So, how were those debates, huh? Kerry totally won, right? Is it just me, or did Kerry come out ahead. Mark Shields agrees with me. But here's the thing -- I listen to Air America all the time, and they love to say, "This new study came out in The Washington Post," or "an article in The Nation claims," and, I mean, guys, these are left-wing newspapers. We're part of your base, so we definitely know this, and if you're trying to make us feel good, please quote something supportive from, oh, I don't know... like... David Brooks or that dumb fuck Friedman or something.
I... hmmm. My mind is bad tonight. I can't... remember things. Ugh.
Busy, busy, busy at work. Boy, I can't wait until [New software version] comes out! What a huge amount of personal pride I will take in the finished product! Some fucking salesperson scumbag told us all the other day, "I thank God every day for [other leathery salesperson, whose knowledge of computing is matched only by his success at being a non-awful non-scumsucking Willy Loman waste of space]." Jesus. Christ. People, I'm not taking anyone to task for not caring about something boring, but hey, I put in the time here -- in computer stuff, that is, not work. Thank God for me, because I care about boring shit so you don't have to.
Speaking of which, I'm still trying to get some developer docs for gzochi together. Plus, I'm trying to get more aggressive about actually implementing stuff now that will make it possible to get some game-like things working. I'm developing this sample "game" called "chat-example" that will hopefully be illustrative for new game designers, and I'm using it to help myself flesh out the Guile-to-C interface I want to implement; that is, I pretend that I have the entire API and XML parsing system that I need, and just go ahead and implement stuff and refer to not-yet-written procedures and stuff like that. This way I know what's necessary for when I go back and write the game management side of things. I've already discovered that I'll need to add at least some kind of minimal class/inheritance logic to make objects act the way you'd expect as a developer. Shit -- "logic." That's a business word for "the ideas in the algorithm." This shit is rubbing off on me.
Racist, racist, racist.
I gave some more money to Kerry yesterday. He didn't disappoint me tonight.
Thursday, September 30, 2004
Monday, September 27, 2004
Tekeli-li!
Sky Captain? More like, "I Sky Crapped in my pants over how awful this movie is!" More like, "Sky Captain and The Non-Interactive Backdrop." More like, "Ia! Ia! Shub Niggurath!" Devin didn't like it neither, and he literally majored in liking things. Good boy, Dex.
Look at this, found on Jamie Zawinski's blog. It got me so paranoid and depressed that I printed out some Bertrand Russell to use as ammo should the need arise. Don't think it will -- the F's pretty secular.
Speaking of cockroaches, the roach problem here is bad tonight. I bought 4 new roach motels and put three of them in the kitchen, because those fuckers are getting bold. I saw a little one and a big waterbug in the cabinets wihin the span of like 15 minutes. Don't tell Mer. She'll find out when she reads this, anyway.
I went up to visit my old friend Asta last night -- yes, that's right, Sunday -- up in the 'Heights, round 187th or so. She was having a "hard liquor and boardgames" party, a premise dangerously close to hipsterism, but which turned out to be really sweet and nice. I saw a bunch of fairly acceptable people from high school, including, I'm pretty sure, a literal date-rapist, and got along pretty well with 'em all. The second best part, though, was coming home on the A. I was in the last car and it was empty and noisy -- perfect setting for a little singin' to one's self. And I sang all the way down to 145th, when this guy came into the car and wanted to sketch my portrait. "Not that you want or need a portrait," he said, "but I do the whole thing while the train is moving. I'm that good."
Look at this, found on Jamie Zawinski's blog. It got me so paranoid and depressed that I printed out some Bertrand Russell to use as ammo should the need arise. Don't think it will -- the F's pretty secular.
My house smells just like a zoo
It's chock full of shit and puke
Cockroaches on the walls
Crabs crawlin' on my balls
Aw, but I'm so clean cut -- I just wanna fuck some slut!
Speaking of cockroaches, the roach problem here is bad tonight. I bought 4 new roach motels and put three of them in the kitchen, because those fuckers are getting bold. I saw a little one and a big waterbug in the cabinets wihin the span of like 15 minutes. Don't tell Mer. She'll find out when she reads this, anyway.
I went up to visit my old friend Asta last night -- yes, that's right, Sunday -- up in the 'Heights, round 187th or so. She was having a "hard liquor and boardgames" party, a premise dangerously close to hipsterism, but which turned out to be really sweet and nice. I saw a bunch of fairly acceptable people from high school, including, I'm pretty sure, a literal date-rapist, and got along pretty well with 'em all. The second best part, though, was coming home on the A. I was in the last car and it was empty and noisy -- perfect setting for a little singin' to one's self. And I sang all the way down to 145th, when this guy came into the car and wanted to sketch my portrait. "Not that you want or need a portrait," he said, "but I do the whole thing while the train is moving. I'm that good."
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Chunk-Star
Don't drink, don't smoke, don't fuck -- fuck you!Listen to what happened. It's a computer thing, but it's crazy. I was fixing my sister's computer -- something I have to do every few months because she's always installing viruses and spyware and things like that. Usually it just means running AdAware and such, but this time I thought I'd install Windows XP Service Pack 2 in the hope that all the new security fixes would let me off the hook for this sort of thing in the future.
Straight-edge kids... fuck you!
Okay, so I get the laptop home and plug it into my network and it starts downloading SP2 automatically, which is nice. So that takes a while, and then it's 'validating' the download or some shit, so I go and start making some food. Well, I get back, and the laptop has turned itself off. This is where the crazy stuff begins. Guys, just so you know, I know next to nothing about any of this Windows shit, so keep it mind I am just guessing how to do all this stuff as I'm doing it.
Me: Oh, maybe SP2 needed to restart the laptop but it got turned off by accident. (Turns laptop back on.)
Laptop: (Begins to boot into Windows, then, accompanied by Blue Screen of Death) PROCESS1_INITIALIZATION_FAILED.
Me: Hmmm... the laptop is awfully hot. Maybe some internal motherboard sensor is freaking out. (Waits 10 minutes. Starts laptop up again.)
Laptop: PROCESS1_INITIALIZATION_FAILED.
Me: Gee, this looks bad. Let me search the Internet on my other computer to see what this means.
Internet: (Thinks for a while.) You are fucked. Format your hard disk and re-install Windows XP.
Me: Ack! No, I can't do that! This is my sister's laptop -- it's got all her MP3s on it and she needs it to write a paper for school tomorrow night! There's gotta be something I can do... oh, I know, I'll boot off a Windows XP CD and try to check the hard disk for errors. (Burns a copy of Windows XP Professional, Yale Academic Edition, and boots off of it.)
Laptop, via Windows XP CD: Do you want to start the Recovery Console?
Me: Ooh, that sounds good. Yeah!
Laptop: What's the Administrator password?
Me: Oh, fuck, I don't know. Hang on. (Makes a phone call to parents' house.) Hey, sister, what is the Administrator password?
Sister: There is no Administrator password!
Me: Okay, thanks. (Hangs up. Tries the CD-boot thing again.)
Laptop: What's the Administrator password?
Me: Ah, fuck.
Internet: Excuse me, but have you heard about these special programs you can use to reset Windows XP Administrator passwords? You burn them onto a CD and then you boot off the CD and then you can reset the password. Here, try this one.
Me: Oh, okay, thanks. (Burns the program onto a CD and boots the laptop off of it.)
Laptop, via Linux NTFS CD: Hey, you wanna try to reset the Administrator password?
Me: Yeah!
Laptop: Sorry, your registry files are corrupt! Peace!
Internet: Okay, that one didn't work out so well. You wanna try again with this one?
Me: Well... alright. (Burns the program onto a CD and boots the laptop off of it.)
Laptop, via Linux NTFS CD v2: Hey, you wanna try to reset the Administrator password?
Me: Yeah!
Laptop: Sorry, your registry files are corrupt! Peace! Oh, wait -- you wanna try to change the settings for the Recovery Console so it doesn't need the Administrator password?
Me: Uh... yeah, that sounds good. Let's do it. (Does it. Puts the Windows XP Boot CD back in the drive and reboots.)
Laptop: Okay, here's the Recovery Console. As you can see, it's a lot like DOS. You can type stuff and run a few programs.
Me: Well, I'm pretty sure this is all due to some kind of filesystem problem. Laptop, can we check the disk for errors?
Laptop: Sure. (Thinks for a while.) The disk is fine.
Me: Hmmm... what should we do now? Internet, any ideas?
Internet: Well, the registry, the giant configuration file for Windows, is divided into two big pieces. One's called SOFTWARE and has settings for installed programs; the other one's called SYSTEM and has all the settings for the hardware. There are backups of both files in "C:\WINDOWS\REPAIR."
Me: Okay, let's replace the SOFTWARE file with the backup one.
Laptop: PROCESS1_INITIALIZATION_FAILURE.
Me: That didn't work. Let's try replacing the SYSTEM file with the backup.
Laptop: (Reboots ad infinitum.)
Me: That's not good either. Well, I'm out of ideas again.
Internet: Excuse me, but I just found something that Microsoft's saying that might be helpful. Microsoft?
Microsoft: Yes, thanks, hmmm... well, you see, if you've got a bad Service Pack 2 installation, you can roll it back using the Recovery Console by typing 'batch spuninst.txt'.
Me: Okay, I'll try that. (Does. It works. The laptop is now back in the state it was in before the trouble started -- still with several viruses and spyware programs. It is 2:30 AM.)
And... scene.
Monday, September 20, 2004
Orance Juice Guerillas
Hey Bill, if you're reading this, check it out -- I had this dream last night that we were hanging out on the L.E.S. and went to get some Chinese food. You wanted dim sum; I wanted to get some broccoli with garlic sauce, but the chef or whoever it was we were ordering from was like, "No! Dim sum only!" He explained that it was close to closing time and that he had all this dim sum that he had to get rid of, so dim sum was what I had to get. And you know, I'm not even a hundred percent sure what dim sum is -- I think it's this little pancake thing you use to wrap up some other food items -- but in my dream, dim sum was like millions of little bright pink shrimp with their shells on, and you'd just get this little wooden drawer full of them all neatly stacked in rows, and you just had to reach in and put a handful in your mouth. They were crunchy, on account of the shells, and had this vaguely stale taste, like an attic. Not unpleasant, but not pleasant, either.
Also you mentioned that Laura was hassling you for child support for this kid that you said you two'd never had. I asked whether you were going to try to prove that she was scamming you, but you were like, "No. She's got a paternity test that says it's mine." Oh.
Also you mentioned that Laura was hassling you for child support for this kid that you said you two'd never had. I asked whether you were going to try to prove that she was scamming you, but you were like, "No. She's got a paternity test that says it's mine." Oh.
Sunday, September 19, 2004
"Who The Hell Is Elaine Stritch"
This is a great recipe -- I just made it. The culinarilly-inclined among you (Ted) may want to give it a shot. Takes about half an hour to prepare; cost like $15, serves two. For $7 more you could make enough for four, I'd wager.
Watching the Emmys for some reason. Tony Kushner, you are the original punk rocker.
I just solved this stupid synchronization problem that I'd been poking at all weekend and not getting. I say it's stupid because it looks obvious now that I've solved it, but, you know... ugh. And of course I'm going to explain because that's one of the things I like to do. So.
A semaphore is a synchronization primitive (well, it's not necessarily a primitive, but...) consisting of a condition variable and a counter. You can "wait on the semaphore" by attempting to decrement the value of the counter. If it's greater than zero when you do this, the counter gets decremented and the call returns immediately; if it's zero, your thread goes to sleep until another thread "posts the semaphore," incrementing the value of the counter, at which point your thread wakes up, decrements it, and the call returns.
Many semaphore implementations provide, in addition to the "wait" function, a "trywait" function, in which you merely check the value of the semaphore, and if it's zero, instead of sleeping, you just inform the calling thread that it would have slept. If it's not zero, you do what the normal wait function does, which is decrement the value of the counter and return. My semaphore implementation provides this function.
Here's what happened: I wanted to wait for an item to be added to this queue (the queue's embedded semaphore would get posted when this happened). I didn't want to wait forever, though, so I did a trywait on the queue's semaphore, and if it came back false, indicating that the value of the counter was zero, I would wait for a while to see if somebody added something to the queue -- and if they did, grab it and return it, otherwise just return NULL. Here's the problem: I'd do the trywait, it would come back false, so I'd sleep for a while, get woken up by somebody adding to the queue, grab the value, but hold on a sec -- the semaphore's counter never got decremented, because the trywait came back false initially and we never decremented when we got woken up! So the next person to wait for an item to get added to the list would see that the semaphore's counter was non-zero, decrement it, try to grab something off the list, get NULL, and, well... It showed up in my program as the server pinging the client over and over without waiting for the timeout period to pass.
Why do I post these boring explanations of boring stuff? Well, because it's not boring, fuckers -- it's awesome! It's totally a mind-blow the extent to which code can seem like this gaseous, chaotic stuff until you resolve a bug and all of a sudden it all coalesces into a beautiful, mechanically glorious whole. Three worlds, guys. Three worlds.
Starting to work on documentation; DocBook is real fun to work with, but the docbook2texinfo converter is super frustrating because it insists on naming your fucking info document with a normalized string it generates based on a bunch of mystery factors that I can't control. Like, for example, I can't make it produce 'gzochi-server.info' out of 'gzochi-server-manual.docbook.xml'. The best I can seem to do is 'gzochi_server_manual.info'. You hear that Steve Cheng? Insane. And don't get me started on how retarded automake can be when it comes to dynamically-generated documentation.
I didn't do anything this weekend.
Watching the Emmys for some reason. Tony Kushner, you are the original punk rocker.
I just solved this stupid synchronization problem that I'd been poking at all weekend and not getting. I say it's stupid because it looks obvious now that I've solved it, but, you know... ugh. And of course I'm going to explain because that's one of the things I like to do. So.
A semaphore is a synchronization primitive (well, it's not necessarily a primitive, but...) consisting of a condition variable and a counter. You can "wait on the semaphore" by attempting to decrement the value of the counter. If it's greater than zero when you do this, the counter gets decremented and the call returns immediately; if it's zero, your thread goes to sleep until another thread "posts the semaphore," incrementing the value of the counter, at which point your thread wakes up, decrements it, and the call returns.
Many semaphore implementations provide, in addition to the "wait" function, a "trywait" function, in which you merely check the value of the semaphore, and if it's zero, instead of sleeping, you just inform the calling thread that it would have slept. If it's not zero, you do what the normal wait function does, which is decrement the value of the counter and return. My semaphore implementation provides this function.
Here's what happened: I wanted to wait for an item to be added to this queue (the queue's embedded semaphore would get posted when this happened). I didn't want to wait forever, though, so I did a trywait on the queue's semaphore, and if it came back false, indicating that the value of the counter was zero, I would wait for a while to see if somebody added something to the queue -- and if they did, grab it and return it, otherwise just return NULL. Here's the problem: I'd do the trywait, it would come back false, so I'd sleep for a while, get woken up by somebody adding to the queue, grab the value, but hold on a sec -- the semaphore's counter never got decremented, because the trywait came back false initially and we never decremented when we got woken up! So the next person to wait for an item to get added to the list would see that the semaphore's counter was non-zero, decrement it, try to grab something off the list, get NULL, and, well... It showed up in my program as the server pinging the client over and over without waiting for the timeout period to pass.
Why do I post these boring explanations of boring stuff? Well, because it's not boring, fuckers -- it's awesome! It's totally a mind-blow the extent to which code can seem like this gaseous, chaotic stuff until you resolve a bug and all of a sudden it all coalesces into a beautiful, mechanically glorious whole. Three worlds, guys. Three worlds.
Starting to work on documentation; DocBook is real fun to work with, but the docbook2texinfo converter is super frustrating because it insists on naming your fucking info document with a normalized string it generates based on a bunch of mystery factors that I can't control. Like, for example, I can't make it produce 'gzochi-server.info' out of 'gzochi-server-manual.docbook.xml'. The best I can seem to do is 'gzochi_server_manual.info'. You hear that Steve Cheng? Insane. And don't get me started on how retarded automake can be when it comes to dynamically-generated documentation.
I didn't do anything this weekend.
Thursday, September 16, 2004
Marky Next
So... here's a funny thing: I was at Panchito's over in the most horrible part of New York on any night of the week, Minetta Lane, to celebrate Katharine's birthday last week, and Sophie's friend Lisa was there with her boyfriend Dan Slobbo. I hadn't seen her since graduation, so she was asking me about my job and everything, and I told her I worked for a company that made distributed computing software. She seemed sort of taken aback for a second, then she said, "Well, I hope you're doing your best to make it less stupid and confusing." See, she misheard me. Hah. It's not terribly confusing, but it is stupid, I tell you what.
Oh yeah, and going home on the F, the train was making express stops because of construction or something, so one of the conductors was announcing which stops were gonna get skipped, but the intercom system was characteristically crackly, and it just so happened that whoever was driving the train needed to honk the horn at that moment because we were trying to pass another train or something, and, well, those subway horns are loud, so you basically couldn't hear the stops that the woman was announcing. Anyway, this fat, pretentious-looking dude sitting next to his girlfriend yells at the top of his lungs, "We can't hear you when you're blowing the horn! Argh!" Man, that pissed me off. I mean, I've got no surplus of love for the MTA, but:
Wow, how much is it literally about to rain?
So I just came back from the laundromat, where there's this adorable fat old curly-haired golden retriever. Okay, so some of the dryers they have are missing these top panel pieces, so you can see the inner workings of the machine, and guess what -- it's on fucking fire! Is this how all dryers work? The first time I saw it I thought something had gone wrong, but all the dryers there seem to do that. I guess if you want to make something hot, fire's the way to go.
Oh yeah, and going home on the F, the train was making express stops because of construction or something, so one of the conductors was announcing which stops were gonna get skipped, but the intercom system was characteristically crackly, and it just so happened that whoever was driving the train needed to honk the horn at that moment because we were trying to pass another train or something, and, well, those subway horns are loud, so you basically couldn't hear the stops that the woman was announcing. Anyway, this fat, pretentious-looking dude sitting next to his girlfriend yells at the top of his lungs, "We can't hear you when you're blowing the horn! Argh!" Man, that pissed me off. I mean, I've got no surplus of love for the MTA, but:
- The person speaking over the intercom is not necessarily the person driving the train, moron.
- She's gonna read it at every stop.
- No one finds it plausible that you were so overcome with rage that you just had to vent your frustration in the most affronted-white person way in the middle of a crowded subway car on a Tuesday night.
- No one is impressed by your inability to control yourself.
- You are a fucking idiot.
Wow, how much is it literally about to rain?
So I just came back from the laundromat, where there's this adorable fat old curly-haired golden retriever. Okay, so some of the dryers they have are missing these top panel pieces, so you can see the inner workings of the machine, and guess what -- it's on fucking fire! Is this how all dryers work? The first time I saw it I thought something had gone wrong, but all the dryers there seem to do that. I guess if you want to make something hot, fire's the way to go.
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Snapple-Grappling
I'm not much of a photog, but this sunset a couple of days ago was so pretty that I had to take a picture. That's our fire escape.
Man, was my stomach fucked up tonight! I was eating carrots all day at work and I guess that was too much fiber, because when I got home some things started churning around down there. It's funny because usually when I get sick to my stomach it's this awful whole-body thing where I just feel like I'm gonna die all over, but this time my mind was very clear and I was just thinking to myself that I'd better get to a shitter. And boy, did it stink. I'm sorry, but it's true. The thing is, I was in the middle of feeding the cat -- I'll get to that in a second -- when I had a real strong urge to go, and she was so intent on getting me to finish mixing her food that she tried to follow me to the bathroom. I'd left the bathroom door slightly ajar and she stuck her paw in and tried her hardest to open it. After warning her that she wasn't gonna like the smell, I cracked the door enough for her to poke her head in, and she did, but yanked it right back out as soon as she got a whiff in this really funny awkward way.
Oh yeah, so the vet thinks she might be chewing on herself because of a food allergy, so we're feeding her this 'limited ingredient' cat food, which apparently consists of naught but duck and peas. Sick, right? And the weird thing is, she's hungry all the time now. She can't wait to suck down her next serving of this greyish-green gelatinous puree.
Guess which of my many Bosses came back from two weeks of paternity leave that I'm pretty sure are in addition to his standard 4 weeks of vacation and opened our first meeting with, "I don't care [if] you got to stay late." Take as many guesses as you like.
As if you guys didn't have enough blogs to read, Raymond Chen over at Microsoft has a great and interesting blog about the reasons behind various Windows / Microsoft / x86 idiosyncrasies. Everyone praises it; now I'm praising it.
Jesus Fucking Christ: (link-a-dink)
BEIJING (Reuters) - China executed four people, including employees of two of its Big Four state-owned banks, for fraud totaling $15 million, the state Xinhua news agency said Tuesday....
The precise number of people executed for all crimes in China is a state secret. Reports range from 5,000 to 10,000 a year, many for murder, but they have also been killed for corruption and crimes as minor as bottom-pinching.Maggles has a 'blog. She didn't think I'd find it, but I did.
Thursday, September 09, 2004
Red Hot Moon
Bill, when we were talking outside the club last night I kind of backed into Kevin's friend, that big guy John (or he crept up on me) and he was so... soft. Huge soft smiling weirdo.
I took The Rase out to dinner tonight and who should we see at Dojo but our old friends Asta and the loathsome Zeke. I hadn't seen Asta in years, literally. She is looking good, let me tell you. She once told this guy who was giving her a hard time "Suck my pussy!" and, you know, was pretty much able to sell that line in an earnest, non-sassy way, no easy task.
Um. What. Else. I am thoroughly bored and not bored with my job.
I took The Rase out to dinner tonight and who should we see at Dojo but our old friends Asta and the loathsome Zeke. I hadn't seen Asta in years, literally. She is looking good, let me tell you. She once told this guy who was giving her a hard time "Suck my pussy!" and, you know, was pretty much able to sell that line in an earnest, non-sassy way, no easy task.
Um. What. Else. I am thoroughly bored and not bored with my job.
Weilding His Hideous Sandwich
No new 'blog entries in a while -- sorry, guys!
Man, was it ever hard to get to work yesterday. I waited for like half an hour at the 7th Ave. F stop before someone on the opposite track yelled out to us that the East Broadway stop was flooded and that F trains were basically not going into Manhattan. So I got out of the station and grabbed the B67 to Flatbush and 7th Ave. for the 7th Ave. Q/B stop. A B came pretty quickly, and I thought my troubles were over until we got over the Manhattan bridge and then just... stopped. After about half an hour or 45 minutes or so, the radio twittered to us that there was a power outage at the West 4th St. stop and that trains who'd been trying to enter that station had decided to turn around and go back to Brooklyn. At first I thought that that's what we were going to do, which would have sucked, but it turned out we were just going to sit there and wait for them to get out of our way. That took about 30 more minutes. Finally they nudged our train just barely into Grand St. and we all had to walk through the train to the first car to exit. And there was a D train just sitting at Grand St. waiting to take me to work! And it did! That was great.
But the most irritating part of all of this was this very pear-shaped, baby-faced, acne ridden business-casual intern guy in our car who was or was acting like about 15 years old the whole goddamn time. He would take off his fucking discman headphones every few minutes and say things like, "They just can't do this to us. Fuck;" or, announcing to the whole car, "Okay, what I need right now is a fucking cigarette." Great, all the construction workers and part-time security guards trying to get to work are very impressed at what a grown-up smoker you are. They totally don't think you're a faggot. The more he said, "Fuck," the more ineffectual and irritating he sounded. Damn it. Oh yeah, and he totally wasn't cool with having to evacuate the train. While we were filing out, he kept asking everyone, "What are we doing? What are we doing? Are they going to make us walk through the tracks? Because I'm definitely not cool with that."
Anyway, what am I doing? I don't know. This laptop feels like it's ready to bite the dust. Yesterday I couldn't even get it to turn on.
Saw some Big Business last night. Happy Birthday, Chrittopher! With the help of Eric Prengel, I bought a delicious hero sandwich for only $4.50, and it lasted me all night!
Tom lent me a copy of Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorazde, and it's really great, particularly the drawings. The reportage is, well, I don't know, it could use a good editor, most of it. But the drawings are fantastic, especially the ones Sacco does of himself. He looks totally creepy in his comic, even though he's actually kind of good looking in real life. I'm also reading W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants.
I miss you, too, little man!
What's going on with my programming project? Sorry guys, this has to be a part of every entry. Well, I got the ncurses interface for the little debug client I'm writing mostly off the ground. Ncurses is hard, but once you figure out how to do all the ncurses stuff in a single thread, it's cool. The only hard part is I can't figure out how not to force ncurses to busy-wait switching between listening for getch() input and listening to some other source (in my case, updates that show up in a synchronized queue). If you could do a select-based thing, it would be easy, since I could use a named pipe with the queue, but I don't know how to get getch() to write to an fd in the background. Crazy.
Man, was it ever hard to get to work yesterday. I waited for like half an hour at the 7th Ave. F stop before someone on the opposite track yelled out to us that the East Broadway stop was flooded and that F trains were basically not going into Manhattan. So I got out of the station and grabbed the B67 to Flatbush and 7th Ave. for the 7th Ave. Q/B stop. A B came pretty quickly, and I thought my troubles were over until we got over the Manhattan bridge and then just... stopped. After about half an hour or 45 minutes or so, the radio twittered to us that there was a power outage at the West 4th St. stop and that trains who'd been trying to enter that station had decided to turn around and go back to Brooklyn. At first I thought that that's what we were going to do, which would have sucked, but it turned out we were just going to sit there and wait for them to get out of our way. That took about 30 more minutes. Finally they nudged our train just barely into Grand St. and we all had to walk through the train to the first car to exit. And there was a D train just sitting at Grand St. waiting to take me to work! And it did! That was great.
But the most irritating part of all of this was this very pear-shaped, baby-faced, acne ridden business-casual intern guy in our car who was or was acting like about 15 years old the whole goddamn time. He would take off his fucking discman headphones every few minutes and say things like, "They just can't do this to us. Fuck;" or, announcing to the whole car, "Okay, what I need right now is a fucking cigarette." Great, all the construction workers and part-time security guards trying to get to work are very impressed at what a grown-up smoker you are. They totally don't think you're a faggot. The more he said, "Fuck," the more ineffectual and irritating he sounded. Damn it. Oh yeah, and he totally wasn't cool with having to evacuate the train. While we were filing out, he kept asking everyone, "What are we doing? What are we doing? Are they going to make us walk through the tracks? Because I'm definitely not cool with that."
Anyway, what am I doing? I don't know. This laptop feels like it's ready to bite the dust. Yesterday I couldn't even get it to turn on.
Saw some Big Business last night. Happy Birthday, Chrittopher! With the help of Eric Prengel, I bought a delicious hero sandwich for only $4.50, and it lasted me all night!
Tom lent me a copy of Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorazde, and it's really great, particularly the drawings. The reportage is, well, I don't know, it could use a good editor, most of it. But the drawings are fantastic, especially the ones Sacco does of himself. He looks totally creepy in his comic, even though he's actually kind of good looking in real life. I'm also reading W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants.
I miss you, too, little man!
What's going on with my programming project? Sorry guys, this has to be a part of every entry. Well, I got the ncurses interface for the little debug client I'm writing mostly off the ground. Ncurses is hard, but once you figure out how to do all the ncurses stuff in a single thread, it's cool. The only hard part is I can't figure out how not to force ncurses to busy-wait switching between listening for getch() input and listening to some other source (in my case, updates that show up in a synchronized queue). If you could do a select-based thing, it would be easy, since I could use a named pipe with the queue, but I don't know how to get getch() to write to an fd in the background. Crazy.
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