Plaidophile

I just went to Yo's Sushi Club for dinner, because I felt like treating myself. It is quite excellent.

I had the voodoo salmon nigiri, Yo's Special maki (the most amazingly elaborate maki I've ever seen), and an umeshiso maki (umeshi + shiso leaves). Also a large Sapporo. I am amazingly stuffed and satisfied and the total bill was only $32 (after tip). Obviously not something I'm going to do every night or anything, but as an occasional treat, I highly recommend it.

Most nights it's very crowded, but tonight I was the only one there. So, I guess Thursday night is a good time to go, if that's your sort of thing.

Yay, I entered Song Fight! this week. You know the drill — listen to the songs and select your favorites (one of which should be Sockpuppet).

My lyrics (and remix pack) are over yonder.

I didn't die. I did have a strange dream about Muni though — due to a miscommunication with a couple friends I ended up in a part of town where it would have taken me 15 hours to get to the place I was supposed to be in half an hour. The place being some sort of "beneficial mad science" convention.

I still feel a little queasy but not like I'm going to make a mess all over the place (on either end), so I guess my lunch plans are unaffected.

i drank some juice which was kind of old and it tasted funny, and then half an hour later I started to feel numb and weak, so I called 911. the paramedics came and asked me a few questions and even though I'm feeling bad they decided it was just 'bum juice' and that I shouldn't worry, even thoughmy face is pretty much completely numb. I don't think that's a good sign and I'm feeling a pretty weak, and also annoyed that the paramedics were kind of insulting about it.

anyway i am definitely dumping the juice (except I would hope that they'd have wanted to test it for botulism toxin or something)

so if you do't see me post to twitter for a while you'll probably know why (i hope this isn't my last entry)

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The outdoor temperature is higher, so computer fans and refrigerators run harder, which raises indoor temperatures more, so people run fans or air conditioners which produce work which raises the outdoor temperature more, and which also put more pressure on the electricity distribution infrastructure which generates more heat and more CO₂, which raises the outdoor temperature.

The higher CO₂ levels make the grass grow longer, faster, so the people who insist on having lawns run their lawnmowers more, which generates heat and uses more fuel and puts even more CO₂ in the atmosphere (as well as other nasty emissions because lawnmower engines aren't at all clean).

The more we struggle to keep comfortable, the harder it will become.

• Every time I boot into Windows to play a quick game of TF2, I end up having to install a bunch of reboot-required service packs RIGHT AWAY or else the world will end, apparently
• Most of the time I have my laptop running in "clamshell mode," i.e. just using an external screen and keyboard and mouse. Windows will boot just fine, but then once it notices that the lid is closed, it goes to sleep. So I have to barely prop the lid open just enough to defeat the sensor.
• The fan runs constantly at the highest speed
• It takes forever to detect my external mouse and keyboard
• Even though my laptop is on WiFi and is connected just fine thanks it feels it necessary to remind me every 10 seconds to check my Ethernet cable (and mind you, I normally do have Ethernet plugged in with a direct connection to my file server, but that also makes Windows crap itself because NO WAY can there be TWO active Internet connections with different routing tables!!!)
• Why do I need to boot into Windows just to play games, again? Oh right, because every new Steam and TF2 client update makes it run even worse under Crossover. Meh.
• and by the time I finally get everything sorted and in a state where I can play, everyone's disconnected from my favorite server. cripes
• And then when I finally get that taken care of I have another update to install! I literally spend more time updating Windows than using Windows on this computer.

Dear furry artists who insist on drawing platypi:

• They are not birds. The "duck" bill is an example of convergent evolution. They do not have feathers. They are not in any way "avian."
• Their eggs are soft-shelled and leathery like a snake's, not hard like a chicken's.
• The tail is shaped somewhat like a beaver's, but it's not actually a beaver tail (to start with, it's furred); it's a rudder and a fat reserve, not a piece of construction equipment. This also does not mean that they are in any other way like a beaver. In particular they don't have buckteeth, or in fact teeth at all. Moreover, this means that their tails are not like that of the following species:
  • Fox
  • Wolf
  • Squirrel
  • Dinosaur
  • Whatever the hell it is has long flowing locks of hair instead of a tail
• They do not have breasts or nipples. They secrete milk directly through the skin. I suppose you could take some artistic license and make them a bit curvy but they still shouldn't have gigantic nipples with areolae.
• Being monotremes (which literally means "one hole"), they have a cloaca, which the penis or vagina is hidden in. A hermaphroditic platypus would probably look just like a male platypus. They would not let it all "hang out."
• Also, if you really must insist on drawing one in a state of arousal, the penis has four heads on it.

I wanted to play Neill's Metroid hack but there's no binaries available of FCEUX for Mac OS X. So I had to build it myself. It wasn't too difficult, but there's definitely some barriers for people who don't know their way around the OS X toolchain very much.

These instructions are based on Fink (and obviously you need XCode installed). For Darwinports/Macports/whatever it's probably similar. Whatever you do, I really don't recommend trying to hand-manage the dependencies.

For build-dependencies, it's just fink install scons sdl zenity lua51-dev, and to build fceux it's just CFLAGS=-I/sw/include LDFLAGS=-L/sw/lib scons; sudo cp bin/* /usr/local/bin

gfceux doesn't seem to work (even after getting PYTHONPATH set up, pygtk doesn't appear to be available), but I'm fine with the commandline (to play Neill's hack it's just fceux --loadlua metroid.lua metroid.nes, assuming fceux is in your $PATH and metroid.nes/metroid.lua are in the current directory). At least, I assume this works - I still need to acquire the ROM (I'm sure I have it on a hard drive somewhere but I'm lazy). I tried a couple of homebrew demo ROMs and fceux worked just fine, aside from the usual SDL-on-OSX gimpiness anyway. (UPDATE: the Lua stuff doesn't seem to work. So I'm just using the Windows build under VMWare anyway. Meh.)

Also, I highly recommend running fceux with the following command line options at least once: --inputcfg gamepad1 --xscale 4 --yscale 4 --opengl 1. Fortunately it saves the last command line options in ~/.fceux/fceux.cfg so you don't have to do that every time.

So, this Easter weekend, a bit of a storm hit the Internet when word got out that Amazon was removing GLBT materials from search results and sales ranks. The Internet (well, Twitter and dozens of weblogs) assumed this was some sort of puritanical hokum from Amazon, Amazon's official response was that it was a glitch, and the meta-response was that Amazon has purposefully done this and is just trying to "cover its ass" and that there's no way such a thing could happen as a glitch.

As a former Amazon employee (who left the company voluntarily on very good terms two years ago), I should share some of my thoughts.

4:15 PM Read this. Mike Daisey's explanation makes perfect sense. Of course my main point is that you should put the damn pitchforks down because the actual situation is much more complicated than what the Internet masses want to believe. Whatever the root cause was, I am positive it wasn't the result of directed malice from anyone at Amazon.

So, for various reasons I decided to finally subject myself to the torture of the Matrix sequels. I knew beforehand that Gloria Foster had died from diabetes sometime during the filming of the third one and was replaced by another actress (with the replacement justified by her being a piece of software anyway), but I didn't realize that they had discarded all of her filmed scenes.

So, when the Oracle appeared, I just thought that Gloria Foster had some terribly slurred speech due to the effects of the diabetes and I kept on wondering where in the movie the actress change was to take place, until she specifically mentioned her changed appearance to Neo.

Tonight was of course פֶּסַח and so I went over to Berkeley for my cousin's סֵדֶר, which is a large enough affair that he does it as a pot luck. Since I didn't have any ideas for what to bring, he assigned me to do the חֲרֽוֹסֶת, which is one of the vital staple symbolic foods (it represents the mortar the slaves used to assemble the pyramids, never mind that the pyramids probably didn't use mortar).

Growing up, eating חֲרֽוֹסֶת always seemed like something of a chore, so I decided to kick it up a bit and make it something people would actually want to eat. Since I didn't know how many people were coming to dinner I made a whole bunch (which turned out to be about twice as much as needed). On the plus side, it was the hit of the dinner and people were commenting about it non-stop.

I ended up leaving all the leftovers with my cousin, since I don't have any מַצָּה‎ to put it on and no inclination to eat it on its own.

I'd like to see an episode of House where the patient is the star of a medical mystery show. His personality (and even accent) should be completely different than his on-screen persona's, and he shouldn't actually try to know anything about medicine, but the doctors should nitpick about various inaccuracies in his show. In the resolution, it should turn out that he actually has the illness that was last shown on his show, but with a completely different set of symptoms. (As a nice twist, on the show-within-a-show, the symptoms and progression should be the ones that are completely accurate.)

I finally got sick of my crappy WiFi setup, which consisted of two Buffalo 802.11g router/access points and two Netgear 802.11n-ethernet bridges. The 11n connectivity was always laggy and didn't allow ipv6, and the Buffalo routers worked but were a bit unreliable. and the signals from all of them were very weak.

The whole reason I had such a complicated setup was to keep my 11g and 11n networks split so the 11n could be wholly on the 5GHz band, but even with that I ended up putting my only 11n devices on the 11g network anyway since it ended up being faster most of the time.

So, when Apple updated the Aiport Extreme to have DualBand operation, I decided to finally pick one up.