Plaidophile

On my latest Songfight entry, which was a totally off-the-cuff unrehearsed thing where I couldn't even hold a simple pitch, I'm getting plenty of reviews telling me that my vocals are improving, ostensibly compared to the entries where I've sung 20 takes and used pitch correction and every other production trick in the book.

WTF?

New song, 45 minutes from conception to submission.

Vote smart, vote fluffy.

OSX app development is a total joy compared to other OSes.

XCode is actually pretty easy to do things in, once you know how to do them. It's just not that easy to figure some things out.

Anyway. Silly little app which has laid the groundwork for me to actually grok OSX application development. Yay!

I keep on running up against a wall of not knowing the language whenever I try coding an OSX app. So, I'm learning it.

Man it's weird.

but now I can't stand it anymore.

XCode feels like something I'd have loved to play with a few years ago, but it just seems frungy to me.

I just noticed that in a lot of bad science-fiction literature/comics/etc., the earmark of a character having a less-developed mind is by it always referring to itself in the third person (often by name).

However, it's usually the awareness of others which is a strong indication of a highly-developed consciousness. Self-centeredness is what comes easily.

Right now, whenever I sleep and am all coughy and stuff, I have the exact same disjointed series of imagery: the premise of my cough is that it's a way to navigate through a 5-dimensional manifold full of all sorts of floating space junk, trying to get out to where there's no coughing.

Moreover, this is a form of recreation for higher-dimensional beings.

I'm just being hit extra-hard by this bug that's going around, thanks to my asthma.

Prescribed stuff:

• Full course of erythromycin
• Robitussin AC (yay, codeine! opiates!)
• NO TALKING ('coz my vocal cords and throat have taken enough abuse as it is just from the coughing)

So I'd better email my mom and tell her not to call me this week.

In the past 48 hours, I've had 4 hours of sleep, a bowl of soup, a few cookies, and more hot showers and doses of Robitussin than I care to think about.

Fortunately, the student clinic opens in an hour.

When running a fever, and feeling hot, don't follow inter-net people advice about getting a warm blanket, 'coz that just makes the fever go up to 101.6°.

Also, my friends can be pretty useless.

No wonder I'm so delirious.

(My normal body temperature is like 96°F.)

I thought I'd taken care of it but there's a dumb race condition in my phpBB integration stuff. (If you don't see what it is, sometimes posts get created twice if two outgoing weblog pings cause two views of the page to happen more or less simultaneously.)

Anyone have any ideas on how to fix it? Obviously just locking the 'integrate' table isn't working, and I have no idea why...

2003/11/17 10:10 PM I think I've made a change which mitigates this problem and also reduces server overhead — index pages won't create threads. If you're using phpBB-MT, be sure to update your code for $commentcount as computed in your index pages. (The key is using GetThread instead of GetForum.) Theoretically there is still a possible race condition, but it'll happen only if two people are the "first" to view a thread, which should be much more rare than multiple pinged sites perusing an index simultaneously...

bronchitis, like clockwork. ugh.

while (show.running()) {
    show << "Gravity and the big scale is predicted by general relativity." << cheezy3D;
    show << "At the small scale we have quantum mechanics." << cheezy3D;
    show << "But general relativity conflicts with quantum mechanics." << explosion;
    show << "BUT STRING THEORY MIGHT CHANGE ALL THAT." << peoplePlayingCello;
}

and I am behind on my daily reading list now.

I blame the prof I TA for. And the other TA for this class.

Looks like Apple has fixed some of the annoying bugs in FileVault and with Firewire 800 drives. Update your systems!

Though it looks like they didn't change any of the UNIXy problems with it, they just fixed the "defragmenting your encrypted home area destroys your keychain" bug.

FUCK fuck FUCK fuck FUCK fuck FUCK.

I didn't get the job at WSMR because I "didn't have enough professional experience." The person they hired supposedly had much more experience and skills than me. GNAR.

Rmeebmer the thnig form a few mnoths ago shwonig how it deosn't mtater waht odrer the itnrenal lteetrs are in for raednig cmoprheesnoin? Wlel, Vic Lee has dnoe a cmoic aolng tohse lnies.

Quartz Extreme is really fast. Woo!

Unfortunately, it turns out that the original Radeon doesn't support multiple monitors after all. I guess the Radeon 7000 was the first which did. But the original Radeon is actually faster than the 7000. Meh. I guess for multiple heads I should have just bought an 8500 for less cost total than getting an AGP and PCI Radeon (which is what I'll have to do to get a second head with this card).

I also had to recalibrate my monitor, since apparently the LUTs from the Rage 128 don't apply to the Radeon. Oh well.

I have entered into this week's blue Songfight, Violet Wants It Her Way.

Feel free to post your interpretations of the lyrics here (or email them like it says on the detail page). Unless you're one of the ones who already figured it out in conversations earlier, since once the actual meaning is figured out, it's impossible to see anything else. (For this I won't be giving any hints, either, or even any confirmation or denial about correctness... I just want to see what people think in general.)

I just got my first annoying troll comment since moving to the phpBB integration. Deleting it was so easy! Two clicks, no rebuilds.

I feel sorry for the people who are still using the MT comments engine... even with MT-Blacklist, removing troll posts doesn't look all that simple...

I just got a 160GB (152GiB) hard drive for my Mac, since the 10GB drive is just unworkable for any of the stuff I want to do. But it turns out that the firmware in my Mac's ATA controller is limited to 127GiB and there's no upgrade (at least not for OSX)... on the one hand, 127GiB is still a LOT of space, but I'm still missing 25GiB!

Oh well. $100 for a 128GiB (134GB) drive still isn't bad, especially considering I bought it at Best Buy. Yay instant gratification!

Any ideas about who I could be?

Ah, The Onion has put to words exactly what was in the back of my mind, bothering me about CTC's corporate culture.

Of course, it's all moot now anyway. Still, it's nice to have a tangible expression of the lingering doubts.

I just looked at how FileVault is actually implemented in Panther. It's pretty cool in its simplicity. (But, as it turns out, it limits some of the flexibility of the system as a whole, which is something to keep in mind if you're going to use it on a production system.)

The other night, just for the kitsch value, Geof gave me a file on zip disk.

It was as if we'd exchanged a message with a secret decoder ring.

That was much too difficult.

Or: why I had to do a load of laundry at 4:30 AM