Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Khedron's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
10:38 pm	why I like CS types Why I like CS types: in a serious talk on dynamic languages, you can have someone say, "I mean, the Java people went nuts, I mean really really nuts, I mean like angry Orcs, they were just like AAAaaaaauuuugh, they did NOT want to hear it. OK?" (Comment on this)
8:59 pm	political commentary from Batman Oh, Batman. How naive you were. The Penguin is clearly going to win that battle for the hearts & minds of voters. (Link to Accordion Guy's blog.) (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 8th, 2008
11:36 pm	Colbert Show in space! The Colbert Show interview with the astronaut on the ISS is freakin' *awesome* stuff! Update: Comedy Central has the entire episode up here. It starts with the good part. This worked for me in both Firefox 3 and Safari. I think what I love about this is that Stephen Colbert is a total geek, and he's clearly just happy as can be in this. He radiates sheer joy. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
1:04 pm	beware of robots! I'd never seen this SNL robot insurance commercial from 1995. Great delivery! (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 27th, 2008
11:31 pm	no wonder netflix is trying to improve their recommendations I've been following the contest to improve Netflix recommendations from afar with interest. Months before I signed up for Netflix myself, I was reading about the teams and their efforts to win the $1,000,000 prize for improving recommendations past a certain level. I even thought briefly about trying it myself, but there are dozens of other things that have higher priority. But I've dabbled in data mining, search engines, and natural language, and the recommendation contest is a nice combination of all three. In general, I haven't been disappointed in my Netflix recommendations, but that may be because I'm too tolerant of failures there. The music recommendation project guy at Sun has put up a couple of examples of really bad suggestions lately: Trekkies --> Frontier House The Killers --> Looney Tunes Death Wish 3 --> The Bible Collection: Moses A lot of the time, you can figure out that the recommenders have their wires crossed -- maybe it's two different Steve Martins, maybe the movies have the same director. But, wow, these really are pretty terrible. At least with Amazon's infamous Tuscan Whole Milk, I know it's the goofy users intentionally making links from milk to uranium ore or, ummm, the Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank ($19,995). (Comment on this)
Friday, December 7th, 2007
9:22 pm	massive quantity of bookshelves! Staples is having a sale on their bookshelves. Free delivery & everything. Sure, they're cheap fake-wood bookshelves, but at $30/per for 6', 5-shelf ones, I'll be able to stop double-stacking my paperbacks & computer books. Yay! (Comment on this)
Monday, October 22nd, 2007
4:27 pm	wrong reason to join the next (videogame) generation I've been avoiding the "next generation" video consoles -- they haven't really had anything I've wanted thus far, and I've got a huge backlog to go through at this point anyway. There's finishing FF12, playing Neverwinter Nights modules we bought, Disgaea 2, Suikoden V, ... the list goes on and on. And the consoles are pretty expensive, and up until a couple of months ago, we didn't have a fancy TV to show off the graphical mojo, and really, what was the point? But today, I'm tempted to buy a PS3. Why? So that in November, I could get the PS3 version of the Half Life "Orange Box", which includes a little side game called Portal. Why? Because I want to know the context of this song written by Jonathan Coulton. (Click on "more..." in YouTube window to read full lyrics to song.) There is one advantage to buying a PS3 sooner rather than later -- the new ones that will be coming out soon will be cheaper, but they'll lack backwards-compatibility with the PS2 games. And sure, as a Sony exec pointed out, $(New-PS3 + PS2) < $Old-PS3, but I'd feel stupid bringing the PS2 upstairs to play older games on the nice TV if there were a game machine already plugged in up here. There are other things I'd appreciate, like DVD upscaling. But really, it'd be all about a song about cake. And that's probably the wrong reason. Current Music: you just keep on trying until you run out of cake (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007
9:19 pm	is it really Wednesday already? Matthew Broderick: Father, we can't eat this bird! Leo McKern: Why no.. oh, god, is it Lent again already? Sorry. Brief Ladyhawke moment there. It happens to me once in a while. Anyway, is it Wednesday already? I've gotten almost nothing done work-wise this week, even if I have done a bunch of house stuff. The gutters on the house are now verified to be functional -- unfortunately, I can't really say that we got them cleaned, because it turned out that while the fancy gutter guards keep leaves out, they also keep water out too. Whoops. Water tension not strong enough for a real downpour. In addition to gutters, we had someone come out to deal with our dryer, to fix the gas hookup and ensure proper venting. And, a 3rd guy came out to do furnace maintenance & testing. All good things, but suddenly, the week is half gone and I have lots of work to do. At least one of the benefits of it being Wednesday is that there's another madcap video game review out there. I don't care about Half Life 2, Portal, &c., but I still love watching the game reviews. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 15th, 2007
10:07 pm	heroes, context-free commentary 1. They do seem to like their conservation of characters, not to mention their convenient meet-ups. I _still_ wonder how Sylar happened to be in the right place at the right time to go on a road trip with Mohinder. 2. Is every episode going to have a "Parkman, you idiot!" moment? (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 4th, 2007
11:16 am	rabbits invade New York The new Sony Bravia commercial is out -- New York City is invaded by play-doh bunnies!. They put up a teaser a while back showing how 40 animators & "2.5 tonnes of plasticine" were involved, so I was looking actually forward to this a bit. The bouncing balls ad is still my favorite of this lot, but Sony does make nice commercials. (We bought a Sharp Aquos, though. Don't tell, I don't want to hurt their feelings.) Current Music: was Rolling Stones, now ff7.ocremix.org (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007
4:15 pm	random nuggets * There's a video game starring Chopin out there. I'd heard about it, but didn't know it actually intended to correlate with Chopin's life as seen through a dream sequence. Wacky. I'm not going to get an Xbox 360 for this -- I'm still playing FFXII on the PS2, when I can. * Lolthulhu! "I made you a fish-god cult... but I eated it." * One man's thoughts on squirrels vs. hedgehogs: "Even though I keep on writing and tweaking this site, my ability to do so like a rabid squirrel on crack has come up against The Brick Wall of Real Life, and said squirrel is now being phased out in favor of something more hirsute and sedate, like, say, a hedgehog on chocolate puffs – slow, deliberate, somewhat nearsighted but given to rare bursts of activity and quite a bit of curling up into a prickly ball." * An example of Joel Spolsky's writing style: "As a programmer [in the late 90s], thanks to plummeting memory prices, and CPU speeds doubling every year, you had a choice. You could spend six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies." (Comment on this)
Thursday, September 6th, 2007
10:15 am	local news continues with ambiguous headlines Here's another one from the daily local news blurbs: Police: Theft Suspect Hits Girl With Prosthetic Leg Unlike last time, the more interesting interpretation is the correct one: it's the "thief suspect" who threw his prosthetic leg at someone. I am glad that it's not a story of a woman with a prosthetic leg hopping down the street after a guy who mugged her. But, at least in this writeup, it sounds like an odd little story, since the guy isn't being charged with anything other than protesting too much (and hitting someone with his leg). It's not clear that the girl did the right thing in following him. I'll just have to wait & see. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 19th, 2007
2:41 pm	"I just keep this under my pillow..." Via Gizmodo, here's a story from the Orlando Sentinel which caught my eye. It turns out that Orlando has a yearly shindig where anyone can turn in a firearm, no questions asked, and get a pair of sneakers in return. "Kicks for Guns". Interesting idea. This year, someone turned in a missile launcher. Picture here, so I'm not leeching bandwidth from the newspaper. For what it's worth, the guy said he found it and wasn't sure how to dispose of it; he doesn't keep it under pillow, as I suggested in the subject line. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 8th, 2007
2:13 am	On "Stuff" Paul Graham has posted his latest thing, and like most of his writing lately, it has nothing to do with computers but I enjoyed reading it anyway. In this one, he argues that "stuff" isn't worth having, unless it's a book. Fact is, there are some types of stuff that I like collecting, but I'll admit it wouldn't hurt to ask "will I really use this all the time?" before buying something. But anyway, I don't care about that, at least not enough to post about it. It wouldn't bear mentioning at all, except for one of the comments: Dear Paul Graham, You don't know me, but I implore you to remove this post. You see, my fiance loves your blog and thinks you're a really smart guy. I'd go so far as to say that he looks up to you. Now, we're getting married in December and he's been close to throwing a temper tantrum on more than one occasion since we (I) started registering, as he can't understand why we need "stuff." He's been using that word. "Stuff." Please take down this post. Or write a recant. For the sake of me and the monogrammed napkins and shiny toaster I picked out. Fondly, Regan Fletcher (Comment on this)
Friday, August 3rd, 2007
12:26 pm	8-bit Civilization The guy who normally does "8-Bit Theater" put up a Civilization comic the other day. Pretty funny. There is no such thing as "enough research". Current Mood: "fish-turnip soup" (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 28th, 2007
2:46 am	Google is too cool I knew about Google solving equations in a search query. I knew about defining words, and interpreting addresses. But I did not expect that when I searched for {vietnam time zone}, I'd get back: Vietnam — Time Zone: (UTC+7) According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam (Comment on this)
Friday, July 27th, 2007
3:33 pm	star trek/heroes crossover madness! Sylar to play Spock? Aieee! Although, I'll admit, that by itself might make it the first Star Trek movie I've wanted to see in a long time. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 26th, 2007
12:35 pm	running afowl of the law This story showed up in my inbox this morning. It's not spam, it's a real local news blurb. "Men Convicted Of Soliciting Prostitutes To Wear Chicken Suit" There's a picture attached. I believe that it's just a case that the ordinary constraints of newspaper headlines have made this one ambiguous. I hope, at least, that it's not "Men Convicted Of (Soliciting Prostitutes To Wear Chicken Suit)", which is how I first read it. But maybe Ohio's just stranger than I'd expected? (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007
3:50 pm	jettison! CNN has a nice description of an unusual house-cleaning EVA on the space station. Anderson, a sportsman who enjoys officiating basketball games back on Earth, hurled the 1,400-pound, refrigerator-size ammonia tank away from the station with a single strong shove. His first toss was a 200-pound camera mounting. Mission Control praised the tank throw as being "right down the middle." "Well, in that case, give Brad Lidge and Roy Oswalt a call and tell them I just hummed a 17,500-mph fastball," Anderson said. For each celestial toss, Anderson leaned back on the end of the space station's 58-foot robot arm, as far from the space station as possible. He rocked forward and shouted "Jettison!" as he shoved the 4-foot camera mounting into space. He repeated the moves an hour later with the bulkier ammonia tank. The tank had been launched in 2001 to provide spare coolant in case of a leak at the orbiting complex. The surplus ammonia was never needed, and the tank itself had exceeded its life expectancy. NASA normally tries to avoid adding to the orbiting junkyard, but officials felt they had no choice in this case. The equipment had to be removed, and because of a looming 2010 deadline for ending all shuttle flights, NASA does not have room on its remaining missions to return the tank to Earth. (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 22nd, 2007
4:37 pm	bionic arms (non-Harry Potter post) Here's a nice clip about bionic arms from Gizmodo. Stupid name, but looks like it works well enough. (2 Comments |Comment on this)