Fri Feb 01 2002 07:57:
Argh. I'm hungry, but I can't eat before my surgery, and I sure won't be able to eat much after my surgery. My only hope is to somehow be able to eat during the surgery.
Fri Feb 01 2002 08:40:
US mulls Linux for world's biggest computer. Mmm, mulled Linux.
Fri Feb 01 2002 09:38:
Time to take my Valium!
Fri Feb 01 2002 13:27:
Well, I'm back. I feel okay so far, though my mouth is incredibly dry and I'm not supposed to rinse til tomorrow. My mother convinced me that Valium is for neurotics and that I didn't need to take it, and she was right (about me not needing it). I wasn't apprehensive (especially since in the past two months I've already had a root canal, eight fillings, and four extractions).
This page has a similar idea, which I could accept.
Sat Feb 02 2002 10:50:
For a long time I've been bothered by the fact that the election cycle in the The West Wing universe is two years out of sync with the election cycle in our universe. The only explanation Sumana and I could come up with was that there was some huge disaster or scandal that killed or caused most of an administration to resign, and a Constitutional amendment was passed to hold a new presidental election when such a thing happened.
The other thing that's innovation is the big wicker laundry hamper shaped like a frog with its mouth wide open.
Sat Feb 02 2002 15:45:
The last time I had oral surgery was in the mid-80s. I got stitches and about a week later I had to go in to have them snipped out. I've got stitches where my wisdom teeth used to be, but in this modern age these stitches will disintegrate in 5-10 days so I don't have to go in again. Now that's innovation!
Non-Kitten Items Explained Through Quoting Someone Else Who Noticed Them: First In A Series
--Steven Jay Gould, Eight Little Piggies
Sat Feb 02 2002 20:41:
In fact, I have proof that few people have ever heard of nautiloids at all, and therefore don't give a damn in the fulest sense. Recently, the World Weekly News, king of the shopping-mall tabloids, published unretouched photographs of a chambered nautilus labeled as a giant monster now on an earthbound path from Mars and scheduled to arrive well before the millenium.
vagreangvbanyvmngvba ubrqbja (Score: 8,438,800,000)
The second one is invalid under some rules because its first word
is not found at dictionary.com (it should be, though).
I actually find the construction of three-word Googlewhacks more
interesting than two-word ones, because they make you triangulate relative unrelatedness of words. Two-word ones are more impressive once constructed, though.
Sat Feb 02 2002 20:49:
My two best Googlewhacks so far (rot13ed so as not to add search results for them):
onpxcbeg zheqref (Score: 53,118,800,000)
Sun Feb 03 2002 07:39:
Seth originally didn't notice that I'd rot13ed my Googlewhack words,
and suggests that "vagreangvbanyvmngvba" be abbreviated "v18a".
I put up a navigable file tree over at Da Da Warren Memorial Memorial (which has now been running a year longer than Da Warren ran), and restored five of the file areas. A treasure trove of old DOS stuff.
Sun Feb 03 2002 16:29:
I'm pretty swollen today. Allegedly today will be my worst day, and it's not too bad.
Gainful employment is not to be confused with lossy employment.
Mon Feb 04 2002 12:14:
Mike Popovic has once again found gainful employement--he's the new webmaster for Tom's of Maine! Congratulations!
Tue Feb 05 2002 06:28:
I'm surprised Mike Sussman can get any work done what with giant storms duking it out on Jupiter all the time.
Kevin has been waiting with poised schaudenfreude for the dental procedure which causes me intense pain. Unless something goes horribly wrong during the fitting of the braces, he's not going to get what he wants. He'll have to be satisfied with the medium-term discomfort caused by the braces.
Tue Feb 05 2002 10:01:
Well, I've gone through all my antibiotics. I slept (well) last night without the ice pack, though I still need it in my waking hours.
Tue Feb 05 2002 15:58:
Sumana points to Jared Diamond's The Curse of QWERTY, "or, as I call it, 'Guns, Germs, and RSI'".
The headliner was a Jew from Texas, and he had a little bit on how bad his routine would be if he were confined to comedy about being a Texan Jew, which bit was strangely the best part of his act. There were two (!) other pro comedians who were also funny, and the show was MCed by Kenny Byerly, who resembles Campbell Chiang to a disturbing extent, but who is much funnier. And Sumana's open mic performance was also very funny, though it relied almost entirely on stereotype humor (this was intentional).
Wed Feb 06 2002 09:18:
Another comedy night last night. It was much more enjoyable than last time, mainly because the comedians were funny, their civilizations by this time having developed the Joke technology.
Wed Feb 06 2002 10:28:
This is horribly geeky, {yet, and} funny: The Angband Comic. This one is the best of the lot.
Thu Feb 07 2002 10:54:
Hey hey! We finally did a release of Eyebrowse!
Thu Feb 07 2002 14:11:
Envelope Watch II: Day One! I sent off an envelope to Mike's new place in Maine, containing a gift I've been meaning to give to him for over a year.
Thu Feb 07 2002 14:36:
Everyone at work is in a really good mood: we just had a great pep talk in the form of a conference call from an employee of a new client. For years, their software development had been done with little coordination or cross-department communication, and the resulting mess was recently exacerbated by an attempt to use Rational's suite of apps. They switched to SourceCast and cleaned up the mess within two months, and now they're ridin' high. It felt really good to hear about their success with software I helped write.
Thu Feb 07 2002 18:45:
Wow, my day stayed good. I implemented an awesome new feature (project and category tree display) which
was much easier to implement than I'd thought it was going to be, and
which gave me some good ideas for a redesign I need to do.
Thu Feb 07 2002 19:31:
"Someday soon I'm gonna tell the moon about the crying game."
What the hell does the moon care about the crying game?
I have a couple souvenirs from my trip to Texas. I have a little
beanbag-type penguin which my mother bought me. I have
some books I bought at Half Price Books (more of which anon). I have a
Nutra-Grain bar Andy's mother gave me which I still haven't eaten (not
technically a souvenir). I have a garter which I caught at Kristin's
wedding (it was the second garter they threw; they kept shucking
garters off of Kristin's leg and throwing them into the crowd, which
was pretty funny).
I also have a reciept from HEB (a Texas supermarket) which I've
been hanging on to solely to mention it here. Our first day in Texas
we were at a hotel which offered a not very impressive continental
breakfast, so we went across the corner to HEB, bought a bunch of
food, and invited the aunts and cousins over to partake. I fed about
10 people for $33, which was pretty good. Reproduced below is the list
of food from the receipt:
QUAKR GRANOLA BR CHOC PNT In particular, I would like to draw your attention to this item:
HEB TEXAS SHAPED CHEDDAR
It was a block of cheddar cheese. It cost $1.95. It was shaped like
the state of Texas. My mother decided that she had to have it, so I
bought it for her. For all I know she has it still.
Robert had earlier expounded his hypothesis that Texas is the only
state in the union in which the citizens think of themselves primarily
as citizens of their state (as opposed to American citizens or
citizens of a particular city). He siezed upon the Texas cheese as
evidence of this. Yup, everyone wants a piece of the Texas cheese to bolster his or her own personal argument. Not for any other reason, though--it's mild cheddar, and what fun is mild cheddar?
Thu Feb 07 2002 19:43:
DANNON LA CREME STRAWBERR
HEB HEAVY WT. CUTLERY COM
*B* HEB PRINTED PLATE 6 7
TROPICANA PURE PEMIUM WIT
PHILLY SFT CRM CHEESE REG
PHILLY SOFT CREAM CHEESE
MICKELBERRY HAM 8OZ PKG
SMOKED TURKEY BREAST 8OZ
INGLEHOFF MUSTARD SWEET H
HEB TEXAS SHAPED CHEDDAR
205 BAGELS TX ONION 2953_
BABY SWISS DELICO SLICED
LARGE BUTTER CROISSANTS 6
Palladium has a lot of interesting features. It comes with a
campaign setting which looks fun and full of variety. The alignment
system is really great; it captures the way people act a lot better
than the AD&D system does.
The book describes about five different magic systems; they're all
pretty interesting, though most of them seem not to be very
powerful. The main one (generic RPG wizard/priest magic) looks really
well designed, and the instructions indulge in some great bashing of
the annoying AD&D magic system:
Most of my complaints have to do with the book itself rather than
the game system. The sections are organized haphazardly, as though the
book were written as hypertext and then the hypertext were
automatically traversed to create a book.
The writing style is florid, sometimes, hilariously so, as in this
masterpiece of redundancy:
And the Tonight's Episode-y:
There's a new edition of the Palladium rulebook out, which
allegedly fixes the stylistic problems; if that's so then my main
complaints would be the paucity of supplied monsters and the seeming
weakness of most of the magic systems. But no one's making you play a
diabolist.
Thu Feb 07 2002 21:44:
Another Texas-related entry. At Half Price Books in Houston, I made
quite a find: a copy of an old 1983 manual for Palladium, a
role-playing game I'd vaguely heard of. It cost $10, which is a lot
for a Half Price Book, but it was in good condition so I bought it.
Nor does the wizard forget a spell upon casting it. This is his
life, spell magic and study... To forget a spell could mena his death
and is a fairly ludicrous idea. This is his occupation, his
livelihood, he is no longer an apprentice... To suggest that he would
forget a spell is like saying a soldier might forget how to use his
sword.
"Generally, dwarves and elves treat each other with an air that is so
cold that it could freeze an iceberg."
"The assassin, like the mercenary fighter, is a sword for hire; their
specialty: death."
Fri Feb 08 2002 12:43:
I have no idea how canon this is, but Sean Neakums has a very cool map of Springfield.
Fri Feb 08 2002 13:47:
Unlike most people, I do get paid to have ideas, though not all my ideas result in payment (these are known in the trade as "useless" ideas). So far today I've come up with two such ideas:
Fri Feb 08 2002 15:21:
AP photo roundup:
Game update: I have a title, plot and (lame) cosmology for my game. I know
how a couple of the puzzles will work (because I already wrote code for them). I have an interesting main character
for whom I will enjoy writing interior monologue. I'm feeling some ennui
about the project in general but I think it will dissipate once a few more pieces fall into
place and I start writing code.
Sun Feb 10 2002 21:13:
New song, started and in honor of around this time last year:
Three
Years Ahead of the Japanese
The sad thing is, someone working for General Mills probably thought of that in 1986 and it probably made it through one or two rounds of focus groups.
Mon Feb 11 2002 08:09:
Early yesterday morning I had an incredibly stupid idea (in fairness, I had it as part of a dream, but I've also had good ideas as parts of dreams): a breakfast cereal for kids which instead of (or by dint of) coming in different shapes, was associated with different point values. You would stand some distance away from the cereal bowl, throw cereal at it, and rack up points depending on how accurate your aim was.
Mon Feb 11 2002 08:39:
Hollywood lives and dies by Internet Movie Database made me stop dead in my scan of the Red Rock Eater digest because of the headline's sheer audacity, but the article makes a decent case--for the movie industry, it's probably as useful as Google is to the population at large.
Mon Feb 11 2002 09:27:
For the first time in years I'm eating one of those cup-of-noodles things, mainly for nostalgia reasons--I used to eat them frequently when I was working at MAP in college. The last step in the cooking process is "[E]njoy from cup". I always have to look back at the instructions before eating because I can't remember whether I'm supposed to enjoy it or not.
The thing that disturbs me is that apparently 1/3 of the test-takers have an internally inconsistent idea of personal identity. I can only hold out hope that most of those were people trying different responses to questions to see what would happen.
Mon Feb 11 2002 10:30:
From JOHO, here's a series of thought experiments to help ferret out to which theory of personal identity one hews. Few surprises for me, as I already knew I was a psychological reductionist; I waffled a bit on the answer to #1, but either answer is compatible with PR.
Mon Feb 11 2002 18:32:
Wow, I haven't worked a 12-hour day in quite a while.
Mon Feb 11 2002 20:11:
My tiny hand is dwarfed by the huge hand of America's future, the youth of today!
Tue Feb 12 2002 00:00:
Wow, I haven't worked a 17-hour day for nearly a year.
"Hey, that is really cool!"
"By the time you actually need something like that, there will be something ten times cooler available for half the price."
"Oh yeah. I'll wait."
Tue Feb 12 2002 09:25:
How Leonard Prevents Himself From Buying Consumer Electronics
Tue Feb 12 2002 18:02:
Today, in addition to (hopefully) fixing once and for all the horrible problem that caused me to work 17 hours yesterday, I (along with Michael Stack) came up with a really cool idea for a new UNIX utility which could be the next cut, nay, the next wc! Stack and I will jealously guard this idea until one of us implements it, so stay tuned.
Also: I also went to the dentist today for a cleaning. During the cleaning the dentist found a cavity that had previously escaped him. I have to go in on Friday and get it filled. Bah.
Tue Feb 12 2002 18:52:
The crisis, which I will discuss in my forthcoming tell-all book, for some reason caused the skin of my face to become flaky and red. I don't know why.
Fortunately, and hopefully, today will not be insane as Monday and Tuesday were.
Wed Feb 13 2002 06:53:
I woke up three times last night (the last time for good) and all three times I remember dreaming about debugging imaginary SourceCast problems. Aiee!
Wed Feb 13 2002 07:09:
Everything I do is more than it appears
A coded message reaching out a hundred million years
Wed Feb 13 2002 12:29:
AP photo roundup:
I got junk mail from Time offering me "a special offer for senior citizens".
Fri Feb 15 2002 09:00:
Great Moments in Demographics: First in a Series
Fri Feb 15 2002 09:01:
More crises at work, but while we're hardly out of the woods, we can at least see the way out of the woods.
* I just realized that it's not the AP photo ticker, it's Reuters. So unless "AP" is allowable as a general term for "news wire" in a way similar to kleenex or xerox, "AP Photo Roundup" is innacurate (though it sounds good).
Fri Feb 15 2002 09:13:
Photo Roundup* (I love doing this!):
Fri Feb 15 2002 18:44:
In another triumph for NewsBruiser (not to mention COPOUT), Mike Popovic has started a new weblog called "mv * Vacationland". It's all about life in Maine. There's little so far, but more will surely be forthcoming.
Sat Feb 16 2002 19:05:
There's a greasy spoon Chinese restaurant near the BART station, called "Tom's Restaurant", which I
didn't try until recently, even though I love greasy spoon
Chinese restaurants (this goes back to my youth; the only Chinese
restaurant in Arvin was (and is) a greasy spoon called the Canton Cafe).
Some chow mein, some fried rice--delicious. My only complaint is that
Tom's of San Francisco likes to put water chestnuts in things, and I
don't like water chestnut. They also like to use baby corn, though,
which cancels it out.
Sun Feb 17 2002 17:40:
I'd really like a recording of Ray Noble's version of Slumming on
Park Avenue. Somehow I doubt even Napster in its heyday had that,
though.
I'm not cutting a release yet because 1) it's not 'productized', as we would say at work (you can't turn it off on a per-notebook basis and you can't choose what to display; it's always that little ball), and 2) it's a big pain for me to cut a NewsBruiser release, so I like to let changes add up.
I'm uncertain about the ball, if only because it adds an element of graphicality to the previously austere NewsBruiser. I thought about having a linked "x" or other character, but I think the graphic looks better. I may change my mind.
Sun Feb 17 2002 19:23:
As you can see, I just added a new feature to NewsBruiser the absence of which has been bothering me for a while. It's been possible for at least 2 years to link to a particular NYCB entry, but figuring out what the link to a particular entry might look like required looking at the date on the entry or the name anchor in the HTML code. No more! There's now a nice little link icon to the left of the date of every entry, which you can click to be magically transported to a URL which will display on that entry. It shows up whenever a NewsBruiser entry is rendered, so you can use it to easily link to search results (something that's been annoying me ever since I added search functionality).
Sun Feb 17 2002 19:36:
I changed the ball to a link-colored triangle--I seem to remember that working well on Doc Searls' site.
Sun Feb 17 2002 21:48:
Joe was sneaky and changed weblogs without telling anyone, but I hunted him down! His fatal mistake: mirroring the old site, complete with old comments, so that it showed up when I did a vanity search. And linking to me so that his site showed up in my referer logs.
Sun Feb 17 2002 22:20:
In addition to the NewsBruiser changes, today I wrote a little script for Sumana that goes through (pre-downloaded) Kuro5hin diary entries and formats them more or less the way they're formatted here. I also worked a bit on my game; I've got most of the game worked out in my head but only half the intro (and, of course, that fiendish puzzle) actually written down to my satisfaction.
I didn't know what a dream catcher did. Sumana told me and claimed that I should have known, since I'm part Native American. However, the dream catcher is of Lakota origin and I am not, so how could I be an expert on Lakota technology? Fallacious!
Tue Feb 19 2002 18:06:
Yesterday I hung out with Adam and Sumana, and had fun. For some reason I acted a poor sport at our Scrabble game, even though I ended up winning. I need to think of my participation in games the way the panelists of My x! think of their participation on one panel or the other.
Sumana also came up with a great idea for my game. Thanks, Sumana!
Tue Feb 19 2002 21:24:
I should explain that "Fallacious!" is a Sumana bit. It takes off on the inevitable response of a lady in days gone by to unwelcome advances, which was to slap the offending man and announce "Fresh!". (I've never actually seen this happen, except possibly in old issues of Mad) If the lady is a logician (but not a tramp), she might instead say "Fallacious!"
I should mention that Greg Knauss recently informed me that Paul Conrad is a stroke victim, so it's not really politically correct to take the sort of lime-and-salt pleasure in his cartoons that Kris/Leonard/Sumana take. Greg also passed along the following touching story:
[Conrad came to] speak at my high-school, seven million years ago, when I was a freshman.
After doing his spiel, he took questions, and someone asked where his ideas
came from. He, of course, said everywhere -- the newspaper, conversations,
even high-school kids. Did anybody in the audience have an idea?
So I raised my hand, he liked it, and it was in the LA Times the next day.
He framed the original and sent it to me.
I thought that was pretty cool.
Addendum: Ouch!
Wed Feb 20 2002 07:55:
Kris has a great insult on his page today: "I think it's written by Indie Rock Pete." And Airsick Moth has a bit of doggerel inspired by a particularly tasteless Paul Conrad cartoon.
Of course, the real puzzle is just figuring out what is going on, so maybe that's what they meant.
Wed Feb 20 2002 10:34:
Wow, Degeneracy got an XYZZY nomination for Best Puzzles. I don't think it deserves it, though, and I say that without having played any of the other games. As I argue in my postmortem, the actual puzzles are either based on vague ideas or are standard adventure game puzzles that trick you by looking like completely different standard adventure game puzzles (a good idea, but probably not the best one of the year).
Wed Feb 20 2002 14:42:
Jason said: "Do you think if a cop stopped one of those lunch trucks for speeding, he'd buy something from it?"
Wed Feb 20 2002 17:39:
I need a haircut. You know who else needs a haircut? Glenn Reynolds!
Next time I will use some non-changable amount like $24.
Thu Feb 21 2002 10:34:
Argh. Service industry disaster. My pizza cost $20. I gave the delivery person $25: $20 plus a $5 tip. He gave me $5 back in ones. I foolishly assumed that meant he was relenquishing his tip. Only later did I realize that he'd given me $5 back because he thought I wanted change for the five so that I could return to him some, but not all, of the money I'd given him and he'd just given back to me. Now he thinks I'm a jerk who doesn't tip.
Thu Feb 21 2002 10:36:
Every news article should have two parts: the news article proper, and an explanation of how this helps us find other solar systems.
Fri Feb 22 2002 20:29:
While upstairs making pasta, I noticed on the dishwasher a little red lantern of the sort you might find at the beginning of a really cheap text adventure. Hopefully my life has not become a really cheap text adventure, so I will simply note that according to the text on the lantern container, the lantern is of "Excellente Quality". I think that "Excellente" is to "Excellent" as "Presidente" is to "President".
Fri Feb 22 2002 20:37:
Hey hey! I moved NewsBruiser development over to tigris.org! Now it's got a CVS repository! Now it won't be a pain in the butt to do new versions! (and I won't need to do new versions as often because people can just get it from CVS). This is a new feeling; I've had the feeling of using SourceCast on itself for over a year, but this is the first time I've used it on anything else.
There is, but it's not very interesting.
Fri Feb 22 2002 20:39:
Chris saw the syringe I'm using to irrigate the gaping holes in my mouth where my wisdom teeth used to be, and said "There's probably a story behind that."
Unfortunately, I can't change the little message up there until I can actually ssh in again, which won't be for a while because I'm farms? in Berkeley? and my ssh key is in San Francisco.
Sat Feb 23 2002 11:49:
The system date on this machine was set to 2036 briefly today, so the Today in History links showed what happened 35-38 years ago. Not only is this funny, but it demonstrates that the TiH actually works along very long periods of time (though not across long periods of time in which there was an entry on a particular day for every year--I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to get more than 10 entries, but I haven't tested that yet).
The other thing that got me thinking about this is my realisation that for years I've been using this stuff, when all along I should have been saving it in airtight containers for later sale on eBay. Sure, right now it's just Enron swag that gets the big bucks, but how much would my eToys pen be worth in ten years if I hadn't been all along using, compulsively dis- and re-assembling, and losing it?
This is the realization an earlier generation had about its Star Wars action figures.
Mon Feb 25 2002 07:20:
I got a lot of tech company swag when I was in college. Earlier today I was wondering how many of those companies are still around. This came up in my mind because I'm wearing a shirt I haven't worn in quite a while which turns out to be a double whammy. The main advertisement on the shirt is the very cool logo for magicbeanstalk, the defunct meta-startup. But the shirt itself was made by the equally defunct snacki, whose site makes its graceful exit with a Marx Brothers reference.
Also, wouldn't it be faster and cheaper (and better, for that matter) to just bring some hydrobots along, just in case?
Mon Feb 25 2002 07:34:
It's the old moon switcheroo!
Mon Feb 25 2002 18:32:
I heard from Mark Fasheh again
a couple days ago. He recently revamped his website, which now has
many sets of enjoyable photographs in addition to a newly often-updated
weblog. I enjoy the photographs, anyway, but I know and haven't seen for a while a lot of the people
in them.
Mon Feb 25 2002 18:42:
Odd unintentional punchline similarities today between WIGU and Checkerboard Nightmare.
You're already in the Milky
Way!
Mon Feb 25 2002 20:51:
Leonard Nitpicks The Pop Songs: Second In A Series Tell me, did you sail across the sun
Did
you make it to the Milky Way?
Tue Feb 26 2002 06:46:
Here are reviews of various Inform utility libraries from Emily Short, who has written many very good games and who had nice things to say about Degeneracy.
I never mentioned that the last time I was in Bakersfield (for Christmas) I took Sumana on a tour of Arvin, where I grew up, and also showed her the house way out in the grape fields where I used to live. That house is apparently now owned by one of Rachel's elementary school teachers.
Rachel sent her immediate family an email detailing her current set of plans. As she says, "i seem to have a habit of throwing one complicated life plan out the window every other week in exchange for another, slightly more complicated". She still refuses to have a weblog, but one of the classes she's taking is Bio 30, Human Sexual Behavior, known to the student body as "Dirty 30".
Fourthly in the list of items pertaining in some way to my family, my mother sent me a link to The Sugar Beet, a very funny Mormon satirical newspaper which achieves the ultimate Onion-alike goal of never making you want to click on a link to get more of a particular story.
Tue Feb 26 2002 07:05:
This weekend I'm driving down to Bakersfield for yet another relative wedding. This time it's my uncle Garry.
Tue Feb 26 2002 08:51:
Sumana gave me a set of hooks that screw into the wall and on which you hang things. I set this up in my room and it works much better than hanging all my shirts on a board outside the bathroom, which is what I had been doing. However, when I'm in bed and it's dark and I'm looking at the mass of overlapping shirts, it resembles a large leathery creature affixed to the wall, like a larger version of the unconvincing flying creatures from the original Star Trek series, or a new AD&D monster: the lurker to the side.
Tue Feb 26 2002 11:14:
Sumana says that there should be a rap group called "Run DMCA".
I'm the king of rock, there is none higher
Sucka MCs should call me sire
But should not circumvent my copy control mechanism
Lest they face up to a $500,000 fine or up to five years imprisonment for a first offense, and up to a $1,000,000 fine or up to ten years imprisonment for subsequent offenses
I'm pretty nervous about getting braces, especially this late in life,
but two years is not that long a time, and my bad teeth have really started to bother
me; it's not uncommon for me to cut my lip while chewing food, for instance.
Tue Feb 26 2002 16:45:
On the 25th I undergo the first of two orthodontist appointments
dedicated to getting braces on my teeth. The second one will be on the 28th.
The braces will stay on for about two years. Once they come off, my
teeth will presumably be straight instead of the jumble they are
currently. The braces cost about $5500 and they're not covered by my
insurance; bleah, but doable, especially on a payment plan.
I bought a bunch of books, a CD of Morton Lauridsen's Lux Aeterna, which has haunted me ever since I heard it on KUSC back in the 1900s, and the Diablo II Battle Chest ("Buying proprietary software on amazon.com!" gasped a shocked Sumana), which I purchased because I'm still obsessed with Diablo II even though I don't really have any way to play it once I get it--my current thinking is that the Windows laptop upstairs that Leonard uses might be fast enough to run it.
I'm quite excited about this. I can click on links and cause foolish people to send me packages containing objects! Of course, there is the exchange of money involved, but what good is money if you never spend it?
That was a rhetorical question.
Tue Feb 26 2002 21:22:
Today I accomplished any number of useful real-world things in addition to setting up my braces appointment. One of those things was to order a new debit card because my current one has been partially demagnetized. While doing so I got the address on my debit card fixed so that I could buy stuff online. Having done this, I followed Luther's injunction to "sin boldly" and bought a bunch of stuff from amazon.com (which I really like in all respects other than their patent evilness; the site is more like a Google for physical objects than anything else i've ever seen).
Wed Feb 27 2002 06:24:
Photo wire roundup:
Wed Feb 27 2002 06:40:
I almost had 9 issues assigned to me yesterday; that would have been the first time since we started doing issue tracking that my number of assigned issues would have been represented by a single-digit number. However, just as I completed issue #10, a new issue was filed and assigned to me. This morning I have 12 issues. I'm pretty sure I can get to 9 today, though.
Wed Feb 27 2002 08:38:
Woohoo! I'm at 9!
Wed Feb 27 2002 10:41:
Hey, all you Adam Kaplan fanboys and fangirls. Adam has up career-spanning reviews of the ouvres of Johnathan Richman and
Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. Enjoy!
Wed Feb 27 2002 11:15:
Poor Kevin:
<leonardr> wait, i know what you could do
<leonardr> use a strongly typed language!
Update: Chris DiBona is going to find out tomorrow.
Wed Feb 27 2002 11:32:
CRAP. All the Segfault code and stories are probably gone. The hardware was recommissioned. The only hope is that it was archived by someone at VA before that happened. More as the story unfolds.
Wed Feb 27 2002 11:37:
Wow; an incredible story (NYT, so requires registration, but cpunks/cpunks still works) about the Iranian satellite television station broadcasting from LA; I'd known about this for quite a while but it had always been at the periphery of my consciousness, and now that I read about it it's great. Get those people some funding!
Wed Feb 27 2002 17:10:
I'm back up to 13 issues. But I did achieve 9 earlier, so I'm not
as uptight about it as I was yesterday.
Wed Feb 27 2002 18:08:
Good thing I spent all that money while I felt like I had it; turns out I owe my dentist and Uncle Sam a cool grand each.
Thu Feb 28 2002 12:47:
Yesterday Sumana came over and I made a dish for dinner which I like to call "The Axis of Pasta". You heat up frozen green-beans-with-garlic-sauce and you cook pasta and you dump the former over the latter. Sumana and I agreed that it needs a third ingredient, but we couldn't figure out what. I think bacon would work very well, but I'd like the Axis to be vegetarian.
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