Whenever people discuss movies or books, inevitably someone says a sentence similar to the following. "*gasp* you haven't see Movie X? What's wrong with you? You must not be human." Just about everyone I know, especially myself is guilty of being on both ends of that sentence. My roommate thought I was nuts for having never seen American Beauty and I thought he was nuts for never seeing The Usual Suspects. And so life goes on.

Well, I've had some free time lately. And I'm not going to be at RIT much longer, so I have to take care of this internet connection while I still have it. Therefore I have started my great IMDB top 50 streak. If you go to IMDB there is a list of the top 250 movies, and it's a fairly static list. So my current pastime is downloading movies in the top 50 of this list which I have not already seen, and watching them on my nice Samsun 172x monitor with mplayer. When I'm done I hope that nobody will every say to me again "you haven't seen that?" because I will have seen it.

A few weeks ago I had a run where I watched every major mafia movie whether or not I had previously seen it. Conveniently this coincided a great deal with the IMDB list since the first two godfathers are ranked very highly. The first of which has held the number one spot for a very long time. So that is basically where this whole thing started.

This has got me thinking. That with the internet making it very easy to acquire popular full length feature films very easily and watch them in succession with little effort, that someone could potentially watch every significant movie ever made in a very short amount of time. I'm trying to think of what the far reaching consequences of such a thing are, if there are indeed any. But all it pretty much means is that we can watch a fuck ton of movies. I consider this a good thing, since I have cast off broadcast television, I can still sit back and relax to some commerical free video entertainment. And theoretically the best movies ever are better for my brain than whatever is on the "idiot box". And it keeps me off slashdot for awhile. I just wanted to share this with people.

So I'm taking a little nap in class, which I usually do in-between drawing doodles in my twenty cent notebook and going home. I'm in the standard comfortable position of sitting in my chair with my head resting sideways on the table, but then I experience a rude awakening. The table starts vibrating awakening me from my slumber. The only other guy sitting at the table is furiously typing something on his laptop which is on the table.

Okay, that's cool. If I had a laptop I would probably write code in class instead of sleeping, also. But wait... That typing is too fast and too constant to be coding. Coding is short quick bursts of typing interspersed with long bouts of deep thought. This is non-stop word processing going on here. Maybe he's writing a paper for another class? Maybe he's really good at nethack? Maybe he's making a blog entry? Whatever it is that requires such a quantity of typing during class must be interesting.

So I lean back and take a peek at his screen. As soon as I realized what it was I almost leaned too far. Which is good, because I did not want to provide the entire class with a weeks worth of entertainment. What I saw was Microsoft Word (blech! use AbiWord of OpenOffice if you want to save a few hundred bucks) and within it were notes for the current class. Get a grip, maybe he's a paid not taker. But this class has no deaf people! There is no note taker! Oh noes! I can't believe that there are actually people in class taking real notes. And this guy was taking some fancy notes! He had diagrams of the professor's drawings and bullets of just about everything that was said or written on the board. If he posted these on-line the rest of us could have skipped class.

To let you understand my shock let me tell you my personal history of note taking. Around the fourth grade I had a teacher tell us to take notes. Taking notes then consisted of copying down the things she wrote on the overhead projector. At that point in my life I could not understand why this would be necessary, but I did it because I thought it might be an assignment. When I found out that the only purpose of it was to take home and read I ceased doing it. I had never taken notes before then, I just listened to what the teacher says and remember it. In fourth grade I was still capable of continuing to learn this way, so I brushed off note taking.

Time moved on through middle and high school. I was always told by various teachers that I should take notes. The reasoning was that I wouldn't need the notes now, but that if I didn't take notes in the higher level school I would surely fail. I always believed it like a dumb-ass, but thankfully I made an excuse; "Oh? Then I'll start taking notes in the next school." One middle school teacher actually required us to keep a notebook that was checked and graded. I made a very well organized notebook with the minimum amount of content to pass. One high school teacher also had notebook checks which were to look for homework as well as notes. At this point I had quit doing non-graded homework and note taking was obviously only going to be necessary in college. So I just got terrible grades on those. The teacher was pissed that I still got 90+ grades on the tests.

So here I am in my fifth year as a CS student at RIT. All I need to do to receive my BS degree is finish classes this quarter and take 4 more classes next quarter. I also have one more co-op, but that doesn't mean anything. I am guaranteed to graduate a very high quality university without ever taking a single day of notes, in any class, ever.

Now, by no means am I a genius. In fact, my GPA is mediocre at best. I've never had an IQ test, but all of my friends like to think they are smarter than me and say it freely. Hell, sometimes I'm stupid and I know it. Neither my memory nor my attention span are so amazing as to draw attention. Hell, it takes me two or three weeks to remember my class schedule let alone anything more complicated. And even when I'm programming in C, which I first wrote in when I was 13, I keep a reference for syntax handy. As for an example of my weak attention span, ask my former roommate about me crossing NYC streets too soon or too late.

Given all this you can imagine how blown away I am by people taking notes in class. What are they doing? Why go through all that effort for nothing? What scares me even more is the library. The RIT library is a great place, full of free information in a comfortable atmosphere. But I see people there doing schoolwork. They make copies of books. They get huge stacks of literature and retreat to cube desks for research. I can understand if you were working on a thesis how this might be appropriate. But often I go in and see people from my classes studying. They are studying for the class I am in with them. There are people, in the library, studying, for a class which I am also in and am passing easily, yet I have never so much as cracked the spine of the book. What the fuck? Sure, I can understand maybe a cursory glance before a test or quiz. but people are spending multiple hours studying days before a test. I cannot believe this. Never has a class at RIT required that kind of effort to achieve a passing grade. From what I understand "studying" is when you read over notes and text using various techniques to refresh your memory of information in preparation for an examination. In this sense of studying I have never in my entire life studied for more than a few minutes prior to an exam.

Let me disclaim and make sure not everyone immediately takes offense and thinks I'm calling them an idiot, and that I alone am the only intelligent being on earth. First, I already have given a pass to paid note takers. They have a very good reason to take notes and their purpose is legitimate and necessary. Second, I have already devoted an entire paragraph to humbly admitting my own stupidity. Lastly, I understand that some people have different ways of learning. Some people have trouble "absorbing" information from lecture, and writing down and/or reading information helps them to learn.

Now let me make everybody offended and call you all idiots. If you can't retain information given to you very quickly by people talking you are going to fail in this world. You cannot take notes on what everyone says to you everywhere you go in life. Do you see people walking around with notebooks writing down everything that every person says to them? No, you do not. People remember what they are told. Since I don't remember ever seeing a person walk around campus taking notes on causal conversations I assume that the people I see studying also have this ability. Yes, it is true. Every single person reading this is fully capable of learning without note taking or studying. You do it in every aspect of your lives except for schoolwork.

First, I admit this. If I had studied and taken notes like all these other people I would probably graduate from RIT with a much higher GPA. Studying and note taking does work. However, here is the part where I rescind previous statements and tell you why I am smarter than every one of you studiers. Your GPA is an intangible imaginary number. The only time it will matter after college is in three situations. The first situation is applying to graduate school. The second is if you want to work somewhere that requires a GPA that is high, such as the FBI or NSA. The last is if you want a few extra Latin words added to your diploma.

Think about this. Twenty or thirty weeks I will receive an extremely expensive piece of paper from RIT. The same piece of paper that every other CS major gets. In the long term, my GPA will mean absolute dick. My rare and valuable programming experience will far outweigh any negative my GPA carries. And after my first real job nobody will ever ask me for my GPA ever again. And I was able to acquire this piece of paper for the exact same amount of money the rest of you paid. But not only that, I did it with less than half of the effort. I am smarter than the rest of you for one reason and one reason only. I was able to maximize my enjoyment of life by spending the minimal amount of time necessary to achieve a passing grade while leaving the maximum amount of time for enjoyment of my very few and very precious college years. Too many people I meet in the real world remember college as the best days of their lives that they long to return to. I wasn't about to piss these valuable years away by spending time studying or doing other un-fun schoolwork related activities. And in the end, I get the same end result as every single one of you living in the library. If you enjoy studying and note taking, then you are excused. You are making your life more enjoyable. But for most people it seems that schoolwork is not the most enjoyable activity. That is why parties involve drinking and screaming and not math problems and history tests. Every single one of you is capable of putting in the minimum effort just like me. There is no reason for this excess of studying and note taking, none at all.

When I was in elementary school they said that my grades were the most important thing in the world, and failing at school was failing at life. In middle school they said my grades were the most important thing in the world, and failing at them meant no honors classes in high school, which means failing at life. In high school they said that my grades determined what college I could go to, which would determine the rest of my life. Thank god that after being lied to three times I figured it out. A slew of bad grades in high school got me into RIT, the college I wanted to go to.

I now share my secret knowledge with the world! Cast away your books and writing utensils! Get out of the library and grab a Frisbee! You can achieve your long term goals in life without wasting time with all that bullshit. For anyone who still isn't convinced, just look at the President of the United States. How much time do you think the leader of the free world spent studying and taking notes? My point is proved. To all of you who already live my way, rejoice. To all of you who heed my call, congratulations! Despite what you have already lost in wasted time you have become better for realizing your error. For the rest of you still studying today and every day let the rest of us join with Nelson Muntz in saying to you, HA HA!

Blame has been a hot topic lately. From events local to my circle of friends to the presidential elections, everyone is talking about blame. Who's fault is it when there is a problem? Where should the buck stop? To be honest, I'm not sure 100% of the time. But, I have a system that I have followed for years, and it has suited me well. Not only does this system have strong logical foundations, but it makes my life a million times easier. So, I thought that since it is so relevant to what is going on today, and that I might help others live better lives, I would share my blame philosophy with you all.

My blame policy is very simple. It goes like this. If somebody has a problem with blame that needs to be placed, then that blame should be placed on the person with the problem. It is an extremely rare case when the blame should be placed on someone other than the person with the problem. And in almost all cases when blame should not be placed on the person with the problem there are third parties who notice and point it out. The only ambiguous cases are when there are no third parties who can recognize one person giving another person trouble.

Let me try to explain it from a first person stance so you can understand how correct and beneficial this line of thinking can be. The first rule is that I blame all of my problems on myself. There are only two circumstances in which I do not blame my own problems on myself. The first is if people other than myself, independent of me, recognize and point out that someone other than me is causing my problem. The other is the very rare case when another person directly causes a problem for me that is not recognized by third parties. The reason this is great for me is multi-fold. First, I am accustomed to receiving blame. Most people can't handle it when anything is their fault. They try to pass the buck at all costs. They are perfect and the world must change to fit them, who can do no wrong. I realize that everyone can do wrong, especially myself. So the best course of action for me is to take blame. By taking blame for my own problems I realize that, since my problems are my fault, they will only be fixed through my own actions. What happens very quickly is that I begin to act to correct my own problems. Any problem in life can be most easily corrected by the person who caused the problem. Based on the fact that I have very few unresolved problems in life, actually none come to mind, I can be sure that I am in fact the correct person to blame for my problems.

The second part is that I blame other peoples problems on themselves. If blaming myself for my own problems is correct, then the same is usually true for others. This allows me to not worry about other peoples problems if I do not want to. I can deflect blame if they try to pin it on me quite easily. The person who always blames their own problems on others has an even more difficult time when blame for external problems comes their way. Because they so strongly try to avoid the blame, people believe more strongly that the fault is theirs. What happens is that the blame is not placed correctly, so nobody acts to correct the issue. I, instead, appear to accept a great deal of blame that I correct. These are my own problems. And when blame incorrectly comes my way I can easily direct it to the correct location. To the person whose problem it is. And others will view it in a positive and correct light because of the amount of blame I accept. They think, "he would accept the blame if it was his fault even before we say anything, so it mustn't be his fault." Sort of a wolf crying variant.

I've mentioned it a couple times already, but let me fully explain the third parties issue. It is actually a very rare occurrence when one person causes a problem for another person. And the vast majority of cases in which this does happen, uninvolved individuals notice this and speak up. For a simple example. A bully beats up a nerd. People other than the bully and the nerd notice this happening. They also recognize the bully to be at fault. People other than the bully or the nerd independently witness and assess the situation, and they place blame correctly. Think about all the problems in the world in which blame can be placed. Uninvolved witnesses always place blame correctly. In the Iraq war, the people of the world who were not involved in any way nearly unanimously recognized the United States to be in the wrong. In a case of arson, everybody blames the arsonist. Who the arsonist is might require investigation, but nobody blames it on the president or the firemen or the police. They blame correctly, the symbolic arsonist character who has an unknown identity. When a hurricane strikes Florida people who have absolutely no involvement in the disaster do not blame mother nature. They recognize that whoever stayed there and got killed knew it was coming and it's their own fault.

There are very very few cases in which one person causes a problem for another person and third parties do not notice. Two hermits would have to get into a feud over a wild berry bush for that to happen. However, it does indeed happen. And in these cases it is up to each involved individual to place blame among themselves. When I am in this situation I usually place blame on myself. The reason for this is that if it IS my fault I am now empowered to fix it. If I place blame on myself wrongly then I will soon find that I cannot easily fix the problem and that it was not my fault. At the absolute worst I am only correctly placing blame half the time in these situations.

All tolled this leaves me placing blame incorrectly an extremely small amount of the time. The only time blame is incorrectly is no greater than half of the times when another person causes a problem for me, or me for another, and third parties do not take notice. All of my problems are fixed by me. This leaves me to lead a life of very little worry. Everything that I have wrong I fix promptly because I desire to better myself as a person. As a result I have a great deal of time to help other people's problems at my leisure. The only problem with this is that I sometimes appear as an asshole, on purpose mind you. Since I correctly blame all the problems of others on themselves they do not like it when I come to them voluntarily trying to help them solve those problems. It implies that their problems are their fault, which they do not want to accept. Usually what happens is people come to me looking for consolation and agreement that the blame is not their own. Instead I tell them exactly what they should do to fix their problem. The truth hurts. It still boggles me how people can have problems that they would rather blame on external forces than fix their problems and make a better life for themselves.

I tell fat people they are fat because they eat too much. I tell people who fail that it is their fault for not doing the work, not the teacher's fault. I tell people who get fired it is their fault for doing a bad job, because if the boss really was a bad guy then other people in the department would have noticed and said something when you got fired. All of these things make me seem like an ass. But in reality I am simply placing blame correctly. And because I place blame correctly I am able to correct all my problems. Then I voluntarily help other people correct their own problems if I desire. I firmly believe that this is one of the underlying fundamental flaws in our society that is bringing us down. Because of the incorrect place of blame there are millions of problems that go unfixed that people suffer through on a day to day basis. If only people had more personal responsibility and took care of their own problems then a lot of the bigger problems in our world would vanish.

So next time you have a problem, blame it on yourself and fix it. Next time someone else has a problem blame it on them and help them fix it. And if one person gives another person trouble, be a good witness and recognize who is truly to blame. Maybe if we change our thinking on this low level we can make the world a better place.

We all know communism doesn't work. There isn't even a debate. Take any number of laborers. Now reward all those laborers with equivalent living conditions, luxuries, etc. regardless of difficulty of labor or effort and you will have problems. Because of the way our society is structured people do work which does not directly effect their lives in any way. For example a steel mill worker. He doesn't live off the steel. His continued survival has very little to do with how good, bad or how much steel is produced. Therefore he must be rewarded with things like food and shelter in exchange for his steel making. That is the way things work. So unless you are a subsistence farmer or some such communism will not work. Simply because people will have no move to work if they are guaranteed to get an equal share no matter what. And the no matter what does not hurt them in the least.

However, we all know that communistic style communities do work on a small scale. Ten farmers all working together and sharing profits equally is a very communist scenario. And it works. It works as long as the sale of the crops from that farm is sold competetively in a capitalist marketplace. If the sale of those crops was always guaranteed to bring in the same amount the farmers wouldn't mind growing crummy crops, or fewer crops. They would make one rusty ear of corn, or no corn, and that would be that. But because the better they work the more they all get, they work harder. It is a prisoners dilemma for each and every farmer. One of them can try to go the other way and leech off the others, and that will work. The problem is that the other farmers will notice and kick your ass out. Since the group of people is so small, and they all agree to help each other "escape from prison" beforehand, they all benefit double through their help of each other.

This is how the kibbutz works. In Israel there are small communities just like this. They start a business, build homes, build schools and work together to help the community become bigger and better. Slackers are noticed and weeded out. Some of them grow oranges, but others run resort hotels or manufacture shoes. Its quite a happy existence of people working together to survive in a close knit community working together for the greater good of each other. And as long as the work they cooperate on is beneficial and profitable in the outside world, everything is great.

So I thought to myself, hey. I would love to live like that. Not have to worry about the boss or deadlines or any of that type of stuff. Just every day wake up and get to work doing something I love to do that is directly related to my continued survival and happiness. And I would be with a bunch of friends all working together making life very enjoyable. If you get right down to it, the only things missing in my life are two material goods. Those are a laptop computer and a nice car. I consider the Treo 650 to already be in my posession because I have set aside mony for it. Other than that, all I really want is to live near and around other intelligent and like minded people. People I can play video games, D+D and german board games with. People who I can discuss slashdot with on a daily basis. I want to sit at the dinner table, talk about what I did during the day, and for the other people to be interested and understanding instead of just "that's nice". Despite all the flaws, those are the things that make college the greatest place, and I see no reason to give up those things in order to continue with life.

So obviously I propose a geek commune. Like minded geeky people like myself should pick up and move to somewhere where land is cheap. We can spend half of our time developing high quality non-free software for any customer who needs it. We can use this money to feed ourselves, purchse technology, pay the bills andacquire luxuries and other fun things. In our spare time we can all work together on free/open source software that interests us and makes the world a better place. And because we will have a geographically central location we will be much more efficient and higher quality at developing said FOSS software than those who communicate solely through the internet. We can apply techniques like extreme programming and other in order to make some really awesome stuff. Also, because the people there are indirectly "paid" for their work we can maybe get some artists and musicians into the fold to make some FOSS games. It would be geek Mecca and college graduates would embark on pilgrimages to visit and join us if they are deemed (trust)worthy and useful/valuable.

We could also do awesome stuff like lock up all the buildings and caravan to conventions like Otakon and Comic-con with wireless mesh networks between our vehicles. There would be websites documenting our activities and antics for the world to share in. It would be truly a beautiful thing. There are only two obstacles in getting this thing to work. First we need stuff to start with. Difficult to come by a large block of land, a good internet connection, living space and an officy type building without starting funds. Second we have to start a profitable software business that can at least feed all of the founding members.

Barring those two difficulties I think this is the most realistic dream come true I can hope for. Anyone interested can just drop me a line and we'll talk about it. I especially want to hear from you if you can help out with either of the two problems. I can tell you right now that if I had enough initial investment and a customer/customer base, and my college degree was complete I would be out buying land in the desert as we speak.

The hot issue in gaming today is the new portable war. The game industry just loves wars. First there was Atari, it was the only choice. Then came NES, again the only choice. There was just no arguing. But when the 16 bit era began there were two, the SNES and the Genesis. Sega vs. Nintendo. The NES made a game console a staple in any family household. For children who had one it was the ultimate toy. I had plenty of other toys, but when I was a kid, the video game consoles got the most use for the most hours. It was also the most expensive if you added in all the games. And since not everyone is rich, they can usually afford to get only one. Thus, when there are multiple consoles to choose from, people must decide. Thus, wars begin.

Ever since the epic Game Boy vs. Game Gear war Nintendo has been the king of portable gaming. With Tetris, the Narsil of the handheld world, in hand there was just no stopping the Game Boy. To this day, mainly due to continued backwards compatabilty, the Game Boy has remained the only handheld system to mean squat despite serious competition.

But now Nintendo is taking a risk. The Gamecube got a false reputation as a system for little kids and suffered for it, despite being extremely profitable for Nintendo. So Nintendo got creative. While the other companies are re-hashing the same played out games year after year, Nintendo looked at Konami's phenomena of Bemani and started thinking. First they linked the GBA into the GCN for FF:CC. They made the e-reader. They made the wavebird. They made WarioWare. And now, they are making the DS. And after that the coup de grace, the revolution will be revealed. But these are untested waters. How will gamers respond to this? We'll have to wait and see.

I've posted it in various places, but this is my prediction and the reasons for it. The DS will reign. Here is why. First off, think about this. In the absolute worst situation the DS will be the next Virtual Boy. At the absolute best everybody will buy one and there will be tons of great games. And the price is pretty much gauranteed to be less than $200. Because of this, the DS will be a good investment no matter what happens. And because its a good investment, people will buy it. The PSP on the other hand might be a bad investment. Its going to be expensive, very expensive. And there is no guarantee of it being awesome. If it fails then everyone who bought it will be sitting high and dry. The DS is guaranteed to have a Zelda game, worth the price alone. The PSP is guaranteed to have GTA and Gran Turismo. Now look back in time to when the Game Boy beat the Game Gear. The reason was not hardware, Nintendo admits it. The reason was that the games that were released for the Game Boy were portable games. The same way that PC games like Quake don't do well on home systems is the same reason that console games don't translate into succesful portable games. Nintendo has always made games like Advance Wars. Truly portable games that would not work well anywhere else. The PSP is going to attempt to directly translate PS2 games to a smaller screen with fewer buttons. That wont work as history has shown. The GBA is so good that people buy Game Boy Players. They want to play their portable games on their TVs. When the PSP can manage that it can beat the DS.

Now that we have established that the DS will be such a success we can talk about the killer app. While talking in the car yesterday me and my roommate came to an epiphany. The killer app of the DS was discovered. The pieces of the puzzle were as follows: wireless, two screens, stylus, and the need for only one cartridge for 16 people to play a multiplayer game. What do these pieces make when you put them together? I'll tell you. Board games in the car. That's right. Are you tired of losing pieces to all those magnetic board games? Did your travel version of Connect 4 fall under the seat? The DS is the ultimate solution. Imagine sitting in the library and having a pick up game of Monopoly or chess. Two screens, one shows your stuff, the other screen shows the game board. The stylus makes play casual and relaxed. If the DS connects to the internet you can use it to do real gambling. You can play a few hands of hold 'em on the train ride into work for real money. You can't tell me there's no money in that. But for me and my friends the German Board games are the big ticket. We just love the purely strategic and tactical games involving lots of little wooden bits and pieces. With the DS we can finally play Puerto Rico or El Grande from the back of the van on the way to a geek convention. It's geek heaven.

So while the DS will probably capture the hearts of current GBA lovers it will also be an instant sell to geeks everywhere. All the people who hang on social networks. People who play board games and strategy games. The PSP's best hope is to get all the common folk who aren't serious gamers. But the Playstation demographic just doesn't play portable games. If they did, they would have bought GBAs. They can't expect to steal market from Nintendo. The only hope is for the market to expand, and its not likely. Especially since the DS has the killer solution to all of life's portable gaming problems. Time to go to bed. I'll see you guys next year, in a cafe. We'll have us a pick up game of Settlers.