I was recently introduced to this website by my Social teacher of all people. I could go on and on about this wesbite and its genius but I believe that TED can talk for himself. The website is really a video account of an annual convention where a number of interesting experts on various subjects (any subject really, there are no rules) talk. That is what they do, they talk. They talk on a wide variety of EXTREMELY interesting topics. By spending a mere hour on this website you will learn, to be completely precise, a whole fucking lot. I have always been a strong believer in the idea that all knowledge is relevant and that learning about anything and everything is always the best way to go. Always find out random shit and expand your library of inconsistent facts and you will find yourself understanding and enjoying life to a newer extent.

So I beg that you please visit this site and watch something that interests you, It is a collection of the ideas of the beautiful minds of a handfull of the worlds most masterful orators. This website is an intellectual gold mine just waiting to be exploited.

Just to juice up this post further I will include a few videos that I personally really enjoyed and found incredibly fascinating.

Janine Benyus: 12 sustainable design ideas from nature

Dan Dennett: Can we know our own minds?

Craig Venter: On the verge of creating synthetic life

Rives: Is 4 a.m. the new midnight?
this one was done purely as comedy but its still quite fucking hilarious.

Don’t worry, i don’t actually use Messenger for the Mac on a regular basis, only when a new version comes out and i want to see if anything at all has been improved. On an everyday basis i use the amazing Adium IM client. The one big thing that is lacking in pretty much every 3rd party MSN client is webcam support. For some odd reasons, Messenger for the Mac is missing it to. I really don’t understand this as almost every Mac sold has a built in webcam, so there is no reason not to have Webcam support. I was hoping that the new release would have it but of course Microsoft keeps up its regular deal and just disappoints me. Another thing that i really don’t like is that the notifications that the program uses aren’t done through the fairly standard Growl but instead Microsoft’s own unique “solution”. On top of it all, the interface is completely fugly. It doesn’t fit in with the mac interface at all. At least Office 2008 does a good job of fitting in. I give Messenger for the Mac 7 an EPIC FAIL
Edit: It actually does have video/audio capabilities but for some odd reason its only in the Corporate version aka no use for any regular consumer

First off in the name the plural of succubus is succubi kinda like cactus. OK why they are succubi is simply first they bitch and complain about how they are not treated equal then want all the same rights to be able to play sports with men that are physical strenuous and involve high muscular performance and ability to take pain. ( which as we all now are not really the strong parts of our female counter parts) among loads of other things which i do agree on some but then they just go over the top with the whole p.c. thing and with there demands. OK so after they have bitched and complained about everything and we give them the same rights as men they then take it to far and demand things like manhole covers to be called people hole covers and for all the manhole covers to be changed to people hole covers OK so for example(this was actually a demand from a feminist group in new york city )there is over 700 miles of roads in new york right and lets say maybe about 60 manhole covers per one mile which is probably wrong there is probably more then that on each mile of road but OK yeah so if we take 60 * by 700 we get 42000 OK so there are probably more manhole covers then that but it is still a pretty big number and we take the price of the manhole covers at the current rate right now which is 500$ plus going in and digging the old ones up which includes labor cost of workers and everything else in between so then 42000*500=21000000 ok then add the labor costs and all the other materials needed to replace a manhole over and the inconvenience to the drivers of new york people just to have the feminist in the world happy about how manhole covers and no longer sexist i think that that is just over the top and all in all dumb as hell. But other then that one interesting fact i found on my journeys through life and the internet. I also have some complaints about things that i have experienced so they want all girls to be treated as equals in everything so then why should we have to open doors for you let you go first not be as hard on you as we are on guys in lets say sports and other things and why is it not right to hit a girl if you are our equals then they should be able to take a punch from anyone just like any guy would and there should not have to be a huge controversy over it and don’t worry people i wont hit a girl i am just stating a fact. Another thing is girls and guys are genetically made different guys are made to be strong and physically dominant because when we first evolved from whatever who did all the hunting in most cultures and who did all the fighting guys right so we were made to be stronger and dominate. Now i am also not saying that all guys are stronger because there are exceptions there will always be a girl who can bench 200 pounds some where and a guy that can only bench 40 pounds so yes there are exceptions and every one i think has come to terms with that so why cant you feminist just shut up and take into account the genetic nature of things that guys are strong there can do more physically strenuous actives and if you want to be equal in things like that then go work out and change how you are naturally and then stop bitching and as well don’t say that you want to be treated equally then say that girls and more fragile and everyone has to be gentle when doing anything with girls and pick up your own god damn luggage that would also help. and open the doors for yourselves it is a pain in the ass. Oh i agree with rights of women like working and voting and stuff like that just dont go over the fucking top and think about the whole of nature god damn succubi.

I’m typing this from an iPod touch, most likely because I hate myself subconsciously. I say that because the onscreen keyboard is painful. This is common from my experience with handhelds, for reasons unknown.

The first device I tried to use was an up iPaq pocket PC. It was an interesting device. For one thing it ran windows CE. Windows CE shares only its name with the popular OS. For one thing, the interface tried to be too much like windows. It had draggable message boxes, multitasking, and a full filesystem complete with filetypes and a different structure than the desktop release of windows. My complaint boils down to this: windows CE tries to be too complex for it to work well as a mobile device. Programs don’t close when you press on their ‘X’; they merely close their window. But wait, the only task browser was buried three layers deep in the control panel lookalike, under the memory tab. (I think newer versions buried it even deeper).

My next target is Palm OS. My experience with it isn’t recent at all, so take this all with a grain of salt. Palm OS is still ugly though. Flat colors and short curves are all that Palm OS uses. Other odd features, such as an entirely new written language, held Palm OS back. I think palm has resigned itself to using windows CE now though, so basically HP just has some competition now.

As for the black berry. I haven’t used one, and I hope I never do. The buttons are tiny, and the lack of a touch screen makes my fingers cry out in empathy towards all those who use them. Or maybe it’s spite. Whatever it is, I don’t need to be connected to everyone at every time.

Now it’s time for the device im using right now, the iPod touch. The onscreen keyboard makes me cry. The buttons are too small to reliably hit with my fingertips. With practice I can work around it, but this just highlights an obnoxious spelling suggestion tool. ‘OS’ translates to ‘I’d’ automatically. CE translates to de. The only way to stop this behaviour is to press on a small bubble the appears. The punctuation and numbers are on a separate layer of the keyboard, meaning that if you wanted (for some reason that will never be known) to use proper punctuation for your sentences you need to flip to the punctuation page, add the period, then flip back. The lack of any sort of language resembling english somewhat annoys me, although I do have to admit that character recognition generally sucks even today.

PS: Blame Apple for any misspellings

This is the accompanying post for the Comic#22 which hasn’y yet posted at the time of writing.
Basically heres the story of why instead of writing a (if i do say so myself) damn near hilarious comic about suicidal whales I just randomly through together a place holder because I wanted to save that new comic for when I get my new tablet later this week, and shortly you will see exactly why.
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Since the beginning of time… well actually just since the beginning of November last year I have been bringing you endless hours of epic comic-related hilarity using this tablet.
Yeah its kindof a junker but it was cheap and reliable as all-getout. Its a Hanvon product, meaning it’s a cheap asian knock off of a Wacom Bamboo. I found the little bugger on Ebay for a mere 60 dollars! I was ecstatic at the time having no alternative means of getting a tablet of any quality. Lets just say that the tablet worked very well, my only concern being that it was difficult to produce work that was even remotely competent or even half as good as my illustrations could have been if done directly on paper. It was a cheap, rickety, slippery, shitty little throwaway tablet and I love it to fucking peices.

And now we get to the interesting part of the story. Upgrading. To shorten an already painfully long story I will just inform you that earlier today a conversation ensued with my parents where I ended up explaining the past, future and present of ExplodingWumpus.com. I was metaphorically cock slapped by the news that followed. It turns out somewhere deep in the tangle, cobweb emblazoned inner workings of my fathers mind he had decided that he would invest in my future by buying me a new tablet. Yeah. Wow.

After a short look around the site he seemed to be so impressed by what he saw I was working on that he told me to just look around and pick a tablet I wanted… Let me tell you right now that I wanted to turn him down and be the humble bastard I wish I was, but no I just couldn’t let up on the opportunity to upgrade to a tablet in the range of 300-400$ from a tablet that was in the range of giveaway-60$. I could go on even further but I have no way of explaining what happened next, basically I am now the proud owner of a Cintiq 12WX Pen Tablet a MOTHER FUCKING 1000$ TABLET! After I was finished shitting bricks at the news that he had somehow gone from offering me a “300-400$” tablet to buying this beautiful, elegant machine; I proceeded to order and now the tablet should be here by the end of the week! Im not sure where he got the idea to buy this thing but I was not about to say “no thanks, I’ll work and save up some money and earn it!” his exact words were “I’m investing in your future, and it’s only money”.

I found out later that after he had bought his Yaris the government had sent him a check for 1000$ because he was helping the economy by buying that big blue shoebox with wheels. But I honestly didn’t care where the money came from, it was the thought that mattered and the fact that this is one of the nicest tablets you can get. Heres a video of the goddess being used. And here is a commercial for the lovely thing.

Expect a significant increase in the quality of the comics as soon as this thing arrives!

We decided to give the general public a randomly, and probably well needed, history lesson. This is a short and precise documentation of the colonization of the Americas. Thats all you need to know.

P.S. We might have taken some creative liberties

Exploding Wumpus Random Video #1 - The 7 Years War from Exploding Wumpus on Vimeo.

First they argued about whether Obama was black enough and now they think he looks to good? Wow American politics are really fucked up.

It’s not like there arent enough good reasons already to shy away from using Windows Server as a web server. Hundreds of Thousands of websites have been hacked recently by exploiting security flaws in Microsoft Windows Server to install malicious software on visitors’ machines. The exploit is in Window’s IIS Webserver(aka a terrible clone of Apache). Please folks, make the right choice and stick with Linux when it comes to servers.

Via: Washington Post

Well this past few weeks I have had several coincidences that I could not understand. This was not the kind of coincidence that required some in-depth thinking but merely could be solved with one question directed at one person. But i was stuck, I couldn’t ask them it was too informal and I was afraid of the truth. Apparently while researching coincidences i came across this wiki article, it shows that many coincidences can be solved by simply making a chart of possibilities and probabilities.

This is actually pretty cool, especially if you want to improve your typing. It’s called TypeRacer and it’s basically at typing game but your typing speed controls a car and you play against other people online.