blogwaffe

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.

We’ve all taken them. From them, I’ve learned I’m a gin and tonic, a freakin’ accountant, a demon in the sack, and that I don’t know the difference between Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Osama bin Laden. But when I saw What Religion are You (Mystery of the zen hex – The truth that is pulled over your eyes to blind you from the world), on some livejournal account I got to from the coven (xaosseed -> spankarella), I was intrigued.

Turns out I’m of “unknown category” but that I lie somewhere between modern satanist and average christian.

Oh man, I nearly cried. Couldn’t ask for more entertaining results.

Old news, I know, but still of note. I was working late yesterday and so hadn’t check the news in over twenty hours. Contrary to my expectations, the world had not ended while I wasn’t there to passively check up on it, but I did still get a shock. The first headline to pop up in my RSS feed reader was “Powel Quits, Rice to be new Secretary of State“.

Noo…… The saving grace of this administration is leaving. To be replaced, yes, by the “unsticker”.

I think the Illuminati are on the upswing these days.

Anyway, thanks Secretary Powell.

Not for me, unfortunately, but for the greater good. Google News recently aggregated two articles about scientific andvances on the frontlines of sex. The first is about the recent study linking the female libido with chocolate consumption. And we’re not just talking desire, but arousal and satisfaction as well. This has been popular knowledge for eons, and science has finally caught up. Of course, the sample size was only 163 women, so I figure this was really just a university sponsored excuse for some Italian guy to ask lots of dirty questions of strange women.

The second article relates the recent “success” of innoculating macaque monkeys agains their own sperm. Well, really a protein necessary for the sperm’s fertility, but who’s counting? The summary: nine monkey’s, seven of which became infertile after innoculations, five of which became fertile again at the end of the experiment. So a bit better than fifty percent. Also, keep in mind these are injections and were required every three weeks for the monkeys. Now, there’s no way any man is going to get injections every three weeks to keep his soldiers out of combat boots. Machismo aside, injections are more expensive than pills: you’d have to go somewhere and have someone stick you (so you could go off and stick someone else…) the first time, and get trained so you can stick yourself (…?) subsequently. I assume this can all be done subcutaneously, so it’s proabably not complicated. But still more of a pain in the ass than pills. Maybe they can take a page from the diabetes industry’s book and start making antisperm innoculant pumps.

Or maybe we should just wait around for the pills.

My dad went to a Death Cab for Cutie concert last night. Calling it a “cultural experience”, he says the (almost) last concert he went to was a Simon and Garfunkel in Chicago. And I’m sure he’s not talking about a reunion tour. Apparently he was a few standard deviations away from the mean age, but he saw lots of people there he knows (contemporaries of Allen’s or mine, people he knows from church, additional degrees of separation, etc.).

The sold out concert was, in his terms, “loud and energetic” and “not bad at all”. He certainly seems to have enjoyed himself.

I’m not sure I could ever have dragged either of my parents to a similar concert while I was in high school. Though, to be fair, I doubt I would have wanted to. But he’s good friends with a couple kids from church (juniors or seniors by now – damn), and they convinced him to go (without their parents of course).

Glad he had fun. Now if only he and Mom will go see the movies I tell them to.

A little bird told me the other day Vroman’s coffee shop stocks hot apple cider. Man, I love the stuff. It’s hard to find out here, even in the fall, and I’ve been jonesin’. So rather than do my field theory in the living room as always, I decided to hit it up last night.

No dice. Last weekend was apparently ridiculously busy, and they’re out of cider. You’d think three days would be enough time to restock, but maybe they were so busy that their cider supply went into the red. Ah well, their Star of India tea was good enough to keep me there taking up half of a big table with various papers and texts.

More interesting than quantizing the Majorana fermion theory was the conversation the two girls (one claiming to be 21, the other 17) were having at the table next door. The conversation was politcal, complete with rightist (the older, fashonista, lush, wannabe socialite) and leftist (the younger, product of divorced parents (whoa there – just stating facts), teetotaler (but only after having a bad experience or two with drugs (and their abusers), outwardly extroverted to compensate for fundamental self-confidence/image issues). Neither was making any real argument, each was just spouting off moral judgements or personal theories without any support (other than, “I have seen a homeless person before”, to paraphrase). I’m sure most of what they said was deeply felt, but none of it was terribly well developed. Well, maybe that’s unfair; at best their ideas were poorly communicated.

It was frustrating to listen to these people trying to string together sentences out of but-grasped-for ideas. I think the amount of information conveyed in their hour long conversation was on the order of bits. Clearly a very noisy channel.

But, hell, at least they were talking about the current administration and what they thought could be better with the country. More power to ’em.

Best Sound bites (all by Rightie): “But we need homeless people. We need 18% unemployment [sic] for this society to function.” “Not everyone needs healthcare.” “I like living in the most powerful country in the world. Having that behind me and being able to tell people that.”