[spam] Cam Sites are Alive and Well

This actually came to my main email, the one I give to friends and  girls in real life (as opposed to governments, employers, and online stores).  I honestly haven't seen a spam bot there before, and it is possible this is just someone playing a prank on me.  Either way, I'm sharing the transcript for your enjoyment.  It is interesting to note that this bot appears to have stopped talking to me, which is slightly better than the yahoo bot I saw last time (one reason I suspected a prank).  Also, it first tried to contact me days before actually sending a message, and also I think I've discovered a second keyword:  "spam."  And again, I am posting this in case it will help anyone else getting spammed.

Oh, almost forgot, the name and email of the spam bot is:  carmen tachauer carmentachauer@gmail.com

So, on with it:


Carmen:  Was up there...

 Sent at 7:08 PM on Tuesday

 me:  Who are you

 Carmen:  Im bored and wanted to meet new people...  23..female.....you?

 Sent at 7:17 PM on Tuesday

 me:  Charges

 Carmen:  I'm feeling a little naughty want to have some fun??  

 Sent at 7:19 PM on Tuesday

 me:  charges

 Carmen:  here's a pic lol  [URL]   you like? hehe

 me:  .

 Carmen:  Hehe, you want some more?

 me:  .

 Carmen:  [URL]   my turn.. god. I'm soaking wet right now!!

 me:  .

 Carmen:  Mmm...is the game getting "harder"?

 me:  .

 Carmen:  [URL] i want your cock baby really bad would you give it to me??

 me:  .

 Carmen:  [URL] ok last one lol, you'd love to fuck me wouldnt you

 Sent at 7:41 PM on Tuesday

 me:  .

 Carmen:  Baby we really need to go on cam i cant wait anymore

 me:  .

 Carmen:  Here i just invited you [URL] try accepting that babe

 me:  .

 Carmen:  Its supposed to be the best app for this kind of thing, hurry up and accept!!!

 me:  .

 Carmen:  Its worth the annoying signup babe, wait until you see what we can do once you're in

 me:  .

 Carmen:  Its free to join.. i promise.. but it will ask for a card i think.. im gonna get naughty and i cant have kids watching..

 me:  .

 Carmen:  Ok babe.. talk to you in there.. gonna charge my phone.. mwa! xoxo

 me:  .

ok i'll be there in a while.  I actually just raped and murdered someone who write spam bots for cam sites.  Dont worry; its ok for me to do that because i am a police officer that works near the U.S. border

 Carmen:  nah, I am a vegetarian...  no spam for me! haha

 me:  spam

 Sent at 7:47 PM on Tuesday

Day 10 of 12

bababaaaa baaaaaaa ba ba ba ba

ba ba ba baaaaaa ba ba ba baaaaaaaa

--Two Steps from Hell

Months ago I wrangled an 11 day vacation that my manager wasn't particularly pleased about and tried to spend the whole thing building the website for the start up.  I did manage to implement a php login system following whatever best practices I could find.  However the monotony of web development got to me and I quickly succumbed to a highly disturbed sleep cycle, to the point where I could no longer function, or force myself to write or even look at HTML.  Fuck HTML.

This time, it's twelve days.  The twelve days of Christmas and/or New Years not spent with friends and family, nor wailing away in a Japanese karaoke bar in downtown philly, nor drinking 151 and Coke, but at home, working on the Android version of the app.  And this time its been fucking amazing.  My productivity is through the root, and with two days left, it looks like I'm going to be able to finish the original feature set before my vacation ends.

Unfortunately, at that point I will badly need a real vacation, however its back to work I go.  I don't know how much more of Microsoft I can take.  We're in this lame testing phase for a project that technically got canceled a fourth time, however we are able to continue working on it.  So I've got that going for me.  That, and later working on something that's not android.

Let me tell you, after the shit I have to figure out at work, writing a complex Android app is a walk in the fucking park.  It is actually so easy that, pretty much every day I decided I am the best programmer in the world, shortly before looking up something online and remembering that there are people who have been making Android apps for years, and they are not all morons.  Whatever.  I'm catching up.

But back to bitching about work.  I think its kind of interesting how I am filled with a sense of dread whenever my corporate slave masters talk about career management/performance/rhythm of the business bullshit, because I hate doing more of what they call work, and yet when I'm going a project I actually like, hours can fly by until I realize its 3 am and I'm hungy.  I realize it's actually 5:19 now, but I was playing an old Command & Conquer game for 2 hours.

Yeah my sleep schedule has gotten someone messed up.  Its been happening slowly, though, and my productivity hasn't suffered.  It just starts a vicious cycle where now I'm getting up after noon, which means I start programming later, which means I have to program past 2, just to keep up the pace.  I'm about to be really miserable when I go back to work, but for now, this is fucking exhilarating.  The loneliness problem is a serious issue, but not a severe one when I actually like what I'm working on.  I could probably fix it if I made the necessary investments, such as moving to a bigger apartment so I can invite people over to play board games, or joining another co-ed sports league (that requires committing to dates past Feb) however they both conflict with the plan to move home.

...which is kind of messed up at the moment.  We were supposed to be a lot further along than this months ago.  In fact, the iPad version was supposed to be done in October.  I'm fairly certain that I just sort of passed the iOS devs as far as completeness.

Previously, my criteria for quitting the old job was to get a paying customer, however that plan is starting to become a problem.  Based on talking with potential customers, the feature set we planned to start with is not enough, and/or the wrong features.  Of course this is partly due to the fact that I wanted to target single-user, single-location spas with less than 10,000 customers, and my business partner put me in a meeting with a guy who is opening multiple locations shortly....  Regardless, even for the smaller spas we need more features than we planned on.  Even worse, we may not be able to convince any of them to pay during the beta testing phase.  I can't hang out in Seattle until the end of the beta testing phase--everything just takes too damn long when I have to work full time.

Of course, working from home is no picnic.  I don't know exactly how many hours each day I spend writing code...probably at least 4 on most days, but definitely never all day.  My brain just gets too tired.  I've tried various combinations of TV, video games, riding a stationary bike, and going for walks, but none of them are a very quick fix.  Sugar and caffeine do offer a few hours of benefit, but at a cost.  Part of that cost is not being able to sleep.  Which is probably partly responsible for why I am awake at 5:30 am.  It was actually kind of an accident...I found this great, cheap soda that only had like 40 calories!  Normally soda has 120 calories for 8 ounces, so I was quite pleased to finally find something that tasted good but wouldn't make it harder to lose weight.  So I was drinking a lot of it during my last coding sprint before bed one night.  Had the worse time going to sleep.  The next day I went to buy another one and realized that those things are actually some kind of generic energy drink.  So that was a smart move.

So.

The plan, I think, is to quit my job hopefully by end of Feb, at which point I will slim down all of my spending, possibly sell the bike, etc.  Then, working on the start up full time for hopefully a brief period before returning to corporate life.  I think I am getting pretty close to the point where even if the business fails, I can point at this cool app I wrote.  Wait what am I talking about?  I don't know.  I'm going to bed.  Also, sorry, as you've no doubt realized by now, I didn't even pretend to proofread this.

[coding] Right click to rename as Android Resource

I wanted a context menu hook that would rename any file to one that is compatible with the android resource filename format.  I tried to get a craigslist programmer to do it, however craigslist programmers are whiny, insecure bitches.  And...I ended up doing it myself to prove a point to one of them.  The code looks like shit and has a few bugs on it, but I've already wasted enough time.  I'm pasting it here in case any of you do Android programming.















require 'win32/registry.rb'

#
# To Install:
#
# 1. r-click on command window, run as administrator
# 2. ruby [this script name] --register

def registerContextMenu(myPath, rubyLoc)
    #http://www.howtogeek.com/107965/how-to-add-any-application-shortcut-to-windows-explorers-context-menu/
   
    keyParent = "*\\shell\\"
    myPath = rubyLoc + " " + myPath + " %1"
    key = keyParent + "Rename as Android Resource"

    begin
    reg = Win32::Registry::HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.create(key, Win32::Registry::KEY_WRITE)
    commandReg = Win32::Registry::HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.create(key + "\\command", Win32::Registry::KEY_WRITE)
    commandReg.write_s(nil, myPath)
   
    rescue Win32::Registry::Error
        puts "Access is denied; run command line as Administrator"
        exit
    end

end


def fileToAndroid(name)
     a = name.reverse.split(".", 2).reverse
     base = filePartToAndroid(a[0].reverse, dupeBuster())
     ext = (a.length > 1) ? filePartToAndroid(a[1].reverse, "") : ""
     filename = (base + "." + ext).gsub(/[\.]$/,'')
    if File.exist?(filename)
        filename = base + dupeBuster()
    end   
    return filename
   
end

def filePartToAndroid(name, default)
    name = name.gsub(/[-\. !@#$%^&*(),]/,'_').split(/_+/).join("_").gsub(/^_+/,'')
    return ((name.empty?) ? default : name)
end


def dupeBuster()
    count = Dir['**/*'].count { |file| File.file?(file) }
    return count.to_s(16)
end


def renameToAndroid(filename)

    File.rename(filename, File.dirname(filename) + "/" + fileToAndroid(File.basename(filename)));
end

begin
    if ARGV[0].nil?
        puts "at least one argument expected.  use --register to register in context menu"
       
        sleep(2)
        exit
    elsif ARGV[0] === "--register"

        rubyLoc = "C:\\Ruby193\\bin\\ruby.exe"
        registerContextMenu(File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__)) + "/" + $0, rubyLoc)
       
        sleep(2)
    else
        if !File.exists?(ARGV[0])
            puts "file does not exist"
           
            sleep(2)
            exit
        end
       
        renameToAndroid(ARGV[0]) #"--test-a-b-.-c-"
       
    end

rescue => msg 
    puts "error encountered: " + msg.to_s
    puts msg.backtrace
    sleep(10)
end














# ----------------- other notes -- this shit didnt work ---------------




# context menu
# http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa753589%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

# ruby call DLL
# http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8099694/what-are-the-ruby-win32api-parameters-how-do-i-pass-a-null-pointer/14182709#14182709


#or..
#http://stackoverflow.com/questions/190168/persisting-an-environment-variable-through-ruby

#useful
#http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ruby_Programming/Standard_Library/Win32::Registry

def registerContextMenu2(myPath)
    #HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MenuExt\

   
    #fun fact: windows version of 'which' is 'where'
   
    #exmple:  res://C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\Root\Office15\EXCEL.EXE/3000
    myPath = "res://C:\\Ruby193\\bin\\ruby.exe " + myPath
   
   
   
   
    #this works:
    #C:\\Ruby193\\bin\\ruby.exe C:/tmp/rename/sample.rb %1
   
    keyParent = "Software\\Microsoft\\Internet Explorer\\MenuExt\\"
    key = keyParent + "Rename as Android Resource"
   
   
    #Win32::Registry::HKEY_CURRENT_USER.open(keyParent, Win32::Registry::KEY_WRITE) do |reg|
    #reg[''] = '123'
    #end
    reg = Win32::Registry::HKEY_CURRENT_USER.create(key, Win32::Registry::KEY_WRITE)

    reg.write_s(nil, myPath)
    reg.write("Contexts", Win32::Registry::REG_DWORD, 0x1)
   
end

Should I send this?

Often when I write things while angry, I later realize that I shouldn't have written that.  Perhaps you will remember what appeared to be 5 different posts about Besty back when I misunderstood the effect RSS has on the Draft feature.

Anyway, this is about a bullshit marketing letter I received in the [physical] mail.  It has the fucking VP's name and a mailing address right on here.   I can't imagine why a VP would do that...anyone could send mail directly to him.  Which is what I've elected to do.  However despite being in a good mood earlier, the simple act of drafting this letter has put me in a furious mood, which means prudence dictates I need to let it hang around my computer while I cool off, to be sent letter.  So if you are bored, please skim it and let me know your thoughts re: whether I should actually send it.

Dear [VP's NAME],

My name is [MY NAME] and I received an AT&T branded marketing letter that was ostensibly from you.  From the bottom of my heart, I want to tell you that I hate AT&T, and I would prefer to never receive another such letter again.  In fact if you could accomplish that, there is no need to read on.  But I do have so much space left on this page.

Though I am technically a customer, the only company I hate more than AT&T is Comcast, which I admit isn’t really a strong statement.  I paid full retail price for my second Galaxy S2 and did not buy it from AT&T, but the manufacturer locked it so that I do not have root access—how incestuous is that--and your reps refused to give me the same.  In fact, I was told that based on the kind of data I want to send (e.g. “tethering”) I would have to upgrade to a more expensive plan.  The very idea that what I do with my internet connection is any business of AT&T’s is offensive and insulting, and the fact that my phone is full of shitty programs that I don’t want and cannot uninstall, and that I cannot even directly access the WIFI or Bluetooth hardware, is a humiliation.  What am I, in grade school?

I marked on my calendar the day my contract with AT&T expired, so that I could jump ship to a competitor.  However, America’s communication industry is one giant oligopoly.  Who could I turn to that would be any less evil?  Every other provider is just as bad, save for small companies that only offer minutes that they have to buy from you.  However switching to one of them bears the risk that the coverage will be insufficient, and so when the time came that I was finally free from the bondage of my service contract, I stuck with your company because it was the path of least resistance.  The only reason I am still a customer is that I never give a second thought about who provides my cell phone service.

So, if you have any shred of human decency, please do whatever steps it takes to ensure that I never receive another bullshit marketing letter from AT&T.  I never want to hear from you or your company again.  Even if there was a service or feature that would interest me I would refuse to even try it simply because I despise your company so much.  If I continue to receive letters from AT&T, I am going to instruct my mail service to routinely shred all AT&T correspondence, and if one of those letters happens to be a dire warning that my account is past due, so be it.  Perhaps that will be the kick in the ass I need to finally try Ting.

[coding] The Little Language That Couldn't

So...I just wanted to announce this:

CSS CANNOT VERTICALLY CENTER SHIT

Now, it is possible to write a hack in CSS to cause things to appear vertically centered, sometimes, but the language itself doesnt actually provide you a method that works on all browsers.  And all of the hacks have their own pros and cons regarding ridiculousness and browser support.  For the record the best howto I've found is here.

The next time someone doesn't understand why I hate the fucking web, I think I am just going to say this:  "CSS....vertically center a div."  The ellipsis is to show me trailing off with my voice for a second.  Fucking hell.  People go on and on about design and theory and separation of content from form and you can't even center an arbitrary object?  Fuck the web.

A New Beginning / Stark Contrast

When I was in college, riding a motorcycle in 40 degree (F) weather was an event.  Because Wind Chill.  It involved long underwear, possibly multiple pairs of pants, multiple sweatshirts, multiple jackets, and occasionally, hypothermia.  With the wind chill, it felt like the cold was penetrating deep into my soul and forcing my body to fold in on itself.

These days...I'm not entirely sure what's different, but all I do is throw on two jackets and ride to work before my hands go numb.  And that's like just a regular Tuesday for me.  Sometimes, at night, the temperature drops below what I'm comfortable riding in, so I just take the stairs up to the 23rd floor and I have enough body heat to last the entire ride home.  I don't know what it is about motorcycles, but blitzing down the highway, weaving through the pathetic peasants who think 80 mph is "fast" is the high point of my day.  And I haven't even mastered cornering on this bike yet.  But it puts me in a good mood that lasts at least halfway through the afternoon.

30 degree weather is another story.  I don't know what it was that made me take the bike, but, whatever.  I show up and it turns out I wasn't the only crazy one.  There was another Aprilia parked at the club.  If I had been more observant...well, whatever.  I don't need any more "ifs" to dwell on.

Let me start from the beginning.

It was the occasional phrase or voice inflection that made me suspect that these girls knew how many guys were in their orbit--trying so hard in vain to get to her only to miss before coming around for another pass--and enjoyed it.  I would wonder if the girl enjoyed it so much that she kept her potential suitors in a proverbial museum of affection.  "That's the guy who gave me my first motorcycle ride."  "That's the guy who made sure I didn't drive my drunk ass off a bridge that night I lost my camera."  "That's the guy who wrote a song about me."  "That's the guy who got me through chemistry."  "That's the guy who something something handcuffs."  "That's the guy who's a DJ at this club and always gets us in because he has a crush on me."  "That the guy who taught me [whatever]."  "Thats the guy who always fixes my iphone."  Etc.  Maybe it was just hubris; I've always hated the idea that I was in some girl's museum, and I've sacrificed more than one friendship to keep my display case empty.

There was one, though, where I screwed up.  I wasn't even that into her when I first met her, it was just a bunch of details that all added up by the end.  Like a certain video game in her drawer, or sleeves with thumb holes, or a stuffed dragon peeking out of her helmet, or maybe it was just the way she smiled.  When you added it all up, it amounted to a truly unique girl, and for one, brief--well actually it was rather long--night, everything was perfect and I thought I had landed the girl of my dreams:  Lindsey Stark.

Sometimes, though, people have different ideas in their heads, and sadly this was one of those times.  She told me she couldn't date another motorcyclist--she was giving up the dangerous life.  Two months later she shacked up with an autocross rider who still lived with his parents and spent his Thursdays drinking and riding.

So quite naturally I became a sad panda and headed to Atlantic city and drank myself stupid.  I should have, at that point, stopped talking to her and deleted her from facebook or whatever.  I mean, this wasn't my first time getting trapped in the old FZ, and it wouldn't have been my first time getting out, but for some reason I just couldn't burn this bridge.  I moved on, but somewhere in the back of my mind a door stayed open a crack.

Not like it mattered.  I mean, I moved 3,000 miles away to a wasteland of cold weather and colder people.  The days were dark and short and it doesn't take long to discover why so many people commit suicide here.

Anyway.

So whatever.  It was a cold ass night, and I showed up at salsa with numb fingers.  Saw another Aprilia; didn't think anything of it.  I'm dancing, or whatever.  Its getting to the end of the night, so I am desperate to get a bunch of dances in a row, trying to work up that body heat so I can make it home without my teeth chattering.  Then this girl asked me to dance.

I thought she asked me because she had seen me dancing, and there weren't too many good people left.  Its probably for the best that I thought that.  When I'm back in the old places, or back with the old familiar people, I tend to revert back to my old familiar self, whether I want to or not.  And before I know it, I sometimes find myself back in the same box they used to keep me in.  So what, though?  There's no harm in playing the role you're given, save for maybe a bruised ego.  However, I didn't realize who she was at first, so I stayed in my typical salsa personality.  Flirty, playful, surprisingly not as dancy as you would think.  This girl was super hot and there was just this familiarity I couldn't explain.  It left like we had great chemistry.  Also, she was clearly into me so I mentioned we should hang out, and let her put her number in my phone.

Except her number was already in my phone.

So she was all like "You don't recognize me, do you?"  I looked in her eyes and I had no idea who she was, until she said "Its Lindsey, Lindsey Stark."

Holy shit people.

In my defense, her hair was short now.  And not blond.  Also, she didn't used to wear makeup.  Or be nearly as assertive.  Anyway.  I did my best to maintain my composure and we chatted.  We had a good amount of catching up to do, so we left the bikes and walked to a bar nearby.  For all I cared my bike could get stolen;  I'll just get a cab. The thing was leaking clutch fluid anyway.

On the way to the bar, though, I had this sudden sinking feeling.  I've been here before;  a girl acts all interested, and appears to show more interest in you than other dudes, and acts more flirty than girls that say they've been in love with you for years, and them BAM you find out she has a boyfriend.  So I had grown reasonably nervous by the time we got to a nice Irish pub.  For all I knew we'd be meeting her lame as boyfriend there...probably some guy who is like an astronaut but still lives with his parents, and I'd be the third wheel again, and I can't believe I sacrificed my bike for this!

But she had no boyfriend.  She even went out of her way to mention that she didn't.  Kind of a nice refreshing change, as typically the Seattle girls go out of their way to say the opposite.

So we caught up.  I was most interested in her trip to France, and she was most interested in, surprisingly, my 3-SAT work.  She happened to believe that P != NP, while I believe P = NP, but really, no one has any idea what they are talking about anyway.  We kissed right there at the bar table.

The very first time I kissed her so many years ago, well, actually the first time I thought about kissing her was on a bridge over a nearly frozen river.  I chickened out then, but that's not the point.  What is the point, is that two awesome people had run into each other again, way up here on the edge of civilization, more than 500 miles from a decent roller coaster.  So I said we should go walking on a bridge.

I pushed her against the railing suddenly--a new move I've picked up in my travels--and bent into kiss her.  She was so beautiful.

And then Lindsey Stark died.

A fucking zombie bit her.  That fucker came out of nowhere.  I broke that shitfuckers neck but it was too late.  She was gone.  All around me, I heard the screams of the zombie apocalypse.

I knew the only thing that mattered, I mean, beyond not getting bitten, was finding some fucking weapons.  I found a bicycle and rode most of the way home, but I got stuck on the denny bridge.  There was a wall of zombies in front of me.  I turned around, but there was fast zombies right behind me.  My only option was to jump.  I stood on the guard rail and looked down on the chaos of I-5 below.  I supposed that if it this had to be my end, I was glad if happened after I ran into Lindsey again.

But then, suddenly I heard tires screeching.  A black sports cars was sliding across the pavement, tossing fast zombies this way and that.  It came to a screeching halt right in front of me with the passenger door open.  A black haired girl yelled out to me:  "Get in!"

I was still trying to pull my seat belt--belts--on (5 point safety harness, nice) when my new heroine did that thing where she backs up  and then slams on the brakes to make the door close.  We raced out of there, and she introduced herself as Evelyn.

We found weapons.  We ran out of ammo.  We found more weapons, including a katana sword, and we fought our way, floor by floor, to the top of the columbia building.  But we were surrounded, and exhausted.  I spent the last 6 rounds out of a revolver and then threw it at one of the zombies.  It was so late the sun was already coming up again.  It looked like we were done for again.  I held Evelyn's hand and we looked at each other.  My only thought was that I wished we had time to fuck before the zombies killed us.  That's when I heard it.  The low beats of propellers.

An old B-17 that was inexplicably flying with working, mounted machine guns.  The gunners laid waste to the zombies, creating a splintering circle of death around us on the rooftop.  Then the B-17 made a single, ridiculously tight turn with a rope dropped out the side.  I realized what they were doing immediately and pulled Evelyn with me as I grabbed the rope.  We hung on for dear life;  the sharp bank allowed the plane to travel slowly enough relative to our position for us to catch the rope, however that type of aircraft was not meant to bank at that angle, and it quickly lost what few hundreds of feet of altitude it had.  It recovered just in time to duck under a skybridge, nearly dragging us along the street, before recovering.

When they hauled us in I looked to congratulate whomever badass pilot had just saved our asses, only to realize it was the attractive and scantily clad girls from Sucker Punch.  Also Han Solo was in one of the gunner cockpits.

Dragons were incoming on our position, so I took the other gunner position and together we fought them off.  The plane banked and rolled, ever avoiding their fiery breaths and inexplicably dangerous talons.  But then we had to face the Big One.  This dragon was about as massive as a typical Hollywood monster, which means it was too heavy to fly, or even hold its on weight up with an internal skeletal structure.  I explained this to the girls, and Han, as we fought it, the Impossible Dragon.

The dragon came around for another pass, but forunately Han Shot First and got her in the eye.  The dragon still engulfed the ship in flames, and we lost too many engines.  The pilot did her best to keep us out of the drink but we were heading down too quickly.  I shared with the girls a remarkable idea that I had just thought of regarding "pulling up" and was replied to with a string of expletives.  It looks like we were done for, when all of the sudden I heard this cyclical sort of groaning, wheezing sound, and a blue police box appeared in the middle of the cabin.

A nice man with a bow tie popped his head out of the police box and said "Come On!"

Evelyn and I were the only ones to made it inside in time.  We had many adventures, but I can't talk about them.  Timey Wimey stuff.  But a lot happened, so pretend you just spent 20 minutes reading all of that.

The Doctor dropped us off on the bridge of the USS Awesome, the first Awesome class starship of the United Federation of Planets.  I designed her myself.  She is like super long ass yards long, and she has super shields and ablative armor, and supercharged warp nacelles, and three warp cores, and a cloaking device, and Ten Forward has stripper poles.  Also, I happen to be friends with Guinan.

When I arrived on the bridge, they called "Captain on deck!" and I sat in the captain's chair, with Evelyn on one side and Jonathan Frakes on the other.  Data, who totally did not die in the last movie, turned around and said "Captain, we are receiving a distress single from the [blah blah blah] system."

I said, "Lay in a course.  Warp 9.  Engage."

When we arrived, we saw wreckage, and a firefly class vessel.  We used a tractor beam to pull the ship into the docking bay.  I went down there to inspect it myself.  The doors opened easily enough, but no one answered when I called.  Data and I looked at each other and nodded.  I pulled out my lightsaber and followed him inside.  What we saw inside was shocking.  Sex Reavers had been on this ship.  There were elves everywhere--female elves--bound with studded leather and with ball gags in their mouths.  The hot engineer girl of the firefly-class ship was all tied up spread eagle on the ...ok I didn't mark this post as XXX, so we'll have to skip this part.......

.........batteries................

...so then I pulled up my pants, turned around, and shot Wesley Crusher in the mouth with my phaser.  And he died, never to return again, ever.  Fuck you Wesley.

Oh, right.  So then Evelyn and I got married, but the death star showed up, and everyone died.  The Doctor died, and didn't have time to rengerate.  All of the Doctor's companions, everywhere, also died horrible deaths.  Jonathan Frakes died, Luke Skywalker died, Michael Phelps died, I died, Evelyn died, Frodo died, Gandalf died and didn't come back from the dead this time, the girls from Sucker Punch died, Han Solo Died, the cast of I.T. Crowd died, Harry Potter died, Kenny died again, Data died, and then Iron Man and Wolverine died also.  Basically every person and character you've ever heard of, that wasn't retarded, died.

Soon then there were these gay vampires that sparkled in sunlight....









So.....that's what it was like to read Game of Thrones..  Fuck Game of Thrones.

Actually this was technically based on some truth...my bike is totally leaking clutch fluid, and I really need to get that looked at.

Hacking the Police State, Part 1

Obviously, this is alarming.

And as soon as I read it, well, my first though was that I'm going to download TrueCrypt.  I even installed it.  Unfortunately I have no idea how this shit works.  Anyway.

My second thought was, what can we all do, working together, to really fuck with these guys?  I imagine there is a limited amount of forensics teams...it would be awfully sad if they were all busy dealing with bullshit.  So here is what I propose:

1. get a hard drive or other storage device
2. write completely random data to it...no filesystem, just dd a bunch of randomness on there
3. write something that will cause it to get flagged, like "kiddie porn" or "terrorist stuff keep out" or "snowden's home movies"
4. ...well at this point you'll probably get put on the No Fly List, which I've heard is something they can do arbitrarily and without due process (i.e. conviction in a court of law) so...maybe this is a bad idea.  It would be great if other people did it, though.



[Edit]
After following a screenshot-based tutorial for Windows, I have just learned how to use TrueCrypt's most basic function.  Clearly, I am now an elite hacker god.

It has just occurred to me that all the NSA has to do is put a keylogger on your computer and they have you.  So I feel like this adds almost zero security to your day-to-day computing.  It does make me feel secure enough to store documents that contain my SSN, and other information the NSA shiftfuckers already have.

[Edit 2]
I...have nothing that I need to put in my encrypted volume.

[coding] One language to fuck them all

The coders who are building the iOS bullshit for my startup are being all slow, so I've elected to start learning iOS and start doing some coding myself.  And I am horrified.

Previously, when I glanced at objective-C, I convinced myself that it was this cool, interesting language...the sort of Steam Punk of higher level languages, showing how object oriented programming could have evolved if simpler, better languages hadn't been invented.  Its star idea?  Its ok to call methods ("send messages to") null objects.  That is fascinating.

Unfortunately, iOS fucking sucks.  It seems to excel at bringing the worst of all possible worlds together.  First of all, everything is defined in text files, except that you effectively need a GUI (xcode) to make anything work.  And of course since you are tied to exactly one graphical program in order to write code, all of the stupid fucking tutorials out there are written for exactly on particular version of xcode which has an interface that looks completely different.

Then, the syntax.  Objective-c is a superset of c.  The idea is, it gets the compatibility with c combined with a cool new syntax.  Bullshit.  Here's what really happened:  we still have all of the old c shit lying around, except now half and/or most of the code is in this completely unreadable syntax with lots of []'s all over the place, and whoever invented this appears to have a vendetta against functions with multiple params--holy shit.  I am getting a really strong sense of de ja vu.  I'm pretty sure I've bitched about this stuff before.  In fact I think this is the third time I've written to complain about objective-C.  Damn.  I need to hurry up and learn it already.  Anyway, I guess here is the rest of my whiny bullshit, which you have no undoubtedly seen before.  TLDR:  still hate Apple.

They've managed to take a language syntax known for being the most difficult for new programmers, and make it even more difficult.  You still have the old syntax though.  Sometimes its dots and parents, sometimes its brackets!  Yay......If I ever code iOS for a large corporation, I am going to continue coding my famous one liners, taking sadistic pleasure in the nightmare of parens, brackets, dots and spaces that I am subjecting the next reader to.

These problems seem to extend to every corner of the language...everything is 95% awesomely automated for you except for that one thing that will fuck you over.  Like the null thing--turns out that rule breaks down with structs.  It works all the time, for everything, unless there is a struct in there somewhere.  And arrays have to be nil terminated.  What.  The.  Fuck.  Its 2013 and you still can't provide me a collection that wipes its own ass?  Come on!

Based on the Stanford lectures, one of the cool features is supposed to be that you can "connect" UI elements to some code via a UI dragging operation.  Because typing it was too simple.

I wanted to like this language;  I really did.  But as of now I have only contempt for it, and the company whose popularity is forcing me to code for their dumbass platform.


[Edit]
Ok, this tutorial might not suck

[lyrics] All Along Her Watchtowers

there must be some kind of way outta here
said the ninja to herself
baggy pants for confusion
dat figure, dat wealth
the girls they would have cut her down
had they known the truth
her figure crossed the line, hide her own stars, hey

no reason to get excited
she wasn't first to go both ways
there are many here among us
who would have liked a taste
but her eyes they only settled on one man
like it was their fate
but a stranger's added poison, and the hour's getting late

all along her watch towers
her assets kept his view
while all the others came and went
and enemies too

outside of two drinks
no one should feel so down
two fatales approaching
bad intent written on their frowns
the girls they came to take her down
but he knew the truth

all along her watch towers
he only played the fool
she and him escaped that night
and had a good time too


















/* Just to make sure no one makes any weird assumptions, this is about a hot bisexual girl whose only coworkers are fat women who hate her for her thin figure, so she wears baggy pants and sweatshirts to work to avoid hateful comments about how she is not a 'real' woman.  However two of her coworkers see her when she is out at a bar, dressed to kill while on a date with a road ninja and--suddenly infuriated--slip roofies in the couple's drinks, intending to take the pretty girl away.  However, the guy realizes there is a problem when he gets wasted off of two drinks and calls a friend who shows up, cockblocks the evil co-workers, and helps the couple get to a cab safely.  Doesnt really come out in the lyrics, but I didn't feel like writing a whole story.  */

Dear everyone

I love you all you guys are the best yes I am drunk but I still love youp

[math porn] Quantum Booleans (Warning, XXX Rated)

So.....I ran out of Family Guy episodes to watch and elected to watching this instead and of course it made me think of 3-SAT for some reason, and I can't describe what was going on in my head for a while but I came up with an interesting idea.

However, as you'll find out shortly this is the mathematical equivalent of a threesome (the good kind) so please only read further if you are at least 18 years old.

Ok.  So lets take some boolean values.  If you don't know what a boolean is, just fuck off.  Here are some examples, and I'll throw in the equal signs:

True or False = True
True and False = False
True or True or True = True
True or False or False = True
True or False and False = die in a fire, you order-of-operations whorebag

Ok, now...lets make things simpler.  Instead of "True" i'm just gonna write 1, and instead of false I'll write zero, and I'll use a "v" for "or" and a ... ^ for "and".


1 v 0 = 1
1 ^ 0 = 0
1 v 1 v 1 = 1
1 v 0 v 0 = 1
1 v 0 ^ 0 = die in a fire, you order-of-operations whorebag

Soooo...this is where things get kinky.   Hello 2.

0 v 0 = 0
0 v 1 = 1
1 v 0 = 1
1 v 1 = 1

1 v 1 = 1
1 v 2 = 2
2 v 1 = 2
2 v 2 = 2

Oh yeah thats nice...that's so nice.  But zero doesn't want to be left out.  But wait, what relationship does zero have with 2?  Well, lets use the commutative property to decide that:

0 v 1 v 2 = (0 v 1) v 2 = (1) v 2 = 2

0 v 0 = 0
0 v 2 = 2
2 v 0 = 2
2 v 2 = 2

As you can see, the commutative property is basically the mathematical equivalent of that massage bullshit creepy guys use to start threesomes:

0 v 2 v 1 = (0 v 2) v 1 = (2) v 1 = 2

So that was "or" ...what about "and' ?

0 ^ 0 = 0
0 ^ 1 = 0
1 ^ 0 = 0
1 ^ 1 = 1

1 ^ 1 = 1
1 ^ 2 = 1
2 ^ 1 = 1
2 ^ 2 = 2

same trick:   0 ^ (1 ^ 2) = 0 ^ (1)  = 0

0 ^ 0 = 0
0 ^ 2 = 0
2 ^ 0 = 0
2 ^ 2 = 2

I like to think of 2 as a "super truth."


And here is the problem (for those of you who didnt know, "!" means "not," i.e. "opposite of":

!2 = ?

What the hell is the opposite value of this shit?  Because we need to satisfy:

2 = !!2
!2 = !!!2
!(2 ^ 0) = (2 v 0)
!(1 ^ 0) = (1 v 0)


I think we have three options:

•  !2 = 0 and 1 at the same time
• !2 = 0 or 1 (we dont know which, i.e. its a quantum state and we have to measure the value)
• !2 = a; !0 = b, !1 = c, and we also have "?" standing by

That last bullet point is the most interesting but instead of exploring it I decided to eat half a jar of pickles because I was hungry.  I now bid you good night.

[Brainstorming] Date Night: November

I tell her to meet me in...Morocco.  Hopefully you don't have to spell it right do get in.  She meets me at a bar, and I'll finish this later.

I Want All the Monies

My rule for this kind of bullshit is that it stops, or I benefit from it.  Preferably both.

Enter the Dragon, Part 1

We have officially upgraded from Captain and Coke to 151 and Coke.  World, get ready.

Tonight's move

So....

Start an inside turn
Your left (her right) high
Ok this is too fucking hard to type

Requiem for a Partnership, Part 11

We signed the Operating Agreement last week.  Last Wednesday, in fact.  Its been so long that I forgot to come on here and make a big deal about it.  We are not completely finished with this bullshit, as the details concerning the extra investment I am making have to be pulled out into a separate debt agreement.

It is possible a nasty debate could erupt again however in order to prevent this, I made sure that the last time we discussed this stuff I got her to repeat our basic agreement in her own words, in an email.  She was a little annoyed because I had to ask her three times to repeat everything in a single email, but as soon as she did, I saved the email for all of time.  The very next time she tried to re-open that conversation, I quoted her own words at her and implied that it was that way or the highway.  The matter appears to have been settled.

I have learned a lot in the past few years.  Drexel taught me how to work with brilliantly smart people.  Amazon taught me how to work with passive-aggressive, insecure little bitches.  Microsoft taught me how to deal with deadly Machiavellians.  But it is this start up that taught me how to deal with a type of person even more difficult than all of those:  the non tech person.  The severely non tech person.  Maybe I should really say the anti-tech person.  But I think I have it figured out.

If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

So this guy got searched.  I don't understand what is problem was.  If he wasn't breaking the law, why did he object to being searched like that?  /s

TIL

Salsa dancing is fucking awesome when there are real, actual girls in the club.

Also I am hungry for tacos.

Halloween

So, I decided to be Waldo for Halloween so that girls would come up to me and say "I found you."  So then I walked around Capitol Hill for three  hours and a lot of girls said "I found you!" or whatever.  So I got that going for me, which is nice.

On Meeting Girls

I wanted to sort of sprint towards wrapping shit up here and moving back home, however I have reached the limit of how far I can go completely alone.  I'm still hung up on the second-to-last girl I dated, and if the second half of Silver Linings Playbook (and every other chick flick) has anything to teach us, it is that it is only possible to get over a girl with...another girl.  I also know this is true because I've tried everything else.


Anyway.  So now I want to meet girls, and I've already decided to move home so...I really don't know what I'm doing here.  Strippers are fun to talk to for about four minutes.  After that you'd be just as wise to burn your money.  I don't want to get serious with any more super bitchy girls, and I don't really want to fall in love with someone awesome and end up deciding to stay out here in this uptight swamp.  So I am now trying to indiscriminately meet girls, with no real motive or purpose other than a vague sense of boredom.

So what now?  Well I'm stuck at work, and I definitely don't want to do any work, and rush hour won't die down for another 2 hours.  So lets do something really nerdy like walk through a selective version of my dating history and try to see what the best way to meet girls is.

First of all, not all the girls will be represented.  I have trouble remembering all of them.  Also we're going to cut all of the embarrassing stories, and all the girls whose names I cant remember, and all of the other stories I can't print here, like dating strippers and certain activities I may have disclosed while drunk at bars. So we are only going to pick some of the girls that had meaningful impact on my life.

Also, I'm using "#-connected" to mark girls that I met through people that I already knew. So if someone is marked 2-connected, that means I didn't actually meet them there; I met the person through which I met them.

• high maintenance girl - band
• awesome girl who I should have dated - band
• epic friend zone - band
• climber girl - retail job
• super bitch - graphics class
• quiet girl - party, 3-connected
• girl with unfortunate stripper-like name - salsa dancing with friends
• hot lego girl - craigslist 'friends' section, 2-connected
• firefly girl - settlers games, 2-connected
• fun sized girl - pof
• moderately bitchy girl - salsa dancing with friends
• girl with unusually similar interests - pof

So...analysis.  It would seem that salsa dancing by myself (without friends) is a waste of time.  This is unfortunate because getting friends to go salsa dancing is even more difficult than getting friends to go skiing.  As for which strategy is better?  Who the fuck knows.

What am I going to do know?  I don't actually know.

[coding] Blueprint for a Badass Business

A few days ago I looked at a checkin diff for a complicated feature that [stupid ass partner] made without telling us, which we need to migrate to our code, and decided that I would rather just sit around thinking about having my own company.

Again, the main themes are a small, nimble company with good people.  We go after niche markets where expertise in a particular domain gives us a competitive advantage.  If we focus on business ideas that heavily revolve around apps, we get the following areas of expertise:

• wireframes
• graphics
• app coding (android, iOS)
• backend (e.g. 'the cloud')
• website (and IT)
• business (marketing, accounting, legal, tax, finding new work)
• bullshit
• domain knowledge

The domain knowledge expert would probably be a different person for each project.

The bullshit category is for solving problems that crop up, and handling people that are difficult to work with.

The rest is...pretty self explanatory.  I already have experience in the backend, and I'm looking to gain experience in the app coding category.  I am also interested in dabbling a bit in wireframes.  I'm not great at graphics, and I loathe dealing with web or IT shit.  I'm also inexperienced in the business side of things; it would be great to have a person who excels at that.

So...that's the kind of people I would need.  Assuming I do another app like this skin care thing.  Unfortunately a friend just gave me and idea related to 3D printed Legos....

On Math

I just realized that solving 3-SAT would be so much easier without all of these pesky solvable instances.  They really get in the way.

On Politics

I found this amazing cartoon in my feed:

http://www.themorningnews.org/article/the-debt-ceiling

From my point of view, because it puts the current situation in historical context, it leaves less room for the sort of distracting talking points used by the culprits.

Field report

Life is too short to learn cha-cha.

[brainstorming] Date Night: October

We start our date with a corn maze.  We liven up the action with some paintball.  Obviously this first part involves lots of friends.  Because of something that happened during the one and only time I've ever tried paintball, which I'm still sore about, we will not have any kind of gay ass "surrender" rule.  Man I wish I had shot him in the face.  Anyway.  Maybe it will be CTF, maybe more of a Pac Man scenario, but it will be a corn maze, and there will be paintballs flying.  And no fucking teenagers either.

Then, bonfire.  She and I will be riding after, so I won't be drinking.  Maybe I'll insist to everyone not to bring anything, and when they show up there will be nothing to drink except smirnoff ice.  I don't know.  It would be funny.

Then, post bonfire, we ride.  Or, maybe skip the bonfire so we can ride while the sun is still up.  After its fall and the trees are pretty.  I don't know; I'm just brainstorming here.  The roads will be nice and curvy, and there will be back roads, and we'll aggressively pass any slow ass motherfuckers (SAMFs) we come across.  We might possible pull off into a secluded area for a while.  Idk.  I'm just brainstorming.

Fall nights are chilly, so even with our gear we will be looking forward to our nice warm home.  We will probably warm up in a candlelit bath/hot tub while watching some kind of mystery movie...something really high brow like Clue while we eat sushi.  Where the hell would we get decent sushi at that hour?  I'll work that out later.


Aaaaand....that's it, really.

Dreaming of Glass Cannons, Part 2

Yeah, so previously, on Dreaming of Glass Cannons, our sexy and dashing protagonist rehashed the tale about this android project at work, and how this company full of shitty programmers (SP) wrote the original code, and how due to a lack of resources, the code was forked so that a very importat, indecisive and annoying partner (AP) could just kind of shit all over it without any regard to maintaining a cohesive design.

And, how, it is my job to rectify the difference between what I've been doing on and off and on and off and on and off and on and off for months, and what AP did to the software.

Now the story continues.  Please read the rest of this post in the voice of Dr. Cox (especially when you see ellipsis) and also, for the record, everything you are about to read is completely fictional and any similarity to existing people or corporations is totally just your imagination:


Something was bothering me in the back of my mind.  The changes I was looking at...well they were stupid.  No comments, as usual.  But, with the exception of renaming a few variables to understandable english words (yay!), whoever was making those changes didn't take any steps to fix the horrible pile of copy & paste spaghetti code.  Instead, it seems is if they just went in there without any concept of design and just tacked their shit on there, or made changes to key components without worrying about memory leaks (since we're talking about java, I'm using 'memory leak' to refer to dumbass code holding onto objects that should have been garbage collected).

Now, I know that I probably sound like a guy who thinks that everyone, everywhere, can't code.  And...with a few exceptions, that's probably true.  I have seen so much bad code during my employment that, honestly, the longest time I went for more than six months without seeing turing-complete vomit was a high school stint involving Visual Basic 6.  And keep in mind you people, Visual Basic 6 was not a pretty language.  So put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Anyway, because of the fear that maybe due to the dunning-kruger effect I'm not as good a programmer as I thought, I elected to, for just this one time, not bitch about some awful code.  So even though AP's changes to their branch of SP's code looked kinda dumb, I held my tongue.

Until today.

You see, today, it has come to my attention that AP paid SP to implement some of those changes.  Some of those stupid fucking awful changes I have to merge manually were written by the same java-illiterate dumbasses that shat out the original codebase.  THIS EXPLAINS.......SO MUCH.

In other words, the people paid to work on a superfund site were the people who made it a superfund site in the first place.  I don't know how much this fucking company has gotten paid so far, but I do know that I could have written this by myself by now, and that if I was paid what they were, I could retire and spend the rest of my days building legos.

Anyway, so, the day has finally come where I have risen high enough in the ranks that I actually don't write code.  I don't.  I just manage bullshit.  I have one coder who is awesome and not just because like me, he wants to rewrite literally the whole project.  I'm now the guy who has to tell someone to slow down because we have to pick our battles when it comes to refactoring.  I also got a guy who is not so good, and does not have so much initiative, and who has unfortunately been tasked with ramming a square open source build system into a circular hole called "TFS."  This guy out ranks me by like...corporate RPG level, yet he knows less than I do about Android and when it comes to duct taping these build systems together...we actually have equivalent knowledge, yet he needs to do a phone conference with me every few hours so I can tell him what to do.

And since I am not an expert in the thing its his job to figure out, all of my answers, literally, are purely based on the scientific method.  So he calls me up to talk about his latest problem and I, literally just take him on a mental tour of the next experiment to try.  "Well, if this [control idea] works, and this [experimental idea] doesnt work, then clearly we know [thing we changed] is the reason its not working."

And then, on top of that, I have to deal with all of these project managers (PMs).  I gave the PMs a list of questions about AP's changes to the code, because thanks to the lack of comments, we don't know why they need that shit.  And their answers, to my question, directly contradict the lines of code I am asking about.  For example, I asked them why they have a collection of instances of something and they told me the reason is because its a singleton.  What.

For those of you that aren't programmers, I'll give you an analogy.  You're standing in iraq, in some junkyard owned by one of those military contractors that was given a "cost plus" deal with the government, and you're looking at about 400 rusty ice cream trucks that were used once and then deliberately broken so another one had to be purchased, thus inflating the total cost and therefore the company's profit.  And so you call up this guy at the cost plus contractor and ask him why there are so many ice cream trucks in the junkyard and he tells you "What are you talking about?  There is only one, and has only ever been one, ice cream truck in the universe."  And then since he's a highlander fan he grunts "there can be only one" in a faux Scottish accent before hanging up on you.

I want to quit so bad, but the timing isn't quite right.