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
Writebacks (2)
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
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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
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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
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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
Writebacks (0)
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
Writebacks (0)
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
Writebacks (0)
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
Writebacks (0)
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
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