When I was much much younger I wrote two parts of a story for English class. The first embodied rebellion, and the second revenge; that was the gist of the assignments for the year. The stories were pretty horrible as I look them over now. While I had quite the imagination the effort wasn't there, but I'm happy to blame that on the fact that is was an assignment for a class I didn't like.

The story takes place in a post apocalyptic world. A hacker launches all the world nukes, and all of modern civilization goes by-by leaving pockets of life here and there.

The first story talks about how a Flier named Bower learns he has not in fact been spreading a helpful Cure over the citizens of Survival City in New Moscow ( no relation, whatever I actually meant by that ), but has instead been poisoning them to conduct experiments for the evil General Reat. Bower exacts revenge by throwing some of the radioactive chemical into General Reat's face and then running off with all the other Fliers to become rebels.

The follow up sees Bower pursued by General Reat as the group is attempting to escape and make plans. The general ends up dropping a bomb near the group. They hide thinking it to be just a regular old bomb, but no, turns out this is an enzyme bomb which gets on Bowers clothing and eats him through. I was sure to parenthetically specify that enzyme bombs were only bad if they hit synthetics first.

One of the oddest things in these stories is that the vehicles run on 'doolb.' That's blood backwards. I'm not really sure why I went for that, I guess it was somehow obvious at the time. It also is make the story slightly appropriate for me to mention it now. ( I have yet to have a trick or treater by the way )

This story brings up my apparent like for post apocalyptic stories. I've never really thought about it much, but the evidence is there. I actually like The Postman. Waterworld was not _that_ bad and you know it. If there is a movie about people trapped in some sort of natural disaster on tv during a weekend I will need to watch it all. One of my favorite is a recent one where not one, but two volcano's erupt in a major city. Lava is pouring through the city and the bright citizens who must save themselves find the Holy Grail, Jersey Barriers.

Yes, apparently Jersey Barriers can drive the tide of anything from rush hour traffic to molten lava. They also apparantly take the edge off the heat so that you can stand right next to them watching the lava flow by at chest height.

So yea, blood, lava, and mailmen on horses in the future.

Goodnight out there, Whatever you are!

My "Republicans For Voldemort" shirt is in the mail, elections are coming soon, so it seemed like a good time to say a thing or two about the issues.

Stem Cell Research

i think the easiest way to approach this issue is to reduce it down. I'll start with the man himself, President Bush and his policy in 2001 governing the last set of stem cells that were usable.

        1. The derivation process (which begins with the destruction of the embryo) was initiated prior to 9:00 P.M. EDT on August 9, 2001.
        2. The stem cells must have been derived from an embryo that was created for reproductive purposes and was no longer needed.
        3. Informed consent must have been obtained for the donation of the embryo and that donation must not have involved financial inducements.

Ok, #1 was the time line for government funding to stop. #3 is just common sense. Now lets look at #2. #2 basically says that it's ok to have used an embryo that was created for a fertility treatment, but isn't needed anymore. Mommy and Daddy wanted 1 child, 13 embryos were fertilized, the best few were picked and the rest are deemed unwanted, and will most likely be incinerated. Right there several embryos were created that were never going to be used. If you are truely against stem cell research because it creates an embyo that will be 'killed' then you also must be against fertility treatments that do the same. I'd be pretty interested to see the poll number differences on those two things.

Gay Marriage

I talked about this previously, but here goes again. First off, when we say gay marriage we can only mean legal marriage/union, that is, a document the government endorses that entitles two people to the the rights of legally married people. The religious interpretation is up to the many different churches and they are entitled to dictate whatever they want on their followers. I understand that for some the whole thing may simply be an issue of semantics between the words marriage and union, but I seriously hope that this is not the only reason they would choose to legally prevent the rights of a whole group of people.

Now from a legal stand point ( to the best of my knowledge ), you can not legally discriminate against a person due to race, sex, creed, religion, national origin, age, color, or handicapping condition. It is then illegal to prevent two legally responsible people from entering into a legal marriage on the basis on sex. There is the small issue that the person being discriminated against is not specific since it's the sex of only one of the people that needs to change for it to be 'ok,' however I think that is a pretty weak argument if used. So it comes down to this; to be against legal gay marriage is to be for legal discrimination against a mentally competent adult. The only argument I see at this point is that a gay person is mentally ill in some way. There are lots of studies both ways on this, however there is no conclusive evidence that it is legally an illness. Therefore you can not legally discriminate against it. At this point I suppose a vote against gay marriage is then a vote that being gay is to be mentally ill. This is of course anyone's prerogative, but best to realize what's really going on.

In my view, the best compromise is that the government issue legal civil unions to anyone who wishes and is able, and churches conduct marriage ceremonies. This takes care of the semantic issue which seems to be a big part of things, as well the government is not discriminating against its citizens.

It seemed like a good time to go through some randomness of late.

letteratura
 
I recently finished St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, a collection of 10 short stories. It's a pretty nice set in general. All the stories take reality, toss in some fantastical themes, and then tell them from the point of view of their child leading characters. I had an issue with the style of some of the endings, but they don't really matter. The worlds created in the stories, along with the crazy characters are enough even when the endings don't come through. Plus there's a neat picture of a wolf on the cover.
 
I'll soon be done with Of Love and Other Demons. This is a book I've had since my first intership at Microsoft in 1999 where an intern started a book group, but there was way too much going on that summer for me to do much reading. 700 other interns in a new awesome city will do that to you. There are parts in the book where I'm surprised I'm not bored, but I guess Marquez has infused something in the whole store to make it all interesting.
 
I was thinking of reading At Swim-Two Birds next, but the closest half-price that has it seems to be several states away. I'll probably snag it when the next Amazon Credit Card rewards comes in.
 
A couple weeks ago I took a note from Rachel and tossed a bunch of my books up on LibraryThing. So far I've only put up books that I've read and own. Seems I only still own 50 of them. There's several I was kind of surprised to not find; in particular an oddly bound version of Snow Crash. It was slightly shorter than a paper back, but hard back and several inches thick. There was something specific about that binding that made me enjoy reading it. I guess it got lost or dontated during the great migration from Boston to Atlanta.

  litteratus
 
A week or so ago I started a short story that I think is actually ready to be fully written. It's a bit more light hearted than my other ideas which makes it somewhat easier to write. Almost all the stories I wrote in high school had a humorous slant to them by default. This one in particular has a young cave boy as the protagonist and hopes to offer up an explanation for some of the craziness that archeology has told us about cave persons.
 
I say this story is ready to be fully written because I have 2 other stories that are kind of hanging there. One needs a completely different direction so it's not so dull. It's more of an idea story, where the characters are minor to an inanimate object. It reminds me of a book Rachel has of Jacek Yerka's art pair with fairly short stories based on them. I kinda get the feeling that'd be the best route for this, but well I can't draw, so there.
 
The other story is kind of my dream story, the one I want to get right, if I get any of them. The basis for it has been with me since I was fairly young, so I want to do it justice. I have some pieces of the story, but it's not flushed out nearly enough. I do have a title though, if maybe tentative, 'anna.'

moneta
 
Approximately 34 days ago I opened an IRA and filled it out for the year. This happened to give me free trading for 45 days, which caused a small amount of craziness. While I didn't ever make a bad trade, I ran head on into a restriction that really only so called 'day traders' would care about. Due to this I prevented myself from making $300; that's a 7.5% one day gain. It kind of made me pissed with myself, but I guess lesson learned. I now know about this annoying restriction, and have real evidence that even "smart" day trading is just stupid, stupid, stupid. ( If anyone is interested in opening a brokerage account, let me know. I'll get a few free trades that would be useful for my regular account ;o) )
 
In related news, the first stock I ever bought, SGI back in 1999, was canceled earlier this week. That's right, canceled. Sgi has some trouble, went into Chapter 11 bankrupcty. As part of coming out of that, they were able to just toss all their old stock out the window. Ah well.

cattus
 
Abby got her first annual checkup back in september, I've officially had her a year. It's odd, there are times I feel like I've had her forever, that there wasn't a 13 year gap since Teddy Bear ran off into the rain to die, and then there are times I feel like I just got her. I guess that's a good sign of our relationship. Right now she's laying in the top of her cat tree watching me with almost closed eyes.

  pictura
 
Vision, my newer tivo, is still going strong. Currently I'm going through reruns of Dead Like Me, and Arrested Development. These are both shows that people just deserve to be smacked for canceling. I mean come on. I kind of blame marketing for both of their demises. I didn't feel like watching either show until well after they were canceled, so it certaintly took long enough to work on me. I recommend both highly, if you get a change give them a watch, though Arrested Development is one of those shows you're better off starting as early as possible in the series.

Alright, that's enough for one night, bonam noctem.

So that iPod virus thing that came out today. I was hit by it!!! and boy did it piss me off for so many reasons.

I'd bought my brand new shiny iPod. I even traded in my reliable 3rd gen iPod "Atrus" for it to get a discount.

So I get home plug the new sleekness in and to start with I get a message saying that I needed to upgrade to iTunes 7. Unknown to me, this was also a message that the virus was paying my computer a visit.

So I download iTunes 7, and start the installer, and ... nothing. Installer doesn't come up, I'm just sitting there with the hard drive light flickering, and then it comes. The virus software warning. You've Got Virus!!

Man that fired up. Any change in iTunes is a bad change; here they force me to upgrade to a whole new level of horribleness and, seemingly at the time, give me a virus with it!

I went through some safety measures to make sure I had a good installer, tried reinstalling and all if fine.

When I tried getting the installer again that part of the webpage ( yea just part of the page ) was down, so I figured maybe they caught something. Anyway, I figured it was a fluke, and went on my way.

Luckily that was the end of it, I have McAfee still from GaTech, and I can only assume Microsoft's is actually running since the updater has me update it's definitions multiple times a week.

But it's all ok now, and Podder is here with me. The upgrade was very very nice, even if it wasn't absolutely necessary.

Looks like This American Life is coming to a podcast near you for free! Starts on the 16th, and better get them the week of or then it costs $.95 which is much better than their audible.com price.

There was a cute reference to World of Warcraft in last night's Stargate Atlantis. I wonder with the references to the currently unreleased expansion if they actually meant the episode to air later in the season but was changed given the canceling of the series.

( Rough transcript )

DL: Dr. Lesban
DW: Dr. Weir

(scene Rodney and Elizabeth are in DL's lab, trying to distract him to hack his computer)
DL: I've gotta say, I've never met a woman this into World of Warcraft.
DW: It's a silent passion of mine.
DL: Oh, as it is with all of us. I'm a level 75 mage specializing in Engineering and jewlcrafting, you?
DW: ( walks around, pulling DL's view away from Rodney; he starts tinkering ) Wow, level 75. Me? I'm only level 50.
DL: Ah, well I had the beta of the expansion pack so I sorts had a leg up on most people. What's your race?
DW: ... Mage.
DL: You know I'm trying to increse my enchanter skill, .. ehh it's just not going very well.
DW: Oh, I disagree Bill.
DL: What? (Turns around to look at Rodney) Uh Rodney...
DW: (Comes in closer and touches him on the shoulders, bringing him back to her ) Uh I don't mean, I don't mean to be so forward.
DL: No no go ahead be forward
DW: Well, oh, I, look, I'm not quite sure how exactly I should put this.
DL: A true mage speaks his mine, or her mind in your case.
( Rodney finishes )
Rodney: Oh look at the time we should get going.

Well it is done. I've just finished the last DVD of 24 season 4. After having watched season 5 on tv I am now glowing in the drama that is 24. Man that Jack Bauer, he's sure something. And what a healthy set of lungs he's got. That's no small feat considering how many toxic situations he's been in. He can even point a gun fairly accurately while serenading his enemies with his bass.

In the end I can't say any of the seasons really stand out from the rest, I guess that's somewhat due to watching somewhere between 8-16 episodes a week for however many weeks given how similar each seasons plot is. But oh well, it was enjoyable as it went along, and I'm looking forward to the 6th season where Jack gets a nasty paper cut and dies of gangrene because he refused to put his gun down.

Time With the Clouds

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Anatrove has a new look. I decided to finally polish it up a bit, and after some help from Rachel it's looking might nice. All the same functionality is there, but Rachel was nice enough to do some wireframes and a new layout that definitely make Anatrove nicer to look at.

For those who don't know, Anatrove is my pet web project. It all started in grad school when I needed to stop doing academic work for a weekend and just pounded out basically all of the functionality you see now in the site. The premise behind the site is that there's little difference between what you get when you buy a CD from Amazon vs downloading all or some of an album from iTunes. What are those differences? Mainly just the visuals like the liner notes, the cd face and maybe even the casing. The problem is, these suck most of the time; so what's the point in paying more for a cd when you get nothing more?

That's where Anatrove steps in. It's a user supplied database of these extras that come with cd's so that you can make a more educated use of your money.

I realize the site will probably never really go anywhere, but I like to play, and it is an actual purpose.

My next thoughts for the site are to round out the user side of things, see who supplied a particular album description, see all the ones they've done, etc. Other than that I'm thinking of redoing it using AJAX to make it smoother, and learn AJAX.

I'm an active user of Flickr and peruse their discussion folders occasionally, and man if there isn't one mangy user that lights up like a light bulb whenever I come across something they've posted. They're just freaking irritating, and they are very active ( in bad ways ) so it's hard to just forget about them.

So I've decided any social networking site needs a 'Block User Completely' feature. Flickr has a block feature but it only prevents them from commenting on your photos, man it'd be so nice if I could suppress all of their forum posts too; no more of their whining and bitching for me.

I thought this guy was just crazy, but it turns out he was kinda right. The end of the world came today!

Joking aside, it was a good show, but it's time was about up. They more or less tried to rehash the entire original plot recently which was probably a good sign they should have ended it.

Having some issues with derby and understanding why it may be as such.

I have two table in my DataBase

Table A:
    Int
  varchar(500) The values have an average length of 19 with a std dev of 10

Table B:
  Int
  Int
  SmallInt

So the Ints are 2 Bytes, the SmallInt 1 Byte, and the varchar ( god help me ) is as small as need be.

I have 2 million record in Table A, 3.5 Million in Table B.

Table A's size per record is about 64 Bytes. 30 Bytes to get 1 std dev worth of data, times 2 because I think they're stored as utf-16 + 4 for the int

Table B's size per record is 10 Bytes.

so 2M * 64B + 3.5M * 10B = 128MB + 35MB = 163 MB

The size on disk however is 1GB!!!

Now all the columns have an index on them except Table B.SmallInt, could these indexes really be eating something like 6x the source data??

After my switch from Blockbuster to Netflix I've been watching 24 from the beginning. Netflix has yet to not have the next disk available and it's almost always a 2 day turn around; rock on netflix.

As for 24, it's a great show. If you like movies with covert ops, terrorists and writers than don't mind killing important people then I recommend it. I didn't like the show at all for no good reason until I caught an episode in season 5 and got hooked. I don't mind at all.

My issue is though, is the dvd version of the show. Having watched through 3 iterations of DVD conversion I've noticed some distinct things they do nice, and also some things not so nice.

The Good:

1. In season 3 they finally cut out the break between commercials completely: It wasn't hard either, but took 2 seasons worth. Usually there's just a 1s gap between the end and begin around the show, but cutting it out makes a lot of difference; it feels more like a continuous show. In 24 though it's not always possible, some commercials have the clock up when they cut to and from a commercial ( showing the time elapsed ) so you kind of have to have some dead frames between the clock jumping a couple minutes.

It would be pretty cool if they did this in between episodes too. Now that dvd players can remember where you were between power cycles this would work well.

2. In-line Extras: Each episode has some cut scenes and alternate takes that you can watch in-line in the episode, a marker in the corner denotes when one is currently playing. I think that's pretty cool, though I have never used it as I prefer to watch the 'real' episode first. Also the fact that they have per episode extras and on almost all of them.

The Bad:

1. Only in-line Extras: You can only watch the extras in-line. Very Very annoying.

2. Skip the recap: This is the crazy one, in season 2 the first chapter of each episode was the recap and you could skip it to go right to the beginning of the new material, in season 3 they didn't do this. They must have cut it at commercial breaks only, lame.

3. Visual Spoilers!!: This is probably the most annoying thing and it applies to most than just 24 or dvds. Each episode has it's own sub menu with various option ( like extras ) and a shot from the episode. In season 2 the shot was actually pretty major and a spoiler. Some one was about to die at the end of last episode? Well the shot they have shows them back at work nice and safe. thanks, thanks a lot.

In season 3 they did away with that, choosing innocuous scenes instead. However they decided to put a montage as the main menu screen loads which definitely gives away way too much.

I often wonder how these things are designed. Are there usability people that specialize in this type of thing? I'm gonna guess that most of the time the studio really doesn't care about the interface, and simply having something on dvd is their main goal.

Lately I've been playing with hardware more than usual. I don't really like the typical stuff like figuring out why I can boot windows; is it the harddrive? is it the ram? I really don't care. I just want the damned thing to work. To solve that problem I had to ditch a drive, wipe the other and reload everything. Fun. especially for a computer that I only play WoW on a couple hours a week.

But there's been some more enjoyable things too. Abby ate through my mouse cable a couple weeks ago. Clean through, chomp chomp, now the mouse is in two parts. This would also happen to be the mouse I need to play WoW, guess it was good timing that they both die for about the same period. Anyway. I stripped down the main cable, stripped each of the four inner wires, twisted them together and a little electrical tape later it's all working. It doesn't even seem to care that a couple inch section is devoid of any of the shielding the cable normally has. yay!

The next one is the power adapter to my laptop, a most important device since my battery lasts for all of 15 minutes otherwise. It's been getting flaky over the last month or two and sunday night died completely. I managed to order another one off of ebay in the last few minutes of batter time I had left. Since the adapter I had was worthless I decided to take a look inside.

They don't make these things to be opened, I think they probably glued it shut, but with a couple screwdrivers it popped open to reveal it's insides. After some fiddling and plugging it in a nice blue electrical arc made the problem spot obvious. The inductor had a wire loop with a bit too much slack and the electricity was arcing to the other loops. This is the state it's in when it's working though, when it doesn't work there's nothing and all I did was move that wire loop a little.

Oh well, kinda fun and a new ones on the way.

Abby ate through my mouse cable today :/

She seems to not like it when I'm sitting at my desk on the computer and proceeds to nibble on whatever wires may be snaking around the area. Looks like I'll get to have some fun splicing the wires back together.