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Prologue...

Saturday, the 19th day in the month of March in the year 2005 of the Common Era
Inscribed: 7:05 am
Phew
Wow. that was a hell of a night. I've ben spending the last few weeks/months being stressed out by work I haven't been getting enough progress on, and to have to worry about having fun today was just all kinds of weird/relief.

Tonight was a joint birthday party for Leah/Matt. As it was Leah's 21st, it was a bring-your-own bottle party, which meant there were large amounts of alcohol/mixers. There were insane amounts of people in our apartment. I don't think that anyone actually kept count, but there were easily in excess of 35 people most of the time, perhaps even 40 or 45 at some points. I gotta say, this party rocked hardcore. I hate college parties. Parties focused on alcohol bug me, but somehow the mix of having a lot of close friends/Apartment of Justice-types and a bunch of people I didn't know or barely knew worked very well.

The level of socializing, conversation was awesome, the dancing was good, if sporadic. It's sad to say, but many people had to have alcohol in them to dance, so it didn't really get going until later. There was a certain amount of weird cliquing: the SFT circle, the CavDaily circle, the TJ/AoJ circle and the alcohol (this last was the great melting pot, it seemed, that and me flitting around between groups and my room, trying to get music working). However, I feel (hope) that everybody there had a good time, and I certainly did, which to me says that the party was a huge success. I hope everyone had as much fun as I. (Also, it was really cool meeting some new people.)

(2 musings | muse)

Friday, the 18th day in the month of March in the year 2005 of the Common Era
Inscribed: 1:25 pm
Gaim
Oh, I also wanted to mention how I dislike Gaim versioning. They just released "1.2.0" from "1.1.4"

The sum total of non-bugfix changes over 1.1.1-1.2.0:

* Allow SILC authentication via public key if your key is password protected (Michele Baldessari)
* Disable the delete button on pounces that aren't saved yet anyway (Kevin Stange)
* The Autopackage now builds both the mozilla-nss and the gnutls ssl plugins, and requires at least one of those libraries.
* AIM SecurID login support
* Better handling of MSN's Individuals group and buddy status updates (Felipe Contreras)
* CHAP authentication support for SOCKS5 proxies (Malcolm Smith)
* ICQ offline messages are sent using your specified character set instead of Unicode (Magnus Hult)
* Yahoo! privacy improvements (Bleeter)

Only the last one is from the 1.1.4->1.2.0 jump. How does this build differ significantly enough from 1.1.0 to justify a new minor number?

(2 musings | muse)

Inscribed: 11:27 am
I should be writing a paper, but I'd just like to mention that i really like the use of the Knight Rider sample in Mundiyan To Bachke by Punjabi MC (later to become Jay-Z's Beware the Boys)

(1 musing | muse)

Monday, the 14th day in the month of March in the year 2005 of the Common Era
Inscribed: 3:39 pm
On hte perils of sloppy chalking
So on my way to the lab from class, I saw the following written on the sidewalk:

UVa Fragrom in
PERV


I had no idea what this meant - initially I thought is had something to do with sexual FPS's but then it dawned on me - it was supposed to say:

UVa Program in
PERU

Which made a lot more sense.

(muse)

Inscribed: 12:12 pm
Not that he'll read this...
Happy birthday, [info]goldenfool! And many happy returns.

If you see him today, do something birthday-ish to him.

Also, as [info]nonelf pointed out, happy pi day.

(1 musing | muse)

Inscribed: 1:03 am
Because I've seen it misspelled in a couple places recently, and I'm anal retentive like that:
spiel
Function: noun
: a voluble line of often extravagant talk : PITCH

(5 musings | muse)

Thursday, the 10th day in the month of March in the year 2005 of the Common Era
Inscribed: 5:11 pm
Trip to AC was really cool, even if we spent 12 hours in the car and 22 hours awake. In the NL tourney, I busted out in an unimaginably stupid way after an hour and a half or so. Mike was the next of our trio to bust, an hour later on the right play, but the wrong opponent's hand. (Pair of 7s were high card on the flop, he went all in with pocket 8s, the other guy, in a phenomenal call, called him with pocket 10s.) Adam went out like 2 hours after that on just a bad luck call. (how often is 5-8 off suit gonna hold up against A-10?)

Anyway, while we were waiting for Adam, Mike and I played low-stakes tables (not together, though). I played a 2-4 Hold'em table, and started with 50, went up to 125, and decided to leave with $5 in profit overall for the night (including the $5 I spent on various sodas/snacks). So, the trip ended up costing me no more than gas and toll. I think we all had a lot of fun, so that's good. We have to do it again sometime with more people.

(3 musings | muse)

Monday, the 7th day in the month of March in the year 2005 of the Common Era
Inscribed: 11:15 pm
In case you missed it, here's a silly game: http://nanaca.narr.as/

It's awesome. For those of you who actually understand Japanese, it'll probably be easier to catch on, but honestly figuring out the rules is half the fun.

My current record is 4763.86m.

(4 musings | muse)

Inscribed: 11:09 am
Julian 352 11:03: hmm.. can you go to /.? I'm having problems opening it..
beatniklaptop 11:05: no
beatniklaptop 11:05: seems like it's down
beatniklaptop 11:05: *gasp!*
Julian 352 11:05: productivity is going up around the world
beatniklaptop 11:05: nah - LJ's still up.

(1 musing | muse)

Saturday, the 5th day in the month of March in the year 2005 of the Common Era
Inscribed: 5:44 am
STS, where art thou?
Now, I usually get pissed off about people making fun of the English of foreigners/foreign news sources, particularly when they make fun of Indians, but the excellent placement of the modifier in this sentence needs to be posted:

"A year ago a pupil, addicted to videogames, killed a video saloon attendant in downtown Riga to get a few lats (dollars) to continue the game, which ended in tragedy." - The Hindustan Times, "Boys kill friend using "Mortal Combat" video technique"

(1 musing | muse)

Thursday, the 3rd day in the month of March in the year 2005 of the Common Era
Inscribed: 12:52 am
I should be studying for crypto, but:

On a whim, I decided to install Ubuntu in place of the old Debian install. After hours of wrestling (admittedly my fault) here are my results:

I like that they have the automatic mounting of USB and CDs in gnome (almost) right.
I dislike everything about trying to get newer packages than the ones in the standard distribution. Running a mixed debian system is so much easier.
I like and dislike the installer - it's remarkably easy, but when I wanted to wipe only my /boot and / partitions and leave my /home alone, it formated them ext3 (the default, good) and then ran parted, which failed because it had issues with the "peculiar ext2" (bad).
It did the video stuff automatically for me (and even found a mode that I wasn't aware my vidcard/monitor combination could do!), which is nice, but for somebody with an idea of what their hardware is, the sarge installer is pretty intuitive.
The installer is a lot easier for the average Joe, but I'll take the Debian Sarge installer and the downsides in order to effectively run a mixed system.

I think I'll be reinstalling tomorrow.

(2 musings | muse)

Monday, the 28th day in the month of February in the year 2005 of the Common Era
Inscribed: 9:14 pm
What's going on?
this is one of the weirdest threads I've participated in on /.

(muse)

Friday, the 25th day in the month of February in the year 2005 of the Common Era
Inscribed: 5:23 pm
(17:22:38) BeatnikWork: true data
(17:22:40) BeatnikWork: um
(17:22:42) BeatnikWork: dat
(17:22:46) BeatnikWork: god, I'm a geek

(muse)

Thursday, the 24th day in the month of February in the year 2005 of the Common Era
Inscribed: 2:11 am
So, I was in Tweeter's tonight around 10:20, just, you know, browsing the olive bar, when somebody who worked there tells me: "Just so you know, we're closing at 10:30 tonight for maintenance." Buh. Harris Teeter's. Closed. Brain broken.

Turns out they're doing some "floor work". I guess it makes sense that every so often, a place open 24/7 has been open for so long continuously that things just need to be closed so they can fix 'em, but still. Wild. Anyway, they don't open until 7:30 tomorrow morning.

(6 musings | muse)

Wednesday, the 23rd day in the month of February in the year 2005 of the Common Era
Inscribed: 8:00 pm
A note to all developers out there
Your server will not stay up. Remember this. Jeremy Gillick who writes the SwitchProxy extension knows this now. (Don't bother clicking those - site's down.) Stuffit knows this now, too.

Why do they know this? Because their admirers and adoring users are getting pissed off.

Why are they getting pissed off? Because their software phones home (every time the software is started - which, in the case of SwitchProxy is everytime Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird opens a new window) for information on upgrades. Not only that, they phone home and have long timeouts. But worst of all, while they're phoning home, they do absolutely nothing. Matter of fact, while SwitchProxy's phoning home, Firefox is unusable (any of the windows). Admittedly, both these pieces of software allow you to disable the update functionality, but it's on by default, and in any case, they shouldn't allow you to enable something that will (inexplicably to most users) break the program.

So, I would like to proclaim an edict to all developers, of all software, everywhere:
Your servers will go down. If your software phones home while this is happening and the program freezes, your users will not be happy. Ergo, if talking to your server is not central to the functionality of your software, either do not do an do it, or, for the love of all that is good and right in the world, do not make it a blocking operation.

This shouldn't be that hard to do for update checking with knowledge of threading - most software updates require the running software to be closed anyway, so just set a flag or somewhere in your checking thread, and check it (quickly) at appropriate times. There are probably even better ways to implement this, but it really needs to be fixed - this bug is way too common. If you cannot do threading (I'm not sure whether Mozilla extensions are allowed to, for example), then don't phone home - your users will update when they want to. (Admittedly there are downsides to this, but it beats your users never using your program again.)

BTW - anybody with switchproxy installed who has been having problems w/ Firefox, start Firefox up, several minutes later, when it's responsive, go to extensions, edit switchproxy's preferences and tell it not to notify of updates. I don't know if it's this easy for T-bird users.

(3 musings | muse)

Inscribed: 6:08 pm
Of interest to people in Four American Directors
I emailed Prof. Kolker to see if we could watch the movies outside of class. Here's hoping that he changes his response from what he said to Adam.

(For those of you curious, the summary is that the room in which we watch movies is awful because it's just a room with a flat floor and a screen. This means that people's heads are always in the way, and usually the bottom tenth to fifth of the screen is obscured. Since our Tuesday classes consist of brief introductory comments by the professor followed by a film screening and nothing else, Adam asked Prof. Kolker if we could come to class on Tuesdays, and then watch the movies elsewhere, to which Prof. Kolker responded in the negative. This is my appeal.)

The email )

(6 musings | muse)

Tuesday, the 22nd day in the month of February in the year 2005 of the Common Era
Inscribed: 3:50 am
Wouldn't you know? My academic and social/romantic life are always at odds. Suffice to say - school is killing me, but most other things seem almost healed, and perhaps even better in some ways, than they were two weeks ago.

Oh yeah, I need a job. Anybody need a linux hacker/decent writer who they want to throw large amounts of money at?

(1 musing | muse)

Monday, the 21st day in the month of February in the year 2005 of the Common Era
Inscribed: 9:33 pm
Hmm.. facebook (I swear, I'm only on it to find people's contact info in my class) says that I'm currently logged in from Delta Gamma. methinks that maybe this feature needs work.

(muse)

Wednesday, the 16th day in the month of February in the year 2005 of the Common Era
Inscribed: 12:00 am
BTW
In case you hadn't heard already, SHA-1 has been broken.

current music: 07 J-E-N-O-V-A (Final Fantasy VII)

(4 musings | muse)

Tuesday, the 15th day in the month of February in the year 2005 of the Common Era
Inscribed: 7:08 pm
Today was excellent, but now the low point and the lack of sleep is starting to catch up with me.

First, the good:

Had a full day of good class. Natural Born Killers is... interesting. I'm still not sure what to make of it. For a little more reasoned discussion of the movie, as well as some comments from me, check out [info]nishmael's latest post. (It's actually a protected entry, I now realize, so maybe I'll post more about it later, but for those of you who can see it, go read.)

Lunch... was ok. It was, howeer, followed by visiting Lolo at java City for a while, and then leaving. I got as far as the table immediately outside the bookstore, and got stuck there for like 40 miutes, talking with a stranger about religion, some random passers-by I knew, and Kirril Orlov about all kinds of varied things. so, that part of my day was excellent. I then went to Toy R Us with Matt, hoping to get something worthwhile from their green-tag sale, but pickings were slim. However, just going out there was fun, and i got mini Eggs, which is always excellent.

Now the bad and cryptic:

I'm feeling like I made a mistake (this isn't about the issues previously mentioned in this space), and it bothers me a lot. I don't like making people upset, especially when in fact it's something that I don't feel is much of a big deal. Anyway, as a result I've been feeling pretty down, and I don't know when/if I and/or other person will feel ok about things. Anyway, it feels a lot like I've screwed up what seemed to be a pretty good friendship. (Not totally, mind you, but enough to make things tense.)

Anyway, tonight is FYS/stereotyping, which is always fun - that ought ot pick me up. I'm off to that now...

(1 musing | muse)



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