bytex64.net/blog

Not too long ago I headed over to the local Barnes and Noble in order to be a dutiful fanboy and pick up Megatokyo vol. 4. Why, you ask, do I feel the need to buy a dead tree version of a bunch of comics I can find online, and have already read, to boot? Because Fred Gallagher gave up a steady, well-paying job to follow through with something he believed in. That's awesome, and I want to support him in following his dreams. I couldn't resist the allure of printed paper, so I picked up the first volume of the Read Or Die manga, and "The Gripping Hand" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

The Read Or Die manga takes place before both the OVA and the TV series, and I recommend it for any fan of those. "The Gripping Hand" is the sequel to "The Mote in God's Eye", an absolutely amazing sci-fi novel that you should read. Even if you've already read it. Yes. Go read it now.

I've been perusing Whispered Apologies, which is interesting in that no two comics are alike, since they're created from a random mishmash of writers and artists. Some of them are very thought-provoking, like this one about the pursuit of happiness. This led me to Andrew Danner's TwentySevenLetters, which threw me over to The Pretentious History of Everything. I forgot where I got sidetracked into Flaky Pastry, but it's starting to look eerily famililar. Is it... Nethack?

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya has ended, so I've been browsing for a new series to watch. Ouran High School Host Club has taught me not to judge a cross-gender anime by it's cover, so I downloaded the first episode of Kashimashi, which sounds really awful, but it's not that bad. Long story short, a boy gets rejected, runs off into the woods, and takes a falling spaceship to the face. The kid is sort of vaporized, but the aliens rebuild him... as a girl. To add insult to injury, the aliens broadcast across the world, "Um, so, we kinda smeared one of yours while we were de-orbiting, but it's OK, 'cause we rebuilt him. Everything will be OK. Oh, by the way, he's a she, now, bye!" Yuri ensues.

But really! It's really an entertaining show! I don't care what you think!

My much hacked upon and scraped together Alpha box is finally up and running. I've installed NetBSD 3.0 on it, which required some compiling. Thankfully, pkgsrc made this completely trivial. (Note to Gentoo fanboys: NetBSD did it first) Just a few essentials, like perl, apache, vim, screen, wget... and nethack.

For those unfamiliar with nethack, it is an RPG of the old school. Graphics are ASCII, and minimalistic to the point of being cryptic. The mechanics, though, are full-featured, rivaling games like Diablo. For those able to work through the zillion commands and the dated (or nonexistent, really) graphics, it's a rewarding game that will have you sitting in front of a terminal for hours. For those who can't, there's always Falcon's Eye.

Despite having been a hardcore Linux geek for over five years, now, I've never really picked up nethack. So my initial attempts were pretty poor. Like:

 No  Points     Name                                                   Hp [max]
  5         65  chip-Mon-Hum-Mal-Law died in The Dungeons of Doom on
                level 1.  Killed by kicking a boulder.                  -  [14]

Which is my worst score, but isn't nearly as hilarious as:

 No  Points     Name                                                   Hp [max]
  3        162  chip-Wiz-Hum-Mal-Cha was poisoned in The Dungeons of
                Doom on level 1.  Poisoned by a rotted kitten corpse.   7  [12]

A lesson for everyone here: If you're going to eat a kitten corpse, make sure it's a fresh kitten corpse. The life you save may be your own.

I'd like to clear up a little unintentional roughness that's happened to me a number of times in the past. Girls, when telling a guy you're not interested, do not, under any circumstances utter the words, "You're a nice guy, I'm sure you'll find someone." Because this is what you're wanting to say:

I want you to realize that there are other opportunities out there, and that you shouldn't be depressed because I'm not interested in you.

And this is what we hear:

I don't think you're good enough for me, but surely there's someone out there with low enough standards that they will tolerate you.

Hopefully this will clear up some misunderstandings. Thank you.

I've just come upon a brilliant idea. The web (2.0) has plenty of so-called "social networking" sites, where people link their accounts through "friend" properties... and... well, that's about it. They're pretty pointless. Taking that pointlessness a step further and tapping the crowd that really doesn't want anything to do with the crowd, I propose the "antisocial network".

The first and most obvious application will be pointless "friendster" site. But instead of finding your friends or other interesting people and "friending" them, you find people you particularly dislike, and add them as an enemy. The ever-present and rarely explained action (woo/poke/nudge) will be the "ignore", and you will be able to create events that you can tell people not to come to, and post photo albums with unflattering and incriminating pictures of people you dislike. (This last aspect is actually quite similar to regular social networking)

Next in line is "social bookmarking," the antisocial version of which I'll call "gravedigg". You post links to sites, and instead of voting for an item to get promoted to the front page, you "gravedigg" a link to show how much you hate it and think the poster is stupid.

Dating services follow similarly, with "OkStupid" allowing you to find people who have different interests and background than you do, make assumptions about their intelligence, and question their sexuality through short messages. A prototype of this system is currently in operation, called the "web-based forum".

Of course, antisocial blogs are a part of it, too, with the antisocial version of livejournal being deadjournal... Whoops, nevermind, that one already exists.

With the advent of this new design paradigm, it's even easier to tell our fellow net users to bugger off!

At some point you must wake up and realize that the dream you've been chasing is nothing more than that -- a dream. It's a fading echo in your soul, and that the reality is that your friends have lied to you, you've been played for a fool, and that even though you knew that this was going to happen, you naively believed otherwise. You've lied to yourself.

But perhaps the most disheartening part is that there is no lesson to be learned. The entire experience has been worthless. Even the tattered remains of a house can be burnt to provide warmth, but there is no house. No remains. Not even ashes.

I am a coward and a fool.

A while back, I had a need to carry URLs back and forth from school and work. While sending emails to myself would have worked, I've never regarded that practice as anything more than a bad hack. So I wrote a little web applet to store bits of text, export them as an RSS feed, and called it 'q'. Short for queue, y'know, 'cause things go in at the top and come off from the bottom... Ok, they don't in q, but that's beside the point.

The point is, I figured other people might like something like this, so I polished it up a bit and released q.bytex64.net. No, it doesn't use AJAX, Ruby on Rails, or the Google Web Toolkit. There's no tagging, or social network effect, or use of the experimental <canvas> tag. And to be perfectly honest, it's pretty damned ugly. But it is fast and functional, two things at least some people care about these days. Oh, and it looks great on a cell phone. (For values of "great" close to "not worse than a desktop browser")

So try it out, it filled a need for me, maybe you'll find it handy, too.

You've had corn, right? Comes in a can, cut or creamed, occasionally on a cob. And you know what it tastes like, right? Well, I'm here to tell you that it doesn't taste like that.

Have you ever had fresh corn?

It's a little known fact that as soon as a cob of corn is picked from the plant, the kernels immediately begin converting sugar into starch. This process proceeds rapidly, and can substantially change the flavor of the corn in about a day. This means that if the "fresh" corn you've eaten wasn't picked that same day, what you tasted isn't what corn really tastes like.

Here in the midwest, you'll find people sitting by the roadside, lounging in lawn chairs next to a pickup full of sweetcorn and a sign proclaiming "Fresh sweetcorn!" The corn you see in that truck was picked that morning, and you can't get fresher unless you pick it yourself. (And if you have the opportunity, I'd suggest that you do)

When you go to the supermarket and pick out some frozen fish, it's not a stretch of the imagination to realize that here in the midwest, you're probably not getting the freshest fish. That fish got caught somewhere on the coast, was frozen, and shipped several days before it wound up at your local supermarket. But nobody considers the fact that sweetcorn only comes fresh from a cornfield, and declines just as rapidly. Most people have never had fresh corn, and they don't even know it.

There are hybrids created to combat this, though. So-called sugar enhanced hybrids ramp up the sugar content so that there's still some sugar left by the time you get it up to a week later. On the downside, the sugar overload also alters the natural taste of the corn. Other, "shrunken" hybrids, slow down the sugar to starch conversion rate, making the taste last a little longer.

But, I'll tell you, there's nothing like picking and shucking your own fresh sweetcorn to taste it at it's peak.

Shortly before leaving his house, Yan gave me one of those small "family radios" so we could chat back and forth between cars. Jen would be driving the rental car in the first leg, Yan would be driving the van, and I got to sit back and relax.

"Don't use the radio too much, we don't want to run the batteries down," Yan admonished before we left. He, of course, neglected his own warning and filled the radio waves with chatter until we stopped for gas in Gifford. Gassed up, we made way for the interstate and a very boring drive.

About an hour into the trip, Yan radioed in saying he was about to fall asleep, so I took over his post in the van while he slept. Also in the van was Yan's mom (hehe), who proceeded to talk my ear off, in an attempt to keep me from dozing off. I believe that at some point she was trying to give me advice on women, but I'll admit I wasn't really paying attention. Yan radioed.

"Mom! Stop talking to Chip so much!"

Surprised, she replied, "How did you know?"

"We can see you moving around from back here!" She had been gesticulating wildly during her entire oration.

After a half hour Yan Rapid Recharge, he was able to take over van-driving duties, and I switched to driving the rental to give Jen a rest. As we proceeded westward, the corn and bean fields faded away to denser and denser forest, and gently rolling hills replaced the linear monotony of Illinois. The final leg of the journey took us through twisty, hilly country filled with Amish folk. A Dodge Stratus isn't the best car for this, mainly because of it's completely dead steering feel. I was going 65MPH over a hill while turning, and got nothing even vaguely intimating where my traction limits were. I was driving on pure leemer. (Leemer is apparently a term used by fighter pilots to describe the feeling when something is about to go terribly wrong. It's described as "a shot of ice cold urine to the heart.")

Safely arrived at Yan's parents' new house, we looked around and took some pictures, then headed inside for dinner. For those of you who have not had the pleasure of dinner from an actual Chinese mother, it goes something like this:

Mother: Here, have some food!
Victim: Mmm!
Mother: Here, have some more food!
Victim: Oh, I'm kinda full...
Mother: Here, have some more food!
Victim: Urghhh... no more.
Mother: Here, have some more food!
Victim: *explodes*

Thankfully, we were able to escape the exploding part and Yan taught us how to play Hearts. I got very good at taking the queen of spades. (Hint: taking the queen of spades is a bad thing) Exhausted after a full day, we went to bed.

Continued in part 3...

Thanks, Nancy, I appreciate that you tried. :-/

I suppose I owe you all an update, considering I'm not dead, or even emotionally distraught. I've just been lazy. Well, sort of.

I have a car now. I'm currently borrowing my brother's 1989 Toyota MR2, which is a different kind of car than I'm used to. No, not a front wheel drive econobox. MR2 is short for Mid-engine, Rear wheel drive, Two seater. It really has a lot more in common with a go-kart than your average automobile. The engine is behind the seats and ahead of the rear wheels, giving it excellent handling characteristics... and an unforgiving tendency to throw you into the weeds if you push it too far. You see, there are some cars, like the AE86 Corolla, or the RX-7, which are said to "train the driver." The MR2 does no such thing. If you make a mistake, it boots you in the ass, and throws you into the weeds.

This particular car tries very hard to find new and interesting ways to leak. The clutch pedal, since it actuates the clutch some distance rearward of your buttocks, is hydraulic. And it leaks. I backed the car out of the driveway today, only to find that once I got it out in the street, I couldn't shift. I struggled to push it back into the driveway (it weighs a little over a metric ton), but couldn't get it up the incline by myself. A nice lady stopped and helped me push it. Woman in the gray Corolla, you're awesome. Thank you.

Once I got it back in the driveway, filled up the clutch fluid (which is, in fact, DOT3 brake fluid), I went out for a drive only to be caught in a downpour. Guess what else leaks? That's right, the sunroof. *drip drip*

But mostly, I'm happy with it. It does handle really well, and gets me places I need to be. Ok, I don't need to be anywhere, but it's nice to drive around recreationally.

Zoom Zo... Can I even say that with a Toyota? What the hell. Zoom Zoom bitches.