Yeah. It’s been a long time since I last fell ill. It’s not a big deal – I just got myself a huge cold – but it still sucks. Nonethe­less, I’ll go and visit Hun­gary with my girl­friend. We plan on stay­ing there until Sun­day. I really hope it won’t get too cold and windy. If I don’t for­get my cam I may even post a few pho­tos of the Hun­gar­ian plains or so. Have a nice week­end everyone.

Deus Ex is a game, I really, really loved. Still do, in fact. Back then it was ground­break­ing. I didn’t like the suc­ces­sor, Deus Ex: Invis­i­ble Wars, though. They fucked up because the tried to use the same code base on two dif­fer­ent sys­tems: on a con­sole and on a PC. Of course, for PC gamers it really sucked hard. Leav­ing all the game­play issues aside, the story wasn’t a bum­mer either. And still … there’s one phrase that still sticks in my head: “The only fron­tier that has ever existed is the self.“.

I tend to believe that this say­ing is true. Even though it was issued by a fic­tional arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence called Helios in the sec­ond install­ment of Deus Ex. Humankind has come a long way since the dawn of human­ity. We’ve made some progress and all just because of a few good men who con­tin­u­ally pushed the enve­lope. We’re right here, we con­sider our­selves mostly civ­i­lized and we mas­sively use tech­nol­ogy to achieve great things. In the end, it’s always about push­ing, about try­ing harder than ever before, about sens­ing out the fron­tiers. Read more…

Just a short note to let you know of my suc­cess fight­ing over­weight – if you can call it that way – by not mak­ing a diet. I’ve lost only 1.1 pounds (0.5 kg) since last week but I’m glad the trend of los­ing weight is still there to see. Let’s see how all the train­ing this week will turn out. I’m talk­ing push-ups, sit-ups and the like. Just a lit­tle bit to get into shape, so it’s no real training.

I apol­o­gize for not post­ing sooner, but I’m attend­ing an advanced train­ing course in Java this week and I’m hard pressed to keep all the new stuff in my head. Instead of blog­ging I pro­duced some code to fur­ther advance my knowl­edge of this pro­gram­ming lan­guage. Any­ways, I wanted to write about my progress on Mon­day so, here we go.

After one week of eat­ing “healthy” food, mov­ing way more on foot rather than going any­where by means of pub­lic trans­porta­tion and stop­ping to eat junk food after 2000 hours there’s a pretty impres­sive result to behold: I’ve already lost 5 pounds (2,3 kg) even though I wasn’t as con­se­quent as I wanted to be. Right know, I weigh 198 lbs (89,9 kg). Next week, after the train­ing course, I’m plan­ning on doing some work­out every day to boost the basal metab­o­lism of my body.

“Oh no”, you sigh. Not again. But here I am writ­ing about aliens. At least, it has noth­ing to do with the TV show Aliens in Amer­ica. And, for your sake, it’s short too. Since I was read­ing a lot from Charles Stross as of lately, I just had to think about it. What’s the hall­mark of an advanced civ­i­liza­tion? While philoso­phers might argue this point to death, it involves a cer­tain tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment. Just imag­ine a highly tech­no­log­i­cally advanced species who can do won­ders with its tech­nol­ogy. If we can’t see the tech­nol­ogy, would we fall for them if they state that they’re our Gods?

Any­way, that’s not what I was think­ing about. I went along the lines of “how would they explore the uni­verse”? Even if they got ships that are able to move faster than light (FTL), cos­mos is a really big place and it’s get­ting big­ger every sec­ond. So, how would they go about it? I for myself would opt for self-replicating robots. They would be per­fect for that kind of task. You start send­ing a bunch of them out into space and then you lean back and wait for results com­ing in. If they can move faster than light, they wouldn’t have to wait all that long, would they? If they can’t, they’d cover more ground in the most effi­cient way pos­si­ble. Their robots would have resources aplenty, what­ever they’d need to fuel their repli­cat­ing and journeying.

I won­der if that’s the first sign of higher life-forms on other plan­ets we will dis­cover. To me, it sounds com­pletely log­i­cal. If you’re an avid watcher of Star­gate, be it SG-1 or Atlantis, then you are already famil­iar with the con­cept of repli­ca­tors. Any­how, I wouldn’t assume they’d look any­where near the same. Well, it’s noth­ing more than a mind game but I can’t stop think­ing about it.

I’ve got a whole lot of noth­ing going on. Lit­er­ally. Unfor­tu­nately, I can’t write about that, can I? Instead I rather write about an ini­tia­tive that deserves sup­port. It’s about fight­ing stu­pid­ity on the inter­net. Of course, one might invol­un­tar­ily think of Don Quixote when read­ing the for­mer sen­tence. Don’t blame me, I’m just the mes­sen­ger. Any­way, check it out for your­self. In the mean­time, relax and enjoy the comics (yes, they’re kinda geeky).