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?...