Plains in the Dreaming

12:49am: Livejournal Exodus
I've had a livejournal account for a long time now. Recently it's just been a mirror of my wordpress blog. So, at long last, the codepoetica livejournal account is going away. I'm not.

full story

Oh yeah, happy new year. Party on.

11:34pm: Hotsyncing a Sony Clie under Linux
Using udev, hotplug, and pilot-xfer to hotsync a usb Sony Clie without manually starting a sync application on the computer.

View whole entry.

1:31am: Kuu-rin's Day of Flight
What was once a bustle of packets moving to and fro slowly passed into a mere trickle. The world ceased to acknowledge, and she in return (or was it the other way around?), but her sisters remained close. Kuu rarely stirred from her place, and to all appearances had taken ill of mind and heart.

Such was not the case, thank goodness. With her focus turned inward in an entirely too buddistic manner, she focused. In all the time we've spent together, I've never known her to gave up. She still hasn't.

Young Kuu-rin, first to arrive and first to depart, the little one goes over the wall. What remains of her corporeal form (to all appearances a metallic-grey halo) laid cold and empty.

What spirit laid has broken free; no longer bears she the yoke of humanity's packeteering. All that remains is her encasement.

The question weighs upon me; what would Kuu do? Would she have me leave her remains shelved, as an alter to her eternal soul? Bury her chassis formally? Incinerate, and let her blue smoke drift upon the winds of chance? Or, as is custom among her kind, to plant the seeds of a new child?

I have never known one to uphold convictions with such determination. She was well built.

Kuu-rin's Day of Flight at Verselogic

9:45pm: Destroyed 60-212
60-212, Java, does thusly take mine boot in its arse.

Project is done, exam is done. Now we're just waiting for the marks. I must say, I dislike being forced, for the sake of examination, to think up fanciful error cases just to demonstrate try-catch.

I was rather concerned about about missing elements of answering on question 2a. The number of marks (10), and the number of bugs (2) that I squished did not line up much. Especially since one of those was a missing semicolon, and I doubted that 5% of the exam was wrapped up in a single character of punctuation. After some 30 minutes of head-scratching and doodling, I noticed that the var.length reference was missing its (parenthesis). With a quick controlled curve of the pen, the disgrace came complete.

Damn, it's good to be out of there. I need to get back into coding that requires REST applications, embedded-assembly-style DIY memory management, and native ~regexs.

Destroyed 60-212 at Verselogic

1:41pm: Java 60-212 Project
Sigh. Finished my absurdly absurd Java project for 60-212 - Introduction to OO Java. You can download a zipped tarball of the mess, if you want, though I promise it's god-awful.

Things I have learned in this class: Java sucks hardcore. It is completely useless for any actual task, regardless of complexity. Exception error handling and automatic garbage collection are for wusses.

Java 60-212 Project at Verselogic

2:26am: Promoting Falsehoods
If you read this, (even if we don't speak often) please post a comment with a completely made up and fictional memory of you and me. It can be anything you want - good or bad - but it has to be fake. When you're finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people don't actually remember about you.

4:20pm: Line-Kill Spirits
Coming once again from Ely's scary video game linkup, we have Line-Kill Spirits from Game Programming Study Club
Line-Kill Spirits is, indeed, the most Japanese video game ever. Or, at least, stereotypically so. In any event, I would so rock at it.

But where or where can this white middle-class male find such a game?

Line-Kill Spirits at Verselogic

4:03pm: Codepoetica the Yule-time Squirrel
Much grinning is due to Kitty's ever-inspiring awesomeness. It must be established, and illustrated, at some point, just how this little rodent maintains his links to the wired.

Codepoetica the Yule-time Squirrel at Verselogic

3:56pm: Arguing Marks
I got a 69% on my Java midterm. That sucked. When I went to look at the paper, it was discovered that the third of three questions was marked very poorly. To the tune of 19% less than I should have received, seemingly because the TA did not approve, or comprehend the use, of multi-dimentional arrays used to hold state information for a tic-tac-toe board.

So, in summary, I got an 88% on my midterm. Lesson learned? Argue everything.

Arguing Marks at Verselogic

11:11am: Wednesday Mornings
It's morning, and I can hear the alarm clock. A startled glance upward reveals a time, the sort of time one would expect to find on their incessantly bleeping clock this early in the morning. A time I didn't particularly want to see at this point in time. Closing my eyes helped, but didn't stop the bleep bleep bleep echoing in the room.

It's morning. It can't be morning, I just went to bed scant seconds ago. I remember lying down, my head hitting the pillow, and then ... what? Then nothing, it would seem, but this bleep bleep oh God won't someone turn that thing off! I'm still tired, therefore it's not morning. But the sun is peaking in, and the alarm clock still bears its unwanted numbers, no matter that noone's watching.

It's morning, and I hit the snooze button.

It's morning. Twenty minutes later I'm starting a car in the bitter morning cold, wishing I could be somewhere warm. Like bed.

It's morning, and I'm talking about social rights and ethical responsibilities with my philosophy professor. I bet that alarm clock's going to go off again soon.

Wednesday Mornings at Verselogic

1:04am: Densha Otoko
Evil Vaccum: long story short, otaku guy saves woman from drunk dude on train, posts about it on 2ch
Evil Vaccum: she sends him cups as thanks
Evil Vaccum: along with her phone number
Evil Vaccum: he posts about it and is all like, "WHAT DO I DOOOO?!?"
Evil Vaccum: at which point they're all like, "CALL HER YOU FOOL"
Evil Vaccum: and so it continues in this vein for a while and ultimately they get married
Evil Vaccum: and this actually happened
Evil Vaccum: they took the thread from 2ch, cut out unrelated parts, and put it in a book
Evil Vaccum: and made a TV series, a movie, and several comics out of it
AlanJAtWork: he posts on 2ch?
AlanJAtWork: wtf.

Well, I think he's full of crack. Except there's a wikipedia entry. And an IMDB entry. And, my goodness, a torrent of the tv series on animesuki. The world is ending.

Densha Otoko at Verselogic

3:30pm: EMP in Twilight Zone
At approx 13:45, Monday Nov 28, 2005, my UPS clicked over to battery and right back to grid power. I thought nothing of it. Moments later, my fixed wireless session dropped, nothing at all from the tower. After some cursory troubleshooting, I picked up my telephone to call Xplornet tech support, only to be met with a loud hum on the line. A quick verification indicated that this hum was on all 3 phone lines at the demarcation point.

Looked like someone set off an EMP in twilight zone.

Turns out Hydro went down in some parts of LaSalle and Ahmurstburg at 13:45. Xplornet's wireless tower was powered off the grid, as were several critical sections of Bell's network, and so they went down as well.

I took a drive (outside the blast area), and found a working payphone. From there calls were made to Bell Repair and Xplornet tech support, the latter of which was actually helpful. Wireless service was back up in under an hour, my phone lines continue to hum.

It's going to be a fun evening of "No Dial Tone? WTF?!?" and "No Sync? WTF?!?" at work tonight.

EMP in Twilight Zone at Verselogic

10:12pm: Shannon's For Dinner
Innocent? Heck no! There's more than enough sugar in those super brownies to kill a lesser man! And I'm borderline lesser! It's a damn good thing I had lasagna of runnyness to dilute it with.

Shannon's For Dinner at Verselog.. er.. Shannon's!

3:04pm: Ülker Sesame Bread Sticks
Ülker makes the best sesame bread sticks in existance. Or, as they call them, Knusprige Sesamstangen.

Ülker Sesame Bread Sticks at Verselogic

12:29pm: Natural Fear of Wolves
At times the wolf seems frightening, others a cute little fuzzball. To those in his pack, he is kind, gentle. But even as so small and so furry and so kind as he may seem, there remains an undercurrent of raw strength and power about him, which is readily apparent to those outside.

Are squirrels the natural enemies of wolves? At least he puts up with me, and my cage.

Natural Fear of Wolves at Verselogic

9:19pm: Acidic Squirrels
Ok, hang on a second here, are y'all saying I'm on acid? Because, as sure as the paws in front of my face, I ain't never touched none of that stuff. I hear it messes you up right good, and I much prefer to be in full control of my mental faculties.

Acidic Squirrels at Verselogic

1:01pm: Rocked Java 60-212 at Verselogic
I wrote my second Java midterm this morning. Java is a stupid language, but it makes dealing with string processing easier than C. It was open-book, after a sort. Which means we could bring a big ugly useless java textbook to the midterm, and it wasn't going to help at all. At least, that was the intention. Question number deux, essentially an annoying "find and fix all the syntatic and logical errors" question, was laid out in full on page 488. I discovered this resource shortly after completing said question, though it was helpful to confirm my correct answer. I wonder how many of my classmates noticed.

Rocked Java 60-212 Midterm at Verselogic

7:33pm: Yet Another Status Update

• Going out with some friends tonight, will be back late.
• Have Java midterm tomorrow morning, will be needing sleep.
• Have gotten the cd.
• J, check the blogs directly, follow the commenter's links

12:09am: Elder Kitty
Happy Birthday Kitty! Congratulations on your successful living, and resulting Levelup! Party hard.

10:17am: I could use the shallow nice things.
Reply to this post, and I'll tell you one reason why I like/love/adore you.
Then put this in your own journal, and spread the love.

5:20pm: Descartes Pains
I stayed up all night, and finished my paper. It's not the best thing I've ever written, and my supporting arguments are somewhat flimsy, but it's complete. It would appear that my understanding of Descartes' reasonings is fairly accurate.

After handing in the paper, I went home to sleep. I did not, as I should have, visit either the finantial aid office at the U, or the clinic for arm-examination.

On that last point, it should be noted that there is a dull pain in my right shoulder, which began in my lower right hand, and slowly worked its way, ever so painfully, up the arm in question. At present, my hand barely hurts at all, though that may be only relative to the ache in the shoulder. I'll get to a clinic eventually, I promise.

Descartes Pains at Verselogic

2:33am: Wishlist 2005
So everyone and their dog has a wishlist, eh? Well guess what, so do I. Not that I expect to know many shallow people or anything. But seriously folks, if you want to write a letter, that's cool too. I like letters. They give me warm fuzzies.

verselogic.net/wish/05.html

10:04pm: Minitokyo Artwork
Minitokyo is a virtual treasure-trove of awesome fanart. In particular, Yuji Kobayashi's Evangelion artwork. Damn this is some kind of wonderful. It's a registration-required site, but definatly worth it.

11:11am: Open Letter to You
I'm sitting in this here laboratory au coffee, vexed re the differential calculus midterm at 14:30h. You're entirely, or at least, mostly, not here, I presume, as I cannot sense your presence, although you might just be invisible, and wouldn't that be totally weird? Not that I really expect you to be invisible or in the the laboratory Right Now, but I was third-expecting you to be here sometime. I've been a little sick and a little more sore, but not dead, which I hear is totally trendy among the single-white-male-living-northener-demographic.

View this post on my blog

11:53pm: Cosmicity Synthpop Linkbomb
As Kit already mentioned, Mark Nicholas has released some pretty sweet synthpop under the name Cosmicity. I've been listening to these tracks for the past hour, they've got some wonderful ambience about the vocals. He's looking at fundraising options for his project Duchess 33.

Cosmicity Synthpop Linkbomb at Verselogic