mcpantz.org

So here we are in 2009, and in between the hangovers and days off people are considering what they’d like to achieve this year.  I already accomplished my major goal (see last post), but there’s still much I’d like to do before I feel like I’m living a completely sane and productive life:

• I’d like to start working out again.  I don’t specifically mean getting pumped in the gym, but to get back into martial arts or somehow train myself  physically.  I’m not wasting away, but I want to make sure I still am in good shape.
• I want to be more of a polyglot, both spoken and computational.  I want to pick up Python and Haskell in the coming year, though using darcs, haskell’s community-standard revision control system, isn’t all that appealing to me.  Beyond that, I want a good excuse to start practicing my spoken languages again, as my German’s always been abysmal and my Spanish could use some polishing.  If I’m feeling particularly ambitious, I’ll pick up French; but that’s got a snowball’s chance right now.
• In addition to adding new languages, I’d like to expand my toolkit.  I worked as a web programmer for half a year a while back, and I’d like to re-vamp those skills in Perl so I can put things together myself, and actually work on the web projects I’ve had in mind for a while.
• While it’s certainly not a major issue now, I should be putting 15-20% of my take-home pay into savings.  I’ve got a couple recurring withdrawals set up to do that right now.

All in all, my goals are relatively modest, but I feel like that’s what makes them achievable.  Call me back in a year, and we’ll see where I am.

When I turned 18, I was staying with my aunt and uncle in Champaign, IL; soon on my way to college.  The first thing I did that night was go down to the nearest convenience store and bought a pack of black and milds.  That didn’t quite strike my fancy, so I switched to Marlboro Reds.  Since then, I’ve been a pretty hardcore smoker.

I did manage to do a really good job of cutting back for about three months in the fall of 2006, where I was only having one cigarette a day.   Smoking was primarily a social activity for me, and my coworkers at the computer lab I was working at would often cut out about noon to re-center ourselves.  However, the stress involved with the last year of college compounded with a rather intense breakup plunged my addiction deeper than it had been before, and that’s where it’s been since.

I found that smoking is more often a psychologically fulfilling activity for me, and that was reflected in my choice of tobacco.  From Black n’ Milds, I switched to Marlboro Reds, to Djarum Blacks, and then to Lucky Strikes.  Cost & convenience switched me to Drum rolling tobacco in the end, which I’ve been smoking almost exclusively for the past three years or so.  My choices were often motivated by image, and I often relied on smoking as a fashion accessory as much as anything else.

Every time I get sick, I’d get nagged about how my revovery period is on the order of weeks instead of days, and that i should see a doctor.  I never considered it a major issue, because I knew what to expect.  However, recently after an illness, after I had recovered, I noticed that every time I laughed, I’d cough.  Every time.  It was violent enough to the point where i noticed myself subconsciously trying to stop laughing.

For someone like me who enjoys my sense of humor in life, I found this unacceptable.   So as of Sunday night, I have not had one cigarette.  I’ve gone cold turkey.

Today marks the sixth day since my last smoke, and so far I’ve resisted the temptation many times, between going out to Neo, where at any point about 20% of the patrons are outside smoking, to simply being around people who leave the main group, and missing the change to express my usual cynicism and wit in a more relaxed, one-on-one context of sharing a mood-altering substance.

I’ve also noticed that without the sweet, sweet nicotine coursing through my body, I’ve become quite irritable and a bit more misanthropic than is usual for me.  However, this is usual and expected, and is supposed to end after a month or so after hating everyone.  Hopefully, I can get over being an insufferable dick to everyone, and thinking that everyone is the same, and reclaim a much healthier lifestyle.

Why yes, I *would* like to beat up my boss!

Aren’t there much better ways to go about this? Maybe like the USPS 100 Man Kumite? Stock Broker Bumfights? I’m sure they could do better than this.

How do you like having an extremely extensible, mature, and stable text editor. I sure do. One thing that always bugged me when writing code is going through and finding all sorts of annoying trailing whitespace. For most major modes, tabs are converted to spaces for consistency, but trailing whitespaces are neglected. I was considering writing an elisp function to go ahead and take care this until I found This little gem. I suggest that anyone that has to deal with syntax where trailing whitespace is ignored to have a crack at this.

For that matter, the rest of the interface enhancements on the main page look like they’d be excellent additions to one’s ~/elisp/ folder even today; as for the most part, the code here dates back to the early 90’s. Emacs isn’t exactly a popular mail client anymore…

http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com

I invite all of you to view the source of this site, which is exponentially hilarious.

I’d never been to Hot Doug’s before, but I’m certainly glad I went:

That’s a half-eaten merlot and blueberry venison sausages, and a kangaroo sausage with chili mayonnaise, with duck fat fries lining the top right of the image.  Life is good.

For being in Chicago for almost five years, I’ve been fairly lucky as I’d never been mugged. I always wondered if it was because I didn’t look like the type that would be packing a fat wallet, because I’ve certainly traveled alone at night enough to put myself at risk.

Last night, I was riding home on the L, and the train was one stop away from where I get off. I was pretty tired but still lucid; as it was 4:30, but I was still lucid thanks to a very early post-party breakfast. I was dressed to the nines as well, wearing a vest, tie & fedora as I often do when I’m out. The guy sitting across the aisle then very noticeably put his hand under his hoodie, and then started fidgeting in his seat. I think me must have thought I wasn’t paying attention to him, as I probably looked pretty zonked. I’d had a good night, but i was meditating on the craziness of the past couple months of my life in general, which put me in a bit of an irate mood, as well.

The guy, this cooked scrawny bum-looking character then leans over and says “hey, I’ve got a gun.” No he doesn’t. He has a hand under his shirt. I saw the fool put it there. He was fidgeting with it. I saw his round finger, not a cylindrical barrel sticking out from his stupid sweater. He’d given me like, a minute to look at him fool and try and get it right. I looked at him, and went back to to ignoring him.

He’s obviously pissed, so he says “hey, I’ve got a gun. Give me your wallet.” Dammit. I don’t want to put up with this bullshit. I’m used to aggressive situations; I’ve been in a couple fights as an adult before (not proudly, being jumped in a foreign country sucks), so I wasn’t going to lose my cool here. I drew a blank stare, and put my hand in my front pocket.

Getting away with that, too, told me that this guy was an amateur. If he was serious, I should have gotten my ass beat. No one carries their wallet in a front pocket. He was too concerned with getting his cash to realize that. Poor bastard didn’t know I was calling on a friend.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce Mr. Twisty:

Mr. Twisty is an Italian-made Damascus blade “leverletto”, which means that he is an Italian-style stiletto knife with a German lever release mechanism. Not as fast of an action as a traditional switchblade, but much safer to carry. When I reached into my pocket, I palmed my knife and flipped the trigger down, into a ready state.

I was still giving this guy a blank stare, just waiting for him to move. When you’re in a confrontation where you have an obvious advantage, you never want to tip your hand, and that’s what this guy thought. He interpreted my deal look as fear, but it was just calm and resentment. Here I was with this guy sitting across from me trying to mug me with a fake gun, and I have my hand on the trigger of a switchblade. He kept on leaving himself open, and I debated the merits of kicking this guy in the face when he sat in the seat on his bench nearer to me. Finally, he worked up the courage to do something. “So are you going to give me your wallet, or am I going to have to take it?”

That’s when he got up, and that was my cue. I pulled Mr. Twisty from my pocket and sprung from my seat. The scraggly bum damn near shit a brick, as I watched a cell phone fly from under his hoodie (his very poorly done fake gun), and he started backpedaling as fast as he could manage. I yelled at him to stay back, and he did a good job of it. Thankfully, the train was just pulling into my stop as this all went down. “I’m getting off, you’re staying here,” I said, “I can’t believe you tried to rob me with a cell phone.” I then backed off to my bag, and got the hell of that train.

My good friend Karl and I were on our way back from Lollapalooza last week when we happened upon this vehicle carrying two passengers from the Blackstone Hotel.

I apologize for the bad image quality, my Blackberry Pearl has crappy image quality.

Google Labs just released Lively, a supposed contender to Second Life. I played the latter a decent amount to see what it has become, which is mostly a desperate cry for more and more attention. People will wander about looking for someone to talk to, and run into a variety of weirdos. I predict a combination of late 90’s AOL chatrooms, IRC gaming, or any other effort at suspended reality that just feels empty and unfulfilling.

The general cycle will probably engender the following:

• early technology adopters and cool-hunters enter the scene, encountering a vast wasteland; declare it simultaneously the next best thing and a complete waste of time
• tweens, internet-based subcultures, and perverts invade the start inhabiting the wasteland. The first page is already filled with sex rooms.
• the technology languishes on in limbo with Google occasionally trying to inject life into the project, only to be met with general disinterest and all-around frustration.

I should probably note that I haven’t actually tried Lively yet. There are a number of things that Lively does get right, and should probably be adapted by any future virtual worlds:

• Separate rooms. Mind you, they could have called it something else that doesn’t make it feel like IRC, but it’s the right idea. Keeping every area of a persistent world totally active in a distributed environment sucks resources that may *never* be used.it makes much more sense to just enforce a boundary & throw up a skybox on users and make them talk to each other.
• Browser integration. No one wants to boot up a full-screen app to just see what rooms are popular and maybe if your friends are online.
• An offline editor. Rumors persist that Sketchup 7 may very well allow people to design objects in a dedicated atmosphere instead of trying to do so in-game, allowing people to focus instead of deal with a bunch of furries running by in morally repulsive costumes.

However, there are some other areas where it falls flat on its face:

• Lack of user content from the get-go. Google’s Don’t Announce Anything policy does give them the freedom to drop something When It’s Ready, and the lack of user content is just going to result in a bunchor restless users who are tired of seeing the same fucking samuri squirrel run around. On another level, it does give them the ability to establish a look and feel to the program, but users may find that more stifling in the end.
• Platform lock-in. I know, I know, most of the civilized world uses windows, but most of the world who is going to write reviews of the software does not. Especially design professionals; the ones who will actually be the cogs in the virtual market they are so desperately trying to create.

The real problem is that no one’s found a good reason to use virtual world technology in a non-gaming context. Second Life general offensiveness in getting *anything* done in a reasonable time in-world has turned off a number of potential users, including myself.  However, there is a lot of potential markets that a decent implementation could access.  It’s that latter part that really means something.

In the meantime however, I’m just going to curse until someone creates a virtual world that doesn’t completely mock the cyberpunk ideal.

Because I’ve never had one. Frankly, most poetry that gets handed off to me, I have a very low opinion of. However, a bit of googling led me to this highlights collection, and refreshes my opinion of the beauty of brevity of words. Can anyone else recommend poets that are capable of delivering the full value of their words without making it feel like a laborious, overwrought exercise? Just like coding, music and every other subjective field I’ve come across, there is beauty to be found in minimalism.