CUViper

I have twins that my parents know nothing about.

A while ago while googling my name (everyone does it), I learned that there’s a secondary character in Resident Evil 5 who is named Josh Stone.  I haven’t played the game, but I think it would be really weird to hear the dialogue using my name to refer to someone else.  Now just yesterday they announced an add-on in which he becomes a playable character.  I’m afraid if I ever play as my own eponym, the universe might explode.

I have a similar twin in the real world: my good friend Joy.  Okay, we don’t actually share names, but we do share our full initials, so it’s a very special bond.  She’s quite secretive about her middle name, but I do know that it starts with ‘I’ to match my Ian.  So now, anytime we discover a common trait, it’s declared to be a twin factor.  Differing traits are genes that we stole from each other.

I suppose we could all be called triplets, though the link between RE5-Josh and Joy is less certain — does he even have a middle name?  Anyway, here we are together, probably the most diverse triplets ever:

Of course there are others which could be added to this set, as my name is not terribly unique.  There’s a professional windsurfer in Maui who owns joshstone.com.  A few months back, a Josh Stone on Twitter starting following me and a bunch of others by our name.  Sun’s CEO is a JIS and an Ian.  Google is also quick to suggest that I meant Joss Stone when I search for my name.

So common name aside, I’ll just have to be me.

These election results are as good a reason as any to break blog silence — congratulations to our President-elect, Barack Obama!  And while I’m sad about California’s current results on Prop 8, overall I feel much more optimistic about our immediate future.

Obama is not the messiah, and he doesn’t have a magic wand to solve all of our problems, but he has inspired me and so many others in a way I’ve not experienced before.  I hope to see great things in the next four years…

I finally watched An Inconvenient Truth this weekend, and it was definitely eye-opening. I was annoyed a little by Gore tooting his own horn — the election scandal was especially off-topic — but the message is still powerful. While I generally understood and believed already that global warming is an issue, I didn’t know the raw scale of it. So now that I’ve received the warning, I’ll start watching for ways that my own habits can be improved, and I encourage others to do the same.

On another side of humans deteriorating our own condition, we have Musharraf declaring emergency rule in Pakistan. I remember seeing him as a guest on The Daily Show, and he seemed like a genuinely nice guy. He has the charisma that makes for a powerful leader, which makes his current actions even more frightening. People will genuinely believe in him and his justifications for extreme actions, much more than the puppet show that our own administration puts on. I hope for Pakistanis that this can be resolved peacefully, but it’s hard to see how when he has already defied diplomatic efforts.

It’s funny — I’m still one of many young adults who get their primary news from Comedy Central, but I’m developing an interest in politics and world affairs that used to bore me. Maybe this is just part of getting older…

So it had to happen sometime, living in California and all, but Millie and I just experienced our first earthquake!  That was apparently a “moderate” quake at a magnitude of 5.6 — it was definitely enough that I knew what was happening. It’s a funny feeling, for sure, but we’re fine.  The house rattled around a bit, and the ground felt “wavy,” but nothing broke.  Just thought I’d post a note in case family/friends are wondering…

One of my favorite authors, Robert Jordan, passed away yesterday.  I don’t even know how to express this loss, except to say that I’m very sorry I never got the chance to meet him.  May he rest in peace with the knowledge that he has touched many lives…

I love xkcd for the funny-because-it’s-true look at the way some people think. He might just be the nerdy-webcomic equivalent of Jeff Foxworthy.

I thought of my own quip the other day along those lines. I won’t attempt to make it into a comic — not even with stick figures — but here’s the gist of it:

When you’re out with your friends (say N people in the group) and someone proposes a toast, do you ever watch to see if there are N*(N-1)/2 unique glass clinks?

Ok, I’ve never actually counted as it happens, but I have wondered before…

When I moved my blog a while back, I tried to give an explanation of how to use RSS to better keep track of blogs and other websites. But like many things, I think my explanation did little for people who don’t already have some idea about what RSS is. My mom’s reaction was simple: “Huh?”

So if you still don’t get it, check out this video, which (I think) does a great job of putting it in simple terms: Video: RSS in Plain English

The irony, of course, is that I don’t really end up spending any less time on the internet now that I use an RSS reader. The difference is that I can cover a lot more area in that time by letting it come to me. Just try it for a few days, and you’ll see how powerful it really is.

As suggested in the video, I use Google Reader for my feeds. (Clever Google — they’re trapping me in their services more and more…) I like that I can “star” items, which I use to track things that I want to read more or follow up on later. I can also share items that I think are cool, which ends up on my own link blog. And if you just added that page to your bookmarks, you’re missing the point — there’s a feed for it too!

Some food for thought: The Denver Blizzard

Of course, I don’t live in Colorado anymore, but I still consider myself a Coloradan. People around the Bay Area are freaking out that the overnight temperatures are dipping below freezing – OMG! News sources are having a field day with how to protect from the cold, even telling people how to keep their pipes from freezing. Give me a break…

The internets are all a-buzz with chatter about the iPhone (this one, not those) so I thought I should throw in my 2¢. And then I realized that I’d need $498.98 more to actually get my hands on one, plus a 2-year contract. I find it ironic that people were so up-in-arms about the price of the PS3 — which ironically has the exact same pricing tiers — but a cellphone seems somehow reasonable at that price. I like my phone just fine, and a 2-year contract got mine and Millie’s for free. So while Apple’s new toy does look cool, I’ll be passing on it, thank you very much. I hope I don’t lose geek-cred for saying that though…

My blog has moved — its new home is http://blog.cuviper.com/. Of course, if you’re reading this, then you’ve already found it. Anyone who can’t find it, just let me know… Actually, those of you who use a feed-reader instead of probably won’t notice, assuming my redirects work properly. You might want to update your feed subscription though.

The move is mostly inspired by me being lazy. I used to have the blog on my own hosting account at AxisInternet, which worked great. WordPress keeps coming out with new versions though — it’s good to get new features and bug fixes, of course, and the upgrades have all gone smoothly, but it’s still a nuisance. So, I transferred my blog to the official wordpress.com site (with some DNS magic so you still see it on cuviper.com), and now they can update it for me.

Hosting WordPress on your own is good if you want to do a lot of customization, but I’m not really doing anything special. The new site is almost exactly the same as before. The only loss is to the people who subscribed to email updates before, and I’ll send a note to those on how to get updates now.

If you read this far, you are now rewarded with our Christmas pics. Bombs away!

Update: After writing up directions of the various ways to easily track new content on websites, I decided I might as well copy that here. When a site gives you a feed URL, here are some things you can do with it:

1. If you use a custom homepage like Google or Yahoo, they usually let you add feeds to see updates. Look for a place to add content by URL and copy in my feed link.
2. When you have a lot of sites you want to keep track of, an aggregator can come in handy — this is what I use to read all my websites. There are programs you can download to manage this, or you can use a website like Bloglines or Google Reader. Basically, you get all of your websites collected into one page for you to read, so you don’t have to go all over the place looking for updates.
3. If you really like getting email updates, you can do that too. There are several sites that can translate RSS feeds to email for you. RssFwd looks pretty good, or you could try R-mail or FeedBlitz.

For any of those, all you’ll need is my feed address: http://blog.cuviper.com/feed/

Enjoy!

I’ve always wondered…

You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 70% Superman 70% Green Lantern 65% The Flash 65% Iron Man 60% Robin 55% Catwoman 40% Hulk 40% Wonder Woman 30% Supergirl 30% Batman 20%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

Spider-Man and Superman — I guess that makes me quite the goody-goody.

Tests like this are interesting, but not because of anything they reveal to yourself. Most of the time you’ll feel quite pleased with the result — since you provided the answers, of course it will align with your self-image. It’s more revealing for others as a way to see through your eyes in the mirror.

It might be a cool social experiment to flip it around — I tend to be curious about the way others see me. For example, if someone else found that I closely resemble the Hulk, that might indicate some areas for personal improvement. Anyone want to fill out the same quiz about me and let me know your result?