Plaidophile

(I'm not a fan of "resolutions.")

I just opened up my feedreader and what do I find, but a new comic by Shaenon Garrity! Woo! (Well, written by Garrity and Wells.)

Only one strip has been posted so far and it's already looking quite awesome. (Hopefully Wells' writing won't get as goofy and "random" as his stories normally are, though.)

It'd sure be nice if Movable Type supported per-entry timezones, and furthermore if it would actually internally provide a time value in UTC (like for parsing in PHP). I've been using my Palm more and more lately, which makes it even more aggravating to have to keep it in sync with my phone (especially for meeting reminders, which I have to deal with a heck of a lot lately).

The latest Sockpuppet track "tw3rp" is on Song Fight. I was debating inviting people to dinner at my place on Sunday since Marcus was visiting but he wasn't sure he'd be able to stay for dinner tonight, and then finally he said he could so I invited a bunch of people over yesterday.

Apparently this is illegal: 9 249 17 2 157 116 227 91 216 65 86 197 99 86 136 192.

I keep forgetting how much I hate bok choi. My bike got stolen, right out of my garage. I haven't drawn anything in so long. Gah. I'm having a heck of a time trying to find a decent massage therapist in downtown San Francisco.

This is the most addictive platformer I've ever played. So, I bought my PS3 several months ago, and immediately filled out the "get 5 free Blu-Ray movies" promotion.

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So, I listed the futon and sofa on Craigslist the other day, and I got contacted by Rian, who works at a local homeless community center and asked if I could come down on the price, as he had a client couple who were getting back on their feet after some time in their shelter. I said, "Sure, how about I just donate it as a charitable contribution?" He was totally okay with that.

So, when Terrence (the male of the couple) came to pick up the futon and the sofa, I also asked him if he wanted the stereo, the speakers, and the DVD player. He was happy to take them off my hands.

So, what's a good long-term storage medium? While quantum dots can theoretically last about 10 million years without losing their data, what else could possibly last that long? Certainly not a hard drive or flash memory, though maybe a hard drive sealed in argon behind lead shielding and kept in a Faraday cage would. Or is there still too much background randomness with magnetic pole drift?

Stone tablets could keep information that long, but their density (in at least two senses) leaves much to be desired, and trying to keep, say, a partial compendium of human knowledge in that format wouldn't really work out all that well.

So, I was checking the "maybe" list for my spam filter, and in one of the obligatory penis-enlargement spams there was a picture of an NSFW wood (heh) carving that I just had to share.

There's a lot of things that I don't use and that I probably should just get rid of. Anyone in the San Francisco area might be interested in some of these things, and can feel free to contact me about them. (I'd list this stuff on Craigslist but that's such a pain to deal with.)

Not to be confused with the educational film Flatland: The Movie, Flatland: The Film is an excellent movie.

There's a few minor problems with it, but as far as amateur, independent, feature-length productions go, it was extremely good. The story has been updated for a modern audience, and the sense of humor has been retained, with a few nice twists (such as the way the narrator is conveyed, as wry interstitial title cards).

Of course, there are still several factual errors with what can and can't happen in two dimensions and how it relates to the third (for example, there's nothing to prevent light from bouncing, and a Flatlander would also experience perspective), but those were in the original novel and fairly important to the story.

Every now and then I'll do some random poking around of something which happens to be something I've mentioned on my weblog, and I'll come across some weblog-aggregation/community thing which syndicates my weblog for all the wrong reasons.

For example, while seeing if I could find any stats about my PSN profile, I came across an aggregator view of my announcement here.

The funny thing, of course, is where my weblog is categorized.

Can it wait until tomorrow to start? A whole bunchof stuff arrived today: Radiohead In Rainbows discbox, a 1/3 case of wine from Woot, Quadrophenia and Bender's Big Score from Amazon, Flatland: The Film (not to be confused with Flatland: The Movie), something from Netflix (okay that doesn't count since the whole point to Netflix is collection-growth abatement), and my OLPC, which I am making this entry from. (the keyboard is driving me crazy)

No new ideas, but arranged in a nice, readable way.

So, my copy finally arrived today. I had a few hours to play it tonight, so I did.

Portal is a lot of fun. Half-Life 2 is also pretty good though it's making me a bit motion sick. The controls are definitely the best console FPS controls I've ever had... unlike, say, The Darkness, the controls on this actually feel natural and responsive. Not quite as good as keyboard+mouse, of course, but they did a good job of at least making moving and aiming feel somewhat natural.

HL-2 suffers from feeling very linear but also very "find the one little tiny clue needed to go forward" which is a bit annoying. Hopefully it'll get better soon. (I'm only to the part where you're trying to escape the city after the transporter fails to work right.)

Unfortunately, I have to go to bed early for an all-day "cultural training" thing down in San Jose tomorrow. Ugh.

I have a weird metabolism when it comes to alcohol. When I drink it, it takes a while to affect me, but once a little bit starts to affect me, ALL of what I've had affects me, and works its way through my system very quickly, like it's building momentum or something. Usually this isn't a problem since usually I'll have a beer or some wine and maybe a mixed drink. But last night at a party, I had something like 6 or 8 shots' worth of liquor, and suddenly I was all "ooh which way is up?" and then shortly after that "ugh I gotta go outside and get some fresh air." It's the most drunk I've ever been.

Thankfully I didn't have to puke (though I felt very close at times) and I was among friends who made sure I was okay, and as usual I sobered up really quickly, although I ended up missing both the last Caltrain so I stayed the night at a friend's place in Fremont and took BART home in the morning.

Of course right now I have an open bottle of a very nice Sousão in the fridge which is probably going to go bad since I can't apparently stomach even a small glass of wine right now.

I have never, ever seen a graphing app which made a dual 2.0 GHz G5 GRIND TO A HALT while trying to draw a SIMPLE LINE GRAPH with a whole whopping 280 DATA POINTS. WHAT. THE. HELL.

So, I've been playing Metroid Prime 3 in fits and spurts. I play games because I want to be entertained and because I like solving puzzles and generally being challenged. I do not play games to be utterly frustrated by the challenges involving a long series of miniboss battles with no save points in between them only to culminate in an action-puzzle sequence where you have to pull four levers while fighting off bad guys who can also fly quickly and undo the lever pulling, and the bad guys respawn too quickly for you to just go around and pull all the levers before they come back.

It's not like I want it to be trivially-simple or anything, but fucking HELL at least make it POSSIBLE. STOP MAKING ME THROW MY CONTROLLER. (Especially since on the Wii you have to go to a pretty big effort to throw it down in disgust, what with the wrist strap and so forth.)

So I just took my bike on BART to visit friends in Berkeley for Hanukkah dinner. That went well. Lots of people were curious about my bike (though a few people were glarey and bitchy because OMG U HAS A BIKE ON THE TRAIN DURING THE BIKE EMBARGO PERIOD and I'm all YES BUT IT IS A FOLDING BIKE AND THOSE ARE ALWAYS ALLOWED).

All that's left is taking it on Caltrain and then I'll have completed the trifecta of use cases for why I bought the bike. (I have a stupid training seminar thing down in San Jose in a couple weeks, which seems like as good a time as any to complete it.)

I still haven't actually used Zipcar/Flexcar, either. Ho hum.

So, the bike I bought a month ago? I finally had a chance to ride it a decent amount, to go to Pat's place. It handles quite nicely. Fortunately the roads are completely flat between SoMa and the Mission, but the gearing seems to have a very nice range and hills shouldn't be a problem (at least when my lungs are in better shape due to not being, you know, still sick). It was only a mile and a half each way, and a very easy ride. Fortunately the streets are fairly well-lit here, though, since my headlight is basically just good for letting other people see me (it doesn't light up the ground worth crap).

I also definitely appreciate the bike lanes around here. It'd be nice if the one on Harrison went all the way to my apartment though. (Fortunately, the one on Folsom goes all the way home, so the return trip was actually somewhat safer.)

Also: Last Supper Club is awesome. A little spendy but very top-notch. Apparently it's even better if you have a working sense of smell! I had the ricotta-stuffed cannelloni for dinner, and a Torta di Capri with vanilla gelato for dessert.

So, I bought my PS3 several months ago, and immediately filled out the "get 5 free Blu-Ray movies" promotion. Tonight I finally received them (although to be fair, a lot of the delay was because I had them shipped to my sister's apartment, and she didn't ever tell me they arrived and just gave them to me when I was over there tonight for a different reason).

I don't remember all five of my selections, but two of them were replaced with The Guardian and Happy Feet (there was an apologetic note about this). Considering that the only three movies I actually remember selecting (and cared about) came through, and that Happy Feet is probably a step up from whichever one it replaced, I guess I can't be too sad about that.

(The three I actually remembered selecting were Corpse Bride, Stir of Echoes, and The Last Waltz — and really, I only actually cared about getting Corpse Bride.)