I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw these at the store the other day. Stop me if this is old news, but I had no idea they made Jack Daniels-filled chocolates. I went ahead and bought myself a little bag just for shits and giggles.

They are surprisingly tasty and, supposedly, filled with 7% JD. You can barely taste it, but who gives a shit, it's booze-filled chocolate!

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I usually post tech-related stuff on this blog, but I've recently read an article about the modern school system that, literally, made my jaw drop to the floor. This is something I feel everybody should read, especially those of you that have children attending public schools. It will give you a greater understanding of how the system was originally meant to work.

Even if you think it's complete hogwash it's definitely a VERY interesting read.

The 6 Basic Functions of Modern Schooling

1. The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2. The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

3. The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.

4. The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5. The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6. The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

Read the rest here: http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm

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Well, after taking a 6-month break from working out, I finally started going back to the gym on Monday. Pretty stoked about the deal I got. Johnson & Johnson has their own company gym and it costs only $20 AUD a month. Thats, like, only $5 in real money for a fully stocked gym!!!

I am a bit sore, though. This is understandable considering the fact that I haven't touched a weight or ran for close to half a year. I think I did a pretty good job avoiding over-exertion and was a bit impressed with how much I could still do.

I only really did my upper body last night. Here's my small routine until I get back into the old swing of things:

1. 15 minutes on the recumbent bike in cardio mode.
2. 2x sets of curls with 50lb dumb bells, both arms, 10 reps each.
3. 2x sets of single-arm rows with 50lb dumb bells, both arms, 10 reps each.
4. 2x sets of shrugs with 50lb dumb bells, both arms, 10 reps each.
5. 2x sets of seated shoulder presses with 50lb dumb bells, both arms, 10 reps each.
6. 1x set of bench presses with 245lb of weight, 10 reps 'ouch'
7. 2x sets of lateral independent pull downs with 115lbs of weight, 10 reps each
8. 15 minutes on the recumbent bike in cardio mode to cool down.

I think that's decent for a first time back in the gym. Feeling great already!

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I just found a pretty sweet PHP extension that allows you to easily determine whether 2 pictures are alike. I thought about how I could do this a few years ago, but never really did a whole lot of research on it. I pretty much decided that PHP couldn't deal with the amount of processing power it would take to determine the similarity between two image files. Fortunately, Libpuzzle does exactly that and takes the form of a PHP extension written in C!

The Puzzle library is designed to quickly find visually similar images (gif, png, jpg), even if they have been resized, recompressed, recolored or slightly modified. The library is free, lightweight yet very fast, configurable, easy to use and it has been designed with security in mind.

It's incredibly simple to implement and it seems that most modern website hosts meet the requirements.

Check it out!

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This is for a long-time buddy and colleague of mine who just recently got a kick ass job in Nashville, Tennessee. He currently lives in Idaho and has to move his entire family down to his new location. The guy has a house he's trying to sell before he heads out, but with the current housing market, he's having a very difficult time doing so. This somewhat dire situation has left him with little options to choose from. Thankfully, he's somewhat creative and came up with an ingenious idea!

"The $100 House & Essay Contest" is an event where if you send him $100 and a well-worded essay, you have a chance to win his house. The only real catch is before he picks a winner, he needs 2,500 submissions to cover the cost of his house. Once he receives the required amount of entries, he'll pick a winning essay and, in turn, a winner.

I think it's a very creative solution to a problem that's all too common in today's real estate market. Hats off to my buddy, James of onelotus creative fame, for being such a nutty genius!

You can read more about the contest here and Digg the entry here!

Good luck, Jim!

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Well, it took Nick Shepherd just a few months longer than me to finally launch his personal website. I always found it kind of ironic that we never really launched a fully functional website considering we've been involved in web development for the past 7 or so years.

I imagine if we had done this years ago, we'd be a great bit more popular out there on the intertubes and probably be making a metric ton more money off our online endeavors than we currently do.

Anyhow, for those of you who are interested, Nick has created a pretty fresh design. A design, that I think, is probably the best to ever come out of his teeny, tiny brain.

If you really want to read about crap that interests Nick and musings concerning his personal life, go for it. You might regret your decision, though. I should know, I lived with the wop bastard for 4 months.

Much love, little buddy!

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If you like blasting zombies as much as I do, then you'll love this little[internet gem I found the other day while browsing around. 9 out of 10 doctors agree that killing zombies is good for your health!

Just looking out you guys, is all.

The Endless Zombie Rampage (Flash Game)

The premise behind the game, which is simple enough, is to defend your base from the oncoming zombie hordes. The game is broken up into rounds. A round is over when you kill the necessary amount of zombies. Every time you kill a zombie, you gain experience points. At the end of each round you have the ability to trade in experience points for new weapons and upgrades which is a good thing as you'll want to trade in that crappy pistol for a shotgun as soon as you can. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that different weapons have their own respective reload times, attack strength and capacity, so if you have a screen full of running zombies ( the fast ones ) it'd probably be a good idea to make sure your shot gun is full.

If you don't have the need to purchase a new weapons you also have the option of purchasing upgrades for yourself and your base. A good portion of these items are mainly hitpoint boosters that increase the number of hitpoints for you and your base. Since the game gets progressively more difficult as you go, the odds of a zombie slipping past you to attack your base increase, so it's a good idea to buy hitpoint upgrades whenever you have some experience points available.

The controls are easy enough to learn. For those of you who've played Crimson Land, you should feel pretty comfortable with learning how to move around. Basically your WASD or Arrow Keys move your little guy around, while you use your mouse to aim. To pick different weapon in your inventory, just use the scroll wheel. Press 'R' if you want to reload.

All in all, this game is pretty fun, but the novelty wears off after about 30 minutes. It's still a fun little game, but it's something you should only take in small doses.

I'll close this review with some screenshots:

1. Title Screen
2. The Player, Base and a Zombie
3. Weapon Shop
4. Upgrade Shop
5. Lots of Shells
6. I Heart Jackhammer

Anyhow, enjoy!

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