Paul Stansifer

So I hadn't had too many excuses to do graphics stuff recently. This has changed! I discovered shirt.woot, which holds weekly T-shirt design competitions. My entries haven't been really competitive, but they've been fun to make. Here's what I made for the topic "fake rock band":


The lyrics to the song he's playing go "RAAAAAAAaaaaAAAAaaaaaaaaAAR AIIIIIEEEEE GWAAAAARRAAAA".

I told Emily about the concept, and she suggested that I misspell "adequate". When I showed her the design, she pointed out that I already had. So I had to keep it that way...

And, for the topic "space", I revisted a concept I love, the relative scales of celestial objects:

(that's moon-earth, earth-Saturn, Saturn-Sun, Sun-subgiant star, subgiant star-giant star, etc. Note that the images shrink to nothing before they reach the largest stars, which have 2000 times the radius of the Sun (that's 8 billion times the Sun's volume))

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This weekend I decided that using my laptop slouched over on the sofa is probably not a good idea in the long term. I've been looking into getting a desk, but my room is kinda small, so there's not really any place to put it.

So instead, I piled a bunch of books on my dresser (including my parents' theses; they've turned out to be useful after all. (Hi Mom and Dad! Aren't you glad you read my LJ?)). I stuck my laptop atop the pile, et voilà: instant standing desk. You know what I love about computers? The fact that I can use French words without having to pronounce them.

If I make it to the weekend without giving up, I'll get myself an antifatigue mat (a mildly bizarre concept, but supposedly they are pretty important), and start making plans for getting a more permanent desk surface. And, once I have a desktop, getting a desktop computer, since I'm still bending over to see phlegethon's screen, and it's also getting older and has a tendency to drag sometimes. Do I have 22 tabs open in Firefox right now? Stop distracting me with irrelevant questions!

Where was I? Shoot, I need to go to work!

In the excitement of experiencing the events that lie below, I neglected to take pictures of them. But that's alright; I think I've been posting too many relevant pictures lately.






Rootweave! Unbelievably, I wasn't able to find a screenshot online of it [reason for its importance elided, as it involves Unix], so I had to reproduce it myself. Well, I think I got it right, but I can't know for sure.

So, at the last minute, I decided to go to NEFFA. It was just for half of Saturday, since I was afraid that I'd be worn out if I tried to go for longer. I was pretty proud of remembering to pack everything I needed, but hubris caught up with me, and I failed to catch the commuter rail to Mansfield.

So I waited around a while (fortunately, I brought a couple books), ran into Matt Spencer (also going to NEFFA), who in turn ran into a friend of his from Brown (not relevant enough to the story to merit a parenthetical note), and we got on the next train.

It was hot on this train. Like, super hot. About like the NEFFA dance floor with 500 people constantly moving, only without as much airflow. So maybe they had left the heat on from the winter or something?

If you don't follow the weather in Eastern MA, springtime lasted about three days this year, with full-fledged summer starting this weekend. Somewhat less than ideal for NEFFA, but it was still a relief to step outside into the relative cool, and wait for the bus to take us to the complex.

The event was somewhat different than what I imagined. There were more people, and it seemed strangely well-organized. Actually, it was astonishingly well-organized. I've never been to an event in which all the bathrooms are numbered so they can respond to supplies outages more easily. Other things: many high-powered fans, shoe brushes to keep the dance floors clean, two different kinds of craft sales, a poem explaining the workings of the contra medley in rhyme, and a lost and found system that one of the bus drivers seemed to know a great deal about and have a great deal of confidence in when someone lost her water bottle. There were also custom clocks (!) reading "NEFFA TIME" to keep the events on schedule. This was being held in a school complex, which already had clocks! So, I guess that there's some kind of traditional American folk logistics culture.



Tree!

There were a lot of familiar faces at NEFFA. I saw at least four Williams people, five people from the MIT contra, one person from where I work (!), one that I had met while visiting Northeastern (!), and one person I had last seen at a math camp when I was in high school, seven years ago (!!). So, I'm thinking that, if NEFFA got an overhead projector and a LaTeX template, it would be able to make the transition into a full-fledged interdisciplinary academic conference. It would be the best-dressed conference ever.

Dang, I didn't take a picture of my outfit. Maybe there will be a reprise of it next year!

So, Emily and I went to visit New York City to visit Joanna for the new year.

We took a bus in. We actually missed two buses in the process, but they came frequently enough that we only left an hour late. It was a snowy day, and travel was slow. We were optimistic that our troubles were behind us:

From Even winterer

For the record, it's surprisingly hard to take a good picture holding the camera at arm's length, facing backwards. Also, I would like to remind everyone that I rarely micromanage poorly my facial expressions except when I'm being photographed.

...but then the bus started riding funny. And slowly. And then it turned around and limped to a rest stop...



So we were stuck in the rest stop. Fortunately, I had brought along my XO laptop, a deck of Set, a couple of books, and my camera. I took pictures of the kitsch they were selling in the Stucky's:




And we waited for a couple hours. And then we waited for an hour. And then we waited for another two hours. By the time we were on the road again, the sun had long set on 2008. Against all probability, though, we made it into New York City with a half hour left until midnight! So we got to experience a real New York City New Year's:



...on the subway. But our friends stayed up for us, and we had fun:


Disclaimer: this picture is actually from the following morning because it seems like I deleted most of the pictures from the previous night for being unconscionably blurry. Knowing me, that's pretty blurry.


And then it was time to go back! But that's alright. I'd accumulated about 656 million person-hours of city co-occupancy, which I'd need to spend 45 days in Boston to do. (or almost nine years in Williamstown!)

And then I failed to update my LJ for three and a half months. But now I have more excitement!

I found out that next fall, I will be entering the [deep breath for long phrase] Ph.D program at the Northeastern University College of Computer and Information Science.

It's actually the only place that I got into of the four I applied to (U Penn, Harvard, and MIT were the others), but that's just fine, because it's got everything: it's in the Boston area, it's got a great programming languages program (about half of the people there in computer science are PL, whereas most places just have a token PL representative or two), and I like the people. It's also got a nice view of the Green Line. Can't work somewhere without being able to stare out the window at the trains going by.

From Remember the economy?

It's the building in the background. Pretty, huh? It's sixteen stories tall, which is a power of two. Coincidence? I think not.

Dan came up with a great idea for an Internet Holiday, and asked for someone with Internet cred to make it official. I don't have any, but let me scrounge around here...

Aha! A Google search for the phrase "Provisional King of the Internet" returns no hits, so, by virtue of having thought of it first, I declare myself to be the possessor of that title until such a time that a real King of the Internet comes along and receives a formal coronation. Furthermore, befitting my office, I assign myself a remuneration of cred, such as suits a person of my station.

Therefore, as Provisional King of the Internet, I hereby announce that, today, December 20th is

Blog Like a Parody of Yourself Day

Citizens of the Internet are encouraged to exaggerate, parody, and mock their own writing styles, dispositions, interests, and beliefs.

It should come as no surprise that this entry will contain some instances of disconnectedness. For example, "Paul Stansifer" is an anagram of
FAUST PRALINES

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I went home for Thanksgiving. There was food, nice weather, and nine kids under the age of twelve.

From Thanksgiving

A FLAN — IT'S SUPER!

(note: no flan was actually present. But there were a number of super pies. And some super turkey. And some super five cup "salad". And some super mashed potatoes. And now I'm getting hungry. Fortunately, I'm flying back there for Christmas today.)

We found the best toy to entertain the kids, though. It's a set of wood blocks with grooves in them for marbles to roll through. The great thing about it is that (a) kids love to experiment with it, and (b) the blocks have to be precisely aligned in order to function, so they know they have to cooperate. Actually, it's just a fabulous toy. If they made marble-groove LEGO pieces, I might just have not come out of my room between ages 6 and 10.

From Thanksgiving

IS A STAPLER FUN?

Also, I've been thinking about album art lately, and how, in certain genres of music that I don't need to name, album covers tend to be arbitrarily nonsensical. Anyways, I think that I have managed to come up with some designs that are sooo stupid that they aren't actually plausible album covers.

From Not album covers

From Not album covers

From Not album covers

(the duck is based on a photograph, but the cats are actually a drawing I made a long, long time ago)

FES UP, LIAR STAN!

I made more, but this is enough.

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I submitted all of my grad school applications! No thanks to ETS, which thinks my name is "Paul Stanfer", which is absurd, because "Paul Stanfer" isn't an anagram of
I, SUPER SALT FAN
...and that would be absurd.

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Allison and Dan (visiting from Providence), and Christine and Emily and I went to the Bazaar Bizarre, which is a huge one-day crafts show.

From Oh, it's close enough to winter already.

Every crafts show needs a DJ.

I acquired a garment that I'm extremely proud of:

From Oh, it's close enough to winter already.

Thinking of clothing, "Paul Stansifer" is also an anagram of
PANTS FAILURES
That is all.

So I got a digit—

From Fall 2008

It's a Casio Exilim v7, which has—

From Fall 2008

( I took a lot— )

W I!

"Give me an L L!"

L L!

"Give me an A M S!"

A M S!

"What's that spell?"

WILLAMS!

"... Give me another I!"

ANOTHER I!

"Thank you!"

YOU'RE WELCOME!

Darn, I love that cheer.

Emily, Allison, Dan and I rented a car and drove to Williams for homecoming weekend. The following events occurred, but they have no overarching narrative, so they could never be elected president:

• Emily and I practiced with the marching band. The half-time show had been outlined, but not written, so I filled it in, drawing on my skills from the Mad Cow, which was usually largely written on a similar schedule. I got to use the following phrases:
  
  • "...rain coming down like the Dow Jones Industrial Average..."
  
  
  • "...some sour skittles and a fish."
  
  
  • "You don't need to outrun the Cardinals, you just need to outrun your drummers."
  
  
  • "...which is like a clown car, only with infinitely more destructive potential."
  
  
  • "...cruton torpedoes..."
  
  There were also some words between them, but they weren't important.
  


• Williams crushed Weslyan (or however it's spelled), 48-14 or so. Also they were serving chili at the game!


• There was a Halloween contradance. Lots of people had cool costumes, but the best-sounding costume was the person who dressed up as Mt. Greylock. Emily crushed the competition in apple-bobbing.


• I played a few games of Halo 3 with Erik. I discovered I was pretty rusty.


• When you're setting your newly-acquired cell phone to wake you up on the day of changeover for Daylight Saving Time, you have no choice but to guess whether it will automatically respect it or not. I guessed correctly that it did, which in retrospect, makes a lot of sense, since there's no way to set the time manually. I guess that makes sense. Thinking of which, I have a new cell phone, with an awesome number (except for the Boston area code, 617, which is lame. All area codes are lame compared to the Brevard County area code.):
  
  
  
  • It consists of three distinct odd digits.
  
  
  • Each of those digits appears in a quantity that is a distinct power of two.
  
  
  • The digit that appears four times is four greater than the digit that appears two times, which is two greater than the digit that appears one time (which is one greater than a digit that appears zero times, which is an even prime number).
  
  
  • The digit that appears four times appears in a contiguous block of four.
  
  
  • The digit that appears twice appears at the beginning and the end.
  
  
  
  That narrows it down to two possible phone numbers, but I can't think of a way in which my number is more awesome than the other one, so you'll just have to guess.
  


• The whole business with the cell phone alarm clock turned out to be irrelevant because the Daystar is still extremely bright, and activates earlier than I needed to get up on Sunday. So, before church, I went and explored campus. No one was in at the CS department (not a big surprise), but they had candy corn and chips left out from CS snacks. Yum! Then I went to church, and discovered that no one had adjusted the wall clock in the CS common room for the time change. So I went to the eight o'clock service, and then choir came, and I practiced with them. The alto section had increased in height to the point that they overshadowed the men. The St. John's choir is still really good. Then we sang at the ten o'clock service.


• Then, still dressed in my Sunday clothes, I went to the legendary tree fort. Gavin, Hanlon, Jack, and Dan were helping improve it. I helped a little myself, by inscribing a warning message on a platform that would be tempting, but foolish, to sit on, as it is attached only to a wobbly dead tree trunk. It says "NOT A SEAT" and has a little diagram of a stick figure falling to its doom. Note: the tree house is still probably not OSHA compliant.


• We made it back to the car rental place in time, despite Harvard Square being a vortex that sucks cars in and spits them out in random unproductive directions.

I've been working on my resume for grad schools. This is what the upper left-hand corner looks like:

That's right, it's a digitized version of a font that was made before computers existed.

Thinking of computers, I've rediscovered one of the best uses for a computer: SimCopter. Ah, rescuing people off of buildings. Ah, aerial firefighting. Ah, using the megaphone to say things like "Evacuate now or you will all die!" or "Ignore this message. Repeat, ignore this message." Ah, trying not to crash into buildings as you careen through the city at an altitude that the FAA considers appropriate for stilts. Ah, fighting crime with the Whirling Blades of Justice. Or for that matter, stealing an Apache helicopter fighting crime the efficient way.



Yep, officer, he died of a sudden acute case of guilt. A tragedy, really.

So I got it in my head to make falafel.

This is part two in our ongoing series about oil, and its effect on modern Paul.

After church, I went to the co-op nearby that is for people who are too much hippies to shop at Whole Foods. I went to the spice aisle to stock up on parsley, because the amount of parsley required for falafel is measured in tablespoons. (I basically never measure spices, but "tablespoon" sounded kinda large, so I didn't want to mess it up.) Of course, I couldn't stop there, so I spent something like fifteen minutes mulling over the other different spices I could get. I can't wait until I am a spice-rack owning adult¹. I also got plenty of chick peas, because I understand that they are important, in addition to delicious. And oil. You need oil to deep fry things.

¹You think I'm joking, but I'm not going to consider myself an adult until I'm settled in one place enough to get a spice rack. This is more of a commitment than it sounds like, because, once you have a spice storage system set up, you're committed to going back to the same place and getting the same stuff if you need to expand it.

So I went home, reinvigorated the dried chick peas, cut up an onion (using the nice new mandoline I got, which, despite what it sounds like, you should not strum), gathered together the necessary spices, divvy the chick peas up into two classes and put class 1 into a blender.

It turns out that a blender is not the same thing as a food processor. I'll tell you how they differ. While both of them can be used to make food into a paste, the body of a food processor is wide enough that a paste cannot reasonably support the weight of other food. In a blender, it can, and the small quantity of paste produced will quickly form an impenetrable floor to spare its cousins from the same gruesome fate.

Actually, the wall is not entirely impenetrable. It will admit the passage of a wooden spoon one might accidentally be holding in the blender while it is in operation. (By the way, roommates, you may have had a little extra fiber today. Also, one of our wooden spoons has nicks in it now.)

If you ignore that I may have just given away its ending, I faced a serious dilemma. I had everything I needed to make falafel, but it had too much structural cohesion. Mashing with a fork and a hand blender didn't work very well, either. I was on the verge of angst. I'd never failed to make a food before. Sure, there had been some incidents, of varying levels of edibility and humor value, and I'd occasionally attempted to make one food and wound up making something else, but I'd never had to stop in the middle because I was stuck before. Then, fortunately, Alec came back from New York City.

Alec and I applied more elbow grease to deconstructing the mix, and decided that, if we set the class 2 chick peas to boil for longer to soften them up, they'd have the chance their siblings never knew. Meanwhile, even if they didn't stay together, we could at least give class 1 a chance to shine in the hot oil. It might turn out that, instead of falafel, we'd wind up with deep-fried salad, but I've eaten deep-fried cheese before, and I figured that this would be much the same, only healthier. Alec managed to get a ball of stuff together, and put it in the oil.

Success! The result was brown on the outside, soft on the inside, and tasted much like it was intended to. While I worked on putting class 2 through an accelerated program, Alec went out to buy tahini sauce (I realized before the start of this project we didn't have anything to serve falafel with, but — shoot, the rice. I forgot about the rice.

Well, if you ignore a pot of rice for too long, you get something carbonized and smelling strangely of popcorn, but not as good, and harder to clean from your pot. If you ignore a rice cooker for too long, you get cold steamed rice. That is a wonderful thing about rice cookers. I hope no one minds that I just stuck the rice cooker's pan in the fridge, but I don't think anyone will need to use the pan for any other purpose. Now where was I? Right, in a parenthetical.) That's better. Alec went out to buy tahini sauce, Sarah got some lettuce and cut up a tomato, and I deep-fried individual chick peas (delicious, BTW) while I waited for Alec to return. Before long, we had a lot falafel of two distinct quality grades, and I had a sense of accomplishment. We did not burn down the house.

Now, I'm pretty proud of this, but falafel, in places where it is traditional, is traditionally fast food, so what I've done is approximately the moral equivalent of making freedom fries, except that searching for the recipe online may have put me on some kind of CIA list ("Jihad Fries"?). Oh, right, I should put up a picture of the falafel:



Awwww, what a cute falafel!


Also:

• I went sailing on a schooner on Friday, for a release party at work. This is the version of our software that we've been working on since well before I started working there. I wore a pirate hat. Yay!


• I discovered that you shouldn't turn on the heat in your apartment for the first time since winter and then sit where it can blow dust in your eyes. On the other hand, you should turn on the heat in your apartment for the first time since winter, because, dude, it's getting kinda cold.


• I now have a friend who has a tattoo. No wait, I have a friend who now has a tattoo. The latter is not exactly the same as the former, though technically, they're both true.

Incidentally, in the interest of intellectual honesty, most of this was written yesterday. There have been no falafel-related incidents today, and I did not forget about the rice for over twenty four hours.

If I were to sum up my weekend in four words, it would be those four. They make up a noun phrase, mind you, a specific pizza, not some random combination of events. The pizza in question was homemade and delicious. It had apples procured by Team A, in an apple-picking expedition which went extremely smoothly (as most apple-picking expeditions do, I suppose. My previous experience with apple-picking is probably unusual). I wasn't on Team B, so I can't say with authority what steps they took in subduing the emu, but by the time we got back, it was maroon-colored piece of meat wrapped in plastic. I hear that they used a "farmer's market", which must be some kind of iron implement with a lot of spikes.

So we had a pizza, along with a lot of 'your mom' jokes, and then went to the Guiding Star Grange for a contra (later, I asked Katy how much of a factor the Grange was in choosing to live in Greenfield. There wasn't a definite answer, but she wasn't able to name any part of the decision that wasn't affected by this.). I'd totally forgotten how wonderfully cathartic contra is. Also, how much sweat is involved.

Early next morning, in the dark, Samreen served us Rogue Eggs, which are a traditional Ramadan meal among Samreens.

There are two YouTube music videos, "Girl From Ipanema" performed by the B-52s, and "Kompressor Does Not Dance" as performed by some Polish band. Or perhaps those videos don't exist and I was actually experimenting with two very different and powerful mind-altering drugs.

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Configuring a Linux kernel is the sort of experience that you have to write about on your LiveJournal, because otherwise you'll have spent an hour of your life hitting 'n' to each of a million pieces of obsolete hardware you've never even heard of for nothing.

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I was tempted to send the a draft of the above around to see whether it came out right, or whether they thought it was unfair, but I realized that that's not actually what friends are for.

Thinking of politics:

Our nation's screens: Do they have too many badges on them?


If this election goes on much longer, the green cones in my eyes will atrophy from neglect.

So, last weekend, Christine and Allison and Dan and I took a road trip to Providence to move Allison and Dan's stuff in to their new apartment. Actually, Providence isn't really a road trip away, more like the length of a Beatles album and some complaining about the Boston road system. I think that something like a third of the trip was spent driving in a big loop through the Big Dig to get on the road to Rhode Island, which Wikipedia points out, is entirely contained in the Boston metropolitan area. Their new apartment is right across the street from the Whole Foods. I'm not sure if Rhode Island has any other grocery stores, but it took a suspiciously short time to cover the distance between any two points in its largest city. I suspect that the state might be some kind of scam that New England uses to get two extra senators.

And this weekend, I flew off to Denver for the biannual Stansifer Family Reunion, held at my aunt's house, which can help you estimate the popularity of my last name. Flying into Denver is somewhat disconcerting, because you stare out the window at the circular plots of farmland for a long time, and then they start getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and then you start worrying that the pilot has gotten confused and accidentally navigated to a dirt airstrip in some Midwestern state with a smaller population than Rhode Island. And then the plane taxis to a huge airport with some stunning roof arrangements, which has a gorgeous and clean interior. And isn't a heck of a lot closer to Denver than Logan Airport is to Providence. The airport tram system has nice little musical jingles before announcements, which is really cool, but would make a lot more sense in, say, a metropolitan subway system, where the average rider is expected to have more than two chances to memorize what the jingles mean. If you sit in the first car, you will discover, alarmingly for a system which does not have human operators in the vehicles, the tracks appear to allow bidirectional traffic at the ends of the line, rather than looping around, and there are multiple trains. As an occasional player of OpenTTD, the only thing I learned about bidirectional tracks with multiple trains is they are a bad idea.



Ooh! Look! Balloons! Also, I'm only about a third of the way through this entry

I have two pairs of aunts and uncles in Denver. I stayed with my three cousins on the one side, boys who aged from 4 to 10. They had a HUGE LEGO collection.

There was a birthday cake for my brother, who is in Ampsterdam now and who needs to write his parents and brother, ahem, and a violent storm (a very occasional occurrence in the semi-arid climate) stranded us at a restaurant, created streams in backyards, littered the roads with debris and knocked down trees. The backyard awning for the reunion the next day, which we were sure was a goner, just stayed up throughout the entire storm, hardly even swaying. Apparently, when the instructions said "moderate to severe winds", they meant it.

The reunion day was sunny, and the event went very well. My father put up a big family tree on the outside wall, which was cool, but the cooler part was the codes that matched between it and our nametags, to indicate how everyone is related to everyone else. Mine was BAEHCAA, meaning that John Stansifer's second son's first son's fifth son's eighth son's third son's first son's first son is me. Siblings share all but the last letter of their codes, cousins all but the last two, second cousins all but the last three and so on. Observe the power of a well-chosen notation! Before this, I didn't even know what second cousins were. So the Californian branch of the family, who came in their RV, and whose codes start with 'F', is about 1/16384 related to me. (16384 is also the lowest power of two I don't recognize on sight. As a programmer, I am ashamed of running out of powers of two so early.)

They gave out door prizes, mostly snazzy mugs with the reunion's logo on them, and they awarded other prizes, including one to me for being the person who had come from the furthest. The runner up was my parents, who came from central Florida, whom I outdistanced by about twenty miles.

The next day, there were two expeditions, one to the Celestial Seasonings factory, and one to a baseball game. I went to the game with my second cousins as a cultural experience, after it became clear that I'd never actually attended a major league baseball game before in my life. It was fun, though the Rockies could have stood to score a few more points. (They were down 14-0, scored 7 runs in an inning, and then sat around while the Padres scored for the rest of the game. But at one point, they were only 44 consecutive balls away from taking the lead!)

I guess my duty as a Bostonian isn't complete until I actually go to a Red Sox game, but one thing at a time.

Then I (not to mention my parents and uncle) got up at 4 AM to go to the airport, and I got back to my apartment at around 6:30 PM. In the process, I discovered that I can develop an irrational fear of my plane getting stuck in the sky, circling forever, as I slowly waste away on a diet of occasional pretzels and apple juice.

Man, I should have gotten a camera before going on the trip. So instead, here's an ad that showed up in GMail a while back:



I just want to say to the world, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

At this rate of increase in my rate of posting, I will fill up the Internet soon.

With luck, tomorrow I will have checked in a fix to the Bug That Wouldn't Die. If you could put a stake through a bug's heart and bury it at a crossroads, we would. This is the bug that I helped introduce (in the process of fixing another bug) as my first act as a full-time employee at this company, and which occupied three months of waiting for security analysis and two rounds of sending our client instrumented binaries so we could observe the bizarre inner workings of the dreaded agraph. The agraph is a piece of software which I have spent months examining without being able to ascertain any overall structure. And it had a bug. Well, an assumption that became incorrect after the aforementioned work that happened nine months ago. Actually, it had two of them in the span of five lines which were written to make something kinda sorta work in a case where there is really was no correct result. We talked to the doc team, and they have issued a dire proclamation that any customer who intentionally allows this code to be executed will only get what they deserve.

I found my phone. I was sitting at work when suddenly I felt it fall against my feet. After confirming that my nearby coworker did not toss it at me (hey, he's the one with the paper airplanes and the largest Nerf gun I have ever seen), I was forced to conclude that this phone must have been in my pants for the entire time, and finally got bored and decided to escape. I'm not sure how I didn't notice it earlier. This isn't even a pair of jeans -- it's some kind of really lightweight material shows off the exact location of one's wallet. And looking back at my history of phones, this becomes more unsettling, because, while I have had a history of having unfortunate things happen to my cell phones, only one of them was actually unaccounted for in the end, and that is the one that I lost... last summer. A look at its phone book confirms that this is the phone that I was using before I lost my childlike faith that I could enter numbers into one piece of electronics that I would proceed to use, rather than lose. Also: apparently running a Motorola C139 through the washing machine does not significantly impair its functionality.

The power is back on. The electrician was apparently not sure exactly what the problem was, but it seems to be fixed for now. I was hoping for something more exciting. Maybe there would be a hideous creature of the night which was consuming power in our basement in order to grow stronger, and we would have to team up to defeat it, using the convenient bag of broken glass we acquired last episode.

I've realized that, when I've incompletely awoken in the middle of the night, I have a serious number problem. By this I mean that I will find myself under the distinct impression that I have on the order of a dozen noses. Or that I'm actually a small group of similar-looking people who are all lying in bed and apparently simply failing to collide with each other.

After something like seven years, I'm starting to take a stab at fixing my chesscube. Okay, that's too strong a description for what I actually did. I threw on some felt pads so white pieces on white tiles look better, and gave the pieces a little bit of random wiggle before placing them. And I moved and added some pieces, on parts of it that aren't even really visible from this angle. What I really need to do is fix those knights, which I've finally come to accept don't look "modern", but just look "ugly".


Oh, also, I'm thinking about possibly taking the bus to Williams to visit people to make up for missing Trivia last weekend because I had a cold. Are people still going to be around at this point?

A while back, the power went out at work. Apparently, construction work had accidentally taken out a powerline. Our computers are all connected to UPSes at work, so they keep running, but everything else goes down. It's kind of weird -- everyone shutting down their computers in the dark, while their UPSes beep warnings that the power is gone. And then there was nothing to do. We hung around in the dark for a while playing Settlers of Catan. I tried to control the wheat supply, but it didn't work out too well for me. If only you could get oil from the desert tile in Settlers, I could've been OPEC. Then they kicked us out, because you're apparently not allowed to let people stay in an office that doesn't have running water for too long.

The next week, the power failed again at work. For a relatively short period of time, but it took down our network. Turns out there's not much we can do without our network. So they sent us home again.

Received in the mail: Oil! In the future, this could be worth a fortune!

For Christmas, my parents got me a bottle of this stuff, and it was almost empty, so I decided to get a 12-pack of the stuff. It's some kind of oil that can be used in the place of shaving cream, and it is ever so much more convenient than trying to get an even coating of fluff all over one's face. I project that (depending on my usage pattern) this supply could last up to half a decade! I guess this means that I won't be growing a beard until I'm 27 at least.

Our landlady's husband apparently left the country until the end of the month. Now, we've known until this point that our apartment is kind of flaky. But apparently, its flakiness is active, not passive, because it has sensed this, and experienced the following problems:

1. The stove is down to one functional knob and 2.5 functional burners.
2. The overhead fluorescent light in the kitchen went out. We replaced it, but it appears as though the "40 W" on the lamp does not mean that it actually draws 40 watts of power, it's just equivalent to a 40-watt incandescent lightbulb. I'm not sure why the hardware store sells these. We will deal with this at some point, but it is not urgent, because of item #4.
3. One of our back windows (fortunately in a room we use for storage) blew open in a windstorm and then shattered, scattering broken glass all across the driveway. It turns out that there's a lot of glass in your average window. Also, the spray of glass somehow wrapped around the house and traveled a ways down the driveway, well out of line of sight of the window in question.
4. Also, we are experiencing erratic power failure throughout most of our apartment. It turns on and off and on and off, at a rate that varies all the way from "either all the lights are flickering or I am going insane" to "oops, now we have to reset our clocks" to "a rolling blackout of one". It seems to be slowing down. The lights were flickering on Friday night, and have been on and off in 12+ hour phases recently. Current status: off.
   

Fortunately, the power outage is not total. In particular, the outlets into which the fridge and microwave are plugged are still working. (The apartment only gets partial credit for not spoiling all our food, because the fridge stops working and needs defrosting every 2 to 3 months anyways.) While we wait for an electrician (we can understand not being able to get on Sunday. However, it is now the end of Tuesday.), we've strung a series of extension cords and power strips to provide power to the living room, and, in particular, the router and cable modem. So we're not exactly roughing it, but we do have to bring a flashlight to use the bathroom, and we are suddenly concerned with the setting of the alarm clock known as the "Daystar".

This is the sort of thing that could be really depressing or could be really hilarious.  Fortunately, the general reaction in the apartment has tended towards the later interpretation. 

Also, if you suddenly throw an egg into cooking oil that you are warming on the stove, it will start to fry and you will be unable to scramble it, because it will start spitting oil at anyone foolish enough to approach. Fortunately, the laptops close enough to get hit by oil were closed at the time. I am impressed that I managed to decide to crack an egg without thinking ahead enough to realize that the sink was probably not the intended destination.

Interesting, but non-oil-related things that have happened to me recently: N/A

Well, I kind of randomly decided to actually have a birthday party for turning 22. Since I'd already used up the "lameness"-themed party last year, I had to actually do something. We watched the primary (well, randomly checked up on it occasionally) and had cake with blueberries and strawberries (courtesy my roommate Christine), and apple pie (also thanks to Christine), and red, white, and blue smoothies (by me and Gavin). We'd been hoping to watch Obama clinch the nomination, but it was kind of disappointing (As I understand it, it was portrayed as a loss in the media, but it really was nearly a tie, in states that were unfavorable to him. If he "loses" the rest of the contests like this, he'll still be the nominee). So instead we sat around and talked. And it was great! Most of the people were Williams folk I didn't really know well from school because they were ahead of me, but they were really outstanding party guests. A++++++++ WOULD INVITE AGAIN.

But I miss having the people who would've been there if distance weren't a factor.

My parents got me a book on type for non-designers, and a book on types (a completely different concept involving program verification) for computer scientists for my birthday. I know I already have plenty of CS books that I'd love to read if I had more time, but I'm starting to feel the urge that I've heard so much about to Have More Cool Books.

Speaking of books, I ran into this on Wikipedia a while back:



The citation business with "Epic" is a bit weird, but I love way the lengths of the names work out.

President's Day is a day off for me, and, it turns out, a really warm day. I walked to the store and back without anything warm on, and felt fine, despite the drizzle. It was one of those overcast days on which bright colors really pop out. ( Oops, I kinda rambled here about shopping. )

Then Dan arrived with his new electric guitar. We sang along as he worked out "Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots". I'm hoping that the guitar coolness rubs off on me some. There's probably some kind of indie band here struggling to get out. Dan on lead guitar, Christine on ukulele (Oddly, my misspelling "ukleale" has only one Google hit.), and one of our XO laptops providing synth effects.

( Apparently, one's first casserole is an important enough experience to ramble forever about it. )

Allison's computer's backlight stopped working after taking a fall on its side, so I tried to disassemble it and see if I could look officiously at some cables. With some help, I succeeded at that, at least. As a bonus, the groups of screws we removed as we got deeper into the machine were of sizes 2, 4, 6, and 8 in order. Also, I got to use the word "bezel" a lot. I fiddled with the power cord for the backlight's inverter, but there's still nothing on the screen.

Well, I still don't having anything to include a picture for, so here's the result of some extensive computer analysis: The best photo in the Davis Square group on Flickr:


And the rest of the top five:

• A snail


• Dogs in line-of-sight


• A jumping bird


• A hopping bird

Disclaimer: The computer might not yet be tuned to objectively assess value.

So, I went to England, to see my brother, and (eventually, as transportation was difficult around Christmas) my parents. I had some trouble at passport control, because I had lost the piece of paper that had my brother's address on it, which caused some trouble. The person who was checking my passport was kind of cross with me, but let me off with a warning on my passport. I spent most of my time there trying to figure out whether the differences between American and British English phrasing and vocabulary. Conclusion: it turns out that I am not a linguist. I have no clue. We went to church at the Minster on Christmas. We also went to the world's largest train museum, two days in a row (I've noticed that my parents seem to be awful tolerant of my acting like a five-year-old lately). It was very shiny.

What I didn't do was go to London. It's kind of hard to get bus tickets in a foreign country if you don't have a printer or a cell phone, it turns out. So Erik waited at the bus station for an hour for me, and I never got to see him or Emily.  ) :

There's an ominous-looking building to the north of my office. I've always been suspicious of it. Somebody finally told me what it was: it's one of our nation's few high-rise jails. So I searched for it on Google Maps, and, well, I found a link I was really tempted to click on:



Then my company had a meeting, a multi-day event taking place at a casino in Connecticut. ( These scenes contain bourgeoisie material, and may not be suitable for readers with a sense of perspective. ) It was interesting, but I have no particular urge to going back again before next year.

I was over at Dan's place today, doing some coding with him on a project, when he informed me that his roommate was smelling burning rubber, and that I should get ready to get out. Then there's a rather confusing episode, when we try to call 911, but discover that neither of us had a phone. Fortunately, someone was walking down the street, and was able to make the call for us. (It's just as well that I didn't make the call. My end of the conversation would have gone something like this: "Hi there! I was wondering if maybe you could stop by and take a look our place. I think our house may be on fire. I'm not sure what its address is.") Meanwhile, Dan's roommate had broken into the downstairs (where their landlord lived, but everyone was out), located a burning powerstrip, and blown it out. A police car, a couple firetrucks, and an ambulance came, and they checked everything out. The bottom floor was really smoky. Notably, no smoke detector went off during the entire process.

So, test your smoke detector! And don't overload your powerstrips.

It's got a built-in handle. It's small and light enough to easily pick up by the corner. It has no internal moving parts. It's the laptop that I have been drooling over for months now. It's really kind of amazing. It's got environments for Python, Smalltalk, and Logo, a little tiny Firefox, software for its video camera, a rather cool music lab, and the original SimCity. They fit all of that into a GB of flash storage space, 65% of which is still free. The screen is readable, backlight-off, outside in bright sunlight.

It's a bit laggy, of course, and the software could use some improvements, but this is a nice machine. I'm looking forward to taking it with me on my flight across the Atlantic. I'm going to show it off to everyone I meet. It's just so ... nice.

That is all.

• If you want to see the lamest bug ever in Mac OS X, position the Dock on the right side of the screen, and increase its size and magnification to maximum. Open up Text Edit, and resize the window as small as possible, and move it near the top right side of the screen. Minimize it, then shift-click on it, and watch (without moving the cursor from its current location). Look at that animation discontinuity! WHO'S LAUGHING NOW, APPLE FANBOYS, HUH?
  


• XO laptops have started to arrive. The first (known) recipient infuriated the world by failing to post extensive details and unboxing photos. His explanation for the photo with him and the laptop is wonderful.
  
  They're not giving us package tracking numbers, which is possibly a good thing, because I wouldn't be able to get any work done for refreshing the page every 45 seconds.
  


• 
  
  We made a gingerbread house. Well, the structure itself was prefabricated. But we (Jake) brazenly disobeyed instructions and added aftermarket improvements, like doors, and a chimney, suspiciously the same width as the doors. The evening got progressively stranger as we sank deeper into a sugar high from eating excess building materials. We still need to pick a source of catastrophic structural failure to motivate the deconstruction and salvage of building materials afforded by the customs of our society. Climate change is an obvious choice. Sadly, sticking it in the oven would probably end poorly, as the house is attached to cardboard.



• Finally, look what showed up on The Onion:
  
  
  

That is all.

• Homecoming was great. I played with the band (As an alum! Oh, no!), did a roleplaying one-shot in which I played a goblin that loved explosives and technology. We made it back to the parking space with something like thirty seconds left on our Zip Car reservation. In related news, I have lost my second cell phone since arriving in Boston. People call Tracfones "disposable cell phones", and it turns out that this is actually an economically viable proposition. As in, it would be vastly more expensive to get a land line, and I'd probably find a way to lose it, too, eventually.

• I'm done with studying FP now, and I'm going to move slightly more mainstream and learn Ada next. Thinking of which, I need to make a sticker for Ada, still....
  
  


• I got up shortly before 6 AM this morning to place my order for the XO laptop. I was barely awake enough to catch myself from shipping it to Florida, rather than here, but I got my emailed receipt at 6:03 AM, which means that I might get it before the end of the year. Judging by the level of enthusiasm, they are going to need a lot of laptops.
  

So far, I've been doing a really good job of not making the dumb mistakes while cooking that I got a Mad Cow article out of a couple years ago.  But I drew blood (well, caused blood to escape in small quantities) three times for this soup!  It turned out pretty good, although I didn't really use much water, so it turned out more like mashed potatoes with some carrots and spinach.  I got to finally use the paprika that I bought on impulse. 


Oh, and I've been plugging slowly away at learning FP.  I made the gradient background for the above image using FP, which was totally inefficient.  Especially since, whenever I had an idea, I'd mock it up in the GIMP, and now I have made a total of five covers for this album.

Jake is back from his sleep study, having advanced the cause of Science!

I finished up work on learning Smalltalk, and I'm now (slowly) starting in to learning FP.  Interestingly, Internet People actually occasionally stopped by my sixteen languages journal and gave me advice and assistance, including one of the maintainers of GNU Smalltalk!  I don't expect a similar response for FP, which is a language that's so obscure that it doesn't have a modern implementation. 

I finally got my hands on In Rainbows, the new Radiohead album, today.  It doesn't feel like it has tracks -- it's more one long series of pleasant sounds with occasional snatches of lyrics. It doesn't have official album art, so I made some:

So I decided to stop quavering and dive into the project that I mentioned previously.  The plan is to learn 16 programming languages, given 16 days each, with a 7 day break between each pair (that adds up to almost a year). I'm starting with Smalltalk, and I did Hello World and the TPK algorithm so far, which took me a while because I'm really not used to the Smalltalk way of thinking. I'm recording my thoughts on this project, although I really recommend that you don't click on that link, because it's really boring unless you're a complete dork.



Also, I've decided to make sticker images for each of the languages I'm working in, in the style of those stickers that you see on suitcases all the time in popular culture but not in real life.  It's all a travel metaphor, you see: off to see the world... youthful exploration... blah, blah, blah....