Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Fucker Stole My Name

I feel like I should say something, but there's nothing to say (unless you want to hear about Women and Family in Rural Taiwan) and I should be studying for a physics exam right now. There is something to look forward to though...

Chapter Two: Flames Of The East

Coming of the Byzantine


First, however, I need to write and run Chapter One ("Order Of Ascension", so something like that). See, I started a little RPG group that will be playing a swashbuckling campaign that I'm in the process of writing. Taking on the time commitment of writing and running it may not have been a good idea, but I did it anyways in the hope that it would take me one step closer to my dream of founding a gaming company. I said our first meeting would be this Saturday, and although I need to have very little prepared for it (we're not even rolling up characters), I've hardly started making the setting, barely thought about the mechanics I'm making/adapting for it, and have only the faintest outline of a plot. I also have that exam, a book to finish, and a lab report looming in the distance.

If only magic was real so I could cast "time stop"...

Friday, February 22, 2008

Cold Weld My Heart

Check this out:



I just got a valentine from my high school. How sick is that? I feel so privileged to be on the mailing list of an alumni department that cares enough about me to send a card and candy. That's true love.

If that sounds sarcastic to you, you're wrong. As tacky as it may be, it is a nice gesture and reminded me that I still need to be philanthropic this year. I mean, the $1 I'm going to give them is just going to candy for me anyways, but I'm pretty sure it's the thought that counts.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Thought Experiment

(Random aside: this is post #150...go me.)

For a while now I've been intending to explore the world of AIs through computer programming. I wanted to write some script that simulated people would follow and, assuming I wrote it right, prosper in their simulated environment. Lately, I've been interested in finding some very "general" way to do this, instead of writing a script that applies very specifically to the world I'd created.

I hadn't really gotten around to fleshing out this idea too much, until I found myself bored to death in philosophy today. My brilliant (like I said, "go me!"), if staggeringly complex idea, was to right a script that would right the script for people. This means that the programmer (me) wouldn't know anything about the world itself, only the very basic mechanics of it. They (I) would, in essence, program a programmer that would then learn about the world from the automatons in it and have to direct them from this information.

Thinking about it, I realized this went beyond Fun With Algorithms, it was about learning itself. Sweet. However, my first attempts at coming up with a framework for this programmed programmer made me realize it will have to be horrendously complex. If only I had tons if time (i.e. no homework) so I could do this...

Monday, February 18, 2008

Fuck The Z-Grip: The Saga Continues

This past August, I made a grave mistake. Standing in a Staples aisle, I thought to myself "our Civilization has surely advanced to the point where we can't screw up mechanical pencils. I mean, we put a man on the moon, so of course we can make perfectly good mechanical pencils, right?" Thus foolishly mistaken, I grabbed the first bunch of pencils I saw. Given my propensity for losing writing utensils, I grabbed a lot (though, mysteriously, not a lot of pens, which I have since run out of several times).

This was the beginning of the Hell that was Z-Grip mechanical pencils.

They are ugly. Really, very, quite ugly. The eraser is the same thing as the clicky-make-more-lead-come-out thing, so every time you erase something, you end up with a dangerously long piece of lead. If you use an eraser too much, you'll never get it out and therefore never be able to load more lead into the pencil. They suck.

But that's just the beginning.

They jam incessantly. At times, it is impossible to get any workable lead out of them, even though there is clearly a piece 4 millimeters from the opening. In this event, you must disassemble the pencil and use a writing utensil that doesn't fail at life to poke out the tiny piece of lead that's jammed into the tip. This happens a lot because these pencil are psychotic lead serial killers. I don't know how it works, but somehow they manage to hack up pieces of lead internally. It's not that you break your tip off a lot while writing, it gets broken off inside the pencil. This means your pencil is constantly coughing up tiny pieces of lead, all too small to actually use. They go into the loader in one long piece, so some part of the clicky-make-more-lead-come-out system must butcher this stuff. So not only do you use only a fraction of your lead for actual writing, but you spend 50% of your time using the defective clicker to get more lead out instead of taking harried notes on FileNotFoundExceptions like you need to.

Why do I still use them? Well, most of my money goes towards laundry, LEGOs, and Bawls, so I can't justify buying new pencils when I still have some barely-workable ones. I've done everything I can to get rid of them; snapping a couple in frustration, lending them as often as I can, but they won't go away. I loose black pens at a rate of 1 per 6.8 days, and these stupid pencils at a rate of 1 per 43.2 days.

THAT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE!

Looking For That Silver Lining

School is making me a racist. Last semester, it was the Japanese and their absurdly difficult language that wrecked my life. Now, it's the Aborigines. One goddamned book about them has been haunting me for a week, hanging over any moment I spend relaxing. It's too dry to read for any great length of time, and it's being aided by nefarious physics problem sets that eat up ungodly lengths of time (and also refuse to die because I can never figure them out).

I'm looking for a silver lining. Friday night it was messing around in GTA, last night it was going to the dining hall for a second time just to get a triple chocolate sunday. Tonight, well, tonight was mostly filled with Aborigines and resignation about them (which mainly involved staring at a book or the wall). There was a brief period of joy as I rebuilt a LEGO helicopter I bought last week, but it was ruined when the build-your-own-LEGO-set software turned out to suck.

Then, about to go to bed, I happened by my new Facebook picture, and it reminded me of better time (a.k.a. Tuesday).
The details of this endeavor are, unfortunately, unsuited for this blog. They are too shrouded in obscure references and inside jokes to make much sense (ordinarily, this wouldn't stop me, but I don't think these will amuse me enough to make it worth it). It involves a box of Kleenex, a pile of very cheap peeps, and lots of permanent marker (hence the mask). If my creative genius is, well, genius, the results of this labor are presently adorning someone's wall (not the Facebook kind).

If someone bothers me, I'll write the whole story and put up some more pictures (for those of you who are my Facebook friends, you can see them in my "Milwaukee Roadtrip" album).

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Meditations On Venereal Diseases

I'd like to think that I can sum up my Valentine's Day with the events of physics class: I came in late and, upon discovering a left-handed desk, sat in it.

I'm not sure it's quite fitting, but wouldn't it be cool if it was?

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Let's Just Say It's A Good Thing I Had An Extra Pair Of Socks

The title is a true story. There's too much toe-freezing slush and it makes me angry. Also, I'm drowning in work and that makes me angry. I'm sure it makes you angry too because its prevented me from blogging. Take your complaints to the study of Anthropology, not me.

Presently, however, I'm sitting in a computer lab waiting for a class to start and wishing I had a dry pair of shoes. I'm also hoping that my lab TA won't mind me not wearing my very wet pair of shoes. Anyways, I have about 10 minutes to write stuff here, only I have nothing to write about. Unless you want to hear about Ohm's law or the Mardu Aborigines, I don't have much to offer.

Hopefully, free time and something of interest will come up in the next few days, and you can all sup on the goodness of my blog again.

Thursday, February 07, 2008

I Am King Of The Muppets

I feel like this page looks to bland, so here's a picture.

Dissolving the Leukocytes Of My Soul

Things that are epic:

The Star Wars Saga.

The fact that I spelled "leukocytes" correctly on the first try. It's worth noting that I misspelled "correctly" on the first try (twice).

24 bottles of Bawls, currently sitting under my bed. The day they arrived was joyous indeed, and nerve wracking as I carried a very heavy, rapidly disintegrating box of glass bottles to my dorm through the rain. The most epic part if that 4 of us ordered these boxes (enough to earn our dealer a bar of caffeine soap), meaning that 96 bottles of bawls entered this dorm in the span of a few days.

Pole vaulting over a pit of sharks. Also, pole vaulting over Graboids.

A friend of mine was recently asked to describe the two best moments of his life. The first was the day of his SATs, when he listened to only "I'm a True American" by Hulk Hogan from the moment he woke up until the test. The second was more recent when he woke up at 1:55 and decided to make lunch (which closes at 2). He made it, although only barely. I remember seeing him walking into the dining hall, arms held triumphantly over his head, saying "I'm making lunch!".

A world in which this could be considered "substantial".

The Latest From The Seventh Census

Get it? I think it's pretty clever.

Anyways, I'm procrastinating on the posts I meant to write but have since forgotten, so instead I'll use siteMeter for inspiration.

First, I'd like to thank all you loyal readers (all 12 per day of you) for sticking around and giving me the sense that readership here is picking up. January came in at a record high for visits (ok, so I've only been tracking it for 4 months...)! Hooray 7th Notion!

I also enjoyed the tidbit where it told me that the average visits is 54 seconds. Nice. I encourage you all to leave the 'Notion open in a tab somewhere so I can pretend that everyone who stops by here reads through my archives.

Now I'll try to write something a little more substantial because Goobers is getting me down.

Monday, February 04, 2008

Rule #4

Leave your boyfriends out of your blogs! I'm looking at you nerddd and random blog I found on Puntabulous. I get it, you found the Final Five and I wasn't one of them. Ronald Moore doing it was bad enough, but I don't need it in my blogosphere. Yeah, yeah, I'm happy that you're happy, but we're done with that. Tack has no place on the internet, just porn, fansites, 'Copter, and the 7th Notion.

But I'm not bitter.

I don't, definitely don't, remember the time the Nerddd shot down my marriage proposal. MP totally stole my hit-on-girls-via-blog-comments tactic.

But seriously, no bitterness. You know why? 'Cuz Saltines are very tasty and I have some. Mmmmm.

:P