Interesting Stuff

Well, I spent Spring Break in Santa Monica and the surrounding areas looking for an apartment. Although I didn’t get one (none of the landlords know whether they’ll have apartments available in June, let alone August), but I’m feeling a lot more comfortable about the whole thing. Yes, there are some very expensive parts of Santa Monica, but there are some surprisingly affordable places as well. I met with a friend of an acquaintance who lives there, and he gave me some invaluable information about where to look for available places, and which areas to avoid. and after looking over budgeting stuff, it looks like I’ll be able to afford such a place and still save some money for when I’m piss-broke in grad school. I’ll head out there again a couple weeks before I move out, and rent one then.

and yes, my mom (who flew out to look for stuff with me) and I didn’t get along as well as possible, but it was much better than I expected. She seems to slowly be starting to realize that I can make my own decisions, and she’s beginning te treat me like a person instead of a child.

If you’re ever in the area, go to the “Bistro of Santa Monica” for dinner. They have a live jazz pianist and absolutely fantastic food! Dinner is around $15 per person, which is surprisingly affordable for the quality of the food and the general atmosphere of the place. It’s on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and 23rd Street.

I know I haven’t posted news in quite a while, and rather a lot has happened. I’ll (hopefully) get around to doing that sometime soon.

If you have time and inclination, I invite you all to come see the LaTeX talk today (Friday) at 4:15 in Galileo Edwards. I made the slides, with a bit of editing from Mac, and I’m currently making the handout. I don’t yet know if I’m giving the talk, but I suspect I am.

After that, I invite you all to come see the robotics talk I’m giving along with Mac, Ricco, and Ben on Saturday. We’re giving it at 4:30 in Galileo Edwards. This talk has the potential to be awesome or horrible, depending on how smoothly things go tomorrow: we have to build the robot, find computers to run it (we still have the software, but we need 2 laptops with Visual Studio and OpenCV, as well as two of the webcams in the lab) and rehearse our talk (we haven’t given it since about September). Still, it should be fun. It was a really great project with some really great results. And we might even do a demonstration!

I now have to go start the handout for the talk in my psych class to which you’re not invited… :-P

Well, crap. Tomorrow I have a clinic presentation, and tonight I have a practice for that. Tomorrow I also have SciComp due (and no, I did not turn in the rough draft when it was due last week, so I have a fair amount left) and Big Algorithms. Wednesday I have a paper due in my Brit Lit course, followed by more Big Algorithms on Thursday. Friday, for a change, I have a presentation as well as a project proposal for my Psych course and I think that this week I’m supposed to make the slides for the LaTeX seminar. and to top it off, Letty wants the robotics team to give a presentation for Parents Weekend (I still haven’t seen the robot since August, let alone checked if it still works, let alone created a map of… wherever the presentation is going to be). Moreover, I got about 3 hours of sleep last night. I was given to understand that this semester’s 18 credits would be easier than my equivalent of 22 credits last semester, but that’s not happening right now. Only 3 more months to go… :-P

I also finally got The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy: Text-Based Adventure game (copyright 1984) working under Linux. It’s amazingly entertaining, and I’d be happy to share the program with anyone interested (I know it works under Linux and Windows; I don’t know about Mac). Since it’s written by Douglas Adams, it has his characteristic wit and off-kilter viewpoint. For instance, if you check your inventory at the very beginning of the game, you find that

You have:
- a splitting headache
- no tea

What a wonderful way to think of an inventory! The game also lies to you at several points, which I think is hilarious. However, save often, and under different names, since I strongly suspect that it’s possible to get to a point where you can’t win unless you undo something you did a long time ago (though I’m not sure about this). One of the tricky things is that at various points, you have to control 4 different characters through different temporal episodes, and you can influence things that happen chronologically in the future, although you might not do them in the correct order in the real world. Speaking of which, here’s a spoiler for you, that I would never have gotten in a million years (don’t read if you don’t want a really useful hint): As Arthur, before your house gets knocked down, buy a sandwich at the bar and give it to the dog. You cannot do this as Ford. I accidentally stumbled upon this in a message board, but would never have figured it out otherwise. Also, remember that not only do you need to know where your towel is to be a hoopy frood, but you should have it with you at all times. My first game, I got all the way to Traal before realizing I’d left the towel on the Vogon ship, but had not yet realized that I could go back and get it eventually, so I restarted (the significance of the towel on Traal will make more sense if you’re already familiar with the HHGG lore).

Right. I now have to go finish my Algorithms homework.

On a random note, yesterday night there was a possum hanging out on the steps up to the LAC computer lab. It was pretty cool to see.

I know this is old hat in the blogosphere, but it turns out that the cartoons that the Muslims around the world are so incensed about were actually republished months ago in a major Egyptian newspaper, without anyone complaining. Why are they all protesting the republication of these in secular newspapers now? As far as I can tell, it’s due to propaganda put out by the various governments in the region, but I don’t see the goal of it all. What are these people trying to protest? I’m having difficulty finding a valid reason for anyone, particularly a religious group, to hate Denmark (unless you’re really anti-drugs, but that’s totally off-topic).

On another news topic, Sadam Hussein’s trial has broken down once more, with the defendants’ lawyers boycotting the trial, and the defendants refusing their substitute lawyers, forcing guards to drag them to the courthouse, and shouting through the whole thing. I can pretty much understand this – if you get caught for genocide/etc, you can’t really do anything except stall and make everyone else miserable while they try to bring you to justice.

Oh, and Cheney shot his friend while they were hunting, which I think is pretty funny.

So here I am, working on my Big Algorithms assignment and listening to music (I’ve finally gotten my iPod to work with Linux, which has made everything really convenient!). One of the questions on this weeks assignment is about splay trees, and why a simpler, though more intuitive, design does not perform as well. As I am LaTeXing this up, I’m listening to Float by The Music, the chorus of which consists of the phrase “you wanna be free” repeated over and over. In a particularly topical mondegreen, I mishear this as the singer repeatedly telling me that “you want a B-tree!” Although I much prefer splay trees to B-trees, I was still quite entertained.

On a tangential note, earlier today I tried to use the word “mondegreen,” but totally forgot it. I tried looking it up on the web by searching for “vendement” and various spellings thereof, but could not find it. I had finally given up, when I happened across it again. What a wonderful word!

On a more newsy topic, President Bush has unveiled his budget proposal, in which he increases the spending for the military and the DHS, while cutting the budget to almost all civil departments: not only Medicare and Medicaid, but education, agriculture, medical research, not to mention the Departments of Justice and Transportation. Although this is an excellent strategy if you’re playing Sid Meier’s Civilization II, I fear it’s a bad policy for our country.

Finally, last week, a Danish newspaper, while running an article about how many illustrators are afraid that the Islamic community will grow angry if they draw Muslim-related pictures, published 12 drawings of the prophet Muhammed (which can be seen here), with the intent of showing that Muslims won’t be enraged by people drawing pictures of their prophet (Islam forbids the creation of pictures/sculptures/etc of Muhammed, although people have done just that, and celebrated their work, throughout the years). However, this totally backfired – the Muslim communities have had riots, several countries have withdrawn their ambassadors from Denmark, and the Danish embassies in several cities have been torched. However, Europe seems to be standing strong, with the pictures reprinted in quite a few newspapers all over the continent. I found a very thoughtful article on the subject here. Personally, I think this is just ridiculous – the way to get people to stop stereotyping Muslims is to show that they’re really just people, not mad, suicidal, murderous jihadists bent on ruling the world with Sharia. However, the Muslim community apparently wants to do just the opposite. Indeed, the death toll is mounting…

Right. I have to go back to my homework.

My computer is in trouble again. I came back from break to discover that about a million different programs had had new versions released, and I installed updates for them. This was wonderful – OpenOffice has come out with the totally new Version 2.0, which doesn’t suck ass like the older one did. Shockwave/Flash/etc is much more stable. I found a better CD-ripping programme. Life was great.

However, things took a turn for the worse when I started noticing that my right monitor would flash when I typed or clicked too fast (at first I thought it was just the right mouse button that caused this, but I’ve found other ways to cause it as well). I’m almost positive this is a software problem, since this never happens for certain actions and almost always happens for other ones. It’s ridiculous, though. A reboot of XFCE lead to my left monitor not turning back on. Upon a total reboot, I found that this was because the nVIDIA modules could not be loaded (nor could the ALSA modules). When recompiling the modules didn’t help, I decided it’s high time I rebuilt my kernel (I was still running 2.6.10-r4, and the most recent kernel is 2.6.15-r1). After 4 tries, I got a working kernel that could load the modules (although some things are still not back, such as support for smb stuff). When I started XFCE back up, I my background didn’t load, and I couldn’t right click on the desktop to get a menu. Poking around revealed that xftaskbar hadn’t started, but I’ve now gotten that fixed again.

At this point, here are the things that used to work but still don’t:

• smb anything – no browsing, no mounting, nothing.
• sound – the modules are loaded, but ALSA can’t seem to find my sound card. I have to play around with this more.
• The bloody right sceen still flashes when I type/click!

On the other hand, I’m running a much newer kernel, I now have support built in to try out udev whenever I finally run out of broken things to fix, and I believe my kernel now has iPod support in it, which should come in handy.

The thing about Gentoo which I both love and hate is that if you can get something working, it is rock solid and works beautifully. Getting it working in the first place, however, is a pain in the ass.

It seems as though Halliburton has been supplying US troops in Iraq with contaminated water, and have known about the problem and just kept quiet for months. Although I originally found this on Fark, the article I have linked to is, in my opinion, a more detailed account. Still, I liked Fark’s caption:

Stealing billions from US Taxpayers and doing business with Iran in direct violation of US Sanctions was obviously not enough. Halliburton is now giving polluted water to US Troops. Cheney seen mumbling “excellent.”

I wish it were possible to just put this company out of business once and for all. Bastards.

On a totally unrelated and happier note, I’ve begun watching Firefly, which really is an amazing show. It has some very subtle points in it, which obviously took a lot of thought from the creators: the ships only make noise when they’re in a planet’s atmosphere (they’re silent in space), everyone is bilingual in English and Chinese, and they slip Chinese expressions into their dialogue, etc. Not to mention that the characters are fascinating and the plot is quite fun. If you haven’t seen this, you might find a copy and watch at least the first couple episodes.