In America, a story is told of how a valiant hero saved a fair princess from a giant evil fire-breathing dragon.

In Japan, a story is told of how a valiant hero saved a fair princess from a giant evil fire-breathing turtle.

I wanted to go out and do some volunteer work today. I never leave the house without some sort of Nintendo gadget in my pocket. But my DS was badly in need of charging, and I never bothered to repair or replace my worn-out GBA.

So I did all of today's running around and volunteering with a Game Boy Color in my pocket. Appropriate considering the volunteer work was for California Extreme, an arcade & pinball game show which includes an awful lot of old games.

If anyone's up for some retro awesomeness, I highly recommend installing ROM CHECK FAIL from www.Farbs.org. It's available for Windows & Linux but the Linux version seems a tad crash-prone.

I learned some neat things about my home, San Jose, California, when I went to read about it on Wikipedia.

1. San Jose's sister cities include, among five others, Okayama, Japan, and Dublin, capital of Ireland.
2. There is an asteroid named after San Jose.
3. The Mario Bros.' voice actor was born in San Jose. Mama mia! Hoohoo!

So I read Iwata Asks - Rhythm Heaven, and what sprang to my mind almost immediately was "Holy cow... Kazuyoshi Osawa is a lot like me". My Internet friends probably have no idea what I'm talking about, because I behave rather differently online, but take my word for it: In the meat-o-sphere, Kazuyoshi and I have a lot in common. Nervous, not very good at communication, self-conscious, strong-minded, but multi-talented and wanting to have fun with whatever we do. It strengthens my hope for my own future when I see what sorts of things Kazuyoshi has accomplished in spite of himself, and especially what sorts of people he's gotten to work with him and support him. Wouldn't you love to have a teammate who sends you pictures of kittens when you're feeling down? :-D

I'm going to have to get my own copy of Rhythm Heaven. It'll be neat to see what someone like me has done.

Speaking of multi-talented, my future as a vector graphics artist on deviantART is seeming more and more likely the more I use Inkscape. I never really enjoyed drawing using MS Paint, Multimedia Fusion, the GIMP, or meat-o-sphere products, but drawing with Inkscape is kind of... fun. Possibly because everything I draw is easily adjustable, so I can do away with any imperfections niggling at me without having to erase a lot of stuff and start over. Perhaps I was meant to be a full deviant; I've even got a clear picture of an OC sitting in my head.

One of the great bickering contests of the Internet regards the equality, or lack thereof, of the number 0.999... with the number 1. This is one of the not-so-great proofs provided by the "not equal" camp:

0.999 ≠ 1
0.9999999 ≠ 1
0.999999999999999999 ≠ 1
0.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 ≠ 1
Therefore, 0.999... ≠ 1.

( Silliness )

There was much awesomeness to be had while my family and I were in Florida from January 13 to January 19 (the 12th and the 20th were spent traveling). Here are a few of the more memorable things we saw:

( The list )

On the day we left Walt Disney World, as we rode the Disney's Magical Express bus to take us to the airport where we would board the plane for home, I reflected on how our trip had had everything that a trip to Disney parks ought to have except for Pachyderms and Baroque Hoedown. And then they played Baroque Hoedown on the bus. IN ELECTRO-SYNTHO-MAGNETIC MUSICAL SOUNDS. So, all in all, it was a fantastic trip.

Jeff Atwood, author of the Coding Horror blog, posed this interesting question in a recent post:

"Let's say, hypothetically speaking, you met someone who told you they had two children, and one of them is a girl. What are the odds that person has a boy and a girl?"

Now, Jeff isn't as powerful as Randall Munroe, but he's earned his own horde of geeks, and when they received this most fascinating question, they proceeded to bicker for literally hundreds of comments.

Jeff Atwood wrote a follow-up post that included a "proof" that the answer was 2/3rds.

I guess it's time for me to join the horde of bickering geeks.

( bicker bicker bicker )

Something I privately foresaw some time ago has, in part, come to pass.

You see, there is a very powerful man at work behind the scenes in the United States. This man has won the support of a horde of geeks, and they will carry out his every wish. He commanded that his geeks make his site one of the top Google search results for "THE ALGORITHM IS FROM JERSEY". They made it so. He commanded that his geeks be at a certain latitude and longitude at a certain time. They came. He commanded that his geeks photograph themselves naked holding a guitar in a shower. I'm not gonna link to that.

In January, he commanded that his geeks support Barack Obama.

We know what happened at the Democratic National Convention.

Like it or not, Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States. The geeks controlled by Randall Munroe will not permit any alternate result.

EDIT: And it's happened. Randall always gets what he asks of his geeks. On a completely unrelated note, this is my first modification to my blog using ScribeFire Blog Editor. We'll see how this works out.

EDIT 2: Well, there's one Firefox extension that's not worth bothering with. I'll just keep my drafts in plain text files.

It is quite possible, when dealing with the heaping pile of garbage that pseudoscientists generate, for a real scientist to lose their sense of humor. Thankfully, this happens much less often than one might think.

Watch out, this blog post and its comments have a whole school of fish puns!

*sigh* LiveJournal or Wordpress.com. No matter which one I choose, there will be reasons why I will love my choice, reasons why I will regret it, and reasons why I oughtn't care.

But you know what? LiveJournal gets my avatar right.

You can see the results of my uploading my avatar in the upper-left corner of this post. But when I uploaded my avatar to Wordpress.com, this happened. Way to fail, Wordpress.com.

Henceforth, all further geeky babbling from this dude will occur here. (Which, incidentally, is one of the reasons why I'll love my choice of LiveJournal - instead of "entries", I have "babbling"!)

The sort of geek who enjoys trying multiple operating systems to see what he likes will, of course, also try multiple blogging sites. In addition to LiveJournal, I'll also be trying Wordpress.com.

I must say, I'm pretty impressed with what I've seen here so far.