Most of the networks around my house are called "Relix," and I can't really remember where that came from. I remember Pete or Javi mentioning it at one point, but I'm not sure if they made it up or stole it from somewhere else. The point is, it's largely meaningless...
I'm taking a political science course right now. We watch a lot of films in this class. The current topic is the history of power in the middle east, and the unwitting struggles that major world powers get into over ridiculous local squabbles. Lebanon in 1983 is a fantastic example....
At Mouser's quasi-suggestion, I reworked this image. OK....
I know for a fact that this car is driven daily to-and-from an apartment building around a mile away from campus. Hit the image for a close-up. HOW DO THEY DO IT???...
Aleph is in a rowdy mood today. First, he unrolled half of a roll of toilet paper. Then, he spilled dirt all over Ken's desk. What a little butt. I gave him a stern talking to (rerolling paper towel tubes isn't the kind of thing I'd like to be doing...
One of the words for "attorney" in French can also mean, "avocado." Avocat (m). L'avocat n'est pas tres savoureux....
I don't, in general, trust incremental updates of anything. It's not that they're inherently inreliable—because they're not—it's just that because it's difficult to prove the correctness of operations performed on undefined existing data, most people don't bother. It's a good deal easier, for example, to get full updates correct because...
I'm having trouble with vowels this morning. When I typed the word, "other" in the title above, it first came out as, "athor." And then, the word, "when" came out as, "whon." Anyway. One of my CS professors was ill yesterday. He sent an email to one of his classes,...
14 And lo, Hosea came down from the mount 15and spake the word of the Lord: 16Be all good who look upon me with a respectful gaze, and always remember to use the fucking spellchecker. I was looking for phoon shots earlier. Don't ask why. I did, however, run across...
This is my 200th post. Mini-party in honor of the numbers 2, 0, and the number 0. I have a problem with pants. "Why," you must be saying to yoursel(f|ves), "that explains the misdemeanor charges." And to that I say that Senator Hutchinson (R-TX) needs to learn a thing or...
Aleph's hind leg markings look an awful lot like BMW Z8 taillights. The funny thing is that I've been waiting for a week to take a picture of my cat's ass....
I have three things to note:I noticed a Wal*Manager using a (gasp) digital camera to take a picture inside Wal*Metropolis earlier. He was shooting a carton of fuel additive that was perched on top of an 8' shelf. His comment was, "that's not safe." Presumably, his powers of digital photography...
My friend Vik is headed to Europe for the summer. He asked for some pointers, and instead of dumping them into the IRC window, I figured I'd post them here. There are a lot of things here that are pretty high on the, "duh" scale, but it's impossible to know...
Aleph has a new friend. Earlier tonight, we had a crane fly find its way into the house. Aleph spotted it around 30 minutes ago and has been chasing it ever since. I'm surprised he hasn't killed the damn thing so far—he seems most interested in chasing it and swatting...
Yay, more painting fun. I'm sure you're all sick of hearing about this. I got started around 10am, because it's the weekend and I can be a lazy ass sometimes. Anyway, it was partly cloudy (around 5/8 coverage1) but I figured I had enough time to mask the car, paint,...
I'm trying to watch Citizen Kane on my computer right now. Unfortunately, it keeps freezing. Twice so far. Fuck this, I'm going to sleep....
In response to Monday's bromine spill, the SFS class was moved to Denny's. Thankfully, the EDC was on hand to cover the action....
This is probably the highest comment-to-post length ratio I've ever pulled off. We're talking around 100:1 here. P.S. The title of this post came from a letter by Bob Jones, III (president of Bob Jones University) to the Right Honorable Mr. President George W. (W is for "white") Bush, just...
I just got back from Wal*Maracas. I was buying more tape and plastic masking for the car, and litter for Aleph. On the way to the cashier, I debated using the self-checkout. No, I figured—I wouldn't. There's no reason to get involved in that whole mess1. Anyway, I got into...
More car painting fun. And yes, that's a draft copy of my EE334 homework....
+/- 1 day. Results courtesy of Gallup Polls. I have to admit that I'm much less excited about graduating than I am about actually starting work. I guess I don't really see my academic involvement ending for a very long time, and graduation doesn't really indicate anything other than the...
I bought some Half & Half the other day. For coffee. The thing that I noticed was that the little cap thing got in the way of the ink delivery system, and part of the expiration date got printed on it. I can only think of three ways this would...
...is the name of that goofy evacuation hood thing for sale in the duty-free catalogs on airliners. Hours of entertainment, right there. Anyway. Last night, at around 6:50pm, I went to campus for my political science class. Much to my surprise, they were evacuating at least five buildings. Apparantely, a...
I'm taking a speech class. We've covered this before. The upcoming assignment is to give a 10–12 minute informative speech with visual aids. Since I gave a seminar on how to buy a car last semester for the car club, I figured it would be easy to rewrite it into...
I call this part of campus, "broken Saturn alley."...
Behold, more sanding! I'm nearly done with the sanding—but not entirely. I've decided to take all of the smaller chips out of the hood, which is probably a good idea, but not completely necessary. I get the impression that in a few years, I'll be happy that I took an...
I've had the same IP since exactly ten days after the hail storm: October 15, 2004. 63.227.105.11 has served me well. My router has rebooted numerous times since then, but it always grabs the same IP back from the pool. Hurrah for DHCP. But this morning everything seemed to flub...
MST3K: Space Travellers was just on the TV. Episode 0401. I really missed most of the movie because I was doing my taxes. But, what pieces of this movie I caught, seemed to be very Apollo-13-esque. Hint: it's all about NASA, rockets, space, three guys, and running out of oxygen....
I mean, taxes! I paid my taxes years ago, and the government keeps sending me the forms! Two consecutive jokes sortof take the fun out of it all. I just finished my taxes, for both the estado de Nuevo México as well as the federales. Every year up until now,...
I own a Pentax Optio S camera. Here's a picture that I ripped off of images-eu.amazon.com: So what's the occasion for the celebration? I just took my 5000th picture with this camera1. Here it is, in all its glory: Aleph, Aleph, Aleph. When will you learn not to sleep like...
I mentioned previously that my file server drives were b0rking up from time to time. I'm fairly sure it's heat related. On Tuesday, when the gods let loose their fluffy white load all over the Grand State of New Mexico, the temperature in my house dropped a good ten degrees...
...by Fyodor Dogstoevsky. Boy, was that ever terrible. Remind me to never use puns, ever. I've got two things to note.I've started using a spray bottle on Aleph when he does something that could potentially get him in physical harm: such as climbing in the fridge (where he could get...
In lieu of actual content, here's Another Aleph Clip Show Post. Today's topic: Aleph being a nerd....
Only 60 days left until graduation. I could have any number of things, such as having a rebate processed, in that amount of time....
What the hell? This last weekend, it hit (at the very least, according to NOAA) 72 degrees here in sunny socorro. Today, however, it snowed. A lot. Compare: The first shot was taken on Saturday, while I was weeding. The second was taken today at around 10am. And yes, I...
Rob told me that I needed to watch City of God a long time ago. It's taken me until now to get around to it, and I'm really wishing I hadn't waited so long to actually do so. This film is probably one of the best I've seen in the...
I need to drink less. A bottle of wine, and I'm giggling uncontrollably at MST3K. Maybe it has to do with the MST3K. Maybe it doesn't....
MST3K: Colossus and the Headhunters is on the TV. Episode 0605. Looks promising. Choice quote: "Oh man, Hasslehoff can't suck it in like this guy!"...
I ran across this today at lifehacker: Typing in a site's 2LD (like, "amazon" for "www.amazon.com") and pressing Ctrl-enter will automatically wrap the name with www. and .com and launch the page for you. Hot. Way hot. This is saving me a lot of keystrokes in the future....
MST3K: Girls Town (ep. 0601) is on. It seems odd to see Girls Town without an apostrophe in it, but I guess that's the way it goes. I'll weigh in when it's done. It's done. Commence weighing. Consistently good, but lots of jokes that refer back to older jokes. A...
I picked up some more cat toys for Aleph today at Wal*Transnationalmegacorp because A) cat toys are cheap, and B) maybe this will keep him from eating my feet every time I walk down the hallway. I got him some more hypercheap fluffy-things-with-a-hint-of-catnip because he seemed to like this before....
...has a dead filament. Really. We have two incandescent (i.e., cheap non-halogen) torchiererere lamps in the living room. They're three-way lamps with a low-intensity and a high-intensity filament in each. Calling them three-way lamps is sortof a lie, because they really have four settings. Whatever. Anyway, the low-intensity filament has...
Hooray for spring and the opportunities I have to work on cars! Today I pulled the door card out of the Scirocco again so I could fix the door latch, again. Here's the background: When I bought the car, neither of the door latches worked very well. In particular, one...
I've got car painting on the brain and it looks like it's going to rain outside. So instead, I'll quickly discuss the first car I painted and why I don't get excited about sanding cars...not that I ever did, really. The first I car I painted was my 1991 Eagle...
MST3K: The Human Duplicators is on the TV right at this moment. I actually haven't been watching this very closely because I've been writing my car-sanding ultramegamegapost. In fact, I had forgotten what the title was and then was surprised when I found out what it was. Human Duplicators? There...
But I've just sanded and painted another car. Not the entire car, but really any automotive painting is a giant pain in the ass, and it's something I'd just as soon avoid. At some point, I'll discuss what it took to paint my Talon in 1998 and 1999, and why...
So I've been running into some serious problems with earl, my fileserver. When I'm trying to read big batches of files at once (in particular, when copying off MP3s or doing mass resizings on image galleries), my whole system will lock up for a good five to ten minutes. The...
Last night was the first night that I was the only one around the house. And since Aleph was being an assbasket last night (lots of biting and scratching ... and he was trying to climb the screens earlier) I left him to sleep in the living room. This morning...
Spring break. Woo. Everyone seems to have split town, which means I'll have a ton of time to catch up on work. And probably spend a ton of time at the Wikies, but whatever. Excitement!...
Remember my comment about graphs without axes? My CS prof was so pissed that he spent a good five minutes discussing why graduate students (this was in a graduate course, by the way) needed to know that graphs need axes. You really should know how to do this by the...
I just sat through the best CS lecture of all time. It involved recovery of database systems, and thus, there was a good deal of discussion about dumps and logs. Dumps, especially large dumps, can often be very involved. This is especially true when there are alot of transactions during...
I've got a ton of pictures of Aleph sleeping in weird positions. I've included some duplicate poses because he's really grown over the last seven weeks. I'm not sure why this breaks all the layout, though. Guh. Figured it out: errant newlines in the table were converted into <br />s....
More pictures! I figured I'd post this too, because it's one of the sweetest airplanes I've ever flown. It's the Diamond Katana, and it's essentially a glider that's been converted into a plane. Actually, that's a lie—motor gliders are gliders with engines, whereas the Katana is an airplane that's been...
...because I couldn't think of a good title. So my attention has strayed back into flying again, because I can't seem to concentrate on one given thing for more than an hour or so. Really, though, you should see the stacks of different projects I've got. I'll be wandering back...
My house has been consistently clean for the entire last week. Color me content....
Will called me around 30 minutes ago. "You know the ditch next to my house? There's a car in it." Sweet. I grabbed my sandals, and off I went. Here's what I've been able to piece together: Three gentlemen were driving a blue early 1980s Chevy S-10 Blazer (without a...
In honor of just passing 150 posts, here's a recap of posts whose index is a power of 2 was spit out by a random number generator. 35: Fishy Engrishy 52: Atmel updates 64: Smells like Feline Spirit 130: Chicken? 136: Signs, signs, everywhere signs...
Dances With Wolves is on the TV. I love this film because looking back, it serves as a clear marker for the exact moment that Kevin Costner went batshit insane. People—and least of all Americans, if you dare call them people—have ridiculously short attention spans. With the exception of LotR,...
If you stare long enough at this picture, you see a picture of Syrian President Bashar al-Asad....
I had commented that there seemed to be entirely too much review in my classes. I want to quote that post:Wednesday, EE: 25 minutes going over a test, which I finished in 25 minutes. Well, we just got the test back. For our viewing pleasure (and to segue into alternative...
I've finally finished my intent to graduate paperwork. What a mess. In the end, I had to submit something like 8 pages of forms. I've been told that this is usually a 1-page process. "My word," you're surely saying, "7 extra pages?? The nerve!" And I know. That's ridiculous inflation...
w00t. First message on my ja.wikipedia talk page is: a boilerplate welcome announcement. Quick translation: Hello. Welcome to Wikipedia. Ahem. In any event, it turns out that the user who posted that speaks (at least) German, English, and Japanese. Bitchin'....
Two things that are great about Moovatype being a static-sourced system instead of dynamically generating content:My server doesn't eat itself whenever someone accesses this journal. Loading the main MT interface takes around 5 seconds, and I imagine that dumping the 10 entries on the main page would take quite a...
Here are some pictures of Aleph being a weirdo....
8½ is on the TV. Rather, it was on my monitor in my room. More GT4 is on the TV, technically. I was a bit worried when I popped this film in, to be honest. I've heard nothing but fantastic things and would be somewhat embarrassed if, for example, it...
I've always wanted to know how to use the Japanese language on a computer. I spent six semesters learning how to read, write, and speak Japanese, but the alphabetic differences induce two very severe problems:It's difficult to read anything with a lot of complex Kanji1 because there's no easy way...
Gone in 60 Seconds is on the TV. Lots of movies tonight. My favorite part about this film is that its IMDB page currently features a user review that reads, TRASH OF THE LOWEST ORDER. Brilliant! It's interesting that IMDB viewers gave this a 5.7/10—rather, I find it interesting that...
In honor of just passing 128 posts (err, well over ten posts ago), here's a recap of posts whose index is a power of 2. This post is largely copied from Power of 2 roll call. The entire static version of this journal is now 7.9MB. 10000000 (128): Weird night....
There are two important things of note here:I need to buy a scanner. Until then, you get photos of things I should be scanning, laid out across my floor. When I looked at the index for the Jennifer Love Hewitt section, I found out it was on page 144....
I've started reading Lifehacker because it seems like they have a lot of surprisingly useful notes on ... well, pretty much everything. They featured Microsoft's Windows XP Powertoys page, which includes lots of cool utilities. Specifically, the Alt-Tab replacement absolutely rules. No more reading window titles to figure out what...
Ôdishon is on the TV right now. Ken informs me that it's a film about a man whose wife dies and who holds auditions to find someone new. I asked him how it was. His response was, "anticlimactic." Update: Ken now informs me that this is the most disgusting movie...
This is one of the most moving things I've read in a while....
And the sign says, "long-haired freaky people need not apply." So said the prophet Hosea. I read recently that urban planners in the freaky-deaky Netherlands are considering removing nearly all street signs and speed bumps from their roads. [1] [2] [3] [4] In case you don't actually want to check...
I just cooked a pizza because:I'm hungry, and I'm too lazy to cook something real. But, mostly because I'm hungry (see reason 1, above). One thing that I noticed was that the megacheap pizza I bought earlier has a surprisingly low pepperoni density, despite the fact that it is, in...
I would like to congratulate my good friend Manuel on his recent defiance of the ever-rolling cogs of fate. Hopefully he'll be joining me (and all the other techies) in Seattle in May! Editor's note: Linking that image was a significant part of the motivation of this post....
The Pontiac Aztek* is considered by many notable automotive journalists to be a miserable fucking failure. In specific, its cross-generational marketing strategy didn't tap effectively into the go-anywhere spirit of emerging families of the US and missed lucrative marketshare opportunities in both high-energy, single 20-somethings as well as active older...
Halo 2 is on the TV right now. Two players on this Xbox, playing online. When piping the in-game chatter to the main speakers (instead of the Xbox Online headset), this turns from a somewhat böring experience into ... a slightly less boring one. Listening to 12-year-olds bitch each other...
I had commented earlier on the somewhat bizarre traffic flow around the local Wal*Installation. The workable, but completely inconsistent, arrangement of lanes isn't necessarily intuitive and is likely to confuse drivers who are either inattentive or, as the case is likely to be, just plain stupid. My first encounter with...
Chicken chicken chicken chicken, chicken chicken chicken. I'd also like to point out that this paper comes to us from a recently graduated PhD student at the University of Washington. Rock on....
I suggest that Aleph is related to a cat from Idaho....
Wow. Weird goings-on. Rob and Will and I spent some time at the Camino, and while we were leaving ran into someone who appeared to be hashing...although it's hard to tell. He was wearing a headlamp and a camelback, and was chalking xs and circles into the ground. He also...
It's happened again! Another 75 minutes of my life, gone forever. And it happened again in my undergraduate CS course. This is twice just this week. Plus, all these self-pitying whiners petitioned the professor to have the midterm exam moved from Tuesday to Thursday of next week. Dear god, why?...
The other day I visited the little computer scientists' room in Speare before a class to freshen up a bit. Behold, someone was in there talking to themselves! Well, to someone else—but on the phone. This, of course, made me giggle to no end. I talked with Rob and Satan...
And Aleph just woke up by eating my toes. Better than an alarm clock? At least I can set an alarm clock....
I had commented previously that Aleph had stopped farting. I'm afraid to report that this was a dirty, dirty lie. Thank you for your attention....
Lots of GT4 is on the TV. Lots. And apparantely, Clerks, although I haven't actually seen it being played. Clerks is one of those films that's supposed to be good because it's an early work of a director who makes largely different movies. I agree that Clerks is unconventional in...
When you publish art, then saying goes, it no longer belongs to you—it belongs to the world. Your work of love and labor is tossed to the unwashed masses, who will subsequently proclaim you genius, spend a lifetime pointing out your works' flaws, and generally overanalyze the living shit out...
...is a line ripped straight from a really ancient copy of The Onion. Nevertheless, here are some pictures of that, Ken's muddy truck, and the monstrous replacement power cord he got for his XBOX. It looks like a GFCI outlet. Wow....
I just did a quick survey of my posts. Not including sentences added after the main post body (e.g., footnotes and P.S.s), 19 of my 119 entries here end with a one-word protosentence. Example. This amounts to just under a somewhat-staggering 16%. I guess I usually dump these into the...
Last semester I went through a shitton of supplies. At last count, I was up to 14 or 15 pens and three full notebooks. Already this semester, I'm nearing the end of my third pen and have filled around 1.25 notebooks. I don't suspect I'll crack last semester's total ......
I'm getting really frustrated with professors who spend class time going over homework and test problems. Unless there are some obvious classwide comprehension issues*, there's no reason to cover these things. I did, after all, pay the money for a textbook, and know how to crack it open. I've gotten...
How many of you remember Rob's Supra when it was actually Rob's? Show of hands? Despite being old (and, admittedly, a bit rough in a few spots), the car was very very sharp. The only serious flaws that I can remember were a botched bumper paint job and a small...
Something happened earlier on the ACM list which reminded me of the troubles of Reply-To addresses. The upshot of this is that I've gotten about a million emails and AIMs today about cats (KITTIES!!! wooOOOo) but that's about it. The incident that it reminded me of, however, caused one hell...
Nobody who really knows about it ever talks about it. Ever....
Tuning a guitar is a tricky thing. It's just occured to me that there a ton of small tricks that I regularly use that I don't think I've ever seen written down. Most everyone simply shows the typical pattern, and moves on. So to start, here's the typical pattern: e||--|--|--|--|--|...
The story of the Martin Speare building on the NMT campus is an interesting one...although I have no idea how true it is. The basic story goes: the school built the Speare building in the late 1960s/1970s/1980s (and light rock from the 1990s) to fulfill the need for a new...
...we will have replaced television with Smell-O-Vision. Or so I keep reading. I remember doing a creative writing assignment sometime earlier in my education. I can't recall exactly when I did it—I suppose anywhere between my 6th and 10th grade years seems about right—but the details are still with me...
I forgot to feed Aleph. I'm a bad cat owner. When I first got him, I bought a "kitten-sized" cat litter box from Wal*Mar ($3.97) ... this turned out to be horribly undersized. It would probably have worked at one point, but even when I got him, he would usually...
