Plaidophile

It was mentioned on various weblogs but I never paid it any mind, but XCode looks awesome. It might be the impetus for me to finally write the windowing abstraction layer in Solace, which will finally give it Ultra Super Portability (and not just "pretty good portability to systems which can run an X11 layer).

You are missing out on one or more friends-only entries. Please log in, if you have an account.

Jesse is back.

His car isn't.

Shooby just mounted Toby and tried to have sex with him.

Horny little bastard.

Nice heavy rainstorm today. Shooby was outside though, and hasn't yet learned to come inside when it starts to get stormy. Every cat must learn that eventually.

Back using Mozilla. Its focus problems and other little niggles aren't nearly as bad as the the majorly annoying problems with Opera 7 (like it crashing all the time, or losing TEXTAREA contents or whatever).

Other random stuff inside.

Does anyone know of any good weblogs which aren't about weblogging?

Oh well. Any other suggestions?

Toby went fucking nuts yesterday, so I decided that I'd let the cats out during the day when Jesse's not home. This seems to be a much better way of doing things.

Some pages have the exact opposite imagery for pre- vs. post-op than what I'm used to seeing.

From Alien Skin software:

Thank you for applying for the Graphics Programmer position. After careful consideration, we have decided that we need to keep looking for someone who is a better fit. We will keep your resume on file in case other positions become available.

I wonder how careful the consideration was, considering they never even, say,called me on the phone to talk. What, am I supposed to put every single graphical effect I've ever coded on my resume? It's not like they even requested a portfolio...

No interview for me at Pixar. Job opening is already being closed, because they already have "an offer out to an excellent candidate," as the boss of that division put it. Kind of annoying, since it implies that I'm not an excellent candidate (which he'd have no way of knowing since he's never actually talked to me), but that's probably just unfortunate phrasing on his part, combined with me reading too much into things what with feeling like every little failure to have something good happen is getting a critique on my life as a whole.

Though the really upsetting thing about this is knowing that I would have gotten an interview if I'd known about the job posting just a few weeks ago. Bad timing strikes yet again.

As impossible as it would be, taking a month-long break from the computer seems really appealing right now.

I think I'll apply for video editing jobs as well. I like video editing, now that I've finally figured out Final Cut's interface.

This demo reel I'm making for Pixar's Seattle R&D department (which it doesn't sound like I'm likely to get, because the friend of mine who works there said the boss already has basically settled on one of the candidates who has already interviewed) would serve equally well as a demo reel for a film studio, what with the cool editing and neat titling I've done. I've even synchronized events to the soundtrack! (Which is "Moodswing #3," the album mix of my "Moodswings" entry from the short-lived InTune Composer Challenge.)

I got $150 for it! Yay!

Man... between the eBay listing fee ($2.20), the eBay final value fee ($4.70), the both of those for the previous non-sale ($7.34), and the PayPal merchant fee ($4.84), eBay sure is getting a lot of money ($19.08) for basically sending automated emails around.

Whatever happened to when listings were $1 + 1%?

Cafepress has realized they were majorly shooting themselves in the foot with their recent policy changes (the "if you don't make $25 you get a $25 administrative fee" thing, and the "you get charged an extra 15% overhead" thing, and a few others) and changed them to be something much more reasonable; as such, I'm bringing back the links to the trikuare store. Not that anyone ever buys anything from it anyway.

Of course, who knows how long it'll be before they change the policies yet again...

I don't want to leave Las Cruces. I'm comfortable here. I have friends here. But there's no jobs here.

There's starting to be some decent jobs in other places again. I just sent my resume off to Pixar (specifically the prman group in Seattle) and Alien Skin. And there's plenty of other places which would be really cool to work at which might actually consider hiring me. Meef.

(nt)

Take one pint water. Add a large squirt of lemon juice. Enjoy.

Yesterday at the mall when I was buying aforementioned dress shoes, I stopped in on EBWorld to see if they had anything nifty, and in the used games bin was something nifty: a copy of Ico, like I'd been trying to locate for quite some time. (I mean, a working one, not a formal rental which had been scratched to hell being sold on eBay as "like new" by a seller who likes to rip people off by claiming that they never got the return back.)

The only worse thing on my feet than wearing dress shoes is wearing dress shoes which haven't been broken in. Nyurgh.

Anyway. The presentation I gave on my research and such today at WSMR went well, but of course they're not hiring right now. They were pretty interested anyway, though, and very impressed with my work. No prospect for a job through them at this time, but at least it gives me networking contacts.

1. The keyboard is cramped and incomplete (fortunately, the handwriting recognition rules)
2. The keyboard is really hard on my wrists for some reason
3. Opera 6 doesn't support the cursor keys for scrolling, and has lots of other interface niggles

My cats are being surprisingly good about being kept indoors.

I think the fact they're both really high on catnip right now helps.

Got another note from him taped onto my car today.

Nobody missed a webcast because there wasn't one. Basically, nobody showed up, except Delphine and Gerald (who were givens), Geof (who had to leave pretty early), Dr. Pfeiffer (who had to leave even before Geof), and Rick and Cathy (who had to leave at 8 to pick up their daughter, who was also at a birthday party). So there was a whole buttload of food for 10 people (only 8 of whom were actually there for any significant amount of time), and lots of conversation but not too much entertainment, except a brief period where Cathy wanted a tour of my house now that it's clean and she saw I had the DDR mats and so we had to play a set. :D

Anyone else awake?

I'm posting this wirelessly from the Zaurus. Yay technology!

I should get around to installing Graffiti now...

Haven't posted about my graphics engine in a while, so here's some pictures of my dynamic shadow stresstest running at 20fps.

Cool! I still have all of the TaxCut 1999 stuff - the old databases, the install media, etc. And so now I've got all of the forms to show that there's an error in their database, not that there's a discrepancy!

The irony is that I just went to start to upload the forms to my CS account (from which I actually have access to a working printer) and noticed that I already had the old printed forms there. I never got around to deleting them. Heh.

Tonight, Delphine took me out to a bar so we could see a couple of ska bands and stuff and she bought me drinks and a couple of the albums being sold (and I bought the other couple), and then I got home and saw that my mailbox had a big Priority Mail envelope in it and I thought it might have finally been the Cafepress stuff I bought like two weeks ago, but it wasn't — it was a present from Ali! She got me this adorable porcupine puppet! Yay!

I have the bestest friends in the whole wide world. :)

at least according to Google News.

Never, ever buy Powmax power supplies. They only last 6 months.

My favorite bit on DDR: the one which has the two graphs, one showing my stamina going up and up, and the other one showing my weight going down and down.

I can pass some 7* songs now!

And he's very hungry.

But Shooby's okay. :)

The Zaurus is cool!

Can't wait until I have the 802.11 card for it (which I'll be getting on Friday).

This morning at around 7:30 or so I heard the sound of breaking glass from the direction of next door, where Jesse lives.

This afternoon I discovered that someone had lobbed a beer bottle over that fence fence into my back yard. Gee, I wonder who that could been.

I just got a letter from the NM Taxation and Revenue Department that I have a discrepancy on my state vs. federal tax return.

From 1999.

That was a fucking pain in the ass. But the forum is recovered to its former glory.

phpBB needs a better upgrade mechanism. One which doesn't require the admin to take a crash-course in SQL to learn how to fix the horribly-broken tables.

(If you already had an account, it should still work just fine, though you may need to clear your cookies to get in. Also, all avatar images got deleted.)

Update: Except for that little problem of not being able to post anything. God damnit.

There needs to be a "Ban this IP" link from the "Edit this comment" page. Bulk comment deletion (from the blog and/or entry pages) would be nice, too.

Also, where the hell can I get to the event log without having a failed aggregator ping?

Meh. So much for my IEEE version of the spatial partitioning paper.

which is why I finally just hacked the MovableType code to remove it from all public pages.

(My philosophy: If someone wanted a link to open in a new window, they'd ask their browser to do that. I don't see why someone's browser history should be destroyed just because they clicked on a commenter's homepage URL.)

For others who want to do that, just search on _blank in lib/MT/Template/Context.pm; there's two instances, one for email addresses and one for homepage URLs. (I have no idea why it specifically does target="_blank" on a mailto: link, either, but that's another issue of crackheadedness entirely.)

Apparently I'm so hard on the pads that even with the overengineering I did to keep the pad to stay in one place, the pad inside my 1P platform has shifted around a whole bunch (making the registration bumps no longer useful), and the cover's gotten stretched out.

Maybe I'll try replacing the cover with the hardwood floor cover that ddrfreak.com recommends so highly. In the meantime I think I'll switch to using the 2P pad for a while.

Okay, between Opera deciding that ^U is "delete entire textarea without undo" (it's supposed to be "delete to the beginning of the current line") and my DSL connection being all wonky today, I'm having a really hard time getting this rather long entry posted. At least I came to my senses and put the bulk of the text in a proper text editor this time.

So anyway, as you probably know, I've left Kuro5hin, partly because of some specific people, but mostly because of the major problems inherent in a single centralized community (which rusty wants to do nothing to actually try to fix, which certainly isn't helping him to keep the users which make the site desirable).

So, here's a very brief history of the events which led up to me leaving K5, and some ideas on how to make decentralized "communities" (such as the "blogosphere") work as more than a big circlejerk of crosstalk.

It's summer, I got my master's degree, and I've managed to successfully complete another revolution around the sun within the same relativistic frame as everyone else (more or less). So, you are cordially invited to attend a party at my house on Sunday, June 14, starting around 5:30 PM. There will be a variety of food and drinks, and the usual musical jamming, so bring an instrument (and any necessary amplification/cables/etc.) if you're so inclined. (This time the jam will probably happen in the greenhouse or the living room, and may be broadcast LIVE ON THE INTERNET, just because.)

When: Saturday, June 14, 5:30-ish

Where: Email for address, map and directions (if you'd actually be able to get to Las Cruces on that day and are actually interested in coming)

Yay!

Okay, enough people complained about the forum as being too much trouble for random commentary that I'll go back to the old behavior, where I'll keep entries' comments open by default and then shunt any entries which get out of hand over to the forum.

I just found out that some people have been unable to get into phpBB in order to post comments on the forum. Damnit. If you're having trouble, please email me (anything at this domain will work) so I can try to figure out what's going on. I don't mean to exclude anyone! I just want to raise the bar a bit for people to post comments, and to make it easier to exclude certain people. ;)

(Oh, and at this time you don't have to actually register to post comments, FYI.)

It's settled.

• Zaurus SL-5500 - $214 at TigerDirect (after shipping)
• Lexar 256MB SD card - $75 at TigerDirect, with $20 rebate
• Netgear MA701 802.11 CF card - $65 at eTechWarehouse (after shipping)
• Total: $334 after shipping and rebates

for a 200MHz ARM-based PDA with a total of 352MB of memory. Yum. :d

Update: Damnit, I wish places like ETW would tell me before I order that the item is backordered. I asked them to kindly cancel the order, and so hopefully I'll be able to buy it from somewhere else instead. :P

Opened my door this morning to find that Toby had "lost" his collar. So had Shooby.

Yay, now if they get run over, nobody will know who to call, and less pessimistically, I won't be able to hear their tags jingling to know which cat is asking to be let in, or if Shooby's on his way in after I open the door for Toby, or whatever.

I try explaining it to them, but nothing seems to work...

I've gotten more "How much would you be willing to sell the Sidekick for to me right now?" (a violation of eBay policy) emails than I've gotten bids. (I've politely responded with, "I'd rather not violate the eBay policy, thanks." They all make it sound like they'd be doing me a big favor by giving me money "now instead of later.")

Of course, it'll be just my luck that the color Sidekick will be announced in a couple days, before my auction heats up...

I don't want mine anymore.

Anyone have any replacement suggestions?

MT definitely needs an auto-close old comment threads option.

Some sort of spam throttling would be nice, too.