Plaidophile

Today's top story in the newspaper which doesn't let you link to even the summary of an article on their website: Area man found a piece of marble with an image of something nailed to a tree in it.

Since the Albuquerque Journal is so retarded about third-party links, though, I'll have to link to a much better summary anyway.

My mom pointed me to this great article: Caring For Your Introvert, by Jonathan Rausch.

Yeah, sounds about right.

Given A ♥ B and B ♥ C, we don't necessarily know that A ♥ C. Usually this is not the case; oftentimes, A ♣ C or, in extreme cases, A ♠ C.

In other words, love is not a monotonic relationship.

I did a Songfight entry for Run Faster a week ago. While I was traveling to Albuquerque, I did three more mixes. (My favorite is Inflight Turbulence Mix.)

GarageBand is a wonderful thing.

Meh. Out-of-network coverage has a $2000 deductible. Which means a doctor's appointment to deal with this icky infection etc. would be a total out-of-pocket expense for me.

Fortunately, I have an uncle in town who used to be a doctor and still has a license to prescribe medication, so hopefully he'll get back from his morning nature hike soon and can put me on a full course of zithromax or similar.

I"ve been sick ever since I got to Albuquerque. Yet another damn cold which is turning into bronchitis and/or a sinus infection, as usual. meh.

My mp3 hosting situation has been worked out, though, so as soon as some DNS changes propagate I'll be linking to the niftiness I mentioned a few days ago.

You may have noticed that downloads from trikuare.cx have been really slow lately (like, 2K/sec). This is because the friend who has so graciously hosted my site for so long has had to throttle back the bandwidth for everyone, since the formerly unlimited bandwidth he had access to is now limited (and the rules for overages are so confusing that he's not about to mess with different bandwidth-allocation strategies, since it could easily end up costing him thousands of dollars a month depending on how the math is done).

Since I'm one of the worse bandwidth users, I'm looking into ways of reducing my usage to make things better for everyone.

So, does anyone have any hosting recommendations?

Oh yeah, I'm at my parents' house.

Saw Toby for the first time since I left in July. He's gotten fat. But he still remembers me, and is snuggly.

Also, I get to sleep in the same room as my dad's loud-fanned computer. Lucky me.

Apparently, Jason's idea of going home "early" is going home at the same time that normal jobs have people leave on a normal day. Meh.

Also picked up two dozen bagels for Christmas brunch.

Now I get to go and wrap the one present I managed to buy for anyone in my family (to be shared between my parents) and fret about not having any time to get anything for my siblings. Meh.

>:(

Yesterday: "We'll play it by ear, but after we get the Sprung UK ROM submitted and tested you'll be able to take off. We'll try to get you out as soon as possible."

Today (after submitting the ROM and while waiting for a response): "Do you have nothing to do? Couldn't you, like, start working on the display layouts for the different phones?"

Because a mime is a terrible thing to waste.

Meh. I've been on the verge of burnout for a while, but there were also lots of things I have to keep on coming in to do, like the UK build of Sprung, which I'm waiting on Nintendo of Europe for something for. But because of these things I never bothered to ask if I could take any personal days off, since I knew the answer would be "no." So, today I finally asked Jason if I could take part of tomorrow off (after getting the UK build done, assuming NoE gets the ROM header to us like they were supposed to do a week ago) and he said it was a difficult thing to approve because I was the last one to ask for specific days off.

Two things which disturb me about an article about a premature (at 26 weeks) birth:

• The most immediate size comparison was with a cellphone
• The parents seem to care more that they have a record-holding baby than that this baby's life is probably going to be rather difficult for the first few years

It kind of bothers me that whenever someone decides to mash-up the Beatles with something else (like Jay-Z or the Beastie Boys), the Beatles are always used as backup and the something else always takes the forefront.

I should do a mash-up someday which turns that around.

Last night was the company holiday party. We went to a great Italian restaurant called Bottino, completely at the company's expense. Much great gourmet Italian food and expensive wine was had by all, as was much mirth and merriment.

After that a bunch of us went to a karaoke bar, where I discovered that when I'm intoxicated it's even harder to sing "Take On Me" and "You Oughta Know," especially since my coworkers are all of the school of thought that you should turn up the speakers as loud as possible without causing mic feedback.

I woke up today at about 10:30, then fell back to sleep and got up at 3ish.

I want to post something, but I don't want to talk about work, because it's shitty enough right now without me dwelling on it, and really, what good does it serve to talk about the last couple of days of high tensions and James' temper tantrums?

But there's nothing else I can really talk about, since I haven't worked on music, Second Life is down for the count tonight (or at least, the Mac client is crashy right now while they're pushing out lots of bugfixes-to-fix-the-unfixed-bugs), I don't have the inspiration to draw, and I'm just too tired and blurry to feel like doing anything.

Yep, just because you never took a manufacturing engineering course in college (because you went to a trade school for video game programmers instead of a real university) means that you can throw out a totally useless statement like "$COMPANY must be making lots of money on $EXPENSIVE_PRODUCT because I'm sure it only costs them $20 to make it," then defend any attempts at reasonable discourse with, "Well, neither of us know what we're talking about, so we can't really debate it anyway."

Below, the debate. For bonus points, guess the variables' values.

6.0 on Tuesday. Go me. (And now I get to carry $12.00 in quarters around in my pocket.)

Also, IGN's review is so pointlessly-negative it's funny.

Even though I normally work until 7:30 PM, every time I show up at 9:15 or later Antoine bitches at me for needing to be on time. Every single fucking day something conspires to make me get in at 9:15 or later, so every single fucking day he's been bitching at me for being late. Even though I still put in more hours than him, and there's no specific reason I have to be in at 9:00 exactly.

Even though yesterday I gave myself the worst asthma attack I've had in 10 years trying to get in on time (I had to run to the next station because at the station by my apartment they'd closed all but one booth and all but one vending machine, and of course it was the day I needed to buy a new pass, and just as I got to the vending machine after waiting in line for 20 minutes, they shut it down too), I still ended up late. Antoine was totally unsympathetic.

My webhost went down unexpectedly on Thursday night, and the admin hasn't restarted it until today. So far it seems stable though it's likely that he's going to take it home to rebuild the OS.

But yes, I'm still alive. Actually, I've even got a second life now. (You can find me as "fluffy Pennyfeather" if you're so inclined.) Long-winded writeup about how awesome SL is to come. (The short form is that it's nearly exactly what I was planning with Solace. You may recall a brief writeup I did on it during Siggraph 2003 — it's gotten much better since then.)

My job's pretty decent, I guess, even when I do work 10+ hours a day...

That wasn't the datacenter-move downtime, that was a "mysterious crash" downtime which couldn't be taken care of until the admin got back into work this morning. Whee.

Any emails I receive letting me know that my site is down will be laughed at. (My email is hosted on the same server.)

Also, we all got complimentary copies of Sprung today. Woo! Now there are two things I've done with a UPC label on them. (And the other one doesn't have a retail presence.)

Between love and hate there's general indifference. I guess I'm fine here for now.

Though maybe I should share an article with various people around here.

Sometime in the near future, trikuare.cx is going to be down for a while as it gets relocated to a different data center. I don't know when or for how long, but I also won't get email during that time either. The best way to contact me, should this site go down, would be via AIM or a MUCK, though I also have a gmail account (nigritude.ultramarine at gmail-dot-com) which I might remember to check.

The other thing this affects is that I will no longer have unlimited bandwidth, which means I need to do something about all the mp3s on my site since those are what take up the most. (My site uses 4GB/month, and a whole bunch of that is my music.)

I need a job where I don't get physically ill at the thought of getting up in the morning to go to it. Nf.

Reach Daily Flosser: I got one of these free through some link I saw on a weblog post, where apparently Reach was trying to get bloggers to try their product ostensibly for a review. So here's my review: this thing is great. Flossing is actually not a major pain in the butt, and I'm doing every tooth every day. My gums have never been happier.

Cyberhome CH-DVD 300: Best Buy had a huge pile of these small formfactor DVD players for like $40 each. Since I'd been annoyed at the component output on my PS2 for DVD playback (I have an older PS2 which won't play DVDs in progressive-scan mode, and the component out was generally flickery anyway) I decided to pick one up. This is the best DVD player I've ever had — great video quality, very impressive progressive scan pulldown (on CRTs progressive-scan doesn't make much difference, IMO, but on LCD HDTVs the difference is outstanding). Plus, it's region-free practically out of the box (there's a hidden menu). The only downsides are that it can't be oriented vertically, which would go together really well with its narrow footprint, and it only has an S/PDIF coax out and no TOSlink (coax gives more options in the long run, but ideally it'd have both just to make it more flexible with various setups).

Broadway Café's coffee, when taken black, tastes like ass.