Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas Everybody! Today has been a super spectacular day. It's just been great to hang out with my family, and just have a good time. I really love my family, they're amazing.

So, what'd I give this year? The coolest stuff ever. I havent ever really given gifts in the past, but this year I gave them to all my family, and it was way cooler than all those other times I was lame and didn't. I got my dad some swedish fire steel, which is some souped up flint 'n steel. I figure since he's the scout master it'll come in handy. For my mom, I got her the one thing I could find that had an attitude as great as her's, the 2006 demotivators Calendar. It's hilarious.

For my lovely sister Stephanie, I got a super cool si-link fm transmitter. The cd player in her car doesn't work, and she really wanted one. Since that was out of my economic range, and since I couldnt purchase it from the comfort of my office chair, I got her the next best thing. Its a pretty cool doo-hickey. You plug it into the headphone jack of a portable CD player, and it'll broadcast whatever is coming out of the cd player on a short range FM frequency. You just tune your car radio to whatever frequency it's one, and you can listen, it's amazing!

Nathan got my favorite gift, Silly Putty on 'Roids. I was very tempted to keep it for myself and just give Nathan money. I was a bad person, and I totally played with it all night on friday cause he was gone. It's the most amazing stuff. Sure, it's 12 dollars of silly putty, but it's worth every cent.

Andrew got a Google T-shirt. Google is Andrew's one true love. He has a thing for google. In his own words. "I would pay them to let me be their janitor, I just want to be able to say I work for them!"

If you havent noticed, i did all my shopping online. Hooray! I like getting stuff for people, it's good times.

My Christmas haul was rather good this year. I got a super nice new frisbee, tons of shirts. The problem with the shirts is that they're not T-shirts, which leaves me in a predicament. All my life my wardrobe has consisted of jeans and a t-shirt. Now I'm going to have to learn how to wear something that isn't a T-shirt. My mom is trying to break me out of my ultra-conservative shell, and that's a dangerous thing to do. Nathan got me and Andrew a combined gift of the 5th season of simpsons. That's quality right there. Michael sent me a super amazing gift, I'll post pictures as soon as I can.

Well, That's my writeup. It's been a super great day. Now, as promised, here's a little something for you. It's not much, but it's all I can do from my desk. Here is a bunch of crap that I've found to be extremely useful on the internet. The internet is a great tool, here's what I've found thats good.

Weather Forecast: This is the weather forecast for SLC and the surrounding area. it's generally way accurate, and just a good thing to know. How warm is it gonna be on tuesday? Just check online tubby.

Google News: Google's news service, it searches thousands and thousands of news sources, and shows you the most popular/best ones. it's a great way to keep up with the world. Don't be kept in ignorance, read the news.

Dollar Theater: These are the listings for the dollar theater, updated every Friday. "Hey, whats in the dollar theater?" Go here, it'll tell you. Its got links to reviews too, so you know if something sucks or not.

Dictionary.com: If you ever talk to Hope, 80% of the things she asks you have to do with vocabulary words. Fear not, dictionary.com will help. It defines everything for you, it's great.

Google: Find it, with google. If any of you are ever using another search engine I will have to smite you. Google is the best. Hands down. Google is superior. Use it.

Wikipedia: The best online encyclopedia ever. Need to know something about something? Wikipedia has the answer, just go search it.

Nick's blog

Marissa's blog

UPA: The Ultimate Players Association, the governing body of Ultimate in the United States. They're the guys in charge of the mad action frisbee I love.

Firefox: Most of you are using internet explorer. This needs to stop now. Firefox is better in nearly every aspect. Not to mention, its open source, which is just cool. No, it's not going to blow your computer up james. Sure, your parents aren't gonna let you download it, but it's superior, so try to get it. Everybody else, at least go take a look at it. I'm looking at you Nick. Get firefox, it's amazing. Its a web browser, kicks butt. Yeah.

Folding@Home: This is a scientific project. Here's what happens. Some guys at stanford are trying to figure out how proteins fold. See, proteins do everything in our body, but in order to do the things they do they have to "assemble" themselves into certain shapes to do it. They call this folding. Protein mis-folding leads to many diseases, including some cancers, huntingtons, parkinsons, and even madcow disease. So, these stanford folks are simulating this folding to figure out how it works. Unfortunately, this stuff happens really really quick, microsecond quick. Its nearly impossible to simulate that on even the fast super computer. You couldn't even do it on a cluster of supercomputers. So, what's the solution? It's called distributed computing. You let people like me and you install and run a little application on their home computer. That app connects to their server, gets a "Work unit" and folds it. This generally takes about a day. once its finished, it sends it back, and you get another one. That alone is kinda slow, but when you get millions and millions of people running their application, you can move mountains of data. I've been running it for a while, and it really is just amazing. It makes me feel like im not such a lazy loser. I can say "Hey, while I took a nap my computer moved the world 1 step closer to understanding protein folding." This application does not harm your computer at all. It runs continuously in the background, using all your idle processing time. I have never had any problems whatsoever with this program. I can play counter strike just fine with it running, i can edit videos just fine when I'm running it. It's a great thing to do, and I'd like nothing more than for all of you to run it. If anybody is interested talk to me, cause its way awesome.

I believe that that is it. Was that a worthless present? Yes, but at least now you know what the weather is gonna be like. Merry Christmas everybody, I hope you've all had a wonderful holiday. I'm really looking forward to spending this week lounging about, and taking it easy. Have a great one everybody, Toodles~