San Quentin, You Been Livin' Hell To Me

Okay, it's Super Tuesday. I have no idea who to vote for. Is it wrong to vote for a very good but no longer campaigning candidate in the hopes that everyone else will do the same or that one of the two surviving candidates will take notice? Or should I vote for the Senator from Massachussetts so that fucking Edwards, a religious shrimp of a man with a sincerity rating hovering slightly below Tom Cruise's, won't be put forward as a lamb to be slaughtered by the Republican slaughtering machine? It's a tough one.

On Saturday, Tom, Devlin and I peeped out a White Castle at 4th Ave. and 31st St. in B'klyn. It was one of those drive-thru franchise configurations, so we thought it would be an ironic time to go eat our tiny hamburgers in Greenwood Cemetery. Well, it was such a beautiful day and it was so nice and quite in there that we ended up spending a couple hours just strolling around. A lot of the mausoleums have glass windows / apertures built into their doors, so you can peek in. Tom asked whether I'd be scared about being in the cemetery at night, all by myself. I think maybe, if only because its right smack in the middle of a populous city, but no one would be able to help you if you got into trouble. It's like urban legends -- they're totally terrifying because the circumstances in which the awful shit they describe occur are so utterly mundane. Case in point: You're munching on some preternaturally soft bubblegum on the subway and all of a sudden a billion tiny spiders start pouring out of your mouth, and you're surrounded by people but there's nothing anyone can do to stop it. Wild.

Brave New World does not hold a candle to 1984, I'll tell you that much.

Continuing to sketch out (with broad strokes) the important parts of the unfortunately-named Gzochi. I designed a sort of abstract set object for grouping in-game entities, as well as a kind of queue for dealing with game events in a synchronous way. I also implemented Base64 encoding / decoding from scratch, right from the RFC. For those who don't know, Base64 is a way of converting binary data (which tends to be difficult to look at for humans and simple lexical analysis systems) to data that only uses the characters '0' through '9', 'A' through 'Z', 'a' through 'z', and '/' and '+'. I'd forgotten how much fun it is to implement something from a spec that's already been written for you, with reference implementations against which to compare yours, etc. Inventing new things is hard. Gzochi's on SourceForge, now, too: http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/gzochi/, but only via CVS for the moment.

From House UnAmerican Activities Coordinator Adam Cadre's page:

In the country where I live, the current top movie at the box office, made by a sodomy-obsessed Holocaust denier, is a sadistic snuff film about the torture and execution of a charismatic schizophrenic whom the vast majority of people in the audience believe to have been an omnipotent deity who created the universe.

Looks like it's Death March time at the old job, sort of; sometimes it really gets me down.

Last night I woke up with all this thick, gross saliva (mine, I hope) in the back of my throat -- so thick, in fact, that it was hard to swallow. I went to the bathroom and managed to spit most of it out.