Heath C. Ice

A friend today posted on Facebook that the Admiral Twin Drive-In Theater had burned down before she ever got around to going. She was unhappy that she would probably now not get to see a drive-in movie. I decided to go on Wikipedia.” I searched for “drive in theater” and was instantly brought to the page for Drive-in theater. Skimming through the article, I found nothing about current theaters, but the “See Also” section of the article contained a link to List of active drive-in theaters.

This list contained theaters for Australia, Brasil, Canada, United States (broken down by state), and India. Listed under Oklahoma were Admiral Twin Drive In Theatre in Tulsa (uh-oh, this is out of date), Beacon Drive-In in Guthrie, Chief Drive-In in Chickasha, Corral Drive-In in Guymon, Tower Drive-In in Poteau, and Winchester Drive-In in Oklahoma City. Now, I was afraid this list was outdated since they still listed the Admiral Twin, but then I read the small description under Admiral Twin which stated “Note: The Admiral Twin burned down on 9/3/10, no word on if it will be rebuilt.” So short a time after it happened and Wikipedia has already been updated. Almost any other website listing something as random as current Drive-In Theaters would have been out of date much longer.

Is Wikipedia always accurate and update-to-date? No. But I have found over the years that it has given me far more right correct answers than incorrect answers. When everyone can edit everything (basically) on the site, it is bound to have inaccuracies at times. This same editing power, though, is what has allowed it to become one of the most vast and up-to-date repositories of knowledge I’ve ever found.

This is a panel discussion from the 2009 Christian Book Expo. The panelist are William Lane Craig, Christopher Hitchens, Douglas Wilson, Lee Strobel, and Jim Denison. Some good discussion. Compiled for you here on my blog simply to save you the effort of finding all 12 videos on YouTube. Enjoy.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Read the rest of this entry »

I am a lazy bastard and I have been meaning to test this for days. Last week, Apple released a software update as shown below.

I found this strange since Apple is typically pretty vague about what it has fixed in many software updates. Good job on the part of Valve and Blizzard though in putting pressure on Apple to fix it’s graphics drivers. Anyways, I was curious if this would allow my Starcraft II install to run better on OSX. Previously, I could not run Starcraft II on “Ultra” graphics settings without having a framerate issue on my quad-core i7 iMac. With this new update though, I am not able to run with “Ultra” settings! I am happy. Granted that when I ran this test, Blizzard also installed an update, so that could have also affected the results. Anyways, I am looking forward now to better and better graphics performance in games on OSX!!!

After a few weekends of eating 12lbs of steak (oh god, those were good weekends!) I decided that I should eat healthy part of the time. One thing that came of this was that I raided the vegetarian frozen section of my supermarket and started trying out veggie burgers and other like products. In my journey I have found that vegetarian chicken SUCKS, at least if it is from Morning Star.

The first fake chicken I tried was Morning Star Buffalo Wings. While the buffalo flavor was ok, the overall texture and quality was HORRIBLE. While the “chicken” nuggets were hot they were ok, but as soon as they started to cool off they became the nastiest densest food substance I have eaten in a long while.

Next, I tried the Morning Star Chicken Tenders. They had the same issue as the Buffalo Wings; as soon as they started to cool off, they became inedible. It was nasty… until I came to the chicken tender to which I had added malt vinegar! While still warm, this “chicken” tender was still pretty good. The good/bad thing about it though was that it reminded me of Long John Silver’s fish instead of chicken. If they would simply add malt vinegar to the chicken tenders and relabel them as “fish tenders,” they might be edible! This same evaluation applies also to Morning Star Chicken Nuggets.

Now here comes the shocker (no, not THAT shocker, you sick person!) Boca Breaded Chicken Patties were actually pretty damned good! I would call them comparable to most any frozen real chicken patty in taste. They had a country fried steak seasoning to them and the texture was very close to actual processed chicken. While I cannot recommend any Morning Star chicken products, I am a big fan of Boca Breaded Chicken Patties!

Before I was 5 years old, I had many nightmares of clowns coming out of my bedroom walls in the dark at night and terrorizing me. A couple of months ago I think I finally figured out what caused these nightmares. I had MANY surgeries before I was 2 years old to correct a number of birth defects including scoliosis and a missing tendon on my left thumb. At the University of Oklahoma Children’s Hospital in Oklahoma City, the waiting are and hallways were all painted with clown murals. I am almost certain that my mind associated the surgeries, and any associated pain, with the clowns painted on the walls of the hospital.

I no longer have any fear of clowns whatsoever, but I had always wondered what made me so scared of clowns coming to get me at night when I was a kid. Needless to say, I tried watching “It” one time when I was a kid and didn’t make it very far into the movie after the first appearance of the clown guy. As a final note, I know that the clowns were on the wall in hopes of comforting the kids, but is causing the kids to associate seeing clowns with being sick really the best thing in the world?

Well, amusing and/or impressive.

First we have a cartoon depicting the difference between the Conservative and Liberal mindsets on greed and responsibility.

Next, we have a picture of a definite ass hole!

We all know that Fox News is in bed with the republican party, but is it really honest for some of the other news sources to call them out about it?

Ahh, Tobias Fünke, the man you had the audacity and foresight to combine the professions of analyst and therapists.

No real description here, just a thing that made me go “WTF” when I first watched it.

Let us take a moment to reimagine “The Wizard of Oz” in a slightly darker, more realistic manner.

And finally, a high resolution picture of the space shuttle taking off at night.

And finally, how could this cat be so selfish and shortsighted. He deserves his sticker!!!

Note that none of these images are my original work. If you would like to know the original source, run the image through TinEye.

The wind was fairly calm this morning so a couple of friends and I went off into the desert to fly for a few hours. I ended up forgetting my good HD video camera, but here are a couple of short videos taken with my iPhone 4. The videos were originally 720p, but since I edited them and uploaded them directly from my phone, it looks like they were compressed before being sent to YouTube. Oh well, 360p is good enough for these videos.

There were two pretty spectacular crashes this morning, but I didn’t get video of either of them. On the first crash, the plane started to spin out of control and then plunged nose first into the ground pretty hard. The final crash was on the other side of a hill, but it still made a loud THUD as it hit. The second crash happened when a hard turn was attempted with my plane. The wings buckled under the pressure and sent the plane spiraling straight down into the ground.

Since it was sitting on the table when I made the video about my Aerobird’s damage, I decided to talk a bit about the history of my Striker.

I got home tonight and suddenly had a craving for something sweet. Since I don’t usually keep such things in the house (as I don’t crave them much) I had nothing to satisfy my craving. I really didn’t want to go across town to get ice cream either. I then remembered that I had some strawberries in the fridge and some almond milk. So, I added the following to the blender just to see if it would make a decent ice cream like substance.

• Silk Almond Milk
• Fresh Strawberries
• Sweetened Condensed Milk
• Lots of Ice

The result was not as great as I had hoped, but it still tasted pretty damned good! I put the remainder in the freezer to solidify it, and so far it is turning into a pretty decent dessert. I will try to upload a picture/video of the final product tomorrow. For now, here are the results directly out of the blender.

I recently found the files from my Senior Design Project at the University of Missouri – Rolla. Unfortunately, this was in 2005, before the era of cheap high-definition cameras. I really wish I had a better video of all of this! I will be posting a fair amount about it in the next few days. We attempted to create an autonomous surveillance aircraft. Here are a couple of videos of the flight.

Here’s the video we put together for our final presentation. The first few minutes are spent testing out all of the electronics before flight.

Here is the raw video from the onboard camera.

I hope to post a lot more about this project soon.

Starcraft II looks beautiful with all graphics settings at high, but many people have computers that are a few years old and cannot handle these higher graphics settings. While I was messing around earlier today I decided to get a screenshot of the same scene with high graphics settings and then low graphics settings.

Starcraft II with High Graphics Settings

Starcraft II with Low Graphics Settings

Even at the lowest graphics settings, the games was easily playable. In some ways, the lower settings were easier use because everything was very basic and it was easier to see many of the units against the background. At times, I have found myself distracted by all of the extra details and colors in both the background and the units of Starcraft II. I plan to play with my settings until I find those which give me the best gameplay.

A friend has been successful in playing Starcraft II on Windows XP with just a 2GHz AMD Athlon processor. His computer does meet the bare minimum for video card and RAM. I do not know his exact graphics settings, but they were a mixture of low and medium. According to him, the gameplay was smooth and he had no issues. So, if you have a computer that is close to, but not quite, the stated “minimum requirements,” you may be surprised at just how playable the game is without having to shell out $100s for a new computer right now!

As a final note, to those that look at the difference between high settings and low settings and think, “the low settings look horrible,” how many times did you play (and possible recently played) using the graphics settings shown below?

Screenshot from Original Starcraft