Hmm... lalalalala... why won't the next line go bold?
Day tripping across the Pacific
They like me. They really really like me! I don't get it. They said more and were just generally nicer to me this week than they ever have. For example, last year, we had to get a taxi to take us to her parents house, but this time, came to meet us at the airport! WTF's up that? They even picked up a few English phrases between last November and now to use with me. I totally don't understand it. I got to know more about all of them in the ~day I was in HK than the three and a half months I was there last year. And it wasn't just them; her friends actually wanted to meet me this time. No blank stares or whispering or anything. I feel accepted, finally. I'm still like giddy-drunk over how they actually acknowledged my existence this time!
They remembered me in my little danish place down the alley and we fucked in her old bedroom. Perfect.
Long winded 'net hosting gripe
Ok, this afternoon, I checked my mail. There is never anything special there, but I've been away so there was more of it... spam... spam... mom... spam... work... spam... receipt for pair hosting... spam... spa- whoa, there. I forgot I was hosting with Pair. Yeah, that's right, I fell for the hype and got gouged by those losers. And I stupidly prepaid for 12 months. Never used it because I ((gasp)) found a more reliable and quite a bit cheaper host a week after I signed up with Pair. [anger sets in] Over $150 wasted on hosting I never use. GAH! Well... hmm... I could always catch up on my friends list over on SG... and friends threads... hmm... yeah... Ah! Weigh down their servers a bit! Yes! Aha! .:pushes up glasses and goes to work:. I present to you...
The SG Degree of Separation Challenge!
Geekness follows...
Heya, fellow geeks! Let's just do a quick rundown of what's going on here, shall we?
Alrighty, once all the cgi stuff is done, we take the two contestants and pull their friends lists. These are cached in a mySQL db, of course, to save SG's bandwidth (the script treats the cache as valid if it's under a week old; This is to make sure it's only a DoS trick by common acronym
). Next, we do a little Dijkstra mojo to see if they're buddies. If not, we go deeper; the "from" guy's first buddy is pulled and put through the Dijkstra wringer, then the first buddy of "to," then the second, and so on until we have at least one path. At first, I purposely wrote the algorithm as inefficient as possible (alpha version typically gobbled ~500M of RAM and >45sec) to screw with Pair a bit but... eh, why waste time with one iteration when I can test yourself and get more work done. After playing with it a few mins, I've come to realize a few things:
1) if I include SGs, no one is more than three of four steps from each other. How do they even keep up with their 'real' friends?
2) without logging in, you can't get SGs' list of friends from their friends page and I'm not comfortable with the thought of SG logging me out every time someone tries this out
3) expired, private, and zotted people don't have friends lists despite the fact that they can remain on other's lists
4) this may be in violation of the TOS. It's not addressed specifically, but it is sorta mentioned in the FAQ where it reads...
Day tripping across the Pacific
They like me. They really really like me! I don't get it. They said more and were just generally nicer to me this week than they ever have. For example, last year, we had to get a taxi to take us to her parents house, but this time, came to meet us at the airport! WTF's up that? They even picked up a few English phrases between last November and now to use with me. I totally don't understand it. I got to know more about all of them in the ~day I was in HK than the three and a half months I was there last year. And it wasn't just them; her friends actually wanted to meet me this time. No blank stares or whispering or anything. I feel accepted, finally. I'm still like giddy-drunk over how they actually acknowledged my existence this time!
They remembered me in my little danish place down the alley and we fucked in her old bedroom. Perfect.
Long winded 'net hosting gripe
Ok, this afternoon, I checked my mail. There is never anything special there, but I've been away so there was more of it... spam... spam... mom... spam... work... spam... receipt for pair hosting... spam... spa- whoa, there. I forgot I was hosting with Pair. Yeah, that's right, I fell for the hype and got gouged by those losers. And I stupidly prepaid for 12 months. Never used it because I ((gasp)) found a more reliable and quite a bit cheaper host a week after I signed up with Pair. [anger sets in] Over $150 wasted on hosting I never use. GAH! Well... hmm... I could always catch up on my friends list over on SG... and friends threads... hmm... yeah... Ah! Weigh down their servers a bit! Yes! Aha! .:pushes up glasses and goes to work:. I present to you...
The SG Degree of Separation Challenge!
Geekness follows...
Heya, fellow geeks! Let's just do a quick rundown of what's going on here, shall we?
Alrighty, once all the cgi stuff is done, we take the two contestants and pull their friends lists. These are cached in a mySQL db, of course, to save SG's bandwidth (the script treats the cache as valid if it's under a week old; This is to make sure it's only a DoS trick by common acronym
). Next, we do a little Dijkstra mojo to see if they're buddies. If not, we go deeper; the "from" guy's first buddy is pulled and put through the Dijkstra wringer, then the first buddy of "to," then the second, and so on until we have at least one path. At first, I purposely wrote the algorithm as inefficient as possible (alpha version typically gobbled ~500M of RAM and >45sec) to screw with Pair a bit but... eh, why waste time with one iteration when I can test yourself and get more work done. After playing with it a few mins, I've come to realize a few things:
1) if I include SGs, no one is more than three of four steps from each other. How do they even keep up with their 'real' friends?
2) without logging in, you can't get SGs' list of friends from their friends page and I'm not comfortable with the thought of SG logging me out every time someone tries this out
3) expired, private, and zotted people don't have friends lists despite the fact that they can remain on other's lists
4) this may be in violation of the TOS. It's not addressed specifically, but it is sorta mentioned in the FAQ where it reads...
Do not attempt to [...] run scripts on the site.
I'm not hacking it, but if too many people use this at once and request members that aren't cached it could be a problem. I rather enjoy my account here and will take the page down the second I hear it's even remotely in violation.
This is all beta, btw... Written after flying back from Asia Saturday night... or Friday morning... or... Friday afternoon... or... uh... ((sigh)) I've never gotten used to that ~18hr flight...
Beat it to death. Please.
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p.s. want to have sword fights with sparklers?