<rash generalization expressing discontent about my state in life, especially that pertaining to my lack of female companionship>
<further observations hilighting idiosyncracies in both my thoughts and others>
<blatant self-loathing mixed with not-so-subtle inuuendo about sexual frustration>
<an exploration of self that attempts to find reason in the randomness of life>
<resignation>
<facile acceptance and a hollow parting thought that everything will be alright>
*BLAM*
Don't question my logic.
I'm a huge fan of free music. Not just free as in price, but free as in freedom. Understandably, I'm pretty excited about EMI's decision to un-DRM their catalog for online distribution (at least on iTunes, and maybe through other vendors as well). I actually loaded up iTunes (and QuickTime Alternative shortly afterwards) on my wintendo to see if I could find anything I liked in EMI's now unburdened catalog. Unfortunately, I failed to process the part of the article that said "starting next month." Oh well. In the meantime, here's some free (no cost, and for some, freely distributable) music I've found.
From Nancy, I've found last.fm (formerly known as audioscrobbler) They've built up a huge correlation database of what people listen to, so if you tell it you like TaQ, it figures you also like Smile.dk and Kylie Minogue. Truthfully, I can't stand Smile.dk, so take its prognosticative abilities with a grain of salt. I suppose that if I signed up for an account, I could tell it that I dislike Smile.dk, but I just can't be arsed right now. It is good, though, if you just want some music, and don't care where it comes from (and don't want to listen to the radio).
While watching a video on Youtube, I noticed some really great music I hadn't heard before. The end of the video said it was from Secession Records, an independent label out of Australia. Similar to Monotonik and 8bitpeoples, they sell CDs and distribute albums freely in MP3 format. They do very experimental stuff; I'm actually not crazy about a lot of it, but there is some good stuff there.
As I was tracing the history of Pac-Man earlier, I found that Namco has nearly the entire sountrack for Wangan Midngight Maximum Tune available for download in MP3 format. Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune is an arcade game based on a manga similar to Initial D. But where Initial D's music is typically adrenaline-pumping Eurobeat, WMMT employs high-energy trance created by the talented Yuzo Koshiro.
While not quite as free as everything above, I've recently played a little O2Jam. It's a rhythm game similar to Beatmania or DDR, but designed to play on the keyboard. There is a wide variety of music on it, including songs from sanxion7 (who has been mentioned before) and DM Ashura (who also has a lot of his music available here).
RELEASE THE BEAR!
Most kids, however, are much more interested in the American Easter tradition. You know, the one where a perverse lagomorphic furry makes kids hunt for disco-colored boiled chicken embryos. For their cooperation, parents are rewarded with kids that are hopped up on sugar and a lingering but untraceable rotten egg smell in about six months.
Caught in the sugar buzz, my mom brought home a treasure trove of leftover easter candy, including a pack of white chocolate Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. White chocolate? Why would you even do that to a peanut butter cup? They have taken what is quite possibly the world's greatest union, peanut butter and chocolate, and turned it into a cruel farce. It's just wrong.
Anywho, enjoy your Easter, and watch out for the reanimated corpse of the son of God! :P
Cunt
There we are. And now, to balance out my karma:
Puppies
That is all.
Not exactly the most streamlined process, but the part that really gets me is the reliance on an ActiveX control. That's a method that was used quite successfully in 1998 on the Internet Gaming Zone (which later became the MSN Gaming Zone, and god knows what it is now. Gaming Zone .NET?). Why is such a widely used game still relying on a method only supported by what is arguably the worst browser on the 'net? Well, Gunbound is Korean. And things are a little different in Korea.
It's a widely publicized fact that South Korea has the highest broadband penetration rate in the world. South Korea is very connected, and South Koreans do a lot online. More interestingly, though, is that 99.9% of computers in South Korea run Windows (by comparison, the US sees someting like 80-90% Windows). This seems disturbingly high. Did Microsoft do something terribly right? Did they successfully create the monopoly there that they failed to do here? Actually, no. Microsoft is not to blame, and the story is even weirder.
Back in 1998, 128-bit SSL didn't exist yet, and South Korea's government wouldn't allow the existing 40-bit SSL for online transactions (and rightly so). So instead of waiting for 128-bit SSL to be finalized (which happened in 1999), South Korea developed its own 128-bit security system called SEED. SEED was originally available as both a Netscape 4 plugin and as an ActiveX control for IE. Well, Netscape lost the browser war, and the only option left was to use IE. So for the past eight years, the only way to do online banking, interface with secure government sites, or do anything secure online in South Korea was to use Internet Explorer. And so, everything that couldn't run Internet Explorer died. That is why South Korea is 99.9% Windows.
In an environment like that, it's no shock that a popular game uses ActiveX. It's not even an inconvenience; everyone is already using IE. It's completely and utterly ridiculous. The good news is that people are fighting to change this. A group called "OpenWeb" is suing the Korean government to get them to adopt open web standards.
Remember kiddies, monoculture is bad.
Second Life is a massive virtual reality environment. It simulates simple objects, which can be scripted, and you interact with this world through an "avatar." If you've read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, it's very similar to his "Metaverse." A huge range of activities are possible, from shooting to racing to... shooting. Well, I've been told there are a lot of activities. "What's the goal?" you may be asking. Despite its wide-ranging and open-ended environment, Second Life is played with one very simple rule: If at any point you start caring about Second Life, you lose.
Naturally, SL's combination of Lego-like object construction and what amounts to a very simple parallel programming environment has proven to be an irresistible force for me. After I get done with work, I go to SL and have fun programming new, interesting, and quite annoying objects. One such object is the LOL Shooter, a shoulder-mounted anything-goes projectile launcher. It shoots a wide variety of objects ranging from rolls of toilet paper to giraffe-print chairs to giant metal phalluses. It's become the griefer weapon of choice for my brother and his miscreant friends.
SL's success rests on its virtual economy. Instead of charging a certain amount per month just to play, SL starts you off with a "basic" account. You can do a lot of stuff with a basic account, but for the things that require you to shell out some cash, US Dollars can be exchanged for Linden Dollars (and vice versa). This simple idea has turned Second Life into something of a virtual country. Best of all, it's sufficient to keep the game afloat for the company while still allowing free access for anyone. Where a lot of MMO's fail it, SL has this important aspect figured out.
SL is not all sunshine and rainbows, though. Since you don't have to stay logged in, most of the "grid" has an eerie ghost-town quality to it. Almost all of the mainland is occupied, but if you traverse it, you will find almost no people. Generally, people are helpful, but there's no shortage of griefers, either. And, as you would expect, SL is chock-full of bizarre, deviant, and tasteless shit (but you could say that about anything on the internet). The game itself is pretty buggy, as well. You can tell how stable a game is when there is slang like "relog" (short for re-login).
But it's fun enough when it does work, and I haven't paid a dime for it. That puts me way ahead in my book. :)
While I've not traveled every road that exists, I have driven very nearly coast to coast, and I can say without any hyperbole that Kenosha, WI has the worst intersections I have ever seen. Horizontal and vertical stoplights, stacks of directional stoplights, turn lanes that veer off like left-lane highway exits, and signs galore are just some of their many bewildering features. One intersection featured two right turn lanes, but there was a sign saying that right turn on red was only allowed from the rightmost right turn lane. Many roads are divided by a lane of rumble strip or Jersey barriers, and trying to find a place that allows a left turn onto these roads is an exercise in frustration. I don't think this is just a Wisconsin thing, either. Chrissy and I drove up the lakefront into Racine, which had standard sane intersections. Kenosha street planners, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
Mike was there Sunday night, too, and we discussed such interesting things as "Are over-the-air channel frequencies the same as Cable TV channel frequencies?" (A: Only for channels 2-13) and "Colloquialisms that exist south of I-80" (Do you "make dinner" or do you "fix dinner"?). On Monday Chrissy and I ate breakfast at IHOP and drove out to the lake (not very far). It was a beautiful day, but since the sun is trying to kill me, we eventually wound up back inside, where I walked Chrissy through the process of filing her taxes online (and at least in the case of her federal return, for free. Check out IRS Free File). Chrissy had business to attend to, so I left.
On my way back, I arranged to stop by and have dinner with Jen. I took the short way, which is to say I took the path of shortest distance, but apparently the most 45MPH zones and stoplights. On the map, you'll see it as "US Route 41." It took me nearly two hours to get to Jen's place, but I didn't have to backtrack, and I successfully navigated Chicago according to the advice of a friend: "All the streets are numbered."
By the time I got to Jen's place, our original plans had been shot. Instead, we ate at the Bar Louie right next to Wrigley Field. I still don't understand the draw of Bar Louie. OK food, OK drinks, and a toasted tan waitress. I could get that at a lot of places. It was nice to see Jen, if only for a little bit, but the night was far from over. I had a long drive back, and once I was pointed in the right direction (one of these days I'll get my bearings in that concrete jungle), I got to see a side of Chicago that I'd never seen before.
As close as Jen is to the lake, the easiest way to get back to the interstate was via Lake Shore Drive. That is an amazing drive at night, and I began to see the inspiration for such games as Rad Racer, Cruisin' USA, and Sega Outrun. As I crossed the bridge over the mouth of the Chicago River, I did an actual double-take at the river's nocturnal beauty. It's a pretty jaw-dropping visual, so if you ever have the option of leaving Chicago that way, I recommend it fully.
I've also come to a realization: I don't hate cities. Cities, it turns out, are pretty cool places to be. I hate suburbs. Suburbs are soul-sucking mediocrity transmogrified into a place to live. I have described the suburbs as being similar to an old video game — once you hit the edge of the map, it loops back to the other side. In the suburbs, you are stuck a never-ending landscape of housing developments, country clubs, and malls that is as unchanging as it is sprawling. And they are the same whether they surround Chicago, Seattle, or Washington DC. Any particular chunk of suburb could be from Naperville, Bellevue, or Potomac. It's just, "Bleh."
Bleh!
I have attempted to model this growth by fitting the data to an exponential function. For those who don't recall, an exponential function is one that has the form
f(x) = AebxWhere e is the natural number (2.718281828...), and A and b are constants we have to find. I'll not bore you with the details, but by plugging in his first two works, and making x the number of years since 1994, we find that A = 2.0 and b = 0.2747:
f(x) = 2e0.2747xSolving this for Negima, though, yields only a little less than 24 girls, far shy of 31. Thus, the number of females in Ken Akamatsu's manga are actually growing faster than exponentially. Here's what it looks like (courtesy of gnuplot).
The solid red line is the growth rate observed, and the broken green line is the growth predicted by the above equation. While the equation has proven to be inaccurate, we can nevertheless use it as a lower bound. If Ken Akamatsu comes out with another series in 2008, which seems reasonable, it will have at least 93 girls. Of course, since it is actually growing faster than that, it is likely that there will be over a hundred.
Of course, no such analysis would be complete without a quote from America's most famous cynic:
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale
returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
-- Mark Twain
First, robots. The second weekend of March is always host to UIUC's Engineering Open House. One of the major attractions at this event is the Jerry Sanders Design Competition, where teams create robots that must navigate a course (by remote control) and perform certain tasks. This year's task involved gathering hula hoops and frisbees (oops, I'm sorry, rings and discs) and placing them in/around color-changing bases. Alexei's Avengers did well this year, scoring 6th in a field of over 20, even though they had to forefit two rounds. They also won "Most Creative Design," an award worth $150. You've made me proud, guys.
Saturday evening, Yan and I traveled up to Chicagoland to visit friends and play IIDX. Well, I went to play IIDX. Konami is actually weighing the possibility of releasing a US English version of their IIDX arcade machines. A prototype of this machine made its way to Naperville for an informal location test, so I had to show up to show my support for this idea. But first, a movie.
We had wanted to go see "300" in Imax, but we didn't get there nearly soon enough, and saw The Host at a regular theater instead. We missed the first half hour of the movie, so I can't pass judgement on it right now. Hopefully, I'll be able to find it and give a proper review. (but what I saw was terrible)
After wasting $21 at the Brunswick Zone, we drove back to Chicago for some authentic Korean BBQ. For $15, you get a plate of raw meat and a fire to cook it on. But that's not all. Jen said that you'll get twenty small plates of stuff to eat. She was neither joking, nor using the literary device of hyperbole. We did get over twenty small plates of stuff to eat, including the standard kimchee, bean sprouts, and seaweed, but also spicy mussels, spicy tofu, strange jelly stuff... I wish I'd have been less hungry at the time and taken a picture. Also: you get rice and miso soup. It was a feast, even if some assembly was required. Oh, the name of the place was "San Soo Gap San," IIRC.
I've made it safely back home, and I'm going to sleep.
My mind then started to wonder about alternate permutations. 12 holes, each of which can have the lace go through it once. That's 12! (479,001,600) possibilities just for order alone! Assuming a 12 hole shoe, each person in the United States could be uniquely identified by a particular lacing pattern. If you factor in over and under for each hole (2^12), you now have 1,961,990,553,600, nearly two trillion shoe lacing combinations, enough to uniquely identify every person who has ever lived 17 times over. Such things boggle my mind.
How do I lace my shoes? Lace-under, left-over-right on the left shoe, mirrored on the right, tied with Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot. :)