Review of Brian J. Robb's Counterfeit Worlds

• May 26, 2007
• James Skemp

This is the review that I wrote for Amazon.com for the book Counterfeit Worlds by Brian J. Robb.

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Cho Seung-Hui Against All: On Societies Need to Ostracize the Ill

• April 20, 2007
• James Skemp

“These wars, famines, floods and quakes meet well-defined needs. Man wants chaos. In fact, he’s gotta have it. Depression, strife, riots, murder, all this dread. We’re irresistibly drawn to that almost orgiastic state created out of death and destruction. It’s in all of us. We revel in it. Sure, the media tries to put a sad face on these things, painting them up as great human tragedies. But we all know the function of the media has never been to eliminate the evils of the world, no. Their job is to persuade us to accept those evils and get used to living with them. The powers that be want us to be passive observers.” - Waking Life

Unfortunately, I haven’t kept up all that much with the recent (April 17, 2007) shootings in Virginia. However, I’ve seen and heard a disturbing trend, namely the dehumanizing and ostracizing of the shooter, Cho Seung-Hui. Quite frankly, this is disturbing.

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The Biological Imperative : or argument I get into

• March 24, 2007
• James Skemp

Pink mice and Hank

I frequently find myself in an argument that to many appears to be one of splitting hairs. That is the discussion of atheism, that I am atheist, not AN atheist.

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Installing Apache 2.2.4 to a Windows-based computer, locally: Part 1

• March 17, 2007
• James Skemp

In February 2006, I wrote an article covering the installation of Apache 1.3.34, which can be found on my site, StrivingLife.net. In August 2006, I covered the installation of Apache 2.0.59. This time, I'll be covering the installation of the current version of Apache 2.2.x, Apache 2.2.4, to a Windows XP machine, for the purpose of local development.

While I'll be covering an installation of Apache 2.2.4 that will work along with Apache 1.3.x and Apache 2.0.x, this guide will work equally well if you're installing Apache 2.2.x by itself.

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Schopenhauer's Prefaces to The World as Will and Representation

• February 11, 2007
• James Skemp

Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) went through three editions in Schopenhauer's lifetime, and accordingly there are three prefaces, one for each edition. The first was written in 1818, the second in 1844, and the third in 1859.

Today I'll be looking at the preface of each of the three editions, and providing an analysis of what he has attempted to get across within each.

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Determining 3D Distances and Angles

• September 4, 2006
• James Skemp

Near the top of one of the sections in the POV-Ray™ 3.5 manual there is a quote about wishing that past mathematical formulas were remembered, or something to that effect. I too wish I had remembered what I had learned in some of my past math classes, but after a bit of research, I have begun to work on some of the information that I have forgotten. Here is one of those areas.

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Initial thoughts on a square image canvas for fractals

• June 9, 2006
• James Skemp

I've been a part of a number of boards in my years, but the one that I've probably stayed on with for the longest is the board at Fractovia. In response to an image, I mentioned the canvas which turned into it's own thread (Squares?). Here's my intial reply, which I just had to save:

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Logical coding

• May 28, 2006
• James Skemp

When it comes to proper coding, you should know the most important rule of all; LIFO. However, not even LIFO nor the W3C can really tell you which order to put certain elements. In the nature of Web 2.0, I'll discuss some of the standards I've been bouncing around for HTML text markup when the same text is given multiple attributes.

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Does in-game advertising really hurt video games?

• April 23, 2006
• James Skemp

Just for purchasing a discount card at a local video store (GameStop), I not only got a year of 10% off video games, I also picked up a free one-year subscription to Game Informer. Not too bad for $15. In this month's issue, Issue 157 (May 2006), there's a page of debate (yes and no) to the question of whether or not in-game advertising really hurts video games. In this post, I'll be looking at the two responses, as well as crafting my own response to this question.

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Cross Sums Number Combinations Guide

• April 13, 2006
• James Skemp

Quite a while ago - back in May of 2003 actually - I began work on a guide that would display every possible number combination for cross sum puzzles. Since then, a number of people have corrected mistakes that crept in, resulting in a number of different versions of the guide over the last (almost) two years.

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