Minnesota Connect

So this past weekend I went up with about 9 people to my grandma’s cabin. This included my two brothers, cousin, and 6 friends.

Friday night was mostly spent playing Rock Band and Grand Theft Auto IV. We did watch Patriot Games, though. Not really a unique cabin-going experience, I know. People tried to play “Twin Cities” (a rip-off of Monopoly) but once I started playing GTA IV the ferocity of the board game dwindled until we started passing around the controller for epic, civilian-killing sprees.

Saturday was more “productive.” We went out on the pontoon on the lake and some of us went tubing while others hung out and swam on the beach. We also played a few innings of baseball which was fun.

I had to go to the dentist earlier today to fill a small cavity. I was unsure as to what to expect. Hearing reports from “it hurts” to “I didn’t feel anything.” Well now I present to you the answer:

I didn’t feel anything. They wiped a gel on my gums to numb the region, then they used the Novocain needle, which I didn’t feel. I could kinda feel it somewhere but not painful at all.

Then, after it was all numb, the entire procedure seriously took about 5 minutes. In and out.

What happens later is a different story. My right side of my face is still numb and I can’t eat my supper because I can’t feel it very well. It’s been 2 hours. I will wait another hour and see how it goes.

The interwebs are abuzz with E3 information. Personally I don’t follow it much because I can’t keep up. However I did read about Microsoft’s presentation.

The Xbox 360 will be getting some cool new features come Fall, including a new dashboard, avatars, gameshows, NetFlix streaming, and some other neat things.

I am excited about NetFlix streaming. I know there’s a plug-in for Media Center from a 3rd party… but I don’t have Windows Media Center so having it built-in to the Xbox will be sweet.

The gameshow idea is interesting. Apparently it will be social games that you can compete in to win prizes. Crazy.

As for avatars, I guess that’s cool but I’m not really sure what purpose they’ll serve. They look better than Miis but still.

I’ll be gone to the cabin this weekend, so I won’t be updating the blog nor able to check my email. I am going with about 8 people so my grandma will have her work cut out for her, heh. We’ll be playing some Rock Band, GTA, and maybe Halo. We’ll also probably go swimming and out on the lake. It’ll be fun.

Hope you all have a good weekend!

Background

Torrent Typhoon was a small project I started back in April 2003. At the time, there was no good real-time search engine for BitTorrent. There was ISOHunt and other websites that indexed sites but didn’t always offer up-to-the-minute results. So I created the first real-time BT search engine, not YouTorrent thank you very much.

Basically, I searched other websites in real-time and parsed their results. At first, it was a really bad implementation of search and replace. Now it has evolved to just ONE "Rules" file where I define regular expressions for each site, real streamlined. The engine takes care of the rest automatically, I was fairly proud of myself. It reduced the average time to search 5 sites from 15 seconds to 3 seconds, on a shared host. I also switched from static search to AJAX making Torrent Typhoon the real "first" of AJAX BT searching (YouTorrent’s implementation was better, though).