I Don't Even Like It

Well, it's a New Year -- it's 2004, and nobody likes to make a web-log anymore. Least of all, me.

So Mer and I made our pilgrimage to Sarasota. I do not like that place at all. I was shitting explosions the whole time. Thank the fuck Christ it's over.

For New Year's we went to this guy Kevin's house over in the Heights, and we were drinking and you know, whatever, and everyone decides to go down to the courtyard for a cigarette. So I'm down there and you know, we'd been singing around the piano up in the apartment, and we're still singing some songs down in the courtyard. About 15 minutes after we get down there, this woman comes down and is like, "Don't you know how much noise you're making? This is a private apartment building and it's really late and blah blah blah." So we're all like, "Okay, we're sorry, we'll leave," but she says, "You're visiting someone in the building, aren't you? Who are you visiting?" When she says that, we're all like, "Booozht!" because Kevin's subletting, and if we get him in trouble it could be disastrous. So no one's saying a word, and the woman keeps asking us which tenant we're visiting. Finally, Mer goes, "Well, we wouldn't want our behavior to reflect poorly on our host, so I don't think we should get into that." The woman's like, "Well, then, I'll just consider all of you strangers on my property," and Mer's like, "Yes, I think that would be best." And the woman went back upstairs to her cushy waterfront apartment. Granted, group singing is kind of inherently lame, and I have certainly told groups of singers to shut the fuck up myself in the past, but, you know, we were very polite, and it's Christing New Year's for Christ's sake. Some people are plain old vindictive, I guess. Not me, though. Anyway, well handled, Mer. I was very impressed. She also had the good sense not to tell Kevin about it, so that he'd have plausible deniability later. S-M-R-T.

On Friday I went to a party at Alex Plakias' house. I totally didn't recognize her parents, since I hadn't seen there in like, what, 15 years? But they were all about hugging and kissing and "say hi to your family for us." Sure, I'll do that. She's pretty hot; that girl wanted to play dirty marriage with me all the time when we were kids. But now she's graduated from Hamilton -- and she's already in grad school! What the Christ. She's also got this library of pretentious books in her bedroom that I wish I had. Time to sign up for the GREs.

How do you guys feel about all this We-Know-What's-Good-For-You legislation? I mean, look, I'm practically a communist in terms of the size of government I prefer, but some of this stuff is pretty stupid, like this thing that got passed in Ohio that makes illegal the act of videotaping in a movie theater. Why is that the State's business? Private companies should have to take care of themselves. Mind you, I'm completely in favor of the anti-smoking-in-bars thing, because the burden of taking care of smokers falls almost directly on the State, via the cost of Medicare / Medicaid / whatever it is. I haven't really thought about it that much; maybe it's a bad precedent. No, wait, I like it.

Speaking of such issues, it amuses me to no end that noted Libertarian and prolific Open Source evangelist Eric Raymond thinks he has any chance of picking up girls at a movie screening, even if it's The Lord of the Rings. The man is a toad; physically, and, pursuant to that, on account of his aggressive enthusiasm for talking about sex. Going forward, let's agree that it's only okay to write about sex if you're sexy. Granted, that's a bit glib, but things are getting gross out there.

I have made my submission to Adam Cadre's Lyttle Lytton contest. No doubt it will bring me both fame and happiness.

I spent this weekend trying to iron out a couple of truly pesky bugs in OpenRPG. One of them, I got -- when you pass a a set of file descriptors to select(), it removes the file descriptors that didn't have input to read (or space for output or whatever), so if you're using it to calculate timeouts, like I was, you have to re-add the client's file descriptor in order to check to see if the ping that you sent got a response. That was stupid. I suspect that the other one, though, is a delicious malloc-overrun. For those not in the know, when you need to store something, anything, in C, you need to allocate memory for it. The memory allocator, malloc(), returns a block of memory for you to use, and stores, directly in the vicinity of that block, some accounting information. Unless this accounting information falls on a page boundary, you can easily overwrite it using any number of helpful string manipulation functions, and you won't know you screwed up until much, much later. This sucks. Fortunately, I've got this delightful little library called NJAMD by Mike Perry; unfortunately, it hasn't caught the error yet, and it really should have. Maybe I have to turn up the strictness or something.