Why? Why not?

Since I last posted, Trang and I were sick with a bug she brought back from Thailand, got better, rearranged the house, and have generally had a great time.

I went and saw Van Helsing – it was atrocious, in a mildly entertaining kind of way. It seemed to me like the writers and director had a checklist of old-school horror movie cliches they had to include. Mob with torches and pitchforks? Check. Windmill? Check. Burning Windmill? Check. Angst over whether to kill a loved one who has become a werewolf? Check. The list goes on.

A bucketload of links in my ‘to post’ folder, so here goes:
Stalin vs Hitler (in comic form?) Those wacky Russians!

The OS-Tan are a bit of an internet phenomenon, although I wouldn’t be surprised to see them advertising Windows one day…

Tom’s Hardware Guide did a feature about Xbox Media Center on the Xbox that does a great job of explaining just how awesome it is.

A warning to would-be Internet scammers – if you get unlucky, you’ll mobilise a whole crowd of people against you and end up getting screwed over yourself…

An interesting article here about the technical differences between Shrek 1 and 2. Sounds pretty impressive.

This one’s fascinating. Apparently, there was a photographer in Russia around the turn of the century who took full colour photographs by taking negatives through different colour filters and ending up with three black and white images that represented the different colours. Just like in Photoshop! And so, people from the Library of Congress have digitally composited the colour channels and reconstructed the colour photographs of Russia before the First World War. Pretty amazing.

More serious, now. Benjamin Kuipers, a Computer Scientist from the University of Texas in Austin, has a number of well-thought-out articles about terrorism. This one, titled ‘How to Defeat Terrorism’ is very interesting. Also interesting is his parable, ‘The Seeds of War‘.

Trang got back yesterday! it’s sooo good to have her back, even if it was only ten days. ^_^

Had a great weekend of LAN playing at Rommel’s – I reckon Rommel and I probably ended up playing for about 20 out of the 24 hours of Saturday. mmmm, Twitchy.

Looking forward to catching up on sleep this week, and then a bit of flat rearranging on the weekend…

Well, Trang left on her Thailand adventure Friday night, and I’ve been trying to keep myself busy since then.

The Xbox modification went really well, as did transferring about 40G of anime to it. ^_^ I’ve watched the latest episode of Naruto on it – it’s so sweet.

Saturday was Supanova day. Rommel and I met up with Joey and Vikki from the tamaboards and we spent the day being way geeky. It was great. And we went to karaoke in the evening. So now I have actually, at long last, sung at karaoke.

Sunday was wushu, then into work for a Champ upgrade, then home to hang out and then watch Kill Bill Vol 2. (which was great.)

All this has meant that I’ve been busy enough to distract myself from missing Trang too much. I probably sound way pathetic, but this week is the longest amount of time we’ve spent apart for at least a year or two. So it can be a bit hard sometimes.