May 2006 Archives

If you didn't see City of God, you plum missed out. It was fantastic.

It was about life in one of the favelas (i.e. the slums) around Rio de Janero. Well, apparently the depiction wasn't too far from the truth, and by and large, not much has changed. As can be seen from this guy's report from Rio recently.

Well, all hell continues to break out. There's been a prison riot which culminated with a drug kingpin orchestrating violence throughout Rio and all over the city, which led to the deaths of over 200 cops. And the violence ended by the city surrendering to the aforementioned drug kingpin.

Bad news. Well, the World Cup is around the corner, so hopefully the nation of Brazil will calm down a bit, you know, until the Azzuri (i.e. Italian national team) knock them out of contention in the quarterfinals.

I mean, really, if you saw this pair of undies how closely would you be inspecting it to see if there was, I dunno, some undies or some such in them?

Genius!

If you're like me, you sometimes wonder how different your life would have turned out if you'd gotten a Pound Puppy for Christmas in 1985. I mean, it probably wouldn't be that different at all. But it might be. Sometimes little things have big consequences.

But also, if you're like me, you probably use Firefox almost exclusively. The only problem being that you can't check the SharePoint server from it.

Or can you?

Actually, you can. Check it out!

Genius

Sgt. Baker's Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Sgt. Baker was teased mercilessly because he would not operate the teleporter until Mega Force members were standing on the teleport pad according to height, name and birthday. Because Mega Force members wouldn't cooperate, often times it took 40 minutes to get to the planet surface - at which time most hostages were usually dead.

Read the whole thing

Take the quiz here

I got 8 out of 10. The similarities are eerie. Although in defense of programmers in general, these being programming language inventors, those guys are most likely academics. We don't all have that dead, creepy look in our eyes that these guys have.

Well, that took longer than expected.

I had to do some much-needed updates to the server, and ended up reinstalling the OS. Which was a long, ugly process, made worse by the fact that I had little to no idea what I was doing.

Anyway, that's done, and while I was at it, I decided to switch to Wordpress. Right now, I'm using the default style, but I'll be making changes over the next few days and hopefully I'll have this looking sharp.

Many links that I'll be posting over the next few. So look out for that, too.

¡Adios, muchachos!

Update: After poking around a bit, I changed my mind, and decided to stick with Movable Type.

If you're a male between the ages of, say, 26 to 33, then you probably have a 12 year old inside you who thinks this video file is awesome.

...can be found here

A sample:

The Trinity

This is the Christian expression of God, who Christians say is personified by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Not all Christians accept this: Unitarians, Jehovah's Witnesses, and some Pentecostals reject trinitarianism, as do Muslims. Interestingly, while this does not mean Pentecostals are Muslim, it does mean that Muslims are Jehovah's Witnesses.

The whole thing is good.

Where to start with Metal Machine Music?

This is something of the lost Lou Reed album. Or maybe the Lou Reed album that everyone ran away from. It came out in 1975, so Transformer was still fresh on people's minds. Although people hoping this would have the next "Walk on the Wild Side" were about to be disappointed.

You know the end of Mellow Gold by Beck, how the last song is Blackhole, and there's five minutes of silence and suddenly the speakers erupt with this wild assortment of sounds? Well, Metal Machine Music is most closely reminiscent of that. Only without such a variety of sounds. It's guitar feedback, sped up, slowed down, piled into layer upon mind numbing layer. And also, unlike the untitled Beck opus, this goes on for over an hour.

I listen to some utter garbage. I'm the first to admit it. So when I start questioning whether something really qualifies as "music", you can be assured that it's probably really, really bad.

I think it all comes down to a beat. You can have a beat but no melody (q.v. all that rap music the kids are listening to these days). That's music, of a sort. But you can't have a melody without a beat. This has neither a beat nor a melody. It's just noise.

Now, having said that, I still think you should pick up this album. What's more, I believe the $15 you shell out for it might prove to be the most useful $15 you ever shell out.

How could one make use of 63-odd minutes of screeching guitar feedback, the listening to which feels like a knitting needle being jabbed into the side of your head? The only limit is your imagination!

First of all, this album has the magical ability to slow down time. I've listened to the thing in its entirety, I can vouch for the fact that that was one of the longest hours of my life. I thought it would never end. "In the name of Mary, Joseph, and the little baby Jesus, is this thing ever, ever going to end?" I said to myself. I suspect if you listened to this all the time, you would effectively live forever*.

Second, once I was done listening, I felt so alive! Like if you've ever had a near-death experience. Or if you've spent three days straight in the computer lab, and you walk outside for the first time, blinking in the sun. Colors were brighter, smells smelled better, and all other music sounded way better.

But it has many more uses aside from just listening to it and gaining a new appreciation for how wonderful life is when you aren't listening to it. For instance:

Say you have something important to do one morning and you're afraid you're going to fall asleep. If you have one of those CD alarm clocks, this will make the perfect CD to make sure you spring out of bed so you can dart across the room to make it stop. It might even break you of the snooze bar habit, since actually getting up might be preferrable to having to listen to that again.

Or if you've had that house party and you want the last four stragglers to finally go home. Throw this in the Hi-Fi and even the most obtuse guest will finally get the hint.

Use your imagination. Dress up like a robot on Halloween, and have it playing when you open the door for the trick-or-treaters. That'll probably be the scariest house they'll go to.

Therefore and in conclusion, I think everyone should have a copy of Metal Machine Music. Some day you'll be glad you do. As a work of "art", I give it 1/2 a dog head. As something handy, I give it 4 dog heads. This averages out to be about two dog heads.

And at some point, I'm going to make a replacement dog head image. So for right now, just know that it gets two dog heads, and you should buy it anyway.

* The author makes no claim as to your quality of life, only its duration.

Actually, this might be the blooper of the decade.

The deal is, Apple made a big breakthrough with the Beatles people where they'd start selling Beatles music over iTunes. So they were going to interview Guy Kewney, editor of NewsWireless.net

The trouble is, the guy's cab driver had a nametag with Guy Kewney on it for some reason. The BBC person goes out to the lobby, sees the nametag, and says "You need to be over here."

So Generic Cab Driver is placed in the studio and on camera. And when the interviewer says, "Guy Kewney is editor of the technology website Newswireless" the cabbie realizes what's just happened and this look of utter panic crosses his face that I've watched about ten times and it's still funny.

But then, rather than say, "Goodness, you have the wrong guy", he decides to just wing it. I don't think he's ever actually been in the same room as someone connected to the internet, truth be told. So, he answers these questions as best he can in an impenetrable French accent.

Priceless.

You may not know this, but as you all know, I probably don't work as hard as I ought to. By a mile.

I figured the biggest problem was that I spent to f*@$-ing much time putzing around on the dad blam internet.

I know what some of you must be thinking. You're thinking, "Well, if you're spending too much time putzing around on the internet, then, uh, just don't do that. Do work instead."

Excellent idea. However, that would involve self-control. And there are two big problems with me and self-control. One of them is "self" and the other is "control".

So, I had a bit of inspiration one day and decided to install a firewall on my computer at work. Man, that's one of the better ideas I've had.

It's one of those with a timer. So I have the first half hour of the day to do web stuff, then at 8:30, it starts blocking ol' port 80, i.e. web traffic. So I can still get mail, and the seventeen IM's still work, but no reading the news or what not. So, for lack of anything better to do, I figure I might as well do some work.

Then from 11 to 12:30, the magic internet turns back on, so I can check the sports page in Oklahoma while I'm munching on five-day-old leftovers, and then back to work.

One final opening at 4:45 in case I need to print out a map before I leave (which happens fairly often, actually), and then I go home.

So, having installed this firewall, I'd say I got more done these last two days than I have the previous two weeks.

Unfortunately, if I have a bit of inspiration for some idiotic thought I'd like to share, I can't act on it. I can't open the little blog manager and fire off an entry or six.

Like today, I thought of no less than 70 things I thought I would write about if I had internet access. But no worries. This idea is so genius, there's absolutely no way I could possibly forget it. So I'm not even going to write a note or anything.

And how many of those 70 ideas can I remember? You guessed it.

So, I'm going to sleep instead.

Newest thing from Google:

Google Trends

You enter a phrase and it'll tell you how many people were searching for that and where they're from.

Some of the ones I was looking at, for no particular reason, were:

• College Football
• C# (The U.S. doesn't show up until #7)
• Michael Jackson (Most often searched for in... Lima, Peru. What's up with that?)
• Famous J (Most often searched for in St. Louis. Go figure.)

"It's the exception that proves the rule."

[At this point, I usually start sputtering incoherently for a few seconds. After I regain my composure, I say:]

No, the exception does not prove the rule. Exceptions don't prove the rule. Logic proves the rule. The exception is the freakin' exception! Which means A) it's not part of the rule, and 2) it shows the rule isn't really a rule.

If you feel tempted to use that particular phrase, make sure you don't know me personally or that I'll never read that. Because otherwise, I'll kill you in your sleep.

P.S. I'm just kidding.

P.P.S. I'm not kidding. You say that and I will murder you.

This is fascinating stuff. It's about using machines to play poker, and the limits of artificial intelligence and game theory.

It's especially interesting if you're concerned that robots are going to take over the world. Which I'm not, by the way. At least not until I'm long, long dead.

However tricked out the hardware gets, however many productivity leaps are made, in the end, software is still written by people. People like me. People making blog entries when they probably ought to be working.

And I think I'm one of the better programmers.

The Cub had his spring band concert. His was the second band of four. They were all very good, but...

Sometime around the last band, I started having flashbacks of being in band myself. Not so much a flashback in terms of anything visual, just that I remembered what it felt like being in band. Which lead to a general flashback of being in high school.

It was this low-level of angst, existential frustration, and a deep sadness that didn't have much of a focus to it. I felt like I was going to throw up. And this was just a flashback. I knew the actual feeling was much more intense.

Whoever said that high school is the greatest years of your life was full of it. Sure, you never have more fun than you do in high school, but I don't think I was ever more miserable than I was in high school.

And now that I think about it, I had more fun in college than I did in high school. By a mile.

I guess if I had a point... no, wait, I don't have one of those.

Wait! I got it!

My point is, I realized what misery Jacob has waiting for him just around the corner. If you believe in God and that He listens when you pray, say a prayer for him. He's got a long, hard stretch ahead of him.

this link. You know, unless you don't have anything to do for the next two hours.

Actually, screw it. It's Friday afternoon. I think you should click on that link. Stick it to the man!

So I was thinking about the lyrics to the song "P.Funk (Wants To Get Funked Up)" by Parliament.

Take a gander:

Welcome to station W-E-F-U-N-K,
better known as We-Funk,
Or deeper still, the Mothership Connection.
Home of the extraterrestrial brothers,
Dealers of funky music.
P.Funk, uncut funk, The Bomb.

Coming to you directly from the Mothership
Top of the Chocolate Milky Way,
500,000 kilowatts of P.Funk-power.
So kick back, dig, while we do it to you in your eardrums.

Anyway, I realized that these are some of the most bizarre lyrics pressed into vinyl, at least until Beck came along.

So, here's what I'm trying to figure out. This song would pop up in the iPod every now and again with some regularity, but it's been a long time since I actually thought about how weird they are.

I can't remember the first time I heard Parliament, so I don't know if they always struck me as weird, if I initially said, "What the [redacted] is this [redacted]?" but after repeated listenings, I lost that feeling, until the song was just music and words.

Or is it possible that I just didn't notice the weirdness? Maybe odd stuff strikes me now in a way it didn't used to. Just a part of getting old. Losing your edge.

Deep Donkey Crew, Oklahoma City's premiere gay communist rap band, is no more.

The details of the band's demise are not suitable for this, a family website, but the band is as dead as Freddie Mercury.

I won't say this is a devastating blow. I'm sure everyone in the band will carry on. The world will keep turning. I just think the world is a bit poorer now.

Still, say what you want about the DDC, but of all the local bands playing today, probably none of them will become the next Flaming Lips. Most will disappear without a trace. But ten years from now, you'll still hear people say, "Do you remember that band Deep Donkey Crew? Those guys were [insert whatever phrase they'll be using in 10 years that means roughly the same as "off da hook"]!"