Category: HT archives

Random rants…

This article is a year and a half old, so I don’t know how we’re doing, but it says that at current rates, CPUs in 2005 will be as hot as nuclear reactors, and in 2015, they’ll be as hot as the surface of the sun. I think that’s the surface of the sun in the daytime, not at night. Anyway, wouldn’t it be cool if it worked the other way around and CPUs were really cold? We’d have that global warming thing licked. As it is, my physics is rusty. If we heat up nuclear reactors to make electricity which then powers CPUs which then heat up to the heat of the reactors in the first place, I’m thinking the power grid’s in trouble. And yes, I know how wrong my logic is. I just wanted to get that “at night” crack in. Heh heh, “crack in”. What?

From The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature: “For every ten thousand fraternity boys and sorority sisters who were seeking a cheap thrill on my page, at least one Third World prepubescent sought legitimate instruction. This Rawandan boy and his friends were being taught a lesson in creative autoeroticism. By me. Over the Internet. From my bedroom in the surprisingly hip Brooklyn neighbourhood in which I live, for a few brief minutes every day somewhere in the world, my little Web page was helping to ease the pain of genocide.” I just started reading this book.

Speaking of books, the site I alluded to the other day is Bookslut. I still haven’t had much time to check it out, but the blog part looks interesting. Judge for yourselves, lest, ye be judged by yourselves or something.

So the government’s trying to crack down on the “underground economy” and the barter system for tax purposes. I don’t have a link to back this up, I just know that they are. I was a fed once, you know. Meanwhile, what kind of example are they setting? Look at this Mint thing: they get paper and ink from their suppliers, and in exchange they use the ink to make pictures on the paper and give it right back. It’s just not right.

Pardon the non-interconnectedness (I managed a “speaking of” though!), although it’s no worse than usual, this time I actually have an excuse: I’m getting sick. I swear it’s been forever since it last happened, but hey, here it is. The whole office seems to be coming down with something simultaneously, which makes me suspect some kind of curse from a rival corporation. I have a date with some high-alcohol cough medicine now, so if you’ll excuse me…

My Palm whatzit has broken, after I just started getting some decent use out of it. It’s still semi-functional, as long as I don’t need to use the right half of the screen. To make matters even more amusing, they don’t seem to have any older models for sale around me, and my work PC still doesn’t support USB, so I’m not too sure what I’ll be doing for now. Of course, I still haven’t taken it apart and looked for the blinking “flip this switch” arrow that they taught me about in school, so there’s still hope.

In case you were wondering, the official Thrust Plant is Horehound. Say it with me: Horehound.

Not a lot to talk about tonight, the construction was pretty quiet today. AngelA took pictures, but I haven’t looked at them yet. I got a lot of Thrust Labs coding done, but that’s still a week or two away.

Speaking of a week or two away, my Halloween costume is in the works. I was trying to go with something involving no pants, but if that doesn’t pan out, I’ll go with an excess of pants. The theme is pants pants revolution, your suggestions are welcome.

Hey, here’s something not too surprising: there’s a link to this site and AngelA’s on VP. Guess which one gets more attention? Here’s a hint: I’m changing my name to Hot Naked Farm Slut Thrust.

Well, I’m back, and damn, what a good weekend to get away. Here’s what was waiting for me when I got home Friday afternoon:

 

That’s the street corner I live on my building is at. What the image does not capture is the dust and dirt flying in the air, timed to the rhythmic pulsing of that whatever the hell it is machine. What the image also does not capture is the noise level that was going on at the time. Everyone on the site was wearing earplugs. I found myself removing my headphones, which were playing pretty loud but not as loud as they did in my younger, more foolish days, and stick my fingers in my ears. It seemed like a strange thing to do. We’d gotten notice a few weeks ago that this was going to happen. They’re replacing the streetcar tracks for about 3 or 4 blocks of my street, they’re doing this 7/24, and the noisiest equipment would be restricted to 7-11. NoisiEST implies less noisy equipment at 3 in the morning, but I haven’t had a chance to sample that yet, as it seems that the workers have Thanksgiving off. I was hoping that the work would be done this weekend, but they’ve only finished tearing up half of the street so far, so I think I’ll be working late a few days this week… No joke, it’s painful to be inside while these machines are working. I’ll hopefully remember to take more pictures tomorrow morning – the street looks pretty funny.

I think this is the first picture I’ve put in an entry so far. I don’t think it’ll be the last, since I bought a little spy cam that isn’t really a spy cam but it’s a digital camera that fits in my pocket and takes 640×480 pictures of things that don’t move, and 640×480 abstract blurry things of things that do move. Thanks to my university physics education, I can understand relative motion means that if I move, it’s just like other things moving. Anyway, it’s fun to carry around, too bad it doesn’t work with Macs. The PC is way at the other end of the room though, so you’ll have to wait for fun stories about the weekend at the cottage.

I will say this about the pre-cottage part of the weekend: AngelA’s family does not live in Brampton. Despite many references to the city over the past year and a bit, it turns out that if one were to take a train to meet the family, and if one were to expect them to meet one at the train station, it would not be wise to get off at the Brampton stop, for if one did, this would be what awaited:

If you can look past the really small picture size that my dumb horizontal design has enforced, you will notice that the photo is slightly blurry. This is not the fault of the photographer, rather it is the artistic approach taken to give the viewer a sense of everything going dim. Anyway, in the confusion, I had to wait a while for my ride. A long enough while that I could have visited my parents in the time it took to get from door to door, but not long enough to consider that a cell phone would actually be a good thing in some limited situations. Consider this a copy of the HT home game. How many ways can you amuse yourself in a train station parking lot? Yes, the station is closed for the night. Yes, it’s cold and dark. Ok, pencils down. The correct answers were: play “balance game” on the railing on the right side of the picture, play “lonely union guy on strike who forgot his picket sign at home” and pace back and forth muttering things, play “take pictures of all the interesting things in the parking lot” and be ever so thankful that your memory card can hold 155 full resolution photos (I used 21 slots), play “lookout” while standing on the rail (also known as “balance game with cheating variant, holding onto sign”), and play “act out scenes from Footloose” (some of which done on rail for extra points). I like to say that I make my own fun, but I guess I shouldn’t always elaborate on how exactly I do that…

That’s right, it’s HermanThrust.com, once again your bi-daily source of whatever turns me on. I’ve been working on a lot of projects right now, which means hardly any THPS3, which my wrists are very thankful for. I don’t know if the PS2 controller really doesn’t fit my hands or if I’m just gripping too tight, but I’m pretty sure it’s the controller and not, um, other non-PS2 factors. I’ve done experiments.

Most of the stuff I want to talk about belongs on a different site, one which doesn’t exist yet but is getting closer to reality, so I’ll hold off. Mostly. Ok, just a few dev-related comments. The problem with not coding regularly, for me anyway, isn’t a lack of competence but rather that every time I finish something I want to restructure everything to use a different algorithm or object model. I just haven’t had time to develop a favorite style yet, probably because I’ve been reading more than doing lately. On the bright side, it looks like my whining about not getting enough development work will be stopping soon due to the impending departure of a team member. Yay for both of us.

So today I get up at 6, decide to finish some work from the night before instead of going to the gym, figuring I’ll just go at lunchtime. The strategy for the day is to stay as out of sight as possible, get some decent stuff done and get out of the office for the long weekend. By 10 o’clock I’d killed four people, and the gym will not see me for a while longer. Things just never go well for me on Fridays… And yes, non-Canadians, it’s Thanksgiving weekend here. Apparently it’s earlier here than in the USA because it’s weird celebrating a harvest when you’re shovelling snow off of the driveway. Not that I have to shovel anything in November, but I guess it’s got to be a frozen wasteland somewhere up here, because otherwise the Canadian Tourism Board is lying. As a side “benefit” to the earlier holiday (I guess), we already have Christmas decorations up in some stores.

We’re going away for the weekend, and while “going to the cottage” seems to include bringing a satellite TV decoder, internet access apparently doesn’t fit into the suburban idea of “roughing it”, so in other words, the next update will arrive right on pathetic schedule Monday or Tuesday.

In other news…

I haven’t seen it on Blogdex, but that might be because everything seems to be about the “war” right now. Judging from the response time from the central server, you’ve probably seen this already. “I’ve pissed patterns on snow that look more coherent than this“. I’m going to use that line for my next code review.

The trailer for Bowling for Columbine is up. I don’t have QuickTime loaded up at work, so I haven’t seen it yet, but rest assured I’ll be taking a look later today.

Speaking of doing things at work or home, I just found an interesting link, but I’ll have to check it out further before saying yea or nay. See, it’s got a URL that I just went to before thinking about how it’d look on the company’s access logs. On the bright side, things like that might really free up my time in weeks to come… Consider this a placeholder to remind myself to check back later.

Ok, one more. I’ve been doing some work on a project to bring speech recognition to a system here. I haven’t been doing any of the speech stuff though, and my job would be a lot easier without the project, so I have no problems with sending this link to the project managers. Daily. On the bright side, a friend of mine just got a job where he’ll have to explain to customers why whatever horrible things happen as a result are their problem and not ours. Ok, I’m kidding. Best project ever. Hey, how did you get this URL?

Ah, the joys of Google News. Consider exhibit A from the Globe and Mail: “When Toula locks eyes on the man of her dreams, a WASP schoolteacher with shoulder-length hair and vegan tastes, all hell breaks loose“. Exhibit B from the Sun-Herald give us “When Toula locks eyes on the man of her dreams, a WASP schoolteacher with shoulder-length hair and vegan tastes, all Hades breaks loose at Chez Portokalos“. The articles are different enough to demonstrate that they’re from different writers, but hmmm…

Also from Google: How to pick a franchise location. In this case, it’s Krispy Kreme, but damn this makes me want to get an Air Miles card and buy weird combinations of stuff. I don’t get this whole Krispy Kreme thing – 241 stories on Google last I checked, and they’re generally about people lining up for the doughnuts. You know, hard hitting business journalism.

AngelA just got an email from someone she knows but rarely gets email from, and it’s an IE “send page by email” thing, which Mac IE seems to have trouble parsing, but it’s some kind of form for some PC-Cillan software. Wouldn’t it be funny if there was a virus that sent out ads for anti-virus software? Of course, that might be what this was, and maybe that will be even funnier. I love Macs.

So you might be wondering where I’ve been. The answer, of course, is Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3. This is actual proof that violent video games are a bad idea. The more I play, the more I want a skateboard. Anyway, I figured new shoes would be a good compromise, and then I found out that Geoff Rowley Vans are non-leather, so that was cool, then I found out that Geoff Rowley is a rather well known skateboarder, then I found out that Geoff Rowley is a character in THPS3. I started a whole new game, and it felt good to know that my videogame player was wearing non-leather shoes. Now if I could just manage to play without my wrists and hands hurting for days afterwards…

As you’ve probably read already, I do some work for the local vegetarian association. One of the things I do is answer a bunch of email, but most of it gets deleted. We get a lot of the Nigerian scam, and for a while it was funny, then it got annoying. I just realized that I should be sending these emails to our director of fundraising. Now it’s funny again.

I’m probably going to rework this thread into something for VP, but it struck me during my last shift at the local resource centre that vegetarian books have great porn titles. “Deep Vegetarianism” got us started, then “Beyond Beef”, “Better than Peanut Butter and Jelly”, and “Best Vegetarian Ever” kicked it into high gear. Once you get in the right frame of mind, plotlines start to emerge for “Diet for a Small Planet”, and with the right inflection, “Becoming Vegan” works well too. With my work ethic, it’ll be a while before I turn this idea into something, um, bigger, so just let it work its way through your mind before you visit a bookstore.

Apparently, just about anybody can get nominated for a Peace Prize. I’m not slagging the Kielburger nomination, rather the mention of the nominations for the leaders of Afghanistan, the USA and the UK. ‘Cause you can’t have peace without guys like that to stir things up, right? If there have been 156 nominations already, what’s one more? Who do I have to call to get nominated for a Peace Prize? I haven’t killed anybody in weeks, possibly years, possibly even a lifetime. I’m all about peace, baby.

We caught the Face to Face show last night, with Moneen, Brand New and Riddlin’ Kids also playing. I prefer to think that our 25 foot displacement during Face to Face’s set was due to a general sense of apathy than any weakness on our part. The moshing was fine, the gradual flattening of my left foot as it was repeatedly stomped on was tolerable, and I didn’t even mind the occasional boot to the head as people tried to crowd surf, since it was really fun to watch people land (badly). I wasn’t a big fan of the guy with the mohawk though. He seemed to find it necessary to punch and elbow my spine to the beat. Guy, see me bouncing up and down to the beat? I know the beat. The beat and I go way back. I don’t need your “assistance” finding the beat. I’m good, thanks. Anyway, that was the part when AngelA pointed out that the band hadn’t really gotten into their old stuff yet, so we drifted back a bit. After all, if I’d stayed where I was, I might have hurt my chances of that Peace Prize nomination.

In one sentence review mode, we missed the first song or two of Brand New’s set, but they had a great sound, so I picked up their CD after the show; it’s pretty good, although I’ve only heard 3 songs so far. I admired Riddlin’ Kids ability to jump up and down, but their crowd interaction skills need a bit of work. As for Moneen, Erik really mixes well with the other guys on stage, making their live shows even more fun, something I didn’t think was possible. Oh yeah, those Face to Face guys were good — that’s why they’re Face to Face, nominees for the 1938 Peace Prize.

I’m scared to mention a discussion on Slashdot, but this one had some interesting points, at least when I read it with 200 or so comments entered. It’s a small debate about digital versus film based photography.

I have a Minolta 2330 Zoom, and I’m not a big fan of it, especially at low light. AngelA says it isn’t great either, and she can make up reasons that sound credible, but all I know is that the pictures often come out blurry and/or noisy unless I’m shooting at high noon. I’m not scheduled for an upgrade for a few more cycles (need more Mac stuff first!), so I’ll wait it out, but I would like to get some decent images captured for a few projects in the meantime.

Speaking of projects, the new and improved Thrust Labs site is starting to take shape (don’t bother checking it now, it’s still the ugly page). I figure it’s about two weeks away from going live, but we’ll see how many other things get in the way, so be prepared for more boring technical rants over here in the meantime. Once that’s done I’m going to do some serious VP work based on what I’ve learned from this adventure. It shall be sweet. After all of THAT, perhaps I’ll get around to doing something with the other domain name impulse purchases that I’ve made over the past year. You know, when I’m not playing Tony Hawk.

Hey, a major gas leak a block away from my home! Perhaps I should be going now…

Odd sighting of the day: Durex condoms are available in many shapes and sizes, including this one where each condom is in a gold coin shaped disc container. I don’t think it’s at all odd that I thought they were foil covered chocolate coins, what with them hanging next to the Hallowe’en candy at the local drug store. No, the rest of the condoms were in another aisle. These were special.

Things that made me sad(der): Two of yesterday’s papers, side by side. The Toronto Sun’s cover had a full page deal about how public outcry is “forcing” the CBC to renegotiate a contract with Hockey Night in Canada host Ron McLean. “People Power!” exclaimed the paper, as if it was a shining example of democracy in action or something. The Globe and Mail, right next to it, reported that Canada will be supporting the USA in Iraq. The photo was of our Prime Minister receiving some award from Henry Kissinger. But hey, we get to keep Coach’s Corner, because our voices matter.

What I did not need to see: Keith Richards is on the cover of Rolling Stone. Topless. Yes, that link goes to a picture. No, you don’t really need to click it. It’s exactly as you imagined.

Things I saw that were necessary in the course of my mission: really bad greeting cards. Who the hell buys the crap that represents 95% of the card store? Most likely people who didn’t have time to create honest sentiments because they were busy clipping out that morning’s Family Circus. What kind of man buys an anniversary card with shiny foil script that says “To my beautiful darling” on the cover, and has two pages of rancid prose on the inside, leaving barely enough room for a signature? The kind of man who gets his secretary to forge his name, I’m thinking. Ridiculous crap out there. Of course, I was sinking halfway to their level by even shopping for a card instead of doing something interesting, but my art skills are fading, and I’m dating an actual artist (she’s got a diploma and business cards!), so how can compete?

Yep, I had to buy an anniversary card. 1 year today. It’s good. The year, not the card. I went with a funny one, in case my prose proved as rancid as the crap in the non-on-purpose funny cards. I think it went ok.

I didn’t post anything yesterday because I was too likely to take advantage of the fact that this site doesn’t have an archive and I’d probably say something most uncharitable about my management team. The post could then disappear in 10 days or so, right around the time prospective employers visited. Today went much better, in that I avoided most contact with them. Tomorrow, disguises!

My anger-motivated visits to job posting websites pointed out that while 6 1/2 years of experience puts me in a decent spot, spending those 6 1/2 years developing and maintaining a dozen different and aging applications (at once) leaves my technical skills severely in the dust. Time management, sure, but very few buzzwords. I’m going to avoid the issue by pursuing a career as a naked woman painter. I will apply paint to a naked woman’s body for $7000, and I will use all of my technical resources to do so. At the very least, it will make for an attention grabbing “objective” on the resume: “to apply paint to a naked woman’s body, or failing that, to develop software for your company. Or both.”

Hey, here’s a fun idea! Make a development image of one of your websites and change a bunch of the code around, then get an idea for a new feature that you want to implement right away, before all the other changes are done. Spend the next 3 hours editing two somewhat different sets of source code to ensure that the changes are implemented right away (negating the benefits of a development image) and that they won’t be lost when you (someday) switch to the new version. For extra points, do it all in vi. Anyway, when all is said and done and whined about, VP has a new filter installed for regular users who don’t want to see horrifying tales of animal abuse every day.

Another fun idea! Go shopping for a present! I hate shopping for presents. Don’t get me wrong, I love giving things to people, but I’m no good at picking said things out. I ended up spending about 3 hours walking all over the greater downtown area, and still no gift. I did score a couple of books for myself though. Yeah, more books, right after Word on the Street. One is a guide to the English language though, so I figure that everybody wins there. I also picked up the other two volumes of Mishima’s tetralogy, which I’m going to make a serious effort to finish in the next 6 months.

Another fun idea! Go to work! Well, it’s always a fun thing to do… So boring right now. People ask me why I do so much computer stuff in my off hours. It’s basically a biological necessity that isn’t getting fed at the office these days. Too many stupid meetings about trivial changes that can be coded in less time than it takes to argue about whether or not we have time to do them. You know, fun.

Anyway…

If you search for “porn” on Google (always a fun idea) right now, you’ll see eight text ads. I think their new system is set up so that it doesn’t cost the advertiser anything unless you click on the link, and I’d like to run their bills up, but I’m frightened.

Ok, my whereabouts for the past three days can not be 100% predicted based on my new status as an owner of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 for the PS2, as the following will indicate. More on the game later, let’s move on to a weekend in the life…

Friday night: it’s drinking time, and drink we did. A case of beer and a new videogame or two probably works out to the cost of a night actually spent in a bar, so we went with that plan and got the aforementioned THPS3 along with some football thing that I won’t name, because I lost heavily. I discover the joy that is THPS3 and ramble drunkenly that I want a skateboard of my very own. Good times.

Saturday morning: early Saturday morning. Heavy early Saturday morning. I’m still drunk Saturday morning. It’s time to haul everything over to AngelA’s art show, about 3 clicks away. Lacking a vehicle, we booked a minivan taxi. Who shows up half an hour late. Half an hour of negative sleep late. Since I still have a few brilliant brain cells left, I elect to ride my bike to the show so we have a way of getting out of the post-industrial wasteland that the site sits on in the even that we need anything, like, say, lunch. Ok, I’m now chasing a minivan on a bike that I’ve been on for about an hour this year, it’s early, I’m either drunk or hung over, and I’m wearing a t-shirt. Oh yeah, I’m feeling good. At the show someone from another booth lends me an extra jacket. It seems that the pastel green towel I had clipped on like a cape was a fashion faux pas. Heh, artists.

Saturday day: I discovered that biking in Toronto is actually fun. I don’t know why, but it seems easier than it used to be. I was gunning up and down streets like I actually knew what I was doing, and I even made decent time. Of course, after a half hour of hard (for me) cycling, I discovered that the store I was going to had closed. The way back was kinda downhill. I also discovered that my water bottle cage will not hold onto bottles picked up at the convenience store, because my drink was gone when I got to the art site. It’s possible that I was a victim of some really fast pickpocket. I will name her Soosan.

Sunday: Word on the Street, the annual festival where I can justify buying anything with writing on it. Somehow I managed to subscribe to three magazines and I bought copious amounts of back issues. I also grabbed three books, all of which I expect to read in the next decade. AngelA scored a copy of that Coupland book that Shawn was all happy about. Yep, readers are leaders or something.

The rest of the available time, since walking seemed so strange after biking, was spent on the multiply aforementioned THPS3. I now understand why people play video games, and I even see why people skateboard. To be honest, I’d been using my PS2 pretty much exclusively for DVDs, with a little Grand Theft Auto 3 every once in awhile. THPS3 is an actually fun game. You can do stuff that’s way cooler than the stuff I see people do across the street from my office, like jump and land. It’s not even oppressively hard. Sure, it’s hard, but it’s not one of those games where you’re either good at it or you spend your whole time swearing and not having fun. I say that with some credibility behind me, because I’m not reknowned for being very good at video games in general.

So yeah, drinking, biking, setting up art, reading (or pre-reading buying), and video-skateboarding. That be the weekend. The rest of the week has just been cancelled, because it won’t be as eventful, and I’d rather be playing videogames.