News You Can Bruise for 2001 February

Thu Feb 01 2001 17:19: Be Dope was the inspiration for Segfault, and somewhere along the way was born my friendship with Be Dope editor Mike Popovic. He wrote some Segfault stories, I wrote some Be Dope stories (too lazy to find and link to them), he beta-tested Guess The Verb!, I went to his beach parties and ate his veggie burgers, etc. etc. As fate would have it, I became the author of the very last paragraph to be published on Be Dope.

But the Leonard/Mike collaboration will not end with the retirement of Be Dope. Oh no. Devoted NYCB readers (such as myself) will remember that Mike holds the lofty position of Vice-President in charge of Pig Exposure for Degeneracy, which one day I actually hope to work on. I also may be making contributions to Mike's post-Be Dope project.

I don't really know how to end this entry. I just sort of wanted to mark the passing of Be Dope. Streethouse Rock is over now.

Thu Feb 01 2001 21:04: I added A Credit To His Demographic to my list of completed albums, fixed some typos and put up a lyrics sheet. So that's done, at least. Don't miss 100 Amazing Facts About Jake Berendes.

In David Brin's Uplift series, there is a species known as the hoon. Hoons have spiny vertebrae which break off during puberty and are replaced, sort of like baby teeth. I mention this because my vertebrae feel like they're about to become separated and break off and later be replaced. I don't know whether Wednesday yoga is alleviating this feeling or making it worse.

Thu Feb 01 2001 21:18: My next musical project: Finish The Age of Reason, a three-part dream-spawned song cycle that I wrote on a dare. It should be fairly easy, as I have to write a mere four lines and it's done. Unfortunately, "The train from Tehachapi came in on time" will not be one of those lines.

Only one other person in the whole world will get that joke. Fortunately, she reads NYCB. Hi, mom.

Thu Feb 01 2001 21:50: Welcome to the Kripke! There's a point I'd like to make for you... a minimal fixed point, that is! Ah hahahaha!

Fri Feb 02 2001 07:46: My Be Dope stories: Be Assures Users: Your Ass Is Safe (1999/07/01), Be's Tim Self Deallocated in Freak Accident (2000/07/25), eVilla vs. Godzilla (2001/01/11). I was going to label them with prefixes such as "The surreal" and "The rather silly", but all three are surreal and rather silly.

Fri Feb 02 2001 10:08: It occured to me that "The train from Tehachapi came in on time" could in fact be two of the four lines I'm missing to complete The Age of Reason, as it fits the rhythm and rhyme scheme. It would make absolutely no sense, but since when did songs have to make sense? What?!?! Damn you, George W. Bush, and your squirrely executive orders!

Fri Feb 02 2001 10:36: This is all-out HO-scale wackiness: the Toho Light Opera Scrapbook: Sketches from the HMS Pinafore. You also get The Mikado, without cost or obligation.

Fri Feb 02 2001 15:45: I engaged in an elaborate knapsack problem duel with Amazon today, in an attempt to get as much use out of my about-to-expire $100 gift certificate as possible without having to divert any of my own money to the patentmongering malignancy that is Amazon. Through clever addition and deletion of variously-priced P.G. Wodehouse books, I got it to around $97 and then realized that I still had to pay shipping. So they got about $15 from me for that. Oh well.

Note that I spent the entire gift certificate on books for myself. All rumors that I also bought books for someone else are misleading and ill-founded. Not to mention pernicious.

(NYCB antiquarians: I was granted the Amazon gift certificate about a year ago, for whomping on some technical tests at CollegeHire.)

Mon Feb 05 2001 18:30: If a Web application can verify that the state I gave it does not match the ZIP code I gave it, why do I need to specify the state at all?

Tue Feb 06 2001 06:53: Adam sent me an MP3 of him and Kris, a song called "Shakin' All Over". It's very 80s. I like it. Thanks, Adam! Kris, I'm still trying to get an interview for you at CollabNet.

Tue Feb 06 2001 07:38: Hello. I am a hedgehog. Hedgehogs as pets are illegal in California, unfortunately, but I do have a story to tell of contraband California hedgehogs. A sister of a friend of mine picked up a pet hedgehog while living outside of California, and she once smuggled it into and back out of California inside her sweater. That is the contraband hedgehog story. I cannot name names because round these parts they have a hangin' in store for hedgehog rustlers.

Tue Feb 06 2001 13:56: Celeste is moving from her temp housing today. She was going to call me but I thought I was going to be at home all day and it turns out I had to go to work to brainstorm with Jon Stevens. I hope she gets the message I left her on her cell phone. She got a new cell phone and I don't know if she's keeping the old service because it's the one she had in LA.

Wed Feb 07 2001 06:27: eToys is dead. Good thing I didn't go to work there.

Wed Feb 07 2001 07:47: From a spam mail:

20  MILLION
 E-MAIL ADDRESSES
  FOR ONLY $249
        **Over Night International Shipping Included**

So I shell out my $249 and I get a fifteen-foot stack of books full of email addresses in small type delivered to my door. I can then OCR the books into my spam automailer over the course of several years and then spam everyone on the list. And what better to sell them than my electronic version of the list their name is on, which I can sell multiple times for much less than $249?

Wed Feb 07 2001 07:52: Oh, I didn't read the spam closely enough. They send it on a CD. I guess I just assumed that if they were going to be stupid about it they would go all the way.

Thu Feb 08 2001 08:44: So last night I joined Brian, Manoj, Jason (Robbins), Elice, and professional new guy Mike Sussman at TGI Fridays. That place has the worst food I've ever tasted in my life. That's a slight exaggeration, but man. My grade school cafeteria had better food.

However, complaining about the food at TGI Fridays is not the point of this entry. The point of this entry is twofold. First, on the knapsack problem game front, I discussed the possibility with Jason. We think that a game could be developed which does for the knapsack problem what Tetris does for the bin-packing problem. Research is still continuing in this area, but consensus is that a game involving different liquids might work..

Second is a technique I came up with for expressing your wealth as a complex number so as to avoid depression when your stock options tank. Your real wealth is your actual liquid assets. Your imaginary wealth is the current potential value of your options and whatnot. Money you have locked up in stocks and bonds and the like should probably go into real wealth, but I'm not sure.

I was subjected to severe grilling for this plan as people tried to come up with situations where you would square your wealth and end up with a negative number. But I really don't think there's ever a situation where you multiply a sum of money by another sum of money. Let me know if you can come up with one.

Thu Feb 08 2001 10:10: Hey hey! Katzdot is mentioned in this Register story!

Thu Feb 08 2001 15:51: Excellent! Kris found pictures from the Voynich Manuscript!

Thu Feb 08 2001 15:51: Exclamation of joy! Descriptive text leading up to link!

Fri Feb 09 2001 11:27: "In some markets, [C]rummy has been OK." -- Steve Ballmer

Fri Feb 09 2001 17:41: So, a couple days ago I received the fruits of my Amazon.com labors: Jeeves In The Morning, Bertie Wooster Sees It Through, Life With Jeeves, The Code Of The Woosters, Carry On Jeeves, and P.G. Wodehouse: Five Complete Novels. It turns out that I acquired Bertie Wooster Sees It Through unneccessarily, since it is reprinted in Five Complete Novels. Oh well.

The reason I held off on announcing my Wodehouse deluge is that I was waiting for Celeste to get all the Terry Pratchett books I sent her on the same gift certificate. She got those today. Hooray!

You know, if I were to go back in time to when I was awarded that gift certificate and inform my former self that half of the gift certificate would be spent on P.G. Wodehouse books and that the other half would be spent on Terry Pratchett books for my girlfriend, my former self would say "This is one of those deals where you go back in time and tell implausible stories to your former self, isn't it?" He's pretty sharp, that former self of mine.

Fri Feb 09 2001 18:52: Manoj on Torque: "If it will autogenerate my Java code for me, that might be helpful." You have no idea, Manoj. Torque is very cool, and I am only moderately worried about the fact that Helm is only the second real application to use it.

Mon Feb 12 2001 10:52:
"How's your knowledge?"
"Oh, I manage."

Mon Feb 12 2001 17:17: What would the world be like if programmers had to deal with hecklers?

Tue Feb 13 2001 13:52: Segfault from me: Bacon Lovers up in Arms Over Ximian Keyword Purchase

Wed Feb 14 2001 09:20: My web of connection becomes both larger and denser with the addition of Bridget Spitznagel, author of iRogue, the roguelike game for the PalmOS with which my uncle Robert is obsessed. Bridget wrote a PalmOS port of robotfindskitten and contacted me about it. I directed her both to Robert and to the robotfindskitten folks, the latter being probably the most densely connected set of people I know since it contains Pete Peterson. I think I am headed towards a situation where everyone I know directly knows everyone else I know and there is no need for me at all.

The Palm rfk port will be merged into the main tree soon, apparantly. As I told Bridget, I don't drive rfk development anymore. In fact, I'm not even in the car.

Thu Feb 15 2001 05:53: Why did the Dreamcast die? Because The robotfindskitten port wasn't finished in time.

Thu Feb 15 2001 06:49: Segfault story I want to write but will never get around to it: "Napster as a Version Control System".

Fri Feb 16 2001 06:27: Who has a PayPal account and wants to get the referal bonus when I sign up?

Fri Feb 16 2001 09:19: I bought Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II last weekend and still haven't watched it. I'm tempted to watch it now, but I'm trying to set up Tigris on my laptop (because the lag to the dev machine at work is intolerable) and that requires my full attention.

Mechagodzilla is really the coolest Godzilla monster ever, apart from the G man himself. He's the poster boy for government waste. "Gentlemen, once again an immense kaiju threatens our shores. The only solution is to build a full-scale replica of Godzilla out of dully-gleaming, plastic-like metal."

OK, my huge download of the tarball of RPMS containing the Tigris runtime environment is done. Back at it.

Sat Feb 17 2001 08:01: Karl Fogel of Subversion fame has combined the Industry Buzzword Generator with the Elizabethian Insult Generator to come up with The Elizabethian Buzzword Generator! Now that's organised churlish dynamic motley-minded leverage!

Oh yeah, he also wrote the CVS book, which will hopefully tell me how to do a time-based diff, and which is the thing I was actually looking for on his site.

Sun Feb 18 2001 05:38: Today I'm going skiing with my uncle. Since I have never been skiing before, I will probably not get much skiing done today, what with the lesson I'm sure I'll have to take and all. Oh well.

Sun Feb 18 2001 19:47: Sumana has brought up an excellent point which completely invalidates the methodology of the current poll.

I note that all the possible values in your crummy.com poll are >1. What if one night in Bangkok makes 10, 100, or 1000 MEN humble?

Sumana gets 100 points, and the poll is restarted accordionly.

Sun Feb 18 2001 19:50: By the way, consensus on the old (invalid) poll was that 104.76 nights in Bangkok make a proud man humble. If I discard the two outliers, that goes way down to 5.26 nights in Bangkok.

Tue Feb 20 2001 16:59: Adam and Kim are engaged!

Thu Feb 22 2001 13:35: Sub Accident Forces Godzilla Off TV. I prefer the interpretation of that headline which goes like this:

Newsreader: We now go to Godzilla in our Monster Island studios.
[Cut to Godzilla.]
Godzilla: REEEEEAAAAAARGH!!
Caption: Godzilla - ALL-CONSUMING LIZARD BEAST
[Meanwhile, on the sub...]
Mate: We're headed straight for that transcontinental television feed!
Captain: Arr, Godzilla, I'll best ye yet!
[Crunch!]

Thu Feb 22 2001 15:55: Jason Robbins and Kevin Maples graduated from the same high school in the same year. How about that?

Thu Feb 22 2001 16:41: Even if this tiny patch were the only patch I'd committed today, today would have been a productive day. That's how useful (in the stop-hitting-yourself-with-a-hammer sense) that patch is. The truth is, I committed lots of other patches today, so my productivity today is so great that it cancels out the fact that Brian has seemingly spent all day finding "all your base are belong to us" graphics to paste into IRC.

Thu Feb 22 2001 16:42: Oh yeah, don't forget yesterday's opus, The Helm Peer Port And You.

Fri Feb 23 2001 09:28: Allow me to apologize in advance for this Segfault story.

Fri Feb 23 2001 16:02: This history of the BBC brings me one step closer to zeroing in on the broadcast dates of the "My Word!" tapes I made when I lived in LA. BTW, if you live in LA (or wherever else they broadcast "My Word!") and you are willing to make "My Word!" tapes and send them to me, I will give you money. The same goes for MST3K tapes.