Andrew Natoli

So as you may know, it’s my concern that all of you are prepared in the case of a Velociraptor attack. Therefore I’ve been inspired by a certain issue of xkcd to create a real-life scenario and tell you the results because after all, this IS a matter of life and death.

A velociraptor smells you from a distance of 100 meters and begins to accelerate at 10m/s^s from rest to a maximum speed of 25m/s. You’re standing still on some roller-blades and hear the raptor approaching. You immediately begin to accelerate at 4m/s^2 to your maximum, adrenaline powered speed of 8m/s thinking you might be able to save yourself.

There are two doors between you and the raptor. The raptor has to run 60 meters to stop and open the first door and another 40 meters to the second door. Knowing Velociraptors take five minutes to open the first door in their path and half the time for every subsequent door, how long do you have to live before you are devoured?

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Not really.

Don’t deny it, no matter how hard someone pegged a block of it at your face or how many times you’ve slipped on it while wiping the snow off your car in the morning, its about to happen all over again soon because Winter’s coming fast. What is it I’m referring to? Nothing other than ice, of course!

That’s right, ice! That lovable, handy combination of H, 2 and O frozen at a temperature of 273K for your enjoyment. Ice is a part of our every day lives as it is commonly used for simple tasks such as freezing a finger you lost in your tech class while operating a jigsaw. Okay, not all people are as daring and curious as that one kid it always happens to each year but there’s more!

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For my Radio Broadcasting class, I had to throw together a fifteen-minute radio play with a group, meaning writing a unique script, recording it and then editing it. After recording, I decided to bring the project files home because I wasn’t a fan of the editor we were using at school and worked on editing it by myself. Five hours later? Here’s the result, enjoy! I played the narrator, guard and generic screaming passengers.

Well, I haven’t posted a progress update in a while being my old desktop died and I haven’t gotten a chance to get much done on this new one yet so here’s a quick update. School’s back and running again so I’ve got a bit less time to work on my projects, but I’m thinking my next move will be to get into XNA and everything. I want to try and break away from using Game Maker, especially if I might be looking into going towards game development / other kinds of programming in the future.

As for videos, Alex and I will probably be trying to film a new episode of Nardy Network News sometime late this week if we get a chance, so be on the lookout for that!

By now I’m sure we’ve all heard about ZNet-III’s passing, but before we completely move on from it lets take a look back on everything the system accomplished!

ZNet-III sported an AMD Athlon64 x2 processor at 2.1Ghz, 2GB of DDR2 RAM at 667Mhz and a 250GB Hard Drive. All of which was pushed the the limits of their potential just about each day. Built July 31st, 2007 and retired August 18th, 2009, ZNet-III racked up approximately 16,800 hours of service time.

That service time surely had a significant impact and pretty much is the story behind anything you see on my websites today. (Which were also built using it) Hit the “Read More” link for a quick summary of significant achievements by ZNet-III.

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Wow so it’s been quite a bit since I’ve posted on here. I really meant to post something when my netbook died two days after ZNet-III but I never got around to that. Anyway, nothing exciting has happened in the past few weeks, oh wait my netbook died. Two days following ZNet-III my little Acer Aspire One’s solid-state drive gave out. It was a sad moment indeed for quite a while… that is until my mom no longer needed her 3G-equipped HP-Mini. I must say, Netbooks aren’t too bad as long as you have a HDD… not an SSD. The Aspire One was painfully slow. So much potential lied within it, yet none was seen because of its drive that felt slower than a Class 6 MicroSD card.

Anyway, as I said in the last post, I was due to be getting a new HP desktop. Yeah that didn’t quite work out at first, which is why it took me so long to be back on a desktop. You see, I ordered an HP Pavillion Slimline at first, not realizing it was a slimline. It got it and the case was half the width of an average video card. Disappointed I was, because that meant running on horrible integrated graphics. So I sent it back and spent an extra $80 bucks to move onto a “normal” sized Pavillion. Just got it yesterday and I’m presently loving it.

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So Monday morning I woke up and something seemed very strange. It wasn’t the new bedsheets I had gotten, nor was the heat on in the middle of Summer. The strange sense was that there was no noise coming from my computer. Infact, it wasn’t even on.

Somewhere that night between 3am and 8am something went crazy-go-nuts and the motherboard fried itself. Not exactly sure what happened, but something did.

Anyway, I’ve ordered a new computer from HP… usually I’d build my own of course but I found this deal to be a real steal:

Intel Core 2 Quad @ 2.3Ghz
4GB DDR2 RAM
640GB HDD
Windows Vista Home Premium with a free upgrade to Windows 7

Plus the usual stuff HP throws in like the case, power supply, keyboard, etc. All for just  $525, I found that for quite a steal and ordered it. Of course, it won’t be here probably until next Friday or something so for now I’ve double-monitored my netbook. It’s good fun. 1024×600 on a 19 inch monitor; an 80-year-old’s dream.

Anyway, what this means for you guys right now is Spherack is completely down. You won’t be able to host or join servers because my computer is what they all use to route themselves together. I apologize; I didn’t expect this to happen until December yet it did anyway.

SOOOOO yeah. I’ll be on a netbook with two monitors for the next week or so. Leave comments here or something.

One billion downloads? How can you question that? Well, you can’t.

Here’s how the internet works…
Each technical user, like myself is bound to have Firefox installed on at least three to six machines in their household. That’s six downloads.

A major version of Firefox like 3.1 -> 3.5 is released. That’s six more downloads. We’re at twelve!

Oh shoot, operating system data got eaten by malware. Reformat. Reinstall Firefox.

Thirteen from one person now!

You can’t question one billion on the internet. You just can’t.

Originally posted as a comment by AndrewNatoli on Mashable – The Social Media Guide using Disqus.

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