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<Zamf> I have heard NY people are very bitter/angry

What is it with you people and the Google queries for "the hairiest women in the world"??? Go away, you frickin' pervs! Go play bushmaster somewhere else!

Sheesh.

I just watched a Robin Williams special on HBO. I found myself laughing at a few points, but in general, I was wishing someone would sneak him some coke to liven him up.

The bits at which I laughed were suspect, when I read the MP3Gain page and well-nigh laughed out loud at the corny jokes.

I am coming to believe RW was funny because I wanted him to be funny, because he was funny a hundred years ago, before he made sappy movies that are to funny as Jean-Claude Van Damme movies are to martial arts -- brief interruptions of activity in ninety minutes of banality. It's like dating a gorgeous, but dumb, girl -- you want to see her naked, you don't want to listen to her talk for two hours. Oh!

Mumble mumble Java Speech API mumble mumble sucks mumble mumble vectorising speech mumble mumble pain in the mumble.

Busy day, what with the Superbowl and all. Referrers from today:



http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=picture+of+stampeding+cats

http://www.google.com/search?q=My+Personal+Naked+Pictures+-shemale&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&start=90&sa=N

http://www.google.ca/search?q=CyberPounce+crack&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&meta=



Bubble Lard

I have finally found a half-way tolerable grocery store in DC. Not a great one, but it's better than a stab in the eye with a carrot stick. It's the Whole Foods in Bethesda, out River Road, not too far from DC.

In the same vein as the pootie scale mentioned last night, I have created the Larry's scale for grocery stores, normalised on the Oak Tree Larry's in Seattle. Whole Foods on Sacramento or California or whatever in SF is 50 millilarry's. Tower Market in SF, near Twin Peaks, is about 80 millilarry's. Whole Foods in Tenleytown in DC is about 60 millilarry's, only because of their cheese selection. Giant Foods in the DC area are all around 30-40 millilarry's. D'Agostino's in NYC run around 800 microlarry's.

The Whole Foods discovered today was about 100 millilarry's. Kat and I both agreed on this figure, and have decided that it is the best grocery store we've found so far in the DC area.

This, more than any other reason, is why Goose is a crackhead, in my arrogant opinion. Small towns and bad locations do matter, because I can't get the food I like in most towns. Heck, I can't get produce at the hypersupermegamarts here like I can in a mom&pop corner store in Seattle. I was laughing today because all of the produce in Whole Foods had "California Grown" stickers.

What I want is a place like SF, in terms of population and weather, with the food of Seattle. I can't get that in the Appalachians.

The newly-shorn karl was telling me about his new 6.1 speaker kit for his PC, and I happened to see this. At first I was appalled, and wanted to know someone who bought one, so I could be pretentiously but casually mortified in their presence. Then, I realised that I would have drooled over this when I was 16, when I was saving for a pathetic Juno to tie to my Atari ST. So I acted appalled at myself, and all was good in the world.

By the way, for those of you not on the secret-linuxnet-channel, you can see Karl Asha's nut in that picture. I'm doing this merely to embarrass my half brother when someone googles for him.

Yup, I'm recycling old links. First, I linked it to embarrass Nat, and now I'm doing it to embarrass karl, or at least his nut. But hey, I'm helping their page rank!

Man, I should be going to bed.

I just watched Pootie Tang, because the premise seemed silly, and I had narrowly missed seeing it several times on TV.

Good lord. I'm really trying to figure out if it's this brilliant accidentally, or by design.

I'm totally serious. It's as if the entire body of Dada was distilled into seventy minutes and sprayed through three electron guns at my head.

Of course, everyone else I talked to thought it sucked, but I suspect you have to suspend more than the typical amount of disbelief to enjoy the movie. I'm good at that. :-)

In fact, I hereby declare the Coleridge scale for suspension of disbelief, measured in units called "pooties". Tora! Tora! Tora! might register only about ninety micropooties, whereas movies such as Moulin Rouge! and Fight Club require as much as two hundred millipooties. David Lynch is capable of producing films consistently measuring in the multiple pooties.

I'll probably be cursed with analysing the pootosity of any film I see for the next year. "Oh, Daredevil was foul...Ben Affleck forced it into megapootie range, well above my limits of credulity!"

Searched the web for pootie tang brilliant. Results 1 - 10 of about 287. Search took 0.23 seconds.

Sigh.

It's a day of tolerance.

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Thanks, Dell.com, that makes it so much clearer why you can't show me my order status!

Most despised profession: The rat bastage who puts the "Security Device Enclosed" stickers on the opening edges of DVDs and CDs.

I hope he's the first guy to lose his job when the recording and movie industries collapse.

Man, I spent two weeks of train time reading Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee because of a good review. It is not a good book. Sure, the fact-checking is good, and the quantity of factual information relayed is high, but good god, I can't stand books like this:

Little Big Butt had good medicine and was not shot.

He rode around in circles.

Star Chief Smith massacred an innocent village.

Grumpy Care Bear raided a missionary village in revenge. (I would have used the word reprisal, but I don't think that word appeared in the book.)

The book doesn't tell a story, it just dumps out facts, without any transitions other than the word "then" or "n units of time later". The only reason I finished it is that it has especial significance based on my family background. My mother has the same sort of choice words about most of the Manifest Destiny types as my father has about Hitler. People don't long wonder why I have a very suspicious of the way a government can turn on a group of people living within its reach and bugger them senseless. I'll write more about east coast and west coast jews another time, and how weird it is to be on the wrong side without the paranoia.

So, anyway, I read this book, and am now watching a two hour program on the History Channel on the battle of Little Bighorn, and how Custer was a raging rat bastage. Amazon should stamp,"Just buy this dvd instead," inside the front cover, and save people a lot of time.

And yes, I am aware of the apparent irony in a person who writes this way, complaining about a book written this way. However, I'm also aware that I don't claim to be a writer, don't claim to be good at writing, and don't claim to be writing literature with a frickin' blog.

The rise of Ecstasy abuse paralleled the growth of the underground "rave" culture in Europe in the late 1980's. Raves began as gatherings of thousands and revolved around techno music. They originated in England and were traditionally held in large warehouses or open outdoor areas. These events then moved into established clubs and were identified by police as "Drug Taking Festivals.

Holy diamonds.

I was reading some of the new gruntles on Zawinski's site, and stumbled upon something truly disturbing.

C-Kermit includes:

* Along with Kermit 95, the fastest and most advanced implementation of the Kermit file transfer protocol available anywhere.

* A powerful, portable, easy-to-use script programming language to automate all your routine communications tasks.

* Consistent operation over serial connections (direct or dialed) and network connections (TCP/IP and in some cases also LAT or X.25) -- on a huge selection of hardware and software platforms.

* Secure authentication and strong encryption.

* Built-in FTP and HTTP clients plus an SSH interface

* Configurability as an SSH Subsystem ← New!

* Character-set translation in both file transfer and online sessions, for Western- and Eastern-European languages, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and Japanese, now including Unicode.

* Ability to send numeric and alphanumeric pages.

I caved and finally ordered an LCD monitor from Dell today. It was smaller than I was dreaming about (18.1" instead of 20"), but even that's overkill for my needs. I snagged it for 25% off + $35 off + free shipping, which made the whole thing run about $450. I can't say that's bad, and it's only $70 more than the crudomatic Walmart LCD that was supposedly on sale in the few places that carried it. The Dell in general looks nicer (thin bezel), and has DVI in, which is tres important, because I hate analog LCD flicker.

I think my attempt to buy that Walmart LCD fooled the computer hardware gods into providing a subsequent deal that would have caused me to kick myself in the head. Suckers.

Punk Rock Horology

I have been keeping my one New Year's Resolution lately, which leads me to believe I resolved wisely.

See, instead of something unattainable such as "lose ten pounds," "read more books," or "don't be such an a-hole," I picked a more attainable goal that arguably makes a bigger impact on the world.

My resolution was,"Correct other people when they do rude things I don't like."

And make smaller paragraphs.

Today, because it was so cold (see last entry), I drove to work. If I haven't mentioned it before, let me do so now -- drivers in DC suck. Not Athens bad, but really bad nonetheless. I've been laying on the horn both to and from work, and even ran the window down this morning (in the cold, mind you) to yell at another driver, who insisted on making a left-hand turn in heavy traffic, despite the presence of a BLOODY HUGE sign that said "NO LEFT TURNS" right in front of his bloody face. I honked at him, the people behind me honked at him, I stuck my head out the window (well, not really, but the window was down), and yelled,"Dude, no left turns!"

Yeah, "Dude". I'm such a blessed coaster. I was going to yell A-hole, but I didn't know if there were any kids around, and I have this problem with swearing (or being around people who swear) in front of them. It's the same feeling one gets when one ducks into a shrubbery to pinch an emergency loaf, finishes with great relief, pulls one's pants up, and turns around to see a family at a picnic trying to keep from throwing up.

Not that that happens much anymore, but that's how it feels. Except slightly less malodorous.

I just ordered a passel of one-wire gear to build a weather station on my deck, and I see that someone has a weather station just a stone's throw away.

Oh. "Last report received 3 days 8 hours 13 minutes 49 seconds ago". Never mind.

Of course, immediately after I order the kit from iButton, I see on the one-wire mailing list that they take about one geologic era to ship. So, I should be able to see how cold and rainy it is from work, some time this summer.

By the way -- cold. Very cold. Worry about cellular damage to exposed skin cold. We had cold this cold when I was a kid in Eastern Washington maybe once, and I was a kid and even dumber then than I am now, so it doesn't really count.

This is cold. As Kat would say, butt cold. When Kat graduates, if we don't move to Prague as planned, we're moving somewhere frickin' warm that isn't Florida.

OMFG. I think law school is actually more stressful for me than Kat. I can't take it -- I have to drop her out! At least she only has three years left.

Oh, and since you read this -- Scott, give me back my CD, eh?

Maaaaan.

I have this thing I do, that is probably the first thing people who know me pretty well think of when they think of me. Apart from my contortionist abuse of english, that is. It's not my first language, so I have an excuse.

I like to say something outlandish or hyperbolic, and keep a straight face. I don't know why I love it so much, but I can't pass it up. I really, really love it when someone figures it out, but it's funny enough otherwise. Of course, I'm the only one who thinks this is funny, since everyone else thinks I'm serious, but almost all of my jokes are that way, based on an elaborate chain of what I consider to be very erudite observations about the world, literature, culture, and language.

That said, I'm very, very good at casting the dry line, and you should be careful if you ever ask me to help you fix your computer, because I'll tell you to use the "rm" command, which can be anything starting from "restore metadata, dash rewrite factorisation, forward slash". I'm sure Nat remembers someone not asking the ever-important,"Are you sure?" or "Really?" and being quite peeved.

Anyway, I've stumbled into this at my new job. "Already?" you ask. Yes, already. When talking about interviewing, people already at the company mentioned that they wanted to make their interview process a little more rigorous. Hey, no problem, I'm actually good at that. So, at a few opportunities, I joked that I would make people cry, or be especially tough.

Now, I am definitely a tough interviewer, but I've never interviewed someone who didn't have fun. I ask tough questions, but if you're the least bit geeky, you're going to have fun sussing it out, and I'll keep the tone light and jocular. I don't believe in acing tests, and any test that can be aced is not a test. That said, if you're wasting my time and don't know the difference between parens and curly braces, and insist that Java is your best language, well, it's not going to go well.

Besides, while I'm an a-hole to many people, I'm not an a-hole to strangers. I prefer to lure them in first, so I can inflict the most damage.

See, I'd say that while keeping a straight face in person, and you'd have to weigh my body language against the outlandishness of the statement. My one weakness is that I try too hard -- if I seem really, really serious and sincere, I'm lying out the tuckus.

What has arisen from this type of declaration (which only becomes funnier the longer people believe it in the face of evidence to the contrary) is a real perception that I'm some broken intellectual bully who likes to spring upon unsuspecting interviewees, carefully contrived and impossible to answer questions requiring lateral insight. As if there's something wrong with that.

I also like the soft inside of a meringue.

Oh, and JavaCC is great, but the documentation sucks.

Go ahead, Google for it. I'll wait.

Exactly. It doesn't exist! What does exist is a loose chain of non-representative examples. I gave up on them and took a socratic approach using JUnit.

My first test was "testDoesntPukeOnInput()", which did exactly that. Red bar.

I tweaked the grammar until I had the identity parser, and got a green bar. So I added "testParsesOneField()". It's not actually named that, but it basically pulls out one field into a structure. Red bar. Fix the grammar, both tests fail. Mung around, and javacc complains. Mung around more, and javac complains.

Mung around more, waving a magnet randomly in front of the spinning hard drive, and lo, both tests pass. So I use the venerated software engineering technique of copy-and-paste to repeat the code to pull out the other fields in my test sample.

Let me tell you, this is beautiful code. I haven't written a grammar for a complicated corpus in some time, and the last time I did do it, I wrote a recursive descent parser on my own. That's the great thing about controlling the language -- it will appear just like something for which you could easily write a parser.

But, I have unit tests, and isn't that the point? I hate the term "refactoring" as much as the next guy, so I'll just say,"cleaning up my garbage so no one else dies from the stench."

[SCENE THREE, THE CUCUMBER PIT]

Kat's (well, the one she acquired from me by way of adverse possession) laptop has been acting up lately. When she closes the lid, instead of suspending, it goes into some uninterruptible hypnagogic state. I really, really believe that she did something, but I can't see what.

What this is leading to is a requirement to buy a new laptop. I hate buying computer hardware because something fails. It messes with my worldview, which is based on the notion of using a computer until it's far too slow and outdated, and then you stick Linux on it and use it some more, until the cost of electricity is so much greater than its utility that I give it to Dread.

This also comes at a time when I am shopping around for an LCD for my desktop machine, so I'm balancing $850 for a 20" LCD against $1000-2000 for a decent laptop, and wondering if I should get two laptops and a super-cheap 15" LCD for the desktop, and should the new laptops be G4 Powerbooks, and how cool would that be, and it would be great for picking up babes if my wife didn't have the same laptop, so should I get her an iBook, but I have this feeling that I would end up with the iBook and she would take the PowerBook, and the iBook can't do multiheaded display like the PowerBook can, and besides, why should I worry about picking up babes since I'm married and too tired to do anything with them other than perhaps show very poorly in an arm-wrestling contest?

What will probably end up happening is that Kat will get a new Thinkpad, I'll take the old 600x, and for some strange reason, it will never fail on me. Oh, and I'll wait six months and buy that 20" LCD for $400.

Oh, I used Kismet to sniff those APs out under Linux. I'll have to dig out one of my ancient GPSs from the mid-90s and do some warstrolling when the weather sucks slightly less.

Any time I move someplace new, I have to sniff around for open APs and see what's floating around. I never use them, apart from perhaps a quick "Hah, I could use this if I were completely unethical and lost my normal network access!" link establishment, but I am compelled to see how wired my neighbors are. I know this goes against all of my touted values of personal sovereignty, so I feel guilty about it. I repent to the god of property and all is well.

DC is definitely not a geeky town, but I did find one open Linksys, using all the default settings for, I am guessing, a WAP11. This is one better than when I lived in NY last year, which is probably at the bottom of the barrel for geekiness/population, even below this city.

Whooohooo!

After several thousand dollars and three weeks, the movers came today, and after three hours, my tiny apartment has become a cardboard box warehouse. I've been unpacking like mad since 3pm, and still have books galore to uncrate. It's absolutely lovely having a couch and BED(!!!) after three weeks of living on the floor. My elbows, knees, hips, and tuckus will hopefully recover.

Oh, and I love Starpower/RCN and their crappy policy regarding broadband. Apparently, the machine that the tech actually installs when he comes to your house is the ONLY machine they'll support in accessing their network. This means that, say, you buy a router/NAT box or whatever, you can't actually use it unless you can have it report the same MAC address.

Hint: if you're having trouble, have the NAT box clone the MAC addr. And wait!

Real Genius is on, and I was curious about one of the riffs on lasers, and the accuracy thereof. I did googled and found this page. Interesting in that it was a little informing, although I still don't buy the "liquid nitrogen" bit, for obvious reasons.

It was the link at the bottom, the graphic, that caused me to write this entry. I clicked on it, and followed a link on the target page, bring me here.

Oh, and someone emailed me about lesbian peanut butter. Apparently there's a band by the same name, which may account for some of the referrers. Mystery solved! It doesn't rank up there with Lindbergh's baby or fat free cheese, but three pickles don't make a sombrero.

Man, the weather in this town is something else. It was almost jacketless weather today. We ate at Nam Viet tonight, and I had the Bun Hanoi, which looked like a bowl of bacon. I haven't had unassembled bun before, but it was nummy lovely pig-meat goodness. Kat had the won ton soup, which surprised her with its lack of greasiness. I had to explain the difference between chinese and vietnamese cuisine, and I think I have a convert in the house.

On the less pleasant side, RCN/Starpower has been the poop of dogs for service today. My cablemodem went dark at 3am, and has been only intermittently available since then. Once the movers get here and I have a computer, I'm going to have to monitor the service level. I suspect they're aiming for a nine, but will settle for an eight. As if to be pithy, it just dropped again for ten minutes. I'm glad I didn't discover it after clicking "publish".

My good heavens this is a cold town. We have a thick blanket of snow on the ground, and it hasn't been warm enough during the day to melt it away. Most of my really warm clothing is in boxes somewhere in the middle of the country, and my shoe choices are either ultra-light Nikes or Gucci suede half-boots that I can't wear in the snow. So my feet get cold. At least I have a polar fleece vest to wear under a coat (again, the choices here are limited, but we have layers...) and a wool scarf. Stocking cap and gloves are in boxes, also.

I made some bad choices coming home yesterday, and ended up standing at an semi-enclosed Metro station for fifteen or twenty minutes. It reminded me of one of the ice rinks in Wenatchee, WA, that was open on both ends, and doubled as a sub-zero wind tunnel. I came home, wrapped myself in a blanket and ate a warm dinner until my ears stopped hurting, then took a warm shower and went to bed.

Maybe I'll carry a cat in my backpack for extra heat production.

This is bloody lovely. You know, we understand that it's inappropriate to trust our government. We don't need any more proof! Really! You can go back to obeying the Constitution now!

I like that (admittedly, somewhat famous) people are starting to get positive results from complaining about obnoxious or inappropriate behavior on the part of airport screening staff. It doesn't hurt that it's funny.

Oh, and by the way -- SNOW!

I'm trying to remember the last time I expressed how glad I was to be away from that godforsaken town. If it weren't for the food or the fact that the staff at Seattle Starbucks don't cop an attitude when you correct them after they screw up your order (oh, wait, they don't screw up my order...), I wouldn't miss it at all.

Somehow, I suspect cops from DC and NY vacationing in Seattle can't help but think of the SPD in the same way they think about campus cops or mall security.