Damn it Feels Good to be a Programmer

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

I miss my parents!

Thought that kind of thing should be recorded.

The One

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

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

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

sun goes out

you'll be standing

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

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

Critical mass for a good party is....2 people.  Not 6.

How to Unfuck your System after Accidentally installing Gnome3

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

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.