Plaidophile

Just as it began... not with a bang, but a whimper.

Pros, cons, and more uncertainty than I had when I started.

From the chatter I overhearing, I'm not the only one who's totally disappointed with the conference itself this year.

Oh well, I did what I came here to do: get job interviews. Trying to meet up with someone from NASA right now.

According to the food caterers at this Siggraph party, "international" means:

• A table with nachos ("Mexican")
• A table with pizza ("Italian")
• A table with bratwurst, sauerkraut, and pretzels ("Bavarian")
• Warm Heineken

Some of them really do have spikey hair.

Some of them really do wear a kimono with a big ribbon tied to their back.

So far I haven't seen one with both attributes.

Now the problem is that there's too much I want to attend which is all at the same time. Grr.

Last update: 5:10 PM PDT (I may have a job!)

So far I'm pretty disappointed with SIGGRAPH. If I'd known they were filming the sessions and were going to sell the DVD for $60, I'd have just gotten the "conference select" package for $250 less and then gotten the conference materials and filmed sessions for $120 total at a later time. The courses and papers haven't been too terribly interesting so far (aside from that one texture synthesis one)...

Last updated: 6:00 PM PDT

SOLACE-like MMORPG, lowering the bar for Farkers, etc. (Will be updated as the day goes on.)

Also, the wireless network here is setup with a stupid transparent proxy which keeps on letting me know who is providing the web access. Thank you, I know already. You told me the last 10 times I unslept my computer.

Also, the food is even more outrageously expensive than it was last year. $7.50 for a fucking SANDWICH? And of course, it's the most expensive part of town so I can't just go to an In & Out or something. I'll have to buy a bunch of ramen at the grocery store tonight and just keep that in my backpack. (Mmm, ramen chips.)

I can't find any food which is affordable. I can't even find water which is affordable. $3 for bottled water, no drinking fountains in sight (of course, this is San Diego, where the tap water's only a bit better than, say, Hong Kong or Mexico). Fuckers.

Last update: 4:50PM PDT

It's extremely low-key right now, but there's not a whole lot going on yet. Didn't get a chance to shower this morning (I forgot to set my alarm clock) so I fit right in, unfortunately.

This one is definitely going to be smaller than last year, by a pretty big margin. Meef.

(nt)

I didn't think I'd have time to do a writeup this morning, but, well...

SongFight Live is, without a doubt, the most fun I've had in a long time.

I have nothing to do until 1:45 PM, so I went and just paid the $7 for the WiFi access.

I had no idea that some airports could be so horribly mismanaged.

This is a non-Songfight entry. I'll post a final Songfight Live 2k3 writeup in a bit.

9:46 PDT Note to self: random deep security screenings go faster, and with the stuff I carry I'm fated to always end up getting a deep screening anyway. Bring on the boarding passes with the SSSS! (and since all of my tickets are technically one-way, I'll even get it on my final flight in a week... Convenient!)

1:49 PM PDT Laptop battery's almost dead, but flight's almost boarding anyway. I don't think this WiFi access I bought here will work in Las Vegas, so this is the last shred of Internet access I have until I get to my cousin's house in San Diego. Which is fine, since the Internet is kind of stupid anyway. ;)

Today I met the person behind MC Frontalot.

He is cute!!!!!

Also, nothing like his ficticious persona. :) Except the voice. Yet another case of "I can't believe that I'm talking to THAT VOICE in person!"

While waiting for Spud to show up, I pulled out my Zaurus, and noticed the link light on its 802.11 card was solid. So I pulled out my iBook, and am now online from one of my cousin's neighbors' unsecured WLAN. Woo!

It's nice being in a city where even low-income neighborhoods are likely to have people who have just enough money and technical urge to have a wireless router, but not enough technical competence to actually secure it... :D

Tonight is the final rehearsal. Tomorrow is the concert. Many people are still just now arriving.

Things were rather slow... Frankie, Add, and JBB went off on their own touristy stuff, leaving just me, Spud, and Bro to do various things. The bowling messed up my right arm (and my arm tendons are still a bit sore, but I'll manage) so I couldn't do much piano or any guitar, so I mostly practiced drums while Spud worked on transcribing Octothorpe's newest song to sheet music (since after a long comedy of errors we couldn't figure out how to restore a missing font which was needed for his notation software). Bro was out running errands for Spud.

It's amazing... I hadn't met these people in person before, but I feel like I know them so well. Then again, they seem to act a lot in person lik they do online and in their music.

Here I am, having just arrived in Seattle, weblogging from Spud's place of work. Not much to say about that, really, though Seattle is a rather interesting city so far.

Just a few hours (relatively speaking) before I get up, take my kitties to Delphine's house, and then go up to Albuquerque. Then early Tuesday morning, my brother drives me to the airport for Seattle, then the following Sunday I go to San Diego until Saturday, when I return to Albuquerque to spend a few days with my family before coming back down here.

There will probably be weblog updates through all of that. :)

How long and at what temperature should one bake a pizza with a whole wheat crust? 'coz mine's been going for like 25 minutes at 475 now and although the toppings are getting pleasantly crispy, the crust is still basically raw. I think it's getting moisture from the tomato sauce or something.

I passed another 9* level. Which I followed up by passing another 8* level. Which I then "cooled off" from by passing a 7* level. And after all that, I still somehow managed to get MY BEST SET SCORE EVER. Holy cow.

You are in a twisty maze of passages, all bureaucratic.
>

Nope, didn't get the pre-trial arraignment today anyway. Oh well, at least I finally have something with a high degree of certainty to deal with. It was also a good practice for dressing nice for job interviews.

The reason I'm so anxious about the court hearing thing is that I've been looking at it as a case of something going potentially bad. But that's not how it is.

The worst case is just having to pay a bit more than what I'd have had to pay if I weren't doing it. There is no potential for it turning out worse than it is; all of the potential is for a good outcome.

That puts me at ease quite a bit.

The one thing I urgently need to do this week, the one thing which I've been gearing myself up to do, which I need to do before I leave next week... and I couldn't bring myself to do it today.

Debian 3.0 seems easier to install and then immediately upgrade to testing than 2.x did, even though there doesn't seem to be anything different about the installer. Maybe the package dependencies are much more mature.

It's still dumb how it gives you all these stupid warnings about things which are "no longer relevant" and also makes you do lots of stuff to fix broken configurations which it should be able to do on its own. Like a new user is going to understand things like editing lilo.conf?

Thanks to a very generous donation sent in by a very kind lady, I was able to afford a very needed working printer.

The printer, however, was not configured correctly, so it was printing out raw postscript. No problem, except that my kernel's parport driver wouldn't let me clear out the output buffer.

And it all went downhill from there...

I was just buying a quick, late and cheap lunch at the grocery store when I noticed "Café Intense: Candy with X-treme Caffeine" candies in various flavors, including cappucino and café mocha. So I got some café mocha ones.

Who here will be in or near San Diego the last week of July? (In particular, those attending SIGGRAPH)

And who of those want to meet up with me?

Note that my transportation may be fairly limited since I can't afford a rental car.

I had a rather funky dream last night. I'll try to remember what I can about it. Unfortunately, the funkiness was all visual in nature, so capturing it in anything less than full animation probably won't work too well...

Okay, I ended up using absolute positioning, but it's okay because I also realized that there IS a way to subtract another measure from the width of a div - using a margin!

2:45 This works in every single CSS-enabled browser I've tried it on, even IE5/Mac and Opera 6/QTopia (in handheld mode, anyway, but unsurprisingly it breaks horribly in the full view). That's when you know it's right. (And of course, it's still usable without CSS, just ugly.)

10:48 Changed things a little so that the main content comes first (and used padding instead of a margin to keep IE5/Mac happy, since it ignores margins on floated elements and it's just an issue of six of one, half dozen of the other, semantically speaking), and also narrowed the sidebar to 15em. The former slightly breaks things on Konqueror (the sidebar's absolute positioning ignores that the content panel is floated), but it's fine in Safari so I think it's just one of the CSS bugs which Apple fixed so it should work fine in Konqueror when they get around to releasing one with Apple's patches. :)

Either someone's firing off leftover fireworks, or there's a gang war breaking out. Either way, I'd rather not have to hear this.

Hey, it's cheap, it's edible, and it's got a lot more nutrition and flavor than a bowl of Ramen.

I finally got around to making use of PHP to automatically close comment threads older than 45 days. If you're interested in doing the same on your weblog, read below.

Okay, so obviously, I've been tweaking the formatting a lot. I'm still using a table hack, but thanks to a complaint from a true fossil (namely, a Netscape 4.7 user) I was prompted to finally try validating the HTML, and discovered many things...

It's not often that you can clearly see the veins inside your eyes.

yum

9:01 PM oh man I'm really drunk. this stuff's like rootbeer but moreso! FWEEEEEEEEEEE!!!! (and i only had one! i'm such a featherweight :)

936 PM second one is jharder to get through. which keyboard key does what thing? fwee (i have now gently fucked the pain away with a chainsaw!)

Note: When you almost kill me and your son due to your being too busy talking on the phone to drive well enough to even stay in your own lane, it is not an appropriate response to glare at me when I honk at you.

Note: When I say "[such-and-such] is overrated," that doesn't mean I think it's bad, just I don't think it's worthy of all the praise it gets from its drooling fanbase. And that in itself isn't a complaint that some things do manage to get a fanbase.

Shooby throwing up 6 inches away from my face.

Like, okay, some SVCDs don't play fully through because of weird buffering issues with leadout tracks, so the SVCD needs to be mastered making sure that there's enough leadout to fill the buffer. Fine.

So why's there no easy way to tack a leadout onto an existing MPEG stream?

Every day I waste on this stupid bullshit, trying to get a simple 4-minute DVD burned, is another day I risk more positions closing out from under me.

After utterly failing to get FUDforum to work, I decided to go back to phpBB2. Of course, I still couldn't salvage the old tables, so it's all brand-new. Joy.

Grab v1.5 while it's hot.

Also, this is the 2⁸th entry. (Yes, I know the archive file isn't numbered 256. But trust me anyway, this is the 256th entry.)

It's July 5. You'd think people would have gotten sick of setting off fireworks by now, but no.

The Siggraph career fair was cancelled because there weren't enough employers interested in employing employees, or interviewing interviewees.

For the other thing, right now the only DVD burner I have access to is on a Win2K system on campus, and you'd think that burning a simple 4-minute video to DVD wouldn't be such a fucking crucible.

i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job i need a job

but I want the backlink, so that maybe someone who is feeling generous enough to find this total stranger a job can help me to find a job too, 'coz Ron isn't the only intelligent and talented yet unemployed person in the world right now.

Hopefully I'll be making an AudioCompress release soon, since someone submitted a patch to let it act as an esd plugin (so all esd-speaking apps can be processed by it, which makes me very happy indeed).

The only reason I'm not releasing it yet is that for some reason, it keeps on blocking on write after 31 fragments are processed. Anyone have any ideas? The patch submitter doesn't have any idea what's going on for me.

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my 1P DDR pad is already worn out.

The joys of parenthood.

Update, 4:15 AM: Unsurprisingly, he's back.

Damnit. Guess whose car just returned.

Looks like it was just parked somewhere outside for a week though. Totally dirty. Nyah!

Wherein I list my job submissions thus far.

i just completed an 8* (paranoia max dirty mix, heavymode) the first time i tried it. B rating. woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo