blogwaffe

I have been admonished for having a slow site. I don’t access it much from outside my apartment, so I was unaware of the annoyance. I knew that the photos were slow to load; I’ve been thinking about preloading them ahead of time, but I’m not sure about the best way to do that. Photos may just have to be slow.

The more important issue is the images loaded in my css. They take too long. I’ve been thinking about reworking the style of the site, anyway. Perhaps I’ll try to get something a bit less bandwidth intensive. The real problem is that I’m doing my own hosting over a cable modem: not much uploading bandwidth. I’ll look into other possibilities, but I’m cheap.

As a stopgap, I’ll change a few links and have caltech host all my images, so at least those will load a bit faster.

I’ve also just finished importaing all my old .in need of a life. entries to this site. Many of the links are likely broken. I will not be fixing them. Deal with it.

Who ever thought you could fry an entire turkey, all at once? Who ever thought you could do it in a scant thirty-eight minutes.

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Allen bought a condo. Well, by the time Allen is fifty-six, he’ll have bought a condo. Right now, some nice people at a bank are just letting him squat on their property.

The nice two bedroom unit is now furnished with (nearly) all of his worldly goods as well as one or two of the otherworldly ones. The new place could probably host about twenty people comfortably and sleep about ten (depending on heights and relations). Sounds like a party to me.

I went down the day after Thanksgiving to help make this all possible. We rented a fourteen foot U-Haul (driven by yours truly – I was a real long distance hauler that day – drivin’ my rig from state to state, sleepin’ in rest stops, pissin’ in bottles, eatin’ burger king, peerin’ down the tops of women in convertibles and jerkin’ off to the Celine Dion station all day long) and made two trips from Poway to South Escondido (apparently, unless you specify the quadrant, people think you live in the boonies). Many of you may know just how good at parallel parking I am. You should have seen me in the truck.

Following a hard day’s work of manual labor, we hit up the Shakespeare Pub in or around downtown San Diego. Black and Tan and Shepherd’s Pie.

A day well spent.

Who else thinks that “to devour in greedy gulps” must have come via Thanksgiving from “the guttural, chortling sound of a male turkey” (American Heritage Dictionary)?

Even if it didn’t, the two words have now a happy coexistance.

Thanksgiving was held here at the SLR this year, which meant Greg, Paul.za and I had to figure out how to sit seventeen people in our living room in order to make war against Thanksgiving dinner. Not a trivial task. Paul.za’s and Greg’s Ikea desks were drafted for service in the trenches. The real problem, though, was chairs. I think, between the three of us, we have over twenty places for people to sit. But about half of these seats do not couple well with dinner tables. Thus, Wednesday evening, I could be found aimlessly walking around the apartment expecting to find a new chair source we hadn’t yet thought of (“hm, maybe I’ll look into my room again – see if there are a half dozen dining room chairs in there I forgot about”). So I broke down and went to Target, where I enlisted four folding charis and a card table. Heidi brought another set of folding chairs to complete our arsenal.

Read more…

I suppose I should write something about Thanksgiving, but I have a backlog of photos to put up regarding Ariele’s birthday party held at the SLR. So here they are. Michelle was using my camera, so laud her for anything remarkable.

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Sometimes I type fast. Sometimes I type slow. Be it circadian, topical, mood dependent (anyone have a good adjective for “mood dependent”) or otherwise contextual, there it is. Plain and true.

So, for the love of all you find sacred, stop fucking autocompleting my URL whenever I pause for more than 1.9 µs.

Now, I love autocompletion. It makes my life worthwhile; without the small convenience that is autocompletion, I’d probably be pushed just over the edge into crawling under a rock to die. So don’t even think about getting rid of the feature.

Just get rid of your overly aggressive time parameter. Really, who the hell needs a time parameter anyway? A good command line uses the TAB key to autocomplete. Most web browsers (to be consistent with the GUIs in which they run) opt for the DOWN ARROW. But you, you have to try and do it automatically. That’d be just fine, if your guesses weren’t the rancid chunks of goat testes they are. No, I do not want to go to http://mathworld.wolfram.com/search/, I’d rather http://mathworld.wolfram.com/. I don’t care how many times I’ve been to the former over the later, I have never typed in the former. Don’t take me there. Don’t think I want to go there, especially when I hit the enter key just this side of too slowly and you’ve appended the “search/” before I’ve been able to react (and don’t blame my reflexes – they’re decent). I don’t care if the sites offer similar functionality, you know that’s not what this is about. I know what I want and I’m not about to be persuaded by a less than sentient, over-zealous (if otherwise likable) string of 1’s and 0’s that thinks it knows what’s good for me.

Well. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll shape up fast or lose me to Firefox, which I should have been using all this time before I got attached to you.

So watch yourself. One more little quibble and I am gone.

Reuters recently posted a story with the title, “Report: Nearly Half of HIV Adults Are Women“.

My response: “…umm… nearly half of all adults are women.” This doesn’t really mean anything, unless you think the percentage should be skewed.

The rest of the article is as poorly written. The language is ambiguous (did the number of women in East Asia jump by 56% or to 56%, and are they normalizing to total population or to total infected population?), and the writing keeps jumping back and forth from topic to topic.

I (think I) understand the issues unique to women with HIV. Indeed, they are very important issues: male dependence, oppression, abuse, cultural inequalites. The list, surely, goes on. But this article does not present those issues very well. All they’ve done is throw some big numbers around. Now, anything that gets more people aware of the AIDS crisis is a good thing, but I wouldn’t mind if those somethings contained actual information.

I need some music. I need it to rock my ass off and leave me wanting more. I don’t care about lyrics (as long as they don’t promote the cultish worship of the thrice bled baby, condemn interracial marriage, autc.). I’ll read a freakin’ book or some poetry if I want to hear some masterful language. I don’t care about what kind of crappy anecdotal information you can give me about the rhythm guitar player’s sister. Not unless the music ends up blowing me away and she’s absurdly hot. I don’t want some puerile crap that starts off weak and builds to anger-rock (or worse, stays weak). Angst, emo, a Jedi craves not these things; I need it to kick and I need it to kick now.

I care about soul. Beat, Bass lines, Groove, these I crave. I want to hear something ridiculous from an electric guitar, or a B3, or some tables, or somebody with a voice so good it doesn’t make sense. Be it electronic(a), funk, honest to God rock, jazz, pop, blues, throat singing, or zydeco: Gotta get me boppin’. Gotta get me rockin’. Gotta get me hollerin’ “oh yeah”.

If you think you’ve got something that can fulfill my demands, let me give it a try. But my ass better get itself good and rocked off.

Amazing how quickly one’s outlook on life can change in a twenty-four hour peiod. Yesterday I was so pleased with myself because, for the first week in months, I had turned in all of my homework in on time. It was cause for celebration. I did a bit of work here and there inbetween classes, but overall I was reasonably unproductive.

Today I found out I’m failing general relativity.

To pass (mind you, passing only requires 50%), I need to do better on the remaining two homeworks than I have on any of the previous seven. you might ask how I could be doing worse than 50% so far. Well, I neglected to do the first set until the last (literal) minute (GR was my only class with homework due the first week – I forgot about it), and one set I faithfully placed in my bag but forgot to turn in until a week later, knocking 75% off my score (not to mention things like getting 0/10 for flipping upper and lower indices in a computaional problem and 3/10 for not proving that rapidity (a sophomore level concept) is additive).

Today (which has passed) was drop day. Not that dropping the class is a great solution. I (more or less) need it for degree requirements, plus I haven’t done a lick of research these past months because of my course load. All for naught if I drop. But I’m sure Preskill has been notified already. Looking forward to group meeting on Thursday.

Ass.