This is the archive of tumbledry happenings that occurred on January, 2000.

Thoughts about the new millennium

Hope all of you had a safe and happy new millennium! I had a good time at home with family. Watching the ball drop in New York was really boring. It was the first time I had actually seen it drop and I was under the assumption that it was a free fall drop. I thought that they would release the ball and let gravity take over. Oh well; the Thames fireworks were incredible. Officials wanted the river to look like it was on fire with red, and I think they succeeded. In addition to that there was France with the 10 huge decorative ferris wheels and the Eiffel tower thing was incredible. It took a group of mountain climbers three months to get all the fireworks up there. The Eiffel tower looked like it was going to blow up. Pretty cool. Just a little FYI for those of you who don’t know; it isn’t really the new millenium. There was no year 0 so the real new millennium occurs on New Years 2001. One year to go. Overall we had a calm millenium (no Y2K problems) and I think Europe beat us out on the festivities.

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Despite the drawback for FP shooters, zone.com is great for gaming

Not long ago I decided to take up playing hearts on the zone occasionally. I had come to the conclusion that the zone was way to slow to keep up with the 40,000+ users that are usually online. Granted, it does have trouble dealing with the highly graphical first person shooters. But, within 10 minutes I was playing hearts with essentially no lag. People are friendly at the hearts section of the site and I didn’t see any swearing. Other parts of the zone are more rowdy; like the first person shooter rooms, but my experience was one of a relaxed environment and no worrys about modem speed; just a friendly game. The zone also give you room to get better; there are competitive rooms and there is always, always somebody that is better than you are. The zone gives me a friendly environment to get better at hearts in; that is when I am not chatting or writing these updates. =-)

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GoZilla is worthy of its download of the year title

Recently, I read an article in the paper that said GoZilla was rated number one download of the year by various websites. What is this program you ask? Well, it manages your downloads. You can resume downloads after you have disconnected and even set the program to turn off your computer when a download has been completed. This is useful if you have a large file but do not want to stay up late and wait for it to finish. I don’t download files much, so I don’t know about this from personal experience, but if this is the number one download of the year I suggest you check it out. Goto GoZilla.com and get this program today. You won’t be sorry and you won’t be tired from staying up and waiting for files to download; that is if you aren’t chatting ‘til one in the morning!

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Dotcomma.org is a good tutorial site

Do you need help in advanced or beginner programming techniques? Or do you have a tutorial that you would like publicized? dotcomma.org is an excellent and growing site updated almost daily. Its creators and contributors are some of the best web people out there like Adam Berlinsky-Schine creator of Dimension TI and Nick Disabato major contributor to ticalc.org. These are some big names and if you don’t believe me, check out the sites that they started at. Dotcomma stands for the dot and the comma that make up a semi-colon; the semi-colon is very important in almost all programming languages. This site offers tutorials under the following programming languages; C/C++, CGI, ASM, Perl, Java, JavaScript, HTML, Visual Anything, PHP, ASP, databases, and source code. This site was started in September of 1999 and has grown quite steadily since then, I am impressed both with the design and with the tools available that allow the user to search for keywords and specific tutorials. The site organization was well thought out and gives plenty of room for expansion. I think a little more publicity combined with a steady increase in tutorial count will cause dotcomma’s traffic to skyrocket.

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Are kids going to school too many days out of the year?

Every year the school year feels like it is getting longer. I especially look at year length during this semester time when we are halfway through the school year. At first I thought I was imagining it, but then I found it to be true. School districts (at least the ones in my area) are increasing the length of the school year! Of course, they have their reasons; one of them is snow days. They need to have some leeway to allow for school cancellations but still meet the state mandate of the number of days the kids are in school. However, throughout the years, snow days have decreased from about 4 per school year down to 1 or none. So why increase school length if the snow days are becoming more rare? While talking to an older person I discovered that 40 years ago, the school year began at about mid September and ended at the first of June. Now, the year starts at the first of September and goes until about June 10th. That is about 10-15 more days of school! What is going on and how can we change it? Complaints about school year length from students are always weak and aren’t really listened to. Also, parents don’t really mind if their kids are in school an extra week or two; they figure it can’t hurt. For now I guess my friends and I will just have to live with it. Comments and/or suggestions about this topic are welcome by E-Mail. Use the contact page to send mail.

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There has been a recent explosion in T.V. game shows

Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, Greed, and 21 are some of the new titles of television game shows. The successful [and fairly original] ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ started the craze. Everybody is cashing in and most networks have their own give-away-large-amounts-of-money-game shows. Even the cable channel called ‘Old Game Shows’ has seen increased ratings due to the current game show frenzy. The question is will it die down or keep going strong? Right now, the future outlook looks promising for the bigger shows, but I think the smaller imitations will die in about 6 months. However, I have found most of these shows to be fairly interesting and not at all boring. Because of this, many shows could keep going for quite a while if they play their cards right. Just look at Wheel of Fortune; that show has been on for a very long time and shows no signs of slowing down. The same could happen for these game shows. But, I believe they need sponsers. For example, most everything on Wheel of Fortune is a certain brand and the companies give Wheel of Fortune some items to give away in exchange for advertising. On these big money shows, there could be a million dollar prize sponsered by, say, Visa Credit Cards. We will see how it all turns out but I am hoping some of these shows stick around.

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