Alex’s Journal

So it looks like I will probably not be writing much on here for the next few weeks or so. A friend of mine is coming out from overseas and we’re going to be quite busy traveling around and doing things. Eventually I will make another post though.

Also, it’s really sad that the USA lost today’s Championship game in soccer. They had the Brazilians up 2:0, but then blew it towards the end of the game. Oh well, at least the US made it as far as the Championship.

I’ve posted my newest story to my new writings website. You can find it here:

Drilled

Muse just announced today that their new album, The Resistance, comes out September 14!

Now that’s good news.

This is a great video.

I’ve posted a couple of new stories on my Writings site. One is a story that used to be hosted on this blog, “Together to One,” and the other is an old skit I made a while ago called “Bricks.” You can find them at the following links:

Bricks
Together to One

This is a fun riddle I was e-mailed at some point. I solved it relatively easily:

There are no tricks, just pure logic, so good luck and don’t give up. 



1. In a street there are five houses, painted five different colours.
2. In each house lives a person of different nationality.
3. These five homeowners each drink a different kind of beverage, smoke different brand of cigar and keep a different pet. 



THE QUESTION: Who owns the fish?

HINTS

1. The Brit lives in a red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The Green house is next to, and on the left of the White house.
5. The owner of the Green house drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.
7. The owner of the Yellow house smokes Dunhill.
8. The man living in the centre house drinks milk.
9. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
10. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
12. The man who smokes Blue Master drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Prince.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes Blends has a neighbour who drinks water.

Good luck!

Yesterday, Apple announced the release of Safari 4 at it’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Of course, I upgraded immediately from Safari 3 on my Mac. It seems like a pretty good update so far, but there is one major feature that Apple previewed in the beta version that didn’t make it to the final release.

One of my favorite features of Safari 4 Beta was the tabs on top, which Apple promptly got rid of in the final release of the browser. This feature I liked because I tend to overshoot the tabs quite often and, instead of selecting the tab I want, I click on a bookmark in my bookmarks bar. With the tabs on top, the problem was thus solved. Unfortunately, Apple did away with that feature with no option to change it back. I have to say that I’m fairly disappointed with that.

I realize, of course, that there are many good changes that came about in Safari 4. One of them being the better JavaScript performance through the new JavaScript engine, Nitro. I also really do like the way the new address bar looks. The changes were very subtle, but it looks better in my opinion. Apple, for some unexplained reason, removed the progress bar that was embedded in the address bar and was replaced with a small blue rectangle at the end that says “Loading…”.

Overall, it was worth upgrading despite the tabs now being in their traditional location underneath the bookmarks bar.

Recently I posted a whole bunch of short writings which I called the Tales of Fate. In lieu of wasting time and space here, I have decided to setup a website specifically dedicated to the publication of my writings. This website can be found at http://writing.alexseifert.com. Also, check out the new Writings page on this blog.

I will be republishing such stories as “Together to One” and “Drilled” on that site as well instead of just posting the stories in a PDF file as I have been doing most recently. I also have several others to post. I will be making good use of this new site, so check back frequently or subscribe to the RSS feed or by e-mail to automatically be notified when I publish a new story.

The goal is to eventually have enough short stories to publish my own book of short stories. I am not terribly far off from that point and when I reach it, I will let everyone know here.

In the month since the university has been out for the summer, I have to admit that I haven’t had much motivation to write any entries about history. I haven’t researched anything nor have I really read anything pertaining to history. I have finished a couple of Mark Twain books and a book with short vampire stories, but other than that, I haven’t really read anything. Which brings me to this entry’s topic.

I’ve given it a bit of thought about why exactly I study history. The answer is fairly straight-forward I think. I’ve always had a strong fasciation for the past and for some unexplainable reason, a particular interest in the 19th century. I remember when I was a young child at my grandparents’ house when my grandmother would show me old photos of her grandparents and great-grandparents. I always marveled that the people in the old sepia photographs who I was looking at lived in a completely different time and century when things were much simpler.

Even today I think that same drive is behind my fascination with history. I am obviously a modern student in a modern world, who has a fancy laptop, a couple of websites, a couple of blogs, a cell phone, a Facebook account, several gigabytes of music, etc, etc — all of the so-called modern necessities for people of my age; and yet, even I often feel overwhelmed and feel the need to just reject all of this technology and go back to a more basic life. Studying history gives me the ability to simply disappear into a simpler world in which these modern marvels do not exist and to try to experience what life would have been like before electricity or the advent of microchips.

It may seem strange for the son of a computer programmer who is only 21 years of age and who has grown up with computers all of his life to feel this way, but I often do. When doing research, I prefer to use books in the library and read articles in physical journals and take notes with a notebook and pen rather than finding resources online and taking notes digitally as so many of my peers do. I know it is not as efficient and if pressed for time, I will resort to that, but I feel that if you enjoy the research, why does it matter how long it takes?

When I was much younger, the computer was virtually my life. I’ve created programs on multiple platforms, I’ve experimented with different flavors of Unix and Linux and I’ve done websites since I was 11 and the web was hardly anything but a sparse collection of text. I am by no means computer-illiterate or technology-shy (to be perfectly modest…) as many people I know who prefer to do things the old fashioned way. For me, it is simply a choice.

That is why I study history. Not only do I find it absolutely fascinating from an academic approach, but it is a means of escape, I suppose, where a body can disappear to a time before Facebook and MySpace, a time when calling somebody meant visiting them in person, a time when riding shotgun implied carrying an actual shotgun and a time when things were simpler.

This is a duplicate post from my history blog, History Rhymes.

Well, I’ve posted the eighth and final installment of my Tales of Fate series. I decided to just quickly post them all so I can move on. From here on out, I will be posting better and more normal short stories. I’ve still got several to post and will spend the next several weeks posting them I think. I am still trying to decide on a decent format for posting some of the longer ones. Perhaps I will break them up into several different posts so they are not exceedingly long posts.

I’ve also just finished one of the books I’ve been working on for the past couple of months. Really, I do read a lot, but I tend to read three or four books at a time, meaning that they take a bit longer to read. The book I just finished is called 100 Vicious Little Vampire Stories edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz and Martin Greenberg. As the title implies, it is a collection of short vampire stories. I really don’t know why, but I’ve always found short stories more entertaining than longer stories. It’s possible that my attention span is not up to the task of focusing on a long story. That could also explain my tendency to read several books at once.