A Conflagration of Randomness

A few years ago I saw this article challenging people to make pong in any language and decided to design Pong in Java.  At that time I had taking Java in high school for about 5 months, but we were still no where near making applets.  I had already designed Chess and Checkers, and even though they were basic, they gave me the knowledge I needed to develop pong.  Of course this version of pong is really outdated because I have learned a lot since, but I have not felt the urge really to go back and change.  The AI is a bit strange since it follows the ball and randomly goes the opposite direction that it does not track the ball perfectly and I developed a new AI that finds where the ball will land and attempts to go that point, but I haven’t implemented it yet.  Writing this post makes me realize just how many unfinished projects I have.

Yes, the mailman in fact does come on Christmas Eve since Christmas is a Federal Holiday, but not Christmas Eve. So for all those folks wondering if they will receive their packages today, yes you will! I was wondering the same thing today as I am expecting books required for school today in the mail.

Merry Christmas Eve everyone!  Tonight Santa is coming to town and you can track his annual journey with Norad’s tracking system.  The North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad) has been tracking Santa for over 50 years and this year is no different.

However, now you can track Santa from Twitter, Facebook, and Google Earth/Maps. For further information you can read Brian McClendon’s, engineering director for Google Earth and Google Maps, article on tracking Santa.

A recent patent application by Microsoft shows that Microsoft is planning on developing games that would limit certain areas and competitions to healthy Americans.  The players in-game avatars would reflect their own physique. Overweight players would  be restricted unless they maintained a proper health records.  The game would draw the information from digital medical records.  How this will go I don’t know, but it seems like there may be lawsuits of some form against equal rights for all Americans.  We shall see.

I have discovered four domain valuation tools in the last few months. Both calculate the value of a domain in very different ways leading to very different results. I tested both with my domain name http://shopthe.net. One came out to $700,000 while the other resulted in $100.

The first was Leapfish:

This gives a very generous estimate of a domain, obviously based on only popularity and not actual traffic, since I basically get none.

You can try their search for getting the value of your domain:

The other site is called Website Outlook:

This gives a much more modest and accurate result.

Search on Website Outlook. Enter your domain.

In addition there is another tool called Estibot.  This offered the lowest price of all.

Estibot

Finally I tried a tool called Valuate, which gave me the second lowest appraisal.

Results:

So which domain tool would you trust the most?