Pony Keg

Okay, who hasn't seen Fahrenheit 9/11? While I was watching City Of God last week, I thought of this alternate title for it, but it'd do pretty good for Fahrenheit, too: Scum In Hell.

I'm crushing on this Distillers song Seneca Falls real hard right now, which is kind of gay, since it's about Women's Rights. The funny thing is, a lot of web sites will let you download it for free. Maybe it was one of their singles or something.

I've got this scratchy feeling in my throat, which makes me thing I'm getting sick. The past two summers, I've gotten a bad sore throat and a fever right around this time -- I think it has something to do with mucus building up in my throat -- but I'd prefer not to have it happen right this weekend because, well, I want to eat hamburgers and drink beer and all that.

Having just come off the early shift, I seem to have picked up a disturbing habit -- I've started writing these pseudo-shorthand sentences, like, "Thanks for the data. Will get back to you shortly." Sick.

The Darkest Of The Hillside Thickets

Have you ever had to flush butter down a toilet? On moving day, or I guess maybe it was the day after moving day, I found a stick of butter in our old fridge, and I was like, "This guy's not gonna make it." So, for want of a garbage can, I took it into the bathroom and flushed it. Of course this was a bad idea -- that even started to occur to me as I was pushing the handle down, but, you know... So the toilet got really clogged.

Last Saturday I went to this "Anyone, But Especially Kerry" fundraising party / event and saw a whole bunch of Harvard kids from my high school. Ugh -- now I remember why I don't hang out with them any more. This one guy kept trying to get me to dance, and I was like, hey, okay, so I started just waving my arms around and being silly, and he starts going, "Okay, but on the beat. Listen for the beat." What the fuck? Suck a cock, buster -- I'm a drummer, for fuck's sake. I'll do what I want. Plus, the one person I really even wanted to see didn't show. Oops, besides The Rase, that is -- always good to see her.

Having just written hundreds of lines of ugly, sloppy, UDP packet reorder / reassembly code, I started surfing around to see if there was maybe a stable, ubiquitous library that would do it for me. I happened across GNetLib, an outgrowth of GLib (not glibc, mind you), that does not stuff. It didn't do what I wanted, but the search kind of threw me into a panic about how I'm totally re-inventing the wheel a whole bunch in this stuff I'm doing on this project, and probably not in a very robust way. But then I calmed down and was like, well, this thing is kind of my hobby, my art, if you will, and I guess I'm kind of taking the same approach to it that I do for writing anything, code or not -- that approach being the polishing-a-turd approach. I like to create the turds from scratch and then slowly polish the fuck out of them. Not that I'm putting any of it down, mind you -- it all rocks, without exception -- it's just an expression. "Polishing a turd."

Then I totally jerked off.

That crippled kid who wrote all that poetry just died. Man, sometimes life's just so unjust -- like when you turn on the news and they're reading shit like this on the air:

No matter who you are,
Say a prayer this season.
No matter what your faith,
Say a prayer this season.
No matter how you celebrate,
Say a prayer this season.
There are so many ways
To celebrate faiths,
There are so many faiths
To celebrate life.
No matter who,
No matter what
No matter how...
You pray.
Let's say a prayer
This season,
Together, for peace.

Man, this makes me want to go murder someone. Also, there was that thing that kid said about not being able to ride the 7 train to Shea without some fag with AIDS dying all over him. Hero. Poet hero.

Went running yesterday -- think I made it about 2/3 of the 3.8 miles without walking.

How excited is everyone about CoC: Dark Corners of the Earth? Very excited. I wish they'd publish some system requirements so I could start the upgrade process on the ol' desktop sooner.

I Will Go Down With This Ship

Man, I had a scary dream last night -- my old high school friends Billy and Chris and I had organized this Fight Club-esque fighting tournament, and I ended up killing this guy I was fighting. And it was one of those awful dreams where it's not just the violence (which I think was sort of mercifully elided), but the entire guilty aftermath, in which it becomes clearer and clearer that you are in deep shit until you finally jerk awake. The thing is, though, a tangential aspect of the dream was that I figured out how to get this stupid light on my answering machine to stop flashing -- which it's been doing since we moved -- and I was kind of disappointed when I woke up to see that it was back to not being fixed. I mean, who do I have to kill around here to... right?

One of the things that has begun to tick me off about working for a corporate software company is how customer-driven the design process is. What I like about UNIX libc, for example, is that from a user's point of view, it looks very much like they've (the designers / developers) taken the time to read the research on things, they've thought about all the possible ways in which a piece of software might and should be used -- and not just in a commercial sense, in a "What if I did this?" kind of academic sense -- and they've written a really adaptive piece of software that fits in as best it can philosophically with what's already out there and allows new stuff to be built on top of it in a sane way. (There are a few exceptions to this, such as the various GLIBC binary compatibility nonsenses and the awful, confusing ctime() / time() / gettimeofday() / etc. functions.) The business software people are totally the opposite of this. They've got these ridiculous systems that are set up in literally the worst-possible-but-still-able-to-function way, and their attitude is, "Well, whatever new thing we're going to develop / buy / whatever, it should just work with what we've got." That little credo about things "just working" is the reason behind all this Windows virus / worm / whatever bullshit, if I may get self-righteous for a moment. And when you're designing software that caters to this attitude, you wind up with something that's very niche and isn't very interesting, and really just isn't further developable after a certain point because it's such a lopsided monster and the processes / systems it depends on have eventually been phased out because somebody realized they were bullshit.

And don't tell me it's about money. I know it's about money, but it's gotta be more expensive to finally overhaul a car-crash of a system than it is to make short term re-arrangements that keep you on the path to sanity. Maybe they're just so sure that by the time they have to seriously rethink their software architecture, they'll be out of business or the company itself'll have been drastically re-organized anyway that it's not worth the trouble.

And that doesn't always happen -- listen to this paragraph from Joel On Software about Microsoft:

I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.

Oh my God. This is 100% absolutely the dumbest thing I have ever heard of. And fucking Spolsky thinks it's genius! The management people at Maxis who told Microsoft to do this should be fired, and the management people at Microsoft who agreed to this should be fired, too. When I first clicked his article on How Microsoft Lost the API War, I thought it was going to be about how no one writes Windows code because their API is such a convoluted disgusting mess and there's about 10 different, extremely complicated and varyingly buggy ways to do this tiny simple thing that you want; but it turns out that Microsoft lost the API "war" because their API isn't backwards-compatible any more. I mean, that's a problem, but the nicest thing I can think of to say about .NET is that at least it looks like they're trying to create a rational and consistent API for people to use, even if they had to rip it off wholesale from Sun. If they had done this to start out with, maybe you wouldn't have to pay people a million dollars to touch Windows code today.

There But For The Grace Of God Goes Sherlock Holmes

Is everyone in the army a rapist or what? Props, Ted "Vicious" Rall -- you called it again.

I forgot to talk about the fucking massage I got: Mer and I went out for a walk to this little Gay Pride festival near our house, and one of the thousands of little tents was one of those Asian massage things where you sit in this weird chair and they give you a back rub. (Was it gay? Not sure.) Mer likes that sort of thing, so I offered to pay for her to get one, but once those crafty Orientals saw that we were interested, they started pulling me over to one of the chairs by my arm. I was like, "No, just her," pointing at Mer, but the lady pulling me was like, "No. Two. Two. You." So I had to get this stupid uncomfortable massage for ten minutes. I'm not one of those creepy people who's got some kind of thing about being touched -- I don't even have any Personal Space -- but I just flat out don't like back rubs. My back is fine, thanks. Anyway, at the end I had to pay for both of them.

One of my fucking Bosses, I'll let you guess which one, tried to suggest that I didn't know what IP multicast was. Wait, this is sounding like I'm being purposefully oblique. To qualify this, let's say that networks are like Shakespeare; it's like accusing someone of not having read Henry IV. Granted, not as popular as Hamlet, but if you're an English major, you've 100% probably fucking read it. "So, is it possible that [THE THING] is picking up the multicast address instead of the regular IP?" "You even know what multicast is?" Jesus Christ. And I was fucking totally on-the-money right, too. Anyway, he's incredibly rude. I don't like feeling like one of the whiny Executive Assistants I used to temp with; and I don't, really. I'm not going to say, "Dignity's more important than money." Please, humiliate me. I have to pay rent and save up for grad school. And hoard it, too, of course.

Kevin the Wass-man is having a 4th Of July party that I'm totally going to. With his usual degree of Mortal Kombat bombast, he claimed that he was going to have "1100 fireworks, at least." I haven't seen him in like 3 years. It's gonna be awesome.

Internet's still not working, but I successfully set up the wireless network last night. If you're in the area, the router's name is Goethe, but don't bother trying to connect, 'cause it's all WEP-secured, fags.

I'm reading the Live From New York book that I got Mer for Christmas. I knew everybody hated Chevy, but did you know that they also hated Nora Dunn, Victoria Jackson, and for cryin' out loud, Harry Shearer? Apparently Harry Shearer is a prick of tremendous proportions. And listen to this quote about Chris Farley, who I once saw in a restaurant:

Farley once stuck his ass out the window of the seventeenth floor at 30 Rock and took a shit. Another time, in front of twenty or twenty-five people in a very crowded writers' room -- mixed company, women, men -- Farley came in naked. He had his dick tucked between his legs and he was doing Jame Gumb from Silence of the Lambs. He took a golf club and shoved it about three inches up his ass, then pulled the golf club out and started licking it.

Jesus Christ!

"Oh Fuck Off, Chris"

Apparently someone reads his referrer logs. So much for all the whining on the ol' blog.

How good is that second 'The Office' Christmas Special? I don't know. Pretty good. My emotions? Call them successfully manipulated.

Fixed some troublesome threading problems with gzochi; for one of the first times in the history of the world, I was right and the debugger was wrong -- though they've fixed it in CVS, which is what I'm using now. Now I'm working on the UDP subsystem. UDP, being the not-guaranteed-to-deliver but somewhat faster cousin of TCP, requires that my code handle packet fragmentation (though this only happens with packets larger than 64k) and out of order delivery, and to generally be tolerant of lossage. Establishing a UDP "connection" is particularly troublesome since it takes place over a different port than the administrative stuff and you can't ID clients by originating host, since the traffic is bound to come over NAT-performing routers if it occurs on the Internet at all. To get around this I've established a "token" system, in which "new" UDP clients present a token that's been previously delivered to them over TCP.

More later, I guess. I don't know.

Tune & Rhythm On A Bubbledome

Well, we made it through the move. Now I know why people hire movers -- it's very hard and really sucks to do it yourself. Mer was a star at driving the U-Haul, but we got a ticket on it from parking it in a residential neighborhood overnight, plus we turned it in a few hours too late so all the costs doubled -- including the insurance, bringing the total cost up to like... $200. Christ. Still cheaper than movers, still cheaper than movers, etc.

The new place is nice, much bigger. We're still sorting all the things out. It gets very moist in there. I don't know, is it the external humidity or... what?

How much does Verizon suck, by the way? The lady I talked to the week before the move was very gracious and even helped me select a catchy new phone number, but she also said she'd notify our DSL provider to switch the Internet to the new number and when I called Earthlink a week and a half later to see how they were doing on it, they claimed to have no knowledge of the request. Zero knowledge, even. So now we don't have any Internet for two weeks.

Maybe I'm still exhausted from all the hoisting, but maybe I'm depressed. I don't know; I haven't been able to work on gzochi at all -- so much stuff needs to be done, like setting up the datagram delivery system and the event queue and the whole god-damn Scheme API. Why am I even doing this, anyway? Why would anyone want to write an RPG in LISP? God, when I look at what other people are doing, I get so depressed and jealous. This fucker from Yale DSAC, look what he's doing. Suck a cock, Collin Dickweed Jackson.

At least I'm not Dean Stark

I've been playing Red Dead Revolver, a copy I got from Devin, who said it was absolutely awful, but I'm kind of getting into it. It's pretty hard, and, like I think he mentioned, the camera's behavior is pretty infuriating sometimes, but, you know.

Went to see The Dickies at Irving Plaza on the 19th for some kind of Joey Ramone birthday thing. It was okay, but there were so many too old / tool young people there and almost no one was dancing around. Their set was okay -- they added See My Way, which is not my favorite song, but they also added Going Homo, which is my favorite song. Not really. Is it just me or was Leonard a lot more fun when he was on junk? None of you are going to answer that question, probably.

Oh, apparently he wants "Tiny" out of the band. Not that I blame him. Those guys are cretins.

I did AIDSWalk.

That's about it.

Felton Industries

Heyo. The weather gets hot, nobody wants to blog any more. I get it. It's hot. Let's keep this short.

• My job is boring the shits off me. I've been slinking out at the earliest acceptable time every day.
• We're moving. Most of you already know, but yeah, we're getting a bigger place, down by the Park, on 12th St., it's $200 more per month for each of us. We're doing it June 1st. Hopefully we can keep our phone number. I like it.
• Took the cone off the cat's head because she'd figured out a way to get around it and she promptly chewed a hole in her stomach. We started slathering this bitter ointment on her, and it might be working. At the very least, she's is extremely ticked off.
• Way to go, Ogrish, on posting the head-chopping video. Some (nu-)media outlet just referred to them as "once-again courageous." I remember when their layout looked a heck of a lot like Stile's and their content was a heck of a lot more like Steak n' Cheese's.

And now for the long part:

Finished the Scheme core, I think -- had to relearn a lot of Scheme syntax. For some reason, I thought it would be okay to put parentheses around everything. Not cool. Sometimes, like when you're setting up a catch block or using 'begin', you don't want to over-evaluate. Of course, Guile won't tell you this until someone throws a type exception further down the line, so... so. Anyway, the Big Frustrating Thing I fixed this weekend was yet another COOP-threads SNAFU, this time that on account of the behavior of the garbage collector, Guile threads will hang if the Guile-controlling C thread goes to sleep. It is hard to make the C thread go dormant without busy-waiting and without making Guile sleep also. The epiphanous moment occurred while I was staring at this Guile console I'd opened to test out some threading stuff by hand -- I remembered that the little command-prompt interface (they call it PREC, I think), is written in Scheme, and that threads can run while it's waiting for input! So, in C, I created a named pipe (thank you, unistd.h) and had the work-submitting function put '0's into one end of the pipe and had Guile doing a blocking read on them, one at a time, semaphore-style, through a Scheme port wrapping the other end.

Good luck on your finals, M-biddy, if you have any more, even!

The Turtle Book

Comedy. Everybody love comedy these day. Mmm mmm. Here's some material from these two guys named Derek and Clive, though you might know them better as him and him, respectively. Yes, Tom, this is the kind of thing I would listen to wif' my friend Razor before we'd go out to roll punchies down at the club. No! No, that didn't happen! I never had that friend! Anyway:

CLIVE: Fff-uck. Dudley, are you not, is...? Fucking, fucking alcoholic! You're so drunk! You must ha' be on something else, you know.

DEREK: Oh, hold on, let's get this rhyme right:

My Mum came into the room and sucked my fucking knob, oh!
She put her mouth right, her mouth right round it and then she done a gob
On the end of it to make it smooth and make it nice and soft
And then she tossed me right off with her, er, Mrs. Mopp
Who came into the... (starts laughing)

CLIVE: Oh yes, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you very much indeed, thank you very much indeed, it is awfully good but it's not quite what we're looking for, erm, some of our...

We finally put the fucking Elizabethan Collar on Mimi, and boy did she hate it. She was very depressed for several days, she wouldn't eat, she wouldn't drink, we had to force feed and drink her. Now she's a bit happier and her gross little rash has basically entirely cleared up, and it's only been a few days. I want to leave the thing on until all the hair grows back, though. So fuck you, cat.

Guess who's getting reading glasses! Yeah, that's right -- ME. I went to the eye doctor a few days ago because it was one of those things that, you know, I'd been promising myself I'd do eventually, and it turns out I've got pseudo-myopia from staring at a stupid screen all day. So I get to have reading glasses that will hopefully relax my eyes a bit and make me more productive in the late afternoon and evening. Sick. The eye doctor was a real big fat dude who I think was cracking jokes about how much he hates exercise. He put a bunch of yellow shit in my eyes at one point to check me for glaucoma, and it felt rilly gross. He also gave me these exercises to do at work in which I have to focus on a pencil and move it to and away from my nose. Totally retarded. The frames cost a lot of money, too, but I'm pretty excited about looking hot and studious instead of hot and squinty.

DEREK & CLIVE: Oh! My old man's a dustman, he wears a dustman's hat

DEREK: (continues with farting noise in tune)

CLIVE: He's got fucking cancer, now what d'you think of that?!

DEREK: Oh... (falls into helpless laughter)

CLIVE: My old man's a dustman, he's got cancer too
Silly fucking arsehole, he's got it up the flue
He's got so much of fucking cancer it drives him fucking mad
He says, "I've got fucking cancer," and he's my fucking Dad
Oh, what a fucking boring cunt, he goes on and on all day
He's got this fucking cancer and he's too gone on the way

For his birthday or something I guess Tom got the DVD of the first season of The Office, and it is pretty funny. We've been watching episodes of it for the past three nights, but I have to say that the first episode is probably my favorite. Ricky Gervais is so manic and hideous, he's great to watch. I especially like it when he's in an awkward situation with another character and starts shooting little sidelong glances at the camera -- there's this implied camera crew that's making some kind of anthropological documentary about this office of a paper company. I also like it when he's in a one-on-one interview bit with the camera and makes this self-righteous grimace where he bears his revolting sharp little teeth. For his birthday I got Tom the Todd Barry album and Mitch Hedberg's album Strategic Grill Locations, which I kind of want to peep from him, since, as Mitch says in this clip I heard, "These are the jokes for the CD."

I finished The Iceman Cometh, and I guess I liked it. O'Neill uses the pat characterization that sort of irked me at the beginning of the play to make the end of the play even more humiliating for everyone, and that was pretty satisfying. Now I'm reading House of Leaves by Poe's brother, Mark Danielewski, and that's a lot of fun, if a bit, you know, pretentious. The centerpiece of the story of is a house that changes its shape, spawning hidden rooms and hallways that couldn't possibly fit inside the bounds given by its external dimensions and eventually a giant staircase leading down to somewhere else. I don't know where, I haven't gotten there yet. But it reminds of the terrible city Alex Roivas discovers beneath her family's ancestral manor in the Pulitzer-prize winning television drama "Eternal Grarkness."

And that, for some reason, reminds me of this funny site I just found again for the first time, Book-A-Minute. Particularly worthy is their summary of Slaughterhouse Five, greatest cause of death of junior high school readers after Catcher in the Rye.

DEREK: (more laughter) He's got cancer of the arsehole, he's got cancer of the bum

CLIVE: Cancer of the knob...

DEREK: Cancer in his eyeballs, he's got cancer on the gob
He's got cancer in his fingernails and cancer in his palm
Cancer up his bumhole where the...

CLIVE: ...half way up his arm!

DEREK: (laughs)

CLIVE: Oh, he's got fucking cancer, cancer everywhere
He's got cancer of the bumhole, 'cause he's a fucking queer...

DEREK: Oh...

CLIVE: He takes his fucking knobs up, he shoves 'em up his arse
And everybody knows it! HE'S FUCKING WORKING CLASS!!!

Okay, computer time: I got around the threading problems in Guile 1.6.4 by consolidating the Guile stuff into a single thread and writing a work queue-ing system for it, routing all requests for Guile service to a thread that reads them, launches Scheme threads to handle them, and then notifies the caller once the evaluation is complete. That was looking promising until I found out that there's no way to cancel a Guile Scheme thread in either Scheme or C, which kind of sucks the fatty, since I need to be able to prevent threads from chewing up system resources indefinitely. The Guile team has been very helpful -- they've promised some improvements in 1.7 / 1.8, but given that this is GNU project, I expect that will not be for a while. I've decided to focus on some of the more trivial and enjoyable aspects of the whole thing, such as replacing my logging system with stuff from syslog.h and potentially replacing libxml2 with libSXML, which is a GNU project. For the sake of perversity, it might be fun to try to build this using only GNU libraries.

Why am I doing any of this again? To get into grad school? I don't know. I'm getting pretty interested in stuff like genetic compiler optimization and similar stuff that I always told myself was masturbatory and stupid; maybe that means I'm ready to hit the books again, I don't know. Speaking of which: Guy, you should post your solution to that problem. Me, I'm just proud of myself for remembering that that big pi thing means set product.

Thank You, MSN

0-4 Correct Ouch! You totally pulled a Monica. As Chandler told Joey, you have to stop the Q-Tip when there's resistance. We suggest you spend ever spare minute between now and the finale watching the "Friends" DVD box sets.

5-8 Correct How you doin'? Not bad, but just like paleontologist Ross, you need to dig a little deeper.

9-12 Correct Could you be a bigger "Friends" fan? You could try... but you would not be successful.

Robert Moses A-Go-Go

I just got back from running around Prospect Park with Tom. It still killed me this time, but it killed me less. I actually ran, I think, about a mile without stopping, but then my shoelaces started getting untied and I had to burp so I had to stop. And after you stop, it's hard to get the momentum back. My leg started hurting pretty bad like two thirds of the way, so I just walked the rest, because last time I pushed it and I couldn't walk the next day. But the park was totally beautiful, really, really green, like the Parks Department's Special Purpose: The country in the city. Except it's not really the country, it's more like a golf course. But it's still totally fantastic looking, and seeing those nice apartment buildings around Grand Army Plaza reminded me of my old friends who lived near Central Park, like Chris and Sophie Pinkham. I even got kind of wistful, and depressed about coming back to my shabby little apartment building. Three. Point. Three. Five. Miles.

I started reading the novel the tech writer at work wrote online. I'm reading it online, he didn't write it online. Maybe he did. It's actually sort of okay, so far, even though he's a creep. He's funny and fun to talk to, but he's got this very immature and selfish reactionary political philosophy and this very indie-rock attitude about heavy metal even though he hates indie rock because people have indie-rock atttitude about it.

I can't work on gzochi any more until I find out this thing about Guile and pthreads -- I sent a message to the Guile mailing list about it, it sounded kind of bitchy, I don't know. It might be one of those messages that nobody replies to because it sounds ungrateful.

So this guy Ben Holtzman, I went to high school with him, and he's got this livejournal, which I read, and he doesn't know that I read it. Which is a little creepy, but you know, I love reading journals. I think he's kind of an idiot, which is ironic, because he certainly doesn't think he's an idiot, but, you know... I mean, he's not an idiot-idiot, but his priorities are all messed up. Anyway, he wrote the following description of what it's like to be obsessed with someone:

It's like finding an incredible sale at a store with only one item left in stock, rushing out to the ATM to get the necessary money together to make your purchase, and seeing it advertised on every corner between the shop and the bank. How could anybody not love her knowing how she laughs and what she laughs at?

Pretty accurate, right? The rest of the journal is about applying to graduate school and trying to say witty things to make inferior people in his Philosophy section laugh and admire him.

Sam Sedar on Majority Report just suggested that NYC liberals volunteer for the G.O.P. convention and be "nice." I'm pretty sure the implication was that we should sign up and then just be the worst possible volunteer. Like, take out-of-town republicans into the deepest, most angry part of Brooklyn and then just leave them there. If I can find a way to do it that minimizes personal risk (por supuesto), maybe I'll do it. You guys wanna do it, too? Come on. Come. On.

Morning Sedition Shift

Well, I don't want to disclose any agreement that I've agreed to non-disclose, but let's just say I make a great sissy and that Tom's got the voice of a big fat dude. Thanks, Devlin!

Okay, so I am not so good about publishing these updates after I write them.

Yesterday I did some manual labor with Tetley, helping him clean up the stick apocalypse that is their "back yard." In the process we found about a trillion snails, nice big ones with yellow shells, and we started thinking, what about a TERRARIUM? So I got a cheapo plastic box from the pet store and put some dirt and sticks and worms in it, along with a banana peel and a couple of baby carrots, and just like that we started to reap the benefits of a real, working terrarium. Like, for one, Emma and Katie didn't want it in their house, but I was like, it's Ted's, not mine, so it stays here. That was one benefit. Later on, we all went out to get burgers at Parkside, and I took all the gross gigantic chunks of iceberg lettuce and stuffed them in my pocket so I could give them to the snails. That was gross.

We watched Neil Simon's Murder By Death, which is more like Murder By Sucks if you ask me.

Mmm... Almond-Poppy Muffin and coffee. No combo is better.

A To Z Maintenance finally but also totally fixed the plumbing, so I can now sleep through the night completely -- the downside to this is that I've been having rilly weird dreams. Last night I dreamed I was rescuing a bunch of HIV-positive vampire hobos from some kind of government research facility. We were all running around in a big hedge maze, kind of like the one in the Alice in Wonderland cartoon, and I had a special tuxedo that would let me walk through these laser fences that were totally out of the video game Beyond Good And Evil -- or, as I like to call it, Beyond Good And Sucks.

Guy, how bad do you want to go to this thing?

I'm actually getting gzochi pretty close to being useful. I've written the code that sets up all the object-set relationships, now all I have to do is

• Finish the game file parsing code, including adding suppor for strict / non-strict error checking
• Write the event-queue loop code, that, you know, makes the games "go"
• Learn more about Guile environments / modules so that I can make sure the bindings from one game don't bleed into other ones
• Write the Guile API for the game designers

Long-term goals include

• Making a nice GUI for game / resource editing
• Making a "standard" reference client for each of the major tiers of graphical resource capabilities
• Making a real good sample game to illustrate how good the software is (if it is, in fact, good)

No sweat.

Oh yeah, one more thing: I fucking did not win anything in Adam Cadre's Lyttle-Lytton contest. My entries:

• Worse first sentence in a novel: The carrot mouldered; the rabbit stank.
• Worst opening line in a political speech: Folks, I'm from a simpler time, when a boy from a humble circus family could shoot himself straight outta a cannon and into the Presidency.

Given the constraints set forth in the rules, I think those were pretty good.

Resource Enumeration

The DSL is acting the fuck up, so I might lose the stuff in this entry. I already lost it once. I don't know.

A To Z Maintenance "Up Graded" the plumbing in our building on Monday, which naturally led to the ceiling in the bedroom starting to leak. I put a bucket under it and now the bucket is, you know, not full by any means, but very heavy with water. Pregnant or, say, fat, with water. Like a person with edema. I picture edema-water to be sort of milky / yeasty. The water in the bucket is brown.

I went running around Prospect Park with ol' Murder on th' Wind on Saturday. I didn't think I was going to make it at all, but I did, though I only actually ran ran like less than 50% of it. Well, I guess I'm in kind of lousy shape, because I must have pulled a bunch of real secret muscles -- I could barely walk on Sunday, no joke, and was literally unable to do things like lift my left knee to put on a shoe, say. I'm mostly better now, but my back still hurt -- what's up with that? You don't run with your back.

(22:48:36) [My Sister]: bobo would oyu be my friend if i looked like jack osbourne?
(22:48:46) Nintendo Julian: I guess
(22:48:48) Nintendo Julian: why not
(22:49:05) [My Sister]: thats a good additude

Tedious progress on gzochi. I'm still in the middle of writing the code that parses the game files. Once I've done that, it's on to the event queue and some code for the API, and that should yield an actual, usable system. I'm kind of depressed over how much time I've been spending on it and how it's not done yet. It just eats me up, really. Just having to be at work takes up so much of my time, and since the code I write at work is tedious as a rule, I don't always have the spirit to do more of it when I get home. I don't know if I could pull off doing the Master's part-time. The degree, not the golf thing.

I had some food from Tsing Tao tonight, though, and it was good.

Reading Myla Goldberg's Bee Season, which is good and deeply creepy.

The Onion -- not that funny any more, right? But you know who is kind of funny? I'm embarrassed to say so, but I really enjoyed this episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live that I saw last night on ABC. It seems like it's sort of a different flavor from his usual work -- he talks about how he hates the FCC, doesn't care much for Jesus, and, you know, that's all it takes to win me over. I've gotten to the point where I enjoy comedy if and only if it appeals to my sense of political propriety. It's stupid, I know, but it's my little way of fighting the War on Terror. I blame Air America.

The Horses Keep Her Up At Night

Turn the fucking heat off, A to Z! Fuck damn it! Agggh!!! Turn it off! The fucking banging is driving me nuts! Shut it off, for Christ's sake! Bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang!!!

Oh yeah, so I spilled some water on my laptop the other day and some of the keys stopped working. But I hunted down the actual manufacturer and ordered a new keyboard. It should be here tomorrow. Also, I grabbed the Microsoft Natural Keyboard from my desktop and plugged it into one of the USB ports on the 'aptop, and it just worked -- no configuration, no monkey business, no nothing. And they say Linux isn't ready for the desktop.

Word to the wise -- [:digit:] != [[:digit:]]

Look, has anyone else besides me and Big Baby O'Donnell noticed that Ted Rall is a whiny little shit? I for one love the man for being unlovable, nay, loathsome, even, but I can imagine that he might be alienating people by

• Claiming that Air America sucks and that he wouldn't be on it even if he were asked // complaining that no one's asked him to host a show on Air America even though he's such a great radio guy
• Coming up with unfunny, weepy, Very Special-style comics like this one.

M-biddy was regaling me with tales of this super-enthusiastic Networks professor we've both had and that he's got now:

ekiMlleB: the other day in class he said that every CS major should try to break at least one NP-complete problem
ekiMlleB: "because maybe you get lucky"

Dismantle Me

Yo, I'm still sick. I even had a mild fever tonight, but I wasn't gonna let that stop me from going to the Distillers show that I walked all across town to get tickets to. So I just got back, and, you know, it was okay. They'd rigged up this ill-conceived set involving red fairy lights and dangling mannequin body parts that I guess was supposed to echo the concept behind their new album, but, you know, any kind of mannequin art ends up looking pretty stupid. They seemed to be pretty proud of it, though. Brody looked like a hotter version of Barbara Ramone -- hot. Their set was pretty okay. They sounded almost exactly like they do on the album, which is lame -- it's always cooler when the band plays their set a lot faster or the singer sings it different or something. Definitely a lot of steakheads in the audience, also a lot of young girls with they moms. About 10 people got pulled onto the stage and herded out of the place for crowd-surfing.

Courtney Love showed up halfway through their set, a couple of thirteen-year-old girls scraming "Courtney!" in tow, and walked right by me up the stairs. She's actually not too hard on the eyes. And I thought I saw my friend Chris pushing through the crowd in front of me at one point, but it turned out to be some hipster doofus with the same haircut he used to have. I kind of miss that guy.

When I first got to the place, I had to pee real bad, so I went straight to the Men's room even though The 'stillers were already on and playing my favorite song. I pissed a real long time and I kind of had to fart, too, so I farted a long, low fart in the empty bathroom.

Tetley got us tickets to see Match today, so we saw that. Ray Liotta's in it, and he tells a faggot that toenails don't have nuclei. I need this!

Computer thing going okay; GNU regex library making itself frustrating. I'm reading the new William Gibson book. The main character is physically allergic to trademarks, which is a bit pretentious, premise-wise, but it's sort of an interesting story.

Shitting The Bed

I got a haircut, today, at Astor (where my mom would never take me when I was a kid, seeing as they wouldn't boil all their combs. New York City in the grip of a lice epidemic!) The barber kept asking me how it felt. "How was your day, good? How does it feel?" "What's that?" "How does it feel, how does it look?" "Good, it looks good." He had warm hands, like a grand-dad.

In the seat next to mine, a guy with frosted tips was getting a trim. "What's this, you got a big scar back here." "Yeah, lots of surgery." "Surgery? You okay?" "Yeah, it's a... well, it's a brain thing. Long story." "You okay now?" "Hope so."

I'm sorry, Mike, but the guy who writes Questionable Content is a creep. Examples:

• Go fuck yourself, fascist.
• You making less than a career construction worker does not mean that you can claim to be worse off than him. Get back to Googling Malkmus at your cushy office job.
• What are you, like five years old?

That little robot is adorable, though.

I Don't Like Your Peaches

[I meant to post this last Wednesday, but... well, I just could muster up the initiative to type it and click. It's so hard sometimes.]

I played some poker at Joel's house last night [i.e., last Tuesday]. Just dime-ante stuff, some draw, some hold 'em. We played a fun seven-card game called Anaconda. Oh, and I learned a new game -- not quite poker, but way more exciting -- called Guts. It works like this: You get dealt three cards at the beginning and there's no betting. The best hand you can make, naturally, is three-of-a-kind. Everybody holds their cards in their hands over the center of the table and the dealer counts to three. On three, you can either drop your cards, in which case you're out of the current round scot free, or you can hold onto them, in which case you lay down the hand you've been dealt against those of the other remaining players. If, at this point, you've got the best hand, you get the pot. The losers each have to contribute the value of the current pot towards the next round's pot. The game ends when you hit a round in which only one player sticks to his guns during the drop-out phase. I invented an extension to the game (I call it "Ultimate Guts") where, if all the players drop out of the round (which happened a few times when the pot got too big) all players have to pick up the same cards again and go through the count-off again, each player knowing that the other players weren't confident enough in their cards to stay in.

Work is pretty shitty these days. There's this big "project" we're supposed to be finishing, but it's just... unfinishable, really. I mean, whenever we talk to our "manager," he's like, "Yeah, it has to have this, and it should include this," like he's some kind of reclusive billionaire building a Mystery House with a thousand rooms. Your house is never gonna get finished, guy. Death march. Just FYI. Like I was saying to Devin, though, it's hard for a little baby job. I have a little baby job, really.

Now for the computer stuff: gzochi is coming along... okay. I need to restructure the shared linked-list type; it's just too fucked up and crazy for use. I'm also at the stage where I have to start thinking about content presentation. Maybe you guys can help. Here's the scoop: A game has sets of "resources" -- images, 3-D meshes, sound files, etc. -- and in order to display, rather, present these resources, the server sends what I'm going to call "presentation hints." So if you send a panel image to be used as the backdrop for a sidebar menu or something, there will be a little cue in the object XML that you receive that'll have a hint for the client to that effect. (The client is free to ignore the hints.) What I'm trying to do is draft up a lightweight... mark-up language, I guess, for game components. Peep the project entry on SourceForge and sign up and we'll discuss it.

I peeped Intolerable Cruelty last night. It was okay. Tonight Tetley peeped some tickets to McFiddler on the Roof. So we are going to see that.

I have to go to work now. Christ.

Seacrest Out!

Good morning, blogstars. It looks like I only write once a week in this thing. Sorry.

On Saturday, Ted called up and was like, "hey, do you know where to get poker chips in Brooklyn?" I'm like, no, but do you want to take a walk? So we go off walking down 7th Avenue, and we don't find them anywhere. We get to like 7th and 19th St. and still nothing, so we take a right and walk back down on 5th Ave. The deeper parts of 5th are apparently some kind of discount store mecca, so we're popping in and out of these stores asking people who barely speak English whether they sell something as admittedly bizarre as poker chips. None of them have it. Finally, we're standing next to a bar from which this drunk old man is being noisily evicted and we see a toy store across the street. It's a crapshoot, but it's the only honest-to-god toy store we've seen so far, so we go in and ask. The owner's like, "No, we don't have that," but his young assistant pipes up from the video game section, "Wait, hold on, I thought I saw some kind of poker thing over there a while back," indicating a teetering pile of boxes in a corner. He digs around for a while, and sure enough, comes up with "Star Poker," which he claims includes "seven racks of poker chips." It's only $4.99. "If you find poker chips somewhere else," he says, "they're gonna be $4.99 anyway." We think he's got a point, so we buy the thing and take it home. When we open it up, there is a dime-bag-sized pouch of tiny, tiddly-wink-like chips. Ted says, "Julian, how many do you think are in there." I guess 70. Turns out there were 71.

Then Ted and I made this great if ersatz Vindaloo. It was basically just mustard, pork, and coconut milk, but it was delicious. I crapped most of it out in nauseous agony when I got home.

My parents came over last night and took me and Mer out to City Lighting, this bar / restaurant that opened up on our corner. I was a little nervous when they were building it that it was going to be some kind of hellish nightclub, but it turns out it's a pretty quiet place, and the food is pretty great, if fabulously expensive. I had the wild salmon -- $13.95? Give me a break. It was really good, though. Lo malo es que right when I was about to go to bed last night, fucking Mimi heaved herself off the sofa at something, dislodging, the process, my laptop, which landed right on its metaphorical tailbone, the little AC power input thing, with the adapter still in it. This is the second time it's happened catastrophically -- when I opened it up this time, the little power feed thingy was hanging on by a thread. I doused it in superglue, but if it happens again, the laptop is toast. Fuck custom laptops, man. I'm gonna have to get a Dell laptop, that's how much fuck custom laptops.

Today is real beautiful outside. Is summer coming? I'm having actual confusion with this weather over whether we're done with winter and heading into summer or vice versa. Maybe that's what happens when you don't have an academic schedule to go by. Anyway, it reminds me of summer days I spent in high school loping around the Lower East and West Sides with friends and sort of scheming about forming bands, drawing comics, designing video games, and drinking -- scheming about drinking and actually drinking, too.

Links:

• Elijah Woods is Very, Very Gay
• Not Johnny!

The Only Card I Need Is The Ace Of Spades

I'm a hell of a C programmer. I'm crazy. Here's the thing: gzochi launches a lot of threads. Creeps, think of threads as a bunch of concurrently executing blocks of code -- you've got to run things in threads if you want your program to act like it's thinking about more than one thing at once, like say, printing messages and listening to the keyboard at the same time. gzochi, for instance, has a thread that listens for new connections and other threads that talk to existing connections. The problem is that sometimes one thread needs to stop the execution of all the other threads in a coordinated way, for example, when you want to shut down the gzochi server and have the game threads politely hang up on the clients and save all the information about currently executing games to the database. This is a tough problem because there's no built-in way for one thread to kill a thread it didn't launch -- most of the time, each thread has no idea that other threads even exist. Well, try this on for size: I've written a wrapper function for the thread creation call that records an identifier for the thread object in a "registry," launches the thread, "joins" (i.e., waits) on its exit, and then removes it from the registry. If, between the time the thread gets launched and the time it exits, the shutdown function runs, it goes through the thread registry cancelling all the threads, which in turn causes each thread's cancellation handler, which does useful things like saving user data and closing connections.

SICK.

I bought a ticket for the April 4th Distillers show at the Bowery Ballroom. Picture me nuzzling Brody Dalle's massive bicep.

If you listen to Howard Stern (who, by the way, deserves a Pulitzer for doing an hour long bit about constitutional speech and the fallacy of decency and then putting a guy on the air who needs women to vomit on him in order to get off and having some willing listener come in and vomit on him; someone called in and said he'd had to run out to his front porch to puke, he'd been so disgusted, and saw people pulling over in their cars to puke out the windows) in the morning like I've been doing for the past week or so, you'd think there's going to be some kind of cultural apocalypse in this country in the next decade or so. I'd been reluctant to agree about that sort of thing, but it's looking more and more likely. Creepy, huh? It's not like I'm as attached to this country as all you simpering immigrants out there, I just don't quite know where to go when it happens. Japan? Scandinavia? Okay, but let's say that all the people that generate capital for this country were to up and leave and go somewhere else -- it's not an entirely unreasonable proposition; these guys who work at Goldman Sachs and what have you are real sick puppies, thoroughly corrupt and selfish, but the majority of them are atheists, I think. Then the only people left would be the religious trash, who, in the face of an economic meltdown, would whip themselves into a frenzy over all those Islamiacs, say, and then start firing missiles and invading Middle Eastern countries. That would be great -- nothing makes me happier than people who believe in an afterlife slaughtering each other on the altar of self-righteousness. I'm serious; I'm sorry if that creeps you out, but I get totally gleeful over the idea of a bunch of mangled theist bodies.

Speaking of Howard Stern, a friend of a friend of Mer's is staying over at our place. Apparently she's interviewing with a bunch of companies in New York and doesn't know anybody who lives here. If that doesn't make her sound a bit suspect, she's "interested in media management." For fuck's sake, that sounds like this Epsilon semi-moron Nari who I took Princeton Review with. She wanted to go to University of Miami where she could "study the music industry, which is like no other industry on Earth." Where do these people get these ideas? Is there a big machine somewhere that cranks out slightly-below-average-intelligence babies in black pants suits with congenitally attached textbooks on Marketing and no ambitions? Anyway, this girl mentioned that she'd interned at Clear Channel her sophomore year, which made me mad until I told myself that it's kind of like interning at Microsoft, which is something I tried to do once -- unsuccessfully, I might add. Is it? Who knows.

Links and stinks:

• DownSyndromDolls [sic]
• World's Fattest People

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.

The "Other" Eurydice

What up, hombres?

Google found my blog, so I had to take it down for a few days while they processed my "removal" request. I'd never seen an Earthlink home page come up in my search results, so I figured Earthlink had some kind of restrictive /robots.txt file, but I must have been mistaken. Anyway, now I've got my own robots.txt, ready to get re-processed 90 days from now. It's so hard to have a blog, don't you find?

The stupid copyright stuff I've been bitching about for so long got resolved sort of informally, which makes me a little nervous, but we'll see what happens, I suppose. I'm allowed to work on gzochi, at least. Now I'm jus' eating some carrots.

Last night was sort of hellish -- I bought this tiny little microwave on eBay a little while back, and UPS, in characteristic fashion, had made two failed attempts to deliver it to me at times when I would definitely, definitely not be home. So yesterday I was like, "I'm'a get this thing tonight." So I called UPS and they told me I could come out to their Brooklyn facility (104-01 Foster Ave.) between 8:00 and 10:00 PM -- decidedly non-optimal time, you know, but I ended up having to stay late at work, so, you know, okay. So the first bad thing that happened was that I forgot the trouble that Mer had had when she'd gone to pick up a package there and just pasted the address from their website right into MapQuest. So MapQuest gives me an address that would be easily reachable by taking the F to Avenue I. I leave home at 7:00, reach Ave. I by 7:30, and start looking for it. I'd remembered Mer saying it was right outside the station, so I knew something was wrong when I'd walked down Foster Ave. for 30 minutes without finding it. Finally I popped into an auto-body shop and asked the mechanics on duty. They said, "Yeah, people are always coming in here asking about that. I have no idea where it is." A bad sign. But I kept walking and eventually ran into a bona fide UPS guy in his truck. I said, "Hey, do you guys have a warehouse around here?" He said, "Not around here -- we've got a warehouse on Foster, but it's all the way down at Rockaway." I said, "Okay," and kept walking, thinking if I just grit my teeth I could walk from E. 7th St. to Rockaway. Well, 15 minutes later I found myself at the B/Q station for Something-or-other St. and I'm like, "Maybe I should just go home, because I don't know where I'm going."

I get home at 8:30 and Mer informs me that she'd tried had the same problem -- MapQuest is stupid and doesn't understand the number 104-01. If you punch it in as 10401 (which, given the numbering on the houses where I was walking, seems reasonable), then you get a totally different address. Basically, you have to take the L to the end of the line, and then you're right there. Now, a normal person might just put it off until tomorrow, but that's another day of having UPS stupidly try to drop it off while I'm not home, even when I've told them on the card that they can basically leave my package anywhere they want, and I like to wait until a situation is really ugly before I cut my losses and leave, because then, you know, it's just so much sweeter when you get what you want. Anyway, Round 2. So I decide I'm gonna take the B to Prospect Park; transfer to the S and take it to Franklin; take the C to Broadway Junction; and take the L to the end. It's like 8:40, and I'm kind of ticked off, but , you know, I'm gonna get this thing. So I get to the S and it finally chugs out of the station, and I'm thinking, "Okay, the S only makes three stops -- there's Prospect Park, the Botanical Gardens, and then Franklin." Wrong -- there's something between Botanical Gardens and Franklin, and that's where I get off. Unfortunately, no other trains stop at this mystery stop, and by the time I realize that I'm in the wrong place, the S is fading off into the distance, and, you know, it only comes like once a month. So I leave the station (actually, I leave the station, have second thoughts, pay again, then realize there are no other trains and leave again), and pop into a deli. I ask the proprietors if they've got the number of a cab company, and they're nice enough to call up Evelyn for me. (I buy a bag of Utz to be a good patron while I'm waiting for the cab.) The car finally comes, and the driver takes me to Foster and Rockaway. Well, it's not there. But there are some police officers just kind of hanging out, so we ask them if they know where the place is. "Yeah," one of them says. "Um... just... um... take a left up here and drive all the way down. It's the tallest building around here, you can't miss it." Okay, thanks, officer. We do, you know, what he says, and we're driving, and we're driving, and finally we're at a big intersection, and no UPS. So my driver flags another person down and asks where the UPS building is. The guy tells us to just keep driving straight for like 4 or 5 blocks. So we do that, and we pass the place where we were before, where the cops were, and finally we find the building and I get my microwave. The whole cab ride, which lasted about an hour, only cost me $22.00. Top marks, Evelyn.

But man, Mer'd told me there was nothing out there, and she wasn't kidding. It's all one-story warehouses and garages and lots full of towering heaps of scrap metal. It's like a different fucking planet, especially at 9:30 at night during winter. It was like the chilling perpetual pre-dawn wasteland where Fraidy Cat and the ship full of gay pirate mice dwell in a limbo of fear and despair. The graffiti on all the buildings was particularly surreal -- it was all done in the old-fashioned balloon style, and the accompanying pictures were mostly figures from 1980s pop-culture, like Mario Mario and Michael Jackson. I felt like I was in some creepy arcade game like Bad Dudes -- you know, that part of Bad Dudes where a car service drives you around.

I read Italo Calvino's Numbers in the Dark. It's a mixed bag. "Dry River," "Numbers in the Dark," "World Memory," and "Montezuma" were good. The other ones I could take or leave.