Another weekend.. and another Sunspot filled Saturday night. Sunspot played at The Mad Planet in Milwaukee, WI with The Buskers and Fly Neurotic. It was a great show, and an excellent night. I should have some pictures from these last 2 weekends in a few days, I'll flickr them and add them up here as well.

For those of you (I think there's only one) that are following my attempt at minimizing my energy use.. last month's energy bill put me at another $30 month. I've been almost spot-on $30 since I've moved into my new apartment in June. This last bill is still slightly skewed though. It includes the cost of running the air-conditioning solely to dehumidify things after my dishwasher flooded my apartment. I tried to reduce usage in other areas to balance things out, so I'm sure that next month (as long as I can avoid any freak accidents) I can lower it a bit more.

The facebook app is still in the unstarted stage. I may have to push out the beta testing timeline by another Sunday. I've begun setting things up so the programming will go as smoothly as possible.. but there still isn't a single line of code in this project.

Non-update related - if anyone knows of a decent and free Flash authoring tool, please tell me. I'm having zero luck finding anything free and usable, and I have a few projects that I'd like to start on that I need to use flash for.

Friday afternoon I started to get a bit.. bored. For some reason I decided to cope with that by writing a sudoku solver in javascript. The logic is pretty minimalistic, so it won't solve the difficult sudoku puzzles, but for you normal "in the comics section of the newspaper" puzzles, it should nail the majority of them.

You can copy the html below if you want to include it on your webpage/blog/whatever for some reason:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://sparxmind.com/sudoku.js"></script><noscript><a href="http://sparxmind.com/2007/09/16/javascript-sudoku-solver/">Javascript Sudoku Solver</a></noscript>

Copy Cat

i can has best fwend?

Dude… Wait, what?

Halp! am not 4 kocoa!

The facebook application.. I'm kind of excited by the potential of it. I also realize that it could flop incredibly, and that I have to be able to cope with that. I want to do it right, obviously, so it has the greatest potential of success, but I'm not sure right now how exactly I'd even measure its success.

Right now I'm getting caught up in the planning. There's a lot that needs to be figured out, and I just realized yesterday that I seem to have started planning from the wrong end. I'm focusing too much on things that don't need to be figured out until quite a bit further down the development path. Hell, I haven't even started programming the darn thing yet, and I'm trying to think up a logo design and things like that.

I might as well at least give a glimpse at the direction this thing is going.. a brief glimpse. It has something to do with the superpower post earlier, and hopefully it'll spread faster than that annoying zombie facebook app that everyone seems to keep trying to spread to me.

I'll be completely honest - I hardly ever use facebook. The only reason I'm doing this is because it's a captive market, and it gives this app a chance to spread almost virally. Basically, it seems like the most effective way to borrow the eyes of a lot of people. For financial gain. There, I said it. I'm doing it in hopes of bringing in a profit.

I hope to have a basic version up and testable by Sunday, Sept. 23. If you're willing to be a tester, and won't get upset by unexpected delays, leave a comment and I'll keep you in mind when it gets to that point. Thanks.

Last night I was laying down tubing for a radiant basement floor.. until almost 11pm. The basement floor is being poured today, so it needed to get finished, and I had volunteered to help. It wasn't bad, just time consuming. It also gave me a lot of time to think and ponder things, as if I didn't already do that enough.

Stars. Wow. It's been forever since I've just stared up at the sky and tried to find meaning in all those bright points of light. The sky was perfectly clear, it was dark.. it was perfect, very calming. I'm really tempted to try to start up a grassroots movement to fight the light pollution around here. There's just way too much light at night to enjoy the night as much as I could.. seeing the glow on the horizon from neighboring cities at 11pm is not what I want.

Anyway, back to the stars - it's amazing how insignificant you can begin to feel when you start to contemplate the totality of everything that exists. Those stars are farther away than I can comprehend. They're bigger than I can even imagine. And there's so much more out there besides them. Here we are, on this little spinning rock, less than a speck of dust in the grand scheme of things. It could all end right now.. fwoosh.. and we wouldn't have any idea, and it wouldn't really affect anything else.

We're only important because we perceive ourselves as being important… but really, that's all that matters. I think it's important that every so often we stop and look at the big picture.. the one where we're hardly noticeable, if even at all.. otherwise we start to take things way too seriously, and get too caught up in ourselves and our daily lives that we forget to have fun and enjoy the things and people around us.

Cold. Bleh. It was like 50 degrees (Fahrenheit) last night. Brrr. I had to put on a jacket. It's way too early in the year to be putting on a jacket. I feel like I've failed in some sense just because I had to do it and couldn't hold out for a few more weeks.

Mosquitoes. It's too cold for them! Why are they still out?! I had to cover myself with mosquito repellent last night to the point where the smell was almost making me nauseous. It worked though. The little buggers were hovering around me trying to penetrate my anti-them forcefield. There were tons, it was disgusting. At one point there were so many around me, that it felt like I had a buzzing blood-sucking aura.

They also seemed to be grouped together in areas like those little gnats that just hover in a big pack. I decided to play a little game with those ones - I sprayed my hand and arm a bit more just for good measure, and them slowly stuck my hand into the middle of the pack. It was strangely satisfying to watch them diverge from me, rather than trying to give me west nile virus. At the time, it felt like I was getting some sort of revenge against them for all of humanity, making them suffer maybe just a little bit. Tempting and repelling them both at the same time. If we're such a small part of the universe, imagine where they fit in in the grand scheme of things.. and then laugh at them.. and then itch one of the million bites that they've managed to get in in the last few weeks.

How did this turn into a "mosquitoes suck" post? Oh well. It's done now.

I'm not a republican.. never considered any republican candidate appealing.. and never thought I would. But I continue to be impressed by Ron Paul. His views are radical compared to the rest of the republican party, and strike are relatively harmonic with my own. And, here's the kicker, you can tell that he's in the election because he thinks he can make a difference for the better, not because he wants people to call him "Mr. President." If you have some time, I'd suggest searching for him on youtube and checking out some of his debate footage. Ron Paul 2008 / Ron Paul (wikipedia article)

China promises safe toys for Christmas. It's about time.. I need to get a new handbag accessory for my barbie.. I mean.. umm, I need more Hot Wheels cars.. and do NOT want to get lead poisoning (I've got a mug that'll do that job for me already.)

Also, some of you may or may not have heard something about me starting an incredibly ridiculous new facebook app. This may or may not be true. Ok.. it is. But it's still in the pre-planning "we haven't done anything yet" stage, which means the idea could completely vanish as if it never existed. But we'll see. Or rather we MAY OR MAY NOT see. Maybe. Enough uncertainty?

lyg

Walgreens has a coupon on their website for a free printer cartridge refill. It's not good for Canon or Epson cartridges though. But for everyone else, if you're running low on ink this might be a good chance to save a few bills.

Click here for the coupon.