Hawk’s Babble-Log

Directed by: Shane Felux
Produced by: Dawn Cowings
Starring: Gina Hernandez, Karen Hammang, Holland Gedney, Frank Hernandez, and Shane Felux.

An amazing production, if you consider the amature nature of the production. I am really amazed. These guys had no funding and managed to pull off an entertaining chapter in the Star Wars universe. They did an excellent job with the special effects, the space scenes, the scenery, the lighting, etc. It was really cool how they got so much help from all over the world. I love awsome collaboration like that. The only weak point was likeable characters. Despite the amazing job these guys did on the production, I just didn’t really like any of the characters.

Here’s the official website:
[http://panicstruckpro.com/revelations/](http://panicstruckpro.com/revelations/)

and you can download the thing for free here:
[http://panicstruckpro.com/revelations/revelations_movie.html](http://panicstruckpro.com/revelations/revelations_movie.html)

I’m also hosting these movies here on my own server:
revelations_film\_QT\_large.mov Quicktime version, about 253M
revelations\_film\_large.wmv Windows Media version, about 243M
but note that this may not last; depends on how much bandwidth is used.

Post a comment here and let me know if you like it or what.

Ever since I started playing chess against my phone, I’ve had a really big desire to thoroughly kick it’s ass. I’ve had this desire for so long because, well, usually my phone kicks my ass at chess. On level “easy”. So… for me, this is a really big chess win.

Let’s start at the move just before checkmate. Here, I’ve got four queens, one rook, one bishop, and one knight. He’s got his king. It’s interesting to note that he never resigns, even in a situation like this. Maybe he’s hoping for a draw. His king is trapped at the bottom of the board by my knight and my queens, and it’s my move. The red square is my cursor, the selector (which is how to select which piece to move next). If I were to move something else, such as my king, then this would be a stalemate (draw) because his king is not in check but is also not able to move without moving into check.

I select my bishop and move it down to the right-hand side of the board, as shown here.

Bingo! Checkmate, I win. Oooaaaahh yeah… that felt good!

This is the final position; double-checked by my queen and my bishop. OOoooooohhh yeeaaahhhhhhh! Now, if that’s not a rout, I don’t know what is.

Wow, already I’ve played 300 games against this thing. Geez, it’s a real hit to my ego when my phone can kick my ass at chess! On level EASY! But that’s okay, because I’m getting better, and soon I’ll be able to kick his ass more than he kicks mine (on level EASY). After that point, I guess I’ll just have to graduate on up to MEDIUM difficulty. As of this game, I’ve played 300 games, drawn 20, won 139 and lost 141. I’m catching up. I used to be way behind.

Some time ago, I signed up with a site called ShareBuilder, so that I could trade stocks online. I had used several services in the past, such as Etrade and some that don’t exist any more.

ShareBuilder sucks for the following reasons:

- Their site is up and operational… except when you want to use it.
- When their site goes down (see above), you can’t get anyone on the phone.
- They force you to change your password every month.
- They don’t let you use any prior password that you’ve used; they keep _all_ prior passwords that you’ve used. All of ‘em. Now _that’s_ a security breach.
- You can’t close your account. When you want to close your account, they have you withdraw all funds, cancel any automatic features, and unsubscribe from their email service… then they “consider” your account “closed”.

So, overall, I’d say they are extremely unprofessional. Even on the technical side, their site seems to be down more than it’s up and operational. At least, it’s down when I want to use it.

As I was trying to unsubscribe from their newsletter (the last step in their “close” procedure), their site crashed and I could no longer log in. I just kept getting an error page saying go back to the homepage and log in again.