( ) smoked a cigarette
( ) crashed a friend's car
( ) stolen a car
(x) been in love
(x) been dumped
( ) shoplifted
(X) been fired
(X) been in a fist fight
(X) snuck out of your parent's house
(x) had feelings for someone who didn't have them back
( ) been arrested
( ) gone on a blind date
(x) lied to a friend
(x) skipped school
( ) seen someone die
(x) had a crush on one of your internet friends
( ) been to Canada
(x) been to Mexico
(x) been on a plane
( ) purposely set a part of yourself on fire
(x) eaten sushi
(X) been skiing Cross country counts, right?
(x) met someone from the internet
(x) been at a concert
(x) taken painkillers
(x) love someone or miss someone right now
(x) laid on your back and watched cloud shapes go by
(x) made a snow angel
( ) had a tea party
(x) flown a kite
(x) built a sand castle
(x) gone puddle jumping
( ) played dress up
(x) jumped into a pile of leaves
(x) gone sledding
(x) cheated while playing a game
(x) been lonely
(x) fallen asleep at work/school
( ) used a fake ID
(x) watched the sun set
(x) felt an earthquake
(x) slept beneath the stars
(x) been tickled
(x) been robbed
(x) been misunderstood
( ) petted a reindeer /kangaroo
(x) won a contest
(x) run a red light/stop sign
( ) been suspended from school
(x) been in a car crash
( ) had braces
(x) felt like an outcast/third person
(x) eaten a whole pint of ice cream in one night
(x) had deja vu
(x) had deja vu
(x) danced in the moonlight
(x) liked the way you looked
(x) witnessed a crime
(x) questioned your heart
( ) been obsessed with post-it notes
(x) squished barefoot through the mud
(x) been lost
( ) been on the opposite side of the country
(x) swam in the ocean
(x) felt like dying
(x) cried yourself to sleep
(x) played cops and robbers
( ) recently colored with crayons
( ) sung karaoke
(x) paid for a meal with only coins
(x) done something you told yourself you wouldn't do
(x) made prank phone calls
(x) laughed until some kind of beverage came out of your nose
(x) caught a snowflake on your tongue
(x) danced in the rain
(x) written a letter to Santa Claus
(x) been kissed under the mistletoe
(x) watched the sun rise with someone you care about
(x) blown bubbles
( ) made a bonfire on the beach
(x) crashed a party
(x) gone rollerskating
(x) had a wish come true
( ) jumped off a bridge
(x) ate dog/cat food
( ) told a complete stranger you loved them
( ) kissed a mirror
(x) sang in the shower
(x) had a dream that you married someone
( ) glued your hand to something
( ) kissed a fish
(X) sat on a roof top
(x) screamed at the top of your lungs
( ) done a one-handed cartwheel
(x) talked on the phone for more than 5 hours
(x) stayed up all night
(x) picked and ate an apple right off the tree
(x) climbed a tree
( ) had a tree house
(x) scared to watch a scary movie alone
( ) believe in ghosts
( ) have more than 30 pairs of shoes
(x) worn a really ugly outfit to school
( ) gone streaking
(x) gone doorbell ditching
( ) played gay chicken?
(x) pushed into a pool/hot tub with all your clothes on
( ) told you're hot by a complete stranger
( ) broken a bone
(x) been easily amused
(x) caught a fish then ate it
(x) caught a butterfly
( ) laughed so hard you cried
( ) cried so hard you laughed
( ) cheated on a test
(x) forgotten someone's name
( ) french braided someone's hair
( ) gone skinny dipping in a pool/hot tub
( ) been threatened to be kicked out of your house
(x) loved someone so much you would gladly die for them

Have a look at the snippet from Jane's.

Would there happen to be anyone here with a Jane's Online subscription that could forward me the article?

*grovel*grovel*

When I first saw the story about Tommy Hook getting beaten up, I freaked out. I grew up in Los Alamos. It was home and the Lab a nice place to work (I did my senior year of HS for that matter). My first reaction was no fracking way! THAT is not Los Alamos (unless you're an HS boy, but anyways...different story there). THen more and more information started trickling in. Then the police came out with their investigation results.

Either way, his credibility is shot. We'll see what happens and if anything else comes out...

I haven't posted my reading list in a while. Truth be told, I've not been reading as much since the finals days of pregnancy. That's changing back some. The books listed might end up both my May and June reading list.

Centauri Dreams : Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration
Charlie Stross' Singularity Sky
Sea Dragons: Predators Of The Prehistoric Oceans
Gregory Benford's Tides of Light
The Pentagon's New Map
Dictionary of Angels: Including the Fallen Angels
AI for Game Developers. An O'Reilly book.

I am finishing _Phytoremediation: Transformation and Control of Contaminants_. It's a collection of papers educating about phytoremediation. I didn't know that there are already two nickel extracting phytomines in the US! *boggle*

This guy is the hacker we've been so fraking nervous about. He's heen eating supercomputing sites for some time now. We held him off. However, all it would have taken was a single oops and he'd have eaten us too. Well, iirc, I warned people hear he was loose and to patch! patch! patch! I also seemed to remember saying I was surprised that the mainstream media hadn't said anything...well, it seems that the NY Times finally caught on to what was going on. Sorta. Their story is only a small part of the real story.

Edit: PS. The /. story (that I missed) had it rather wrong. The cracks had nada to do with the Cisco code and the story only scratches the very, very surface of what happened. This cracker was bad for HPC sites.

Too good to let go.

here

I've been thinking about a Usenet successor medium. My favorite newsgroups are choking a bit from spam and declining membership (UN in general is having issues).

What would you put in it?

ObFamilyPict: here.

Wife and I when we were on a vacation to her home country (obviously long prior to baby). What a baby does to a woman's body is...rough.

My wife. I'm damn lucky. :D

I tried submitting this to the index, but unfortunately the html keeps getting screwed up for the links. IDK why. Anyways...

Dr Adrian Bower of the University of Bath seems to think that he has figured out a way to modify the rapid prototyping machines to allow simple manufacture at home or even to have the rapid prototyping machine replicate itself. The question is whether or not he'll succeed and if he is making what he thinks he is making. Are we looking at the first Matter Compiler? Or are we looking at the first von Neumann Machine? Or neither?

Aurora Devika was born on Feb 28th @ 8:17 am. She is the most beautiful baby in the world.

No biases here! ;)

Mom and baby are doing awesome.

So I found the Apple iTunes developer stuff. Contrary to what I remembered it is free to download the API for iTunes. While they give you working code, it is pretty ugly as far as being a visualization. I have hacked it a bit to get a feel for it and have re-implemented the effect that I created way back when by rewiring an Apple // monitor and running my the wires to my stereo speakers through the coils.

So if you have a Mac you can see it. This similar to the WinAmp viz I posted before, but this version is much better. It scales properly and is green on black. Grab it here:
http//www.angelfire.com/games4/anirak/iTunesX_Visualizer.bundle.zip

As usual, unzip the file and place it in the user/Library/iTunes/iTunes Plug-ins/ directory.

If the direct link doesn't work, there is a link in the "links" section towards the bottom of this page

As I put more effort into this I will probably make a page for it, maybe on a .mac account. We'll see what happens.

Edit: corrected second link. It is probably the one to use.

After much hassle with FedEx the Mac mini showed up yesterday. The box it comes in is smaller than any desktop I've seen other than the Cappuchino that I never use.

I plugged everything in and it worked as expected. I began to see the beach ball quite a bit though when multi-tasking, so I decided to go ahead and buy a gig of ram for it.

Luckily, MicroCenter is about a 10 minute walk and a 4 minute drive away. I grabbed the ad at the door and saw that they had a gig of PC3200 for $139. This was a steal. When I finally found it though I was upset. It was a "kit", which wasn't mentioned in the ad. This means that it was actually two 512MB sticks. Only one slot in the mini, so I got a gig stick of PC3200 for $199. The mini takes PC2700, but I've seen rumours that it doesn't take all PC2700. Plus, the PC3200 was cheaper.

I then went to the hardware store since I don't have any puddy knives. They had one type that was thinner and a second type that was thicker but had a sharpened edge. I bought two of the thinner ones, since my experiements with a razor knife had shown me that it wasn't easy to get anything in the edge. Maybe the sharpened ones would have worked better, but they were pretty thick. Anyhow it is not easy to open the thing. It took me over 15 minutes, and I can't say that I didn't leave some little marks. I don't think anyone would notice, but I did. Having two knives made it easier, but once you get one in one side it is hard to get anything in the other side.

I finally got it open and popped the memory and put the new stick in. It works fine.

My first project is going to be writing an OpenGL based music visualization program with a twist. It will actually make a movie out of the visualization that can be written to a DVD. Also, it won't suck the way many visualization programs do. It will actaully react to the music rather than spraying color on the screen for no apparent reason.

Oh, I forgot to mention. No iWork. For some reason I thought it was included, but it has AppleWorks instead. Too bad. I was looking forward to trying out Keynote.

This has been mentioned by others. It has happened to me before. Yet I will complain anew!

FedEx was supposed to drop off my Mac mini today. Instead they left a note on the door. No ringing of the doorbell mind you, just a note on the door. I was home, waiting for it. Why can't they ring the bell? Is it that hard? I called less than ten minutes after the note was left and asked them to come back. They said they would. They never did.

There is now a big note on the door with an arrow pointing at the doorbell.

I have only bought two computers myself. I certainly didn't have the cash to buy the Commodore 64 that my dad brought home when I was in 3rd grade. This is a bit strange, given that I am one of the bigger "computer nerds" that I know. I have a CS degree and I work for big blue. Anyhow, back to the story.

I bought an Apple Performa 614 in college. This was because I was sick of going to the CS lab to do assignments. I wanted to program in my dorm room. Of course it took about 45 minutes to compile anything with only 8 megs of RAM, so I went to Fry's and bought a 16 MB stick, to bring me up to a total of 24 MB. No more thrashing, compiles took mere moments. That computer stayed with me through college and then I gave it to my brother so that he could use it in college, since it already had the software he needed. Even though the Performa line is looked upon now as the dark days of the Mac, I look back on it fondly. They might have been coasting on inertia then, but the foundation of quality that had been laid before carried through, at least in my mind.

I then defected from the Mac camp and bought parts to build my own Celeron 300, which I occasionally overclocked to a magnificent 500 MHz. Why did I defect? Well, mostly because I could cheaply put together a machine that had a 3D card. This would make it easier to improve my 3D asteroids game.

That computer is still running, but doesn't see much use. I get a new laptop from work every few years which has killed my need to buy a fancy machine of my own. Of course I occasionally have wanted to go back to the Mac camp, at least for personal use, but I never had a good excuse, and I while I've had the money to buy one if I wanted, I was never quite able to justify it.

Why am I writing this? Because I just ordered my third computer, a mini Mac. The price is too good to ignore, and I admit that the design impresses me. They lowered the price to the level of impulse buy and they hooked me. Now I just have to find a cheap 1 gig stick of RAM somewhere...

I haven't written in here for a while. It's been due to be so bloody busy. Some external reviewers came through and shot the project full of holes...the exact same ones I yelled about before.

At any rate, my wife and I have selected a name. IDK if it'll stick. The first name is not common, but not 100% rare either: Aurora. It was on my list initially. However, then my wife rejected it. She searched through the names for some time in a book and online. She then got bent on finding a name through literary sources. She remembered an author she loves - George Sand - and looked up her - yes, her - real name. Aurore was one of them. Aurora being the yanqi equivalent, we went with that.

The middle name is more of what I am concerned about. That's 'Devika'. Aurora Devika sounds very good together. However, Devika is from Sankrit and means 'little goddess'. The reason for settling on that is that my better half's mother called her and her sister something like that as a pet name, but derived from the Russian word for 'girl'. My better half spells the nickname as 'devike'. My worry is that Devika might have some funky secondary meaning that might make people snicker. It seems a common enough name in India, but...any /.ers found or know of anything like that?

PS. Neither of us are Indian in descent. I'm pasty western European: Italian, Scotish, German, Irish, and English. My wife is Ukrainian and Russian.

PPS 12 weeks to go.