Dear Fellow Star Trek Fans

I just realized Geordi LaForge is black.  I'm not even kidding;  I only now figured that out.

[Edit]
P.S.  I was briefly thrilled do discover someone on PlentyOfFish that liked sushi, salsa dancing and sportbikes.  Then I discovered I was reading my own profile....

I Bless the Rains Down in Aaaafricaaaaaa

The Ex

I have been really wanting to tell my ex these words:  "I miss you, and you were great."  ...because that is exactly how I feel right now.  However, upon consulting with friends, this would be perceived as a move and I'd have to ask myself a lot of complicated questions and I think I'm just going to hope that she is well and found someone who is almost is awesome as I am but more affectionate.


Lana Del Ray

Karaoke went well, well enough that I am willing to put up with the scheduling bullshit.  Next time, I am thinking salsa+karaoke in one night.  Another night, drinking and bowling.  Maybe.  I don't know.


Old Friends

Went to my high school reunion.  An attractive girl that I never hung out with in high school, I thought, made it a point to let me know she was single and three other things and I'm getting bored...well if we skip the boring part of the story I have her card and am pretty sure she'll never return my text--which is actually double sad because she hinted at a really interesting since-highschool life story that I was hoping to hear more of while also seeing more of her.  Unfortunately, as with the cute cafeteria girl at work, there was a strong internal debate between two possibilities:  "interested" and "just friendly."   This time I thought it was "interested" but it turned out to be "just friendly."  Damn those...friendly women and their friendliness.


Field Report

Today I aggressively attempted to perform "the zipper" while merging onto the highway, even though some asshat in a small green car sped up to block me.  I called his bluff but he didn't back off so I was forced onto the shoulder.  It was a sad day for the zipper.  I smiled at him from my new position of power on his 6, and he did something gay that looked like writing down my front plate.  I miss Pennsylvania.


The PenIs Mightier

While drinking with friends we decided that Chris and Kev will take all of the ridiculous things I write, including all of the posts I've started hiding since my last breakup, and publish them in some form that makes money.  Of course that same night I also started bitching about how much money 50 Shades made, and we decided that I was going to write a girl-on-girl version of it.  I started the second one on the plane back to Seattle.  Turns out, writing a story that is anything other than melodramatic bullshit betwixt my road ninja characters is actually quite difficult.  Even worse, writing the girl version of the book means I have to read the original.  I am not happy.  I'm not happy with the prose;  I'm not happy with the characters;  and I am not at all happy about the kind of social dynamics girls care about.  The author just keeps droning on about people being intimidated by this ass clown who maintains a hostile work environment at his company that does nothing.  Whatever.  I'm probably going to get tired of this in a week.  You know what?  I need a writing partner.  If you would like to help write a book that is basically 50 shades of grey except that the man character is a hot femme fatale instead of some dorky version of prince charming, and the book is different in every way that might otherwise allow the original author to sue us, then please drop me a line.  Especially if you can write the relationship parts.

Fun Facts

The TSA agent that groped me asked if I was ok becaused I "look[ed] pissed off."  Sometimes people just don't understand that I hate them.

If I ever become a pickup artist ( and I never would of course)  my gay little screen name would be "the doctor"

The Secret of Unhappiness

I'm going to be a giant dork about this post, because if I don't, I will write pages of text (already happened).

Choice 1:
A.  Move East to be happier by a certain margin
B.  Stay in Seattle to not burn bridges in the tech industry by abandoning a new job in less than 6 months (ouch)

Choice 2:
I forget what choice 2 was

Consequence:
I will be in Seattle when the world ends on Nov 8, 2013.

What to do with the time given to us, or, Operation Gandalf:
A.  Continue obsessing over 3-SAT, writing, or random side project business ideas that for three years have been no more than a fruitless self-employment fantasy
B.  Quit by current job to do risky writing/startup stuff:  already precluded by choice 1
C.  Go all in at work, and stop wasting time on side projects.

One thing I've learned:  I suck at identifying good projects to work on.  I hated the scroll wheel mouse, and I thought facebook was dumb, and I wasn't even impressed with Amazon even after they became a big success.  No one impresses me.  So I can't do the ideas party by myself.

So the next thing to think about is meeting people.  Again.  I have this theory about the number of hours I spend with friends during the week, and how lonely I feel, and I think I could empirically derive a loneliness formula (accouding for things like weekend days having a higher weight) and then determine the minimum amount of time I need to spend with friends in order to not be lonely at all, ever.  I'm not going to do that though.  Just going to go back to meeting people.  That is really the only reason I'm writing this--to remember that I'm supposed to be meeting people and not starting and abandoning another hundred side projects.

Again.  Meeting people.  Poker, skiing, settlers, go kart racing, salsa, and maybe another thing.  I'm probably going to forget all of this anyway.  Oh!  And playing more games online with friends, maybe.  Ooooh and we could start up the lan parties again, and that other idea that I can't mention here but we'll refer to as....mmmmmmmmmmmmm....Operation Clove Hitch.  Fuck that took a lot of concentration.  Was there anything else?  Thats probably en--oh yeah, and finally, actually going to europe.  Maybe co-writing a novel with another person--i will reeeeeeeally want to get into the romance novel market.  I don't care that most girls think I'm an emotionless robot, or that I have the social skills of a computer scientist.  I saw what happened with 50 shades and I want in on that cash cow.  Shit we're going back to projects again.  If I write it with another person--ooh, like what if I find a girl who can describe all of the relationship shit, but doesn't want to deal with the prose, and we'll keep it interesting by adding what will appear to be kinky sex scenes but upon a re-read will turn out to be just bland romance scenes, and maybe I'll put in a road ninja character just for funsies.  Did I write that I wanted to go to europe?  I'm not proofreading this post.  I'm really almost sorry about that.

Ok.  Again, for my memory:  people.  That is the new project.

I've always wanted to make a spreadsheet with all of the girls I've ever fallen in love with or hooked up with (in an ideal world those sets would be equivalent) and then figure out how I met them, and then rank social activities based on past successes.  Unfortunately, as we all just learned recently, any girl I ever date in the future (or in the past) might read this post, so....I'm totally not going to do that.


[Edit]
and motorcycling on the Isle of Man


[Edit]
Ok maybe hold off on the no projects thing....what if we made a game that was Dota2 + C&C Renegade?  It would be just like renegade except that bot soldiers are constantly running out and fighting...I think that would be awesome.


[Edit]
Forget all that.  Here is a simpler SAT thing that might be easier to compute:  instead of going after all possible unsat instances, start with a SAT instance, and check all UNSAT instances that can be made out of it.  Use a DFS that branches on the clause being in it or not, in order to avoid duplicates.  Well, some duplicates.

Things I Didn't Want to Learn Today

Superblock does not wear tights

Here are some things I didn't want to learn today:
1.  Those cheap, foxconn computers are apparently worthless in any role where you are accessing storage via USB
2.  Though fsck may call your ext3 filesystem an ext2 filesystem, it does actually know what its doing.
3.  The command to search for backup superblocks is dumpe2fs:
sudo dumpe2fs /dev/sdb1 | grep -i superblock

  Primary superblock at 0, Group descriptors at 1-117
  Backup superblock at 32768, Group descriptors at 32769-32885
  Backup superblock at 98304, Group descriptors at 98305-98421
  Backup superblock at 163840, Group descriptors at 163841-163957
  Backup superblock at 229376, Group descriptors at 229377-229493
  Backup superblock at 294912, Group descriptors at 294913-295029
  Backup superblock at 819200, Group descriptors at 819201-819317
  Backup superblock at 884736, Group descriptors at 884737-884853
  Backup superblock at 1605632, Group descriptors at 1605633-1605749
  Backup superblock at 2654208, Group descriptors at 2654209-2654325
  Backup superblock at 4096000, Group descriptors at 4096001-4096117
  Backup superblock at 7962624, Group descriptors at 7962625-7962741
  Backup superblock at 11239424, Group descriptors at 11239425-11239541
  Backup superblock at 20480000, Group descriptors at 20480001-20480117
  Backup superblock at 23887872, Group descriptors at 23887873-23887989
  Backup superblock at 71663616, Group descriptors at 71663617-71663733
  Backup superblock at 78675968, Group descriptors at 78675969-78676085
  Backup superblock at 102400000, Group descriptors at 102400001-102400117
  Backup superblock at 214990848, Group descriptors at 214990849-214990965


4. and then maybe you fix it with this?  Note its e2fsck and not just fsck

sudo e2fsck -b 32768 /dev/sdb1


What is a superblock, you ask?  A superblock is this thing in your hard drive that both of us don't want to know about.  I spent $805 last month renting windows azure computers that generated so much data I had to then buy a $200 western digital external hard drive.  Since I regularly flip between windows and linux, I connected the hard drive to one of my cheap ass foxconn computers.  That may have been a mistake, because after downloading most of the generated data, the journal and primary superblock of the filesystem got corrupted.

Anyway, might as well put these here:




Lets find out if any of these are still good!  Yay!




[edit]
running fsck on /dev/sdb will always fail because you need to run it on /dev/sdb1 ....

[fiction] The Independant Jetsam

When I stepped off the boat, I had nothing but my clothes and a guitar with a broken E string on my back and a million dollars in an offshore account.

I followed streams of people around for hours, wondering what brought me to this particular city.  I was very tired by the end of the day.  Then I spotted it.  Part of the skyline was wrong.  Not ugly, or different, but wrong.  Wrong like seeing a red sports car in a swords & sandals movie wrong.  It just shouldn't have been there.

I hopped on a ferry across the water, standing outside to face the wrong part o the skyline.  It came into view a little bit more.  I could make out spires.  Or maybe towers, or something.  After the boat I walked to it on foot.  Got there at twilight.

It was a church.  Well...not an actual church.  It was church-ish.  Churchy.  Gothic.  The floor was a hair salon.  I won't know what the other floors were but the windows were boarded up and we were in a neighborhood where white people shouldn't be out after dark.

Then I felt it.  It.  A sort of coldness, and from all directions there was this force that tore color out of the world, and there was a sinking onrush of fear of something coming, but without the adrenaline.  I moved to the site of the door of the hair salon, ducking into a gothic alcove.  Something dark shot out of the entrance and went off somewhere down the street.

Color came back into the world, and I hugged myself, shivering slightly.  Then I went inside the hair salon.

Aside from the ugly wall color, there didn't seem to be anything amiss.  There was a radio in the corner of the room playing The Bad Touch by the bloodhound gang.  I listened to pleas for doggy-style during science fiction television while I examined each hair-cutting station.  Other than the door being unlocked.  I found a stair in the back.  Every floor was empty.  The top is where things got interesting.  Of course the roof door was unlocked.  Like it ever wasn't.

No, it was the person standing on the roof.  He wasn't supposed to be there.  Not only was the entire building wrong, but the person standing on it was even more wrong.  It was as if some cosmic jackass had offended the rules of the universe by placing a building that shouldn't exist, just to piss off the laws of physics, and then another cosmic jackass led this man up to the roof just to piss off the first jackass.

He was the sort of person that would be sitting in the audience during a very important trial, or who would be seen running into the background when a tiger escapes at the zoo, or who would be sitting at a cafe when a car chase rushes past.  He was so unremarkable that he made the act of standing too close to the edge of a tall building seem mundane.

There was nothing about his person that caught my interest.  He was tall, wearning moderately fashionable jeans, a typical leather jacket, and shoes that didn't quite work in the same way that most men's shoes didn't quite work.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

He looked up, and held up a large laminated sheet in his hands.  "Ice cream menu," he said.  "Its the strangest thing."

I frowned.  I was hoping for something more about the very suicide-like pose he was striking than ice cream, but he kept talking about the fucking ice cream.

"It's strange," he said.  "I always order the same thing.  I have good reasons that I can't order anything else--there's a reason for each of these...allergic, allergic, hate mint, awful flavor...reminds me of my ex-girlfriend..." he was pointing to each one as he said it, going through the entire menu, "...which leaves us with this one.  I always choose it.  Its as if its not even my choice, even though I'm the one choosing it."

I looked behind me.  I saw nothing.  Of course that didn't count for much.  If this guy didn't clear off the roof he was going to become a casualty.

"What's your name?"

"Thomas," he said.  "What's yours?"

"People call me the Dragon."  It was the truth.

Thomas looked at me strangely, with a hint of the kind of disdain you use when glancing at someone you just decided to start ignoring, as if my unusual moniker was somehow stranger than breaking into a hair salon in a building with out-of-place architecture to go stand on the roof and bitch about how unoriginal your desert choices are.  Fucking asshole.  I frowned right back at the fucker.  Just my luck.  Couldn't be a girl cute up here, maybe trapped, maybe cold yet smoking hot, maybe some kind of vulnerability complex that leads to impulse sex against a backdrop of rain and kind words.  No.  It was this fucking guy.

The guy--oh right, Thomas--tossed the ice cream menu into the air and walked past me as if that wasn't a weird thing to do.  I was then free to concentrate on what I'd come up here for.  Then I remembered that it was apparently all about that guy.

I followed him down the stairs.  The stairs became darker and darker as I descended, until finally I pulled out my cell phone to use as a makeshift flash light, but the screen was dim and flickering.  The phone said the battery was at 70% though.  That is when I realized the stairway wasn't dark.  It was something else.  Something cold.

I didn't want to descend.  I wanted to do anything other then continue descending.  However, I learned a long time ago that so long as fear does not stop your heart or make your hands shake too much to accomplish your task, all it takes to move forward is a somewhat detached, robotic control of your extremities.  I wouldn't have had a chance in hell of threading a needle in that state, but I cure sure as hell put one foot in front of the other going down those stairs.  When I got to the bottom it was pitch black.  The sun was still up outside but where I was, it was pitch black.  No lights from curling iron AC adapters or glowing click dials or cracks of light through windows or doors.  Just black.

And then, an outline.  Two, actually.  I could see Thomas in front of me, and in front of him, the outline of a sort of minotaur person.  That's how I always saw them; outlined by some kind of grayish light that was always behind them.  It appeared to be trained on Thomas, moving in for a kill stroke when it suddenly stopped.  I saw its head tilt.  Then it evaporated.

Light burned into my eyes, searing, painful light like kind you get when you walk out of a dark theatre onto the boardwalk of a beach in the south.  When my eyes finally adjusted I could see the hair salon clearly.  I looked up at the florescent lights.  I could them flickering.  Not flickering, like they were broken, but I could see the constant light dilation emitted by the gas.  When I looked down, Thomas was staring at me.

"What the fuck was that?" he asked.

"It's a long story," I began.  Thomas insisted on hearing it, so I began telling it, the "guardian angels didn't plan for exponential growth" part, but by the time we reached the exit and stepped out onto the street, he had completely forgotten what he just saw.

The Answer

It's the question that drives us, Neo. It's the question that brought you here. You know the question, just as I did. 

--Trinity

I have thought of a counterpart to my polynomial-time 3-SAT algorithm.  The purpose of the counterpart algorithm is to attempt to discredit the 3-SAT algorithm, by doing something complicated that looks a lot like exhaustively searching for a problem instance that I don't believe exists.

Unfortunately, this algorithm is at best, even in computer science terms, ridiculous.  Every step of the algorithm contains exponential sub-parts, and the branching factor itself is exponential.  Its failure for a number n proves that my 3-SAT algorithm will succeed for all 3-SAT instances of size n.  Therefore all I have to do is code it and run it on the set of Natural Numbers.  Small problem--more of an issue, really--that set is infinitely large, and therefore impossible to do with a homemade supercomputer, but, ironically, this is the closest I've ever come to proving P=NP.  Wouldn't it be hilarious if NP-Completeness ended up like the Continuum hypothesis?

I am one of those people who religiously cling to the school of thought that science is things that are unprovable theories that we can never know for certain (although you shouldn't mention this around jaded atheists that read Reddit all day), while mathematics is everything that is abstract and provable with absolute certainty.  I cling to this distinction because it is convenient, and because, despite what 1984 claims, even the most hardcore religious extremist or politician can't deny 2+2=4.  Why?  Because you need math to measure the ingredients in your stupid ass bombs that kill people, and you need math to count all the money you bring in from donations/tithes, and you need math to count votes.  You can deny math in some kind of masturbatory game of existentialism, but no one will care, and no one can stand on a pulpit in a church or body of political representatives and convince reasonable people that math is wrong, because it proves itself.  See Bad Wolf.

The World is Full of Possibilies

The World is Full of Possibilities - yet it is hard to balance realizing them against all of the other concerns in life.  Maybe I'm inefficient;  maybe its the golden handcuffs.  I simply feel like I should have accomplished more by now.

[notes] Random 3-SAT Notes

Had this in a notepad:




exhaustive generator:   maintain sorting


constraints:

#T's less than #

(x = y) or (x != y)

--> can be used to advance open list


what happens if we demorgan the whole expression?



----
ideas:


temporary roomates

long term...quit job to do:  kickstarter ?

should really try:  http://evernote.com/evernote/

SkyAutumn

I didn't realize this at the time, but apparently the IMAX showing of Skyfall that I went to today was some kind of special preview, and the new James Bond movie doesn't open to the general public for another day or two.  So, that's awesome.  I just saw the new James Bond movie and you all didn't.  Also, to the section of this paragraph that you already read I inserted an awful spoiler.

No I didn't.  Anyway.  It is not bad.  This latest one is coming around to something closer to what I would call a James Bond film.  So that was pleasant.  If you have a degree is computer science, though, you may want to avert your eyes the minute you see a giant [c.s.] graph on a computer screen.  Fair warning.

Anyway, more importantly, I am coming home for thanksgiving. I didn't think to make vacation days a bargaining point when I switched companies, so now I am back down to almost nothing.  Here is my schedule though:

Wed night:  arrive
Thursday:  family stuff
Friday:  whatever.  Philly?  Salsa or karaoke?
Saturday:  High school reunion, then maybe out drinking near ptown?
Sunday:  Free early in the day, then I have to fly back.

I'm posting this here because I keep forgetting to let people know I'll be home.  So there is a sort of announcement.

Cloud Map

Spoiler Alert.  I'm about to spoil you.

The feature film Cloud Atlas has no point.  The preview, I thought, implied that all of these different (or same?) people living in different ages (or different universes?) realized that something (someone?) was controlling things and...

Well no.  They don't seem to realize anything.  Cloud Atlas is basically The Matrix, except for all of the parts where Neo or anyone else wakes up from the Matrix.  It is basically about The Matrix, except no one realizes it and Hugo Weaving just creeps some people out.

One interesting thing I noticed, though, was that many of the characters switched sides between good and evil (or maybe good and neutral in the case of Keith David), Hugo Weaving's character is always evil, and Halle Berry is always good.  In a way they act as poles of the conflict.

Unfortunately, wikipedia doesn't mention this so it must be unintentional.  According to wikipedia, the plot has something to do with turning Tom Hank's soul from a killer into a not a killer over time, except that, chronologically, in the second to last story he is still a killer.

Fun to watch though.