By now you may have heard about someone breaking into Sarah Palin’s email account at Yahoo. Sure, that sucks for her, but I don’t really care. If the presidential candidate can’t read email, it would surprise me if it was a piece of cake to phish/guess her password. What does surprise me, is the government’s response to it:

The Secret Service contacted The Associated Press on Wednesday and asked for copies of the leaked e-mails, which circulated widely on the Internet. The AP did not comply.

Really? The government had to go out and ask the Associated press for leaked emails? Wait a minute… It was on The front page of fucking Digg! How the fuck do you manage to not find that?! Typing it into google, they even help me find the images! How incompetent does the Secret Service have to be when they go out and ask reporters for the images, rather than spending 5 seconds Googling it?

Apparently the Secret Service would be a leading group in the investigation of this, and they can’t even find something that ranks in Google that easily?!

Feels nice to have a working site up now. I’ve got to say, Drupal is fucking awesome to work with. After all the different systems I’ve tried to get this site working on (at one point it was even running on phpBB), this has got to be my absolute favorite. It does what I want, plain and simple.

I’m also rather excited about getting to use Drupal. For some time I’ve been planning to start up a series of micro-sites, but have shirked away because of how difficult it would be to set up 10-20 different site. Drupal makes it crazy easy though, one installation, a bunch of sites.

I’m working on writin up a new About me page. I’ve decided to make a comitment to being easier to reach. I’ve decided to make a concerted effort to communicate with people more. On that note, I’m workin on a list of all the social networks/chat programs/etc that I use. If you notice anything missing, either things that I don’t have on the list but you know I have, or something which you think I /should/ have, leave me a comment with it. Here is a partial:

• Myspace
• Facebook
• Last.fm
• Plurk
• Twitter
• Aim
• MSN
• Yahoo
• List of the websites I’m running
• Email/Gtalk

I’m also going to work on making accounts on a bunch of different social networking sites. I’ll need some suggestions for that, I’ve only got a fairly basic idea of what I should be signing up for.

In addition to all that, I’m thinking about getting a domain for this blog. Its nice having it here, but I certainly think I should get a domain for my personal blog too.

Its been quite a while since I’ve posted anything. Between a rather hectic schedule for my summer and just having other stuff to work on I wasn’t able to do much in the way of posting. So, I figured I would let any readers I have know about some of current projects for the blog.

• Spreadsheet tutorial. I’ll probably be working on the basics, then I’ll do some videos on making spreadsheets for gaming purposes. Hopefully it will help someone at least a little bit… I figure this will be a series of 5-10 posts, depending on how in depth I go.

• Runescape. I’ll be doing an essay-article on Runescape, specifically how much good it did for me because of its terrible features. Hopefully I can drum up some cool traffic from the Runescape fan-kids.
• Some website projects. I’m testing out outsourcing blogging. I’ve got some high school kids and a few middle easterners doing a couple of test runs, to see if I can make some nice money off of it.
• NBTD Site work. Notice how far down this is? That’s because the real site updater isn’t doing shit anyway…

So, I’d like some feedback on it. Lets see if anyone has ideas.

You’ve probably heard of the mystic “spreadsheets.” Almost all gamers have heard of them, and anyone who works in an office has a passing familiarity with them. But how many of you know how to use them, really use them, not just creating simple tables?

I’ve mentioned the game Kingdom of Loathing before on here. Its my favorite game, and spreadsheets play a huge part in it (for some people). See, there’s two ways to play a game, any game at all: Casually, or Hardcore. Casual is pretty simple, you sit down and play, nothing complicated at all about that, and most games design at least a portion of the game for that kind of person. Hardcore is, well, hardcore. A hardcore player spends hours researching things, digging through piles of old data and numbers to try and come up with the “Optimal” thing to do. That’s what Hardcore players, real hardcore players, love Spread Sheets. See, spreadsheets are all about taking a bunch of numbers, and giving you something usable out of it.

So what makes a good spreadsheet? There’s a couple things you need:
Data. Lots of data, usually in the form of percentages and the like

Inputs. Good spreadsheets don’t just work in one situation, they let you put your situation in and pull up the best thing to do.

Results. The spreadsheet has to create results of some sort, and answer.

Thats it. Over the next few weeks I’ll be working on this, and doing a nice introduction to spreadsheeting.

I did a video blog. Yay me!