Journal entries for March, 2005

I was messing around with the Tivo the other day and discovered that the Tivo Desktop application communicates with the Tivo via simple HTTP and HTTPS calls. I found that if you submit the same request that the Tivo Desktop application sends, and use 'tivo' as your username and your Media Access Key as your password, the Tivo returns an XML file describing the shows currently stored on the drive. I then spent about four hours hacking up a script to parse that XML file and output a nice pretty HTML listing of the stuff currently on the drive. Why? I don't know. Nobody gives a crap what I've got stored on my Tivo. I guess now I can check it from work and see what shows it has recorded for me while I was gone, but I think I could handle the suspense with no problem before :) Basically I just like the idea of having this big complex interacting system. If only I could think of more useful ways of putting this interest to use.

If you're curious, here's what's Now Playing on Dan's Tivo.

Today I saw the pilot of the American version of The Office. I've only seen one episode of the British version too, but from my limited perspective, I think the British one was better. Both cover a subject that I'd think would get tired kind of quickly, but if it's awkward, idiotic bosses and kooky inter-office interactions you want, I think the British one pulled it off more successfully. As much as I like Steve Carell, the boss on the British version was definitely more awkward and sleazy :)

This is not really what I'd expect to find at a linguistics-oriented blog, but Language Log has an interesting series of posts analyzing the term 'tighty-whiteys', discussing first the phonology and then the semantics of the term, before moving on to consider the sociology behind the relative perceptions of boxers vs. briefs, first considering everyday society and eventually proceeding into gay porn. Mmm, edifying.

Well, that was a waste of an hour and a half. My plan was to go to the sci-fi convention today, camera firmly in hand, and take pictures of all the costumed nerds (OK, and probably enjoy myself a whole lot). I called the place it was at, Tropimar, to ask when it ended, and they said 8pm. Splendid. So around 4pm I headed off, but got stuck in traffic, which I keep forgetting to factor into my plans.

I finally got there around 5, but figured I still had three hours, which would likely be more than enough nerdage to satisfy me. However, as I pulled into the parking lot, the guy in line ahead of me was backing out, and the parking attendant told me that they had just closed. I asked if there was any other place to park and he said nope, not in the area. Excellent. So essentially I had to turn around and go home (and fight my way through the traffic again), having seen nothing but one slightly costumed nerd in a purple wig standing out by the curb. I didn't even get to hear the guy who played Chewbacca make that great "Awwwaararagggh" sound, as I'm sure someone would have asked him to do.

When I make peanut butter and jelly (actually preserves; jelly is gross) sandwiches, I always spread the peanut butter first, even though it would make a little more sense to do it the other way since jelly doesn't stick to the knife as much as peanut butter does, so you get less cross-over when you don't feel like cleaning the knife between applications. I think this is because I consider peanut butter more substantial than jelly. It would seem wrong to spread the jelly first. That'd be sort of like eating dessert before your meal.

Additionally, I always put the peanut butter on the left slice of bread and the jelly on the right. This just makes sense because, being primarily a speaker of western languages, I'm used to thinking right-to-left. However, it's at odds with my usual strategy, where I tend to favor the right-hand choice when making a decision, due to the fact that I'm right-handed.

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Haha, there's a sci-fi convention here on Sunday, and Peter Mayhew, the actor who played Chewbacca in the first three episodes of Star Wars (and is reprising the role in the upcoming Episode III) will be speaking. I'm tempted to go just for the hell of it :) I wonder if they will stage a reenactment. I sure hope they pick me. (mp3)

Oh, Zelda Classic, you will consume what little free time I had left. It started off as a simple PC clone of the original Legend Of Zelda NES game, but over time grew into way more. They made it possible to develop new quests, graphics, and sounds for the game, and there are now tons of cool levels available, developed by users. It's a good thing this doesn't run on Linux, or my worktime productivity would be in danger.

EDIT: As long as we're talking about The Legend Of Zelda, here's an amusing description of the items to be found throughout the game.

What is a namber? A namber is a word that acts as a mnemonic for a number. For example, 65 is drum, and 181 is push.

A namber address uses an arbitrarily-chosen list of nambers to represent each of the numbers from 0 to 255 in order to assemble four words to represent any IP address. BinRock.net's namber is ear.north.fork.stick, and mysteryrobot.com conveniently provides translation and forwarding to the real IP address.

It's not as if we don't have an existing system in place to translate easy-to-remember strings into IP addresses, but I suppose the point is that if this list of nambers were accepted as standard, the translation could be done locally without needing to query a remote DNS server. Still, pretty useless as a whole :)

Man. You know how when you sleep too much, it just makes you tired? I think I did that last night, and woke up and felt sleepy, so I slept some more until I was rested again. I went to bed at 8pm for a short nap, and ended up waking up at 10am, 14 hours later. I'd better not get sleepy at work today, or I'll be pissed :)

Oh no, I'm posting IM conversations on my blog! I need to go back to LiveJournal. But I couldn't deny you this.

raxtdrugar: man im a fucking hypochondriac
cowgod77: hehe how so
raxtdrugar: because i use words without knowing their definition for sure
raxtdrugar: isnt that what hypochondriac means?

Jing is either slightly dumb or a comedic genius. I can never tell which :)

Another cool example of the sheer genius concentrated at Google. Google Sets accepts a list of terms, and attempts to predict other items that fit in the same "category". It's eerily clever. Some examples I tried: supra/camry, images and words/awake. Did you forget the noble gases? Enter helium/argon/neon and you get the rest of the list (with some other non-noble elements at the end, though). What movies has Angelina Jolie been in? I know she was in Hackers and Tomb Raider... Awesome.

Will Wright, the creator of SimCity and The Sims, is working on an incredible new game that I'm really excited about. The concept is called Spore, and essentially, gameplay proceeds in stages, getting more and more complex. As your character evolves, the scale changes, much like the film, Powers Of 10. You start as a single-celled lifeform trying to avoid being eaten by other single-celled organisms (think Pac-Man), and over time the game progresses all the way to controlling an interplanetary culture that interacts with other races (created by other players elsewhere on the internet). GameSpy published a detailed review of the game that explains the concept much better than I can, and GamingSteve has some screenshots grabbed from the introduction Wright gave at Game Developer's Conference last week. It's encouraging how complete and polished the demo appears to be — otherwise I'd worry that the game was too ambitious to be practical. However, it seems like it's actually happening, so now all that's left to do is to wait eagerly for its release.

Illustrated Notes from Computer Science: Tom Murphy VII makes wonderful things when bored in class.

I think I need this, although it sort of scares me. The guys at MIT came up with Clocky, which is a little clock for people who have trouble waking up. When the alarm clock goes off and the snooze button is pressed, clocky will roll off the bedside table, run away, and hide. Minutes later when the alarm goes off again, the sleeper must get up and look for Clocky. Clocky is kind of like a troublesome pet that you love anyway. Everyday he finds a new hiding spot.

Yes, ingenious, but I don't think I could sleep comfortably with that creepy, furry creature lying in wait next to me, ready to scurry off into a dark corner. It would certainly help to break up the morning routine though.

Well that was a brief yet exciting adventure. I expected a package on Saturday, and it hasn't yet arrived, so when I saw the mail truck pass by, I went out in my robe (against my better judgement, but I didn't have time to dress) to get the mail and ask him about the package. Upon my return, I realized I had let the door shut behind me, and as I'm not in the habit of keeping house keys in my robe, I was locked out, with the cable guys working on the cable box right in front of my house. Needless to say, there was no one else home. Perfect.

Obviously, the side gate was locked as well, but I figured one of the back doors themselves was probably open, if I could just get into the backyard.

I don't know if you've ever tried jumping a wall in a bathrobe, but it's not easy to do without exposing untanned regions to the public at large. At least, today I learned that I'm not capable of such a feat. Sorry, cable guys.

To add injury to insult, in my haste to get over the wall, I was not able to give due care to protecting sensitive nether regions from harm. Sorry, genitalia.

But the happy ending is the back door was unlocked. And I'm now wearing pants.

Today was fun. So many people remembered my birthday. Weird. I woke up to find like eight or nine IMs from people, and throughout the day Bryan, Meg, and Jenn called. Although I've always felt the whole "ackowledging a birthday" thing is a bit hackneyed and overrated, I have to admit it is nice when people remember of their own accord :)

I met up with Michelle and David, and we tried to go bowling but were deterred by traffic. We found ourselves near San Patricio, so we ducked out of the dilatory morass and decided to watch Million Dollar Baby. Great movie, but not an uplifting experience. So to lift our spirits, from there we returned to my house and ate delicious brownies that Natalia and Mami had made to serve as my birthday cake. Michelle went over to her boyfriend Billy's house to say hi, since it's nearby, and David and I played a little music.

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Today I hung out with Michelle, and went with her to pick up an old friend of hers named David Hernandez from the airport. He is a guy she sort of dated back in 6th grade, at which point he moved to Arizona, and they hadn't seen each other since. He was actually really cool, and I got along great with him. I was sold when we were discussing musical tastes and he asked Michelle, "Have you heard of Dream Theater?" and she smiled and pointed at me. He's a drummer, so he was surprised and impressed when I mentioned that Mike Portnoy did a drum clinic here a few years ago.

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I'm going to try out reviving this old feature. Just an occasional sampling of songs I think are good, with links to MP3s for each.

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Frighteningly, I'm actually getting into this EVE Online thing. It's a different experience, because of the whole multiplayer thing. In most games, when you're starting out, you run up to everything and look curiously at it, try shooting at random stuff, etc. In this case though, most ships and stuff you see out there are actual people, and things you do can actually affect other players, so acting like an inquisitive four-year-old ends up drawing attention to yourself :) I was exploring the interface, looking through the list of signed-on users, and double-clicked one to bring up the information on that user. However, instead of doing that it opened up a conversation window, and the person said "Hey, what's up?" I said eek and explained I was just learning my way around.

We'll see if it remains interesting once I get enough into the game where I'm actually interacting with other people regularly — I've never been a super social person, so it's hard to say whether that would be a desirable or distasteful aspect in a game. We shall see. There's tons of potential for interaction in this game if it's desired — players can form corporations to manufacture products that are better than the ones available directly from the game, for example. You can join a corporation and perform some service for them like mining or couriering or whatever. I sort of think that might make it feel too much like work though, because they would probably be pissed if I didn't sign on for a few days because I didn't feel like it or had too much work or whatever, hehe. I don't want to feel obligated to a video game.

It seems that Brian "Head" Welch, former guitarist for KoRn, has found Christ, quit the band, and is now proselytizing quite fervently. He's got a new website, Head To Christ, and is planning on recording a new solo record and selling it directly from his website, then "[giving the money] back to my people by building something positive, like a skatepark or something." This seems to be big news because everyone finds the transformation so unexpected, but I really don't find it very shocking. I'm not really familiar with any of their newer stuff, but KoRn's older songs were not particularly outspoken against religion. The most common subject matter was pain and unhappiness. If anything, people going through what KoRn's songs describe are prime candidates for discovering religion and the relief and hope that it can provide. Of course, Jonathan Davis is the one that wrote most of their lyrics, so in fact KoRn's music doesn't even provide us that little insight into Brian's life, but the fact remains that KoRn doesn't seem like a particularly un-christian band. Now, if Kerry King of Slayer were to suddenly convert...

Recently I learned about a whole aspect of photography I'd never even heard of before: movements. I'd seen the various Canon TS-E tilt/shift lenses (such as the TS-E 45mm f/2.8) but never understood what the hell the tilt/shift meant. I finally found a page that explains it very well: Understanding Camera Movements at Luminous Landscape.

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Well, I've become quite a punctual person lately, at least with regards to getting to work. For the longest time, it was pretty much standard for me to leave for work right around the time I was ostensibly supposed to be arriving (or later), so it was normal for me to arrive between 20-40 minutes late for work. This wasn't too big a deal, as nobody here really minds. However, now that I'm working 8pm-6am, I relieve the daytime guys, who work 10am-8pm, and often they are the only ones here. So if I'm late, they have to stay late and wait for me. Thus, punctuality became more important. Surprisingly, I realized today that I've actually managed to make the transformation. I now get here between 745-8pm very reliably, usually walking in the door right around 7:58. It's a very satisfying and rewarding feeling, sort of like the experience of turning in an assignment that I experienced occasionally. I never would have thought I could actually learn to be on time for anything. Take that, Danielle, not coming out with us just because I was 45 minutes late to pick you up! And yet you kept my stuffed cow that moos three times. But victory is mine!! Except you still have my cow. And my sweatshirt.

Yesterday I came across this entertaining tale of deceit and consciencelessness describing a scam a guy pulled off in a space-based MMORPG called EVE Online. I hadn't heard of the game before, but although the general point of his story is that he becomes disillusioned with the game and turns to "crime," his vivid descriptions of the battle scenes actually sounded pretty intriguing. It's sort of like Homeworld only multiplayer. So, despite my usual lack of enthusiasm for online gaming, I figured what the hell and downloaded the EVE client and paid the $20 for 30 days worth. I highly doubt I'll actually keep paying the $15/month even if I do like the game, but it sounded interesting and worth a $20 experiment.

I've only played it a little so far — I've only done the tutorials, haven't interacted with anyone else yet. But it does seem pretty enjoyable. You can pretty much do anything you want — some choose to mine asteroids, some run trade routes to sell goods in areas where they fetch a higher price. The part I like is that some decide to be pirates and lurk in the less patrolled areas of space between star systems and prey on those traders. Sure, the fact that it's an MMORPG means you're stealing from real people, but hey, their job would be boring if you didn't provide some excitement and risk :)

So we'll see if it proves entertaining enough to hold my interest — very few games do — but at first glance it looks pretty fun.

So, can someone explain Donnie Darko to me? I fear I may lack the cognitive capacity to reason it out for myself. I managed to maintain a tenuous grasp through most of the movie, but those last 20 minutes or so... Completely lost me.

I stumbled across such a great story today. Apparently about a year ago, some kids who take MMORPGs way too seriously started up a Storm Trooper guild in the Star Wars Galaxies online role-playing game. Just like my old roommate Bobby in Tribes, they'd meet for drills and patrols. Finally, the game developers noticed this little bubble of dedicated players and arranged for Darth Vader to take some time out of his busy day and stop by to inspect the troops and give a speech. Since I'm sure the screenshots on the linked thread will go down soon, here's my two favorites. Imagine the titillation those players felt when their year of hard work finally paid off. It's times like this that make it all worth it.

Last month a guy from England named Chris Rustage sent me an email saying he liked my photo gallery software and would like a copy to use on his own site. I haven't really prepared it for public distribution, and told him so, but he still felt it was his best option, so I cleaned it up a bit and sent it to him.

Anyway, we were talking about photography yesterday and he mentioned he's got the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L lens I've been longing for since I got my first Canon (although of course what I really want is the version with Image Stabilization). I asked him how he liked it and the bastard showed me all these incredible photos he has taken with it (Kids by the fire, Sunset at the beach, Pelican, Swinging, Seagull in flight, Tiff Needell). It's incredible how sharp the photos come out, even handheld in such low light. How am I supposed to be mature and save my money responsibly when faced with temptation such as this?! Jerk. :) Fortunately, I can't currently afford that lens even if I were to spend all the money in my bank account PLUS max out my credit card. So I'm safe for now, phew.

Remember how I was looking forward to this weekend, and finally getting to sleep, catch up on a week's worth of Stargate, etc? I've found an even better way to spend the weekend: working! Luis asked me to cover his shift on Sunday, from 10am to 10pm. Sweet. I like how it's a day shift too, so I get to adjust to daytime and then back to nighttime for Monday night. I mean, I certainly don't begrudge it, since he's got a family emergency, and I'm just glad I can help. I just found it amusing to have the request come on the one weekend I was most looking forward to sleeping :) Ah well, maybe this will all help me get used to sleeping less. Right now, I'm not very functional if I get much less than 8 hours of sleep, and I view that as a handicap.

We cows are more complex than you thought.

Ugh, this has been a difficult week. Andy, Donny, and Violet are down here for the week for their spring break, and as usual, I'm spending my nights working and my days hanging out with them, and carefully ignoring the missing third component, sleep. However, I've never been very good at this, so it just means that sleep encroaches upon all the other activities of my day like wine soaking through a tablecloth.

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When I saw this eBay auction, I immediately thought of Jeff and smiled.

As you might have noticed, I redid the login system on BinRock to be a little less insecure. I tried to make it as simple as possible the first time around, by only requiring passwords, but after someone forgot their password and tried a few different ones and found themselves logged in as someone else, I figured I should probably stick with the tried and true combination of username AND password :) If you're already logged in, it should automatically convert to the new system without any effort on your part, but next time you log in, you'll need to know both credentials. Your password is still the same. Ask me for your username. You may actually be able to guess it, most of them are pretty logical choices. If you prefer, I can change it to whatever you'd like.