Older blog entries for Krelin (starting at number 6)

Phoon: Thanks! The rest of advogato can blame you for being the cert that put me over the edge! :)

In other news, Fear Factor will be in San Diego next week. I need to practice my worm-eating skills.

How do weirdos like this guy get rich and powerful benefactors? Better question, how do I get a rich and powerful benefactor?

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Food

Went to "The Fish Market" last night, where our service was absolutely horrible (with the exception of an overachiever busboy, who got the lion's share of the tip). The food was excellent though. As we sat down, I found myself looking at the emergency exit door, labelled with a bright, flaming red notice on the cross-bar that said "ALARMED EMERGENCY EXIT" and behind that (slightly obscured by the bar itself, but still quite clear) a larger sign saying "Do not touch the bar when door is open, or alarm will WRAAAAAANG!" (sic)

Near the end of our meal, I observed over my wife's shoulder a couple of small girls, racing down the wooden floor of the restaurant, thumping as loud as possible. The thumping was loud and unsettling, but not nearly so much as the alarm door, as the first girl slammed into the oddly-labelled cross-bar, terrifying herself with the noise.

Bills

San Diego Gas and Electric bill arrived, surprisingly less than expected (still fairly high, but only $30-40 more than Austin TX, and it is the middle of the summer, after all). I dunno what all the fuss is about. :)

Advogato as Message Board (I know that's stolen, but I liked it)

hacker: It's not bullets, either. It's the blood-loss, or the massive brain trauma, or the gaping, sucking wound in the chest cavity. The worst thing about the Brazill case is how the kid got the gun.

footrot: If she looks anything like Shannon Elizabeth, I can't wait to see the webcast (try to keep yourself out of the picture).

ldunbar: My experience of Windows ME so far (with the Sony VAIO laptop I purchased a month or two ago) is that it is the most unstable, configuration-sensitive OS I've used in several years. M$ should be ashamed of themselves for releasing it. I immediately installed Linux on a second partition. Bleh.

Eh?

sjanes71: What're "nightshade-related veggies"? And have you actually lost weight on this diet, or just sleep? :)

footrot: Hope you get to bone that chick. Thanks for sharing.

baueran: Checked out Agoris VERY briefly... a couple of quick comments (which you probably are already aware of). Textchess could be improved by understanding algebraic notation (d4, instead of X1: 4 Y1: 2 X2: 4 Y2: 4), or by simply being compatible with Tim Mann's xboard protocol. Agoris might benefit from having even a very small, naive opening library (the search space of an opening chess position is extremely broad, and not even really that interesting from a computational/algorithmic perspective). And I don't know if I missed it, but it would be interesting to see a document on how your scoring/search algorithms work. Thanks! :)

whytheluckystiff: Dude, I'm so sorry about your dog. That's not self-pity at all. I have a young dog who I'd be very sad to lose (my wife and I very much think of him as our kid -- it's almost freakish). Best wishes.

Went to see Scary Movie 2 last night. No wonder it barely escape an NC-17 rating. Some of it was funny, though. Other parts of it were either too gross to be funny, or too over-the-line to allow my brain to stop thinking about how over-the-line they were, leaving me unable spend cycles on laughter.

I'm listening to David Sedaris' "Me Talk Pretty One Day" as an Audio book, currently. This is really entertaining, if you haven't checked it out yet. It's abridged (which is normally a peeve of mine with books-on-CD), but this works out okay for books composed of short stories or short articles (at least in this case), since the abridgement really just leaves out various articles. With novels, I'm always concerned that the abridgement may alter or remove some minor but interesting sub-plot that the abridging editor has decided isn't worthwhile. (As I listen more, I'm realizing that there probably are sub-plots tying these articles together, some of which I am missing in the audio-CD version, but it's still very entertaining. Plus, it's cool when the author takes the time to read their own book. Which reminds me, if you can find Stephen King's "Blood and Smoke", I highly recommend it.)

The new Cake album is not as good as I'd hoped, Fashion Nugget is still probably my favorite Cake album. However, "Short Skirt/Long Jacket" is a great song (and the CD contains a quicktime of the video which is hilarious).

I still haven't decided whether I dig the new Staind album yet or not.

RFC2795 is hilarious.

As if my recently renewed addiction to mudding weren't enough to consume my time entirely, I'm writing this diary entry as I install EverQuest. In spite of having worked on UO for nearly two years, I've actually never played EQ! I guess I'm more of a Nethacker.

Once again rode the San Diego coaster to work this morning. This is truly the best way to commute. It takes only slightly longer than driving myself, and I can read, or watch as beautiful, scenic ocean view after beautiful, scenic ocean view pass by.

I'm buying my VW Jetta Jazz after leasing it. I know you're not supposed to buy after leasing, but I like the car... a lot. Oh well.

I really wanted to go to the O'Reilly open source convention here in San Diego this year, but it was too expensive. I must save up to go to some Linux convention or other next year... (yeah, that'll happen :)

Ahhh, well. Back to work. (or playing EQ)

This is my first diary entry..... though I've been following the Linux effort for a while. I am not much of an open source developer, as I spend most of my time doing proprietary code for Massively Multiplayer Online Games, such as Ultima Online and Sovereign. So, mostly I lurk.

Some tremendously cool projects you already know about, that are currently interesting to me:

• SDL rules for writing game front-ends. As I mostly work on game server code, I like toying with SDL as a break from my usual. Nothing worth sharing yet, though.
• Guile is a tremendously cool extension utility/language. If you're wondering about extending your application with a scripting language, check Guile out, it's a great head-start, and being actively maintained.
• Crystal Space is coming along very nicely!
• Evolution is very useable already... Ximian are doing great things.
• Mozilla rocks. Although, its form cut and paste is really irritating today. I like the nightly builds too much, perhaps.

Well, that's it for now... back to work!