Pony Keg

Okay, who hasn't seen Fahrenheit 9/11? While I was watching City Of God last week, I thought of this alternate title for it, but it'd do pretty good for Fahrenheit, too: Scum In Hell.

I'm crushing on this Distillers song Seneca Falls real hard right now, which is kind of gay, since it's about Women's Rights. The funny thing is, a lot of web sites will let you download it for free. Maybe it was one of their singles or something.

I've got this scratchy feeling in my throat, which makes me thing I'm getting sick. The past two summers, I've gotten a bad sore throat and a fever right around this time -- I think it has something to do with mucus building up in my throat -- but I'd prefer not to have it happen right this weekend because, well, I want to eat hamburgers and drink beer and all that.

Having just come off the early shift, I seem to have picked up a disturbing habit -- I've started writing these pseudo-shorthand sentences, like, "Thanks for the data. Will get back to you shortly." Sick.

The Darkest Of The Hillside Thickets

Have you ever had to flush butter down a toilet? On moving day, or I guess maybe it was the day after moving day, I found a stick of butter in our old fridge, and I was like, "This guy's not gonna make it." So, for want of a garbage can, I took it into the bathroom and flushed it. Of course this was a bad idea -- that even started to occur to me as I was pushing the handle down, but, you know... So the toilet got really clogged.

Last Saturday I went to this "Anyone, But Especially Kerry" fundraising party / event and saw a whole bunch of Harvard kids from my high school. Ugh -- now I remember why I don't hang out with them any more. This one guy kept trying to get me to dance, and I was like, hey, okay, so I started just waving my arms around and being silly, and he starts going, "Okay, but on the beat. Listen for the beat." What the fuck? Suck a cock, buster -- I'm a drummer, for fuck's sake. I'll do what I want. Plus, the one person I really even wanted to see didn't show. Oops, besides The Rase, that is -- always good to see her.

Having just written hundreds of lines of ugly, sloppy, UDP packet reorder / reassembly code, I started surfing around to see if there was maybe a stable, ubiquitous library that would do it for me. I happened across GNetLib, an outgrowth of GLib (not glibc, mind you), that does not stuff. It didn't do what I wanted, but the search kind of threw me into a panic about how I'm totally re-inventing the wheel a whole bunch in this stuff I'm doing on this project, and probably not in a very robust way. But then I calmed down and was like, well, this thing is kind of my hobby, my art, if you will, and I guess I'm kind of taking the same approach to it that I do for writing anything, code or not -- that approach being the polishing-a-turd approach. I like to create the turds from scratch and then slowly polish the fuck out of them. Not that I'm putting any of it down, mind you -- it all rocks, without exception -- it's just an expression. "Polishing a turd."

Then I totally jerked off.

That crippled kid who wrote all that poetry just died. Man, sometimes life's just so unjust -- like when you turn on the news and they're reading shit like this on the air:

No matter who you are,
Say a prayer this season.
No matter what your faith,
Say a prayer this season.
No matter how you celebrate,
Say a prayer this season.
There are so many ways
To celebrate faiths,
There are so many faiths
To celebrate life.
No matter who,
No matter what
No matter how...
You pray.
Let's say a prayer
This season,
Together, for peace.

Man, this makes me want to go murder someone. Also, there was that thing that kid said about not being able to ride the 7 train to Shea without some fag with AIDS dying all over him. Hero. Poet hero.

Went running yesterday -- think I made it about 2/3 of the 3.8 miles without walking.

How excited is everyone about CoC: Dark Corners of the Earth? Very excited. I wish they'd publish some system requirements so I could start the upgrade process on the ol' desktop sooner.

I Will Go Down With This Ship

Man, I had a scary dream last night -- my old high school friends Billy and Chris and I had organized this Fight Club-esque fighting tournament, and I ended up killing this guy I was fighting. And it was one of those awful dreams where it's not just the violence (which I think was sort of mercifully elided), but the entire guilty aftermath, in which it becomes clearer and clearer that you are in deep shit until you finally jerk awake. The thing is, though, a tangential aspect of the dream was that I figured out how to get this stupid light on my answering machine to stop flashing -- which it's been doing since we moved -- and I was kind of disappointed when I woke up to see that it was back to not being fixed. I mean, who do I have to kill around here to... right?

One of the things that has begun to tick me off about working for a corporate software company is how customer-driven the design process is. What I like about UNIX libc, for example, is that from a user's point of view, it looks very much like they've (the designers / developers) taken the time to read the research on things, they've thought about all the possible ways in which a piece of software might and should be used -- and not just in a commercial sense, in a "What if I did this?" kind of academic sense -- and they've written a really adaptive piece of software that fits in as best it can philosophically with what's already out there and allows new stuff to be built on top of it in a sane way. (There are a few exceptions to this, such as the various GLIBC binary compatibility nonsenses and the awful, confusing ctime() / time() / gettimeofday() / etc. functions.) The business software people are totally the opposite of this. They've got these ridiculous systems that are set up in literally the worst-possible-but-still-able-to-function way, and their attitude is, "Well, whatever new thing we're going to develop / buy / whatever, it should just work with what we've got." That little credo about things "just working" is the reason behind all this Windows virus / worm / whatever bullshit, if I may get self-righteous for a moment. And when you're designing software that caters to this attitude, you wind up with something that's very niche and isn't very interesting, and really just isn't further developable after a certain point because it's such a lopsided monster and the processes / systems it depends on have eventually been phased out because somebody realized they were bullshit.

And don't tell me it's about money. I know it's about money, but it's gotta be more expensive to finally overhaul a car-crash of a system than it is to make short term re-arrangements that keep you on the path to sanity. Maybe they're just so sure that by the time they have to seriously rethink their software architecture, they'll be out of business or the company itself'll have been drastically re-organized anyway that it's not worth the trouble.

And that doesn't always happen -- listen to this paragraph from Joel On Software about Microsoft:

I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.

Oh my God. This is 100% absolutely the dumbest thing I have ever heard of. And fucking Spolsky thinks it's genius! The management people at Maxis who told Microsoft to do this should be fired, and the management people at Microsoft who agreed to this should be fired, too. When I first clicked his article on How Microsoft Lost the API War, I thought it was going to be about how no one writes Windows code because their API is such a convoluted disgusting mess and there's about 10 different, extremely complicated and varyingly buggy ways to do this tiny simple thing that you want; but it turns out that Microsoft lost the API "war" because their API isn't backwards-compatible any more. I mean, that's a problem, but the nicest thing I can think of to say about .NET is that at least it looks like they're trying to create a rational and consistent API for people to use, even if they had to rip it off wholesale from Sun. If they had done this to start out with, maybe you wouldn't have to pay people a million dollars to touch Windows code today.

There But For The Grace Of God Goes Sherlock Holmes

Is everyone in the army a rapist or what? Props, Ted "Vicious" Rall -- you called it again.

I forgot to talk about the fucking massage I got: Mer and I went out for a walk to this little Gay Pride festival near our house, and one of the thousands of little tents was one of those Asian massage things where you sit in this weird chair and they give you a back rub. (Was it gay? Not sure.) Mer likes that sort of thing, so I offered to pay for her to get one, but once those crafty Orientals saw that we were interested, they started pulling me over to one of the chairs by my arm. I was like, "No, just her," pointing at Mer, but the lady pulling me was like, "No. Two. Two. You." So I had to get this stupid uncomfortable massage for ten minutes. I'm not one of those creepy people who's got some kind of thing about being touched -- I don't even have any Personal Space -- but I just flat out don't like back rubs. My back is fine, thanks. Anyway, at the end I had to pay for both of them.

One of my fucking Bosses, I'll let you guess which one, tried to suggest that I didn't know what IP multicast was. Wait, this is sounding like I'm being purposefully oblique. To qualify this, let's say that networks are like Shakespeare; it's like accusing someone of not having read Henry IV. Granted, not as popular as Hamlet, but if you're an English major, you've 100% probably fucking read it. "So, is it possible that [THE THING] is picking up the multicast address instead of the regular IP?" "You even know what multicast is?" Jesus Christ. And I was fucking totally on-the-money right, too. Anyway, he's incredibly rude. I don't like feeling like one of the whiny Executive Assistants I used to temp with; and I don't, really. I'm not going to say, "Dignity's more important than money." Please, humiliate me. I have to pay rent and save up for grad school. And hoard it, too, of course.

Kevin the Wass-man is having a 4th Of July party that I'm totally going to. With his usual degree of Mortal Kombat bombast, he claimed that he was going to have "1100 fireworks, at least." I haven't seen him in like 3 years. It's gonna be awesome.

Internet's still not working, but I successfully set up the wireless network last night. If you're in the area, the router's name is Goethe, but don't bother trying to connect, 'cause it's all WEP-secured, fags.

I'm reading the Live From New York book that I got Mer for Christmas. I knew everybody hated Chevy, but did you know that they also hated Nora Dunn, Victoria Jackson, and for cryin' out loud, Harry Shearer? Apparently Harry Shearer is a prick of tremendous proportions. And listen to this quote about Chris Farley, who I once saw in a restaurant:

Farley once stuck his ass out the window of the seventeenth floor at 30 Rock and took a shit. Another time, in front of twenty or twenty-five people in a very crowded writers' room -- mixed company, women, men -- Farley came in naked. He had his dick tucked between his legs and he was doing Jame Gumb from Silence of the Lambs. He took a golf club and shoved it about three inches up his ass, then pulled the golf club out and started licking it.

Jesus Christ!

"Oh Fuck Off, Chris"

Apparently someone reads his referrer logs. So much for all the whining on the ol' blog.

How good is that second 'The Office' Christmas Special? I don't know. Pretty good. My emotions? Call them successfully manipulated.

Fixed some troublesome threading problems with gzochi; for one of the first times in the history of the world, I was right and the debugger was wrong -- though they've fixed it in CVS, which is what I'm using now. Now I'm working on the UDP subsystem. UDP, being the not-guaranteed-to-deliver but somewhat faster cousin of TCP, requires that my code handle packet fragmentation (though this only happens with packets larger than 64k) and out of order delivery, and to generally be tolerant of lossage. Establishing a UDP "connection" is particularly troublesome since it takes place over a different port than the administrative stuff and you can't ID clients by originating host, since the traffic is bound to come over NAT-performing routers if it occurs on the Internet at all. To get around this I've established a "token" system, in which "new" UDP clients present a token that's been previously delivered to them over TCP.

More later, I guess. I don't know.

Tune & Rhythm On A Bubbledome

Well, we made it through the move. Now I know why people hire movers -- it's very hard and really sucks to do it yourself. Mer was a star at driving the U-Haul, but we got a ticket on it from parking it in a residential neighborhood overnight, plus we turned it in a few hours too late so all the costs doubled -- including the insurance, bringing the total cost up to like... $200. Christ. Still cheaper than movers, still cheaper than movers, etc.

The new place is nice, much bigger. We're still sorting all the things out. It gets very moist in there. I don't know, is it the external humidity or... what?

How much does Verizon suck, by the way? The lady I talked to the week before the move was very gracious and even helped me select a catchy new phone number, but she also said she'd notify our DSL provider to switch the Internet to the new number and when I called Earthlink a week and a half later to see how they were doing on it, they claimed to have no knowledge of the request. Zero knowledge, even. So now we don't have any Internet for two weeks.

Maybe I'm still exhausted from all the hoisting, but maybe I'm depressed. I don't know; I haven't been able to work on gzochi at all -- so much stuff needs to be done, like setting up the datagram delivery system and the event queue and the whole god-damn Scheme API. Why am I even doing this, anyway? Why would anyone want to write an RPG in LISP? God, when I look at what other people are doing, I get so depressed and jealous. This fucker from Yale DSAC, look what he's doing. Suck a cock, Collin Dickweed Jackson.

At least I'm not Dean Stark

I've been playing Red Dead Revolver, a copy I got from Devin, who said it was absolutely awful, but I'm kind of getting into it. It's pretty hard, and, like I think he mentioned, the camera's behavior is pretty infuriating sometimes, but, you know.

Went to see The Dickies at Irving Plaza on the 19th for some kind of Joey Ramone birthday thing. It was okay, but there were so many too old / tool young people there and almost no one was dancing around. Their set was okay -- they added See My Way, which is not my favorite song, but they also added Going Homo, which is my favorite song. Not really. Is it just me or was Leonard a lot more fun when he was on junk? None of you are going to answer that question, probably.

Oh, apparently he wants "Tiny" out of the band. Not that I blame him. Those guys are cretins.

I did AIDSWalk.

That's about it.