News You Can Bruise for 2000 January

Sat Jan 01 2000 20:50: Hey, I have a bit part in the new ZZT/Megazeux saga. And it's a singing part! And it's one more cavern in the canyon.

Here is the fortune I got just now:

The worst thing one can do is not to try, to be aware of what one wants and
not give in to it, to spend years in silent hurt wondering if something could
have materialized -- and never knowing.
                -- David Viscott

I think I will die without learning this lesson. So many lessons I will die without having learned. Like "don't die".

Sun Jan 02 2000 11:14: Susanna's friend's nephew has a wooden duck which "goes waddling across the floor making 'realistic duck noises'" and which, bizarrely, is named after me. "They were deciding what to name it and Clark shouted out the first name that popped into his head, and you are the only leonard he knows, or knows of at least.", says Susanna.

Mon Jan 03 2000 08:01: Huzzah! My Be Dope story made Best of Be Dope!

Mon Jan 03 2000 10:08: eCow is back online. We apologize for the convenience.

Mon Jan 03 2000 10:24: Hrmph. Scott ripped off the intentional-Y2K-breakage code I wrote for Segfault, and put it on his own {platters,site}. The joke is gone from Segfault, but it will remain on netsplit until time immemorial, if I may mix my metaphors, probably.

Mon Jan 03 2000 11:34: Oh yeah, the new Mentos commercials are pale shadows of the old Mentos commercials. I'm afraid Mentos may no longer be The Freshmaker. The question is, if so, what is The Freshmaker now? (There must be a Freshmaker, by the Law of Conservation of The Freshmaker)

Mon Jan 03 2000 14:08: Scott claims that he didn't rip off my fake Y2K breakage code (which is good, as the code was terrible), he just ripped off the idea. I stand by my previous statement of "Hrmph."

Tue Jan 04 2000 08:21: Wired News has the story:

VA Linux Systems Inc., a developer of systems and services tailored to the alternative Linux operating system, said Tuesday that it will create a hosting service for so-called open source software projects.

Why don't they take care of the real open source projects before going on to the so-called open source projects?

Tue Jan 04 2000 11:35: Behold Marvin Minsky's page! With all the third-person biography you can stomach, and fun articles besides.

We all know the legend of the great mathematician who [was] warned that his proof would lead to a paradox if he took one more step. He replied "Ah, but I shall not take that step."

Wed Jan 05 2000 09:28: First, there was Extreme Pizza Eating! Now, there's Extreme Programming! The geek population may never recover!

Wed Jan 05 2000 14:52: I feel really, really bad that I couldn't think of anything funnier than "Extreme Pizza Eating" to put in the previous entry. That entry deserved better.

Wed Jan 05 2000 14:54: I don't feel that bad. I feel a lot worse for other reasons. But I wish I could have thought up something funnier.

Thu Jan 06 2000 06:26: Is it fair to publish something like this? I think it is. But why are they only picking on 4 or 5 guys?

Thu Jan 06 2000 06:35: I don't understand the Amazon boycott thing. They take a loss on every purchase you make, right? So the way to hit them where it hurts is to buy a whole lot of stuff from them. The worst thing you could possibly do is boycott them.

Fri Jan 07 2000 08:10: Excellent. I was going to start writing Mahjongg Carnage and never finish it, but someone else has written xmahjongg, so I don't have to.

At one point Dan and I had a big argument over whether or not the solitaire version of Mahjongg was a "bastardized American version" (his exact words) of Mahjongg. I held that it was actually a different game that just happened to be played with the same materials, like Shisen-Sho, and that if you wanted a bastardized American version of Mahjongg you would have to look into the rule changes introduced upon the game's importation in the 1920s. Dan insisted on calling solitaire Mahjongg a bastardized American version of real Mahjongg, despite the fact that by the same logic, Klondike is a bastardized American version of Blackjack.

Fri Jan 07 2000 08:19: Wait, never mind, xmahjongg is just another version of the solitaire game, albeit one the authors of which are aware of the original game.

Fri Jan 07 2000 14:36: All you trendy people who are getting pointed to Hyperdiscordia's Jusanotoron calendar by your trendy web sites, be sure to also read the rebuttal to it I wrote and Hyperdiscordia published, way back in 1996.

Sat Jan 08 2000 17:28: I bought this little bag of legumes for 79 cents at Trader Joes, wanting to make soup with it. The rest of the stuff you need for the soup (vegetables, tomato sauce) cost about $5. I didn't even get the celery.

Sat Jan 08 2000 18:32: Guess what? I ruined the soup.

Mon Jan 10 2000 05:55: I have class in 2 hours. Bleah.

Mon Jan 10 2000 06:39: I think this guy might be the coolest person with an AOL homepage, so cool that if you didn't know he had an AOL homepage and someone told you, you'd say "No way!". Even more astounding, he actually has two AOL homepages, each of which contains one of the things I'm going to mention, and nothing else. On one is his essay on the "bowling noir" art form, which is from his book on The Big Lebowski. Just that ratchets him ten notches above every other AOL page I've ever seen. But then he goes off into this great rant:

By the time you finish this slim but magnificent volume, you'll have everything you need to know in order to make your very own Coen brothers film!

You heard us right! Who needs those two skinny Minnesotan oddballs? After you've read this paginated treasure trove of Coenana, you'll be able to create your very own offbeat, inaccessible, yet exquisitely crafted cinema that will leave audiences everywhere stupefied with delight! ...Right, boys?

Magnificent. I may or may not have to have that book.

Mon Jan 10 2000 07:50: Whoops, I don't have class til 10. My EE discussion is tomorrow. Conveniently, both my discussions conflict with my lab so I don't have to feel bad about not going.

Mon Jan 10 2000 14:11: Inspired by Leonardonics, Scott James Remnant has posted Scottish. The page gives the impression that Scott's life is a continuous sitcom in which strangers on the street proposition Scott for sex, to which propositions Scott reacts with comic astonishment.

Mon Jan 10 2000 18:13: My life is a hollow lie!

At the moment, anyway.

Dan's not helping.

Mon Jan 10 2000 18:36: Apparantly the guy from whom my mother bought my Stop The Cascadia Megathrust Subduction Event T-shirt (see /pix/1999/misc/) was predicting the Cascadia Megathrust Subduction Event for the end of last year. He wrote a letter to the Sequim Gazette (forwarded to my mother by my great-aunt, forwarded to me by my mother) explaining why no Cascadia Megathrust Subduction event had occured. Surprisingly, the explanation was not that we had successfully Stopped it. The explanation is that high atmospheric pressure had temporarily deterred the Cascadia Megathrust Subduction Event, but that it was still coming, mark you.

If I were this guy I would cut my losses and move onto something else, like model ships, but I don't have the emotional investment in the subject that he does. If I were to devise and implement a plan to actually Stop the Cascadia Megathrust Subduction Event once and for all, he'd probably punch me in the face.

Wed Jan 12 2000 06:51: I'm working on getting the Totally MAD CD (which my mother gave me, thanks Mom) to work under Linux. The first CD, which I assume to be a model for the others, has a huge 500M file containing large numbers of JPEGs. There is also a 25M file which appears to contain an index. Unfortunately I can't view the JPEGs because they're some weird nonstandard kind of JPEGs. I sent one to Mike and he's going to get the graphics format guru at Be to poke it with a stick. In the meantime, I'm going into the CSUA lounge and installing in on the games machine, and seeing what sort of temp files it leaves on the hard drive.

Wed Jan 12 2000 06:56: I thought that Scott's quotes file only had Terry Pratchett quotes in it, but just now I found one from me in there. So, me and Terry Pretchett, pretty much. Living it up in Scott's quotes file. Quotes database I should say.

Scott also put up the pictures of himself, myself, Garrett, and sometimes Illiad, so I can link those again from my never-to-be-finished (seriously) LWE travelogue.

Thu Jan 13 2000 06:42: Blargh. My best current guess is that the JPGs are in some undocumented format proponented (that's not a word) by a company called Pegasus, which company is helpfully mentioned on the box the CDs come in. Dan from Be says that the data might be encrypted somehow. That'd be all I'd need.

I think that there are two factions within Be locked in a low-grade sort of mortal combat; one consisting of people with dull American names like Mike and Dan; and the other consisting of people with European names like Jean-Louis and Beno�t, and that this internal struggle is what gives the BeOS its distinctive flavor. One day one side will triumph over the other, everyone on the losing side will change their name, and the BeOS will be altered forever.

Thu Jan 13 2000 06:43: That last entry was not intended to offend anyone at Be. The people at Be can take it, I know, so I guess this entry is to stave off anyone who thinks they need to be offended for the people at Be.

Thu Jan 13 2000 12:18: LUGFest LUGFest. LUGFest eighty-niiiine. LUGFest LUGFest.

Thu Jan 13 2000 16:54: OK, the mystery is solved. One byte of the JPEG was obfuscated; adding 16 to it fixed the whole file. Only problem is, the files on the CD are encoded using arithmetic coding, a Super-Huffman-Coding technique which is patented by IBM. According to the data compression FAQ, this technique offers 5%-10% greater compression than the normal Huffman coding technique. Well, I (or my mother) may have been bilked out of $70, but at least I learned a lot about the JPEG file format.

Fri Jan 14 2000 06:10: OK, this is good news. I've plugged for Steve Ballmer in this space in the past, and I'm doing it again. Steve Ballmer is perfect to head up Microsoft. He's evil, he knows he's evil, and he's got a sense of humor about it. He's like the ultimate Bond villan. Gates was just some dork who tried to pretend he was a regular guy. You felt bad ridiculing him, just because it was so easy. Ballmer knows where he stands and he can take it as well as he dishes it out. Ballmer knows the score.

Fri Jan 14 2000 06:22: I have a strange tendency toward beginning entries with "OK," or "Hey,". I think it's because when I write one of these entries I feel like I'm sitting down at a table where you are already seated and bringing you up to speed.

Fri Jan 14 2000 16:45: Mike writes to say "btw, congrats on your 'Beanie' nomination". I can't find any references to this so-called nomination on Slashdot, and I even logged in on my account and everything. I await something less vague from Mike.

Fri Jan 14 2000 16:53: OK, the nomination is for me personally, "Best Deserving of a $2000 Award". at this looooong URL which I had to type in because GPM isn't working on kuato. Vote for me, even though I won't win, and even though I couldn't tell you how to go about voting for me if my life depended on it.

Mon Jan 17 2000 17:46: Hey, that link doesn't work anymore!

I gotta go to the LUG meeting now.

Mon Jan 17 2000 20:02: I'm going to stubbornly ignore the fact that the images on the MAD CDs are encoded with arithmetic coding, and get to work on cracking the index. Eventually, the patent will expire or I will move to Korea, and when that happens I want a program that will work.

Tue Jan 18 2000 12:23: Why does Scott always refer to me as "people", and say I'm complaining when I'm not?

Certain people have complained that I always refer to them as "people" and that I say they complain when they're not complaining. These same people have swiped the style of the smarmy response to these pseudo-complaints so I can't do it. Bastards!

Wed Jan 19 2000 06:06: I'm reading this article about water on Europa. And it occurs to me that it would really suck if there was water on Europa but no life. Because let's not fool ourselves, the only reason we care about water on Europa is because that might mean life. Until we start strip-mining moons like in Fiasco, anyway.

Wed Jan 19 2000 07:31: I have to go print my resume (which hopefully I can get to fit on one page) for the job fair today. And at 6, Dr. Rittel from Sun will be speaking on "What I Wished [sic?] I Had Learned In Engineering School". I guess that's not [sic], since he knows it now, and therefore no longer wishes he had learned it in engineering school.

My left shoelace for some reason became all ragged, so I had to cut it up and restring my left shoe. Lousy shoelace!

Wed Jan 19 2000 07:43: One of the things Dan keeps going on about is how bad the movie High School High is. He goes on about this to the extent that he will not believe that Jon Lovitz is actually pretty funny, just because Jon Lovitz was in that movie. (I ask you, is it fair to judge someone's entire comedic career based on one failure? No! Because if that were the case, nobody would be funny.) So last night, to silence these murmurings, I sat him down and we watched Manos: The Hands Of Fate. After the movie: "I submit to you that that movie was worse than High School High." Dan: "It was bad in a different way." AAAAARGH!!!

Wed Jan 19 2000 09:01: Guess who added this to kuato's motd:

Motd is archaic and unnecessarily restrictive. Text is so 70s!

My resume fits on one page, and I'm fairly sure the address is right. Now, to make copies!

Wed Jan 19 2000 16:46: There's an actual game of Make Dan Complain going on in kuato's motd now. I told Dan to work on bringing MDC to you, the Web public. My idea is that he keeps a list of past complaints and people can query them or request a new complaint.

I love this keyboard. It has great tactile and audible feedback. It says it's an MCL Micronorth. They don't make them anymore. I can say this with confidence because this keyboard does not have those damn Windows keys.

Thu Jan 20 2000 14:57: Woohoo! I'm graduating in June! I just have to submit a petition for my philosophy class, and declare my degree candidacy on URSA Telephone, which I'm doing right now.

There, it's done. The candidacy part, I mean. I still have to submit that petition.

Thu Jan 20 2000 15:01: Woops! My graduation evaluation report prints the year as 1900!

Fri Jan 21 2000 11:13: The question is... what are the other nine algorithms of the century? Seems like a list of the top ten algorithms of the century would be very similar to a list of the top ten algorithms ever.

Which reminds me, there is a talk being given by the Graduate Outreach group of the math department on "The Partial Differential Equation of the Century", "in the style of TIME Magazine". I'm not going to go because I hate differential equations, but I thought the flyer for the event was funny.

Fri Jan 21 2000 14:00: Leonardonics: Demon Dog, That was a good x. I'm not too happy about the copy for those entries, although the Aerosmith part is great (but it's a great bit, and I've been kicking it around my head for a while).

Fri Jan 21 2000 14:37: I'm low-key looking at the web sites that have numbers as .com domain names. It's sort of a function mapping the natural numbers onto the set of web pages. As you might have expected, this function is neither one-to-one nor onto.

Domain names consisting of numbers are good to deal with because 1) they're easy to enumerate (the smallest untaken number I can find is 2151.com), and 2) they tend to be owned by people who think or hope that owning a domain name is the key to riches. Look at the sales pitch of the person who owns 500.com.

Sat Jan 22 2000 07:32: See! The frustration of this guy who wrote a Linux development environment for the Playstation and has to put "This is not a game and this is not a Sony product and it's not Linux for the PlayStation." in the Freshmeat entry!

Wed Jan 26 2000 04:45: I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.

Wed Jan 26 2000 04:59: I added a section about dealing with questionable complaints in Make Dan Complain. I'm thinking about maybe making the penalty for questionable complaints greater than it is now, to add some balance to the game.

Fri Jan 28 2000 11:28: I got mail from Andy. The reason Andy is so hard to get a hold of is that he's in England (or will be soon). Wowsers! He's doing a research-type deal. "It all came sort of like a mandate," says Andy. Andy's the only person I know who could say "It all came sort of like a mandate."

I want to make a trailer for a movie called "How's It Goin', Andy?" I don't want to make the movie, just the trailer. I don't know what the trailer would involve, but it would definitely have lots of people saying "How's it goin', Andy?". I love that phrase. I want to have the following conversation with Andy:

Leonard: How's it goin', Andy?
Andy: It all came sort of like a mandate.

Fri Jan 28 2000 11:32: ~~YES~~terday I was talking with Josh about Space Ghost. And about Brak. Yes, Brak! It all started because I have a Space Ghost quote in my sig. Brak! Josh revealed that he has huge amounts of Brak quotes and skits in MP3 format. Here is the FTP site: Brak Attack! It has some other comedy stuff too, but who needs comedy when you've got Brak? Brak!

Fri Jan 28 2000 15:01: The LUG is having a Nethack tournament on xorn (kuato's replacement, donated by VA). Nobody is particularily good, but I'm way ahead of everybody else. Dan's going to beat me when his character finally dies, though. He's been working on one character since yesterday afternoon.

Sat Jan 29 2000 17:03: All my clothes are clean. And the sky is grey. My part of the room has been invaded by ants so I bought things that you set out which contain food such that the ants take the food home to their queen and it kills her. Presumably all the other ants die when the queen dies, or there'd be no point in engaging in this bit of political intruigue.

Last night Josh invited me over to watch Space Ghost. It was tasty.