January 2011 Archives

i've begun following the blog of the angry arab. it's quite the apt title, he does what it says on the tin (in contrast to something like "fox news" where you'd expect... no wait, it works. okay, minus the "news").

amidst copious amounts of knee-jerk israel bashing, he makes some fair to excellent points. one of his more excellent points is how lame it is that the US keeps blabbing about how our pal Mubarak should recognize Egyptians' "human rights". The angry arab says this isn't enough: Egyptians, like all humans, should be free to exercise their political rights as well.

The US is supposedly in a tricky position here. But it doesn't take a genius to notice that the protesters in Egypt are not calling for human rights in general, but very explicitly for Mubarak to leave the government. I was taught to keep silent if I didn't have anything nice to say. Likewise, perhaps the US should keep silent on this issue until it recognizes that the people of Egypt believe the only way to achieve human rights is through the application of political rights.

After all, this is what the founders of our own nation believed.

where sarah palin's extra stupid "don't retreat, reload!" catch phrase ("i'd buy that for a dollar!") is discussed, i realized that although my combat training is pretty much limited to metal gear solid 2 and 4 (oh, and medal of honor (oh yeah, and half life (oh, and doom))), in general, if you are in a position where retreat is beginning to sound like a good idea, it's probably not a great idea to just stand there and reload instead.

i mean, i guess if you're shooting wolves out of a helicopter, you might as well just reload, you're in about as much danger as i am while playing dead space (oh, yeah) (though i could suffer a heart attack induced by fright). but who would engage in so cowardly and unsportsmanlike an act as shooting defenseless animals from a helicopter?

A: no.

when you don't know where he's going, don't follow him around and turn lights out because he may be planning a return voyage along the same route.

not by faux news
not by the corporate news network
not by microsoft-comcast-ge-lockheed-national-broadcasting-corporation
not even by comedy central

only al jazeera is on the ground in the midst of it.

for reasons now lost to the hoary mists of history, a couple of weeks ago hops and i organized a weekly sunday group ride. we get together with a half dozen friends and ride at entirely different speeds along a poorly defined route, ending tired, happy, and totally disgruntled at the chaotic un-group-rideyness of the whole affair. it's fun, but the planning needs some work.

anyhow, i knew i was out of shape, but it turns out i'm really out of shape. out of the half dozen or so that ride with us, i'm smack in the middle of the speed curve, and that's not cool. so rather than just whine about it on my blog, i've resumed my twice weekly weekday rides, to great enjoyment if not fitness improvement. it's true, i was planning to do that anyways in early 2011, and the weather has gotten so nice i'd lost my last excuse against it, but getting dropped so easily by the "group" was a real kick in the pants.

speaking of pants, i ran into a coworker yesterday who started biking about a year ago, with some initial advice from me. he accused me of not telling him you're not supposed to wear underpants under your bike shorts. i guess he just figured that one out. i told him that conversations about underpants are really not appropriate for office talk.

not particularly unique, but this is how i do it, and i think my recipe isn't going to budge a whole lot from this:

in a shaker, combine:

1 oz Appleton Estates 12 year old rum
1 oz El Dorado 12 year old rum
3/4 oz fresh lime juice
1/2 oz Orange Curaçao (the orange colored one)
1/2 oz small hand foods orgeat
1/4 oz 2:1 sugar:water simple syrup (aka "rock candy syrup") (optional)

fill the destination glass with crushed ice or small ice cubes
dump the ice into the shaker

shake like a mofo. no fake shake.

dump shaker contents into glass. garnish with a lime shell, then spank some mint and drop that in as well.

over the weekend, a friend SMS-ed me to ask whether Highland Park 12, which he was eyeballing at Costco, was any good. i told him something clever, like "buy some, bring it over, and let's see". he took me up on the offer.

because my friend is a bit strange (takes one to know one), he also brought in a pair of grapefruits which he'd acquired at costco. as he began cutting one up for consumption, i cautioned that eating a grapefruit would most assuredly ruin his palate for the scotch. since i was the most senior scotch drinker in the room, my advice was taken.

well, it turns out that not only was i wrong, i was pretty much backwards.

after he'd taken a couple of sips of the peaty malt, he took a bite of the grapefruit, and declared it a wonderful experience. curious, i took a bite of grapefruit, swallowed it, and chased it down with some of the scotch.

it was indeed wonderful!

the grapefruit brought out the peat and smoothed out the flavor. It's not easy, really, to describe how the two flavors interacted, but I would not hesitate to say that they "paired". I never would have guessed that grapefruit would pair with a peaty scotch, but in this case, it surely did.

this is the kind of willful ignorance when building strawmen that i talk about when i bore you with my posts on politics.

this blogger is pretending not to understand what "liberals" are saying: that the use of violent rhetoric leads to an atmosphere where political violence is felt to be justified.

it doesn't matter if GB is saying "they'll shoot first" vs "you shoot first". the point is that he's talking about shooting to begin with, spinning a fantasy world where obama is coming to take your guns and your medicare and shoot you if you don't comply.

it's a violent image, and it's totally separate from reality. who knows or cares if the shooter in AZ heard this stuff? the point is that other people are hearing it, and buying into it, and if they buy into this fantasy yarn that is spun in a language of violence (shooting them, shooting you, shooting us), shooting seems like a reasonable solution to problems.

If you say Beck was telling his audience to shoot people in the head, you are stupid or a liar.

I don't know any other way to parse "You're going to have to shoot them in the head." than an exhortation to shoot people in the head. I must be a stupid liar.

He could have said "vote them out of office" or "impeach them" or a million other phrases that don't involve shooting or stabbing or blowing up people. But he didn't. He said "they're going to shoot you unless you shoot them".

i made simple syrup today, which, as it says in the name, is simple. 1 cup of sugar and one half cup of water, heat gently, stir until syrupy.

i did this in the same pan i use to cook eggs, because it's basically my only non-stick pan. i washed it out thoroughly with soap beforehand, but the syrup, when done, had a slight eggy smell to it. i'm not sure if that's just psychological or what, but stay tuned for a report on my new eggy-old-fashioned cocktail.

The original The Prisoner was weird. Very weird. And every episode, it got weirder. And weirder. It was bizarre. It was surreal. It had a point which was not entirely obvious.

The new one sucks. We watched one and a half episodes and ditched it.

Patrick McGoohan, star of the original, oozed charisma, charm, and smirk. He was constantly sharing a secret smile with the audience, because he knew what we knew: the bastards weren't going to get a word out of him. He had them beat from the very first episode.

The new one, starring Jesus Caviezel, is not the same show. Jesus has very little charm, no charisma, and instead of the Superman Smirk, he's got a dazed-and-confused where-am-i look. Number two is the same in both episodes we watched, breaking the important formula of the original. But more importantly, Number Six isn't the winner. It is not set up that The Village wants something from him, so Number Six doesn't have anything to hold back, and thus scores no victory by holding it back each episode.

The series appears to be framed as a thriller/mystery of the who-am-i and who-are-you variety. It's very modern with a forgettable theme song and modern cinematography. It truly has nothing to recommend it, having omitted all the charm and mind-bending of the original in favor of bland, modern tropes and a hapless and dull star.

the remake of "the prisoner" pretty damn well sucks.

the original was awesome right from the theme song. this one has a crappy theme song, and we're mostly through episode 2 and number 2 hasn't asked number 6 why he quit.

lame.

i don't use a debugger.

yup, i read the code and insert print statements.

i'll use the interactive python/ruby shells to try stuff out, but i don't even know how to run the respective debuggers.

i am (as the blogger points out) blessed in that i rarely have to read other people's code, and back when i did, i used a debugger. but i like to think the reason i don't need a debugger is because my code is so nicely factored and compartmentalized that it's simple enough just to unit test it instead of stepping through it to find problems.

i made my first daiquiri tonight, and since the recipe is significantly less demanding than a mai tai, i think i did a pretty fine job. i even had a nice garnish, though i can see my garnishing needs a lot of work.

i won't be getting scurvy this week, believe you me.

i was about to post a short memorial here to plastic.com, which i misunderstood as today celebrating the 10th anniversary of its closing.

then i realized that it was announcing its closing, after celebrating the 10th anniversary of its opening.

then i realized that i never read plastic.com at all, and what i really missed was suck.com.

oh suck.com, it's a sadder world without you. plastic.com? i'd forgotten all about you.

that for some odd reason, i have not all these years been saying, "brb, gotta go take a jonathan frakes", or, "hold on, i gotta go take a commander riker".

why did this only just occur to me now?

recently i have taken to brushing my teeth in the shower, on occasion.

on such occasions, i imagine that i am the captain of Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B.

it is not a difficult stretch.

2010 saw the reintroduction of reading into my daily life. i probably read more books in 2010 than the previous 2 years. over the xmas vacation, i started Iain Banks' Culture series, with "Consider Phlebas". I still haven't met Phlebas, and I'm nearly done with it, and one thing that I didn't consider when buying was the possibility that the book would be boring.

Sure, I expected clumsy writing. I mean, I'd recently read through The Dark Tower, and after that, Revelation Space. Both excellent stories, both with clumsy writing.

But Banks' book so far is just boring. Whole chapters that a good editor should have cut out. Events that don't matter -- a main character loses a noticeable body part, for example, and it doesn't ever seem to make it into the plot. Nobody mentions it. Meh. So I'm powering through it.

I finally got around to smoking a pipe yesterday. The long I wait between smokes the more enjoyable the smoke is, it seems. Yesterday's was pretty great. No less because the weather finally broke, and I was quite comfy in shorts, no footwear, and a light fleece at 5PM.

I found an interesting article this morning, about what's wrong with computer science in India, written by an Indian. One passage really stuck out at me:

They don't like it. They don't love their jobs. They just want to live a life. So they do the bare minimum that their job asks. They don't have that drive to excel at their work.

I find this to be an interesting contrast to myself. Yesterday I told my coworker that I don't really care about the company, but I do very much care about the quality (or arguably, the beauty) of our code. I said this in the context of a perhaps too-harsh code review, but it really is true. I don't especially like my job, and I do just want to live a life, not work a job. But when it gets down to code, I really do care quite a lot that variables have proper names, code meets certain readability standards, and is possessed of a certain beauty that's as easy to describe as pornography before the supreme court: I'll know it when I see it.

In other words, I impose arbitrary standards of "code beauty" on my hapless coworker. But I think I do it because I honestly believe that beautiful code leads to beautiful designs, and the beauty of my designs are frequently proven. So there.

Anyhow, in regards to the Indian CS problem: I don't see why not liking your job and excelling at your work have to be mutually exclusive. In fact, now that I mention it, most of the people I know are in exactly that situation, from my whole family to my lifting mentor to my laziness mentor. So maybe the blogger missed something important in making a distinction which really doesn't exist stateside.

Maybe I should let him know. Meh.

While I was away on vacation, my car got smashed up.

Sigh.

It's in the shop now with $12,000+ worth of damage. I'm finding that while hops' hybrid camry is nowhere near as fun to drive, and lacks in many of the luxuries to be found in a luxury car (duh), since my normal use of the G35 is an 8 mile daily commute and nothing else, I have a hard time mentally justifying owning it. It really has been almost no hassle at all having only one car.

On the other hand, selling it would be a huge pain in the ass, so I'll probably just keep it.

I've decided that I really should have a portable music player so that I can enjoy some tunes while I read and smoke. Using the laptop is cumbersome, and worse, it's a distraction and an invitation to browse reddit or IM instead of doing the reading I should be doing. So I did some research. And the conclusion of my research is this: everything still sucks. And that angers me. It's 2011. I've accepted that I'm not going to get the flying car that I was promised. But can't I at least get a reasonably priced player that will play my music? I have the following outrageous needs that are not met by any current player:

1) I like sound quality. I'm not an audiophile any more than I am a wine expert or a ribs snob. I'm just someone who has experienced good sound, good wine, and good ribs, and I don't have time to waste on bad sound, crummy wine, or boiled ribs. I will be listening to music on my street-facing patio, so sound quality is not a top priority, but it is a consideration.

2) I have a large-ish collection. 130GB. That's not much compared to many people that I know. But it is, if my math is correct, more than will fit on any of the current "high end" 64GB players that cost damn near 400 clams. Much of it is in apple lossless format, which is not supported by most non-apple players. Apple lossless is, first of all, lossless, which means (again, I am not an expert) that there should be very little decoding going on. In other words, it should be simple to support it. It is also an old standard. Maybe there are licensing fees involved, but that really is of no consequence other than to prove that stupid shit is getting in the way of me buying an player.

3) My house is well set up to stream music. I have my entire collection shared via SMB, NFS, and SqueezeBox server. I could easily add afp, uPnP, and a dozen other sharing methods. A four hundred dollar iPod should be able to handle that, right? Right? It's basically a mini supercomputer, more powerful than the computer I used in college. Right? It is, but streaming music is beyond its capability. Oh sure, there are hacks that will get you kinda there, and there are some third party apps that sorta work. But nothing really works, and besides, you've gotta shell out 400 bucks plus five to find out if it works. Screw that. The non-apple competitors either don't have the wifis, or don't support streaming either, except in the "pay up and find out if it works" model.

So really, my house is set up as a musical future-land. One server, a ton of media, and thin clients in many rooms to access the music. But there's nothing battery-powered that can deal with that today. The iPod classic (with 160GB of storage) is hideously overpriced and besides doesn't have any of the bells and whistles of the modern iPods. So, what's the point?

I've got an old iRiver IHP 120, which is the last awesome mp3 player that was ever made, and it was made a decade ago. It has optical out, which means I can hook up an external DAC to infinitely scale my audio quality. It has 20GB of storage, which was immense at the time and still has been only barely exceeded by mainstream players. But it is a thing of its times, and has a clunky UI, and came out before apple lossless was a major standard, and of course it doesn't have the wifis. But I've got it, and it works, and I'm gonna use it, and all you bastards who make mp3 players are just gonna have to get by on someone else's buck for 2011.

It's been cold so I haven't been biking, though that's starting to change. hops has set up a (hopefully weekly) weekend group ride that was a fair amount of fun last week. This weekend looks sunnyish so it should be nice as well. The weekdays find me doing daily, very short kettlebell workouts to great success. I plumped up quite a bit due to 2010's deadlifting, and though I thought it was all muscle, there is some evidence to the contrary. I can never manage to do better than maintain my weight between Nov and Jan, but finally the real loss is beginning. Whoopie.

For some reason or another I'm using my slow cooker again. I've cooked two beef stews. The first one was just a warm up and kinda sucked. The second one was pretty good. This week's stew is gonna be epic, I can feel it. I don't have a recipe, I follow my whim and my instinct, and so far, that's worked out 50% of the time.

Last week I finished Demon's Souls. I don't just mean that I beat the game, which I guess I did, though that was my second time through. I mean I'm done with it, I'm not going to play it any more, I'm putting it away. It's a fantastic game, one of the best I've played, but it's highly addictive (moreso than nicotine as far as I can tell) and time consuming, and ultimately, at the end of it, when I play online or play the second playthrough (where enemies are 40% harder), it is revealed to me that even after some 300 hours of gameplay, I still totally suck. That's depressing, So instead, I'll try to do things at which I actually show improvement, like biking, and writing, and slow cooking beef.

I think I had more to say, but I'm pretty much done for now. I've covered all the very important issues of early 2011, and now it's time to prepare for lunch, which is, of course, the very most important issue of 2011.

yesterday i got a tetanus booster. i've been to the doctor twice in the last six months or so, both times for ailments totally unrelated to tetanus in any possible way. and both times, the doc has said i should get a tetanus booster. i suppose it's because his computer told him i need one, but i am also entertaining other ideas:

- i've been targeted for CIA mind control. this seems most likely, especially post-tetanus.

- they're overstocked on vaccine and this is an inventory reduction procedure.

- i am part of a psychological experiment on patient compliance.

note that hops went to a doctor at the same hospital just last week, and there was no mention of a tetanus booster for her, even though i'm pretty sure she hasn't had one any more recently than i.

in any case, the shot itself was surprisingly painless, but now i've got a bit of a sore welt (don't worry mom that's expected). the upside is that finally i can sleep on my bed of nails again, and this morning i shaved with grand dad's old straight razor.

tonight i look forward to cutting my steak on the exposed edges of the mailbox.

having a slow start getting back into the blogging, as being out of the world for just one week involves a lot of catching up.

but i will stop by to point out that for the last several days, my job has primarily involved asking Skynet for a SITREP, so life's not all bad.

ha ha ha, just kidding. hair's growing out, no haircuts on the radar for quite a while now.