Platinum Blond Champion

I forgot to mention that Angel continues to amuse the fuck out of me. Wednesday's episode was odd, another Boreanaz directed episode where the timing between shots was just a little bit slow for me. The payoff was Spike playing the role of champion, saving some bint from getting eaten and finishing off by telling her what a stupid cow she was for walking home in high heels alone at 2am through back alleys. Priceless.

Also fun was the return of Christian Kane as Lindsey McDonald, a character I have always liked. I really enjoy the way the writers have made him such a sympathetic villain - especially during the Darla saga I just felt for him.

...

Crap. This post is totally gay. Go ahead people, make your comments. I stand by my vampires / evil lawyers.

Orange Juice

Tropicana has a new ad campaign wherein computer animated oranges and OJ bottles dance around to the "I Dream of Jeani" theme song. Every time I see one, I get a demented grin on my face and do a little dance.

Thought you'd like to know.

State of the Yoonyun

Maybe this is intellectual snobbery on my part but I wish my president knew the difference between Nuclear Weapons, which actually do exist, and Nukular Weapons, which in fact do not. Especially since his finger is on the button.

And what the hell was with the baby? Since when is the State of the Union a campaign stop?

3.14159265

I am currently reading Yann Martel's "Life of Pi", a fascinating tale rich with insight into the nature of man and beast. The book is about a young indian boy who is stranded on a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific with a Royal Bengal Tiger, and the lengths he goes to in order to survive his ordeal. I will not ruin the plot further, but so far as I have read I may say that no punches are pulled, no niceties are pulled over the reader's eye to abstract the absolutely raw animal nature of man. At the same time the author exalts the nobility and spirituality of man such that I wish I were more religeous and could experience the kind of theophanistic high the main character Pi undergoes after emerging from the depths of despair and which the author has obviously felt himself.

If you read "Hatchet" in the fourth grade and liked it, read this - it's smarter, better-written, more authentic and more thought-provoking.

Also, I will be in Boston from about 4pm Friday February 27 through 4pm Sunday February 29, so get ready for some drunk Jordi.

You might even say I'm preparing to be Reckless.

The World Is Ending

Mikey Walsh picked HaloScan for his commenting system.

I picked BlogSpeak.

Now BlogSpeak is dead, and HaloScan has absorbed their userbase.

*sigh* I'm never gonna live this down.

P.S. If anyone needs help with the transition, let me know.

For Stu, With Love

Q. What do you call 53 guys sitting around watching the Super Bowl?
A. The Buffalo Bills!

Q. How do you keep a Buffalo Bill out of your yard?
A. Put up goal posts!

Q. Where do you go in Buffalo in case of a tornado?
A. To Rich Stadium - they never get a touchdown there!

Q. Why doesn't Lackawana have a professional football team?
A. Becasue then Buffalo would want one.

Q. Why was Grey Williams upset when the Bills play book was stolen?
A. Because he hadn't finished coloring it.

Q. What's the difference between the Buffalo Bills and a dollar bill?
A. You can still get four quarters out a dollar.

Q. What do the Bills and possums have in common?
A. Both play dead at home and get killed on the road!

A guys walks into a bar to watch the football game with a dachshund under his arm. The dog is wearing a Buffalo Bills jersey and helmet, and is festooned with Bills pom-poms. The big game begins with the Bills receiving the kickoff. They march down field, get stopped at the 30yrd line, and kick a field goal. Suddenly, the dog jumps up on the bar and begins walking up and down the bar giving high-fives to everyone. The bartender says, "Wow, that is the most amazing thing I've seen! What does the dog do if they score a touchdown?" The owner replies, "I don't know, I''ve only had him for three years."

Spirit

Nasa's Spirit Rover severed the last umbilical cord connecting it to the landing platform and executed a 45 degree turn last night. This means the little rover is autonomous and all of its actuators are working - it will be able to rove the surface of Mars! If you haven't been following the little guy's progress, go here.

It's a very exciting time to be a space enthusiast!

Comments Down

If you, like me, use blogspeak to host your comments, you were probably wondering why they were down. If, unlike me (and the rest of the internet population) you have never heard of google, you probably still don't know the reason.

From the blogspeak domain website:

"BlogSpeak is currently down because the bastards that host it decided to suspend my account. I do not know as of yet when this situation will be resolved. If you don't want any JavaScript errors on your pages, take the code off for the time being. Thanks for your patience."

He really ought to get speakeasy. If the problem persists I may take a few months to switch providers, register a domain name, and provide you (my friends) with a better, free comment system. And if it turns out really well, I suppose I could even charge other people some exorbitant fee in the name of enterprise.

< geek on >

I'm reading a book called "The Wiz Biz" by Rick Cook. I'm also reading Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" as part of my ongoing attempt to read something other than fantasy/sci-fi pulp, but that's a separate review. The concept of "The Wiz Biz" is that a computer programmer gets summoned into this other world by a great wizard and is drafted into a war against the Bad Guys. He then uses his knowlege of programming to write a magic compiler which he programs "spells" into.

The concept is really cool but I'm stuck with a dilemma. Cook sprinkles the story with bits and pieces of jargon and the occasional insider joke. At one point the main character creates an interpreter demon that pops into existence looking like Gerald Sussman, and he wonders to himself if the little demon speaks with a lisp (haha)[1]. Unfortunately, the author never goes into the depths of detail I would require to get truly involved in the concept.

For a self-taught programmer or someone in their first year of comp-sci education, the book would be wonderful. But Cook relegates all the internal workings of the magical compiler to one or two sentences - "Wiz slaved over the compiler and debugger, working out the kludgy hacks until his spell functions began to work properly" sort of thing. Beginners tend to treat compilers the same way - plug in source code, and magically, voila! A program appears. But for someone who has actually written a compiler, I want to know what the hell he is tokenizing[2]. What are the basic assembler-style magical commands? Are they atomic or is there a base unit of magical information like a bit?

It's very frustrating to have such a promising concept with so little followthrough. At the same time I realize if the book was as geeky as I want it to be it would never sell. You can't write a fantasy novel about frame allocation and type-hierarchies and expect it to sell well to the general pulp audience. I just wish you could, cause I would love a book like that.

[1] Gerald Sussman is a famous computer scientist who wrote one of the quintessential books about the structure of programming languages. The book uses a language called Lisp for its examples.

[2] Or would that be tolkienizing?

< / geek off >

For Those Of You Familiar With My Repertoir...

It occured to me this morning that it might have been amusing to you all had I named my kitten "Othello".

Heh.