11:14 am - Check it out So, after many years of planning, yearning, questing and striving, the time is finally up on us: I have quit my day job, thrown off the shackles of The Man, and gone into business with my friend Toby. We're going to be making a game our way (not your way), and what's better, we're fully funded by a private venture capital firm, so I don't even have to give up buying groceries or diamond tennis bracelets, as most of the self-employed have to do. Working from home, on a project I really enjoy, with some good friends who all have experience working together, diamond tennis bracelets, what's not to love? Check out our nascent webpage: Thinglefin: The Website of the Movie Novelization. If anyone wants to tell me why my CSS is so dicked up, feel free.
Also, yesterday my water heater exploded and my glasses broke.
12:13 pm - Cultural icons that only exist in cartoons For some reason I've been thinking of weird things we're all aware of, but pretty much only because they've been passed down to us by cartoons. Cartoons seem to have their own unique iconography that was developed during the Great Depression, and then was weirdly never left behind. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, here's a short list off the top of my head:
Wearing a barrel because you are poor
Wearing a monocle and top hat because you are rich
Anvils
1-ton cast-iron weights
Dog catchers
Truant officers
Groucho Marx caricatures
Criminals with striped uniforms and chains
Short, ragged cigars in the mouths of said criminals
Brown cloth sacks of money with "$" on the side
Hobos with polka-dotted bindles over one shoulder
Picnic baskets
Pies on window ledges
White gloves as a common occurrence
Red sticks of dynamite with "TNT" written on them
Shiny black spherical bombs
Canes that come out and pull you off a stage
Throwing tomatoes
Slipping on banana peels
Wooden mallets
Cloth diapers with a safety-pin
Kids selling newspapers
I'm sure there are many more. What other odd bits and pieces of the 1930s do we still consider familiar and commonplace... but only in cartoons? Seriously, wearing a barrel? If it weren't for cartoons, if someone did that as a shorthand for being poor, we'd be totally baffled. I mean, come on, wearing a barrel.
02:49 pm - Ahhh, WORMS! Yesterday we gave Cora a dose of de-worming goo. Doing this was its own fun little adventure, since the stuff comes in a little plastic plunger that you're supposed to cram down your dog's throat and plunge directly into their little gullet. Our attempts to hold her still and pry her mouth open went poorly, so eventually we just held the thing up to her face until her natural puppy instincts (bite any unfamiliar object!) came into play and we were able to shove it in her mouth.
Anyway, that was yesterday. This morning Cora squatted down and pooped out several large glistening globs of intertwined white worms, about the size and shape of bean sprouts. Man! Guh-ROSS! Now Jenny and I are entirely paranoid that sometime in the past few weeks we might have carelessly picked up worm eggs from picking up or touching Cora, and then UNKNOWINGLY TRANSFERED THEM INTO OUR MOUTHES. IT COULD HAVE HAPPENED. Oh my god.
Ahhh pricing controls. Does your comedy routine get any less funny every time you do it? Not so far! Comedy gold, each and every time, as an economy rapidly falls to pieces while the leaders variously blame capitalists, Jews, the United States, and whatever else they think of. I think I can safely call Venezuela a walking dead country at this point. My sympathy, Venezuelans.
10:35 am - Wii Play I got my Wii Play, mostly because hey, why not have another controller. It's weird that Wii Play is coming out now, since it seems explicitly designed to be a tutorial for the system, much more so than Wii Sports. Had they included Wii Play with the system and sold Wii Sports separately, I would not have thought to complain and would probably have bought Wii Sports. But anywhere, here it is out now. And perhaps having the system tutorial out a few months after launch isn't a terrible thing, since it'll still be a while until people can casually walk into a store and buy a Wii, and those are the people that'll probably benefit most from a tutorial that comes with an extra controller. I can see Wii Play as the standard up-sell item to be offered to non-gamers buying a Wii.
Oh, did I enjoy Wii Play? Yeah, in a mild, relaxing sort of way. The laserball and tank games seem like they'll have some furious and fun multiplayer replay potential. The "Mii matching" game was surprisingly hard, which gave me some interesting food for thought on the subject of how our brains pattern-match. Try it, you'll see what I mean.
03:49 pm - Yardwork This weekend was mostly spent outside, building a new railing for the deck stairs in the back yard and installing more outdoor landscape lighting. The railing project was inspired a week ago when I was trying to convince Cora to come down the scary open-backed wooden steps on her own for the first time. She made it about 2/3rds of the way down and all seemed good until she suddenly realized how high up she was and panicked. I suddenly knew what was about to happen, and reached out to grab her, but too late, she lunged off the side of the steps with no railing and fell to the flagstones 6 feet below. Incredibly, she was shaken but fine. I'm not sure if she learned a lesson about jumping from tall things or not, but we're not going to take any chances. So now the stairs are completely and comfortingly enclosed. I also buried about 100 feet of 12 volt DC cable all around the yard, so we could put lights everywhere to make those late-night puppy potty trips slightly more bearable.
Next up: Building a gate between our backyard and the neighbors'. And then the hottub.
01:44 pm - Google buildings I just happened to be looking up an address in downtown Seattle and noticed, hey! Check it out.
Google maps now shows individual buildings, a la Google Earth. Not incredibly useful (yet!) but pretty cool. For added fun, try inspecting lower Manhattan.
02:21 pm - Usernames Wow, it just occurred to me that the days are numbered for using freeform unique usernames on the internet. Maybe I'm wrong, but think about it! Let's look at one username space, AIM. How long has AIM been around? Around 10 years, right? How many millions of accounts are registered on it? I don't know, but it's a shit-ton, and furthermore it's a shit-ton that's heavily clustered around names and words. Let's fast-forward 50 years or so. Multiply this shit-ton by a growing global population, a growing amount of the globe that uses usernames, and by the fact that even people with existing usernames will continue to consume new ones. Obviously, usernames can accommodate an unlimited number of people given unlimited username length, but at some point it's not going to be practical. Usernames will be so obscure and long that they'll be less useful than telephone numbers, which are at least of bounded length. At some point, usernames that are recognizable names or words will be a curious thing of the past.
So how do we identify people in a way that won't get used up? Well, we could partition the username space temporally. Let's say we reserve some character in our username, like # or something. Then we could have all usernames registered in 2007 have #2007 appended to them. One can imagine a lot of schemes like that, but I'm not sure that'll save usernames, since it doesn't help you memorize someone's username (were they a 2005 or a 2003?) and pretty much any way you partition the username space is bound to expose some kind of detail that's probably best not to expose.
I guess we'll just have to limp along until the system collapses. Maybe by then we'll all be born with GUIDs or something, have a single global open login system using a thumb-print pad or something. Anyway, the point is, usernames won't last forever! Claim lots of them right now!
"He would not describe it. Nor would he say what it turned out to be."
Possible things it could have been: A discarded bike lock? A Sega Master System? A lone rollerblade wheel? A half-empty soda cup from Spuds with the straw missing and the "DIET" dimple punched in? A car battery? A filthy burlap hobo backpack, the kind with an unspeakably nasty sleeping-bag dangling partway out because it's too stuffed full of hobo shit? Someone's forgotten sketchbook, with one partly-done pencil drawing of a leaf on the first page? There are just too many possibilities to even comprehend. Come on, SPD, give us a hint here!
12:41 pm - So... Tired... This whole puppy nonsense is nonsense! I've been going to bed at 10 pm lately just because I feel SO DAMN TIRED. Dogs might have been designed to get up at the crack of dawn, but not man. Not man. The thing is, Cora holds all the cards. When she wakes up in the morning and starts fussing and agitating the household awake, we know that we ignore her at our own peril. She has it in her power to call down a SHITSTORM upon us if we don't bow to her demands. So there I am out in the backyard before it's even light, taking an interest in a dog's excrement. So tired.
But it's getting better. We're becoming experts on distinguishing the pattern of "wandering around sniffing because I want to pee somewhere" from the pattern of "just wandering around sniffing because things should be sniffed". Cora is starting to tolerate being guided around on a leash, so we're hopeful a walk is in our future (the farthest we've made it so far is half a block from the house).
Well, time to go complicate up my home theater setup even more so I can use the built-in TV tuner to watch digital TV and still output the audio to the speaker system via optical cable. It's my first HD Superbowl, woo! In your face, analogists.
04:05 pm Regarding Boston: Jeeze, people. First I will grant that putting up guerrilla marketing devices without permission from whoever owns the various areas was a pretty bad idea. However, I'm pretty amazed by the official response to these things. They'd been in the wild for several weeks, indicating that most people who saw them realized their harmless nature pretty quickly. Most people seem to have realized that a small device covered in flashy blinking LEDs is not, in fact, a bomb. Why would a bomb call attention to itself with blinking lights? That only happens in movie-land where the audience needs to be told through shorthand that "this thing blinks and/or beeps, therefor it is going to explode". So, I understand that a handful of people might be confused by this when they see an unknown blinking item in an odd place. What saddens me (but doesn't really surprise me) is that the city of Boston's finest emergency responders didn't seem to understand this. Not only that, but they didn't seem to understand that a device comprised entirely of lights isn't going to have any room left over for, say, explosives. The fact that nearly every single report bears a headline similar to Fake Bombs Cause Boston Panic, clearly indicating that those releasing the information to the media can't determine the difference between a lite-brite and a bomb.
Oh sure, they were just trying to be "cautious" in this "post 9/11 world". But shouldn't caution also include being cautious about shutting down a major city, and creating widespread panic? Terrorism is about creating terror. If we jump at every shadow, then we must seem a pretty easy target. I hope future emergency responders will take a moment to collect some common sense before the adrenaline starts pumping. And maybe actually look at what IEDs actually look like. Oh, and maybe getting someone on the force who is under 35 and in touch with popular culture might not be a bad idea either!
12:18 pm - Finally, news that's fit to print Right, I was going to use this thing to communicate things to my friends. Maybe I'll start that up again. And what better way to do that than with PUPPY?!?!!!!!
This weekend Jenny and I drove all the way down to the hills of rural Eugene, Oregon, which was the closest we could find a reputable shetland sheepdog breeder without an incredibly long waiting list. That's probably about 9 hours longer than most people are willing to drive to get a puppy, but we're not most people! We're sheepdog people.
It was obvious when we first saw her that she was a great puppy. As soon as she was set down in the house, she exploded towards us and danced around, wagging and licking. After such a long trip, I'm sure we wouldn't have turned down even a sulky, shy puppy, but this one was everything we could want. We wrote a check, got paperwork and were quickly off, one nervously excited dog on a towel on my lap.
The trip back was long, and included one barf stop and one unsuccessful potty stop. By the time we'd finally made it home, little Cora had acquired her name as we randomly called out things we read on highway signs. At one point she was close to being named "Hazelwood Plaza", but after we tested out saying "Hazel" over and over again, as one might to a dog, we decided that Cora was the way to go.
She's utterly the sweetest little thing imaginable, very playful and inquisitive. It's just sinking in that we now have a dog and have to make all sorts of adjustments, such as getting up earlier to get some outside time with her, and cordoning off the kitchen until she figures out about peeing outside. Still, we couldn't be happier. We've gone from "engaged" to "dog-parents"!
So far my old-house maintanence has been mainly replacing lightbulbs and weather strips, but I'm sure more is on the way. One irritant I have been running into though: Really crumbly old plaster walls. I've been trying to install various screws in the walls for paintings and such. I've had trouble though. Various methods tried:
Slender nail for lightweight stuff - The problem: Nail goes through plaster, hits slender lath board behind plaster, and then just bounces instead of penetrating the lath board.
Drill small hole, insert small nail - Works so-so. Nail goes in, but drilling seems to make the plaster pretty crumbly, and I'm skeptical of putting any serious weight on it.
Using drywall anchors - These screws seem deeper than the plaster is thick, so they're invariably going to have to stick through the lath as well. Maybe I just need to be more careful about this part, but so far my attempts to drill the perfect sized hole have resulted in too much plaster crumbling away. By the time there's a big enough hole in the lath, all this plaster has crumbled away and basically I end up with a screw in the lath totally unsupported by plaster. Note: All pre-existing wall screws in the house are like this, and they all feel really wimpy. If you pull on them even gently, you can feel them "boing" as they twist the lath they're screwed into.
Special plaster and lath accordion screw - These buggers are supposed to go right through everything and then expand on the other side, but so far my attempts to tighten them have just crushed the head of the screw deep into the plaster (kind of hard to explain). In practice, the head of the screw is supposed to stay flush with the wall as the screw contracts. I managed to get one to work by sticking a huge washer between it and the wall, but I had to use some tools to remove the little teeth that are designed to bite into the plaster. It seemed awkward, but it's the only thing so far that seems solid, so maybe that's just the way I'll do it.
Anyone out there with old plaster experience have any tips for me? Thanks!
12:20 pm Bah, lorrior tagged me with a meme ray. I will comply out of brotherly respect, but will decline to pass the "tag" along to any specific people.
Six random facts about myself:
1. I had a dream last night in which I lived in an alternate reality in which reality show contestants were instantly and privately executed upon being eliminated from whatever show they were on. The odd thing was, reality shows were just as popular and just as many people applied to be on them, and while everyone knew that reality show losers were killed, nobody really talked about it or called attention to it. It was just one of those accepted facts of life, like how I enjoy eating meat and mentally gloss over animals suffering to get me that meat.
2. I have a built-in anti-addiction circuit breaker. Whenever my brain notices me doing something unproductive too often, I start to get a strong uncomfortable feeling while doing it, until I stop. This is both good and bad, since it means I don't get addicted to much, but it also makes it hard for me to finish videogames, and often results in me sitting around doing nothing at all, when I could at least be doing something unproductive but fun.
3. My left eye is much more nearsighted than my right eye, but my right eye has slightly less color depth.
4. I love nearly all food stuffs with the exception of walnuts (which make my throat feel anxious).
5. I enjoy standing in front of the bathroom mirror squeezing yucky goop out of plugged nose pores.
6. Sometimes my own shoulders smell DELICIOUS to me.
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rejemy's journal
