Older blog entries for Wheat (starting at number 116)

Ammunition

Discussing nightly dreams has become a topic with the GSC lunchers. I had at three last night:

The first happened maybe around 5 am, as it was punctuated by a rolling over in bed and a glance at the clock. My family went out on the ocean on boat, that contained two huge pontoons, the rest of the boat was made of a mish mash of tarps and cheap plastic. Really slow, and really manouverable, and the name of the boat was Sagedogs. I'm sure there was lots of other stuff going on, but the rest is lost in the fog.

Atsushi came by at 8:30 am to pick up my roommate John for the snow camping trip, and I could hear voices in the other room. I fell back into a deeper sleep around 9 am. This time there was a woman, with long reddish orange hair. And we travelled with a group of other acquaintances, again by boat, to some strange form of 16th century Italy. A dark haired, sinister Machiavellian man who had been wooing the woman and the trip over was there. It got dark and the three of us laid down in some large bed. The man and woman side by side, with me crouched uncomfortably at the foot of the bed. The man got up at some point, and I turned 90 degrees, so that my feet were beside the womans waist and vice versa. At this point we began flirting, playing footsies and kicking the covers around. This went on for some time, as in reality, my covers had done a 90 degree turn at some point in the night, and there was no longer any sheet protection for my feet. Eventually we got up, and the dark haired man came back. He wanted me to leave and I was saying he should go. He became threatining, as he was known to ahve a gang of thieves and thugs under his command. So I took a small, very sharp bread knife, and began hacking the fingers off his left hand. At this point he began screaming and noticed that his fingers were very small. I looked closer and noticed that his hand was the size and shape of a fork. Then I woke up.

Oh, and I also dreamed about Maid Marian at some point last night too. Maid Marian was Beej's brother (Beej is my cat), but he was killed by a car four years ago. Not much happened in the dream, I just noticed the cat, and start petting it, saying, "how come I never pay attention to you anymore kity?"

H&E

*sigh*

Work is interesting and challenging and fun. More and more of the biojargon is starting to make sense, so that's nice. Maintaining and expanding a large code base is challenging. At lunch, we've been playing frisbee, which is fun.

Nethack has been all the rage, what with some big month long tournament going on or something. I suck at nethack. I always die on level 4 or 5. I should run away from the tough monsters and eat fewer zombie corpses. But I play fast and careless.

"I tried to tell my kids, you don't realize ... you know, there was a certain charm."

werk

Whew! Halloween partied at the Wett Bar with DJ Doc Martin, who had things moving well and good with his signature jungle bongo-energy spinning. Enjoyed gin and beer and the costumes.

This morning though, at werk. Wow. It was not possible to write code. Me poor head full of cotton balls. Me poor brain.

Preparing to take over the maintainence of the sequencing database for the next two months during Ran's sabbatical absence. There's a whole mountain o' Perl code needing to be maintained. Today spent some more time poking around the glossaries on the web. Restriction enzymes, aliqouts, ET Terminators, BigDye Terminators and more.

Next week I'll also be poking around in Mapping. Mapping seems weird, working with all the image bands they use the object-oriented AceDB a fair bit.

Oh, and I scheduled to do a talk about the Zope-powered intranet in three weeks for the benefit of my co-worker client-base.

I'm gonna but a rabbit!

31 Oct 2001 (updated 31 Oct 2001 at 05:14 UTC) »
things

Tomorrow, I hope to score a cupcake in the afternoon.

Myth III is out! I have no fast Mac, I have no Windows! Fawk. Someone should port this to the Linux Computer Operating System.

Kohan is OK. Nice RTS. Only played the solo stuff so far, looking forward to multiplayer - except the servers usually seem fairly empty ...

Justin quit his job. This is the thing to do. Quit your job.

Trakker is fixing boogs all the time.

I have a gun. I don't have to pay.

I built a paper and balse wood airplane.

I painted a ceramic plate. With carrots. With the tight GSC slacker crew.

I stayed up till 7 am playing Axis and Allies: Pacific. Dauntingly long set-up time, and then you're locked into the simulated combat arena of the Pacific.

I stuffed my cat into the arm of a sweater and then she rolled off the couch.

I like rabbits.

Tomorrow is halloween. I'll be a buccaneer I will.

19 Oct 2001 (updated 19 Oct 2001 at 06:08 UTC) »
Monkies

<MonkeyMan> Wheat: Innaccessible by a the immense majority (perhaps higher than 90%) of.

biology

"What's python?"

"What's a pathogen?"

Reading about pathogens, as all be doing a bit of touch up to some areas of http://www.pathogenomics.bc.ca.

Bacteria is like little bugs. Real small bugs. There are three kinds of these "mini-bugs": Bacteria, Archaea and Eukarya. Bacteria are the simplest. They don't have the complex cell structure of the Eukarya. The Eukarya are pretty nifty - they weren't discovered until the 1970s - and they can survive in temperatures up to 90 C.

A pathogen is an agent that causes disease. In particular, certain types of bacteria.

Star Trek: Enterprise.

C. Gtk. Glade.

A Gift From Earth.

If you try and give me chocolate, I will say, "fuggoff! fugoff!"

If you play me in Quake 3, I will frag your sorry bum.

The chocolate makes my mouth hurt. I ate too much.

Logs files are boring.

rsync is cool.

supatwee

Belle and Sebastion were supatwee. In the end, they had fourteen people on stage. Rattling maracas and shakers and blowing on twee little bits o' brass. The Orpheum was a nice venue. Except they don't really sell much beer. But if you've got a boozing audience, how can you invite a twee bunch o' twirling teenage girls on stage for a "wee dance". Shitza, y'all homies supatwee n' shit.

I'll go see M.E. Smith in The Fall this fall, then I'll get a fill of gleeful vitriol rock noize. Sheeit biatch!

Arab Strap was OK. And a few others.

"What are you hypnotized?"

QuickTime

I used my "Yahoo! Wallet" to purchase CodeWeavers wine plug-in. I installed it without too much trouble, and now I can play QuickTime movies on my computer. Nice. Except the sounds is all messed up. Sounds like this, "phbhpbpbpbpbpptbtbbtbt". So I go to their FAQ support page, and it says, "search for via82cxxx_audio in the output of lsmod". Which means my onboard sound chip is crap/and or poorly supported. I need to get a decent sound card.

The terrorist attack

What a horror show! It's on like, every channel, and even Slashdot was covering only the event. Seinfeld reruns were pre-empted yesterday and then halfway through today's Seinfeld episode they switched to more of that damned news. They didn't even have anything new to say. Just pre-empted my reruns for no good reason. And all those pictures! Keep surfing pic collections of the event, photos of business men in suits bleeding and covered in ash. Photos at night, with the wreckage that makes New York look like some post-nuclear wasteland. And reading all the comments. Everyone has comments. So much commentry.

Jerry Pournelle has published some fairly extremist stuff on his mail page. Lot's of talk about war. I don't understand why there are so many Americans who love war so much. Comments like the following are fairly typical: "We know there are several terrorist groups who wish to do this to us. We know which countries harbor and support them. We are at war with those countries. Let us begin with Libya, Sudan and Afghanistan, and go on from there." Probably somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 people were killed. On an average day, over 40,000 people die from world hunger. 20% of the world's people consume 80% of the earth's resources. Folks clamoring to go to war to "protect" this way of life. Some more rhetoric: "A simple solution would be as follows: all natural resources, world-wide, should be taken over by the civilized nations."

The attack was fueled by hatred for the USA. Bringing the terrorists to justice, and retalition on the terrorists, fair enough. But all this talk about war, and "making an example of the country that harboured such criminals". I don't get this. I don't understand this. "An eye for an eye" is just "That was so bad, we should do it to. Only more, coz we're Americans and we are bigger and badder and more powerful!" When innocent people are killed in acts of revenge, this is only going to fuel more anti-American hatred.

I don't know. People are pretty wired right now, and understandably so, I suppose. Just look at the crazy noise that ESR is spewing. Totally wired and all fight.

107 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!