Plaidophile

hahaha (entry 0030)

I like how the only emulator test says it plays with glitchy graphics. That's what happens when you use every little scrap of VRAM and make the rasterization single-buffered and timing-sensitive, bitch!

(most of the time it's decompressing the animation just barely ahead of the raster scan position. oh and the timing is very DMA-sensitive and also the CODEC is optimized for byte alignment issues and so on.)

So today I finally went to the Mosler Lofts sales office, and was a bit underwhelmed. I mean, the units seemed like they were every bit as nice as the website led me to believe, but the prices were a bit higher than I was expecting; the units I wanted were half a million, which is of course out of my price range.

Although a stopped clock may be right twice a day, one which is precisely twenty-seven minutes behind is never right at all.

I appreciate Six Apart's most recent marketing screed for Movable Type (which I saw because it was plastered on the "MT news" sidebar in the MT interface on my site), and I agree with it, but it kind of requires that the templating engine do everything that one would want to do in PHP. Unfortunately, there's a few very important places where MT's template engine falls flat:

why do they have to suck so much

argh

(nt)

Too many people are using Firefox 1.5 and the Firefox people are slow in fixing the stupid background-attach:fixed bug, so I've done a stupid stopgap change to the layout to stop triggering the bug (which makes things slightly less-neat-looking but whatever). Someday I'll just redo the whole weblog layout anyway (yes, again).

I just thought of an idea for an assistive technology which would help out people with trouble typing, due to motor skill deficiencies, carpal tunnel syndrom, and so on: predictive typing! But not just the minimal predictive stuff that's common in a lot of apps, but something pervasive through the whole operating system.

Maintain a dictionary of words and their usage frequency, and when recognized words are being typed, predictively display a phantom of the rest of the word, and then with some easy key press (or other system event, like a foot pedal or similar), fill in the rest of the word automatically.

You are missing out on one or more friends-only entries. Please log in, if you have an account.

plus+5

(Or why not subscribe to the RSS feed?)

What do they think they gain by spamming my forum?

Recently a whole bunch have shown up in ways that I can't easily trace, and the ones which I can trace are, oddly enough, finding the forum by searching on other spammers' user names. So that makes my mod_rewrite-based thing no longer as useful. (Not to mention it shows that a lot of them are either in cooperation or feeding off of each other. Very odd, either way.)

Two spammers in the last few days, and nothing I can see to prevent this particular case but plenty of room for it to get much worse. Meh. I've added some stuff back into my robots.txt which should help, at least.

I just discovered there's a band called Asexuals with an album/single entitled Love Goes Plaid.

I'd be really tempted to upgrade my Powerbook except

• I just boughtt this new G5
• I don't use my Powerbook much as a result
• Logic Pro isn't going to be supported on Intel for a few months anyway

Maybe when the Intel Logic Pro update comes out (Apple claims it'll be by the end of March) I'll consider getting a MacBook Pro, though then my concern is that it'd be replacing my G5 since it's probably at least as fast!

DAMN YOU, PROGRESS.

So yeah, I had a party at my place. It went pretty well, though I'd made enough food for many more people to come (a large pot of green chili stew with turkey, a small pot of vegetarian green chili stew, a huge bowl of champagne vinaigrette pasta salad, a big quantity of vegetable stir-fry with marinated crispy tofu and carrots, hummus, and citrus-chocolate cordial, and Amy brought some Indian food which she cooked at my place and Judy brought some stir-fry). There were a bunch of people who I'd hoped would come but didn't, but maybe now that word will get out that I actually can cook well maybe more will come next time (one person was pretty hesitant to come until he heard that a couple other people were coming, but little did he know that they didn't even bring any food anyway).

Things I finally got to use, and how long I'd had them just sitting around waiting to be used in this way:

Fill a blue cordial decanter halfway with Blue Curaçao and the rest of the way with Creme de Cacao (white, not brown). Offer it to guests, who are amused and intrigued by a blue liqueur coming from a blue bottle. Provide no hints as to the contents (you may need to assure them that it is safe to drink), but perhaps let them in on the contents when they are unable to figure out what it is or why it tastes so good. Toast life, friendship, and/or the new year.

Boil one package of tri-color rotini pasta as per package directions; when done, drain and rinse with cold water. Meanwhile, in a food processor combine 1/3 cup of champagne vinegar and 1/4 cup of olive oil. Add various herbs and spices such as basil, oregano, rosemary, white pepper, and whatever else you think will go well in it, and a teaspoon of mustard. Blend until emulsified, making a vinaigrette.

Drain one can of chick peas, and place into a blender. Add olive oil to cover the lower 2/3, and lemon juice to cover the remaining 1/3. Add half a tablespoon of crushed red pepper, a tablespoon of cilantro, half a teaspoon of kosher salt, and two tablespoons of roasted sesame tahini. In a small frying pan, gently toast a teaspoon each of fennel seed and coriander, and add them to the blender. Blend until smooth.

Serve with naan and best wishes.

Coat the bottom of a large pot with olive oil, and heat it up. Add 3-4 cloves of minced garlic, and either a pound of ground turkey (for carnivores) or a peeled and finely-diced brown potato and a large minced shallot (for herbivores). Brown the ingredient, and then add two large diced yellow onions. Sautée and simmer until the onions are sweated, then add two peeled and coarsely-diced brown potatoes, and four peeled and coarsely-diced red potatoes. Add a tablespoon of cumin, 2-3 tablespoons of cilantro, 3-4 tablespoons of Mexican oregano, a cup of diced green chili (preferably imported recently from The Frontier in Albuquerque, NM) and a couple tablespoons of champagne vinegar. Fill with water to cover and bring to a boil, cover the pot, then reduce to a simmer. Allow to boil for at least an hour (or until potatoes are soft).

Serve with tortillas, 8-10 friends, and good conversation with jazz music in the background.

For everyone in the LA area:

SongFight! Presents
February 4th, 6pm-midnight
SoundArena Showcase Room
7712 Burnet Avenue, Van Nuys, CA

See hither.

compare and contrast

I might add more instruments though, if I can find something reasonable.

1/3 8:24 AM What the hell was I thinking? This is nowhere near done. I must have been sleep-deprived.

1/4 2:20AM okay, NOW it's done. Maybe.

For some reason I thought I'd look for an older song of mine, and I found it on my media server, buried in with all of my old stuff. Listening to it (thanks to Schism Tracker) I'm realizing that I actually started a lot of pretty cool things back in high school and college (yes, I still have music project files from high school! early/mid 90s!). I think I'll convert some of it to mp3 and start a new music subsection called 'fossils' or something.

I think I've just listened to over a hundred old song fragments and a few completed songs.