When I interviewed for my new job*, I was told that everyone in that particular group had at least one of three things:Italian citizenship, an old, giant American SUV, or a terrible chain-smoking habit. Apparantely there's one guy with all three. So which is it, folks? 1978 Dodge Ramcharger or...
A few years ago, I ran across a controller board for an old (~100MB) hard drive which had a picture of a Pontiac GTO printed on the PCB. Fantastic! The picture was taken with a 640x480 (as I didn't have a digital camera proper until April of 2004), but I'm...
The EE department has printed departmental shirts. Unfortunately, it seems that these have become Yet Another Example of Decision by Committee. The shirts are black (which is, in my opinion, a horrendous color to actually wear around*) with a saying across the back: There are 10 types of people in...
Aleph is a bit strung out tonight. He managed to cause a very large crash earlier, although a search of the house hasn't revealed anything that he's tipped over. Unsettling. While I was writing my last post, he tore ass into my room, simultaneously pulled three books out of my...
I made an earlier reference to Kyrgyzstan in an article about corporate socialism. Unexpectedly (to you, at least), this wasn't just something I pulled out of my ass: I listened to an interview about Kyr—fuck it, I'm just going to call it K* from now on—anyway, I listened to the...
GT4 has been on a lot, but that's to be expected. Yesterday (or the day before?) it was Hero, whose IMDB page hilariously lists the movie's tagline in Japanese, and later Crouching Tiger, Hidden Tiger Dropping. Massive kung-foo up in here....
I guess this has less to do with what I don't watch and more to do with why I don't watch it. I used to watch a lot of TV when I was growing up. I can remember many afternoons spent absorbing ridiculously stimulating shows like Double Dare and You...
I've been thinking about what I've heard concerning the social culture in Redmond. Microsoft employees are guaranteed perks like gym memberships and free bus rides anywhere within the city thanks to corporate deals that the company has with these entities and the philanthropy of certain someones. I hadn't really ever...
I just got an email from JC Whitney ensubjected: What's on TV?. What a bunch of tossers....
I've got a fixed amount of publishing momentum every day. It seems like recently it's been spent entirely on this journal, although earlier I spent a good deal at the Wikipedia. Bummer....
I ran across this from MeFi earlier. It's not really all that interesting (unless you're into that sort of thing, I suppose), but hit the "Products" link. Ironic....
I immediately notice two things about this page:Flaming poo! Hilarious! And, The rendering on the headline text is absolutely fantastic. I was certain it was an image before looking to see if they used an autogenerator or if it was hand-built for the story. Surprise, it's just CSS!...
Snatch is on. Another film with fantastic execution. I tried watching Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels a month or two ago but was bored mindless....
I'm torn on the Wikipedia Watchlist. I've been thinking about it recently because the Wikimedia servers came back up a few days ago, but had Watchlists disabled for a few days until the databases were fully operational. This left things mostly usable for casual users, but left heavy contributors like...
Gran Turismo 4 is on the TV—or, at least, it was earlier. I'm surprised by how disinterested I am in the game. I'll probably end up playing it eventually, but not because I want to win any races or break any records. I'm much more interested in tooling around a...
Aleph has been getting increasingly strung out in the past few days. Overall counts of random cuteness have declined in proportion to instances of window screen climbing and 8am toe-eating. Thankfully, occurences of gross flatulence are down 28%. I'm bit worried that not giving him enough attention is starting to...
I was the NMT Mud Bog event chairman in 2003 and 2004. I won't be running the event this year, but I ran across some sweet pictures I took in March of 2004. This is the best shot of the Mud Bog grounds, taken from around 1500 feet in a...
Laura, Will, James and I went to the Camino earlier. Next to the table was a guy who immediately set off my coolguy radar. I'm not sure what, exactly, he was speaking, but it sure as hell wasn't English. Occasionally words like "bullshit" would come though, but the bulk of...
I've always known that composing outside of a finicky editor was a good idea. Notepad.exe (or Editpad, which is a freaking fantastic replacement—anyone have any other favorites?) has always been a close friend of mine when writing long emails. Saving often (and to different filenames for complex cases) was always...
Ken and Erick were playing some snowboarding game earlier, although I can't remember the name of it, but I think it started with a P. Hilariously, they were playing in battle mode when the game borked and sent Ken's score nonlinear. Performing a simple flip, for example, earned him 1,600,000,000...
Cowboy Bebop is on the TV. And actually, Mac was watching Akira again earlier.* Cowbop Bebop is one of those series that tends to be hit-and-miss with the storylines, but which nearly always has brilliant style. The artwork, voice acting, and especially music are universally spot-on. Even when the writing...
At the risk of sounding like a hypocrite, I'd like to talk about another hobby of mine: flight. Flying planes is ridiculously expensive. Really, really expensive. In fact, the only thing that I can think of that's costlier is Extreme Elective Surgery, where you get a tummy tuck while skydiving...
Even with my lovingly crafted explanation (Washington DC/Cincinattus), there was still significant confusion over what the hell a Smith chart actually is. Part of the problem is that two of the axes are the same in certain directions and one isn't even printed on the chart anywhere. So, here we...
People who anthropomorphize animals worry me. I'm not really sure what it is, but hearing a comment like, "my dog adores my family" is the type of thing that makes my skin crawl. There is a very fine line between your dog loving you, and your dog understanding the natural...
I admit, I have a pet peeve. Some of you in TV land may be saying, what, just one? I admit, you may have a point—but that's really neither here nor there. Every day of my life, I'm surrounded by people who play video games, watch TV, sit through classes,...
Halo 2: The Shortest Game Ever is on the TV. I find it funny that both Halo 2 and Half-Life start out with a quasianonymous voice talking at you while you're riding in a tram to nowhere. As Ken pointed out, both games start with Hal... As Erick pointed out,...
The Emporer's New Groove is on the TV. I'm not sure what I think about this, mostly because I haven't ever seen it. I'm usually pretty turned off by the sort of hamfisted cutesy jokes that the writers try to cram in these films, but occasionally they pull it off...
Because hey, why not? Screenshots after the jump....
I really really like mechanical and graphical computers. I've been doing signal reflection problems all morning and figured I'd share one of the most clever and elegant computation systems I've seen so far: the Smith Chart. This is actually a four-dimensional chart. In order to make this easier to understand,...
Lots of picture-only posts tonight. At least this one doesn't involve any nuts. It does involve my cat and my wireless mouse, though....
Both the entrances and the exits at the Wal*Mar here in Socorro are inconsistently designed and confuse the locals like you wouldn't believe. There's a three-way stop light and two four way intersections with only three stopped directions. The streets running in front of Wal Mart have a constant number...
As I'm sure many of you know, I organize nearly everything I come across. The car video archive and photo gallery, for example, are perfect examples of this. My paper filing system is no different. I've got a 2.5'-deep two-drawer filing cabinet that is packed solid with paperwork. I've been...
I have two monitors on my desk. There's a problem with one of them. The center monitor is fine—it's a Hitachi CM751 running 1600x1200@75Hz off of the analog connector on my Radeon 9100. The problem monitor is sitting to my left—it's a Dell 1025TM running at 1280x1024@60Hz on the DVI...
Tonight is one of those nights where I seem to be working as hard as possible and still can't make any significant progress on the total pile. I haven't lost motivation yet because I'm actually accomplishing a ton of little things—it's just that I've got waay more little things to...
Will just reminded me of something that happened in Europe. It's somewhat humorous and I don't think it's recorded in my Europe 2004 Trip Report. By the time we were leaving Paris (for the first time), we were having some trouble keeping our attachments charged. In specific, we both had...
I was going to post on this, but it seems that Mouser has beaten me to it. His commentary sums up pretty much everything I was going to say—except, I suppose, that I'm looking forward to all the bullshit that this is going to cause in the fucked up world...
Goodfellas is on the TV right now. Somewhat surprisingly, this is the highest-rating film that's been listed here so far, and is #30 in the top listings on IMDB. I'm actually a little surprised this was made in 1990. I thought it was older than that. I don't have any...
CBS has apparantely just published an article about tapes that were recently released and pin Bush as a pothead. This neither surprises me nor interests me, to be honest. I guess it confirms that Bush is a good deal more uptight and weasily than, say, Clinton; but it's hard to...
Dodgeball is on the TV right now. Spoilers ahead, like you care Under extreme duress and boredom, I watched this with Mac a few months ago. The entire thing was ... exactly what I was expecting, with two exceptions:The Hasselhoff cameo and German connection were hilarious, and The fact that...
If all goes well, I'm graduating in 83 days. Thinking about that number makes me pretty excited. I'm a bit surprised, actually, because I don't think I've ever been excited about graduating before. It's always been hiding behind another semester, the sort of thing that I wouldn't really have to...
Mad props to the Japanese Wikipedia. They passed 100,000 articles a few days ago. The 100,000th one was te-kousema*, an article on Iron Ore. JA.wiki is the third-largest Wikipedia, behind EN (470k articles) and DE (100k articles), and is just ahead of FR (83k articles). Now, all I need to...
Socorro was (here I am) rocked like a hurricane on October 5, 2004. On that day, a 1986 Nissan 300ZX with shattered windows was rolled into the garage. It has since been pulled out less than a half-dozen times. Today is the 138th day that it has been in there....
I'm really sick of hearing that line. It turns out that my Glorious Windfall is, in fact, tainted. Most of the 8th and 10th seasons, and all of the 9th, are in fact just random films renamed. Obnoxious. The loss count is 35 films out of a total of 194,...
In honor of just passing 64 posts, here's a recap of posts whose index is a power of 2. 1000000 (64): Friday Night Lights lead to Saturday Night Fever 0100000 (32): Su-pu-ra 0010000 (16): TSR 0001000 (8): What's on the TV 0000100 (4): Who is the biggest dork ever? 0000010...
Friday Night Lights is on the TV. This is yet another football film, which means my ability to understand it is approximately zero. The kids (and, oddly, old ladies) seem to like it, though....
When we first got Aleph, we kept the bathroom door closed unless someone was either on their way to or had just done some manner of nastiness. In the ensuing weeks, though, it became clear that the bathroom suffered from inadequate ventilation and would become laden with vapors and odors...
I've been keeping an eye on eBay when I have an afternoon off. The list keeps growing and growing, but here is a presumably exhaustive list of cars that I wouldn't at all mind driving.Acura RSX Type-S Audi Turbo Quattro Coupe Austin/Morris Mini BMW 325is, 328is BMW 850i/850CSi BMW Isetta...
ATHF: Dusty Gonzagas is on the TV. There's a section in the episode where Carl, Master Shake, and Meatwad list the gentlemen's clubs in the area.Wild Wild Chest Funbag Junction Nipple Hut Crotch Town Boobburg Boobburg...Boobburg is kind of a scam....
This is the funniest thing I've seen all day. Sorry de snorry betsy!...
AIM has suspended the SexyTime account again. Fuckers. Funny thing is that they suspended it two days ago (which explains why the script was bombing at logon) and I didn't notice it because Gmail filed it as Spam. Hilarity. I suspect they're following the same pattern: send suspension letter, change...
Ashley and I went to the Rube Goldberg competition on campus earlier. I must admit that originally I was fairly uninterested, but decided to go anyway just to get out of the house. The more I think about it, though, the more that I realize that the effort expended in...
Troy is on the TV right now. This looks like Yet Another Bad Historical Action Epic, a la Gladiator and Spartacus. ...maybe not Spartacus....
MST3K: Daddy-O is on the TV. MST3K is almost always good stuff, but this episode falls into the sortof-blah category. The intro (image below) features some of the weirest imagery ever, though. Of course, I didn't really like I Accurse My Parents the first time I saw it, and now...
Some of you may be familiar with the ChildCare Action Project (CAP). Amongst some of the best website design this side of Mahir's I Kiss You and Hello My Future Girlfriend, CAPAlert provides hyperconservative movie reviews to the type of people who have fierce internal debates over how best to...
I, Robot is on the TV right now. I have absolutely no idea how good this movie is. I keep asking people who have seen it and they invariably reply with a noncommittal shrug. IMDB reinforces that it's OK, but not great. Anybody feel like weighing in?...
I launched this journal last week. In specific, the first post was made at 9:40pm on February 11, 2005. It's now 9:40pm on February 18, exactly one week later. This is the 55th post that I've made. One technically hasn't been launched yet (although you'll definitely know when it is),...
The subject line in this post is courtesy of one of my roommates. The Program is on the TV right now. Oddly, this is not a selection plucked from the local DVD collection, but has instead been lovingly imported for consumption herein. The film is apparantely about football, although there's...
Despite the fact that I generate typos faster than an epilectic simian on a Selectric, typesetting errors really bug the living hell out of me. I realize that it's difficult to copyedit an entire book—but look, we have computers for that. It would be difficult to convince me that anything...
The more I learn about the Atmel board, the cooler it becomes. I'm most impressed by Atmel. From their website, I've snagged the development environment, bootloader hex code, preinstalled OS hex code, and the entire source for the OS. I haven't installed the devel environment yet, but so far I...
For those of you in the know, I'm not wearing any pants. No. Rather, some of you realize that I've been moving files all day. Well, the core files just finished: all 194 of them. A grand total of 136,541,272 1024-byte blocks, which took around 9 hours to move. Rock,...
Spaceballs is (or was, a bit ago) on the TV. Spaceballs is, in my opinion, the best of Mel Brooks' movies (that I've seen). It's better than Blazing Saddles and barely beats out History of the World: Part I and Robin Hood: Men in Tights. I haven't seen Young Frankenstein...
Today hath rained a bountiful plenificence of boo-tay upon my coffers, opened wide by the possibility of wicked bling. First on the agenda was an order from Amazon, including some really fantastic music. In specific: Schubert Complete Trios, including one of the best movements ever. I really like Schubert—he's one...
More speech class fun. I got my peer reviews back from the speech I gave in class last week. Here are some selected comments to the question Was the chosen selection appropriate for the audience and the speaker?scary !!! Absolutly [sic] important and vital for all Americans to be aware...
The old adage goes: What's wow upside down? Mom! What's mom upside down? Dad's favorite thing. World of Warcraft is, as far as I can tell, signaling the death knell for civilization as we know it. Aye, here's the rub: WoW is just as bad as Everquest in terms of...
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is on the TV right now. I really disliked this film. A lot. It isn't all that bad if considered a standalone film (correction: yes it is), but unfortunately it's part of the Terminator: franchise, and that makes me expect a lot more from...
Ach. Here's a quick breakdown of the work that Midterm #1 (20% of my grade, first of three midterms and one final) required of me over the past few days: * 2 hours reading Friedman (7 pages, very dense) * 4 hours reading Johnson (20 pages) * 2 hours reading...
I'm still working on political science essays. I just ran across a quote by Walter Russell Mead in his book Special Providence, published in 2002. SADDAM HUSSEIN STILL HAS HIS JOB; DO YOU? said a bumper sticker during the 1992 [US presidential] campaign. Funny for many different reasons—I'm sure the...
I just ran across the trailer for the upcoming Hitchhiker's Guide film. I'm struck by two things: 1) Isn't the Heart of Gold supposed to be shaped like a sleek running shoe, and not a Union-class dropship from BattleTech? 2) Douglas Adams would be proud that the trailer for his...
It's around 8:30 in the morning. You could have figured it out by looking at the post time at the bottom of this entry, but it's important. Why? Because people driving past my house feel the need to honk their horns at one another. I like to imagine that there's...
In terms of raw area, Canada is only 3.67% larger than the United States, which in turn is only 0.36% larger than China. I never remember being taught that these numbers were so close. All I recall is that Russia (then USSR) was way larger than Canada, which was way...
Tonight will be an allnighter as I crank out my first test for my political science class. The test consists of five double-spaced 2–3 page essays on preselected topics. Expect updates as the night goes on and as I switch gears between essays. Also note that I'm very excited that...
Last year, I volunteered to write problems for an ACM programming contest. The results were hilarious. I wrote three problems, two of which were uniquely of my own devising--the third was written with suggestions by Dr. Mazumdar in the CS department. The two that were mine still crack me up....
The making of House of the Dead (the film, not the game) is on the TV right now. Actually, "The Making of the House of the Dead: the film" is on the House of the Dead 2 game disc. Confusing. Honestly, the only reason I even walked out into the...
"Regimented" collective writing exercises often result in stilted and confusing phrases and stories. I suspect most of you have been involved in something similar in the past--each member of a team adds a new word to the existing heap. Side effects include head-scratching, laughing, and uncontrollable diarrhea. Here's the end...
Engrish cracks me up. Being at a university that attracts many foreign students provides me with more than enough amusement. Last week, I heard a guy in the TCC say, "yeah fuck that shit" in the thickest Indian accent ever. Written Engrish is, by far, the best. Here are two...
Yesterday I bought a hard drive from the CompUSA and their sales staff. Here is a picture of it installed in Earl, the file server. Yes, those are 6 drives that you see there. The machine has around 700GB of space at the moment....
I have two things to say about meat. The first is that I actually use one of those George Foreman grill things now (thanks, mom). It seems really cliche, but in my defense, I'm not using it because of any of the following overadvertised properties: * Lean, * mean, *...
Pending my imminent upward social motion, I'll be in the market for a new car. When I mean new, I mean used. I've been doing the math on a new car for the last ten years. Unless you're loaded, it makes no sense whatsoever. Go a year old, and you've...
If you read this, smile and say something nice to the next person you see. You don't have a good excuse not to....
I've made a bunch of flyers in the past. I ran across a few that I haven't seen in a long time and figured that these deserve to be tossed to the masses...again. They're set here chronologically, and you may notice that they suck progressively less over time. If you're...
CompUSA is staffed by a bunch of hotties. Really. I went up to Albuquerque to pick up a new hard drive, and was astonished to find that the managers at the I-40 & San Mateo location has filled their registers with a bunch of megababes, ostensibly to intimidate the inbound...
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is on the TV right now. You know, the colon has to be the single most overused piece of punctuation in titles of any sort. Commas get an occasional mention and exclamation points seem to make their way into anything...
Some of you may remember the unpleasantness that occured during a CS course I took last semester. Well, as it turns out, the joker in question is in another one of my classes, this semester. And he just sent me an email asking if he could borrow the text* from...
Just for shits, here's a picture of Ken holding a frozen pizza under the lamp on my desk....
I'm taking EE334, the second semester of our E&M curriculum. For those of you who are technically inclined, that stands for Electricity and Magnetism. For those of you who are getting a liberal arts degree (in psychology, for example), it stands for Ear and Mouth. Photos of the text follow....
Akira is on right now. Engaging and well-executed. No complaints....
I presently have no policy for breaking posts between pages. Is there any consistent way to do this?...
I ran across a problem in the MovableType markup that wouldn't let me do precisely what I wanted with the calendar which, if you're looking at the main index here, you see at the upper left. When clicking on an individual day, the desired behavior would be to bring up...
Whereas my first post (below) dealt primarily with the execution of the class, this one deals more with the material itself. This is good, because the material is written by published authors, not the armchair remote-control jockeys in the class....
I'm taking a political science course this semester. A good deal of the history is absolutely fascinating stuff and there's so much to choose from that there's never a drought of good topics to bitch about. I've got two things to say about political science. I wrote the first one,...
AIM (and all of AOL, I suppose) is run by a bunch of jackasses. Details follow....
The last few posts have highlighted a few points about Movable Type. I want to start by saying that it's exceedingly well executed and has everything put in precisely the right spot, but there are a few very serious flaws in the structure that make the system behave unexpectedly....
Resident Evil: Apocalypse. I have no idea what this film is about or if it's any good, but a 5.6 on IMDB can't be all that great. They've traded the rarely targeted "Males, 18-35" demographic for the uberlucrative whiny women under 18 market. That would explain why the DVD came...
I've never seen a Rottweiler/Chow mix before. Wow. That is one ridiculously ugly animal. It, and a large dalmation, were walking around my yard earlier. They were both collared but seemed to be scrounging for food. The Rottweiler had some pretty nasty Battle Damage(TM) on his right leg. In other...
What's on? Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Season 4....
Aleph REMs out a lot when he sleeps. Most of the time, it's just paws and whiskers twitching and generally results in me being quite amused. Just now, though, he started wigging out and chattering his teeth before waking himself up and falling back asleep. Weird....
I feel like I'm doing my duty to prop up an ailing economy. Spend it while you've got it--Keynes would be proud. What's upsetting, though, is Amazon's shipping system. An $80 order (which contains gems such as Jon Stewart's America and Transformed Man) clearly qualified for the free shipping, although...
During the Fall 2004 semester I was involved with a project for my Digital Forensics class that entailed performing static and running analyses on both production and synthetic file systems. The goal of the project was to assemble some conclusions on file-overwrite characteristics in common usage scenarios and develop a...
Right now, Ken is playing Outrun 2....
Earlier today, Will, James, Ashley and I went to the Owl for lunch, primarily because it rules. Apparantely the NM Mini group was there, too, which was sweet. Sweet....
I'm starting a new category entry called, ... it should be obvious by now. Anyway, the idea here is that anytime I see anything being watched (or not, I suppose) or played on the TV, I'll go ahead and throw it on here. People at whom I bitch regularly know...
I'm a member of the Wikipedia. It's been reported that Google wants to host "some" of the projects within the WikiMedia ... thing. So I've done a quick and rigorously unscientific analysis of the impact the Wikis would have on Google's bandwidth....
I was digging through Alexa for my next post and ran across their "featured category" for the day: Sciences. The top site in the category is eHarmony. I'm nearly certain these sites are hand-sorted (there are just too few of them to justify developing the algorithm for automatic grouping, and...
Aleph is my cat. Just so I don't forget all the details (and because I still can't sleep), I'll go ahead and dump the Aleph story here so at least it's recorded in the depths of my database server....
I am. I can't sleep. Some of you know why, but it's largely unimportant. What is important is that around 2am I noticed that I missed setting the UTC offset in Movable Type when I installed it, and that my first few posts occured 7 hours before they should have....
SPACEBALLS THE WEBLOG POST...
I'm taking a speech class. There's really no reason that I'm doing it besides 1) it's an easy A, and 2) there is almost no homework. For a three-hour class, this isn't a terrible deal. I guess the only downside to the course is that a few of the other...
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas fermentum, elit non lobortis cursus, orci velit suscipit est, id mollis turpis mi eget orci. Ut aliquam sollicitudin metus. Mauris at sapien sed sapien congue iaculis. Nulla lorem urna, bibendum id, laoreet iaculis, nonummy eget, massa. Phasellus ullamcorper commodo velit. Class...
