« I can't find boots that I like, » she whined. « They are either too hooker or ugly. »
« If boots don't make a girl look like a hooker, then they are ugly, » he replied. « There's a reason anything between calf and mid-thigh are called fuck-me boots. A hooker should be hotter and sexier than any girl you could see or meet at a bar, bar mitzvah, or social club. Otherwise, why pay? »
« I like that the choices are bar, bar mitzvah, and social club, » she observed.
Posted Tue Jan 1 22:33:25 2008They also teach LOL 103 at ROFL University in LOLheim.
Posted Thu Jan 10 11:10:39 2008It was just like Christmas. I finished urinating on the Mother Church, then we headed over to Fenway for to do some trespassing.
Snowflakes fell and swirled in the breeze, their eddies making that ugly fluorescent light seem pretty, so pretty.
The crash of duckpins resounded through the night, and hipsters flashed jazz hands at one another.
It was just like Christmas. Not one insalata 3ndy could be found.
Posted Sun Jan 20 15:05:15 2008Sometimes creepy shit happens, like a gay black man eating quiche and talking on the phone about The Prestige or a British man sending me a box of strozzapreti and a colander almost a year after I wrote this, then turning out to be the same man who is rumored to buy Laranejeira Prateada because of the suffusion of e's.
Posted Tue Jan 22 20:04:35 2008Raphael, what you're doing is incredibly inefficient, especially with one million string-to-integer conversions and two million back. You could do this instead:
Posted Sun Feb 10 20:02:38 2008% zsh -c 'zmodload zsh/datetime; (( s = EPOCHSECONDS )); for (( c = 0; c < 1000000; c++ )) do : ; done; print "$0 took" $(( EPOCHSECONDS - s )) "seconds to finish"' zsh took 3 seconds to finish
I was walking under Union Square, listening to Hank Williams, when suddenly Hank was completely drowned out by the blaring of Hypnotic Brass Ensemble.
You have no idea how sad I am that I can identify Chicago street musicians.
Posted Thu Feb 21 22:41:44 2008One day the Stranger arrived. He was a tall and lanky teen, his face peppered with acne and sparse pubescent hair. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, a long coat, a scarf, and he was Strange. Some newcomers prefer to observe, to gauge the breadth and nuance of Social Custom, and to keep low profiles until they are comfortable enough to risk a misstep. This newcomer preferred to wield a bean bag, and to go door to door, knocking, introducing himself, and asking if there might be any nice conversation lurking inside in which he might join.
Predictably, most people were horrified, frightened, and offended. They responded in a hostile fashion, and branded him Bean Bag Boy, or Bag Boy for short. A few others viewed him instead as a free spirit, a visionary, a unique character, and a Cool Guy. Perhaps they bought into the crap that society spews forth as part of its Campaign for Cognitive Dissonance. Perhaps they were just confused. Those that admired him branded him Doctor Who, a moniker of affection and respect. I will never understand this, even though I know which drugs they were on (Prozac, Zoloft, LSD, THC, psylocybin, and PCP, respectively).
Bag Boy learned to keep mostly to those who appreciated his insane ramblings. Had he been motivated and competent, he probably could have been a minor cult leader. Instead, he fell out of public view for a while. When he returned, he had two younger companions: a boy and a girl.
It became immediately obvious what to call them. The female, whose name, eerily enough, was Baggs, would be Bag Girl. Since Bag Boy already possessed that name, the male would have to be Little Bag.
Little Bag was an enigma unto himself, and went on to have many adventures of his own. Once he called me a Zenmaster, so I will refrain from mentioning him for a long time.
Bag Girl was no less a character. She detested being called by either her given name or her surname, and instead preferred to brandish an agglutinative designation of her own choosing: one part temporal adjective, one part finite act of performance. This contrasted delightfully with her appearance, which was not dissimilar to a three-foot-tall chinchilla.
Most were content to call her by her chosen appellation, though some would add her real surname (to which she fumed bitterly), and one insisted on calling her by her given name, as a hostile act of hatred.
Bag Girl's main hobby was a menagerie of characters that she explained were her multiple personalities. Unlike persons suffering from dissociative identity disorder, Bag Girl had full knowledge of her personalities and their doings.
One of these personalities was a 90-year-old elf named Galiganda Dulin. Another was a man named Sayjon, who bore a suspicious resemblance to Pink Floyd's fascist alter ego from The Wall.
In fact, Bag Girl had been profoundly affected by The Wall, although she had watched it while on LSD, so interpolation based on these data may be tainted.
Posted Sat Mar 8 22:10:14 2008As part of a long overdue move to ikiwiki, this blog now lives here.
Kindly update your subscriptions to the RSS and Atom feeds.
I have attempted to convert all entries and preserve all but 4 permalinks. I apologize if any links or HTML broke in the process.
If you do not see this entry at all, your aggregator likely does not understand HTTP redirects, and you should update your subscription with great haste.
Posted Sun Mar 9 13:59:21 2008Since Ari was too incompetent to successfully complete a self-nomination this year, I have taken the liberty of writing his platform for him against his will.
Ari's Platform
What follows is a grassroots movement for positive social change through fostering and giving voice to initiatives and local activism, civic engagement, volunteerism, taking trendy Whole Foods tote bags to supermarkets that are not Whole Foods, and the broader motif of green, eco-friendly, environmentally-sound, community-based, issue-driven, civic-minded focus on saving the environment through awareness of energy and power.
Even though recycling consumes lots of energy and pollutes the ground and water, do it anyway. You can make up for it by buying carbon offsets. You don't need to buy carbon offsets for aluminum can recycling, since that is actually good for the environment on a long-term basis, but you should, since it's Fun. Always recycle!
The worst team dynamics can be found in appointed teams. The best team dynamics can be found in self-selecting teams.
Give some thought to the teams (Small or otherwise) you observe. The self-selecting teams are well-oiled machines, competent and effective in every way. In stark contrast, the appointed teams are vulnerable to cronyism, acceptance of bribes, poor communication, pettiness, abuse of power, tunnel vision, xenophobia, and egomania. Who is appointing these teams? It should be stopped, and all teams should be self-selecting to avoid these problems.
Face-to-face meetings and events are very important, but we are being terribly irresponsible by using planes, trains, and automobiles. We need to reduce our carbon footprint, so bicycles should be the preferred tool of transportation, and therefore travel sponsorship should be allocated according to these categories: Spandex, Chamois, and Mudflap.
- Self-nomination
Currently, too many people nominate others for tasks. This leads to an unfortunate mix of egoists and people that no one believes can do the job. Even the nominators have no faith; the only reason they are nominating others is that they know it would be necessary to nominate themselves otherwise. Instead, everyone should take it upon themselves to self-nominate for any position they can, whether they are qualified or not, as it will look good on college transcripts. Only this can ensure that we get the most qualified applicants. Remember, if you do not claim to know better than everyone else, no one can trust you.
Relations with SPI have been strained for quite some time, probably because their routine operations resemble a bad episode of The Simpsons. This can be fixed by delegating five hundred people to show up to each month's meeting and bikeshed about American politics and modern fashions.
- Conservation of power and hats
There have been many attempts to defang concentrations of power and influence and all this does is prevent things from getting done. The proper solution is to give as many hats as possible to the people who get things done. They have already demonstrated that they are trustworthy by getting things done and by having hats, so there is no problem with giving them more hats. Ideally the hats would be fashionable. In order to prevent territorialism and cabals, each person with a hat should be able to give hats to anyone else, but only if the recipient already has a hat. If anyone collects 15 or more hats, he may crown himself High Milliner and proceed to award himself additional hats. Since women do not, as a rule, wear hats, they cannot participate in the hat exchange.
I do not agree with Ari's platform; therefore I will not be writing him into my ballot.
Posted Tue Mar 11 13:46:48 2008You sweep your toes across the sand as you stare at the ebb tide. Your gaze is focused but your mind is elsewhere. To be more precise, your mind is hopping somewhat rapidly between several different elsewheres.
Your companion is standing nearby, blissfully oblivious. You muse that he is in the εὖτόπος and you are in the οὐτόπος. It is clear that you have been pretentious since you were young. You would prefer to call it precocious, but that term is no longer applicable.
Your friends think that you have a sweet deal and would be a fool to throw it away. He treats you well, mostly. At least he spends lots of money on you and lavishes you with attention. Of course he does get a bit possessive. He thinks that with all the effort he puts into wooing you, he has earned some high status. Maybe he has. Of course, you hate him a little for putting you on a pedestal. Is it really you whom he sees, or some imaginary creature of his fantasies, some ideal to which you can never approach?
Your ex treated you quite poorly by comparison. He was a liar, but in some ways he, if not his words, was more honest with you. There was something else that drew you to him, some reason you kept having affairs with him even though it upset your other boyfriends.
The guy who treats you the worst, though, is the one you have been in love with for ten years. You are unaware of what has caused him to lash out at you, what unleashes his venom every time you sneak away to make yourself vulnerable to him. He acts like it is obvious, but your reasoning cannot produce a reasonable hypothesis.
At last your consciousness lands on the man you secretly crave the most, so much that you never tell your friends about him. You think you would give up everything if he only asked, but he never asks. You have never been involved with him, and you fear that he would reject you cruelly if you let him know you were interested. You think that that would destroy you. You are perhaps a bit prone to melodrama. At any rate, you need to make the smart choices, and do the things that you would do if you were normal.
So when your beau leans in for a moonlight kiss, you tell him how happy you are. Maybe someday you will be.
Posted Mon Mar 17 22:49:24 2008I shall sleep the sleep of the damned, swathed in sateen and the silken locks of angels. I will dream of Fabergé eggs resting atop a plateau of gabardine. Blessed are those who walk the path betwixt linen and twill, watching the chain links cross the sky, breathlessly seeking Heaven.
I hope that J.K. Rowling does not sue me for mentioning MayoKetchup™.
Posted Wed Apr 16 14:51:18 2008Jaldhar, you are dressed too nicely to be in the club.
Posted Fri Apr 18 09:58:15 2008A thousand years ago, I was paid to be an oper (at the time, the common term for an IRCop) on EFnet. I quickly grew to hate it.
The unwritten code of ethics amounted to the following: you were entitled to do whatever it is you wanted with your power, so long as you did not step on the toes of your peers or anyone above you in the pecking order. In practical terms this usually meant that you could /kill anyone you wanted as long as he was connected to your IRC server, but to /kill someone on another IRC server was a grave political action.
Most of the opers were territorial and petty. My theory on this, extrapolating from several I met in person, is that they were often the targets of abuse in the real world, either for their alternative lifestyle choices, their poor hygiene, or other reasons, and that EFnet was a place that they could feel extremely powerful without burdening themselves with any more responsibility than was sufficient to justify claims that they were maintaining order.
People on power trips can very easily claim that they are selflessly acting in the public interest, and without their critical participation, the world would fall into chaos. What is far more likely is that if they bowed out or were removed, they would be replaced by the next set of power-hungry bullies quick enough on the draw.
I think that, if they were good people, the EFnet opers of this era would have behaved differently. My painter friend Donald says that I am judgmental and a bad person for expecting them to live up to my moro-ethical standards. I guess he has a point.
Posted Mon Apr 21 09:13:24 2008Thijs, in the U.S. we call it arugula and have bred all the flavor out of it so it can be just as non-threatening as Iceberg lettuce. Americans who go to the UK will be hesitant to pay £12 for a rocket sandwich, as without being able to see a TSA seal of approval, they will fear the Washington school bus's re-entry shield.
Posted Wed May 7 12:06:23 2008[This entry is dedicated to Russell, ﷺ, and the squirrels (صلى الله عليهم وسلم) that tried to sit on my lap even though I told them that I was not toresbe.]
The man handed us burritos full of spinach-infused E. coli and salsa verde of the botulist manifesto. Para llevar? You bet. I need to get me some waterfall Giardia to right my viscera or I'm bound to start hallucinating mountain paths full of dogs, Россиянe, inedible gorp, and children throwing themselves to their death. Hi, kids.
池乃花, 納豆, ミルクイ, what happened to the garlic bread‽ Can you imagine being allergic to 艾絨? My Dreamsicle can't.
Now fly, fly away to the land of the peppermint tea, the deer without fear, the queer, the other beer, Sue's sambar. I like my இட்லி pretty damn fancy, but we're not in मुंबई, are we, Toto?
There is a warp in the space-time continuum, causing multiple instances of calderae and 27 Dresses. One fled a bookstore and flew to its adopted homeland. One time.
It sure is windy atop this peak, and while Phil Collins sings about burning down some kind of mission, the husband is eying Mr. MacLachlan. My ex's ex gives a lesson about testosterone, but we are too far away to see the bison. The bison do not, it would seem, give a damn about us or Irving, and they do not care about the worker exposing her VS panties.
A secret hidden jeep whisks, and a card hides defiantly in my wallet. Nothing more can be said, and not for the reasons you think.
Posted Sat May 17 00:01:53 2008If you have brilliant ideas for Peter, please reply to this mailing list post and share them.
For your convenience, you can look at the bld_line() function here.
Posted Sun May 18 15:13:07 2008I cannot tell if MPD is what I want. Things like this and this lead me to believe that it is beyond repair, but things like this and this give me the faint feeling that it might not be.
What I want is a music architecture that has a a core that plays a music file to a soundcard, takes direction from any number of stackable plugins, and feeds event data to any number of stackable plugins.
I'm less sure about whether I want some kind of shared database or if each plugin should have to maintain its own database infrastructure. If tracks should be identified by MusicBrainz IDs, how do you handle files lacking those tags?
I want song selection plugins: one that does playlists, one that selects randomly, ones that choose via arbitrary algorithms (vux, last.fm recommendations, a snippet of user-entered pseudocode/query, and so on). These should be able to handle files local to the core process, files on the client machines, simple http audio streams, and last.fm radio.
The core should be able to communicate to any number of event plugins when a track starts, when a track is at an arbitrary point (240 seconds, halfway, etc.), when a track ends, when a track is skipped (whether by user action or plugin logic), when a track is paused, and so forth. I want event plugins: last.fm reporting via Audioscrobbler 1.2 or newer, vux preference tracking, simple statistics tracking, logging, and anything else anyone might want to keep track of reasonably.
I have some scarier ideas, but they can wait.
Posted Sat May 24 17:45:15 2008![[Spaces]](http://ximg.scru.org/images/bmssb.jpg)
I ordered the уха по-царски. It was not in the cards. The харчо was an acceptable compromise. I do love a good харчо.
мика says that her grandma's уха is the bomb-diggity. I will probably never verify this.
Posted Sun Jun 1 10:08:59 2008![[Broccoli]](http://ximg.scru.org/images/brocnbrue.jpg)
It is said broccoli was produced by crossbreeding cauliflower with rapini. I don't know who said this.
Posted Tue Jun 3 18:06:06 2008
Somewhere, probably not in the space between spaces, but somewhere, at this very moment, someone is experiencing distress. He is not keeping this distress clutched tightly inside. He is sharing his distress with others, in the form of a rant, even though no one there has solicited his opinion.
He goes on, full steam, disregarding the feeble attempts at participation by those listeners who perhaps feel it polite to acknowledge him. He is not trying to entice anyone to act. He is not trying to troll for arguments. Perhaps he believes himself to be sharing generously his important thoughts.
Those hypnotized by his ravings are experiencing a variety of reactions. Some are forced to confront the Truth in his words, and they themselves become distressed as they think about the Unfairness and Injustice created by the actions of others. This distress will cause some of them to wander off elsewhere and help the process cascade by performing rants of their own. Some others will bristle at the Lies and Misrepresentations he tosses out liberally and casually, and they will become distressed as well, and they may suddenly feel motivated to lend their efforts to push a political agenda contrary to the Speaker's. Some are nonplussed. Some become distressed because some self-important fool appears to think he has the right to bother them with his ideas.
All this because some asshole decided to throw his weight around when it wasn't and isn't his place. I am not talking about Star Simpson.
Posted Tue Jun 3 21:08:42 2008![[Lines]](http://ximg.scru.org/images/mlhh.jpg)
Francois-Denis,
you can get more bash-like behavior by doing setopt nohup, or you can
disown the jobs before exiting, or you can background and disown
immediately by running program &|.
Also, that silly non-free window manager, ion3, is decent with the small popups.
Posted Wed Jun 11 15:51:11 2008We sat at the round table, decanting the Tokaji. Elkins gave me a quizzical look. Podjad stared at the label on the bottle. Elkins wiggled her nose at me. It was then that I knew I was going to lose.
The Scourge of Scranton made his entrance, striding just so to maximize his projection of gravitas. His long, purple velvet cape trailed behind him as his knee-high leather boots clacked on the parlor floor.
Podjad studied a word etched on the carafe. Elkins smirked. The Scourge of Scranton stood before the table as beads of sweat collected on his widow's peak.
He looked at us. We looked at him. He strode out whence he came.
Posted Fri Jun 13 11:47:12 2008I'm in Manitoba, drinking port and eating Jarlsberg and fontina. This is not a pleasant combination, yet I have no intention of aborting the mission.
Robert DeNiro is wearing a rubber fat suit and shouting belligerently about carpentry. I still have never been to Winnipeg.
Throughout the years, people have informed me that various animals are unable to swim. In the first Diplomacy game I ever played, it was frequently mentioned that sheep cannot swim. At the Parade of the Flailing Clowns, it was observed that chimps cannot swim. The chimpanzee cannot swim, apparently, because of a total lack of body fat. That's right; chimps have absolutely 0 body fat. Not a single gram.
Tell someone obsessed with eating low-fat meat this factoid. You shall observe an order for potted chimp meat being placed immediately. On the other hand, if you point out that goat is lower in fat than chicken, this person will appear nonplussed, and continue to maintain the same diet, because even though goat is a leaner meat, it is red meat and therefore higher in fat than chicken, which is higher in fat than goat.
You can witness the same sort of behavior when pointing out the farmed nature of farm-raised fish to a free-ranger. There is a classification for this kind of interplay between faith, logic, and rationality. It is either insanity or religion; I forget the difference.
Posted Sun Jun 15 08:10:31 2008This is dedicated to the little girl who just said that all tea tastes the same, but only because I bet she can't use an RSS aggregator.
I had had enough tea to kill a horse. Okay, that's an understatement. I had had enough sweet corn to kill a horse, but I had had enough tea to kill a whole village of horses. The horses constructed a village, then they had a big schism because some of them wanted to become centaurs, then there was a war, then they had to rebuild the village, and now they're living in constant fear of being wiped out by tea.
I had some cold, leftover tea for breakfast. I had milk tea for zweites Frühstück. I had milk tea for drittes Frühstück. Okay, drittes Frühstück was nothing more than a mug of milk tea and a glass of water. Then at dim sum, I was doubly foiled by a lack of 菊花茶. Doubly. I won't get into the details, but we ended up settling on some jasmine. I have a very shaky relationship with jasmine tea, but I didn't want to be difficult. I won't get into the details.
A couple hours later, my heart was doing handstands. It stopped. It started. It did a jig. It projected itself into the future, fondled the Shrike inappropriately, and returned, only skipping four beats. Disco. It shifted itself into the eighth dimension, did a pirouette, and installed a gopher server. My other organs eyed it with disgust and contempt.
It is no wonder then that I concluded I should have no more tea, then made the ridiculous decision to walk into a Cantonese restaurant for dinner. If this is not a clear case of Thanatos mixed with some idiocy and veal stock, then swirled around in a cocktail shaker until I get tired of this metaphor, then I… get tired of this metaphor.
I have some beer to help lower my pulse to 180, though I know it will elevate my blood pressure even more, and my blood pressure is already at about 3500 volts. So when I finish the bottle, the waiter asks if I want some tea. How can I refuse? He wanders off, and a second waiter appears out of the shadows, and asks me if I want some tea. Again I agree. Reinforcing it makes it better. Then he drops the question. This guy is my homeboy: he asks if jasmine is okay. I casually inquire what choices I might have that don't suck. He is about to respond when waiter #1 drops a teapot on my table. Surprise, it's jasmine. I surrender. Homeslice ain't having it though: he offers to trade me for something else. He gives me some options and I opt for the 龍井茶. He mumbles something informative and largely irrelevant, not suspecting that I just want to play tic-tac-toe in the 井. Surprisingly, I don't.
Then I had mango pudding even though I had it at lunch too.
Posted Mon Jun 16 09:53:44 2008The West Virginian is huddled over his bong, swirling the ice cubes around his glass of cream sherry. There is a montage on the television, set to some factory-produced pop song sung by a no-talent teen who was thrust into major stardom with the help of comb filters and clever marketing. He is not watching the montage; he is thinking about Chris Wallace and nepotism.
He will stand in the end.
Posted Tue Jun 24 18:30:31 2008ropa vieja : old rope :: sopa vieja : ?
- old soup
- old soap
- shrimp butty
- The Sexual Misadventures of Natty Gann
I was misled. That much is probably true. I certainly had no idea what I was getting myself into. Enough of that though; there's narrative fading away.
The part I should take responsibility for is the decision I made to stray off the map. Perhaps it was not so much a decision as a compulsion. I looked at the map. I saw the suspicious unmarked area at the edge, and concluded immediately that there was something good there, something the people wanted to keep hidden from me. I was correct, but I presumed far too much about the terrain. I thought I would make a quick exploration of the secret place, then backtrack to the more mapped area and get back with the program. Enough of that though; I've nearly forgotten the story.
First I should point out that, had the map been to scale, it should have taken me an leisurely fifteen minutes to get to my first destination. It should have, assuming the land would be as flat as the map that represented it. Instead, it turned out to be something one could cover in fifteen minutes if one had, say, a jetpack and spring boots. I'm probably wrong; I'd probably injure myself in the process and take longer. Anyway, the average incline was close to 45°, and luckily was mostly uphill. Luckily.
When I got to a resting place, I was able to conclude that my supply of fluids was almost certainly insufficient for me to continue. On the other hand, there was probably no way I would return if I went back for more drink. I told myself that there would likely be a beverage-selling shack out in the middle of nowhere around the next bend or so. Having solved this probability problem, I pressed on into the blazing sun.
I came to a path leading down to the sea. It was unclear what was down there, but it was clear that it seemed to be a million miles down, and that that path might be the only way back. Given my current state of exhaustion and hydration, I decided to pass on this opportunity.
After continuing for a while, the features at the bottom of that path became visible. A very pretty cove was down there, and almost certainly no shack o' drinks. I then came upon a fork. A wide path led downward: to what, I could not see. To its left, a narrow and rough path led straight. Knowing that a descent probably meant climbing four to eight times the altitude back somehow, and assuming the less pleasant-looking path led somewhere better, I went left. After a while, the land began to slope down, ever so slightly. Little clusters of bottles and newspapers were left on the rocks here and there. Then came a sofa under a tent. I began to wonder what hippies were traveling this path. The slope grew greater, and I passed a bench in a tent. Then I came to a giant staircase, almost straight down. It was covered in weeds and insects. Some were vegan, some wanted my flesh. As I got toward the bottom I thought about how glad I was that I had come that way from the top and not the other way around. Oh, I was very glad.
At the bottom was something resembling a plastic bottle graveyard and barrels among barrels filled with water. Rubber hoses seemed to run randomly between certain barrels. A kitchen stood at the edge of some barrels. I suddenly got the feeling that I was not supposed to be here. After discovering that a couple of escape routes were actually dead ends, I proceeded to descend a small staircase to a terraced garden. Hoses lay about the rows, presumably for watering the plants. A cot under a tent lay empty, and I hurried past hoping I would not encounter the owner. Then I was at the ocean. The coast was lined with huge boulders, and a wooden bridge led me to the first one, and another wooden bridge took me to the second. Then the bridges stopped.
In the distance, I could see that pretty little cove from before. I took stock. I could either return whence I came, up that horrifying staircase, or I could try to traverse the rocky coast over to the cove, then maybe do a faceplant on the beach and let the tide drown me rather than climbing back up. It seemed like a no-brainer, so I began making my way toward the cove.
It got harder. Several times I became very afraid, either of falling and smashing my head against a rock or falling into the water below, or some sequential combination thereof. In the end I turned out to be more afraid of going back, at least until I got to what I judged the point of no return. I was reasonably close to where I imagined the sandy beach started, but there was a huge and impassable boulder in the way. Also, if I went further there was no way I would be able to climb back up in case I needed to retreat. I was thinking I would need to retreat, because unless there was some magical hidden toehold, I would be forced to jump into the water and swim around. I did not want to jump into the water. I wanted my phone to stay unfried in the event that I would need to use it to get rescued. I also did not want to call anyone to get rescued, especially since I didn't really know how to explain where I was.
With a heavy sigh, I gave up, turned, and went back. This time I moved more quickly, though incurring more damage to my hands and feet. No humans were visible at the crazy farm/garden and makeshift reservoir, but plenty of bugs were visible on the staircase. I made the mistake of trying to lean against the railing to catch my breath. When I finally got to the bench in the tent, I understood exactly what it was for. I sat down, took a sip of my remaining water, ate an apple, and kept going up. When I got to the couch, I sat again.
This time I sat and tried to figure out a plan. I still clung to the belief that once I got back to somewhere less wild I'd be able to buy a drink. I noted that I only had a little bit of water left, that I was dehydrated, that I was sunburned, that my pulse was about 180, and that there were no dogs or Russian people wandering past me.
I ate a pear and drank my last few drops of water. I kept sitting until my pulse was down to around 150, then I figured I needed to keep moving. I was experiencing most of the effects of caffeine, and for free.
Oddly, I passed a dog a few steps later. It was just standing by a rock, looking at me. I decided not to converse. When I had nearly reached the fork again, a couple came my way. I thought about begging them for water. I decided not to be rude. I have no idea what happened to them. I'm betting they wisely decided not to go down the steps.
Resolving that the only sane option was to go back all the way to where I absolutely knew I could buy something potable, I headed in that direction. Still, I took two risks. Instead of going up the exact way I had come, or taking a well-travelled path down, I took a narrow and flat dirt path. It was actually a bit of a dilemma. I started down the latter two more than once each. Finally I saw that the down path was rather V shaped, and I concluded correctly that the straight path would bypass that angular-half-pipe-like construct. When I finally got to a point I recognized, it was smooth sailing the rest of the way down.
I bought water and a snack, since I had had almost nothing to eat that day. At this point it would have been prudent to call it quits and go off and gorge myself on seafood or something, but no, I was now in the mapped area and surely it would all be roses and manna.
Finishing one bottle, I bought two more. Five minutes later I bought another. I had now overcompensated, but I was playing it safe. I continued my explorations. Bicyclists kept nearly running into me, and, aside from the obvious, I viewed this as a good sign. Bicyclists, especially those that can't seem to steer straight for some reason, avoid difficult terrain. This is why they take their bikes on subways, trains, and buses. I don't like bike-riding, but if I had my druthers, I would always go downhill. No up, no flat, just down. Like downhill skiing, just down. It is a good thing I don't ride a bike.
Once I got to the point where the bicycles thinned out to nonexistence, I was at an intersection. The way I wanted to go was up. The way I didn't want to go, but was a reasonable option, was only very slightly up. Additional factors complicated this decision point.
![[elision]](http://ximg.scru.org/images/elizion.jpg)
This passage
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without logging in.
Moving hurriedly away from there, I headed upward. After a couple of turns, I ran into Catholics. First there were dead Catholics. Then there were Catholics pre-occupied with dead Catholics. Then there were Catholics waiting to die. Then there were seminarians. Then there were teens with prayer books. When I reached the next pinnacle, there were more teens with prayer books. There were benches, and there were no teens on them, for the teens were standing or sitting on the ground, quietly contemplating the Word. Unfortunately, they had decided that the benches were more suitable for holding all their bags, so there was nowhere for me to sit.
I considered interrupting their reverie, but decided it wouldn't be very Christian of me to disturb them, so I just placed an ancient Drasnian curse on them and plodded down the hill toward a small beach. I really didn't need any more sun, but at least there probably wouldn't be anyone praying there.
The water was tempting, but I'm always paranoid about my belongings when swimming alone, and if my phone were taken I wouldn't be able to call anybody to come rescue me at the next crisis point, sure to come. So I skirted the coastline and arrived at a much larger beach, one with facilities and services.
Opting to save money but complicate things by using the public changing rooms and showers, I made a discovery.
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has been marked friends-only and you will not be able to view it
without logging in.
Nonetheless, I changed into my swimming trunks, stuffed everything else but my towel, sunglasses, and a disgusting sugary drink I never should have bought into my bag, and went barefoot a few buildings down to rent a locker. The locker was ridiculously large for a single person, which is good to know should I ever want to kidnap a family and torture them at this place. The proprietor informed me that they were closing at some specific time, about an hour from then. I had no timekeeping device outside of the locker, so I had to wing it, and erring heavily on the side of caution, I had a short beach diversion. Given that large swathes of my epidermis were turning bright red, it's probably for the best.
Handling the shower, locker, and changing in the other direction was slightly more complicated, but I did it and then I headed inland, figuring I should have a substantial meal for once that day. On my way to find dinner is when things got really crazy.
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I wandered over to a bench to eat my newly-acquired snack, and did not exercise enough caution, because the flimsy paper bag ripped and I got sauce all over my pants and a little on my shirt. Unfortunately I had used my napkin in that earlier episode, and I'm not sure how much it would have helped anyway.
Thus I continued on, looking like a slobby retard. Then I made an obviously-poor decision and ended up having a subpar dinner. What happened after that is a story for another time.
Posted Wed Jun 25 09:13:32 2008Word on the street is that there will be a Mini Purse in about seven months. That could mean Procter & Gamble stock is undervalued. Contact Manish for more details.
Posted Wed Jul 2 10:13:17 2008A sound caught my ear, tickling my consciousness until I was impelled to locate its source. It was not that I wanted any ice cream from the ice cream truck I was sure was the culprit; it was because it sounded suspiciously like it was playing Come Dancing by the Kinks. When I saw that it was a large garbage truck, I was still more bothered by the calliope-like riffs coming from it than the fact that the garbage truck was playing a song.
Naturally, I whirled around and goosestepped away. After having dinner with what was probably a contracted companion, I was escorted to a massage parlor. While I was being serviced, I stared at the TV while a news program started. Its theme song was a muzak version of Yanni.
Shortly thereafter I made the mistake of getting into a conversation about lavender: the flower, not the color. The musical accompaniment was Elvis Costello. This is not notable.
Then, before I was fondled unpleasantly by an 8-year-old with Down's Syndrome, whose mother was entirely unsympathetic to my plight, I encountered a much smaller garbage truck. It was playing Für Elise. What a contrast! I only want to encounter garbage trucks playing classic rock from now on.
Come dancing; it's only natural, unless you get molested by a mongoloid.
Posted Sun Jul 6 02:44:08 2008This is the night of second-hand thoughts. Oh, the shame. I'm gonna do this in mostly-chronological order. Mostly.
I vaguely remember the first great meal I had in Paris. I got off the plane, went through immigration and customs, hopped on the RER, got out and dragged my suitcase to Le Chat Grippé. I walked through the door in my T-shirt and jeans, and said… well, I don't remember what I said, but I ended up getting a table and ordering the tasting menu. I don't remember very much about the food, but I remember that the waiter had to wake me up between courses. I've kinda had a thing for tasting menus ever since.
Tonight I made a reservation at a fine dining establishment that was advertised as having a couple of tasting menus. I wasn't going to commit myself to a tasting menu, but there was a good chance I would find it irresistable. I timed my departure pretty well, and after walking the 2.5 miles to the restaurant, I was only a couple minutes early.
Now the funny thing about this is I did not happen to notice that I had entered Molecular Gastronomy Hut. The signs outside did not say Molecular Gastronomy Hut, neither in cuneiform, hieroglyphs, nor any language I could read. The menu did not advertise the fact that this was Molecular Gastronomy Hut. Had I known that this was Molecular Gastronomy Hut, I would have not ordered the tasting menu, especially since I was not hungry and should probably have not even eaten a whole course. Had I known that the wine pairings would only include two reds, I wouldn't have ordered those either.
Normally I expect wine pairings to include a white. It's the thing to do; it adds contrast. You drink it and get it over with and then you enjoy the rest of your meal. This had at least three whites and one rosé. Mother of God.
For the moment, though, I had no foreknowledge of the wines, and was was entranced by the knives, which were twisted such that if the handle was lying flat on the table, the blade stood vertically. Not only was this incredibly distracting, it seemed to have some practical value; if there were foodstuffs on your knife, they would remain elevated and not touch the tablecloth.
Anyway, the food comes out, course by course, wine by wine. I wonder if Richard from Top Chef is hiding back in the kitchen. There are random foams and gastriques lying conspicuously on my plates. My second course had a lemon sorbet sitting on top of various types of vegetable matter. My third course involved arthropods. Ever wonder what to pair with fried arthropod? That's right, rosé. My fourth course was actually tasty, much to my surprise. It was a pumpkin flower cappuccino. It is hubris to call it cappuccino, but they did and I am going to maintain the tradition. It tasted like warm infused buttery goodness, even though I was picking insect legs out of my mouth while drinking it.
You may or may not be surprised to learn that the lemon sorbet made a reappearance in a later course. The waiter recommended mixing it with the other ingredients. Tom Colicchio was hiding in the back of my head asking why, if it was meant to be mixed, wouldn't they serve it mixed. I am forced to agree.
The only other thing worth having was the cheese plate. It was populated with cheese I had never had before, and fruit concoctions to go with each. Most of the cheese were nothing special, but one was orgasmic. No, I'm not going to tell you what it was. Oh, all right, it was the middle one.
One hundred fifty-six courses later, I was asked if I wanted any coffee. I didn't really want caffeine, but as I didn't want to sabotage the experience, I acquiesced and consented to an espresso. I'm not sure how I was understood, as by this time I had stopped speaking the local language and was presently shouting about bacon-burger dogs, the Huxtables, and Freebird. Then after coffee and being ignored, I asked for the check. Surprise, surprise: there was an additional dessert course to go. Didn't I look foolish? The bill came out to about half the country's GDP. The last time I had seen that many digits was when a bunch of hipsters tried to calculate π while spaz-dancing to Fischerspooner and playing Space Channel Five. I wondered how it must feel for one of those guys who decides to order all kinds of extravagant room service in a luxury hotel right before committing suicide.
After I paid, which seemed to confuse them a bit, they offered to call me a cab. I refused politely several times. I don't like cabs to begin with, aside from the whole plutocrat-fatcat I-might-as-well-get-a-maid-and-a-butler-and-a-valet feel to them, and the practical aspects of the drivers being douchebags. I had just spent a ridiculous amount of money on food that wasn't worth it, and I saw no reason to add insult to injury by paying for a taxi. It could probably have been $10 or $15 more. Mother of Christ.
So I walked. It was only four or so miles to my bed, and I passed the time by singing songs of cormorants and racial disharmony and seventeen-year-old prostitutes and the time the Rescue Rangers got sentenced to maximum-security prison. All in all it was a terribly unpleasant contrast to the happy song about alfajores I was singing before dinner.
Mmm… alfajores.
⋰
Posted Tue Jul 22 00:02:15 2008![[unreleased zomg]](http://ximg.scru.org/images/zcr.png)
The worst thing an idealist can be is practical. I see this problem nearly every day when people are trying to comply with laws, rules, regulations, standards, or what-have-you. You fail to meet the objective, so you smudge reality and make compromises. Well, we cannot reasonably drive under the speed limit so let's arbitrarily make up our own limit (10 mph over) and stick to that. That way we endure the hardship of having to comply with something but not the extreme and unattainable hardship of complying with the real thing. Nevermind that some people actually obey the speed limit; that's just anecdotal evidence or a fluke or some other excuse you can use to disregard the fact that what you are claiming is impossible is actually possible.
That's an example of a rule mandated by an external power (the oppressor you theoretically owe your allegiance to or the oppressor you are on loan to). Where idealism really comes into play is when people choose their own oppression, be that a formal religion, moral code that they got from a pamphlet somebody was handing out on the sidewalk, or other voluntarily-adopted standards of behavior.
Then you end up with raw-food vegans who eat pepperoni pizza twice a week, environmentalists who drive cars, PETA members who keep pets, feminists who are lapsitters, Christians who sin, people who claim that things are best-effort, and people who claim that things that are obviously part of other things are not really part of those things.
Posted Wed Aug 6 19:58:57 2008Things I am not going to do this week:
- Orphan arch-perl
- Orphan archway
- Orphan archzoom
- Orphan axp
- Switch libdb-dev to db4.7.
- Split debianutils into kernel-utils and sensible-utils.
- Orphan libuuid-perl
- Orphan mktemp or care whether or not coreutils will start shipping its version.
Once there was a professor, and they assigned a paper on epicene singular they in common usage around their school. One student interviewed other students as part of their research, and another student cited their paper as part of their research. They handed in their papers on time, as did most of the rest of the students, and the professor graded them. There was a hint of plagiarism in them, and they didn't know what to do about them. In the end, they appealed to the Academic Integrity Committee, and they discussed the matter with them.
Some of the them redefined success. They said that they reaped the benefits of flexibility, whether political or not, and that they did not suffer from problems of ambiguity or sounding illiterate. They, but not all of them, also said that prescriptive grammar was oppressing them, and that evidence of epicene singular they from the Middle Ages was clear basis for belief that subjunctives were dead and that they were only used by sticklers and language bigots. They maintained that they were keeping them down. The grades did not necessarily reflect this. They could infer from them that they had seen a world where they could use several anonymous antecedents of varying gender and number, and they would not need to use artificial gender-neutral pronouns when they could just rely on good and proper epicene singular they. They knew that once language shaped thought enough, there would be no need to expend the extra effort to clarify the doubts introduced by them using the same word to mean fifty different things, because they would just know what they were saying.
They didn't care at all that it sounded incredibly stupid. They only cared that they were right.
Posted Fri Aug 15 10:57:06 2008![[Christian Hug]](http://ximg.scru.org/images/christianhug.png)
That was the best flan I've had since A-Rod's cousin brought me some. Hers wasn't topped with dulce de leche though. Suite Judy Blue Eyes, the dulce de leche. Mmm.
I don't know how I managed to get intoxicated. The waiter did flash me a creepy, mischievous smile when he was pouring my wine, so maybe he spiked it. Maybe the fine herbs in my cooked cheese were of a special psychoactive variety. I don't know.
What I do know is that I noticed something was wrong when I found myself walking up to a police officer and wishing him buenas noches. This is an unwise thing to do in police states like the US or UK. Depending on region and jurisdiction, this type of behavior can get you searched, cuffed, jacked, detained, questioned, interrogated, co-opted to help steal a fire truck, beaten, shot, looked at with disdain, or Clockwork-Oranged. He just looked at me like I was completely unsuspicious.
Then I inquired about how babby is formed. A few minutes later I was trying to escape from the ninth floor of a construction zone.
I have a friend whose name isn't Ronaldinho. not-Ronaldinho lives at the crossroads between two cultures. One culture is all about paying attention to your fellow human, trying to behave with honor and propriety, not inconveniencing anyone or causing them distress. The other culture is more about being reactive. Do what it is you like, and if you end up bothering people, they will alert you with loud complaints. Depending on the situation, the loud complaints can either result in apologies and behavior correction, or escalation.
The two of them don't mix particularly well because they're founded on entirely different assumptions. It's like what the Uruguayan prostitute says about the sponge used to wash ambos lados. I really hate her for that attitude.
Posted Tue Aug 19 21:10:11 2008The loud girl wasn't there. The dynamic boy missed her only in the most tangential sense. As the radio plays. The flighty girl missed her when she wasn't getting enough attention, for the loud girl was disturbingly good at giving her attention. I just can't face myself alone again. The weary boy did not miss her, for he had peered into her soul and seen the evil fomenting within. Maybe we ain't that young anymore. Italian blared. You ain't a beauty but, hey, you're all right. The euphuistic boy was of three minds about the subject and he made no prætense about it. Throw roses in the rain. The rude girl flip-flopped like a politician on speed. For a savior to rise from these streets. They maintained their course, with smut, standards, and debauchery. Is beneath this dirty hood.
The weary boy invoked the power of pork, and the euphuistic boy invoked Chaim and his band of goyim. Let the wind blow back your hair. The flighty girl grew more insecure. We got one last chance to make it real.
Oh, Thunderoos.
Posted Tue Aug 26 21:36:44 2008This is the night that the clockwork burns down. This is the night of elbows scraping against iron bars. Tom Stoppard thought he had a glass full of fractals, when really it was an ass full of dactyls. This is the night of candelabras crashing into the shoes of giants. This is the night when the man with the homburg sings a hymn for the hopeless. The novice groped an honored mater outside the slic hut. This is the night that the hunger reached out for the abyss and fell in. This is the night that the crack broke its own mother's back. Sweet Nutty went to the levee and the levee didn't like it one bit. This is the night of the British spellings. This is the night of the sandpiper's dream. Lady Starbucks wondered about the healing powers of the dental-floss bikini. This is the night that nothing lasts forever. This is the night that nothing ever ends. The Q2 Gang tripped the light fantastic while waxing the text unreadable. This is the night of the Magic Mainspring. This is the night of remembering Trufflehunter's name. There's ice cream waiting for me in another world.
Posted Thu Aug 28 21:59:20 2008Trick looked up at the bay window. He raised the phone and dialed. No answer. He looked at the window again. He dialed again. Brystol answered. She asked him what he wanted. She sounded irritated. He asked if he could come up. She told him no. In his romcom fantasy, she had welcomed him with warmth and gusto. He sighed and trudged off.
In her romcom fantasy, he had ignored her no, burst through the door, and generally behaved in such ways that, if her friend Chessil had expressed the same scenario, she would have described as most resembling a creepy stalker. When she peered out the window, he was no longer there. This happened several more times, and always ended in disappointment.
Brystol's boyfriend Trock knew that she wasn't into him enough. That much was obvious. In his romcom fantsay, though, his persistence and unwavering devotion finally melted her cold, black heart, and she changed into the woman of his dreams. In her romcom fantasy, he effortlessly changed into an entirely different man. Trock lavished her with attentions and affections, directly in furtherance of his aims. For this reason, she disrespected him greatly. Brystol did not want someone to put her on a pedestal, nor did she want someone who wanted to spend all his time with her. What she wanted was something entirely different.
One day, when particularly irritated by Trock, she called Trick and invited him to dinner. She made clear that it was strictly platonic. He dropped everything, cancelled all his plans, made several sacrifices that could not be justified if he were to try to explain this to someone logically, and met her for dinner. In his romcom fantasy, things would not be strictly platonic. In her romcom fantasy, he would ignore the platonic bit and put the moves on her. Both were disappointed that night.
Life began to wear on Brystol. Trock continued to grate on her nerves. She was losing hope for all aspects of her life, and panic caused her to travel on false pretenses to go visit her ex-boyfriend Treck. Treck was probably not what you would call a ladies' man, but he had lots of women, and he treated them all like dirt. In her previous dealings with him, Brystol had been subjected to all manner of abuse, and though she complained about it and reciprocated, this was treatment with which she was very comfortable. In her romcom fantasy, their mutual mistreatment was indicative for their great love for one another, and Treck would someday forego all his other affairs and declare her to be his one and only. In his romcom fantasy, he bested the Sultan of Brunei in personal combat, somehow won his title, and satisfied himself with no fewer than ten concubines per day.
Still, Brystol's soul was not completely filled, and when she returned home, she positioned herself in three ways to provoke Trick. In her romcom fantasy, he would recognize her vulnerability, accommodate her whims, and fight her boyfriend for her. He did not recognize her vulnerability, nor did he understand that her callous airs of indifference masked the significance of her seemingly innocuous statements to him of late. In his romcom fantasy she would stop being such a bitch.
Shortly thereafter they both died of broken hearts, one after the other. Trock was devastated. He couldn't figure out what had happened. Then again, who can?
Posted Fri Sep 19 16:24:38 2008You can do the similar things with better-licensed software:
gnutls-cli --insecure -p 443 samba.grep.be
and
gnutls-cli --insecure --starttls -p 587 samba.grep.be
For a while, lots
of
people
have been using their zsh prompts to display information
about their current VCS (git in particular) working directories. I am no
exception, though I was just doing a simple git rev-parse and
git symbolic-ref in my precmd().
Starting with zsh-beta 4.3.6-dev-0+20080921-1, I am now using the vcs_info subsystem developed by Frank Terbeck. It has backends for bzr, cdv, cvs, darcs, git, hg, mtn, p4, svk, svn, and tla. These backends can be enabled or disabled via configuration.
To get it working quickly, do something like
autoload -Uz vcs_info
precmd() {
psvar=()
vcs_info
[[ -n $vcs_info_msg_0_ ]] && psvar[1]="$vcs_info_msg_0_"
}
PS1="%m%(1v.%F{red}%1v%f.)%# "
In the olden days, things were a bit simpler. Oh, things were far from perfect; we didn't all have the same levels of access. We all had access to the machine with the ftp archive master, but Only a few people had access to the mailing list server, and only a few people had root (though not all of them were German). I actually had root on a couple of buildds until some guy named Ryan Murray appeared out of nowhere and disabled my accounts. I remember wondering, at the time, who he was and how he had gotten root on everything.
As the years went by, the disparity grew. Like the lie told by the illuminati of post-9/11 thinking, things need to be kept safe, so access started to be less of an entitlement and more of a needs-only privilege. It just so happens that you don't need to do anything. However, the people who actually deserve the access can provide alternate services for you in case you want to try something you don't deserve access to. Of course it won't be as good, and if it breaks you may be called an impatient ingrate if you complain. Then if you want something else, you are asked to justify it. It is extremely condescending for a power-hungry, power-hoarding person to demand to know why someone should have access to something. The two main factors in gaining power are such a craving and cronyism, and if you remember that power is relative, you can see why a power-hungry person would not wish to participate in an egalitarian society, and why anarchy is unstable and falls easily to syndicalism.
Back on the bus, we now have more layers of access, and thus we end up with more classes of people. As people and machines multiple, there are more opportunities to deny people access to machines, and more instances in which one could inquire why someone needed access to something. In this new Enlightenment, it is not just the power-mad asking the question, but also some hangers-on and other people who do nothing useful. There was some overlap of the two groups.
Like everything else that doesn't get struck down violently and immediately, these attitudes become the standard, and people insist that any other choice would lead to instantaneous destruction of the universe. Look at how Anthony Towns redefined the meaning of experimental to work around a technical shortcoming. Now, instead of acknowledging the fact that there's a major deficiency in the release process that makes it inconvenient to upload packages to unstable during a freeze, and trying to fix it, we all mostly misuse experimental.
Now we couldn't log into ftp-master, and we couldn't log into half the other machines either, but we could always upload. Even when the release team was giving us the bad advice not to upload, we could still do it. This vexed them, so the privileged ftp-team granted the privileged release team additional privileges. Can you guess what they were? I don't think I could. It's practically unfathomable to me. The release team can block a developer's right to upload. This is the fundamental building block of the whole kit and caboodle. Everything is predicated on this basic action, and their new privilege is the power to take that away from us. Yet this was greeted with very little objection, probably because of the people involved and vague promises of well-meaning and non-misuse.
However, there is a simple axiom which applies to all of this:
If you impede me doing something I want to do, you are an asshole.
So now we can still upload (except when a bribe-loving ftpmaster is being petty or when the release team is expediting a transition) and we can still vote, and we can log into a machine or two. We're running low on powers to take away. Maybe we could create an even lower class of citizen, some kind of undermaintainer without any voting rights.
Whee. DM was born. Instead of fixing the problems of class inequality, we created another class. Fantastic.
Why stop there? Why not create more? Clearly nobody wants to work toward an egalitarian culture, so we might as well make it like a game where you can hop from level to level. Then you can go to society parties and brag that you are a DVMRP-Q White Belt Green Stripe with a concentration in Taiwanese Bug Reporting, and that after a 6-month wait you can make a lateral move to second-chair cantor of Der Process under the wavy waves.
As always, making the constructive suggestion to take things in the exact opposite direction will be called out as unconstructive.
Posted Thu Oct 23 00:01:15 2008- Day One
The South American maid confesses that she doesn't clean much, because the Spaniards don't notice.
- Day Two
People keep playing the same Jason Mraz song over and over again. It is awful. Does Jason Mraz have more than one song? If so, does he have any good songs? This makes Coldplay seem like good music.
- Day Three
While dumpster-diving in Fulda, a large man wearing an archer's cap and peculiar shoes appeared, carrying one of the largest baskets I have ever seen. He showed me that it was full of bread, and attempted to sell me some. When I showed no interest in his wares, he recited the following gibberish:
Ich glaab ich bin aus Staa unn hab' mehr Bauch wie Baa- unn doch bin ich en arme Tropp- denn ach, ich hab'e Loch im Kopp!
- Day Four
More Jason Mraz. Ugh. José complains about people who will walk together without talking constantly. He repeats himself about fifty times without accidentally saying anything interesting. I am afraid that he will injure his voice and then his brain will have to start working. Luckily this does not occur.
- Day Five
In Neu-Isenburg for a standoff with the Sky Chefs. Every time I enter Neu-Isenburg I get paranoid and start looking for UutiSaruman. It's creepy.
- Day Six
A Hessian woman tells me I lead a sad life. I can tell that she's Hessian because she looks like a slender Austrian with teeth. I don't tell her this.
- Day Seven
Razula asks if I remember what ležák means in Slavic. I don't know why he thinks I knew in the first place. His friend starts spouting off a lecture on why Hungarians are superior to Germans because Hungarians lie, cheat, and steal, and Germans obey laws. I wonder if ležák can help this situation. Probably not.
- Day Eight
Now the South American maid is complaining that Spanish men are gay and don't realize it. Then she goes on at great length about the Great Flying Circus of North Korea. I think about asking her where it's from. I decide against it.
Posted Thu Oct 30 08:38:12 2008I have no good reason to participate in a system I believe to be so flawed it should be replaced entirely. However, I am still going to vote, and since people have already threatened to pay me to vote for Obama, I have concocted this little solicitation scheme to justify my trip to the polls.
I don't believe in the free market any more than I believe in the crap that is Keynesianism, so the following offsets will be subtracted from the final totals.
$0.00 Barr / Root
$0.00 Calero / Kennedy
$0.00 La Riva / Puryear
$0.00 McKinney / Clemente
$0.00 Nader / Gonzalez
$0.01 Obama / Biden
$1,000,001 McCain / Palin
Bribes will be kept anonymous, and should there be an inquest, I will deny all of this. Everything must be prepaid to count. Should there be any ties after the adjustments, decisions will be made through a game of mumblety-peg with an effeminate Texan.
Whining and FUD about how not voting for one of the two mainstream parties causes simultaneously global warming and the heat death of the universe will be met with the skepticism appropriate for the PR drivel paid for by those two parties.
If you want something inspirational instead, read John Goerzen.
Posted Sun Nov 2 16:18:17 2008A long time ago, I had the idea of improving the interface between
shell completion and the programs being completed. The result of
this was the bzr shell-complete command (or bzr s-c for short),
which was never fully fleshed out, and has since fallen into disrepair.
The principles behind this are + the program is the best place to store up-to-date and accurate information + the program already knows all these things (albeit usually in unparseable forms) + duplicating information and effort is annoying
Here is an excerpt from bzr s-c, which was intended to give a comprehensive
list of subcommands, paired with short descriptions:
diff:show differences in the working tree, between revisions or branches
export:export current or past revision to a destination directory or archive
get:create a new copy of a branch
help:show help on a command or other topic
ignore:ignore specified files or patterns
ignored:list ignored files and the patterns that matched them
info:show information about a working tree, branch or repository
init:make a directory into a versioned branch
There is one subcommand per line, separated from its description by a colon.
Next you can invoke something like bzr s-c diff to get the possible options
and arguments for the diff subcommand, although the output you would see today
is broken and nearly useless.
Since I've lost faith in bzr, I'll illustrate what the output might be
corresponding to topgit's tg remote if topgit supported this kind of thing:
--populate
REMOTE
This would mean that tg remote can understand the option --populate, which
takes no argument, and that the first non-option argument should be a
REMOTE.
REMOTE would then be defined, for example, in zsh's _topgit function as
some kind of git remote which is completed in the same way you might complete
a git remote for git.
The exciting part then, is that if tg remote starts taking a --decimate
option, the topgit completion helper subsystem will start outputting it
and _topgit will do the right thing without having to be altered.
For tg export, things are a bit more complicated, so let's have it be
described in the style of the zsh completion system:
'(--collapse)--quilt:directory:_directories'
'(--collapse -b --branch)'{-b,--branch=}':branches:BRANCHES'
'(--quilt)--collapse:branch:BRANCH'
This means that --collapse and --quilt are exclusive, that -b
and --branch cannot be used with --collapse, that -b and
--branch are equivalent, that -b and --branch take an argument
in the form of BRANCHES, that --collapse takes an argument in the
form of BRANCH, and that --quilt takes an argument that's a
real directory in the filesystem.
Then _topgit would have logic to interpret BRANCH as a branch, and
BRANCHES as a comma-separated list of branches.
A similar idea is the one used by axp. If you invoke axp self completion zsh,
it will output zsh completion functions for you. To me this seems more onerous
on both the developers and the end users, but I suppose it gives you immediate
flexibility that a more generic interface would lack.
Amanda and Sarah and Anna and I were in the back room, with the nice guy who can't sing. At least I'm told that he was nice and can't sing. Things were said that did not come to fruition.
It's like that girl in the movie where everyone is skating on the edge, and though she keeps running, the weave and the weft get in the way, and the needle which was threaded at the Delly Place threatens to puncture someone's eye in the shadow of the factory where the angels watch poor souls trying to express themselves in coffee shops.
A long time ago, Whatsherface explained to me the purpose of going to church: not the one where you meet business contacts, or cruise for ass, or get credit in some moral superiority program, or get harassed by some jackhole named Василий even though he's not Russian, or to serve a higher power, or any of that, but the one where you become part of a greater whole.
On the other side of the swimming pool, someone is dipping vis toe into the water. The conventional wisdom is that ve should plunge right in, withstand the shock of the temperature change, and be clearly better off for it. There is no doubt in the mind of conventional wisdom that this is the best outcome for ver. All factors are deemed irrelevant at this point.
The same cannot be said for someone about to eat a poison ivy sandwich.
I'm gonna need an Almdudler, gespritzt.
Posted Sun Nov 16 01:01:42 2008I'm not too old to mosh with Dr. Bubbles in front of a Christian rock band. (Obviously this couldn't happen. Why would we be near a Christian rock band?)
Bitch, I am is as constant as the Northern Star. Where dat at?
Posted Fri Nov 21 01:01:28 2008