Take It Sleazy

Sometimes its hard to get these little entries finished. You know, I start them, and then... I don't know. When I get home from work I don't really always feel like writing in the 'blog.

So the cat has been acting real suspicious around the kitchen, spending most of her time in there, always with her nose to the ground, peeking under the stove and refridgerator in particular. Well, the other day, she ran into the living room with real goddamn live mouse (well, mouse-baby) in her mouth. We didn't even think we had mice! Guess they came in from the cold. Anyway, though, she's chomping it and spitting it out and whacking around, and eventually, man, this mouse is fucking dead. But she's still batting it around, so Mer and I make a move to take it away from her -- I'm advancing on her with the broom and dustpan -- and she does not like this at all. So what she does is, she just fucking swallows the whole thing on the spot! The whole thing! I've never heard of a cat actually eating the things it kills. Yeah, but anyway, she also happens to be wearing this Elizabethan collar that's supposed to stop her from chewing on herself (it doesn't) but now it's got mouse guts all over it. So we had to pin her down, take off the collar and wash it, and then put it back on.

Apparently she threw up in the collar the other day and that was much worse, but it happened on Mer's watch, so I don't really have any salient details. Maybe she'll put it in her thing.

What else, what else... oh yeah -- if you like XML and you like Scheme, then you may or may not like my SDOM, but you should still help me out with it, because god damn it it's a lot of work.

Oh shit I just farted pretty loud, at work. I'm here real early though (it's 8:15 right now) so I don't think anyone heard. I'm gonna go take a shit, I think.

How good does this movie look?

Lizard 2005!

...I mean, blizzard... 2005. So the snow (and forecasts of doom) started at noon yesterday, and were finished promptly at noon today. I took a few pictures. We even trudged out to Prospect Park, where there was some marathon sledding shit going on, but the picture I took there didn't get recorded by my piece-of-crap camera.

Router, Care-Bear pillow, Kleenex, The Making of a Poem, and, oh yeah -- fuckin' snow!	The bathroom: We're snowed in!
Is this not the cutest thing you have ever seen?

My sister, genious (sic):

(19:41:53) [My Sister]: is grace an ugly fat girl name or a hot beautiful blonde name
(19:41:56) [My Sister]: in your opinion
(19:42:03) Nintendo Julian: depends
(19:42:07) Nintendo Julian: how fat is the girl
(19:42:27) [My Sister]: pretty fat id say
(19:42:36) Nintendo Julian: Mer and I say hot beautiful blonde
(19:43:00) [My Sister]: your wrong
(19:43:04) [My Sister]: its fat ugly girl
(19:43:07) [My Sister]: with braces
(19:43:08) Nintendo Julian: well... alright
(19:43:16) [My Sister]: that or old lady

Fucking Z-Bots!

Rebuilding for like... the 5th fucking time today, no joke. Jesus. The past week or so at work has been so profoundly boring that all I've been doing is reloading my HoTMaiL and Gmail windows in the hopes that someone will contact me. No one has! Fagits!

Some people don't like jerkcity, but I do. Here are some good ones:

• COOL AS ICE
• WINE AND CHEESE
• DEAR DOCTOR DONG
• ONE MORE TIME
• THERE ARE NO PRIZES INVOLVED

It's not for everyone, I guess.

I have decided to cut myself some slack, a little, on my spare-time programming, because it makes me really exhausted and headache-y. Like I know I've mentioned before, the language I'm writing in right now requires that you construct your code in a less... straightforward way, the end result being that at "execution" time, it "evaluates" like a beautiful blooming flower instead of coursely ejaculating like a hairy, sequentially-oriented gaijin Jew bastard. So.

Stallman goes for, does not get the girl.

• How To Draw A Bunny - Rocks!
• The Village - Sucks!
• The Distillers: Distillers - Rocks!

Reading the Larry Lessig book that the FSF sent me as part of my membership package -- persuasive to say the least. If you've ever wanted to let yourself off the hook for all the MP3s you download... well. No, that's not really what it's about. Let me know if any of y'all want it when I'm done (I actually just finished it right now at work), otherwise I'm givin' it to the liberry.

In other news, we got a rather baffling answering machine message a few days ago. Here's my best attempt at piecing it together. As you can tell from listening, the speaker had a rather heavy European accent.

Hey [Julian?]. Uh... It's Alex. How are you? Heh. How are you and where are you? Ah, I am in... uh... in Brooklyn, in... uh... York St. I'll call you back later, but [maybe I'll go now?] I was taking pictures of this bridge. Uh... I'll try you at your other num- other number, or uh... I'll try to find you... later. But it... [???] Little Italy or Chinatown. I'll find you. Bye.

The Death Of A Toad

I've been farting around with Norton a bit, and I like this Richard Wilbur poem in there that shares its name with this post:

       A toad the power mower caught,

Chewed and clipped of a leg, with a hobbling hop has got

   To the garden verge, and sanctuaried him

   Under the cineraria leaves, in the shade

      Of the ashen and heartshaped leaves, in a dim,

          Low, and a final glade.



       The rare original heartsbleed goes,

Spends in the earthen hide, in the folds and wizenings, flows

    In the gutters of the banked and staring eyes. He lies

    As still as if he would return to stone,

        And soundlessly attending, dies

           Toward some deep monotone,



       Toward misted and ebullient seas

And cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia^Rs emperies.

    Day dwindles, drowning and at length is gone

    In the wide and antique eyes, which still appear

        To watch, across the castrate lawn,

            The haggard daylight steer.

I thought I had other things to post, but I don't.

Krupps & Felt

I've been thinking about House of Leaves lately. I've read a whole lot of Internet things that say it's a load of pretentious hackery, which is, of course, all it takes to take the wind out of everyone else's sails. What I think is that the material devoted to the emotional motivation of the main character falls pretty flat (to the extent, I guess, that it necessitated the writing of a whole 'nother book), but that the rest of it is a truly nasty and extremely virulent little meme. I recommend it to all of you who are patient.

Mer rented Garden State and I just watched it. It's alright -- self-indulgent, wears a bit thin in the last act, but it's fairly genuine otherwise, it seems like. All those Jersey rich-kids reminded me of my friends from Wesleyan, none of whom read this.

Apparently Devil-Lynn got me this DVD for Christmas. Thanks, guy! (Does a 'blog "thank you" mean I don't have to write a note?)

Here are some tidbits from a story from Edge (as featured on /.) where they ask 120 experts from various fields about things they believe but cannot prove. Inneresting! Tor Nørretranders preaches to the choir:

It is important to have faith, but not necessarily in God. Faith is important far outside the realm of religion: having faith in other people, in oneself, in the world, in the existence of truth, justice and beauty. There is a continuum of faith, from the basic everyday trust in others to the grand devotion to divine entities.

Carlo Rovelli appeals to people who don't know anything about physics, like me:

I think that the notions of space and time will turn out to be useful only within some approximation. They are similar to a notion like "the surface of the water" which looses meaning when we describe the dynamics of the individual atoms forming water and air: if we look at very small scale, there isn't really any actual surface down there. I am convinced space and time are like the surface of the water: convenient macroscopic approximations, flimsy but illusory and insufficient screens that our mind uses to organize reality.

Chris Anderson gets plain mean:

The Intelligent Design movement has opened my eyes. I realize that although I believe that evolution explains why the living world is the way it is, I can't actually prove it. At least not to the satisfaction of the ID folk, who seem to require that every example of extraordinary complexity and clever plumbing in nature be fully traced back (not just traceable back) along an evolutionary tree to prove that it wasn't directed by an invisible hand. If the scientific community won't do that, then the arguments goes that they must accept a large red "theory" stamp placed on the evolution textbooks and that alternative theories, such as "guided" evolution and creationism, be taught alongside.

So, by this standard, virtually everything I believe in must now fall under the shadow of unproveability. Most importantly, this includes the belief that democracy, capitalism and other market-driven systems (including evolution!) are better than their alternatives. Indeed, I suppose I should now refer to them as the "theory of democracy" and the "theory of capitalism", to join the theory of evolution, and accept the teaching of living Marxism and fascism as alternatives in high schools.

I'm getting pretty sick of having to go to work -- especially when I make some critical breakthrough in something I'm working on and look at the clock and it's time to brush my teef and get on the subway before I have time to finish implementing it. I want to go on vacation again. Anyone want to sponsor me, Damian Conway-style? Right, didn't think so.

A funny Jerkcity, something of a rarity.

Aud Lang Sine Wave

Happy New Year, my little habichuelos! (My little habas!)

The way of the future.
The way of the... future.
The w-way of the future.

Peep it, creepits -- a letter from Knuth to Condi Rice, circa 2002. You may also enjoy some of his photographs.

Also of interest: John Gilmore (EFF)'s explanation of what's wrong with copy protection.

I've been frying my brain on computer shit lately. Luckily, Razor Lopez, with whom I spent a delightful NYE, lent me a whole bunch of XBox games that I'm totally gonna play. To whit:

• LOTR: The Two Towers (really hard, though apparently I'm already farther than Billy)
• Arx Fatalis
• The Simpsons: Hit & Run (utterly delightful)
• The Thing
• Believe it or not, Syberia the first!

In return we gave him Fable, which I think he'll enjoy. It's well-crafted, if not terribly expansive.

On the subway ride home from Roger Cumming Architecture, this young middle eastern guy puked up a whole bunch of brown crap like halfway down the car from us. Gross! The cat still has a little diarrhea. Mer cleaned literally everything in the whole house. We are becoming vegetarians for 2005; we are becoming vegetarians that can fish.

Come in with the milk.