I’m done my net.art final project. It’s not much but let’s not forget what’s truly important – it’s done.

The swim team likes to say, “It’s Milner-Time” right before I swim. It’s kinda my nickname – if you can call it that. It’s a good thing they don’t speak latin or my new nickname might be Colymbosathon ecplecticos. It’s a sub-one-percenter (less than 1% of the people reading this will get the joke).

You know, this phone is what I really want for Christmas, but a new DVD burner would also be cool – and probably a lot less money. Just posting this in case anybody that cares wants to know what I would like for Christmas.

South Park ran a hilarious episode in November titled “All About Mormons”.

From the South Park Studios Website:

“A Mormon kid moves to South Park and Stan has to kick his ass. But when Stan and his dad meet their new Mormon neighbors, they become fascinated with how genuinely nice they are. Meanwhile the other boys mock Stan relentlessly for wimping out.”

If you missed it, you can probably get a copy of the whole episode off of the FastTrack network (download Kazaa Lite). Just search for “SouthPark – 712 – All About Mormons.avi”.

Or if you want, you can check out the “audio only” version of the South Park Joseph Smith Story.

I think pretty much the greatest thing about this episode is that is gives people who don’t know anything about the church a background into how the church started. As someone that knows from personal experience, they tell the Joseph Smith story pretty much just like they do if you were to have the Mormon Missionaries come into your house and tell you the story, except for the part where they call Martin Harris dumb. Mormon Missionaries would never call him dumb – unless they were calling him dumb because he gave his wife the unpublished transcript, then they might but other than that – no way. This episode also portrays what nice people Mormons are – based on some of the Mormon families I know it’s so accurate it’s scary.

Update: http://www.suprnova.org has finally released this episode as a torrent. Get All About Mormons(XviD-lol).torrent now (the actual file is an AVI). It’s May 2nd, 2004 so who knows when this link will stop working.

Update: It appears to have stopped working. Sorry.

I just finished my final script for Writing for New Media. It’s not an entire story, just a couple of scenes. I need to run and print it now, but I’m really getting close to be done for REAL!

Only 3 more days and a few more school projects stand in my way for leaving to Utah. Anna wants me to bring the dog – which pretty much means I’m bringing the dog. I’m really sick of the dog. Would you like a really nice dog? I just don’t have time or interest in giving her the attention she needs.

From Wired:

“Armed with inexpensive, mass-produced gems, two startups are launching an assault on the De Beers cartel.”

Wired writer Joshua Davis reports that two companies, Gemesis and Apollo are synthetically producing diamonds. Apollo’s diamonds have reached a level so close to traditionally mined diamonds that they are almost indistinguishable. In fact they are only identifiable because of the fact that they are too perfect.

This leads to the inevitable question, “How will consumers feel about them? The mystique of natural diamonds is anything but rational. Part of the allure is their high cost and supposed rarity. Yet diamonds are plentiful – De Beers maintains vast stockpiles and tightly controls supply.”

One gem wholesaler states, “If you go into a florist and buy a beautiful orchid, it’s not grown in some steamy hot jungle in Central America. It’s grown in a hothouse somewhere in California. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a beautiful orchid.”

Jef Van Royen, a senior scientist at the Diamond High Council, disagrees. He contends that, “If people really love each other, then they give each other the real stone. It is not a symbol of eternal love if it is something that was created last week.”

The article continues by pointing out that selling diamonds as gemstones is just the tip of the iceberg. Next up: the computing industry, where diamonds could theoretically be used as semiconductors.

Silicon processors are limited by the fact that as processors get faster they also get hotter. Eventually the technology will lead to processors that get so hot as to melt the silicon.

Diamonds on the other hand could handle the heat. In order to form microchip circuits, however, positive and negative conductors are needed and diamond is an inherent insulator – it doesn’t conduct electricity.

From the article:

But both Gemesis and Apollo have been able to inject boron into the lattice, which creates a positive charge. Until now, though, no one had been able to manufacture a negatively charged, or n-type, diamond with sufficient conductivity. When I visit Butler in Washington, he can barely contain his glee. “There’s been a major breakthrough,” he tells me. In June, together with scientists from Israel and France, he announced a novel way of inverting boron’s natural conductivity to form a boron-doped n-type diamond. “We now have a p-n junction,” Butler says. “Which means that we have a diamond semiconductor that really works. I can now see an Intel diamond Pentium chip on the horizon.”

The interenet is changing the way election campains in the States are run. Of course if you are a miserable failure then you probably want to stay as far away from that thar interweb as possible.

Search the web for miserable failure.

Quite possibly the coolest cell phone yet. Actually I don’t know how it compares to other phones but it looks pretty cool to me.

Anna’s family has just moved to Sandy, Utah. I hope they realize what kind of troubled people they are now living with.