Randox

As I understand it, there are two main ways to reset the body clock. The first is to use melatonin to regulate the circadian rhythm, with the aim being that your body will want to be awake and asleep at appropriate times. The other is to take advantage of a survival mechanism, and simply not eat anything for 16 hours before you want to be waking up (and then you do have to eat once that wake up time rolls around). This tells your body when the good hunting hours are, and your body wants to be awake for that, because it likes getting food. For best results, particularly if you've not been eating anything when you wake up (or have been, but you are getting up late so breakfast is at 10am now), you might want to do both, gets the body all right on queue.

Nah, I don't even own the game. I was thinking of two examples. The first is that you can smoke weed while watching TV, which is at the very least extremely casual and consequence free so far as I can see. It also makes you say funny things. The other is a 'Bad Trip' mission where you get a mini gun and shoot aliens. While not depicted as fun for the character, I would conjecture that barring prior experience with a bad trip, that looks pretty fun. That said, assuming the game is being played by people who meet the criteria for an M game, I would think that the players have probably already made their choice on where they stand with smoking weed, and GTA 5 isn't going to change their mind. That's the point of the rating in many respects, to keep certain material away from more impressionable minds. Still, perhaps glorifying is not the right way to describe it, in the same sense that the consequences of drinking in GTA 4 are sort of hilarious, if not motion sickness inducing.

I can see a point to it for certain age groups, since the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy is not an ability people are born with, it develops later in life. That could be a legitimate problem in some cases I think. On the other hand, I know that past that point, there is also research which suggest that perhaps it acts as a pressure relief, that because humans are inherently lazy (not wasting energy is a crucial step in your species continued existence), reality escapes can satisfy the urges of people who would otherwise have to deal with their desires by breaking the law. It does seem to roll both ways though. An example in the other direction is that it's been shown that, for males, playing a racing game and then getting in a real car makes you an objectively worse driver, who is now sort of driving like they are still in a racing game. It's not a clear cut issue. GTA 5 was enough to make me go back and check exactly what the M rating meant (I was apparently thinking Teen). I'm actually still surprised that a game that glorifies weed (and it totally does) managed to score only an M.

Keep in mind that the human brain has a gigantic blind spot for brand loyalty, in that your own possessions are automatically seen as superior (and this does include the brands we buy from), despite any evidence to the contrary. It's a fairly well documented and proven phenomenon. My point being, it's an argument in which everyone who has ever used a computer has a personal bias that is immune to argumentation, it will always circle back to 'yeah, but my chosen brand is the best'. Just throwing that out there :P I have decided that having a more comfortable bed makes it markedly more difficult to actually get out of said bed in the morning, especially now that the nights are getting cool. It is truly a case of 'at no point today will I be this comfortable, so I really want to stay here and enjoy this as long as I possibly can'. I think I am enjoying my class schedule though, it starts and ends on computers and english, with maths in the center. It's not a bad way to ease yourself into the day, and sort of relax at the end.

This is one I do agree with, something that does bug me, both when people use it to self identify, and when people use it to label others. The only people who have any claim to the title of American or Canadian as an ethnicity are the Native Americans. They are the only people who have been here long enough to have become truly distinct from their ethnic origins. I see the labels only as a way to artificially widen the cultural ethnic gap even further, only serve to create division. I should also clarify that I have no issues with people who bring their culture with them. It's just, I always thought the idea was that Canadian culture was supposed to be an amalgamation. Their customs should become integrated into ours, and the end product be something unique. Instead, it's many cultures with defined borders. Some people embrace and try things out, and others fight to defend their culture, to prevent the foreign influences. The labels, to me, only serve to highlight a culture as something that people need to defend against. I don't see why our culture should be defined in terms of other cultures, why it simply can't be Canadian (or American).

Note that the population of these boards is mostly gamers, and a few programmers :P Because it's a perfect excuse, some comics for general enjoyment: But in all seriousness, use whatever makes you happy.

That's fair Giordano. Come to think of it, I wouldn't say no to the local highways. Actually, this prompted me to take a look at them, and our road designations being fantastically crazy (most of the major roads are apparently trunk and collector highways pretending to be normal roads under other names). Also, got a memory foam cover for my bed. It's pretty awesome. Deeper than the one I had for my bed at home, which is a nice bonus.

Just watching the first bit of the video there, and I actually recognized that part immediately, being about where I left off watching mine (which was supposed to start at 7:26, when the game tells him to hide and he shuts himself in a wardrobe for a couple minutes). I think it's a fair point, that most people's introduction is someone playing it up a bit, which can be a bit of a shame. Perhaps I am lucky that I didn't bother to think diction was playing that up (since as near as I can tell, he is legitimately bad with scary games, much like myself). No offence, but an I-15 sign seems kind of boring, unless there is a pop culture reference I am missing? Ragged Ass Road is always a nice choice (Yellowknife), which I have a nice duplicate of knocking around. The real metal ones are a bit heavy though, so I just have some plastic ones up on the wall. I have the Nene (Hawaii), Polar Bear (Canada), and Wombat (Australia?) crossing signs up right now. I'm not sure where all the metal ones are right now. I also wouldn't mind having one of the "Warning: Flying Rocks" signs. I don't think any of mine are stolen though.

Found a new game that I will not be buying. Amnesia: Descent into Darkness is a really awesome game, and it's ridiculously scary. The closest I have come to that are the Deadspace games, and in deadspace backing into a corner and panic firing your machine gun is always an option. Amnesia has no weapons at all, which added to the extraordinary job they did on the atmosphere, must make it pretty freaky to play. So far, what I have seen hasn't had many enemies, though I did like this part: http://youtu.be/EseOdcgxVpg That might be special, because unlike every other video and lets play I found, this guy actually immerses himself in the game, and he's really being scared. Makes it a lot more fun to watch as well; it sort of rubs off on the viewer I think. Especially if you do as he says and watch it in the dark with headphones on (how he plays the game). I'll also throw in the EatMyDiction video that prompted me to look for the lets play: [hide] http://youtu.be/02oPn7DXTuA [/hide] Anyway, I've been watching that for the bulk of the day seeing as I was up late last night, and up late today.

So it looks like my computer class is just a group of 3 in the labs. Fine by me in all honesty. Also, looks like we are rotating jobs so that we all learn to use the program, which is fair, though it's kind of boring being the person whose job is to sit there and look busy. I'm just waiting for us to get through all the tutorials so we can go on to the projects, which should be a lot more fun and engaging. Other than that, enjoying our rain and wind storm, and the 70% humidity ensuring that you are either too warm or too cold, but always moist. I'm pretty sure I saw someone walking around in a bathing suit under some sort of knit tank top.

I feel like, if you aren't supposed to do loops, you shouldn't be getting asked to do anything that would usually require them. I get to do my second lab for gaming today. I wonder if our fourth person will show up, and exactly what he will be doing to contribute. Three people is already enough that we could designate someone to spin around in their chair the whole time and we collectively wouldn't notice. Ah well, I pretty much got myself designated as the leader, meaning I get to use the computer. Beyond that, I don't really care because I will get contribution marks, and I will be entertained during each lab.

I've tracked down some of my first posts, and had to resist the urge to delete some of them. They are a testament to the fact that I would not get along with a younger version of myself, but also I suppose, that people do grow up. I wonder what the me that first joined the boards would think of the me making this post. Would I like or hate my future? Would I even believe that I was my future? Did something a bit different last night. Listened to a podcast but out by David Wong and Jack O'Brien, Senior Editor and Editor in Chief of Cracked. It's a fairly big departure from their normal content I thought, very much a medium for them to talk seriously on the side, when they aren't writing fart jokes. Titled as "Why People Born after 1995 can't understand '1984'". I thought it was an interesting listen, to get a more indepth runthrough of the cultural shift that I missed much of.

What facebook do you use and what happened to the real one?

Err yeah, wrong Century. Had my first computer lab for my animated/game design course today. Using Scratch, which actually seems like a decent idea since the course focuses entirely on the game design elements, not programming. What makes less sense if having us in groups. It's not really a group work sort of thing, it's not like you can even work on it separately and come back like you could do with a larger computer program. That said, it's a first year course, and I could see the group work being more important to a group of first years perhaps just because anyone with programming experience has an immediate conceptual advantage. It should work out alright though, and I think I am going to toy around with the program in my spare time if I can.

Got through about half of Frankenstein today. Not as much as I needed to, but it will have to do. I like the part where the book has barely a passing resemblance to what I was led to believe was the plot (what little I have seen of the movie adaptations). I also can't tell if the book is not nearly as short as I thought, or if the 1930's english is causing me to slow down that much. If I have the time, I sort of want to finish it, but I also feel like it's going to get major depressing really fast and I'm really tired of every book I read for school being about people dying or being ostracized.

Last night I was playing around with trying to encourage my CPU to run a bit faster to get through the physics for Kerbal Space Program. I still haven't figured out anyway to force it into turbo mode, though I did observe that it's perfectly happy to run cores a little over 3GHz from time to time without bothering to kill any of the others (hex core at 2.9, turbo should be tri core at 3.4). It's also interesting to note that this is occurring with no core ever going above about 90%, suggesting that the computer should have processing to spare, and given that the cpu is doing the physics, it is the bottleneck here, you shouldn't have a stuttering frame rate and the game time slowing down so the computer has more time to do math. I still can't get the CPU to use it's turbo mode, where it drops 3 cores and ramps the other to 3.4GHz, but using AMD overdrive I can get all the processors at 2.9 (presumably, turbo could still activate I assume, especially since you can see some of the cores switching to a higher voltage for a moment). The effect is magical though, and the program runs exactly how you would expect a program not using the full power of the computer to run. Perfectly smooth and consistent frame rate, game time is real time, and everything is rainbows. So I'm a little dismayed that the process of moving threads around and needing to change the clock multipliers on the cores seems to have some horrific performance impacts, and that the computer doesn't seem to be capable of recognizing that it's dropping the ball. Of course, I suppose if no core maxes, and the program doesn't yell at the CPU for being slow, from what it sees, everything is fine. That said, if you set the game to run on one core, it maxes out and still nothing happens. Maybe it's waiting for a sign from God, I'm not sure. I'm also less than impressed with the GPU's ability to communicate it's status. It reports it's clock and temperature and fan speed, but it seems to be a total flake on processor load. I'm going to take a stab in the dark that if the clocks are both at maximum and the temperature is going up, the GPU load is probably not 0%. Pretty much it only reports load when it's not important, generally in the 15% to 60% range.

So I've gotten back into this, well into 0.21, now using the Lazor Docking cam mod, and probably soon to be using Kerbal Engineer as well. It turns out I still have some residual talent for rondevouz once I got through the first one, and with the docking cam, I can dock in IVA mode, though if I go in too soon I will use more fuel I think. I am also using the Kethane mod, because it gives me something to do. I already tried a small mining operation, but I need to send in a new mining vehicle as the last one cleverly didn't have a refinery, and I don't feel like using the orbital refinery station as a rescue craft again. Sadly, the Miner did not survive re entry either, and lost me 3 Kerbals, including Bill I think. It was too heavy and ran out of fuel on the way down, and when the parachutes opened all the way it tore the entire ship apart. Some modifications might be made in the future to this, but that ship had never really been intended for anything but low-g landings, and it was designed under the assumption it would still have working engines during the entire process, so a new one is in the works with landing lights and a small emergency refinery, and possibly a slightly larger Kethane capacity. What I am really working on though is a flight to Duna. I've tried this in the past, and gotten intercepts, but the protractor mod kept crashing me so I've never completed this. The plan is to send a specialized Kethane refining station and Kethane Miner out to Duna, and relocate to Ike (or stop there on the way in) to start the Kethane mining operation. A second interplanetary craft will be sent carrying a space plane for deployment on Duna. The Kethane mod includes the Kethane turbine, a jet engine capable of operating in extraterrestrial atmospheres, and I want to try it. If the plane is unable to escape on the rockets I will be providing it, I think I can rig the Miner so that it will be guaranteed to be able to escape from the Duna surface assuming it can land in the first place. Anyway, this is the second generation Station, a redesigned version of the orbital Hub I have over Kerbin which includes a better docking port selection (including an in-axist senior port which among other things, means the station can both be towed and act as a tugboat) and a greater crew capacity, as well as the Kethane refining equipment. It's a fairly capable ship in it's own right, and htis was taken just after it chased the nearly empty mining rig so they could dock. I've also been having a lot of fun with my cargo lifting rockets. Kethane tanks are empty on launch, so the Miner was actually really light for lifting, but I used the heavy lifter becuase I was headed strait to Minimus. I still had the 6 boosters when I started the second phase of the orbital burn (once you are at altitude, you finish getting orbital velocity). Without thinking, I put the hammer down on the engines, and the craft made it all the way to 8+ g-force acceleration before it folded from the strain and turned into a pants soiling inferno. The command pod managed to survive, so I have this picture before I decided to try that again. As near as I could figure out, the boosters broke free from the main engine fuel tanks (which is usually the case for this design, the boosters have an astronomical TWR when nearly empty compared to the main engine which still has a full tank plus the payload holding it back). It looks like the boosters ran out of fuel right as the ship broke apart since the 4 survivors are so close together. The other two booster collided with the central stack, at least of which actually shot into the mining rig itself blowing up everything below the command pod, which has a higher impact tolerance.

Starting to enjoy having the philosophy types as roommates. Had a...4 and half hour conversation with one of my house mates on pretty much everything through North American politics and political systems in general, every awesome book series I have ever read, and a few I need to read apparently, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Definitely one of the more interesting conversations I have ever had in my life, as well as one of the longest uninterrupted ones. Theres another philosophy student as well in the house right now, so I see some interesting and very long and conversations in our futures this year. Also got introduced to the America's Cup (sailing), and I'm in love with the design of those boats (Hydrofoiling Catamarans which can sail faster than the wind both into and out of it). Just absolutely magnificent feats of engineering, and probably a good dose of crazy.

I'd like to second this actually. Whether that ultimately works or not, major props for some outside the box thinking.

Loving/hating the rain right now. Actually got ambushed by it last night, thought it had stopped for the day. In reality it has just been pooling itself in the sky so that when it started up again is was less 'rain' and more 'solid sheet of water'. At least the rain is still kind of warm. It's been doing mostly the same thing today, continually easing off only snap back to turning the area into one big outdoor shower. Had to pick something up from the store in an area where I guess the road slope is a little wonky, and the storm drain seems to be having trouble coping. You don't normally see cars here pretty much up to their bumpers getting through a puddle. I've only ever seen it one other time where another road has a big depression, and the Pathfinder hit the water (at speed) with it's bumper, while my Dad was driving. That moment as the 10 ft wave of water forms in front of you and then comes crashing down. Was a bit scary at the time since it was totally blinding, but it did look pretty awesome. Driving through puddles is fun (or maybe it's because I was a puddle jumper as a kid?).

Today I am pleased to announce some changes to the structure of our moderation team here at tip.it, changes intended to more clearly define roles and expectations, as well as working to increase the speed at which the moderation team can respond to particular issues. Perhaps the largest change for us, publicly and internally, is the addition of a Moderator Leader. The Moderator Leader will take on a more active leadership role within the team, as well as participating in some of the administration duties, and acting as a sort of relief supervisor when the administration is not available. Supporting this change are the Senior Moderators, the former Super Moderators who are also now being officially tasked with a leadership role within the team, including assisting the Moderator Leader and Administration with running any public projects the moderation team takes on. This also includes responsibilities for training new moderators. The Board and Global moderator positions are being merged into the Moderator position. We train our moderators to be able to function in any part of our forums, and having moderators with more limited areas of power was serving only to create delays. The Board Moderator type role, limited areas of power, is being retained for use in the training of new moderators, as a transition between a trainee and full moderator until people become comfortable with the moderator role. As part of this reorganization, I also have three promotions to announce. First and Second, it gives me great pleasure to promote both @Stev and to the position of Moderator. They have been doing a fantastic job as Board Moderators, and I'm sure will continue to do excellent work now that they can moderate anywhere. Third, I am pleased to announce that @Kimberly will be our first ever Moderator Leader, and has been of great assistance working out what kind of changes the moderation team needs. Congratulations to Stev, Jeremy, and Kim on their new positions, and a big thankyou to the entire moderation team for all their great work.

This is where you want to be bigger than all your housemates. Cleaning is less optional when they ultimately can't argue with them. I think that's how my brother made his friends do it when he lived here. We just rebuilt our shower (well, it's in the process) in which the tiles werent properly spaced, and thus not all of them had grout sealing them against water. The result, aside from accumulating damage and potential health issues behind the walls, is that the shower gets moldy way faster (as does the ceiling), compounded by the lack of natural ventilation in the room (no windows). Javex is pretty awesome (I use tilex on it mostly). What I will say, is sooner rather than later. Silicone is the worst, there is very little you can do for it except replace it. Grout stains as well, and at some point it will never come clean, and that's a much larger problem. You can kill it well enough, but visually, it will always be there. So as much as it's going to suck being the guy who has to do it, they obviously don't care, and sooner is much better for you. Also, Dishwashers are awesome.

Did go to the zipline course this week, though it's as much agility as anything else. All in all, I got easily a couple weeks worth of exercise out of it, and a few bruises. We also made the classic mistake of warming up on easy courses, which of course means your arms are ready to fall off by the time you get to the fun stuff. Want to go back, but I need to get some rock climbing in first to build back the arm and hand muscles. They have one track that is more personal gratification, or bragging rights, than anything else, and aside from being ridiculously challenging, is also designed as a test of endurance (my cousin managed to get through it somehow, where I only got part way). It's also the only course without at least one zipline. Probably the most fun I have had all summer, and it wasn't too busy, so there wasn't a lot of waiting on people (most of the waiting was welcome anyway, to give us a chance to rest).

I looked it up, and the game seems to use three different damage formulas. It is good to know that generally, ice does the most damage, then fire, then lightning (as I said, backwards), but now that I've seen it, they don't list damage because it's not really that important. I'd still prefer that it was all listed, but it doesn't look like the game will pull a Diablo 2 where abilities become entirely useless at higher levels. The concept that I am having trouble wrapping my head around is how mage combat is supposed to flow. The spells are often more useful in a tactical role than as damage buffs (you have a base magical attack, if you are holding a staff), though some are just damage. I'm not used to that flow, more of a fire everything as fast as you can. The one that is a bit of a pain for me are the specializations. It's awesome if you play through the game a lot, since unlocks carry over. But the first time through, the unlocks are either extremely expensive, or mid to late game depending on if you read ahead a bit (I just looked to see which main quest lines I would need to do). I want to gain the ability to use armour easily (I forget the name, it allows you to use magic as your strength stat), and spirit healer (which can only be bought) because they have much better healing magic (like group heal). Still loving the game though, particularly the story. They got good writing, voice talent, and music, and it really adds some depth to it as well.

I've played a bit of Dragon Age now. I might yet reverse my stance on the second game, we'll see. So far I love the game, just fantastic. My only gripe is that nothing says how much damage it does, or at least, none of the spells (the healing one doesn't say how much it heals either), and it's driving me nuts. I diud observe that the base ice spell seems to do more damage than the base lightning spell, which kind of highlights the need for a damage stat since that defies the usual fantasy convention where cold spells are the weakest (because the freezing effect is kind of awesome). I will have to see if I can dig up some damage tables.