| I want a bumper sticker that says "everybody's child is a bloody honor student, it's not a sign that your child is good, it's a sign of the progressing decay of the education standards in this country". It should be a sticker the width of a standard SUV. [03:18] [5 comments]
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Sunday 18 August 2002
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| I have succumbed to the lure of financial reward, and allowed advertisements to taint my wares. My quizzes and games now have popup ads, thanks to popupsponsor.com offering me $3 for every thousand unique visitors in a day. It's not a lot of money, but it's more than I was getting without popups. [20:54] [4 comments]
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| Gen-X Cops: Amusing, somewhat formulaic kung-fu-cop thing, with an endorsing cameo from Jackie Chan. [20:44] [0 comments]
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Thursday 15 August 2002
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| There should be a box on IRS forms for "deliberate overpayment" or "error insurance", into which I could put $25 and save myself eight hours of work four months later. Alternatively, they should just fuck off and bloody try to get tax money out of people who are really scamming them for a lot, rather than hassling people who've made tiny omissions. Pop-quiz: Which is a better use of IRS auditors; attempting to get $3.3bn from Worldcom (to pick one example), or attempting to get $0.000000025bn from me? Not that the IRS asked for their $25; of course not. They were going to wait a few years before bringing it up, so they could charge ridiculous interest and extortionate fees. [02:13] [2 comments]
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Tuesday 13 August 2002
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 After several hours of digging up convoluted 1999 tax forms from the Virginia tax-bastards' website, filling them out with lots of calculations and table-cross-references, the result is that we don't, in fact, owe them over a thousand dollars, but rather they owe us $76. The only notice we got from them had no papers with which to contest their claim, but I figure the notation I used, displayed here, would be clear enough even for government people. The temptation is to also append 'Ha!'. [02:41] [4 comments]
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Monday 12 August 2002
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| And now for the post-work slacking; reading comedy things, and finding such horrors as this article about a book entitled The Rules For Online Dating. Hooray for the snide remarks of SomethingAwful. [12:30] [2 comments]
| I'm impressed by how much more I got done by keeping track of my hours; easy to waste hours watching TV or reading websites, but much less easy to accept when you're writing it down. I still lost over an hour into a void, though. ("18:30 - start work. 19:45 - really start work." - I don't know what I was doing between these two times. Probably staring blankly. Perhaps drooling a bit. Maybe making a graaaughghrrgh noise.) [11:55] [0 comments]
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| Quills: I hated this before we even got past the DVD menu - falling silk and whingy music - and it didn't get much better. [11:52] [0 comments]
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Sunday 11 August 2002
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| On a related note, I enjoy the ominous ellipsis and the choice of dramatic wording in the online Encyclopaedia Britannica's entry for passeriform. [19:07] [0 comments]
| A certain article - or set of articles based on it - about crows' intelligence appears to be doing the rounds at the moment. At least the one I link there gives a passing nod to the fact that they're confirming old information, not producing new. [19:05] [0 comments]
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| As a ploy to persuade myself to do more constructive things, I've decided to keep a timesheet of my behaviour, listing anything I do that takes more than a couple of minutes. If this doesn't help, I may have to allow it to cover brief interruptions, too (8:55am-8:56am; blogged about idea to keep a timesheet). An apparent side-effect of this decision has been to wake up in the morning, though that may instead be a side-effect of the fridge containing soda, as it hasn't for so very long. [17:06] [2 comments]
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| For the first time in quite a while, we went shopping for food. For the first time ever, I went to a wholesale club, thanks to Rogue. The closest such thing to us bears the unfortunate name BJ's. The $40 yearly membership thing is well worth it; under $200 purchased significantly more food than we'd usually get for $300. Admittedly, much of the food in question is a bit frivolous; such necessities as a five pound bag of smarties. Some unfortunate omissions mean I'll still need to go to the normal shop, though; difficulty resulting from veganity. [11:20] [1 comment]
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| Soylent Green: A lovely concept with quotable quotes, but with unfortunately unpleasant production even for its time. [11:08] [0 comments]
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Tuesday 6 August 2002
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| It's time for another Programmer Babble. Trying to make non-blocking networking things work alike on both Lunix and Windows. It rather seems to me that Lunix has only a very clumsy and horrible mechanism for doing non-blocking things. Sure, it has a mediocre method that uses signals, that's only half implemented and isn't shared by other unix variants, making it about as useful as using the MFC, dynamically linking it, and not distributing the DLL. Windows, on the other hand, has had relatively nice message-based sockets for nigh on 7 years. After spending some time trying to get decent asynchronous sockets behaving reasonably in Lunix, I suddenly understand why Squid was doing a horrendous CPU-eating thing a while back, why Apache starts up a billion and five threads when you run it, why SQL implementations are clumpy - it's because Lunix sucks. What I'd really like to see is an asynchronous sockets implementation that goes one step beyond Windows' - instead of handing you a note saying "hey, I've got data when you want it", I want the OS to hand me the data straight off the bat. That said, at least with Windows it's fairly easy to wrap the "hey, I've got data" sockets in an extra layer of fluff that will behave pretty much like a "here's your data" implementation. As, indeed, I have done. It's a pain to do the same for Lunix, since message queues are not the norm there. Trying to make something that will work with both Lunix and Windows is another layer of awkwardness altogether, with uncertainty as to how each one will behave given unusual and unexpected input. Gngh. [18:39] [0 comments]
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| The Raven: A delightfully buffoonish comedy, as all Poe's works should be when translated to the screen. [18:00] [1 comment]
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Sunday 4 August 2002
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| Speaking of end-of-the-world, it's doing a good job of resembling that, here. Thirty minutes of booming almost-perpetual thunder, with no lightning or rain or darkening of the sky. And last night, there was near-perpetual lightning, with no thunder or rain; there may have been darkening of the sky, it's hard to tell in the dark. It's all terribly dramatic. [00:24] [4 comments]
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| Omega Man: I have a soft spot for post-end-of-the-world movies, and this one is better than most. [00:20] [0 comments]
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Friday 2 August 2002
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| My digital video camera, I have just discovered, is bloody marvellous. It functions as a webcam better than my webcam, because it can function in my natural environment; darkness. Its "Super Nightshot" capability really is super. It can see better than I can, using it. It has only two flaws I've noticed for the webcam purpose; its cable is too short, and it doesn't have a very wide zoom-out capability (about the same as the webcam's, but the webcam has a longer cable). Still, the night-vision is completely excellent. [11:09] [1 comment]
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| Existing on only very cheap food has an interesting side-effect; one bag of trash in a week rather than three. Tentative conclusion: cheap food comes in packets, expensive food comes in boxes. [07:00] [0 comments]
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| Freaked: Best summarised by the phrase "Mr T as a bearded lady". [06:58] [5 comments]
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Thursday 1 August 2002
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| In time for her visit to DefCon, I've made my wife a less gothy-looking online resumé, and a set of lovely business cards. If anyone local wants me to make them some lovely business cards too, all they have to do is ask. [04:54] [2 comments]
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I was amused by the envelope the post-office gave us as a stamps container. It reads:
COLLECT U.S. COMMEMORATIVES
THEY'RE FUN
THEY'RE HISTORY
THEY'RE AMERICA [04:37] [0 comments]
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