Bnpositive's Blog

I finally picked up Halo 3 on Friday night. The graphics are impressive and game play has been improved dramatically in my opinion. One area of the graphics I think is a bit below par are some of the video sequences though. The character movements seem too rigid and distorted. Appendages don’t seem to bend right, shading is off and faces appear distorted.

Doesn’t bother me too much though. After I watch them the first time I’m not going to be paying much attention to the video sequences anyway.

New vehicles and weapons are great. Maybe sometime this week I’ll run some CAT5 cable to my living room and give online a try. I’ve got a number of friends that have spent all of their time playing online and nothing on the actual game campaign.

According to this website I’m in the Top 1% of the world in wealth. How in the world can that be? Trust me, I’m not getting rich by blogging yet, and that’s on top of my full-time job(s). It sure doesn’t feel this way the end of each month for me.

Are you filthy rich too? Go find out here.

I always liked having a player’s last name on the back of their jersey, in this case I can understand if these player’s would tend to disagree with me.

Received that one forwarded from a friend and thought it was pretty funny. My first thought was that the picture had been Photoshopped, but I checked out the WVU Mountaineers roster and sure enough:

• #92 – Johnny Dingle – DE from Miami, FL
• #93 – Scooter Berry – DL from North Babylon, NY

That didn’t quite go as planned now did it?

It’s been awhile now since all the loads of media attention that Kathy Griffin snagged by her comments at the recent Emmy Awards. If you didn’t catch it, here’s a general recap:

In accepting the Emmy for her Bravo reality show, “My Life on the D-List,” Griffin said that “a lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus.”

She went on to hold up her Emmy, make an off-color remark about Christ and proclaim, “This award is my god now!”

First who cares what Kathy Griffin says or thinks? I’ve never woken up to a new day and asked myself what Kathy Griffin thinks, or really any other Hollywood person. I should also specify that I don’t care what an actor/actress thinks that I actually agree with on some kind of philosophical level, definitely not one that I realize ultimately I don’t agree with on just about anything. Suffice it to say, my world has not been nudged, much less rocked over the last seven days.

This kind of stuff is what irritates me more than anything Kathy Griffin said or could imagine saying:

The Miracle Theater in Pigeon Forge spent $90,440 on a full-page advertisement in USA Today that ran nationally Monday, proclaiming “enough is enough.”

“We at The Miracle Theater consider it an honor to stand for Jesus today,” the ad said. “We may never win a national award. We may never be household names. We may never be seen in Hollywood. Although others may choose to use their national platform to slander our God, we are honored as professional entertainers to stand for Christ.”

$90,440 STINKING DOLLARS!!! I don’t know, but does anyone else think this group could have exhibited a little bit better decision-making skills when it comes to spending almost $100,000. I’m thinking soup kitchen, homeless, medical bills for someone, the single mom that needs daycare or a new car?

NO! They decide to take out a full-page advertisement in USA Today. If you or someone you know saw Jesus when you saw the ad, PLEASE let me know.

There’s lots of stuff you can find on the Internet. Finding a job isn’t too out of the ordinary either with sites like Monster, HotJobs and CareerBuilder.

A guy just bid for a walk-on part in an upcoming Will Ferrell movie on eBay and won. He had to bid $47,100 for the honor and it’s not even a main role.

The winner of the eBay online auction asked to remain anonymous, according to a statement from San Diego-based Cancer for College, which awards scholarships to current and former cancer patients.

The 10-year-old will be able to meet the stars on the set of movie “Step Brothers” and appear as an extra in the movie.

If I had an extra $47,000 laying around I can’t imagine using it to win this auction. Of course, I can’t even comprehend having that much money just laying around waiting to be spent either.

Check-out the auction at eBay

Source: Boy gets $47,000 shot to act in Will Ferrell comedy

This guy really wouldn’t want to have heard my post last week about the guy who wrote a bedtime song based on Pachelbel’s Canon in D.

Funny none the less.

and another interpretation as well

I’m so bummed! This week is absolutely nuts for me with my full-time job. Pile that on top of my other, personal client projects and my blogging and there’s just been no free time to pop Halo 3 in and play. The reason is that I’m sure if I started a game, I’d end up playing all night and not get any sleep, making me thus more useless to anyone, including my family.

With that being said, what do you think? Who’s played? Have you stopped playing since yesterday? Is it worth the hype? I’m hoping to go pick it up this weekend and catch up somehow on the fun.

I personally am loving the new Office 2007. I’ve been using it since way back in the early beta days and I think it’s great. There’s still stuff I can’t find, but it’s no more than the stuff I couldn’t find or rarely used in the earlier versions. My boss and brother on the other hand can’t stand it. I guess there were more proficient and advanced at using various items so the learning curve has been more like careening down Lombard Street in San Francisco.

One thing you’d expect from Excel though, back to version 1.0 is that it could handle simple arithmetic like addition, subtraction, division and multiplication. It appears though that Excel 2007 has forgotten it’s multiplication charts.

If it were just 850*77.1 that gave a wrong answer, we could probably work around that. But there are tons of other problem numbers, as I discovered for myself. I set up a spreadsheet to divide 65,535 by every number from 1 to 65,535 itself, then multiply the number by that result. So, for example, it divided 65,535 by 26 to get 2,520.577. Then it multiplied 26 by 2,520.577 to get… 100,000?! Over ten thousand of these simple calculations gave the wrong answer.

I’m no rocket scientist, but it seems to me that a crucial office application like Excel that can’t do some simple math problems is a really big issue.

The writers at AppScout have updated their original story with the following news from Microsoft:

UPDATE: Microsoft recognizes the problem and assures us that Excel Will Learn to Multiply.

GOOD NEWS: The Excel team has dissected the problem in detail and is working feverishly to swat this Excel bug.

I wonder when this fix will be seen in the real world and be updated on everyone’s systems. Should we expect this in a standard patch Tuesday release?

Source: Excel Can’t Multiply

My brother alerted me to a sister-college of my alma mater making headlines in Newsweek with a story titled, “Can God Love Darwin, Too?”. A simple answer to that question is an obvious “YES!”.

The article centers around an professor at Olivet Nazarene University writing a book entitled “Random Designer” that states that components of evolution may fit within the intelligent design theory as well. A statement I can say I agree with. Mutations and variations obviously occur in both the plant and animal kingdom. Why must these variations be considered outside of God’s plan for creation itself?

The sad part is the exposure this article is giving to various churches in the Nazarene denomination and their response to the work of this professor. Including threatening to withhold funding from the school and other little actions.

In a letter to Bowling, ministers in Caro, Mo., expressed “deep concern regarding the teaching of evolutionary theory as a scientifically proven fact,” calling it “a philosophy that is godless, contrary to scripture and scientifically unverifiable.” Irate parents, pastors and others complained to Bowling, while a meeting between church leaders and Colling “led to some tension and misunderstanding,” Bowling said in a letter to trustees. (Well, “misunderstanding” in the sense that the Noachian flood was a little puddle.) It’s a rude awakening to scientists who thought the Galilean gulf was closing.

I believe my brother says it well with the following response:

It’s just like the church’s arrogant narrow-minded reductionism of any single issue or cause to an irreducible claim on God’s position. As with homosexuality, abortion, being a Republican, the War in Iraq, Evolution vs. Creationism, etc…who gets off deciding what God’s view is and then dictating it to others. Religious elitists and prudes beware or be damned! There are certainly some guides and commands in Scripture which make certain things clear. But on many other things there is SO much room for interpretation that you’ve got to be mentally deficient to claim a definitive stance (e.g. evolution).

I remember a conversation I had recently about the idea that maybe humans had only been on the planet 10,000 years and how that is contrary to carbon dating being used. I’m not sure about you, but my God was all powerful the last time I checked and if he wanted to make something in an instant and make it look like it had been that way for millions of years, I wouldn’t put it past Him.

Let me jump back to my initial point though. What does arguing this fact in public in a situation internal to the church do for our witness to non-believers? My guess is it doesn’t make it any easier for them to change their opinions and stereotypes about us when we prove them correct with this kind of garbage.

Can you feel it? Are the hairs on the back of your neck standing up? Do you have goose bumps?

Halo 3 will be spinning in thousands of Xboxes this time tomorrow. Will you be one of them?

Get more details at Xbox.com and Halo3.MSN.com