WebCammy Goodness!
I splurged today: An iSight is mine.
One of the first things I did was set it up as my SG webcam. Hop over to the Cams page and you might catch a glimpse of the elusive baudot.
New toys.
Yum.
I splurged today: An iSight is mine.
One of the first things I did was set it up as my SG webcam. Hop over to the Cams page and you might catch a glimpse of the elusive baudot.
New toys.
Yum.
This was probably brought on by a discussion in one of the Current Events threads...
I dreamed that there was a spill of liquid Sarin, and that I cleaned it up. I got the stuff on my hands, arms... all over. I was carrying around a fragment of paper towel coated with it, to get it tested and confirmed.
In the dream, I went back to my second high school, the Alabama School of Mathematics and Science, looking for help. One of the chemistry teachers told me that I could wash off outside. I went out and found the ruins of buildings that hadn't been there before. Ducking inside the archway of one, I found a partially enclosed pool, dotted with rubble and fallen limestone statuary of ancient kashmiri gods and goddesses. I stripped down, splashed into the water....
...and woke up.
.-.-.
-.-.-. -.-.- -.-.-.
Background for those who don't know it:
Sarin is a nerve gas, developed by the Nazis but not used in war by them. It's considered fatal in doses of 1/2 milligram for a person, and can enter the body through several pathways other than breathing alone. Going on 10 years ago, the Aum cult released Sarin on the Tokyo subway, attempting to cause hysteria and lend credence to their leader's apocalyptic prophesies. Hundreds of people were crippled for life, but only a dozen actually died. It was a cold day, and of the four trains where the Sarin was released, only on one did a significant amount of it vaporize.
A few days ago the U.S. army tripped an improvised trap made from an artillery shell in Iraq. Apparently unbeknownst to the trapmaker, the artillery shell wasn't a conventional High Explosive round, but a Sarin-payload chemical shell. The reaction was almost entirely spoiled by the age of the chemicals and the way the trap was rigged, and only two soldiers were significantly injured by gas that resulted. Again, poor deployment saved the day.
I seem to have remembered in the dream that the Sarin bombing of the Tokyo subway had been problematic because no one knew what was going on and it was most of the day before Sarin was confirmed as being the active agent. I also seemed to be aware that I had a short window of reduced danger in dealing with the sarin in liquid form, and the it could be washed off to cut down on the exposure, too.
I dreamed that there was a spill of liquid Sarin, and that I cleaned it up. I got the stuff on my hands, arms... all over. I was carrying around a fragment of paper towel coated with it, to get it tested and confirmed.
In the dream, I went back to my second high school, the Alabama School of Mathematics and Science, looking for help. One of the chemistry teachers told me that I could wash off outside. I went out and found the ruins of buildings that hadn't been there before. Ducking inside the archway of one, I found a partially enclosed pool, dotted with rubble and fallen limestone statuary of ancient kashmiri gods and goddesses. I stripped down, splashed into the water....
...and woke up.
.-.-.
-.-.-. -.-.- -.-.-.Background for those who don't know it:
Sarin is a nerve gas, developed by the Nazis but not used in war by them. It's considered fatal in doses of 1/2 milligram for a person, and can enter the body through several pathways other than breathing alone. Going on 10 years ago, the Aum cult released Sarin on the Tokyo subway, attempting to cause hysteria and lend credence to their leader's apocalyptic prophesies. Hundreds of people were crippled for life, but only a dozen actually died. It was a cold day, and of the four trains where the Sarin was released, only on one did a significant amount of it vaporize.
A few days ago the U.S. army tripped an improvised trap made from an artillery shell in Iraq. Apparently unbeknownst to the trapmaker, the artillery shell wasn't a conventional High Explosive round, but a Sarin-payload chemical shell. The reaction was almost entirely spoiled by the age of the chemicals and the way the trap was rigged, and only two soldiers were significantly injured by gas that resulted. Again, poor deployment saved the day.
I seem to have remembered in the dream that the Sarin bombing of the Tokyo subway had been problematic because no one knew what was going on and it was most of the day before Sarin was confirmed as being the active agent. I also seemed to be aware that I had a short window of reduced danger in dealing with the sarin in liquid form, and the it could be washed off to cut down on the exposure, too.
Settled the coconut issue for once and for all tonight. This ended up manifesting as a small party in which the coconuts had rum poured into them, and, in accordance with the prophecy, lime.
After that, headed out goth-clubbing, where that cute girl commented that she hadn't seen me in a while. It's good to be remembered.
Another gothling told me repeatedly that I looked just like Chris Cornell. Is this why Al was prone for a time to responding to my posts? Who is this Chris Cornell?
After that, headed out goth-clubbing, where that cute girl commented that she hadn't seen me in a while. It's good to be remembered.
Another gothling told me repeatedly that I looked just like Chris Cornell. Is this why Al was prone for a time to responding to my posts? Who is this Chris Cornell?
It is to my sorrow to report that Lucky #5, the baby goldfish announced in the last journal entry, passed away while in quarantine.
I, at last, have a third goldfish.
He's a little orange & white lionhead. I was looking for a different colour pattern than Collossus the iFish, but this little guy was just too friendly to pass by.
He's a little orange & white lionhead. I was looking for a different colour pattern than Collossus the iFish, but this little guy was just too friendly to pass by.
"Break! Break, damn you!"
This from Chris, who is coding next to me.
"This damn piece of..." is what I hear through the VNV nation in my earplugs. He's enraged because he wrote a chunk of code. It had a bug in it. It wouldn't run.
So he ripped it apart, re-wrote it in a way that he KNEW was incorrect, but that would illustrate a point in the way it failed...
...and now it works perfectly.
"Look at this! Why isn't this breaking?"
I have to admit, the code looks misguided to me, too. For a programmer, this is one of the worst kind of bugs. The kind that you're CERTAIN is there, but you can't fix it, because it won't break while you're looking at it.
Now he's consulting Jamie. Maybe she can figure out what's so horribly right with his code.
This from Chris, who is coding next to me.
"This damn piece of..." is what I hear through the VNV nation in my earplugs. He's enraged because he wrote a chunk of code. It had a bug in it. It wouldn't run.
So he ripped it apart, re-wrote it in a way that he KNEW was incorrect, but that would illustrate a point in the way it failed...
...and now it works perfectly.
"Look at this! Why isn't this breaking?"
I have to admit, the code looks misguided to me, too. For a programmer, this is one of the worst kind of bugs. The kind that you're CERTAIN is there, but you can't fix it, because it won't break while you're looking at it.
Now he's consulting Jamie. Maybe she can figure out what's so horribly right with his code.
He made the letter Lamed king over coition
And He bound a crown to it
And He combined one with another
And with them He formed
Libra in the Universe
Tishrei in the Year
And the gall bladder in the soul
male and female
- Sefir Yetzirah 5:9
There you have it; The kabbalist's answer to why we librans are such horndogs.
(Not my usual reading material, but I'm nose deep in a major research paper on Angels As Automata.)
So I went out and spent a month's rent and then some today on things to make me happy. The big one: A 29 string neo-celtic lap harp. Pinning happiness on material possessions may be bad, but this is one I've been lusting after for a few years now, and it is so very beautiful. Her tone is clear, and her notes ring just so long, and we communicate well.
Note: The gender of harps is determined by the sexual preferences of the player, by tradition. This is because the harp spends its time between your legs, and had best be a welcome guest there. This tidily solves the pronoun issue, except for bisexual bards.
Some of that cash might be made back in a bonus influx of income: I started writing down a gaming idea that had been bouncing around my head for the last week, and it's coming out very neatly. I wouldn't be surprised at all if this one makes it into Pyramid magazine. I haven't published there in nearly 2 years now, so I'd like to visit its pages again.
Note: The gender of harps is determined by the sexual preferences of the player, by tradition. This is because the harp spends its time between your legs, and had best be a welcome guest there. This tidily solves the pronoun issue, except for bisexual bards.
Some of that cash might be made back in a bonus influx of income: I started writing down a gaming idea that had been bouncing around my head for the last week, and it's coming out very neatly. I wouldn't be surprised at all if this one makes it into Pyramid magazine. I haven't published there in nearly 2 years now, so I'd like to visit its pages again.
Skipped CS562 (Name: Advanced Buzzword-Buzzword Software Buzzword) today to attend a lecture by Dr. Banchoff, visiting from Brown University. I'd be exagerating if I said the man was a hero of mine, but he's been on my radar since I was a wee lad, and he published 'Beyond the Third Dimension' with Scientific American press. It had all these gorgeous, rainbow-hued computer generated pictures of what klein bottles and tesseracts would look like as they passed through or rotated in our three dimensional space. If I wasn't already hooked on non-euclidean and theoreticc geometry before, that did it for me.
So I finally got to see the man speak. He's a charismatic presenter - quite funny. He gave a talk on the works of Abbot-Abbot (Flatland), L'Engle (A Wrinkle in Time) and Dali all drew on fourth dimensional geometric concepts, and how all these folks had gotten it fundamentally right and what we could learn from them. He4 also showed some of his earliest computer graphics: a vector display illustration of a rotating hypercube.
Trivia: The computer graphics scene of the trench-run on the Death Star briefing from A New Hope is based on the introductory credits from Banchoff's hypercube movie.
So I finally got to see the man speak. He's a charismatic presenter - quite funny. He gave a talk on the works of Abbot-Abbot (Flatland), L'Engle (A Wrinkle in Time) and Dali all drew on fourth dimensional geometric concepts, and how all these folks had gotten it fundamentally right and what we could learn from them. He4 also showed some of his earliest computer graphics: a vector display illustration of a rotating hypercube.
Trivia: The computer graphics scene of the trench-run on the Death Star briefing from A New Hope is based on the introductory credits from Banchoff's hypercube movie.
