Bitches!

I bought stamps at the post office before coming to work and affixed them to the remaining "holiday cards" on the subway. The guy I was sitting next to was very well-dressed -- leather, etc. -- but he smelled like feces. I mailed the cards before coming upstairs. Literally nobody is in the office today. Zero developers. 2 QA people (including me -- I am honorary QA manager). Nothing can get done.

Sounds like Mitch Hedberg's got a little dok-dok-dok problem (or his existing problem has gotten worse). His act actually sounds pretty punk rock, though.

Okay, I'm home now. Razor Lopez and Chrissy Rodney were supposed to come over to hang out / play Xbox, but one's feeling sick and the other may not be doing so great either, so right now it's looking like an evening of drinking wine and hacking LISP by candlelight.

Fuck Christmas

Mer has flown the coop, so to speak. I miss her already. But we made a bunch of totally awesome "holiday" cards and maybe some of you will get one in the mail once I can buy some stamps.

We have switched the cat to this dry food that's supposed to help her skin, but I'm not very good about measuring out how much to give her -- I just pour it into the bowl until she pushes my hand out of the way with her head -- and it's kind of upset her stomach. She just crapped an extremely noisy diarrheaic crap into her litter box. Think the ring-presentation scene in Henry Fool.

Look, I know crapping on people who whine about the discrepancies between the book and movie versions of Lord of the Rings is kind of passe these days, but take a gander at this site. See... there seem to be a lot of you out there who think these books are some kind of masterpiece, but you need to face facts: This Tolkien guy is positively a misogynist and extremely probably a homosexual. I shit you not, I have read his biography. All this bullshit people are always carping about -- platonic ideal of male friendship and all that -- it's just Tolkien crapping on women and wanting to fuck his WW1 buddies. There is no such thing as this innocent, affectionate male friendship that people won't shut up about -- Sam wants to fuck Frodo. Don't you get it? And when you people get all fussy about Peter Jackson tampering with this sacred, sacred little repressed love affair it means a) you are gay, which is fine; or, b) you are a tiny little immature baby-person, because that was the creepiest goddamn part of the whole trilogy of books -- books, which, by the way, are notable more for the obsessiveness of their author than for anything else. They represent a disorder on the scale of this, minus the little naked girls with dicks, of course.

I sarcastically cannot wait to hear everyone's wonderful opinions about this upcoming thing.

Mer and I have been doing this thing recently which I think is fun enough to recommend to others. Instead of going to the movies or buying CDs or whatever, once a week we have been going out to eat, usually for brunch, at a different shi-shi restaurant in our neighborhood. It usually comes out to around $30, which is why we only do it once a week, but now we have totally eaten at like every restaurant in our neighborhood. Places like

• The Cornbread Cafe
- Good cornbread, which is something of a rarity; roasted potatoes to die for
• Applewood - Good food, especially if you like apples; they have a real working fireplace, too
• Dizzy's - Expensive, so-so food, and they gave us the bum's rush when it started to get busy
• 2nd St. Cafe - Deelightful, if you don't mind the wait. Best "huevos rancheros" in the galaxy.

Mer's playing of the light-side Jedi guardian is mad finished, son. It's time for my guy, Dark Jedi Astor Speeris -- heck, that's Darth Speeris to you -- to really shine, or do whatever dark lords of the Sith do. Simmer, I guess? I'm awesome at naming these guys. My dude from the first game was named Telstar Schlitz. Now I gotta do some laundry and get some groceries.

Oh yeah, and I forgot -- I don't usually like Mac Hall that much, but this strip is a keeper.

Oh Bess

I realized that I was really on edge literally because I couldn't decide whether I should write a full DOM implementation (a big stupid programming task -- this 'blog is still going to try to stay non-technical, don't worry) in Scheme and try to get it included in guile-lib and then depend on it for my library or whether I should write my own DOM-like API and expose that to users. And that's a stupid thing to worry about. So for the past couple of days I have just been taking it easy on myself, brain-wise. And that's okay, as far as I'm concerned.

None of you are getting Christmas presents from me, because frankly I think it's silly.

Went to see a production of a play called "The Highwayman" that my friend Julia was putting on; a bunch of my other friends were in it -- hell, I was almost in it myself but I got bumped in a case of cruel casting-call caprice. It was great, except that the theater-space it was in was not heated at all, and I was wearing my All-Star low-tops. My toesies got been frozed.

The Worst Day Of Your Entire Life

Mer made this sausage pasta dish tonight that it totally the best thing you can possibly eat if you don't care about the environment or your health. Here's how to make it -- it's from Joy of Cooking, but since you can't copyright a recipe I think it's okay to talk about it here. You'll need:

• About 3 (spicy) italian sausages, torn into little chunks with your fingers
• Broccoli (or other steamable veggie) cut up however you like it
• Some garlic, chopped up small
• Some hot red pepper flakes if you want
• Olive oil, a third of a cup or so

Heat up the oil in a skillet and cook the sausage until it looks somewhat cooked. Put the garlic in there and keep cookin' until the garlic gets cooked and sprinkle the pepper if you've got it. Now add the veggie and get a piece of tinfoil and, with oven mitts, wrap it around the skillet and just leave it for 5 minutes. Now you're done -- put it on pasta and you've got a meal. Bam!

I've been reading some old textbooks on computability I had lying around and reviewing the proofs for shits and giggles -- it's like playing a videogame with a walkthrough. Among the amusing results, for the sake of review:

• It is not possible to write a program that can figure out whether or not a particular program will behave in a particular way given a particular input (call it "accepting" or "rejecting" a string)
• It is not possible to write a program to determine whether another program rejects all string
• Furthermore, it is not possible to write a program that can tell whether two programs have any properties related to string-acceptance in common at all
• It's not possible to write a program that can tell whether another program is as efficiently-written as possible

I had a meeting at work today that I was pretty on edge about, and it turned out to not really be anything. And of course I can't say anything else about it, this being the Internet and all, so you guys don't care. But I'm still kind of neither here-nor-there regarding how I feel about my job, which is stupid because they pay me more than I think is probably necessary for... well, for something for which I've basically put all the actually important things in life aside. So.

Taking a tip from Devin, who literally has a separate blogger.com account for each of the cartoon characters in Yu-Gi-Oh! with whom he's consumated a relationship, I've added a little sidebar that contains an HTML-ization of my Advogato RSS feed. What the fuck does that mean? Well, it means I don't have to write about computer stuff in this 'blog any more, because any interested parties (don't think there are any) can read about it there. It also means there'll be fewer entries in here, because I don't give a fuck about shit that doesn't compute, knowwha'msayin'? Now I just need to find a way to fix the stupid font color for those links.

Vacation Wrap-Up

So, the vacation's almost up. I didn't do that much stuff, or at least not as much as I expected to do. Let's see...

• On Sunday and Wednesday I went running. After that it got way, way too cold in the late afternoon, which is when I like to go
• Rented a couple of movies that I'd been wanting to see for a while: The Wicker Man and eXistenZ. The Wicker Man kind of dragged it's feet a bit when it came to making with the scary (make with the scary already!) but it was a fine character study, at least. And it has songs. Everyone (i.e., the back of the box) is always comparing eXistenZ to The Matrix, but that's stupid. I think the Matrix maybe had a cleverer premise, but not even. Whatever. Fuck talking about movies.
• Vacuumed and cleaned a whole bunch
• Partied out with Razor Lopez a bit
• I went shopping at the Target down at the Atlantic Center mall on Flatbush near our old place. Let me tell you something -- Target is some nice shit. It almost approaches the level of, like, a department store in Manhattan, where you feel like you're too dirty and poor to shop there. I bought some new boxers, a pitcher for juice, and a wonderful glass container for storing flour so that the larder beetles don't have babies in it any more.

I was thinking I wouldn't be able to talk about this at all -- for diplomatic reasons -- but since Mer wrote about it in her 'blog, you can just read all about it there: My mom thinks I live in a cave

After her mom left, Mer and I went out to brunch to celebrate at the 2nd Street Cafe (it's on 7th Ave.), and I had these huevos rancheros that were basically the most delicious thing I'd ever eaten. I mean, I've never had huevos rancheros before, but shit. I could eat 'em for god-damn forever. Anyway, on the way home we stopped at GameStop and Mer bought this game called Syberia II, which is like a sort of shitty version of Myst set in the colder parts of Europe -- an idea not without its charm, mind you.

So Mer and I have been playing this game, but it just sort of freezes up all the time, so this morning I re-played all this stuff that we'd played yesterday but lost. The funny thing about the game, though, is that by default there's a subtitle track that goes along with the voice acting, and whoever wrote out the script... well, they really wrote it out, so you've got characters whose dialogue comes up as something like, "Snigger. Sure seems like it, eh, pet? Snigger."

Okay, so you know how I said I wanted to post some screenshots of the XUL renderer I you all I was working on? Well, this afternoon I got it a to a point where I got something worth showing off, and I have promptly stopped working on it. Phew -- now I can finally enjoy my vacation! Oh, wait -- I go back to work on Wednesday. Anyway, the thing I'm rendering is the Preferences dialog window from this Mozilla XUL application called MozEdit. I've modified it slightly to compensate for the fact that my renderer doesn't deal well with explicit lengths that are specified in pixels. The one on the left is the output of my renderer, the one on the right is Gecko (i.e., FireFox):Note that for some weird reason, on my system my renderer even does a better job than Gecko because Gecko fails to render the radio buttons for those radio groups -- I think that has something to do with the way I was viewing the page, though.

Tonight I think I'll go see Bill's band over at Knitting Factory. Maybe there'll be an open bar.

UPDATE: Yeah, so I went to the show, and it was fine. Very nice. But before going I made this elaborate dinner -- it was spicy baked yams and eggs au gratin with asparagus tops. Totally delicious and I totally pulled it off in about an hour. But during the (terrible) band that came after Big Business, I was talking to Sam Huntington in the back by the bar and I farted this long awful fart; probably the stinkiest fart I've ever farted in my life. It just smelled like rotten garbage or something, and it hung around for freakin' forever. The female member of this couple that was standing next to us actually suggested that they go somewhere else. Sam was totally understanding, though, and said that he'd farted a worse fart earlier the same day. What a guy.

I On Vacation

That's right -- suck it up, bitches. I've been on vacation all week, just haven't been 'bloggin'. I've got things to talk about, but I don't feel like talkin' 'bout 'em right now. Maybe I'll add some stuff to this post later. My ncurses renderer's coming along nicely -- I was hoping to have some screenshots comparing it to the Gecko renderer, but I've been having some trouble with it. It does a whole bunch of sophisticated things, like matching HTML colors to ANSI ones, but there are some simple things that make it barf for some reason, like trying to render 0-size elements.