Monkey Monasticism

From the phrases I didn't expect I'd be saying dept.:

2008-06-03T14:22:00.001Z

"Apparently, the Walter Matthau part will be played by Denzel Washington."

Not feeling well

2008-05-18T02:24:00.000Z

Diary of a day not feeling well:

A bit before 0930, woke up. Totally surprised that I didn't sleep till noon or something.
Made a bowl of oatmeal, though didn't have the appetite to eat much of it.
Made a grocery list, as I had almost nothing left in the house.
1030 or so, fell back to sleep.
Woke up. When I thought to check the clock, it was 1830.
Showered.
I think I tried to eat something, but I can't imagine what for the life of me, as I had nothing to eat.
Took out the trash.
Went grocery shopping.
Put the groceries away, and had a salad (well, just spinach, really -- I don't know if that counts as a salad per se) and a PB&J sandwich. Entire process took three hours. I don't think it should have taken that long, but I guess that's how long it takes.
2130 - 2300 Futzing around on the computer and intermittently listening to music. This includes getting writing what became this blog entry, and getting bummed out because I realized being home sick the other day had caused me to miss the Radiohead show. I bought tickets soon after it was announced. Was slightly heartened by ex post facto online reports that indicated, because of rain, traffic, and my time management skills, I would have missed most of the thing even if I had tried to go.

Why...yes. Yes I am.

2007-12-11T22:20:00.000Z

Seen on last.fm:

Are you Wu-Tang Clan? Well? ARE YOU?

I am nerd, hear me add

2007-04-19T16:27:00.000Z

So Mom called last night.

Ma: Hi. I have a question for you. What's the name of that series of numbers where...

Me: Fibonacci.

Ma:...where the numbers go in order adding together?

Me: Fibonacci.

Ma: You know, each one is the the last one and the one before it added?

Me: That's the Fibonacci sequence. It goes "1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8," right?

Ma: Right. That's it. How do you spell it?

Me: F-I-B-O- uh, I can't remember if it's one N or two -O[sic]-C-C-I.

Ma: I knew you were the person to ask. I thought it was Greek, though. It sounds more like an Italian name.

Me: That's because it probably is.

Ma: Okay, thanks. Bye.

I might be posting a bit again because...

2007-02-12T05:29:00.000Z

Frankly, I can't remember my account and/or password for your blog site thingy to post comments. Or I don't want to get livejournal/myspace/whatever cooties.

But really, for all intents and purposes, del.icio.us is my blog now.

(Or maybe last.fm:

)

Covetousness

2006-11-10T15:30:00.000Z

Yom Kippur is just over, and I'm thinking about stuff I want. I think stuff I want to do is okay. Like I might want to go to hear David Macaulay (ooh - didn't realize it costs $17, though). Ooh, but Berkeley Breathed is coming. That might be good. I mean, who can't help but to take pity on this puppy?

I want this CD from Guided by Voices. But only that CD.

Well, this CD is okay, too.

H. Monkey's shopping lists for the fortnight starting Sunday, August 27th

2006-11-10T07:06:00.000Z

I ended up buying less than half of these.

my daily bread
iPod Shuffle
gym shoes (one pair)
work shoes (brownish)
post-workout protien low-carb things
bananas
a PCI 802.11g wireless card that doesn't choke using WPA preshared-key with AES
belts, one black and one dark brown
tailoring for the suit
Gormenghast
Yamaha CLP (Clavinova) series digital piano or equivalent
FM radio adapter for iPod shuffle
FM radio adapter for iPod Nano as gift later this year for sister
Subscription to "The Believer" as gift for birthday for sister
Ubuntu Linux
a couple pints of Vermont's Finest if I actually get all this done

To sister;

2006-08-22T02:13:00.000Z

I do not need to express feelings on your hobbies, because others have done so for me:

Knitting

Yoga

That is all.

Random acts of...

2006-06-27T17:54:00.000Z

...singing and dancing.

...kindness.

...pillows.

Notes on show covers

2006-06-27T17:02:00.000Z

Saw Echo & the Bunnymen.

Songs covered (in whole or in part), in no order:

"Roadhouse Blues", The Doors
"The Bends", Radiohead (they did the whole song)
"Walk on the Wild Side", Lou Reed (I hate to say it, but he flubbed the rhythm of the "doot-da-doot" part a little).
I can't remember — was it the Wilson Pickett tune "In the Midnight Hour" or was it "After Midnight" by J. J. Cale?

Crap, are there any others I'm missing?

Boy Kill Boy was the opening act. For the first couple and last couple songs they played, I felt like the band was pulling against thier own drummer. Then the Bunnymen came out, and right off the bat the drummer was like, "Follow me, boys!" And that's why some bands still headline after 25 years.

Ooh, I feel all connoisseur-y right now. I used to be drummer ignorant, until I had a roommate (brother of the girl with the bed of nails side-show side-job) who had a band. I found out how little I was aware of the difference a good drummer can make. A couple years of paying attention, and now I'm all critiquing and shit.

Zap Squeeze

2006-06-27T15:52:00.000Z

I had a dream I was working on a device that could squeeze the juice from an orange using microwaves. There was also a bunch of stuff about eating in restaurants of various nationalities (probably related to the Japanese and Korean restaurant conversation with Josh from the day before). A waitress at the English pub-like place was working part-time while she finished an engineering degree, and was fascinated the 3-D mock-up I was making of the device on the restaurant's table. I made out of origami boxes I folded from thick white paper stock and tied together loosely with red string.

On wakening, I realized that the 3-D schmatic was crap, but the core concept would actually work well for purifying water by distillation. My gut tells me it's not worth trying because microwaves probably wouldn't be more cost or enegery efficient than gas or solar heat.

Excuses

2006-06-20T05:40:00.000Z

The blogger's clichéd lament: sorry for the delay in posting.

My big excuses this month are that I have been looking for a new place to stay which I find no where near draining as actually trying to move, that my ability to sleep regularly has waned from the month prior, and that my credit card was taken — most likely picked up in a grocery store parking lot, and was used to buy $200 dollars of something at a gas station (presumably gas) and at other locations — which in turn hindered my ability to enjoy some of my culture's traditional activities, like buying two hotdogs at a baseball game.

I've been delayed for technical reasons, too, since, even though I have two computers, each has a failing hard drive. On one computer, either my insistence on keeping the failing hard drive plugged in so I can seek out salvageable data or the fact that I just added in the new one without upgrading the power supply has prevented me from installing any operating system without the computer rebooting unexpectedly partway through the install, except for a specific version of Windows for which I have lost the registration key. On the other, it's an out-of-warranty laptop with room only for the one drive, which I scavenged because the only thing wrong with it was a corroded IO chip that to get to you have to take the laptop apart as much as humanly possible without destroying it, but once that's done fixing the corrosion is easy except for trying not to lose all the little screws when putting it back together. I still have most of the screws, though I lost my optometry-sized screwdriver, so I can't go back and reconnect the wire that powers the LCD display backlight that the drop from the edge of the sink to the floor must have dislodged during along with causing the aforementioned hard drive failure. But at least the laptop still boots and lets be bring up a web browser, which is good because the only working wireless card I have left is a PCMCIA card that won't fit in the other computer (though of the USB adapters, both of which are bent because I inadvertently rolled on top of them after I fell asleep while listening to podcasts, I think one really only needs a touch-up of solder on a bent connector to be working again, and it's at the bottom of my laundry hamper so I wouldn't forget it and put heavy things on top of it, damaging it irreparably).

And before I forget, there was the whole incident with going to court to argue about a speeding ticket (I still don't think I was going that fast), which didn't work out well; not to mention that I can't find my driver's license, though I think it's one of the boxes where I've packed my books (though to be honest, I've only packed one box and am way behind schedule for moving this weekend) but then, I thought that about my credit card, too.

Oh, and even though it's my own damn fault for working a 14-hour day, I got sick after doing so and haven't been able to shake it off for the past few days.

And believe it or not, I didn’t think I had anything worth blogging about.

I have no talent at living simply, much less writing simply. I think that’s enough for now. I’ll come up with more later, but first I’ll finish my post on differences between Fight Club and kill puppies for satan.

Breakfast of Champions

2006-06-06T15:42:00.000Z

— no relation to any cereal product implied.

I just finished reading Kurt Vonnegut's breakfast of champions. I think it influenced a couple of my recent posts. It's written with the pacing of instructional children's book, and it'd be a good one at that if it weren't ham-handed with regard to race and too subtle about the martinis and olives. The sex it gets more or less okay.

(I'm sure the racism was intentionally ham-handed, but unlike other blunt parts of the books, the black characters seemed too flat, and I couldn't find any knowing wink from the author indicating that the flatness in particular was a parody of stereotypes.)

The book has an interesting layout, in that it reminded me of some of the best and most cleanly designed web pages, which is nice coming from a book that predated HTTP. The prose also shows the power of simplicity.

I hope it is, as the author has admitted, one of his worst books. It wasn't very good, and I certainly enjoyed reading it.

The favicon from the author's web site comes from one of the hand-drawn pictures in the book: .

It is a depiction of the author's anus.

You might say

2006-05-24T23:26:00.000Z

I've been in a bit of a daze since Sunday night. I was dead to the world Sunday night at about 8 PM, and just haven't been able to shake off the sleepiness until today. Apologies to anyone whom I tried to hold a conversation with the past few days.

Part of my problem is this weird sleeping condition where I'll have hours of sleep without any REM sleep (I have proof of this), and then it feels like I'm trying to make up for it in the last hour (which is a guess). Yesterday, writing about it seemed to help, so here it is:

Monday morning dreams

A wise man taught me how to freeze and thaw ice at will. He was explaining to me that this was not illusion but true transmogrification. I could walk between the Aleutian Islands by freezing the water underneath my feet, one block of ice one step at a time.

I'm searching for the wise man who can finish my lessons of this form of control over the elements. I'm on the Pacific Ocean riding on a gigantic rubber duck, that looks like a real brown duck if you look at it from a distance. I keep going due north and due south, back and forth, looking for the man. Either someone points out to me or I realize myself that I should probably branch out and look to the east and the west, but I don't.

There is a Saturday Night Live skit with an actress — it's someone who resembles Natalie Portman, but isn't quite her — point is, there's this very slap-stick skit where she's fallen out of her parents' minivan and is somehow skidding along with her left foot in a hubcap scraping the pavement. A rope or a torn strip of her own clothes is stuck in a car door, keeping her attached as the car drives on. It's at night, and it's all downhill. At one point, her right foot catches fire from friction with the road. There are young couples in love whose dates are ruined. A pier catches fire. There is a ridiculously disproportional explosion caused by the still-flaming foot.

The SNL skit plays again, briefly, but by day.

That guy who used to be on the Drew Carey show and now has a spot after Letterman comes on TV. He and Drew Carey make fun of the SNL skit of the actress going down hill. That guy is dragged behind the car; Drew Carey plays a couple of people he passes. Wilford Brimley is there.

Wilford Brimley is fishing off a pier. As he pulls his rod back to cast forward again, the line entangles on a telephone line above his head and the hook catches on the back of Natalie Portman's (or whosever's) t-shirt collar as she's dragged behind her mom's van. He gets pulled up towards the telephone line as Natalie (or whichever actress it is) continues down.

There are three Wilford Brimleys fishing. All their fishing lines get tangled with each other. One is also tangled on the telephone line above, which gets hooked to the person being dragged down hill. All three dangle in mid air, just below the telephone wires. Eventually the tension is too strong, the line snaps, and the men collapse to the ground in a heap of Wilford Brimleys.

Tuesday morning dreams

I'm lying down in bed and it's really early in the morning. It's not my bed, it's a sleeper-sofa at my parents' house, and Mom and my sister are sitting on it, too, waiting for me to wake up already. We're talking about funny things we remember from our childhood. There are some anecdotes I can't remember because my memory of the dream is fading. My 93-year-old (keyn ay'hora) grandmother has finally published a book based on the memoirs she is writing. I'm reading a paperback copy of it (a trade paperback) looking for funny things to add to the conversation. Bubby's prose style is a little stilted, which makes it not quite as funny as it could be. Someone in Bubby's story of remembering people at Synagogue when she was young has a gigantic mole. Mom remembers one of the people in the story. The book rambles, but that's Bubby for you.

Mom tells a story about how she ordered a shirt and had the shop alter it for her. Both Mom and the salesperson then forgot about it. Over a year later she got a call saying her shirt was ready, but the guy from the shop was somewhat rude. He didn't say, "Hello, we've cleaned and iron your shirt for you to pick up," he just said, "Steamed shirt." Mom thought he said "Steve Shirt," and thought that was an odd name. So Mom continues the story, "After almost two years, I wasn't sure I still wanted to buy the shirt, especially since the shop had completely forgotten me. I tried to explain this to the guy. Eventually I said, 'Look, Joe...'" at which point both my sister and I interrupt by saying, "Joe Shirt!" For some reason this actually is funny, and the three of us laugh.

My sister tells a story about the Minnie and Mickey Mouse stuffed animals she had. Sometimes she would have them argue. If it got bad enough, Minnie would leave Mickey at the chest at the foot of the bed (there really isn't a chest in my sister's room — never was) she'd put a sock on the dresser as a flag, and hide away near the dresser at the window sill. When she took the sock away, that was a signal to Mickey that she was no longer mad at him. When she got older, my sister had Minnie say to Mickey, "We're out of socks to use as flags. If we get into a fight again, I guess we'll just have to stay together and tough it out from here on."

I think she's trying to draw a parallel between this story and Mom and Dad's relationship, and how appreciative she is of both of them. She starts parodying a noir film to take an edge off the sappiness of what she's about to say; "I've spent a million years in this city; and met millions of people, and..." I interrupt, "One of them named Joe Shirt!" For some reason this is now hilarious. The three of us are rolling in laughter.

Dad is waiting in the garage for us to go to breakfast. He's already started the car. It's really early in the morning, and I'm surprised anywhere is open this early. We get ourselves up, snickering about "Joe Shirt" and something else from Bubby's memoirs. We head out to talk with Dad and figure out where we want to go to eat.

* * *

I'm lying down in bed and it's really early in the morning. I wake up and it takes me a minute to be sure that it's my bed and I'm alone. The clock says it's five-ish. I stumble into the kitchen because I'm really hungry for breakfast. I don't find anything I particularly want to eat, so I return to my bedroom and try to remember the dreams I've had the past couple mornings.

And I'm not entirely sure why

2006-05-21T04:39:00.000Z

My car smells very strongly of bergamot.

...two bits.

2006-05-16T03:32:00.000Z

I got a haircut last Wednesday.

I had the barber use the shortest attachment made for electric shavers, the #1. Here's an interview where one co-founders of PayPal, after pulling an coding all-nighter, babbles about how he prefers the #2.

I like this haircut. I like scratching my own head; the novelty of it probably won't wear off for another week.

I think I'll buy a full electric shaving kit for my own use. It'll pay for itself after the first couple uses (well, maybe after the third — I'll probably botch it once or twice at first). More importantly, I wouldn't have to rearrange my schedule when my hair gets shaggy, since I can do it before bed some evening.

I'd still want to have a professional for important occasions, and maybe trimming up around the edges. I like my hair faded in the back (which I'm certainly not going to try and figure out how to do on my own), but that's because trying to make a straight line on my neck and saying, "okay, now the hair can be on this side but not on this side," will never look right. Where would you draw the line? My neck topology isn't the most user-friendly.

Yesterday I had a dream my hair had grown out like Louis-XIV-the-Sun-King-of-France-hair, though I dreamt mine was more just wavy instead of curly.

On all other nights we eat sitting or reclining...

2006-05-01T03:43:00.000Z

I like the "Donation Derby" at Cat and Girl: if you donate $5 or more, the artist will draw a picture of how your money was spent. I assume from her comics, that she wants "derby" to mean the kind of hat, not the race. A donation hat, see?

Anyway, the one where they bought beers and then discussed Epcot Center reminded me of the time when I was about six and the family went. There is, in fact, something in "the silver hexagon thing" (Buckminster Fuller would be aghast at that description). When we were there, it contained something like "America's Glorious Bounty (brought to you by ADM™)". I distinctly remember images of amber waves of grain whisking past.

Sadly, while we were there the ride was in need of fixing (get it? ADM ... fixing? Eh? Ah. Never mind). I have fond memories of being stuck sitting at a 45° slope for several minutes at a time while we waited for the theme park workers to get the ride moving again. Thankfully, our familial sense of humor shines during irrational pauses. Dad is his most funny at an angle or otherwise under expectant duress.

Maybe it was brought to us by Kraft. They also sponsored a four food-groups singing and dancing show at Epcot (this was pre-food pyramid days). I still have a plush version of the dancing eggplant somewhere. It has a thin, dark mustache and ruffled sleeves (no shirt, just white arms jutting out with ruffled sleeves on them).

Arbitrary

2006-03-29T03:51:00.000Z

feeling today.

Today, I left the house carrying a banana and two packs of balogna. As I stepped out of the car, I realized I had bread waiting for me in the car, and I was going to meet friends for dinner and have a burrito. So I arbitrarily decided I would only eat things today that I can wholly sum up with words that begin with B. I had trouble at the vending machine, because I wanted trail mix. There was a Baby Ruth, but that's two words, and one begins with R. Mae and K asked: weren't there any Butterfingers in the machine? (I didn't see any.) What if there was flour in your banana bread? (That's okay. "Banana bread" is sufficient to wholly describe a thing of which flour is just a component. But if I wanted extra flour with my bread, that's a negatory.) You can have butterscotch? (Right, but not butterscotch candy.) Then Long-J stopped by and somehow we devolved into a conversation about Klingon weblogs.

But then I went to Chipotle, and I wussed out. I did get a buritto with black beans and beef. But then: toppings. I asked for the berde salsa (yeah, it was a stretch, but I got what I wanted), and then broke down and asked for my habitual corn and lettuce. Spanish wouldn't have helped (maíz y lechuga). Bummer.

Lem

2006-03-29T03:33:00.000Z

Well, I know I'll be rereading my copy of The Cyberiad tomorrow. There are very few authors whose honesty and completness of vision I respect as much as his.

Requiscat In Pacem, Stanislaw Lem.

Defective time-traveler

2006-03-16T16:50:00.000Z

So I set my RSS reader back up. I hadn't touched the thing since I moved at the end of last year.

Matthew Baldwin at Defective Yeti blog must have some good taste. Not long after I started re-reading The Time-Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, I see it on his best of 2005 list. Sure, I'll grant the book's critics that the characterization was weak in spots, and it may be much more satisfyingly believable in its central conceit than in the characters emotions, but I enjoyed it too much to notice those flaws the first two times I read it. I like the Ulyssean part of it, the journey. Its twist on and old story is nice: the wife is waiting for or husband to come home, but sometimes she has him there while she's waiting. At least Niffenegger handles writing about the paradoxes better than I can.

Most of my enjoyment I'm sure comes from my identification Henry. After Henry first meets his eponymous wife-to-be, Claire, she realizes how selfish and self-destructive Henry is compared to the older him she knew so well. Henry tells Claire, "Stick with me, and sooner or later, he's bound to appear. That's the best I can do, though."

I want to say that to my girl. I don't have the proof backed by unintentional violations of the laws of physics, but I believe that living life well will make me a better person. I'm rereading The Time-traveler's Wife for its optimism.

Also about music,

2006-03-14T03:05:00.000Z

I didn't want to forget to mention that Ali Farka Toure passed away last week.

For a slightly different pace than last post's rap, I have the CD he did with Ry Cooder, which I like immensely. One of our local radio stations already broadcast the Afropop Worldwide show that included most of a live concert. If you're quick, you can still catch the podcast.

As a fair warning, if you really don't care for the Afropop Worldwide program, Toure's music is probably not going to do it for you. If you do like it, don't skip out on the late Fela Kuti and his son, Femi. (He came to the 9:30 Club not that long ago. I should have gone, but I didn't.)

Music was just on the tip of my tongue

2006-03-13T02:20:00.000Z

Okay, no it wasn't. There was no way I was going to remember this guy's name until I got back home and looked at my stuff.

Lyrics Born, dammit. The only page Google returns that has the snippet of lyrics I was thinking of that isn't some scummy lyrics page is this review of "Same !@#$ Different Day". The track is "Do That There".

Ladies and fellas,
I was hella bored
So I pedaled hella hard
To a seminar
In Zanzibar,
Ben & Jerry, tennis star,
And Pat Benatar
Ridin' on my handlebars

While I swear I saw some off-hand comment comparing Aesop Rock and Lyrics Born on some blog I linked to off of Tucker's site, I think I heard it first on NPR, of all places. It was in one of the Fresh Air reviewers' best of 2005 list.

Not that Ken Tucker (no relation) doesn't do a good job, but hearing him review rap on the radio is pretty damn incongruous to say the least, and the little icon photo on the NPR web site isn't helping:

As for the music itself, the Aesop Rock comparison isn't completely unfair, but Lyrics Born takes himself and his lyrics much less seriously. I think Aesop Rock is better more consistently — Lyrics Born lets slide a few that shouldn't — but it's nice not having to be as cerebral all the time. There's a sample of "I'm Just Raw" in the review at NPR, if you want to give a listen.

Bed of nails

2006-02-28T23:05:00.000Z

So, you remember me talking about the roommate who made her own bed of nails? Here's my proof.

This was on one of them one-time use cardboard&plastic cameras that I just got developed. It took me a little while, because I bought two and kept forgetting which was which and which I wanted to use up first. The image is kinda big but worth viewing in its glory, so here's a link to my shot of the newly-varnished wood for Mab's bed of nails, sitting out to dry. It just looks like a piece of varnished wood with holes in it. Once she put all the nails in, it started to look pretty intimidating. I'm not sure if I have a picture of that anywhere. When finished, it looked more daunting than it is, but that's the point.

More pictures to come; this one was one of the few that didn't need color correction.

Emotest

2006-01-25T17:21:00.000Z

This is a test of the Emo Broadcasting System.

This is only a test. Were this an actual emogency, this post would be followed by crappy poetry or a long dissertation on the mournfulness of a bizarre dream I had last week.

I suck.

Thank you. This was a test of the Emo Broadcasting System. This was only a test. We now return you to your regularly scheduled Internet.

This blog is not delicious

2006-01-05T07:36:00.000Z

Even when I hadn't been blogging regularly, I did update my del.icio.us page frequently. Sure, I could make notes for myself by ssh'ing to my home computer to check on or update the list of things I wanted to remember, but this way is quicker and more convenient when showing others.

Anyway, it's a good list of what was rummaging around in my mind recently. The history of how instruments are tuned is still blowing my mind -- I knew modern instruments make compromises, but it's another thing entirely to have the math of those compromises quantitatively spelled out for you. I've been watching Good Eats on TV, thinking of signing up for martial arts classes, and playing around with various computer tools, both useful and time-wasting.

And I was pissed that my genius idea from October -- to have 3-D glasses that work by alternately shuttering in synch to a monitor's refresh rate -- I found it in November already sold by someone else.

Lessons learned so far this year

2006-01-01T16:23:00.000Z

Since my loyal readers (how you two doing?) complained about me not posting enough, here you go.

I'm going be optimistic here: last night was a flawed ending to a flawed year, as opposed to a bad sign for the next. And what's more, it was a learning experience.

Here's what we learned yesterday, chum:

While you may want to do something impressive for New Year's Eve dinner, an hour or two prior is not the best time to try some culinary cleverness you have never before attempted.

Don't use quite so much oil.

Don't thoroughly clean your kitchen and then start cooking.

When you follow DIY instructions from a guy on television and he shows you how to use oil you already own, but suggests some other oil that would be better, go ahead and spring for the better stuff.

The smoke alarm still works.

While it's a good idea to take a 450°F cast-iron pan of smoking oil outside to forestall it catching on fire, and it's a good idea not to put it on the matting covering the stairs leading to your door (because, hey, won't that catch on fire, too?), the front sidewalk next the building's gutters is not the best place, especially if you're going to leave it there while you dash to the local 24-7 grocery store for cleaning supplies and air fresheners, because your brand new pan will not be there when you get back.

If you start with good supplies, horrible mistakes are often still redeemable.

Buying quality cookware when it's half price during a post-holiday sale is a good idea because someone's just going to steal the pan anyway.

While spraying aerosol air freshener to cover a large area, do not simultaneously spray forward, face forward, and walk forward.

Seriously, who the hell walks by the sidewalk on New Year's Eve and takes someone else's brand new cast iron pan full of bubbling oil?

Preparing for something, even when preparation goes wrong, can still be far, far more worthwhile than the thing itself.

Where the fsck is the damn pan?

I'm sure we all can agree these are universal life lessons that will serve us well in the year to come.

Putting the antic in pedantic.

2005-08-10T14:14:00.000Z

And how small am I that I can't resist pointing out this sort of thing?

I didn't want to say anything because you don't correct friends when you're not too sure you're right yourself, but detritus. Three syllables there.

"I'm not smoking crack"

2005-05-16T18:57:00.000Z

Dave Chappelle is OKAY. (HWHAT?)

Public Apology

2005-03-30T00:02:00.000Z

I think a public apology makes sense for a public mistake.

Some bad timing here, a poor choice there, and a few weeks ago I'm pretty low. It snowballs, bad news from other people becomes contagious, and when I get that depressed, the best thing I could possibly do for myself is just to walk outside and do something.

Talk to people. Go; do things. So I tell everyone, "I'm going. I'll be there. I'll do it," because I want to believe that I am doing right, that I am becoming better. When I freak out and cave in, I make a liar of myself, and fools of others. I'm sorry.

Finance and you

2005-02-28T00:26:00.000Z

I balanced a checkbook. I think this is the first time I've ever properly done that. This is probably not something I should be bragging about. I put everything in Grisbi, an open-source personal finance tool, because I (a) don't have the hard drive space to install an X Windows/another OS to run GnuCash, (b) didn't feel like buying hardware or software, (c) think Grisbi it does the basics of what I need it for. It's a bit unstable on my WinXP Pro box (read: mean time between crashes is 30 minutes of continuous usage).

Hunter S. Thompson's passing reminded me of an image that was my desktop background for a while. The quote's from Fear and Loathing:

Something about the expression on Spike's face gets me.

Also, in the last post, てまえ (temae) would be more insulting than お前 (omae). Pronounce it tey-mey, and sound like a gangster.

Your Mom's box

2005-02-20T23:07:00.000Z

Since .Pete asked:

I'm not using this space for anything else this week, I might as well figure out the Japanese and Hebrew translations of "Your mom's box". Also, editing this post was a pain, so sorry if my misspellings make it worse

Japanese was easier because I knew of a reliable on-line dictionary that contains slang terms, but it was harder because I don't know it as well. お前のお母さんの箱(o-ma-eh-no o-kaa-san-no ha-ko) would be the literal translation of "Your mom's box". The only slang term I could find was 玉門 (gyo-ku-mon, a "beautifully decorated gate"). Judging from the few sites I could find it used in the desired context, I'm guessing it's more of a literary or formal euphemism than the neatly abrupt 'box'. If it's any consolation, お前 (omae) is often used in an insulting context. Use あなた (anata) if you want to be more straightforward, or, even better, leave it out if it's clear from context whom — or whose mom — you're talking to — or about. So: お前のお母さんの玉門 (your mom's "gate") would be o-ma-eh-no o-kaa-san-no gyo-ku-mon.

For Hebrew, a quick run through a translator yields a perfectly acceptable literal translation. I also went looking for a dictionary and found this as incomplete as it is. Here's a citing showing koos is apparently in common use (though the 'mom' part is more commonly spelled emek instead of ummek). This page looks like to be a slang dictionary (maybe) that includes the term. Koos has the opposite problem from the Japanese term — it's way more crude and explicit than "box".

So: הקופסה של אמא שלך, pronounced hakufa shel eemah shelcha, with a guttural ch, stress on the syllables ku, ee, and cha, is literally "your mom's box", and the modern slang derived from Arabic is קוס אמק, koos emek.

Laying bear a PHP bug

2005-02-08T05:48:00.000Z

I've been playing around with security profiles on my main home computer (XP Professional), and have found new ways to destabilize my system. Upshot is, with the non-admin account I usually use, Firefox is crashing occasionally on form submittal.

I wanted to post here my response to a problem Mr. Bear was having at "The Truth Laid Bear" was having in case I lost it again:
This might be due to a known PHP bug.

The one thing I noticed from the lsof output is the value in the size/offset column for the one Unix domain socket (~544MB). Not the IP socket — I think that's stuck in CLOSE_WAIT because that's how Apache deals with connections while it's waiting for possibly dependent file handles to close.

If this is an error with Unix sockets, then it's probably an inter-process communication problem. Running 'lsof -U -r' should who that one socket going out of control parallel with the HTTPD process. Something in Apache is going nuts trying to talk to some other process, most likely MySQL.

The best match I could find is this bug first reported for PHP 4.3.4. There's an official PHP bug page for it. It's been fixed in CVS, but I don't see it incorporated into any 4.x release yet. As a bonus, the bug descriptions include test script to recreate the problem on purpose.

If that doesn't pan out, I did find one other thread where it looks like mysql_close wasn't behaving as the guy expected it to.

What image scares me

2005-02-06T16:09:00.000Z

I was reading Erica's post and was reminded of a TV news item about the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Mind you, I only heard about this when I was flipping through the TV channels in order. I saw a picture on one of the Spanish-language channels and instantly thought, "that looks like Birkenau. What a creepy thing to show a picture that looks so much like Birkenau." I was surprised that a straight-forward brick gatehouse would be instantly recognizable to me on television when the only other time I had ever seen it was one day eight years ago.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was the most infamous concentration camp complex built by the Nazis, and estimates place deaths there during WWII at 1-1.5 million. The site now is a protected historical landmark, which is a good thing: I visited one concentration camp where the Nazis did their best to cover their tracks; the site was found because of eyewitness accounts of people who escaped.

But making a site of murder into a place to visit is an odd proposition at best. If you have an odd fascination, or a morbid curiosity to get out of your system, visit the Auschwitz part of Auschwitz-Birkenau. There you'll find the signs and exhibits you'd expect from a historical museum: a pile of shoes, a pile of hair, signs with dates of events, a plaque stating what this or that building was used for. Afterwards, you can eat a muted lunch at the picnic tables while the kids to young to understand play tag.

If you want a first-hand feel of the scope, the history, and the passage of time, go to the Birkenau part of the complex, preferably with someone who was interred there who is actually willing to talk about his past (an inevitably dwindling group of people). It is large. There is no plexiglas in front of the furniture. Half was preserved, reconstructed here and there to fill in blanks, and half is in ruins. Cramped wooden bunks are still intact, the buildings still stained and painted on the outside in dark brown. Grass is growing over the train tracks where the cattle cars ran. One of the caved-in gas chambers is now a muddy, stone-strewn morass. Half of it is neatly kept so that you understand, and the worst is left to the decay it deserves.

Bringing it on home (from work)

2005-01-31T03:51:00.000Z

So the stuff I mentioned about productivity the other week is really, really working for me... at work. At home, it's crap. I think it's been easier to impose structure at work than at home. No surprise there: everyone at work also trying to create an order to things, and home is for non-productive time as well as productive time so requires more effort to keep them separate.

Pardon me while I brainstorm. Feel free to skip to the bottom of the list if you want. Possible solutions:

Home just requires more effort.
I'm willing to try this one; I certainly am willing to expand more effort than I have to date, and not doing so put me in a bit of a bind when the clutch went out on my car this past week.
I need a place at home for non-work productive time separate from where I relax at home.
There is a desk in Chris' recording studio area that I'm sure no one would mind me using for a bit every evening. Either way more effort is required, but I'm liking this the more I think about it.
I need to have a place outside of home for non-work productive time so the distraction of computer/TV/books isn't there.
I'm thinking local coffee shop or something. This is actually less feasible than it was before, though; now that I've moved I'm no longer in walking distance to a nice quiet place where I can sit down, and this Winter's made clear I need a place to go to even when I can't drive there.
The system at work won't work at home
Cross this one out, too. I'm not maintaining two systems, and what's going good at work is going really, really good.

Part of the problem with all this is I feel comfortable in clutter. I'm ill-served by clutter. It's the last thing I need, and it's gotten to the point where I don't even notice modest-sized messes any more — not consciously, anyway. And since clutter feels like home to me, naturally I'm very cluttered at home. It's tough to give that up, but I have to.

Impromptu unspoken lyrics for thurs. night jam session

2005-01-27T23:46:00.000Z

Yay! Angsty free-association poetry! Imagine guitars just this side of metal; Pretend that I can carry a tune.

three eggs laid themselves
bear the seeds of someone else
damned are you damned am I
damned the earth your wand'ring eye

everythings the same all day and all night
all night
all night and all day
all night and all day

pardon me as I lay over
pardon me as I roll down
pardon me as I lay over
and someone else moves in to town

everythings the same all day and all night
all night
all night and all day
all night and all day

excuse me as I lay over
excuse me as I roll down
excuse me as I lay over
and someone else moves in to town

everything depends on
everything depends on
it all f'kn depends on

everything dissolves to shadow
every ship sails off to null
everything dissolves to shadow
from every port they sail to null

we depend on
oh we depend on
f'k me I depend on

everyone goes back to weakness
every ship runs from the wind
everyone goes back to weakness
all the ships run from the wind

three things depend on
three things depend on
the world depends on

these three things

everyone longs for power
every ship seeks good strong tides
everyone longs for power
leave port hoping for good strong tides

Productivity vs. Blogging

2005-01-21T03:31:00.000Z

There's a good reason for the past week's lull.

So Frank sent me a link about productivity, and after reading that site and 43folders.com, I've adapted the method to myself and it's working. (I haven't actually opened the book this is all based on, but that doesn't seem terribly necessary now.)

But I can't honestly consider blogging as important as, say, getting all my health insurance paperwork taken care of or picking up water and veggies at the grocery store. So blogging has fallen by the wayside. As a consolation, you can have a look at the del.icio.us linkpage I've been keeping. These are all the things I've been meaning to blog about (though a few are only things I wanted to email to people).

Also, how wrong is it that Blogger's spell checker's dictionary doesn't include the words blogger or blog? You better believe that in every dictionary that comes out of Redmond, Microsoft not only includes Visio, but makes sure you capitalize it everytime, too.

SJM for SJF, self-centered bastard, likes good endings

2005-01-13T14:46:00.000Z

yep, that's me.

I'd just like to say that, as much in my own little world as I am, I didn't realize that people I know beat me too the punch by no small margin and I didn't notice.

I wish I was listening just as they changed formats. The Post reported it as Jeff Buckley's Last Goodbye, and there's nothing I like more than a good, sad ending.

When MTV cut loose their video mix crew on the show AMP, which is much of what made AMP cool (the show was canceled next season), they let them go out with Rez from Underworld. Well, not all 10.5 minutes, but, I mean, look at the thing. (Yes, this is just the sort of thing I like. I don't like the video's ending, though — they should have left it purely instrumental.) They also had the first commercial contest I remember winning. I won the Amp CD, which is pretty cool. We have explosive indeed.

Cómo se dice "alt-rock news coverage" en español

2005-01-13T05:59:00.000Z

tangential to the WHFS going latino post.

While looking at the Google news searches for the format change, I noticed the local ABC affiliate, while posting the shortest article, was the only one to mention that people were injured at the last big WHFS concert (not to mention seeming to rip off the NBC affiliate's headline). Why? I'm guessing the article posted was from a transcript of the news broadcast. Pictures of EMTs treating people with eyebrow piercings was the best footage they had, and if they don't have good footage for the talking head to talk over, it doesn't get on the local TV news. This is why I don't like local TV news.

Contrast the Washington Post article, which got a short quote from Damian Einstein. He may not be the most photogenic, but if Infinity and its employees aren't talking, than Damian is the best person worth getting a quote from. Someone at the Post either knew enough of the history of the area's radio stations or actually did some research.

I am an American aquarium drinker.

2005-01-13T05:54:00.000Z

Anyone want to see Wilco? Speak now or forever hold your $30.

I thought my radio was broken

2005-01-13T04:37:00.000Z

Either that, or it was some kind of joke promotion — Ace's Mexican Ranchero Accordian Countdown writ large or something.

So I'm driving on the beltway around our nation's capital this afternoon (this afternoon apparently being an operative word here), and I turn on the radio, and I immediately assume my radio is wrong. There's salsa where my emo is supposed to be.

Admittedly, WHFS was in decline after Infinity bought it. Their willingness to play good music that other people wouldn't was part of what made their appeal, and large media corporations are infamously risk-adverse. Just a few months back, more or less, Frank made a comment about how it was sad that the station he fondly remembered from high school now clearly sucks much more than its long-time competitor.

Here's the Washington Post's article about the format change.

Can't sleep, meme will eat me.

2004-12-31T19:34:00.000Z

I dunno.

I just had the phrase stuck in my head. The '92 Simpsons episode (origin thread about how it came from one of the show's writer's childhood) clearly predates the 2000 release on a Alice Cooper Japanese bonus disc of the song "Clowns Will Eat Me".

Can't sleep...clown'll eat me...can't sleep...clown'll eat me...can't sleep...clown'll eat me...can't sleep...clown'll eat me...can't sleep...clown'll eat me...can't sleep...clown'll eat me...can't sleep...clown'll eat me...

Review and Airing of grievances: The Hebrew Hammer

2004-12-28T10:42:00.001Z

It's shlock, but it's not awful shlock.

I was fully prepared to hate The Hebrew Hammer, but it's not that bad. It's not that good, but it's not that bad, either. I was afraid they'd blow the import of Hanukkah out of proportion or throw in meaningless Yiddish words only because they sound funny. The movie does no such thing.

It does, however, four things that bother me. In increasing irksomeness:

In the movie they don't say shul or synagogue. I know, there are good, observant, non-Reform Jews who call it temple. I just don't personally know any. It bugs me. It sounds so polytheistic, having all these little "temples".
Why not say "HaShem" when you pretend that you're saying a brucha in the opening theme song? I never understood that. It's such a small thing. And then later your protagonist complains about taking the Lord's name in vain?
When he lists the stuff on the seder plate in alphabetical order, they should be in the Hebrew alphabet's order. If I'm using that question to test someone for Jewishness and they list zroa זרוע after karpas כרפס, that's instant disqualification.
A good Jewish girl going downtown with gusto. Maybe it's like the temple thing and it actually happens. I'm just saying I've never heard of it.

Wow. I regretted that last one before I even started typing it.

Atom Feed

2004-12-27T23:52:00.000Z

Looks nicer, is all.

Blogger has had an automagic Atom feed for a while now. The hyperlinked content and paragraph breaks show up all nice in SharpReader, so I changed the links on this page to point to my Atom feed. The RSS feed isn't going anywhere, it just doesn't look as good. I don't feel like spending the time to invent an alternative when one already exists.

You made them live happily ever after! You bastards!

2004-12-26T09:34:00.000Z

The customized Romeo and Juliet sucks. First: once you start substituting in, most names are going to completely ruin the iambic pentameter. Also, if you're paying six times what the Folger Shakespeare Library edition sells for, you deserve a better happy ending on your Shakespearean tragedy than four dinky, tacked-on lines. The last two lines of the "classic" happy ending don't even rhyme, unlike every Shakespearian tragedy that comes to mind.

Some constructive criticism, then, to all would-be Romeos: buy a nice, unadulterated hardcover edition. If you can't think of a couplet you can sign the frontispiece with, take the five bucks you've saved and pay someone to think of one for you.

Review month pt 1: Reading Lolita in Tehran

2004-12-24T20:29:00.000Z

For lack of nothing better to post about, here's the first of some short reviews.

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Azar Nafisi was an English Lit university professor in Tehran before the Shah was deposed and for quite some time after. She was eventually kicked out of Iranian universities, and still kept teaching novels to a small group of female students.

The book founders the most when talking about her private coterie of students, especially in the beginning where I could only have kept names and personalites by making a crib sheet — until Nafisi hits her stride in the second of four sections, 'Gatsby', most her students feel quite flat. Once "Reading Lolita" starts with actual storytelling, it frames a very effective comparison of the Western world's concept of "the West", the Iranian concept of "the West", and Iranians' concepts of their own society during unrest, revolution, and aftermath.

I started reading "Reading Lolita in Tehran" and thought I might be better equipped to understand if I read "Lolita" itself. Nafisi clearly sees something wonderful in Nabokov's prose — his description of American middle-class houses, his subtleties of the unreliable narrator, Humbert Humbert. I got frustrated from not seeing what she does from the novel, and didn't finish. My suggestion: read "The Great Gatsby" instead. "Reading Lolita" spends more time, and much better time, on "Gatsby" or on Henry James novels than Nabakov. If you're not planning to read "Reading Lolita", read "Gatsby" anyway. I'll even give you a copy.

As Nafisi brings F. Scott Fitzgerald's take on American dreams and Henry James' versions of feminine courage side by side with her students hopes and actions, she gives a very real and very immediate sense to the importance of fiction and the Middle-East context it was read in.

splitting hairs, trading spaces

2004-10-27T18:10:00.000Z

I'm getting a haircut today

I saw an ad for "Japanese hair straightening". Why would there be a Japanese straightening technique? Don't the Japanese already have straight hair? A quick check with google shows that some of these products really are from Japan. So what do they call them there?

I've heard said that you don't see signs for "Authentic Philly Cheesesteaks" in Philly or "New York-style Pizza" in New York. But Dominos (or Pizza Hut or somesuch) has a national campaign that they surely aren't exempting one of their largest markets from. And was in Philly a few years back and saw signs touting that one store was more authentic Philly than the rest (and therefore tasted better, etc.).

Regardless, I'm getting a haircut. I'm using ancient United States buzz-cut methods passed down from one generation of immigrants to the next (my usual barber was born in Vietnam).

It moves!

2004-10-19T04:39:00.000Z

I have been amazingly inert for almost a month now.

I've been a homebody, and home sucks. I just finished sending off a bunch of emails to strangers from Craigslist asking to live with them. I've never done the roommate thing before, so I'm not sure what people are looking for. The usual trick is, If you were on the other side, what would you want to hear? but not ever having dealt with this sort of thing, I can't imagine anything other than the basics: someone modest and relaxed with a steady source of income so they pay their share of the rent.

But so I've been inert. I haven't been minding my own blog; I haven't been reading yours (for any given value of 'you'). I haven't sent a note to the conductor girl, and now I can't find where I put her email address (dammit!). I haven't exercised. I haven't gone anywhere different or interesting (I'm not including the Morrissey concert here, obviously).

At least I've been sleeping a little better than my average, which is still crap for most people, with the exception of last night when I was just too cold and the heat was not working. Yet another reason to move.

For those of you about to Cygwin, we salute you

2004-09-23T01:25:00.000Z

and also encourage you to try something else instead. Seriously, scrounge around for a cheap, used PIII 300-based box and install OpenBSD on it instead; get Services For Unix now that it's free, and can mount NFS shares where Cygwin can only serve them; download VMware. Don't get me wrong, Cygwin is an amazingly detailed and clever set of sophisticated hacks. The development crew is a cool bunch. But a hack is a hack.

Anyway, in interest of giving something back to the community: if you find people can't see mounted directories when connecting to a Cygwin server, check the registry keys.

In Cygwin, the mount command will only take a folder, like "/usr/bin", and point it to a Windows drive, like "D:\cygwin\bin". Cygwin can't open a device directly, it depends on Windows for the filesystem and device drivers. What's more, the mappings are stored in the registry, not in /etc, like all us UNIX weenies would expect. I was running ProFTPD and was setting default directories to folder that, via a mount, redirected to the D: drive. After I upgraded my version of Cygwin, users FTPing would find themselves in the directory and could list the files, but the permissions showed up wrong and they couldn't send or recieve any files. Turns out the upgrade reset registry key permissions so that the user that the ProFTPD server was running under (BUILTIN\SYSTEM) could read them but normal users couldn't. Since this was a Windows 2000 box, I ran regedt32.exe, went to "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Cygnus Solutions\Cygwin\", clicked on "mounts v2" branch, went to the menus under Security -> Permissions... and added the group Users and gave them read permissions. Permission inheritance propagated the change down to the sub-branches and the problem was fixed. Yay.

Concert going.

2004-09-21T22:54:00.000Z

So now that I think of it, while I might like listening to Death Cab for Cutie, do I really want to pay to see them in concert?

There's a fairly representative collection of DCFC mp3s here. But I'm more up about ...and you will know us by the trail of dead, Flogging Molly, and PJ Harvey. Now I'm fairly sure Double-D has a Flogging Molly CD if not two, and you can't tell me you haven't at least one of PJ Harvey's songs.

I'm trying to be good w/budget. But if I'm going to see Morrissey, too, Polly Jean might just have priced herself out of my price range. But she's so cool. It's not fair.

To sport or not to sport

2004-09-08T18:24:00.000Z

aye, there's the rub

Erica and I have been going back and forth about the Olympics and what counts as a sport. Her suggestion is for a more objective scoring method for figure skating. My argument is that it doesn't matter: I like figure skating as it is, but it's not a sport.

> [...] Is windsurfing a

> sport just because you can measure who crosses the finish line first?

> I will acknowledge that there is a degree of finesse involved because

> you need to read the wind, but are they the same kind of athlete?  I

> couldn't do what any beginning gymnast or figure skater does, and I am

> in awe of the top athletes, Paul Hamm, et al.
Exactly. Because you can measure who crosses the line first. I'm not sure if I like racing as a sport, either. To me, that straddles the line but is easily closer to sport than figure skating.
I'm thinking by writing here, so forgive me if this isn't fully clear. My definition of sport: Sport is a direct physical competition between people that gives the competitors an opportunity to demonstrate good sportsmanship. And by good sportsmanship, I mean primarily fair play.
Direct physical: take soccer as an example. As a team sport, there is an important mental aspect needed to win a soccer match, but if you can't stay active on the field for an hour, you aren't going to make it to the Olympics. While there is the intermediary of the ball, the physical actions you take directly and clearly affect the actions your opponents then choose (this has to happen if you want to play
competitively, anyway).
Between people: the measurable part of the struggle is between you (or you as part of a team) and another person or other people.
Sportsmanship and fair play: Try hard to win, and always follow the rules; compete on equal terms. So there needs to be clear rules for you to follow, and clear, objective terms for the winning conditions. The measurement of whether the winner won a match should only be important because it is compared, on the same terms, to the measurement for other competitors in that match.

Look, about last night

2004-09-05T19:08:00.000Z

Thanks for helping me find my car, considering it took an hour. And yes, I noticed there was parking on both sides of the street.

Yogi Berra would be proud of me

2004-08-31T00:39:00.000Z

"...all over again."

Today, I'm sitting at my computer looking out the window while trying to figure out a problem.

Then I get this strong feeling of déjà vu that I've been staring out this window thinking about the same problem before.

Then I get this strong feeling of déjà vu that I've gotten this strong feeling of déjà vu that I've been staring out this window thinking about the same problem before.

Déjà vu never feels to me like I've done something before but like I've dreamed it before. I usually take it as a sign I haven't been sleeping well lately. Either that, or the Matrix has me.

Roshambo for Radio (XM Radio, that is)

2004-08-27T16:37:00.000Z

Rock-paper-scissors your way to fabulous prizes!

For my friends in the D.C. metropolitan area, you need to know that tomorrow is the The 2004 DC National Rock Paper Scissors Championship. Winner gets $1000 dollars and an XM radio. For those of you who can't/won't be going (like me), you can always play correspondence rock-paper-scissors thanks to the wonder that is the internet. No money it it, though.

Unrelated: The A-Team Resolves Lapses in Homeland Security. I like last two steps of our new plan for terrorists threatening to detonate a bomb that contains nuclear materials: "While terrorists' attention is diverted, replace radioactive materials with horse manure. Later, when bomb detonates harmlessly, have B.A. deliver line, 'Now that's what I call a dirty bomb.'"

Ignore it like it's pork

2004-08-18T23:38:00.000Z

I asked Erica if she had seen that woman's story in the NYT this Sunday about OCD manifesting as religious observance. I've been saying for years now that Judaism is a great religion for the obsessive compulsive.

I remember reading about one of the Talmudic rabbis -- I can't remember who -- who had a hole in the wall just above his commode. I remember the rationale as:
An evil spirit would be more eager to beset a prominent rabbi than a normal man,
but someone else’s presence with you would warded it off,
but it's indecent to have someone watch you go to the bathroom.
So he bored a hole so his wife could put her hand on his head while he was sitting down without worry of accidentally seeing anything.

My mom used to always tell us how, when she was a kid, she thought flatware grew out of the ground. My grandparents had someone come in to help around the house when the kids were young, but she didn't know from keeping kosher and would wash all the silverware together. To clean something, you can use fire to burn away the treif, but you can bury it in the earth for however many days if you can't burn it. Mom would walk by and see silverware sticking out of the ground...

[ Listening to: "What Cool Breezes Do" - Digable Planets ]

The only thing worse than a bad poet is one who doesn't think he is.

2004-08-17T21:50:00.000Z

H Monkey runs, H Monkey hides -
a monkey's always by our sides.
Mine sees no ill nor hears too well
but screeches that I'll go to hell.
(Or else he sings without one word.

Be glad if you have never heard
what buzzes raw and feels more fell,
a din of rage, a one-man cell.)

We control the...screw it, we don't control nothin'

2004-08-17T06:00:00.000Z

Woah. They were directed by the same guy?

Yes, Whichfinder General is more worth your time, assuming violent, bloody misogyny and eye gouging aren't deal-breakers for you.

I've said it before: The Sorcerers was a poorly edited episode of The Outer Limits — the newer series, not the 1960's version. The cast has one 'name' actor everyone knows and a few others that are vaguely familiar. There are serious plot holes, but the general concept is something you probably would never see on screen otherwise. The production values could have been a little better, and there's one horribly miscast guy.

Also, how sad is it that when I saw that episode with Kevin Nealon I instantly recognized the woman as being the English voice of Sailor Moon? This is why I've sworn off cable, people. I'm incapable of regulating my television intake. I turn it on while I'm futzing around on the computer, and the next thing you know I'm riveted, torn between watching people mill around during a quorum call on C-SPAN and an episode of the Telemundo equivalent of Passions. Ten hours later, I'm waking up in the morning two hours after my alarm went off with only three hours total of sleep.

Jodi Foster does origami (Follow up to a link on Franks page, II).

2004-08-10T22:47:00.000Z

About the 10 dumb scifi moments, Superman turning back time absolutely belongs there.

I have a problem with the "Contact" thing, the last one on the page. Maybe it's because I read the book and never saw the movie, but it seemed perfectly rational to me. Maybe the alien race you're communicating with has naturally evolved radio signal receptors, and maybe the technology you're trying to communicate is potentially disastrous if misunderstood. An I.Q. test first seems perfectly reasonable then. So you send a simple message from space, and the more a species can analyze it, the more puzzles peel off like an onion until they get to the blueprints.

And if it's just because you're the kind of race who just likes being enigmatic, why would you stop right when you get to the good stuff?

On chicken subservience,

2004-07-23T16:50:00.000Z

as seen on the BBC.

An argument for video games: if poultry industry employees knew they could get their avian-related frustrations out on a web site, maybe they wouldn't have gotten fired.

Also from the Beeb: racketeers go where the money is, to DDoS attacks.

Biggest. Collection. Ever.

2004-07-13T22:37:00.000Z

Every comic book DC ever published.

Yes, every single one:

Among the more esoteric items in the collection is the two-volume set of Cancelled Comics Cavalcade, published by DC in 1978. With a print run of only 35 copies, these books contain stories left over following the infamous "DC Implosion." Printed for copyright purposes, these were distributed internally to creators whose work it featured.

The best squalor money can buy.

2004-07-13T17:05:00.000Z

Now selling tickets for admittance to offset costs. Inquire within.

Seriously, why did the landlord decide they have to do air conditioning maintenance now. Why? Why would you wait for the middle of the hottest month of the year, and then turn the A/C off. This is the second July in a row with several consecutive days without A/C, though to be fair, last year's outage was because a telephone pole fell on a power line and caught on fire and all the power was out.

Canucks' got nothing on U.S.

2004-07-11T12:08:00.000Z

Thanks, Frank, for the link about the Canadian Election (no party won the majorty this time, BTW). But for its wackiness factor, the District of Columbia beats Canada any day.

Because the United States federal government resides in the District, the Feds get to control the district. Which seems reasonable enough until you realize that, due to the nature of the federal legislative body, a Congressman from New Jersey has effective veto power every time D.C. wants a bill to change the funding for their failing school system. D.C. doesn't get any say in the federal legislative body. Sure, the District elects someone to congress (1 out of 535), but Congresswoman Norton isn't actually allowed to vote.

So after 173 years, Congress allowed D.C. to elect its own mayor and the Washington City Council in The Home Rule Act. They've still no voting Congressional representative. If you live in D.C., for ten bucks you can have your licenses plates read "TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION". I think the default is "Celebrate and Discover".

And what did they get by having home rule? Last time around, the current mayor almost didn't get himself on the ballot for his own reelection, because his campaign screwed up in the face of a deadline and filled petitions full of obviously fake signatures. But at least he's not ex-Mayor Marion "Bitch set me up" Barry, who set low mayoral standards by getting caught with a hooker and crack. I mean, if the current mayor gest caught with an high-end escort and some pot, he's still doing better than average. Now Marion Barry wants to run for the Ward 8 City Council seat (yet again, after a campaign in 2002 for an "at large" spot on the council which was cut short by another cocaine-related incident), but the incumbent for the seat he's running for, Sandy Allen, announced his candidacy before he did. And if you're tired of hearing those two argue back and forth, it's okay: I've been told there are over 500 other people running for elected positions in the District this year.

The school system is still the biggest political issue, though. There was last year's scandal of embezzlement by the head of the teacher's union. The mayor's struggling to gain control over what is now a wholly elected school board, with good reason: if he's held accountable for failing schools at election time, he'd like the authority to do something about it. The city's still searching for someone ~~a sucker~~ qualified enough to be the D.C. Superintendent of Schools.

Some linguistic notes on names:

For confused foreigners, the District of Columbia contains only the city of Washington and all of the city of Washington. There used to be more than that: Alexandria used to be part of the district, and Georgetown was considered separate from Washington City (history here). From my personal experience, people usually use D.C. for the physical place: "I'm going in to the District this weekend"; and Washington for concepts, entities or organizations: "Those fat cats in Washington have another thing coming." "The Washington Times is owned by the Reverend Sun Yung Moon [true!]." These are not hard and fast rules.

The spokesman for the D.C. police is Joe Gentile. I get a kick out of that. Also, the mayor appointed someone last year to help get the bureaucracy in order. That man's name is Bob Bobb. People actually call him that.

Bob Bobb.

C-SPAN hasn't been the same since

2004-07-07T21:24:00.000Z

Matthew Baldwin was unimpressed with White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan.

I couldn't put my finger on just why I loved watching the pre-McClellan press briefings until today. I didn't care much for what Ari Fleischer had to say, but I liked his skill in dodging. Ari could not answer questions, make the askers feel like the idiot for even having asked it, then insult their mothers; and they would thank him for it.

And about that dodging article: I believe them when they say there's been a decline in research by journalists. I know a journalist who has done covered music, and I've heard stories of bands stunned that a reporter already knows when the last time they came to town was and how long they've been around because they actually looked it up. To be fair, rock bands are very different than Colin Powell.

Which reminds me why I like Fresh Air so much, where they have rock bands and Colin Powell. It's not hard, 0day news, but someone has actually done a lot of work before Terry Gross sits down to an interview. Guests come on their show and say, "OMGWTF! Someone actually did their homework. My head feels like it will explode! [*explode*]". Sure, they lose a lot of guests from this, but it makes for great radio either way.

Follow up to a link on Franks page, I

2004-07-02T01:13:00.000Z

In re things you can and can't run from:

WARNING

Many visitors have been gored by vuffalo.

Buffalo can weigh 2000 pounds
and can sprint at 30 mph,
three times faster than you can run.

I left town and you didn't even notice /// Three to tango

2004-07-02T01:01:00.000Z

I flew to Chicago.

Downtown Chicago is one of the most impressive-looking downtowns I have ever seen. There are these huge, impressively architected buildings all very close, as if they're trying to overpower the land they’re forced into. At street level, if you're not looking up, it seems fairly normal.

I got in a cab where the guy never checked his blind spot. The first time the car he almost sideswiped was an unmarked police car. The cop used his bull-horn to say, "You better watch it there, buddy." Of course ten minutes later, the cabbie does it again. And then once more, for good measure.

My plane back was delayed 1 hr 45 min or so. While waiting, I struck up a conversation with two women and a man who were going to Argentina "for dancing, food, and shoes. In that order." They are in to tango enough that they fly from Chicago to Buenos Aires every year. And it doesn't hurt that you could get what would be a $50 four-course meal stateside for ten bucks, and they know about this guy who makes shoes by hand in such a bad part of town, that last time the cabbie refused to leave until he saw they had actually entered the building. They're my kind of people when they travel, too: "Who wants to go in October [or did they say April?] when all the Americans and Europeans fly in to town? They want to see people they could meet at home, just down there. If I go, and everyone speaks Spanish and I meet no one from home, I'm happy." You can't meet the locals there back here. Isn't that part of why we travel on vacation?

I wake to sleep

2004-06-29T23:02:00.000Z

Grr, grr, grr.

I've been writing blog stuff on my computer at home that doesn't have internet access, but I keep forgetting to bring the files to a machine that does.

I've skipped on blogging (and exercise, sadly) because I've been sleeping horribly. But it's horrible in a cycle. I'm alternating between 11 hrs one day and 0-3 the next. Back and forth, back and forth. It's better than only 5 hrs every night, because I'm in good form at least every other day, but it's still f'ed up. The biggest thing I've noticed when I'm running on little sleep is I have trouble following along when someone's talking. The day after one 0-hr night, I think Joe (you don't know him — he's new around these parts) must have thought I was drugged. Which is always even more ironic with me because I never, ever am. Every time I saw Joe I thought he was trying to suppress a grin, like I was a joke to him. Then again, I was also just very paranoid that day.

But I figure I could at least share with you the toaster poster made from toast.

The post title is from a villanelle I always liked.

I am trying to break your art

2004-06-23T14:54:00.000Z

A Wikipaedia article from last month (last modified 21:15, 18 May 2004) seems almost precient by mentioning The Conet Project and Wilco in one sentance after the other.

The Conet Project disc consists of recordings of numbers stations, which I used to listen to on Dad's shortwave radio. His radio is a bit bigger than an ATX mid-tower PC, IIRC, and is the only thing I've ever seen that uses a single-A battery. The recording in question is the album's titular sample, a woman repeating for a minute or two the words "yankee...hotel...foxtrot". The label that produced The Conet Project recordings says she's from Israeli intelligence. She may be, but it's not an Israeli accent — sabras have distinctive "long o" sounds, and the o's in "foxtrot" sound more British to me than anything else.

Anyway, the point is that the label Irdial sued Wilco's label for sampling of stuff recorded off a broadcast in the clear over shortwave. Though I don't have all the facts, my impression is that based on an crappy law, the suing, smaller label would have won the case. Joe Gratz, who comes up first in Google for this issue, thinks the case would be to close to call without a lot of fact-finding. The label ended up settling, paying Irdial's lawyers fees and some unrelease value in royalties.

All this prompted by the article in Wired, btw. Also, see pre-settlement post on Boing Boing yesterday.

Om mani padme hum

2004-06-17T14:43:00.000Z

Thanks, Spiney, for this article about the Dalai Lama. I really want to meet the Dalai Lama in this lifetime (mine and his). But Spiney sent it because of this:

That rooted quality, I presume, reflected years of mental training and meditation. It also made for a brilliant demonstration of the Buddhist contention that the key to happiness lies in the ability to control what is sometimes called the “monkey mind,” the undisciplined consciousness that scrambles from thought to thought, impelled by negative emotions and impulsive desires.

The battle between Monkey and Monk. Here I am at Monkey Monasticism, the worst of both worlds.

BTW, posts about vacation forthcoming. As soon as I keep the monkey minds at bay for a day, you'll see them. I'll say this Sunday at worst, now that I have a working floppy drive.

"Look, I think I know the difference between a hideous biomechanically-animated corpse and a big-boned woman"

2004-06-04T17:30:00.000Z

Haven't you always wanted to listen in to a superhero's phone conversations? From the City of Heroes forums. Very funny. Go, read.

At last

2004-06-02T21:17:00.000Z

It's all over with; case dismissed. I want to borrow Tony's copy of The Who's Tommy. I want to play "I'm Free" several times. Then I'd like to take a nap.

Note: will actually do neither - I have a few other things to do today.

You think you know movies?

2004-06-02T01:14:00.000Z

But do you know the typography? Quizzes like this movie poster game take me back to the good old days when I had a subscription to GAMES Magazine. Of course, I couldn't do better than 30% back then, either. Don't forget the 80's. (via ntk)

Better than the hemp victrola

2004-05-31T19:50:00.000Z

Okay, I know I should stop picking apart spelling in blog comments when I'm no better, but a music-playing jute box would be pretty cool. We could revitalize the Bangladeshi economy! Yow!

I know the bug, his wire running down into the hole

2004-05-31T19:32:00.000Z

The bug, a crude coloring from a crude sketch from last week.

Teaching myself how to use The Gimp would be easier with a tablet.

Uh, is this thing on?

2004-05-30T23:39:00.000Z

A test of posting pictures; why buck a trend?

I always forget to shave

2004-05-28T20:10:00.000Z

You can not see, but I just did a little dance. I have license plates and stickers and pieces of paper and reciepts and a new shiny laminated plastic rectangle with my name on it to replace the older, less shiny laminated rectangle. I am also a few hundred dollars poorer, BUT!

Today I will go the repair store place and give them some more hundreds of dollars, and I will put the new plates and stickers on, and then I will DRIVE HOME. Well, I'll probably stop at the grocery store right accross the street first, but after that I will DRIVE HOME.

YAY! CAR!

I always forget to shave the day I get a license/passport/photo ID/etc. Always. I mean what, did I not expect to be at the DMV? "Oh, how'd I get here? Where did my birth certificate come from? I didn't mean to bring these papers here, but I might as well..."

Then again, at least the picture is more accurate this way.

Chance

2004-05-28T02:59:00.000Z

Stardust: Our instincts usually calculate odds poorly. For example:

On the game show "Let's Make a Deal", Montey Hall asks you to pick between three doors. Each is equally likely of hiding a prize. You pick door #1. Montey shows you that door #3 didn't contain the prize, and asks if you want to pick door #2 or stay with door #1.

The kicker is that knowing what's behind door #3 doesn't change the probability that door #1 is right. When you picked door #1, you had a one-in-three chance of picking correctly, and you still have a one-in-three chance after door #3 is revealed ... unless you switch.

Some time back I also heard game theory experts analyze Millionaire. The verdict: no one takes enough risk.

Also, the bit about fear reminds me of the movie Defending Your Life. I'm not a fan of Albert Brooks, but I liked part of the premise: your life (at least this time around) is evaluated based on fear. Whether or not you overcame your fear to do the right thing is pretty much the only basis for deciding if you get to go to a better place when you die.

Cicada Concerto

2004-05-26T02:22:00.000Z

The sound of a swarm of 17-year cicadas in person is pretty cool. It needs to be mandatory, in-person listing for anyone who designs sounds and timbres for a living.

These cicadas sound like the nice whirring sound ~~a Foxtail~~ nunchucks make when you spin it. There’s a pulsing to it that doesn’t very much in pitch, but not a pulse with nay rhythm or order. You can’t count the beats of a thousand buzzing insects.

I thought the whirring was mostly lots of beating wings. Maybe because I was closer to the middle of them yesterday, or because there’s fewer now that many have done their business, but it’s easier to pick out that the sound is the composite of a thousand ugly screams.

I thought it was cute the day before. Inspired by a Mac Hall comic, I let a few land and crawl around. One little bugger crawled up my on shoulder, sang his little two-note song, and flew off.

Now they screech binotonous as they whack themselves the window next to my bed.

Hooray.

The normal summer cicadas haven't gone anywhere. (The usual local variety ~~apparently~~allegedly sound the same as in Japan — a movie I saw on UHF last year and some Anime — can't remember which — have used the sound as shorthand for "it's now summer".) The regulars were aurally fighting it out with the tourists Monday afternoon. I was rooting for the annual home team with their raspy “ssseeeep-ssseeeep”; they're not any less ugly, but at least they don’t sound like hundreds of faint recordings of "The Torment of Alvin, Simon, and Theodore" played simultaneously.

Running away vs. giving in

2004-05-21T17:59:00.000Z

My main home computer went down last week. It hadn't been set up for productive stuff — I was mostly using it to play games and screw around.

I was writing a few blog posts at home and then taking them via sneakernet to somewhere with a better network connection. This past week I took out an old composition book, but I keep on forgetting to bring it with me anywhere. From what I last wrote, all I remember is:

Waves' constant crashing

Burnt sand or salt water drenched?

Even gulls wet their feet

Jewish

2004-05-07T17:10:00.000Z

This is a post I started writing a month ago, hence the Passover reference. I still haven't said what I want in the last few lines, so I'm just going to post this now and try to rehash that last part later.

In Friday's post, the ̣H is supposed to be a guttural (like the German 'ch'). What's weird is that I need to enter the dot before the H for it to appear correctly in the web interface when I edit blog posts, but I need to have it after the H for it to look right when it's pushed out to the web page.

I'll be honest: in the last few years I've been wavering about my own Judaism. Part of the reason why I was happy to be moving back in 2001 was because I'd be somewhere with an actual sizable Jewish community (by dint of population density and averages if nothing else). But I'm questioning my faith even more now that I did then.

For one thing, I haven't really done anything to involve myself in the local community. Sure, I went to the informal study classes that I really, really liked, but with a thirty- to forty-minute trip each way every Monday evening and with me having enough problems as it is getting up on time the next morning, I've let that go. I thought where I was moving to would be close enough to a shul, but honestly I'm farther than practical walking distance, especially on a hot, humid summer day. And even when I do go, I usually don't bother to fight my own recent tendency to remove myself from people and hide in the corner.

I'm also trying to educate myself in being more reasoned, rational, and empirical. Everywhere I look the reasoning and empirically based folks are anti-religion if not atheists. How can I believe in the Gd of my fathers who, in this Passover season, "rescued us [from Egypt] with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm"? The plagues? The parting of the sea? The earth opening up and swallowing Korach? "Let there be light"? But despite my doubts, I still want to believe there is something — some overarching thing, a deity. And even if I have trouble believing, I still want to sit down and pray, and I still want to study Talmud and its millennia of wisdom. Maybe I just need to pick up Critique of Pure Reason.

I always liked the story of Jacob wrestling with an angel, because it always struck me as representing a man trying to come to terms with his own faith. Neither truly wins: Jacob wins because time runs out, but gets a dislocated hip that never completely heals. The Rabbis say that this battle lasts the one night, but it also lasts all of Jacob's life in a way.

I like thinking we should wrestle with our beliefs and try to come to terms; we should take all our lives and search for answers only to never find them.

Back.

2004-05-05T22:03:00.000Z

Ah, a return. In case you care, the car is still in the shop. I have to get new tags, and I can't do that without the car passing inspection, and I was just told today it needs $200+ worth of parts and labor to get it up to spec. So it's going to be a little while longer.

I really haven't wanted to use this blog to moan and whinge. I don't want to sensor myself, but it's as much as a disservice to myself is the reader. Taking time here to wallow in the doldrums makes it that much harder to pull myself out. If I start whining, please hit me or something. At least let me know.

Hello, me. It's me again.

2004-05-05T21:59:00.000Z

I feel demoralized every time I walk out the door. It's like there's two of me, and every time I go anywhere the smart H has to the stupid H, "Now, H, do you have your keys with you?" The dumb side feels a blow to his pride from being talked down to, and the smart side feels frustrated because the dumb side never seems to learn. And both sides feel lower and more frustrated because I know the times I forget to ask are the times I lose my keys.

no excuses

2004-04-20T00:39:00.000Z

FWIW, taking hiatus from writing blog until after May 5th. In part because not having a car at the moment (in the shop, can't get a rental) is eating a lot of travel time, in part because time spent preparing for family coming to visit, in part because of stuff I'll blog about eventually.

I have stuff I've been trying to work out in my head and write about, but I just can't get it all focused while being distracted by things that are, honestly, much more important.

This belt can make me invincible

2004-04-13T16:01:00.000Z

I have a sudden urge to grab Tucker's waist and press up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Select, Start.

It's not working? Maybe we have to blow on the cart first...

Spanglish Bouncing Beybies

2004-04-12T15:12:00.000Z

This morning I saw lined (not college rule), hole-punched notebook paper taped sideways to the side of a bus stop enclosure. Handwritten in pen were the words:

Si necesitas Beybicir[,] favor de
llamar al numero se encuentra aquí

followed by two local phone numbers and the name "Elizabet" (as is standard procedure, the name and numbers were repeated a few times and the paper was cut so that you could easily tear off a copy of the name and numbers and put it in your pocket).

Beybicir clearly must mean "to baby-sit". It's horrible, horrible Spanish, but it sounds wonderful. FWIW, Si necesitas is "if you need", favor de llamar a is "please call", and el numero se encuentra aquí is "the number found here". Beybicir is exactly how you would write the English word using Spanish spelling conventions plus the obligatory "ir" ending to make it a verb.

A few notes:

I think that line was a comma, but there was a stray mark higher on the paper that, if intentional, would make it look more like an accented "i". From what Spanish I know, an "í" would make even less sense.

The other verb endings, "ar" and "er" sound wrong in this context. "Ir" is the only one that sounds right, probably because there are a lot of "cir" verbs — mostly from the Latin "ducere": traducir (to translate), conducir (to drive) — and "i"-consonant-"ir" verbs: bebir (to drink), dirigirse (to head or direct oneself [towards]).

If you're not the lead dog...

2004-04-09T17:59:00.000Z

I was again browsing through Amritas' linguistic notes (of late I just ignore his political stuff, though I did like this), and read this Chinese proverb (and the professor's gloss of it):

寧為雞首，不為牛後

Ning wei ji shou, bu wei niu hou

Lit. ‘rather be chicken head, not be cow rear’

He also mentions a variant with "pheonix tail" instead of "cow rear".

As a happy coincidence for a Friday, since I always like a good Hebrew quote heading into Shabbas, there's a similarly patterned saying in the Talmud. I've quoted Pirkei Avot (פרקי אבות) before — it's a central Talmudic repository of ethics and general advice. Someone once taught me "Pirkei Avot is the only place where [the great competing teachers] Hillel and Shammai are right next to each other and don't disagree." As a side note, when I went to Israel a few years ago, the corner of Hillel and Shammai streets in Jerusalem was the proud home to a definitely non-kosher McDonalds.

Anyway, from Pirkei Avot, Chapter 4; mishna 20:

רַבִּי מַתְיָא בֶּן־חָרָשׁ אוֹמֵר׃
הֱוֵי מַקְדִּים בִּשְׁלוֹם כָּל־אָדָם
וֶהֳוֵי זָנָב לָאֲרָיוֹת וְאַל תְּהִי ראשׁ לַשֻּׁעָלִים

Rabii Matya ben-Ḥarash omair:
Hevai makdim bishlom col-adam,
Vehevai zanav laarayot v'al t'hii rosh lashualim.

Rabbi Mattia ben Ḥarash taught [omair lit.: says, note the present tense]:
Be the first to extend greetings to every person [col-adam: All of Adam, a common scriptural Hebrew locution for "all of humanity"].
Be a tail to lions [arayot] rather than a head to foxes [shualim].

I agree with the professor when he says "I'd rather be the 鳳尾 phoenix’s tail".

My mad l33t rhetorical skills

2004-04-07T21:21:00.000Z

(Her changes channel to MTV, watches first minute of a recent Britney Spears video.)

Her: Okay. Now Britney is just plain creepy.
Me: Yes, but: boobs.
Her: (looks over dubiously)
Me: (Raises hands hand in air to make point) Boobs! I win!

Q. E. M-F'n. D.

Can't even procrastinate in peace.

2004-03-31T11:39:00.000Z

I got into accident a while back and I haven't gotten around to dropping the car off for bodywork (fix the dents, get a new bumper, etc.). I've been putting off giving up use of the thing for a while now. For now I'm telling myself I'll ignore it until right after I come back from a next week's Passover vacation. But these guys — and it's always guys — keep pulling up in their cars and stopping. "Hey, I can fix that for you. I do body work." I didn't mind it so much the first few times.

Monday I promised I'd help someone at 3:30, so at 3 I went to buy a late, quick lunch, made matters worse by leaving my cell phone behind on the sub shop counter, and when I went back to get it there's a guy who pulls into the empty parking spot next to where I'm walking to talk to me about my car. So I tell him I didn't have time right then, and he keeps going on about how he'll do it for cheap. I just keep walking and do my thing, but it gets on my nerves.

Tuesday I'm running late once again to meet with someone early (at least I made backup plan for when I was the inevitable 25 minutes late), and I'm driving down the narrow little street where I live, stuck behind someone driving slower than what everyone usually does. Then the driver stops and puts his hazards on, and opens his door, and I start judging which side has enough room for me to pass him on. But he stops at the rear of his car and starts gesturing towards my dented driver's-side bumper, so I think maybe he's just pointing out that there's something wrong with my car in case I didn't notice. That's nice, but...

"I can fix that for you."

I left my car in first so that when I blew past the guy the engine rev'ed extra just in case the sudden acceleration wasn't clue enough.

How good could these guys be that they need to stop random strangers, anyway? Either you're good enough to work in a shop where you can get consistency, a controlled environment, and benefits, or you're even better and you list yourself in the phonebook and advertise like normal people and work hard so people know you by word-of-mouth. Am I wrong?

Requiescant in pace. Keep off the grass.

2004-03-30T22:03:00.000Z

I was listening to the BBC World Service in the 0700 GMT hour today, and heard them announce that Alistair Cooke passed away. Most of us USians probably know him from "Masterpiece Theater", but the past couple years I found and really grew to like his "Letter from America" segment. As an American, it was like having kind Uncle visit once a week to tell stories about all the little things you know to be true but just never stopped to think of before. I was kind of resigned to not hearing from him ever again already, since he stopped recording a month ago on the advice of his doctor. I feel let down easy, but it's sad just the same. Me, I would like to live to 95 and be as sharp as Mr. Cooke was. (This would require a marked improvement.) It could happen — I have a Grandmother who's 91 and was telling me a few weeks ago how she had a nice time "visiting with the elderly" just the day before.

I remember one Sesame Street episode with the Cookie Monster where they had "Monsterpiece Theater". The host was Alistair Cookie [sic]. The feature was "Me, Claudius", which consisted of a half minute of two monsters in togas, each pointing at himself and arguing, "Me Claudius;" "No, me Claudius." Then a third one enters and shouts "No, me Claudius." Curtains fall. How this was supposed to educate kids is beyond me.

In re the title, requiescant is the plural of requiescat (I had to look it up), the R of RIP. Also, Peter Ustinov passed away recently and he often said he wanted his epitaph to be "Keep Off the Grass".

The Penn State is mightier than the sword.

2004-03-30T18:38:00.000Z

I ~~apparently~~ allegedly made a big bluder writing "Penn" when I should have written "Penn State". Corrected.

Happy Spiney?

Dinsdale! Dinsdale!!!

Just Like Darkman

2004-03-30T02:46:00.000Z

Only with a face still. Or most of a face, I... heavens it's hard to sound lighthearted or witty without being a cruel bastard when talking about this three-year-old girl. Link via some blog or other. I forget.

There are only 16 or so people like her in the world. Because of a genetic defect, they feel no pain.

As a side note, her dad is some kind of racecar driver.

I don't know about you, but after reading the article I wondered what happened to Hereditary Sensory and Autonomic Neuropathy (HSAN) Types 1 through 4, and I found which genes and nerve types are affected. The FRED site at Penn State's College of Medicine is a little more informative from a layperson's perspective, even if the site seems to exist only to plug Penn State's researchers. Judging from references in published article abstracts, the creator of this classification system for HSAN is one Dr. Peter J. Dyck.

Sorry for the lack of links to scholarly journals or why it's Dyck's classification system &mdash I didn't think to check that I had bookmarked HTTP POST request responses to medical journal search engines before closing my browser window. I did find a chart that I think shows which symptoms appear in which type, but the chart's in Traditional Chinese. I don't know Chinese, but 無 means 'not', if that's any help.

I don't have to explain why bookmarking POST responses fail, right?

Unicode vs. search engines

2004-03-26T00:55:00.000Z

Someone came here looking for "צורי USB" on Google. צורי is "rock" from this post, and USB came from here. Probably not what this person was looking for.

I'm happy. I was worried Google didn't up the UTF-8 stuff. After all, if the search engine can't see them, how would I know of the pages that aren't getting indexed? The search engine issue was what pushed me over the edge to give up on the more portable HTML escapes. This is also why good spelling is important — only the people who spell consistently with everyone else are the folks who will be found.

Not that the escapes were hard. In Mozilla, all I had to do was make sure I was looking at the post submission form in a non-Unicode encoding, and Mozilla, knowing the characters can't be displayed in that encoding, automatically handled the conversion.

What's neat is, with Unicode or the HTML entities, Lynx tries its best even if you tell it you don't have Unicode capabilities. Kohelet with the vowels left out (which is how it's written in the Bible), shows up as Q+H+L+T+. Japanese phonetic characters fare even better, though it doesn't deal with Kanji. I'm guessing is probably because getting the phonetic equivalents would computationally require about 70% of the effort of just translating the whole thing anyway.

His "little Hugo" was showing.

2004-03-25T23:58:00.000Z

On his offical page for the The Man In The High Castle, Philip K. Dicks site has a picture of the Hugo award the novel won. I know that's just how rocket ships are built, but it strikes me as being much more phallic than strictly necessary.

To be rhetorically fair

2004-03-23T20:07:00.000Z

Since I always point out Rush Limbaugh's relentless ad hominem attacks, I should try to be fair about my "poor rhetoric" statement yesterday. I'm not blaming him for lies. If I talked on radio for as much as he does I would be dumbfounded if everything I said on air stood up to as much scrutiny as Rush gets. What's more, fallacies sell. I don't think he'd get as good ratings if he didn't appeal to emotion or use guilt by association (that plan is horrible because the Senate Democrats hate it, e.g.).

Also, I screwed up the last paragraphs of the post. Second to last should read:

Second, I did not understand the width of the great moral divide. I think many opposed to gay marriage believe homosexuality is as perverse as, say, sacrificing puppies. In that light, ~~I'm even~~they're probably a little astonished that I'm not as indignant as they are. This might seem a "no duh" statement to you, but the realness of the feeling, real empathy never hit me until I put Tony's two and Dinesh's two together.

And there should be no break before the last sentence.

A moral decision or two

2004-03-23T03:52:00.000Z

I rode in Tony's car to pick up some computer hardware. On the way back from the first trip where we had just earmarked the stuff we'd come back for, he turned the radio on. Rush Limbaugh came on, which is fine.

Not that I think Rush Limbaugh's show is fine, but I have no problem if your radio was already on the station when you turn it on and we sit there for twenty minutes listening to him. I'd take a trip with my dad to the beach and we'd be listing to a financial advice show that gave good advice, and then Rush would come on next, and why change the station? We're not going to agree on a music station, there was no game to listen to; we might as well stick with it. Secondly, I can handle streams of poor rhetoric in radio-sized doses. Everything moves at the speed of conversation which is a speed I'm used to dealing with on a daily basis, and I can work out in my head why or why not Limbaugh has a point statement-by-statement before he's already moved on. I'm always paranoid with produced and edited TV segments that with the visual data added to the mix that I'm missing something that's subliminally affecting my judgment. I worry after I've fallen asleep with the radio on, too.

So on the second trip, when we've got a truck following us to actually carry the stuff in, the radio burbles on about gay marriages in San Francisco or maybe some county seat in New York. So Tony, knowing I agree with him on some foreign policy issues and haven't objected to his radio talk show choices so far, starts venting his frustration about the gay marriage/civil union issue. He is, just to be clear, against homosexuality. Not that he has anything against the homosexuals. Though he didn't say as much, his stance is close to the Augustinian "hate the sin, love the sinner," which, if nothing else, is commendable from a consistency standpoint from a man who is proud to be a practicing Catholic.

I don't agree. I could go in to states rights vs. federalism, church vs. state and economic arguments, but that's not my point. My point is that I'm sitting in a car listening to a guy rant on about a point I don't agree with, and I'm saying nothing. I feel bad. It's not like he's trying to convince me - he's only expressing how he feels and isn't spending effort to tie it all together to prove his point. Still, I feel a bit cheap just sitting still and taking it in. I think to myself, I'm going to see Tony almost every day for the next few months at least, and it's going to be a lot easier for both of us if I just shut up and sit still.

Without that listening to Tony, though, I don't think I would have ever understood the moral side of the argument.

Later that week, once more scouting out people with opinions I don't normally pay attention to, I found Dinesh D'Souza. I was reading A Solution for the Democrats when two things hit me — first, I have no hope of being convinced when even D'Souza's straw men seem pretty reasonable at times. (I am opposed to robbery, but what's so bad about wanting free health care for everyone? I would love my elected representative to say "I would like free health care for everyone. Sadly, to do so is horribly impractical. Here is my proposal:..." I also want world peace, and for puppies not to die.) Second, I did not understand the width of the great moral divide. I think many opposed to gay marriage believe homosexuality is as perverse as, say, sacrificing puppies. In that light, I'm even a little astonished that I'm not as indignant as they are. This might seem a "no duh" statement to you, but the realness of the feeling, real empathy never hit me until I put Tony's two and Dinesh's two together.

There are a few loose threads about all this that I am trying together. There's the story about conceptions of disgust and roaches that have been in an autoclave (and so are more sterile than your own finger) from the "No Thanks" episode of Been There Done That. There's George Carlin arguing the evils of religion in a way that I find hard to refute.

I'm still not sure what I ought to have done in the car that day.

Final Programming Exercise Tactics Advance

2004-03-19T18:08:00.000Z

In part because of .Pete linking to this article, and in part because I just had a craving to play the game, I started writing a program for Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. After most major events in the game you get to place a piece of terrain on the map, gradually arranging the countryside. Certain clusters of terrain types will have buried treasures, and the nicest treasures will be hidden only under certain patterns.

So it's a basic optimizing problem. Given which patterns yield which treasures, how favorable one item is over the other, and a known list of pieces and the array they can be placed in, which is the best possible layout? So I fired up a Scheme interpreter and got to work. My code generates a few thousand random scenarios, rates each by summing the assigned weight values, sorts the scenarios by that rating, and randomly recombines bits of the best 25% and some more random ones into a new set of a few thousand, and does it all over again. The code does exactly what I tried to tell it to do, but after 7 minutes — about 10 iterations at 4000 scenarios each time (experiment found using more scenarios at fewer iterations yields quicker results) — it's only about two-thirds as good as me sitting down for 30 minutes with pen and paper.

It's still a little buggy. I fixed the problem where, for a given set of neighboring terrain I was checking permutations against the list of items and not combinations. Currently I'm counting literal combinations: if you have four mountains, there are three combinations of three you can make, but I think the game might count only that there is at least one set of three neighboring mountains and ignore the remaining combinations (only terrain types matter). I'd have to play for hours to get to a point where I could test it. Also, I just finished figuring out that I need to carry the best trial(s) over each time so that if the random recombining doesn't yield better results I don't go backwards for an iteration. Thanks to the good old A.I. koan about teaching a computer to play tic-tac-toe for that one (if it bugs you, ESR explains the garbage collector koan and garbage collecting). Also, code profiling shows that more time is spent determining which items will be generated and summing the ratings than anything else. I should get a nice speed increase if I sit down for a bit and rework the algorithm.

I'd like to post the code, but I'd have to have a front page post with just screenfulls of code. I'll find some way to post it and link to it here without getting a whole new site.

I recommend:

If you like FFTA, try Fire Emblem: Sealed Sword or, even better, Advance Wars 2 for more of a tactical challenge. Advance Wars 2 more than makes up in challenge and game play for what it lacks in unique units/characters. For more of a traditional RPG, try Golden Sun but feel free to skip the sequel. All these are for Gameboy Advance.

I'd have used the very excellent MacGambit scheme interpreter and IDE, but my Mac only has a 16MHz CPU.

Oh, and I got all my data about how FFTA works from Gamefaqs.

Getting my butt out of bed in the morning

2004-03-19T15:43:00.000Z

I mean it every time I say that I'll be ready early in the morning. Every time I think, I've got everything under control. I can handle this much better than I used to. I'm a driver. I'm a winner. Things are gonna change — I can feel it.

Every time the person I promise is skeptical. But I will show them. I'll not only be there, I'll be early. I'll show them all; They'll be impressed. This monkey has turned over a new leaf. It never works.

This morning, no one was waiting. There was no emergency. I was early.

Linux is less shitty than it used to be

2004-03-16T15:13:00.000Z

I knew there was propotionally more crap when I upgraded to the 2.4 linux kernel from 2.2. I just couldn't prove it until now.

Quid Pro Quo

2004-03-11T00:42:00.000Z

Ah, I thought I had finally kicked my Anime habit, but I gave in and checked out Full Metal Alchemist. One thing I like about the show, is that they play up the laws of conservation. I like watching a show that uses the concepts of conservation of mass and energy as its philisophical basis. The part of me that loves justice would like to know that the universe at every level works that way, but I can't logically argue for it.

We can't assume parallels exist just because these conservation laws are inescapable for chemical reactions. At the level of electrons and smaller quantum mechanical "supositions of states" abound, but that doesn't mean we deal with Schrödenger's Cats daily. I may deal with unknowables, indeterminate data, and averages regulary, but these are different than suppositions — the indeterminancy of whether traffic is bad today won't make this evening's bus arrive partially on time and partially late.

Given we can't assume parallels, do we have any proof these parallels exist anyway? Aren't there win-win situations? Does everyone who gets ahead in life only do so at the expense of others? Can we possibly do more good than harm, or are we just deluding ourselves each time? I was taugh the Lord is just, but he is also merciful — He remembers inequity to the hundreths but kindness to the thousanths. I want to believe that the universe works that way. Some days it's hard.

Fire and Ice

Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Public warning, unless you're Matt

2004-03-11T00:29:00.001Z

I don't think Matt actually reads this, but in case he does: Matt, you need to see the new live-action remake of Sailor Moon, now if not sooner. I saw one episode of this (no need to go into the details of how), and it was horrible. Matt bought Spice World. This is was much, much worse. It was, in fact, the exact kind of horrible that Matt loves. Matt, you see, has an unending hunger for the awfulness that can only be created by people who suck very much but try really hard. What more could he want that this?

To all of you not-Matts in attendance, stay away. I got stupider just from watching it.

To: Frank; Subject: Power (was: RE: Simplicity of Dark)

2004-03-10T04:47:00.000Z

Okay, Frank;

Problem: Captain Carth is clearly a weakling and cannot see the power of the dark side of the force. Further, he DARED question your judgement.
Solution: You've gotta kill the girl now, or else Carth will think he can order you around any time he wants (and nobody orders around a jedi except a better jedi), so kill the girl (remember it's Carth's fault), then amputate some random limb of Carth's. In the Star Wars universe, amputation isn't such a big deal and, in fact, is an accepted way to make a point.

Assuming that I did want to be evil, you're saying I should let my actions be dictated by my underling? Weakness. I wouldn't kill the girl because of Carth's insubordination. You maim Carth to make him learn. Then you kill the girl for the money, since you were planning to do so anyway. Reverse the order if you think the girl's a greater flight risk than Carth. Thought process may not seem to matter here because the results are the same. The same this time. Next time you may act to spite a minion and find yourself striking out when you are weak instead of building power and waiting or your opening.

Further examples provided upon request, but I enjoy nitpicking better. In the game when this all goes down, you sort of aren't really a jedi. Also, not that I'd imagine it'd be much fun, but can you beat the game and not be a jedi? I've only played through it all the way once.

If knowing was even 60% of the battle, I would be much better off.

2004-03-10T04:30:00.000Z

E.g.: I know why my writing needs work.

BTW, I know I lied about a followup to Moon on Friday. I was OBE, you could say.