Mikhael's Journal

One of the most interesting parts of my job is interacting with the people in the various offices I visit each day. I submit one rather creepy lady I get to see every two weeks: her (now dead) older sister used to place her in the oven, dryer or washing machine and turn them on. Creepy lady would then scream until her mother came running and pulled her out. She's claustrophobic and more than a bit loopy now. She speaks cheerfully about her sister being dead, but--and this stands out to me--never mentions how she died.

Today, she walked up behind me and said, "I'm here to make your mouth's life happy!" and walked off. I haven't found out what she meant, but I can tell you I don't think I want to know.

                              Zaurus PDA
                                 ScummVM
+ Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
----------------------------------------
                  deep geek satisfaction

Such things help keep me from going mad while writing this my last paper.

I generally despise people who proclaim their relgious or political beliefs on the tail end of their cars, unless they're clever. Near the top of my list are the Fishies: the people who have bumper stickers that say "In the event of Rapture, this vehicle will be unattended!", to which, I alway want to reply, "The Rapture already happened, and you're still here you moron." Uncharitable, I know. Its just the way I am.

Imagine my surprise and delight, however, at the following juxtaposition of Fishy iconography and the automotive industry's continuous struggle to give cars appealing names. I can only wonder if this driver was being ironic or thick. Regardless of which it was, I knew I had to grab my camera and snap a pic super quick.

( Irony or Ignorant? )

And here's the post-final draft. Though it got an A+, the instructor pointed out some places where I had  errors. Whilst the rest of the class can get up to eight more points for fixing their errors and turning them in, I can't go anywhere. She does want to use my paper as an example for later classes though, so I'm doing the reworking anyway.

( Read more... )

Bleargh. Now I have to do this three more times.

And here's tonight's rework of the essay. I think it came out a little better this time. I'll probably bleed on it again tomorrow morning, and do a final rewrite for my class Monday night.

The class, by the way, is a 5wk, 4 days per week condensation of a 16 week, 2 days per week class. I've only been going for a week, and I'm already feeling exhausted. That damned bagel program (thanks again, Collabi, for setting me on the right path with that), never made my brain hurt the way this essay did.

( Read more... )

Yes. I live. I'm taking an condensed, 5wk Eng111 course at the local tech school so I can get enrolled in my CSC degree program. Below, I've included the paper that was supposed to be due this evening. Looking back over it 16hrs after I "finished" it, I'm glad I have until monday evening to rework it.
Here's the complete, unedited, ugly, ugly mess. Sorry about the horrors of MS-Word-->HTML conversions. :D

( Read more... )

I never update this damn thing. :D

I've pasted the text of a rambling, overly gushing review I wrote about Jedi Academy. Enjoy it, if you're into that sort of thing.

( Read more... )

Remember, when trying to enable APM in your kernel, you have to unocmment this line.

#device apm0 at nexus? disabled flags 0x20 # Advanced Power Management

You also have to remove "disabled". Two months of trying everything but the blatantly fucking obvious.

In my recent reinstall of FreeBSD I've run into several problems. Chief among them is a decision on my part to switch from locally compiled software to binary distributed software. Linux user's seem to swear by binary distributions (especially the Debian sorts), as do many of my fellow Daemons. After all, binary distributions are quick and easy: just download, install and you're off. I have, however, somehow always avoided them. My first act after installing FreeBSD on a machine is to immediately grab the source for the kernel and the world, and compile everything, replacing every last externally generated binary. Locally compiled software can be a real pain in the neck though: you have to download it and compile it. Compiling can be quite the lengthy process.

I decided to give binary distribution packages a shot. This was, as I stated before, a huge problem: It seems that the packages are not maintained with quite the same diligence and intelligence as the ports (the source of the locally compiled software). When I went to install packages for one of the more popular desktop environments, I was balked: some of my shared libraries were too recent, so they didn't match up with what the packages expected. In most cases, getting the package to work was a tweak here, a twist there, a poke some other place... nothing serious, just a bit of time and work. That bit added up, however. The time spent finding the source of the problems mounted quickly. The time spent fixing the problems mounted even more quickly.

When I was using locally compiled software (ports), everything was simple: figure out which software I wanted, download, compile and install it. The ports system in FreeBSD made this pathetically simple. Want apache? Just do this:
# cd /usr/ports/www/apache && make install clean
Pretty easy. It seldom fails. When it does it fails in detailed and easy to diagnose (and usually easy to fix) ways. I very seldom had to fix a broken port though.

I just don't see the advantage of binary distributions if they're as fragile as I'm experiencing. I'm going back to compiling everything locally immediately.

Last week or maybe the week before, I wrecked my car. Some idiot in a big pickup (F150 or a Tundra or some such) felt that he needed the space I was currently occupying on the freeway, and decided that he should ocupy it immediately, previous to my vacating it. In order to avoid being hit, I swerved left into the median. I soon discovered that Thunderbirds do NOT handle well at moderate speeds on grass. I slid along the guard wires, doing about $3600US damage to the left side of the car. It will be ready next week.

This weekend, we decided to drive my wife's car to the dealership where my father works to get its annual inspection done. Halfway there, the electronic engine control computer burned out. On an 89 Scorpio, the EEC handles such important things as making the fuel pump pump, the injectors to inject and the spark plugs to spark. Needless to say, internal combustion engines don't combust, internally or otherwise, when these three things don't happen. My father drove to us with a tow dolly. We ended up staying with my parents for the weekend, unplanned. No spare clothes or toiletries. After two days of working on the car with my father, my own stink was beginning to complain about my smell. In the end, the computer needed to be replaced, though that will not happen until tomorrow. To this end, my father lent me his 86 Merkur XR4Ti.

It has a transmission leak, but a minor one, my father informed me. Oh and it needed new belts. We put the car up on jacks and got under it and looks for the source of the leak. Nothing. I got in the car and put the thing up at 55mph. No leak. We declared the car fit for the road and my wife and I drove home--trailing grey-white smoke most of the way. As we pulled up to our apartment, the transmission started shifting oddly. This morning, I checked the transmission oil. There wasn't even enough to wet the dipstick. So much for a little leak.

I'm in a rental right now, a Ford Focus (Laser for you Aussie sorts) of indeterminate year. I'm waiting for something to happen. Perhaps a T-bone. Or a bridge collapsing. Or lightning stiking a tree and causing it to fall on the car.Who knows, maybe I'll end up in Afghanistan, driving across a bloody minefield. In fact, I'm hoping for the minefield. Wanting to blow up the vehicle might actually reduce the chances of it happening.

( A bunch of LJ meme test things... )

The important things to know are simple: John Crichton Kicks Ass, Don't Shake Hands With Me, I'm really quite Ominous, not only am I Morally Corrupt, but I'm Really deeply Evil Too.

[URL that was here removed because it wasn't supposed to be used publicly. As soon as there is one, I'll put it here instead.]

As a side note, Dictionary.com offers this:


treason

\Trea"son\, n. [OE. tresun, treisun, traisoun, OF. tra["i]son, F. trahison, L. traditio a giving up, a delivering up, fr. tradere to give up, betray. See Traitor , and cf. Tradition.] 1. The offense of attempting to overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance, or of betraying the state into the hands of a foreign power; disloyalty; treachery.

The treason of the murthering in the bed. --Chaucer.

Note: In monarchies, the killing of the sovereign, or an attempt to take his life, is treason. In England, to imagine or compass the death of the king, or of the queen consort, or of the heir apparent to the crown, is high treason, as are many other offenses created by statute. In the United States, treason is confined to the actual levying of war against the United States, or to an adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. [emphasis mine]

Interesting article sent to me by my wife. All I can say is that I think that artist is wonderful.

( Read more... )

Something I forgot in my earlier random musings:

The new Matrix movie rocked. It needs better pacing, and it is entirely eyeball candy, but it rocks. If the first movie could be summed up in a single phoneme, it was Neo's utterance of "Whoa." The new movie can be summed up with Agent Smith's utterance of "More."

There is one fight sequence in particular which just left feeling... i dunno... empowered. I sat and watched the whole thing getting more and more excited. The outcome was never in question. Ever. Somehow though, I kept working closer and closer to the edge of my seat, utterly... gobsmacked. Some little part of me--that part that makes my wife say, repatedly, "you're such a BOY!"--was bouncing around wanting to be Neo. The other, utterly gay part of me was thinking, "That coat flows well, such nice lines. Bitch."

Now, if there is one thing I would change, it would be to rip out all but a token moment of the rave/orgy and the trinity/neo serial port link up.

My uncle Edwin died yesterday. He had an agressive, advanced stage form of Lou Gehrig's disease (did I spell that right?). Edwin pulled strings, I suspect, to get me into university ten years ago when my grades couldn't. When I came back from Japan and needed money, he hired me to build a couple of computers for him, and to consult on a possible network for his business. The funeral is Thursday.

I'm okay, so long as I don't think about it too much. If I think about it, I break down. Music helps.

Archos wall wart showed up finally. My personal soundtrack is back. This is good for bad reasons.

Blueberry lambic not so good. Apricot and raspberry still divine. Someone here at Cisco brews his own beer. Looking forward to trying some of his.

Margaret Atwood rocks. I read "The Blind Assassin" about a year and a half ago and was in awe of the work. I'm reading "Oryx and Crake" now. While I generally dislike dystopia-cum-wasteland stories, this one is so intensely personal--taking place in the muddled mind and memories of of the main character, Snowman--that I can't get enough. I'm almost done, unfortunately. Its not very long.

Metroid Prime for the GameCube is quite easily one of the finest examples of the game maker's art. Though the writing is simplistic, it exists only to facilitate the action and leave the player to take in the details visually and aurally and fill in the rest with the imagination. The action is sublime, being a near perfect mix of button-mashing shoot-em-up goodness and puzzle solving that, while not deep or in any way meaningful, give the game the Metroid feel that was developed in the property's 2d platformer days. My only complaint about this game is that it is a console game, and thus lacks the convenience of a mouse and keyboard arrangement. For a long time ChronoTrigger and Super Metroid were the greatest console games ever, in my opinion. Now that Metroid Prime has released, it and ChronoTrigger's sequel ChronoCross hold that title in a firm grip.

Since spring session is over (A+ in Math for Morons and A- in CSC214, thank you very much), I've been back to work on my tile engine 'research', on the theory that if I don't use the skills, I'll lose them. While working on the TM_CELL and TM_MAP classes, I realized that I needed some way to test the reading and writing of map objects. The catch, of course, is that I have no properly formatted binary file with which to test the class. To this end, I decided that I needed a map editor. A simple enough thing to imagine, not so simple to implement.
I set about to learning the event handling interface for SDL and realized that I needed to play about with what I was reading before I could do anything serious. My solution was to create a CD Player applet. SDL provides routines for poking at the standard stuff in CD-ROM drives that allows them to play CDs. All I needed to do was write the applet to wrap around these routines. I figured that such an applet required, at a bare minimum, buttons on the screen and visual feedback for clicking the buttons.
It took about two days from start to finish. I have a six button interface (RW, FF, Play, Stop, Eject, Pause). The buttons are loaded from a windows BMP file which contains 'pressed' and 'unpressed' versions of each. Clicking on a button causes it to flip to the 'pressed' version, releasing the click within the same button causes the action to take place. Because I have a preponderence for turning everything into an object, there is a CD_CDROM object wrapping the SDL CD interface, adding reasonably CD-Playerish logic (play after pause acts as resume, pause after pause acts as resume, ff while stopped changes tracks but doesn't play it, ff while playing changes tracks and does, etC). There is also a CD_Button class to simplify loading the button map, arrange the button faces on the screen, and the like. It is not nearly as well implemented as the CD_CDROM class.
All in all, it works great. There's some refinements to the existing code that need to be made and it needs more features (like showing you what track you're listening to!). I learned how to handle mouse events, which is what the whole thing was about in the first place.
Proposed refinements include creating a mouse "trap" map to handle the button clicks independent of the button display, and adding track information such as playtime and FF_Scan and RW_Scan and the like.

I'm sure there's other random stuff, but I can't be bothered to remember right now. I'll add more later.

( My Current College Transcript )

The Degree Program I Wish To Take.

I haven't got a prayer.

Neapolitan Ice Cream + Key Lime Habanero Sauce = Dessert Bliss

I've only been at Cisco for 12 days and I've already had two days of vacation. This is starting off well. For Easter, my wife and I went to Charleston, SC. I'm going to try to write a few entries telling about the place.

For right now, I'm going to talk about beer. I don't know anything about beer. I've had it all over the world, however, and feel that I'm eminently qualified to discuss the subject. In Charleston, whilst walking into a steakhouse, I saw on sign that proclaimed to the world the availability of a fine raspberry wheat ale. I do not know what makes an ale an ale, nor do I know why wheat is mentioned. "Raspberry" caught my eye, though, so I ordered one.

This wonderful brew started off with a slightly harsh taste, with the merest hint of raspberry to smooth it out. As it rolled across my palate, however, the raspberry flavor disappeared to be replaced by a rich, almost nutty tone. As I swallowed, the nutty notes continued into a warm richness, leaving my mouth feeling clean and refreshed. In all, very satisfying.

Since we've been back, I've stopped at the local whole food market--which happens to also have a fine selection of non-megabrewery brews. I bought some raspberry wheat ale, as well as some blueberry and apricot. I have yet to try the blueberry, but the apricot is just divine. The apricot flavor permeates the beer at all levels, giving it a completely different character than the rather lighter raspberry.

One of the best quotes I've seen in a good long time:

"This Legislature takes my gay tax dollars, and my gay tax dollars spend the same as your straight tax dollars. If you're not going to treat me fairly, stop taking my tax dollars."

-- Arizona State Rep. Steve May

And a couple more:

"The whole point of free expression is not
to make ideas exempt from criticism but
to expose them to it."

-- columnist Garry Wills

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims
may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons
than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may
sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who
torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so
with the approval of their own conscience.

-- C.S. Lewis

In case you're wondering what prompted these quotes, please visit The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression and do a quick read through of the Jefferson Muzzles.