Plaidophile

(This would be a comic, but I don't feel like drawing lately. Meh.)

So, on the subway on the way to work, I was standing in front of a woman who had a duffel bag and a soft pet carrier. Between these two vessels she was juggling perhaps half a dozen young kittens, wiping their eyes of cruft and otherwise consoling them.

She put most of the kittens into the duffel bag, but left it open so they could peek out. One of the kittens, obviously her favorite, she kept in her jacket. She talked to this kitten all the way to Union Square.

Tonight I started reading Invisible Monsters by Chuck "Fight Club" Palahniuk.

Tonight I also finished reading it.

It's rather good.

For a while I've wanted a .Mac account but didn't want to pay $100/year for one since all I wanted was the iSync functionality, having no need for the web space, iDisk, or email. But now Apple is starting to really push .Mac integration for a lot of apps, which will become even more apparent in 10.4 since they've actually opened the .Mac APIs up to developers.

At work, we got a new whiteboard for organizational/note-sharing purposes.

Nobody was writing on it, so Neill took the initiative.

• Quick cuts are cool and 3dgy
• Soundtracks can consist of only one vocal sample moaning for 5 seconds at inopportune moments, with the occasional 3-second military drum loop
• Humans can get robots pregnant (and will accept this fact with only the most circumstantial of evidence)
• There are vaccinations against radiation poisoning
• Ion-propulsion engines are explosive
• Someone's hand can be torn to shreds from a crash landing but they can run said hand's fingers through their well-groomed hair without even flinching
• A hull breach in outer space will not cause any change in a spaceship's internal pressure
• Firing live submachine gun rounds in the general direction of the viewing portals in a space ship is a good idea
• .45 rounds tear right through solid rock walls which have been supporting thousands of tons of weight for a thousand years without eroding (and said puncture doesn't affect the structural integrity of the building as a whole)
• Robots who are smart enough to make some robots look like duplicates of strategically-selected humans aren't smart enough to differentiate said duplicates from the original humans, and furthermore don't seem to mind that a robot who is supposed to be going undercover as a human happens to be docking a ship they're not authorized to be flying
• Getting facepunched by your evil robot clone while your head is being held against a sharp, craggly piece of rock doesn't cause any lesions at all
• Melodrama and vague assertions that all religions are true (or at least Christianity and Greek mythology) are a reasonable substitute for a cohesive story
• Virtual cameras need to shake in order to dodge the flying debris from the computer-generated starship which just exploded a thousand miles away
• Delirious concussion-induced hallucinations are really the literal truth which you simply cannot perceive when your conscious mind is filtering it out
• Greek goddesses worship the Christian God

TV is educational!

On the side of a box of hot chocolate mix:

99.9% caffeine free

Does this mean that a 35-gram packet of cocoa mix is made up of 0.1% caffeine? Because if so, 350 35mg of caffeine is actually rather a lot...

• The most obvious headline ever (I had no idea court trials involved things which happened in the past)
• The best tech news graphic, ever (the headline linked on Google News was "Firefox eating into Internet Explorer market share)
• Sudden realization about one of the oft-repeated lines in stories about the Mac Mini:

  The computer will start at US$499. It will be sold without keyboard, display or mouse, but with input ports that Apple says are designed to let most PC users continue using the keyboards, displays and mice they already own.

  This ignores that the key mapping between Mac and PC keyboards is very slightly different (the position of Alt and Meta/Win/Command are swapped — at the keycode level as well as the symbol level — and you need to use a program like uControl to fix them — unless Apple finally gets around to putting that option into OSX itself to correct this issue)
• Snow!

When I got up at 11:45 this morning, it was only very slightly dusting with snow and I thought that all of those dire predictions of huge snowfall were overblown.

It's 1:20 now and there's a few inches on the ground, and many more coming.

So, okay, I have a file which has a bunch of null-terminated 7-bit-char strings in it. J2ME's IO routines don't provide any way to read a C-style null-terminated string aside from readUTF. Which I figure is fine, because UTF8's entire reason to exist is to make it easier to read in standard C-style null-terminated strings from Unicode-clean library functions (with the assumption that the strings only use the character range of 0x00—0x7F, which in this case they do).

Why was the wizard kicked out of culinary school?

On the subway home from work, I was standing next to a person who was having a rather friendly chat with someone who wasn't physically there. It made me wonder at what point someone stops trying to ignore the voices inside their heads and starts just running with it.

Or maybe he was just so lonely and isolated that he started verbalizing his internal dialogue, to keep himself company.

I hope I don't end up like that.

What kind of non-profit organization gouges its members a huge subscription fee in order to disseminate content which is in the public interest, while conveniently "forgetting" about the members who have actually paid said subscription fees?

Argh. I also still haven't gotten my fucking Siggraph 2004 conference materials. Fuckheads.

I left work at 6PM tonight, which was early. On the way home it was snowing.

I went to the R/W station on 23rd and Broadway, as is usual for me when I'm not heading out while chatting with someone who is going down 6th for whatever reason, on the way feeling like something was amiss.

I've gotten overwhelmed by the number of people always trying to have conversations with me regardless of whether I even know them or not, so from now on, if you want to get in touch with me via AIM, either send me an email or private message via my forum with your AIM username so I can add you to the whitelist, and a reason why I should. (Note that if you can see me on and send me messages, you're already in the whitelist.)

It's nothing personal, really. I'm just not particularly fond of being bothered with every random person's request for more information I don't have on video gaming systems I don't care about.

If you're a Mac user, go to some screenshots from Mac OS 1.1, and look at your mouse cursor and compare it to the cursor as it was in 1984.

I guess you just can't mess with perfection.

Heh, this weblog now has the #5 spot on Google for a search on "nigritude ultramarine," even though it's not even titled that anymore. (But there's still a LOT of external NU links pointing to it.)

Who cares about short-term SERP? Long-term is better for business anyway.

Finally ended. BREW version of Sprung is very nearly complete, and should be available on a Verizon handset in just a few weeks. (Also, BREW sucks.)

I've finally come to realize that I'm happiest when I'm learning things. I mean, as much as I hated working for John nearly a year ago, I did learn a lot of interesting stuff about telecommunications and so on which I would have never learned otherwise. And, of course, my current job has involved a lot of learning of various things (different mobile platforms, the inner workings of the games industry, etc.), and currently I'm doing something which actually makes me happy!

• 1 part sweet and sour
• 1 part amaretto
• 1 part blue curacao

yummy (and also very pretty, especially in my nifty cocktail glasses)

WTF

OMG

Okay, so, as much as I love OSX Mail.app, some of its behavior is quite confounding. For example, when it receives email for an address which isn't in the address book and there's no realname in the address, it tries to figure out what the realname should be.

Remember how when you were a kid, your parents thought you weren't brushing your teeth enough so they thought that maybe it's because you didn't like mint and so they'd buy you that kid-oriented orange-flavored toothpaste, which tasted even worse so you'd brush even less?

Well, Crest has updated the flavor for adults, and it's actually pretty tasty. It tastes kind of like hot orange juice with cinnamon, only not hot, and the cinnamon might be a figment of my imagination. It also doesn't taste particularly like orange, either. But still, it's pretty yummy as far as toothpaste goes. Probably still not particularly edible though.

It turns out that although phpBB came with the visual confirmations patch as an option since 2.0.6 or so, in the 2.0.11 upgrade they added it as a mandatory component. Since I'd already installed it, it ended up going into the code twice (I always use patchfiles since it keeps mod-wrestling to a minimum) and so that was preventing people from registering.

It has now been fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Someone at work was reading a bunch of my weblog yesterday from 10:30 AM to 8:10 PM. It was probably Jason but it could have been Antoine or James. I guess I'll probably find out on Monday.

(Incidentally, it was originally found through someone else's weblog post, where a kuro5hin acquaintence had linked his coworker to my weblog, on a writeup of Sprung which Google ranks very highly now. I wish he hadn't done that, but oh well.)

Allo, Gérard. Ne vous inquiétez pas, car le démuni de I a mis tous les secrets de compagnie sur mon weblog, et je ne projette pas sur le ce non plus. Cependant, je suis enclin à rant parfois!

En outre, je ne parle pas beaucomp français. Babelfish c'est magnifique.

So, like, a few weeks ago, when I first got on Second Life, I met someone who really wanted to get into the gaming industry, and who actually had a hell of a lot of hobbyist experience and could articulate this impressively-well to me. So I passed his resume on to Antoine and got to know this guy, and he got an interview and I warned him about a lot of the issues at work and so on, and yet he still took the job anyway.

So anyway, today was my first day working with him, and I am happy to say that my instincts were right in suggesting him — this guy is great.

Flight from Albuquerque to Dallas was delayed an hour, and took another extra half an hour to get to the gate. Dallas to LGA was delayed an hour and a half. LGA baggage handlers don't know a douche from a bag. Finally at 3:00 I had all my bags and a limo driver asked where I was going, I said "Ridgewood," he said, "I'm headed there anyway, $35 flat rate, hop in," 3:30 after a lot of fun late-night conversation with the limo driver and $35 + $5 tip and I finally walked back into my apartment building. It seemed pretty surreal.

Also it's probably a byproduct of my brain running on vapors but I find the current page of Run Faster reviews is cracking me the hell up (especially Puce's review of mine, and deshead's reviews in general).

sitting in the airport, not wanting to go back to NYC.

trikuare.cx was down 'coz my account went over quota, and Linux didn't want to let me know what was going on (every time I tried something which used more disk space it'd just kill my processes).

So, I've also probably lost a lot of email as well (yay for maildir). Fortunately, it was probably all just "OMG trikuare.cx is down!!!" messages like I always seem to get whenever there's a brief temporary issue like, oh, a brief ISE page from me messing with my mod_rewrite settings or whatever.

I started 2004 out waxing poetic on the end of the universe based on one of my many misconceptions about quantum mechanics. It only went downhill from there, except for where it wasn't.