Plaidophile

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Toby is afraid of 2007.

(my dad shouted out HAPPY NEW YEAR and Toby just kinda cowered in the corner, not sure what was going on.)

So, my flight was cancelled. United gave me a hideous runaround. They are still on my shitlist because of how badly they handled it. Plus I almost got arrested because of a stupid series of events which stemmed from this bad handling (apparently the NMPD considers slamming a phone down "an act of vandalism"). I might get into it later but for now I'm too pissed and stressed and tired to even want to think about it.

My dad and I got up early so that we could beat the snow and get to the airport with plenty of time. While on the way there I got a page that my flight had been delayed nearly two hours (from 7:50 to 9:45), but we were already really close to the airport so we decided to stop and get breakfast at The Frontier anyway (which was already in the plan, and why we started so early, since we weren't sure if it would be so crowded from all the stranded travelers due to I-40 being closed). I had a breakfast burrito with sausage and a fresh-squeezed orange juice. My dad gave me the tortillas from his huevos rancheros in case I got hungry later.

We got to the airport without incident (aside from a few idiot drivers who decided they needed to prove that they could still drive normally in 18 inches of snow with more falling), and now I'm waiting at the airport.

Pictures below the cut.

(of snow, at my parents' house)

My travel back to Seattle might be a bit more difficult than anticipated.

Especially since I'm connecting through Denver. on United.

I forget why I didn't like it before, but I like AdiumX now. I mostly decided to give it another try because I'm finally making use of LJ's Jabber server (so you can contact me via jabber at _fluffy[at]livejournal[dot]com) since I have a couple friends who prefer Jabber to AIM, and I quickly got annoyed at how iChat doesn't consolidate the multiple accounts' buddy lists into a single window. And of course it turns out that Adium's buddy list is WAY more configurable anyway. Woo.

So I gave holiday cheer to people:

• My brother got a 5-in-1 TV Game (arcade in a joystick) with Ms. Pac-Man, Xevious, Mappy, Galaga, and Pole Position
• My mom got a USB massager and a USB coffee cup warmer
• My dad got a bunch of gourmet chocolate
• My mom and dad got a CD of "the last year in music and also a bit of last year too" (with a bunch of music I worked on, including all of the Octothorpe songs I've been a part of which is where the "bit of last year" came into play). They liked it.
• I also brought a big chunk of fresh smoked salmon, some coffee from a local roaster (no NOT Starbucks), and uh... I think there was something else but I don't remember.

This is one of the things I was working on last night (and am mostly done with now, though I need to draw a person in running and jumping poses): new 403 error page.

I also have a 404 one in the works, and an oh-so-cute idea for a 500 page (for those rare but sunny times that I break something). I can't do the 500 one until I'm back at home though since I don't have my Logic XSKey with me (and so I can't record the song for it).

(nt)

So, since I was up until like 4:30 AM yesterday having gotten fully caught up in webdesign fun, and since I need to get up at 6:30 today to make sure I have plenty of time to get ready for my holiday travel, I decided to just stay up all night and so on. So of course right now I'm hallucinating like serotonin were going out of fashion, and I've been doing all sorts of random stuff all night. For example, I've recorded a couple of looping mini-songs for another site feature (one that I've been planning since I registered this domain, though, which is especially interesting since I didn't even come up with what to actually put on it until a year later), and I've...

Uh, I'm not entirely sure. I just know that I've done a lot of stuff tonight.

see here

protocat always has his away message set to, "I may actually be away. Please leave a message. Haikus welcome." So I always write him bad haiku. Today I decided to collect the "best" ones.

(It was also yet another stylesheet experiment, which is more fun than the content itself.)

hooray

good thing it has so much google juice for "fluffy" due to all the broken inbound links from several years of existence. it's so nice having random garbage getting a higher search result than me.

I got tired of de^x/dx being on the front page, so I moved it all inside of itself and replaced the main page to better aggregate the things I do.

There's still some hinky broken stuff (especially the meta-pages which I haven't gotten around to styling) but I think this works better in general.

Danica McKellar and Natalie Portman both have an Erdős-Bacon number. Which pretty much automatically raises the question, what is McKellar's Hershlag-Portman number? (the sum of the distance between McKellar and Portman in both academic papers and in films)

The maximum is 15 but it's probably somewhat lower.

Okay maybe I actually am sick, and I was just feeling the early signs of it on Friday. Sore throat! Mucous! Lovely.

Pseudoephedrine + guaifenesin = my favorite friends right now

Back when I wrote phpbb_integrate, MT's comment system was pretty horrible (which is why I wrote it). For now I'm just using MT's system on sockpuppet.us (at first I was going to just use the busybee forums but then I realized there'd be some pretty hairy problems with cross-domain cookies, since phpBB insists on having a single domain name that it comes from and that's configured in the database rather than in an overridable configuration variable), and today I got my first third-party comment. I'm pleasantly surprised to discover that it's actually, you know, good, with easy moderation and so on.

Not good enough to go through the effort of moving back to it for my weblog (and anyway my weblog now uses phpBB for a lot more than just comments, like for friends-locking and so on) and I also don't like how the registration system is TypeKey-centric (I wonder if any of the OpenID modules are any good) and uses scary JavaScript, but for fully-public sites like sockpuppet.us it's definitely viable now.

So, the US Mint thinks they have a surefire plan to get people to use dollar coins, because they think that people have been loathe to change.

The problem wasn't the faces on the coins. The problems were:

• The Susan B. Anthony dollar looked and felt like a quarter
• The Sacajawea dollar looks like an arcade token, and being gold made it seem inherently like a collector's item

The fact that they're making it gold-colored and changing the faces specifically to make it collectible shows how totally they missed the second point.

Also, the article implies that the back won't have an inscription, which makes me wonder how they'll indicate that it is legal tender in the value of $1.

I just spent TWO AND A HALF HOURS on the BUS because people FREAK OUT when there's too much rain. SOME traffic problems were justified because of the flooding in some areas but COME ON. TWO and a HALF HOURS to go SIX MILES.

I should have taken the #28 instead of the #15. I would have if I'd known about the traffic problems which were on the 15/17/18 line. The utterly shocking thing was that during the trip, the bus driver didn't know anything about what was going on. Where were the goddamn traffic bulletins? HELLO you guys have a RADIO for a REASON, and he was actually contacting the base several times and they didn't have any idea what to tell him.

COME ON people.

Seattle-based asexual ISO boy/girl/herm/neuter/misc-friend. Must appreciate and be appreciable. Hobbies include artwork, music, video games, intelligent discourse, and general creativity.

(sigh)

While I'm finally getting around to setting up my band's site, I decided to see about the whole remixing scene.

So, I don't ever actually go out of my way to support IE6 on any of my sites, but on most of my sites (even with the more complex layout) it's at least readable. But my new Sockpuppet site is so beyond broken on IE6 I wouldn't even know where to begin making it work (and even getting it somewhat consistent between Safari and Firefox was rather difficult, which is surprising considering how visually-simple this layout is). Normally I wouldn't mind, but this level of brokenness makes it just plain unreadable.

I could make it just serve up a special IE6 stylesheet or something (that's easy enough to do) but I really can't be bothered to deal with it right now.

Plus, it gets dark at like 3 now.

Yay Seattle.

I may have played a bit too much Paper Mario recently.

Right now I'm watching the first episode of the UK version of The Office. It's unsurprising that the entire show structure, including most of the jokes, are pretty much identical between them, only with different names and accents.

I presume that the NBC version eventually got different writing, considering that it's gone on longer than the BBC version ever did, but this makes it kind of hard to watch the original. Even though I rationally know the BBC version came first, it feels like a ripoff of the NBC one simply because I saw that version first.

An open mic is where people under a time constraint do everything they can to repeatedly violate that time constraint (taking advantage of the fact the MC doesn't want to be a bitch and risk alienating the regulars), while most of the audience is just there to see one or two people.

Also I never realized that my song "Gin Or Ginseng" could actually go over a lot of peoples' heads. I guess only performing it at Song Fight tends to skew my audience towards people who give a shit about video games and are at least somewhat aware of how shitty it is to work in that industry. I think only like ONE PERSON (aside from Spud) actually sung along during the bridge (***SPOILER WARNING*** it's the SUPER MARIO BROS THEME, people!) so I guess I need to learn my audiences better.

So, my iPod Nano (which I got because I got sick of the rebooting issues on my iPod 5G, which I sold to a friend) started having the reboot problems too. Instead of doing my usual horribly time-consuming process I decided to see if someone else had found a root cause.

On the WinAmp forums someone had discovered that the problem was with id3v2 tags where the comment was over 254 characters long! He also included a Perl app to find such files, but it was really badly-coded (and didn't actually work), but I rewrote it and it works great.

Sent to an Amazon merchant:

I ordered an Intec S-Video cable for GameCube from you, and what you sent instead was a Hip Gear Universal Cable. Although at first glance it would seem that the Hip Gear cable was a better product (since it supports more game consoles), I tried it out and the actual video quality on this cable is significantly WORSE than the quality even on the composite cable which came with the GameCube. These all-in-one products tend to be manufactured with lower quality standards than the dedicated cables, and so I would really like to exchange this item for the one I actually paid for to begin with.

Thank you.

Snake was in a convenience store with his retarded pal Goro (who was working in the sanitation department) to buy some ice cream, when Superfly Johnson and CJ held the convenience store up. So it was up to Snake to sneak around the shelves of overpriced candy and bust heads.

(Goro like ice cream.)

I've always had somewhat of a weight problem. It's a combination of genetics, lifestyle, and diet, just like for everyone else. I'm not morbidly obese or anything, but I am overweight (mostly in the gut) and I could stand to lose a decent amount of fat.

When I was in grad school I started on a strict DDR regimen, and got my weight down to 178 (pounds, not kilos!), and I more or less maintained this weight while I lived in NYC (since I walked a lot and couldn't afford to eat very well), but as soon as I came to Seattle I started to pile on the pounds again (I'd eat both breakfast and lunch at the gourmet cafeteria at work, which I drove to, and I didn't play very much DDR). At my peak I was up to an astounding 197 (ugh), and I'd been sitting there for a while.

Why didn't anyone warn me that this is the most addictive video game ever?!

This is the first time in a long time that I've had to force myself to stop playing just so I could get to sleep, usually prompted by Mario dying two or three times in a row (making me realize I'm making bad decisions). Darwinia was also this captivating but it was also much, much shorter.

BEST. GAME. EVER.