News You Can Bruise for 1999 September

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!