After a brief outage, my weblog is back up and running. It's pretty hard to say enough good things about a sysadmin who has a half-hour response time on a Sunday night for a problem that quite possibly affects only me.
On the other hand, I'm running out of ways to curse a dial-up connection that can't even handle ssh connections without huge pockets of lag.
Category: Geek
Well, the Thanksgiving leftovers are dwindling away, the dishes are almost done, and we're all starting to regain mobility after the Turkey-induced stupor. That's right, it's officially Christmas!
I hope everyone looking forward to a month of non-stop Christmas music and crazy shopping. I know I can already feel the Christmas spirit all around me! Or is that rampant capitalism?
Category: Society
So we just converted a spare computer at work into a FreeBSD machine to use as a server for things like CVS, Bugzilla, and other such life-enhancing development tools. After a rocky start, we finally get the machine all set up, tools installed and configured, etc., so we decide to free up some desk space by moving the monitor and keyboard to another computer and moving the CPU elsewhere. So we do that, hook it back up, and fire it up. A few minutes later, we're back up and running, with a handy development server.
Ha ha, don't I wish. No, instead we've spent two days trying to figure out why, in the process of being moved 6 feet, it totally lost the ability to connect to the network. We've basically reached the point of throwing our hands in the air, wiping the whole machine, and starting over. The install seemed kind of flaky anyhow, what with other weird bugs. Hopefully it was the install disks, and not the machine... but given previous issues we've had with the computer, I'm starting to suspect serious a) memory or b) hard-drive issues.
If so, hopefully we can figure out which and start the exciting process of bitching to the manufacturer.
Category: Geek
While reading about the recent Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling against the ban on Gay marriage (personal note to Scalia, who said, "The premise of our system is that those judgments are to be made by the people and not imposed by a governing caste that knows best": if you are going to be a Supreme Court Justice, please learn the difference between a democracy and a republic. Thanks) I found the fascinating article "The Negative Health Effects of Homosexuality" by the Family Research Council. Since this group is fanatically opposed to homosexual marriage, they fall into one of the common traps of fanaticism: trying to twist everything to be evidence in their favor, instead of sticking to the points that actually make sense for them to argue. While it's unfortunate, it also makes for some highly entertaining reading at times. My personal favorite is this choice quote:
The journal AIDS reported that men involved in relationships engaged in anal intercourse and oral-anal intercourse with greater frequency than those without a steady partner. Anal intercourse has been linked to a host of bacterial and parasitical sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS.
Well gosh, that's just shocking! Clearly they must be against heterosexual sex (I'm pretty sure that's also linked to sexually transmitted disease) which begs the question: are they against heterosexual marriage, or do they support it because they have studies that show that married couples have less sex than unmarried couples?
Even better is when they don't seem to remember which side they are on:
Homosexual and lesbian relationships are far more violent than are traditional married households: The Bureau of Justice Statistics (U.S. Department of Justice) reports that married women in traditional families experience the lowest rate of violence compared with women in other types of relationships. [...]
It should be noted that most studies of family violence do not differentiate between married and unmarried partner status. Studies that do make these distinctions have found that marriage relationships tend to have the least intimate partner violence when compared to cohabiting or dating relationships.
So... married women are abused less than unmarried women, and lesbian (and thus by definition unmarried since these are U.S. statistics) women are abused more than married couples. That seems pretty obvious, so I'm with them so far. But what's their point? Is it that they are pro–lesbian marriage, or that they are pro–abuse of lesbians?
More insidious, and thus more disturbing, is their manipulation of (lies, damned lies and) statistics. They quote statistics about things like homosexual promiscuity left and right, but never once do they give statistics on heterosexual promiscuity. They quote one study that compared promiscuity of married and unmarried gay couples in the Netherlands, and give only the statistics from the married couples—from which I can only conclude that they were, in fact, better than those of the unmarried couples. So the majority of their arguments may sound impressive, but are in fact totally meaningless since they have no context.
And finally, some food for thought. They go on and on about the abnormally high incidence of long-term depression, drug and alcohol abuse, and suicide among gays and lesbians. Am I the only one who finds it likely that this has more to do with, oh, say, living in a society where they are stigmatized, discriminated against, and tormented by their peers, rather than how they get their kicks in the bedroom?
So on the balance, the article reads to me more like advocacy for homosexual marriage than against it. What disturbs me isn't that people write things like this—it's that they (and many others) undoubtedly believe everything they are saying at face value.
Category: Society
Our mysterious summer relapse has vanished as abruptly as it arrived, taking with it its 60-70 degree October and November weather. All that remains in its wake is cold, 50-60 mph winds, and some snow pellets spit half-heartedly from the sky, reminding me how little I'm looking forward to another Cleveland winter.
Current weather in Cleveland: 39°F, feels like 18°F (9am local time)
Current weather in Lahaina: 71°F, feels like 72°F (4am local time)
Days until I am there instead of here: 24
Category: Life
I've recently stumbled upon Enigma, which is an open-source remake of an old game called Oxyd, which I used to play back in middle school on Mac OS 7. It's an incredibly absorbing mix of puzzle-solving, coordination, and simple but elegant graphics. I had forgotten all about it, not having played it in more than eight years, but it took me about 30 seconds to become re-addicted. It's been ported to all kinds of platforms, so you have no excuse not to play it.
Category: Geek
I've been thinking a lot about writing as I work on my master's thesis (notice that I say that I've been thinking a lot about writing, not that I've been doing a lot of writing). Anyway, I've been thinking about why I've been having trouble writing, and I had an interesting thought.
People always say that the best way to get over writer's block is to just write stuff down without worrying about it, then to go back and make it good later. Unfortunately, I find that as hard as writing good stuff in the first place, if not harder—I almost always plan every sentence and paragraph in my head before I start writing it—and I think I may know why: I write a lot of code. It's what I did for classes, what I do at work, what I do for my master's research, and not infrequently what I do with my free time. And what's the number one rule of writing code? Don't write any code until you know exactly what you are doing. No one ever says, "Write a lot of free-form code, then go back and try to make it into a good algorithm later"—that's a quick road to buggy, broken code.
So now I have two plausible theories. Theory one: I've written so much code that I've absorbed the doctrine deep into my psyche. Theory two (and this is my favored theory): That's simply the way I've always tended to think and approach problems, which is why I've always found writing papers painful, and writing code relatively easy. Either way, I now have something besides my laziness to share the blame for my slower-than-I'd-like progress.
Category: Random
Now that it's suddenly much more important to get it ASAP, I went ahead and ordered Panther. Since it's still somewhat early in the game, I should be one of the many lucky people to get it delivered on the evening of the 24th, so I won't have to fight my way into and out of the new Cleveland Apple retail store which is rumored to be opening that night.
I know what you are thinking: only a total geek would think that getting a new operating system makes for an exciting Friday night. Don't worry, I'm not that much of a geek.
Ok, yes, I am that much of a geek. Deal with it.
Category: Geek
The habit of skipping disk image checksums is a very bad one to get into... it really comes back to bite you when you, say, install a system update from a corrupt disk image and hose your system to the point that it won't boot.
On the bright side, I have another bootable partition I use for beta testing, so I still have a totally usable computer, making this just a minor annoyance instead of a colossal headache. And on the really bright side, Panther is almost here—and this vastly simplifies the decision of whether or not to do a totally clean install of Panther.
Category: Geek
And for me, today, Dave Barry is that hero. After his original commentary on the Do Not Call list generated some negative feedback in the telemarketing world, he really let them have it. Of course, the ATA spokesperson played right into his hands; you just can't make up quotes that good. But basically, he's my hero for writing the sort of article that we would all write if we were a) that clever, and b) had a nationally syndicated column. Way to stick it to them! It almost makes me want to sent money when the "Barry for President in '04" campaign rolls around.
Category: Society
So I knew about Sunday alcohol laws, and I always thought that they were silly... I had no idea how silly they really are (in Ohio at least). So this morning, we're doing a grocery run, and I thought, "Hey, I should grab some hard cider". I knew that they didn't sell wine or liquor in the morning, but since beer is ok, I foresaw no difficulties. Sadly, they were out of hard cider, so I grabbed some Bacardi instead. But will they sell me the Bacardi? No. "Oh, I thought, I guess beer isn't ok after all". But no, of course that's no it, because that would make too much sense. They won't sell Bacardi because it's a cocktail containing hard liquor. Never mind that it has the same alcohol content as beer. Never mind that they would almost undoubtedly have sold me the hard cider. But if I had wanted, say, 4 cases of Miller, hey, no problem. Who thinks these things up?
In unrelated weird-law news, today I saw the strangest ordinance ever. I can't decide which is weirder—the fact that a city would adopt an ordinance in 1982 that requires heads of households to own guns, or the fact that it contains an exemption for, among other things, people "who conscientiously oppose maintaining firearms as a result of beliefs or religious doctrine." I can just see everyone sitting around drafting ordinance, when someone says, "What we really need is to make everyone own a gun!" "But wait," says another guy, "What if people don't want to own guns?" "Good point," says the first guy, "Lets make the law say that everyone has to own a gun, but only if they want to."
And apparently, nobody thought that was a stupid idea.
Category: Society
Suddenly, the appeal of cell-phones with embedded digital cameras is much clearer to me. There are moments in your life when you would never expect to need a camera, but you'd suddenly do almost anything to have one: Today I was running errands, and the car next to me had a dog leaning out the window. Wearing goggles.
I'd love to know why someone thought to put goggles on a dog, or why the dog didn't seem to mind. But most of all, I'd love to have had a camera
Category: Random
Apparently, people can listen to, understand, and retain audio at double or triple speed—or higher! Doing some quick math: 4 years of classes with 30 weeks or so per year at 16+ hours per week gives me close to 2000 hours of classes. Let's be very generous, and say that 1/3 of those hours involved useful interaction that couldn't have been sped up. That still leaves me with 700-1000 hours at least that I spent listening to pointless empty space and long vowel sounds (some professors ...uuuuuuuuhhhhhhhh... could ...uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhh... be ...uuuuhhhhhh... shortened even ...uhhh... more. Much, much more). We won't even go into the hours that were 100% content free, and could thus be compressed infinitely without loss of information.
Now, even assuming it took me over five hours per page to write my thesis, I could have been done one or two times over with all that lost time. So now I won't have to feel bad about not having finished my thesis. I would have been done, but I had to listen to vowels instead.
Category: School
If someone sets up a lab computer to allow input in Japanese, Korean, and 5 (5!) different types of Chinese, is it too much to ask that they include Dvorak as an option?
Category: Geek
On a happier dance note, it's very good to be dancing again. It's nice to do something that's physically demanding (especially as my job makes me more sedentary than ever before), and to be working on something that involves more than my brain and typing. And of course, it's good quality time with a certain special someone.
And as an added bonus, I can stay fit between my weekly lessons with a completely different type of dance: DDR is up and running! (After many adapter-related headaches; the short version is LevelSix good, RedOctane bad.)
So, after a year of near-groovelessness, I'm once again a dancing machine.
Category: Life
I love dancing. I love actually doing it, and, as a general rule, I love watching it. But what I absolutely can't stand is watching people dance when they have no apparent interest in dancing. I'm not talking about the guy whose girlfriend dragged him to a dance lesson; I'm talking about people who dance competitively or in performances, but look bored... or worse, totally emotionless. Why are you there? Why are you forcing innocent people to watch you "dance"? We have even less interest in watching you than you appear to have in dancing, if such a thing is possible. This is why I've disliked every Argentine Tango demonstration I've seen. All the people I've seen seem to think that it's good to look bored and/or asleep while dancing it.
So for everyone's sake, learn to enjoy dancing—if you can't bear dance, we can't bear to watch. If that's too much to ask, then for crying out load, at least plaster a semi-realistic expression of some kind on your face. If you can learn complicated step, surely you can at least try to have an attitude of some kind.
And no, swishing your skirt (ladies) or wearing a loud shirt (gentlemen), does not magically give you attitude. The shirt just makes you look stupid.
Category: A & E
Overheard outside of the "English for Engineers" class, while people were waiting for it to start, presumably discussing the about-to-be-turned-in draft of a group paper: "I just made a few semantic changes, to make the sentences flow better"" Apparently, altering the fundamental meaning of sentences is fine, so long as you sound good when you are done.
'Semantic' is right up there with 'ironic' as one of the most poorly used words in the English language. It's really much worse though, because while ironic has only expanded to include a lot more than it originally meant, semantic is used almost exclusively as the exact opposite of its actual meaning—in fact, if people knew they were doing it, they would be being ironic (but that in itself is not ironic, it's just kind of funny).
Of course, it's almost certainly the fault of the phrase "arguing semantics", which is a phrase that almost no-one who uses it actually understands. Being curious about language, I often wonder how thing like that happen. All I can think is that it was used to dismiss people who were trying to twist things by claiming that some word or another didn't really stand for its obvious meaning. So, if I say "I like blue better than red", and you say, "Yes, but what do you mean by blue? Do you prefer the shorter wavelength of the light? Do you like things that absorb blue light better, or things that reflect blue light?" then you are just arguing semantics; you are arguing about the meaning of the word blue, when you know full well that all I'm saying is that, given the choice between a blue shirt and a red shirt, I'll take the blue one.
But of course, people just hear it used dismissively, so they infer that it means arguing about things that aren't important, and then assume that semantics are the piddly details that don't matter. And so, as a result, many people think that syntax and semantics are the same thing, instead of fundamental opposites.
But, since it is used incorrectly so often, the issue of how it should be used is, in the end, a moot point
Category: Language
Watching my referrer logs, I feel sort of guilty about blogging, or at least about having my blog indexed by search engines. Except for the handful of you who read regularly (props to you all), the people who end up here are usually doing searches for stuff that has nothing to do with anything I've ever written about. At first I didn't understand why they were showing up, as they were often quite elaborate queries which, in a world that made sense, would never have led them to my blog.
After some investigating I discovered that it's really the fact that weblogs (or at least how they are presented on web pages) are in many ways totally alien to how many people (including me) expect content to be. For example, if I do a search for the words "tree", "explore", "discrete", and "artificial intelligence", I would expect to get pages that relate somewhat to my research. Why? Because I expect pages of content to be somewhat consistent, since that's the way most content works in the Real World™ of web pages. So I assume that if someone manages to use all those words, there's a high probability that they are talking about applying research in tree-based discrete-space exploration to artificial intelligence problems.
In reality, I am relatively likely to get an archive of a month's worth of weblog entries on some random person's site, including a narrative about a hike through a new section of woods in their favorite park, a rant about how much they hated the movie "AI", and a story about telling an embarrassing secret to someone who turned out not to be trustworthy.
I think the ultimate solution would be to have an HTML division marker that was recognized by most search engines (by which I mean Google) as signaling a fundamental shift in content. Weblogs, and weblog archives, could insert it between each post, and the search engine could index each section as if it were a separate page (just one which happens to share a URL with other pages), so all the words would have to occur within one post in order for the page to be returned. It would help immensely, and it would be instantly adopted by many if the major blogging services and software turned it on by default.
Hopefully, GoogleBot is still reading avidly and it can incorporate my ideas into its programming. Until then, I'll watch people hitting my archive based on totally random queries.
If you are here because you wanted info on 'searching for alien intelligence in space', you've come to the wrong place. Next time, read the context preview Google gives you!
Category: Geek
Wow.
Category: A & E
I've now reached (through the time-honored method of skipping ahead) 3-D scene rendering in OpenGL. The coolest think I've discovered so far is that by simultaneously showing 2 slightly different views of the same scene side-by-side, and allowing the camera to pan and zoom, I can make my own, fully interactive, stereo-grams. How cool is that?
Note: if you do this too much, or aren't careful with the camera locations, this also doubles as a good way to give yourself a headache.
Category: Geek
I picked up a book on OpenGL, just for kicks, and it's incredibly cool. The basics (all I've learned so far) are unbelievably easy, and still a lot of fun to play around with. It's a real shame that Case doesn't have a decent (ok, any) undergraduate graphics course: not only would it be quite interesting, since it would move us out of the text-only realm, but it would have been really useful any number of times in my undergraduate career.
Category: Geek
So I'm sitting at work yesterday at about 4:15 when the power suddenly goes out. Clearly, a sign that it's time to go home early--only there's no power there either. I figured it was a large transformer somewhere, and decided to go run some errands a good distance away, where surely they wouldn't be affected. Luckily, I turned on the radio before going far, and heard them say something about a cop directing traffic at 12th and something. "Wow, all the way downtown! This must be a really big blackout," I think, and look for a good spot to turn around and head home. Then I hear, "And that's so-and-so reporting to us live from Detroit." Oh.
Happily, things are more or less getting back to normal here. Some industrious workers get a huge thanks from me, as we got out power back at about 7 this morning. Power in the Cleveland area is still spotty, so we are very fortunate (at least for now; there's word that some areas may lose power again while repairs are made). The only lingering issue for us is that our water is probably bad, but that's nothing that some boiling can't fix.
Things I'm thankful for:
All in all, considering how power-dependent we all are, things went very smoothly for us.
Category: Life
Google really does know everything. Their calculator function is extremely cool, but this is the icing on the cake.
Category: Geek
My blog is currently the number 2 Google result for the search phrase "stress-induced coma". How cool is that?
Category: Random
This could be your last chance to email me: my email address will be expiring. The notice came this morning from admin@po.cwru.edu, so I know it must be valid, especially since I got it five times in a half hour. Repeat sendings and garbage text at the end of the subject (to make sure the vital message isn't inadvertently marked as spam) are how I identify all my legitimate messages. And if there were, somehow, any doubt remaining, all I would have to do is look at the location of the important information: in an attached zip file. I know I always send my text messages in attached zip files. Who doesn't?
Seriously, how hard is it to learn not to open an attachment unless it is very obviously from someone you know (translation: not someone who you've known for years suddenly emailing you in weird, broken English)? And if you can't understand that, then chances are very high that you didn't set up your own computer, in which case the person who did should be beaten about the head for not setting some basic security settings in your email client.
So to my computer-configuring techie bretheren, I say: what the hell is wrong with you? Why are you condemning your less-knowledgable friends and relatives to suffer the agonies of email worms? If nothing else, protect them to save yourself from having to clean up their hosed computers!
Category: Geek
I've been reading Linked, a book about the advances in modeling and understanding the nature and behavior of networks since, the beginnings of graph theory. While it's non-technical, and therefore slightly superficial, it covers some fascinating material. Although some of his conclusions seem at first trivially obvious (like, people link preferrentially to good websites), he goes on to explore the ramifications, the methods of remarkably simple modeling, and (by far the most interesting) the parallels with systems where it's far less obvious. Who knew that cells behave like food chains behave like the internet? That Microsoft is a Bose-Einstein condensate? That there's a mathematical proof that, the internet being structured as it is, stupid people will continue to send me year-old viruses? Not me, but it's amazing how simple it all sounds when you hear it. Just another example of how cool the world is.
Category: Geek
The good news is, my DDR pad and adapter have arrived. So in theory I should be a happy, healthier, dancing machine. The bad news is, it doesn't work. So now I'm in limbo waiting to see if they fix it with drivers (which is worthless to me, as I have no drivers) or ship new ones. In the meantime, all I can do is stare forlornly at the dance mat sitting, totally useless, next to me.
It's a cruel world.
Category: Geek
This is the biggest piece of government stupidity since... Well, since not nearly as long ago as it should have been since something this unbelieveable. Looks like another winner from DARPA.
Category: Society
I have just recently discovered the coolness that is StepMania, a DDR simulator that has been ported to OS X. Now that I don't have to deal with the added expense of buying a playstation just for one game, the price is much more justifyable: my pad and PS -> USB converter are on their way.
Now I won't suck as badly at the next ACM party.
Category: Geek
Today is a very good day: a joint paper that my Master's advisor submitted with myself and another grad student was accepted to this December's CDC '03. And since my advisor thinks it would be a good experience for me to present a paper at a conference, I get to go. And, since presenting research results is covered by our grant, all the big expenses will be paid.
So, to recap: In exchange for presenting a 6 page paper to a room full of people who are smarter than I am, I get a 5-day all expense paid vacation in the middle of the winter.
Oh, and did I mention that the conference is being held in Hawaii?
Category: School
Some days, I don't think I should be allowed to be a programmer. I just spent an hour debugging weird memory errors, before I finally realized that it was because I forgot that destructors of inherited classes cascade. So, like a total n00b, I duplicated all of my base-class memory cleanup in my child class. Which, surprise surprise, gave me deallocation issues. So here I am just finished with my BS in computer science, and I'm already failing Object-Oriented Programming 101. Case would have to be crazy to give me a masters for this!
One thing is clear: programming a C# web application is NOT the way to keep my real programming skills sharp. Maybe I should take up programming crypto algorithms for fun too, before I atrophy completely.
Category: Geek
I've finished Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and one the thing that caught my attention the most was the editing out of British-isms... or rather, the almost total lack thereof. This book was significantly less Americanized than the last four, and although I was mostly able to figure things out by context, there were times I had no idea what someone was saying.
At first, I assumed that this was hasty editing, in an attempt to get it out the door and into the hands of the impatient masses as soon as possible. The more I think about it, though, the more convinced I am that it's a sinister plot. Think about it... the Brits have a totally unprecedented chance to get vast amounts of British slang into American usage, even more so than at the height of Beetle-mania, since many readers are impressionable children, and the books are way more language-intensive than song lyrics. So they're leaving as much British English as possible in the books, well aware that every word will be branded into the memories of the millions of Harry/Ron/Hermione wannabes. Finally they have a chance to fight back against our perversion of English, and they are seizing it. It's brilliant. It's insidious.
I suppose I should be outraged... but frankly, I'm not all that fussed.
Category: A & E
I finally have Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I'll be returning to the world of the living in a few days.
Category: A & E
In the shade, with a stiff breeze, it's ok outside. Sadly, there's little shade, and even less breeze.
Ah, Cleveland, with its hot humid summers and cold dry winters. Give me the moderate temperatures of my homeland (incessant rain and all) any day.
Category: Random
I saw this headline on Google news, and found it somewhat disturbing: Mice succumb to HIV at last. From the article:
"Mouse cells are naturally resistant to HIV in many ways. Some of these barriers have been overcome by adding human genes to mouse cells."
Um... hooray for us, because we've genetically engineered mice so that they can contract a deadly disease that they would otherwise be immune to? And next on their list is figuring out ways to make the HIV virus spread even more quickly in the mice, so they can get sicker faster.
I understand the research significance, but still. It seems a bizarre thing to celebrate.
Category: Society
In an attempt to get more fresh air and exercise Laura and I are taking up tennis, and today we played for the first time. By "played", I of course mean that we made attempts to hit the ball, ideally toward the other person, and over the net. It was comical, but a lot of fun, and we seemed to be getting the hang of things by the end.
I expect that we'll be playing for money any day now.
Category: Life
It's a good day to die if you are a telemarketer, that is: the National Do Not Call Registry is now open. Ok, it would be open if it weren't for the fact that it's such a fantastic thing that it was "slashdotted" before it was even posted to Slashdot. The new FTC Telemarketing Sales Rules has some other nice features as well; I sure won't miss all of the dead calls we get.
Despite all the bitching from the telemarketing industry, I am convinced that this is a bright day for humanity. I only wish we could get a similar law for spam, and a way of enforcing it.
Category: Society
So Apple's WWDC was yesterday, and I finally watched the Keynote live (via satellite) for the first time. It was fun to see, and there was some really exciting new stuff announced. Besides the obvious drooling over the G5 (although I'm not so sure I like the new case at all) I have a couple reactions.
First: Exposé. This feature is, in every way, insanely great. The video makes it look a little weird and jarring, but watching the Keynote demo, it looked like the most natural thing you could imagine. All I could think when I saw it was, "Wow. That's exactly how it should be. How could I ever have had to dig through windows for the one I want?" This is the sort of simple, powerful, and useful interface innovation than makes me love Apple.
Second: Safari 1.0. I want to love this browser, I really do. It's fast, it's sleek, it's elegant, it's tab implementation is very nice (even if they are upside down)... it's almost everything I want in a browsers. I like Camino quite a bit, but recently it's been flakey for me, and the development on it seems to have slowed down significantly, so I'd like another browser, at least for the moment, and I'd like Safari to be that browser. But. I just can't accept Safari's poor cookie management. Inexplicably, there is no option to prompt for new cookies, and thus allow or deny them on a site-by-site basis. Since every browser I can think of has this, I can only think of two explanations: They haven't had time to implement it yet, or they have decided that it's not a worthwhile feature. I sincerely hope it's the former, because as much as I like Safari, cookie control is a deal-breaker for me.
Category: Geek
Laura and I have started teaching ourselves German, her for eventual grad-school requirements, and me because I enjoy languages. We've been having great fun with one of those cartoon-style audio courses, to soften us up for real grammar and vocab study later.
In the process, I've discovered that in the course of all of my French studies, the "foreign language" section of my brain has become very tightly linked with the "French" section of my brain. The humorous result of which is that when I don't speak German with a bad American accent, I speak it with a sort of a French accent. And even better, I occasionally toss in whole French words on accident.
I'm glad I'm not trying this in a real class, where I'd feel like much more of an idiot.
Category: Life
I've just finished reading Dan Simmons' Hyperion series, and enjoyed it very much. He is good at imagining and describing both bizarre alien races and cultures, and believable social evolution of humanity in a variety of situations. I was also impressed by his ability to weave large plot-arcs, revealed piecemiel, without the story being hard to follow. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good science fiction series.
My one complaint is the end of the series. I found several of the "mysteries" revealed at the very end of the last book to have been painfully obvious (the Observer and the father, for those that have already read it). As I'm not exactly known for my ability to see ends of books/movies coming, it's a pretty good bet that if I thought it was obvious, the hero should have had a clue. So I found the last half of the last book slightly grating, since every time the hero struggles with emotional issues surrounding the mysteries, I had to roll my eyes and say, "Yes yes, poor Raul still hasn't figured it out." I'm not sure if Simmons intended it that way, so that the reader can feel clever, or if it was supposed to be a mystery to all. Either way, my patience with thick-headed heroes is limited, so that frustrated me.
But overall, the real substance of the plot and the ending were open and interesting enough that the above was only a minor annoyance in an otherwise great read, and in no way spoiled my enjoyment of the series.
Category: A & E
I've recently learned that Googlebot has been busily crawling my blog (thanks to zeuropa, no doubt). And yet curiously, my blog doesn't appear anywhere on Google. I have no idea why it's refrained from adding me to the searchable index, and of course they are very closed-mouthed about why crawled sites aren't indexed... maybe it's a conspiracy, and They suspect that I know too much.
But the more curious question is, why, if I'm not cool enough to be indexed, does the Googlebot keep coming back? Clearly, Googlebot has become sentient and, for whatever reason, enjoys reading my blog.
Of course, now it (and of course They) will know that I'm on to the secret. If Google calls, you haven't seen me.
Category: Geek
My sidebar is actually starting to look like a real blog sidebar! Maybe a link to some photos next; I haven't decided. How much junk can I manage to squeeze into that tiny space?
Category: Geek
After a lot of frustrating attempts at debugging my Blosxom installation, to figure out why plugins weren't working right, I finally discovered the problem: I'm stupid. When I started using dynamic blog page creation, I made a new copy of the script in my web/cgi-bin directory. But I made all my debugging changes to the old version, in the static directory. Surprise surprise, it never made any difference when I made changes.
But now I really am running the latest version (instead of just having an inert copy of the latest version to confuse myself), and all is well. Even more exciting, I spent a couple of hours with trial and error, and Programming Perl, and I managed to hack a plugin to deal with non-existent urls for writeback posters intelligently, so people's names won't be links to nowhere if they leave info blank. To progress! (however slow and painful)
Category: Geek
When I started doing CSS web development, I thought that IE was the enemy. I'd make a site that looked fine, but WinIE would mangle it. I cursed, I railed, but I began to learn the workarounds. The voice-family hack, and the child-selector override. And in a strange way, I owe IE thanks for making me learn more about CSS than I otherwise might have.
But now I have seen the enemy, and it is Netscape 4.x. When I'm making a personal site, with relatively simple layout, I ignore it. Who cares? I do clean design, so those who want to use NN4 can turn off style sheets and get the content. If they think it's ugly, too bad; it's their decision to use a stone-age browser.
Sadly, that mentality doesn't get me very far when I'm making a commercial "web application" that has to render readably in old browsers, because I don't have the luxury of writing off that segment of the population.
So on behalf of myself and all the other people out there in my position, who really hate supporting (at least partially) NN4 but have no choice, I submit a request to the virus writers of the world: make yourselves useful! Surely it can't be that hard to write a virus/worm that will search for NN4 on an infected machine, delete it, and automatically install Netscape 7, or Firebird (that's "Mozilla Firebird, the web browser formerly known as Phoenix" to all (three) of you FirebirdDB zealots), or IE6, or just about anything made in the last few years. And to be nice, be sure to import their bookmarks, to make the transition smoother.
Sure, it'll cause problems, and people will be upset and complain, but as someone who will encounter none of those problems, but who will reap the benefits of ridding the internet of a big chunk of cruft, I am willing to pay that price.
Category: Geek
In the middle of the afternoon, access services decided that I am no longer a person. Why? Because it's apparently too much trouble for the powers that be to check against graduate school records when they make the axe list to give to access services. So despite the fact that I'm still a student at the university, receiving a degree doomed me to wander, adrift, from locked room to locked room.
I guess this gives me incentive to finish my fall registration (since of course I need a schedule to get a valid card again), and begin the exciting process of re-requesting specific room and building accesses.
Here's to bureaucracy!
Category: School
According to Fannie Farmer, when whipping cream you must "be careful to whip just until soft peaks form: cream that is beaten too long will begin to turn to butter, often quite suddenly."
If only I had thought to consult it before I had a bowl full of butter.
Category: Random
The tradition of freezing some of your wedding cake to eat on your first anniversary is highly overrated. Unless you enjoy eating cardboard, I guess.
On the other hand, it's impossible to say enough good things about spending your whole anniversary realizing that you are at least as happy as the day you were married.
Category: Life
I was going to set up a Google news scraper for my personal start page, so that I can get just the headlines, and just the topics that interest me (the sports section is a waste of screen space for me). I ran into a strange 403 Forbidden accessing it from python, though; it turns out that Google blocks access by User-Agent, to discourage exactly what I was trying.
It took about 30 seconds to find code to set the User-Agent in python's urllib class... Ironically, I found it using Google itself. However, after reading about how Google bans IPs that are caught doing any kind of automated queries, I'm afraid to use my workaround. Assuming they are using some sort of semi-decent AI to look for automation, regenerating my start page every hour of every day is likely to be noticed, and I would be lynched if Google banned CWRU. So I guess that will have to wait until I have a server where I can build the pages dynamically on request, instead of at set intervals. It's irritating, since this is definitely 'fair-use', since it's entirely for my own use, but I guess I understand the need for something like this.
The scary thing is, it seems like there is tremendous capacity for abuse in this draconian enforcement. What's to stop me from picking a victim IP address or domain, and sending tons of automated queries with a spoofed IP address? Bam, instant Google ban, quite possibly for the whole domain. In addition to random acts of evil, this could have really nasty corporate sabotage implications:
I'm beginning to understand why some people fear Google's power.
Category: Geek
I've recently been getting the feeling of drifting away from all my old friends. It's hard to know how much is the distance, and how much the changes in our lives. It's depressing to realize how little I know about the last few years of many people's lives. Which makes it harder to talk, since there isn't that same common base of experiences/knowledge that I always took for granted when I still lived in the same town as all of my friends.
The real problem, I think, is that even with all of the advances in ease of communication that the internet has brought to us, I still haven't found a good virtual analog to hanging out.
As one of my now-departed college friends so insightfully pointed out: even if we could play Apples to Apples online, we'd still need virtual M&Ms.
Category: Life
So one of our phone jacks stopped working recently, and I messed with it for a while looking for the problem. Once I had narrowed it down to the box where it stopped working, and tried the old engineer's trick of taking it apart and putting it back together (to no avail), I was resigned to re-running the line to it. But since that would have been a big pain, I wanted to make sure it was really the wire, since it still looked fine.
And so, drawing on the resources and skills gained from a childhood of tinkering with simple circuits, I built a simple circuit tester from a battery and an LED scavenged from a dead cordless phone that I didn't have any use for but couldn't quite bring myself to get rid of (because you never know when you'll need some parts).
So I was quickly able to ascertain that the line from the last working box did work, and instead focus on the box itself (which I had mistakenly believed was not the problem once I'd unscrewed all the connectors and reattached them). A few minutes later, using only my pocket knife, I had repaired it, and all was well again. All that without ever taking circuits!
Maybe I should talk to the university about getting an honorary EE degree at the next commencement ;)
Category: Geek
Graduation came off with only minor hitches, and I'm now the proud owner of a Bachelor's of Science. It's funny, because for years that's all I wanted: get my diploma, get out, get a job. But in the last year or so my views have changed so much, so that now I'm in the midst of a Master's thesis, glad not to be leaving campus yet, and considering for the first time the idea of going right into a PhD program instead of the work force.
It took me all of high school, and most of college, but I've finally learned something truly useful and important. I've learned to stop thinking about education in terms of the light at the end of the tunnel. I finally shone my flashlight around a little, and found that the tunnel has quite a lot to offer. I'm not so sure anymore that I want to leave it at all.
Category: School
I'm now a better geek than I was yesterday. I've started reading Secrets & Lies, and it finally made me feel guilty enough to overcome my innate laziness enough to mess with ipfw. Granted, I used Google and don't fully understand the ipfw config script I'm now using, but I do have a better firewall than the one built in to OS 10.2. And more importantly, I understand a lot of it, and how it's actually invoked and built. As a fun bonus, now I log denied requests, so I can see anyone crazy enough to try to attack a machine with a dial-in IP that lasts at most an hour.
But most important of all, I won't feel like such a weenie when people talk about their firewalls. And I'll be safe from... uh... all those OS X exploits you hear abo-
Well that's cool. As I write this, another CWRU dial-up user scanned me for Windows file shares (port 137). Not exactly earth-shattering, but I feel that much more aware of what the heck is going on around me.
Category: Geek
It's neat how two cool natural phenomena can occasionally combine to become even cooler. Today, while walking home from work, a thunder storm had rolled in enough to cover all of the sky overhead, but not enough to block the western horizon. So all the buildings around me were lit up a bright orange-red by the setting sun, against a backdrop of steel clouds lit by continuous flashes of lightning. Quite the view.
On a related note, I'm intrigued by the fact that I can see lightning that looks like it's above and all around me, but not hear thunder until several seconds later, as if it's far off.
What can I say... I'm a sucker for thunder storms.
Category: Random
Whoever is responsible for making ad-ware that installs itself by pretending to be something else, has no automatic uninstall, and thwarts attempts at manual uninstall by hiding in invisible folders or by giving itself a random name and squeezing in with similarly named files that are necessary for your system to run, and which continuously bombards you with crap while at the same time downloading and installing more ad-ware without asking, should be be hung up by their thumbs until they repent their sins. I have a degree in computer science, access to good online resources for dealing with scumware, and it still took me three hours to (maybe) clean one computer.
Grad students who install this stuff on semi-public computers are right up there on my thumb-hanging list.
Category: Geek
O is a good example of "dark" done right. It stands to reason that Daredevil wouldn't have sucked if:
Ok, so that last one might not have helped the film much... but on the other hand, more movies with Julia Stiles can only be an improvement.
Category: A & E
At this moment, I can think of no crueler ordeal for good people than to have the whole future of another person given into their hands, with the imperative to Decide.
Who are any of us to set the whole course of another person's life in a single moment? What is an hour's deliberation, even a day's deliberation, in the attempt to understand any person?
Category: Society
I am totally, 100% done with classes at CWRU (except thesis, but that's not really a class). So now I have a year to hang around campus while working, being one of those irritating people who has no homework, no finals, and no evil professors.
I plan to enjoy it immensely.
Category: School
Thunder is a totally different beast out here than it was at home. In Oregon, thunder is a low rumbling. A big thunder storm means the rumbling is louder. Here, thunder sounds like angry gods warming up by snapping huge trees in half, then moving on to breaking handfuls of trees at a time, then doing more of the same, but with a microphone and an amp set to 11.
The idea of thunder as the sounds made by gods makes a whole lot more sense to me now than it did in Oregon.
Category: Random
I realized today while I was driving down Cedar, with the towers directly ahead off in the distance, that even after 4 years here I still haven't experienced the big-city part of Cleveland except for occasionally driving through/past. I don't really think anything of it when I see the towers, even though I grew up in a city with no skyline.
The question is, am I blasé because of TV/movies, which shove skylines at us whenever possible, or am a still a country bumpkin who doesn't really believe in the big buildings except as painted scenery?
I think it's the second; big land features impress me, but I don't think anything when I see a big building. I think the scale of really tall buildings is one of those things that hasn't actually sunk in yet.
Category: Random
I was caught unprepared at campus by a stealth thunderstorm this evening, and was completely drenched at the end of my 15 minute walk home. It was warm out, though, and it wasn't exactly pouring, so it was actually quite nice.
I guess there's something about walking through the rain and arriving home soaked that makes me think fondly of Oregon.
Category: Life
Not only is it warm and sunny, and the last day of class, but I finally have a job for the summer and next year! Not just a job, but a job that I think I will enjoy.
It's good to finally not be in limbo about the next year of my life.
Category: Life
The only good thing I can say about Daredevil is that it made Two Towers seem a whole lot better. I went in knowing that the reviews were bad, but I was totally unprepared for the level of garbage I was exposed to.
I'm pretty sure that they were going for "dark", but all they accomplished was "insanely violent". And while it wasn't really gory, it was very graphic. Basically, the script writers didn't seem to realize that in order for a story to be dark, it has to be both disturbing and (at least somewhat) powerful. All they managed to pull off was unpleasant.
They were far too enamored with fight scenes (I'd conservatively estimate that two thirds of the movie was fighting) and bad CGI. That unfortunately left almost no time for other things like, say, character development. I think that Ben Afleck tried to convey the whole tortured soul thing that is vital to it being a good story. Unfortunately, except for a scene where he trashes his apartment, he didn't really have much chance.
They did save time for trite one-line "insights" into his soul: "I set out to save the city, but with Electra's help, I saved myself." And that's their idea of character development? And no, putting him on the edge of a building looking out over the city each time he delivers one of these gems does not offset the fact that there was no build up and magically make it a good line.
Oh, and for crying out loud don't use CGI, badly, for no reason. If you want to drop a rose onto the ground in slow motion just do it. It's hard to be moved by the symbolism when all I can think is "Wow that rose looks fake as it bounces off the concrete without deforming."
Category: A & E
This line, from Noises Off..., speaks for itself: "Nothing could prepare us for the horror of Cleveland."
Category: Random
I finally saw Two Towers last weekend, and one question has been really bothering me since then: Why was there no rioting? Why didn't a torch-and-pitchfork-carrying mob descend on the studio, and wreak havoc?
As near as I can tell, the people in charge of the move sat around one day, and one said, "So are we going to mostly stick to the story, like we did for the first movie, thus ensuring that we'll have a good movie?" To which, someone responded, "Heck no! That's been done, so we can't just do it again! What a stupid idea!" The first guy slapped his forehead and said, "You're right; silly me! Lets give the story to amateurs and have them rewrite it to be nothing like the original story instead." Everyone agreed that that would be best, and so they did.
So then the script-writers got together and brainstormed, and came up with all of the following ideas:
When, at the end of their brainstorming, they sat down and read their list of changes, they couldn't decide which ones to cut. So they said, "What the heck, we'll just use all of them." Frankly, Dave Barry's version of the script would have been far better.
At least, as Laura pointed out, the movie wasn't a total waste. It was an excellent tourism advertisement for New Zealand.
Category: A & E
That's right, you don't have to be a teacher at one of those high-brow institutions to cause stress and anguish! You too can anger your students with this simple, fool-proof recipe:
Now there's nothing left to do but sit back and enjoy the suffering. As an added bonus, tell your TA to grade all of them in 48 hours, and relish the horror of his realization that he could to give up sleep, research, and all of his classes, and he still probably wouldn't get it done, but that you'll blame him if the class wonders where their homeworks are while studying for the final (once they wake up from their stress-induced coma).
Category: School
So I've suddenly started saying "in the before time" an inordinate amount. I'm trying to figure out where I picked it up, and except for being almost positive that it's nothing recent, and a vague idea that it features in some popular sci-fi book or movie, I haven't a clue. Google isn't really any help.
Plausible theories, anyone?
Category: Random
It's pretty amazing how much there is to learn from other students; it's way beyond most of my formal education.
Today, I learned more about 3-D rendering of first-person games than I had ever even thought to wonder, all from a 45 minute conversation with another student. It seemed wildly more interesting and practical than so much of what I learn in classes, that it makes me wonder if the CS department should, instead of having so many classes, have a few classes and a ton of little student-run workshops. It would be like the ACM talks, but all the time. To graduate, you'd have to both attend a certain (large) number of workshops and demonstrate your understanding (with little projects or bigger projects tying multiple concepts together), and also teach some number of workshops. It would be a choose-your-own-adventure major.
Sure, it would stand a snowball's chance in hell of being accredited, but it would make the experience so much richer for those of us who actually want to learn. Granted, we can do that some now (like I did today), but we'd have so much more time for it in my system. I know it would not be for everyone, but with a large group of interested people, I think it would be fantastic.
Category: School
Switching to the Solaris machines as my primary lab machines was a mistake, I think. Sure, I don't have to use Windows at all anymore, and all I was doing from them was ssh-ing to the Solaris machines anyways. But I got to use a real keyboard on the Windows machines, ones that weren't designed to be a pain.
All evening, I've been hitting \ instead of [delete] on my computer, all because some goon had to go and move the ~ key on those keyboards.
When I find that person, I will rearrange a few random keys on his keyboard, and see how he likes it.
Category: Geek
In any semi-stable group of peers, there is almost inevitably someone who needs to be argumentative in meetings. So the question is, are argumentative people attracted to stable, friendly groups, or does the nature of a non-antagonistic group transform one of its members into a spiteful person?
Category: Society
Whenever I'm walking alone and I see someone approaching on a relatively clear sidewalk, and I know them well enough to say hi but not more than that, there are always a few awkward seconds. I don't want to make eye contact right away, because I'm still too far away to say hello, but that leaves me trying to avoid eye contact until I'm closer, without looking like I'm avoiding eye contact. Even worse is when they happen to see me at the same time I see them, and make eye contact, because then I have to pretend we didn't make eye contact while avoiding eye contact.
I hate that.
Category: Random
There are times that I'm really, really glad I didn't leave just a few minutes later. Getting inside very shortly before a sudden torrential downpour mixed with pea-sized hail is very high on my list of such times.
Category: Random
What qualifies something as a "sense"?
I'm not going to be so weird and philosophical as last time, don't worry. I was just thinking about picking up on emotions, the way it feels, and the language we use to describe it. Sure, we pick up on little clues through all of our normal senses that let us know how people are feeling, but that's not how we really think about it. When someone is really happy, or really angry, we say that it's palpable. We say tension is so thick you could cut it with a knife. When it's spring, we say love is in the air. We don't actually think, "Certain ways they are speaking and acting and looking tell me that they are angry/happy/whatever, so now I know that." We "feel" it at an unconscious level
So no matter how we may get the clues that give us perceptions of people's emotions, we have this whole system in our brains that automatically interprets that information, and feeds it into our conscious through a channel that's totally separate from our other senses. So to some extent, I think it's fair to call it another sense. And I, for one, think that's pretty cool.
Category: Random
Simon, the benevolent god of Vorlon, tweaked some Apache config files for me, the upshot of which is that this is now building the blog pages on the fly, but the url is still clean and shiny. Thanks Simon!
So now... at long last... the moment you've all been waiting for...... *drumroll*....... Comments!
*chirp*chirp*chirp*
Ok, so maybe this would be cooler if I told all my friends about my blog, so there were people actually reading it.
Category: Geek
Despite the fact that it's in the 30's (and was in the 70's a few days ago), it's actually a beautiful day. Blue sky overhead, the falling snowflakes glittering in the bright sunshine...
It took me most of my walk to campus to realize how strange that is.
Category: Random
So it turns out that vorlon does allow CGI scripts, but it doesn't appear to support any means of redirecting URLs to them. So on one hand, I could set up a dynamic blog which would allow comments, and that would be cool. But on the other hand, my blog would be at vorlon.cwru.edu/~sbm5/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi, and that's much less friendly.
So for the time being: no comments. But hopefully I'll come up with a clever solution.
Category: Geek
Ok, not so much my life as the sidebar of this blog. Now thanks to the Calendar plugin for Blosxom (which is very cool, and easy to use), it has a calendar just like you'd see on one of those high-powered, fancy-shmancy blogs.
Now if I get some links and stuff, I'll be all set.
Category: Geek
I don't understand why movies (and TV shows) seem to enjoy setting up situations so wildly inconsistent that no matter how hard you try to suspend disbelief, the script just keeps beating you over the head with incongruities.
Intangible people are one of my pet peeves, because it shouldn't be that hard to do them right, but they so often suck, badly. Usually intangible people physics is as follows:
As a side note, 2 leads to the interesting question: could you trap someone by putting them in a really big bowl, with sides that gradually sloped up to near-vertical? If not, at what angle exactly would they be able to pass through the bowl?
But basically, intangible people only perceive things as solid when it's convenient for the purposes of blocking the scene, which is just a huge cop-out. Sure, there's the argument that it looks like the floor is solid and they are walking on it only because that's how the person is used to thinking of themselves moving. But they aren't used to thinking of themselves walking through walls, and yet they manage that just fine. My favorite scene to illustrate this type of painfully jarring inconsistency: in Ghost, the dead guy makes a running leap through the wall of a subway car, lands hard on the floor of the subway, then takes a minute to regain his balance, being rocked around by the motion of the subway. Huh? A very close second is when he is thrown across a subway car, slides through the (closed) door so that he is between cars, then stops sliding because he hits the door into the next car. Again, what the heck? For the believers of the self-perception theory mentioned above I challenge you to explain how, while sliding backward, he is deciding which doors/walls it makes sense for him to slide through.
I say, if you want ghosts or out-of-phase Star Trek characters or whatever, make a reasonably self-consistent system (like, they float around by thinking) and spring for a few more special effects so you can pull it off. I can suspend disbelief, but I can't suspend my observations about gargantuan inconsistencies in the way the world (even a fantasy world) works any more than those poor babies that researchers made cry by making blocks and puppets disobey the laws of physics.
Category: A & E
It's warm, sunny, and beautiful out. The sort of day that makes me realize that Spring is here, and energizes me.
Sure it's supposed to snow in a few days, but I'm enjoying living in denial for the moment.
Category: Life
I've decided that I need a time compactor, to prevent time fragmentation. It works so well for computer memory, so why don't we apply the same idea to our free time?
What the heck am I talking about, you ask?
I've noticed that more and more, I don't spend my time productively. It's not that I don't do the things I should do (although that's true too); what gets to me is that I don't even do the things I want to do. I've been trying to figure out why, and I think that time fragmentation is (part of) the answer.
By time fragmentation, I basically mean the fact that I almost never want to work on things (work or side projects), because I'll have to do something else in a little while, so I won't have time to get much done. So instead I just wander aimlessly online, or otherwise kill time. If I added all that time up, it would be enough to do all kinds of cool stuff, but instead I waste so much of it. So I need to find a good way of defraging my time—or more accurately, to keep myself from fragmenting it so much. This article is what started me thinking about it, but I think it applies to a lot more than just code (or is it just that so many of my side projects are programming?).
In case you are wondering: no, the irony of blogging about aimlessly killing time online instead of being productive is not lost on me.
Category: Life
Big curves (on tests) are good
But on the other hand, they basically mean that at least one of the following is true:
None of which is a quality that I really look for in a teacher.
Still, given that one of the above is true, I'd much rather take the curve than not.
Category: School
Ever get the urge to google random people you used to know, just to see if you can find out what they are up to these days?
Um... yeah. Me neither.
Category: Life
I've discovered a fantastic way to make my head hurt: trying to think about what vision is. I was pondering the question of whether or not people see the same colors as other people, and then I started to wonder what that question even means. Where and what in my brain is vision (or any other sense) exactly?
I can imagine a neural net hooked up to a wavelength detector, which would allow color identification: neuron x fired, so the sensor is seeing blue. That would be trivial, and presuably that's more or less what my brain does. But that's not what happens from my perspective. I see blue. What the heck does that mean?
This leads to another mind-bender: When a neural net has been trained to, say, approximate a function, how does it perceive the function?
Category: Random
I was suddenly overcome with a strong desire to do some roleplaying today after seeing someone at school messing with a character sheet during class. I would have flipped through my White Wolf books if it hadn't been for the fact that they are all the way across the country.
It was bizarre, since I haven't thought about those games in quite some time, and haven't played in years. It goes beyond just RPGs too; I was reading Angst Technology the other day and there was a comic about Warhammer 40k, and I thought "It sure would be fun to play that again sometime," despite the fact that I really didn't like it when I played. I guess I just miss killing entire days hanging out with everyone back home, being crazy and doing nothing even remotely productive.
Ah, those were the days.
Category: Life
w00t!!
Sorry, Slashdot moment.
Anyways, I've finally decided to give the whole blogging thing a try. I'm not really sure why... I guess I just want a forum to ramble about whatever's on my mind, where I can at least pretend other people are reading. It makes it feel less pointless somehow.
If I keep this up, the blank space on the right will likely become a sidebar with links to other pages, and this will at long last be the homepage I've always vaguely felt like I aught to make.
On the other hand, to paraphrase the Dread Pirate Roberts, I'll most likely kill this in the morning.
Category: Life