I should hardly have to mention anymore my glorious walk for free vacation time. The graph has been sitting there up at the top of my blog page slowly counting up to the grand total of 750,000. And today, one week before deadline, I have hit that total. This little exercise has added quite a bit to my life, from friendly competition with co-workers to some much needed think time. Now, to celebrate this achievement, I give you some more photos of my journeys.
So, I'm walking around the downtown area, an activity I've undertaken in an attempt to accumulate 10,000 steps/day for a work thing.
Anyways, I'm walking around enjoying the scenery and weather when I spot a giant billboard. On it is a man and his three young children. I was slightly touched by this nice picturesque scene... until I read the accompanying text:
Our daddy will sell your home... GUARANTEED!
In just a few words, this man went from upstanding role model of the American family to a parental pimp, whoring out his children to make a quick buck. Does anybody else find this kind of advertising appalling?
I see a commercial for a local used car reseller and his prepubescent daughter is going on about how her daddy will get you the best deal in town. Is this supposed to make people go "awwww" and rush out to buy a car, or are they marketing to pedophiles?
I don't know. I just don't know.
Now, I realize that the "system specs" spewed forth in the above video were probably intentionally skewed so as to follow the whacky, 80s style zaniness, but as an uber nerd and somebody who's intimately familiar with NES hardware, I feel compelled to correct their errors.
Claim #1: 3.58Mhz video core clock speed
The NES video processor, a Ricoh 2C02 "Picture Processing Unit", or PPU, is actually clocked at 5.37Mhz. The CPU is exactly one third of this, or 1.79Mhz. The figure they're quoting is the timing of a color NTSC signal.
Claim #2: 240x226 resolution
The PPU actually worked with an internal resolution 256x240, though most old TVs did not display the first and last eight scanlines effectively making the resolution 256x224. This was the same for both NTSC and PAL models.
Claim #3: 16 sprite pixel depth
I don't even know where to begin on this one. Firstly, the NES had enough sprite RAM (object attribute memory, or OAM) for 64, 8x8 or 8x16 sprites. Secondly, every sprite could have three colors (four if you include transparency) from a palette of 53 colors. Every scanline could hae a maximum of eight sprites, and when this limit was exceeded some sprites were not drawn causing the infamous flicker. Finally, you could have a total of 25 colors per scanline. What the hell they were talking about to begin with baffles me, but there were no 16s involved there at all. Except maybe that internal 16-bit PPU register that could be written to through dual writes to address $2006....
Claim #4: NES has a Zilog Z80 processor
This one's easy. The NES did not have a Z80. It had a Ricoh 2A03, which was a 6502 without decimal mode and a set of sound instructions. The Gameboy, however, had a Z80 and the Sega Genesis used one as its sound processor.
Claim #5 It's an 8-bit system
Well, that's about the only thing they got right. Though, the system did have a 16-bit address bus....
Well, I'm finished. I'm sure somewhere God has smote a kitten for my nerdy rantingness, but it had to be said and I said it. Caio.
If you've been around the internet as much as I have you'll probably know that it has it's own set of rules. Of these rules, #34 is most famous. Rule #34 states:
If it exists, there is porn of it.
Unwanted results from an innocent Google image search is enough to say that this rule is nearly one hundred percent true. However, there is no definition for something that's even more true than rule #34 (luckily, it's also more safe for work). I hereby decree that Internet Rule #48 will be defined as:
If it exists, there is anime of it.
This rule can be nearly solely confirmed by one website: deviantArt. For anybody who has never really scoured the annals of dA, it should be noted that almost 90% of everything posted is anime or some lame attempt at anime. A good chunk of this is fan art of just about anything. It doesn't matter what TV show, movie, comic, game, or person it is or is from. If they exist, somebody has drawn it in anime form. Let's get to proving using five examples from each stated category.
TV Shows
SpongeBob (a true abomination)
Greatest American Hero (as a chick, even)
Movies
Luke Skywalker (Star Wars) (too easy, I'll admit)
Comics
Penny Arcade (not entirely fair because even the comic's artist has anime'd the characters in one or two comics)
Games
Halo and Metroid (a twofer)
Mario (there are no good words for this one)
People
and of course
So, there you have it. Anything under the sun has anime art made of it, and nearly all of it can be found on deviantArt. So, let the internet propogate with the wisdom that is Internet Rule #48.
My thoughts: This guy is way too nerdy. That doesn't look too good on his part considering that I am a self-professed geek. But he didn't stop there, he also addressed the school board dressed in Jedi robes. But, just because a guy is nerdy doesn't necessarily reflect upon his ability to perform the duties and obligations that come part and parcel with the position he is trying to fill. Oh, but wait... he's got a strike against him in that department as well:
"I'm *extremely* happy with how good I did :-)"
This was posted by Christopher Knight as a postmortem to the embedded video above. Anybody who wants to work in any kind of school environment should at least be able to use proper grammar (for those who didn't get it that should be "how well [he] did"). And that smiley face just isn't doing it for me.
- dxprog (The Grammar Nazi)
