Plaidophile

So far, Toby and Shooby aren't getting along with Axel and Geneve (my parents' cats). Shooby keeps on hiding in Axel's covered litterbox for some reason (which is really gross). Maybe he's trying to build up a "colony scent" real quickly or something.

Tomorrow I get to start calling local businesses. Joy.

So, English-name-is-Natalie came to buy the couch today. She took one look at it, and said...

Most of my possessions are in the back of a trailer attached to my parents' SUV. Except my computer (obviously) and my clothes and cats, and a few other things they're going to pick up tomorrow morning before they head back to Albuquerque tomorrow (Saturday). I'll probably follow suit on Sunday rather than tomorrow, since I need a bit more time than expected to get my stuff together.

Assuming my realtor can really sell my house for as much as she says she can (and she makes a very strong case for it), I'll make enough to pay off my credit cards and most of my car without even touching my savings. Yay!

So, one of the professors in my former department has a daughter who is looking to buy a couch. So she just called me. I found it very hard to not get snippy at her.

That sure came fast.

Considering how much money people make by selling shady garbage over the web, I think I could make plenty of money by making a very nice site, selling something which is un-harmful, and would actually give people a positive health benefit.

One month in the making

1. Move back to Albuquerque on the 27th (my dad and brother are coming to help, and I've already reserved a U-Haul trailer for the occasion), staying with my parents for a while
2. ???
3. PROFIT!

Today they were kind enough to show up when I was getting up anyway, so I decided to humor them.

Instead of the usual "bored housewife" type, this was a pair of elderly gentlemen, one Hispanic and one black.

This is useful for reading any book written solely by Arthur Clarke (especially his more recent stuff, like 3001), or any recent interviews with him:

I've gotten to the point where I'm throwing out at least as much as I'm packing away. But some of this stuff is just too useless to throw out.

A yummy experiment in baking, adapted from the back of a box of Nestle's baking cocoa powder.

1. The Frontalittle entry last week won!!! Yay! This is the first time I've been involved in a winning entry on Songfight. (Which means now I no longer have the title of "longest-running participant without a win" anymore, though people are telling me that it doesn't count if it's a collaboration anyway. But I totally made that track, in more ways than one...)
2. I have an entry in Moscow, Idaho.

Joel is being linked to a lot lately, but although many of his points are just "duh" (like knowing how to spell and punctuate), one of his points stands out to me:

Please do not use cover letters that you copied out of a book. If you write ‘I understand the position also requires a candidate who is team- and detail-oriented, works well under pressure, and is able to deal with people in departments throughout the firm’ then at best people will think you're a bullshit artist and at worst they will think that you were not born with the part of the brain that allows you to form your own thoughts and ideas.

With that in mind, here is the cover letter I just wrote for a research staff position at a university...

Last year, there were over 1000 paper submissions, continuing an ever-increasing trend of submissions each year.

The conference itself was an organizational cock-up which seemed designed from the ground up to screw over the attendees if nothing else, and I was far from the only person muttering about how badly it sucked (and I never overheard anyone saying anything positive about the conference experience, unlike at 2002).

This year, there were only 478 papers submitted.

Coincidence?

So, the friend who hosts this site for me popped online and gave me a little code snippet: Basically, compile it and run it with something like "./a.out Foobar" and it'll output the string repeatedly, rotating the capitalization to the right. (With the caveat that it doesn't work with more than one capital letter.)

But it seemed rather bloated to me, so I rewrote it...

No need to contact me.

phpBB FUCKING SUCKS.

11:24 PM We should be back in business now. As it turns out, phpBB's "backup database" doesn't back up quite everything — it doesn't preserve the various sequence numbers. So I just had to take a crash-course in SQL exotica so I could go through and manually restart each sequence after manually finding where it's supposed to be. For 15 sequences, in the ultra-verbose shitfest that is SQL. Ugh.

Saw that one of my images was being deep-linked from dozens of weblogs. Although it's flattering, not one actually provided attribution, and many of them were on registration-only sites where I couldn't even tell if it was being used commercially or not.

but would there really be so much media attention if it weren't so fun to say "cockle picker?"

I decided to do my taxes early this year. As it turns out, I owe about $1300, because my fellowship (which was previously tax-free) has changed to taxable status this year (even though it was funded with tax money to begin with). Ludicrous.

So after getting upset with myself for every mistake I've made in life, I calmed down and made some brownies, and thought about the problems in trying to get a job. (Maybe it'll lead to a solution.)

I've reenabled the old comment engine for the time being. It'll go away again when postgres comes back (which will probably be later today anyway).

(Note that this is the heavily spam-guarded one. Also, any comments posted to older entries will appear to be older than any comments posted with the new comment engine, so now's your chance to be revisionist with some of the discussion threads.)

Just put up a pseudo-tutorial explaining why you should almost always encode MPEG-2 with a 16:9 aspect ratio.

I really should stop getting so involved with IRC.

1. RemixFight is in full swing. I have an entry for "Skin, Disguised" and my song "Sunny Again" is being butchered for next month's competition.
2. I did all the mixing/sequencing/sound effects/Godzilla noises for The Frontalittle Squad this week at Songfight (title: Goodbye Monster, in case it hasn't been posted yet or if it's already been taken down when you read this).

The migration to the new server was less than pleasant, but at least the weblog is back, though no comments for now (until the forum's working again).

libdb2 kinda fucking sucks. (But not too badly.)

There's gonna be some downtime as my webhost upgrades everything to be all snazzy and shit. This will be a perfect trial-by-fire to see if phpBB's database backup actually works now... eep!

(Note that this means that any comments posted after this point might not be saved.)

(Note that this isn't an invitation to open trolling. Sorry.)

A Whole Lotta Nothing had a little bit about DJ Danger Mouse — The Grey Album. From the New Yorker article I was interested enough to download preview a few tracks, and can't help but think that this is just an ill-conceived publicity stunt.

I just found this banner ad for Microsoft Frontpage to be horribly ironic.

2/9/04 Haha, Kottke found a better one which is definitely invalid.

In Safari 1.2, downloading files get a little progress indicator within their own icon. Useful when doing a lot of downloads to the desktop and wanting to know which ones are ready...

(In the past it simply didn't put it on the desktop until the download was done like in IE. Now apparently it supports interrupted-download resume, so it makes perfect sense for them to do it this way.)

I will most likely be performing at SongFight Live 2004 in Austin, TX on June 19. No venue has been announced yet, and the date might float around, but hopefully I'll be able to get the requisite vacation time (assuming I have the requisite job to get vacation time from by then) to make it there.

Today (February 1) only, the Apple Store has a 10% off sale for the full-size iPods and select iPod accessories. Get them while they're hot.

(I'd grab a 15GB but I need to save my money, and $270 is the normal educational price anyway. Since the university bookstore doesn't actually check for current enrollment before giving .edu prices on computer stuff.)