| The flowers in your kitchen, they weep for you. |
[08 Jul 2009|12:11am] |
Today seems to be a day for objects falling apart.
My wallet seems to be starting to delaminate, and a thread has come loose. It's been in continuous service for over twelve years at this point, being the wallet I got the first time I had need of one. Such is the way of things. I'll probably try to get another one just like it, at least once it starts actually falling apart.
The mini-SD card that held the Debian chroot on pants.xlerb.net, my PDA of sorts, has rather decisively died. Why of course I have backups, they're, er, um, okay I don't. I haven't lost any data from this, for the most part, just the time it'll take to reinstall everything once the replacement shows up.
Today I also bought a lamp to replace the one that had been clipped over the stove before the plastic clip disintegrated one night (but the new lamp is a different kind and doesn't work in that space, so that quest is still open) and a kitchen scale to replace my old one which recently went on the fritz.
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| Clearly I've had too much to drink. |
[04 Jul 2009|03:22am] |
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Because I could have sworn I just saw a post on the White House blog beginning “Jimmy Fallon will emcee a special concert featuring the Foo Fighters and Michelle Branch … from the South Lawn of the White House.” And that sentence is just too— Oh. Never mind.
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| Ow. |
[04 Jul 2009|02:12am] |
We have just finished watching this movie. OMG. There is not enough “what” in the world. And that was *after* we'd passed on this movie after maybe ten minutes (“Send me home, silvertongue!” If you know what I mean).
But the first of the evening was this movie, which, while full of Russian WTF, was nonethless… respectable, in its own way. …oh, of course, it's based on a book, like every single movie in the past N years that's done anything interesting. (Determining the value of N left for the reader.) Though I did like what they did with the subtitles.
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| I am not making this up. |
[03 Jul 2009|01:51am] |
“Universal has won a four-studio bidding war to pick up the film rights to the classic Atari video game ‘Asteroids.’”
Yes. They're going to somehow make a full-length movie out of a video game where you're a small quadrilateral shooting dots at big polygons to make them into smaller polygons.
However, my skepticism is… acted upon by Slashdot's summary, which reveals that the script will be written by the same Matthew Lopez who counts among his writing credits a full-length version of The Sorceror's Apprentice, planned for release about a year hence, which was brought to my attention a week and a half ago. Still, it's one thing to adapt what's basically a standard-format cautionary fable into something where Nicholas Cage in a ridiculous hat and his goofy-looking apprentice fight against an evil sorceror and *his* goofy-looking apprentice (the latter, apparently, empowered by the supernal might of Questional Hair Choices — alas, I've lost the article I was going to link to there) against the backdrop of modern Manhattan, because all the kids these days are into Edgy Urban Fantasy, don't you know. Um, and it's entirely another thing to build a world and charaters and story completely from scratch on the strength of a few unexplained line segments. Though, come to think of it, it's entirely likely that in both cases a roughly similar amount of the original will survive.
Nor am I alone in being a incredulous in print. The New York Times has a piece where, aside from reporting the news, the author speculates on what various directors would do with it; in the case of Michael Bay, we are told that “In this $300 million, three-and-a-half hour spectacle, loud and expensive computer simulations of large boulders crashing into one another are briefly interrupted by the hilarious antics of Chip and Gravel, two living rocks with gold teeth who speak in hip-hop slang, and the nonstop shouting of John Turturro.”
I haven't actually seen the new Transformers movie. (Or the old one.) But I did read an article whose author was, shall we say, less than entirely pleased with the racial sterotypes on display in the characters being referred to in the above. I also saw a trailer for the movie which, for me as a viewer unfamiliar with the Transformersverse, entirely failed to address the obvious question of why the giant robots found the tiny flesh-monkeys to be of any consequence.
But back to the that first article, which if one reads to the bottom (oh, hey, it also mentions the Sorceror's Apprentice thing) brings to light that “Universal, however, is used to that development process, as it's in the middle of doing just that for several of the Hasbro board game properties it is translating to the big screen, such as ‘Battleship’ and ‘Candyland.’”
I have run out of commentary.
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| Progress. |
[02 Jul 2009|12:54am] |
The cause of gay rights, at least in the US, has made some remarkable advances in the past few decades. The relevant legal issues on the table lately are things like legally recognized marriage and right to serve openly in the military, rather than people being prosecuted and driven to suicide. (Yes, kids, that's “prosecuted” with an ‘o’. Welcome to history.) This much is true.
It is also true that, in certain more enlightened communities, sexual orientation really isn't an issue. Conveniently, this happens to include all of the groups I'm likely to associate with, so I can be reasonably certain that none of my friends[*], few if any of my acquaintances, and hopefully none of my colleagues think of me as less than human, or would if they knew more about me.
A well-intentioned heterosexual might see these things and conclude that, to a first approximation, all's right with the world.
I, however, get to read in the news about a 1960's-style police raid on a gay bar carried out just this past Monday. I have to read about how “seven men were arrested during the raid … and one of those men — Chad Gibson — remains in intensive care with a brain injury. Gibson may not survive.” I get to know that, somewhere in my own country, just in the past week, someone (about the same age as me, even) got gay-bashed by the police, very nearly to death, with what sounds from the eyewitness statements an awful lot like malice aforethought.
There are reports that he's doing a little better (which is relative, given that he's still in intensive care and, well, this is vascular damage in the brain we're talking about here) since the initial report, which is good to hear.
[*] Notice how I carefully do not mention family here. How about that.
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| Merry Xmas |
[26 Jun 2009|02:47am] |
Tomorrow begins the 2009 ICFP Programming Contest. I will be largely ignoring the Interwebs and most other distractions for the duration. (I'll have to submit a move or two of the multiplayer Dominions 3 game I'm in, but that won't take too long, especially because I've mostly lost it already. CoH is right out.)
Also, this year it seems I will have another human to collaborate with. This is unprecedented.
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| Ualuealuealeuale |
[25 Jun 2009|02:10am] |
Today, I biked to school. It was still drizzling, but I've done that before. I was only mostly unproductive there. After that, I went to the Assembly Square Mall, via the Harvard Bridge, Memorial Drive, Land Blvd / Charlestown Ave / Austin St (according to the map), a Rutherford Ave which may or may not be New, and that goes to the Rotary Of Annoyance and as before.
Doing that route on a bike was somewhat like obtaining the golden rune of Zot: doable, but yeeeaaaarrrrrgh.
But now I have a whole dozen plain black t-shirts. And it turns out that the K-Mart actually does stock underwear in my preferred (brand, shape, textile, waistband tech), and of the two packages I found one was even in the right size, but they were both the same hideous colors I've gotten from online. I blame the economy. Also I went looking for stuff at the Home Despot, but failed to find it. Mostly this was to try out that route.
And then I went back home. Something like 14±1 miles for the day.
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| Bike Rage |
[23 Jun 2009|12:54am] |
Today I had a bit of Bike Rage. Nothing serious, but a definite… involuntary lapse of politeness. It was on the occasion of a car that had stopped (with blinkers on and someone in it) athwart the bike line I was using; at first I thought maybe I could go between it and the parked cars, but then I got closer and no; nor could I go around the other side, as there was traffic and more traffic. So I came to an annoyed stop, waited for what I hoped was a big enough gap in the cars, made to pedal, and my foot slipped off the wet pedal. It is thus that I passed the car while commenting “fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK”, with the last FUCK kind of shouted at the car. Oops.
Items on the other side of the Road Karma scale, in no particular order:
- The mangled metal railing that's been lying in the northbound bike lane on Mass. Ave. just before the Harvard Bridge[*] for at least a few days now. Someone helpfully put caution-tape around it, but has not, you know, taken it away. (It does not appear to be attached to anything, but of course I wasn't looking too closely as I was trying to lane-change on short notice.)
- In order to continue northward on Mass. Ave. past Harvard Square[%], it is necessary to traverse a certain confluence of roads in a lane which is on the right or center or left or maybe all of these things at various times, because the lanes keep shifting and aren't really marked except for when you're in the wrong one, and also either take or be on the right-hand side of that lane. Executing this maneuver correctly is… challenging, especially for a beginner. So I'm not sure if the car that honked and honked and then zoomed around me was annoyed because I was straddling lanes as it saw them, or just because I dared be in front of them.
- In Porter Square, a car I passed started to pull out of its parking space into me; it did not do that, but it was too close. “JESUS!”, I exclaimed. And then noticed the bystanders on the sidewalk. I continued primly, “Pardon me.”
Definitely more exciting than exercising in a gym, and I got to fail at a minor errand that could have waited while I was at it, but ugh.
[*] Which, for the out-of-towners, is not actually near the present-day Harvard University.
[%] This actually is where Harvard is.
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| You can't go walking in the morning dew today. |
[21 Jun 2009|11:40pm] |
Today, I logged about 75 minutes on the bicycle — oh, yes, I bought one Friday before last and entirely failed to inform the Internets. Anyway, on the bicycle, in the light but persistent rain. With my new raincoat, which I also didn't tell you about, but was needful as I've historically used umbrellas, and the only rain-worthy outerwear I have it's about 30°F too warm for.
So I biked in the rain, or really drizzle, and got slightly godzilla-bukkaked, but overall it was fun, and it's not like I could have made it to a Bed Bath & Beyond and a Trader Joe's in anything remotely like 90 minutes round-trip by any combination of T and walking.
I think this is the first time on the new bike that I tactically converted to pedestrian-mode — both because of a bit of road layout that managed to be obnoxious to both vehicle and foot traffic, and a couple unplanned events, like “oops, missed the turn; I'll get off and walk back to the intersection” and “OH SHIT THIS IS ONE-WAY THE WRONG WAY I'M ON THE WRONG STREET AAAAAAAA!” and yes I'm aware the latter is not the stereotypical reaction of a bicyclist in that situation, even facing down two lanes of oncoming cars, but.
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| Someone is WRONG on the Internet! |
[21 Jun 2009|01:50pm] |
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It's a comment on slashdot, so one doesn't really expect much, but:
Just so you know, HFCS {high fructose corn syrup} isn't something the human body can process well. Sugar is definitely better for you.
Oh really. Because when you eat sugar (sucrose), the first thing that happens to it is that it's hydrolyzed into equal quantities of glucose and fructose.
Now let us compare this with the grades of HFCS used in food and drink, which consist of… approximately equal quantities of glucose and fructose.
That is, it's a lot like sugar that's been pre-digested for you (though it happens to be made from corn). It's also about as sweet as the same amount of sugar; this may or may not be by design.
It's also a lot like honey, except without the flowery stuff or having been vomited up by bees.
What the commenter may have been thinking of is that, while glucose can be metabolized by pretty much every living cell on the planet, fructose eaten by humans has to get shipped off to the liver and be processed specially. Following this line of reasoning, one might want to have No-Fructose Corn Syrup instead; this is called “corn syrup” and is available at most food stores, and it is not only like but actually is pre-digested cornstarch.
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| Today's Kitchen Tip |
[18 Jun 2009|08:30pm] |
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While the “lunge to catch the falling utensil” reflex is often useful, care must be taken that it not override the “do not fling boiling water at one's own hand” condition.
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| Like Politics, But Entirely Pointless |
[14 Jun 2009|12:57pm] |
This morning, I awoke to find that Language Log castmember Geoffrey K. Pullum had posted a lengthy, colorful rant about the state of trash pickup in Ediburgh, including as rants are wont to some contentious and one-sided statements, and oh yeah I guess there's a bit of commentary on the bizarre language used by the local council to refer to trash and various operations concerning it.
Which would be all well and good but for that it was edited afterwards to append a pissy notice that the “more … non-linguistic” comments that had been left in response would be deleted.
In particular, I have to assume that the comment calling out the “I get up…before 7 a.m.…; so can they” on behalf of shift workers, which I'd have made myself[*] if someone else hadn't, is among them. I might also take issue with the contention that the trash barrels are possible only in “suburbia”, and the suggestion that his neighborhood's housing stuck utterly precludes any sort of rigid container[%]; but, oh, that would be offtopic.
Certainly it's everyone's right to do as they want in their own space — I've been known to kill Facebook comments for excess inanity — but that doesn't mean I can't whine about take issue with it.
And I believe I've mentioned my usual mood first thing in the morning.
[*] The reader may be thinking haughty thoughts about my time at Panix. The reader probably does not recall the summer I spent in a job that ran from 6:30 to 15:00, and which was a year-round job for my then cow-orkers. There are other jobs with odder times than that, I'm sure.
[%] This part could be true — I've not been there — but I must recall that a former tenement packed among many others, in the Spleen Of Manhattan, could deal with its trash easily enough.
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| Politicians lie in cast-iron sinks. |
[13 Jun 2009|11:53pm] |
“Unlike Senator Clinton, I support the complete repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) – a position I have held since before arriving in the U.S. Senate. While some say we should repeal only part of the law, I believe we should get rid of that statute altogether. Federal law should not discriminate in any way against gay and lesbian couples, which is precisely what DOMA does.”
— Barack Obama
Yay! I've been lied to by a politician! From my own party, on an issue I care about! I feel so grown-up now.
As I may or may not have properly stressed in my last post, while Obama did not personally write it, he is certainly responsible for directing its general content, and I believe should have exercised some form of oversight over the details. (Full disclosure: I effectively failed the US Government AP test, though some of that was letting most of a year elapse between the class and the test, as I took the class over the summer.) So, yes, I feel I am justified in calling this a lie by Obama the person. I continue to object to completely obliterating the distinction between Obama and his Cabinet's underlings as a cheap manipulative ploy.
What I do have to retract, however, is my earlier comment that the pro-DOMA stance should have been unsurprising given Obama's earlier statements; I forget if I specifically specified his campaign here or if that sank into the mire of another blog's comment system, but especially so for that.
Also, I should definitely not leave politics posts sitting half-written while doing something else for a few hours, because then I forget where I was going, but also I begin to doubt the wisdom of actually posting, and that just won't do.
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| In which I am dismayed by a political blogger's bias. |
[12 Jun 2009|10:47pm] |
People keep linking to this AmericaBlog post on the US Department of Justice's latest legal brief in the current federal court case over the Defense Of Marriage Act.
The post begins by saying that “Obama defends” the act and “Obama claims” various things and “Obama is … destroying our civil rights”, as if it were a political statement by the President himself (cf. Rick Santorum), when in fact this is about a legal document written by several members of the Department of Justice. Obama is their boss's boss, and to be sure they're doing generally what they were told, but I find this characterization somewhat disingenuous.
What I find much more disingenuous is the allegation that the brief equates same-sex marriage with either “incest and people marrying children” or, incredibly, “incest and child rape”. The “child” in question, the determined reader learns, was 16 years old — i.e., had attained the age of consent in a good many US states[*], including presumably the one in which she had been legally married. Because, unsurprisingly, a legal opinion on a case about marriages recognized in one state but not others is going to refer to earlier cases about marriages recognized in one state but not others; and I have my suspicions as to what issues are generally going to be involved in that.
As to the fact that Obama's DoJ chose to use these cases to argue in favor of DOMA: have we already forgotten his campaign statements on same-sex marriage? This part should be unsurprising.
However. The part where the DoJ argues that same-sex marriages should be denied federal recognition because the tax breaks and other benefits would cost too much money and the budget is already tight — that is every bit as bizarrely ridiculous in the original as in summary. In fact, the obvious retort of “Yeah, so how about we stop recognizing opposite-sex marriage, too? I bet that'll save a lot of money!” (i.e., my first reaction, as shouted at the monitor) seems to be about as well justified by the same text with a small deletion or two and a simple search-and-replace.
Also, there are some more slimy bits hiding in there; I'll need to spend more time on them before I have an opinion, but it does seem as if the DoJ was unnecessarily vicious (even allowing for lawyers' necessary tendency to ask for everything and the moon) in terms of not just asking for this case to be dismissed but also for more general precedent to be established, and in the details of that.
It's also, at the risk of stating the obvious, important to remember that is just what they're asking for; they might or might not get it. It still speaks to the administration's character, of course, but I personally am less concerned with the details of particular politicans' weaselry than with what affects the actual laws.
Finally, I must give John Aravosis credit for quoting the parts of the brief he summarized, thus allowing armchair commentators like me (and hey, I'm even doing this from an actual armchair) to form our own opinions without even having to go through the effort of hunting down the original ourselves.
[*] I am especially offended by this because I seem to recall reading that there's a history of similar distortions being used against gay people to falsely insinuate pedophilia. I mention this so that, in the grand tradition of Usenet, someone will tell me I'm wrong.
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| Yet More On Wheels |
[10 Jun 2009|11:49pm] |
Today I walked down to the Broadway Bicycle School, which had been recommended to me by several different people, to present my situation to them. The people there are, indeed, really nice. But first, hardware.
I wound up test-driving two three-speeds. Operating a hub gear was not, in fact, one of those “Yes! Where has this been all my life!” moments, but rather more of an “Oh; so I turn the control, and it does what it's supposed to. I'll stop thinking about it now.”
Coaster brakes, meanwhile, really do break my reflexes; not only am I not used to making foot movements to slow down, but it turns out I really, really am used to being able to backpedal at a stop to get my feet where I want them. I suppose I could get used to this eventually, but. Also, on the bike I tried that had the coaster brake, it would slow the bike but not stop it in any useful distance; stopping needed the front hand brake as well. (Also, thing to think about during all this: braking in rain.)
The second bike had the usual freewheel semantics and two hand brakes, which is not something I'm used to seeing three-speeds with. The frame fit better, too, I think, though I'd definitely need to swap the seat out for something less narrow. (And add on fenders. And a rack.)
There was an odd feeling I got from both of them, which I couldn't put my finger on at the time, but I think it might have been that they're built to put my hands farther back and my posture more upright than I'm used to. Which, given that I'm looking at commuting rather than racing, is probably what I want, I think.
At the end of this, I was still feeling kind of unsure, and so the person who'd been helping me (despite that I don't think I even actually said as much) suggested that maybe I ought to take some time and think about it, and try out some bikes at another store, so I could be sure I was making the right decision. That right there is worth a lot, even if I do wind up buying from someone else.
In other news, today I noticed that the author of one of the informational resources I'd been reading was 1) married to one of the faculty in my department, and 2) deceased as of last year.
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[07 Jun 2009|05:15pm] |
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And now I am reading through all the 190 LiveJournal comment notification emails I'd left marked unread in the hope of responding to them later. Going back to late 2007.
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| See the triple moons! |
[07 Jun 2009|03:38pm] |
Back in the mid-70s, there was a TV show called Land of the Lost, which (or so it is written) had a budget that made Doctor Who look like a modern summer blockbuster, but was uncommonly well done as a work of speculative fiction. Of course, that was before I was born, and in fact I didn't even know that that version of it existed until a few years ago.
In the early 90s, some TV people apparently decided to desecrate the childhoods of all the then-twentysomethings and put together a remake. It probably had a bit more money, but discarded much of what had made the original great. And this is what I watched when I was young. To the show's credit, it taught me some valuable life lessons, like that if you take the lizard king's mind-dagger it will turn you into a goth.
And now it's 2009, and some movie people have decided to desecrate my childhood by make a screamingly godawful CGI-heavy movie. Which, it pleases me to know, has not been doing especially well at the box office.
I did not see it, of course. I very likely wouldn't have seen it anyway, but for good measure I was warned off in no uncertain terms by seeing the trailer when I went to see Star Trek. In fact they screened the trailer twice, and the second time I kind of wanted to preemptively spork out my eyeballs.
There is not enough booze on this planet or any other.
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[05 Jun 2009|08:57pm] |
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Bother. I've forgotten my earplugs. I'll just soak the damage this time.
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