As of last saturday, we now have power at my house, but still no internet. Actually, when LIPA restored our power, they must have stretched/bent our fiber for fios, thus messing up our internet. Verizon was at our house yesterday, but they still need to find the cable they need to connect our house back up, since supplies are low. The whole thing sucks, so I can only update from work, school, or Cora's house. Since I've been busy at work and school, it's been tough. But I refuse to stop posting like I have in the past. Fuck it, I'm writing something today. 

The Wii U launched today, and I want one. That's all that needs to be said about that. Yeah, all the TV features aren't going to be there until december, so I can wait. It's not like the Wii where my dad and I lined up at toys r us at the asscrack of dawn to get one so I could play Twilight Princess, but yeah. It doesn't matter at the moment anyway since we still don't have internet. Sucks.

Even though places are flooded, and not everywhere has internet and whatnot back yet, my professors at school have not stopped assigning work. Thus, I have a backlog of about two weeks worth of homework to do for my Business class, which is due tomorrow. It sucks. I don't care about business management, these topics are of no insterest to me. Fuck Hackman and Oldham's "core job dimensions". And the worst part is, we have to memorize all this shit and we're tested on what acronyms like "SMART" mean. I suck at memorization, especially for stuff that literally makes no sense to me. It isn't as if anybody in my class is going to use the knowledge they learn from this class in real life. I feel like management is learned from experience, not from class. But whatevs, I'll suck it up and get it done so I never have to think about it again.

So Long Island is getting hit by another storm... and this time it's a snowstorm. I swear to fucking Eris if this shit doesn't stop soon, I'm moving to fucking Colorado where I can chill and get high legally. Just kidding, I'm not a pothead, but still. Shit's retarded.

Still have no power... But my amazingly awesome BFF (hereby referred to by her name, which is Cora) does, so I'm over at her house, and this fucking cat jumps next to me and acts like she's the queen of the goddamn room. She's seriously such a fat cat. Shit's ridiculous. Anyway so I'm here for the duration of this storm since she has power and my house is cold as shit. Also it's fun, so that's one nice thing that comes out of all these goddamn fucking storms.

We saw Wreck it Ralph last night, and it was holy shit fucking awesome. I enjoyed it greatly, and had a ton of fun seeing it. Cora and I were literally the only people in the theater for most of the movie (two girls were there for the first like 5 minutes but left) so we were able to react as loudly as we wanted without fear of disturbing the peace. Not that I typically give a shit. I'm one of those, yeah. If you like video games of any sort, go see Wreck it Ralph now. It's hilarious. And Vanellope is amazing too. You'll know what I'm talking about when you see it. GO SEE IT. But don't drive in this storm. It's pretty shitty.

So yeah, basically right now I'm chilling in Cora's room writing this post while she works on her latest painting, listening to music. I'm having a pretty good time at the moment. And I'm not writing this on my lunch break at work today so I can actually do nice things like write for a longer period of time.

As I thought, Obama won again and completely obliterated Romney in electoral votes. Oh, it was close in the popular vote, but yeah. What's even cooler, though, is that my man, Gary Johnson, got about 1% of the popular vote, nationwide. Not bad for a guy in no debates in a third party. To compare, the green party gal, Jill Stein (she's awesome too, I love GENUINE candidates who aren't mass marketed like the main parties) got .3% of the vote. Johnson tripled that.

I did not want Romney to win, even though I'm a libertarian. While a lot of his financial policies sound nice, I really have no clue what he actually believes since he's flipflopped so much. He's like the republican John Kerry, for fuck's sake. Also I don't like where he stands on most social issues. I'm pro-choice and pro-gay-rights, and Romney would suck for that. He'd veto any sort of advance we make in those areas, although Mass was one of the first states with legalized gay marriage (figure that one out). Like I said, he flipflops way too fucking much. So I guess Obama's alright. Contrary to what Fox News and my father might have you believe, he's not going to destroy the country in the next four years, and who knows, maybe we'll actually have a sane republican candidate in 2016. Or maybe we'll get Sarah Palin and Iron Sky will come true.

So that's it. Back to watching youtube videos and browsing reddit for me. See you in a couple days :)

Election Day is tomorrow in the US, so I figured I'd post some thoughts on the election. If you know me on facebook or in real life or whatever, you should know that I'm a Libertarian, and I will be voting for Gary Johnson for President. If you want to see a fantastic summary of the issues each candidate (in any election) supports, check out On The Issues. At the bottom of each page for a candidate is the candidate's "location" on the political spectrum. For instance, Obama is a libertarian-leaning progressive (liberal), and Romney would be a populist-leaning conservative, based on their previous views. Jill Stein is a hard-core liberal and Gary Johnson is a hard-core libertarian. But of course, you should read more in-depth about each issue they have a stance on, and make your decision on that. The Verge also recently posted an article about the presidential candidates. Check that out too.

Of course, none of that even matters. The winner of this election is going to be either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. None of the third-party candidates really matter, and that, to me, is a big problem. By voting for Gary Johnson, I am basically voting for not-mitt-romney, which means it's a vote for Obama. But I am showing my support for third parties in statistics, and maybe in the future, that small percentage of people voting for third parties will grow, and maybe even secure a third party a place in a debate again. But that's not how it should be.

Recently on facebook I posted a link to Wikipedia's article on Instant-Runoff Voting. This is the voting system that I think we should use for most elections. It's a little more complex, but basically you rank your choices from the person you want in office the most, down to the person who you want in office the least. So in this case, I'd rank Gary Johnson "1", Obama as "2", and then that's probably all that matters.  More hardcore republicans who lean libertarian might rank Gary Johnson a "1" and then Romney as a "2". When counting the votes, they'd see that Johnson can't win, and then take everyone's votes that voted for Johnson, and give them to their second choice. This way, those votes aren't "wasted". This would also encourage people to vote for third-party candidates since it wouldn't be seen as throwing out their vote, which I believe is the main problem people see with voting for a third-party candidate. Hell, I'd rather have Jill Stein than Romney/Ryan, and I am not a liberal by any means.

My lunch break is almost over so I'm going to wrap this up. I still have no power at my house due to Sandy, and we have a nor'easter possibly hitting on Wednesday. Hopefully I'll get power back before then so it can go back out on Wednesday night. That'd be sweet. I'm actively keeping my eye on the LIPA storm center and my favorite weather site for updates and whatnot. School starts tonight and I have no idea what my teachers expect of me. I had a rough draft due last wednesday which I never wrote because I've had no power. I wonder when my professor will expect it to be handed in. Oh well, we will see. 

PS. The Emperor's Soul is out. I know what I'll be doing tonight.

So after a while of not having a proper "blog" and using tumblr mostly, I've decided I'm going to start writing again. Basically the idea came from NaNoWriMo. Lots of people spend November trying to write a novel from scratch. I'm not driven enough nor do I have the free time to do that, so I've decided to instead start blogging again. If I spend maybe 20 minutes every couple days writing an entry, I'll be happy with myself. I've imported entries from Benign Thoughts for the sake of... archiving purposes. An archive of Benign Thoughts in full with comments and everything is available at blog.benignthoughts.com. Keep in mind these older posts started when I was like 12, so a lot has changed over the years. Don't judge, I'm different now. So yeah, this is today's entry, post-Sandy.

So Sandy hit, and everything is fine. Sort of. Everybody is fine and there's not much damage done to the house, but there is still lots to be done. The chimney is fucked because a tree knocked it off the house. The air conditioner in the "family room" got knocked by the chimney and needs to be replaced or removed. We still have no power after several days, though LIPA says that they're trying to restore power to most people by the end of next week. I have pictures of things on Instagram (available on this site in the gallery) as does @coracrettenand (this picture is of my house), a fantastic photographer/artist and my best friend (check out her Facebook, she's amazing).

I'm sick of no heat. As you can see in the picture linked above, my chimney's knocked right off the side of my house, so it's not like we can run the natural-gas powered heating system... Right now my house is a little bit hotter than it is outside, but it's like 40-50 degrees outside. Which sucks. I'm freezing at home. Thankfully, I'm at work at the moment, on my lunch break, so I'm toasty for now. Just thought that deserved a mention. Screw Sandy.

I need to wrap this up as my break is ending in about 5 minutes... so I just wanted to give Android 4.2 an honorable mention. It looks amazing and I can't wait for it to hit AOSP and get it on my Galaxy Nexus. Android Police is probably the best site for the coverage on this, so check them out. I've pretty much decided that once my Verizon contract runs out (in a little over a year) I'll be buying my phones directly from Google and switching to T-Mobile for their cheap-ass $30/month no-contract plan. But that's not for a while. We'll see what the mobile landscape is like in a year.

So, to say I haven't been active recently is a huge understatement. I really, really haven't been active. Unlike previous posts of this nature, I am not going to say that I am going to try to post more often. In fact, the opposite will likely happen. After I am done writing this post, I will probably go back to playing World of Warcraft, watching Netflix, and doing schoolwork. Actually the school stuff would take priority over everything else but still, you get the gist.

School started for me a week ago... and now I'm back at home. Why is that? The geniuses over at SUNY decided to start class the week before labor day, and Binghamton, with its large population of Jewish people, gives us off for Rosh Hashanah (I'm right, right? That's the holiday this weekend). So basically, we have a whole week off so we all get to go home.  Oh well, at least I get to see my family... oh wait I just had an entire summer off. Dumbasses.

So what did I do this summer? I worked my ass off at Panera Bread, took Calc 2 at Stony Brook University, played trombone in my local community band, and decided to un-quit WoW after almost a year. I actually got a lot done, it was a good time. And now I'm back at school taking physics classes. It's actually pretty rad. I really like my classes, as well as the professors who teach them. They're all very understandable, and very cool in general.

Google released its instant search today. It's pretty nifty. Basically what it does is search as you type. This way, it's constantly showing you the results for what you're searching for, as you are typing. If it's not working on your browser, you should probably switch to Google Chrome. In fact, if you're not using Google Chrome, you should switch to Google Chrome. I know in the past I've been a big fan of Opera, and I still am. But Google Chrome is an incredible browser, and everybody should give it a shot.

And finally, remember how I said I'm using Movable Type now? Well, I'm just about done with it. Wordpress is just so much better for my needs right now. MT has all sorts of cool features, but the problem is it's just too much. I don't need to be able to manage a ton of sites on one engine, and I don't want to have to rebuild my pages and get used to a new theming system. And it also didn't get me to blog more. So I'm done with it.

The other day I was reading very old blog entries and I realized, if I don't post regularly, Future Louis won't be able to do the same to what I'm writing now. Because nothing will be written for him to read. Doesn't that suck? Yeah. I've already put writing this post off several days. I mean, I had this thought on friday, when my sister wrote on my Facebook wall to tell me how pathetic my old "content" was. I would literally post about the weather. I also wrote... decent short stories (I won't call them bad, I was like 15, okay?). I also used to get really off topic, really easily. It happens. At least I wrote more often than I do now. I mean, this is my first post of the new year, and it's in February, for fuck's sake.

So yeah, I'm kind of on the debate team here at Binghamton now. True story. I joined this semester, and the very first weekend, my partner and I had to go to a tournament. I was literally not prepared for anything, but I managed to get my shit together and do fairly decently for a beginner. There's another tournament this coming weekend, plus this time of the year it apparently gets crazy because people go to tournaments every weekend (thankfully I only have this one and maybe one more left). But yeah, I've been working hard on that stuff.

As of last night, I've had this urge to watch Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, and rewatch the movie but I can't find them anywhere! A while back the movie was on one of my on demand stations. Not HBO, but one of the other ones. I love it: even though it's not really a good movie, it's still really funny and a good time in general. The cartoons were also on Google Video for a while, but not anymore. They're on hulu now, but hulu doesn't work well on my college connection. Go figure. You'd think that a state school would have good internet, but it's not nearly as good as I have at home. Ah well, I can kind of watch the 20 episodes that are available on Hulu, but I still want to see the movie again :(

Speaking of movies, HBO is fucking awesome. Now if you have HBO on Verizon Fios, you get access to HBO Go, which is like HBO On Demand, except on the internet. That being said, it sucks on my campus connection. Yeah.

Alright, so before I go, Kat wanted to tell Future Louis something. She says "If you didn't suck so much, you wouldn't be sucky." She's doing it wrong. Really, it should be "If you set aside how much you suck, you're not actually that sucky." But yeah, she fails."

Yep, another entry within 7 days. I know, it's rare, but it happens occasionally. I'm usually the type to post about random celebrity affairs, but I feel that this is appropriate:


Sorry, I just had to do it. Anyway, yeah. With all the madness between Kanye West and Patrick Swayze, it's been a little strange this weekend. Especially between Twitter and Facebook. I can't turn on my computer or blackberry without finding something about either Kanye, Lady Gaga (still haven't seen her performance), or Patrick Swayze (btw, for those who haven't gotten it yet, he died, and he will be missed).

So my Tuesdays kind of own. I didn't do it on purpose, but I have no class until 1:15 (pm). It's pretty rad, actually. And even then, all I have is a physics discussion, then English (which is interesting), and then a break until 6pm when I have a 3 hour Debate class, in which currently we are just going over the various regulations and such. Once that's over, we'll migrate to meeting on wednesdays at 5:50, and actually debate. I really enjoy my Tuesdays. Most importantly, though, I can sleep later :D

Wait, so I am actually enjoying an English class? Yes, yes I am. It's all about analyzing how different people perceive literature scientifically. For the last few classes we've just been talking about whether or not it's possible to study literature from a scientific point of view, and how everybody has a different "lens" through which they read literature. Our class on Thursday ended with a rather enthusiastic discussion about whether or not art is dying out because all possible ideas have already happened, and people have to look for new, crazier ways to be "artistic" (read: lady gaga). I, of course disagreed. There are always people that tend to have crazy ideas about what "art" is, exactly, but it doesn't mean that everything's already happened. We're constantly discovering new technologies, and with that comes new ways to use the technology, hence new art. What the synthesizer did to music is just one example. Computer animated movies, for instance, are becoming more popular with Pixar creating such masterpieces as Wall-e and UP. Not to mention 3D movies. And who knows what'll happen in the next 10 years. One argument was that music today is using samples from older music, and we don't have a distinct style for the 2000's, which is bullshit. In about 2015, the style for the 2000's will have become apparent, just like the style of the 90s has become apparent. It doesn't matter that music is using samples from older music. Music has always been inspired by past music, and in the days of classical music, plenty of themes would be reused across all sorts of works. Not to mention the whole concept of "remixes" that has been around for a long time now.

Anyway, I'm done. I said I would stop doing these sort of closing paragraphs, but whatever. This is one of those useless closing paragraphs. And Scott, if you're reading this, you need to blog too, man.

So today I decided I wanted to try to revive this blog for my longer postings. LouisC.com will still be used for all sorts of random bullshit I find on the internet, but here I plan on posting, like I always have, about day-to-day stuff that I do, as well as some useless shit I find on the internet, but more in depth.

One thing you've probably noticed, is the new design. It's a default Movable Type theme. I'm way too lazy right now to redo the CSS to make it my own quite yet, but I'll get around to it sometime soon. This is all because I've made the switch from Wordpress to Movable Type. Basically, it all comes down to speed and security. Wordpress requires updates all the time because of new, crazy bugs that tend to be utterly ridiculous. I used Wordpress in the past because MT required a fee and WP was a brand new thing that looked amazing. However, I can barely recognize the code anymore. It's a completely different beast, and Movable Type is just so much more feature rich, even before you get into the plugins (which, admittedly, WP has more of). Because MT's pages are mostly static (and designed to be mostly static, unlike the silly WP-SuperCache plugin), they should load at least a little faster.

The trickiest part of the switch was getting the database over intact. MT and WordPress are very different behind the scenes, and MT doesn't really offer a database import. Basically, you export everything from WP to a file, and then upload the file (it's Enhanced RSS or whatever, not mysql) to MT, which then makes sense out of everything. There were a few entries that were misplaced, but I grabbed the original times from WP and fixed them. Also, I needed to delete a few comments. They were very insignificant, otherwise I would have put more effort into fixing the timestamp (which MT wouldn't let me do for some reason).

So that about wraps it up. To comment here now, I believe you need to log in. Movable Type supports logging in via Wordpress.com, Facebook, AIM, Yahoo, Google, whatever. It's a nice deterrence against spam, so yeah. I should be able to post again soonish. My twitter updates are in the tab on the left side of the screen. If I don't update in like a week, feel free to poke me there, or by leaving a comment here.

I got a new tumblr account. It's much more active than here, but I plan on keeping this blog for longer, more formal blog posts. My tumblr is LouisC.com. Be sure to check it out. Whatever I post here will also be updated over there, so I'm really only keeping this site because I've had it for so long.
A more formal post will come soonish, but be sure to read LouisC.com for all sorts of random updates.

So I figured I'd post before going to bed real quick. I haven't been posting as often as I'd like to, but it's at least more often than before. I'm sure if you actually read this site, (which you probably don't given the complete lack of readers I have since my huge hiatus) you'll have noticed some changes. First of all, instead of using images as my post titles, I'm now using text. If you're using a browser that supports CSS fonts, your browser will automatically download Gentium Book Basic, and use it to display my post titles. It won't install it on your system or anything sketchy like that, just download it like it'd download an image. Also, I got the google ads working finally. It was some stupidity with how my pages were being sent as XML+HTML instead of HTML. They're still all XHTML, completely valid, like always, but now the google ads work.

Also, you should be able to see my twitter status in my sidebar. Just a tiny feature that I've been wanting for a while. I got Wordpress working properly finally by basically deleting it and reuploading it. It had some issues with constantly being upgraded, and no fancy javascript was working in the admin area, including managing widgets. Sucks, but now it works. :D

I've been watching a lot of Dexter recently. All 3 seasons are on Showtime on Demand, so I couldn't resist. Plus, it's HD, which is great! Verizon consistently impresses me. In case you didn't know, I use Fios, which is Verizon's TV/Internet/Phone over Fiber service. On Demand stuff uses the internet on TV, so you'd think that it might adversely affect my internet service. It doesn't. Somehow they count the bandwidth for On Demand differently than the bandwidth for my internet. So I can watch Dexter in HD whenever I want, while uploading all my photos from the past year to my "new" flickr account (not really using it yet, so I'm not posting it), while downloading the latest version of Arch Linux for my desktop which isn't handling the latest Ubuntu quite well. For the record, it took less than a minute. I'll set it up tomorrow.