Weird

AJ and I just watched Donnie Darko, which was cool because it's one of those movies where you get the "Oh man like in Donnie Darko," "I haven't seen Donnie Darko," "You haven't seen Donnie Darko?!" "No," "We've got to fix that," type thing, and that's always irritating. Anyway, I really liked it, although I wouldn't recommend it if you're feeling in a funk or a bit blah. At least for me, it seems like the kind of movie that might not help too much. If you're feeling normal, though, by all means check it out.

Pirate Baby

Kershaw just sent me this, and now I'm sharing it with you. It's a great parody/tribute to the streetfight-style video game. Rather violent, highly amusing, with a lot of little inside jokes, from both video games and movies.

Watch.

Power Down

Right towards the end of the work day, I was basically killing time before I left and all of a sudden there was this big hum and then everything in the entire office shut off for about two seconds. I had mixed emotions over it because on the one hand my 217-day uptime went down the tubes, but on the other it was sadly comical hearing everyone in the computer lab go "OOOOOooohhhh..." at the same time. (Those computers re-image their drives when they turn on so even a local save is just straight gone and never coming back.) It also served as a good first real test of the UPS I've had my home computer hooked up to for a while now; it was fine so that's cool. Apparently it was a big outage, though, because the space was hit too (thankfully UPSed) and that's like a mile away.

Then I had to do my student loan exit interview. I almost killed myself. It would have been barely tolerable if I had just had to sit there for an hour, fill out a form, and then wait until next semester until to tell them I'm in graduate school so they can't start billing me yet. The fact that the PA system blew chunks and wouldn't stop either cutting out or producing major feedback made it absolute torture.

Also, the amount of information they want on those forms is crazy. I realize it's because so many people stiff them on things but still; nothing I have ever done in my life has required that amount of information. My favorite was the 3rd and 4th references, who should be "Relatives who will always know your home address." A close second was "Your plans for the next two years." I wanted to write them a book about getting an apartment, maybe a cat but definitely not a dog, maybe one of those cool lamps that you can touch the base and it turns on, etc., but I just wrote "Work so I can pay off this stupid loan. Also, graduate school." So I'm sure they'll love me for that.

I am tired why don't I sleep?

Yea it's god damn late, but as usual I can't make my brain shut the fuck up so me no sleepy. It's been pretty bad the past few days, which is weird because for a while I was doing a much better job of actually just laying down and going to sleep. Oh well.

So, after the initial idea a week or so ago and a good bit of online reading and whatnot, I'm still not sure if I really want to try to get into flying model airplanes.

The pros: it's something I been wanting to do since I was pretty young, there are some places around here that should work pretty well for flying, in the coming year I should be looking at a pretty steady income so I should be able to afford it if I decide I want to (and can) move up to non-beginner equipment.

The cons: it's expensive enough that I would be mad if it turned out to be a total failure, and apparently learning is a good bit harder than you would think. The real problem with the learning difficulty is that all the Beginner's Guides tell you to join a club and get an instructor. All of you can probably see the problem there; I'm not really the type that enjoys large groups of strangers, and a stranger that knows more than me is my least favorite kind of stranger. I'm also a little bit worried that I would just totally suck at it, or that it wouldn't be as cool as I've been building it up to be since I was twelve.

So yea. I guess a little feedback on that would be appreciated.

Ho. Lee. Crap

A little while ago Jeff told me about this tournament hosted at PokerRoom (where we all play online poker). It was a semi-private thing, with an odd two-stage registration. First you signed up at www.podcastpokerchallenge.com, which allowed to actually register your PokerRoom account for the tournament. It was free to enter, with a total prize pool of $2000, plus some players (pre-determined by the organizers, not random) were special and if you knocked them out you got a $50 bonus, regardless of where you finished in the tournament. Ogre, Jeremiah, and I all played it (I should have told Andrew about it but totally spaced on it - my bad). We all played pretty well which was cool. Top 20 paid out, so it was a bummer when Jeremiah finished 40th, but Ogre finished 10th plus got a bounty for a total of 94 bucks. I finished second but with no bounties so I only managed 340 freakin dollars!

I'm cashing out 300, then Nina and I are going to dinner and I'm saving the rest, because I'm so responsible and have this whole new apartment thing coming up.

King Kong knows judo

Marist SPC is part of this program where they can get copies of movies before they officially release to DVD (unfortunately our copy is VHS to make it harder to pirate with any quality). The less-than-awesome picture quality is tolerable though because they show the movies for free, so if they have something that I've been meaning to see and somebody else will go with me I usually wander down.

Last night they were showing Kong, and Nina and I went to it. It was fun, although it required a good bit more suspension of disbelief than I originally anticipated, especially when they're on the island and there are dinosaurs to go with the giant fucking gorilla. If you get past the several "Oh bullSHIT" moments it's really an awesome scene though, because Kong ends up protecting the female lead from three (THREE!) T-Rexes. Let's just say that apparently Kong's TV only gets Kung Fu: the Legend Continues and Mexican Wrestling, and he watches a lot of TV.

But being a Peter Jackson production, there's plenty of time left after the fight scene for a real movie to happen, and it's solid. I really felt for the poor ape at the end of the movie, and several girls in the room were crying. I give it a 3.5 out of 5; if you have a chance to see it for five dollars or less you should definitely do so.

One last thing. There is a scene involving insects. Allow me to reiterate that, but properly convey the emotion from the scene. *ahem*

HOLY FUCKING CHRIST what is that?! It's like three feet long. Is that a cricket? That's a god damn cricket! If that's a cricket then what the fuck do the SPIDERS look like?...AAAAH that's what the spiders look like! Kill it, you've got to kill it. No, the stick won't work! You need to use FIRE!

I totally want to call this number

The number is 214-748-3647, and as it turns out it's somewhere in Texas. What's so special about that number? Well, it's got a little story.

As many of you know, me and my fellow student programmers here at Marist are working on some e-commerce type thing. As one would expect, there are stores in the database for this project, and those stores have phone numbers. Inexplicably, all the phone numbers are the aforementioned number. We figured it was an import error from the original "database" we were given, which was an Excel spreadsheet. Turns out we were wrong.

I finally forced Matt to put in the Edit Store page we've been talking about doing for so long now, and he went to test it but encountered some weird issues. The three of us started testing, and it came down to the fact that if you tried to change the last digit of the phone number from a 7 to an 8 it would not change (or error out), but if you changed it to a 5 the change would stick. Confusion abounded.

We figured it out though, when I realized that it's a 32-bit integer. Turns out that our strange phone number is exactly 2^31 - 1. Mystery solved.

A couple quick things

Just a few quick blurbs about this blog that might make it a little more convenient for all the livejournal people.

First, I know how nice the friends page is, and while I can't offer any way for me to get this blog in there, I'll point out the "Site Feed" link over on the right, which goes to some "atom.xml" file. If you are rss-inclined, point your reader at that to keep up to date.

Second, if you feel like commenting but don't want to have to post as anonymous and then sign your post, choose the "other" option, and put your name in the field there. Then your name will appear at the top of the comment in the "Foo said..." area. If you want, you can also enter an optional URL, and your name will become a link to that page.

P.S. Tony and I built a two-piece robot that plays kickball. When it's perfected I promise there will be video.

Putting this place to use

This will probably bore most of you to tears but I'm typing it anyway. :-P

Today I resolved to set up a working mercurial repository for my graphics work on this server, for two reasons. One, I sometimes work on the code on my work machine, and the instant you have more than one copy of your code, you need something to keep track of which copy is the good one. Two, I need to know how to use mercurial for the summer anyway so this would be a good start. It was an interesting experience.

You see, I know very little about mercurial still, so I didn't really know where to start and honestly wasn't sure I would be able to tell if it worked or not. The big reason for my hesitation is that mercurial works differently from subversion, the system we use right now at work. Subversion is all about a centralized repository where you set up a subversion server and then everybody interacts with it. Mercurial doesn't really center around a main server. In fact, there is no "mercurial server" to install. Armed with only this knowledge, I set about trying to follow a Wiki tutorial titled "Publishing Repositories." After about an hour and a good spot on a permissions issue by Fruity Pants, I had that working, and then promptly realized it was the wrong thing. It provides a nice web interface to viewing the changes and whatnot for the repository, and allows you to pull changesets, but it has no means for pushing changes you make on your local copy (and no permissions model to govern who can or can't do so).

So, the next step was to realize that I actually just want to use the ssh protocol to push and pull changes to and from that repository, which is actually quite simple to set up. Of course, the syntax for working on an ssh repository looks a lot like scp syntax but isn't exactly the same, which cost me another chunk of time and another good spot from Fruity Pants, but it seems that I have what I need now.

Moral of the story, I now have the ability to edit code in a ton of different places with very little worry about where the good copy is or how I'm going to keep all those places up to date. I'm pleased.

Excellence

This is the kind of conversation that makes me smile:

Pyg: All Hail the Skip
Pyg: All hail F to the P
Pyg: I just wanted to tell you that the Blarto AckAck gun is doing a fine job inspiring fear, and quelling rebellion.
Me: the really awesome thing is if they rebels start to lose their fear of the AckAck you just drill a small hole in one ball and fill it with epoxy. a demonstration of it going through some drywall should get the point across easily enough.
Pyg: I'm able to shove 4 balls out at a time with a prime and a full push
Me: nice
Pyg: it's pants shitting terror when this thing goes off
Pyg: minus the pants
Me: the noise alone is enough to make people fall down sometimes
Pyg: yeah, shock and awe, to be sure

I let Pyg borrow the ping pong ball minigun that Chris Boulden got us for Christmas, and apparently it's doing well in the arena of office warfare.

Easter Break

This year was a very nice Easter break. The whole family was of course home, Nina came with me and Josh brought Moriah so that was cool. Jeremiah's girlfriend Danielle was around a little but we didn't get to see as much of her because she wasn't staying at our house.

Got a little paintball in, which is always a good time. This time around it was me, Josh, Jeremiah, Ogre, Dad, and my cousin Michael, and we played in the woods behind my grandfather's place. It was my first time in that setting and I've gotta say I'm a big fan of the balance of thick, partial, and minimal cover. It would be even better if we got a few more guys on each team and widened the boundaries a bit; maybe we'll be able to do that in between graduation and work.

While we were at paintball Nina and Moriah went to look at furniture for the new apartments. They looked at beds, desks, coffee tables, and dining room sets, but when they dragged Josh and I back down there we only ended up buying the dining room sets (I also don't see myself fitting a coffee table into the budget any time in the near future). We of course ended up with the same ones, because they had a very limited selection that would actually fit in our respective kitchens/dining rooms, and we usually like the same stuff anyways.

Then Nina started laughing on the ride home and almost died choking on a Tootsie Roll. That was a lot of fun. She coughed it out just as a I was going to drag her out of the Jeep after whipping into a bank parking lot at about 60 miles an hour. I am aware of how to execute the Heimlich manuever, but not exactly eager to try it out, so I was very relieved she spit it out when she did.

Later we flew kites, which was a lot of fun but marred slightly by the fact that Nina's kite, while really nice for looking at, was crap for flying. It spun, but the design was kind of poor so it ended up using all the force it caught to spin and none of it to provide lift, making its maximum flight time about two minutes with even the strongest winds.

We also went to visit some cousins and enjoy a campfire in their backyard, which was nice except it was pretty windy so sparks and smoke were problematic at times. Nothing too bad though, and I also found out my aunt and uncle are replacing their bedroom set at the end of the month so I'm getting their bed frame. Then I just need buy a matching headboard and a mattress. Woo.

Only bad news: I didn't do any of my calc, and so I must return to that.

The Pride Of Vernon

This was brought to my attention by Ogre. Apparently one of my classmates from high school is really awesome. Check it:

(Newington-WTNH, Apr. 11, 2006 6:35 PM) _ A Central Connecticut State University student has been arrested for allegedly hooking up with underage girls he met online.

Police say 22-year-old David Leonard from New Britain set up a meeting with a 12-year-old. The girl allegedly used her sister's myspace.com account to chat with Leonard and later talked to him by cell phone.

Police say the two then arranged to meet at an elementary school in Newington over the summer. Police say Leonard met the girl and a friend, also 12-years-old. He allegedly lead the girls into a wooded area and kissed and fondled them.

Police say Leonard then invited the girls to his apartment for alcohol and movies, but a second meeting never took place.

Leonard has been charged with sexual assault, interfering with police and giving a false statement.

He really liked Nirvana a lot, so this doesn't come as much of a surprise to me.

Oops my bad...

I'd been wondering why I still have zero comments on this thing. It's not like my LiveJournal had a million comments on it but usually every three or four posts would at least get a comment or two so I was starting to wonder. Then tonight Ogre IMs me and asks why his comments aren't showing up. Turns out I had comment moderation on but didn't set an email address for notifications, so all the comments were waiting for me to approve them and I didn't know they were there. I turned off moderation so now comments will be posted by themselves.

Car Drives

So through some conversation at work, I decided to check and see if cardrives.com is available and it is. I'm actually having trouble figuring out why we didn't register it in the first place and went with car-drives.com instead. I guess maybe we thought that the dash would be good for separating out the words but now I realize that nobody wants to have to type the dash or tell other people "It's car dash drives dot com," so I'm thinking I'm gonna drop the old one and pick up cardrives.com.

Also, I found out that the hosting account Matt gave me can have two high level domains. They'll share bandwidth and space but that really shouldn't be a problem, and now we can actually have a real home for the site. Woo.

[Edit]
So much for thinking about it. It's done and done; everything is set up. Josh and Jeff, if you want ftp accounts, either for your own smallish personal stuff or so you can contribute actual content to the site, just let me know. It's very painless for me to add them now that I know what I'm doing.
[/Edit]

Rolling down stairs alone or in pairs

I know this is very super-dork of me, but I got bored and check out my apache log for the site. Not surprisingly, it took Googlebot less than 24 hours after I first registered the domain to start crawling the site. I'd imagine it was one of Googlebot's less satisfying crawls, what with my entire site consisting of a about a half a dozen files.

I also learned that Lindsay and Nina have been here. Props to them, and all the rest of you aren't invited to my next birthday party any more.

Go Sawx

I know it's so so early in the season, and doing this will probably just turn into an awful karmic curse on my Sox, but I'd just like to point out that Boston is in first place at 3-1, and the Yankees are in last at 1-3 with a three game losing streak. I'm sure it will all even out soon enough, but for the time being I'm really enjoying imagining people in the Yankees' front office diving into closets and down flights of stairs to avoid The Boss, because he's probably getting ready to fire about half the organization.

Welcome

Well, you're here, so obviously you figured out that I got my own domain name. Matt (aka Fruitypants aka F to the P) hooked me up with a great hosting deal because, well, he owns the hosting company. It's pretty sweet, I get email accounts and mysql databases and all that good stuff. Me being a pretty crap web designer type I'll probably use it mostly to host this and as a file repository that I can reach anywhere. Great for that whole "I don't own a printer so I print at the lab" thing. Then we (me, Matt, Chris) spent a while setting everything up (DNS, blogger...) and I must say it's been far more exciting for me than it should be.

But anyway, sorry to those of you who use the friends page to check everything, this is where I'll be posting from now on.

P.S. Check it out, I've got a favicon. I think it's a pretty good one, and I made it all by myself. Well, not entirely. I got the "circle with two letters" idea from an example and then made mine. Either way, I like it, but if anybody wants to make a really awesome one I'll totally use it. You don't even need to make it an actual icon file. Either use this tool I found or just send me any image and I'll convert it myself.