I think I broke the Netflix recommendation engine.



Seriously? Syriana, Scanner Darkly, and Salton Sea? None of those are comedies, and they really have NOTHING in common.

We wanna be free!
We wanna be free to do what we wanna do!
We wanna be free to ride!
And we wanna be free to ride on machines without being hassled by the man!

And we wanna get loaded!

I am listening to Superfuzz Bigmuff, cracking back Coronas and failing to code anything productive. The magikal TiVo is recording both the premier of Heroes and this week's episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles at the same time. In HD! Technological madness, this is.

Back in, oh, 1995 or so, there were only, like, four movie channels. So you gots what they gave, which was usually the same five movies. God help you if you wanted to watch the tube during the daytime.

Over time, the number of channels increased pretty heavily. At the beginning of the year, I think I was getting something like thirty or thirty-five movie channels plus all the other crap. So there was always something on - which is important when you work from home.

However, now that I have all this high-def goodness, I'm finding myself in the same position I was a decade ago. High-def teevee looks so much freakin' better that I can't go back to standard definition. And while I still get the four-quadrillion standard definition channels, I don't want to watch any of them - I only want to watch the shit that's on the ten or twelve high-def channels.

Which sucks during the day, because there are only three or four movie channels, and they all play kids movies before four p.m. And my other options are Dr. Phil, Oprah, and the Guiding Light.

Life is hard.

Jesus take me to a higher place
Sliding in 'n' out of grace
Christ - body and blood I crave
Sliding in 'n' out of grace, yeah

Mom is home from the hospital now following her double bypass heart surgery. This is apparently a very, very good thing that she's recovering so quickly. My father and I were actually able to talk about things other than her today (such as the US victory in the Ryder Cup and my boys trouncing the fuck out of the Lions [31 to 13; eat it bitches]).

Speaking of football, my alma mater is playing WVU on Saturday as some sort of "state rivalry" thing. I'm fairly certain I'm not going to be able to see this game through the miracle of Comcast but maybe it will show up on DISH or summat and I'll be able to see it.

(Hey. Two prime numbers. Awesome.)

Speaking of home, I am (very) likely to be heading there for Christmas. EA "shuts down" during this time, so there's no work, and I haven't been home in a dog's age. Also: mom being sick. Also: need to see the mountains. Also: hopefully run into old school people from home.

Speaking of people from home, here is Jenny in a commercial for the Sarah Palin Action Figure. (Yes, KBK, I know you're sick of hearing about Palin, but it's Jenny!)

Cry for mercy, relieve my hate
Sliding in 'n' out of grace
Spill my seed, suck my waste
Sliding in 'n' out of grace

I took a nap (well, I tried to take a nap but failed) and upon getting up found myself suddenly depressed. No real reason, just . . . down. I reckon it is the result of the previous week's crappiness catching up to me.

(Also, I got kind of shot down by this chick for a dinner date. I include that only for completion, even though it's probably not impacted my mental state. She and I have been orbiting each other for several months at various distances. She'd asked me out a week or so ago but had to bail, and when I tried to reschedule she said she was taking some "self time". C'est la vie; this is pretty par for the course for the two of us. One of us is always unavailable. Hence my thought that it has nothing of impact.)

Facebook is weird. I posted in my "status" that I was "suddenly depressed" and then got responses from three kids I went to high school with about it. It has been weird, but I've been connecting with people from my Deep Past more and more often and with greater and greater depth.

Now I'm listening to Mudhoney and it's all better. This was the shit I was listening to as I grew "into my own," so it's always a good nostalgia trip.

Oh God, how I love to hate
Sliding in 'n' out of grace
Save me Lord, and fuck the race
Sliding in 'n' out of grace

We're all douchebags on this bus.

Half the fun of getting a new TiVo is teaching it to hate the Jesus channels.

ITEM!

I am avoiding discussion with people about my mother and her impending heart surgery. It's kind of weird, but it seems that if I talk about it becomes more real.

However, everyone seems (at this point) to be optimistic. So there's that.

ITEM!

I, however, am less optimistic about the country's current case of economic botulism. So much so that I found myself awake at four a.m. worried about it, and couldn't get back to sleep until about seven.

I have no desire to repeat the Great Job Scare of 2001. I rather like my current lifestyle.

ITEM!

I am now 300 pages into Anathem and, lo and behold, there has been plot movement. Like, there have been actual things happening in the story rather than pages upon pages of mood-setting.

The book has started to catch hold of me, however, despite it's long-windedness. One thing that I think he did well is that he put all his little stories where the main character teaches geometry proofs to someone in an appendix. The main text says, "So I taught him about foo.*" and at the bottom it says "See XXXX". And if you go to XXXX, it's text that could be inserted right there (and probably was, in Draft 1). This is good: Stephenson has a habit of going into super spatter nerd mode and go into excruciating depth about esoterica such as the banking laws of Holland in the 1600s. For twenty pages.

A large part of the monk-life as described involves them engaging in philosophic dialog (though they call it "Theoric Dialog" and at one point there is a big deal about describing the difference between Theorics and Philosophers. This I find humorous, because many of the "dialogs" are pretty much lifted directly out of second and third year Plato (only attributed to fictional people from his universe).

ITEM!

This is really cool, and makes me want to build crap out of Lego again.

ITEM!

On Friday my venerable rear-projection teevee finally croaked over. It had been dying for a while - projectors going out of sync, whatever, audio glitches, etc. So on Saturday afternoon I went out and blew a chunk of change on a new LCD television.

This of course included an HD TiVo (see below), a mounting bracket, and a couple HDMI cables.

Maynard and I mounted it on Saturday night and got the most important thing hooked up to it: the 360. This was done via HDMI-1; the other things were set up component. Worked perfectly.

Until I hooked the HD TiVo into HDMI-2. At this point, neither the TiVo nor the XBox were producing audio. Since the TiVo had support for optical audio in addition to HDMI, and HDMI-1 allows for optical audio, I switched TiVo to HDMI-1 and pulled the XBox onto the HD Component cable system (not an HDMI cable).

So, wtf? Why would the HDMI inputs (all four of them - I checked) suddenly stop taking audio?

ITEM!

Man, TiVo HD and CableCARDs can eat a can of Spaghetti-os and then be sent to work in Hell's Scab Factory.

In theory, this is a cool idea: ditch the cable box; just slot a special kind of PCMCIA card into the TiVo. BAM! The TiVo becomes your cable box. Which is a neat idea, assuming it fucking works. Which, apparently, it only does about half the time. The other half of the time the cards don't sync up, or they're fried, or the TiVo software has bugs and needs an upgrade, or whatever. The intertron is filled with horror stories about this.

It seems to be a good idea but poorly tested and executed.

ITEM!

I started a new game of Grand Theft Auto IV in a hope that the game is "better" when it doesn't look like shit on a decade-old, dying television. I played it for about an hour and a half and so far it is more fun - though I'm not sure if that's because I'm at the early points, because I know the control scheme already, or because it looks so damned fine.

(Geometry Wars 2 looks utterly phenomenal in 1080p.)

ITEM!

With the removal of the Monolith TV, the furniture layout in my apartment has also changed. The new TV is above the fireplace, which pushed the couch into one of the bay windows. This has provided the downstairs with about 30 square feet of empty space.

I'm unsure what to put there. The place feels empty now.

Maybe a big table for building Lego crap.

Smell that? That smells like douche.

ITEM!

My copy of Anathem arrived yesterday and was promptly placed in The Stack atop Matter, which is also a multi-thousand page sci-fi novel. I'm currently in the midst of re-reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for like, the fiftieth time, but when I'm done I'll start on the new Stephenson book. Matter scares the fucking bejesus out of me: it's got a fucking built in concordance. WTF?

Say what you will about Heinlein (and I'll fight you if you, probably, if it's bad enough), you can mostly follow his books without having to resort to external references.

ITEM!

Some political crap, just to give you the runs:

It's like a really bad Disney movie. Matt Damon on the terrifying prospect of "President Palin". I need to know if she really thinks dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago. . . because she's gonna have the nuclear codes.

Roger Ebert is in agreement. I want a vice president who is better than me, wiser, well-traveled, has met world leaders, who three months ago had an opinion on Iraq. Someone who doesn't repeat bald-faced lies about earmarks and the Bridge to Nowhere. Someone who doesn't appoint Alaskan politicians to "study" global warming, because, hello! It has been studied. Even better: The most damning indictment against her is that she considered herself a good choice to be a heartbeat away. That shows bad judgment.

ITEM!

I am in the process of absorbing the Spring Framework for use in the rockstar game. This is good and bad.

Good because I'm learning a new (and popular) technology. Bad in that it's irritating to have to learn yet another java framework. Why am I doing this, you ask? Because dealing with Hibernate sessions is a pain in the ass without it.

ITEM!

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay is good, but would have probably been funnier if they were high more throughout the film. R.I.P. NPH.

ITEM!

After the awesome construction job on Portola at Woodside on Saturday, the guys totally screwed up the lane markers. This has been entertaining for me, watching people almost k-rash into each other from my porch. This is better than TiVo.

ITEM!

Speaking of TiVo. Two years ago I bought a TiVo for my dad. I put the thing in my name, so that they billed me 12.50 a month for the service. He's my dad! He loves it. It's changed his life.

Anyways, apparently a year or so ago it died for some reason and they sent him a new one for free, provided that he pay a three year contract for three hundred bones or so. So he did that, not being aware that I was paying for his service. And today we discovered, lo and behold, that they've been double-dipping: I've paid for his service for the past 18 months even though he's also paid for it.

So I look forward to an afternoon of sitting on hold while I try to get my money back.

ITEM!

Jimisan is excellent sushi. You should go.

Tonight's Irritation (tm) is brought to you by Apple's iTunes!

Thank you, iTunes, for chewing up 80% of my computer's processor for 45 minutes, even though I didn't ask you to, just to generate thumbnails of the album covers for some shitty, unusable "view" of my mp3 library that I will never, ever fucking use, ever because, frankly, a "grid" view of over 1,000 albums is totally fucking useless.

If I had a wish for the iTunes development team, it would be this:

STOP TRYING TO BE CLEVER AND CUTE AND MAKING IT LOOK PRETTY AND INSTEAD MAKE IT OPERATE ON LARGE COLLECTIONS FASTER AND WITH MORE USABILITY.

I could give a fuck about coverflow. That impresses people for all of five minutes until they realize that browsing more than 20 records with it bites ass.

On this machine: 1110 Albums, 37.5 days, 60.93 GB. No videos. Just audio. And that's just a subset; $DEITY help people with what I would consider "huge" collections.

Edit: Damn you to a further layer of hell, iTunes! It just crashed my machine while loading that fucking "genius" mode.

(Genius at crashing boxes, amirite?)

Before people say stupid shit like "buy better computers, yo" I should point out that I go through laptops like a transvestite goes through pantyhose. I get a new one every 6 to 8 months and I always buy top of the line.

(There is a specific business reason for this: if spending an extra 500 bucks on a faster chip will increase my compile times by even fifteen minutes, and my compiles are an hour, I will make profit within five compiles.)

So it's not like my machines are ancient boxes.

Fuck you, bitches.

I've totally disabled "coward" mode. I've had too many anonymous comments in too short of time. Accounts are free here! And I seriously don't care if you disagree with me or are a dick to me!

But I gotta know who I'm dealing with.

So, if you can't man up to it, good bye.

I've had a twitter account for a while now. It is kind of an experiment in creating either a) a long term, short-burst story or b) a pack of lies. You pick.

Anyways: http://twitter.com/jorm/

The iTunes store is now selling classic Doctor Who episodes at a buck ninety-nine a pop.

I sincerely hope that when the Large Hadron Supercollider is turned on that it creates a micro black hole that brings a loud and instantaneous, painless death to everyone on our planet.

Thus, my ever-increasing thirst for oblivion will be quenched without having to resort to the bloody messiness and potential failure of suicide attempts.


(I'm kidding about the suicide part; not so much about hoping we all die.)

Argh. Today they released a "Mandatory Upgrade" for Trillian Astra that, upon install, completely blew away all my preferences, connections, nicknames for contacts, groupings - everything.

Awesome kwality there, guys.

Hey, bitches.

I got the Wii setup; here is my console ID:

1752 4421 3267 6413

If I had your number before, I don't anymore. It's gone. Finito. Eaten by the man, like so many gravied children.

So it's gotta be done all over again.

I am currently in the possession of not one but two brand new Wii consoles in the box - one for me, and one for Maynard's kids.

Since I work across from the Stoneridge Mall campus, getting over there at noonish when they get the shipments is rather trivial. They only sold me one per game store, though.

Even if I disregard the entire "my extremely common, Windows-based operating system isn't supported and this is no where listed on the box" clusterfuck, I'm not impressed so far.

Why?

Well, I can't seem to make a fucking call. It simply won't dial out.

I can receive calls just fine! But attempting to tap a contact, or even straight dial a number? Nothing. Helen Keller mode.

Is the ability to actually *use* the fucking phone something that takes a while to "kick in", or should I be looking forward to spending hours on the phone with tech support?

I hope the former, and that it fucking works when I wake up. Because otherwise, I'm looking at the hassle of returning it and trying to get my old phone reactivated.

So I bought an iPhone.

Excellent!

I have a 64-bit Vista laptop. iTunes does not fully support this operating system - a year and a half after its release. Okay, fine. It plays music, that's all I care about.

However, to configure the iPhone you have to connect it to iTunes. Okay, groovy!

But there is apparently no 64 bit driver for the iPhone. So it's a brick. "Please connect iPhone to a 32 bit version of Windows XP (SP2) or Vista."

I. . . I don't have one. I have a machine running a 32 bit XP, but it doesn't have any USB2 ports so I can't connect the fucking phone to it.

Luckily, my work laptop is 32 bits, so I'm installing iTunes on there - all just to get my phone that I just spent four hundred bucks on to fucking work.

This is infuriating, since the big mantra for Apple is "easy to use" and "works out of the box".

I need to pick up a new phone. Probably one of those new fangled types of phones.

Anyone have any suggestions as to what kind?

So, Thursday evening, we had a power outage. There are two servers here, both important for different reasons:

elohim: mail server, shell server, all around "everything" server, but also the server for domains.gaijin.com, which runs this ancient perl cgi stuff.
samael: cvs server and testing server for the games (lots of java)

( tech frustration and nerdity )

In other news, new car is fucking awesome. The specs say 0-60 in 6.7 seconds, but I'm not that good of a driver. Still, from a standstill, the i-VTECH kicks in around 3000 RPM in first and it feels like a rocket booster (not enough to take out a Mustang, but woot). I tooled all the way to Pleasanton in 3rd at about 75 MPH (only revving to about 4000) - and still had 3 speeds to spare.

I had to get new insurance for it, though. And since it's technically a "sports car", my rates went, uh, up.

I just have to figure out how to use the radio.

Work is good. I am making some new friends. The commute is a bit rough - not so much in the morning, but a bit grave in the evening. Most of my commute stress, though, is the fact that I always seem to have to pee while stuck on span 2 of the bay bridge.

Tonight's plan: Tower Burger with Ming and Maynard and KBK.

Of course, the power in the entire neighborhood blows out, throwing water all over that.

It was very creepy up here, with the fog and the rain and absolutely no light whatsoever. Tower Burger was a done deal, so instead we went to this totally awesome burger joint down in the deep mission that Ming knew and stuffed ourselves.

And then went to Mitchell's for ice cream. So more stuffing.

Back up the hill, and the power's on. . .but the shuttle hardware that runs the gaijin.com mail server and a bunch of webservers has completely fried out. Gone. Dead. Diddled and doop. I performed some emergency surgery and swapped drives with the other shuttle, bringing it offline.

Of course, that shuttle is not only the testing environment for all the games, it's also my fscking code repository.

So I'm kind of flying without a net right now until I can buy a new box for the server (which I'll do tomorrow, probably).

It's looking like this weekend is going to be expensive as I was already planning on getting a new car.

Urgh.

Recently, LJ has added a "feature" where, if you hover over a link in someone's page that leaves the lj domain, it puts up a little "preview" bubble or somesuch.

I fucking hate them.

Does anyone know how I can turn this off? Is there a preference of some kind?

Edit: Found it. You have to activate one of the hovers, click on the gear in the corner, and click "disable."

I need/want to create an ant task that will do something like flatten a database and reload some stub SQL (so that test builds can just use ant and only ant). The problem is that the ant sql task totally chokes on comments in the sql - stuff that the command line thinger won't care about.

The code it chokes on is something like this:


INSERT INTO foo SET id=1, bar=2, name="foofa"; # here is a comment


And it hates the "; #" bit, apparently treating the # as a new command.

Here is my ant task:


<target name="db.loadstatic">
<sql driver="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
keepformat="true"
escapeprocessing="true"
url="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/steamfront?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8"
userid="root" password="PASSWORD" >
<classpath>
<pathelement path="${classpathroot}/mysql-connector-java-3.1.10-bin.jar"/>
</classpath>
<path>
<fileset dir="./sql/entity">
<include name="species.sql"/>
</fileset>
</path>
</sql>
</target>


(Another problem is using relative paths with "SOURCE filename", but that's a totally different problem).

Anyone ever seen or dealt with this before?