu they were showing an episode of "Buffy, The Vampire Slayer". I like the first seasons of that show but have never really seen it from beginning to end. This episode was one I have not seen before so I just stuck. It was about how Buffy begins at college, I think, and have to share a room with another girl she does not know. Of course there is stuff about this girl that Buffy does not like and the story have begun... As tired and as weird as I am, I did not pay much attention to it until I noticed that this girl had a lot of boiled eggs in the fridge, and in a special "montage" session they even showed her peeling one. She did it in a way I have never actually seen before - which is kind of surprising as it is just a stupid egg.

The new special way was simply to put light pressure on the egg while rolling it. Almost instantly the shell starts to break and come loose in larger pieces which afterwards is much easier to remove than before. At the same time it seems that by rolling the shells sticks easier to the thin "skin" that exists beneath it which increase the chance of peeling off a whole "lane".

Some out there might get the same kind of epiphany as me, others wont. My point however is: "You never know what you might learn by watching TV" :P .

I have just made a large update to the site. At least big enough for me to now call the site version 1.1. Most of it is done "behind the scene". Only really visible change is the image in the upper left corner. I liked it before where it was pixelised but it was also annoying - it was to hard to come up with new images that could fit there and at the same time be recognisable as large pixels. Therefore I have changed it to proper quality and added a bit of effect on it. Now there are images of my home, the cat, and from my trips. Maybe you will recognise some of it :P .

Here is the changelog - because I can:

• Changed encoding from "iso-8859-1" to "utf-8" - there might still be a few bugs here and there
• Changed all University pages to use "keyvalue-tables"
• Added ShortcutController which makes it possible to make shorter or changeable links, e.g. http://www.109.dk/nickchanger/warrior.html.
• Changed initialisation order such that error messages from the database can be displayed using the design.
• Changed and added other error messages that now uses the design.
• Cleaned up the article database table a bit.
• Improved the statistics gathering and saving.
• Changed the design of the left-side images and added more.
• Made a lot of updates, changes and additions to the administration system. Also made it independent of the site itself - calling the new system "CiXadmin" and might release it someday.
• Moved several library like classes out of the site it self - calling all of them together "CiXlibrary" and might release this package someday.
• Fixed how articles and comments are "cut" in the RSS feed.
• Minor fixes here and there, including changes to lists and article images
• Minor Internet Explorer related fixes.
• Added pages: Warrior and LineCounter (version 2.0) to Sparetime.

Today I watched the latest episode of The Big Bang Theory. During the opening sequence we fly from way out into the milky way and into our solar system pass our sun and ending at the earth. This time I got a déjà vu, and not just because I've seen the opening sequence many times before but because of some smaller visual stuff.

Here is a screenshot from the opening sequence of The Big Bang theory:

A few weeks ago I discovered a cool program called Celestia. With it you can fly around in space and look at planets, moons, stars and of course the sun. This can all be done at any time in history or the future. The textures on the planets are as close to "reality" as possible but the sun is basically just a big yellow ball with a few dark sunspots on it. This texture is used for all stars in Celestia so I doubt the sunspots are actually those of the sun but instead just random ones.

Here is a screenshot from Celestia of the Sun:

Did you notice anything? Here is a close-up of my déjà vu:

It might not be a secret to other people but at least now I know how they made parts of the opening sequence to The Big Bang Theory - or at least where they got inspiration.