Plaidophile

Yes, I believe that was the idea.

Anyone know if this is legitimate?

Slept another 10.5 hours last night. Had a lot of broken disconnected dreams.

In one of them, at work we ordered in Mexican food. I ordered the green chili chicken enchiladas. There was no green chili, and it was just a pile of cheese and tortillas and lettuce with a breaded fried chicken cutlet on top. Eww. So I added more chili on top and my coworkers thought I was weird for it.

Other one I remember is too personal to post about, even as friends-only. Sorry.

I slept for 11 hours last night, and had many odd dreams.

• I was on an airplane, and everyone was drinking Guinness straight from the can.
• My grandpa died, and left me his house in Chicago. The Roomba had a lot of fun chasing the mice in the basement. Jimmy, one of the maintenance crew at the building where I work, came along to be my manservant without my knowledge, but he kept on doing my laundry when I didn't want him to.
• My parents decided that it would help me with my job search if they'd give me their house and disappear. Suddenly I had all of the daunting tasks of maintaining their gardens and the various fish ponds and gazebos (the dream-version of their house was much more ornate than the one in reality — they don't actually have any fish ponds or gazebos) and all of the various water pumps gave out at about the same time, and then Jimmy tossed all of my clothes into one of the ponds which was full of dirty brown water.

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More developments in the Beatallica case — Sony invoked the DMCA to do a takedown procedure.

They did not have any fucking Sony digital property on their site. They were not distributing MP3s of Sony recordings. Sony doesn't even own the fucking recordings of Beatles songs, they own the compositions, but even if they did own the recordings it wouldn't fucking matter because they weren't distributing digital copies of Beatles CDs anyway!!!

I'm all for people practicing their music, and trying to express themselves artistically. But the people one unit over downstairs have certainly crossed the line.

Okay, I didn't like Beatallica much, but as I understand copyright law:

• Parody is a protected form of expression
• The songs were parodies and not faithful reproductions
• Since when does Sony own any of the rights to the music? Last I was aware, Michael Jackson owns the composition rights (meaning the notes and the lyrics), and EMI/Apple Corps own the reproduction rights (meaning the actual recordings). It looks as if it's the composition rights which are being clamped down on (and that's dubious at best, because of the parody status), so did MJ sell them off or something?

After about a year of drinking only "gourmet" (meaning, non-cheap) tea, I can unequivocally state that Lipton tastes like total ass.

Last comic for a while. I swear. (These things are killing my wrists.)

A bit of an experiment this time...

Remember how Broadway Café, the place we eat lunch at every day, doesn't use MSG?

They do now. Or at least, one of the things I ate there today had enough to trigger my first MSG aura in a few years.

For the first time in a while I actually had a pretty decent day at work. The stress factors were low, I actually had things to work on which weren't totally retarded, and things were otherwise okay.

Neill linked me to an amusing webtoy this morning. (So if I get nothing done today, it's all Neill's fault!)

The right way to handle an exception: Print out a debug message which allows the programmer to figure out where, and what, went wrong. Also, if it's not a critical error, try to put things in a consistent state.

The wrong way to handle an exception:

I was going to spend lots of money on some metal DDR pads, but then while reading DDRFreak I came across someone's alternative to taping a pad to a big piece of plywood - namely, taping it to an anti-slip chair mat.

It works really well, even better than plywood. I'm back up to 7* consistently, and even did a full combo on a few songs. I also played for about an hour, which is the longest I've played it since I moved to Albuquerque a year ago.

So, today after work, Neill and I decided to go play DDR, since he had found out there are a couple of machines at the Port Authority bus station.

I haven't played since last October, and I was a bit over-ambitious in jumping right back in. First three songs went well, but I hit my wall halfway through the fourth song. (I was only expecting there to be three songs anyway. So the fourth was kind of a bonus.)

I really should have known better; I should have gotten a bottle of water or fruit juice or something before starting like I meant to, and I shouldn't have played 7* levels exclusively. (But all of the songs we decided on jumped from 4-5* to 7* between two difficulties, and 5* is just way beneath my level even now.) It's like two hours later and I'm still feeling dizzy and lightheaded.

My wrists have gotten extremely bad lately, to the extent that I can't type for more than a few minutes at a time sometimes (especially at work, where the setup is extremely non-ergonomic, though at home I have things set up well so I don't have this problem). This job isn't exactly something I've been enamored with for a while, and I definitely need some time off at the very least, both for personal reasons and for recovery from carpal tunnel syndrome.