Well, I learned once again what a small town Clifton Park really can be. A few weeks back I realized that one of my co-worker’s Chris Nawrot was a year ahead of me at Shen and while we didn’t share any classes, we were going in and out of a room at the same time. Then this week I found out that another one of my co-worker’s Jackie Chen is related to two classmates from high school. I guess it just goes to show that even though many of those I know have moved on, Clifton Park still is proving to be its own little small world.
September 24, 2007
September 5, 2007
Scientology Faces Criminal Charges – Label as a Criminal Organization
Belgian prosecutor on Tuesday recommended that the U.S.-based Church of Scientology stand trial for fraud and extortion, following a 10-year investigation that concluded the group should be labeled a criminal organization.
August 30, 2007
First Posting on Digg
Well, I added my first ever article posting to Digg today. I found the article below on Slashdot this morning and thought it was noteworthy. It’s a topic that really matters to me since my Grandfather died from Alzheimer’s. I would appreciate it if everyone could take a look at the article and Digg it if they feel it merits it.
In other news, I have now added a user for Digg and will start blogging articles that I really think stand out above the crowd. Look out for posts under the Digg user.
Promising Alzheimer’s Treatment works in Mice
Researchers at the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women
’s and McLean hospitals, have successfully removed toxic plaque from the brain cells of mice with Alzheimer’s. If this treatment works in humans, it could aid millions of elderly who suffer from the degenerative memory loss condition.
August 23, 2007
New Design
Well, I finished moving the old site to a new location. For the sake of archiving, the old site can be found at http://old.ajhenderson.com, but I will be hosting this blog on http://www.ajhenderson.com from now on.
August 16, 2007
Vacation
Vacation is going well. We got to Delaware just fine. We’ve been enjoying time on the beach and I’m actually not completely white anymore. (Who ever thought that would happen?) We’re celebrating Tim’s birthday today with his Uncle Neil and cousin Lex. It should be fun, but I have to get going now to make it to that. I might be able to get on more later now that I know the hotel has wireless.
August 14, 2007
A New Beginning
Well, unfortunatly Sythesis Software lapsed on its registration and I lost it to a domain camper, but I’m not to disappointed as I have long since given up on wanting to start a video editing/computer graphics software business. As of May 7th, 2007 I am now engaged to the ever beautiful Danielle Dignon. I have also given up on the Coast Guard a long time ago as I realized it would take me away from Danielle and wasn’t all that worth it. Danielle got discharged from the Air Force for medical reasons and we have been playing World of Warcraft together. (We have a level 70 warrior and druid on Eonar.)
I have been working for Applied Underwriters, a company that specializes in workers compensation insurance and payroll services for small and medium size businesses, for a little over a year and have already been given system admin duties at our office as well as being in charge of a section of one of our applications.
I just got this new domain yesterday and have migrated my old site to WordPress to encourage more updates. I have also been working with Dan Horning from www.americandigitalservices.com and www.planetnoc.com on several PHP based development projects.
Overall life has been going pretty well and I am really looking forward to going on vacation tommorow with Danielle’s family to Delaware to visit her Uncle and Cousin and then on to New York City for a couple of days. I am also really looking forward to our wedding, tenativly scheduled for June 7th, 2008 (6/7/8, yes, we’re that dorky). Hopefully I will be updating this more now that I have a better system in place. Until next time…
September 11, 2005
A Long Time Comming
Well, well, well. I’m guessing anyone who stumbled across this site probably thought it was dead after not being updated for a year and a half. The truth is, the hosting company that hosts this page had to change their main hosting center because of a problem with their Internet connection, but I wasn’t able to get a stable enough connection to download my site to be able to move it from their old servers to their new servers. Rather than put in the needed time and energy to fix it I just let it sit and then when I tried to retrieve my site in class the other day it worked. So anyway, now the site is up on the new server so it should perform much better and be easier to update.So what has happened in the last year and a half? Well, I’m now in my Senior year at RPI which is incredibly hard to believe. The super secret project for GameCube Café was the E3 DVD which was delayed by a year and then ended up falling pretty much through the floor because Nintendo dropped a big fat goose egg and gave no useful information about the Revolution. Since that was our main marketing point we were kind of sunk from the get go. The DVD came out really nice though.
In other news, I started playing a MMOFPS called PlanetSide in January. I immediatly became a fan. Basically it is a futuristic war sim. You take the role of a soldier in one of three empires battling for control of a planet called Auraxis which had a bunch of advanced technology on it, some of which caused the planets continents to each split to being their own planet. (Wierd yes, but it gave them a reason to expand the game and make different types of climates and such.) Each continent/planet holds up to 133 people from each of the 3 empires and you battle for control of bases on each continent. (You capture bases by either hacking a terminal in the base and holding it for 15 minutes or by hacking that terminal, picking up the LLU (a ball basically) and getting it to another one of your bases.) The reason I love it so much is that it is like a real time strategy game, but every character is a real person. You level up by getting kills and helping capture bases. This gets you BEP (battle experience points) and when you get enough you get a battle rank (BR). You can also get command experience points(CEP) for helping with captures while leading a squad. There are 25 BR levels and 6 CR levels (BR 1-25 and CR 0-5) BR gets you implants for special abilities (3 total), Certification points (1 for each of most battle ranks), and cosmetic changes such as armor color. Command rank grants different special abilities such as placing 4 waypoints on the map for all squad members(CR1), revealing the locations of all friendlies on the continent (CR2), EMPs that take out or disable all mines, turrets, vehicle weapons and implants in the area of the EMP (CR3 – CR5 getting bigger each level), Revealing enemies in an area on the map (CR4 and 5), Orbital Strikes from space (CR4 and 5) and the ability to send messages to all players on your empire on the server (CR5). Each CR also has a cosmetic armor change and access to a command chat channel with others of that CR level within a growing area. (CR2 – base, CR3 – region, CR4 – continent, CR5 – server) I joined up with an outfit (guild/clan) pretty early on called Forgotten Soldiers. They are probably one of the best outfits on the server. I worked my way up through the outfit and I am now an officer with them. I have a BR23/CR5 character and a BR13/CR0 character. I’m also involved with several websites related to PlanetSide. http://www.forgottensoldiers.us/ is the homepage for Forgotten Soldiers. http://www.ncallianceps.com is the website for the New Conglomerate Alliance (NCA) which is an alliance of various tactical outfits. http://www.emeraldnc.com is a community site for all people that play an NC character on the Emerald server. A friend of mine from PS and I started it about 3 weeks ago. Mostly I do coding on all these sites automating different things based on stat tracking and such. All in all, I love the game because it is so tactical and so large scale.In other big news, I have decided to break from my original plan to start a company writing computer graphics and video software. Instead I plan to apply to the FBI as a Special Agent. This decission came about when I realized that the FBI is looking for Computer Science majors and I realized they pay on par with the rest of industry. I hope to work with both computer related investigation and SWAT. I may even eventually try to make it on to the HRT (Hostage Rescue Team [Think FBI version of the SAS.]) I can’t apply until I’m 23 though, so it gives me a year to kill after I graduate. I have begun to workout to prepare physically and I am also learning Arabic, continuing my training on rifle marksmanship and will be applying for a pistol permit in December so that I can work on pistol marksmanship.
Ok, I think that is quite a bit for now, I’m sure there are things I have missed, but I can always bring those up in future updates. Hopefully I’ll be updating this again in less than a year and a half. Until then, later.
March 3, 2004
IT Directing and Cool Secrets
Wow, I have let this site sit for a long time. I had a Flash site up for a while, but then I realized that Google couldn’t read it, so I dropped it in to a subfolder. I haven’t had a chance to update the site at all because I have been really busy with Gamecube Café. Since December I have been the IT Director at GameCube Café. I’m also involved with a super secret project there. Shh, noybody even knows there is a secret project yet, except my readers. Stay tuned to GameCube Café for more details about the project in a couple of months.
August 13, 2003
Summer, Work, Conferences and Connections
Ok, havn’t made any updates for awhile. I’ve been working at RPI over the summer. DC/LA was really cool. Mel Gibson was there and I made big connections to the company that makes MediaShout.(PowerPoint like software for churches.) In fact they offered me a co-op which is really cool because there programmers are mostly RPI graduates and the programming devision is based in the Albany area. Then Soul Fest was really cool too. I was able to get on stage with Jars of Clay, 6 Pence None the Richer and Five Iron Frenzy. I met lots of cool people, heard lots of cool music and had a lot of fun. My family is going to Disney next week which is fun, but it is kind of a let down that it turns out that the Lathrops are going down this week and we will miss them by a few days. It would have been really cool to be able to hang out with Niffer and Aimee down there some or at least to have bumped in to them once or twice. Then it is back to school.
On another note, I found two really cool features of AIM. First, I found one a lot of people know about, you can forward messages to your cellphone when you are off AIM by going to www.aim.com/wireless/. I signed up my cellphone account under ajh16cp. If you need to get ahold of me, you can IM me there if I’m not on. The other is AIM Security. If you get a free E-mail ID Certificate from www.thawte.com, then you can encrypt IMs and digitally sign them. It is really cool and gets the lovely lock icon next to your name. (Once you have the certificate you can use the Security options tab to import the certificate.)