Black Diamonds and Power Chords

Na na na na na, Na na na na na

2012-01-27T01:14:00.000-08:00

La la la la la

Telling myself that "meeting people" is my project is basically saying I'm not allowed to work on anything project at all. Kind of weird. Anyway, here is some brainstorming I did last night. I think the best approach would be to discover some kind of awesome community that I can be a part of but which only requires a commitment of doing something like once a month.

Shit you do with friends that will sadly never result in meeting a girl
-going to the movies
-skiing
-starcraft
-programming startup

Shit you do at some guy's house
-poker night
-settlers
-fun movie night (no one wants to do this)
-wine and cheese

community angle: Weekly repeating commitments
-salsa class
-beginner salsa class that you dont actually need
-yoga class
- class
-volleyball league
-indoor soccer league?
-crossfit gym (probably...no)
-climbing class
-book club...bleh (monthly though, so thats a plus)

community angle: no weekly commitment
-climbing
-couch surving community...meh
-teaching (vulnerable to jailbait)
-hm....blues dancing? They are really nerdy though
-are there like...clubs where authors hang out? Or are we all supposed to be antisocial book nerds?

Completely Passive
-reading at coffee shop
-eating and reading at panera bread
-gym
-teaching (vulnerable to jailbait)

Active
-go to bars and hit on girls (I hate this)
-salsa dancing
-drop in volleyball night
-ski lift?

Desperate
-Craigslist
-free dating sites: okcupid, plentyoffish
-expensive dating sites: ??
-give in a finally read "the game" ?

Awesome shit you organize
-LAN parties in an alternate universe where hot girls play games
-...I forget
-lego events?
-4 AM motorcycle races
-Epic party scene (I wish)
-start a nearly all female metal band

Attracting people passively
-witty t-shirt (overdone, also too hispter. also lame)
-funny costume (dont do tron, people think its nerdy)
- ??

Attracting people: shotgun method
-stunts: operation cowabunga
-record music videos (Who is Watching riff, There Is by blink 182)
-personal website ?

Not sure how to categorize
-concerts
-open track days with the STI
-awesome private karaoke
-quit job and attend nursing school (kev offered to pay but I think he is lying)
-let holly and nicole sign me up for "the bachelor"

Vacation mindset: Solo operations
-drive to vancouver for salsa
-ski in utah
-visit new orleans during mardis gras. Fuck I really really really want to do that. When is mardis gras? Oh fuck catholics and their bullshit holiday schedules. Holidays should be dates, not formulas. I should make up some of that shit for my birthday...."oh yeah my birthday is typically the 3rd wednesday after the last full moon before the equinox, unless of course that would fall on a sunday, in which case..."

Vacation mindset: group ops
-bachelor party (fucking espensive)
-girls that live 3000 miles away

At Least I Never Slept with Lumbergh

2012-01-25T00:58:00.000-08:00

My life continues.

Recently I made moves to switch teams at work. I have a technical interview. Started brushing up on "bits and bytes."* Then I started looking at something else to prepare for the interview, and got distracted by an idea for an exponential, but still fun, 3-SAT solver, which I day-dreamed about all day, and went home and coded.

Since making moves to switch teams, I have discovered that my current manager, Boss1**, whom I don't get along with all that well, is getting promoted off somewhere to do some cool shit, and me, and my entire half of the team, is getting split off and sent back to my old boss, Boss2 that I really like. Though I have learned a lot from Boss1, I am excited to work with Boss2 again because we get along so well and he is awesome.

So.....now I have a difficult decision within my company, all the while I am trying to tackle the bigger decision: move to Philly. Or Southern California. Or London.

I finished the design for another mosaic. I don't know if I wrote about it before...it is a picture of the Penny Arcade characters; its yet another copyrighted image that I can't sell, but I couldn't help myself. In the process I wrote a Lego mosaic editor program while listening to Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangster. This program I wrote cut the design time from twenty hours down to one or two, prints out an exact shopping list of how many of each piece to buy and lets you optimize piece selection to reduce cost and tells you exactly how much it will cost before you even order anything. Felt like a badass when I wrote it but I'm still waking up alone, so I guess its not the best thing ever.

Saturday, I slept in and did not go skiing. Then, because of the enormous amount of money that I spent on Legos around christmas time, I had these...lets skip to the epiphany. I was standing in the lego store, in the mall, wearing crappy shoes (girls care about shoes) because the laces of my nice fake cowboy boots broke and I don't know where to buy shoelaces, and I was staring at a wall of containers holding individual Lego bricks for sale, wondering how the Lego company could possibly let me fill up a small plastic container for only $15 because those containers hold hundreds of bricks, and each brick costs $.1 online...I can stuff way more than $15 worth of bricks into this thing. And then my thoughts are interrupted by the realization that I am surrounded by oodles of small children whose parents are all explaining to them the basic concepts of how to pick out legos you want and put them in the little plastic box. I glanced outside of the Lego store, in the mall where all the normal people were, and told myself that somewhere, somehow, my life has gone horribly wrong and I don't know how to fix it. And all I could think about was how excited I was to get a good price on these Lego pieces that I could use in the mosaic.

Yesterday, in an effort to be friendly, I tried to rally some people at work to go see a movie. No one wanted to go, and then someone reminded me that I had a conference call with India at 7:30pm. So that's how my social life is going.

I have been trying to eat healthy, and to pack. For this reason, hunger is a new and nearly constant companion. I am like hungry all the time now. Today I ran to Taco Del Mar between meetings and bought 4 tacos, which I ate too fast and regretted about an hour later. Then I brainstormed ways to make "side income."

I came up with a few video game ripoffs, a How to Memorize the Guitar Fretboard book that I started and lost interest in, a book called How to Cook Cheap, Healthy Meals for Lazy People That Live Alone which you will shortly discover I am unqualified to write, some video game related things that would make no money whatsoever, some kind of program involving a cartoon robot that would teach people how to be programmers, a fantasy novel about wizards or maybe a guy with a talking cat, some kind of fake vitamin product marketed towards software developers, a fictional novel like Mad Men but with programmers fixing robots like Dr House, and then this video game that would be a cross between Lemmings and Tower Defense. Those were my ideas for making money on my own. And then I wondered if you could make a naughty version of that video game, and that is how I realized that brainstorming time was overrated and returned my attention to a CPU issue that keeps happening in Europe that I don't want to fix. Raise your hand if you don't know what a fucking C2 Compiler Thread is. Yeah, you with your hands raised. I want to be you.

I came home and tried out a pork chops recipe that I got from Dan. It involved using enough brown sugar to give every child in Africa a cavity. I checked on the pork chops while they were baking. The switch for the oven light radiated heat, reminding me that I have a very old oven.

Have you ever seen the special effects in an old B movie? Like maybe the poop monster from that movie Dogma, or maybe the gelatinous villain of the movie The Blob? Or maybe Gremlins? That is what I saw when I turned the oven light on. It was clear to me that something was going wrong so I immediately turned the oven light off and went back to playing video games. Then the buzzer sounded and I took the pork chops out of the oven. That set off the fire alarm, so I put the pork chops back in the oven and held a towel over the fire alarm speaker until it switched back off. Then I ate the two giant pork chops by myself and without anything else to eat while watching three episodes of 30 Rock, and then I felt sick.

It is gym night, so I am now sitting at my computer and writing in my blog, trying to figure out if enough time has passed to assume that my digestive tract has forgiven me and will let me go to the gym. Not like it matters much. Four days ago I did less than 30 bicep curls with some 25 pound weights. My biceps are still sore. I'd like to go running though. I like running, even though there are mirrors everywhere and it is really awkward to look anywhere but the ceiling the whole time.

Since the Lego mosaic, which according to my personal schedule I wasn't supposed to be working on anyway, is finished design-wise and the first batch of Lego bricks have been ordered, and since I have, I feel, mostly accomplished incorporating "going to the gym" into my lifestyle, it is on to my next project.

...And I think we are going to interrupt the regular project backlog and insert a new, surprise project: meeting new people.

Somehow.

*Saw a page on the internal wiki at work preaching the word that those awful people who think bits and bytes don't matter that much are the kind of people that don't remember a lot about bits and bytes, as if this is some kind of clever revelation. Oh really? Well the kind of people who think the average chemical composition of name-brand tampons also happen to be the kind of people who don't know what tampons are made out of. Look how clever I am!

As evidenced by my attractive personal assistant email, I am the kind of guy who likes to find the line, and then cross it. I am also the kind of person who likes candor. Direct, aggressive, eviscerating candor. However I am also trying to grow up, so I resisted the urge to add something colorful and sarcastic to the wiki page. For the record, though, I think that guy is a jackass. I don't want to mention his name, because I don't want to be found by a google search, but here's a hint: it rhymes with Yeven Steggar. Jackass.

Anyway, in an effort to prepare myself, I looked up two algorithms for counting bits. One is a three line for loop that right shifts every bit and increments something, which I am pretty sure even a first year programmer could come up with. Another, is also a three line piece of code, but it is very clever: you subtract by one and then AND the result with what you have--it knocks out the least significant bit. Really clever.

**in programming, making up names for things is called "Assignment." I'm not even kidding; this is what we do.

[Poetry] My Favorite Place to Program

2012-01-18T01:48:00.000-08:00

Where is my favorite place to program? Why, my dear, have you not heard of Coder's Island?

It is a private, 32 acre island in the middle of the bay. You haven't heard of this? You haven't seen the lighthouse? Well I travel to the island on my motorcycle on a long stone causeway* that is too narrow for cars. The causeway has an authentic gothic feel that leads you to believe you are on your way to Dracula's castle. Every few feet there are large cauldrons burning something that smells like vanilla. At the end are two stone gargoyles, except the stone is steel and they are robots programmed to detect mopeds and bat them off of the causeway and into the water.

I enter a brilliant but dark (in an edgy way) landscape of green grass and ferns and Awesome Trees. Nestled among the Awesome Trees is Whiteboard City, but we won't go there.

The road winds up a steep hill until I reach the pinnacle, where stands the large cathedral with a lighthouse on top. You haven't heard of this? Really? Maybe you haven't been to the bay in a while. Yes, there is a bay here, just like bay in Bucktown but larger. Yeah, its just south of the all-female Women's College of Software Engineering**.

The RFID chip in my motorcycle--actually its not an RFID but a complex challenge-response system designed by Chevelle but we'll get to her in a second--activates the large oak doors which have been augmented with titanium. I direct my motorcycle inside. I am riding a motorcycle through a church, with either sunlight or moonlight streaming in through bullet proof stained glass windows. This is a normal part of my routine.

I nod to Chevelle and Rose on the balcony. They are the guardians of the Citadel, as I call this place. Chevelle is a southern belle with a delicious accent, and Rose is a salsa goddess who dresses and acts exactly like the hot gyspy girl in the Sherlock Holmes sequal with Robert Downy Jr. Both girls are armed with katana blades. It is their charge to attack and violently kill any executive or lawyer affiliated with the MPAA, RIAA, BSA, or TSA.

There are 16 residents of the Citadel, not counting Chevelle and Rose, who are only web developers***. I have the penthouse suite for my programming. When I reach the main dais I like to park my motorcycle next to the altar (I call this area the parking altar--a lego mosaic of Donald Knuth hangs on the back wall) and take the service elevator up to the lighthouse level.

The lighthouse level is divided into three concentric circles. The outer circle has a beautiful 360 degree view of the cityscape across the bay. It is here that I pace or jog in order to think, or to clear my head when switching to a different area of a problem. Inside this circle is a circle of whiteboards, where I work out my designs and think critically. The inner circle, also known as the glo, is where I do my coding. Large widescreen monitors line the walls from floor to ceiling and I have a chair with a keyboard and mouse attached and the chair circles around the floor in a way similar to those ladders that circle a library. The monitors go to many computers and are all controlled by just that one keyboard and mouse. This is possible because of a program I wrote that is exactly like the popular program Synergy but without all of the bugs.

In the very center of the room are the elevator, a bed, a weight bench, a kitchenette and toilet but in its own little room thing so its not awkward when I have guests, marble statues of Wolverine, Jason Bourne and Dr. House, and also a small minifridge stocked with aderall, coccaine, a viscious amount of mountain dew, and, in case I get inspiration to work on 3-sat, a single shot of pure adrenaline. Oh and there is an R2D2 robot that looks like it serves drinks but actually doesn't--thats just to fuck with people because the drink-server R2D2 is so overdone these days. Imbibing alcohol while I am coding would probably induce cardiac arrest anyway. The lighthouse does have lights; they are up top in the loft. Also up there are the enormous speakers that play techno, rock, trance, hip hop, and classical scores that help me focus. Nothing like a little "Turn Me On" or "Rage of the Champtions" or "Lose Yourself" to get me amped to write turing-complete poetry. I like to hear the words

My body needs a hero
Come and save me
Something tells me you know how to save me
I've been feeling real low
Oh, I need you to come and rescue me

while I am writing code to save the Internet, or as those of us in the Citadel call it, Internet 1. Yeah, you didn't know where was more than one internet. That one I'm not surprised about.

The elevator is wide enough to accomodate my motorcycle, because after a few incidents we all agreed it is not polite to have motorcycle sex in the parking altar.

From time to time my girlfriend, Tanyajessilauravendawn, who was born in Ambiguous Eastern European Country but hails from Bucktown, Pennsylvania,visits me on the roof of the lighthouse on her personal rocket pack. Sometimes we have sex in front of the lighthouse lamps and the shadows cast by our copulation are splayed onto the skyscrapers like the lewd ghosts of giants that once coded before us. Sometimes we pair program. Naked.

When I reach the end of a sprint or a particular task, or I go seventy two hours without eating or sleeping and am about to die from multiple causes, I ride the elevator down to the basement where an attractive lady nurse with a british accent named Moneypenny helps me detox from the narcotics and caffeine and adrenaline in my system. Detoxing looks alot like that blue thing that Luke Skywalker floated inside of in The Empire Strikes Back.

Sometimes I tour the rest of the place, maybe say high to the girls, maybe tell them my latest 3-sat theory and watch them roll their eyes. Yes that is right: all of the other residents are girls. I am one of the rare males talented enough to be invited to join them. After an arduous training period in the Tao of the Turing I finally surpassed my master (mistress?) and became a True programmer, like those cliche movies where some white dude is invited to join a ninja clan.

Then its off into the sunset with me. I ride down to the causeway. One of the robot gargoyles gives me a fistpound as I roll by. Above on the hill, Chevelle and Rose, the sirens of the Citadel, keep watch.

Inspired by http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_POEIhEXRI&feature=related which isn't actually a poem, even. (Note: Taylor Mali is on deck for being one of my new role models, as is Captain Picard).

*wikipedia is down (fuck SOPA!) so this, like many others, may be the wrong word. Oh wait! Google define: for the win!

**I have a theory that women might make better software developers, and its not impossible for men to make better programmers!

***someone please remind me if I am friends with any web developers; if so I will stop making fun of them. This is part of my new thing where I am nice to people.

Why don't more people like this guy?

2012-01-17T09:44:00.001-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9TplOWgQZI

How to Avoid Friends and be Influenced by People

2012-01-16T02:11:00.000-08:00

Went on an out-of-town skiing strip recently. The point of the trip was a complete failure but I did do a lot of skiing.

I am sick.

Dan gave me an allegedly awesome recipe for pork chops. Turns out I don't own 13x9 glass pan. Aaaaannd I just ordered one. Fuck I love Amazon.

Might switch teams at work. If I do, I will get to play with one awesome concept that I'm sort of addicted to, and another awesome thing that I haven't bothered with much.

Changing my lifestyle in order to make the gym a part of it and start weightlifting has proven more difficult than expected. I hate looking like gumby, but I also hate sacrificing my time, even though I waste far, far too much of it on video games.

Possible whistler trip next year. I and my core group of friends back home are currently trying to agree on a simple file-sharing solution that won't cost much time or money. Gonna see how that pans out before I try something difficult like convincing people to spend a lot of time and money flying across the country to go skiing in Canada.

I have come to the realization that not only do I need to stop being an asshole to everyone, but that I need to be more friendly. Way more friendly. This girl that I was talking to at a party too much because I didn't feel like talking to the other girl there (because she is like the fucking queen of mixed signals) was giving me some lecture on something about having a conversation with my dental hygienist. I normally am unable to talk to people while they are poking my teeth with tiny little knives, but I gave it a try and asked my hygienist how her Christmas and New Years vacations when she wasn't making my underbrushed gums bleed.

A girl on PlentyOfFish indicated that she was interested in meeting me, but her profile has a nasty thing about hating people who own "rice burners." Bitch.

I'm going to start brushing more.

Seriously though, I have to become a friendly person. It is my understanding that this will require me to stop completely ignoring other men. You, dear reader, probably haven't noticed because we are already friends, but if I didn't know you, I probably wouldn't even be aware of your existence, even if some part of my consciousness could sense that you were trying to make eye contact on the fucking elevator. I filter all males out because I have more guy friends than anyone, anywhere, will ever need. But lets pretend thats not true. Yay! More friends!

I am still going to stare at the fucking TSA assholes. By the way, the security theatre at terminal D of the philadelphia airport has no rape scanners (or didn't the last time I was there).

The PlentyOfFish girl who hates Japanese people responded to my email. Apparently she prefers guys who have lifted fucking tires on their dumbass country trucks. I am making a note here to constantly say nasty things about that demographic.

I have no idea how to be nice to people. My entire life I have tried to emulate James Bond, Jason Bourne, Wolverine, and Dr. Gregory House. Like, for real, those are my actual role models. I try to be like them in everything I do. So that probably explains a lot, I know.

I just...modified...my PlentyOfFish profile. The new version reads a bit too passive aggressively but it is too awesome to remove. Damn that was passive aggressive...in order to be not passive aggressive I should have told her to die in a fire.

I could start pretending I'm interested in how my coworker's weekends went.

My attempt to lash out at this bitch on PlentyOfFish and make her feel guilty and stupid and in violation of political correctness has failed. Accusing her of being a bigot that hates all Japanese people did not work, and now she said something about me being sensitive. Shit, people. Shit. That is the complete opposite of the effect I wanted. I was hoping she would cry herself to sleep and then buy a Subaru.

I am not great at digitally sparing with people in real time--can't use my voice inflection to convey sarcasm. I got a buddy that hangs out on 4chan. I think I will ask him for advice on how to talk to people politely.

I'll just have to somehow make it through this dry spell and somehow force myself to be nice and make new friends. What did I say? Something about asking about my coworker's weekends...awww I don't feel like doing that.

Fuck You Blizzard

2012-01-01T19:04:00.000-08:00

I logged into Starcraft after months of inactivity because I wanted to take it easy today and just play a quick game or two. I was shocked to see my real, actual, legal name, and the real, actual legal names of my friends in the game.

Keep in mind, I didn't even tell Blizzard my real name. When I went through the forced registration that I put up with just to play a video game, I gave them a single letter of the alphabet for my last name. Random assholes on the internet* can see my full last name, however. So...they must have grabbed my name off my credit card. And then opted me in to this real id shit without my knowledge? I don't remember much, but I DO remember not seeing my friend's real names all over the place. How come the only other people who are about this are privacy freaks? I'm not a privacy freak. I just don't feel like having to manage personal information while I'm trying to play some video game. And manage it you must--apparently there is already an unfixed vulnerability where people can steal your name. So thats great.

Fortunately, two can play this game. I happen to have a credit card in the name of Jason Bourne. You too can do this--the credit card companies don't care. All you have to do is ask for a second card for an authorized user. I will probably do this if I end up playing starcraft a lot more. Now that I think of it, perhaps I should start using a that card again. It seemed unecessary when I started buying almost everything from Amazon (FYI: it is my own personal opinion that Amazon would never dream of violating their customers privacy like this). For now, I'm just going to disable RealID.

If we were previously starcraft buddies, you'll have to add me again.

How to Disable RealID

1) According to google the BattleNet site is battle.net...I used to know that.

2) account

3) settings

4) communication preferences

*Blizzard calls them "friends of friends"

Still want to get into teaching

2012-01-01T12:58:00.001-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xuFnP5N2uA&feature=related

[fiction] When Angels Deserve to Die - Act 6

2012-01-01T11:45:00.000-08:00

Act VI: Epil's Log

Jason and a couple of the others who where more than willing to help out when Biff needed a favour were all gathered in a house, sharing a drink and nursing their wounds.

"Fuck, man."

"I know, right?"

"Can they really just roadblock that shit whenver they want to?"

"I think we did a good job of fucking that up."

"Sure, but still."

"Yeah."

"Yeah I know."

"And I hear the TSA is checking people out on highways now."

"What? They don't have enough people to grope in the airports?"

"That's why I fucking driving everywhere."

"Word."

"Dude it's only gonna get worse. There's a bill in congress that says even if you're a U.S. citizen the military can lock you up indefnitely if you have more than 7 days of food."

"Shit!" said Jason. He stood up and opened the cupboard. "I have way more than 7 days of food. Look at all these beans."

"Dude its not p--"

"Why do you have all those beans?"

"Damn Jason you're never riding in my car again."

"This explains a lot."

Jason started piling the beans on the counter. Some of them hit the floor. He wasn't exactly sober. "We got to cook all these now."

"I think you're overreacting."

"No," said Jason. "I just had a guy beat the shit out of me and then force me to dig what I thought was my own grave. Being held forever by the U.S. military would be like 10 times worse."

"Just move to Canada."

"Canada is not a real place."

They were all laughing, but one by one grew silent. No one wanted to bring up the elephant in the room, but it was unavoidable.

"So...Eric is dead."

"Sucks balls."

" 'The Charlie's Angels' Last Stand' "

"I hear he killed the dragon."

"It takes one to kill one."

"Yeah seriously. Eric was kind of scary. He was a monster. I wouldn't want him like, over for dinner or anything."

"But he was our monster. When the Charlie's Angels were on your side...yeah the police came around a lot but you still had it made, right? No one fucked with you," said Jason. "Now, what? Who's going to keep the heat off our backs now?"

"I will." Biff Becker walked into the room. There was a man behind him. "Boys, I want you to meet Lawrence."

"Hi," said Lawrence.

"Jason," said Jason. They shook hands.

"Lawrence. Lawrence Lee." Lawrence shook everyone's hand. "Just bought that old tire garage on the hill. Any time you feel like it, drop on by."

"I could use a good mechanic," said someone.

"Hey, you know Ed's old car had this thing in the glove box. If you connected these two wires it would spew out a shit ton of smoke all over the road," said Jason.

Biff looked at Lawrence. "Think you could rig up something like that?"

Lawrence shrugged. "Lets try it."

[fiction] When Angels Deserve to Die - Act 5

2012-01-01T11:38:00.000-08:00

Act V: And the Light is Nearly Gone

Eric scrambled for the nearest tree. There was another shot. He felt the shockwave brush past his leg. He cowered between the roots as best he could. Another shot--this one hitting the bark.

Eric had no gun. The shooter--the dragon--could just stand up, waltz around with his gun and pop him off. The guy was probably doing that now.

Running was the only option. Where? There was the road. His bike. There was a crevasse into a cave. A tiny gully way south. The road--too far, and his bike--no protection. The crevasse--a trap. The gully--useless. Wait. The mirror tree. He knew exactly where that was. Adrenaline was surging through his veins. The sound of his heart pounding was louder than the gunshots.

Eric's higher functioning brain had not worked out all the details. All he knew was that he had to get to the mirror tree. He looked and found it. It was a bit shorter, and fatter, and sort of squirmier than the others.

Eric jumped up and ran for it. As he did so he caught a glimpse of the dragon, who was indeed on his feet. Less accuracy than lying down still. Eric's feet pumped and left little energy for breathing.

The next shot missed. The one after that hit his leg. He fell and scrambled to the tree. The mirror tree was mostly dead, with a large hollow in the center. It had previously been called the hollow tree, before Saudade, as a little girl, saw a movie where a dead person talked to a live one through a mirror. She stole a hand mirror from her mothers bedroom and met Eric at the hollow tree, where they tried to use the mirror to contact her late father. The hand mirror failed to bring back her father. Sauda blamed the mirror, and returned the next day with another one. Then another. And another. Then a mirror from the school bathroom, and then a full length mirror. The mirrors, being stolen, had to be left in the tree. After that, the proper name was obvious.

Eric took one of the hand mirrors and used it to peer around the tree. He got a damn good look at the dragon, who was approaching at a walk. He stopped immediately and fired at the mirror. It shattered into a hundred pieces. Eric grabbed another hand mirror and looked. The dragon was standing still. He shot that mirror too. Eric pulled out the mirror from the bathroom. It showed the dragon behind a tree.

Eric watched the dragon take aim and shoot the corner off. It was a strange sort of intimacy between too men trying to kill each other. And it was fairly clear that the one holding the rifle was confused and scared. Eric pressed the mirror game, sliding the mirror out just a little each time, letting the dragon dismantle it one chunk at a time. Could it really be this easy?

/* note: rifle is AR-15 w/ 30 round mag */

~ . ~ . ~ . ~

Biff, and a girl, were waiting next to a large rental truck when Dave arrived in his F150.

"What's this about?" asked Dave.

"Dave, meet Daisy. Daisy is Candy's sister."

"Oh...." said Dave.

Daisy gave him a half-smile.

"What do you need?" asked Dave.

"You're gonna ride with Daisy and make a furniture delivery. Also I need your truck."

"What? Whose furnit--wait what do you mean my truck? Its my truck."

"I need to haul something."

"Get another rental truck."

"I need to haul something...quickly. And away from the eyes of law enforcement and various thug assholes that call themselves a family."

"Oh no. Oh no hell no. Fuck no. You're not going fuck up my truck. Get your own fucking truck. I take the whole night off to help you out. You're not gonna-"

"Dave, please," said Daisy.

Dave jerked his thumb as his vehicle. "These things don't grow on trees. I had to save up three years for that."

"Damnit Dave," said Biff, "people are dying. Her sister is dead-"

"And I'm sorry for that," said Dave.

"-and there is another woman who will most certainly be murdered if we don't make these two deliveries as soon as fucking possible. We shouldn't be involved but we are. And I can't ...I can't just sit out and let this shit go down bro. I can't. And if you want to be my friend after tomorrow you can't either."

Dave glared at Biff. "Fuck!"

"Good man." Biff held out his hands for the keys.

"If you don't bring that back to me, you're buying me a Trans Am," said Dave.

"Fine." Biff took the keys and started walked to the pickup.

"A blue one. With a t-top."

"Whatever!"

~ . ~ . ~ . ~

Back in the white forest Eric had done his best to manage his leg but he knew it was getting worse, and the adrenaline had worn off. Now all he had was anger, and thousands of glass shards circling his body. He drew it out as long as he could, trying to sort of maximize the number of shots he could goad out of his enemy. The dragon appeared to have no shortage of bullets, and no interest in changing the status quo. He clearly believed, still, that those mirrors were a threat, even though he had seen no gun. He used up another mirror and reached into the tree for another one, only to discover that there was one left. It was a hand mirror. Old, heavy, likely metal. The rim was white with purple flowers sculpted onto it. He felt his heart sink. This was good for one shot. Maybe two, max.

Then the thing happened that Eric had been waiting for. A click. It sounded like nothing compared to all of the gunshots but it was clear and unmistakable. He watched his enemy look down as his rifle in surprise. It was a quick glance but to Eric it happened in slow motion. Then Eric screamed.

He was out of adrenaline. His leg was shot and bleeding out, and he didn't have any useful narcotics on his person. It was just him and his iron will. So he screamed a blood-curdling battle cry and ran for his enemy. The dragon was close; it turned out he wasn't that great of a shot and didn't even have a scope on his rifle. In fact, depending on how you looked at it, the dragon was just one tree over from Eric.

Eric crossed the distance, screaming to keep the pain at bay, and descended upon his victim.

~ . ~ . ~ . ~

There was an enormous line of cars waiting to go through the roadblock on Kemp road. It stood to reason that similar blocks existed on the other roads. Three police cruisers and as many men were comparing the occupants of every car with the printouts of Sauda's face they had in their hands. Trunks were getting opened. No space was left unturned. The police even made Dave and Daisy open up the trunk, and the got in and fished around.

"I need you to pull some of this furniture out so we can look in the back," said one of the cops.

"I ain't pulling this fucking shit out for you," said Dave.

"Yes, you are."

"No, I'm fucking not. I don't know the all the laws about probable cause, but I'd be happy to let this truck sit here for twelve hours while I call my uncle who is a lawyer and ask him about it. He's currently in china. Might take a while to reach him though; he's a heavy sleeper."

"Sir hand me your keys," said another cop.

"Can't. My lady friend here," Dave gestured at Daisy, "stuck the truck key up her asshole. You're gonna have to get a female cop down here to work her over."

Daisy gave them the finger.

This time the cops didn't say anything. They looked about ready to tackle and arrest him, which would seriously and harmfully compound their furniture mission. Behind them, cars started laying in on their horns. One of the cops, Craig Capulet, looked behind him. The line was at least...four times as long as it was just ten minutes ago, and they were all impatient. There were a lot of sports cars in the line. Mustangs, Corvettes, Cameroes, oh and a red Miata that Craig was certain had come through the checkpoint three times already.

"Got any friends in the TSA?" asked Dave.

"You can pull over there and wait for your lawyer," said the cop.

Inside the truck, Daisy slapped him. Hard. Then she threw the keys at him.

Outside one of the cops screamed "move already!"

Another cop moved onto the next car. It was a purple road runner, and he was certain that he'd seen it before. Twice. "What are you doing back here?"

"Got lost."

"Get out of here." The cop motioned violently. The Road Runner moved forward an inch. The driver motioned at the moving truck ahead of him and shrugged.

An hour later the line stretched out of sight, the cops were rushing to check three cars at a time, the moving truck was still on the side of the road, and a black Boss 429 pulled up to the front, followed by a pickup with a coffin in the bed.

A cop approached the pickup truck. "Sir I need you to pull over."

"Name's Jason," said the driver. "Jason Web." He spoke with deliberate slowness. "Whats all this about?"

Ahead of them, Craig Capulete approached the 429 and recognized Biff immediately. He pulled his weapon. "Show me your hands!"

Biff raised his hands slowly. It was tough to see; the spotlight of one of the cop cars was pointed in his general direction, but he knew who he was talking to. Craig order him out of the car, or whatever. Biff slowly closed the fingers in his left hand, except for the middle one. Then he floored it.

That got their attention fast. As soon as Jason's officer was distracted, he followed. The cops were running back to their cars but were significanly delayed by a purple road runner that pulled in front of them and seemed to have a lot of trouble getting out of the way again.

Biff and Jason had a decent head start but it wasn't great and an F150 is no match for vehicles designed for pursuit. Biff called Jason on his cell phone.

"I'm a little busy!" said Jason.

"Keep going," said Biff. "I'm gonna to try something. Whatever you do, just keep going." The call ended. Jason watched Biff's black muscle car swerve into the oncoming lane and brake hard, ducking behind him. Then Biff pulled a 180 at 50 miles per hour on a curvy back road, and started driving backwards, flicking his high beams on to blind the cops. The entire chase sort of slowed down at that point, but it was far from over. The cops were probably on the radio by then, giving all of their friends the boys position and heading. It was only a matter of time before the got cut off.

Then they reached the river.

Biff's first idea for this part was a large ramp. He even showed Jason the ramp. Jason stared at Biff, silently, for at least five straight minutes until Biff got the idea and stopped talking about the fucking ramp. Plan B was the trick gate. Jason went through first. Biff--facing forward again--followed, driving his car into a large trash can. The trash can launched into the air and bounced once on the roof. Behind them the gate slammed shut. One of the cop cars attempted to ram it. The gate did move about 5 feet, but by the end of those five feet the car was stopped and the airbags were deployed. The others skidded to a stop behind it.

~ . ~ . ~ . ~

Arthur Capulet looked, and dressed, like a cowboy. All the guy really needed was a ten gallon hat and some spurs. And he had the best white whiskers. He was enjoying a quick nightcap in the living room when there was a loud knock on the door. The room was large and airy. It smelled of whisky, cigar smoke, and old money. The knocking happened again. It was loud, like pounding. Arthur put his cigarette down and looked towards the door. The pounding came again, louder, harder, and longer. It sounded like it was going to rattle the door clear off its hinges.

The chair creaked as Arthur sat up. He traded a drink for his sidearm on the way to the door. When he opened it, a pickup truck squealed out of his driveway. In front of him, in front of his door, was a casket. Arthur clenched his teeth and bent down to open it. Candy wasn't exactly an innocent girl, but she had never wronged the capulets. Arthur got a good look at her face, and then reentered his house. He picked up a phone. It was an old phone; the kind where dialing a number involved turning a plastic circle to the irst digit and waiting for it to turn back before giving it the next digit. Arthur took his time with this.

John answered immediately. "Hi, Dad."

"I would like you to explain why the corpse of a young woman was just dropped off on my doorstep."

"That son-of-a-bitch. My ex-wife-"

"This is not your ex-wife. I want an explanation for this and I want it now. In person."

"Dad I kind of have my hands full..." John started talking a lot. It gave Arthur a headache to listen to that many words through a tiny piece of plastic in his hands.

"John. John. Jonathan! Come here. At once. I expect to see you in twenty minutes." Arthur hung up.

~ . ~ . ~ . ~

Dave and Daisy had little trouble quitting the town once the cops were distracted. They arrived at the lake with the furniture on time, but there was no house and no one to meet them there. They waited.

"Something is wrong," said Dave. "Wasn't Biff supposed to meet us here?"

"He'll be here. He's never let anyone down before," said Daisy.

"There's a first time for everything."

"Don't say that." Daisy looked cross.

"He had three cops following him. Biff is good but he's not that good. What if he's in a lockup now? What do we do them?"

"The question you should be asking," said Dasy as she slid towards Dave on the bench seat, "is what are we going to do to pass the time?"

"Yeah I guess I should have brought a book or something..."

Daisy put her hand on his leg.

~ . ~ . ~ . ~

"I love it when a plan comes together." That is the line Biff was rehearsing on his way to the lake. He just couldn't quite get the intonation right. Not enough tv as a young child; that was the problem. It was coming together though. And they were almost out of the woods. Then he received a phone call.

"Eric," said Biff.

"Hey little buddy. Heyyyy. The dragon got the drop on me. I got him, but...he got me too. I don't think I can make it to my final battle with John."

"No!" Biff pulled a very loud u-turn in the middle of a busy road and punched the gas.

"I'm bleeding out here Biff. Just listen. I need you to do something for me."

"NO!"

"Biff."

"No! You can't! You're the only one left."

Eric mumbled something, but that was it. The call didn't end but there was no sound coming from the other line. Biff called Eric's name a few times and then just concentrated on getting to the white forest.

When he arrived he found Eric leaning against his bike. There was blood everywhere. Eric didn't respond. Eric didn't have a pulse. Erics eyes were closed. Biff sat down next to him and lit a cigarette. He was supposed to have arrived just in time to hear some final words and watch him that close his eyes, right? He missed his cue. Biff looked at the white forest, at the dead or dying trees, trying to imagine what Eric would have said.

Eric's dead body was clutching a piece of paper. It was a sealed envelop addressed to Sauda. Biff opened it.

"Oh Eric," Biff shook his head, "Oh...oh Eric...so gay." Biff lit the letter on fire and made sure it burned entirely. He took the mirror.

~ . ~ . ~ . ~

Jason and his new friend with the purple road runner, were lounging in the Cathedral when the thugs found them. The Cathedral would have indeed made a sweet "hideout" ...all except for the hiding part. In fact, it was quite conspicuous. The thugs were previously unmentioned Capulets. They set fire to the Cathedral and beat on Jason and his friend until they told them where Sudade was hiding--Eric had drugged her and hitten her in a coffin for safekeeping. The Capulets didn't believe them until they saw the freshly disturbed earth at Candy's gravesite.

The Capulets started digging. As they dug the twilight faded to darnkess. One of the Capulets fell in the hole. Jason stood over with with a shovel, wondering whether he had it in him to attack the man. He wasn't sure.

Then one of the Capulets got a phone call. The conversation was short and involved a lot of "yes sir." Then the Capulets left. All of them.

"I don't think there's a coffin down here," said Jason's new friend. "I think we are past 6 feet."

"Oh yeah, there's no one here. Frankly, I'm disappointed. I bet we could have gone another 5 feet before those numbskulls realized they'd been fooled."

"So...where is this 'Sauda' chick then?"

~ . ~ . ~ . ~

Biff arrived at the lake just in time to watch a small dresser fly out of the back of a moving truck and burst into shrapnel on impact. I mean Dave really launched the thing. Daisy was in the truck too. They were amassing a pile of now-broken furniture behind the truck. Dave also appeared to be in an exceptionally jovial mood.

"No no no," Dave was saying, "don't throw that one, I like that. I could use a coffee table. Biff!"

"How you doin?" said Biff.

"We're almost to the back," said Daisy.

"Well lets haul ass than. She's been back there long enough," said Biff.

With Biff's help they cleared the rest of the furniture until they reached the coffin.

"What is that?" asked Dave.

"Help me move it out of the truck. Cafeful now."

As soon as they started moving it there was a furious banging and a woman's voice screaming "LET ME OUT" over and over again.

Dave's face turned snow white and he stumbled back. Daisy caught him in time to keep him from falling out. Daisy and Biff burst out laughing.

The coffin was opened on the soft ground next to the lake. Sauda popped out, angry as a hellcat. Piles of books and tasty cakes and unused glowsticks fell off of her. "What the fuck were you thinking?"

Biff shrugged. "Eric said he saw this in a play once."

"Shakespeare..." said Sauda.

"Yeah I don't know who that is," said Biff. "Dave, Daisy, meet Soda. Soda, meet-"

"Its Saudade you dumb fuck. Where is Eric? I'm going to kill that little cunt. I really am. I'm going to fucking kill him. Where is he?" asked Sauda.

"Eric didn't make it," said Biff. Sauda, Dave and Daisy all looked at him in shock. Biff held out the mirror.

Sauda appeared to recognize it immediately. She stood up, teetering a bit, and took the mirror. Tears ran down her cheeks.

Somewhere over the water the sun ducked behind the tree line, leaving only the twilight.

[fiction] When Angels Deserve to Die - Act 4

2011-12-30T04:05:00.000-08:00

Act IV: On the Grey

The mall. Surprisingly safe.

At least, it felt safe. Whether the...the authorities has positively identified anyone in the most recent car chase was uknown. That Craig Capulet was doing everything he could to pin the heat on Eric was Biff was known. Still, the large airy cooridors, white walls and glass ceilings that allowed light to flood in did make one feel safe. And the people. No member of the capulet family could act here. Not with these people, and not with the camera.

Saudade walked with her arm linked to Eric. She had specifically manoeuvred them paste the Bath and Body stall three times. She loved the smell. She loved the way Eric wrinkled his nose even more. Biff was in front of them, with a girl in each arm. "He's really milking it, isn't he?" said Sauda.

"Don't let him fool you," said Eric. "The guy is crushed. He tries not to show it but I think its pretty obvious. Hey lets duck in here." The photo booth.

When they were inside Eric didn't put money in. "I'm moving against the Capulets this afternoon."

Sauda looked at him. His eyes. Eyebrows. Hair. Face. She shook her head. "I never wanted you to get involved in this. It's my fight."

"We're not having this discussion."

"Yes we are."

Eric studied the photo booth's simple payment mechanism with great intensity.

"I'm going to go away. I need you to not follow," said Sauda.

"I want to be with you."

"You of all people should know that this is a bad time."

"True," admitted Eric.

Sauda squeezed his hand. "Let's take a picture."

Biff walked by the photo later and saw a picture of them lying on the ground. He scooped it up. When he saw it more closely he stopped walking. It was Eric and Sauda, smiling. Biff didn't realize anyone was calling his name until one of the girls poked him.

~ . ~ . ~ . ~

"Eric why are you taking me candy shopping. Fuck." Biff hated the word candy.

"Biff you can't flip out every time you hear the word candy. I know you--wait how long had you been dating her?"

"A week. And a half."

"A week and a half," said Eric.

"You know that's a long time for me. Here chocolate covered cherries."

"No they must be grapes. Keep looking. Is this the first time you've lost someone?"

"Yeah I guess. Its like that sinking feeling after sex, but worse, and it won't go away," said Biff.

Eric stopped walking. "You're not supposed to get a sinking feeling after sex."

"You're not?" Biff changed the subject. "They're not here bro lets just get whatever. Why the fuck are we buying candy--aw dammnit." Biff saw the woman at the register glaring at them. "Sorry."

Eric said "Yeah they don't have them. We'll get the chocolate here and some grapes from a supermarket. Let's roll."

~ . ~ . ~ . ~

Biff was hungry. He made the poor, poor decision to dump all of the chocolate and grapes in the damn dog bowl. Stupid mutt didn't need all of it. And now his stomach was growling.

There was a handheld citizen's band radio on the dashboard. It had a minor obfuscation on it, but that was only to clear the channel between you and any of your friends who also wanted some $20 radios. It wasn't real encryption. So they were using code names.

Biff heard the a click from his radio. Might have been static. Might have been someone pressing the talk button for a split second.

Biff picked up his radio. "Captain Crunch to Batman. Come in Batmam." No response. "Captain Crush to Batman. The frosting is on the flakes. If you know what I mean Batman the frosting is on the flakes. Nudge nudge wink wink." No reply. "Sky captain to princess. Sky captains callking Pink Peach Princess. Come in Princess."

"SHUT THE FUCK UP ...captain...fuckhead." Eric's voice was unmistakeable.

"The eagle has landed," replied Biff.

"I don't know what that means," said Eric. "Did the thing happen that I wanted you to tell me about? Is the target on his way?"

"Well...no."

"Then shut the fuck up."

Biff held the radio with his thumb and forefinger and dropped in in the front seat. Cranky ass.

Sometime later Biff saw Brighton Capulet hobbling out of his apartment. He had like a cast on one leg, a sort of crutch, and he was somehow hobbling with his dog in his arms. And his face! Biff laughed out loud until he remembered Eric's description of Candy's appearance. Then Biff just felt sick to his stomach. Maybe he was better off hungry.

Brighton secured his dog in his car. Fucker had a Lotus Elise. What the hell did he do to get that kind of money? Biff waited until the guy was pulling out to start his Boss 429. Biff grabbed the radio. "Fucker's on his way."

"Understood." Eric's voice sounded scary. Made Biff never want to cross him. Brighton drove fast. Biff kept up. Darkness fell.

~ . ~ . ~ . ~

Elmira Johnson was not on call for the vetinary clinic. At least, she wasn't supposed to be, but one of her customers and call her hysterically. It was the only reason she dragged herself out on a saturday night. She was waiting in her car in the parking lot. Even so, she was only giving this guy ten more minutes before she drove away and turned her phone off.

Brighton showed up. He drove his car straight up to the front door, ignoring the parking lines entirely. And there was a dog in the car. Elmira sighed and got out of her car. Actually, she only got as far as putting her hand on the door handle when she heard screeching tires.

A large cadillac veered off the road and drove straight into Brighton's car at more than twenty miles an hour, crushing the smaller car into the entrance of the building. Elmira fished into her purse for her phone. As she did so she glanced back up and saw a tall white male get out of the second car. He was walking casually, like he meant to crash his car. And he was carrying something. Elmira froze. That something looked like a gas can. The man was pouring it on--into the first car. Elmira slid down her seat as far as she could go before her knees ran into the firewall. Then she folded her knees and slid down further, until most of her body was curled up between the pedals and the driver's seat.

Biff parked on the side of the road, out of sight. When he arrived at the vet clinic, Eric had apparently just finished pouring gasoline all over Brighton's car. That was...that seemed like a little much. Then Biff thought of Candy.

"Let me do it," he said.

"Suite yourself." Eric handed Biff the lighter.

Biff opened the lighter. Then he closed it again. Then he flicked it open. He forced himself to think of Candy, using his mental picture of her bloodied and broken body. He lit the lighter and held it out in front of him, grimacing and keeping his head turned with every step toward the gas-soaked vehicle.

Brighton was making a lot of noise. Talking, or begging or something. Maybe it was crying. Biff closed his ears to it.

"Oh fuck no," said Eric. Eric snatched the lighter from Biff's hand and tossed it towards the open window. The gas vapors lit before the lighter even passed through the window. The explosion was deafening and bathed them in a flash of scorching heat. Eric and Biff stumbled back.

The howls of pain--both man and beast--were unmistakable, and loud. Biff knelt on the ground with his hands over his ears.

"Time to go," said Eric. He looked down at Biff. Eric grabbed Biff's wrist and yanked the kid to his feet. Biff had fifty pounds on Eric but somehow Eric didn't appear to have the disadvantage. Eric hauled Biff to the Boss 429 and put Biff in the passenger seat. They didn't talk until the clinic was miles behind them.

"Pull over," said Biff.

"Why?"

"I said pull over, man. Pull the fuck over. Its my fucking car, pull the fucking over."

"Alright," said Eric.

Biff spilled out of the door. He got to his feet and stumbled away from the car. "I can still hear him. Oh fuck me sideways I can still hear him screaming."

Eric got out of the car. Glanced up and down the road in both directions.

"FUUUUUCK" screamed Biff. "How could you do that? And the dog. The fucking dog!" Biff fell to his knees.

Eric looked up at the stars. It was a pretty rural area. Wasn't much light polution. The sky was beautiful. He sighed. "Do you know what that dog did to Candy? Brighton wasn't--"

Biff vomited. Pizza and soft pretzel remants spilled onto the ground. Then he vomited again. More pizza. More soft pretzel. Little bits of carrots. Biff looked at Eric.

"Don't look at me like that," said Eric. "You knew what you were getting into. This is why Ed never let you ride with us."

"Ed never pulled shit like that!"

"Yes he did," said Eric. "He did worse."

Biff screamed and launched himself at Eric. There was a punch. Eric dodged out of the way and let Biff's momentum take him into the car. Biff grunted and came back swinging again. Eric blocked. Eric danced. Biff tripped. He was on the ground again.

"You never knew what we were like. Ed never wanted you to know. Do you get it now? Charlie's Angels? The Angels part was a joke. It was a double joke; we weren't hot girls, and we sure as hell weren't Angels.

"No," said Biff.

"Yeah buddy. And I'm sorry you had to hear it from me. I wish you'd heard it sooner though. A lot sooner. You can't really love someone when you idolize them."

"Ed was a fucking hero." Biff felt how tears cloud up his vision. He bent his will towards not throwing up again.

"No. He wasn't. In real life when you start doing this you're not a hero. You're never a hero. You're just a vigilante. And in real life, vigilantes die young."

Biff didn't answer.

~ . ~ . ~ . ~

John Capulet was in a conference room when he was told what his soon-to-be-dead wife's new fling had done to Brighton. Not that there was any proof. That was small consolation--that the police were unlikely to get in his way. He threw his phone against a large glass window mid call. He turned to his personal assistant, a wiry man who was the white collar equivalent of a henchman.

"Give me your phone," said John. The assistant did so with out hesistation. John threw that one into the wall also.

~ . ~ . ~ . ~

Biff was chopping wood. He had been chopping wood all night. It was all he could do. Couldn't eat. Couldn't sleep. Couldn't fuck. Couldn't even think about fucking. So he just chopped wood. He had a whole tree to go through, and he started burning it as he cut it. The wood fire was completely different from the hellfire they'd started at the clinic. He got a third of the tree chopped before he even needed his first break at 4 am.

Sauda was sitting on the floor, inside, watching Biff through the glass paneled door. Eric joined her with two mugs of hot chocolate.

"He's a sweet kid," said Sauda. "Childish and chauvanistic, but sweet, somehow. I don't like him getting involved."

"It was his girlfriend. Besides: too late."

"No." Sauda took a sip of her hot chocolate. "Its not too late. I'm going to end this," she said.

"Saudade...."

"His family--my family, I guess--they won't leave a single stone unturned."

"They still won't find you."

"Yes, well. They'll burn down every house in this neighboorhood. In every neighboorhood. I won't have that on my conscience."

Eric rolled his eyes. "So lets go on the run. They'll know you left. You can divorce him from the road if you need to."

"Eric I can't."

"Why not?"

"I already made a deal with John's brother. They call him the dragon. I'm going to meet him in the white forest tomorrow evening and sign my way out of this. He said I can give up my half of the--"

"That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard," said Eric. "You know they are just going to kill you."

"So be it."

"What the fuck, Sauda? Seriously. What the fuck?"

"This is my fight. I'm going to end it."

"No. You're not."

"Says who? It's my fight. You shouldn't even be involved. What do you care? They probably won't kill me."

"I love you," said Eric. "That's why I care."

Sauda sipped her hot chocolate and looked away. "Ugh, this is too sweet." She set the mug down beside her.

"Yeah, I said it. I love you," said Eric. "You probably wish you didn't hear that."

"Eric..." Sauda looked like she wanted to say something but instead she just held her head.

"Yeah, I know. Not a good time. Thing is, I don't think it'll ever be a good time. I think this is going to drag on. I think there's always been some reason you thought we shouldn't get together. Different schools, different colleges, then I lived too far away, and then I lived too close. I don't think you want to ever be with me--I think you just like having someone you were into once. You want to hang out and think bittersweet thoughts about what could have been. Well I call bullshit."

"Stop," said Sauda, "just stop. If you care about me as a friend, you'll let me end this."

"I don't care about you as a friend."

"What?" said Sauda. Her pupils were dialating.

"Sauda we can be strangers on Earth, or enemies in Hell, but I will never, ever be your friend. Your self-righteous suicide isn't going to change that. Isn't going to make me finally have you. So whats the point? If one of us is going to get killed by the dragon, well then I volunteer. You might as well stay on and make somebody happy."

Sauda clamped her hand on his forearm. "What the fuck did you put in my drink?"

Eric smiled. "Sweet dreams, sunshine. I'll call you." In answer to her question, that time it was a sedative.

Sauda collapsed in his arms. Eric looked up to see Biff standing in the open doorway.

/* note: the other one gets left somewhere interesting. also possibly shift this scene to a lighthouse. */

~ . ~ . ~ . ~

The white forest was so named for a relatively flat place south of the river, full of flowerless trees that were perpetually dying a slow death. At one point they had been a beautiful orchard, but a blight had scarred the land, and now there were little more than white husks. It was an eerie place; felt like a graveyard. Eric loved it. He and Sauda had played there as kids.

Now his grey Hayabusa screamed through the hills. There was no time to waste; the dragon was on his way to kill Sauda. Eric needed enough time to set up on him. Eric arrived at the white trees and stashed his bike.

He was running. Past half a dozen trees before even thinking about taking his helmet off. He never got a chance.

Pain exploded in the back of his head. Pieces of his helmet fell away. The gunshot echoed. Eric dropped to the ground and crawled to the nearest tree. He had a rough idea where the shooter was. Fucking dragon dipshit. Eric wasn't sure if whichever of the Capulets was up there on the high ground getting his gun off, but he did know one thing.

Eric was fucked.

[fiction] When Angels Deserve to Die - Act 3

2011-12-29T03:30:00.000-08:00

Act III: Gasoline

Biff heard plastic ruffling. He looked up from his center-stage sprawl on the floor to see Saudade holding a tux in a dry cleaning bag.

"It seems James Bond Jr. needs a little help escaping," she said.

"Lets go dude. I bailed you out." Eric was standing behind her. "High Society Night waits for no one!"

Biff looked at the reigning baliff: Craig Capulet. Craig was too busy shooting eye-daggers at Eric.

Eric was the last to leave the tiny station. Craig intercepted him and shoved him against the wall.

"What fuck are you doing with my cousin's wife?" demanded Craig.

"Way I hear it she won't be his wife for long," said Eric.

"My family will end you. You'll end up just like your two friends."

Eric shoved Craig so hard the man fell backwards onto a desk.

"The last time one of you boneheads tried to touch us 30 people died," said Eric. "I promise you, you're gonna run out of family members." Eric left.

"You're making a mistake!"

"You are a mistake!"

~ . ~ . ~ . ~

High Society Night was a night of low stakes poker game between people that sucked at poker and could barely afford the tuxes and dresses they wore. It was, by far, the favorite, beating out Toga Night and even School Girl Night.

Eric and Sauda made quite the entrance. Eric knew how to wear a tux, and Sauda, in her sparkly dress and high heels, looked like a Bond girl had just walked out of a movie.

Biff's good friend Jason jumped out of his seat. "Is that? For serious?"

Biff touched Jason's shoulder. "Yeah, calm down. Don't pee on his leg, alright? And don't mention Ed."

Jason looked a Biff. "Its been like 5 years bro."

Biff shrugged. "Still too soon."

Jason looked back at Eric and sat back down.

Biff said, "Ladies and Gentleman, meet Eric and his date, Soda..."

"Sauda," corrected Eric.

"Yeah. Eric and Soda, meet the ladies," Biff gestured at the girls, "the gentleman," Biff pointed at some dudes, "and also Jason."

Jason gave Biff the finger. Eric pulled Sauda's chair out from under her. Biff slapped Candy's ass when she came by with a platter of drinks. Sauda glared at Biff.

A few sips of whisky, and that's where the blur starts. There isn't much after that, except for one tiny bit:

"You shouldn't treat girls like that," said Sauda.

"Like what? Huh?" said Biff.

Sauda stared at him with her arms crossed, and decided to give up. "Tell me about this Ed guy."

Biff nearly choked. "'This Ed guy?' Are you serious?"

Sauda shrugged.

"You ever hear of Charlie's Angels?" Biff asked.

"Yes."

"No you haven't. Not like this. Ed, Eric, and Charlie were the most badass, awesomest, fucking righteous bros ever. They called themselves Charlie's Angel's, but Ed was in charge. Ed was my brother."

"Something happened."

"Did you fuck Eric yet? I mean like, you know he's dying for it," said Biff.

Sauda slapped him. "Stay on topic! What the hell happened to them?"

Biff appeared to sober up for just a moment. "He got gunned down. Fucking...gunned down by a bunch of pigs. The double fist, man, that's what they mean when they talk about pulling an Ed." Biff looked around for another drink.

"Capulets?"

"Cops. There weren't all Capulets. Only the worst ones." Biff eyes made it clear what he meant. Suddenly he felt a hand grip his arm. He knew that grip. It was the only grip in the world that could inspire fear in him.

"You've said enough," said Eric. "Go fuck a 22-year-old."

"Gladly," muttered Biff. Then walked off calling: "Candeeeeee!"

~ . ~ . ~ . ~

Sometime after that Biff woke with a hangover. Hangovers were like the sinking feeling he always felt after sex, but everywhere, and a million times worse. He was busy moaning to himself in the diner when Eric set a Mountain Dew in front of him.

"Drink that," said Eric, "ancient hangover remedy."

"They didn't have mountain dews in ancient," mumbled Biff.

"How much vodka did you drink?" asked Sauda.

"Enough," said Eric.

"Hey!" Biff looked up at the waitress that just appeared. "Where is Candy?"

"I'm Monica I'll be your server tod-"

"This is Candy's booth," interrupted Biff, "where the fuck is Candy? She said she had to work."

Monica rolled her eyes. "She was supposed to, and since that tramp didn't show up I have to cover both her tables and mine so you just want to order some fucking pancakes and let me on with it?"

Eric got a bit of a strange expression on his face. "I need to check on something." Biff and Sauda watched him ride his Hayabusa out of the parking lot.

Less than an hour later, they saw the sportbike on the tv waltzing with five cop cars on the highway.

"Let's go," said Biff.

"Eric doesn't want you involved in this," said Sauda. But she looked at Biff when she said it and in his face she saw something other than reason.

~ . ~ . ~ . ~

Eric was smart enough to park the bike out of sight but the danger signs had him too stoked to be anymore careful than listening for a second before he busted the door down.

"I've been expecting you," said a man on the couch. He sounded like the kind of person who usually gave orders and rarely got his hands dirty.

"Which one are you again? There are so many I get confused," said Eric.

"Brighton. Brighton Capulet. I forgive you. We've never met before."

"Sounds like a good first-and-last."

"Not for me. This will be your last, yet. You'll be dead by the end of the week. If that."

"All this over a divorce?" asked Eric.

"That bitch has no right-"

"Your family has no right. Not to take lives."

"Your one to talk," said Brighton.

"You have a shitty family."

"My family--you are completely ignorant regarding my family, regarding the the destruction my family with reign down upon you. You and your friends."

"I don't have any friends."

"You have that little kid that follows you around. Biff? And his girlfriend? Oh his girlfriend was nice."

Eric didn't say anything. He just felt a shiver run down his back, and coldness in every muscle. This was not the road he wanted to go down.

Brighton smiled. "The closet."

Eric didn't move. Didn't want to move. He want to be any other place than in front of that closet, sliding the door open, seeing the precious girl fall out to the floor. But he did. There was little clothing left on her, just a bra handing by the straps from one shoulder and some shreds of her jeans around one ankle. There were bloodly circles around her wrists, and bruises all up and down her limbs. More blood and bruises on the rest of her body, by Eric couldn't look. The smell of sex, piss and vomit was turning his empty stomach.

"Don't bother, I made sure she's dead. I also called it in just as you arrived." Brighton was trying to torture him. Went on saying something about even letting the dog have a turn before the end. He probably said, or would have eventually said, something about Eric bringing Saudade to a certain place and time. But all Eric could hear was the rushing of blood in his ears. He felt something hot in his limbs. It was like the warmth of lust, only searing and painful. Truth be told, he didn't really hear a word Brighton said after that.

Brighton was expecting physical confrontation. He was no fool. He was wearing brass knuckles inside his clasped hands. But he never got to use them. In fast the last thing he saw clearly was Eric's outstretched hand, and the white power in his face, blinding him. No fair. No fair indeed.

Eric slammed his helmet into Brighton's head. Brighton landed on the floor. Eric swung hard and slung his helmet into one knee, and then the other. On the second knee the helmet smashed. Brighton cried out. Eric was only getting started, but then caught a glimps of the cop cars collecting outside.

For a brief instant Eric remembered the last time he was at the mercy of law enforcement, down on his knees on the hot asphalt one summer day, irons holding his wrists behind his back while he watched his best friend, his platonic soulmate, Ed. Ed was out of the car, surrounded by a dozen cops all pointing sidearms and shotguns and rifles at him, all screaming their lungs out to tell him to get on the ground with his hands on his head. Ed's last action as a human being was to raise both hands and give them the finger with each.

Eric shook his head. He would made no stand. Through the bedroom, breaking glass, on the bike. No helmet. Aviators in his shirt.

He had the advantage on the twistys, but suburbia has a lot of natural hazards like minivans and traffic lights with cars actively crossing. Eric filtered but he was still nearly tackled, twice. Finally he busted up to the highway.

If he stayed on the highway in any one direction, the cops would radio ahead and gain a huge advantage. Standard Charlie's Angel protocol prescribed staying in the area by switching highways. Unfortunately, any prolonged chase would end in his capture; it was broad daylight and his gas tank was no match for theirs.

Eric knew how this would end. They would run him down, until he ran out of gas or simply made a mistake like everyone else. If he didn't high side and die, he would be running on foot, and they'd sick a dog on him.

Eric weaved through the traffic, but the traffic was parting behind him like the red sea. He stepped up the pace as much as he dared, weaving harder, taking the shoulder. There was too much fucking traffic! He switched highways twice. They'd have a chopper on him soon, if there wasn't one already. Time was running out.

He saw a cop car spin out behind him. Strange thing for a trained police officer to lose control of a vehicle while driving down a highway in a straight line, but Eric didn't look miracle horses in the mouth. Than a second cop car. Double miracle!

Then his gas light went on.

Eric was fortunate enough to have a bike with a gas light and a reserve tap that activated automatically, saving him from the need to reach down somewhere and twist a knob to keep riding. That kind of detail can really save you when you're running from the law. Unfortunately it didn't save Eric.

Eric spotted a break in the median. Driving against traffic was absolutely insane, but it seemed like his only break. He needed to stay alive and out of jail. Someone had to respond for Candy. Someone had to kill the Capulets. All of them. Someone had to save Saudade.

The shift to the grass median was more than Eric was prepared for. His entry speed was way off. There was a moment when thought he might save it, but the next moment he was eating dirt with his bike sliding away from him.

He looked up, expecting to see guns pointed in his direction, brown uniforms running, the snarling snout of a canine. But instead all he saw was Sauda, arms out.

Sauda yanked Eric into Biff's car. First by the arms, then pulling on his shirt, then his ass, and by the time she was busy folding his legs in to get the door shut, Biff was already crossing 80. Against traffic.

"Holy shit," said Sauda.

"Don't worry. I'm awesome at this," said Biff. He sounded like a little kid bragging about a video game. So innocent. Eric smiled.

"Did you take your plate off?" Eric asked.

"Yes sir," said Biff. "And I have a hand grenade in the glove box."

"Toss it," said Eric. Eric steadied himself against the effects of a particularly hard swerve. "Those were a terrible idea. Never make a stand. Just disappear. Just disappear like a ninja."

Biff, when he could spared a quarter second, glanced in the rearview mirror. Eric looked tired.

"Where's Candy?" Biff asked.

[fiction] When Angels Deserve to Die - Act 2

2011-12-28T04:10:00.000-08:00

Act II: Holy Water

Saudade Capulet felt the sunlight on her naked body and rose to take a shower. A complex and asymmetrical celtic knot stretched from her right shoulder down to the sheet she absentmindedly held near her waist. She was not one for modesty, but lately even the bedrooms had felt unsafe. Outside, it was midmorning on the beach. The sun was bright and the gray clouds were in full retreat, giving way to puffy white ones. To most it was a serene landscape with a bit of ocean wind. Only the trained eye would notice the speed with which the cumulous clouds grew.

/* Note: Biff calls her soda */

A short time later the butler opened the front door and welcomed inside a man named Eric. Eric seemed, to the butler, tall and muscular enough but a bit too thin. A poor contestant against his employer.

The butler showed him to the indoor pool. The butler watched Eric watching Saudade get out of the pool. The effect of her athletic body on the young man was obvious. The butler clenched his jaw and forcefully held his facial expression calm, and devoid of any sign of disgust. He noticed that Sauda was still wearing her wedding ring. He didn't know if that made her more or less of a coward, and decided that he didn't want to decide which. He excused himself on the premise of fetching tea. Sauda called after him that tea was not necessary and he ignored her.

As soon as he was in the kitchen and out of Sauda's hearing, he dialed her husband.

"Is the visitor a man or woman?" said a voice on the other line.

"The caller is a young gentleman named..."

"Blue."

"...Eric." The butler looked down on the stove, at two teapots side by side. One was green and one was blue.

"The blue teapot," said Sauda's husband.

The butler touched the handle of the indicated vessel with his hand, but did not reply immediately.

"Did you hear me?"

"Yes I did."

"I have the utmost faith in you, but you mustn't delay. Take the blue teapot and serve it now."

"Sir-"

"Now."

The butler swallowed. "Consider it done."

"My good man. There is a check and a bottle of scotch waiting for you at the office." The call ended.

The butler placed the blue teapot on a tray and added the rest of the items: cups, spoons, sugar, tiny little crackers. His hands were shaking but they steadied as he walked. Righteous anger flooded his heart.

Sauda and Eric were sitting at a table by the pool. It was his fortune that the table should be so close. He set the tea down and watched them sip it. Then Sauda did something strange: a moment after taking her first sip she got up and leapt into the pool. The butler stole a glance at her cup. It was empty enough. All the better if she wanted to leap to her death and save him the trouble of throwing her in. Her adulterous guest was not as easy.

"Ugh!" Eric set the cup down. "That is awful. Just awful. Oh. Sorry mate. No, its great tea and all that. Its just too..." he paused for a second, eyelids fluttering. "...Rich." Then he slumped over and out of his chair.

The butler frowned and rolled his sleeves up. He also put on a pair of latex gloves. The final snap of the glove slipping on his hand echoed in the tiled room. He was just bending down to attend to his second victim when he was impaled by a crossbow bolt. The impact was enough to knock him back on his heels and one palm. He looked at the water. At first he didn't see anything.

Sauda rose out of the water in the shallow end and brought a large crossbow up to her chest, one that the butler had never seen before.

"I forgot that water refracts light. That bolt would've been in your heart. Like this one." She fired another bolt. It landed on target and put the butler onto his back. Sauda tossed the crossbow back in the water.

Eric was out cold. Sauda glanced around. The butler, Andrew, had been the only member of the staff that she thought she could trust. Though she was wrong, he was dead or dying and everyone else had the day off. She bent down, smiling to herself, and kissed Eric on the lips. She could taste more of the ultra sweet poison. He mumbled something. It was probably just a sedative, but better safe than sorry. She pried with mouth open and stuck a finger down his throat until he vomited.

Eric woke up with his head cradled in Sauda's scantily-clad lap, with a horrible taste in his mouth and a trail of vomit running down her leg.

"Uggghhhhhh. ghhhhhhhhhhhhh! hhhhghhh...."

"Shh. You're ok." Sauda was rubbing his back. Eric closed his eyes. Totally worth it. In front of him, a man he barely knew was floating face down in the pool.

"Whaaat happen?"

"My husband..." Sauda paused to take the ring from her left hand. "...I caught my husband with some trailer trash tramp bent over the couch in the living room. If I divorce him, I get half. If he kills me first, I get nothing."

"Sounds like the short end of the stick. Or...end of the short stick, or something."

"The important thing is I should have signed a prenup. Don't ever think you don't need a prenup just because you're in love with the guy." As if to add to her point, Sauda flipped the ring into the air like it was a coin. It ploped into the water with a tiny splash and sank immediately.

Eric closed his eyes. Her lap was warm. He was happy.

~ . ~ . ~

Biff found a decent spot on the side of the road to pull over. The cop behind him rode his ass all the way, like he was eager or something.

Biff watched the door of the police cruiser open in the driver's side mirror of his Boss 429. Shit. It was Craig. Craig Capulet. Son of a bitch. Craig was wearing aviators and chewing gum with his mouth open. He was also swaggering like a ten-year-old's impression of a cowboy.

"You know why I pulled you over sir?" Craig grinned at him.

"No I do not." Biff kept his voice even, but firm.

"You think I didn't see you at that bonfire last night?"

A trick question. Biff frowned in Craig's face and turned away, looking straight ahead.

"Huh? I didn't hear you."

Biff trained his eyes on the distant landscape. It was awkward, but there are some questions you just can't respond to.

"Step out of the car sir."

Biff obeyed.

"Hands on the hood. Yeah uh huh. Now do you have any needles in your pockets?" Craig was patting him down.

"No."

"Alrighty then. Keep your hands on that hood until I tell you to move them."

Biff waited. Nothing seemed to be happening. Then pain surged from his neck to his toes and his legs failed him. Taser. From behind.

"I didn't say move yer hands," said Craig. He bend down and tased Biff again. And then three more times.

Biff would never forget the feeling of the hot gravel against his cheek. It was the small, weird hard stuff, the kind that seemed sort of glued down to the shoulder of the road to keep it rough in case cars needed to stop in a hurry. Biff decided on that day, as steel was clamping down on his wrists behind him, that he would never again get pulled over by a cop.

/* note: Eric gets Biff's car back and doesn't tell him how */

[fiction] When Angels Deserve to Die - Act 1

2011-12-26T23:37:00.000-08:00

Act I: The Holy Hayabusa

/* I am afraid I must begin with an apology. I lack the words to properly describe the opening scene. Its not tricky. I just...lack the literary skills to tell the story the way it deserves to be told. Oh the imagery! The sharp gothic points arch through this story like literary flying buttresses, ...and then something about a gargoyle wearing a corset. Oh dear me I can't even salvage the introduction. Well, on with it then. I suppose I'll just tell you what I know.

We start off with a Boss 429 parked outside a cathedral. Not actually a cathedral--really just a small church with fake gothic trimmings--but everyone called it "the cathedral" so that's how I'll tell it. Anyway the lights were on--both the car and the cathedral. The engine was running. Both Biff and his date, a girl who insisted very strongly that her name really was candy, were in the front seat impatiently waiting -- this sucks -- TODO: remove this block */

"Does this guy seriously live in a church?"

"Is your name really Candy? And its a Cathedral."

"Yes Biff! Come one how many times do I have to tell y--"

"Lets roll."

Biff opened his door and stood up. Light was spilling out of large, arched doors and over the hood of his Boss 429. The glossy black finish reflected the amber glow in such a way as to give the impression that the air scoop was slurping up the light.

Candy got out of the car as well and pressed her legs together while using both hands to straighten her gold miniskirt. Biff loved it when girls did that.

Biff opened the door and held it open for Candy.

"We're not seriously going in there, are we? Churches creep me out."

"Cathedral."

"What-ever. I'm not going in. I thought you said we were going to a bonfi-irrrre." Candry drew out the last syllable like a 5 year old.

"We are. Wait for me in the car." Biff slapped her ass. She gave him a look full of daggers but Biff know she liked it. "He's probably just stoned." Candy stuck her tongue out at him and slammed the door shut.

The cathedral doors were large and heavy and smelled like wood. There were more smells waiting for him inside: old, dusty velvet. Old wood. Old everything. It was the kind of place with old-ass carpet everywhere and kneelers in the pews, and everything was made of wood, but not tastefully. The kind of place where people met based on their common belief that things like the electric guitar were evil. People who liked to dress up and get told what to do and slowly sing old organ songs with 4 or 5 interchangeable verse/chorus lines.

Biff saw his quarry up front. Actually, first he saw a Hayabusa sportbike next to the altar. Then he saw Eric. He yelled his customary greeting: "Eric! Lets roll!" No response. Biff started walking up to the front. He was no fan of churches, but felt nothing but complete indiference towards the buildings. The gargoyles kinda looked cool. He thought about the feasibility of attaching a bottle opener inside their mouths and wondered if Eric would sell him one.

Pages crinkled under his feet. Thin pages, tiny text, some kind of ugly red paste on the edges. They were everywhere.

"What the fuck are you doing?" asked Biff.

"Hey. Oh. Hey!" said Eric, "just getting ready to move in. You know. Gotta get the place ready--oh those. Yeah, I thought I should sit down and read one of these, you know?"

"Read what?"

"The bibles. I don't know why they didn't take them. Anyway I thought I should read one just to give a proper send off. You know. Sort of close this chapter on the place. And I was going to keep one somewhere, like with a knife stuck in it. Or a Katana."

/* that paragraph completes the requirement of having both a sportbike and a katana in the story */

"You're ripping them apart! And thats not good for a Katana." Biff had reached the front, where Eric was laying on his back with his legs up along the podium. There was an unlit joint in his mouth.

As if for an answer, Eric ripped a handful. "Yeah, well, these guys here they added all this extra shit. Except--damnit!--these books keep breaking when I rip all the pages out."

Biff looked around him. The guy must have ruined fifty or more books that way. "Can't you just get the kind you need from 7-11?"

Eric looked at him. "I don't think 7-11 sells bibles."

"Walmart?"

"No, they'd probably censor the good parts," said Ed, "like the part with Solomon's girlfriend and the deer."

Biff's sudden interest in the ancient text was obvious.

"Anyway. I got a call from Saud."

"Oh no."

"Its strange...." droned Eric.

"Fuck me sideways," thought Biff.

"After all the times I've texted or emailed her and she never responds, all of a sudden she called me."

"I wouldn't count on it bro," said Biff

"But why would she do that? I mean, seriously, right? What was the line from Swingers? They never call until...they...its only when you stop calling...."

"You hungry bro?" interrupted Biff.

"Fuck yes. I'm fucking starved, man."

"I have Candy in the car."

Eric shot up. "I could totally eat some candy right now." Eric looked around him, studying the floor covered in loose sheets of cheaply-printed religious text. Biff wondered if the ink would rub onto Candy's back. He also thought about Candy getting eaten and had to adjust his jeans slightly. He also noticed Eric had avoided eye contact since standing up. That was another one of his...traits. Traits that included ripping up bibles and walking on only black tiles.

Had Eric been any other man, Biff wouldn't bother hanging out with him. But Eric was Eric. The last of the Titans. And Eric was always invited.

/* Notes: Act II could possibly be called "Flames of Desire" and Act V ...idk.

* Eric is known as "one of the three"
*
* scratch that: Act II is "holy water"
* -- swimming pool, poison tea, crossbow. Saudade. */

My long winded opinions on the subtle differences between indenting computer code with spaces verses tabs.

2011-12-25T01:14:00.000-08:00

In the beginning, Eru Illuvatar created middle earth, and the vala, and programming, and all of the vala (basically angels) used tabs to indent their code, and the world was whole and perfect. Then Melkor, being a complete fuckhead, switched to using 4 or 8 spaces, and he sought to wholly corrupt the world with his stupid ass programming style. And then came Sauron, who tried to force the world to break lines unecessarily, and the rest is history.

This past week I was investigating a nasty bug that 4 teams were unwilling to fix. I attempted to "fix the glitch" in our system and make it someone elses problem. I then discovered that wasn't possible. Then my boss explained that it was unacceptable for me to take an entire day to review our undocummented, backwards ass codebase and find out the fix wouldn't work. We have thousands of lines of undocummented java code that is wired together at runtime with a poorly-designed framework that was not used as intended, and he told me he expects me to understand every use case. I was about to sarcastically ask if he thought I should go stay up all night for a week figuring out what this shit does, and held my tongue because I was fairly certain he'd say yes. I actually have to hold my tongue every time he criticizes me, because the thing I desperately want to say would dig the hole deeper. My new favorite word is "ok." Our 1on1 meetings have become exactly like traffic stops with a police officer.

He told me directly that the reason we try to hire the brightest engineers is so that we can force them to work on shitty, uncodumented code. (I'm not even kidding. He basically said that, and thats not the first time I've heard it.). The buzzword we use to refer to the fact that documentation sucks and no one knows how the system works is "Tribal Knowledge." The message I am getting is that there are no teams around here that get to write good code that doesn't give you a headache to read. And they say there's no one with an on call responsibility that doesn't suck ass. Are you really confused why your company is no longer in the top 50 by employee satisfaction?

Yeah, uh...forget all of that. Sorry. Sorry. Just filler. From a post that uh...never made it. I have a few of those lying around. And I'm trying to talk like my new favorite character from portal 2, so, feel free to leave now. I mean, its just an option. You can stay. Or go. There's really no reason to keep reading. I just wanted to share some lyrics that I mangled, and I didn't want any of the girls I know reading this, so I thought a bit of computer shit would turn them off. Not that girls can't program, no...its just that none of the girls that have ever read this blog can, except Iris, and I don't think she reads this any more. Its just...hard, you know? I don't know which girls read this, and I can't guess which ones do and/or might think these lyrics are about them**, and they really aren't about anyone in particular. So I just thought I'd kind of avoid that whole potential situation there. Also the indented stuff is filler, so you should assume it was never true and that I would never seriously write something like that. Again, you don't have to read this--ok I see you are still reading this. Ummmm.... Fine. That's fine then. Do what you like.

the real title of this post:

[lyrics] A Fabulous Lie

Now and then I think of when we were together
but it was only ever in my head
told myself you were right for me
a fabulous lie cause it was just a dream

but you don't ever have to know
if I act the part you think its true cause in the end we are nothing
I'll find someone else to love
so when you treat me like a stranger it won't feel so rough

Now and then I see you and let my guard down for a second
but you never notice cause its never what you want to see
and I don't wanna live that way
remembering every word you say

but you don't ever have to know
if I act the part you think its true cause in the end we are nothing
I'll find someone else to love
so when you treat me like a stranger it won't feel so rough

Now and then I think of the last time that we'll have coffee
its a bit hard to believe but i know its just a matter of time
we'll sit and stare and share our tales
I'll be bored by every word you say

but you don't ever have to know
if I act the part you think its true cause in the end we are nothing
I'll find someone else to love
so when you treat me like a stranger it won't feel so rough

Still can't write my own music. This is from Somebody That I Used to Know by a band I've never heard of. I only know about it because Allison posted it on facebook or something. At first I hated the song because the music video is largely of this guys face, which I don't like to look at, especially when he opens his mouth. But I heard the song in my head later. And now I wrote all that shit up there. Also I just watched "From Prada to Nada" with my family which is a movie I did not choose but did consent to and which is based on this oldass chick novel called "Sense and Sensibility" that I only ever read because my strategy for meeting girls in philly included book clubs. Only sounds weird when you write it down...anyway, get this: the movie is way better than the book. Wayyyyyy better. The book was so awful I didn't realize it was supposed to be a sort of comedy until years later when someone told me it was supposed to be funny. I thought everyone in the Victorian era just had a stick up their ass.

Its kind of sad that I appear to be, literally, capable of only telling one kind of romance story, and it is not any of the kinds that make money. This is sad because I think there is a lot of money in romance...something about the volume of material that the readers go through compared to other genres...but I am incapable of writing a story where two people actually love each other, and one of them isn't dead. Well lets give it a go. Bob and Alice...wait, no, those names are from security engineering trope that was expanded by xkcd to imply that Bob was having an affair with...not Alice. Or something. Anyway. Jack and Jill...wait weren't they siblings? Not into that. Ok. Name generator time. Doreen and Dorothy. Ok....hot, but I'm not qualified to write that story, and if I did write it, I would have to censor every sentence before posting it. Trying a different generator...Hazposba, and Opilan. I'm not using that name generator again. Evan sent me a name generator script once, but unfortunately my version of "backing up" is to spend more than $50 on an external enclosure for the system drive of my broken computer and leave it sitting on my desk, still disconnected. So Opilan is the girl, obviously.

Opilan grew up in a great metropolis called Bucktown that was exactly like Gotham city but cooler, and sadly without batman. Then, there is a sportbike and a katana* blade in the plot for some plausible reason, because most stories I write have a sportbike and/or a katana...preferably both. Then she met...fucking...Hazposba, whose parents must have hated him. Good ole' Haz became a sellsword and disappeared for a while. Then he discovered that no one wanted his sword and ended up drunk and disorderly in a back alley of bucktown. He saves Opilan from some feral velociraptors but doesn't remember it when he wakes up in her bathtub without his pants because he blacked out. Then Haz and Opilan get chased through Europe by the CIA and make out just after dying her hair. And then they, uh, love each other or something, and Opilan doesn't die.

Ok I wrote a romance story without a tragic ending or sex scenes. You can tell that one to your kids.

*depending on who is in the bar with you, or who edited wikipedia last, the katana is either a specific type of ceremonial Japanese sword that may or may not have ever been used in battle, OR an entire category of Japanese backswords and therefore just a generic word, in the same way that a sedan is a kind of car. I don't really know for sure...I just know that katanas are awesome, they have something do to with Japan, and if you had a sharp one, the police would likely arrest you regardless of whether or not you were actually breaking the law.

**upon a proofread (not a thorough proofread, mind you...dont get your hopes up) I realized how sad this sounds. You probably wouldn't have realized this if i hadn't pointed this out.

[lyrics] I Remember You

2011-12-21T02:25:00.000-08:00

Hello, Hello

Hello Mellow Fellow

My favorite flavor, the kind I savor

Microwaved leftovers from back when the world made sense

Here to stand guard over withering loyalty

I remember, I remember, oh I remember you

September embers enflame, the wicked ways

never held true.

I can't deny, what we said

I just really, hate how it tastes

Some kind of lie, underneath

Sometimes I wake up and wonder

Hello, Hello

Hello Jello Can You

Tell me why I can't see anything

The lamp still burns but the Spirit hides and Justice cries

Ashes in one cup and poison in the right

I remember, I remember, oh I remember you

Chicken chiseled grins, and fake wins, hear the wind

snap your wings.

I can't deny, what we said

I just really, hate how it tastes

Some kind of lie, underneath

Sometimes I wake up and wonder

The Quest for Cheap, Quicky, Easy, Healthy Lunches made of Food that Lasts for Weeks

2011-12-19T19:54:00.000-08:00

I just realized my problem with making my own food: I dislike anything that takes longer to make than it does to eat, and when I'm hungry, I eat fast.

Its not a laziness thing. Its just some kind of sensation that a longer preparation time is wrong. Incorrect. Kind of like when you start your motorcycle and wait ten minutes for it to warm up in order to drive to a 7-11 that is only five minutes away by foot. That kind of incorrect.

I've also noticed that nearly every recipe I find involves chicken. I'm not sure why. Chicken, being a meat, is inconvenient because it can't sit around in your fridge for long. It should be reserved for special occasions when I am willing to spend more than 5 minutes in my kitchen! Not only that, but its a more porous meat than steak, meaning more effort must be made in order to cook it safetly. Why is everyone putting chicken in their recipes? I don't want to walk all the way to a store, stand in line to buy some chicken, walk all the way back, and then cook it, and then start preparing my "quick lunch" recipe from the internet. This is not sustainable. Maybe if I grew chickens in my apartment, and I could just kind of fling a butchers knife into the living room from my computer chair...idk. I don't know anything about butcherology.

Here's my new plan: vegetarian meals. Now, don't get me wrong. I am, and will always be, vehemently opposed to the idea that eating meat is bad because of something about "oh the poor animals." In fact, even treating animals ethically and not torturing them makes me uneasy, because it seems like only a slippery slope and short fall until I can't eat bacon anymore. However. Some people are vegetarians because of some of the awful things done* in commercial farming, or because they realize that a growing population that eats cows, which themselves must eat plants, requires exponentially more energy than a population that skips the middleman and goes right to the plants. I firmly support this idea, so long as I can still eat bacon whenever I want.

So it is with trepidation that I consider behavior that might possibly support the vegetarian's cause. Unfortunately, vegetarians eat some pretty weird shit. Like who ever made a plant out of eggs? That sounds like some kind of evil Batman henchman.

Here's a list of things that sound weird, which I never want to try:

Hummus
Eggplant
hummus
chick peas?
gross ass goo--looks like poop from a cancerous pidgeon that caught the plauge--sometimes called hummus
the reason hummus appears in this list so many times is because I actually did try it once.

Ok I don't actually have a long list...I actually just wrote this entire post in order to amuse myself while searching for vegetarian lunches. I think I found one:

Unstuffed Peppers. Basically you use the black arts of necromancy to bring a stuffed pepper back to life and then eat it.

By the way...cooking something in the fucking oven is, BY DEFINITION, NOT quick and easy. Its the fucking oven. There is no cooking appliance more heavyweight than the oven. The only way a recipe could be more work, at least by appliance class, would be maybe some kind of fire roast pit, or if you included smoking your own meat. Note that jello doesn't count because you don't preheat the fridge.

Also, why are vegetarians/vegans so obsessed with recreating the foods they left behind? If you really want a burger that bad, just eat a fucking burger. Every time you make a "vegan pizza" or a "vegetarian burger" or a "fake chicken salad" you are basically reminding yourself that other people have it better. Other people are getting the real thing. Kind of like when you try to play windows games on linux**.

Food for thought:

The second of two serious girlfriends that I've had in my life once told me that the reason motorcycles should not do the things she didn't like was because, as a driver of a car, she might accidentally hit them and feel bad.

That is exactly like saying that vegans shouldn't be vegans at lunch time, because I might not notice that the vegan pizza is missing until the delivery guy leaves, which would make me feel bad.

*fuck Monsanto

**fuck you Microsoft

High Gear

2011-12-14T23:28:00.000-08:00

Fun fact: I am absolutely horrible with names. For serious. I was on my way to meet this manager of another team for coffee. I get halfway to the elevator and realize I don't know his name, because people's names are seriously not something I remember. I walk back to my desk just to look at his name. Got it. Bingo. Halfway to starbucks I realize I've forgotten his name again. Its like there is some block in my head regarding names. It would make sense if this only happened with guys...my tendendancy to not think about or notice men has been exhaustively documented (probably too much) by yours truly. It even happens with girls. I just forget their names! Even after meeting them! I don't know whats wrong with my brain.

Slightly less fun fact: A female friend that (I don't want to make out with because her hair is cut like a boy's but I would never tell her that and whom) I go dancing with...whom I would call one of "my salsa girls" so long as she never hears me say that...told me she had signed up for okcupid, as if that is a big deal. She's pretty bitchy; she'll fit right in there. I mentioned that I've been trying to get some of my guy friends to go dancing (hoping for a pat on the back for talking to men because this is the same girl who yelled at me for...nevermind) but she cut me off and said she would never date a programmer. She is still willing to be friends with me, as if that is some kind of consolation prize with nonzero value, but she would never go out with a programmer. She's done.

Not so fun fact: I probably mentioned this before...some friction at work. It continued today. After being told that my tedious and exhaustive investigation of some tiny blips in a graph was not good enough, I returned to my desk in a somewhat negative mood to find too many people gathered in our sad excuse for a team area. I promptly left with our secret stash of whiteboard erase fluid*, found a conference room, and just sort of diagrammed my options. Then I wrote words like "safe" or "unsafe" under them, and other labels for things I value like "mobile." Everything that I want right now is "unsafe," meaning no guaranteed income, no health insurance, and I would likely have to sell my car that I love. And learn how to not bleed money. And move to a cheapass apartment with mice and roomates. Then I circled "startup" and erased everything. There are many reasons why a startup is actually a good move for me right now, but they are a bit complex so I will skip them.

In other words, starting or joining a startup is no longer something I just dream about while walking to work or sitting on the toilet, or out of frustration, or when I'm bored at home. I am now actively looking. I've read some interesting articles that challenged some assumptions I didn't even realize I was making. I'm even thinking about making my own personal website to market myself, but I have a bit of a problem: I don't want prospective employers reading drunk blog posts about how I think objectifying girls is an imaginary problem invented by ugly people, and also don't want girls finding out how good I am at what I do. I don't care what anyone thinks about anything--some hot girl's prejudice against smart people better the hell not prevent me from making out with her. You fucking nerds with your principles can go make your this-is-how-the-world-should-be stand with the fucktards that complain about the symbols on public bathroom doors. I tried it your way. Now I'm playing the game.

In summary, my search for startups, startup jobs, startup ideas...startup opportunities has been kicked into high gear.

You never know when you are going to get hit by a bus (drunk on their new power due to an unfair law that was passed in Seattle but not as bad as the law going through the Senate that nullifies our 4th amendment rights), or have a motorcycle accident, or waste the rest of your good years falling in love with a few more girls that just want to be friends or tell you that you missed your chance, or get kidnapped by the military and held indefinitely without a jury trial because you have more than 7 days of food in your kitchen. When I am lying there on the road with blood gushing out of my broken neck, or listening to a cancer diagnosis, or burning some girls photo and camera charger, or drinking myself to death on my 31st birthday**, or being waterboarded at the hands of the united states military in some extra-continental prison, I don't want to think "well I followed what I was supposed to do and did ok at my job." That is not acceptable. When I feel my life drain away in the end I want to think "I coded with the best; I kicked ass and took names; I slept with/married the girl(s) on the planet; all the cool people love me and all the assholes hate me." The only regret I should have at that point is my failure to live forever. And maybe my failure to prove P=NP. I mean, really...I think I might be wrong about that.

*when we first moved into the poorly named building where I work, they choose not to provide standard, efficient, alcohol-based whiteboard-cleaning fluid available in any office supply store, and instead provided some kind of green acid that I am fairly certain inspired the Batman character Two-Face. This acid ruined the surface of the whiteboards, preventing standard whiteboard erasers from being effective ever again. Unlike the standard alcohol-based dry erase cleaner available in any office supply store, the bottles of acid did not fit on the trays at the buttom of the white boards and required separate metal holders to be installed in every conference room. Then the acid was replaced by some black cloths and some signs consisting of a command to stop using any liquid on the whiteboard, and a false claim that these special, magic microfiber clothes would be sufficient for our erasing needs. Allegedly, the facilities people--the very same people who both failed to provide a whiteboard we requested and stole the whiteboard that we bought and paid for with our own money--have been confiscating the standard and effective alcohol-based whiteboard cleaner available in any office supply store (which they should have provided). For this reason, my team keeps a bottle of standard, efficient alcohol-based dry erase cleaner (available on amazon or any common office supply store, by the way) in a hidden location that I will not disclose, even here. If they take that, we fall back to the bottle of Jack Daniels I keep in my drawer (I have verified that Jack Daniels is an effective whiteboard cleaner, and that unlike the acid provided by the facilities people, it will not burn your face off).

**under no circumstance may anyone infer anything from this completely awesome sentence fragment

[edit]
todo: todo: http://meraki.com/company/jobs#bs_eng

[fiction] Guess What Book I Just Finished

2011-12-12T02:58:00.000-08:00

When someone who is old enough to drink asks you for a bedtime story, tell her this story.

This story is about a castle made of sand. It appeared on the beach one week in June. There was nothing particularly special about this beach. It faced southwest. There were to volleyball courts some distance from the water. There was a two-story motel nearby, the kind where all the rooms had tiled floors to make the sand wash away easily. And there was a small bar with straw umbrellas and fake tiki torches.

The only notable thing about it was the sand castle. A man showed up one day, standing on the side of the beach, hands in the pockets of his baggy white shorts, starring off into the ocean and letting the wind whip is clothes about like a character in a movie. He did this for a good twenty minutes before his legs got tired and he plopped a seat in the sand. Oh shit I really should have done my laundry today. Like I'm out of shirts. Anyway.

The man got bored and started playing with the sand idly. He looked around the beach often, as if expecting to see someone. After an hour he realized he'd made a small mound in the sand. He put a couple walls on it, and in that moment created the simplest of castles: a mott. Just a tiny little affair on a hill. Whoever he was looking for never showed up and he kept building. Soon there was a baily stretching out from the mott: a shorter wall that covered more space than the mott. Then buildings were made for the bailey to keep safe. Then the mott turned into a stone keep. Then the baily was destroyed and remade into simple stone walls joined by square towers.

This entire time the sun had been sinking. The sunset happened while the man attacked the square towers and rounded the corners, leaving no place for the attackers to hide from the defender's arrows. Then the sun was gone but the man stayed, improving his castle by the moonlight. The castle was given a proper gatehouse. The keep was expanded. The walls were moved, made higher, and then moved again, growing to give room to an ever increasing number of buildings.

The man slept some but it was cool and building kept him warm. The keep and stable were previously the only buildings, but soon a barracks appeared, with its own ramparts. Then vast grain storehouses so tall they could be seen above the battlements. Watchtowers were added, and a dungeon, and then merchant stalls, and houses for people to live after the keep fulled up. The original walls could be moved no farther, and another ring was added instead. Then another, and another, until the concentric rings rivaled even Gondor of legend. Then the trebuchets were added, two or three behind every wall, pointed outwards. Catapults on the keep and mid levels, and ballistas on the outermost wall. Each wall was given its own gatehouse, aye, and then a moat, which grew to a lake with the only means of entrace a long causeway that connected to the first gatehouse via a drawbridge.

By this time days had gone by. Still the castle was not complete. A secondary castle had to be added to protect the causeway. Then more walls, more towers, more battlements, more storehouses, blacksmiths, and garrisons for thousands of soldiers. Then the man left.

Pictures were taken. Rumours spread and became stories, and stories became marketing, and the castle became famous. But none of the marketing was right.

The castle was built above the high water line, and lasted for days until various children tore it about.

Children! For that is where this tale begins.

Two children had once stood on that beach, hand in hand, each daring the other to jump in the cold water, and each only doing it because the other was there.

They played there, sometimes with other children. Their favorite game was to built forts to protect them from the wolves. The wolves are coming, they said. Beaches don't offer much in the way of fortress construction, but a downed palm tree, two plankets and the imagination can take you pretty far.

When they were a tad bit older she kissed him, but he still thought girls were gross so he pushed her head in the sand.

But the wolves were coming, so they played together anyway.

When they were both a bit older, she told him the wolves were coming. She wasn't talking about the game, though. He never knew what she meant until he walked by her house one night and saw one fewer parent at her table. She never talked about it.

When they were older still he kissed, her. Right there between the two volleyball nets. He was too nervous to think but he did it anyway. Something was wrong, though. The wolves are coming, was all she'd say.

He promised that he would protect her from the wolves. She said she had some things to take care of. They agreed to meet back at that very spot in exactly a year. One year from that date is the day the castle appeared on the beach.

It was a real nice castle though.

[Cooking] Pasta Salad

2011-12-08T20:52:00.001-08:00

Go to the store. Buy some fucking bow tie pasta. Don't think about it, just do it. Produce. Get like a red pepper, and a then a green cucumber. No one around you will appreciate your jokes so don't say anything. Then an onion, yes. Also buy some chicken and some ham. This time get the chicken without bones--we didn't like how things worked out last time.

Now, you need some MAYONAISE and some MUSTARD. You've never bought either before, but they are in the same aisle. Avoid the organic shit. Buy the smallest bottles you can find, because what you don't use will probably spoil before you ever cook again.

You're done shopping. I know, right? This isn't hard as long as you don't mind walking like 8 blocks to the grocery store that actually has fresh produce.

And you need fresh produce. All of the ingredients are going to sit in your fridge for four days because you are too lazy ("tired") to cook. Instead you're going to use some of the ham to make ham sandwiches. Don't sweat it.

Now, cook the fucking pasta. Just dump the entire box in. Get some salt in there. Oh this ham is delicious. Seriouly. The only food that beats ham is like...bacon. And sex. But bacon never says it has a runny nose and blows off your date. Anyway.

Dice up all the veggies. Don't use the whole union...cut off what you think might be a third, and discard all pieces that look difficult to dice. Dicing sucks. Just do it...it only takes like fifteen minutes. And the onion crying thing is no joke, either. Fuck man I have a foodgasm every time I hit one of these ham cubes. Anyway. You don't end up cooking the chicken because you forgot to put it on when you put the pasta on, and the small frying pan is in the dishwasher anyway, because you just put it there to make room in the sink. Dice up the ham too, buddy.

Now for the goo. Find your tablespoon. You can use a dry tablespoon cause no one is looking and you probably cooked more pasta than the recipe called for anyway. Come to think of it, that cucumber was extremely long too. Like if you took a normal sized cucumber and added four inches, that is what you chose to grab in the produce aisle. Hey man, I'm not here to judge. Just as long as it all fits.

So, yeah, still with the goo. Three tablespoons of mayonaise, and one tablespoon of mustard. You are supposed to use a teaspoon, but then you'd have to put twice as many measuring spoons in the dishwasher. The goo looks gross by itself, but it will taste better once you spread it around.

Mix is all up. The pot you used will probably end up being too small, so offload some of that to a bowl. You're hungry anyway.

Then, take some plastic wrap and just put it over your pot and put it directly in the fridge. No need to get tupperware dirty. If you're out of plastic wrap, use tin foil. Its not like you're going to cook anything else soon, and aliens only visit the southwest anyway.

One last thing: with all that produce in the trash can, you are not going to be able to wait a month before taking the trash out.

Ok. You're done. Pop a coronita like you mean it and write in your blog.

[Edit]
Stand by...I feel a little sick.

Mr. Responsible Guy

2011-12-07T18:08:00.001-08:00

I thought I was doing well and kicking ass, sorting through some chronic problems, and with two other work mates, I even had a pet project underway that, if successful, would be the key to getting to SDE II. Today my manager scheduled a meeting with me to shoot all of that down. Apparently the way we were developing our pet project was against a bunch of policies that I think are lame, and he has serious problems with my tone in emails and the way I handle problems and engage other teams. Oh, and I'm scrum master. He doesn't like how thats going either. Come to think of it, neither do it. Being scrum master sucks ass. I only did it because I hated how the other guy was doing it.

Marketing

I learned a long time ago to stop telling girls exactly what I think. For example, if you discover a misunderstanding between you and your girl as to the nature of your relationship, do not ever, ever, ever explain in crystal clear terms exactly what your understanding was.

I need to start doing the same thing at work. I loved being candid and straight with people, but my current boss hates it. My current boss is the person I need to impress in order to move to SDE II. SDE II is the position I need to move to within a year or so if I don't want to get fired. The company I work for has a sort of move-up-or-get-out policy, which is unfortunate because their idea of moving up sucks.

So...for the time being I will now become "Mr. Responsible Guy," and just like when I talk to girls, I'm going to start asking "what do these people want to hear?" at work. Hello bullshit. Hello politics. Hello passive-aggressive behavior. Hello kow-towing. Hello murky, vague, guarded responses. Hello simply holding my tongue. Goodbye snarky responses on tickets, funny emails, getting to the root cause of problems, trying to make an argument for solving what I believe are large, systemic problems that are wasting hundreds of hours of SDE time, or fixing our shitastic on-call situations.

From here on out, all I want to be saying are "its done" and "I fixed the glitch." Except I'm not actually going to say "I fixed the glitch." I'm going to say whatever politically correct thing they want to hear.

Moves

I looked into internal transfers. The company I work has an unexpectedly dumb policy: if the team you're on is not working out for you...if your manager is giving you bad reviews, etc...you are not allowed to move teams. Fortunately my reviews are always good, although after all the shit my manager gives me about my "communication skills" I'm sensing a bad review coming, and if I transfer internally, I'll need to get that done before he fucks up my escape route.

I looked into the open positions my company has in New York City. They are more boring than what I do now.

My next stock vestment is February 15th. I reeeeeally want to get that stock. I actually want all of it, but a bad review could start a downhill trend that outs me before I can get it all.

Looked at other internal transfers briefly. Nothing jumped out. Such a transfer would bear a high cost of adjusting to a new team, and I would still be in Seattle. I would also get my hands on the rest of the stock. Tough decision.

Startups

In my current job, we are expected to work super long and super hard and super smart. We are expected to not have a life and do lots of work on our own time (until today I had been doing this). Here's an example of something I work on. My team, A, discovers a problem: team B's service is timing out. They claim its not their responsibility, though, so after a week or two, I now have four teams: A,B,C and D, who all claim it is not their fault and they don't own fixing it, and I'm being asked why I'm trying to fix a problem.

I would prefer to work somewhere where I can pour some passion into coding. And where no one in my personal life ever hears me say the words "I'm on call that night." I think that I would prefer to work at a startup--lots of new code being written.

I don't have any great ideas, though, so I'm trying to find people that do. I signed up for a mailing list that Rob pointed me to. There have been no posts. Started searching the web...not finding much yet.

Other Ideas

There are some more...creative lines of employment. I've heard of this job where you get trained on how to drive Ferrari's and then go around teaching rich people how to drive their Ferrari's. Tells girls in bars that I am a "Ferrari driving instructor" would be even better than saying "I work for [large online retailer]."

Something else I was--oh I just got paged.

Asking for Girls is the Crime

2011-12-05T23:50:00.001-08:00

The Epilogue:

My car, who, by the way...lets keep the name on the DL for a while...anyway I'm having a bit of a situation with the lock on the trunk. It still locks, yes, but its...it needs to be fixed. I'm pretty forgetful. I think its been this way since I moved into my apartment. In fact I think the move is what damaged it. The other detail is that my car is a Subaru Impreza WRX STI, which, according to an episode of Top Gear that sadly trashed the STI, was at one point one of only two street legal rally cars worth buying, with the other one being the Evo.

Second Epilogue:

I was comiserrating with this girl about how the ostensibly convinent hours you get in the tech industry can actually be a downside once you realize you never have time to run errands when anything is open. For example, none of the post offices here are open at midnight. We discussed personal assitants.

The Third Act:

Today I sent an email to a craigslist-like mailing list at work. Random guess: close to half of the company is subscribed. I said I needed a personal assistant and that I would prefer someone who was attractive, female, and a champion rally car drive in the AWD division. Incredulous? 1) yes I did say that and 2) take a few minutes and rethink our friendship. Like seriously rethink it. What are you getting out of it? Anyway.

I got a response immediately from one of the girls who helped me out with my whole wardrobe situation. She recommended someone who is two out of three, which is all I was expecting to get.

Then some of my work mates came over, incredulous that I would actually send something like that. Even people on the list thought my email was a case of someone forgetting to lock their keyboard. Apparently what I wrote was sexist. My buddy got me worried enough to try and shutdown the thread--I sent a reply saying I found someone, being pretty sure that such a message would sort of close off the issue in their minds.

The other important detail here is that I took that lame ass sexual harassment training shit last week. Seriously, if you know which company I work for? The company we contract out for our lets-prevent-lawsuits training bullshit is the worst.

Also, some girl who is a solo autocross driver replied, and it seems she was a tiny bit either incredulous or perturbed at my email, even though I'm pretty sure she had no intentions of offer personal assistant services, although she did give me some ideas for getting track time without being forced to volunteer for cone duty...something about open track days. What is cone duty? Cone duty is the reason I have not yet gotten involved in autocross.

The End:

I was feeling concerned, and like, halfway towards guilty about my email. I like having people think I'm a hothead fool. I'm ok with other men thinking I'm an idiot. I don't really want anyone to think I'm sexist. Then, tonight, as I was searching for a way to procrastinate an impending and meticulous task of sorting Lego bricks that is part of a nearly failed scheme that was supposed to double my money, I realized the truth:

If I had asked for an ugly, male, gay, vegan, hipster dude that only rides a fixed gear he assembled himself from parts bought from local companies (and who doesn't filter and actually stops at red lights because he is an asshole) then no one would have minded.

The reason I separated that quote like that is so I can cut & paste easily if I find an email from HR in my inbox tomorrow morning. So I don't feel bad at all now.

[Edit - poetic justice?]

So I wrote about I had two boxes of this Lego Fire Brigade set that were defective and were missing an entire bag of pieces. I asked a buddy of mine to sell me a third set, because I thought it would be easier to compare them than to count every single piece and see what I am missing. The third set he gave me was also from the defective 39R1 batch. I realized this after over an hour of counting pieces. I have three of these fucking sets in my posession and I can't build any of them because they are all missing these stupid little gray pieces. Each of these sets cost $150, and are worth less than a third of that if I sell them for just the parts. AAAAHHHHHH.

[fiction] Inside Job, part 1

2011-12-03T01:10:00.001-08:00

(FYI: this is nothing like how it is in my real job)

Small office on the fourth floor. Too small for all the computer screens I've got in there. Its cramped, like somebody moved too much furniture in. That's not the kind of problem I solve.

I know its a girl before she even knocks on the door, before the curves of her silhouette even fall on the frosted glass. I can smell a customer service girl a mile away. She knocks.

"It's open."

A tasteful business suit walked in. If she had been a programmer it would have been baggy jeans and a sweatshirt, and with my luck a boy's haircut and a lack of interest in men. But she wasn't a programmer. My lucky day. I lean forward and put out my cigarette. Not supposed to smoke in the office. I get worried when people see me do it, but not worried enough to clean up the ash tray.

"Hi. I'm having some trouble with some orders. Someone said you used to be on the COW team?"

COW. Customer Order Workflow. The guys that took care of every single order at Large Online Retailer. Sleepless nights. Severity 1 emergencies. The big red button. Writing untested ruby code directly to production while you're explaining up from down to your manager's manager's manager on the conference call. Losing hosts left and right during prime, watching healthy databases tank...the coding marathons...the ticket wars...the multicast storms. Yeah. I was on COW.

I nod. "What do you need?"

She takes a small piece of paper out of her pocket and unfolds with a sort of deliberate grace. "Its these shipments. They're getting stuck."

I take the paper from her. Our fingers touch for an instant and I feel a spark. Damn carpet. She has four shipments written down. I look one up. "This order is from 2005."

Black stare. She doesn't understand. An order from 2005 is six years old. In internet time that is an epoch. You might as well dig up a dinosour bone and tell me it had a cold this one time.

"I don't understand how we are even shipping stuff for it." I look at the order. It's massive. I groan. "Whatever. I'll just clean the garbage out of the system."

"No, please!" She touches my hand. "That's what the On Calls did. But these keep coming back."

I glance down at the fine curves of her hips. There is a red I.D. badge hanging there. You're run of the mill customer service girl does not get a red badge. This girl is for real.

"Alright," I said to her.

; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;

Twenty minutes later we're on the freeway in my T-top. The fulfillment center is an hour away in normal traffic. I pull into the HOV lane and punch it. We'll get there in 30.

"My name is Alice, by the way."

"Alice. Dex." I swing my right hand over without looking.

She shakes it gingerly. "Yes I know. Dex the dragon."

I snort. "Been a while since I heard that."

"How did you get that name?"

"You know that phrase about burning bridges? I used to do that a lot. And people. They messed with me, they got burned."

"That's horrible."

I just smile and press on the accelerator.

; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;

Waldo meets us at the shipping dock. Waldo is an old buddy of mine. I help the lady step up and we sneak inside. The shipments we're interested in are in the corner. I flash my switchblade.

"Hey! Take it easy will ya? You're not even supposed to be here."

"Relax." I slice one of the boxes open and pocket the knife. "You know what happens to these."

We look inside. Its a videogame. The box shows an unrealistically-muscled marine wielding an M4. It was made for the console--fodder for the lowest common denominator. I check the packing slip. One video game. Nothing else.

"That game comes out tomorrow," says Alice. I glance at her for a second.

"That means its a preorder," I say.

"Why did it get stuck?" asked Waldo. But we are interrupted.

"Excuse me." Unfriendly voice. "Who are you?"

I boost the packing slip as I turn around. I pretend like I'm tucking my shirt in, but I'm really stuffing the slip into my pants. Its the shift leader for the fulfillment center. I don't even need to say anything. She recognized me.

Her eyes narrow. "What are you doing here?"

"Fixing problems," I say.

"You're not a problem solver any more. You are the problem. Waldo, show him out. Now."

"Geez, what was up her ass?" Waldo asks us when we are out of ear shot. "I'm sorry I couldn't help you--I dont know where she came from."

"There was a $25 million outage once. I'm the one who proved it was her fault."

"Million?" asks Alice.

"Shit, Dex. Shit," says Waldo.

"Hey Waldo." We reach my car. "Do me a favor?"

"I just did you-"

"Send me your version of the shipments."

Waldo frowns. "I'll see what I can do."

"Thanks a million." I wink.

"Yeah." Waldo disappears.

"What did you mean his version?" asks Alice.

"The business and the fulfillment center both have a different version of every order," I explain.

"Why is that?"

"Its complicated." We're on our way back to the city when my phone gets an email. I check it. It's Waldo. I hand Alice my phone. "Read that to me."

"I'm not sure I understand it."

"Read me something."

"Well...one thing it says order condition change from 3 to 9."

"You mean 9 to 3?"

"No...I can read. It definitely starts at 3 and changes to 9."

"That's impossible."

"Well, that's what it says."

I grab my phone back. She's right. "Fuck me," I say, and then I don't say anything for a while. I get quiet when I'm working things out.

"So what does it mean?"

"It means some shady shit is going down, that's what it means. An order starts in condition 9. That's a new order. When its getting processed it goes through a bunch of other conditions until finally it arrives at condition 3. Condition 3 is a closed order. There's nothing left to process. No wonder all the oncalls didn't look into this. They thought their system was fine. But its not. Somehow, someone is re-opening old orders and adding shit to them."

"How is that possible?" asks Alice.

"I don't know," I say, "but I think it's an inside job."

Missing Parts

2011-12-01T01:35:00.001-08:00

I'm not going to go into why I thought buying two Lego "Fire Brigade" sets was a good investment. Actually, the one was an investment. Unfortunately, reaping the benefits of that investment precludes opening the box and playing with it before I sell it again, which means that I had to buy a second set to play with. Somewhere in this I am supposed to at least break even. Then comes the missing parts.

I didn't think this would happen...kind of assume all this stuff is packed by robots and/or an assembly line with little human intervention. TURNS OUT that batch "39R1" is missing an entire box of pieces. I realized this after spending an hour looking for pieces that aren't there. What can I say? They are small pieces. And there's a lot of them. And I was watching Ghostbusters II. I had watched Ghostbusters earlier in the evening while assembling a different Lego-related investment. That one went much smoother. All the pieces were there.

I had been psyching myself up to design my own fire hall-like elaborate Lego set that would bear uncanny resemblence to a certain movie franchise, but now that enthusiasm is starting to deflate because I have to figure how to deal with this situation.

This all started when I was minding my own business at work...busily not spending huge amounts of money on toys, when Luke called to tell me of wonderful savings opportunities at the Lego store. Ten percent of $700 is higher than 10% of $0. I have to do my budget tomorrow. I have Legos that I can't assemble spread all over my table. That will make a great impression if any of the girls I meet at salsa want to come back to my place for coffee that I don't actually have. Oh who am I kidding? That never happens in Seattle.

[Edit]
The Lego company appears to be unaware of the problem. I have to go home and match over 1000 small plastic pieces against the list of what I'm supposed to have. Fuck, dude.

Its Good to have Goals in Life

2011-11-28T12:22:00.001-08:00

I want to go to Blackcomb & Whistler and ride down a slope so long that I can listen to the entire track of Ghost Love Score by Nightwish.

You there, reading this: you'd better have a damn good excuse for why you can't come with us to blackcomb the next time we next. Unless you come. Then you are excused from needing an excuse for not coming.

Obligatory Recent Philly Trip Post

2011-11-25T11:41:00.001-08:00

Actually I'm not going to write about it.   I wrote three drafts, and all were squelched by my better judgement.

But here is a 4 line fizzbuzz program instead! Yay!

#!/usr/bin/ruby
for i in 1..100
        fb = {0 => i, 2 => "fizz", 4 => "buzz", 6 => "fizzbuzz"}
        puts fb[ (i%3).zero?.object_id + (i%5).zero?.object_id*2 ]
end

This problem is seductive because the requirement to not print the number when you are printing fizz/buzz means that a simple, clean IF statement won't work, and you'll have to use an ugly IF structure that bothers people like me. So I spent ten minutes researching the innards of ruby until I was able to remove the IF statement completely.

Bleh

2011-11-14T07:53:00.001-08:00

Rachel deleted my number. Said she got a new phone. Then I got a new phone. I am a complete idiot but I have all my numbers. I even have new ones. Thanks to stupid ass Google when I text people their email address shows up as well. Also typing on this thing sucks. I can't even tell you why because it would take an hour to type it. There are no keys. Just a flat screen and tiny squares that are easy to miss. I don't think I can safetly text while driving anymore because I have to look at the screen now. On the plus side I can now get GPS and internet on my phone. Except I can't type the address in while driving. Bleh

The First Person Shooter Called "Space Marine"

2011-11-06T21:35:00.000-08:00

Space Marine covers a single engagement on a single planet. The plot revolves around two betrayals, one so obvious that the game would have been more interesting if it hadn't happened, and one during the final cut scene that makes you feel like you just wasted $50 and ten hours. That cut scene is a cliffhanger. THQ probably won't be making a sequel.

I've played two..."modern" first person shooters recently, and both of them had similar retarded gameplay elements. One is the stupid shield recharge thing from halo. You have this shield thing that takes damage but only recovers when you're not being hit. This forces you to constantly find cover and sit there, waiting for your shield thing to recharge. Fun Game Activity #1: Sitting around waiting for your armor to recharge. Mostly the reason I was playing this game was because I wanted to pretend I was a Space Marine. Given that the main character is a Space Marine, I thought that would work out, but Space Marines actually don't burst out, kill some people, and then run back to cover. Space Marines don't actually ever run away, because thanks to conditioning that likely makes them homicidal maniacs, they are literally unable to experience fear. In this game, though, you have to run away and hide in cover. Because of your Halo shield. Sometimes people blow your cover while you are sitting around, waiting for your shields to come back up. Then you die.

Another element is this thing where you can only carry around a limited number of guns. In real life you can probably only carry around one or two large guns. This is one of the reasons I don't go around shooting people in real life. Video games are fun because you aren't actually killing people, and you can deviate from real life in order to make it fun. The main character in this game is a human that has probably lived for hundreds of years, wearing a special armor suit that magically repairs itself and which is made of some fantasy material that can withstand high powered impacts but is so light that it doesn't cause a large crater and kill the wearer when you fall 50 feet. You're fighting aliens that don't exist, who can be shot more than five times directly in the face without dying, and the realism they chose to add was that I'm not allowed to carry more than 4 guns. So, obviously, on a planet that was recently besieged by 2 million orks, you, at regular intervals, come upon rings of supply boxes perfectly arranged for you to select various weapons. Fun Game Activity #2: Trying to decide which weapons you have to take. Many of the weapons in the game only work well on certain enemies. Many enemies in the game can only be effectively with certain weapons. When choosing which weapons to take with you, you rarely know which enemies you will face. The best way to choose weapons is to pick some at random, die, and then come back and pick the right ones.

A third, actually, stupid element of the modern shooter is the inability to save the game. Being able to save and load games has actually been a part of PC (not console) video games since the beginning of PC games. In recent times, though, I guess, they don't want you to be able to save and load whenever you want, because I guess people keep, you know, cheating, by saving right before the difficult parts and just loading them again and again until they beat them. Fun Game Activity #3: Running down the same long-ass hallway and playing through the same boring battle twenty times in a row because you keep dying sometime after that. Now, take this auto save thing, and combine it with only being able to carry 4 weapons. Now imagine there is a part of the game where you have to fight these flying enemies that are all flying around a tenth of a mile off the edge of a cliff, but you accidentally chose weapons that are nearly useless when trying to kill flying enemies. Now lets imagine that the gave auto saved for you right after you chose those weapons, with no way to go back and change them, so that no matter how many times to reload the game or die, you still come back in the game with the wrong weapons and your only choices are basically to fight a UAV with a pistol and an axe OR go back and play the entire game all the way through again just so you can reach the same spot again but hopefully remember to choose the right weapons this time. Remember, though, you're not allowed to save the game, ever, so if you restart it, you lose everything you just accomplished in the past few days.

Space Marines fight in squads. You are given probably the smallest number of people that could ever count as a squad: 2. Its just you and these two guys. You don't command them, at all, or use any kind of squad based tactics. You just fight near them, and they follow you around like little puppies, and they are invincible, and also all of the enemies inexplicably target you instead of them so you can't even invent your own tactics based on being followed around by dogs. Later, one of them dies unnecessarily to add weight to a cut-scene, and the other betrays you while you are (literally) single-handedly saving the world. There is a brief bridge battle where you get to fight alongside other Space Marines for real. That was fun. And lots of them are Blood Ravens, the chapter that I wish this game had been about.

Sometimes you can to use a Jump Pack, the things that make assault marines able to fly. Jump packs dont work very well but they are fun. You can use them an infinite amount of time without them running out of fuel, but when you enter certain hallways after certain battles they always run out of fuel right then and the main character discards them.

The only way to get health (most of the time) is to perform an "execution" by pressing F on an enemy that is "stunned." The computer tells you an enemy is stunned but putting circles near his head. There are many enemies that you are told are stunned because they have circles over their head (and because you just beat the shit out of them) but when you try to execute them they suddenly wake up and fight back and hurt you a lot. The only way to execute these enemies is using a special melee weapon that is a Hammer. Yup, futuristic science fiction game where you fight with hammers and they thought limiting the number of guns you can carry would be important realism. The reason this hammer is special is that while carrying it, the number of other weapons you can have drops from 4 to 2, and the 2 weapons you are allowed to use are the least useful ones. So you have a choice between not being able to get health back from half of the enemies or having ineffective weapons. I made my choice and started carrying that damn hammer everywhere, because I was tired of dying, but that was when I ran into that part where I had to fight flying vehicles and couldn't go back and get more effective weapons. I realize that this is serious business and all, but wouldn't it be cool if you had a thing where you could pretend to be a space marine and could use any weapon you wanted? It would be like a game.

In the Space Marine universe there are these people that are like doctors who fix you up. We call them Medics. Space Marines call them "apothecaries" because space marine medic just wasn't badass enough. There isn't a single fucking Apothecary anywhere in the game. By the way, the main character is a Captain in command of hundreds of space marines. He could probably requisition an apothecary if he needed one. Nope. Only way to get health back is to execute enemies. Fun Game Activity #4: running around trying to find small enemies to "execute" instead of fighting for real. Executing enemies leaves you vulnerable to ranged and melee attacks while you do it, which means that by the time you finish and execution you took a lot of damage and need to perform another execution in order to regain health, which is literally a vicious cycle.

The Apothecaries, had they been in the game, would have had this cool-looking white armor.

The gameplay is a lot like Duke Forever, which I guess is how most modern first person shooters are done now. You are let along the most constricting critical path from cut-scene to cut-scene like a balloon full of coke being squeezed through someone's colon. There is almost always exactly one path you can take, and all of the door handles glow. You can't ever go backwards; you have fewer choices than I've ever seen in an FPS. Its like you are just being spoonfed tiny bits of a game.

You don't get to pilot any vehicles or tanks. The only Space Marine equipment that appears in the game is the Thunderhawk transport. You occasionally find a heavy bolter but can't carry it around around for long. Since you don't have a squad, you don't have the option to give one of your nonexistent squadmembers a heavy bolter, or heavy flamer. No dreadnoughts or terminators appear.

The game appears to have been designed to force you to use hand-to-hand combat in almost every encounter. If you prefer shooting...you should probably play a different game. Tactics don't matter a whole lot beyond choosing which stack of crates to cower behind.

During an Ork invasion, the main character, Captain Titus of the Ultramarines, rescues an Inquisitor who turns out of be an agent of chaos when he betrays Titus and opens up a warp rift, allowing the Chaos Marines, arch nemesi of the Ultramarines, to invade the planet. Then Captain Titus watches his best friend die and single-handedly saves the planet. While he is busy saving the planet a rookie space marine calls the Inquisition (basically secret police) on Captain Titus, and once the planet is saved a second inquisitor arrives and threatens to have the inquisition start a war to kill all of the Ultramarines and all other humans on the planet unless Titus surrenders and lets himself be arrested. This second inquisitor is a hollow, flat, single-minded character who probably doesnt care if Titus is innocent or not, who takes Captain Titus away in his gay little shuttle just as the game ends. Again, there probably won't be a sequel.

Sing for the laughter, sing for the tears

2011-11-06T12:36:00.000-08:00

Sing with me, sing for the year
Sing for the laughter, sing for the tears
Sing with me, if it's just for today

This birthday girl had a boyfriend, so it was a five couples/sixth wheel kind of night. We went to some piano bar in Pioneer Square. Most of my other piano bar memories are either from Vegas with these asshole pianists who were ostentatious tip whores, or the night I tagged along to some overcrowded one in philly with Chris' ex and a bunch of her gay friends. It was the least I could do after he bought me "The Rules of the Game."

This piano bar wasn't bad though. The pianos were on a stage and they had a drum set. The music was good. I was fairly certain that they have never heard of Ever Dream, so I requested Dream On by "Aerosmith or Eminem" by writing it down on one of those little papers. Based on my experience with the tip whores in Vegas, I added a dollar to sweaten the deal enough for them to actually play it.

Then the DJs complained a lot about not having enough requests, but never mentioned Dream On. Various birthday girls all hung out on stage, and the DJs sang to them or whatever. The worst anyone had to do was sit on the piano, in a normal seating position. <-- foreshadowing

They were still complaining about running out of requests and not playing Dream On. Birthday girl--the one with our group--wanted to dance in the aisle so I pulled out some stuff I learned in the Blues club. She gave me the 3rd degree regarding the exact date of my birthday. She's not an asshole about it like Chris and Kev, so I just played the mystery card. Thought she was just being kind and thinking of others, because she is like one of those unselfish people. I was wrong.

When I wanted to cash out it was difficult waiting for our server to appear so I went to the bar. The people at the bar looked through some cards, didn't find mine, and then looked at me funny and told me I had to go find my server. Storing plastic cards with names on them is a solved problem. They fail. I made a mental note to never come back and hunted my server down so I could get my fucking card back. Then I stopped at the bathroom. Thats when they played Dream On. Ha! I wish. That's when they started calling my name, my full name, via the microphone.

Suddenly I'm on stage, sitting on a piano. No one told me why I was up there. They made me sit on the piano for some random song that was not Dream On. It was so boring. The song was finally over and I slid off, thinking I had done my time, but then the DJ told me to lay on the piano face down and pose like a playboy centerfold. Not making this up. Then they told me to hump the piano while they played another song that was not Dream On. I am so not making this up. Some girls in the front did that screaming thing or whatever but I was pretty sure they were just excited to be drunk and none of them wanted to make out later. I stayed as long as I could stand it and then left. They never played Dream On.

I didn't really want to go home, but I was too drunk and too cold to go for a ride. Some girl flagged me down in Pioneer Square to ask why I was walking so fast. Started talking to her but these two bums descended on us like vultures and my reflexes were dulled by the rum. She backed off. I went home, thinking of a dozen ways I could have kept that conversation going.

In conclusion: need to hit the blues club again.

Fucking Girls Man

2011-11-05T00:57:00.000-07:00

I'm sick of sleeping with these insipid Manhattan debutantes. Nothing shocks them anymore.

I drank to much to go for a ride, so I'm stuck here with my blog. Went to a hipster club tonight. I don't mind hipsters. I'm willing to play a hipster as long as I don't have to grow anything gay on my face. A girl tried to hit on me, asking for a cig. Actually I don't know what she asked for, but I searched my jacket that I was still wearing in the fucking club cause I"m lazy and I had neither a cig nor my awesome lighter. Then she said something about "I don't usually smoke either." I'm pretty sure that meant she wanted to make out somehow, sometime in the future, but the best thing I could thing of to say was "Good luck [finding a cig]." She got one from someone else and smiled at me on her way out. After she was gone I thought of a million things I could have said to her, but I was too slow. I think talking to girls runs in O(n) or O(n^2). We need to get it to O(1). Whatever the case, my damn lighter is in my hand now, and its pretty fucking awesome. The awesomeness of my lighter may not have gotten her shirt off, but that's the way I'm going to tell it. Fucking A. What the hell am I writing about. Yeah. I'm buying a pack of smokes tomorrow, and I'm going to smoke one (because I've never had a cigarette in my life and I'm not going to try one in front of a girl like a bad 80s movie), and leave the rest in my jacket for the next time I am in a fucking hipster bar. There are many, many reasons a girl might not want to make out with me. Some stupid shit I say should never be one of them (long story). Me not having a lighter/pack should also never be one of them.

Then, so, after that I realized that I should wake up and pay attention. Saw this girl standing by herself, looking like...something about I should go dance with her. She wasn't smoking hot like the girl who wanted to go grab a smoke, and I really didn't think I was going to do it, but for some reason I walked up to her and asked her name. She shot me down with a drunk version of the rude hand wave that Sebastian used in cruel intentions to diss the meter maid. It was cruel. I tried to console myself that she was not that hot but it still burned. I guess I got to get used to it.

If I got sad every time my code didn't compile I wouldn't be able to program for shit.

So...then I thought about Betsy, and Shea, and after realizing I was too drunk to ride I figured I'd be a nerd and write about it. I have this fantasy where my life is so exciting that my inability to meet girls in Seattle didn't matter, but in that fantasy I'm never trapped in my apartment because of my blood alcohol content.

Oh, and there was this guy at the club...a friend of a friend...my friends told him I'm a pilot and he turned out to be a flight instructor at one of the places down at boeing field. And we were right next to the speakers. We had an entire club-style shouting conversation...a shoutversation, about my flight club and where I like to fly because there was no way I could explain I lost my medical certificate in a noisy club. Stupid fucking friends; I wish no one knew I ever had a pilots license.

Philly Down

2011-11-01T02:35:00.000-07:00

I scheduled my flights. I arrive in philly on the 12th and depart on the 21st.

November. Possibly not my favorite month, but the best month in the year.

I had a "housewarming" party when to moved to my cheaper, crappier apartment. People actually came this time. I seriously had like an outline for an epic post about all the shit I screwed up with the move and the 48 hour moving marathon that ensued, culminating on a Saturday night with me, after having climbed through the boxes in my new apartment to approximate a shower sans curtain and trekked all over capitol hill trying to meet up with some friends because of what later turned out to be false promises of single girls, sank in disappointment as I was sitting on my sportbike--the last thing I needed to liberate from Fountain Court--after just witnessing exactly what happens when you trying to put a bike with a bad clutch line into first gear. I did it twice, because I didn't believe it the first time.

So then the party...I had a good time. Not sure if everyone else did...I just know that I made myself two flaming Dr Peppers and that all of my friends are cool. Oh yeah, this was the night before my buddy lowsided his Aprilia. Fuck, maybe I did write about this already. Well, anyway. There were no single girls there. Two friends from across the sound came, and they were both attractive and fun and except for the fact that they both had husbands/boyfriends, they were roughly the type of demographic we'd like to see more of around here. They also, I found out later, thought my friends were nerdy and left early because we were all too...whatever. I have no opinion on that. I'm pretty sure I'm the one who brought up LaTeX though. I don't know how, or why, all I know is that when I get a chance to bitch about why I think someone gave something a stupid name (like our fucking building at work!) all of the pleasure centers light up in my brain. And then, I guess, my buddy tipped his hand by trying to explain what TeX was to them. I don't know. My memories of all that are fuzzy and mostly second-hand. I should probably stop mentioning LaTeX around girls. Yeah. That'll be number two in my own version of "The Rules:"

2. Never talk about LaTeX around girls.

Do you have an opinion about #2? Fuck off. Oh and there is a #1...I just don't want to talk about it right now. Here's the moral of the story: we finally have critical mass for good parties. And whistler trips. And possibly ridiculous journeys on sportbikes. Oh, and:

3. Continue never playing Dungeon and Dragons. Fuck D&D. You know, there only two D&D players I every really liked: one was this guy Drumin, who dated Colleen's roomate who looked like Claire Danes, and two is a placeholder for any person in a conversation who plays D&D but doesn't mention it until after I start bitching about how stupid it is. Maybe this rule should be number 1.

Ironically I am still willing to play magic, because at neoquest, the magic players had fun personalities, and I don't actually care that much about that thing with the girl. Girls on OkCupid are super bitches; he knew what he was getting into. Did I write about my own OkCupid recent experience? Oh it never got published. It's a classic (but not horrific) tried-to-meet-a-girl-but-instead-got-guys story. Tell you what, I'll give you the first half:

Some girl on OKCupid was all about karaoke. Given my new affinity for these private-room karaoke clubs where you drunkenly play with karaoke machines, I figured I had an opening and messaged her something about I bless the RAAAAAINS down in AAAAAFRICAAAAA. We had a boring conversation about karaoke and I told her that the private room thing is the shiznet and hey, why don't I get some friends, and you get some friends, and we'll all go sing some Toto together?

I was proud of myself. I have single guy friends who like going out and doing fun things and don't live 30 miles away. I figured she had some lady friends, and we would instantly have a good time.

I talked to my guy friends. They were down. Then the entire operation fell apart. She had trouble getting some friends...I said if there's too few people lets switch it to happy hour...and then I found out that the one friend she was going to bring was a dude. She was going to bring guys to karaoke. I don't know what the fuck this girl was thinking; I figured the whole "I'll bring friends you bring friends" thing made it kind of obvious that her contribution to the group would be ladies. Did she really think it would be not weird to have a bunch of guys all singing songs to each other in a private karaoke room? I don't even know...anyway.

Wrong Again

2011-10-25T01:55:00.000-07:00

n is the number of variables. y is the number of seconds my algorithm took to solve 1000 problems with 4.24*n clauses. n^3 and n^2 are there to make me feel better because currently y happens to sit between them.

n	y	0.1n^3	0.1n^2
32	198	3276.8	102.4
40	366	6400	160
48	761	11059.2	230.4
56	1232	17561.6	313.6
64	2507	26214.4	409.6
80	7138	51200	640
96	18468	88473.6	921.6

I tried to find a "least squares for dummies" web page but instead got this calculator, according to which my function could be n^2, n^3, n^4, or exponential. Any of them can be made to fit the data.

What worries me is that my algorithm has been working on a problem of size n=150 for at least 36 hours and has not solved it yet. If you extrapolate 36 hours per problem to 1000 problems, that number does not fit well in my little table, so perhaps y will blow right past n^3.

[1] http://people.hofstra.edu/Stefan_Waner/newgraph/regressionframes.html

---------------------------

Yeah all that is what I would have written. Today I and a friend were bored at work so I asked him about least squares regression (I know, I know...) and we got into my description of "logarithmic number of exponential steps" and then he pointed out that it is not, in fact, cn*2^log(n) but actually more like cn*n^log(n). Turns out that is a big fucking difference. I believe that my algorithm is, or can be, polynomial time, but now I no longer have an upper bound. Are those figures in my table exponential? Could be. As I probably wrote already, you can fit any equation you want to data using least squares. SAT is a cruel mistress...the simplest of operations, like set intersection, can cause an explosion in the complexity of your representation of the problem.

In summary...I need to get a fucking life. Seriously I'm sitting in my bedroom on a tuesday night and I can't think of anything to do. I will probably just boot up my starcraft partition and play some games, idk.

Stopovers

2011-10-24T23:39:00.000-07:00

Slowly out of line and drifting closer in your sights

My penultimate wedding trip is in November. Penultimate at least of the ones scheduled. We'll see what happens. Told myself I would totally plan ahead this time. You'd think that after ten of these trips I'd have it down. Nope. Its in only 2 or 3 weeks. Fuck why is my little sister getting married already? I haven't even fully broken in my new motorcycle yet and she's already into the next stage of life. Everyone needs to slow the fuck down around here. I think I've met the guy like...twice. I guess thats what happens when...whatever.

So...yet another trip home, or whatever. Its high time I started adding some actual vacation time into my vacations. Sure, bumping around philly trying to chase down like 10 different groups of friends and trying to optimize my schedule for the most quality time and the fewest offended people is great and all but I wouldn't call it a vacation. When I think vacation I'm more thinking wake up in a beach house with people that don't annoy you.

I originally budgeted over a week for this trip, but the idea of living out of a suitcase for that long, putting around in some shitty ass rental car from quiet drink at a bar to yet another quiet drink at a bar seems too exhausting this time. Seriously, it seems like rental car companies specifically choose cars that no one wants to own. I was in a piece of shit Fiat last time. My mom loved it. Also an old lady stopped me outside Borders to ask about it. Horrible. Anyway.

I kind of want to bundle something else into this trip, something, preferably, that is somewhere in between Philly and Seattle so I don't have to be on a commercial jet that long. Still having to the deal with the fucking TSA though...I really hate that bullshit. Every time I go through security I point directly at their full-frontal-nudity cancer machine and say "I'm not going through that; get someone to feel me up" and they still give me this confused look like they don't know what I'm talking about. Really? A guy in blue gloves is about to play with my balls and you have to play this game with me to rub it in?

But...since I am stuck with this shit, lets make the most of it. Stop somewhere cool and do a mini-vacation on the way. Obviously, only places between Seattle and Philly will help. No need to make the damn airplane rides even longer, although I do wonder what its like to have a Mexican TSA agent play with your balls. If he talks Spanish to me I might not mind so much. Speaking of getting raped, stay out of Tennessee. Anyway.

Here is a list of possible mini destinations:

Vegas
New Orleans
Austin, TX
Chicago
New York City

Yeah, everywhere else is in California and would take me out of the way. Not sure what I would do in these places anyway...maybe just stay one night and try to find some couch surfers to hang out with?

In conclusion: fuck you John Pistole.

Today, in 3-SAT

2011-10-24T01:22:00.000-07:00

This paper:

On the Average Similarity Degree between Solutions of
Random k-SAT and Random CSPs

by

Ke Xu and Wei Li

claim that other papers which I'm not bothering to read have established the bounds of the phase transition factor at 3.145 to 4.602. What a pain in the ass. I am going to use 4.24 for now to get a emperical data to extrapolate the runtime complexity of my algorithm in the average case. This means, though, that in all this I am going to have to play with 2 variables when I eventually try to be thorough.

Lets see...for a problem with 64 variables...there are 64-choose-3, or 41,664 possible clauses.

How many problems are there which contain 4.24n or 271 clauses? So...41664 choose 271:

2072331229310765793377672466034020417636278749137269154995246883568702527021961119330338444155265251631068024493999124533647240936284157676458720837336901229107673520873559441276388455770161315227519330469504702375894948548792917160195998669181535033528022164704312214959828265810771630039781426010241744128982277487082137761437258200076747922608614240395600874853517856787979122329993359135296560199897886389786705354539414437639886905745049531129463397610857195300866636502701516169406583772872284149712200483699807594302353726301355389836944568555083818470495508270586692266585517132868094261950528874724887787195704874995733241769392124448648812676324946824216985434343034624394856095456349420769250043520

Here is a more manageable number:

2.whatever * 10 ^ 708

And here is the fun part. That number is wrong. I forgot about negated literals. Those are difficult to add in, but I think we can just multiply by 8. Damn I just got a craving to play descent 3. Anyway. So...

333,312 possible clauses. Damn! Did I do this right?

2.4... * 10 ^ 953

Obviously saying that every variable must be represented will reduce that space. Just thinking about calculating that is giving me a headache.

One variable missing

So you really have n = 63. 63 choose 3 = 39711. (64 3)-(63 3) = 1953. But there is one for each variable! So its 64*((64 3)-(63 3)) = 124992 possible clauses that will be omitted...but not necessarily at the same time. Shit.

If one variable is missing, you're down 1953 clauses and have only 331359. How many problems exist for that variable missing? (331359 choose 271) = 4.97... * 10^952. And there are n of those cases. And that is just when only one variable is missing.

Oh I did this wrong. If you multiply 64 * (331359 choose 271) you get 3.18 * 10 ^ 954. That is greater than the total number of possible problems I previously calculated.

It is probably because I failed to account for the times when more than one variable may be missing...I'm double counting most of the instances.

Also, I think I failed to account for the negated literals of the missing variable. Yeah. The math in this section is basically wrong.

Back to formula

So, now, actually, I just want to know how many there are.

((n choose 3) choose 4.24n)

((32 choose 3) choose 135) = 2.58105...*10^267.

((16 choose 3) choose 67) = hey it has a name!

6 octovigintillio. Who bothers naming 10^80-ish? Does that really come up a lot?

Anyway:

6022078479523219491126506063987820512839398152713862982670624142131867189974969798288000

I dont think that will fit in a long. Wait!!! We can cheat more. We can lower the factor as well. Lets use 3.1 instead.

12 variables, and 3.1*12=37 clauses leads to:

1370125002560566889654596797962961206718960

Oh, yeah, a tredecillian.

I can generate one million of those problems in 281s. Ok thats not happening, unless my constraints for problem generation reeeeally make a difference.

Oh shit, I did the math wrong again. It needs to be this formula:

(((n choose 3)*8) choose 4.24n)

Keep forgetting about those damn negated literals.

In Summary

1) I am bad at math.

2) Every time I think about testing one of these algorithms it always devolves into trying to calculate the total possible number of problems you could have for a given number of variables.

3) I really need to get over the fact that a thousand or a million sample problems does not constitute a thorough representation of the problem space.

4) Lets go with the following generation parameters for n, m and count:

n= 32,48,64,80,96,112,128
m=4.24n
count=1000

Problems of size 125 take hours to complete, but I can in theory manage 500 or 1000 many ec2 instances. Actually I could do more like 200 instances...idk. Anyway. This should be enough datapoints to see if the curve looks polynomial.

Least Squares Calculator

Low Side

2011-10-21T02:35:00.000-07:00

What are the chances that two people would both have a rare make of sportbike? I don't know, but it seems low to me. A buddy of mine also got an Aprilia: a Tuono. I got my Falco fixed. We went riding along with a third friend who brought a vstrom...some kind of dual sport. There is an on ramp to the highway right in front of my place, so when we started I hit it and took off. The other two guys were not that interested in riding as fast as I wanted to, but it was still awesome.

We got out of Seattle and started hitting the twistys. All of a sudden, our friend who'd seemed shy on the highway seemed more comfortable hitting the turns fast. I was impressed. I'm still getting used to the handling of my bike, and have put off installing the second seat for that reason. I took one turn a hair too fast, learned my lesson, and took it easy. We hit one turn that had a 20 m.p.h. warning sign on it which ended up being super wide and easy. Then we hit a series of turns with no signs, that were super tight. Technical, you could say. Technical is the synonym of "difficult" that makes you sound like you know what you're talking about. Try it sometime. "Yeah, that haircut I did was really technical." Anyway. Flashback.

I was on my old bike, Katie the Kawasaki, heading west on 422 when I saw one blue sports car and a white sports car doing something stupid on the highway. I don't remember much about how it started, but I think the blue one tried to pass the white one, and then the white one pulled a total and unecessary asshole move that caused the blue car to lose control. It spun out directly in front of me. The only good memory I have of that event is being on my bike and watching this blue car spin around its vertical axis in the middle of a highway. Keep in mind that since I was on a bike, one tiny little nick from her tailspin could have easily ended my career as a human being. There was a truck to my right, which pulled over enough to give me room so I didn't hit the blue car. All three of us, the truck, me, and the blue car pulled over. The white car was gone. Probably some idiot in high school who wrongly thought he was a badass. The driver of the blue car turned out to be some girl. I was impressed. I liked the way she drove. I wanted to offer to buy her lunch at a nearby Wendy's so she could calm her nerves while I tried to get her number, but I was pretty shy back then and I think she might have been jailbait anyway. I wrote a Road Ninja story about it short enough to fit inside an AOL Instant Messenger "Away Message" and left it at that. The point of this story is the incredible surreal feeling I remember as I watched her car spin out directly in front of me, because I was watching something from an over-the-top movie happen in real life and without arena walls or even a real windshield.

I had the same feeling when I came around the unmarked, suprisingly tight turn and saw my friend with the Tuono rolling on the ground behind his bike. The road went to the right. His bike slid straight through the oncoming lane and he was following it. I remember not being afraid for him at all--must have been obvious that it wasn't a serious wreck (although if a car had been in the other lane I would be writing about his funeral). My chief concern was the limited visibility and the cars that would be coming around. I stopped my bike near the centerline and looked around, trying to figure out a place to sit where I would be able to wave off cars in time. Then I realized that my friend was completely in one of the lanes, and that I was unecessarily endangering myself, so I found a spot on the shoulder where I could still cover oncoming cars in the lane he was in. He got the bike up, I turned around and parked nearby and eventually our friend who was in the lead realized he was alone and came back, and we had three bikes huddled against the guardrail of a very small shoulder.

Turns out, he took the turn too fast (obivously) which by the way accounts for more than 50% of motorcycle accidents. He said he had it leaned all the way down to the peg, and then his food caught on the road or something, and then he went down. This type of accident is called a low side, where you just kind of go down to the ground, and is the better of the two accidents.

We were surprised at how well the bike stood up. My buddy saw sparks, but aside from cosmetic damage the only real problem we could see was the rear brake lever was twisted beyond operation. Fortunately, it was disabled in the off position. My buddy has chest armor but nothing but jeans down below. It was mostly scrapes with him, except that the thumb on his clutch hand was injured too much to ride. My buddy has some kind of insurance policy where they tow his bike for free. We discovered that insurance policy is useless on a sunday afternoon when no one in the office picks up the phone. Still, because he had this insurance policy, he was unwilling to pay to have his bike towed. Suddenly we had an interesting planning problem: three motorcycles to move and only two to do it. To make things interesting, the guy with the injured hand was heavier than both of us by at least 100 pounds, so putting him in the girl's seat* on either bike was not an option. We ended up just summoning a car. I rode my bike home, and then I rode his.

His bike rode a lot different. The clutch engaged fast, it was more powerful, and the steering felt completely different, and it was more of an upright than a sportbike. I also had no rear brake. All of that led to enough discomfort to make me take the turns slower than my buddy was in his car. Yeah...turns out you only need one good hand to drive something with four wheels. Anyway. As soon as we hit the highway I realized my chin strap was unsnapped. We were so excited about the bike not being stolen despite being left on the side of the road for two hours, and I was so concerned about getting hypothermia from the chill in the air if we took too long, that I didn't even strap my helmet on before rolling out. I discovered this while we were on the highway. So here I was with no armor and I probably wouldn't even keep my helmet on if I high-sided. I tried to do it one handed, but it turns out motorcycle helmet straps are very different than bras. My buddy was in front of me in his car. I had no easy way to signal him that we needed to pull over, and none of the spots I saw were good enough for me to get him to pull over in time. Eventually he put his blinker on to take the exit for an even bigger highway, and I figured it was my last option. I hit the throttle and bounced around, cutting him of and pulling over. Unfortunately I still couldn't get my chin strap on because I couldn't get the bike into neutral to take my hand off the clutch. I waved and tapped my helmet which I've heard is normally a warning for cops, but he got the idea that something was wrong with my helmet and stayed in his car. I then fought with the stupid bike's transmission. I let the clutch out a hair to engage first gear briefly, and then it finally let me switch to neutral. Then we were good to go. By the end of the day I was exhausted, and it took a while to warm up again, but I had plans with a lady friend so I just took a nap in my computer chair and turned the heat up in my car on my way to get her.

Riding with friends was awesome. I'd like to do it again, preferably with a crew that is interested in riding faster. The whole day I don't think I ever broke out of fourth gear.

Lots of people who ride sportbikes wrongly think they are badass because they do showy but useless stunts such as wheelies and stoppies. I don't know if they would recognize true skill if they saw it, because it is not as flashy. Something to keep in mind if you ever run from cops: you may have only gotten away because they let you go.

In other news, I still don't have a good plan for testing my 3-SAT algorithm, but I have been methodically verifying that every community-made Arch linux image for EC2 is defective in some way. This makes me sad because I like Arch, even though the thing that make me fall in love with it was the fact that it let me use the real Sun version of Java which Oracle has ironically withdrawn support for. I am going to switch to the example EC2 image that Amazon provides for new developers. I'll tell you one secret about Amazon: their examples always work.

*technically, (and definitely in a perfect world,) both seats on a motorcycle are for girls. The reason I call the back one the girl's seat, though, is because no guy wants to be there.

My State of SAT

2011-10-12T22:27:00.000-07:00

Status. This is where we are. Still don't have a girlfriend. Still don't really believe that my algorithm is polynomial for all cases of SAT. Just got my motorcycle back from the shop. And my apartment is a mess but I'm trying to have a party on saturday.

The algorithm still doesn't have a name. I have been calling--its codename is angel, because thats what I happened to name the file, but the project also has files named things like Princess and Dutchess. And it is actually called angel2, because angel() turned out to be super inefficient. So...whatever.

The algorithm definitely runs in polynomial time for a non-empty subset of 3-SAT problems, and it is definitely correct for all of the SATLIB problems I tried it on, which is everything size 75 and under. Yeah, I know, not that impressive, but I get really bored sitting around waiting for it, and I can't reboot into my starcraft partition* while my computer is churning away.

It is definitely not linear or sub-linear (sorry for the typo last time). It has a runtime that rises quickly enough to make 125-variable problems take too long for my attention span.

Next: Math vs Science. My definition of math is that it is universal and irrefutable, like abstract geometry and...lets skip my opinions on math vs science. Anyway, since I don't understand exactly why my algorithm is working and only have a fuzzy idea. Trying to prove that it both a) solves all 3-sat instances and b) is polynomial-time for all 3-sat instances would be difficult, time consuming, and ultimately a waste of time in the likely event that I prove myself wrong, or, even worse, I never prove myself wrong and it becomes an unending time sink.

Instead, lets try a different direction. I know that if I made a big "HEY GUYS I SOLVED P=NP" anouncement like all the other tools, people--well in reality they would laugh and ignore me but in theoretical land someone would read my paper that took forever to write because I used LaTeX and then send/publish an instance of 3-sat that breaks my algorithm. Why don't I just try to find such an instace myself? My algorithm is hardcoded to halt with a result of "EPIC FAIL" if it exceeds what I think are polynomial bounds. If I can find an instance that causes it to do that, game over.

I have a rough idea of which values of n (number of variables) and m (number of clauses) are the most likely to break it; the self-imposted polynomial safetys are based on log_2(n), so for all problems with n equal to exponents of 2, this safety feature will be the least lenient. This is unfortunate, though, because n=32 is a waste of time (the algorithm solves it before getting to the interesting part) and n=128 takes like more than an hour, leaving n=64 the only one I feel like watching. Admittely, for all I talk about how boring it is to watch, I should be getting a server that I can leave running. That will happen as soon as I find the moving box that contains the hard drive with my AWS keys on them. There is also a USB key...but that is also in a box. Anyway.

Onto m (number of clauses). A lot of google hits I'm getting for hard 3-sat problems all want to talk about this phase transition that happens around 4.24 (that is, where m = n * 4.24) or maybe 4.6 or some other number depending on the paper. People are interested in this value because when you take random samples of instances, most of them are satisfiable with a factor < 4.24 and most are unsatisfiable with a factor > 4.24 and right around 4.24, its like, totally up for grabs. Many papers have insisted that the hardest problems are at 4.24 (at least for DPLL and WALKSAT). This conflicts with my own test data. In fact, I belive that, for a given n, the hardest ones are unsatisfiable instances with the lowest factor possible and in which every variable is represented by at least one literal (otherwise, you are basically not using variables and it is technically a smaller problem). While I was instrumenting my code for batch testing, I ran some tests. Can you insert tables in this thing? Hm I can insert a picture, a video, or something called a jump break. ::sigh:: oh google, why can't you work kinda like Evan's blog but different in the exact way I'm picturing in my head but am too lazy to code?

Each "test" was a batch of 300 problems each with size n=64. I varied the factor x, where m=x*n, and measured the entire user/kernel (not wall clock) time it took to measure the entire batch of 300. Heh heh. 300. Didn't even think of that until now. That's awesome. Yes, it was just these three hundred clauses, the honor guard of the expression false, which defended the free world from the Persians, and from idiots on the internet who argue which inherently wrong wall-clock-time method should be used to measure code, all of which would generate shitty results when they get bored and start watching The Guild during their test because they don't understand why Felicia Day is so popular. Yes...these three clauses. Oh heroic (v_69, v_42, !v_42)...you were the first to go!

Anyway.

Oh yeah, initial test results. Fuck I wish I got paid to do this.

factor (# satisfiable, # unsatisfiable), time in seconds
2.9 (0,300) 112s
2.8 (0,300) 128s
2.7 (1,299) 141s
2.6 (oops) 167s
2.5 (14,286) 195s
2.4 (42,258) 238s
2.3 (77,223) 265s
2.2 (139,161) 314s
2.1 (202,98) 272s
2.0 (261,39) 180s

I believe that unsatisfiable instances with fewer clauses are more difficult to solve, and I believe that satisfiable instances are either always easier to solve than unsat ones, or simply easier to solve when m/n is less than 4.24. Therefore I expected to see the time continue to increase and then start to decrease, which my single trial of incredibly tiny sample size does show.

I'm not ashamed that I researched in a vacuum (did not read much of other people's work) because I was doing this for fun and the part I enjoyed was inventing an algorithm on my own, however, now the vacuum part is coming back to bite me in the ass. I can't read the super technical papers because understanding them depends on understanding all the papers they depend on (I mean, cite...) and none of the easy ones say anything terribly interesting. And I think I'm reading drafts. We have vocational schools that teach you how to cut hair or fix motorbikes. Why can't there be one that covers all of the existing research on NP-Completeless focusing exclusively on 3-SAT and not even spending much time on k-SAT?

What are my next moves? Realistically, I need to get an EC2 server (or some other computer than can run 24/7, but EC2 instances are better because it should always be the same hardware). I need to come up with a thing to measure...either counts of a particular operation, or the sizes of sets or something, so I can stop relying on timing, which is machine dependant.

Next then, I supposed whatever I do will involve running shit-ton of 3-sat instances. The number of possible instances for given values of n and m I believe is something like (n^3)!/( m!(n^3 - m!), where n^3 is way higher than m (not >> higher, just way higher). How many should I run? Enough to convince me, and other people, that it is worth the time to analyze this thing.

First off, what I've seen of solvable 3-sat instance generation is pathetic. People pick a solution and then generate clauses that don't violate the solution. There are some tricks people have done to make this process suck less, but it is basically worthless, especially given my hard-to-describe learnings that I...learned while staring at a hard-to-explain multi-dimensional reduction of 3-SAT constructed out of soap and bandaid boxes from 7-11. Those corners man...the corners killed me.

If you are testing an algorithm I don't understand why you can't just generate a bunch of instances, and then see which ones are SAT ? Once you have an alleged solution, its polynomial time...possibily even linear time to test the solution. Well, anyway, testing SAT instances is out for now. Besides, if we could prove than an algorithm can solve all UNSAT instances in polynomial time, it doesnt matter how long SAT instances take. SAT instances can take until the end of this and any other unverse for all I care; if you know that UNSAT is polynomial time, just stop your algorithm after it has exceeded polynomial time and declare the instance SAT. In fact, once you do that, you can start manipulating the problem (start picking values for variables) and then asking your algorithm if it is still SAT. Combine a polynomial number of such manipulations with your polynomial algorithm and now you have a polynomial algorithm to give you the solution for SAT instances. Wow I think what I just wrote could be turned into a proof. Anyway.

UNSAT. Verifying that an instance is UNSAT may be difficult if you don't feel like printing out a minimal proof tree (I really don't). However, I believe it is far easier to prove that my algorithm is correct than it is to prove why the hell it runs in polynomial time, so without loss of generality, lets assume that I have a girlfriend...oh that didn't work. Fine then lets assume that my algorithm is correct. I'll make it print out the proof later.

Here are some ideas about how to constrain the random samples to be as difficult as possible:

no tautologies, clauses with both a literal and its negation
no duplicate clauses
does not contain a "trivially unsat cluster" -- the group of eight possible distinct clauses over the same three variables
every(both) literal of every variable is expressed in at least one clause

The number of clauses, m, is also a constraint, but whether we choose a single value or use a distribution is its own topic. Given my constraints, what is the smallest value of m/n for which UNSAT instances exist? Does this ratio itself change as n grows? Has someone already done this in a paper that I haven't yet found with google? Such an instance may not be the most difficult, but it would be the most...interesting. For now.

I could set up a search for such instance, and be found asleep at my desk bathed in the monitor light of a flickering screen with headphones blaring by a troupe of fellow associates asking me for an illegal and oddly shaped diskette, whom I follow to a club because the girl has a tattoo of a white rabbit.

Or I could just make some pretty graphs.

Ooh...here is another intersting test: start with an empty set. Randomly pick a clause based on n variables, add it to the set, and run angel2 on it. Add another clause and run angel2 on it again. Repeat by adding 1 randomly selected clause and running angel again until you get UNSAT. Ok what would this accomplish...I'm not sure. Well, actually you could continue adding clauses randomly until you've added all clauses, and record how long each instance takes to solve. Then you would have a pretty graph! You could turn this into sort of an exhaustive search...but you might be better off naming every gluon in the universe. I have a pet gluon. His name is Andy. My preivous pet gluon Bernard ran off with some slutty quark and I never saw him again.

*I've gotten the impression that Microsoft employees do not appreciate me calling it that. The truth hurts.

Fuck the Ducks

2011-10-11T12:01:00.001-07:00

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Motorcyclist-struck-by-Ride-the-Ducks-vehicle-2212073.php

Grooveshark Fail

2011-10-10T19:12:00.000-07:00

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=59134

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners_Guide#Configure_the_audio_card_with_alsamixer

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Allow_multiple_programs_to_play_sound_at_once#Troubleshooting

# pacman -S pulseaudio-alsa

sudo pacman -S lib32-libpulse
 sudo pacman -S lib32-alsa-plugins

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio#Backend_Configuration

So...

2011-10-09T22:46:00.000-07:00

I really just wanted to write this down somewhere:

1000 instances of n=64 takes up 7.9M.

So 1 million would take up about 7.71G.

And a million is just a tiny ass drop in the bucket.

Notes (or, how do I generate difficult instances of 3-sat?):

According to The State of SAT by Henry Kautz and Bart Selman, a 700 variable problem took a couple months of compute time back in...early 2000s? Who doesn't date a paper? This must be a draft.

Two existing (and boring) algorithms for SAT are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WalkSAT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DPLL_algorithm

Problems arising from creating proof trees mentioned in The State of SAT give me hope--modifying my algorithm to produce the proof trees as it runs would be simple if I cared to do it, although the proof trees would not be minimal.

Ok...most of the rest of the paper is boring. Looks like everyone thinks P != NP.

Oooh, finally, something about hard instance generation:

http://www.is.titech.ac.jp/~watanabe/gensat/

Shit. Dead links. Well, at least I know "something about a factorization problem."

Here is Hard Instances for 3-SAT by idk-who in an atrocias ps file intended for slides. Still more people thinking hard is simply m=n*f

Perhaps what I should really do is measure running time affected by the constant factor X, where m=Xn. Pretty graphs! Yay!

Also checked out "Algorithsm for Random 3-SAT" by Abraham D. Flaxman, Microsoft Research. It pointed me to Where the Really Hard Problems Are.

Princess Leia

2011-10-08T19:00:00.000-07:00

Guess I'm a dork for writing this down, but anyway...apparently there is a thing called Geek Girl Con going on. A lady friend got me to go with her. It was nearly half dudes.

This hot girl walked by twice wearing an awesome Leia costume (hairbuns, not bikini) and it had like a slit going up to her thigh. The first time we made eye contact and I saw her smile and glance away. What I instinctively read told me to avoid making a pass. Still had this mindset...geekdom...girls drowning in men...hate being approached...and she's like one of two hot ones within the entire acre. My friend thought differently though, and even told me I should chase after her, which is kind of an anathema to me. By the time she had me convinced to like, run after Leia and ask her out by giving her my nonexistent business card, she was gone.

She said a lot of things that contradict the conventional wisdom. Most people say never, ever give a girl your number (or card) because you should always get theirs, for reasons I don't care about. I think I'm going to try it, though, at least with girls I wouldn't otherwise talk to. Like a little drive by "hey I like your costume I'd love to hang out some time" or whatever my friend told me to say. Finding the words to use is going to be difficult because what I'm actually saying is "you're hot and you're dressed like Leia; I want to be on top of you." I'd prefer to use those exact words but after hearing what every female friend has said, plus a touch of experience...I know I can't.

Another interesting thing my friend told me is that in all the years of being what I say is the only female Magic The Gathering player (note: ladies, I do not play this game. I am available for lame OKCupid dates with bitchy girls), she was only hit on 5 times. I find that strange. After all the stories of the insane attention geek girls get, stories of girls playing male characters and hiding their gender, how could one of them only get asked out 5 times in a matter of years? And she's not ugly either. Is it possible that despite showering them with unwanted attention, most of the guys don't go all the way towards making a move? I don't know.

I just know that normally, when I think about hitting on a hot girl, I think of all the guys that have come before me with their pathetic attempts and shudder in disgust at the very idea that I will be counted among them. Going after a girl like that makes me imagine a pile of slimy dogs covered in mud and shit, slithering over one another as they try to reach a single piece of steak that is dangling out of their reach. I know that has been true in some places...my dance partner Kristal (yeah, with a fucking K...damn I wanted her) got hit on like every week at the dance studio. I'm not even kidding. She was like a level 10 Approach-discourager. She was so good at shooting down guys she made the Red Baron look like a rookie.

Perhaps its different in the geekier places of the world? Perhaps I need to choose a new way of thinking about it. And order business cards. I've always prefered to meet girls the slow way...girls on the same team, with the same band, in the same class, drinking at the same parties or with the same friends. Approaching cold seems like all the work and none of the fun, but I'm going to try it. Like really try it. Like right now I could...well my apartment is a mess (like there is not really anywhere to sit...or stand), but I could at least be getting a drink with Leia if I had not hesitated. That's all the motivation I need for next time.

3 to the S to the A to the T, bitch

2011-10-08T02:46:00.000-07:00

The move was horrific, and I wrote page of notes of things I wanted to mention in what I thought would be an epic post. Too bad I'm too lazy to write an epic post. It was bad, though. Like so bad I'm kind of surprised all of my stuff even made it to the new place. Anyway.

3-SAT. Stop reading if you don't have some kind of math degree. I mean, sure, you're welcome to continue, but don't blame me if you don't understand something and don't go thinking that I'm a big fucking nerd just because I can't stop trying to solve the biggest math problem in computer science.

I was bored at work one day...perhaps one day last...was it in a meeting? I don't know. I was just...sitting around. Got another idea for 3 sat. I was inspired by some random snippet I read on the web about how solving NP-Completeness would probably mean solving NP-Hardness, because you could just solve a polynomial number of NP-Complete problems in order to solve the NP-Hard one. I don't really care about that; NP-Hard can go fuck itself. But it did lead to an interesting idea.

It was an idea that I pursued for at least two weeks, running into road blocks, coming up in new ideas...until I had enough of an idea to turn into code. Then I kept daydreaming about it at work and going home to tweak it at night.

Aaaand it didn't work. I tried over and over to make it work but I just couldn't get it to polynomial time. In fact, some of my ideas for making it work better actually made it worse...far worse. Like doing a polynomial number of reductions to 2-sat. That bombed. Then, while I was just messing around, I tried something that should not have worked at all, and it solved 3-sat faster than anything I've ever tried before.

I never did come up with a polynomial method of solving it...but I do appear to have invented an exponential operation that gets run a polynomial number of times. Something like O(2^(log(n))-ish*. I have no idea why it works. It just does.

I've begun spot-checking the algorithm against a few instances in satlib but my heart is not really in it. This is the high part of a 3-sat addiction, the part where I daydream about being famous and money and selling t-shirts that say "P=NP" on them. What comes next is the moment I crash and realize my algorithm cannot solve all instances of 3-sat. I hate that part. It is the exact same feeling as hooking up with an amazing girl you want to keep and then getting a text about just being friends.

I suppose next up is more testing. Instances with 125 variables are sort of right on the edge of my attention span. Maybe I will spin off a map reduce job to solve every problem in satlib. Maybe write a generator; I don't know. The problem space is too enormous, but maybe I will happen to generate an instance that will break my algorithm. Right now it is programmed to print "FAIL" if it is unable to solve an instance before using up all log(n) of operations that I've alotted it.

*have not thoroughly analyzed the runtime yet...probably more like O(2^log(n) * n^c) or something.

Inspiration

2011-10-08T00:51:00.001-07:00

-Lonely Island Michael Bolton / Jack Sparrow song
-Jack Black singing Rose on the Grey as a prank at American Idol
-that random picture that I probably lost

todo

2011-10-04T13:24:00.001-07:00

write about horrific move

tron costume:

http://ellumiglow.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-to-make-your-own-tron-costume-made.html

Imagine

2011-09-28T11:45:00.000-07:00

Imagine you live in that weird country I read about this one time where monkeys are sacred and you can't shoot them and they know it and harass people. Now imagine you live there, and every day you get up, a monkey slaps you in the face. You shoo it off, but every chance it gets it kicks you or slaps you in the face or steals your food. Every fucking day. You're just going about your work, and the monkey pops out and slaps you in the face. You try to pick some fruit, or whatever. Slap in the face. Walking on the road. Monkey slaps you in the face. You stack some barrels. Monkey knocks them over and slaps you in the face. You try to stack the barrels again and he gets a quick slap in because you weren't careful.

Now imagine you get fed up. You stick a grenade in an apple, toss it to the monkey, and watch as he blows his head off trying to eat it. You look around, at the monkey guts all over your yard. You close your eyes and relax, taking a deep breath. No one slaps you in the face.

THAT is what it feels like to disable Firefox's retarded gay-ass clipboard URL bullshit with the middle mouse.

about:config, set middlemouse.contentLoadURL to false.

Just wanted to write a quick little "fuck you" to the developers that thought that antifeature would be useful.

::sigh::

Wait you guys start over I missed the beginning

2011-09-27T10:23:00.000-07:00

It is 10:04 Seattle time now. Sometime in the last 20 minutes there was a fight between a cyclist and a driver and I missed the beginning!

I had just reached the corner of Denny and some other street when I noticed across the way a cyclist in a fight with a guy in a red car. The driver side door was open and they were really going at it. The red car was in front of a line waiting at the light. The cyclist was between him and the center median. The driver was still in his seat; I think he still had his belt on. There was a girl in the passenger side. At first I wanted to run over there and pull the cyclist off but I was on the other side of 4 lanes of traffic, and I was wearing my backpack with my work laptop. The cyclist was fucking furious.

Then the cyclist broke off and rode away. Some lady honked and pointed at the guy in the red car and said something like "I got your number!" Oh also the guy in the red car like couldn't start it, but that doesn't seem relevant. That is when I started to wonder...why would a cyclist be that pissed, and why was the guys door open if he still had his belt on? Given all the clues I'm beginning to think the guy in the red car doored the cyclist, which would mean he deserves much more of a beatdown than he got. I may never know exactly what happened, unless a police report is filed and I can get access to it. Suffice to say I spend the rest of my communite wondering how to best assault a person in a car.

Punching doesn't seem like a great idea...too hard to get a good shot in through that opening. I think the best option is to, when on a bicycle or motorcycles, carry a can of mace on your belt. If you get doored and survive, you can spray it right inside the car. That should fuck up everything inside without too much blowback in your face, which hopefully will still be protected by your helmet.

What do you guys think?

I Learned Something Today

2011-09-23T01:58:00.000-07:00

Today I learned what it was I said in the Speakeasy. Holy shit dude. Not good. So that explains a lot.

[fiction] The Book of Lost Rides: A Different Breed

2011-09-17T02:26:00.000-07:00

Maybe I'm a different breed
Maybe I'm not listening
So blame it on my ADD baby

Four men sat at a poker table, where once eight men had smoked and sung. Two lines of bottles led from the back door to the table, perfectly arranged longnecks except for the end of one line, where Jason had run out of Coronas and used something that came it red glass instead. Biff watched him now. Jason still gripped his cigarrette the same, but he had a different look about him otherwise. Glassy eyes. His muscles had fattened up and were alot rounder now. The edges of his frame had been smoothed out. Biff knew the man spend more time fucking his wife than he did at the gym.

"So there I was," Jason was saying, "with one hand on the wheel, and the other one is broken but I'm still trying to count forward from her birthday--"

"Why didn't you just subtract--" someone started. Every one else was laughing.

"No! Shut up. So it fucking hurts like hell when I move each finger, but I keep doing it. All the way to eight--"

"Fifteen?"

"Eighteen, and fuck you. Yeah. And then I saw her fucking...shoe. Bigass red high heel--just one--is sitting there on the floor of the passenger side."

"You went all the way back?"

"I sure as hell wasn't going to see her after that night," said Jason, "so you're damn right I went back. And that was when I decided high school prom wasn't for me." Jason spoke as if he was rejecting a flavor or ice cream.

Dave fell out of his seat laughing. Biff leaned over and peeked at his cards.

"I fold," said Biff. He stood up. The others followed suit, dropping their cards. It was late. Biff looked around. Close to thirty people were sleeping, huddled with blankets on chairs and couches and other soft surfaces. Biff remembered when the parties had been hundreds of people, and most of them slept it off in a puddle of their own vomit.

Biff and Jason walked around the yard for a bit, finishing their cigarettes. They stopped at the kiddie pool. It was the closest thing to a pool or a scenic view that they could stop and look at while they talked.

"Is this water or ky jelly?" asked Biff.

"I don't...well definitely don't drink it. You shouldn't touch it either. Or breathe much...in fact it might catch fire if..." Jason tossed the last of is cig in the pool and the the two men seemed almost disappointed that it didn't explode in their faces.

"Jason I need you to do something for me. There's a number of items all over Lee's garage that would make Sheriff Raynor cream in his pants if he caught us with it. I need you to put it in storage."

"You got it boss. You know its been five years and everybody is still talking about that stunt you pulled with the tractor trailer," said Jason.

"Which one?"

"Exactly. You miss it, don't you?"

"Miss it? I never stopped, Jason."

"How can you keep going like that? Fuck if I stay up two nights in a row these days my ears start ringing, and thats not just from Betsy yelling at me. We're getting old, big dog."

Biff took one last drag and tossed his firestick into the kiddie pool. "I can't help it. And I don't have a girl that needs to be kept warm."

"I saw a couple earlier tonight. Don't know what happened to them..."

"One went home before midnight, and the other is passed out under your coffee table."

"That was pretty specific."

"Yeah."

"You know they were pretty hot. Like any of the old dogs would have cut off a finger to take one of them home."

Biff shrugged. "I guess I'm a different breed." Biff pulled out another cigarette and lit it. The flame from his lighter danced around the end of it like a drunk ballerina.

"That you are my friend. Are you staying over? You got first dibs on the den douch."

Biff shook his head.

"Betsy made it up for you. You know she's gonna give me hell if you don't sleep in it."

Biff shrugged.

Betsy caught him on his way out. "Really Biff? You can't just stay for a night? What it my house not good enough for you?"

"I'll just end up staring at your ceiling all night."

"I have I nice ceiling! We picked out the tile from Home-"

"I have a nicer car." Biff slapped her ass as he walked by. "Make him work for it tonight."

Betsy blushed.

Outside, Biff was parked in two deep. They were American made. Old. Strong frame. It made it easy for Biff to do what he was about to do. He would have felt guilty putting the squeeze on some delicate little Japanese rice burner. Biff got in his car and started the engine. The lights flooded Jason's house with light. Biff could feel the rumbling of the engine through his seat. It calmed his nerves.

Biff backed up, slow, steady. He had to go slow enough to avoid denting the bumpers, and that required grinding the clutch a bit. Biff blew a kiss at the dashboard and whispered an apology. Then he turned behind him and watched the cars he was displacing.

If a cop had seen it...well, lets just say no one saw it happen. A certain few people just found their cars the next morning to be a bit dented and in a very different place than they'd left them.

Biff hit the highway and tucked a pillow to is left, to keep his face away from the cold glass. He turned on the radio softly. A good jazz station was playing. Biff sat back and let his mind wander. He eye lids grew heavy. This was the only way he slept nowadays. Soon Biff was out. His car drived over the solid yellow lines for a spell, like it was swaying to the music on its own.

Bait and Switch will Never Die

2011-09-11T20:03:00.000-07:00

I have been sick all weekend. No real symptoms...just an intense fever and a bit of nausea. Mostly been watching Mad Men, which is fun to watch but doesn't seem to have a point. Then I felt a little better today and thought I would try out Firefall, some kind of massive online FPS. I signed up to be in the Beta while I was at Pax. At least, that's what I thought I did.

What actually happened, is that I was standing at the enourmous Firefall like multi-booth with this girl that is hooking up with one of my friends when one of the booth guys walked over and asked if I wanted to be in the Beta for Firefall, and handed me a tablet to give them my email address. Then instead of turning to the girl next to me, he made a big deal of something about how he was so sorry--he shouldn't have assumed I would be the only one of us signing up for the Firefall Beta (shouldn't have given me the tablet first...blah blah blah standard pathetic geek mysogynistic penance). This girl was annoyed and signed up for the Beta. I guarantee she has no interest in playing the Firefall Beta.

Turns out that doesn't matter. Have you caught on yet? Lets replay a bit. He asked if I wanted to play the Firefall Beta, and then I gave him my email address. That was the transaction. He didn't say I would be in the Beta. I wrongly inferred that I was trading my email for a spot in the beta. That was the bait. What I actually got by giving up my email address was an account on their message boards, and advertising emails. That's the switch.

Its a bit humbling to be the one getting fooled like that, but seriously, who does that? "Would you like to be in the beta? Give me your email" seems pretty clear. Kind of like "would you like another PB&J sandwich? Give me your plate." I think its reasonable to be surprised if your plate comes back with a stack of advertising.

I used to feel some kind of self-righteous rage about this kind of thing but now it just seems typical. I'm only interested in the cleverness of it. Think about how that worked. I need to go out to a bar and try that. "Hello would you like a million dollars?...Give me your number...What?? I bought a lottery ticket in your name, what did you think was going to happen?"

Damnit

2011-09-08T22:27:00.000-07:00

Wait, why do we have so many damn dolls in here?

--Archer

I got all entrepreneurial and thought I would make and sell some Lego mosaics of the Firefox logo but some guy beat me to it. Ass.

While we're at it, just to catch you up to speed: some guy also did a Lego model of Serenity (the Firefly class spaceship that starred in a tv show of the same name) only he used the wrong scale and did a crappy job of it so I'm not linking that one.

My next project, I guess, will be to use some glowing wire I found on some hardware girl's website to turn a suit of motorcycle armor into a tron suit. I don't care if someone has done this before; it will look awesome and increase my safety and I will be able to turn it off and become a normal person whenever the hell I want.

[Edit]
This might be a good way to meet people:

http://www.grubwithus.com/

In Restless Dreams I Walked Alone

2011-09-06T23:26:00.000-07:00

I like to monitor my blogging stats page with vigilance as much as the next self-absorbed writer. Sometimes one of those "hits"--like maybe a random guy whose google search for Ubuntu or Legos bumped into something I wrote--can satiate the need for human interaction and saves me from having to pick up the phone and call someone. For this reason, when I tell you that readership has been dropping off and no one seemed to read this anymore, you should know that I at least got that conclusion from a pretty graph. Turns out the pretty graph is dead wrong. Not only do my friends still read this but they even read the fiction posts, which google claims no one reads. Maybe Mr. big search engine just doesn't like my writing.

I was going to write a fake ghost story that looks like it is supposed to be scary, like with a monster ghost, until the end when the uncle of the protagonisst, a dead motorcyclist, shows up and not only beats the shit out of the monster ghost but also dismembers the monster ghost, breaks its back, rips off its head, and then pulls out the monster ghost's entrails and sets them on...on ghostfire. Then the dead motorcyclist points at the protagonist and winks and says "here's looking at you kid" (and hopefully the audience doesn't read too much into the casablanca reference...maybe it will be a dead boyfriend instead of uncle) and the last line of the story is something like "this is what I think of ghost stories." But all that sounded too similar to a story I already wrote so I didn't bother.

Speaking of stories, Game of Thrones helped me get through the flights to philly. Did I peak your interest? NED STARK DIES. You obviously don't know who that is so just trust that I've ruined it for you. Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy the book, however the author did that gayass thing where they have like 7 separate plot lines all going at once, so every chapter is a cliffhanger because they switch plot lines immediately after anything interesting happens. Those of you with literary taste might remember that The Lord of the Rings did not need to abuse this base writing trick. It had like, two plot lines, at the most. Also, the guy writing this book, like, started a bunch of stuff that goes nowhere and is just heating up as the book ends--it is clear that the story is supposed to drag on through another three books, and we will probably have to read all four in order to get any closure for anything. Also, its like a soap opera. Most of the plot is talking, and most of the talking is devious lying--the kind where the reader knows the truth but has to sit back and watch as all of the stupid characters kill all of the fun characters basically with lies. The battle scenes were ok, and the sex scenes were...like the opposite of hot. Listen. If you're going to include a sex scene, well, first off, you should only include a sex scene if it is relevant to the plot like the sex scene in A History of Violence. Secondly, make it fucking hot. Not boring, or kinda gross even. Sex scenes should make the readers want to take their pants off; they should not make the reader wonder what time it is and start guessing how long until the flight is over. There was some kind of interesting stuff going on...and a lot of great ideas, but also a lot of bullshit. I'm not sure I'll read the other books or not. I bet a bunch of nerds at work all like it; I think I of heard of this "song of ice and fire" bullshit somewhere. ..... Its better than twilight.

At one point it seemed like hordes of people all wanted to go to karaoke. I was debating between an 8 and a 12 person room. Then everyone flaked out and we had four. Guess what. It was still awesome. Amanda sang Rolling in the Deep almost as good as Adele herself, Matt drank enough to start singing, Adam and I sang some Evanescence, and me, Adam and Matt all sang a sort of special off-key cover of Can You Feel the Love Tonight that would make any sober person's ears bleed if they heard it. Oh, and guess who has a cover of rollin in the deep! Yeah we played some linkin park too. Then we spent $500. Maybe 6. It was bad. Turns out the bottles of wine we kept re-ordering were $30 each. It was worth it. Also, Amanda totally loved it, and I think she has the charisma to get people off their lazy asses and into the city. Seriously, if I spend $1000 and a third of my vacation to travel 3000 miles to hang out on the east coast, would it kill you to travel 40 miles to come into the city? Or at least respond to a facebook message...I get really creeped out when people ignore me on facebook and then act like they are happy to see me when we end up at the same party in real life. Whatever. So, the plan next time is we are going to pregame in my hotel room (or kev's place and ride the train) and then maybe get a room during those hours that the room is free if you buy enough drinks. Also, we will eat food during the pregaming. Also...ok that is it.

Chris pointed this little gem out to me and explained that it inspired an epic furor on the internet that I never heard about: http://gizmodo.com/5833787/my-brief-okcupid-affair-with-a-world-champion-magic-the-gathering-player

Yeah. Thats why girls suck. That is also why I don't play magic or D&D. Though I have no love for the author of that piece, the words she writes are not lies, and the fact that she admits what many know to be true is probably insufficient cause for persecution. Yes: it totally sucks when hot girls judge you because you play some card game, and yes: the world should not be like that. But guess what. Girls do judge you because you play some card game, or because you don't hate the same religion, or because you are a programmer. Thats the way it is, and bitching about it will probably not get you laid. So lets fix it. My personal strategy is three or four or maybe five pronged. First, there are like a million things I'm interested in. Like, I'd really like to learn how to juggle, right? Just never got around to it because there are so many other things in this world that I also want to learn, and my juggling experiment with the soup cans could have gone better. So if you have one activity, such as becoming a world-class Starcraft2 player, which, in America, has no sex appeal and does not involve meeting many girls, well, that activity just has to get de-prioritized in the face of things I love with sex appeal--motorcycles--and things I love that involve meeting girls--salsa. That was the long winded way of saying "step 1: don't be a fucking magic or D&D nerd." Because if I had just said that, you'd think I was an asshole. The second thing...step 2....actually step 1 mostly covered it. I guess step 2 is don't be a fucking nerd. I'm not saying don't be smart and passionate about cool shit like programming. In my opinion, mathematics is as awesome as being a fighter pilot, and there's no shame is having passion for either of them. There is shame is acting like a nerd, in having long-guy-hippie-hair (i.e. guys with long hair that dont take care of it), in treating girls like they are aliens, in being super awkward, in creating yet another "us and them" atmosphere and using technical jargon in conversations with people who don't have a technical background, in covering one's fatass belly under gay shirts with messages written "in binary" even though its actually a textual representation of the binary encoding of an ASCII file, and in watching the show Big Bang Theory, and in making stupid jokes that aren't funny but after which you pause anyway expecting people to laugh. I would wager you could have any hobby you wanted, and when you finally get a date with the one well-adjusted girl on okcupid, you would both have a good time. Especially if you don't take her to some weird show that hipsters probably like. There is this sort of board game called Warhammer...and then I talk about the space marines...lets just be done with this paragraph. That reminds me, I've going to try to find a chorus to join--someone told me there are lots of girls in those, and I like to sing.

Karaoke...oh yeah the wedding. So, I kind of felt like I was going to pass out at this wedding also. I think I'm allergic to weddings? My other theory is that I always get lightheaded or sleepy 2 hours after ingesting caffeine. I'm going to have to do some experiments to find out. A family situation of moderate urgency (which is now resolved) forced me to reveal the somewhat broken nature of my heart to my inner family. I'm going to pay for that later with all the questions I'll have to deal with, but at least I can stop dodging questions about why I don't fly anymore.

Back to the wedding. I felt, and sounded a bit like a wedding crasher. Thats probably a habit I should curb. The ceremony was nice. Some guy sung something called "The Lords Prayer." What you need to know about "The Lords Prayer" is that it is not, and should never be, a song. Maybe a rap. Something like "give us this day our daily bread so i can feed all these bitches from the club last night. I'm so holy, bullets go right through me. Forgive us our trespasses, 'cause I'll tresspass all over your shit, bitch." That's what I think of most rap songs. Anyway, I wasn't seated with any of the 3 people I knew there, which I think I had been warned about. I was with some people who were cool but who were all married with kids and left early. Then it was just me and a dance floor and crappy hip hop music. There were two girls that reminded me of my nieces. I tried to dance with one of them, and she ran away. One of my friends may have gotten a picture of her running from me, which would honestly make it worth it. Before the night was over I got a salsa dance in with Nicole, who despite not dancing for so long still rivals the girls I dance with now...also Pink Shirt Girl is probably a tad better.

I may have to finally give up my PA license. I didn't realize that you had to renew your license online, and then wait 10 days for this other thing in the mail before you can renew it. My license is going to expire before my next trip home. I had been boycotting WA because I've heard that you have to take a written test to get their ugly-ass license, and taking a test in a state with drivers that stupid hurts my ego. But, since my ego is not a state-issued photo id, it loses this round. Seriously, though, I don't want to be a Washington driver. I want no part of their disgusting mess.

Kevin has an entrepreneurial idea involving coffee. Might get involved with that. I just severed involvement with some people who were building a social networking phone app using a Microsoft SOA (service oriented architecture) framework that, of course, only works with other Microsoft shit, and can only be programmed in Windows, the operating system that exists to allow me to play Starcraft. I mentioned my waning desire to "boot up my starcraft partition" in my farewell email, so they probably won't be interested in collaborating with me ever again. Probably no love lost there...this one guy would like just read Microsoft "whitepapers" which based on what I read over his shoulder, appear too be fact-less bromides written for people who don't know how to read RFCs. We got in an argument. He claimed that this microsoft whitepaper claimed that if we used https, the message would get decrypted by what the whitepaper called an "intermediary." No one in the room knew what the whitepaper meant by "intermediary" and despite the fact that his interpretation of that undefined word was material to our disagreement everyone seemed to think that arguing about it without looking up any other references would be a great use of our time. I tried to get them to pull up the original RFCs for https, but it was like pulling teeth...perhaps rightly so: the RFCs were very lengthy, and it would have taken probably hours of studying them, and also a reference book on software security engineering, in order to prove constructively that the ssl/https connections that google, yahoo, facebook, and like every other website in the world, rely on for their login pages, would be secure enough for the login page of the prototype of our phone-based videogame. I forget which microsoft product we were supposed to use instead...it probably involved XML (please refer to the paragraph where I whine about nerds using technical jargon at the wrong audience).

This paragraph is for going on and on about whether I should move back to philly or not.

[Edit]
That second to last paragraph, about the microsofts, actually put me to sleep. So thats a cool way to get yourself to bed on time.

s/awk/boss

2011-08-30T21:49:00.000-07:00

And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming

...and whispered in the sounds of silence

I don't consider myself to be awkward, but I'd be lying if I claimed to be a socialite. Lying like a one legged motorcyclist telling you he's ready for hurricane operations. I thought about this because I was getting my hair cut like a boss.

One of the things that the writers of the show House don't understand is that people like me love the character House because we love everything he says and we want to be like him, saying rude and witty things to people and generally being a narcissistic asshole to people forced to be around us. But that doesn't work in real life, partly because it is difficult for one lone programmer to wield the wit of twenty comedy writers, and party people in the real world people don't exactly like assholes. And there are no extremely attractive women being forced to be around me. I know. I was dissapointed too. Sometimes people are attracted to mean people, and I'm sure this is a great topic to argue about with...whatever. Moving on.

By my estimate I am thousands of hours behind when it comes to developing social skills and learning how not to completely piss off girls that I want to make out with later. Hey. At least we've moved on from total obvlivion. Anyway. I'm too far behind to catch up by any...active action. I can't just like, be walking home from a shitty day of banging my head against another stupid software engineering (the not cool kind of) problem, and realize that like, I need to go interact with some people today, and like get that done on my way home. It needs to be passive; something I just do every day. Work will not be a help here. Most of my conversations start with "hey" and then a very technical description of what I need from the person I'm talking to.

Holy fuck this is the dumbest idea ever. I was going to write something about getting more haircuts, because thats like 40 minutes of intense small talk that makes my brain hurt, but really...I don't understand why that sounded like such a great idea in my head. Ok. Fine. I'm going to get more haircuts, or ...stuff like haircuts, and thats going to make me into a nicer person who breaks eye contact less frequently. Yeah.

[edit]
Expenses: PA license renewal: $50 per 4 years

People

2011-08-29T00:55:00.000-07:00

People people people people PEOPLE people people people people People. People are all that matter. And remembering that your life is but one of a million candles sitting out during a light rain, one that might be extinguished at any moment by something so meaningless as a fatefully aligned raindrop.

PAX, bungee jumping, speakeasy, karaoke. And fucking Wisconsin. Not in that order. May or may not get around to writing about it, so that was the cliff notes.

Haven't planned hotels or flights yet. Reeeally need to do that. And deliver the check and letter for my last month in my apartment. I contacted a lawyer about my situation and he got back to me super late.

Seriously, in november? I am stopping in Wisconsin either on the way to or from Philly. I have completely underestimated that state.

[edit]
Possibly do the band next.

2011-08-28T12:00:00.001-07:00

http://www.wwscc.org/so-how-do-i-get-started.html

WTF Just Happened?

2011-08-27T14:27:00.000-07:00

Something's getting in the way.
Something's just about to break.
I will try to find my place in the diary of Jane.
As I burn another page,
As I look the other way.

In the old days it was boots, sandals, sneakers. One pair of shoes per purpose. I suppose it was really four of them, if you count the ski boots. The only pants I ever liked were jeans. Sometime between then and now everything changed. Now I'm standing in some kind of fancy pants made of a material I don't recognize trying to pick out a pair of shoes out of a large group, all one which serve a single purpose: looking good. None of them are for hiking, or ninja fights, or saving the world. At best I can use what I (probably inccorectly) think of as fake cowboy boots on the bike. None of my new shoes appear to match my pants. I could be wrong, and you know, maybe one of them technically matches, in the same way that quicksort and mergesort technically have the same runtime, but effectively...I don't care. And now I have to go buy another pair of shoes.

I'm going to drop back down to my standard jeans and button down shirt. Why was I stepping it up? I made a move on a girl who is clearly out of my league. We might grab some drinks tonight, which means I was going to dress to impress, and then go hang out at PAX where I would likely stand out in a sea of balding-with-long-hair shorts-and-t-shirt-wearing awkward-but-friendly nerds, much the same way a...I'll come up with something later.

Oh yeah, so this girl. Fuck, dude. I don't know what happened. I was salsa dancing, because my two female friends said they were going. I was hoping to also run into these two girls I met like three weeks ago. I never asked for their numbers, because party rules say you don't ask for their number the first night you meet them when salsa dancing. I never ran into them because a bunch of shit happened and I couldn't make it out to the club. When I finally did, they were gone.

Instead, as I make my first pass around the dance floor I spot a random girl standing alone and ask her to dance. She seemed beginner-ish, and she was attractive, so I did the thing where I spend more effort talking and less effort dancing. Found out she'd been in india for like 7 months or something, and then lots of small talk. The songs switched, she said I was a great lead. I chatted her up a bit and went to search for my friends, who were absent because the girls decided they had an emergent need to eat some tacos right then.

Fast forward a bit. My friend, who I will call Pink Shirt Girl, was wearing a tight white shirt and an orange skirt and also she is hot. Later, while yelling at me, she would insist her skirt was red, which is just bullocks. Anyway, you weren't there, so you'll obviously have to take my word for it, but really, she kind of looked like a hooters girl. Of course now that I look at that link I realize that hooters girls don't wear long sleeved shirts...what can I say? Its been a while since I've been to hooters.

Anyway. So...I told her she looked like a hooters girl, thinking it would be a compliment. That didn't go over well. What can I say? I was locked in the friend zone anyway.

Needless to say, I later found myself standing alone, watching this random dude creep on the girl I danced with at the beginning of the night, and her friend. Then I got an opening and asked her to dance. She seemed excited to see me. It was a bachatta this time. I'm not a great bachatta dancer, but I can fake my way through it.

Then the song was over. I asked if she was planning to go out dancing some more, hoping I could run into her another night and get her number. She said something about flying places so I just asked her out right then. There was no fear, no hesitation. It was more like a reflex. And this is the second time that has worked. That rule about not asking salsa girls for their number the first time you meet them...I made that for a reason, but I'm starting to think that was flawed.

The reason that rule exists is because of the advice I've received from many female friends who dance, who say they hate being asked out the first night. I like to avoid being a total asshole as much as the next guy, so I took heed and filed that shit away. You know whats fucked up about that? I'll tell you whats fucked up. All the girls that gave me that advice were girls that didn't want to fuck me. Listening to that advice is like going up to a trauma nurse and asking what kind of motorcycle you should buy: you're not going to get a helpful answer.

All my life I've been swallowing advice that sounded great and right a moral but which is turning out to be bullshit. All that stuff about how looks shouldn't be important, or nice guys don't finish last, and girls hate being hit on, and its better to have a good personality than flash, and ad nauseum. Sometimes I don't even realize how much one of these fake accolades is holding me back until I accidentally break one of these rules. So, long story short, asking salsa girls out as soon as I meet them is back on the table.

People talk a lot. They'll tell you all kinds of useless opinions but what matters is this: some people will show up; some won't. Some girls want to fuck you on a regular basis, and some don't. All the words in between are just noise.

One of my friends from work left in the middle of a party last night to pick up "some visitors" from the aiport. He came back with like his sister and his cousins who were all super hot. I haven't been in a room with that many attractive girls since...well, it doesn't happen here. They loved my story about the time I deliberately let my car roll down a hill with Madison screaming inside, but none them took my side about my Hooters comment. The only one at the party who saw it my way was this girl visiting from France. None of that matters. What matters is that my party game is sorely lacking. I am reallly bored.

P.S. PAX is really boring. I thought I would automatically like it because I do play video games, but....zzzzzz

The Fuckers at Fountain Court, Part 2

2011-08-19T16:59:00.000-07:00

After a week of waiting for them to tell me what my month-to-month rent would be, I called and found out they think I'm moving out on the 31st. That is the day I'm boarding a plane to philly. FUCK.

[edit]
They just called me. We worked it out that I will stay through september and the month-to-month rate is %34 higher than my current rate.

The Hardy Boys and the Fuckers at Fountain Court

2011-08-15T00:13:00.000-07:00

Fountain Court is the overpriced apartment complex that despite being one of many properties owned by a larger corporation doesn't accept direct deposit (or really any modern method of payment that is not a scam) located in Belltown, home to some crackheads and a lot of drunk people that are a bit too old for my interest.

Sometime during the bronze age, or maybe during the reign of the Roman Empire, people paid rent using paper checks that they had to drop off in a deposit box at the beginning of every month. My failure to adequately grasp this ancient relic of money transfer is the reason I was frequently late on payments and had to pay an extra 10 percent. That was my fault.

The apartment complex has twice gone back on verbal agreements. That is their fault. One time, it was a girl in the office accepting my payment. Some other bitch called me a week later telling me that even though they found nothing wrong with my personal check and even though they had accepted it in person, they were choosing to not accept it as a matter of policy and I had 12 hours to scramble together a money order for an amount far larger than standard ATM transfer limits.

The second time, I talked to a guy in the office about moving out on September 10th, me being tired of this history lesson with the paper checks. He said he was new and he'd have to ask his managers. This guy called me later to say that it was fine; I could pay $X which was the prorated rent for 10 days of September and if I could just bring the check and a written notice of moving out I would be all set. So I dropped off the check Friday afternoon.

Friday night, I nearly put down $1000 on another apartment starting September. I was pretty pissed that the guy showing the apartment didn't tell me someone else had already put money down before I drove all the way up there. Turns out, if I had gotten the apartment, I'd have some financial issues with the apartment double booking. Then on Saturday I received a phone call from someone else in the Fountain Court office saying that her boss said "no way." WHAT THE FUCK.

My renewal agreement from last year does say it can only be modified in writing, but who hands out verbal agreements they intend to break? The person to called me on Saturday offered me 12 and 8 month contracts (both better than the 15 month I'm currently getting out of) for a higher price than I pay now, sounding kind of surprised that I didn't want to stay there. I mean, who doesn't like being lied to? I made it clear several times that I will be going month to month and moving out as soon as I can do so without violating a contract.

The office screwed up the renewal offer for the end of my lease this year. They normally send out an "offer" that raises your rent by like $200 if you don't sign a new lease and just go month to month. This year, I first received a renewal offer for someone else (who has lower rent than I do) and then I received one for me but a month early and with the wrong information regarding the end of my lease.

I've talked to friends elsewhere. They have all said that after the first year, their rent does not go up when the lease lapses into month to month. I find that interesting. Also, the renewal offer has text like "if you do not reply, we will take that as acceptance of the [higher] month to month rate." This reminds me of something in business law 101. I checked the terms of my renewal agreement. It doesn't say anything about them being able to unilaterally raise the rent on you. It is my theory that they use these "renewal offers" to jack up the price (since you accept the price without replying) and no one realizes they have the option to respond and say "I don't accept the jacked up price, you scheming fuckbags. I'll take the month-to-month rental price I earned by being stuck here for 15 months."

I have not tested this theory. My current place is to find out how much I need to pay month-to-month for September, write my last check, and get the fuck out of here come October 1. If they try to prevent me from doing that, I will lawyer up. I really want to avoid that though. Not only is it expensive, but lawyers always make you sign paper agreements which require stamps to mail.

Fountain Court has a facebook page...I'm tempted to post this story there shortly before I move out. Ooh, and the better business bureau. Admittedly this story isn't that bad--mostly just possibly-deliberate incompetence and sharp businessmanship on their part.

Moral of the story: Seriously, I need to read Hardy Boys again.

[Fiction] The Miller Angle, Chapter 2

2011-08-12T01:06:00.000-07:00

Tires hugged the road like two fingers running along a girl's breast. Biff had the radio on low. Yeah, this was in the old times. Biff's crew would have had the lighthouse running, but it was a clear night, and they were a chillin for a spell anyway. Biiff drove until the sun went down and he caught glimpses of stars when he dared take his eyes off the road. He had a two day stubble and a growing need to take a shower. His eyes were duller than usual, and drooping with fatigue, but he couldn't sleep. He pulled his car into Wilson's tire garage. Jason was there.

"What's up, boss?"

"I don't know."

"You get spotted or just felt like driving around aimlessly all night?"

Biff nodded. "Got something in my head and I can't get it out."

"Something?" Jason smiled. "Or someone?"

Biff shook his head.

"You know girls are trouble."

"I know."

"You said that."

"I know."

"And then you slept with like five hundred of them."

"...I know."

The boys came over. They were working on another car and arguing over the exact set of circumstances that required one to break up with a girl in person verses over the phone. One of them had the, you know, audacity to suggest that sometimes you didn't even need to call. Bullshit, but it was distracting.

Rewind. Back to the sunset. Change location to Watershed Drive. Now we're on to Christine.

"Christine! Fuck!" That was her brother's polite way of telling her that someone was at the door. He'd just left the door hanging open with the deliveryman on the porch. The wrong kind of deliveryman.

Christine's maps usually came via the post, but this was an express carrier. He was holding the familiar cardboard tube though. Was it a ruse? For a second she was worried that the police were about to storm in and blow in the windows and slam her face in the ground and scream in her hear that they were going to blow her fucking brains out if she moved. But there was no one else in the driveway. No cars, no vans, no swat team gearing up for a knockless warrant. Just a guy in a uniform.

Christine signed for the package and realized it was too heavy. She wanted to pry it open right then and see what was inside, but the watchful gaze of her mother was bearing down on her from the kitchen. Every discussion with her was just more questions, more judging. Christine dropped the package with the other cardboard tubes.

Later that night, she snuck down stairs while her family watched a gory horror film, the kind that was like porn but with death instead of sex.

Christine sat on her bed to open the package. Above her head was a large pictures of jagged cliffs rising out of the surf on some far away beach. At least, thats what they looked like a first. Those cliffs were painted to resemble a girls legs and arms. Such posters were completely unnaceptable in that house. Christine had left it up just to see if her mother or brothers would ever realize what it was. They never did.

Christine opened the package. Indeed, it was no map, nor of any relation to her known hobbies. It was a sword. It was sharp. There was a dirty, cloudy jewel at the bottom on the hilt. Christine held it in her hands, admiring it for a second. Who would send her a sword? There was a note attached like a price tag. In fact, it was a price tag, with this message written in ink: "So that you can fight your own battles." Oh. Him. Christine pictured Biff in her mind, squaring off against her taller, stronger brothers like a wildcat.

She closed her fist around the handle. It felt good. Surprising. She never had an interest in swords. She turned it over in her hands, contemplating what kind of hilt she could sew, and what colors to add, what it would go with. What it would go with? What, a dress? She couldn't wear this in public. Christine hid the sword under her bed.

Christine opened the window in her room. It made her room cold, but the window was noisy and she had to do it while they were still watching the movie. She poked her head outside and listened. She couldn't hear anything--anything other than crickets. When the movie ended, Christine was poised and ready. She was waiting with one boot on the sil, staring at the patch of light on the ground that came from her mother's bedroom on the first floor. The moment it went out she climbed and dropped. The ground outside her mothers window was soft, and she pulled her legs in at the last second, making a nearly soundless landing. She'd done this a hundred times, and was an expert at it.

She slid around the side of the house and took off in a soft run at the exact angle that would make her invisible to the bedroom windows of the remaining occupants of the house. Then she was in the corn field. Her corn field, regardless of whichever farmer was legally renting it. There was a movie they had seen when they were kids, involving a monster in a corn field. Her brothers had been kept wide awake with nightmares. She could still remember her mother scolding her father, saying "why did you show them that?" But she had no nightmares. Any monster in this corn field would have to deal with her.

On the other side of the field, there was a tarp-covered pink sportbike hidden in a grove of trees. The tarp itself had branches and leaves glued to it. Christine's mother had often complained about the noise their "reckless neighbor's" motorcle made, having no idea it was actually Christine's. It was only her mother's passive aggressiveness that prevented her from discovering that her neighboor had no sportbike, and in fact himself wondered why his neighboor let her daughter ride one in the middle of the night.

Christine uncovered the sportbike. She had painted it herself, but you wouldn't think a professional had done it if you saw it. She dug into a bag and stripped off her jeans. A beam of moonlight glanced of a white thong as she hopped on one foot, trying to get the tight riding suit on. She hoped the neighboor couldn't see her.

Christine started the bike and watched 45 seconds tick by on her watch. Then she was off.

Back at the garage, Jason was interrupting Biff.

"No way," he said.

"Huh? You were there," said Biff.

Jason didn't answer. He and everyone else were all staring behind Biff. Biff turned around.

Christine--sportbike Christine--was strolling in through the open garage doors, pink jumpsuit and all. None of them had heard her approach. The boys whistled.

"Hell if it ain't the pink ranger," said one of them.

She stopped in front of Biff. "You sure do a lot to get a girl's attention. I don't think I ever gave you my home address."

"I don't think you've ever said more than five words to me."

"I was probably too busy rolling my eyes."

Biff grinned. "Is that what you do inside that helmet?"

"Well I also make faces."

Someone burst out laughing.

"What kind of faces."

"Oh, you know...happy faces...sad faces...boys-are-dumb faces...boys-are-dumb-cause-they-think-driving-fast-impresses-girls faces, boys-are-ridiculous-and-try-to-hard-faces."

"So I guess you didn't like my sword."

"No, I liked your sword very much."

Now everyone burst out laughing. Everyone but Biff and Christine.

Biff grinned a little to widely. "Maybe you'd like to-" Christine slapped him.

"Don't be inappropriate with me. I want the full deal. Whatever you do for all the other girls. And don't be dirty."

"What other girls?"

"Listen. I know you're a whore. But I understand. You're disadvantaged that way, because you're a boy."

Biff was speechless.

"Are you going to take me out or what?" asked Christine.

"What, now?"

"This is your one chance kiddo. I turn into a pumpkin by sunrise."

Biff stuck his elbow out. "Right this way, m'lady."

Christine took it. "Much better. Where are we going?"

"The backseat of my--hey you wanted the full treatment. Ok the front seat. My car."

Biff turned the key and they listened to the engine growl to life. Then he pushed a button on the dashboard with a first aid icon on it. The glove box opened in front of Christine, spilling out cold carbon dioxide gas from dry ice over her legs and exposing two chilled cans of mountain dew. They clinked cans like they were wine glasses, and the adventure began.

Christine fiddled with the radio.

"What the fuck is that?" asked Biff.

"Your new favorite song."

I'm gonna call when you're alone
I'll be your angel on the phone
I'm gonna save you tonight
The way you're barely getting on
All you gotta do is listen to my song

"This isn't conducive to my driving."

"Like you need encouragement to drive fast."

"You're one to talk. I need to haul ass just to keep up with you."

Christine looked out the window and smiled.

American Justice

2011-08-11T23:24:00.000-07:00

Possible Villains:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/08/12/pennsylvania.judge.sentenced/

General Inspiration:

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700170210/Doughertys-did-little-to-conceal-themselves.html

So Take this Night

2011-08-11T01:53:00.000-07:00

There's a game
That I play
There are rules
I had to break
There's mistakes
That I made
But I made them . . .
My way

A guy on my team moved up here from Cali a few months ago. Within that time he's landed a hot girl who is not a nerd* but who has a tattoo of the rebel alliance symbol. I've been here for more than two years, and...with the exception of a few unpublishable stories, my track record in this city is well known, and dismal in comparison.

Him, this girl he's dating, another teammate and I went to a cool live show. Like, really good music. I'm not used to going to small venues and hearing good music. The last time I tried that, it was set up by this girl I knew in college and the music was...not great. Also the one act was this kid who was like singing in his underwear and felt the need to stare directly at me during the bridge of one of this songs. I was one of about 5ish people in a room that could fit 20 or 30. However, if the music can be good, I want to start going to these, especially after seeing Scott Pilgrim vs the World. Anyway. I opened with captain and cokes. My friends made fun of me for not branching out, and I put forth as evidence that one time at the Irish bar that I got a captain and ginger.

The waitress asked if I wanted a single or double shot. The last time I did double shots, I had a three day hangover and couldn't drink rum for a month. Interestingly enough, I got back into rum in Atlantic City, which was the venue for Corona Night. Anyway. So until this morning, I've always felt like a bit of a pussy for getting single shots. Don't tell me how I should think about it; I don't care. So after 3 or 4 single shots I asked to switch to double shots. Actually that wasn't the reason at all. I was looking around and realized that I wasn't enjoying myself...I caught myself thinking how great this would be in the future, and I could come back here later with a girl I liked. I've been sleeping with future and later and next time for more than five years now and frankly they suck in bed. So instead I told myself I should just enjoy the night, and this time I didn't even have my own girl there locking me in the friend zone. I was like the plus one of a third wheel. However, my volleyball team has lost our last game that night, ending our season only halfway towards our goal of winning two games, and I realized I'm not getting any younger, so I tipped my glass back and told myself to enjoy the night. Which I did.

Until I asked for double shots. I'd already had 3 or 4 "single shots" and I could barely taste the captain and I felt completely sober. So I thought maybe the "double shot" was their word for a...real captain and coke. The first one came in a tall glass. It was basically as if you took two captain and cokes and put them in a big glass like pizza shops used. Hot Rebel Alliance Girl, as I've just now decided to call her, is a bartender and told me I should asked for a double short. So I did.

The waitress said something to the effect of "no problem" and came back with two of them. Two double-shots in lowball glasses. Another thing I hate doing is drinking a captain and coke so slowly that the ice melts, and I told myself that wasn't going to happen this time. So I double-fisted and took care of business. And that's when the night went south.

I remember stumbling back and forth to the bathroom. Texting Laura to ask if she knew where her towel was (because the hip hop group on stage was doing an awesome rap piece about Hitchikers Guide) and saying "fucking girls" really loudly when she didn't respond immediately even though it was like 3 or 4 in the morning where she lives. Yeah. Its pathetic that I still think of her. I also remember telling the waitress I didn't understand when she handed me the bill and later sitting in 5 Point Cafe trying not to vomit.

I held my liquor that night. Unfortunately I passed out on my bed before I could drink an adequate amount of water and woke up with a hangover. That's when I decided that I'm done with double shots.

On my way to work I bought pickles (because a Russian kid I met here insisted that pickle juice is a magical russian cure for hangovers) and a container of watermelon slices (because I love watermelon). The pickles tasted like shit but the watermelon was delicious and made me feel better.

This is the paragraph where I was going to go on about various girls, including mentioning Jess and Betsy and hints of stories I never intend to actually tell. While listening to this Black Lab song. So, pretend I did all that.

The moral of the story? Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, you can choose to have a good time. You can choose to say no to double shots.

*Where I come from, nerd is the more pejorative of the pair (nerd,geek). I don't like being seen as a geek either, unless I find it useful.

//TODO: learn this song

Leaf Nodes :(

2011-08-03T20:52:00.000-07:00

8:41pm on a wednesday night. Some girl just not only decided that I wasn't her type, but that she wasn't my type. Fucking bitch. I have the whole "my type" thing under control, thank you very much.

So now...I just wasted $20 in martinis on a leaf node. I have this sudden feelling like I need to reclaim wednesday night, lest it be lost in the void of failed attempts. Can't decide what to do...I guess that's obvious, because if I had figured something out I'd be out doing it. I'm a little too buzzed for the Aprilia :(

[Edit]
9:24pm -- melancholy turned to anger. Thats only ...43 minutes. Badass.

Damn it Feels Good to be a Programmer

2011-07-31T23:44:00.000-07:00

Real gangsta-ass niggas don't talk much
All ya hear is the black from the gun blast
And real gangsta-ass niggas don't run for shit
'cause real gangsta-ass niggas can't run fast

One of the online websites I troll has a "personals" forum where lonely people try to find someone that meets their unrealistic expectations. Most of the posts are from men, but occasionally a girl posts and is then flooded with 75 to 100 messages, most of which are pathetic one-liners. On top of all this I've observed an unusual dynamic: trolls. More like...mini trolls. Unlike their distant 4chan-style cousins, these trolls don't appear to have the typical sociopathic motivations of inciting rage and sowing discord. They are far less diabolical but far more in number. They descend like vultures upon most of the posts to bitch at the poster. Sometimes another troll or the occasional reasonable person responds, and then the personal ad devolves into an irrelevant flame war. I think a lot of people on this site are just negative. Negative nancies (and mancies).

I came upon one of these because I saw that one of my "friends" (on the website) had posted a response. There was one guy who was just posting over and over bitching on nitpicky semantics, and generally being a dick. So I made what I think is a perfectly reasonable move and spent 20 minutes installing greasemonkey, learning javascript, and creating a script that would censor posts made by users that matched a hardcoded array of douchebags. I then posted the entire script in the hijacked personal ad, with the hardcoded array prominently featuring the username of the guy who was being a dick.

I've been aware of greasemonkey for years, and it never held much interest. I gave up javascript back when Firefox was heating up and the IE team had Microsoft had just been reactivated for more incompatibility skirmishes among the wreckage of the ancient browser wars (like Sith hunting jedi after the clone wars) because I was sick and tired of writing correct javascript for firefox, fucking it up for IE, and then trying to hack it to make it work in firefox again. For some reason, though, the thrill of publicly shaming someone in such a geeky way was sufficient motivation for me to blow through all of these previously uninteresting technologies.

Being a dick myself was only half the reason I posted it. In fact, I put a big disclaimer in my post that falsely stated I wasn't doing it just to prove that the fuckrag troll had nothing worthwhile to say. No...the real reason was the hope that lots of girls would message me asking how to install the script, since I posted no installation instructions.

It didn't quite work. A bunch of guys, and guys pretending to be girls, posted bullshit like "what a wonderful little script" and asked for instructions publicly. The reason they were full of shit is that my script was not wonderful: it was a hack job that used a wasteful, inaccurate, brute force but easy-to-code method, because when I spend 20 minutes learning a new language just to make a point that somebody is a dick, I don't spend another hour solving the edge cases. So...I pasted a couple of links that those idiots could have easily googled for just to make them stop talking at me. Then the guy who was being a dick--the one who I was targeting with this little plot--posted to thank me, saying he would find it useful. I rolled my eyes at patted myself on the back for at least trying a novel strategy.

A single girl did eventually message me, and it did turn into a connection like I'd hoped. She lives in Brazil.

As a side note: I later messaged a girl in Florida to compliment her on her profile pictures. She both misinterpreted my compliment as an insult and thought I was trying to hit on her. I'll be directing my energy back to real life for a while--been having much more success there, but that's another story, if I get to it. I actually wasn't going to even write this story, but at the last minute I decided that a tale of throwing code at interpersonal relations would be more interesting than me listening to There Is and recounting every first kiss with every girl I really liked. That was my first idea.

The moral of the story? Javascript is actually not that bad. Seriously. I wouldn't want to ever depend anything on it working correctly in a browser environment, but its not that bad. Besides, when I'm at parties with geeks, I always go with this line about how which language you choose isn't that important, phrased in a way intended to make me look smarter than anyone in the room who was just acting like a language fanboy. So I'm willing to cut the ol' js some slack.

Commander, please note it in the log that

2011-07-28T20:01:00.000-07:00

I miss my parents!

Thought that kind of thing should be recorded.

The One

2011-07-24T10:34:00.000-07:00

Sorry, kid. You got the gift, but it looks like you're waiting for something.

--the Oracle

My ten interested girls became 5 in real life, and then 3 after one round of dates, and now its approaching zero. Of those final three, one of them appears to be rejecting me. It was confused at first, and spent even more time thinking about her, because her actions didn't match her words at all. But actions never lie, and I think I've lost her, which totally sucks ass because she loves wearing corsets. In fact, I took her to see Harry Potter and she wore a corset. I like that whole situation. So, that's what I could have had. The other two...one was never interested in anything long term, and the last one...probably isn't interested in anything long term either. Can't really tell though, she's pretty chill.

I'm not all that worried, though. Imagine if you are trapped underwater and unable to breathe for a few years, and all of a sudden you can breathe for a bit. Its nice.

The dates have been absolutely exhausting. I've been overtaxing a part of mind that is almost never used, and I reached a point last thursday where I was sitting at my desk in our "team room" at work (which is really a poorly-repurposed conference room) trying to ignore my obnoxious workmates playing a very loud game of darts, and suddenly I couldn't take it anymore. I had to leave. I went home and was completely unproductive: I watched TV and played old games like Half-Life by myself. I couldn't even summon the energy to play starcraft.

Starcraft takes a lot of energy. Typical games are like a half hour of furious concentration, mostly because the poor interface forces you, the commander, to micromanage everything while you fight the battles. Koreans seem to like it that way. I've been trying to get better, but often after an hour or two of jackasses showing up at the rear of my bases with two cloacked banshees that I should have countered, or zerg rushes getting into my base because I forgot to raise the supply depots, or a hundred of other dumb outcomes, I get tired of it and find something else to do. Playing with friends has actually been the most fun, but I'm in dire need of improvement to my mid-game, and it seems like a waste of two-to-four people's time if I keep playing with them without practicing.

One of the girls I play volleyball with is kind of hot, but she is already dating someone new, and judging by the way he looks...I apparently need to start going to a gym. I actually made the decision to join a gym weeks ago, mostly because its the last thing I need to sort of..."fix" about myself...the last sort of force multiplier I feel that I need when it comes to dating, however I've been dragging my feet on implementation for lack of time and energy. It will happen eventually. Oh, but anyway, so she and her friends invited me out to dinner. Etheopian food. I showed up on time, waited for a bit, sent a text, waited at the bar, got two drinks and left after half an hour. On my way out I realized they were in a section of the restaurant that I didn't know existed. So that was awesome. The next day I played volleyball with them and realized that they had met half of these people on meetup.com. That website might not be a complete waste of time if you're looking for friends.

The sportbike is awesome. The clutch and the backwards shifter are taking some getting used to. Also it had so much power that when I begin to open up the throttle it feels like the bike is about to fly out from under me--and it nearly did once or twice. Damn powerful. I'm gonna need to spend a lot of time on that bike before I can take a rider. Additionally, I need to weigh more. Like another 20 pounds would be good. See the paragraph about the gym.

My fear of cops has been replaced by anger. I was heading somewhere some night, and there was a cop in one of the left lanes, slowing everyone down. I remember getting angry and wishing he would pull me over and stop fucking up everyone elses commute. I need to know how fast their cars can go, and I need to learn how to disable the speed limiter of American vehicles. Although...it won't help me much unless I install bigger sway bars. We'll see.

Dear Diary, or, the Day Karma Became Politically Correct

2011-07-12T00:12:00.000-07:00

Saw a guy about an Aprilia SL1000. She's a 2-cylinder, half-naked sportbike and looked way hotter in real life compared to the pictures. Ran home and wired him the money. Think I might call her April.

Then I went salsa dancing at century. Then one of my female friends bitched at me for five songs about that one time last year that I tried not to dance with a guy. Then I left. I tried to get pizza, but the shop was closed. Then I went home.

Girls who stand guys up should text them in advance so we know to bring a book

2011-07-11T02:15:00.000-07:00

There was a point in my career where I was sitting in an office trying to keep part of an old online ordering system from crapping itself under the christmas load. The culprit of all our problems was the sheer volume was straining our software systems and causing all kinds of behavior that would probably be quite interesting to a freshman software design course. Our managers were in our little office there to help watch the service struggle. This is what they said:

"This is a good problem..." or "this is not a problem" or "I'm glad we're having this problem!" or whatever.

Their point was, we should not be unhappy with the fact that more and more people wanted to order from us. I wasn't completely convinced; when you have a couple software services that behave ok, getting a little slower, a little slower, and then crash, maybe lots of traffic isn't a good thing. It doesn't matter how much those people are spending if they take out your ordering system and the website goes down and your customers find other places to shop.

However, when your boss' boss' boss is in the room, sharing your own opinions on whether or not we all need to like someone is a low priority.

(for those of you who know where I work: this problem shouldn't pop up again for years; some new software we wrote kicks ass)

I have my own "good problem."

After years of getting basically no action from online dating sites like plenty of fish and ok cupid, and nothing but disasters in real life, there has been a sudden glut of girls who want to meet me. You want to know what I changed? Get ready for this. Pickupmaster...whatever they're called. Pickup artist (yeah, cause they're artists) secrets coming up. Get ready for it.

Are you ready?

I don't think your ready. Prepare yourself. The key to women is coming up! Its coming!

That what she s--I changed nothing.

There is no single significant factor that I can, you know, blog about and start using all the time. So now we come to the problem: too many girls. I was tracking like 9 or 10 at one point. About half of them I've met in real life. Half, or 50%, by the way, is waayyyy more than zero.

So now...ok. Here's the thing. Guys that cheat, or play around? I have no fucking idea how they do it. Me getting married to the most amazing woman on the planet and then cheating on her once is a nightmare of mine, but I could never keep a girl on the side. Its fucking impossible. I can't remember who has or likes or hates motorcycles, or which one hates the new batman movies with Christian Bale, who has which phobias about how to pay for stuff on dates, and we haven't even started making a map of their political/religious prejudices. Simply being able to know that there wasn't anyone waiting for me to text them back required making a spreadsheet at one point.

Plus, time. There's only so many days in a week--nights, really, and its tough to fit into these girls schedules while juggling 5 of them and also trying to troubleshoot a computer experiment (the results are in: I saved $40 by buying a cheapass power supply that blew and damaged $400 worth of video cards) and keep up with the volleyball league, and whatever the hell else I'm supposed to be doing. Buying motorcycle and investigating sailing and autocross, and keeping up with the heart troubleshooting efforts. So, anyway. It's gotten to the point where I'm fooling around with a girl in the middle of a rock band game when my phone alarm goes off telling me I should be leaving for my next date, which would have been a disaster if she hadn't also been late.

So we've done like one...round of dates. I think I got everyone that didn't flake off at the idea of actually meeting in real life. None of them told me they were "taking a break from dating" so I must be improving my game. The dates were...not terribly exciting. They were fun, and there was a point during one of them that I almost felt an adrenaline rush. I'm still kind of getting over my play for Hot Lego Girl, and I hope that the person I think is her new boyfriend gets AIDS and also drowns in a fountain after being kicked in the balls by a turtle. But I digress. Not really feeling the passion, or whatever I usually feel when I go after girls; its more like a chore. Still, though, that feeling that I am completely wasting my life has gone away.

At some point I'm going to have to stop going on dates with multiple girls, I guess. I don't know what that point is, and I don't really want to ask again, because the last time I was upfront and asked about it...it didn't go well. So maybe I'll just guess. One girl I think is blowing me off. Two more seem definitely into me...one definitely wants a second date, or something. I don't know. Holy shit there was so much talking...on and on and on for hours, and I can't even remember what we talked about.

None of them appear to have the sort of...spark that I look for...the white wave. I don't know if its because they don't have it, or because its not obvious in some girls. So, we'll see. Whatever happens, we're all going to have a good time and I'll probably need a regular traffic lawyer. Dating is exhausting though.

Also, if I don't turn up with a girlfriend soon, I'm beginning to be concerned that my family is going to start wondering if I'm gay. I mean, I'm a guy, and I live in Seattle, and I've started to wear clothing that is ill-suited for the purpose is extensibly exists to perform--I understand this is called fashion. For example: I have cowboy shoes that cannot be used for hiking, or cowboying, or really anything any more strenuous than walking on a sidewalk. I have a pair of jeans that, because they fit properly, are so tight its nearly impossible to get my keys and my cell phone in the same pocket. I have a hoodie that at first glance looks like the kind of thing you'd find in the ghetto, but actually cost more than a hundred and doesn't protected against the cold or rain very well. I also have shoes that look like of like sneakers but can't really be used for running or sports--only lounging around when my fake cowboy shoes wouldn't match. I even own a pair of gaudy sunglasses because I was out for a walk and they were the only pair the convenience store had that wasn't hideous. So yeah. These clothes are complete failures from an engineering perspective, but I get compliments on them, so I wear them. Still working on the pants--I have a pair that looks great but you can't fit anything in the pockets.

I think so long as I don't start wearing scarves, I'll be fine, but I really don't want to be a part of any conversation discussing a conclusion that only an idiot should make about me. Having my mom try to get me to use eHarmony was bad enough. A reasonable person might not be concerned about this, but I know this: girls basically think everyone is gay, and they feel the need to share with everyone the false positives that show up on their gaydar. In fact, for any famous guy, there exists a girl that I wanted to hook up with who thinks he's gay. Shit--that's another thing I'm going to have to remember for each of them; I like to avoid mentioning famous men that the girl I'm with thinks are gay in order to shortcut that entire conversation (girls seem to not like it when you think discussing another guy's sexuality is a complete waste of time). And whether they drink or not, or if they have any strange date preferences (like or hate movies, can't sit still indoors, etc) or if they have any weird eating habits, like being pescatarian, or really any food-religion that involves not eating bacon. Bacon is really the primary food group. I'm going to try to cooking it with brown sugar the next time I get a chance--brown sugar creates pure deliciousness when applied to ham, so why not try the rest of the pig?

Plus, my thing where I end up becoming whatever I think the girl wants or needs--that ability is getting all screwed up. Too many modes to cycle between. I'm like a chameleon trapped between 4 television screens.

But I'm totally happy and stuff. Yay for all this.

[Just Fiction] Sun Goes Out

2011-07-07T14:45:00.000-07:00

sun goes out

you'll be standing

all alone

Jeff brought the horses as promised; I'm on Candy, leading Abby with an empty saddle.

Logan was just standing there with a pile of water tanks. Not actual tanks like a normal person would have--no, these were the upside-down water tanks used in office watercoolers. Jeff really wanted to make a joke and ask what office Logan has stolen them from, but he was entirely too afraid that Logan's answer would be real.

Logan was dressed in his typical all-black one-man-army uniform. His bright-tan ten gallon hat looked pretty ridiculous, but it was keeping the sun off his eyes. Logen tilted the hat down--sun was creeping lower--but he glanced up at Jeff and nodded.

"Your horses need water?" Logan asked. Jeff shook his head. There's really not a lot to say after a time like that.

Jeff's little pussy rifle was hanging inches from his hands. Logan flexed his back an inch and felt his backsword. Niether one moved until they heard Jessica.

Jessica arrived in a dustball, her engine purring quietly. The all-wheel drive STI was not made for carefully navigating back country ruts, and she'd kept her RPMs down the whole trip. Logan watched the brake lights flash at the car rolled to a stop. The driver door opened. Jeff's sister stood up; Kaylee had never looked more beautiful to Logan, her sillouette showing offer her boots and her curves and the ruffles of her jacket, but he couldn't stare much because the red sun was behind her.

"She's all ready for you," said Kaylee. Kaylee mounted Abby while Logan loaded whatever water he could fit in the trunk. Jeff didn't offer to help. Kaylee looked over the flat expanse in the direction of the setting sun. "That's an awfully big desert."

"You know what's on the other side?" asked Logan.

"No idea. You need a map?"

"I'll be alright. Ten million men crossed that desert. And they didn't have a car that could do it before sunup."

Jeff snorted his disbelief.

"Awfully quick goodbye there, partner," say Kaylee. "That was some magnificent events." Kaylee and Logan exchanged a glance. If Jeff only knew what she was really talking about.

Logan closed the trunk. A rear-mounted license laser winked its little red light at him. Looked like most of the damaged had buffed out.

"Goodbye, Logan." Kaylee turned Abby around and headed the horse back along her own tracks.

Logan tossed the hat as he got inside the car. A red thong was hanging from the steering column--one of the strap ends had been threaded through his key ring.

Logan coasted Jessica most of the way down to the rock-hard alkaline surface of the desert floor. Then he stopped. Jeff was probably watching him, impatient to see that he left, but Logan lived by rules, one of them was that when you have miles of flat surface with no obstructions, you take your time to enjoy it.

Jessica was at a dead stop. Logan punched the throttle, and just as the tach needle cross 4500 RPM he let the clutch fly in. Jessica launched. Logan held the throttle down to maintain, feeling the pull of the turbo like he was inside a rocket. The car redlined. He shifted. It redlined again and he shifted, again and again, his heartbeat quickening with every shift.

The last thing anyone in that town would have seen was a black speck, shrinking inside the glare of the setting sun's sinking corona.

How to fix the console resolution after installing part of the ati driver on an arch box connected to your tv because you are too cheap to buy another monitor and now the text is too small

2011-07-04T13:38:00.000-07:00

Add:

nomodeset

to the kernel parameters in /boot/grub/menu.lst

Not sure if this will have any unintended consequences though.

Things I Love About My Philly Friends #27

2011-07-03T16:56:00.001-07:00

Critical mass for a good party is....2 people. Not 6.

How to Unfuck your System after Accidentally installing Gnome3

2011-07-03T11:46:00.000-07:00

Fucking shitballs. In the process of trying to install openssh I accidentally upgraded the entire operating system, which put gnome3 on instead of gnome2. Why the fuck do people make a "new version" of a piece of software that is compeletely different than the old one? Imagine if the major league baseball people incremented a version number and you suddenly had cricket.

So now we're back to this game where I'm on my way out the door, and boot up linux just to check my shopping list, and suddenly realize everything is fucked up and now I need to try to fix it.

this might help:

http://intgat.tigress.co.uk/rmy/extensions/index.html

shit that didn't work.

ah, some lovely forum posts from the fuckrags: liking gnome2 means you were doing it wrong.

and other fuckrags who think graphical window managers should only be navigated by the keyboard. Of course! its not like there's a CLI for that or anything.

I need to start doing this: "People who like chocolate ice cream are far less intelligent than me!"

Might just try XFCE again: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xfce

this is a work in progress....

Ok, going back to gnome2 isn't an option. I'm SOL right now. This is partly because of Arch's rolling releases; however those wouldn't be so bad if morons didnt reinvent their stupid ass software.

The...most correct option here is to create a fork of gnome2 for other gnome users that want to be left alone. I don't have time for that; I can't stick my fingers into every piece of ancilliary software that I need when its developers get hardons for doing something they incorrectly think is really cool.

Really don't have an answer here; maybe go back to windows. I mean, I already hate it, and I won't wake up in the morning and find gnome3 or ubuntu's shittastic window manager installed, and I'm forced to use it by Starcraft and now this project I'm doing with some Microsofties. It really sucks when those guys actually want to use their own software.

I think I've at least managed to turn off all the gay sounds gnome3 was making at me. Nothing dulls the pain like small victories.

[Edit]
Figured I'd at least try:   https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=956708#p956708

[Edit]
gnome3 just decided it would stop working completely.
XFCE just gave me a first-class terminal icon the first time I ran it. I think I'm in love. Well, not love, but a complete lack of hate. I don't think this window manager was programmed by morons.

Switch to XFCE

1) To get ctrl+alt+backspace back, put the following in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-zap.conf :

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "Keyboard Defaults"
    MatchIsKeyboard    "yes"
    Option "XkbOptions" "terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp"
EndSection

2) to setup Ctrl+Alt+A to open a terminal, edit

./.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts.xml

find this section:

        <property name="custom" type="empty">

and add:

            <property name="<Control><Alt>a" type="string" value="exo-open --launch TerminalEmulator"/>

3) reclaim ctrl+alt+shift to move window to next workspace with you:

Applications Menu -- Settings -- Window Manager

Double click on "Move window to {upper,bottom,left,right} workspace"

Then you have to actually press the keys, but its not too bad.

4) when you have everything set up the way you like it, use the "log out" think instead of ctrl+alt+backspace, because it waits until to save your settings (??)

Installing libreoffice on Arch

2011-07-02T22:22:00.000-07:00

pacman -S ttf-dejavu artwiz-fonts
pacman -Sy libreoffice

why do you need the Sy for libreoffice? Because...crap people.

And if you get:

error: 'libreoffice': could not find or read package

Comment out the first few mirrors in the mirror list, because they are out of date. Then find out that you have to upgrade pacman. And then you have to run pacman-db-upgrade.

Then try running pacman -Sy libreoffice again.

Oh, and now its failing because "python2 and python are in conflict"

Funny, it been fucking working.

wait....maybe you need to do this:

sudo pacman -Syu

Idk. All I wanted to do was make a spreadsheet of girls i'm talking to on internet dating sites.

<3 Arch Linux

2011-06-25T18:42:00.000-07:00

I just installed the real, authentic, genuine, 200 proof, bona fide, official, legit, veritable, trustworthy, twenty-four carat, pure, definitive, cannon, original, verified, Java. And the sdk. All I had to do was type:

sudo pacman -S jre
sudo pacman -S jdk

I didn't have to crawl all over the gutter of the internet piecing stuff together and enabling rogue, underground, unsupported, "proprietary" and contraband repositories to slip it onto my computer, either. And arch linux didn't fight back and fuck me over by also installing the open source shit java behind my back. Also, Arch didn't pull some stunt with this "alternatives" bullshit, where not using the open source java feels like you're "opting out" of the rape scanners the TSA runs at airports.

Seriously though, this is awesome. Arch linux lets you do what you want with your own computer. All you have to do is look it up on the wiki. I didn't have to spend an hour searching the internet and reading tons of forum posts full of nerds either expounding their usless opinions on which java someone should use, or responding to someones question by not answering it and telling them they should search the web. Searching the web is overrated, because the first few spots are invariably a couple posts where someone asks a question and some nerds don't answer it but instead say "STFW! Geez, the answer is right here on page 53 of the search results!"

Really. I'm amazed. I'm actually not used to an operating system doing what I want. Like, what am I going to do for the next three hours now that I don't have to wrestle with my computer?

Road With Irons

2011-06-23T23:05:00.000-07:00

I’m coming home
I’m coming home
tell the World I’m coming home
Let the rain wash away all the pain of yesterday
I know my kingdom awaits and they’ve forgiven my mistakes
I’m coming home, I’m coming home
tell the World I’m coming

Hi.

This is the tale of yet another philly trip.

First, we begin with the latest evolution of my packing strategy:

Two backpacks (fun fact: the one on the right is a girl's snowboarding backpack). I got 5 days of crap down to two backpacks. I feel like I've come along way from a backpack and a large suitcase for a 2 night stay. The reason my second back needs to be a backpack is that it fits in the overhead bins of turboprops (like the one I flew in from Seattle to Portland) and they are easier to fit into the overhead bins of the turbine jets, which always fill up quick because of the bullshit with bag checking fees. In summary, two bags gives you the best chance of arriving at your destination with all 5 days worth of stuff.

My first night I arrived in philly at 12:30 am, and I couldn't think of anyone in the city that liked me enough to pick me up that late if given only 24 hours notice, so I booked a room at the embassy suites. Embassy suites was pretty badass. All rooms, even with only one bed, are actually multi-room suites with a couch and stuff. The walls were a bit thin, but it still might be a cool place to hang out.

My strategy for this visit was to really only announce my arrival to a few people that I knew I'd be able to hang out with; I didn't even plan for a single night in philly itself. It seemed to work out better this way; I spent almost all of my time hanging out with people and very little of it wasted on my own. I didn't tell Jordan I'd be in philly, since he plans its schedule like an entire week in advance, but I ran into him anyway on the street and we got coffee. That was pretty awesome.

Spent a night in pheonixville. A lot of my old friends came out. I think I've been undervaluing good friends these past few years. I don't mean friends like, people you don't mind seeing, I mean like close, awesome friends. The kind of people that you can say whatever you want around and not worry about what they think of you. The kind of people who always have your back, and will adjust their schedule to see you and with whom you can pick up with after years as if you never left. The kind of people that are rarely lame and boring. I think I need more friends like that. There was a time when I was totally content despite being girlfriend-less, and it was because I had friends like that.

Next night: the graduation party. Laura and Rachel both had graduation parties. I figured I might as well go to one of them, and Rachel's coincided with this Via Ferrata thing my sister wanted to do. Most of the people were people I barely knew, which is always a challenge for me at parties, but I managed to do all right. Not knowing anyone actually works out fine if a lot of the people are cool. So...Laura was there. I mentioned that I'm planning to have (another) pirate party in the next couple months. She told me she owns 4 corsets and would fly to seattle just to be there. We were also talking about my next visit to philly and how it will likely involve japanese-style karaoke and salsa dancing. Laura said she would totally come out for the dancing. This was basically a complete reversal from her position the last time I saw her, which was that she didn't dance, ever, and refused to even do a couple bachatta steps with me, even if I put her feet on my feet, which was itself a reversal of the night we watched her favorite movie and danced a merengue in the middle of it. Girls make no fucking sense to me.

Cassandra, the girl who sold me Katie and taught me to ride--was also at the party. We traded stories about the MSF Rider Coach training program.

Jelloshots taste good when they are home made.

The next night I headed down to Virginia to hang out with my older sisters family. My sis noticed immediately that was "dressing stylish" or whatever she called it, so I guess the ridiculous amount of money that I spent on clothing was...justified for a second.

One of my nieces is learning to play the guitar. I borrowed her child-sized guitar and performed my version of love story for them. I really need to get around to recording that--especially after this whole bit with Hot Lego Girl--that makes like 7 fucking times this has happened.

At one point my brother in law and I watched Point Break, an apparently classic action movie that was referenced in Hot Fuzz. It had a striking similarity to Fast and the Furious.

The Via Ferrata.

My younger sister and I drove to West Virginia in order to participate in what must be one of the most dangerous climbing-related sports I've ever heard of. Don't get me wrong--it was a good time, but this is not something you're gonna do every weekend. In top rope climbing, you're hanging on a rope constantly, with an active belayer below you, and at most you'll fall a few feet. Typically, there is nothing that you will bash your face on, because you are scaling a flat-ish wall. Via Ferrata climbing is different: you don't have a top rope. You are clipped into a steel cable running up the mountain via a y-cable with carabiners on the end (the y cable allows you to move them to the next section of steel cable one at a time, ensuring you are always connected). Instead of groping up raw rock you typically hold onto steel rungs, similar to a ladder but more difficult. You could easily fall up to ten feet, and on the way down there are those steel rungs to bash your face into. Falling is not really an option like it is with climbing, and seemed like it was almost a guaranteed trip to the hostpial.

Ironically, though, I felt safer than when I'm climbing. Turns out, ladder rungs made excellent handholds, and you feel very secure when you're feet and hands are all over them. In contrast, the probably safest part of the climb was when we crossed basically a glorified rope ladder over a valley: a fall there would just scrape you up, and you'd be find hanging on the cable, but despite being the safest spot, it was the scariest part of the climb. Dangling a couple hundred feet up in the air reminded me of that rickety blue ledge you jump off of when bungie jumping off the stratesphere. After cafeful consideration and a lot of looking down, I realized I was more scared of slipping and hanging midair from the safety line than I was of slipping and plummeting to my death. The rope ladder had a steel wire above it, which is where your carabiners clip into. There were two steel cables at your sides that served as railings. I gripped them, sliding my hands along them with each careful step, dragging my y-cable and carabiners along with my elbow. Taking a step or two to the next boards and then bumping my y-cable along the safety line put in my mind an unmistakable image of an elderly person walking and dragging an ivy line. I told myself it would be a great idea to kind of stare down to the bottom of the canyon, since I had to stare down at my feet anyway to place them on the tiny planks, and I told myself that this is how I would "master my fear" like in the movies. I did make it to the other side, but I couldn't tell you what the hell "mastering you fear" means, because I still don't know.

Later, I looked back, and we were even higher than the rope bridge. Like, twice as high. We were standing on a ledge that was only like 5 to 10 feet wide, but it felt incredibly safe because my feet were on solid rock. It looked like the kind of thing that would impress people, so I made sure to get some pictures:

This mountain summit could be reached via a simple hike and is not even part of the via ferrata, but here's a pic from it anyway:

Then we were done, and we both forgot to tip our guide, who was super helpful, and this was made worse by the fact that we were the only two people who showed up, because everyone else assumed it would be canceled by rain. So...we feel bad. I'm trying to get my sister to like send him a tip in the mail or something.

Michael Crichton did lots of cool climbing and diving stuff with his sister--maybe we will end up doing that as well.

September.

Remember, remember, the fifth of novem--oh wrong month. Well it still rhymes. Anyway. My next visit is for this girl Holly's wedding, in september. Holly IMed me to yell at me for not RSVPing yet. I told her I can't handle planning more than one trip at a time. She told me she can't understand how I'm still single. Then she told me I should give in and sign up for The Bachelor, and also that maybe I should lower my standards. I told her about my experimental lowering of standards on okcupid and how I almost went on a date with a guy.

There was lots of talk about my next philly visit. Talk as in interest. I think we're gonna do something cool for once. I'm trying to get a bunch of people to go in on a couple hotel suites in downtown philly for like two nights, and we will go out, drink the best rum (captain), dance salsa at the best nightclub (brasils) and do japanese-style karaoke with the private rooms and the sushi and stuff in chinatown. And anything else cool that people think of. Rizo, Rachel, Laura, Allison, Adam...crap tons of people said they were interested. Lets see what happens.

No word from Hot Lego Girl. Allison says I need to not call her ever and act like I've moved on. So far acting like I'm moving on has been, to me, indistinguishable from actually moving on. So far it doesn't appear to be working; Hot Lego Girl hasn't called me or anything, and its been weeks, and I'm pretty sure she is fine without me. I thought we had something going...she was super scared of this trip she did to Honduras and she called me on my cell from the other side of the security checkpoint and I stayed with her on the phone. And I have no idea how she can possibly not want to be more than friends after that monday night when the got back, but apparently there is nothing I can do about it, so my only choice is to move on and try again. Wolverine doesn't cry over crazy girls.

I have other girls in the pipeline, but they are mostly just a pain in the ass right now. I guess something could happen there, but I'm still going to tell Holly that I'm bringing zero guests to her wedding.

I spent some time watching car chases on the internet. It looks like most of the guys get caught just because they make a mistake--a bad move, or their (usually stolen) car is completely underpowered compared to the police cruisers. I always root for the cars being chased, but they almost never get away. It looks like, to get away in the real world, you have to perfectly execute a move with foreknowledge of the terrain and before a police chopper arrives on the scene.

The Linux Wars

I finally got linux working on my brand new expensive desktop. In fact, I'm back in linux right now. Yay! Its been a rather long adventure. Ubuntu was pure trash, Gentoo had some horrific problem that I've already blocked out of my memory, Fedora's live cd froze while trying to load, and Arch linux failed to boot with either mysterious grub errors or mysterious kernel panics. Yeah, this is what happens when I use technology. Probably not the best idea to become a programmer. Anyway.

I solved the problem with Arch and got it running. I probably ran the installer 20 times but I got it working. IT TURNS OUT that I have two hard drives in my computer. Yes, I knew that obviously. What I didn't know, though, was that the bootloader, grub, thinks that hard drive #0 and hard drive #1 are both hard drive 0. I'm not even kidding. If you don't believe me, flying to fucking Seattle and I'll show you this little technological wonder I have at my desk.

The mysterious kernel panics were because of problem were I was using grub's command line to select the kernel manually and then boot. Every time it gave me a kernel panic about being unable to load the file system. I re-ran the entire operating system installer from scratch many, many times (because you can't do it piecemeal), each time trying different combinations of mount points and different filesystems, and one time I reinstalled the entire operations system just because I wanted to check if the kernel was compiled with ext3 drivers, only to realize that the installer doesnt let you configure the kernel at all, a fact that I should have fucking known since I had just run the installer ten times.

I finally solved the kernel problem by realizing that you cant just type "kernel ..." and then "boot" in grub. You have to also use this "initrd" command to set up some kind of ram filesystem just for booting. That was my problem--the kernel wasn't panicking because it couldn't read the root filesystem (even though that is exactly what it said it was doing), it was panicking because it couldn't read the nonexistent, temporary, weird-ass ram filesystem used for booting.

Once I had arch linux booting, finally, it was a simple matter to realized that the hand-booting procedure only worked when I told it that the root of the oeprating system was on the wrong hard drive. For a day or two, I quite manually booted my computer by entering raw grub commands like:

root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/sdb5
initrd /kernel26.img
boot

I felt pretty badass, until I realized that all the people in the world who could even understand what I was doing would not be impressed.

So, I fixed grub's configuration to point at the wrong hard drive and now my computer boots all the way to run level 3 without intervention! Someday I'll make it do runlevel 5 automatically, you know, start x for me, but I don't want to press my luck.

Oh, and then I tried to use my external usb "backup" drive. That was fun. "Backup" is in quotes because the data I put on it is mostly pirated movies, which I can afford to lose, however I was still quite upset when the drive wouldn't mount. It was working perfectly with my old computer, but suddenly it had a bad super block. Either my old computer fucked it up with a power surge the moment it died (unlikely to occur through a USB cable) or windows saw an ext3 formatted drive and decided to fuck it up. Whatever the case, it took me hours to fix, and I now know a lot more about hard drive partitions and superblocks than I ever really wanted. If this ever happens to you, though, here's the secret:

First, gpart doesn't work on my installation of arch. Who the fuck knows why.
Second, install and run: gparted. I don't remember why, but its important.
sudo partprobe (i actually have to do this every time I turn the drive on)
sudo mke2fs -n /dev/sdc1 (this finds the backup superblocks and prints the block size)
sudo e2fsck -b 32768 -B 4096 /dev/sdc1 (-b is one of the superblock backups, and -B is the blocksize)

So yeah that was a lot of fun. I'm liking arch linux though. You know why? Because instead of tearing my hair out trying to unfuck whatever the ubuntu morons came up with, all I have to do with an arch install is just run a couple commands. I could put these in a script!

pacman -Sy
pacman -S sudo
(edit /etc/sudoers)
pacman -S vim
pacman -Syu
pacman -S gnome
pacman -S gnome-extra
(edit /etc/rc.conf)
pacman -S gdm
pacman -S sorg
startx
killall X
(edit /etc/inittab)
/sbin/telinit 3
/sbin/telinit 5
pacman -S firefox
pacman -S autofs
modprobe autofs4
pacman -S mplayer
pacman -S gthumb
pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils
gconf-editor (apps -- metacity -- global_keybindings)
(edit /etc/pacman.conf to enable multilib repo)
pacman -Syu
pacman -S lib32-libxdamage
pacman -S flashplugin
pacman -S lib32-libvdpau
(edit /etc/adobe/mms.cfg to uncomment EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1)
(edit some about:config thing in firefox)
pacman -S gimp
pacman -S unzip
pacman -S python (this is actually python3)
pacman -S twisted
pacman -S python2
pacman -S make
sudo pacman -S setuptools (for python easy_install ?)
sudo pacman -S gcc
sudo easy_install numpy

pacman -S bc
pacman -S cups ghostscript gsfonts
pacman -S cups-pdf
pacman -S hplip
pacman -S openssh

Yeah. And now my computer works.

Next Moves

pirate party 2.0
weekend roller coaster
weekend salsa in vancouver
side businesses w/ chris and kev
build shelves, sofa
work weekends
plan september
motorcycle
salsa
climbing
sailing
record love story

And thats why she had such a funny looking face

2011-06-10T20:41:00.000-07:00

It isn't very wise to post this king of thing, but I just realized that when I think of my life as a story, this little gem is a part of it:

I just spent 30 minutes flirting with someone on okcupid before realizing that they were a guy pretending to be a girl.

All We Have to Decide...

2011-06-09T18:31:00.000-07:00

All we have to decide is what to do with the time given to us.

--Gandalf the Grey

I made another move on Hot Lego Girl. It was poorly timed and poorly executed, but this was one of those rare cases where I believe doing it poorly was better than not doing it at all. She did the typical girl thing; said she wasn't sure if she wanted to be more than friends and she was still thinking about it. Yet another line I've never heard before; I have no idea if that's true or more girl bullshit.

There is nothing I can do now. I'm basically just standing there, watching her hold a gun to my throat, waiting to see if she pulls the trigger.

Probably a good learning experience, at least. Like I never expected this to happen.

Despite the fact that I have plenty of physical energy, I am plagued by some deep, non-physiological exhaustion that I don't understand. I have grand girl-meeting schemes in my head involving parties and bars and dancing and not an ounce of drive, motivation, or energy to implement them. I mulled over possible solutions during our boring-ass team meeting today. One solution is to become a cold and heartless bastard, a robot that can somehow meet girls without becoming emotionally invested in anyone. That has its drawbacks, and would be difficult; I typically pour everything I have into these attempts. Another option is to find a quick way to recharge, and for that, I'm coming back around to the sportbike. Despite the fact that I seriously don't feel like doing anything right now, the desire to hop on a ninja and feel the throttle twist in my hand again runs deeper than all of that. I don't know when I first saw motorcycles, but I must have been pretty young.

I am going to move up my plans to get another sportbike, and investigate how much I can get along without girls. I'm not sure how to measure that. An obvious approach would be to measure this post-rejection lull I feel, with and without a sportbike to fall back to, but the emotional fallout I encounter after hearing the Just Friends line never has the same magnitude--its different with every girl.

Another possible measure is to see if I can achieve that sort of nirvana-like feeling I've gotten every time I've falsely believed I had made it with one of the girls I'd fallen in love with--like the one time I kissed Laura. Being happy again, with just a sportbike and without some current girl in the picture--thats a possibility. I'm doubtful that even a sportbike is exciting enough.

Yet another possibility is inspired by my experiences with the traffic cops: I reached a point where I got pulled over and felt nothing--my fear of cops had simply vanished. What if I can reach a similar point with girls? What if the next time a girl I'm totally into flushes me down the Just Friends drain, I simply didn't give a shit, because my 600cc ninja never has a headache and is always in the mood to tear up some highways? Again, that's a rather high bar for an inanimate object to fill; nothing can truly replace girls. In fact, I have little faith that I can conduct this experiment rigorously, but if you have any ideas, please don't hesitate to drop me a note.

Here's a parting thought: when you redline a bike 10 times, it doesn't text you later saying it just wants to be friends.

[Edit]
Tried to install Arch Linux today. It installed fine on the 3rd try. Only problem is that it wont boot.
On the bright side, I learned how to fix Window's time problem. So at least my hardware clock is running in UTC.

S.O.L.

2011-06-01T00:38:00.000-07:00

The best investment [you can make] is your own education.

--my Grandfather

Death of an Airman

I got my denial letter from the FAA stating that I am officially fucked. The most likely course of action is that my broken heart mystery will remain unsolved and I will re-apply for medical certification in two years. Until then my Private Pilot's license will sit in my wallet as a monument to the feel-good platitudes found in movies such Yes Man and Meet the Robinsons.

I executed a sell on some stock that my Grandfather gave me that probably should have gone to a house, in order to reset my finances for a new set of opportunities and challenges. A sportbike is number one on the list. You'll see why in part two.

"In our moment of triumph?"

You start off with a 10 and a Jack of Hearts. Not a terrible hand, eh? You bet solid. The flop has the queen and the king. Of fucking hearts. Your own heart races, your hands sweat, and you play the best damn poker game you know. The flop has an extra king in it. You think nothing of it. The turn is another king. Whatever. You're in it to win it, and there's no turning back. Your eyes fixate a little to much on the river card. Everything depends on it.

Its the fucking ace.

You have a 10 of hearts, the Jack of Hearts, the Queen of Hearts, the King of Hearts, and the Ace of Hearts. Royal fucking flush baby. You go all in, and as soon as the dealer says "show 'em" you slam your cards face up on the table and say "suck it bitches!" You debate whether to slide the pot to yourself one stack at a time, or give it a big 'ol hug and pull them all in at once. You're too excited to really think about it. You grab a handful of chips. Someone grabs your arm.

Its a girl with slightly darker skin and a sort of exotic beauty. She's 24 and has a wild pair of eyes that dance around the room. She flashes you a crooked smile as she lays down a king and a joker. There's four kings on the table now, and she says the joker is the fifth. Ladies and Gentlemen, Hot Lego Girl.

Weird, now, didn't know we were playing with jokers. Not sure how one even got into the deck.

That's basically what happened to me, except it wasn't a poker game, it was my dating life. I would have made an analogy of Grand Moff Tarkin getting blown up with the Death Star just as they were about to crush the rebels, but the girl in this story has never seen Star Wars.

It was like Laura all over again. I thought I was there. This time I was sure I was there. "There" might not have even meant the strongest versions of dating, but there was a me and her and we had just started something awesome.

Then, today, in the same text, she told me that last night was amazing and that she just wanted to be friends.

She sounded apologetic, even. Let me give some advice to you girls, that I believe will make the world a better place. Don't ever fucking apologize for the Just Friends. When you deliver the Just Friends sentence, you are informing a boy that he has completely and utterly failed, so say it like you mean it. Despite the nomenclature you are not, in fact, his friend. You are a judge assigning the death penalty and you should act accordingly. You can maybe apologize for being batshit insane, but never apologize for the fact that you think he's a sweet tool. That just rubs it in.

There's really not a lot I can say here--not without going back to the bitching and moaning I've hopefully left behind. Needless to say, I watched everything I hoped for slip away in a frustrating exchange of text messages. My best move, maybe, at this point, is to acquiesce to the sexless prison and hope that she accidentally gets drunk and makes out with me frequently enough to change her mind. It is an extremely dangerous move, less likely to succeed than pulling a Gatsby, and I've never even attempted it without walking away with considerable scars. Also, I think she is hiding something. We exchanged words and it was all bullshit about things becoming too weird.

I experienced every emotion you would guess I would experience, and to a numbing degree. I then paced around my apartment, unable to summon motivation to do anything, not work on projects, or work, or even play Starcraft.

My continuing attempts to devise a means to expedite the process of forgetting about a girl have so far proven fruitless.

Next Moves

T.B.D.

Today I Learned to Stay the Fuck Out of Bremerton

2011-05-30T05:36:00.000-07:00

My first speeding citation. Yeah, I know, I've gotten pulled over many times in my life but it has never resulted in a speeding ticket. Tonight changed that, and it wasn't even from an angle I expected. I always imagined a cop would be hiding in the bushes in some great hiding spot I didn't anticipate, or appear from out of the traffic behind me.

Instead, I had just slowed down to an unbearably slow speed because I realized I was going through a town and not on the highway that I wanted to be on. There was a cop in the opposing lane, and another vehicle between us. I watched the cop pull a u-turn in my rearview mirror, and slowed down as far as I could without stalling my car. The cop came right up behind me. I moved one lane to the right, since the road kata (keep right pass left) demands it. He followed. I basically continued driving as slow as I could, chewing on the beef jerky I was relying on to keep me awake, and staring at him in my rearview mirror.

Finally he put is damn lights on and we went through the whole bit. This guy didn't try to bait me or anything. He just accused me of going 55 in a 30, and asked for my papers. He also made me say the alphabet forwards after finding out I had two drinks in six hours. I would have offered to go through it again using NATO alfa-bravo codes, but I've had a strict say-as-little-as-possible policy every since that time a customs agent searched my trunk because she asked if I brought anything back from Canada and I held up a bottle of Dr. Pepper.

Anyway, I have no comment on my speed, but I will tell you that I was fucking coasting. The ticket is for $247. I am tempted to pay it, but I don't think you can do that and maintain your innocence. Regardless of the amount of money I lose, I care the most about not giving in and not letting the City of Bremerton profit, though I likely face a battle I'm sure to lose. I think I'm going to hire a traffic lawyer and take this to court, if for no other reason than I want to know exactly how the hell he allegedly clocked me from the opposing lane when there would have been a car in the way fucking up his radar. I don't think he's bluffing though: he quoted me the 55 before he saw the out of state license, so I doubt he's betting on me not showing up. If they really expect us to drive this slow maybe I should just sell my car and walk on the highway.

I have 15 days to respond and I have to send in the original ticket, which precludes framing it on my wall.

Calvin and Hobbes Lego Mosaic

2011-05-28T10:33:00.000-07:00

I started this project in February. Most of the time was spent waiting for batches of Legos to arrive, and I can tell you, the Lego.com store is not anywhere near as good as Amazon. Unfortunately they are the only place you can buy brand new bricks and select exactly which ones you want.

It is 64 studs (two baseplates) wide and 136 studs (four baseplates + 1 tiny 8x baseplate) high. I don't know how many pieces it has, but its hundreds or thousands, and it cost me about $269.21. Plus ten cents for that last piece, and then something for the baseplates. So maybe a tad closer to $300.

So, yeah. If you want one of these, or just have a good idea or image, let me know. I created a rose design, and a portal cake design. I don't know if I will make those. Maybe the rose. One of my friends out here wants a mermaid.