Hallow Helloween

Halloween post! We had Halloween in November because, we did. Everyone that showed up was in costume, it was fantastic! Though they don't really celebrate Halloween like we do in the states I felt right at home at our party. On the real Halloween we actually got some trick-or-treaters which was really strange.

Anyway, this post needs less words.







My photos always look terrible when I upload them. I blame flickr, or compression algorithms or something.

Stuff you don't care about

My camera ran out of batteries and I'm sort of scared to try to charge it because that last thing I used my adapter on (alarm clock) got fried. So instead a story. Last Thursday I went to a meeting of the Danish Flash User Group (DFUG) to see Mike Chambers and Lee Brimelow speak. It turned out to be a really good time and I met some really cool people. Long story short one of the people I met was Ralph Hauwert, one of the developers of papervision 3d, a 3d engine for Flash CS3. Still with me? Anyway talking to him was nice for more reasons than that neither of us speak very good Danish (though he is much better than I am) and we conversed in english. It got me excited about AS3 and 3d in general which brings me around to the point of this post and the black box below. This is my first attempt at 3D in a code based environment. To use it, click once to shoot a bunch of balls up and then press spacebar to pause it and rotate it with the mouse. When in that mode pressing shift will resume the balls falling. It's not much and though I pieced the code together from other examples for the most part, I'm proud. Also it's only 4k. Sweet. Flash is great.



PS. wu-tang put out a new mixtape on the internet and it's awesome. download it!

I was talking to my co-workers about Colbert's attempt to make a fake run for president and apparently they had this happen a few years ago, except he won. A comedian named Jacob Haugaard ran for parliament and was actually elected to serve. When he was preparing one of his issues included that he hated wind blowing in your face while you were riding a bike, so he promised for wind to blow from your back whenever you rode. He also promised things like changing the weather and putting god back in churches. With a little wikipedia digging I cam across the election results here. Most shocking to me is that the voter turnout rate was 84.3 percent! The US had a turnout of about 55% in 2004 which was one of the highest turnouts in recent history. Also, he ran without a party, try that USA. Granted it was just a seat in parliament and not prime minister or anything, but still, look at that turnout. When elected he actually served his term as well. Though it seems he didn't do anything that remarkable while serving, it got people interested in politics which is very valuable and commendable I think. Our 2004 election had about a 5% bigger turnout than the 2000 election and the election that Haugaard ran also had a 5% turnout bump. If you'll remember the difference in getting out the vote in 2000 vs 2004 I think it was pretty significant. Here, the one guy running caused a similar bump (I realize as I'm saying this I have no idea if it's true, I wasn't here to experience if there was any other significant impetus to vote, but it helps my point if I assume there wasn't). I just read that Colbert got denied the chance to appear on the ballot by the South Caroline democrats which I think is too bad. Colbert has a tremendous following and I think it would really get a lot of people to the voting booths. I'm not sure if this buzz will wear off by next year but I hope and think that there will be a bigger turnout in next years election.