News You Can Bruise for 1999 January

It's 1999, and time for the Female Algorithm! Warning: contains foul language, although not in the way you might expect, unless you were expecting Adam to curse gratuitously (always a good thing to expect, dammit).

I want my sampo back, sampo back, sampo back. I have been spoiled by the ease of remote Web-based publishing.

My Vietnamese name is Phuong, apparantly.

I finally wrote the mail lister (or most of it) I've been meaning to write. Unfortunately, all the mail I want listed lives on sampo. Oh well.

The first draft of my travelogue is up. It covers our first day and part of our second.

Here is the quote of the day:

"While recent research on hundreds of people found that echinacea was no more effective than a placebo, in my experience it is a very good placebo."

-Isadore Rosenfeld MD, author of Dr. Rosenfeld's Guide to Alternative Medicine: What Works, What Doesn't, and What's Right for You (as seen in Bottom Line Personal)

I'm going through Joe's Garage a lot this weekend, mainly because I can't find Strictly Commercial. The first time I listened to it I didn't really like it, but now I am in the groove. The first disc is great, but the second gets into too many long guitar solos, which are not my favorite thing. Watermelon in Easter Hay, however, is a beautiful song which I can pay attention to despite the fact that it's nine minutes of guitar solo.

School starts tomorrow. I better get a schedule page up so I don't miss classes.

I got a tamale at the Vons deli for a dollar, as I miss the homemade tamales made by my friends' mothers back in Arvin. "That's a hot tamale!" Um, anyway, the tamale comes, as tamales do, in a corn husk, but it was also wrapped in plastic, and when I got it the deli lady wrapped it in a plastic bag. Too much packaging for one poor tamale! The tamale is in the microwave right now, and I'm about to go get it and bring it in here and eat it. It's not too bad, although I prefer the ones with olives and stuff in them. Who am I fooling? Nobody cares about my tamale. And now my tamale is eaten, and its sad tale is over.

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

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

Exchange of the day (in CS131):

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

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

Prof. Izadpanah: How did you skip ahead?

Me: It was a couple of years ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I updated the travelogue. It now covers up to December 22.

Brilliant eh?

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

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

It's the little things that make you happy.

AH HA HA HA HA!

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

It's Platform Independance Day!

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

--NTK

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

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

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

Collect the whole set: Y0K Y1K

Anyone have a Y3K one?

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

Okay, NYCB officially lives on fire, until it moves to kuato.