HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!!!!!

Some of you may have followed the link to Zach’s Comic Chat when he posted it a few days ago. If you’re using Internet Explorer on a PC, you will have discovered that the system didn’t quite work yet.

Well, he managed to get it fixed, so it’s now usable on PC IE. If you haven’t given it a try yet, you should do so now!

I’ve had several people ask me for this lately, so I thought I’d post it here:

There are a whole slew of crummy matrix-style screensavers available for PC, and I’ve used almost all of them, from the flash-based one on thematrix.com to a really really gross text-based one that just barely resembled the matrix at all.

The best matrix screensaver ever made is called xmatrix, and it’s a unix screensaver for xwindows. I’ve been jealous of this ever since I first saw the unix team running it a few years ago.

Happily, someone ported it to PC, and the PC version is GREAT. This is easily the best PC-based matrix screensaver avialable. You can find it here: [http://sourceforge.net/projects/matrix32/]

It’s 1 AM. But I’m not going to bed for a few hours because I just came back from the scariest movie ever. holy god. Signs is really really creepy. The only thing I’ve ever been more scared of was Blair Witch Project (which KT and I saw before everyone knew it was fake, so it was scarier). Now Annie, Sean and I are going to listen to Bill Cosby and watch the Matrix before I can sleep without having nightmares about something I can’t tell you about without ruining the movie.

LOOOOOOOOK

http://www.dslnorthwest.net/~chaz/chat/

Coded from scratch, yo! Four days of intense learning and effort have culminated into this… (I can only hope it helps me get a good job some day.) Fortunately, I think the bulk of it is in place. In fact, the code is so modular that you can drop new rooms and actors into the appropriate folders, and the program will immediately recognize them and work with them. Slick, no?

Soon there will be a feature allowing users to choose actors in _any_ directory on the web, so they won’t be limited to the ones that come with the program. Hot cha cha. (Actually I know good and well what that entails: A homogenous mass of anime characters, mowing over everything like carnivorous, vampiric sheep turned loose on a lawn of raw, squirming beef, destroying everything in their path. Ugh. Oh well.)

The only hurdles left really are cosmetic ones. Some are simple, like putting a cap on how big actor pictures can be, and reading in the image HEIGHT and WIDTH tags before attempting to render each page. Some are more difficult, like the prospect of having the characters face left and right consistently. Uuuhh that one’s actually a logical nightmare.

Anyway, hurry and give it a look before someone discovers some bug that corrupts lots of critical files (which has already happened a couple times!!! AAH bugs) … AND if you’re interested in drawing your own actor, hint hint! (notice there’s only one right now, thanks Miles!), check this directory:

http://www.dslnorthwest.net/~chaz/chat/actors/

Notice the _moods.txt file contains the regex’s that control the actor’s moods, meaning that you don’t have to adhere to the moods given for the Cyan Cube — you can invent and use any moods you want.

$3am == $bed