News You Can Bruise for 1999

Mon Jan 11 1999 12:00: I have Bio with LJ and CS131 with Adam (and lots of other people I only kind of know right now), both pleasant surprises. I also got a very nice new years card from Darren McGraw. Thanks, Darren!

I'm working on the notes for my CGI class. I did my first two real GIMP graphics today, making much use of the screen shot and the copy/paste named buffers. They live here and are slightly too big for a normal-sized screen (gogol's screen is huge).

Exchange of the day (in CS131):

Prof. Izadpanah: You were in my other class, weren't you?

Me: Yeah, I was in your [CS]31.

Prof. Izadpanah: How did you skip ahead?

Me: It was a couple of years ago.

Oh yeah, Andy's not going to be back for a week. I'm going to have to mave all my stuff over to fire, as I just can't deal with this kind of downtime. It was okay last year when all I had was just self-aggrandizing Web pages, but now that I actually use Web tools to do work with, this not having them business has got to stop.

Sat Jan 16 1999 12:00: Has anyone else noticed that there is a lot of cannibalism and pet-eating in this season of A Prairie Home Companion? I'm not complaining, it is funny (yeah!), but there seems to be a big morbid fascination going on. Tonight saw a very funny recap of the pump story in the monologue.

Sun Jan 17 1999 19:42: Like General MacArthur, I'm back from my roadtrip and sampo is back on the air. I direct you to my work-in-progress travelogue, which I hope will amuse you. Go to fire for other new stuff you may have missed (although the old NYCB is down below).

Sun Jan 17 1999 19:44: Doh. I'm gonna need Andy's mighty superuser help to merge the old NYCB into something that a lowly CGI can edit. So for now, her e is the old news.

Sun Jan 24 1999 10:10: My mother sent me a "Bill Gates in hell" schtick. Pretty standard fare, but what got me was Satan pronouncing sentence on Bill Gates:

"You've been selfish, greedy and a big liar all your life."

That cracked my up. I like the imagery of Satan using the phrase "big liar" l ike a second-grader.

"Bobby, you have eaten paste and chalk! You have taken the teacher's name in vain, and you have neglected to feed his hamsterial eminence, Mr. Skitter! For this I condemn you to the pits of brimstone!"

Mon Jan 25 1999 06:37: I updated the travelogue. It now covers up to December 22.

Mon Jan 25 1999 06:38: Brilliant eh?

Tue Jan 26 1999 09:48: I'm rewriting some code at work to make it run faster and not be so stupid, and, alas, in doing so I must take out my beloved funny comment. I will reprint it here, so that it is not forgotten.

Go_To_Health (Old_Row) 'Go to health, old row!

It's the little things that make you happy.

Tue Jan 26 1999 11:42: AH HA HA HA HA!

Wed Jan 27 1999 05:43: Oops, I guess that wasn't so brilliant. The old fire text got mangled near the bottom, making me out to claim that research had backed upclaims that echinidia was the groove. This is not the case. I'll fix it when I move everything over to January.

Thu Jan 28 1999 11:35: It's Platform Independance Day!

Fri Jan 29 1999 14:45:

not sure what kind of message putting "It's bad. It's very bad" on the posters sends out, but ultra-dark Shallow Grave-style accidental murder "comedy" VERY BAD THINGS (MPAA: Rated R for strong, grisly violence) is far more unpleasant than even the presence of Christian Slater and Cameron Diaz would normally alert you to...

--NTK

I did an actual Java applet. It's at my brand new webspace.

Fri Jan 29 1999 15:10: I redid my start page in preparation for the arrival of DailyUpdate. This is gonna be great... (makes TV's Frank running-in place motion)

Sun Jan 31 1999 14:58:

Tomorrow NYCB moves over to fire. The notebook program over there is much better, including (among other things) hashed passwords.

Collect the whole set: Y0K Y1K

Anyone have a Y3K one?

Sun Jan 31 1999 18:24: In what may very well be my very last NYCB entry published on sampo, I point you once again to fire, where my fabulous automatic mail lister can now be seen in the totality of its pagan slendor. It's actually a stopgap lister until I can write a better one (one that, eg. separates tables by month) in Python.

Sun Jan 31 1999 19:07: Okay, NYCB officially lives on fire, until it moves to kuato.

Mon Feb 15 1999 22:24: Oh, did you need that? NYCB got nuked. The good side is that now I have full online editing capability for the notebooks. No more having to put up with bad links and typos and such. I was going to make my students do it, but finally gave in (the corresponding lecture is a week away) and did it myself. Good thing too, actually, as giving it the required generality was tougher than it looked. I had to write a full front-end. I wrote it in Python, just to be contrary. Having mixed feelings about Python. Nothing I do was made easier than the corresponding action in Perl. Not sure how much of that is due to my inexperience. Source forthcoming as soon as I sec check it, generalize status messages, etc. You can see the new interface here.

Memo to myself: Do the dumb things I have to do, think up more enhancements. One: a line containing only a URL will be replaced with a link and a br

Egad! Slashdot adoption of Leonardonics!

I'm writing this paragraph in the editor.

Man, this editing stuff is addictive.

Mon Feb 15 1999 22:31: The next step is to tie this in with the old news. The step after that is to allow any document in my webspace to be edited remotely. I actually don't need that level of control, as I can always telnet in. But an automated news mover would be very nice indeed.

Tue Feb 16 1999 09:29: Well, I just shelled out $67 for a ticket back from San Jose to LAX. Thanks to Stephan Nagey and his gang for offering me a ride up there and saving me from having to spend even more money.

Wed Feb 17 1999 18:31: Whoever was surfing with HP-UX Netscape and got a bad browser greeting, it's fixed now. Marvel as my monstrous CGI recognizes your browser, no matter what it is!

Wed Feb 17 1999 18:32: Easy midterm. Of course, I said that about the LS midterm. But that was an easy midterm, I just did terribly on it. If that makes sense.

Ha ha, I just made a typo in this entry, and submitted it. "Oh darn," I thought. "But wait!", I then thought. "I can edit this now! Now I WILL RULE THE WORLD!!!!"

Wed Feb 17 1999 18:36: In other news, I ordered 2 10.1 gig hard drives. One for me, one for gogol.

Wed Feb 17 1999 18:56: Made the publishing frontend more convenient for me (and for anyone else who uses a .notebookrc) with automatic name insertion. Also fixed the thing where the notebook names were coming out in the wrong order, and learned about tuples in the process.

Wed Feb 17 1999 19:31: I knew there was a security hole in the new notebook scheme, just waiting to be expressed! Waiting to die! Well, it's dead now. You could edit the public notebook without having the system notebook password. That's all changed now. The notebook program isn't here to create disorder. The notebook program is here to preserve disorder.

I'm still not sure if someone could screw with the notebook program by creating malicious HTML interfaces into it. I doubt it, as everything except adding to the public notebook goes through the system password or the user password.

Wed Feb 17 1999 20:19: I updated the travelogue. It now goes up to the 27th.

Thu Feb 18 1999 16:16: News You Can Lose has been ported over to fire. The news page now scans the directory for news files so I don't have to keep updating it. I'm wondering if that should be done as a cron job.

Fri Feb 19 1999 06:53: Whoever was complaining in the public notebook about not being able to see my notebooks, you can still see them. They're just not on the guest menu. To see them you'll have to go to (we present) my menu, which is conveniently the default one.

Sat Feb 20 1999 19:45: I think Garrison Keillor got lucky during one of the musical numbers on A Prairie Home Companion. He was breathing hard and stuttering a lot.

More cannibalism jokes in the monologue.

Sun Feb 21 1999 10:59: Hoo-hah! I sucessfully performed tape surgery and restored the "Carlos/Andy Spoken Word" tape (containing Eat A Pita, both versions of Feedback Feedback Feedback, the Gumby interview, ad nauseum) to a playable state. I gotta make a dub quick, though, as I don't think it will last much longer.

On the subject of tapes, Jake's "Booty Mix" tape has inspired me to do parodies of Soul Coughing songs. So far I have "Is Los Angeles/Is Not Los Angeles" and "Cephalopod Nation". The alternate ending to cephalopods!

Mon Feb 22 1999 20:24: Articles and opinions have been moved from sampo to fire. I am also moving over January's NYCB.. I hope I can find a non-garbled version somewhere.

Mon Feb 22 1999 20:37: OK, January's News is now properly Bruised.

Tue Feb 23 1999 07:52: Am I a lot smarter or does Zippy the Pinhead make a lot more sense than did a few years ago?

Wed Feb 24 1999 19:27: Well, my GNU acronym overflow story is finally getting some Slashdot love.

I still have that note from RMS taped to my wall.

I need to add "I crave x the way I crave tacos" to Leonardonics, to celebrate my first verbal usage of the phrase today ("I crave PHP on kuato the way I crave tacos!").

Fri Feb 26 1999 14:58: I have a really nice view of the Venus-Jupiter conjunction on the way home from the bus.

Sat Feb 27 1999 17:25: Whew! That's over with! Writing three programs in three different languages, two of which I don't particularily like and one of which I've never used before. Now I have the rest of the day to--oh, it's 5:30. Well, time to make Pasta Roni and listen to PHC.

Sat Feb 27 1999 18:04: Woohoo! I'm driving up to San Jose on Tuesday with Mark! I have saved over $100 (some of it in airline credit, but I can use that this summer)! We are to rock and roll, Cleveland.

Sun Feb 28 1999 18:25: OK, The notebook program, MK IV, is now operational. Some things don't work, but the important thing does. And the important thing is that people can have any number of notebooks, and the notebooks are kept in the user's .notebook directory. The only system notebook is the public notebook, and I may make even that on a per-user basis.

Actually the important thing is that I can add to and edit NYCB. My development cycle looks like this (at least for programs that I personally use):

Think of a new feature.
Add the feature to the program, breaking it.
Fix the program without taking out the new feature.
Lather, rinse, repeat.

This works out fine because I have a strong incentive to fix broken programs which I use.

Sun Feb 28 1999 18:27: The other thing I need to do is archiving. Monthly archiving, that is. Swimming pools. Movie stars. People who want other kinds of archiving can add it themselves. Then I need to do an archive editor. It never stops, you see?

Mon Mar 01 1999 14:58: Yay, March. I don't have automatic archiving yet, but I should by next month. The archiver is going to be a separate program, possibly a cron job.

Mon Mar 01 1999 15:13: Oooh, oooh, oooh Mistah Kotter! Now I must do elaborate HTML header/footer programs and make all my files .shtml files so that I can include their magic!

Mon Mar 01 1999 21:22: Today's quote: (I was attempting to give Mark directions to my house and failing because I can't label the streets properly.)

"All this is network level stuff. I operate on the application level."

Thu Mar 04 1999 12:48: Jay Selzberger is my hero.

Thu Mar 04 1999 17:23: BAH/HumBug!

Thu Mar 04 1999 22:10: In flagrant violation of the Law of Travelogues ("Never start a travelogue if you already have pending travelogues"), I present my preliminary my LinuxWorld Expo travelogue, covering my whirlwind tour of LWE and so much more, in a single day.

Fri Mar 05 1999 15:04: My latest innovation is not up yet (I have to make the footer into a CGI), but you can take a look at it.

Fri Mar 05 1999 20:20: Cower before the might of the document tree generator!

Sat Mar 06 1999 16:21: I now have a header script which makes everything right, and can also be used to enforce uniform color schemes and such across the site. As you can see, it has an option to do random colors for everything instead. Isn't it hideous? I feel like the guy who invented the blink tag.

Sat Mar 06 1999 19:40: The automation continues. Every footer-equipped page now has a view source link. I'm going to need to do a library for all these similar programs.

Sun Mar 07 1999 09:09: I put up a devel page, which has descriptions and source viewer links to some of the programs I've written. I ditched the old source viewer as unworkable, and whipped up a new one that, instead of looking at a list to see what documents can have their source viewed, looks at a list to see which documents can't have their source viewed. This makes it possible to have a view source link in the footer, and lets me do a real devel page instead of trying to hack tho capability into the viewer, which really can't handle it.

Mon Mar 08 1999 07:58: Slashdot: "Stanley Kubrick dies". It's not often that you get a good strong active voice in an obituary.

Wed Mar 10 1999 09:53: All the BAH/HumBug bug reports I've gotten so far pertain to Kraftwerk, and have not been bug reports to much as comments. I think I may have to turn it into a comment form. But what is it about Kraftwerk that compells people to fill out BAH/HumBug reports? I don't know.

Wed Mar 10 1999 18:53:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

I just got a catalog from Heartland America. They somehow discovered that I mentioned them on NYCB (months ago), found my mailing address (I've moved since I mentioned them), and sent me their catalog, despite the fact that my mention in NYCB was a total bashfest.

I don't see how else this one obscure catalog company would have been able to connect my name with the set of people who had heard of them. And yet, they were smart enough to track me down, but not smart enough to realize that I think of their catalog as only good to mock.

People reading this: find my street address and email it to me. I'd like to know how you did it.

Wed Mar 10 1999 19:05: Oh, and a piece of happy news. While the world waits for me to get my Linux recording act together, I have conversed with Jake and we will be releasing a beta version of OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO, consisting of about 20 tracks, on MP3. These will be live and not-very-well-recorded tracks, much like the NST tracks. This will be my first release in a year and a half, and will tide the maniacs over until I redo OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO on the computer (this involves learning the tools, of course, but that's a one-time cost). Mrs. Irby will be pleased.

Thu Mar 11 1999 07:15: Whew! Give your eyes a rest. I showed the random colors to JB and he said "Messing around with Javascript?". Nope. It's all done on the server. No more, though. It's back to the standard dull paper look.

Thu Mar 11 1999 20:31: Lynx users, rejoyce! The notebook program will now give you a big honkin' ~~trunk~~ 50-line notebook to make up for the unaddability of lines to a textarea field in lynx. I may have resizing of the notebook for Lynx users, actually, eventually.

I need to get started on my Java RMI project.

Fri Mar 12 1999 05:58: I now have a software notebook for putting my freshmeat appindex entries and other software links in. It's easy, with the notebook program!

The other thing I want to do is have a hook that you can have executed on the text of your notebook entry. So I can <pre> the freshmeat entries, and put the time formatting thing in there for the other notebooks. That will have to wait until I move everything over to Python.

Fri Mar 12 1999 19:05: Ho ho ho ho ho. I have a basic RMI grep up and running. The hard part is over. The other part is also hard, but is more interesting. My aim is to be able to plug in some keywords and have the server look in the source text crossword-puzzle-wise for your words, a la The Bible Code. The part I'm goig to do for CS131 is just a windowed grep, possibly a multidimensional windowed grep.

I need to find out how to make an RMI server unregister itself from the registry instead of killing the registry every time I change the server. I smell it in java.rmi.Naming.

Sat Mar 13 1999 08:27: It seems that my document tree generator does not generate valid 4.0 HTML. Maybe I should actually find out what the DD tags do before using them all over.

I'll fix it later. Right now I'm redoing the notebook program.

Sat Mar 13 1999 10:13: I'v always suspected the Register writers were weird, but I'm starting to think they might actually be high as well.

Sat Mar 13 1999 10:30: Today is Rachel's birthday. Happy birthday, Rachel. She is 16. I remember being 16. Man, I'm old.

Today is also L. Ron Hubbard's birthday. Funny old thing, life.

Sat Mar 13 1999 14:50: No new TATC functionality, save the ability to unbind the server, but the interface is a lot better and it's all nicely object-oriented now. I've run it both locally on fire and from kuato, so there really is RMI happening and I'm not just fooling myself. I'll probably spend the rest of the day hacking on this and then Sunday on stuff for Peter.

Sun Mar 14 1999 14:39: TATC now works locally (not through RMI) if you have all the classes on your system. This is good for me begause it was driving me crazy bringing the server up and down whenever I changed anything. I almost have it doing the basic windowed grep, which is about as far as I will go (yes, sir!) for the 131 project.

Sun Mar 14 1999 15:57:

Shocking come-on found in GNU General Public License!

EWHOS
SFORO
ESEXT
IREWH
OEACH

Man, TATC is great. It only looks backwards and forwards at the moment (the hard part is not looking in other directions but in generating boxes for those other directions), and lacks almost all real functionality, but I can already jump to ridiculous, unwarrented conclusions about pieces of arbitrary text.

The actual run looks like this:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Looking for "sex" in http://crummy.segfault.org/code/gpl.txt
012345
1EWHOS
2SFORO
3ESEXT
4IREWH
5OEACH
"sex" found at (2,3)
Step: (1,0)

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hit enter to continue.

Sun Mar 14 1999 18:58: Oh man. I'm so close to having TATC do arbitrary-step searching. The implementation of the bit that makes the text block is brilliant. I just have to do more experiments and fine-tune the equations.

Sun Mar 14 1999 21:10: TATC To-do list:

Figure out slantwise block generation.
Catch StringIndexOutOfBoundsExceptions and make them just quit looking for the rest of an out-of-box string.
Don't reverse coordinates for strings found upside-down or backwards

I have left-right and up-down searches working.

Mon Mar 15 1999 19:15: I think I just ruined a whole batch of pasta. I'll never make that mistake again.

Tue Mar 16 1999 17:54: I now have a full working version of TATC. It takes about a minute to search through a megabyte of text with a given row length. This is a big improvement over the other method. I don't have a time for the other method, but this is a big improvement. The improvement comes from noting where all the occurances of the first letter of the key are and putting them into a list, then just using the characters on the list instead of going through the whole text again and again (cause it sounded good to me).

Unfortunately, it can't handle much more than a megabyte of text at a time (at least on fire) before it runs out of memory. No way around this, I think, as the Java VM is a resource hog (fire is running at 1.7 load average, sorry guys).

I have another idea to speed up the search, but I need a letter frequency chart. Hey, I have Perl and a bunch of text, I can just make a letter frequency chart.

Mmm, potstickers.

Tue Mar 16 1999 20:40: Perserverance!

Sleep!

Wed Mar 17 1999 15:19: Rehrehrehrehreh! Behold leonardr vs. Demon Dog! Coming soon to a theater near you!

That is me, as of a couple minutes ago, and the ever-present Demon Dog, always eager to lead humans astray. Yes I am in a silly mood right now.

TATC is done, as far as the project is concerned. I tried to put in a thing that would find the rarest character in your key and build a list based on that, and in doing so totally screwed up the block-finding stuff. So I'm just not going to do that for the project. I'll put up what source I have eventually.

I have to shop around for a summer internship, too. I need to work at somewhere besides MAP. Somewhere where I can do UNIX and Web stuff.

Thu Mar 18 1999 14:26: I need to get my dial-up connection working on Debian so I can start hooking up my mega-automated personal web server stuff. I think I'll work on that some right now. I'm so sick of studying for finals.

Sat Mar 20 1999 08:16: You might think I'd be studying for finals, but I've actually been wasting my time on the Chamber Of Horrors, which tells me (and you) how long until my finals.

Sat Mar 20 1999 08:18: Someone reading NYCB might get the impression that I never study for finals at all. This is just an artifact of the fact that when I am studying for finals, I don't put entries in NYCB about it. See that big gap from Thursday to Saturday? Studying for finals.

Sun Mar 21 1999 21:34: I have been busy studying all day, but I cannot let the day go by without paying tribute to the mighty one, rightful designant of the calendrical system, J.S. Bach, born on this day in 0 AB (1685 by the common reckoning). The vernal [occidental] equinox, no less. You see how it all fits together? I normally try to avoid quoting the Music From the Hearts of Space guy, especially when he espouses hokey New Agey theology, but I really like this quote, the way you really like anything that you heard when you were half-asleep and thought was cool: Safe journeys, Sebastian, wherever you are.

Mon Mar 22 1999 19:59: Well, I should get about an 80 on my LS final. The great thing about multiple choice tests is that you can probabilistically predict your score (as long as you're good at not lying to yourself). Now the pain of the math final looms, but after that it's clear sailing.

Wed Mar 24 1999 15:45: I would like to say, well in advance of the actual conclusion, that I had nothing to do with it. Nothing. I disclaim any credit for the idea. Everyone might think it's a great idea, and then I might be made to look stupid for saying this, but even if other people think it's great, I don't want the credit for this idea. It's too easy, too unsubtle. That's not the leonardr way.

What am I talking about? You'll find out.

Wed Mar 24 1999 17:52: Woohoo! My name is in a README! The DailyUpdate README, to be exact. Unfortunately, my actual code was not used, but at least I got credit for an idea.

Tue Mar 30 1999 06:26: Aah, aah. I woke up in the middle of the night with these awful stomach cramps. Couldn't think of how to stop them, so I took a really hot shower, which is my default remedy. It worked okay. How do you stop stomach cramps?

Tue Mar 30 1999 09:41: Here I am at work today.

Tue Mar 30 1999 12:50: I am now the proud owner of an A in Math 114A. This is my first math A ever. Well, since high school. This gives me hope for the 199 class.

Wed Mar 31 1999 06:07: Don't worry, there's always Dada Pokey! And whiskey.

Thu Apr 01 1999 05:59: Again, I had nothing to do with it.

Sat Apr 03 1999 05:56: I have new socks, a new VCR, and a new tape deck. And my mother has a new Zip drive and a new scanner. Hooray for consumer goods and services!

Mon Apr 05 1999 14:37: This is real weird. I have a little birthmark or mole or something on the side of my head, just by my ear. I've never noticed it before. My sideburns were there but last weekend I got a haircut and got them shaved off. Weird.

Tue Apr 06 1999 09:39: My schedule seems to be settling down. I have a contigency plan for every possible... contingency. The best contingency gives me three-day weekends... every single week! Now that's innovation! Hm, the only problem is that then I miss the Memorial day holiday.

I haven't said much about the mega project, SLIME, but it is mega and it is a project, and it will benefit society. Scott and I are busy writing and documenting it now, but will explain it eventually.

Wed Apr 07 1999 06:45: I read Focault's Pendulum on Friday and Saturday. A bibliography is one of those things that you're too lazy to write in PHP or Perl but which will be a snap in SLIME.

But at any rate, a thing that drives my mother crazy (the book is my mother's (The book is my uncle's, borrowed by my mother), borrowed by me) is that when I borrow a book I take off the jacket so I don't ruin it. Actually any book I take off the jacket while I'm reading it. Because if I read a book of any size that has a jacket on it, I just know that that jacket is going to get torn.

Actually, the thing that actually drives my mother crazy is that I leave the jacket on the floor. I can understand that.

Wed Apr 07 1999 06:55: It occurs to me that you might want to know something about Foucalt's Pendulum the book. It's pretty good. In the same vein as Illuminatus, but less off-the-wall 60s and more cereberal.

Thu Apr 08 1999 13:26: Scott has been unaccountably having fun, so I had to publish some segv articles myself this morning. So, you have proofread articles. I am pleased to learn that Scott has also unaccountably written 90% of the SLIME authentication code, with a nice badge system which I don't fully understand just yet, at least as it relates to my idea.

Sat Apr 10 1999 08:23:

DAILY POKEY!!!

Sun Apr 11 1999 15:58: Leonard's [my uncle's] computer now has Debian on it. I don't know why I was afraid of an install-over-dial-up. Maybe it was just making all those floppies for the base system.

Also, the tiny 486 laptop now has Minix on it.

Wed Apr 14 1999 09:09: I like circa-1994 writings about the Internet.

Wed Apr 14 1999 10:09: The sickening click sound made by Microsoft Internet Explorer is the same sickening click sound made when you push in at the part of your eye closest to your nose.

Mon Apr 19 1999 21:00: I updated my LWE travelogue, which is too long to link to. (Maybe I shouldn't have given it such a long name). Now has deconstructions of Mae Ling Mak, RMS, and myself in relation to those two.

MST3K has changed. The MST3K people have changed. Read this convention transcript with Mike and Kevin. If you can. The schtick has turned from light-hearted self-depreciation to real, true, bitter hatred of self and others. Judging from the transcript, anyway.

Tue Apr 20 1999 12:32: I had a dream involving my father last night. It started out okay but then it became really disturbing.

The weather here has been very interesting, as weather goes. Last Thursday we had spring. It was incredible weather. Now we are into summer and it's just hot.

I'm really itching to finish the groundwork of SLIME, but Scott is very hard to get a hold of. I have some sites lined up to do the beta test, and will eventually implement Crummy itself entirely in SLIME (it will be implemented on linux.ucla.edu once linux.ucla.edu exists).

Hm, Pokey the Penguin seems to be back on the air.

Tue Apr 20 1999 21:15: I saw a movie poster for a movie starring Jeff "Lebowski" Bridges today. The tagline: "Your paranoia is real". At the risk of nitpicking, might I suggest "Your paranoia is justified" instead?

Wed Apr 21 1999 08:17: Hey people and CEOs, get a clue! When you buy Red Hat Linux, you are not buying a license! You are not paying for the privilege of using the software! You are paying for a CD, a manual, and a box! You are buying physical objects, like bread, or cake mix! There is nothing wrong with charging money for physical objects!

$50 is a ridiculous price to pay for a CD, a manual, and a box, but if people are willing to pay, no one's stopping them.

Wed Apr 21 1999 09:23: I finally fixed the links in the "me in the lounge" page, which someone sent me a bug report about back when dinosaurs ruled the earth. That whole section needs an overhaul but that won't happen until I SLIME this [porcelain] puppy.

Thu Apr 22 1999 19:47: There is a misspelling in Wednesday's Zippy. A MISSPELLING!

Fri Apr 23 1999 06:51: I made some fixes to the browser greetings program. In particular, bots are properly logged now. The bot log (not Notlob) is publically avaliable, even though right now it only has the test entry.

Also I realized that the stats on the character for the Frank Zappa Nethack tribute are a little out of whack. Oh well.

Sat Apr 24 1999 10:23: Argh! I've been wasting my time doing my AI homework with scheme-elk when I should have been using guile! Well, no more. Finally I get stack traces.

Sat Apr 24 1999 20:14: A year ago today, I dreamed about buying the Games issue for April. I know this because I am going through the huge masses of paper that I have, typing in the stuff that is the reason I saved the paper in the first place, and then putting it in the recycling.

Mon Apr 26 1999 08:39: My question is: if I want to buy a domain name, how much will it cost me? This vital piece of information has never been given to me. Perhaps prices have not been set yet.

Tue Apr 27 1999 07:29: OK, it seems that SCO CEO Doug Michels is intentionally being a bonehead about Linux because he's tried everything else to stop Linux from taking away SCO's market share and nothing has worked.

Tue Apr 27 1999 07:44: Frankly, I'm not impressed.

Tue Apr 27 1999 07:52: witten had the unmitigated audacity to bring up the s/y/k/ joke. I attempted to mock him by showing him how far ahead of him I was, and the link didn't work! Curses! Well, that'll never happen again! AH HA HA HA HA! Because I fixed the link.

I had a good conversation with witten about moderation schemes, though, so that made up for it.

Fri Apr 30 1999 19:19: The best headline I've ever seen: Torvalds: Linux is fun

Fri Apr 30 1999 19:51: I know why that's the best headline I've ever seen. Because it's just like the "Playtime is Fun" headline cranked out by Rod Flanders in episode 3F01 of the Simpsons. I had to look up that number, but I knew which one it was.

Sat May 01 1999 10:46: I'm at the installfest now. This time we actually have an Internet connection. Yay.

Sat May 01 1999 10:48: I'm in the incubator now.

Sat May 01 1999 18:12: I really hope this is an unsolicited quote and not something Scott told Red Hat to describe segfault as on their site:

Segfault.org: Extremely regular Linux Humor site based on stories written and submitted by its readers. A slight parody on Slashdot.org, it views the news how it should be read :) Expect no mercy!

Mon May 03 1999 09:04: I finally got a chance to try out the Pie Gates game. There are worse Shockwave games, I'm sure.

Thu May 06 1999 12:29: Egad! Event provokes controversy! Whoda thunk?

Fri May 07 1999 11:00: I didn't used to like sunlight, but the great weather in LA right now is changing my mood. I can even go out without wearing sunglasses!

Mon May 10 1999 07:28: Just when I was losing my trust in Jesse Ventura, he becomes the only governor to speak out against government endorsement of the National Day of Prayer.

Wed May 12 1999 07:33: Woohoo! My n-queens Scheme program works perfectly! And it's not even due for 24 hours! Now to get cracking on the n-drag-queens problem. I'm kidding, of course. Now to get cracking on the horrid Minix project.

Wed May 12 1999 08:09: Yes, the enumeration of all solutions to the 8-queens problem eluded even that manliest of mathematicians, Karl Friedrich Gauss. Of course, had he had Lisp at his disposal, Gauss would have kicked my ass.

Last week's Futurama was great (oh no, I'm watching television!), but yesterday's was a big disappointment. Like the way it brilliantly set up the Uranus meta-joke*, only to destroy it with excessive joke layering. But then, there's really no way to top last week's "you're soaking in it" reference.

* "Astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to stop that stupid joke once and for all."

Thu May 13 1999 08:00: When you want a juicy quote on open-source Web development, who do you call? No, Esther Dyson is busy, so how about me? Yup.

Thu May 13 1999 19:34: I brought this up in Math 199:

There is a notion of polynomial time as the upper bound for useful decidability, as opposed to just plain decidability. That is, there are many relations which are decidable but which we don't want to sit around and wait for the decision procedure to finish (eg. a 2^2^n algorithm on a modern computer will take longer than the current age of the universe to run, for n=7).

That was not what I brought up. What I brought up was let's take this to its logical conclusion. There are decidable relations which in a very real sense we cannot actually decide because the heat-death of the universe will occur before any decision procedure finishes. Anything not in the set of such relations, even if decidable, would be effectively undecidable in this universe. Even if we posessed mighty quantum computers which shredded exponential time, there are 2^2^2^2^2^2^2...^n-time decision procedures which we would never be able to run.

Possibly we could formalize this with an information-theoretic argument relating the amount of information in the universe with the amount of information required for a decision procedure, but I don't know any information theory. I do know, however, that this set of effectively decidable relations grows smaller with every second that passes and every action you take. So watch it, pal.

Thu May 13 1999 19:55: You want to hear my idea that Peter thinks is crazy? My idea is to design a database and Web front-end for exhaustively cataloguing and cross-referencing every cultural reference and running joke ever made on Mystery Science Theater 3000. I just want to design the database and Web front-end. I never said I wanted to actually catalogue and cross-reference every cultural reference and running joke ever made on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Is that so wrong?

I just cross-referenced that to a Garrison Keillor monologue about a guy who spent his whole life cataloguing every word in Ulysses and just as he was finished they found the lost "Minnesota" monologue which goes on page 4 and puts all the guy's page numbers out of whack. This is because today I was reading a Web page about Ulysses.

Also, Jake, I'm starting work on your 1999 birthday present. I can't promise that it will blow Jake's Birthday Party into tiny shreds of mangled flesh, but it might. Also, Darrin just came in with a roll of wrapping paper, having to wrap a birthday present for someone. Yes, it's all coming together.

The twirly-mustachioed Rudolph Longtooth!
The twirly-mustachioed calcium carbonate!
The twirly-mustachioed Odor Eaters!
The twirly-mustachioed Hawaiian Punch!
The twirly-mustachioed pi over two!
The twirly-mustachioed cephalopods!
The twirly-mustachioed cephalopods!

Fri May 14 1999 07:13: I saw this on peterme, and, as a computer scientist who dabbles in biology, I smell blood. Watch this space.

Fri May 14 1999 21:59: Actual quote from my AI textbook, sounds like a "Land of the small-brained folk" Mr. Boffo:

Hayes was the first to prove that a bath with the plug in will eventually overflow if the tap keeps running; and that a person who falls into a lake will get wet all over.

I just went with my mother and sister to see Van Gogh at LACMA (not LACMA). Yummy!

Tue May 18 1999 12:22: I can't drink soy milk. I'm sorry. I can't. It's too sweet. It's conceptually less gross than dairy milk, but I can't drink it. I certainly can't cook with it.

Tue May 18 1999 12:25: The following is part of an email I just sent to Jake. I think it is of more general interest:

I thought of a great joke this morning. Or what would be a great joke, for some value of x.

Q: What's the difference between an x and an insect?
A: Insects only eat their young.

The trouble is, I can't think of an x that makes sense in that joke. In fact, there may be no such x. The question is, does the absence of any such x make the joke less funny?

I was going to continue my search for some x that made sense, but then I thought of another joke that fits the same pattern:

Q: What's the difference between an x and a computer scientist?
A: Computer scientists start counting from zero.

So now the question is, should I attempt to locate these xes, or should I just treat x as a Skolem constant and take this to be an altogether new joke form, in the spirit of "What's the difference between a duck?".

Tue May 18 1999 17:18: Today's joke that no one else will get (actually from last week, but I forgot about it):

If you change your name to HP_Josh, your neighbors will have to let you use their television!

--Me to Josh Barratt

Wed May 19 1999 08:14: Good, Futurama is back on track. Last night's episode tasted great and never let me down.

10 SIN
20 GOTO HELL

Oh, my ribs.

I love tormenting Scott by sending him SLIME-related emails with subject lines of the form "x problem SOLVED!", eg. the "Subclass function scope problem SOLVED!" one I just sent him. Actually, I'm not sure if he considers that torment. I'll have to ask him. He might be made of stronger stuff than that.

Wed May 19 1999 13:36: Phantom Menace tickets just dropped into my lap, so I'm going to go see it.

Don't you just love the flippant tone of that last paragraph? Actually, you probably don't. The screening is at 3:30. I'll let you know how it goes.

Thu May 20 1999 08:18: Am I so lazy that all future NYCB entries are going to be extracted and edited parts of emails I sent? I don't know. Probably. But here's more stuff I sent to Jake re Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace:

I enjoyed the movie immensely. The people who didn't enjoy it don't realize that it was basically a comedy, sort of a Three Stooges/Dennis the Menace in space sort of thing. In fact, it should have been called "Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Dennis the Menace".

I predict that the Force will become a greater and greater force for wackiness over the rest of the trilogy, arranging for cross-dressing disguises and hiding-in-closets bedroom farce and the like, until some catastrophe in Episode III brings it down to earth as the staid ancient religion we see in the original Star Wars. This ties in with the end of ROTJ, when, with the Empire on its last legs, the Force begins to regain its previous levity, in scenes like the one I don't need to explain, and the other one I don't need to explain.

Thu May 20 1999 17:11: There is a brain dissection to be held in Kinsey 169 at 6. I will probably attend, seeing as how it's twenty feet away. I don't know if actual brain dissection will take place, or if it will just be a lecture about the brain. But why not attend a lecture about the brain that's being held twenty feet away?

The brain (if there will be one) is a human brain, for those of you concerned about animal rights.

Thu May 20 1999 19:00: The brain demonstration was great. I have now held a human brain. Something I think everyone should do at least once.

If something is eating your brain, you don't feel it because there are no nerves in the brain. Also, all your senses pass through a single area of the brain, except for smell, which has its own pathway. Thirdly, humans have two sight paths, one above the other, but the bottom one is not consciously avaliable. If the top sight path is severed, people will be consciously blind, but will still be able to maneuver, point to moving objects, etc., even though they will not be perceiving anything. Those are the three cool things about the brain that I learned.

Fri May 21 1999 07:27: I don't like cyberpunk. Really, at all. Cyberpunk and anime are where my cultural tastes deviate widely from the majority of computer geekdom. I'm not really sure what it is. I don't mind the dystopian futures; but when it's dystopian futures that just ain't going to happen, presented with the intense urgency that all works of cyberpunk must posess, it puts me off my lunch. To my way of thinking, the best dystopian futures remain those of 1984 and Brave New World. Both are far more real to me than anything cyberpunk has dredged up.

(Tangentially speaking of dystopian futures, the Crest in Westwood was showing Dr. Strangelove as part of a film festival, and I intended to go see it on the big screen, but its run was limited to about two days, it being a film festival and all, and I missed it.

BUT, I like to think of myself as someone who is open to new experiences, and everyone and their brother nowadays is praising Neal Stephenson to the skies, because of the supposed mightiness of his new book, Cryptonomicon, and I happen to have a copy of his older book, Snow Crash, accessible, so last night I started reading it.

I'm on page 300 now, and I'm getting to the point where I want to just stop. The plot is okay, and there are characters I care about, but it's getting more and more difficult to keep trudging through all the inane pseudoprescience. I'm sure it's not Neal Stephenson's fault. He's a good writer, but when you write cyberpunk, you have to put in this stuff. It's a union regulation or something.

But look how open-minded I am: I still plan to read Cryptonomicon, because Neal Stephenson is a good writer, and Cryptonomicon takes place in the past and in the present, which will obviate much of what I find annoying about cyberpunk. I also am planning to eventually read The Difference Engine, which takes place in an alternate past. But don't bring your Cyberspace^TM here. Nuh-uh. That's not Dirk. Nuh-uh.

There are about 150 pages of Snow Crash left, so I'll finish it. I always feel compelled to finish every book I start. Except for The Good Soldier Sjvek, much better than Snow Crash and just as jarringly dystopian, which for some reason has remained half-read on my bookshelf for three years.

Fri May 21 1999 07:37: Also, here are two good brain short stories: a description of the destruction of someone's mental facilities as their brain is eaten away by a virus or parasite, and a similar description, except the agent is malicious, possibly a little nano-robot, and intends to really screw you over by retaining your consciousness as long as possible. One or both stories may be feasible; if only one, then the second one is better (the first one exists only to provide contrast, I think). I'm no good at writing fiction, so you can do what you want with these ideas.

I have to remember to get napkins when I buy my breakfast muffin. I keep forgetting and end up with sticky muffin fingers and covered in muffin fragments. Zappa would not approve.

Fri May 21 1999 07:45: As long as I'm adding NYCB entries, Jake thinks that my jokes (see some previous entry or other for this month) should remain unsolved. Thus is born a new kind of joke, funny not because they make some kind of twisted comparison, but because they are, on another level, a joke schema for such jokes. In this way, comparisons so twisted that they cannot be used in first-order jokes at all (because nothing fits) can be appreciated as second-order humor.

Jake was also disappointed by The Phantom Menace, as he fully expected to be. I understand where he's coming from, but mantain that it rocked me like a medium-grade hurricane.

My word for today is "schema". Schema schema schema schema! I'm a schema, baby, I'm a dreama.

Fri May 21 1999 10:00: I just swiped two Apple boxes from the dumpster. Not computers, but literal boxes. One is for a G3, and the other (which is the one that caught my eye) is for a "Studio Display", which looks to be the thing for which the iMac is the pupal stage. It's not as long as the iMac, and has legs. The picture on the side of the box is huge and menacing, and I plan to cut it out and use it for something. But right now, the boxes are just taking up space in Peter's office.

Crafty bastards, those folks at Apple. They make you agree to their software licensing agreements before you can even use the computer. Good thing they don't have a monopoly or anything.

Fri May 21 1999 11:19: I can't wait to get home. I haven't been home since Wednesday morning, and my hair is really icky.

Campbell doesn't like cyberpunk either.

Mon May 24 1999 11:26: I don't want to place blame on anyone, but "open source" is becoming the universally-abused buzzword that "free software" was supposed to become, despite its clear definition, trademark protection, and everything else that was supposed to prevent this fate.

Ambrose Beirce, father of the smiley

Mon May 24 1999 11:34: I can't get enough of the Super Golden Crisp that is The Devil's Dictionary:

EFFEROUS,* EFFIGATE, EFFLAGITATE, EFFODIENT, EFFOSSION,. See some other dictionary.

Tue May 25 1999 07:12: Enjoy The Hubble Constant, the site presenting the findings of the Hubble Space Telescope to you, the taxpayer. Much like that other site whose URL I can't find which presents all the pictures the HST takes, but more technical.

Tue May 25 1999 08:39: Alternating periods of sunshine and shadow. Such is the rule for weather here in LA. I believe there is a city ordinance requiring it.

I need to get back on the LACMA track, as I just felt myself wanting a mail automaton to handle NYCB for me. Yes, I'm so lazy that I can't even be bothered to fire up a Web browser to put up a notebook entry.

Tue May 25 1999 08:43: Also, I'd like to be able to use a real text editor to write these entries in.

Tue May 25 1999 09:51: Links that work:

http://www.altavista.com/ucla/
http://www.altavista.com/mit/
http://www.altavista.com/ucb/

Links that don't work:

http://www.altavista.com/usc/
http://www.altavista.com/stanford/
http://www.altavista.com/ucsd/
http://www.altavista.com/caltech/
http://www.altavista.com/uiuc/
http://www.altavista.com/harvard/
http://www.altavista.com/yale/

More later. Class now.

Tue May 25 1999 12:07: I'm starting to have to delete press releases that people are sending to Segfault. Are we on some list of Linux sites for people to send their press releases to? If so, cut it out.

Tue May 25 1999 12:51: Hm, AIR wants the descendants of famous scientists and inventors to go on stage at this year's Ig Nobels. I am a descendant of Eli Whitney, and as such would probably qualify for the "Flaunt Your Genome" event. The only problem is that I'd miss some of the first week of class next quarter. And I'd have to pay for tickets.

Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, silly. Everybody knows that. More people know that than know what a cotton gin is.

Tue May 25 1999 13:31: If real life had a Wandering Monsters table, this would only show up on a 00: A car being driven by old folks with both a "Victory '96 Dole/Kemp" bumper sticker and this rude bumper sticker. That is my own GIMPy rendition of the bumper sticker in that graphic, by the way.

Also, that bumper sticker is a form of parody bumper sticker that I don't get. The form is an oval with two or three letters (or, in this case, glyphs) inside it. I have a "LNX" sticker that I got at LinuxWorld Expo, and there are millions of others I have seen on other people's cars. They are starting to outnumber even those damn fish. But I don't know what all these bumper stickers are parodying. Help me Spock! And enjoy my feeble mouse-drawing talents.

Tue May 25 1999 13:34: Here are some old graphics I did in the GIMP, predating even the alleged "first GIMP graphic" I stuffed into NYCB a while ago. There are three, in JPG and PNG format. My Netscape 4 won't read PNG. What's up with that, homey?

Tue May 25 1999 13:40: Adam was in the Engineering Week talent show today, and he didn't tell me about it. So I missed him. Not that I haven't seen him play before, but I would prefer the universe in which he had told me about it to the universe which I inhabit.

Tue May 25 1999 14:21: OK, Josh says that those bumper stickers are take-offs on the bumper stickers you put on your car if you live in Europe. I feel like an idiot {standing in line waiting for Miss Perfect da da da da da da da da, for not having known that}.

Tue May 25 1999 21:54: Hoo boy. The next year of my life is going to be a living hell. I wrote a big long explanation of it, which I will not post here, but the short version is that when this quarter ends, the hell will begin. The hell involves no non-working vacation, hellish summer school, no money, and four classes every quarter, even the ones in which I take the heavy CS classes like compiler construction and digital system design.

The payoff is that I will actually graduate in four years flat, instead of four years and one quarter. This will make me feel a lot better, and will have financial benefits as well.

Also, if for scheduling reasons (or because I just snap) I can't make it in four years after all, the hellish summer school I am about to undergo will allow me to take three classes every quarter instead of four. This means two easy quarters and two quarters of moderate difficulty. This also means more time to work. Which is a nice safety net to fall back on.

Living hell... living hell...

Wed May 26 1999 07:59: I can find J.S. Bach Belgian chocolates at Bristle Farms and other fine stores.

Wed May 26 1999 11:44: I love sneaking up on an innocent set and springing a diagonalization or Godelization argument on it. It smells like victory.

Thu May 27 1999 19:27: Oh no, UCLA sucks!. Actually, the only two things I can see on that page where UCLA would really be worse than any other large university would be the constant construction and the fascist anti-Linux dorm computer managers. Much evil is common practice at colleges. Yoda I am today speaking like.

Thu May 27 1999 19:29: This is not to say that I don't applaud the goals of UCLA Sucks, but I think some perspective is needed. UCLA does not have a monopoly on clueless college management. It certainly does not have a monopoly on things like outrageous textbook buyback prices, which are ubiquitous.

Thu May 27 1999 19:31: Until today I had never said the word "ubiquitous" out loud. Try it and you'll see how I know this. I would have noticed that before.

Thu May 27 1999 19:34: I am out of money. I have no money at all. Absolutely no money. I have to pay my rent by Tuesday. This is not good.

Thu May 27 1999 19:41: Wait a minute, dammit. I have to have money. I just got the remainder of Peter's OAC grant dumped in my account today. That check must have already cleared, and I must have $1200 now instead of having $1200 and owing $1250. That is what had better be the case.

Fri May 28 1999 08:42: I do indeed have no money. Fortunately, I should be getting another paycheck today, and I can call the grant people and tell them to give me the rest of the money right now.

Sat May 29 1999 21:21: I upgraded my Texas travelogue. Black gold. Texas travelogue. Just a day and a half to go.

Mon May 31 1999 14:45: My Texas travelogue is done, a mere five months after the trip it describes. Thank the fact that the buses don't run on Memorial Day so I couldn't go do my 111 project with Josh.

I am listening to the album Toreador of Love, by Hazel, now-defunct grunge-pop band off the now-forgotten Sub Pop label.* Accompanying the listening-to of the album comes the renewal of my crush on Jody the drummer, who is ten years older than me and (I think) a lesbian. But she can sing and she can play the drums, which is sufficient for crushhood on my part.

I bought the album in high school because my BBS handle was Hazel, and was surprised how much I liked it. I don't know if I'd recommend buying the album yourself, as it's really just heavy bubblegum, but find some MP3s and see how you like it.

I have to calculate the probabilities of various poker hands now.

*Sub Pop's claim to fame is that Nirvana used to be on their label.

Mon May 31 1999 15:08: More GIMP art: Gone Public.

My bangs were starting to annoy me, so I cut them off with my desck scissors. I now look like a Roman senator. Whee!

Tue Jun 01 1999 08:59: Now it is June.

Today in the Bruin: Half-painted mural causes controversy. People are never behind the controversy, oh no. It's event, or half-painted mural.

Tue Jun 01 1999 09:00: I don't read the Bruin every day looking for "x causes controversy" headlines. These headlines (look at the beginning of May's NYCB for the other one) were front-page headlines on days that I picked up the paper for some other reason.

Tue Jun 01 1999 21:30: OK, I have a sublet for the summer. It's the feel-good sublet of the summer. It costs $325 a month. If I get this other Linux job at UCLA I will be happy.

Wed Jun 02 1999 20:28: Hoo-hah! Josh and I got the first part of the CS111 project done today, and it's not even due for a week! If you want to see us working on it, there are some archives of Josh's webcam. Those were the 3 that we saw that we thought were good enough to keep. It's really like watching someone else's webcam because you're not aware of all the stupid things you do until one of them gets caught on virtual film.

Josh is at his computer now! Go spy on him! Wait, he's gone. He was there a couple minutes ago. Oh well. Spy on whoever this is, with the Cup O' Noodles.

Josh also taught me the rules of cricket today. I finally understand what a dull game it is. Seriously, what other game has an average playing time of six days? Trying to understand why it took so long, I asked Josh "Is it a for loop or a while loop?". I pity the poor sap to whom that makes sense.

Thu Jun 03 1999 13:26: This Sunday's sermon at the Westwood Hills Christian Church: FACING UP TO THE EMPTINESS OF LIFE. There's really nothing to add to that.

Taco Bell's "Fire" sauce is hot enough to make my Mountain Dew taste bad, but not hot enough to actually qualify as 'hot' in any sense of the word. They must formulate it for people in Ohio or something.

I'm sure Ohioans have some terrible stereotype for Californians, so let 'er rip.

Thu Jun 03 1999 21:23: More CS111 work means more webcam wackiness, including 3 shots in a row where I look like a high-fashion supermodel sexing it up on the runway. I emphasize that these were the scenes at particular two-minute intervals, none of them are posed. Josh tried to pose for one and we forced him down. The last picture is particularily interesting as it was taken just as Josh and I were turning to observe Justin's retelling of his rock climbing story. Rock climbing.

Justin is not on our project, he just dropped by Josh's dorm for a while.

Thu Jun 03 1999 21:30: I forgot to mention that Josh doesn't "get" Pokey the Penguin or Zippy the Pinhead. He must be destroyed! Just kidding.

Thu Jun 03 1999 21:56: One more thing before I hit the stain; The Race for the White House, a satirical photoessay I did for my high school paper. When I was in high school, obviously. Not recently. I think it's still pretty funny.

Fri Jun 04 1999 11:10: More old stuff that's (hopefully) stll funny: The Deficient Adventures of Captain Planet (don't ask me to explain that title, but it fits so right), a five-page comic by Kris and me from... gee, it seems like ages ago. A year, at least. Enjoy it. Don't miss the Archie the Roach and Mr. Funersize cameos.

Sat Jun 05 1999 07:20: New in Debian:

vrms - Virtual Richard M. Stallman

The vrms program will analyze the set of currently-installed packages on a
Debian GNU/Linux system, and report all of the packages from the non-free
tree which are currently installed.

Future versions of vrms will include an option to also display text from
the public writings of RMS and others that explain why use of each of the
installed non-free packages might cause moral issues for some in the Free
Software community.  This functionality is not yet included.

I'm doing a big uprade today, including moving over to the 2.2 kernel.

Sat Jun 05 1999 15:55: The only allowable exception to the Nathan Hale Specialty Beer joke standard is the following:

"Try Nathan Hale Soylent Green Beer. It's people."

Sat Jun 05 1999 18:07: Garrison Keillor sounds weird. I think he might have a cold or something.

Sat Jun 05 1999 20:51: Argh! I missed the first 40 minutes of the DS9 series finale! Oh well. I can get Mark to fill me in.

Mon Jun 07 1999 18:45: As previously reported, I missed the first 40 minutes of the DS9 series finale. However, I saw enough to make this judgement: it really, really looked like two episodes pasted together; a battle episode which was really good, and then a wrap-up episode which wasn't as exciting. It stopped being exciting when Garak left, IMO, early in the second half.

I did like it, quite a bit. I haven't been following DS9 until recently, but both the Cardassians and the Federation were made much more well-rounded cultures in DS9 than they ever were in TNG.

The downloading is long done, but the upgrading of my system continues. I switched from stable Debian to unstable Debian, so not only am I having to upgrade every single package, I'm having to run the Install thing multiple times to get rid of all the order dependencies which haven't been worked out yet. I crave the 2.2 kernel the way I crave tacos.

Mmm, tacos. Mmm, html2latex. Mmm, abiword. Mmm, other things on my new system.

Speaking of programs with 2 in their names, I wrote a program on Saturday called bbs2ansi which converts Wildcat! BBS display files (of which I have a million, some of them very funny) into standard ANSI (actually highly nonstandard ANSI, just because I can't be bothered to do efficient ANSI) display files, for piping into iCE's 31337 convansi program for putting on the Web. It works great, although it appears to have problems with blinking sometimes.

Mon Jun 07 1999 18:48: Peter is afraid of the "unstable" designation. Don't you be. Debian "unstable" means "unstable compared to stable" and "stable" means "mission-critical production-quality". There is little to no connection to the meaning of "unstable" in the Windows world, except possibly immediately after a new stable release, when people dump a bunch of stuff in unstable and break everything.

Obviously, if you're running a production server, you don't use unstable, for the same reason you don't use NT. But I'm not.

Tue Jun 08 1999 06:23: RAISIN BREAD! I love it! Complex carbohydrates and fructose! Worship the raisin bread!

Thu Jun 10 1999 06:56: Aha! I could never find the GNU manuals except in the impossible-to-use info format! Here they are in HTML and other readable formats, like ASCII!

Thu Jun 10 1999 20:03: More nutty CS111 Webcam pictures, including leonardr_is_dead. These are from Monday. There is a final one we took today upon completion (of the Brooklyn bridge?), which Josh has yet to send me.

Fri Jun 11 1999 10:34: It is Fun With Perl... yeah!

$a^=$b^=$a^=$b

I thought it was impossible to swap two variables without using a third variable, but there it is. I forgot who posted this to the Fun With Perl list, but I am eternally grateful to them.

Fri Jun 11 1999 10:37: You could make the case that that implicitly uses a third storage space to store the results of the xors before it is put into one of the variables, but even if that does happen, you could design a computer that didn't do that.

I feel like a new xor!

Mon Jun 14 1999 07:52: "Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the laws of nature." -- Michael Faraday

"Nothing is too wonderful to be true." -- Michael Faraday, as quoted above the entrance to Kinsey Hall

Mon Jun 14 1999 08:17: My experiment to get the phrase "lemonade and birthday cake", and all permutations thereof, indelibly etched in Jake's mind, has succeeded. Now, who will be my next victim?

BTW, Jake's page is updated, for the first time in a year (more than a year if you don't count updates I did). It is Pokeyfied and contains many new occurances of my name, which I fixate on in an unhealthy manner.

I flipped between DS9 and X-Files last night. X-Files was very funny. But I felt weird flipping between two television shows, as though I had nothing better to do with my life.

Mon Jun 14 1999 10:07: I need to register for LinuxWorldExpo by the 21st, on the off chance that I'm able to attend.

Wed Jun 16 1999 11:48: That can of shaving cream (be nice and clean) lasted me five or six years.

AI final tomorrow. OS final Friday.

Thu Jun 17 1999 09:58: I had a personal steel cage appointment with the father of each and every one of my CS161 problems. Except the first one, which might be slightly wrong but I'm fairly sure the idea is right.

Fri Jun 18 1999 08:24: Gogol is approaching 100 days uptime. That 100 days includes a major system upgrade including a libc6 upgrade. Yes, here in UNIX land, you can upgrade your system libraries without rebooting. Join us... join us...

The rollover will occur tomorrow at 1600, I believe.

Fri Jun 18 1999 08:36: Oh, yesterday I became the first person to compare drugs to Microsoft Word, rather than comparing Microsoft Word to drugs.

Fri Jun 18 1999 17:33: Woohoo! I am done with finals! Done with finals am I! It's all done with finals!

I predict straight As! No, not really. But I have a better chance of straight As this quarter than any other quarter so far.

Now, I have a week until summer school starts.

Fri Jun 18 1999 20:16: I have a whole bunch of things to complain about, and they all involve movie billboards. Here we go.

First off, the South Park billboard has a Canadian flag on it, but the red parts of the Canadian flag are invisible because the background is red. The person who designed the billboard was looking at it real close up on their PowerMac and didn't think about how it would look as a billboard.

Secondly, the Austin Powers bus billboard says the following:

BIGGER, BETTER FUNNIER
   THAN STAR WARS

The Pokeyfied parts are crossed out in red (thanks Jake for showing me the way to the S tag). Thus, we are supposed to believe that the billboard originally said

BIGGER, BETTER
   THAN STAR WARS

and that someone then crossed out BIGGER and BETTER individually and wrote FUNNIER just where there coincidentally happened to be some space by Austin Powers' feet. They tried to make it look good by indenting the second line, but it doesn't work that way. It doesn't work, period.

Thirdly, the Big Daddy billboard, in which Adam Sandler and the kid who plays his adopted son are supposed to be standing and urinating against the billboard. Fine. But they're just standing there in the male urination position, there's no actual urine happening. It looks like they're too emberassed to pee on a billboard with all of Los Angeles watching them, which is the wrong impression to give if you are advertising an Adam Sandler movie. I mean, I doubt I could do it, but I'm not the wackily obscene Adam Sandler. If the city officials are not going to let you put an actual urination photo on the billboard, you shouldn't go for the urine pose. It's not going to work.

Fri Jun 18 1999 20:54: I updated my music site. All my released songs have lyrics and (if applicable) chords or tabs, except for Techno Schmeckno wit DJ Generik, which I still have to tab. Not that it's hard to tab or anything; that's the whole point.

I hadn't done anything with Techno Schmeckno wit DJ Generik for a long time, and so I was unprepared when I read its silly title this morning. I laughed and laughed and laughed. I laugh really hard at really trivial things. Other people's trivial things as well as my own. There was something Josh said this morning that was really trivial and made me laugh and laugh and laugh. Actually that reminds me of the "this laser has committed an invalid operation and will be terminated" joke which I made at LinuxWorld Expo and which cracked up Scott and Garrett despite being really trivial. So I guess I do it as well.

Musically, I'm putting off Ow, My Prostate! 24,996 Years of Porcelain Puppy Oppression until I am able to record onto the computer (I have a beta version on tape which is in Jake's hands and which he is supposed to be MP3ing). I am writing the songs and librettos for the two follow-up albums, Porcelain Puppy vs. Demon Dog, which is a wacky musical comedy tour de force, and the sequel to that, Revenge of Porcelain Puppy, where it gets really mean and actually somewhat gross in parts. But gross in a refined, artsy way, not in a slasher movie way. I hope. Anyway, those two will also be recorded once I get recording on computer working. Hopefully this will happen during the summer. But we've heard that before.

Fri Jun 18 1999 21:00: You can now thrill to Techno Schmeckno wit DJ Generic, as I have put up the tab.

Sun Jun 20 1999 07:42: Ewan McGregor is James Joyce!

Sun Jun 20 1999 08:22: I should probably point to my public PGP key, in NYCB as I have started signing all of my messages. In case the URL to it in the actual signiature isn't clue enough for you where to find it. The Josh-Campbell-Leonard entity is also capable of sending encrypted mail among its consistutent parts.

Sun Jun 20 1999 13:20: The summertime cleanup continues, as I have finally gotten ansiconv to work. I had to add an option to my BBS2ANSI program to throw away the blink data, as convansi interprets "blink" to mean "white background". That's not as dumb a mistake as you'd think, but it's not what I want. I'm working on an ANSI viewer and sorting out the ANSIs that I actually want people to view, as opposed to the ones that are just shameless appropriations of preexisting ANSIs (as opposed to lame parodies and minor changes made to preexisting ANSIs), and ANSIs I did that I now find highly emberassing.

Sun Jun 20 1999 16:34: The viewer and 45 Da Warren ANSIs are up at the new Da Da Warren Memorial Memorial. The new Gumby! More will be up eventually.

Sun Jun 20 1999 21:09: Tonight's Futurama was the story of me trying to watch Futurama. When my PC is turned on it scrambles Fox.

I'm officially done with sampo. I've been moving stuff over all evening. The trend will continue now that Futurama is over.

Tue Jun 22 1999 07:40: Here is Jake's notebook. Here is what Jake's notebook would look like if I did the decorating. Jake has no taste.

Tue Jun 22 1999 08:48: I'm trying not to obsess over the fact that Bill Gates is nearly three times as rich as the world's second-richest man. It's difficult.

Tangentially. Eben Moglen, who is the legal counsel for the Free Software Foundation, has an article called Anarchism Triumphant in which he makes a number-theoretical argument against the concept of intellectual property. I'm pointing you to it because that's what I am pounding on at the moment.

Tue Jun 22 1999 18:40: I now longer have any hair on my head. Well, I have some, but not much. I went and got a crew cut after work. My hair hasn't been this short for fourteen years. It feels good, especially in the heat of summer.

I got a B+ in 111. Not bad for what is universally considered one of the hardest CS classes. Hopefully I'll make the dean's list this quarter.

Wed Jun 23 1999 07:09: Today's kids think the IT industry is just too geeky. What's the solution? Institute "Techies Day"! Good job, McCloud!

Wed Jun 23 1999 08:33: Hey, look at me! And again! What a world I live in in which I need a webcam in order to look at the back of my head.

"May contain Mike" is a joke from high school. I'll explain it someday. But it does pertain to those pictures.

Thu Jun 24 1999 07:26: A- in CS161. I bet Campbell is steaming mad at {dirt, that news}.

Thu Jun 24 1999 11:25: Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! See the ncurses documentation allow leonardr to port a mountain of colorful DOS code!

Andy knows what I'm talking about. Watch for BOOZE For Linux to be out soon.

Thu Jun 24 1999 19:43: Could Steve Wozniak possibly kick more ass per unit time?

Thu Jun 24 1999 19:56: It's time for me to point once again to my Dylan-esque protest song, The Flag Burning Amendment Makes Me Want To Burn The Flag. As much as I like that song, I wish I didn't have to point to it.

Thu Jun 24 1999 20:48: I'm bored, and tired from packing up stuff for moving tomorrow, so I will take some time to explain "may contain Mike".

It references Mike Howard, who I went to high school with and who started me on playing the guitar. He had the coolest haircut in the world. I can't explain it, but it was really cool. Then one day he shaved his head, and he kept it shaved for the remainder of high school. Which is fine, but not as cool as his old haircut. The point of this paragraph is that Mike Howard shaved his head.

There is a video Mike and I made on May 10, 1996, of us playing our respective guitars in my bedroom. The two highlights of the video are 1) the really stupid faces I make when I sing, and 2) two of the three versions we did of the improvised song "Streethouse Rock" (the first, and superior, version, was lost to a dead battery). It involved the phrase "Streethouse Rock is back again, we've got x and all {his,her,its} friends" a lot. I no longer find it as funny as I used to, but it's pretty funny. Anyway, at the end of the song I do this stream-of-consciousness thing expanding on the station identification for KMPH Fox 26 (man, as soon as I start explaining one bit it brings up another bit), going into all this disclaimer stuff, and ending with (literal quote) "Caution! May contain small parts. Caution! Caution! May contain parts. Caution! May contain explosive material. Do not eat. Caution! May contain Mike. Do not shave head."

Aren't you glad I explained that to you? Now I have to explain the KMPH Fox 26 bit eventually.

Fri Jun 25 1999 09:28: I might get one of these free home automation kits, but man, look at that copy! It makes it sound like this hypothetical guy has his family in some sick animal behavior experiment! Can't home automation be used for good instead of evil?

Actually, I'm not going to get one of those things. I already have too much crap I don't need.

Fri Jun 25 1999 10:55: My mother has printed out my travelogue, and is going to find and scan photos for me to put up. She was complaining that the scanner was telling her that she was out of memory. She was trying to scan pictures at 1200 dpi. I talked her down to 600 dpi, and told her that I don't want anything above 300dpi.

Fri Jun 25 1999 16:32: Well, I'm moved in. My feet are killing me. Now it's runaway with the rich and famous as I go down to Riverside with Mark of LWE travelogue fame to play networked games until all hours.

Texas travelogue pictures are coming along, although they are being scanned at too high a resolution to be Webable. I may have said this already.

Mon Jun 28 1999 07:37: In the LA Times: Computers Used to Make Science Fun. Nowadays they just make it more boring.

Mon Jun 28 1999 11:23: I will probably regret this, but I'm going to stay in the Linear Algebra class despite the better time-coordinates and superior easiness of the Differential Equations class. I just don't want to deal with differential equations anymore.

The Linear Algebra class is easier to justify to UCLA as a technical minor in conjunction with my two number theory classes, anyway.

And then there's that chilling sentence on the top of the DE instructor's homepage...

Mon Jun 28 1999 14:40: Someone spent a little time doing a Jar-Jargonizer. Fine. Wholesome family fun. But they didn't spend just a little time on it, because they spent enough time on it to exhaust the conceptual space to the point where they came up with a hook for the phrase "Austin Powers" (See my page). And who knows what else. I dare say someone spent a whole weekend on this.

Mon Jun 28 1999 15:23: In my Texas travelogue, I make reference to a bit on an old Cowboy Copas tape in which Cowboy Copas and his pal play the same little country riff over and over again, calling it by names like "The Great Speckled Bird" and "Dreamin' Tonight of my Blue Eyes". I had thought that the bit was that they were making up many different titles for the country riff and calling them different songs, but it turns out that those are real country songs which all use that same riff, and the bit is making fun of the repetitiveness of those songs. It's still a funny bit, though not quite as funny as I thought it was. Cowboy Copas needs a page on mp3.com.

Mon Jun 28 1999 15:53: Woohoo! An A in 199 means a 3.66 GPA for the quarter, which (I think) means I get on the dean's list. I don't know why I'm excited about that, but I am.

Tue Jun 29 1999 07:08: I'm back in the segv-story-publishing saddle again, due to unspecified personal problems on Scott's end. Several good stories published so far.

I'd better take a shower before Danny wakes up and wants to take his.

Wed Jun 30 1999 08:36: I'm wondering if NYCB qualifies as a weblog. Here is my reasoning on the subject:

Me #1: It's on the Web, and it's a log. Thus, it's a weblog.
Me #2: It's not a log, you freak!
Me #1: It's a log. Try Nathan Hale Weblog Beer. It's a weblog. Beer.
Me #2: NYCB is not a weblog, dammit! It's you talking about the stupid things that happen in your stupid life!
Me #1: Me? It's you who does that! I bring the weblog to life with witty anecdotes and hot links with the freshest commentary around!
Me #2: Yeah, well weblog this! [hits Me #1 in the face]
Me #1 Why I oughta... [jumps Me #2]
[rumble ensues]

I think if you sliced NYCB a certain way, you would get a weblog, but that would be a mighty poor way of slicing it, as you would miss all the weird entries like this one. Well, this particular one you would probably get.

Wed Jun 30 1999 08:50: I thought I had the encryption argument whomped with respect to Moglen's article, but then along comes {Mary, Eric S. Raymond}, who I still believe to be merely a sophisticated AI, and rephrases the argument in The Magic Cauldron (just incidentally, it's not the main thrust of the article or anything), and I don't know if the same counterargument applies or not.

I really like the verb "to whomp". Also "to whomp on". I'm not sure where it comes from. I may have made it up. It means "to leap on from a great height", metaphorically, "to trump or defeat". cf "To meet another's father in a steel cage".

Thu Jul 01 1999 08:20: Yes, once more Leonard Richardson Month is upon us. I was going to reuse the 1997 Leonard Richardson Month copy for the third year running, but let's try to put a stop to the practice of reusing copy for the third year running, shall we?

There is a new Mail You Can Bruise. It's not even from a real person, but I think it's funny. I get the "fire is being strobed!" security message a lot, but I'd never gotten this security message before. Now I can say "Yes, I get alerted by email whenever someone is in promiscious mode." Whenever someone is in promiscious mode, I know about it! You can count on that.

I now have a whole bunch of travelogue pictures from my mother, which will soon be integrated into the travelogue proper. I am distressed to discover that the haircut I had did not make me look older. In fact, it made me look like a thirteen-year-old. Fortunately, I no longer have that haircut.

In just nine days {I can make you a man, I will be twenty years old}. Huzzah!

Thu Jul 01 1999 12:54: I just met Arely Zaragoza, who I went to high school with, in Ackerman. She is in a pre-med summer plan here, apparantly. I believe she is going to Cal State Bakersfield.

That trumps what I was going to put here, which is that I got my story published in Be Dope. That story is in the vein of the Adam Kaplan school of comedy, which holds that anything involving the word "ass" is funny. I think I did as well as I could have done, given the subject matter.

Mike Popovic, Be Dope editor extraordinaire, has offered me a CD of BeOS 4.5. Yippee! Now maybe I can finally get my music in gear.

So kids, if you want a copy of BeOS 4.5, just write a silly story for Be Dope. Note: I cannot guarantee that this will work for you.

I went to the EMS library, looking for the thing by Kolmogorov on the relative magnitudes of the different indices of a function, thinking it would be fun to read over the weekend. Unfortunately, while "the thing by Kolmogorov on the relative magnitudes of the different indices of a function" is how I store it in my mind, that's not something you can search on in the EMS library. Everything by Kolmogorov I could find looked too heavy for me, so I'll have to ask Prof. Enderton what paper or book he was talking about. This is no great loss, as there are two other books I am in the same predicament about, and I can just ask about all of them at once.

I did get Kernighan's (ho ho ho! I'm Brian Kernighan!) UNIX Programming Environment, Brooks' (ho ho ho! I'm Fred Brooks! No, never mind) The Mythical Man Month, and Knuth's Literate Programming, which will hold me at least through the 4th of July weekend.

Along the hall of the 6th floor of the Math Sciences building, there are portraits of mathematicians. Godel is right outside the door, and Kolmogorov is a little down the hall. Kolmogorov looks like he was quite the ladies' man.

Thu Jul 01 1999 14:16: The door mentioned in the last entry is the door to the room where I am taking my Linear Algebra class.

Fri Jul 02 1999 06:59: How does the BeOS compare to Linux?

Actually, at Be we love Linux...

Geez, I just asked for a comparison. There's no need to get defensive.

Fri Jul 02 1999 07:36: segv really needs to be moved stateside. Every time we get linked to from any site of consequence, response time slows to a crawl.

Also, I'd like to know what crazy mojo Recap is using to get every single column of his linked from Linux Today.

Fri Jul 02 1999 08:00: Here's the real ~~Ghostbusters~~ Linux sound page.

Fri Jul 02 1999 10:01: July seems to be okay, Y2K-wise. Anything that needs to look half a year into the future has broken by now. The next test is in about a week, when fiscal 2000 starts in many states.

Jake alleges that NYCB is in fact a weblog. But what does he know?

Fri Jul 02 1999 15:09: I keep throwing Jar Jar out, and the crafty bugger keeps worming his way back into my life. His foppish mug now stares at me from twelve cans of Mountain Dew. Have you seen me?, he seems to say.

Oh, I got a Yoda PEZ dispenser yesterday, for solving a challenge in Linear Algebra. I've never had a PEZ dispenser before. The upkeep is enormous; it takes over a minute to load the darn thing. The candy disposal mechanism doesn't go far enough. You tilt Yoda's head back and he pushes the candy out about a milimeter. You still have to reach in, chucking Yoda under the chin (Hmm! Stop that! Tickles, it does!), and grab the candy. It should plop it out into your hand.

Also, the [who's the cat who's a funky sex machine for all the chicks?] spring-loaded shaft [damn right. you know, i hear that spring-loaded shaft is one bad motha--(shut yo' mouth!) i'm just talkin' 'bout spring-loaded shaft! (we can dig it!)] needs to have a little latch thing that keeps it extended while you load the candy.

And let's face it; using Yoda's (or anyone's) head as a means of dispensing candy is just plain creepy. I will bet ten to one that PEZ was invented by some crazy German guy.

Also, the PEZ candies are not very good. That said, I like the Yoda PEZ dispenser. But the thing I will not tolerate is the sucker which recieves radio broadcasts and transmits them to your ears via your teeth. There should have been a special section of the Geneva Convention disallowing that.

Fri Jul 02 1999 15:24: As long as I'm cleaning out the Star Wars bin:

The Taco Bell/Star Wars cross promotional contest is something like "Defeat the Dark Side and Win". Defeating the Dark Side should really be its own reward.

Sat Jul 03 1999 20:21: I just realized that if I do The Devil Went Down to Silicon Valley, I won't have to finish the other song that I've never been able to finish. This is a great relief to me. Of course, this presumes that I can finish The Devil Went Down to Silicon Valley, but for Pete's sake, it's a parody of an existing song! I don't think I've ever had to leave a song parody unfinished.

Sat Jul 03 1999 21:03: Here is my hypothesis: When originally broadcast on the BBC, the My Word announcer said, "The BBC present: My Word!". When rebroadcast on American radio, they added in an "s" sound to accomadate American usage, causing the announcer to say, "The BBC present-ss: My Word!" rather creepily.

Sun Jul 04 1999 10:20: I'm going to the fabulous Pricewatch to look at systems, and the thing that's different from last time I was at Pricewatch about six months ago is that now all the cheap systems are Linux systems.

I'm not getting a full system, but that is interesting.

Sun Jul 04 1999 20:19: Go to devel and behold the Linux port of robotfindskitten! Almost just like the original! I just need to get the low ASCII characters to display. Apart from that, better than the original! Also check out my rudimentary action game, robotfindskitten 2: this time it's personal!

Mon Jul 05 1999 18:01: I spent the day greatly improving robotfindskitten 2. It's almost to the point where you could implement something like ZZT in the skeleton provided by robotfindskitten 2. All the stupid things, like the stairway changing colors and moving, and the guys talking to each other when they collide, were just done to test all the different hooks and such, but they also increase the length of time the game is fun, from about ten seconds to about a minute.

This code is very cool. Also, I no longer fear function pointers.

I really need to get working on the project I'm doing with Peter.

Mon Jul 05 1999 18:38: I learned this in English. There are these things called life records, which are put together by historians. A life record of someone is a compendium of absolutely everything that is known about that person's coming and goings and life and writings, indexed by day. Milton's life record is about twelve volumes. Shakespeare's is a lot thinner because we don't know much about his life. But you get the idea. Everything avaliable in historical records, right down to what someone ate on a particular date, is in the life record under the appropriate date.

Fine. But I'm starting to think that you can't simultaneously condone this and condemn those obsessive web pages that gather all information related in any way to, eg., Mr. Belvedere. Imagine the historical value of a really good life record of just some random French guy in the 14th century. Or, to move my analogy forward, an exhaustive, obsessive list and analysis of every gig played by some 1890s vaudevillian.

The better we document our culture, the easier it will be for future historians to make sense of our craziness. Obsessives, as we know, are only too happy to document minutae, and historians are paid to wade through minutae later on to discover the ones that turn out to be important or interesting. It's a perfect match. The only problem is that obsessives are not the people to turn to for objective reporting of events. But that's hardly a new problem for historians.

Mon Jul 05 1999 22:02: Okay, I no longer fear malloc() or free(), and, apart from an ugly cleanup function, the linked list implementation is rumbling along. It goes a lot smoother now, and now I can add mobile things at runtime, like projectiles. Woohoo!

the new version

I must sleep now.

Tue Jul 06 1999 06:44: Where did this fog come from?

Tue Jul 06 1999 07:28: It came on the rails, of course. It couldn't have come... from anywhere else.

Tue Jul 06 1999 16:07: Money For Nothing, Be For Free! Woohoo! It arrives straight from Be, Inc. in Menlo Park. Man, I'd hate to live in Menlo Park.

I'm copying everything over from my old drive so that I can use that as my BeOS drive. Whoa! Look what I found in the old /tmp:

-rw-rw-r--   1 500      500             6 Jun 29  1998 faultnic.log
rubberfish:/other_hd/tmp# less faultnic.log
Booga.

Heh heh... well, time for it to die.

I'm going to get a whole new computer with my birthday money. Except for the hard drives. A whole new computer. That's what I keep telling myself. But I'm afraid I will chicken out and not spend it.

Hm, my DOS partition is in a sorry state. Impossibly huge files in windows/system and such. I don't know if there's a bug in the Linux driver or if it's just DOS being crap.

Okay, I'm almost done. Before I reboot, enjoy this transcript of an old improvised bit Kris and i did once:

Steve: C'mon, Bill, get in my wallet!
Bill: I don't want to get into your wallet!
Steve: You have to! That's the only way we can sneak you into Netscape!
Bill: Oh, all right.
Marc: Good morning, Mr. Ballmer.
Steve: Oh, hi, uh, Mr. Anderson. Andereson. And--
Marc: Andreessen.
Steve: Yeah, that.
Marc: It's a good thing you managed to get here without Bill noticing!
Steve: Yeah, otherwise this whole back door thing would fall apart!
Bill: Heh heh heh!
Marc: What was that?
Steve: Oh, just, uh... my talking wallet! Now let's see some of that
source code!
Marc: But Mr. Ballmer, our source code is free on the net! You can just
download it!
Steve: WHAT?!?!?!

Tue Jul 06 1999 16:11: Argh. I just realized that I have to reconnect my CD-ROM drive.

Wed Jul 07 1999 06:36: Latino Students With Asthma. I thought it was a new student group, but it was an invitation to participate in an experiment.

I foolishly threw caution to the wind (NB: When you find yourself preparing to foolishly throw caution to the wind, don't! You may learn this lesson before I do.) and screwed up my system installing BeOS. I'd be fine if BeOS recognized my video card and mouse (?!), because then I could set up the other hard drive instead of the CDROM and coax BeOS into recognizing it, and be fine. But no. And for some reason, my floppy drive has died. So.

I think I subconsciously engineered this to force me to buy a new system.

Wed Jul 07 1999 07:17: I just realized that in the original improvisation of that bit, Kris and I switched who was doing Ballmer right in the middle, when I started doing Andreesen. I never even noticed that before, it was so smooth. Such teamwork! We would have cleaned up as a vaudeville act, as I believe I have stated here before.

You know what? I'm just gonna buy a whole new computer. I'm sick of pretending that I enjoy upgrading hardware.

Wed Jul 07 1999 08:32: Cool. My GPA is now a refreshing 3.21.

Peter has this wonderful little book I just found called A Book of Russian Idioms Illustrated. Featuring a literal cartoon rendition of a given idiom, and a figural cartoon rendition of that same idiom. It's fun to read.

Here's a great idiom: to sit between two chairs.

Wed Jul 07 1999 10:10: I need to tell you about Poorman's Bikini Beach, but I'm not sure how. It defies any attempt at description.

I'll tell you about it eventually. In the meantime I will say that yesterday there was an MST3K tribute on Bill Nye.

Wed Jul 07 1999 13:11: I just realized that my problem is that everything I know about hardware is about seven years old. Fortunately, the "plug cards into the motherboard and hope they work" paradigm remains dominant, but about this chipset business and this video card and sound card business, oy! These concerns did not exist the last time I bought a computer.

The last time I bought a computer was in 1996. But that computer occupied largely the same conceptual space as the one I bought in 1992, hardware-wise.

Hm... my computer purchases are just a little over three years apart. Three years and a couple months. Late 1992, early 1996, mid-1999. I wonder what class of buyer that puts me in.

My first computer lasted from 1987 to 1992. But I didn't do much on it.

The system I have my eye on is going to cost me about $650 with the shipping. That's about what it would cost to get the parts. Maybe $50 more. Why am I trying to rationalize this? I am not someone who thinks it a sin to buy a whole system instead of building one from parts. I don't even like building computers, dammit! I never liked building computers! I did it because it repesented a savings of $500-plus; this is no longer true!

Whoa. Okay, I'm better now.

Man, I hate dealing with hardware. Maybe it's just the cruftiness of the PC platform. But it's cheap and it works.

Wed Jul 07 1999 13:55: The previous entry is wrong. The system I want should only be about $500.

Wed Jul 07 1999 16:46: I repaired my MBR at home and am up and running here again. All that is screwed up is my old 2 gig hard drive, which was going to have BeOS on it eventually.

Wed Jul 07 1999 19:10:

Okay, I am ready to explain Poorman's Bikini Beach to you.

It's very public access. This guy, stage name "Poorman" (who apparantly is an ex-KROQ DJ) films and talks to and does stupid things with girls he meets on the beach. The selling point of the show is that the girls are all wearing bikinis, and they look pretty good in them. There's really no other reason to watch the show, unless (like me) you like listening to people talk about really trivial things.

It's not as bad as you'd think. I'm not defending the show (some of the girls are still in high school), but it's nowhere near as bad as you'd think. It's got a naivete about it. "Are you man enough for the wildest and wettest bikini contest in the Southland, ladies?"

So Poorman goes around the beach talking to women in bikinis. And they talk about whatever, their personal lives and such. And there are weird little bits like "Bikini Girl Forum", in which women in bikinis lie on towels and form a discussion panel. The topic I saw was "Why men are pigs". So they're discussing their old relationships and how they went sour because their men were pigs, and stuff like that. Poorman: "Do you think Poorman's Bikini Beach might be watched by a few pigs?"

It takes a certain mentality to walk this line: to believe that there's being a pig, and then there's talking to girls in bikinis and making it into a TV show, which is just good clean fun. But if you want to find women who hold this mentality, a good place to look is on the beaches near LA, because those who go to the beach wearing bikinis in the first place are more likely to hold it.

Anyway, one bit is where Poorman and various bikini-clad women go around to try to find the best burger in Southern California. It's a decent concept, I think. But who would watch it if it did not involve young ladies in bikinis? You practically have to have them to make it saleable for television, which I think is a shame.

And the little ads. Man. It's shilling more unabashed and cheerful than anything since the golden age of television. They have this phony taste test set up between this microbrew that sponsors the show, and some national brand beer. I don't know anything about beer, but that beer probably really is better than any national brand. But you'd never believe it from the commercial.

Poorman's Bikini Beach appears to be on weeknights at 6 PM, on channel 62, in the Los Angeles area. Channel 62 treats it as paid programming, but that appears to be how they treat everything. You should probably watch it once, just because the commercials are pretty funny, and occasionally poignant, in an odd sort of way. I don't know how long you'd want to keep watching it. It depends on how much you like low-budget locally-produced television, humdrum personal conversation, and/or ogling girls in bikinis. And you know, if you really want to, you can go to the beach yourself and talk to actual girls in actual bikinis, instead of watching it on television. Just don't be a pig about it.

Thu Jul 08 1999 06:41: My mother alleges that it has not been three years since I bought a computer, since "[w]e just bought mine in February". However, I did not buy that computer, and, more to the point, that is not my computer, it is her computer.

Am I really picky? Yesterday at work I was talking about the sale of 25 tons of gold by the Bank of England, and Rona made a joke, saying that that amount of gold would be worth about 25 cents in Canadian money. The point of the joke was that Canadian money is worthless, but I pointed out that the joke actually implied that Canadian money was incredibly valuable, if 25 cents would buy 25 tons of gold. And Rona implied that I was being really picky. But if you make a joke, and someone points out that the point made by the joke was the opposite point of the one you intended to make, is that being picky?

Thu Jul 08 1999 06:46: How about this: I replace my computer about once every 35 months.

Thu Jul 08 1999 06:53: Oooh mista Kotter! I forgot to mention this: I found those caffinated penguin mints! At the Penguins frozen yogurt place! They're not made by Penguins, it's a cross-promotional deal. With these caffienated penguin mints, I WILL RULE THE WORLD!!!

And my birthday is tomorrow.

Thu Jul 08 1999 08:16: rfk2 now has bullets, although the guys the bullets are supposed to hurt don't realize that they're bullets. How inconsiderate. This is more of a breakthrough than it sounds, as it means that things on the screen can be created and destroyed at runtime. I still have to clean up the code a lot, so I'm not putting out a new release. Not that anyone downloads it anyway. Well, judging from the webserver logs, there have been 19 downloads of it. Pretty good, actually.

Oh, I forgot to mention that Scott D. Boyd (sdboyd@fastlane.net) sent me some Perl code for doing DNS lookups. You have him to thank for the fact that the browser greetings program now prints out your hostname instead of your IP address.

Thu Jul 08 1999 12:16: Now that my home system works again I find myself wanting to not spend my birthday money. Argh! I knew this would happen! Will I have to deliberately destroy my old computer to make me get a new one?

Thu Jul 08 1999 12:38: In the spirit of last year's UNIX countdown, I present this year's American-style date countdown.

Thu Jul 08 1999 12:40: Time for another episode of Date Countdown, American Style!

Thu Jul 08 1999 18:14: Bullets in rfk2 are sane now. They disappear when they go off the screen, but dead killers can still kill you. So get the new version. The code is still messy. I'm still learning how to use malloc and free. I used to be really scared of anything pertaining to pointers, but I think I'm getting a lot better.

Thu Jul 08 1999 21:11: All objects in rfk2, except for robot, are now allocated at runtime. The only problem I'm having right now is when you stand right next to something and fire at it. The object gets overwritten with the bullet. I'm going to need to create the bullet, manually hit the other object with the bullet, and send the touch message to the bullet, whereupon it will remove itself from memory.

rfk2 is a decent game now. By this I do not mean that it's fun for any length of time. I mean that it has a goal, some enemies who interfere with the goal, and a way of dispatching those enemies. Enemy to dispatch.

Another new version up now. This is the first actually playable version, if you ignore the problem with shooting right next to something.

Fri Jul 09 1999 08:28: Happy birthday to me.

Fri Jul 09 1999 08:56: It turns out that Andy is as lost without a map as I am when it comes to these newfangled computers. Andy:

"And on the subject of computer upgrades, my mother and I were shopping around for new computer parts to upgrade Lisa's computer and it dawned on me that I had no friggin' idea what's good these days and what isn't. Apparently motherboards these days require funky new computer cases. And RAM SIMMS are yesterday's news."

I just got some pointers from Mike Popovic of BeDope, though, so I'm doing okay.

Oh, I set up a thing to record where people come to my homepage from. Mostly from segfault, but a few from bedope, one from yenrab's page, and one from the sampo 404 page.

I've gotten 3 emails of appreciation about my bedope story. I don't know how to respond, so I thank you publically on my page here.

Andy is coming over next week sometime, I hope, to record Jake's birthday present with me. While he's here, I hope to do a sort of "Phantasmorgia of Andy!" in which we record all my songs that mention him. I believe I have three. They're all just one-off references, I don't have a song about him per se.

I should really go see the Berliner Ensemble this weekend. It's probably something which for the rest of my life I will regret not having gone to see. But I'm just so lazy.

Fri Jul 09 1999 16:43: There was one Berliner Ensemble ticket left. It was way in the back. It was not a student ticket. It cost $49. There is no way I'm paying $49 for a damn theater ticket.

Twelve Mace Windus take their place in my fridge alongside the four remaining Jar Jars. I don't normally go through eight cans of Mountain Dew in a week, but when it's on sale, it's on sale.

By the way, no one, under any circumstances, should ever use the phrase "roving tongue".

Mon Jul 12 1999 08:12: I just saw an albino pigeon.

I was going to skip class today and go to work, but I couldn't get out of bed.

I have to read Walden. Such dense prose, so hard to read after Franklin's Autobiography. I read it in high school without any trouble. I think if you're going to read Walden you should read it in high school.

I have begun to really dig The X-Files. It's my generation's The Twilight Zone.

Mon Jul 12 1999 08:48: Okay, I ordered my mighty computer. It cost $582. It is an AMD 450 with 128 megs of RAM. It should be here in about two weeks. Now maybe I can stop agonizing over this.

Mon Jul 12 1999 13:47: I screwed up! I forgot that I'm a senior now, and entitled to the first slot for picking classes! And I went and wasted that slot by not signing up for anything! Now 181 is full! ARRGH

Oh well. I had to scramble, but I found a decent schedule for the fall. Computer System Modeling Fundamentals, which appears to be a benchmarking class or a distributed systems class or some combination of the two; the database class I almost took last quarter; A creampuff (?) Bach music history class; and First Course in Logic, which I discovered you need in order to take any interesting upper-division philosophy classes, apart from the Philosophy of Science series, which is not being offered this year.

FCIL has gotta be a joke. What could be in it that I haven't done three times over? My only concern is that I'm using up my easy classes this quarter. But I don't really have a choice, as the two hard classes I have left I can't take this quarter.

I'm going to be very angry if UCLA doesn't think the classes I chose fall into the right categories and makes me take additional classes, thus preventing me from graduating on time. I don't think that will happen, but it might.

Tue Jul 13 1999 05:48: Interesting, as always, to see what searches bring people to this site. The Captain Planet comic is bringing quite a few people in.

Tue Jul 13 1999 06:03: New version of rfk2. I fixed the stairway problem, but an unrelated problem causes segfaults when you shoot right next to an enemy. The whole bullet thing needs to be rethought, so this will be the last rfk2 for a while, probably. You can toggle synchronous mode on and off by hitting the S key. Synchronous mode means everything moves once after you move and then stops and waits for you to move again. It's of no use in rfk2, but as rfk2 is supposed to be a general framework for ANSI games, I figured I'd put it in. So now I could do rfk1 in the framework provided by rfk2.

Tue Jul 13 1999 07:02: I thought of a way to do the cookie subversion thing, but it's not as easy as the way I couldn't do it last year. Browsers won't accept cookies from domains other than the domain offering the cookie. So instead of just setting the cookie I'd have to print out the cookie text and have the user cut and paste it into their cookies.txt. This limits the scope of the subversion somewhat.

Hm, interesting idea for a client-server program.

Tue Jul 13 1999 07:20: I have a fourth song that mentions Andy, but it's not done, and probably never will be.

Tue Jul 13 1999 09:18: I added a link to Scott Hammack's personal slang dictionary on the Leonardonics page. When I say I want to see your personal slang dictionary, I mean I want to see your personal slang dictionary, and I also mean that if you don't have one, I want you to write one. Anyone can make a personal slang dictionary, and, as far as I'm concerned, everyone should. Even if it's just a couple terms.

Tue Jul 13 1999 16:34: Mark Twain's The Late Benjamin Franklin has got to be one of the funniest things I have ever read. Enjoy in moderation.

I typed that in just now. I'm not expecting you to be awed by that, I'm just explaining why I'm putting a copy on my site and not pointing to it somewhere else.

Fred is having this moral crisis about the crappy proprietary software you have to use in the digital design lab. He won't agree to the licensing agreement, and believes that this prohibits him from using the software. Sheesh! I wish that was my biggest moral problem.

To his credit, Fred is not (just) a whiner. He is writing a GPLed replacement for the crappy proprietary software you have to use in the assembly language class (the infamous and much-mocked CUSP). I salute him for that. Also, I went through rfk2 with him today and he enjoyed my code, and I showed him some new C tricks. This I am proud of, as he previously proved to be the repository of all Linux-display-related knowledge, thus making me feel inferior.

Today is the day of swiping stuff from school. I swiped the toaster from CSUA, as I have none of my own (I'm a hatter), and I was having to toast my bread in the oven, and it was always burning. I also swiped the fan from Peter's office, as my apartment is impossibly hot, especially at night. I doubt that fan has seen daylight in fifteen years.

Tue Jul 13 1999 16:38: I'm going to give the stuff back, obviously, once someone else needs it.

Tue Jul 13 1999 20:05: The URL tree printer now generates valid HTML 4.0. I fixed it by making the Franklin page verify correctly.

Wed Jul 14 1999 07:46: Every time I buy something with my check card, they run into a problem with the address verification. It goes on and on until they call the credit union, which magically resolves everything. It is a mystery to me.

Okay, Mr. MegaSuperBrowser, I'm ready for you! I'll take you down!

Wed Jul 14 1999 08:00: How about a program that notifies you via email when you get new email?

Wed Jul 14 1999 08:23: New Leonardronicseseses: magic footnote and (from yesterday) creampuff.

Wed Jul 14 1999 09:00: I need to buy tomatoes, cheese, a spoon to replace Danny's spoon that I broke. I think that's it.

Wed Jul 14 1999 13:32: Here's a big (or small, depending) list of actual factual Y2K problems that have already occured.

Thu Jul 15 1999 06:42: Lately I have been dragged into deep conversations. With Fred the other day, and with Campbell yesterday. Maybe it's {because I'm a Londoner, summer}.

Response to my Cookie Swap Protocol proposal has been fairly positive, except for one AC who called me a bastard via BAH/HumBug, so I am linking the proposal to the public.

Thu Jul 15 1999 07:07: Man! I want in on this! Jake, is this what your friends do instead of studying? What relationship does this "That's a spicy meatball!" have with your "That's a spicy meatball!"?

Fri Jul 16 1999 08:35: I can't get enough of the Super Golden Crisp that is Stanislaw Lem. Every time I think he's going to reuse an idea he's already used in a story, he turns on me and pounds me into the ground for my insolence. Metaphorically, I mean.

I read Eden, Memoirs of a Space Traveller, and Return from the Stars yesterday, picking up one as soon as I finished the other. Memoirs was consistently good, and very funny. Return started out excellent and then dragged along for a while. Eden started off great, was consistently great, and ended in a mind-numbing explosion of greatness that overwhelmed me to the extent that I never want to read the beginning or middle of the book again, just the end.

I have three more books of Lem to read, and there are at least five more books of his in English in the library, although a couple of the novels look like your standard Cold War-era Polish angst-filled novels. I've never actually read such a novel, but I can recognize the form.

Actually, I did read a novel of that form, though by a Russian expatriate, It Is Hard To Be A Russian Spy. I found it in Peter's office. I thought it would be a light-hearted romp through the world of espionage. Instead, it was just depressing. I do like saying "Is hard to be Russian spy" in my lame Russian broken-English accent, though.

I went to the library to get T.H. White's Arthurian novels. I came for the White, stayed for the Lem. I am starting The Sword In The Stone, which I now realize was where Disney got their The Sword In The Stone from. I thought that movie seemed a little lighthearted to be a Disneyisation from the original Arthurian mythos.

Fri Jul 16 1999 08:43: Oh, one more thing about the library. Mark Twain has about three shelves of stuff. And on the shelf right next to Twain is most of a shelf dedicated to Fennimore Cooper (Clemens->Cooper), subject of Twain's riotous "Fennimore Cooper's Literary Offenses", in which Cooper was said to have, on one page alone, committed 114 sins against artistic style of a possible 115. Just a funny juxtaposition.

Fri Jul 16 1999 09:43: A guy posted the Dada Pokey URL on a message board. I know because I got a visitor from there and logged it. Dada Pokey is probably more bookmarked than any other page on my site, judging from the number of hits it gets that aren't from other pages.

Fri Jul 16 1999 13:04: I can't get enough of the Super Golden Crisp that is the phrase "I can't get enough of the Super Golden Crisp that is x". It should probably go in Leonardonics. By the way, there should be a cereal called Super Golem Crisp.

Sun Jul 18 1999 06:04: I am sicker than a dog. Have been since Friday afternoon. Nose plugged up, hurts to eat, etc. Unable to study for midterms. Not good. Will try to study for math (easy) today, and hopefully I'll be better and can study for english tomorrow. I have to go be sick now. Hm, good name for a BeOS productivity suite: Gobe Sick.

Sun Jul 18 1999 20:10: I'm still sick. In my absence, I suggest bowing before the might of Leonard Kleinrock.

Mon Jul 19 1999 08:36: What good is having a student health center that won't take insurance? Why even bother? I suppose they get the occasional student who injures himself in Wooden and can't hobble all the way down to the medical center, but on the whole I don't see how anyone would be desperate enough to go there but not desperate to go the medical center.

My indignation has given me renewed vitality.

Mon Jul 19 1999 09:35: Leonardonics: I can't get enough of the Super Golden Crisp that is x

Mon Jul 19 1999 12:39: I totally whomped my math midterm. I made at most one mistake.

Now I must reread Franklin and Thoreau for my midterm tomorrow. I don't think I read the whole of Walden in high school. I might've, but it just seems so much longer now.

Tue Jul 20 1999 06:31: !!!!! The movie First Spaceship on Venus, as seen on MST3K, is based on a book called The Astronauts by Stanislaw Lem! "Lem is said to have disowned the film."

Lem was alive as of 1996. That's the date of an interview with him I found. At any rate, he no longer writes.

I'm getting all this stuff at pages like this one.

Tue Jul 20 1999 09:32: There is a security seminar called "Deciduous: Decentralized Identification of Network-Based Intrusion Source" today, which I plan to attend, if only for the free food.

Tue Jul 20 1999 11:49: Woo! Warner Brothers cartoon pop culture references explained!

Tue Jul 20 1999 12:41: With this entry, the July 1999 NYCB will become the largest NYCB to date, the previous record holder being the March 1998 NYCB.

95% on the math midterm. I did make the one mistake I thought I had made. English midterm in 20 minutes. I went through Franklin yesterday, marking everything that might be of use, and am trying to force my way through Higher Laws, as my prof believes that to be one of the focal points of Walden.

Tue Jul 20 1999 15:51: My midterm essay was long-winded and scattershot, but such is the manner of midterm essays.

Wed Jul 21 1999 06:32: I didn't go to that seminar thingy. I was too tired after the midterm.

Thu Jul 22 1999 06:06: By what criteria did Red Hat decide who to offer pre-IPO stock to? They didn't offer me any (which is just as well as I can't afford it), but they did offer some to witten and uzi of LUG fame. Possibly they sent mail to everyone who has a freshmeat entry. Which is technically spam. Although I don't know what else could have been done.

Thu Jul 22 1999 15:22: Man, IDG really, really wants me to shell out money for LinuxWorld Expo.

Yippee! My mother has my new computer. Soon it will be in my hands. On my floor, I mean.

Dave Griffith emailed my saying that he got a tape drive and a CD burner and is restoring the Da Warren file library. So I'll have a CD of that eventually. Yay!

Fri Jul 23 1999 08:30: My mother is coming down to LA with my computer. Fortunately she was coming down to LA anyway. At one point in my life I would have been excited to the point of incoherence by a new piece of hardware, much less a new computer. I am excited, but not to the point of incoherence. How swiftly fly the joys of youth!

Fri Jul 23 1999 13:54: An actual "cool links" page that links to Dada Pokey: http://www.spaceninja.com/home/links.html

Fri Jul 23 1999 15:05: Five years later, it's still funny: (extended file description for TOXINS.ZIP, uploaded to Da Warren on 7/15/1994)

Should you go for the more expensive mainstream drugs, or should you
try to get a cheap high off of a passing toad? This file will tell you
which species posess the toxins that make these amphibians a favorite of
Beavis and Butthead, as well as the effects of the toxins. This handy
guide will help you evaluate whether or not to "LICK THAT TOAD!"

Fri Jul 23 1999 15:09: Another Da Warren file description, funny in a different way:

WINMODEM v1.00  - WinModem makes the invisible visible. If you have
an internal modem, WinModem can supply the missing status lights. No
more guesswork. You'll always know what the modem id [sic] doing. A must-have
utility if you use communications under Windows.

Fri Jul 23 1999 16:01: Leonardonics: xus maximus (archaic)

Fri Jul 23 1999 18:15: With the new Linux, going on the Internet has never been easier! And when you buy from Affordable Computers, we don't tell you the root password of the machine you buy, but we set it to "password" so you can probably guess it!

Man, this Netscape is fast. Everything is fast, except for bootup, which unaccountably takes forever. This machine weighs in at a beefy 897.84 Bogomips.

I was given a 3.5 gig hard drive instead of a 1.0 gig. I'm not complaining.

kppp is solid gold.

Fri Jul 23 1999 21:59: I'm cooking in the BeOS. Not at the moment, as I can't get it to recognize my modem. But in general, I have done cooking in the BeOS. I want to do a song composed entirely of pieces of audio that came on the BeOS CD.

Sat Jul 24 1999 10:22: There's a Spinal Tap joke in the BeOS. There is not, however, my modem working. I have all the correct information and it still won't talk to my modem.

I'm on campus at the moment. I took rubberfish in to CSUA as Fred and I are going to make it into a server. Now I'm going to go to Radio Shack (knock a little louder, sugar!) to get a mixer->sound card cable so that I can plug my mixer into my sound card. I have one which is from the last time I bought a new computer, in 1996, but it doesn't work anymore. I base this conclusion on the fact that it does not connect output to input, although output and input both work. Thus, by definition, the cable does not work. QED.

Mon Jul 26 1999 07:01: Wow, everything looks so cosmic! This new lynx is more colorful than a barrel of iMacs! Which I guess would be about two iMacs. Anyway, I got the mixer hookup going, except for this intermittent flickering which I haven't been able to track down yet.

I have a decent little baguette of a song recorded called "Sweet Emulsion". It's basically a joke from high school set to different music and with a funny telemarketer's answering machine message mixed in.

I could do a whole album of such baguettes. I certainly have enough scraps on my tapes which could not be made into whole songs, but which I could stretch out to a minute or so with the clever use of samples.

Mon Jul 26 1999 07:19: Bagatelles, not baguettes.

My mother gave me a shirt she got from a crazy guy in Oregon when she went to visit her aunt. On the front it has a rather unconvincing tsunami collage. On the back it says "STOP THE CASCADIA MEGATHRUST EARTHQUAKE SUBDUCTION EVENT", which reminds me of "STOP CONTINENTAL DRIFT". I am disappointed that there are not seven exclamation marks after "EVENT", but it's a good shirt.

My mother's aunt asked the guy how one goes about STOPping the CASCADIA MEGATHRUST EARTHQUAKE SUBDUCTION EVENT. "Pray!" said the guy. That information should really be on the shirt.

Mon Jul 26 1999 07:42: I keep forgetting things. I'm fairly sure that the guest star on The X-Files last night was the same actor who played Garak on ST:DS9. He had the same voice and mannerisms.

Also, is there a rider in David Duchnovy's contract that requires him to summarize the episode in the fiftieth minute of the hour, just before the conclusion?

I'm watching three hours of television a week (DS9, Simpsons, Futurama, X-Files). I'm not sure how good or bad that is. For comparison, I also listen to three hours of radio a week (Prairie Home Companion, My Word, My Music). I read about six hours yesterday, but that's just because I'm still tearing through Lem like a madman.

Josh tried to get me into listening to the old radio dramas they play nightly on some AM station. I might give that a try again, except I forgot what station they're on.

I'm reading Peace on Earth at the moment. 1987, Lem's last book? It certainly fits the mold of "this is my last book".

Mon Jul 26 1999 19:13: I got rid of the annoying glitches in my recording by setting the BeOS' real-time sound processing checkbox, but that checkbox makes everything I record staticky. I don't know why. Dammit, I have 128M of RAM!

My current project is trying to get a decent recording of "Brandy Waters Will Have Her Revenge On Leonard", the gruesome sequel to Brian Overturf's gruesome "Leonard Shot Everyone Down" (for those of you who didn't hear it the first time, it goes "Leonard shot everyone down/Leonard shot everyone down/He shot down his girlfriend named Brandy Waters/she said "no no no no"; there are people, my sister among them, but me not, who know who Brandy Waters is. I thought it was unfair to have me immortalized in song as killing her, without giving her a chance to kill me back)

It's a do-wop song. I love doing the layered vocals, and if there's one thing I've learned from Frank Zappa, it's that anything is funny when you do it as a do-wop song.

Mon Jul 26 1999 19:55: OK, here is a cheap MP3 of Leonard Shot Everyone Down. I pity the poor sap who comes in on a search for "mp3" and has to content himself with that file.

Mon Jul 26 1999 21:15: Okay, all my electronic strugglings are going on a new album, version 1.1.2pl14, named in parody of the "version 2.0" metaphor. The songs are going on the album in order of creation, so presumably a higher track number will mean better quality. Right now there is Sweet Emulsion and Leonard Shot Everyone Down. I'm not happy about the way Sweet Emulsion got mp3ed. The .wav doesn't have that weird squibbling noise in the background.

Tue Jul 27 1999 08:35: When real-time sound is off, my recording skips. When real-time sound is on, the sound quality degrades as a function of how much other stuff is in memory. In particular, if I am playing back a song to record another track on top of it, the sound quality of what I record is completely unusable.

This is unacceptable behavior on the part of the BeOS, particularily on a 450Mhz/128M machine. I hesitate to blame the BeOS for this, but the evidence is pretty convincing.

Possibly I'm recording at an unreasonably high sampling rate, but I can't find anywhere to change it, either at the system or the application level.

Tue Jul 27 1999 15:12: Woohoo! Dan Helfman, whom I will be living with next year in a room the size of a refrigerator carton, has a personal slang dictionary! I should write some software for managing one's personal slang dictionary. That might encourage more people to have them. All those without personal slang dictionaries will taste my lizard steel!

Tue Jul 27 1999 19:05: I got a RAM checking utility. Even while simultanously mixing a bunch of old tracks and recording a new one on top of that, the BeOS stays within the first 64 megs of RAM. I have half my RAM doing absolutely nothing, and the recording still sounds horrid!

Wed Jul 28 1999 07:11: Okay, it's official. I am going to LinuxWorld Expo, and I'm going to be there for all three days. Yippee! I'm not yet sure how I'm going to get there and back, though.

Wed Jul 28 1999 07:57: I really ought to finish my first LWE travelogue before I attend another LWE.

Wed Jul 28 1999 12:43: Hooray for pitas.com, the public weblog service that's like being able to use my notebook program! Well, I can already use my notebook program, and, since it's GPLed, you can use it too, but you might not have server space for it. So you can go sign up at pitas.com and have your own weblog. Hooray!

Jake wants me to do a public personal slang dictionary. Thinking about it I'm not sure how good an idea that is. It's a good thing in that personal slang needs to dissipate, but not a good thing in that one's personal slang is one's own, and you don't want a page that just has a big blob of your slang mixed in with other peoples'.

Wed Jul 28 1999 16:12: I'm working on getting the 1998 travelogue pictures up for consumption. I'm placed in the emberassing situation of having to not put up photos because my hair is so incredibly bad in them. It took me a while after I got my hair cut to figure out what to do with it, and the pictures taken of me during my first few days of short hair are not kind at all.

Thu Jul 29 1999 02:02: For some reason I didn't think Andy would actually leave for Indiana without coming down here first, but he did, and so my start page is gone. So I had to recreate it. Right now it's just a big jumble.

Thu Jul 29 1999 02:02: Yes, I know what time it is. I fell asleep at 6.

Thu Jul 29 1999 09:11: My Texas travelogue now has pictures! Over 30 pictures! In color! Oh yeah, and the alt tags are pretty funny.d So check it out. It might be a good deal for you.

Thu Jul 29 1999 11:58: My old computer is going to be made into a server in the CSUA room. I want to call it "trurl" but I'm not sure how good that is, pronunciation-wise. There is a trurl.bpac.syr.edu and several trurls at Polish universities, so there are other people who think it's a good name. Better "trurl", which is hard to pronounce, than "rubberfish", which takes a long time to type.

Thu Jul 29 1999 14:05: I got a 92% on my English midterm. Not bad for the horribleness that was my essay. I'm serious. I can't stand to read that essay.

Thu Jul 29 1999 15:40: I'm writing a program that will let me change a piece of text to another piece of text, for use in changing links. And of course, it has wreaked havoc. So the music directory is screwed. I have to fix it now.

Thu Jul 29 1999 16:13: I fixed the front music page. The rest of music needs to be restored from my hard drive. If anyone has the album covers or the OMP collage in their cache, please send it to me.

On the bright side, the link changer works now.

Fri Jul 30 1999 10:37: A lot (a lot) of people are hitting the Dada Pokey page on searches for things like "pokey mon" "pokey man", etc. Strangely (or not so strangely), every one of these people is from AOL. So I put a little helpful notice on the Pokey page for these people.

Sun Aug 01 1999 08:59: I don't think caffeine has any effect on me anymore. I need to lay off for a while, I think.

Mon Aug 02 1999 08:38: I talked to Mike Popovic about my recording problems and he has Be QA on the case. It's good to have connections.

Mon Aug 02 1999 09:49: These green Crunchberries are so sick. I love it. They match my socks.

Tue Aug 03 1999 06:58: Freshmeat announcements... from the future!

Tue Aug 03 1999 07:18: I am writing my little paper contrasting Frederick Douglass and Jim from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I need 800 words. I have 362. I feel cheap comparing a real person with a fictional character, but what are you going to do?

Tue Aug 03 1999 08:31: Danny is making me an ommelette.

Now that I set up a logging thing, I can see that my site is getting 50-100 hits a day. This surprises me. I need to write a log analyzer or a program that converts my funky log format into a log format that one of the existing log analyzers can handle.

Wed Aug 04 1999 06:30: The cross-pollination continues as Mike Popovic writes another story for segfault. It's funny. Read it. As editor of segfault I demand more topical satire and less Microsoft-bashing!

Oh yeah, yesterday while we were doing the endless CSUA lounge cleanup, Mark got on Fred's case about Fred's endless Microsoft-bashing, and Fred and I were responding to every sentence Mark said by replacing words in that sentence to make it a Microsoft-bashing sentence. It was funny. That said, endless (or even substantial) Microsoft-bashing is, IMHO, not good. There's no need to make Microsoft-bashing your raison d'etre. That's French for "ethereal raisin".

Wed Aug 04 1999 06:32: Susanna is leaving for college on the 17th. She is going to BYU. Presumably she will have a home page there. I'm not too happy about her choice of college, but I'm not in charge of where Susanna goes to college or doesn't go to college. So I hope she does well. I don't think she has a major yet.

Wed Aug 04 1999 06:50:

Hi Scott! I see you searching for my name! That contact information page really works.

What does this mean?

http://www/V3/redirect.htm?URL=http%3A//fire.csua.ucla.edu/%7Eleonardr/comics/index.shtml,REFERRER=/tabsearch/,AD_ID=-1

Wed Aug 04 1999 07:18: Also, yesterday we decided that people should not wear Linux T-shirts to LinuxWorld Expo, because all the suits will be wearing Linux T-shirts, and if no real people wear them then it will be easy to spot the suits.

Wed Aug 04 1999 09:56: Susanna does not have a major. Among other classes, she has to take a "student development" class which will presumably guide her to a major.

I told Susanna she has to have a home page when she goes to college.

Surprisingly much of my math homework is done. I have to go turn it in now.

Wed Aug 04 1999 09:57: My big search engine hit-getters this week are "Poorman's Bikini Beach", and the perennially popular "Captain Planet" and its variations.

Wed Aug 04 1999 21:57: My paper is done. 1076 words. Now I will sleep.

Thu Aug 05 1999 06:41: Jake communicates with me through Altavista searches, in the same way I once communicated with Joe Barr through invalid page accesses. Noam Chompsky?

Thu Aug 05 1999 07:00: Hey, cool, I want to go to the GNU picnic.

Thu Aug 05 1999 12:34: Leonardonics: This x is insufficiently y!

I have to take my English final in a little bit. I'd better go figure out how to print out my paper.

Thu Aug 05 1999 17:20: csound is great, but its macro processing sucks. I'm going to have to write Perl programs that generate csound scores. In the meantime, you can listen to my still-unfinished csound masterpiece, Annoying Techno Music, from the version 1.1.2pl14 page. That's as much csound as I can stand to do without being able to make repeated phrases into functions. If I pointed you to that file earlier today, it's updated now, with two more measures of annoying techno goodness.

Thu Aug 05 1999 19:15: Another version of Annoying Techno Music. It's now generated by a Perl script. I now realize that Perl scripts have their own problems when it comes to generating music. However, I suppose I can avoid those by just having it print csound stuff in a print <<.

The little ditty in bars 10-11 is stupid and needs to be changed. I like the fact that I did a 15-bar song that doesn't sound weird because of it.

Fri Aug 06 1999 07:49: I am getting tired of {dandelions, my Texas travelogue}. I keep having to go through it to fix things and I am getting tired of reading it. But don't you get tired of it.

Fri Aug 06 1999 07:51: "Noam Chompsky" is Jake's misspelling (intentional? he knows how to spell it) and not mine. I reproduce below his altavista query, which will not make sense to you because it is in response to an email I sent to him, pertaining to a song I wrote about Mark Fasheh:

http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=q&q=leonard+richardson%2e+this+is +jake%2e+your+new+song+sounds+awesome%2e+i+harbor+strong+feelings+towards+ superintelligent+monkeys+myself%2c+although+in+my+version+they+all+wear+rumpled+ suits+like+noam+chompsky+and+speak+in+english+accents%2e+if+push+comes+to+shove+you+ can+always+output+the+drum+machine+to+tape+and+then+play+it+back+into+your+multi+ tracker+and+record+on+top+of+it%2e+well%2c+i+think+i%27ve+proven+my+point%2e+ your+pal%2c+jake+berendes+%2b%22leonard+richardson%22&stq=10&c9k

Fri Aug 06 1999 07:58: The fact that I can correctly spell Noam Chomsky's name is evidenced by my personal notebook, in which the June 22 entry makes reference to his sinister Chomsky Hierarchy of Grammars.

Fri Aug 06 1999 14:39: Today was Nina Garcia's last day at MAP. Her arrival is chronicled in the May 1998 NYCB, in the 05/06 entry.

Fri Aug 06 1999 17:17: I got an email from Campus Events:

JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR
...
Director Colin Ebling chose to use the rave culture phenomenon as a metaphor for the show. The text has not been changed from its original format. However, the show and its characters appear as never before. Surrounded by his colorful Apostles dressed in layers of day-glo and beads, Jesus (John Torres) suffers for us all, once again.

I'm no expert, but wasn't once enough?

Fri Aug 06 1999 18:13: 6 new graphics in the Texas travelogue, including two from Roswell.

Fri Aug 06 1999 20:05: I am attempting to MP3ify the tracks from Nowhere Standard Time. The results are not that great, but they're probably on par with a dub of the master. I'll let you know how it goes. Yes, you personally.

Fri Aug 06 1999 21:09: Does anyone have the liner notes I wrote for BSD and NST? Because I don't. And I don't want to write them all again.

Fri Aug 06 1999 21:20: Also, if you were to manufacture a robotic giant, wouldn't you make it out of something more durable than iron?

Sun Aug 08 1999 22:08: Jake's Birthday Party got a hit for someone searching for "Mulder's Birthday". The "Now, Mulder, this is silly" verse is still the best verse of JBP. I don't know why I say "still" as though I had added verses since I first wrote it.

(unrelated) Dan, is that you?

Sun Aug 08 1999 22:17: I'm toying around with the Porcelain Puppy trilogy. I'm considering turning what is currently called OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO into an unrelated album (since it is largely unrelated to the trilogy), and putting a new OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO at the end of the trilogy, which actually would take place 24,996 years after PPvDD. Idunno. It beats studying for this stupid matrix midterm. The sequel to The Matrix should be called The Matrix of T with respect to B and B'.

I justify my idle musical speculation by pointing out to myself that I am actually doing recording right now, for the first time in a while. I'll be doing more recording once the BeOS is fixed. A pox upon closed source software!

Sun Aug 08 1999 22:26: I don't think I mentioned this; I'm done with English. I expect a solid A, because my final essay was much better than the wretched midterm essay (which recieved an A), and my paper was good.

Mon Aug 09 1999 06:58: Inverses: the bad boy of the cosmos!

Mon Aug 09 1999 07:06: Also:

roll out the scalar, we'll have a
scalar of fun

These should go in the personal notebook so as not to clutter up NYCB, but Snoore's Law is kicking in and I am stupid enough right now to find these things hilarious.

Mon Aug 09 1999 07:09: Good thing I made that reference to today's top segv article, as a check to find the link revealed that I had neglected to publish it. You see what I mean?

Mon Aug 09 1999 07:30: Bwahahaha! My scam to get a free LWE pass worked! No, actually the LWE people are being nice and letting me pick up a badge at the event since I never got the one they allegedly mailed me.

Mon Aug 09 1999 12:53: Bleah. That midterm sucked. I did well on the proofs though.

Mon Aug 09 1999 14:29: I got an 88 on that midterm, which will be bumped up to an A due to the lousy curve. As Cap'n Crunch would say, Yeee!

Mon Aug 09 1999 18:08: Woohoo! I can make NST MP3s! The sound quality is between as good as the masters (eg. the skits) and distorted in certain registers but servicable (eg. the songs, to varying degrees).

They're going up on linux.ucla.edu (I'm near quota here) as soon as I meet some unspecified goal, such as recording the rest of the second side (I started at Aah, Ricky!, so that's most of the second side; I'm at now.)

I'm using a KDE program called krecord. I had to mess with the makefile to get it to it compile, but it works.

Mon Aug 09 1999 19:45: The word on the MP3ification is variable. Most of the skits, Arbitron, The Chickadee, Malibu, and possibly others are perfect, Asia Carrera, Relativity, and others have distorted vocals. Is is my {breath, MP3 encoder}? I'm using bladeenc. The stuff from the second side is screwed up (with the exception of Malibu) due to improper mixer settings. You have been warned. Download away!

Mon Aug 09 1999 20:22: Listening to Nowhere Standard Time again, two years after its release: a review by Leonard Richardson

Arbitron and Relativity are really the unsung heroes of this album; both pack a double-precision punch. I Screw Up Everything I Touch may no longer be my masterpiece (I have unreleased songs which I think might rival it), but it's still up there. Asia Carrera is funny in at least five different ways. Revolution in A Can kind of emberasses me; I can see what I was trying to do, but I don't think it really worked. Vertigo and Malibu are awesome. The Drool cover is a pleasure to listen to, except for the parts where I have to sing notes I can't reach.

Minnesotan People Having Sex is stupid, but it would have been less stupid if Carlos had said "You betcha!" a couple more times. All the other skits are still funny, except for the ones that weren't really supposed to be that funny; Atari, Still Dying, and (to a lesser extent) the Seinfeld bits.

The performance is fairly amateurish in parts; When I Was Young, The Chickadee, etc. I have a fundamental problem with keeping a beat; that's another thing that helped bring about the downfall of Revolution In a Can. I wish I had enunciated the lyrics more clearly in Bastille Day, but the tempo was too fast.

I don't think Literacy Rate does a good job; it's certainly not as cool as its name would indicate. Death and Destruction and Don't Leave Me Here (Over There Would Be Fine) do what Literacy Rate should do but doesn't. Choppy The Pork Chop and Posture Pal do that and more, kicking my sorry butt up and down the block while they're at it. Circus fails in the same way as Revolution In A Can, but it was never intended to be as good as Revolution In A Can, so I don't feel too bad about it. Radio Free Singapore still works very well, less so, but still okay. Confectioner's Sugar was a throwaway in the first place. The Chickadee is not as good as Jake's remix of it. And the Theme is still unmatched for hidden meaning per word. And that's all the songs, all the real songs anyway. I'm not going to discuss all the skits because I discussed them as a group further up.

That's my review. Tell me what you think.

Tue Aug 10 1999 04:42: I am leaving soon for the airport. I have to pay an hour before the flight. I will be waiting for the flight for as long as I will be on the flight.

My backpack is full of clothes so I need an auxilliary container. I asked Ellina Poulson (who is kindly taking me to LAX) if I can use a briefcase. I don't know if a briefcase is the sort of thing you have lying around the house. If not, I will have to use a Trader Joe's bag to contain my books. I would rather use the briefcase as I can use that at LWE. But as I said, I don't know if she'll have a spare briefcase.

I have a piece of paper which contains all the information I will need to survive from now until I get back. Except for the obvious stuff like not running into walls. Wait, I don't have Mae Ling's cell phone number. Okay, I do now. If I get stranded at the airport or something, Mae Ling will save me. I hope.

Whenever I write a capital "R", I automatically write it with a double bar, making it the symbol for the real numbers. I'm fairly sure this is because the only time I actually write on paper is in math class.

The white zone is for loading and unloading only.

Tue Aug 10 1999 13:52: This is leonardr reporting live from Linuxworld Expo. I'm doing time at the GNU booth with Mae Ling. I have shed my jacket for a cool purple and yellow GNU bowling shirt, which I get to keep even. Woohoo! Miguel De Icaza is talking with some KDE guys about CORBA.

Tue Aug 10 1999 16:20: I'm writing this on Garrett's mighty laptop. I met ESR and totally botched the interaction with him. Mae Ling and I gave out FSF party invitations to all the exhibitors on the show floor. Then we lay on the inflatable couch because our feet hurt. Garrett gave me another linux.com T-shirt.

Tue Aug 10 1999 17:09: Mae Ling ran off with ESR somewhere. I'm stuck manning the FSF booth with another guy. Bleah.

Wed Aug 11 1999 21:23: Mae Ling and I should be a comedy duo.

L: What airport are we picking up your friend at?
ML: Don't end a sentence with "at"!
L: At what airport are we picking up your friend at?

Fri Aug 13 1999 08:12: I consistently and thoroughly missed Mike Popovic at LWE, so Mae Ling and I are going down to {Los Alamos, Menlo Park} to have lunch with him.

In Chinatown there is a store that sells magentic bracelets (yes, only one). The copy on the boxes for these bracelets reads something like:

For hundreds of years, it has been believed that wearing magnets increases blood flow and enhances well-being. Any metal cleanser will keep your bracelet lusterous.

Note how this differs from:

For hundreds of years, it has been believed that wearing magnets increases blood flow and enhances well-being. For hundreds of years, it has been believed that any metal cleanser will keep your bracelet lusterous.

Fri Aug 13 1999 08:18: I'm going to be mentioned on LinuxWorld again, but the story isn't up yet.

Sat Aug 14 1999 20:12: Yesterday, in accordance with prophecy, we went down and had lunch with Mike. He's quite a guy. We have pictures in Mae Ling's camera which may eventually see the light of day. A pair of symmetric bunny-ears pictures, one outside, one in Mike's cubicle. Mike has a BeBox. It's an incredibly cool piece of hardware. All those ports in the back make me drool.

I'm going home tomorrow. I'm going to have to catch up with my math; I think the final is on Thursday. It was worth it to come up here, though.

In San Jose, near the convention center, there is a carpet store. There are big signs in the window saying "Remnant Sale" and "Remnants 80% off". This sparked off a great running joke about Scott James Remnant, which generally involves me doing my stupid British accent that sounds nothing like Scott, but it's supposed to be Scott selling himself in the manner of a used car salesman. "Hurry! I'm going fast!"

Sat Aug 14 1999 20:34: The LinuxWorld story is up now.

Mon Aug 16 1999 08:25: Okay, I'm home. I didn't lose my keys after all. More later.

Tue Aug 17 1999 08:22: Susanna is leaving for college today. My mother is taking her down here and we are going to have lunch. Then off she goes on the plane.

Wed Aug 18 1999 08:42: Last night I finished Pity Me and Platform Independance Day, two songs that have been languishing around unfinished for years. I also chipped away a little at Cultural Integrity, which I doubt I will ever finish. Well, I only need like three more lines. I may finish it in another year or so.

Wed Aug 18 1999 08:51: Oh yeah, I'm writing a new song called Eric Raymond Thinks I'm A Spaz. So far it has nothing to do with Eric Raymond. It has everything to do with Brand's Traditional Essence of Chicken. This device has incorrect properties!

Wed Aug 18 1999 14:19: How good is "Organism Overdrive" as a band name?

I wanted to put up a poll asking that, but I can't find a poll program, and writing one involves doing work. Segfault's poll program uses a database, which is overkill for me.

If I know me, and I think I do, I'll probably get bored of studying tonight and write a poll program then.

Thu Aug 19 1999 00:19: The vote program is good enough for folk. Once more I retain my title as king of silly acronyms with the Cheezy Online Poll Of Useless Things. I'm going to sleep.

Thu Aug 19 1999 07:36: I folded the opinions into the articles, clearing up that big titlebar a little. The features are next to go, maybe.

Thu Aug 19 1999 07:54: I think I would like to live in Menlo Park after all. It's very nice, not Silicon Valley-ish at all. I hear it's really expensive, though.

I should probably be studying.

Thu Aug 19 1999 11:14: The steel cage still vibrates from the meeting of me and the father of the math final. I finished 20 minutes early. I can't see where I could have made a single mistake. Oh, wait, I forgot a square root which screwed up a normalization which gave a vector twice the value it should have had. So that's a couple points off.

Thu Aug 19 1999 11:56: A in English, almost certain A in math.

Thu Aug 19 1999 12:46: Why didn't anyone tell me that the vote was screwing up the front page in Netscape?

Thu Aug 19 1999 13:14: COPOUT is improved. I need to put it on the devel page, and revamp the devel page while I'm at it.

Thu Aug 19 1999 14:40: I added some comics to comics/, and rearranged pix/. There are front and back pictures of the Cascadia Megathrust Subduction Event T-shirt in the misc pictures of me section.

Thu Aug 19 1999 20:07: According to the public, Organism Overdrive is not a good name for a band. I'll leave the poll up over the weekend while I try to think of another name to put on the poll.

Thu Aug 19 1999 20:21: Argh. I don't have anything to do. I'm waiting for my mother to pick me up and I have absolutely nothing to do.

Sat Aug 21 1999 19:36: I really hate San Francisco. It's so ugly. Admittedly, I am in a very bad mood right now, but I hate San Francisco even when I'm in a good mood.

Sat Aug 21 1999 20:10: Consensus is that "Organism Overdrive" sucks as a band name, so I'm going to put my old band name on the chopping block now. If you voted before, vote again. I can take it.

Fri Aug 27 1999 09:44: I'm here, but I'm laying low so that Scott won't make me work on Segfault. Also, my life is changing at a rate more rapid than I am used to, and I need to recalibrate. I don't know how not doing anything will help me recalibrate, but I don't know what else to do.

I'm trying to write a log analysis program. I'm also moving to another apartment, on Saturday. I'll be living with Dan Helfman, when he moves in around the middle of September. La la la la life goes on.

I don't want to say "Dan Helfman" and I don't want to say "Daniel Helfman", which obviously leaves me in a fix. I want to say "Danny Helfman", for obvious reasons, but I don't think he would like that. Possibly I will call him Dan informally, and witten formally. Or vice versa. Let me know, Dan.

I'm probably going to keep "The Open Standards Band", as people generally think it's okay. I'm going to do a poll on "Sunshine Unit" just to see what people think, as I'm still thinking about doing an album based on the fictitious cover art I did for Susanna. I'm certainly not going to do more than one album as Sunshine Unit.

My mother: People who say bad things about L.A...
Me: Live in New York.
My mother: Aren't really talking about L.A., they're talking about the suburbs here.
Me: Oh.

Sat Aug 28 1999 07:17: Okay, I've had enough of this. I invented the term "open sores software" in 1998, and I'm tired of people using it like it's some kind of brand new hilarious sarcastic joke. It was funny once. Once! And I did the once! Last March! So knock it off!

Sat Aug 28 1999 10:03: My packing up reveals that I no longer need the karaoke machine (the machine I recorded BSD, NST, and the rough draft of OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO on). I haven't needed it for months, and I don't even have any microphones that fit it anymore (it takes standard 1/4" jacks, but my only microphone is one of those professional-looking three-prong deals). I'd like to give it to someone who would use it for home recording, but there are logistical problems inherant in getting it to anyone. But if you want it or know someone who does, let me know. It still works fine.

Sat Aug 28 1999 14:50: The Penguin Computing ad on Linuxtoday asks "How do you get 21 penguins in a rack?" It advises purchasing the Penguin 200, as "you can fit 21 servers on a standard rack". However, this assumes a needlessly wasteful policy of one penguin per server. With eight penguins per server, you'd only need three servers to get 21 penguins on a rack. One server can handle eight penguin processes without a problem.

Also, I just realized that instead of remembering "Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November", you can remember "four, six, nine, eleven". It's easier to memorize and it's also faster to go through. Or, if you're an EE type, you can turn the numbers into binary, make a Karnaugh map, and get "a₃ v a₄a₁".

They laughed at my theories! But now I'm laughing... at them! AH HA HA HA HA!

Sat Aug 28 1999 15:21: If you visit my site on any kind of regular basis (ynn.com, infoave.net, bellsouth.net, saunalahti.fi (!), etc.), let me know who you are 1) because I'd like to know, 2) so I can change the Browser Greetings program to greet you. Thanks. If you don't want me to know who you are, at least tell me that. Through BAH/HumBug or something, Idunno.

Sun Aug 29 1999 12:33: More search-engine saps I feel sorry for:

"music theoretician" -> "I'm sure there's a technical reason behind the mellowness of the extended power chord, but do I look like a music theoretician?" on the old music page (just now)

"ling ling potsticker sauce" -> separate discussions of Mae Ling Mak and of mix-your-own-sauce potstickers in my unfinished Spring LWE travelogue (all the way back in July, I only found this by accident just now)

That reminds me that I need to try and get those pictures of Mike and myself from Mae Ling so that we can do a BeDope/segv crossover type story or something. I should probably just have her mail them to Mike.

Sun Aug 29 1999 12:45: I don't have phone in my new apartment. I probably need to go somewhere and pay money to have it hooked up. So I don't have unternet at home. So I have to do everything on campus. In fact, there's really no compelling reason for me to go home at the moment.

I had Mongolian barbecue last night. It occurs to me that the pizza place I slag on in my Texas travelogue was actually no less sanitary than your average Mongolian barbecue place. Well, Mongolian barbecue places have tongs for the food.

Mongolian barbecue is excellent booze.

I got mail from daniel (another one?!) who is my ynn.com visitor. He appears to have a homepage, but it's on a dynamic IP so it's not up at the mo.

"Sunshine Unit" is doing better than I thought it would do.

I guess I'll go buy poster-hanging sticky stuff and then go back home.

Mon Aug 30 1999 08:05: Oh yeah, in the last episode of "My Word!", one of the guys said it had been thirty years since "the war". Assuming this refers to WWII, that confirms my suspicions of a late 60s/early 70s date for the recordings. At last count, "My Word!" is the only good thing to come out of the 70s.

Mon Aug 30 1999 08:41: This week's Information Week has these nutty pictures of Steve Ballmer on the cover. It's like "The Many Faces of Steve Ballmer".

Steve Ballmer cracks me up. I think I figured out his appeal to me. He's evil, but cheerfully so. I arrived at Demon Dog without going through Steve Ballmer, but the characters of the two are very similar, I think.

Nice overccast foggy weather today.

Mon Aug 30 1999 16:05: I wrote a song called "Social Chameleon" a few days ago and I can't stop {loving you, singing it}. It has both a Gilbert-and-Sullivan contrived rhyme scheme and frequent occurances of "the x of cephalopods", so I'm pretty much helpless against its mighty sticking-in-my-head powers.

Tue Aug 31 1999 06:19: Boy, when your subconscious pulls out some random bit of your memory to put in your dream, but the bit of memory it gets involves solving a system of linear equations, and your subconscious can't do math worth beans; that's when the in-dream hilarity begins.

Tue Aug 31 1999 06:29: By a certain, not unreasonable interpretation of the data, "Sunshine Unit" is doing better than "The Open Standards Band" did. The only thing I'm concerned about is that the opinions are more varied as regards "Sunshine Unit".

It just occured to me: is this even a valid way of picking a band name? It seems as though band names should be thought up and voted upon by the members of the band, preferably while drunk.

Tue Aug 31 1999 10:07: Mail You Can Bruise from Dan re his name.

Tue Aug 31 1999 12:06: I put COPOUT on /devel/, despite not having documented it yet, and revamped the devel page. It now looks a lot better.

Tue Aug 31 1999 12:13: I got an A in math, giving me straight As in my technical minor classes. My GPA goes up from 3.21 to 3.233. I doubt I'll get it up to 3.3 before I graduate.

Tue Aug 31 1999 12:17: Wait a minute, something is fishy. I didn't get any grade points for Math 115, and it only puts me down for 4 units last term. Possibly URSA is being flaky. So my actual GPA is probably 3.256 or therabouts.

Tue Aug 31 1999 12:24: I see what it is. The math class was in a different session than the english class. Even though my grade is in, my GPA hasn't been recalculated yet.

Wed Sep 01 1999 06:12: I have phone now. Now I just need a long phone cable so that I can plug the modem into it.

I should see Adam today.

Wed Sep 01 1999 07:44: This FAQ has been in my bookmarks for a long time, so I figured I'd put it on here and get rid of it, as my only use for it is showing it to others.

But Frank Zappa's compositions are only an aid to study. For music that relates directly to China and its politics, you need to listen to a mix of Chinese traditional music and more recent works.

Wed Sep 01 1999 13:26: Early mammals coexisted with dinosaurs. Didn't we know this in the 1960s?

There is still no topping the mighty gorgonopsid.

Wed Sep 01 1999 17:39: Something I've been meaning to do for a long time: Sprinklers, Man (620K). It's repression, man. Andy should like that one.

Vocals, acoustic guitar, and intro recorded under Linux. I wanted the solo to match the vocals so I did that under BeOS while listening to it. The solo is distorted, so the bad BeOS recording quality isn't noticable. I mixed it with 3dsound and went back into Linux to MP3 it.

Eventually I'll be able to record and mix actual songs instead of just these little crunchy musical treats.

Thu Sep 02 1999 07:06: how+to+lose+your+virginity -> /~leonardr/articles/virgin/index.shtml
Another satisfied customer!

They tried that with Google, they should try Ask Jeeves.

COPOUT is up to version 0.9. I just need to add web-based vote add and edit, which I will never do. Thanks for telling me that it wouldn't let you vote for the first item in a poll, nobody.

I saw a possum today!

Thu Sep 02 1999 07:24: I accidentally mailed David Kaplan, who I don't know, instead of Adam Kaplan. However, David Kaplan, re my .sig, suggested pairing up Alfred Tarski with Alonzo Church to make "Tarski and Church". So that turned out okay.

Thu Sep 02 1999 08:46: I also got rid of the "could not get working directory" when you edited a notebook in the notebook program. I did this by dumping a file into the text area instead of making cat do it. Always a good idea to do things yourself instead of passing the buck to cat.

Thu Sep 02 1999 08:56: Kansas school board votes to eliminate any reference to chain letter evolution in curriculum.

Cop-out (not COPOUT) ending, but this this article on the idea of simulated worlds is fun, and quotes Lem.

Thu Sep 02 1999 17:20: We're going to rewire the CSUA lounge. There will be some downtime. There is some giganticism associated with this drug.

Fri Sep 03 1999 06:48: First, there was The Bible Code. Then, leonardr shocked the letter-crunching world with the Java/RMI monstrosity that was The Arbitrary Text Code. Now, behold the grand entrance of The Arbitrary Text Code, version 2.0!

TATC 2 is written in Perl. It's about an order of magnitude faster than TATC 1 (another order of magnitude is still neccessary, though) and about two orders of magnitude simpler. Instead of doing a whole lot of string chopping, it uses ordinary table regexps. To get another order of magnitude in performance I'm going to have to make it more complicated, though. Also, I plan to give TATC 2 the ability to, once it finds a grid for a word, to go through the grid and find all the other words hiding there. Wait a minute, that's the word search problem. That may have been solved before. Anyway.

Enjoy it. It will be there.

Fri Sep 03 1999 08:01: BeOS 4.5.2 is out. My fingers are crossed. The update is almost 7 megs. Gah.

Fri Sep 03 1999 13:08: I just received the generic ZDNet Solaris tip. AND NOW ON WITH THE TIP!!! ~~TRULY!!!~~

Sat Sep 04 1999 11:41: BeOS 4.5.2 does not fix my problem, but I give you Mark Gave A Monkey Acid (883K) anyway. I'll do a better version when such is possible.

Mon Sep 06 1999 08:22: I had a bizarre dream last night that involved my discovery that, instead of starting properly all at once, my classes started at staggered times, and that my CS112 class had started on August 21st. I also lost my backpack. This lead to a frantic search around a surreal version of UCLA. Then somehow it was all okay and I was flirting with some chick, but there was still a sense of impending doom. Perhaps everything was not okay, and I was merely drowning my sorrows in flirting. Fortunately, I woke up to the real world where classes start sensibly and not until the 27th. However, there is the problem of me not having enough money to pay my tuition. I have to pay by the 20th. I'm going to have to take out a loan.

Actually, I can pay by October 15th, if I pay the $50 late fee. And since I'll be using my National Merit scholarship money towards the tuition, it says I can get the late fee waived, even.

The promo for the season premiere of Futurama has Leonardo DiCaprio as a head in a jar. But it's the thirteen-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio, or however old he is now. You'd think that people's heads would be preserved only when they were about to die, but Futurama would have you believe that you can just cut off someone's head anytime it's convenient and put it in a jar, and that the person involved will just sit there and let you do so. This is disappointing to me, as until now Futurama has adhered to the highest standards of scientific accuracy.

Mon Sep 06 1999 11:31: I just discovered how to do simultaneous record and playback in Linux. So I'm going to redo MGAMA now. Then, who knows?

Mon Sep 06 1999 13:35: Okay, if all goes well, when I come back from BeOS, I should have MGAMA, The Kitchen Of The Future, and a rudimentary recording of To Barbecue A Span Of Time. I have got to get one of those piezoelectric things that clips onto your acoustic guitar. I tried to record Social Chameleon and Flag Burning Amendment, and couldn't do it. Argh I say.

Mon Sep 06 1999 15:14: MGAMA is no longer jerky. TKOTF and TBASOT didn't turn out as well as I'd like. I may or may not put them up later. The files are also really big. I suppose it's the normal compression rate, but bleah, huge files. I might have the patience to download TKOTF (2.8M), but not TBASOT (3.8M), especially as the latter is a capella only at the moment.

Mon Sep 06 1999 19:58: Woohoo! Royal Jelly (1.7M) sounds great! Less filling! Almost perfect recording (lyrics not the actual written-down lyrics, but close enough; also, a minor stylistic issue in the guitar part right near the end). Good enough, quality-wise, to use on PPvDD, except it's sung by Don Sargasso, for whom I don't really have a voice yet. Also, in the context of PPvDD I'd like a little more desperation in the vocals. Anyhoo, give it a listen.

Mon Sep 06 1999 20:59: For a good time, download Urban Creation Myth (3.1M). When I'm done uploading it, I mean. The delta between this entry and the last entry is more or less the time it took me to record, mix, and MP3 it.

Although rockin', UCM needs a full rerecord to be production-quality. I could justify the sync breakdown near the end as a reflection of the singer's mentality, but the breakdown of the rhythm and rhyme scheme do that already, and it's easier to just record it correctly, especially with the additional problem that some of the notes are a little out of my range. I'll need to do the guitar and vocals simultaneously because of the weird rhythm.

Oh, there are probably people whom Urban Creation Myth will offend. But I don't think any of them visit this page.

Jake, I await your expert opinion on this recording and the Royal Jelly recording. What should I change?

Mon Sep 06 1999 21:24: I moved the version 1.1.2pl14 stuff over to linux.ucla.edu, as I was over quota on fire. That's where the new stuff will go. I changed some of the links below, you can get everything else from the directory listing.

I will now hit the stain.

Tue Sep 07 1999 07:20: Raspberry danish twist is not actually extravagant.

Tue Sep 07 1999 09:37: I gotta shell out another $35 to keep crummy.com, the domain which to date I have been unable to use. But if I let it lapse, someone else is gonna snap it up pronto. Any actual English word dot com is a valuable thing. I'd be happier if this were not the case, though.

Tue Sep 07 1999 10:43: My GPA actually is 3.255. So I have a chance to beat 3.3 by the time I graduate.

Tue Sep 07 1999 12:27: Is there a better way to get up to speed on [values of x may give rise to] DOM, CSS, ECMAScript, DHTML and all that stuff, than wading through the yawnfests that are the W3 standards? There's nothing I really want to do with such stuff, but I feel I need to know it. Also, if I knew it, I could probably think of something interesting to do with it.

Tue Sep 07 1999 13:18: Aha... if Gmurf does what it claims to do, I might be able to do all my recording in Linux.

Wed Sep 08 1999 07:00: Wear the Bear!

I think they forgot about that URL. Thank goodness for Chef UCLASeek!

Wed Sep 08 1999 09:55: I've decided that with the new direction the notebook program has taken, there's no point in having that (leonardr) after every entry. So I took it out.

Wed Sep 08 1999 10:52: Spot the error in this USA Today article on Project Gutenburg:

"I stopped at the grocery store to pick up a snack to take to the computer room, and they'd stuffed a copy of the Declaration of Independence on fake parchment in my bag. I was pawing around to look for something, found it and decided, 'If I put this up online, it will last a long time.' "

Typing the stirring words beginning "We, the People" into a file, he tried to mail it to everyone on the Net (only about 100 people at the time), almost creating the first spam. After the furor died down, he decided posting the text made more sense.

Wed Sep 08 1999 12:02: Jake has agreed to be my "virtual drummer". Cool!

Wed Sep 08 1999 12:17: Segfault is back up, but the connection still seems kinda slow on my end.

Thu Sep 09 1999 03:08: This is the entry of jake:

I knew when I wrote it that Jake has agreed to be my "virtual drummer" was not as good as I salute you with a "virtual high five".

I recorded some Silver Surfer lines for Jake yesterday. My rendition of the Silver Surfer sounds like some smarmy Simpsons character.

To give you the essence of Jake, I need only reproduce this portion of an email he sent me, on the subject of Marcel Duchamp's having secretly altered his Readymades:

will (who is also a fan) and i were discussing this a few weeks ago and we got so worked up we stood up and shook hands, such is our repect for marcel duchamp.

Thu Sep 09 1999 03:09: I'm back in the mode where I sleep from 6 PM to midnight, apparantly. I'm going to be tired again by the time I have to go catch the bus, though.

Thu Sep 09 1999 03:25: Also, I can get a personal loan at a 12% interest rate. There's no deferment, though, I have to start paying it back right away.

If I get $2000, It'll be about $50 a month for the next 48 months. I can cannibalize the loan itself for $50 a month until I graduate, then wipe it out in one blow with the proceeds from the mighty job I am sure (I hope) to get after I graduate.

Thu Sep 09 1999 04:54: Sorry, the poll wasn't writable. Vote again.

Thu Sep 09 1999 08:39: Today in the Times: "LACMA [not LACMA] Chief to add Role of Art Director". Shouldn't they already have an art director?

Thu Sep 09 1999 13:42: Jake's story in his (unfortunately private so I can't show it to you) notebook reminds me that yesterday I bumped into Tim from CS111 last quarter. We talked for about 4 or 5 minutes and I don't think either of us remembered the other's name. Is it normal to have a long, involved conversation with neither party remembering the other's name? Among engineering students, it is.

Tim is taking CS180 this quarter, but not with Gafni; with another guy, who I believe is the guy that Adam fled to Gafni from. Too bad. As I have previously stipulated in this space, Gafni rocks.

Due to the new version of perl running on sith and various FaultNIC bugs which were exposed by it, FaultNIC stopped working. I fixed one bug but now there appears to be another, which is in Scott's territory so I don't know how to fix it. It looks like we'll be bringing out the musty old articles from the database until it gets fixed.

Thu Sep 09 1999 13:45: Egad! The new lynx allows textarea boxes to be expanded! I can finally get rid of that kludge in the notebook program that makes the textarea 50 lines long if I'm using lynx! This is a great day for the Dominion!

Thu Sep 09 1999 17:31: I pinpointed the problem for Scott (a function that returns a sort of "large object filehandle" is returning -1), but I don't know how to solve it.

Fri Sep 10 1999 06:11: Geez, I'm serving my site to a bunch of potheads. Would-be potheads, anyway.

segfault is back in its normal place, and story submission works once more.

Fri Sep 10 1999 07:39: Some search terms: Yesterday, someone got the front page searching for "mae ling mak". Early this morning, someone from Sweden (if I remember my ISO codes correctly, .se is Sweden) got Jake's Birthday Party searching for "The free software song". And about half an hour ago, somebody got the music page searching for "the all-night drug prowling wolf". That person was also running MSIE on a Mac, so they deserve what they get.

Sat Sep 11 1999 07:06: The thing I thought was going to speed up TATC tenfold actually made it incredibly slower. This surprises me, as I thought I was just doing {what Jerry does for those kids, what the regexps would do if they knew what I was trying to do}. Obviously the regexps are smarter than I am. On the bright side, at least I got to raid Knuth for a binary search.

I'm hoping to spend the weekend working on SLIME with Scott. Failing that, I have TATC and COPOUT to work on.

Sat Sep 11 1999 07:25: CDDB recognizes Supernova, Hazel, and my chants m�di�vaux anglais. That pretty much exhausts my collection of CDs that could possibly trip up CDDB. For some reason Joe's Garage is classified as Jazz.

Didn't CDDB become evil? What should I be using instead?

Sat Sep 11 1999 08:48: I foolishly locked myself out of my room (I grabbed my sunglasses instead of my keys) and had to go to RA Harold's room to have him bail me out.

Sat Sep 11 1999 20:28: Daniel Hsu has been hiding icecream from me. icecream is "a parody" of Notebook Of Web-Basedness, so-called because "[it] sucks next to [mine]". It looks to have all my features, though, except possibly editing. It also has a better name.

Sun Sep 12 1999 06:54: There is a sushi place in Westwood called "Cowboy Sushi". Thus, the new poll. Cowboy Sushi is located next door to the theater at which I saw The Phantom Menace. It offers all you can eat sushi for $7.99, or something like that.

Sun Sep 12 1999 07:06: I'm going to try and MP3 Bad Stupid Delerious ([sic], as always) today. I'm rewinding the master as I type. Mike check! One two! One two! Hello!

Sun Sep 12 1999 11:12: BSD is MP3ed. Enjoy it. The files compressed really well, probably due to the very low fidelity of the original recording. If you want to get a taste of the album but don't have much bandwidth, I reccommend Latest and Beef, which I think are the best tracks.

Sun Sep 12 1999 11:56: I was going to MP3 the first part of Jake's Birthday Party, in order to prevent people from asking me to MP3 the whole thing. Unfortunately, I discovered that I don't actually have it. I just have the tape with the drum loop. So I MP3ed one revolution of the drum loop instead. Jake is the only person on earth who actually has a copy of Jake's Birthday Party.

Sun Sep 12 1999 23:38: Hi. There's a really nice vocal piece on Music From The Hearts of Space. It's called a "prayer cycle" or something stupid like that, but it's really nice. Here is the playlist.

That sort of vocal music tends to have an effect on me regardless of whether it's good or not, so it may not actually be good.

I am eating a bowl of second-order mongrel cereal. The two component cereals are Crispix and the weird barely-sweet "fruity" cereal you get at Trader Joe's. I think it's called Fruit Punch, because the motto is "The Punch with a Crunch!". The mongrel cereal is not as good as I thought it would be.

Hutts of Space is over now. We will surely miss you. If you want to see us again, just turn on your TV to... Channel Two!

Mon Sep 13 1999 06:30: I may be missing something here, but why would someone pay for Citrix Winframe for Unix when they can run applications remotely with plain X? Winframe seems to be a product that exists only to compensate for Windows' brokenness.

Mon Sep 13 1999 07:37: As part of our unending effort to quash free speech, we at segfault.org are cracking down on the most egrerious instances of comment abuse. From now on, comments that render to over 6K long will not be accepted by the database. This puts an end to the practice of putting lots of

s (which the render code treats specially) in comment text, making the associated story pages really long and impossible to view.

To destroy the rights of those who have already posted such messages, the rendering code has been changed such that multiple

s will be folded into one

. There is no escape from the oppressive iron fist of tag-folding which we wield with an iron fist.

Any further attempts at segfault.org comment abuse will require spamming, which nobody is willing to defend.

Mon Sep 13 1999 11:04: My old friend David Griffith has successfully gone two years without updating his homepage!

Mon Sep 13 1999 18:14: Josh, repository of all sushi knowledge, writes me to say that Cowboy Sushi is "not bad at all for the price" (which is $15.99, not $7.99). Josh also reccommends {Zenith products, freecddb}.

A rudimentary scratch recording of the first part of Cerberus is avaliable from the Porcelain Puppy vs. Demon Dog MP3 site. In stereo! I mainly did it to see if my technique for emulating the three-headed hellhound we all know and love would be successful. I think it worked pretty well. The last punchline was tacked on after I'd already recorded the first part; that's why Satan and Cerberus sound different in their last lines.

I don't know how good my narrator voice is. Also, I'm certainly not going to voice all of Cerberus' heads in the real version.

Tue Sep 14 1999 01:15: I woke up to Jake's birthday CD to me slipped under the door. Well, it had been slipped under the door some hours before. I am now listening to Jake busting out on the mike. I better submit this before he stops busting out on the mike and this entry becomes out of date.

Tue Sep 14 1999 02:49: A funny message from the LUG. It's already on the public archive, so I don't feel a need to ask for permission to put it up here. Should I, do you think?

Tue Sep 14 1999 04:32: Susanna tells me that Maria Rasmussen's bridal shower is tomorrow night. Maria Rasmussen is younger than I am! She's Susanna's age! Yee!

Also, Susanna is turning eighteen on Friday.

Tue Sep 14 1999 05:10: I'm ripping the first track off Jake's CD to put up for public consumption. It's very funny. He took a cheezy kid's birthday greeting song and spliced in his own voice to change the words. I don't do it justice; it's a lot funnier than it sounds.

The ripping is taking a lot longer than I thought. Why is it so slow? Ye gods! The file is 114 MB! What does it think it's doing?

Tue Sep 14 1999 09:22: If you have nothing better to do with your bandwidth, you can download Sorry It's Late-The Inadvertent Remix. It's unlistenable. I don't know what happened. I'll redo it when I get home.

Tue Sep 14 1999 10:57: Seen on freshmeat: "Link Site lets you store bookmarks on the web instead of having them scattered across twelve different PCs." That should really be generalized for the n-PCs case. And what about Macs?

Just a little harmless fun. That's a good-lookin' program. My, my.

Tue Sep 14 1999 11:59: Here's a nice friendly VB error:

Only public user defined types defined in public object modules can be used as paramaters or return types for public procedures of class modules or as fields of public user defined types.

Wed Sep 15 1999 06:25: Dan informs me that our phone line is indeed DSLable. The installation will procede next Tuesday afternoon.

Wed Sep 15 1999 06:28: Sorry It's Late (my title, not Jake's) plays fine on Linux. I don't know what the problem is. Possibly bladeenc is using some bizarre Linux-only MP3 compression technique.

Wed Sep 15 1999 09:37: Holy cow! What is Andy doing at a Linux demo day in Denmark?

Wed Sep 15 1999 13:33: It takes 8.5 minutes to get from the bus stop on Westwood to the CSUA lounge (where I write this before going to deposit my paycheck). This will be compared to the time it takes for me to get to the CSUA lounge from the UCLA bus stop. Obviously, I have to count the extra time I stay on the bus, or it won't be fair.

Wed Sep 15 1999 17:55: I isolated Andy in the picture previously mentioned, for the benefit of those who are not good at spotting Andy.

Note: I'm just kidding. It's not really Andy. It's just a guy who looks like him.

Thu Sep 16 1999 06:38: Hey, and here's Mae Ling, who has a column in Maximum Linux.

Lookin' good, Mae Ling!

Thu Sep 16 1999 06:41: This is shaping up to be the most picture-filled month of NYCB yet! This might be Mike Kirb Congregation's best album yet! Greg Louganis is so talented! Young Republicans--they're so hip! (sp) throughout. Now, to kill Up With People!

Thu Sep 16 1999 08:25: Jake has confirmed my fears that Porcelain Puppy vs. Demon Dog... needs a little work. As Jake says, "as i read it, it doesn't rock nearly as much as a compilation of your other songs." "not great, but good", he also says. And anyone who knows me knows that I don't settle for "good" work. Well, people who don't know me: think of me as someone who doesn't settle for "good" work. Maybe that will even it out.

I have a couple options. I'm waiting for another reply from Jake. Non-Porcelain Puppy Trilogy recording will not be affected by this development (ie. it will not happen at the same pace it's been not happening).

Thu Sep 16 1999 10:17: I've applied for my loan. I thought maybe I would get paid enough yesterday that I wouldn't need to get it, but even assuming the botched transfer of $300 from last October finally gets resolved, I'd still only have $1100. My tuition is around $1200. Then I have to pay rent and books and blah and blah. So.

Fri Sep 17 1999 06:56: Someone from the credit union is supposed to call me today about my loan.

Despite not having any money, I tossed away $12 to refresh the optimal haircut. I don't know... we're so decadent! NYCB does not record the last time I got a haircut, but it was about a week before LWE, so around the beginning of August. So I'm getting my hair cut about once every 5 or 6 weeks. I'm throwing my money down a haircut rathole! But this haircut is so great.

There is a barbershop by the Lucky's by work, and down the street on the way to Trader Joe's there is a chain place. The barbershop is less expensive and gives me a closer cut, but I really feel uncomfortable having another man cut my hair. If I go to the chain I stand a good chance of having a pretty woman cut my hair. But I will probably keep going to the barbershop, because the uncomfortableness lasts about fifteen minutes, but a good haircut lasts six weeks.

The last time I got my hair cut (at the chain place), the pretty woman asked me if I was in the military. This time, (at the barbershop) the guy asked me if I was on the football team. It's a shame that the optimal haircut is seen as the sole province of our men in uniform.

Fri Sep 17 1999 07:03: I downloaded a random BSD track and listened to it on Frank's Windows machine. Sure enough, it had the same problem as SIL. So for whatever reason, my MP3s won't play correctly on Windows (non-Unix?) platforms. I don't know why.

Fri Sep 17 1999 07:14: Exsqueeze me? Baking powder? (from the jafo-grinder freshmeat mailing list):

 
dopewars is a UNIX rewrite of the MS-DOS program of the same name,
which in turn was inspired by John E. Dell's "Drug Wars" game. You have
one month to buy and sell drugs on the streets of New York...

...

   urgency:
   medium

Fri Sep 17 1999 08:26: Hey, did you know that there's a movie of Breakfast of Champions out, starring Bruce Willis as Dwayne Hoover? Bruce Willis is Dwayne Hoover! We've got to use the lasers!

Fri Sep 17 1999 09:00: Jake says, "I've never been in love, I don't know what it is, I only--" I'm sorry, Jane said that. Jake says that the MP3s work fine on his Mac of might. So it's all Windows' fault. Yes, it's all Windows' fault. I just like saying that.

Mmm, goldfish crackers and pudding. It's better than sex![1]

[1] Goldfish crackers and pudding are not actually better than sex.

Fri Sep 17 1999 12:36: More segfault from me, this one's pretty good: Press Release Successfully Disguised as News Article. Contains interplay of multiple main jokes, bizarre wordplay, Rodney Blumenthal from PPvDD, and some subtle (some might say obscure) MST3K references. I have 3 other stories in the pipe which I just have to finish; unfortunately, one is a Microsoft story, albeit a funny one.

Sat Sep 18 1999 11:04: Now Susanna is an organism with a Web page!

Mon Sep 20 1999 04:55: Hey, Kris is going to have his Checkerboard Nightmare comics published weekly in the Daily Bruin! I say, let's drink a toast to Kris! Hopefully the character wrinkles have been worked out; as I noted last year, it's hard to put everything shameful into a character designed solely as a repository for checkerboard-related shame.

A more general remark: I'm glad to see that Kris is finally starting to get the recognition he deserves for his work.

Mon Sep 20 1999 05:05: Bird crimes on the increase. I got hassled by some rough-looking chickadees yesterday.

Help me, I'm turning into Jay Leno!

Mon Sep 20 1999 10:49: I cannot pay my tuition without my $166 National Merit Scholarship check.

UCLA will not give me my $166 National Merit Scholarship check until my tuition has been paid.

The woman I spoke to does not find this situation at all interesting or unusual.

Mon Sep 20 1999 10:51: I forgot to mention that I am not eligible to waiver the late fee because my National Merit Scholarship check is not a loan or a grant.

Mon Sep 20 1999 10:57: David Gage has lent me $100. I am forever in his debt. Until I get my check, anyway.

Mon Sep 20 1999 12:23: My tuition has been paid. I HATE UCLA!!! I don't think any other school would be any better, though.

My advice to young people: Go to a junior college for two years and then transfer to a four-year college. At least they won't gouge you on tuition. I probably should have done that, but I was so desperate to get out of Bakersfield. I don't know how good a tradeoff it was.

Just one more year (and I'll have the confidence &tc)...

Tue Sep 21 1999 08:58: Dan has moved in. We should get DSL today. Dan is waiting for the DSL person, who will come at precisely "PM".

We spent some time trying to think of ways to coerce our download bandwidth (we get 96K/sec download bandwidth, 20K/sec upload bandwidth) into augmenting our upload bandwidth. I had various crafty ideas which we dismantled on information-theoretical grounds; they were equivalent in the best case to just compressing the data before sending it. So I think we're stuck with 20K/sec uploads. Oh well.

I'm souping up Segfault's logfile analyser. It has TLD analysis and it will have referer analysis as soon as Scott has Apache log referer. We get a lot of hits from all over the world. I may do second-level domain analysis as well, while I'm at it, eg. "most popular .com domains".

Tue Sep 21 1999 15:32: I'm writing this in NetPositive on the BeOS (where else?). Browser Greetings does not properly recognize NetPositive; I'll have to crush that bug with an iron fist.

I got a network card from work. It was an Intel Etherexpress, not supported by BeOS despite what the compatibility list says. Also, under Linux it was giving weird errors. I looked at the source code, which claimed that there were problems with it under faster machines.

So I swapped it with an NE2000 which was in the 486. The 486 is too slow to manifest the Etherexpress bug, and the NE2000 is supported by BeOS, so everyone's happy!

Tue Sep 21 1999 17:09: Dan: Aw, man! You already voted on the poll?
Me: Yeah, why?
Dan: It's not fair!
[We have the same IP address now, you see]
Me: You want me to hack the code so that it lets two votes in from this hostname?
Dan: No, I'll use one of my many shell accounts.

Tue Sep 21 1999 17:45: Adam has a hilarious new graphic on his homepage pikachugone.jpg is your friend, check it out. Where'd you get that, Adam?

Wed Sep 22 1999 10:29: The story of pikachugone, straight from Adam's mouth:

 
Kris basically told me to look for a place to eat.  I was in Yahoo yellow
pages looking for restaurants in Los Angeles.  I asked Kris what he wanted
to eat, but he was playing with his Pokemon action figure.  He said:
"Pikachu".  I typed it in, and that was Yahoo's response.  I took a
screenshot.  Couldn't resist.

Wed Sep 22 1999 15:50: Dan says my poll is biased. He says that's not what he's saying, but that's what he's saying. He says that no one will vote for #2 because it makes them seem wishy-washy, and no one will vote for #4 because no one wants to be a conformist.

Me: I can see people voting for "absolutely not".
Dan: Yeah, like someone who was really against genetic engineering.
Me: Genetic engineering?
Dan: Yeah.
Me: How do you think you lost your prehensile tail?

Wed Sep 22 1999 15:59: Oh yeah, I'll be taking CS112 this quarter with Adam. Woohoo! I haven' had a class with Adam in a long time. It should be a blast. Blast off, with ADAM.COM!

That assumes I get into the class. I'm #2 on the wait list, which means I do get into the class, but if for some reason I don't get into the class I am really, really screwed. Like not being able to graduate this year screwed. So I'm worried.

Wed Sep 22 1999 19:59: I have a song which I will upload as soon as it's done encoding. Windows people, download this and see if it has the weird problem. I'm using a different, BeOS encoder.

The song is called Hungry Goriya. It's the song that finally brings together The Legend of Zelda and the overly happy noodle place that I pass on the way to the bus stop every morning. I had two more guitar parts that made the song completely unlistenable, but they... made the song completely unlistenable.

The vocals are unneccessarily distorted near the beginning. I'll fix that. Jake, I want you to download this version and do a drum loop for it. I envision rapid-fire hi-hat cymbals. Then I'll do the real version.

Also on my way to the bus stop, I pass a chicken place called "Chasin Chicken". The motto is "The cluck stops here!". Never have I seen the death of chickens announced with such morbid delight. Chasin Chicken is the Mr. Noodle of chicken.

Wed Sep 22 1999 20:10: Enjoy it. It will be there.

Thu Sep 23 1999 08:40: Once again MP3s I made sound like crap under Windows. It can't be the encoder, because this is a completely different encoder under (as Mike Popovic is happy to point out) a completely different operating system from Linux. Possibly I am making a fundamental encoding error. But what? I wonder if the .WAVs would sound like crap under Windows. There's only one way to find out; demand access to the Windows source code! I mean, uh, try it!

This is definitely Windows' fault. Definitely Windows' fault.

Thu Sep 23 1999 20:06: I did a photocopiable cover for Nowhere Standard Time so that Jake could sell copies at his gig. I am officially the fourth member of Jake's band, fireball. I don't have to do anything. They're just going to hang my picture up on the wall at the gig and play some of my songs. Whee!

I am a nervous wreck right now, for personal reasons which I will not go into here.

Fri Sep 24 1999 06:12: Ah, the first Windows lockup of the day. So fresh, so pure.

Still a nervous wreck.

At least I can ssh into my home machine now that it's on the net all the time. Beware the firewall, ne'er-do-wells!

Fri Sep 24 1999 06:45: The .WAVs I recorded sound fine under Windows. The complicity of Windows in the whole not-playing-MP3s-correctly scam looms ever larger.

Tue Sep 28 1999 06:46: How does anyone get any surfing done in Windows? None of the browsers work properly. It happened at my mother's house, and now it's happening at work.

Dan and I are playing networked XBlast and FreeCiv. Not right now, obviously, and not simultaneously. Both are fun, in different ways. We may branch into Quake, but I don't like first-person games very much. I like my games of carnage to have a top view (as in XBlast), like a gruesome, bloody board game. That's what I like about XBlast, actually. It's like Monopoly... with {Asia Carrera, bombs}! Two thousand dollars? Well I'm afraid you don't have a hotel on Boardwalk anymore! AH HA HA HA HA!

Dan: [referring to FreeCiv's game-year system] The game ends in the year 2000, I think.
Me: They should fix that.

I am painfully aware that in almost all my little slices of dialogue that I put on this page, the punchline (if there is one) is delivered by yours truly. I don't know if I selectively remember the things I say, or if I think the things I say are funnier than the things others say, or what.

Dan also helped me get set up with a good X configuration that lets me have 1024x768 at 16-bit color, and doesn't have that fuzzy thing at the edge of the screen. Lousy show-off. I mean, uh, thanks, Dan!

Wed Sep 29 1999 12:45: Why are people so upset over the fact that one day non-organic brains will be smarter than organic brains? That our descendants will not be organisms? I think people would not be so concerned if they had a decent grasp of number theory.

No, I can't elaborate on that.

Those generic "people", always wrong. What are you going to do? That generic "you", always having to do stuff.

Wed Sep 29 1999 12:53: This BBC headline cracks me up: Core, what a scorcher.

Wed Sep 29 1999 14:10: Sampo is responding to pings, which means Andy is back to school (with Rodney Dangerfield), but I can't Web or ssh or telnet in. What deviousness is Andy up to?

Wed Sep 29 1999 16:18: I finally found a copy of Maximum Linux. It cost $8.50, money I cannot spend. It costs so much because it comes with a CD, which is the CD I already have (Mandrake 6.0). But I must obey Mae Ling.

People have been stuffing the ballot box to show their love for cookie dough. At least they can only do this O(n) times. I'm not sure what n would be there, but that statement conveys my general policy towards online polls, and why I limit them by IP.

Thu Sep 30 1999 08:03: School's back from summer. School's back forever. I have to be in Public Policy in half an hour, in my logic class.

Yesterday was Trofim Lysenko's birthday.

Thu Sep 30 1999 10:44: URSA says I am #2 on the CS112 wait list. my.ucla.edu says I am #6. I think my.ucla.edu is lying, or the 6 represents something else, because it says "6/6", which implies that the wait list has a capacity of 6, which is a ridiculous size for a wait list. We shall see.

My logic class was in Franz, not in Public Policy. My CS112 lecture is in Public Policy. News You Can Bruise regrets the error.

Thu Sep 30 1999 20:08: No, no! Someone hit the main page on a Google query for something too horrible to contemplate (if I put it down here, it will just attract more perverts searching for it). No! That is wrong! Shame on you, dialupU163.mpls.uswest.net!

Thu Sep 30 1999 20:11: Scott Hammack points out that "salmonella" is in fact spelled "salmonella". Lousy pedantic bastard--another sandwich, dear?

Fri Oct 01 1999 19:10: Oops, I forgot to move the old NYCB into the archives. I need to do auto-archiving, but I'm too lazy. That's the only reason.

Q: Why did the tachyon cross the road?
A: Because it was on the other side.

Sat Oct 02 1999 07:19: Dan and I want to write a game, for use when we get sick of XBlast and FreeCiv. A networked game, obviously. Dan wanted to do a roguelike game, but unless you have 100+ people playing, a networked roguelike game is not that interesting. So I talked him out of that unless he can come up with a way to make it interesting.

We have one really good idea, but it involves heavy 3D stuff. So I don't want to do it straight off. When Dan wakes up I'm going to try to sell him on a souped-up version of the classic Atari 2600 game Tank. I'm searching through Freshmeat to see if that's been done already, and picking up any other interesting games as I go along.

Sat Oct 02 1999 22:24: We've started on the Tank remake, tenatively titled "Tank Carnage". I'm doing the network support, Dan is doing the client. We're the original Odd Couple! Once I get the message passing figured out, the tank carnage can really begin.

Sun Oct 03 1999 15:15: The Tank Carnage client can connect to the Tank Carnage server, whereupon it obtains a level map and displays it on the screen. It can also send commands to the server, although there are no tanks to receive them yet. The code is a mess. I hate C++!

Mon Oct 04 1999 07:16: People dropped out ahead of me, so I am now, enrolled in CS112. Only problem is, the paycheck I deposited Friday isn't showing up in my bank account, so I'm not going to be able to buy my books today. I wonder if they'll take my credit card.

Mon Oct 04 1999 07:22: Yes, they will. So I'll do that.

Mon Oct 04 1999 10:37: Someone is going crazy, and I hope it's not me. Last night I watched the traditional Simpsons->Futurama->X-Files block (X-Files sucked; I think a policy of watching only episodes with aliens or the Lone Gunmen would be more successful than my current policy), and:

There was stuff in The Simpsons that just plain made no sense. I know about and understand the surreal aspect of the jokes on The Simpsons, but these things weren't jokes, although they were portrayed as jokes. I don't mean they were jokes that weren't funny. I mean they weren't jokes at all. The fan belt? The air instead of Valium? {I, parents} just don't understand [how I could just kill a man]. Rather complicated multiple-reading sentence there.
The commercials made me want to huddle up in a ball. Why? Why? Why are today's commercials so fundamentally disturbing? Were they always like this? Are the ad execs of America smoking crack (more than usual, I mean)? Are these commercials really supposed to make me want to buy these things?
It's not Futurama's fault, but my repitoire of college party movies is extremely limited, so I had to extrapolate a lot of the jokes this week. Same as last week, actually, as I've never seen Titanic.

Mon Oct 04 1999 14:45: So. I'm doing the log analyzer for segfault, and I finally get Scott to log the referers for people who hit the site. And when I analyze the logs I find that some of the referring URLs from Slashdot have Slashdot usernames and passwords in them. We're getting 10-15 passwords a day. Turns out Mike Popovic has been seeing the same thing in his server logs.

So I mail the Slashdot crew, and I get an email back from Rob Malda that, basically, it's not a bug, it's a feature. They have a thing where you bookmark http://slashdot.org/index.pl?op=userlogin&upasswd=xxxx&unickname=yyyy and you can use that as your bookmark. So people go to that bookmark and it logs them in automatically, then they click on the segfault Slashbox and get taken to our site and we get their username and password. Malda sez: "When the bookmark is given to people it clearly states 'This is horribly insecure, but some people want it anyway'. It's a dumb method, but people are being warned of the risks."

So I don't know what moral can be derived from that, except that a lot of people prefer convenience to security. And that if you want people's Slashdot passwords, you should start a popular site and get a Slashbox for it.

Mon Oct 04 1999 15:11: Your tax dollars at work, Israel:

Host: barzili.health.gov.il
Page: /~leonardr/articles/virgin/index.shtml
Last: http://www.google.com/search?q=virgin+defloration

Mon Oct 04 1999 18:23: I'm at the LUG meeting. Dan is giving a talk on security.

I think CS111 might be just a scam to line Leonard Kleinrock's pockets with royalties for his queuing theory book. We're talking about a book published in 1975 here, selling for $95.

I couldn't find two of the books I need for my classes. Bleah. At least the trip through the bookstore only took me about 6 minutes. The line was long but they have learned from previous quarters and had a whole lot of people in the checkout alcoves. So I only spent about 3 minutes in line.

Tue Oct 05 1999 13:24: Sorry, the CS department network has been really flaky lately, as has the new CSUA firewall. I'm going to move Crummy to leonardr.segfault.org or crummy.segfault.org or something in the near future.

Tue Oct 05 1999 16:23: Two of my professors today were wearing the same sort of plaid green shirt that I was wearing. Weird.

Tue Oct 05 1999 19:23: leonardr.segfault.org and crummy.segfault.org will eventually work. Right now they just go to segfault.org. I have to restart Apache, but since sith.segfault.org gets its DNS from linux.com, which doesn't recognize it, sith itself doesn't recognize {leonardr,crummy}.segfault.org. So I gotta wait. I'll try again in the morning.

Tue Oct 05 1999 19:54: I did the guitar part for Sally O'Sally just now, so expect that tomorrow, hopefully.

Mark Gave A Monkey Acid is turning into a very popular song. Dan was playing it for the guys in the LUG yesterday. It could be my surprise hit.

Tue Oct 05 1999 20:07: Woohoo! Sorry, people whose connections I cut off when I accidentally killed Apache.

Wed Oct 06 1999 07:46: I waited until all my socks were dirty before I opened the new socks I got two weeks ago, just so I could feel like someone who buys new socks whenever the old ones get dirty.

Thu Oct 07 1999 17:16: More segfault from me, this one written in frustration so who knows how good it is, although Mike Popovic likes it. I normally don't publish my own stories. But Scott is nowhere to be seen, and I checked this one thoroughly with Dan, so...

Thu Oct 07 1999 18:20:
Leonard: Do you ever feel like there are aliens shooting a nature documentary about you, or am I the only one?
Dan: I think it's just you.

Thu Oct 07 1999 18:40: I forgot to mention that Kris' reign of terror as Daily Bruin cartoonist began today. Behold The Checkerboard Nightmare! A sudden (?) switch to a one-panel format forced Kris to take refuge in hackneyed, punchline-oriented humor, but he showed me one yesterday which is more his style, so it'll pick up. Kris, for the life of me I can't think what the music to that song would be like.

Fri Oct 08 1999 13:41: Arrgh! More "Linux Myths" stories! My story was supposed to put a stop to all that! Arrgh I say!

Someone left a big box of 240 tiny boxes of Raisin Bran Crunch in the kitchen. Apparantly the managers. But that's a whole lot of cereal. And a big waste of packaging.

Fri Oct 08 1999 19:17: I attended Mike Popovic's (I wonder if I should just start calling him Mike) Abacus World Expo keynote. His best line:

I cannot comment on that at this time, but yes.

I wish I'd said that (Oscar Wilde: You will, Leonard, you will).

Anyway. I have another segfault story ready to go. Sometime this weekend, or on Monday.

Sat Oct 09 1999 20:37: CGI works on sith now, but I'm going to hold off for just a little bit longer until I get crummy.com hosted on there. Crummy's long wanderings will finally be over.

Sun Oct 10 1999 08:55: I saw a billboard yesterday, for a credit card. The credit card was said to be "Y3K compliant". The expiration date on the sample credit card had two digits.

I saw another billboard. It was for 1-800-Flowers.com.

I woke up screaming. Initially relieved to be awake, I soon realized that I had seen those billboards before going to sleep the previous night. I screamed some more.

Mon Oct 11 1999 10:20: I just broke the sunglasses Mae Ling gave me. Yes, broke. I did not lose them. I broke them. This is the first time I have broken sunglasses rather than losing them.

Mon Oct 11 1999 19:46: Went to some technology career fair. Never too early to start looking for a job. eToys.com is a perfect match for me; an Internet startup, a Linux shop, needing Perl and Unix people. The woman asked me if I was free before June. Sorry, but I need to go to school.

I don't know if I should apply to scour.net again. I applied for a summer job which I didn't get, but I don't know if I failed their test or if they just didn't like my schedule. I'd ask them outright except I know the guys personally and I don't want to put them in an awkward situation w/r/t me. This is the week of career fairs on campus; there's another one they'll be attending tomorrow. If Ilyah is there I can bring the subject up; I know him well enough that it won't be a problem, I hope. But I don't know if he deigns to visit career fairs.

The best situation for me would be to get hired by VA to work on Segfault full time. But I don't think that's likely to happen. Even if it did happen, they'd hire Scott before they hired me. They already offered VA stock to him and not to me. They already drilled a hole in my throat. Oh well.

Memo to myself: do the dumb things I gotta do. Touch the puppet head. Look up collegehire.com and save.com because they want to do the resume thing online. I can understand that.

Thu Oct 14 1999 10:35: I have a bunch of new Leonardonics terms to write up (eg. device, preposition-buzzword form, etc), but I'm too lazy. I might as well do it now, since I don't have class for 20 minutes.

Thu Oct 14 1999 10:51: Okay, go for it.. There are a couple old ones I never linked to as well.

Thu Oct 14 1999 17:03: Stuff I still have to explain, in Leonardonics or elsewhere: We're your station, x; Forgot the gas card!; the pothead techie joke.

Fri Oct 15 1999 08:01: Chevy Chase: Now, now, calm down, folks. Archaeoraptor liaoningensis is a bird and a dinosaur!

Fri Oct 15 1999 08:15: Today's entertainment provided by people I know:

Another {Tequila Sunrise,Checkerboard Nightmare}
Dan's Ronco PC to sell for $24.95 -- But wait, there's more! includes my BeOS screenshot.

Fri Oct 15 1999 08:37: Here's an artist's rendering of that dinosaur, but I can't find a picture of the fossil yet. It wants the crust from your sandwich!

Fri Oct 15 1999 10:26: The first Are You An Organism? songs out of the gate are Sodium and Gamera and Swim Free. Both are from an old tape which had recordings good enough to dub, rather than re-record. I would have used this version of Swim Free anyway, as I need Susanna to do the song.

Sat Oct 16 1999 12:42: Fire is going down today for a big upgrade. So move to crummy.segfault.org. I'll update that site before they take fire down.

There's an installfest going on. But I don't like installfests, because they make me deal with hardware, and I'm not very good with hardware. So I went home and am doing homework. I also put my Slashdot code into action over on Segfault. It detects if you gave us your Slashdot username and password via HTTP_REFERER, shows your username and password to you, and links to an informative page telling you what to do about it.

Sun Oct 17 1999 08:18: This is the real site now. Still a few quirks and such. I gotta figure out how to get the old site pages to redirect to the new site pages. I mean, I know how to do it, but I don't want to change every single page manually.

We experienced an earthquake yesterday, barely. Dan didn't even wake up. I woke him up and he wasn't interested. He went back to sleep.

Kris is covering Asia Carrera... with plastic wrap! No, I'm kidding. Kris wouldn't do a thing like that. Kris is covering my song Asia Carrera... with plastic wrap! Argh! I mean, I can't wait to hear it. I don't know if that was preposition-buzzword form. It would be, except the joke wasn't the preposition-buzzword joke and "plastic wrap" isn't a buzzword. THE ANSWER IS NO.

Sun Oct 17 1999 11:47: Let's try this again, like we did last summer.

Sun Oct 17 1999 13:20: Kris pointed me to UnCook, which he says gets rid of the Windows MP3 weirdness, which I believe may have something to do with Windows browsers downloading MP3s as the wrong MIME type. So get that program and fix the MP3s as you download them, or something. Let me know how it goes.

Mon Oct 18 1999 13:34: I'm redoing all the Dada Pokey stuff. So it'll be down and {funky, nonfunctional} for a while.

Mon Oct 18 1999 15:53: Everything Dada Pokey is up to version 2.0, except for the Daily Pokey viewer which I ran out of patience before I got to it. But finally we're getting the post-haitus Pokeys in Dada Pokey.

Mon Oct 18 1999 16:01: Stuff to do:

Bring COPOUT to 1.0 (vote editing?).
~~Finish the Dada Pokey lister to do Daily Pokey~~ YES
~~Set up cronjobs so that Daily Pokey works again~~
~~Add final pictures to Texas travelogue~~
~~Put up Coffee Junction pictures~~
Leonardonics: "alleged"

Mon Oct 18 1999 16:36: Okay, here are the Coffee Junction pictures. Those aren't scanned from the actual pictures, and they're not all the pictures I have, so there will be more once I get access to a scanner.

Mon Oct 18 1999 16:37: And don't forget the picture of Scott and Mae Ling at LWE Spring 1999!

Mon Oct 18 1999 20:04: I went to an IBM thing. I got pizza. Celeste won a laptop! Wow! I am in awe of Celeste's laptop-winning skills.

I ate nothing but junk all day. I bought a huge pastry and ate that for breakfast, then I ate pizza for dinner. Bleah. At least I didn't eat anything equally junky (or anything at all) for lunch.

Mon Oct 18 1999 20:43: I added some more (9) pictures to the Texas travelogue, and split it into three files so that it wouldn't be so graphic-heavy. Well, so its graphic-heaviness wouldn't be felt so prominently. This new batch includes such gems as Roswell Ford, Satellite Under Glass, and two new Quartzite pictures. I still have to thumbnail Gameroom, Roswell Bingo, and (maybe) Spoooon. Then I should probably normalize all the thumbnails and make it a full thumbnail thing instead of a combo thumbnail-big picture thing. Then I'll be done. Not quite a year after the trip which the travelogue commemerates.

Mon Oct 18 1999 20:53: I'm just talkin' 'bout Leonard!

Tue Oct 19 1999 08:23: I have this insane nervous tic in my right eye. It kept waking me up last night, and it's driving me crazy now. Argh I say.

By rights crummy.com should work now, but for some reason it doesn't. Stay tuned.

Tue Oct 19 1999 12:52: While moving stuff to crummy.segfault.org, I accidentally deleted madman7, the guided-hypertext CGI I was working on for Peter. Argh again. I'm going to have to go back to an old version and rewrite that.

Tue Oct 19 1999 13:30: Gameroom and Roswell Bingo added to the travelogue. I decided not to do Spoooon because I no longer remember what it was about the spoon that made my mother mad. Look at that alliteration!

Tue Oct 19 1999 18:27: Dada Pokey 2.0 is all working. The cron jobs are in place; Daily Pokey (which has a great new archive system) will be updated every night, as it was before, and the Pokey archives will be checked for new strips every Friday.

Wed Oct 20 1999 15:48: I'm listening to Kris' cover of Asia Carrera, which he sent me. It's great. I'm kind of tired of listening to the original version, but the cover makes it new again. The vocalizations, the phony coffeehouse setting, everything aces. A couple of nitpicks, which I'm sending over to him; we'll see what develops.

Thu Oct 21 1999 09:40: Today's Checkerboard Nightmare

Fri Oct 22 1999 07:39: The competition was keen, but Shaft retains his title as the cat who's a funky sex machine for all the chicks. Don't forget to vote in the new poll.

Fri Oct 22 1999 09:27: COPOUT 1.0 is almost ready. I just have to do the admin password checking and some kind of admin interface.

Fri Oct 22 1999 09:42: 'Jam Echelon Day' brings down NSA Perl script. I mock my own!

Mon Oct 25 1999 09:25: He's a regular guy, your 'average Joe'. But must everyday situations always end in disaster?

Tue Oct 26 1999 07:59: From The Register:

"Research shows that women use the Web differently from men, most typically using it to rapidly find solutions to otherwise time-consuming problems," said Sarah Carpenter, VP strategy at Freeserve.

Well, what damn stupid things are men doing on the Web? This requires a poll. A rubric poll!

Tue Oct 26 1999 18:34: Campbell was talking about the Monty Hall Paradox today, and I looked at the source code for Monty Hall's Hall of Doors, and I thought, "This Perl is so dingy!". So I rewrote it. MHHD 2.0! Easier to follow, easier to understand, more wacky options than ever before! The only thing I took out was the "play at home" option, cause it messed up the code and I really don't think anyone ever used it.

Tue Oct 26 1999 19:12: I found the URL for the Salon interview with Illiad of User Friendly, which interview will be published tomorrow. The article links to Segfault, and someone from Salon checked the link to make sure it was good, so it logged their referrer, which I snarfed up.

Dan doesn't think it's at all cool that I read the interview before anyone else. So I must turn elsewhere for validation.

I won't reveal the URL, but I will quote the (unintentionally) funniest line: "as the open-source movement exploded over the last two years, so did [Illiad's] fans." Ouch.

I suppose it's more a straight entertainment news story than an interview.

Wed Oct 27 1999 07:25: Paleontologists have found bones indicating that the mighty mosasaur was itself preyed upon by huge, prehistoric sharks. Even more startling is the fact that mosasaurs and sharks would often form nutty vaudeville duos and tour the boards of the ancient seas.

Gotta love Oceans of Kansas and its Real Kansas Wildlife shirt. Also has more cool artists renderings by Dan Varner, who did the vaudeville one.

Saber-toothed herring!

Wed Oct 27 1999 08:12: Here's the Salon article. If you knew a Salon article on a subject was coming up, you could have a good chance of finding it ahead of time. I don't know why I care.

Wed Oct 27 1999 08:20: Looking through a list of O'Reilly books, going up to June 2000. Handling Windows NT Logon Emergencies? How long before my pushd and popd becomes reality?

Wed Oct 27 1999 16:24: I just discovered that Dada Pokey was linked to from memepool. I used to read memepool, but then stopped for some unspecified reason.

Wed Oct 27 1999 16:49: Dada Pokey makes the weblog rounds, old chap! Cardhouse claims to have obtained it from PeterMe, which doesn't appear to actually have a link to it anywhere.

Apathy

That appears to be it. Dada Pokey remains by far the most popular page on my site.

Wed Oct 27 1999 18:53: Dada Pokey linked to on PigDog, not as an article but just as a link. Maybe they couldn't think of enough sarcastic things to say about it.

Wed Oct 27 1999 21:23: Dan wrote a program in Python that generates Slashdot headlines, and I want to use it to write a song about Slashdot. But he changed the focus to generating Jon Katz headlines, because the Katz headlines it generated were way funnier than any of the other headlines, so I'm just going to make up my own Slashdot headlines for the song.

Thu Oct 28 1999 06:52: "Females are 'repressed' males and males are 'repressed' females." There go a whole lot of metaphors.

Thu Oct 28 1999 07:47: I called Scott up today and talked with him about the plan of disabling comments and write-ins. He said go for it. So I did. Am now bracing myself for the torrent of email. Also bracing myself for my phone bill.

Thu Oct 28 1999 08:04: Dan improved the KatzDot thing while I was sleeping (while you were sleeping), including moving it over to my suggestion of the Dada Engine (not affiliated with Dada Pokey except in spirit). Some samples:

The Interactive Internet War, Digital Troubled Teens and Grief
The Website Hysteria - Part One
Beware The Online Music Industry Syndrome
The Virtual Web: First Steps
The Power of Digital MP3s and Geek Culture

Some of them are lousy, but most are pretty good. Good job, Dan.

Actually some of them are funny because they don't make sense ("Beyond the Open Source Hellmouth"). Dan and I were debating whether a good KatzDot engine would have those or not.

Thu Oct 28 1999 15:11: Over 20 messages so far; only 4 have anything negative at all to say. I think I made the right decision. But the tough work of coming up with a system that functions correctly is still ahead.

I got a perfect score on my logic midterm. At last, Smithers! A perfect score! But argh! I have a music history midterm and a database project due Tuesday! Argh!

Thu Oct 28 1999 19:27: Dan's trying to get KatzDot to do the first paragraph of stories. It's not going as well as the headlines, but the stories are funny in a different way. "On Monday this society presented this society with morally superior violence across the country of information as information opening a whole new chapter in Internet. Jane's Intelligence Review is riddled with mind-boggling education."

That may be as good at it gets. I'd be happy with more stuff in the headlines, personally.

Thu Oct 28 1999 20:01: The headline generator is still going strong:

The Hellmouth Demands Students
Slashdot? Don't Believe It
Lo-Tech Sexbots - Experience It!
Microsoft, Sexbots and Kids
Cyber-Terrorism: An Interactive Experiment

Fri Oct 29 1999 13:50: At last! crummy.com is fully operational! Blast off, with CRUMMY.COM! Interesting shift in usage of that bit. Anyway, woohoo!

Fri Oct 29 1999 13:58: I forgot to thank Dan (aka load) of linux.com for his help in configuring sith's named.

Fri Oct 29 1999 18:38: What the hell? Here's a Slashdot article about the comment disabling. But it's not on the front page. Although it was posted at 9:30AM, it only has about 10 comments, and we've only gotten 2 click-throughs on it. What's going on?

Fri Oct 29 1999 21:08: I got a haircut today. I told Dan, "I have to wash all the hair out of my hair."

Sat Oct 30 1999 05:46: I got this fortune twice, which must be some kind of omen, or maybe some kind of manifestation of some kind of "memoryless property" of a random system.

                                SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENT

Title:          Are Frogs Turing Compatible?
Speaker:        Don "The Lion" Knuth

                                ABSTRACT
        Several researchers at the University of Louisiana have been studying
the computing power of various amphibians, frogs in particular.  The problem
of frog computability has become a critical issue that ranges across all areas
of computer science.  It has been shown that anything computable by an amphi-
bian community in a fixed-size pond is computable by a frog in the same-size
pond -- that is to say, frogs are Pond-space complete.  We will show that
there is a log-space, polywog-time reduction from any Turing machine program
to a frog.  We will suggest these represent a proper subset of frog-computable
functions.
        This is not just a let's-see-how-far-those-frogs-can-jump seminar.
This is only for hardcore amphibian-computation people and their colleagues.
        Refreshments will be served.  Music will be played.

Sat Oct 30 1999 06:49: Solar power! When will people learn?

Sun Oct 31 1999 19:35: I feel like I have some bizarre disease, but it's probably just my torturous music history midterm, which I had to triage everything else to study for and which is still destined to meet my father in a steel cage.

Sun Oct 31 1999 21:05: What a rip-off! The allegedly incredibly disturbing and graphic X-Files they're rerunning tonight is just the lame "Home" episode! What a rip-off! Wait, I already said that. And they bumped Futurama to next week, too.

Mon Nov 01 1999 07:32: It's Novemberlicious! I'm Novemberlicious!

Mon Nov 01 1999 15:15: My {car,life} is falling apart. May have already fallen apart.

Start your day with gasoline
Rev yourself with Mr. Clean
Power up with Thorazine
Thorazine

Start your day with motor oil
Stand it back and watch it boil
Live it up with potting soil
Potting soil

I don't have a third verse. Not very good, but what did you expect? Don't answer that. Implied, Lisa? Or implode?

Mon Nov 01 1999 15:19: I should probably put some good lyrics in here, rather than ones I just made up, so that people don't get an abnormally low idea of my lyric-writing abilities. But I'm so lazy and tired and depressed that all I can do is wave you at music and let you fend for yourself.

Mon Nov 01 1999 15:24: Dinosau r Auction Snares $1 Million. A fairly run-of-the-mill article, but the headline makes it sound like the auction was some sort of scam.

Mon Nov 01 1999 16:31: My music history essay is pretty lame, but it has a great title: Concerto for Several Patches: Wendy Carlos's Interpretation of the Third Brandenburg Concerto

I forgot to mention that Dan says that there is an MLA form for citing the output of a computer program. The MLA people need to get out more. Who am I to talk?

Mon Nov 01 1999 17:16: It's official: Jon Katz loves Katzdot!

Tue Nov 02 1999 08:06: I finally found a use for the limes. They can be used to make Hansens Mandarin Lime soda potable.

Tue Nov 02 1999 08:16: "Live it up with potting soil" reminds me of a joke Andy put in a ZZT game (Mansion of Bill, for those who care) about potting soil as a pizza topping. "Trust me, it's great! Go out back and dig some up! You'll love it! I swear!" And don't forget Baked Potato on a Bun.

Andy and I should form a biotechnology startup. He'll be the bio and I'll be the technology. Let's make lots of money.

Tue Nov 02 1999 09:18: Argh. Argh. Argh.

Argh.

In conclusion, argh.

Tue Nov 02 1999 11:24: They had the steel cage all ready to go, but I think I managed to prevent the actual meeting. I identified all the pieces correctly, I think. The stuff that got me was the questions about orchestration and dates and such. And the essay (which turned out okay, or so I think in my sleep-deprived state) is only worth 20% of the midterm grade. That's gotta hurt.

Tue Nov 02 1999 11:42: This article doesn't even consider the possibility that the moon might actually be a god! What kind of science is that?

Tue Nov 02 1999 13:08: Related to the previous note: I thought Michael Shermer was going to be on campus today, but it's Thursday. It's Friday! I may buy his book. I have a little money, it's only $25, and it would be cool to have an autographed copy.

Tue Nov 02 1999 15:22: Eric Guenterberg gave me a mod_rewrite thing to use on my fire account. So now accessing any page in my old webspace on fire will automatically redirect you here. Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year! Thanks, Eric!

Wed Nov 03 1999 07:56: Leonardonics: Next time, on X's Creek, the pothead techie joke, we're your station, x.

Thu Nov 04 1999 06:37: I think that The Register overestimates the place that Guy Fawkes Day holds on the U.S. calendar of holidays. On the other hand, I probably shouldn't have told Scott to proofread that Super Bowl article for Segfault.

Thu Nov 04 1999 07:50: The next Leonardonics items on the list are the Demon Dog and his catchphrase, "Rehrehreh!". I love doing Leonardonics, and I really wish more people would have personal slang dictionaries.

Thu Nov 04 1999 07:58: !!! Jon Katz has started actually using Katzdot to do his story headlines.

Thu Nov 04 1999 18:01: I finally got Dan to accept that no natural number is of infinite magnitude. The upshot of this is that he now has to accept that the real numbers can be diagonalized but the natural numbers cannot. Now maybe we can have some peace around here.

The proof is a simple proof by induction: Zero is of finite magnitude. If x is of finite magnitude, so is x+1. Therefore, all natural numbers are of finite magnitude.

Thu Nov 04 1999 18:10: I went to hear Michael Shermer speak. Not as good as I thought he would be, but still very good. I bought both his books (Why People Believe Weird Things and the new one, How we Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science), which he signed "Best skeptical wishes" and "In glorious contingency", respectively. The man is a nut! Heyooo!

Fri Nov 05 1999 07:09: Dan is trying to do the plot for his latest game, Hover Carnage (we are doing a whole family of never-to-be-finished "x Carnage" games; my contribution will be "Tic-Tac-Toe Carnage"). And he's really set on having a real plot, and he's really set on having nanotech in the game. But nanotech just totally removes any conceivable reason why you would run a hovercar around abandoned tunnels at breakneck speed firing mini-nukes at other people in hovercars, except for some sort of death {clock, sport}, and that's so cliche it's not even funny.

Fri Nov 05 1999 12:12: Harry Steven Keeler! And lots of him!

Fri Nov 05 1999 18:20: This is a non-miscarriage of justice! A NON-MISCARRIAGE!!!

Fri Nov 05 1999 19:01: Disclaimer: {36,24,36} is not technically a set, since it contains a duplicate number. Only if she's 5'3"!

Sat Nov 06 1999 08:00: I figured out a better plot for Dan's game than the lame one we had before. The tunnels are in mines on asteroids and the like. The mines are for elements not found in abundance on Earth; although nanotech is avaliable, large-scale element fusion or whatever that's called, is not. So you and the other miners are duking it out, protecting and staking your claims.

The inspiration for Hover Carnage is an old arcade game called Stunrunner, if that means anything to you. Does the name really mean anything to you?

Sat Nov 06 1999 08:26: I told my mother about the findings of fact in the Microsoft case, and she was right in there with all this legalese. I always forget that she was going to be a lawyer.

Sun Nov 07 1999 07:59: The premise of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, in the part where the antagonists are trying to frame Smith as owning the land where the camp/dam will be located, is flawed. All Smith has to do is point out that if he really did own the land, he could sell it to the government for the dam just as easily as for the boy's camp, so he would have no motive for stalling the dam bill.

Mon Nov 08 1999 21:00: Last night I {had a crazy dream, got mail from Chris Roddy} of Da Warren and Death and Destruction fame. He found Crummy (more specifically, he foudn the D&D tab) whilst ego-surfing and dropped me a line. He is attending Emory in Atlanta, and has a homepage, of sorts.

Midterm tomorrow. Midterm Wednesday. I'm trying to figure out whether or not R. Buckminster Fuller is crazy. I think that the way he writes is deliberately engineered to make the reader think he's crazy. But why would he do that?

Tue Nov 09 1999 06:30: When spiral galaxies attack!

Tue Nov 09 1999 13:50: I had an idea for Be Dope, but no time to write the story. In fact, I don't even have time to write this entry that points to Mike's treatment of the idea. Gotta go fail this midterm now.

Tue Nov 09 1999 15:26: Argh. Steel cage carnage. I'm out half an hour early because I couldn't do the problems I couldn't do. I really, really couldn't do them. They required knowledge about secondary B+-tree indices and safe Datalog, knowledge which I do not posess. So I just guessed.

Tue Nov 09 1999 17:04: How can you write an article that involves Frank Zappa as much as does this Salon article, yet is as bad and nonsensical as that selfsame article?

Tue Nov 09 1999 17:09: The problem with America's teenagers is that we as a nation are failing them. We are failing them by no longer producing those silly high school movies and TV shows like Saved by the Bell and Ferris Beuller's Day Off. Today's youth lack constructive goofing off role models.

Wed Nov 10 1999 06:59: Last night I did have a crazy dream. I dreamt {I lived in marble halls, that there was an ice cream flavor named after Eli Gafni}. It was a mix of honey mustard ice cream (?!) and some other, equally gross kind of ice cream. It tasted horrible.

Why is Prof. Gafni so cool? I don't know. He just lives to kick algorithmic ass. I don't think he teaches any undergrad classes besides CS180, though.

That reminds me, I have to sign up for 2 of next quarter's classes a week from today. Don't let me forget!

Wed Nov 10 1999 08:03:

 _________________
< Get cowsay now! >
 -----------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

Wed Nov 10 1999 09:24: I converted and put up a picture I took of myself about a week ago. Why is my hair crooked like that? It always happens. I want it to be on top of my head. Argh.

Why am I even worrying about this right now?

Wed Nov 10 1999 10:35: The joke's on us. Katzdot has seemingly become an essential tool for Jon Katz. Or is Katzdot just really, really good at what it does?

Wed Nov 10 1999 14:36: By some miracle I managed to not do horribly on that midterm.

Thu Nov 11 1999 01:22: Dan found an IRC script that has a bunch of lines from AOL chat rooms and prints one out randomly. I'm fairly sure they're real AOL chat room lines. It would be more amazing if one person could think all of them up.

Thu Nov 11 1999 01:52: Friday is to be movie night. Dan is done with his midterms on Friday, so I'm going to rent all the good movies he hasn't seen and we're going to watch them. Movies I think are good that Dan has not seen include Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the Star Wars trilogy, 200 Motels, Monty Python/Holy Grail, Monty Python/Life of Brian, Dr. Strangelove, and any given Marx Brothers movie. The only movie Dan could think of that he likes and I haven't seen is Sneakers. Finally, I'm not the person in a group of two people who knows less about movies!

I'm not sure that Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is good. I remember thinking it was really good, and the concept is a sound one, but I don't really remember much about it. So I reserve the right to revoke my endorsement of it.

Thu Nov 11 1999 07:40: I used to not like grapes, because I was surrounded by them (literally; our house was in the middle of miles of grape fields). But now I think they are good booze (not literally).

Thu Nov 11 1999 10:58: Mike added poll bars to the poll results and generally made the poll results nicer to look at. I bumped up the version to 0.95. Still vaguely working towards the new 1.0 rewrite.

Peter and I are also starting to work on another hypertext for the Madman CGI, and I am kind of working on eCow, a CGI interface to cowsay, which will be the next feature. Monty Hall's Hall of Doors needs to be a feature as well.

Thu Nov 11 1999 12:51: I got an 87.5 on my Music History midterm, well out of the reach of steel cages (anything less than a normalized 75-80 is steel cage territory as far as I'm concerned). My essay was well-received.

Thu Nov 11 1999 14:59: I'm wondering if it would be worth it to get the Mad Magazine CD-ROM and try to get it to work with Linux, the way someone got the Star Trek Encyclopedia to work with Linux.

Thu Nov 11 1999 15:58: I did horribly on the database midterm, even compared to everyone else, who also did horribly. This is not good.

Thu Nov 11 1999 19:21: A rudimentary version of eCow works on sal. Dan is obsessed with the idea that someone might be able to break the security. I'm pretty sure it's tight. But I need to make the controls look better and write some copy before I put it up.

Fri Nov 12 1999 05:28: Check out the artist's rendering for this dinosaur story. I've never seen a dinosaur drawn with that foot positioning before.

Hm, there was another dinosaur, which sounds like it looks even more interesting, but there's no photos or rendering of it. "This dinosaur had 600 teeth, but we're not going to show it to you."

Finally, enjoy a nutritious meal of buckyballs.

Fri Nov 12 1999 08:04: I had a funny Transmeta story (which did not in any way resemble any previous Transmeta story ever written, so shut up), but it looks like the point will be moot come Monday. Or maybe it will just be a big tease and I can run with the story. At any rate, many of the jokes can be reused in another story.

Fri Nov 12 1999 08:09: Telescope catches star just exploded. The horse raced past the barn fell down.

Fri Nov 12 1999 08:17: From Jake's notebook (onerous unum misspelling corrected):

i've been falling asleep to "rite of spring" which is awesome, though not entirely conducive to falling asleep. if stravinsky was a conventional action hero i'd say "stravinsky does it again! buckle up, this is a wild ride! two thumbs up- way up!". luckily for us all, he's not.

Fri Nov 12 1999 10:22: UCLA wants me to get a senior portrait taken. If you ask me, it sounds like just another scam to line their pockets with my hard-earned money.

Fri Nov 12 1999 16:42: !!!!!

Fri Nov 12 1999 18:47: While in Blockbuster today, I realized that I had forgotten to mention the ultimate teen high school goof-off movie, Rock 'N' Roll High School.

Fri Nov 12 1999 18:51: I scored a couple points above the mean, and several points above the median, in the CS112 midterm. I estimate my grades for this quarter thusly: CS112 B, CS143 C, Music History A, Philosophy A.

Sat Nov 13 1999 16:03: Sometimes I feel like I need to make a movie, but then I remember that my movie has already been made, and that it is called The Big Lebowski.

Sun Nov 14 1999 07:58: I just published a segv story and I changed "Year 2000" to "Y2K" because "Year 2000" sounded funny. When did this happen? I feel dirty.

Sun Nov 14 1999 09:31: Okay, we're past the halfway mark. Grail, Lebowski, and Star Wars down; Motels, Fink, Rabbit, and Monkey Business to go. Return of the Jedi was not the special edition, even though it was in the special edition box. Bastards!

Dan wants to take huge breaks between movies. I don't understand that. I mean, ten minutes, okay. An hour and a half, no. This is a movie marathon, not a non-movie marathon! This is a court of law, not a court of justice!

Sun Nov 14 1999 10:21: Leonardonics: Xfest '89

Mon Nov 15 1999 10:05: We watched Monkey Business, and only Monkey Business, yesterday. I don't know when the videos are due. I have them for five days, but does that include the day I got them? It's so much hassle. I don't know why I bother sometimes.

Tue Nov 16 1999 10:55: The bizarre comic strip poll on Slashdot gave me a couple hits to Dada Pokey, but I can't find an actual link to Dada Pokey anywhere in the comments. Weird.

Tue Nov 16 1999 13:46: I found it. Never mind.

Wed Nov 17 1999 17:25: Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is not that good. I was disappointed. The concept is brilliant, but eh...

It didn't help that I watched it right after Barton Fink.

Wed Nov 17 1999 18:36: Watch in horror as eCow takes to the air!

Wed Nov 17 1999 23:56: I added Katzdot and eCow to the features page. If you get a weird thing where the eCow graphic background doesn't match up with the page background, let me know.

Thu Nov 18 1999 00:10: There's a new paper down at gnu.org. I think it's very funny, on several different levels.

Thu Nov 18 1999 04:36: If you do an Altavista image search for "turkey", the turkey crossing sign from the Texas travelogue shows up on the first page of results. There are a whole lot of people doing Altavista image searches for "turkey". It took me a while to figure out why, but I figured it out.

Thu Nov 18 1999 16:02: ~~YES!!~~ Note to the BBC: Give the guy who thinks up these so-bad-they're-good headlines a raise!

Thu Nov 18 1999 16:43: From an email Susanna sent to me:

> I drove to Arizona and back on Monday night. got back at seven in the
> morning. No reason just did. Never doing it again, it was stupid.

???

Susanna's email style is a lot like my mother's. Interesting.

Susanna never updates her homepage. Oh well.

Thu Nov 18 1999 16:57: Oh yeah, I also got the customary once-in-a-while message from Dave Griffith last night. If only Andy would reply to his mail, I'd be surrounded by Da Warren people.

Sat Nov 20 1999 21:54: I went through all the Gnome Aisleriot card games. Good ones: Elevator, Fortunes, Freecell, Pileon, Scorpion, Spider, Yukon.

Sun Nov 21 1999 18:14: Mystery solved!

Alka-Seltzer's famous "Spicy Meatballs" spot, first aired in 1969, depicted an actor downing endless forkfuls of spaghetti during the filming of a commercial for "Magadini's Meatballs." Dozens of takes are botched, and the hapless actor, gorged and nauseated, can barely utter his big line: "Mama Mia, that's a spicy meatball!"

Jose Preciado had a bit that went "'Ats one hot-ta burrito!" That's tangential, irrelevant to the mystery solved. The mystery solved was, from where does "That's a spicy meatball!" come?

Also:

One squid even mistook a 15,000-ton tanker for a whale. After striking the ship three times, the poor beast slid into the ship's propellers, turning it into the world's largest sushi platter.

Mr. Bond, this machine will turn you into the world's largest sushi platter.

Sun Nov 21 1999 18:29: I didn't even notice that Be Dope linked to eCow until I saw over 20 hits from the link in the access log.

Sun Nov 21 1999 22:01: Instead of Frank Black from Millenium, Scully and Mulder should team up with Frank Black from The Pixies. Then we'd see some action!

Mon Nov 22 1999 03:25: I couldn't get any mail today, but it's working again now. So resend anything that bounced.

Tue Nov 23 1999 07:45: One thing that people who are around me for any length of time know is that I'm constantly singing for no reason. It's completely involuntary; I'm just compelled to do it. I have yet to have anyone actually complain about this, or I'd try to stop. But lately I have been singing songs that I hate, like "Sweet Caroline". And it's annoying.

Tue Nov 23 1999 08:18: Oh yeah; Kurtis, Kris's brother, is going to UCLA now. I saw him yesterday. He's a nut! He's living with Kris, and I think there needs to be a sitcom on that theme.

Gotta go to class now. I should probably find something to eat first.

Tue Nov 23 1999 12:27: My favorite games: freeciv, XBlast, and ADOM. ADOM isn't open source, but it's an awesome game.

Tue Nov 23 1999 21:03: I'm trying to move the MP3s over from linux to sith, but this is complicated by the fact that I can't reach one machine from the other. It's the fault of someone in the middle. In the meantime, you can get the new MP3s (new MP3s of recordings over a year old) of Liquid Crystal and Western Culture on the Skids at the new AYAO? MP3 site. Get Liquid Crystal. It will, it will rock you (take it from Jake). It has killer lyrics and bouncing a spoon off the guitar strings, so the only way to lose is not to play at all.

Tue Nov 23 1999 21:04: Oh yeah, I used a not-based-on-the-codebase-every-other-free-mp3-encoder-is-based-on MP3 encoder, so hopefully the non-Unix noodling problem should finally be dead. Let me know otherwise.

Wed Nov 24 1999 08:06: I'll probably be spending most of the day working on the new Open Standards Band website. I did finally move all the MP3s over to this machine (except for Sorry It's Late and the PPvDD thing; the former may be moved over eventually, but I need to figure out where to put it).

Scott is supposed to talk with me today about the new version of Segfault. But you know Scott.

I'm going home this afternoon. Spending Thanksgiving at my aunt Pat's house. I have another music history midterm, and accompanying essay, next Tuesday.

Wed Nov 24 1999 08:18: Scott actually responded in a timely fashion, so scratch the OSB thing for today.

Mon Nov 29 1999 08:07: Back from vacation. Please do not write "dot.com" unless you really mean "dot dot com".

Mon Nov 29 1999 20:48: Is this the best you can do?!?! C'mon, bring it on!

Tue Nov 30 1999 05:58: My essay is nearly done. I don't know how well I'll do on the midterm. I have to start attending those review sessions.

I also have a job interview today. I don't know it's going to go. I don't know what kind of interview it is.

Tue Nov 30 1999 07:43: Oh yeah, Peter is in town for a while, so I'll see him today. There's an archetype that Peter embodies perfectly, like Pelorat in the later Foundation books, or the guys in Foucault's Pendulum. I think that if you're going to be a professor in the humanities, you have to fulfill either that archetype or the bitter, crusty old person archtype.

Tue Nov 30 1999 15:39: My midterm went well. My interview went well. I'd better go back home soon and see Dan so he can infuse me with the need to complain, or I might have no choice but to cease my cynical misanthropy.

Thu Dec 02 1999 07:52: I need another poll but I can't think of anything. I'm writing this entry just so there will be something for December.

Thu Dec 02 1999 22:11: Am I on project? Am I on fire?

Tue Dec 14 1999 06:30: Does this freakin' work?

Tue Dec 14 1999 07:38: OK, we're back on the air. Dan Cox is working with Scott to get Segfault back up even as I type. As for what's new... not much. Got my heart broken (actively broken, rather than passively broken, for perhaps the first time in my life, if that makes any sense). Saw ESR speak. Read a lot. Had a final yesterday (databases, it went well). Final today at 3.

Probably a lot of CGIs are broken because we're on a new machine, project.linux.com now, and the paths are different. Let me know what doesn't work and I'll fix it in my copious free time.

I have some weird links to write up. I'll do it later.

I'm going to Virginia after finals. Spending Christmas with my uncle Robert and his kin. I'm not too excited about it, but whose fault is that?

Tue Dec 14 1999 07:51: I'm going to have to get the notebook program to 1.0 before I can change the poll, because I don't have root on this machine so I can't make the webserver owner of the poll file. Unix's permissions system is not good. I would be happy with capabilities but for some reason no one's using them even though they're in the Linux kernel.

Tue Dec 14 1999 10:56: Put up the rest of the Coffee Junction pictures. Adam says I should call up Sharon and get another gig at Coffee Junction. I may do just that.

Wed Dec 15 1999 00:18: There's a helicopter circling here, very close to the ground. It makes it impossible to sleep.

Wed Dec 15 1999 10:42: Apropos Microsoft:

For venture capitalist Tim Draper the message from Washington was simple: "Become successful, but not too successful or we'll ruin your life."

Right on! I'm glad the government is putting a stop to this!

Oh, wait, he was talking about the government.

Wed Dec 15 1999 10:51: I accidentally put my jeans on inside-out. I'm not sure what significance that has.

Wed Dec 15 1999 12:59: I'm singing a silly nonsense song at the moment. It's a tale of woe but the music is jaunty because of the context (which I'm not singing at the moment because I can't think of music for it).

The mustard they call men
Is after me again
Stripped me of my BLT
And threw me in the Three-Foot Pit
Never before or elsewhere has the Great Googleplex forsaken me so gratuitously!

Wed Dec 15 1999 16:40: From Bret Chou's column in the Be Developer's Newsletter:

For Kids: Paint the case yellow and slap a Pokemon sticker on it, and voila! It's a Pokemon PC!!!

Wed Dec 15 1999 17:07: Campbell is of the belief that Americans riot whenever the power goes out. I disabused him of this notion. "Trial verdicts and sporting events only."

Wed Dec 15 1999 17:36: I spoke too soon. Apparantly the helicopter I heard last night was due to some wacked-out tradition UCLA has (which I had never heard of before) of burning your papers and such after finals are over, which got out of hand in some unspecified way and the police had to be called in. I found this out from Dan's grandmother, who called us to see if we were okay. We are okay.

Thu Dec 16 1999 07:04: More helicopter madness last night. A full three hours the helicopter circled our house. I slept from about 11 to 1. I need caffeine, but already have the caffeine eye twitch. AAAAaaaaahahaaaaaaasiosdajiosdaosdidsaifoasdiofjerlernjrj;er.

Oh yeah, a new Segfault article from me. Yay.

I'll be home tonight. Unless I die.

Thu Dec 16 1999 07:30: Your sad devotion to that ancient analysis technique has not enabled you to model the actions of the Rebel fleet!

Thu Dec 16 1999 12:34: Musicology final down. I kicked its butt. I'm starting to even feel good about the upcoming 112 final. Who will step into the steel cage? Tune in next time!

Thu Dec 16 1999 18:06: Ouch. That was a horrible final, but I think I did okay on it. If the curve is anything like the midterm, I might get as high as a B+ in CS112. Otherwise probably a B.

Wed Dec 22 1999 17:57: I'm in Virginia. I'll be back on the 27th. Don't expect much in the meantime. I just had a salad that had huge blocks of cheese in it. It was good cheese, in many different kinds, but man. Too much cheese. This little salad had as much cheese as a large cheese pizza.

Wed Dec 22 1999 20:07: There's no {joy, snow} in {Mudville, Virginia}. What a ripoff! I got a hat just like Lou's in Fargo, but what's the point of having that hat if there's no snow from which it can protect you?

Tue Dec 28 1999 10:14: I'm back in {black, LA}. Dan's not back yet. I can mess up the room and not have him complain! Which happens even when he's here. Surprising, as he complains about everything else.

Oh, let me print the official rules to "Make Dan Complain^TM", the exciting game craze that's sweeping the nation, much as Mahjongg did in the early years of this century.

Make Dan Complain^TM

Equipment:

1 Dan Helfman
1 you
1 means of communication between you and Dan Helfman

How to play:
Using the means of communication, ask Dan Helfman what he thinks of some object or concept x. Dan Helfman must come up with a articulate and/or funny complaint about x. To notify Dan Helfman that you are initiating a round of Make Dan Complain^TM and not actually asking him for an analysis of x, the time-honored formula "Hey Dan, what do you think about x?" should be employed. Not that it matters much, since Dan Helfman's actual analyses of things bear suprisingly close resemblances to his games of Make Dan Complain^TM.

Scoring:
If Dan Helfman can come up with an articulate and/or funny complaint about x, he gets one point. If not, he issues the all-purpose complaint "It sucks!", and you get one point.

Sample games:
Game 1:
You: Hey Dan, what do you think about the speed of light?
Dan Helfman: It's too restrictive! It shouldn't be hardcoded everywhere! It should be configurable!
Result: Dan Helfman gets one point.

Game 2:
You: Hey Dan, what do you think about the state of Oregon?
Dan Helfman: It sucks!
Result: You get one point.

Game 3:
You: Hey Dan, what do you think about the Roman alphabet?
Dan Helfman: There are too many redundant letters! It's too inefficient!
Result: Dan Helfman gets one point.

Winning:
The winner is the first player to amass 305 points.
Dan Helfman: 305? That's so arbitrary! It should be a power of two!
Result: Dan Helfman gets one point.

Tue Dec 28 1999 18:03: Crummy.com is the new music alternative, playing The Open Standards Band's Interesting Places To Die 16 hours a day!

If you think you know who that song is about, you're probably right.

I await Jake's analysis of the recording. I'm still iffy on the whole "good recording" thing, as it invariably involves me having to do much more than the 3 takes I can do before I get sick of playing a song.

Speaking of music, Kris has 4 Electrologica songs (but not his non-plastic-wrap cover of Asia Carrera) up on his Electrologica page. They range from pale shadows of ELO songs to pieces with astoundingly beautiful music and lyrics. Could it be that what we thought to be the actual musician Kristofer Straub is merely a solid-state recording of Kristofer Straub singing "Solid State"?

Finally let me mention that a lot of the songs in the Version 1.1.2pl14 directory are going to be moved into other directories when I start the albums they actually belong to. Interesting Places To Die will probably go on Standard Deviation, which I'm still working out the details of, and the tape-to-MP3age of the infamous FEEDBACK FEEDBACK FEEDBACK! bit (which I never linked to, but it's in the directory) will go on Dying Is Easy, Comedy Is Hard (hey, remember that?)

This entry is already huge, but before I go, a quote from an email I sent to jake after he used the nonsense subject line "semiotimatic":

It occurs to me that one could write a story about a Semiotimatic,
in the style of Lem's story about the robotic poet.

"Professors wrote learned articles arguing that a mere machine could never
emulate the subtle nuances of human thought, but the Semiotimatic made
their arguments better than they did, and they were forced to resign in
disgrace."

If you don't know what semiotics is, look it up. I reccommend Semiotics, by L. Ron Hubbard.

Wed Dec 29 1999 05:16: Near my bus stop there is a store that sells stupid novelty stuff. In the window of the store is a boxed game. The game is an Operation rip-off called "Alien Autopsy". The slogan of the game is "One false move and its scream will send you running!". It should really be dead before you autopsy it. It's not "Alien Vivisection", after all.

Wed Dec 29 1999 07:40: Thanks for telling me that the IPTD link didn't work, nobody.

Wed Dec 29 1999 08:54: I just listened to IPTD and the guitar part sounds really bad, like I've been playing for six months instead of four years. I mean, I'm no Frank Zappa, but I think I can play the relatively simple IPTD part. Something with the guitar setup (like the ancient strings) may be the problem, as I can play IPTD fine on the acoustic (which I use almost exclusively now, but I have no reliable way of recording).

Wed Dec 29 1999 09:13: A while ago I read an article about the guy who invented the computer algebra system (I believe he wrote Maple), and how he had this book coming out where he would revolutionize everything with his ideas about cellular automata and the like. My question is, what happened to this guy, and where is this book?

Speaking of revolutionary books, Susanna gave me Guns, Germs, and Steel for Christmas. ~~YES.~~ Read it. It is a work of unparalleled might. It took exactly as long for me to read it as it took to fly back to LA from Virginia. I will lend it to anyone who wants to read it and to whom I can give it instead of having to mail it to them.

Wed Dec 29 1999 18:05: From Dan:

I find it difficult to think of why Trader Joe's sucks. But I'm sure I could think of a reason or two when pressed.

Thu Dec 30 1999 09:06: My grades are in. Bleah. I got a B+ in logic. How could I possibly get a B+? I got perfect scores on both midterms, and at least 90% on the final. I did better than I expected in the database class due to my performance on the final, but still not good. My grades in queueing theory and music history are fair.

Thu Dec 30 1999 09:44: I made the rules to Make Dan Complain into an article. I pointed Dan to the rules. "Yah, very nice. :)", he says. Dan threw away my butter because he thought it would spoil over vacation. Get real, Dan!

Fri Dec 31 1999 17:41: As my gift to humankind[0], I pledge to realize the following plotline, in some cinematic medium, sometime before the year 3000:

Tragically hip twentysomethings come to realize that they are trapped in an elaborate virtual reality system as part of a diabolical conspiracy. This comes as no surprise to the audience, as the twentysomethings and everything in their world are represented by masses of large, blocky polygons and move real jerky.

[0] Without cost or obligation!

Fri Dec 31 1999 21:45: Every year on New Years Eve, Jim Sjveda plays the operetta Die Fleidermaus (That's probably not spelled right, but it translates literally to "The Flying Mouse", or more accurately to "The Bat"). Now, supposedly Die Fleidermaus is a pretty funny piece of work, as there's a character on The Tick named after the operetta, and I'm pretty sure Jim Sjveda knows what he's doing. But for the life of me I can't figure out what's so funny about it. The plot is ridiculous, but no more so than that of any other operatic work, and except for some noticeable repetition that might be verbal humor, I can't get anything out of the German singing. It perplexes and consterns me (you think that's not a word, but how do you explain "consternation"?).

Fortunately, Spike Jones (not Spike Jonez) is on for the moment. The City Slickers are doing Carmen, it's pretty good. At one point Spike, who is doing the narration, yells at the tenor for missing his cue. To me, that's humor. You give me an incompetent performer and a pissed-off narrator, and I'll give you comedy! Because the thing I stipulated you give me already was comedy, you buffoon! So I just have to spit back the exact same thing you gave me! Hoo-hah!

I've been eating penguin mints all day, as you can tell. I bought a box of 'em yesterday, and I have some old ones that Mae Ling gave me which live in a plastic bag before being transfered to my bloodstream. I'm getting rid of the plastic bag ones because they're a little stale and I want to open the shiny new tin of penguin mints.

News You Can Bruise for 1999

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

DAILY POKEY!!!

Make Dan ComplainTM

News You Can Bruise for 1999

Make Dan Complain^TM