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.

I look forward to hearing the Pope speaking through a voice-box, and sounding like a robot.

Robo-Pope, away!!!.

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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!!!

Hey, has anyone had any luck adding an APIC (Attached PICture) frame to an mp3 in a UNIX-based operating system (Linux, Mac OS X, etc.) from the command line?

I have a bunch of mp3s with cover art images as separate .jpgs which would be a pain in the butt to do manually in e.g. iTunes, but neither id3v2 nor PyID3 want to do things like, oh, work.

I just updated phpBB to 2.0.12, but as usual the upgrade didn't go as cleanly as I'd hoped it would, since it turns out that some stuff somehow didn't get upgraded between 2.0.8 and 2.0.9 way back when, so if anyone notices anything weird, please let me know.

I like Papa John's pizza. In looking to see if they have a presence in NYC, I went to their restaurant locator, which indicated that I was already interested in their food. So of course, they decided to block me from clicking on the map so they could very slowly slide a stupid ad for their chicken wings in front of it, which I couldn't close until it finished sliding.

Yeah, way to make people want to order pizza from you, by making it hard to find out how.

Hey, there's a new Paypal email scam making the rounds, but it's a bit different than most, and isn't a phishing scam. This one doesn't try to steal peoples' information — instead, it's an attack on Paypal itself, trying to get people to close their accounts. It's extremely well-crafted, and there are only two clues which tipped me off that it wasn't legitimate:

• The mail was sent to an address other than the primary address for my account (namely my old NMSU address)
• The actual origin of the message (which is very well-hidden) is an xo.net address totally unrelated to Paypal

The message is below in its entirety, with interesting things bolded (and the formatting changed a bit to make it web-friendly, though the original message was entirely plaintext).

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?

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMFG

it looks AWESOME

(update: better version courtesy of waxy.org)

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.)

(I would do this as a fanstrip for Daily Dinosaur Comics except I'm at work right now. Maybe I'll do the fanstrip when I get home.)

The idea of forces as exchanges of quantum particles bothers me. It still relies on the physical notion of two bodies intersecting, and that somehow exacting a force.

Forces are all actions at a distance — so how does the idea of a graviton "colliding" with another particle make any more sense?

It seems like all attempts at explaning how forces work at the quantum scale involve really bad metaphors based on our physical experiences, when the whole idea behind quantum mechanics is taht the quantum scale is nothing like our physical experiences.

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.

I've noticed a pretty alarming trend towards people reselling information as if it were something sacred, and clogging the information channels to make it harder to find the original source they are ripping off.

For example, it used to be that to find, say, the user manual for a cellphone, you could just do a Google search for "Nokia 6600 manual" and it'd be within the top 5 links, but if you do that now, you get a whole bunch of places who want to sell you the PDF for $10. So instead you have to go to Nokia's site and navigate it yourself.

Hey, I have a life outside of work. So, random stuff from today.

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!)

After a lot of tweaking I think I've got it so that it looks pretty good at any gamma from 1.8 (where it's a bit too bright) to 2.6 (where it's a bit too dark). Of course it looks best at 2.2, and this theme is pretty finicky, since it involves lots of contrasts between midtones and so on.

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:

It's amazing how much mileage I got out of the "nigritude ultramarine" theme considering it was just intended as a short-term bit of silliness and not as anything permanent.

This one is more like me.

Introduction

These are some of the questions I get asked fairly often, and some other questions which some people might have. Mostly it's stuff I actually do get asked regularly though.

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.

So, both my mom and sister have been thinking of places for me to look at next. My sister, having recently moved to California, had heard that George Lucas was setting up "a think-tanky research and development-type place with lots of computer graphics," but neither she nor my mom could remember the name. I couldn't find anything in the news about this, though.

Yesterday she finally remembered the name, and sent me an email linking me to it.

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.

Okay, so some of you are probably wondering how I implemented friends-only functionality in MT.

It's actually pretty simple, though it requires that you're using phpBB as your MT comments engine. It also has a few subtle implementation details which will probably not go over so well for the faint of heart.

2/3, 8:10 AM Fixed a silly bug where users pending authorization were able to see the entry too. Also, made it so locked entries don't include the category list.

Trackback spam is the new comment spam.

No more trackbacks on my weblog. Darn.

meh