Plaidophile

...with only my web-enabled cellphone to keep me company.

I think Wisper must finally be doing that total equipment upgrade or something, since my radio can't even establish a session anymore. (usually it establishes a session but never receives any packets.)

Ho hum. Guess I should have brought the drawings I did last night to campus on my laptop so I could upload them that way.

I'm tired of being tired of being tired. And I'm getting tired of being tired of being tired of being tired.

Is it too much to ask that the Internet service I pay for actually work?

(A Southpark quote, for those who don't watch it.)

Computers keep putting sand in my vagina.

Figuratively speaking, of course.

Fortunately, MT supports so-called "moblogging" just fine. The hiptop doesn't even flinch at it, thanks to its limited (and gracefully-degrading) use of javascript in the authoring interface.

rules

Apparently, on the Radeon 9700, the overhead of compiling a displaylist is non-zero, so for displaylists which don't get cached very well (such as shadow volumes), it's a huge performance hit to try to cache them as displaylists.

Of course, I don't know why I ever figured otherwise.

Oh, right, it was because of the geForce 4.

I'm not sure if I want to go to Kurt and Allison's gaming party tonight.

I'm posting this from the toilet. :D

Today I gave a talk about forming a local computer graphics community (tentatively called "graphics.cs," though that'll probably change due to various reasons), and the conference room was pretty much packed with eager people.

So of course, that fueled my eagerness so much that I've setup a MovableType site for it, and will set up a phpBB2 forum when the admins setup the CNAME so that I can give the site its own machine name. Woo!

Rich Kyanka is so right — video games today are way too complex, and it makes them not so fun. (When the article goes off their front page, it'll be here, but you really don't want to go to that page yet. Seriously.)

Okay, so I got the thing in the mail today for renewing the license plate on my car. One-year fee is $33, two-year fee is $65.50 (yay, renew for two years and save 50 cents). They offer a way to pay online. So I went to the site, and on the website it's $34 for one year and $67.50 for two years.

Apparently, if you renew online, they charge you a $1/year "convenience charge."

WTF? I thought the point to automated systems was that it was also more convenient for the people running them. It costs less for them to offer renewals online - they don't need people to open the envelopes and make sure the check is for the right amount and type in all of the information.

So I have to pay for them to have less work?

BinaryTree pointed me to this cute article from December, 2000, during the height of the Playstation 2 shortage: Iraq Scores Hordes of PS2s at US Gamers' Expense

If anyone from the Iraqi government is reading this, let me point out some problems with the approach. (Same goes for anyone from IGN.)

I find the responses I got to the recent entries about Jesse vs. my cat to be interesting, given that both people who responded fell into the exact same mindset as what I was complaining about.

I finally got my Radeon 9700 today, and installed it. Here's what I've found so far, in the hour or so that I've been playing with it. (I'm very thorough, yet very fast. I know exactly what to look for in order to break things.)

Just went over to chat with Riceboy Jesse. Everything's cool.

Adapted from a lengthy email I just wrote to Brian Headley. I hope he doesn't mind. :)

Basically a followup to "Linux is annoying."

So, about 6 months ago, my neighbors' kid told me that I need to keep my cat off of his car, and I told him I'd see what I can do, and didn't hear from him since.

This morning, he taped a note to my car.

I've been using UNIX in one form or another since 1991. I've been using Linux in particular since 1994. I am not a newbie by any stretch of the imagination. But every now and then, Linux somehow manages to make me feel helpless and stupid.

(This would be rantier and angrier but I'm tired and depressed, so all you get is tepid. Sorry.)

I'm sick of using K5 as a weblog, so I'm moving my weblog here.