Plaidophile

So, the monthly "Movie Night" vote was a dead heat between The Matrix and Ghost in the Shell. So the host decided he'd have a vote before starting the movie.

Everyone there had already seen The Matrix.

Almost nobody there had seen Ghost in the Shell.

So of course, we watched The Matrix.

The more time goes on, and the more I use Mac OS X, the more I'm using MacOS as MacOS and less like a UNIX with commercially-supported Quicktime.

And the more I like MacOS better than Linux.

Laws are, like all works of fiction, open to interpretation.

By not providing a decent calltrace mechanism (ktrace doesn't count; it gives no way of printing out the actual char*s which are being passed around), you just made me waste a lot of time in reinstalling OSX and having to then re-apply all of the system updates, when it turned out that the problem was that gethostbyname() just doesn't like having the local domain named local!

Oh, and thanks again, Apple, for special-casing things in gethostbyname() in an incompatible manner and not documenting it!

Gah.

Lately, lago has been discussing the expectations of hardware vs. software systems at great length.

So, I'll be a good little blogwhore and give him lots of nice trackbacks, and below I'll repost my comment from after I figured out WTF he was talking about.

cinnamon-flavored toothpaste?

mudnames not installed ; purge (was: purge). Optional
mudnames - Multi-User Dungeon name generator daemon

This is a small daemon which will listen for incoming telnet connections on port 4004. When a connection is received, it will output a randomly generated list of sample character names suitable for use on many Multi-User-Dungeon type games.

Everyone in the world is, in some way, hypocritical.

Except me, of course.

Finally got a call from the other person's insurance company. Of course, it was Friday afternoon after they were already closing, so of course as soon as I could return the call they were long-closed. Can't call them back until Monday. YAY.

I love being at the mercy of other peoples' glacial paces.

I've finally upgraded to MT 2.63 (which means that sane HTML is allowed in comments now, yay!) and I've installed, but am unable to get working, threaded comments. (Toplevel comments work fine, but when I enable threading, it always recurses to infinity. Not cool. Also not to mention that the UI for the actual posting seems a bit... weird.)

Worst case I'll just go back to normal flat comments though.

Just got an email virus mailed to me with that subject line. I just thought it was too funny to pass up.

When I opened it I was actually hoping it was normal spam! I wanted to see, like, sexy modern crochet lingerie or something. Just for the kitsch value.

I like kitsch.

Just called my insurance company and told them that I've been unable to get in touch with Mr. Garza or his insurance company, and they said that they had been trying and couldn't either (but they were at least able to leave a message, since I guess other insurance companies get information that plebes like me don't). Oh joy.

The upshot is that at worst, they'll just try to extract it from Mr. Garza directly. :D In the meantime, they suggested I just take it into a certified State Farm partner bodyshop (one of which is about a mile from my house) and get an estimate to go from there. So, I guess I'll do that tomorrow.

Some people might remember a certain "President Clinton" on Slashdot, someone who was making fun of a recent news item about someone joining a presidential IRC chat under that name and impersonating the then-President, and who used a shoddy shell script to post lots of random crap to /. one night out of sheer boredom and to see what the administrative response would be.

And here I thought all the non-spam comments were lost!

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My GRAS presentation on my dynamic visibility research, which is also a distilled version of my master's defense, just won 1st place for best research and a special award for best technical presentation. Yay!

About a year ago, while chatting with a high-functioning autistic online and comparing notes, he mentioned hyperlexia.

A few days ago, my mom emailed me out of the blue asking if that describes me, or if it was just another label.

It took me over a year, but I'm now wondering why I bought a new car, instead of just getting a scooter for commuting like I was originally planning.

I mean, seriously. I don't drive all that much (certainly not enough to justify my $240/month car payments), and all of the expensive repairs I'd made on my Honda were probably the last ones I'd have to make for a long time.

Plus, when the car is only worth $1600-$2200 it doesn't matter so much if someone backs into it in a parking lot, but when the car is still worth $10000 (and still has about $12000 in payments left on it, ugh) it's somewhat more frustrating that someone else's stupidity has probably knocked its value down by a whole lot, even if it DOES end up getting repaired (which, at this rate, is seeming less and less likely).

Meh.

It'd be "The Cult of the Scientific Method." We'd only believe in things which are experimentally verifiable, and espouse a morality of non-evangelical altruism, because if you're not nice to each other, the world becomes a crappy place. (Which is, IMO, a much better justification than any sort of afterlife threats.)

Grar. The ONLY people I've given my landline's phone number to are my insurance company, in case they can't get through to me on my cellphone. But they've been using that as the primary number. Whatever.

But then lately I've been getting messages on my landline answering machine, mostly for a wrong number or a telemarketer (which is why I have the machine set to answer as fast as possible and why I only pick it up if it's someone actually calling for me; yay call screening), but some of which are addressed to me. But the problem is that people don't seem to understand that "Please leave a message. *BEEP*" means that it's an answering machine and that they should, like, leave a message.

Hey, Apple asked for feedback on Keynote, so here it is (copied from the feedback form I'm about to submit).

A quantification of the below stress/BS levels.

Stress: 9.4

Bullshit: 5.8

This morning: called King's Auto Insurance (the place which State Farm agent had referred me to), found out that they just resell Vesta insurance, and gave me the policy number.

Called Vesta Insurance, was put on permahold, decided I had more productive things to do.

Stress level: 7

Bullshit level: 5

I am in dire financial shit right now. Barely enough money for a few payments to go through today (only after I sold my remaining stocks today), because I forgot to pick up my stipend check for this month (hopefully they haven't mailed it out yet).

And this whole accident thing is getting on my nerves. I finally got through to Garza's local insurance agent who just referred me to Vesta, who had a horribly-convoluted menu system on their claims line, and then I was put on permahold for like 15 minutes during which time I heard the same honky-tonk country song 3 times, and decided there were more useful things to do with my time.

Like posting annoyed messages to my weblog and then getting paid. Finally applying for that job at PSL wouldn't be a bad idea, either.

I guess even the Weekly World News occasionally decides that truth is strange enough.

I think that's the first time WWN has ever written a real story about a real thing (even if the "real thing" isn't actually feasible).

The submission problem has been fixed -- you can submit your paper now.

Regards,
Greg Turk

Stress level: 5

Bullshit level: 3

Funny, I thought it was the job of the insurance company to deal with the other guy's insurance company in order to proceed with a claim. Nope, State Farm says it's up to me to contact the probably-fake auto insurance place, and then said some vague stuff about how things go on which didn't sink in. Oh joy. What do I pay these guys nearly $1,000/year for, again?

Stress meter: 7.

Bullshit meter: 12.

While trying to keep my mind off of the fact that yet another paper I've poured lots of time and energy into may get rejected for COMPLETELY stupid reasons (I submitted the paper at 17:55 EDT, at 18:35 noticed that there was a stupid typo in a prominent place (specifically, I had inconsistent capitalization on my section headings), fixed the paper, deleted the old uploaded manuscript without a problem, and then at 18:40 was told that the submission deadline was 18:00 EDT, even though everything had stated it was due at 23:59 EDT, not to mention that it still let me delete the manuscript without warning anyway), why not talk about the accident my car got into last night and get ultra-pissed about something else entirely?

(Update: FTP-based asubmiasasionas saeem to be open astill. alaso, the asoup I aspilled on my keyboasrd qwhen I got ezxtremely fruastrated at the crappy asubmiasasion asyastem aseemsa to have put ashortas betqween Q and QW, A and AS, and Z and ZX. Yay me. I need to qwork on my temper, but I hasve an ezxceedingly loqw tolerasnce for bullashit.)

(Update 2: Nope, the automated system rejected the FTP upload too. Fuck. Oh, and I've switch to another keyboard.)

But I just can't get Shooby to clean himself any other way.

(BTW, addendum to the recent Mozilla post: Mozilla has this annoying quirk where it randomly decides to grab focus. I really hate programs which do that. Time to report it as a bug...)

Somewhere around here I have an issue of Creative Computing, an old magazine from January 1983 which I started scanning in to put online as a "museum piece" but never got around to finishing, just to show how different the computing industry is these days...

I'm actually enjoying using Mozilla! This is unnatural. WTF happened to make Mozilla the least-sucky Linux browser, and Galeon one of the worst?

Freaky.

I went over to Delphine's house earlier, and held Shooby for about 45 minutes while chatting with Delphine and never had any of the allergy problems I'd had before. So now he's at home, and he and Toby are playing again. Yay!

Problem: Accidentally bought evaporated, rather than condensed, milk today, due to being extremely sick (the allergy problems with Shooby did, as I feared, end up blossoming into a respiratory infection) and not wearing my glasses to the store and so on

Implication: The key lime pie I was in the middle of making was about to become extremely runny

Solution: Pour the eggs, lime juice, and evaporated milk into a saucepan. Add 1/2 cup of sugar and 1/2 cup of corn starch. Simmer, stirring constantly.

Result: An even better key lime pie filling than if I'd just done it "correctly" to begin with!

As I recently said in my k5 diary, I'm working on gathering timings for my paper for the IEEE Visualization conference, which is basically a rewrite of the rejected Siggraph paper with a much-improved algorithm...

But the algorithm isn't performing quite as predictably as I thought it would.

Instant followup to the previous entry.

For the last few days, I've been having horrible allergy problems.

They've all coincided with Shooby being in my lap or sleeping next to me.

I just finished Zork: Grand Inquisitor.

Keep in mind I only started it last night.