Interesting Stuff

Just thought I’d say that today is a blue moon! ’tis the 2nd full moon of July (the first was on the 2nd). Huh… I just wrote that the first was on the 2nd. That’s a little weird.

In other news, Francis H C Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, passed away on Wednesday. He was 88. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/30/science/30crick.html

As you can see, I’m rather tired. I’ll write more when I’m rested.

Again, tonight, I screwed up cooking something. When I was at the
grocery store, I had bought a tube of croisants and some white
chocolate chips, figuring I could make chocolate croisants. Tonight, I
did so. First, I got the tube out of the freezer, and tried unrolling
the dough. This didn’t work so well, because the dough was frozen
solid. Rereading the label, I was supposed to refridgerate it, instead
of freezing. Oops… I’ll warm it in my hands for a bit. After a minute
with no change, I decided I’ll be there all night at this rate, so I
put the dough in the microwave, and had it defrost for 30sec. Well,
when I took it out, the outside was warm/hot, and really sticky and
stretchy. The inside was still frozen. Which makes sense, if you think
about it (for the details of why this makes sense, IM or email me. It’s
too nerdy to put in an LJ, even for me). Screw it, I think. I’m making
these croisants, even if they are a little stretchy. So I’m tearing
along the perforations to make the pieces the right size. The ones on
the outside just stretch, and don’t tear, so they come out misshapen.
The ones on the inside I can barely keep from cracking. I put in the
chocolate chips, and put them in the oven. The package says to bake for
11-13 minutes, or until golden brown. I set the timer for 9 minutes,
and figure I’ll check on them then. After 6 minutes, I check back, and
they’re definitely done. The room has a hint of smoke in it, and they
certainly smell done. I take them out, only to discover that one pan of
croissants is already burnt on the bottom. 11-13 minutes my foot! I
guess they turned out OK. But this isn’t the only time this summer I’ve
messed up cooking. Early in the summer, some friends and I were in the
habit of making dinner together, 1 person cooking for all of us each
night, so that we only had to cook 1 night each week (but for 5
people). For my first day, I decided to make a lemon-artichoke chicken
dish that I got a recipe for. It looked pretty simple – put the chicken
in the oven, and everything else in a pot. Then wait. I also put some
rice in a rice cooker. Well, I managed to somehow mess up the rice.
That’s right – I messed up rice in a rice cooker.
It started bubbling out the top, and got everything starchy. And on top
of that, something from the night before had dripped onto the bottom of
the oven, and burnt while I was cooking. It set off the smoke alarms,
and CampSec had to come to turn them off (I’m the only one this summer
that I know of to have set of the smoke alarms – well done, everyone
else!). Well, after the smoke alarms, I looked at my chicken, and it
wasn’t done yet… so I put it back in the oven. The meal came out ok,
but my ego didn’t. So… yeah. Apparently I need to learn how to cook.
People say it’s easy, and you just mix stuff together and toss it in
the oven, but I don’t seem to be able to do that. Well, practice makes
perfect, I suppose. :-P

I’m getting pretty fed up with F&M this summer.

At the beginning of the summer, they said I could move into my new room, so I did. I then locked the door to the suite, the door to my room, and went to bed. The next morning I was awakened by 3 guys from F&M in my room wondering how they were going to paint the room while I was living in it. After talking to their headquarters, it was established that I had to move back out. A week later, I could move in again.

Partway through the summer, I (or rather, my parents) received a bill for “room damages.” Not being able to remember damaging the room, I inquired as to what these damages were for, and the reply was that they had to repaint the ceiling because the paint had been ripped off. I went back to look at the old room, and sure enough, there was about 3 square inches of paint that had come off before I lived there. I had marked the ceiling as “good” on my room condition report (by which I meant it didn’t warrant an “excellent,” but was still nice). However, because I hadn’t specified what exactly was “good” about it, they billed me. It seems like many people have gotten ridiculous damage charges (apparently, my $75 was cheap), and the parents are even speculating that they’re using this as extra fund-raising.

It gets better – on Friday, I woke up to 2 people from F&M in the suite talking loudly. When they noticed that I had been sleeping, they left. I got up and went to work. When I came back for my lunch break, I discovered that everything I had left in the big single had been thrown out. This included the entire bridge club inventory (cards, books, cheat-sheets, etc), half of my dishes, and an LCD monitor I was storing for a friend. I spent my lunch break that day talking to F&M trying to get my stuff back, which I was able to do only because the garbage truck hadn’t come by yet. When I initially explained my problem, the secretary tried to claim that I had no business putting stuff in that room and that anything in there was liable to be thrown out. I replied that it was the room I was officially staying in (and I showed her the key), so they had no business touching anything in there. It turns out that when Robert moved out, they planned on cleaning the room he vacated, but didn’t write down which room in the Case Library that was. So, they picked the one that looks like someone had just moved out (for the back story here, Robert and I will both be in the double next year, and the big single was empty, so over the summer he had the double and I had the single. When he moved out, I started moving my stuff into there, so that I don’t have to move when school starts). I eventually got it all back, but I had to sort out the cards again (sorting 10 decks of cards is rather tedious, let me tell you), and in general it’s still a mess. They had just put everything in bags and thrown it out, though they did have the sense not to break the monitor.

Today, again, I woke up to find F&M in my room poking around. However, this time it was Jesse, who is a very cool person. He’s going to be in charge of cleaning Case this year, so he was looking at all the different rooms. After seeing how each other’s summers have been, he left.

So… yeah. I’m fed up with F&M waking me up in the morning. I’m fed up with them telling me I can live in the room and then treating it as though I’m not. Everyone’s fed up with them charging us for minute damage that was there before we moved in. I wish there was a way to change this, but I can’t see how to. Well, perhaps someone else will have a good idea. Until then, thanks for listening to me gripe.

That’s right – my own! X is now working, and KDE is sort-of working (enough to do simple stuff like this, though I don’t have sound, my 2nd monitor, or much more than the internet right now). Hopefully, more to come soon!

Wow. Last night was a blast, in that “we’re horrible people, but damn that was fun” sort of way. Now that summer math has ended, Atwood is housing a group of Italian exchange students taking English courses at Pitzer. They are from a Catholic school, and the woman in charge of the group, Sister Paula, is a very pious, devout nun. So last night I was hanging out with three people, who said they didn’t want to be named in my blog when I mentioned I was going to write about this. Anyway, I was hanging out with 3 people I will call A, B, and C (C is the only girl among us, and she was a very good sport about this whole thing). A has several good friends who are female and spend a fair amount of time in his room (he’s one of the few Mudders living in Atwood), and the Italians think he is some sort of pimp. He had the idea that we should take this a step further, and pretend to have an orgy in his room while the Italians were outside talking on the couches. We all thought that would be hilarious, so we planned it all out – A and B would go find some porn, and then come get C and me. I went and got some condoms, to add to the effect. When it was all ready, we met up, got some bottles of alcohol, and staggered drunkenly (we were sober, though our acting was pretty good) over to Atwood and past the Italians into A’s room. I managed to drop a condom right in front of them, and go pack to pick it up. It was glorious. Once in the room, we used an awesomesound system A was keeping over the summer to play the porn loud enough to be heard outside the room, but quiet enough that it could have been us making those noises. After about 15 minutes of this, we went back outside and staggered back to Case, and talked for much of the rest of the night. The looks on the Italian’s faces were priceless! Usually they’re very talkative and always chattering among themselves. When we came back out, all conversation stopped, and the ones on the couch facing away from us turned around to look: 3 guys and a girl leaning on each other, laughing, and staggering away. B joked that Sister Paula might try to exorcise the room sometime. I think this was a good enough prank that we might need to do this again sometime (there’s another group of Italians coming in a week or two!). So, yeah… what a night.

Back in the computer department, Mac and I have given up on Windows and Knoppix, and put Gentoo on the system. The going’s still pretty tough, but it’s getting better – I now have a command prompt, read/write privs on the hard drive, and an internet connection all at the same time! I’ve installed XWindows, but haven’t configured it yet. Soon, things will be just fine. In the meantime, I’m writing this from the terminal room (the room with computer terminals, not a room you go to to die).

Yesterday I played frisbee again, and gadzooks it was a violent day. Carrie did something quite nasty to her foot, and I’m a bit concerned about that. I think today she’s going to a doctor to have it looked at (personally, I don’t think it’s broken, but it’s a bad sprain at best). Nick and I had another run-in. We usually guard each other because we’re at roughly the same skill level, but we always seem to run into each other. Yesterday, we both (and a couple other people) were bunched up and jumped for the frisbee, and his leg slammed into my thigh. His leg is rather sore, and I’m not sure if he’s going to play again today. My thigh hurts rather a lot, and going down stairs today is quite painful. However, that’s not the worst of it: during warm-ups before the game (yes, during warm-ups :-P ), I took a frisbee on the tips of the fingers of my left hand, and it did something pretty awful. My middle finger has swelled up rather a lot, and I can’t make a fist (though I can type OK, so it could be worse, but I can’t do much else with it – it was a challenge to wring my washcloth out after showering this morning). Baxter Health Facilities is closed over the summer, and I’m not sure if this warrants a trip to a doctor. Well, I’ll keep an eye on it, and see what happens. And I’m definitely not going to frisbee today.

Well, that’s about it for now, and hopefully I’ll be able to get Instant Messenger working again soon so I can talk to all of you!

So, I haven’t updated in a while, but at least I have a good reason! I’ve been meaning to switch to Linux (specifically Knoppix, but if things continue this way, I’ll install Gentoo) for a while, and I finally decided to do it. Mac has helped me a lot with this, and I’m sure he’ll help me a lot more with it soon. The plan was this: shrink the Windows partition on my hard drive, and add a Linux partition so I can dual boot. Well, Partition Magic had a major error shrinking the original partition, even though I had enough space to do it. None of the Windows recovery CDs worked, but we eventually got some recovery floppies for Partition Magic itself. These managed to tell us what the problem was, and the fact that it cannot be fixed. We booted up Knoppix (which worked fine, because it runs from a CD), and managed to get read permissions on the now-corrupted hard drive. This was enough to back up a lot of things to CD. I had backed up the really important stuff before (like airline reservations), but this allowed me to save my entire music collection, most of my movies, and various other things that I can do without, but not easily replace. Then we reformatted the hard drive. That was a little sad, but it’s done now, and I think it’ll be good for me to redo everything, because anyone who has worked on my computer knows that my system of directories is haphazard at best. I made a 20GB partition for Windows (I’m really only going to use it for games and ShareScan), and the rest went to Linux. Because we reformatted the hard drive, I had also lost the backup copy of Windows that came with the computer (HP has this great idea where they don’t give you the boot disks, and instead charge you extra to recover your system for you, when you could do it yourself). So Mac used a Windows XP CD that he had. We put in the serial code, and it installs and boots fine. I go to start the many, many security updates (4 more security problems were discovered in IE yesterday alone!). I get to the updates, and they claim that my serial code is not valid! ARGH! The part that bugs me is that my main reason for switching now is that things were starting to go really, really wrong with Windows. For example, I couldn’t use my POP3 client to check my school email any more, and I couldn’t open webpages in new windows any more either. Things were going really wrong (the last time I’d seen this, within 2 months our copy of Windows 95b was corrupted). And now I can’t even reinstall!

So I try to put Knoppix on the other partition. First, I read several tutorials online, all of which turn out to either be out of date, or for the German-only version of Knoppix, or other things like that. I finally find the tutorial for my system, and start that. Knoppix claims I haven’t partitioned my hard drive yet! and when it tries, it says that it only has read permissions on the hard drive, and can’t reformat it, even with root privs (this is supposed to happen, Knoppix is given read-only privs to stop you from screwing up whatever OS you’re currently running). I finally manage to get Knoppix to try to install, and it can’t. It gives this really cryptic error message, and quits. This whole thing is so frustrating. I know that once I get both OSes installed with the proper software and updates, I shouldn’t have to do this ever again (at least, not until I buy a new computer). Nonetheless, this is very frustrating. Well, I’ll go bug Mac and Michael some more, and hopefully they’ll be able to help. In the meantime, I’m writing this from the computer lab in the LAC.

On a brighter note, today the Senate stopped the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage (if you don’t want to get a free account with the New York Times, go to BugMeNot). I’m quite glad this has happened. To the best of my knowledge (please correct me if I’m wrong), no proposed amendment has ever tried to take the rights away from a small subset of the American people (some have taken rights away, like Prohibition, the 18th Amendment, which took the right to drink away, but that was from everyone, not a select demographic). While I am not gay, I’m rather pro gay rights. While he didn’t mention homosexuals in his poem, I’m reminded of Martin Niemöller’s poem “First They Came”:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out-
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out-
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out-
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out-
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me-
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

If we let the religious right oppress homosexuals, what will stop them from oppressing atheists, or Muslims, or women (sadly, there are still a few nut-cases in power who think women should not have the right to vote). Though I guess part of my mentality comes from going to Mudd – according to the Princeton Review, we are the 11th most homosexual-friendly campus in the country (I’m too lazy to find the link to this statistic, but if you really want, I’m sure you can find it). I have several friends who are openly gay, and one professor who got married in San Fransisco to his partner (husband? I’ve always heard gay couples referred to as partners, but I don’t see why they’re not pairs of husbands and wives). Anyway, I think this is just wonderful.

Lets see… I’ve been playing a fair amount of ultimate frisbee lately. Now that Carrie’s back, and people read my summer-l about how West Nile Virus really isn’t that deadly (It isn’t! The media like to hype things like this, because it boosts ratings. If you want a copy of my email, write to me, and I’ll send it when I get my computer back up), we actually have enough people to play games (last week, we just played catch). It’s a lot of fun, and hopefully it’ll build up my endurance before soccer starts in the fall.

Well, I should get going, but hopefully I’ll have my computer up and running soon, and then I’ll post more.

Tonight, Hansford, Rachel, this guy named Kyle and I were playing Scrabble (well, Hansford was playing guitar, but the 3 of us were playing Scrabble), and I actually did it – I got a 7-letter word! I built off of Kyle’s WEAR to make
SWEAR
P
O
N
G
E
D
Counting the various letter bonuses, and the 50-point bonus for using all of my letters, I scored 77 points that turn. I finished the game with 247 points. This is the first time I can remember having ever broken 200! Whee!
Ordinarily, I don’t even look for words that long, but my tiles were randomly arranged as SPONDEG, so it was easy to find this one. Once I found it, I didn’t have any place to put it (this was the 2nd turn of the game, and there were surprisingly no words that could have an S on the end). So, knowing that an extra 50 points awaited me, I passed, and got a 0 that turn. Rachel gave me a rather funny look at this point, which I probably deserved. But by the next turn, Kyle had played WEAR, and I had my chance. So, yeah. I’m pretty happy right now.

Last night, Mac, Hansford and I went to see Farenheit 9/11. In his usual style, Michael Moore discussed some things I already knew, and many I did not. It was a very intense, emotional movie, and at several points I was brought close to tears. However, this being Michael Moore, it should still be taken with a grain of salt (or as Travis said, a whole salt lick). I know that the part about the Bin Laden family still having contacts with Osama at the beginning was really edited – in early 2002 or thereabouts, I saw an episode of Larry King Live (is episode the right word? Can you have an “episode” of a talk show?) in which he interviewed Osama Bin Laden’s cousin. She said that yes, they really had kicked Osama out of the family. Nonetheless, there’s really nothing wrong with seeing estranged family members at weddings, funerals, and the like. Also, the Bin Laden family is so huge that it doesn’t surprise me at all that one or two members of it would have written to him once in a while.
I’ll have to go online sometime and read criticisms of F9/11, to learn what other things Moore has unrealistically portrayed.
One other thing I should mention about the movie – it is very emotional. So much so that I’m slightly reminded of the environmentalist movement, which uses emotion as a substitute for logic and fact. Yes, Moore puts many facts into his movie, but the emotion sort of obscures them. I wonder if the movie would be as controversial if he had scaled that back a little. But as Mac (playing devil’s advocate in the car ride home) argued, the movie is about people dying in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is a very emotional topic.
I’m rather amazed at some some of the footage in the film. There are scenes of raids in Iraq, there are scenes of President George W Bush having his makeup put on “before” he goes on camera. How does Michael Moore get these clips? If I were a large corporation/government and I owned footage like this, I would probably not share it.
All in all, it was a good movie, and I reccomend seeing it, but keep in mind that Michael Moore twists things to better illustrate his points. The arguments he makes seem to be mostly correct, just exaggerated a fair amount.

So, when Kai left, he gave me some of his leftover food, including a package of “haw flakes” (made with real haw!). Tonight, Hansford finally figured out what they are, by finding this website: http://www.cardhouse.com/a/pixbarn/p19.htm
Haw flakes are like fruit leather made from hawthorne fruit. However, it’s much dryer than fruit leather – haw flakes can chip easily, and I bet I could make one crumble. However, they’re pretty good! And unlike the website, I didn’t get any bad aftertaste or grating feeling. If nothing less, it’s an unusual thing to try.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040308&c=1&s=kennedy
Fucking Bush Administration. I’ve been following this for a while, but this article is a pretty good way to sum it all up (in a lengthy, not-so-summed-up sort of way). The Bush Administration has basically been saying “if the facts don’t agree with us, change the facts.” This is rather obvious with the situation in Iraq, the economy, and the US environmental policy (did you know that it is now legal to deposit mercury in landfills?). However, many people don’t seem to know that the administration has also been outright lying about science. Please, read this article, and spread the word to others! Most people don’t know that this is going on because they trust their government to tell them the truth (which, up until recently, has been a great thing to do. I hope I can trust it again soon).

It seems like every week, I read something new about how the current government is completely screwing up this country. For instance, the Supreme Court ruled a few weeks ago that it is legal for law enforcement to demand to see your ID, even if you are not suspected of any crime, and arrest you if you do not comply. The pertinent article is here. This sort of thing has happened before, but only in countries like the USSR, Hussein’s Iraq, and Nazi Germany.

It just makes me sick. When I graduate, if I can find a job outside the US, I will almost certainly take it. Everyone – whether or not you agree with me, learn what is going on in this country, and then vote in the upcoming election!! Don’t vote for someone because your parents (or neighbors, or government) say you should. Learn what is going on, learn who is doing what about it, and make up your own mind.

So, I happened to wander across this the other day, and was immensely entertained. To quote the Wikipedia article, “Discordianism has been discribed as both an elaborate joke disguised as a religion, and a religion disguised as an elaborate joke.” While I subscribe to the former belief, I can argue both equally well. The whole thing is full of light-hearted fun-poking at “real” religion, while also hinting at more profound insights. I suppose that the basic premise is that most religions strive for order and harmony in the world, and see chaos and discord as things to vanquish. Discordianism sees order and disorder as equally useful, and tries to use both for creative purposes, with a slight emphasis on disorder to counter everyone else’s focus on order. The main text is the Principia Discordia, which was written in roughly 1959, but has had revisions up through the ’70s. Here are a few of my favorite quotes:

“Common sense is what tells us that the world is flat.”
“We are not really esoteric; it’s just that nobody pays much attention to us.”
“A Discordian is Required during his early Illumination to Go Off Alone & Partake Joyously of a Hot Dog on a Friday; this Devotive Ceremony to Remonstrate against the popular Paganisms of the Day: of Catholic Christendom (no meat on Friday), of Judaism (no meat of Pork), of Hindic Peoples (no meat of Beef), of Buddhists (no meat of animal), and of Discordians (no Hot Dog Buns).”

And a wonderful parable:
“A serious young man found the conflicts of mid 20th Century America confusing. He went to many people seeking a way of resolving within himself the discords that troubled him, but he remained troubled.
“One night in a coffee house, a self-ordained Zen Master said to him, “go to the dilapidated mansion you will find at this address which I have written down for you. Do not speak to those who live there; you must remain silent until the moon rises tomorrow night. Go to the large room on the right of the main hallway, sit in the lotus position on top of the rubble in the northeast corner, face the corner, and meditate.”
“He did just as the Zen Master instructed. His meditation was frequently interrupted by worries. He worried whether or not the rest of the plumbing fixtures would fall from the second floor bathroom to join the pipes and other trash he was sitting on. He worried how would he know when the moon rose on the next night. He worried about what the people who walked through the room said about him.
“His worrying and meditation were disturbed when, as if in a test of his faith, ordure fell from the second floor onto him. At that time two people walked into the room. The first asked the second who the man was sitting there was. The second replied “Some say he is a holy man. Others say he is a shithead.”
“Hearing this, the man was enlightened.”

To learn more, go to PrincipiaDiscordia.com or Wikipedia.

So I think it’s pretty neat. If I didn’t think that the world neede more atheists, I might consider claiming to be a discordian, but for the moment I am still staunchly atheist.

Well, the 2nd graphics card I got for the new monitor isn’t as great as I had hoped. I can see why the CS department was throwing it out. So this evening, I bought a new one, that should suit my purposes quite well. It’s a GeForce 2, so it’s by no means a bad card, though it’s far from good. But I’m not a high-end gamer, so I’m happy with it. It should arrive Monday-ish, and then I’ll finally have both monitors running at good resolution.

The 4th of July passed fairly uneventfully this year – there were fireworks in the evening, and that was fun, but not much else happened. I’m still slowly moving into the double. about half of the posters/other art is up, and almost all the big things are moved in. It’s really nice that I don’t have to move it all over 1 day, and that I can spread it out over a month. It’ll get done eventually.

Work has turned frustrating once again. I need to write 4 more FORTRAN subroutines, but these aren’t documented in the user manual (they’re mentioned in passing in a table). I have a sample file of what they might look like, but the comments are written in German. BabelFish has helped a bit, but not much, as it doesn’t do technical mathy words. And Prof. DePillis was out of the office, so I couldn’t ask her for help. Hopefully tomorrow. *sigh*…