Friday: Did it seriously just rain super hard for thirty seconds?

WTF, the sky?

But not this kind of rain.

• That's kind of depressing that we don't have anything as cool as that now-a-days.
• Viktor Yanukovych had a press conference today.  He attempted, but did not succeed at breaking his pen in half, brilliantly illustrating how current situation better than any words possibly could.
• Because this is too confusing, I'm going to put the "Happy Birthday" for Ramona today.

Thursday: never ending statistics

There is no fun math here.  This dataset is where fun statistics go to die.  The best algorithms I can come up with to smooth out the noise in a unquantized manner is of order O(N^4).  That sucks.  So instead I'm using median-based histograms, which means all the high frequency information larger than the box size is eliminated.  I guess I should be doing sigma clipping on that box to remove the discrepant points, and then feed that filtered set into a better smoothing function that now doesn't need to deal with the nonsense data.

And then I need to iterate the thing to identify the three different signals I'm trying to calibrate out.

I wanted to say "dogtender," but that's obviously wrong, and "bartendog" seems like trying too hard.

• Cthulhu.
• Bear.
• Thor.
• Ralph Wiggum.

Wednesday: I have some links for today

• Have I mentioned this story before?  I intended to, but never got around to it.
• Pikachu's face.
• This really should have been two episodes.  There's just too much stuff happening for it to all fit cleanly into one.
• Why Obama is cooler than all other presidents.
• And that's not fake, he actually said that.

Tuesday: Fuck tuesdays while we're at it.

I woke up this morning to discover that my back felt horrible, because apparently my "new bed" only lasts almost exactly one fucking year.  The problem is that all the springs are isolated, and then topped with a squishy layer of foam.  However, now it feels like two of the rows of springs have separated, and the squishy layer of foam is gone (possibly down into the spring gap).  Now I need to do this test myself, confirm that it's above the 1.5 inch threshold, fill out a complaint, and then probably pay a bunch of money in shipping costs because I live in Hawaii and beds are heavy.

If I ever have the chance, I will murder everyone involved with mind fire.  The fire of the mind.  Where you look at them, and your sheer hatred causes fire to erupt inside them.  Where they probably weren't expecting to have fire that day.  Resulting in mind fire murder.

For now, I've rotated the mattress 180 degrees, so the pain spot is now in "blanket and pillow collection land", and the undisturbed spot that was once B&PCL is now where my back will be.

One more thought on this rant:  They arrange the springs into columns and rows.  That's fucking stupid.  What's the best packing for circles in Euclidean space? Pseudo-hexes.  You shift row/column 2 relative to 1, thereby increasing density and forcing fractures to zigzag along.  Sure, the edges are weird then, but who sleeps on the outer two inches of bed?

• I am curious to hear this album.
• Consider the subset of people in America who know who have heard of Cotton Mather.  Of that subset, how many would enjoy satirical movie reviews?  Of that subset, how many read the New Yorker?  Simply put, the very existence of this article baffles me.
• Given that I know this Republican tax plan will never ever become law, I can feel good that it has made part 3c of this post somewhat more relevant.
• I saw the car from part 2 of that post at Safeway over the weekend.  It's Guard Force Security.  I missed that second word.  The guy at Safeway was special opping himself to some groceries, I guess.

Monday: fuck mondays

• I assume they faked it, because I suspect a real squirrel would have jumped out.
• Foxes.
• This seems to be what I've always assumed.  Best Picture nominees are basically the movies that movie people think other people should like.

Sunday: Why can't this be a three day weekend like last week?

It would make things much easier.

It would also be much easier if WF sold pre-washed pre-cut romaine.  I don't want 99 kind of baby lettuces.  I also don't want to have to wash and cut my own lettuce.  I'm lazy.

Another thing that I think I've figured out on my drive yesterday, and in the little I drove today:  Part of the reason H-1 is so bad is that there is not velocity segregation.  People drive on it like it was a standard surface street.  This means that instead of having a regular situation where the left lane is used for driving, the middle lane is for driving somewhat slower, and the right lane is for driving even slower, you get a bunch of random speeds in all lanes.  This sets up lots of situations where someone is driving slowly in the wrong lane, so all faster traffic has to slow down as well, then merge over to pass, and then resume driving.  This reduces average velocity over what it could be, and sets up lots of congestion.

• I said this five years ago.  Five years ago.
• Dog.
• Squirrel.
• Are these only popular here in Hawaii?

Saturday: Kind of an adventure

I decided this week that I wanted new pillows.  All the pillows.  Couch pillows and bed pillows.  Puhoy!

To make it more of an adventure, I decided to go to the far away Target in Kapolei.  I think a large part of that was wanting to actually drive a distance.  Twenty-two whole miles.

Also, they have a Wendy's there, so I could do the fry/frosty thing.

And there was a surprise car show thing happening there?  In the Wendy's/Kmart parking lot?  I don't quite understand it, as it seemed like the goal was to park your car, then get a lawn chair, and sit next to your car, like you're waiting to answer questions.  But everyone else is also just sitting in a chair, so it looks like some sort of weirdo standoff, but with fancy old cars.

• The Ukraine.  He had peacocks, and tried to get rid of the incriminating evidence by throwing it in the river.  Worst attempt at dictator ever.
• This dog joke made me laugh.
• Waffle dogs.  So now I have to try and work this into the schedule for tomorrow.

Friday: This is why I need more robots

I was sitting at work, and went to check my email (which lives at home).  The terminal connected there didn't respond at all, making me think that the network connection at home had dropped.  However, I could ping my ip address correctly, and the cable status said that everything was working fine.

The nice thing:  the webcam/raspberry pi/security bot kept making the scheduled hourly image tweets when it detected that my phone was gone (which enables security mode) and that my laptop wasn't responding (due to the wireless being down).  This led to the diagnosis that the dvr/mailbox/rss database server/storage box/wireless router had crashed.  That sucks, as it runs a bunch of things.

The panic moment:  an hour or so after the big computer crashed, the hourly image tweets stopped showing up.  I think this happened because it hit the daily "save security images to the backup disk attached to the big box" part of the script.  Since that's a NFS mounted partition, it hung until the disk became available again.

So the obvious improvements:   First, the pi needs to check to see if the big box is up, and monitor its status as well.  Second, it would probably be a good idea to move the webcam back and up, so it checks the front door, but also can see the computers as well.  That way I can verify that there aren't any major (fire) issues.  Third, it'd be nice to wire up a reset switch to connect to the pi's IO ports.  That way, if it loses contact with the big box, it can attempt to reboot it.  Since those are both connected to the wired internal network, that doesn't have to be concerned with wireless interference.

• I noticed that in the wording as well.  Basically, there's no limit until 2015, and whatever we have borrowed until March 2015 becomes the new limit, unless prior action is taken.  This makes it a fixed date issue, not a fixed money issue.
• This article is dumb, because the argument is basically, "google is mean for not installing their fiber in poor neighborhoods," but the author never brings up the obvious solution that fiber is infrastructure, and infrastructure should be built and supplied by the government, so people aren't subject to the profits of a company.
• "Rectify its coverage"? That's pretty much how you know you're trying to run a dictatorship.  And no, this is a different situation from the previous argument.  Venezuela nationalized their oil production, but although they have a sovereign wealth fund (basically the good way to manage resource based money), it's not a very...good?  Transparency of 1, been in operation for 15 years and has less than a billion dollars?  Look at Norway.  Complete opposite.  Especially since Norway produces like half of what Venezuela does.  The point is, nationalization makes sense for some things, but you then also have to not run a country where you say things like the press needs to "rectify its coverage."
• That list doesn't mention Honolulu, but it seems it's already playing here.  Next weekend it opens at the theater next to sushi, so I'm probably going to wait until then.
• Professor Oak.

Thursday: Why do I only ever have like 99 things or zero things?

Today is a zero thing day.

Here. Let's go with this.  WTF?  "Hold on, tiny dogs representing France and Belgium nipping at the heels of, let's say, The Kaiser.  Wait, you mean to tell me Willy did have that ridiculous mustache?  I just thought that was some editorial exaggeration.  Anyway, I will add my own tiny dog representation to the fight, where we can slog on for four years.  I'm totally sure we won't completely destabilize all of Europe and set the groundwork for seventy years of various levels of worldwide conflict.  I'm totally sure of that last one."

• Sad cat.
• Fuck this.
• Why does this even exist?  One of the TVs at my parents' house has this, and watching Indiana Jones on it at Christmas was super weird.
• Fuck you, Time Warner Cable.

Wednesday: That's going to take forever.

It turns out that even when the operation is O(N), if N is really big, that can still take a long time to sort out.

I also discovered that I didn't put enough dressing into the chicken caesar salad for today's lunch.  I don't want it to be drenched, but this wasn't enough to ensure all the lettuce had some caesar flavor.  Plus, without a bit of stickiness on the lettuce, all the cheese and delicious bacon bits fall down to the bottom, which isn't what it's supposed to do.  And yes, I know bacon bits are not an authentic caesar salad ingredient.

• Squirrel.
• Jackie Chan.
• The best way to eat Frostys.
• "He points to the retailer’s recent swing-and-miss on the issue of food stamps. Walmart had predicted that cuts to that program in 2013 would have resulted in a sales bump for Walmart as shoppers looked for an affordable place to buy groceries, but that prediction didn't pan out as expected."  People on food stamps are already poor, you fucking morons.  It's not like they're out buying foie gras and steaks, and that without them, they're going to suddenly start shopping in Walmart now that they've come down in the world.  

Tuesday: This got stuck in my head today

Mostly because I had a problem that basically boiled down to "take that X, slap it into that Y, and roll it into that Z."  Plus, this is one of the greatest Joker quotes ever, even if it is three minutes long.

• Really? I just recently noticed that they changed the stickers, but not checking that they can't be changed seems like a major problem.  If it's that fast, you also run into the problem of vandals erasing all the stickers in the parking lot.
• Cute bunny video.
• Cute goat video.
• Yes.  I too, am Piplup.
• If comics were like this all the time, I would read them again.
• Rich people are dicks. 

Monday: Today I learned that Blue from Blue's Clues is a girl.

I did not know that.  Doesn't really change anything about the show, since you know, she's a cartoon dog and all.


Anyway, it's President's Day, so I did as little as possible, and didn't even leave my apartment.  This is how vacations should be.

Because I don't have any other images to post.

• Ok, so the timestamp says this is from October, so it's not like this cat did crash the ongoing Olympics.  Still, I would expect an Olympic arena to satisfy two things: a) ceilings that don't fall apart under the weight of a cat; b) ceilings that don't allow easy cat access.
• Fuck you, Tony Scalia.
• Presidential.
• Bunnies.

Sunday: How did this happen?

I have the option here to either write like four separate blog posts, or stick them all into one.  I'm going to do the second one, even though the result is going to be a short set of links.

Part 0: This little guy.

I stepped out of my apartment, and saw something on the hallway railing.

This little guy.

It's been rainy all day, so I assume Mr. Butterfly was just taking a break and drying his wings.  I was able to get that picture, but I scared him off:

See the out-of-focus blur in the upper-left corner of that house?

Somewhere in here.  I could see it with my eyes, but I guess the camera couldn't.

Part 1: The regular weekend stuff.

Sushi time.

I was just about to ask for a soy sauce dish when one magically appeared for me.

They had really good ahi today.

I think I've mentioned these squirrel branded nuts before, but I had lots of time waiting at the deli.

Part 2: The story from yesterday that I totally forgot about.

Yesterday when I went to get the burrito, I got stuck at this intersection, as usual.  I have to go this way to get to H-1, and it's designed such that the east-bound Wilder traffic gets a full light, while the west-bound traffic (and me) get's a forward-only green, and has to wait for a green arrow once the east-bound traffic is stopped.  It's a sucky intersection, and can't be the best solution.

In any case, the car I'm behind is painted like this:

My car drawing is too small, so just pretend that's all on the back side of the trunk lid.

It's the company car for some private security guard service.  Ok.  Fine.  Then I got to the right side of the car. "Special Ops."  WTF?  I couldn't stop laughing.  What kind of special operations do you need to have to make sure people don't break in to or vandalize buildings?  Do you have some sort of tactical cell phone for calling the actual cops?

So I'm laughing to myself about what kind of special operations this guy must go on.  We turn, drive on, wait at the next light, and then I find out.  What kind of special operations you call Guard Security for.  First, you need to see something, so I'll just crop it out of google maps:

That's my post office, it lives under H-1.  See the "one way" and "do not enter" signs?  They're there because the lot is set up to funnel people from Lunalilo Street in, and then out onto Pensacola, with drive-through mail boxes (as you can see).  If you're on Pensacola, you park on the other side of the street and walk over.

Unless, of course, you're part of the Guard Security Special Ops Team.  Then, you use your incredible Special Ops training to Special Ops your car through that one-way exit.  To secure things.  However, no degree of Special Operations could possibly prepare this guy for his arch-nemesis: Dude Who Just Wanted to Mail a Fucking Letter but Now We're Both Trapped You Jackass.  Yep.  He made that turn, and very nearly rammed into a guy using the mailboxes.  I drove past, continuing to laugh to myself, so I never saw how this epic Special Operation was resolved.

Part 3a: The economics of Minecraft as compared to the real world.

I found this link in the RSS today, which points out that the Minecraft characters have absurd carrying capacities, because it's a game and games should be fun.  Their final number is 44.519e6 kilograms of gold, if that's all you're carrying.  Cool.  But then I remembered this other thing that showed up a few months back, which does info-graphic-y things to show you how much gold has been mined on Earth.  In ever, is their claim (and I'm not going to try to verify that, so we're going with it, because they have shiny graphics).  Their number?  166500 tonnes, which is a unit no one uses, so I had google turn that into kilograms.  166.5e6.  Therefore, in Minecraft, you can carry a little bit more than a quarter of all the gold in the world.

Part 3b: Walmart.

I was watching Olympic throw yourself down a mountain, and a commercial for Walmart came on.  In it, they claim that they're going to spend 250e9 dollars buying made-in-America products over the next ten years.  I googled a bit, and found this thing about how the Dirty Jobs guy is associated in this story somehow, but is less progressive about labor relations, and blah blah even I don't care about this sentence anymore.

Anyway, $250e9 over 10 years.  That's $25e9 per year.  That's: "Revenue (ttm): 474.88B"...um...like 5% of their revenue?  Ok, great, thanks, but that's kind of approaching the rounding error level.  This isn't really much of anything.

Finally, the punchline as to why I looked into this at all:  In their advertisement pointing out how they're going to start buying more American goods for their stores, they have the song "Working Man" playing in the background.  By Rush.  A Canadian band.

...

Part 3c: Inequality and taxes.

I made this plot as a result of thinking about this Krugman article about how fair the tax system is for the top 1%.

f(x) is a simulated income distribution curve, defined as  f(x) = (100 - x) ** (-1/0.3).  g(x) is a simple ramp down: g(x) = (100 - x)/100.0.  It's plotted in log-space because otherwise nothing is visible.

The red curve shows an initial income distribution, f(x).  Let's put a flat tax on everyone of 20%.  That yields the blue curve.  That has effectively zero effect on the inequality of the distribution: the top earner still earns 1e7 times as much as the poorest.  Next idea: ramp up the tax rate as the income increases.  That gives the purple curve.  That's somewhat better, but since the distribution is a power law, it's basically a battle between the index of the income distribution and the tax progressivitiy.  You can see that with the brown line, which has an index of 2, and that's still a pretty wide range.  Only when you fully balance those indices (yellow line, 3.33333) do you get a case where the tax has eliminated the income inequality.

Now, back to the Krugman article: the article it's countering points out that the top 1% paid on average 33.8% in taxes.  Ok.  Fine.  Do you want to know what the top tax rate in my yellow simulation is? Something in the ballpark range of (1 - 1e-7)%.  99.99999%.  That is the full communism, all money is stolen by the government, "there's no point in working hard because all your effort is stolen in taxes" solution.

There are some details (this doesn't model marginal tax rates, it ignores any actual incentive issues, reduces the problem to two variables, blah blah), but the conclusion remains essentially the same: pushing up the top tax rate is not going to instantly create a communist gulag.

Part 4: The remaining links.

• I never thought of Eeyore like this.
• Finn and Jake.

Saturday: Three day weekend!

Which I totally took advantage of by not doing anything at all all day long.

Then I went to get a burrito.

 I should probably not get burritos here anymore.  They're not really bad, but they're also not really good.

Some other people had a dog with them.

• I'm glad this story finally is showing up in the news.  Related note: you probably shouldn't be buying gas at Citgo.
• This is moderately interesting, if for no other reason than to play "guess the country."
• That looks totally legit.

Friday: Valentine's day

I've been saving this for a week.

 But it's also Julie's birthday, so I can't just say we should blot the day out of history.  And now I want cake.

I decided last weekend that I was bored with lunch sandwiches, and decided to try lunch salads:

Like this.

 I haven't sorted out the best way to do this.  This one has baby lettuce, sundried tomatoes, slivered carrots, croutons, ham, and that really tasty gouda that WF always has presliced like that.  The problem is the balance between dressing and not having soggy croutons.  I made a quick red wine vinaigrette, but it doesn't coat things very well, and putting the box's lid back on and shaking it around magically does three things:

1. all ham immediately finds the closest ham, and they stick together into a chunk.
2. all carrots and sundried tomatoes flee to the bottom of the box, so once you eat that last bit of lettuce, you find a secret pile of both of those.
3. the dressing vanishes, no matter how much you put in, only to appear again later in a puddle around the edge of the box.

I clearly have some work to do.  I've also thought this would work for a chicken caesar idea as well.  I do need to get better croutons, as the ones I have were designed by an idiot, so they crunch perfectly fine, unless you get one with the solid grains in it, which cannot be crushed by a molar, and exist only to break teeth.

Plus, I've done seafood the past two days:

This soy-honey salmon recipe was a lie.  The sauce did not in any way "form a glaze," and I shortchanged your cooking times and still ended up with overcooked fish.  I guess that's what I get for not marinating it overnight.

WF fish counter crab cake.  I kind of want to do slider week again, and put this in as one of the sliders.

I also came up with a brilliant idea today for a product that doesn't exist but totally should.  I have lots of books.  Like think of some books, and I have like twice that.  Maybe more if you thought small.  However, I have insufficient shelf space for all of these books.  This means, I lot of my library is in stacks on the floor, or in double-packed shelves (one layer of books, with another layer of books in front).  The problem is that I have a limited amount of wall space, and you have to put shelves against a wall.

Instead of doing things like this, they should make filing cabinets that are designed for books.  This stores the books like a normal shelf, but it's perpendicular to the wall. This makes is stick out further than a regular shelf, but you usually don't put things in front of a bookshelf anyway.  Instead of just pulling a book off the shelf, you open the drawer, and then pull the book off of that shelf.  Here, have a quick doodle-y sketch:

It's nearly legible.

The important thing is that the sides have to be kept as hollow as possible, so my quick idea uses a set of six rails to support an open drawer:  each side has a top and bottom one, plus there are two tracks on the bottom.  Since regular filing cabinets don't fall over (due to the trick that opening one drawer locks the others closed), this would be similarly stable.  The slidey bookend doodle isn't something I've made up, my filing cabinet has that, so I assume it's a standard filing cabinet thing.

This would be significantly more expensive than the cheap flat pack shelves that are common, but I think the storage density would help mitigate that.  The other benefit would be that since the books are isolated, there'd be less chance of dust/light/bug damage, so the books would be safer.  In conclusion, I really want to have a filing cabinet style bookcase.

• I read Paul Krugman, so I saw this.  Then I did a search on twitter (assuming this was something recent), and discovered this and this.  The WSJ has had grammatically incorrect advertisements out for two months.  Holy unprofessionalism, Batman.
• Pika-jollnir?
• This title is completely accurate.  There's using technology for good purposes (like cool filing cabinet bookcases) and then there's using it for bad purposes (like building eyesores that inevitably leak because you don't understand what you're doing).  I'm not kidding.  Like all of his buildings leak.  Or try to set LA on fire.  I can't come up with more fundamental purpose of architecture than a) don't let the rain in; and b) don't burn down the fucking town.  You suck, Frank Gehry, and I don't care how many rich assholes you fool into paying for your shit.

Thursday: I have nothing because I just spent an hour getting simcity 2000 to run in linux.

That's actually not true, I have three different things I could put here, but I didn't prep any of them, so they'll have to wait.

• Misty.
• Star Wars.
• Ok, this makes sense.
• This is suck, though.  Would it have been that hard to let the last season play on Cartoon Network, where all the other seasons played?
• Television.
• Detailed analysis of why this Comcast thing is bullshit.
• Does anyone watch Headline News anymore?  It doesn't do news headlines, since everyone has twitter.  So I guess it's just going to be a bunch of people reading their twitter feeds now?  That's...just stupid.  I can't imagine someone else has a twitter feed more interesting to me than mine is.  Given that that's the case, why would I ever turn to a television channel for this, when I can just watch something else, and have twitter open in a tab?

Wednesday: lists

I usually try to structure the day with a set of items to accomplish.  You know, just a clear way to organize the things that need to get done on any given day.

Today I discovered that although I usually do checks when something is done, you can also just put two dots, and then you get a concerned face :| guy.  This is why I will never stop using paper notebooks.

• Squirrel.
• Different squirrel.
• I tried to do this today, but gave up on getting crispy potatoes when it became 9 and I still hadn't eaten dinner yet.
• Fuck.  This shouldn't be allowed to pass anti-trust checks.  "Oh, but we don't compete," that's because you've gamed the system and divided the country into different regions, you fuckers.
• This is why She-Hulk is cool, and really deserves to be more popular.

Tuesday: Today's accumulation of random things no one cares about

First, this fox.

• CNN is bad at news.
• This tweet, by itself, is useless, as everyone else pointed out.  There's not even a link to further explanation.
• This story.  I was going to use it as a "Russia is screwing up the Olympics," which they are, and this covers some points, but then I saw something else:
• "Ultimately, however, between the snow-making machines and the millions of pounds (kilos) of snow [...]"
• "These mountain peaks rise over 2,300 meters, and since air temperatures generally cool with height, it means these venues stay 5 - 10 C (41 F - 50 F) degrees cooler."
• Holy crap, you are bad at news, CNN.
• While we're talking about Russia.
• So at least that's not a problem for the next year.
• Here's a plot I put together today, but then didn't feel like actually talk about.  Blah blah productivity gains, blah blah unequal distribution.
• The other thing is that if you assume these plots are sequential (they are, I made the previous one too), and that the letters are from the set [0-9a-z], then that plot is the 1353040 made.
• I didn't know you could do this with google.  It's totally the "I want to go somewhere, don't care where, but I do have a budget" way to find flights.
• I'll forget to read this story this weekend.
• I probably should have sat down to figure out how much water needs to be raised how high to provide a hydroelectric battery to solve this issue.

Monday: Headaches

I've had this one since about 2:30.  I am done with this headache, and would like to return it for store credit, please.

Squirrels are quiet and soft.

• And we know that even though you can get a free creature that shoots flame from its mouth on your tenth birthday, there are still guns because they still can't show that episode where Ash catches like a bazillion Tauroses because it's also the episode where Gunny McTriggerhands is all pointing guns at everyone, but no one cares that Ash's best friend is a cute walking-talking-electric chair.
• Jake foot at the end.  And his name is also Ash, but he's a jerk.
• At least he's probably warm.
• This is something that I now realize is also a fairly easy math problem, as it's just a latent ability model.
• This one, specifically.
• I kind of hope someone at Universal was fired for buying the rights to Namor.  I mean.  Fucking Namor.
• Storytime: when I was a kid, we had an Apple 2 computer, and it had a handful of video games.  I've covered one before.  In any case, I've periodically been searching to try to identify another one, which was a text based rpg.  My word array for google has been [gumby,polearm,budget game], because I remember we bought it from some end of the aisle display at like ToysRus or something, and that we got it partially because it was like $5 (and those other words are memorable for a kid).  It was fucking impossible, largely because as a kid, I could never figure out how to get the character to take the sword or whatever he bought, and use it in anyway against the monsters.  This made the game kind of a test of the random number generator, because sometimes the monster would run away, and then you could loot whatever was left.  This is the game, which was apparently a knock off of some other game.  What pissed me off when I saw it last night is that youtube video: since the person playing was familiar with the original game that this one copied, they knew there was a "help" command that would list the other commands the game knew.  You can see the instruction sheet, and how that's not mentioned anywhere.  This explains why when you'd type "use sword" it'd give you some bullshit response, and when you'd say "attack" it'd give you a different bullshit response.  You have to "prepare" the sword first, then you can attack.  Who the fuck is going to figure that out when they're 9?

Sunday: Fuck it, I'm just going to eat a slice of cake for dinner.

And no one can stop me:

The other possible title I had for today was: "Who the fuck came up with this new 'let's put a banner bar that never moves at the top of every page on the internet' idea, because I kind of want to punch them in the face?" but that was a bit long.  Seriously though, that's a terrible design choice.  Everyone has widescreens now, so forcibly allocating a vertical chunk allocates a large area that is remarkably low-information.  I know I'm on the NYT page, NYT.  Besides, do people actually click on those subject links?  People really go to the main page, scroll down a bit, and then think "I want to read Fashion and Style stories now.  Here, just after the top of the headline story"?  You too twitter.  You don't even use your words for most of that.  I hate those stupid "floating sidebar thing that stalks you as you scroll down", but that would at least not waste as much space.  Especially given that below the top half dozen or so tweets, you waste the space that holds the "say shit" entry box and "trending crap" stuff.  Just make that stupid shit a floaty sidebar thing that reuses that space.

It's like people who come up with web design trends are morons who have no concept of utility.  "It establishes our name brand!" No, it makes your webpage look like someone from 2002 who installed every custom toolbar.  They weren't necessary or useful then, this shit isn't necessary or useful now.

• I mean, I get annoyed that the google auto-translate thing thinks I need to be reminded permanently that it changed the language of this page from Japanese to English.  Duh.  I know that.  I saw you do that, when everything was changed from Japanese to nonsensical machine English.  In any case, this is kind of a cool house.  I'd be concerned about moisture behind the shower curtain/partition doors.
• I'm surprised that they don't have more guards.  I mean, it's got a fence, but a baby could hop that thing.  I also don't understand why you'd try to break in.  It's a museum, they have everything cataloged. You wouldn't be able to sell anything.
• Yes, yes, cute koalas, but my actual thought was, "who buys 97% fat free ice cream?"  Then I went and ate my cake.  Out of spite.

Saturday: Three weird dealings with people

1. I got on the elevator, and it stopped on floor 7 for a family to get on.  As they get off, I realize that the little kid was singing the same song that I had stuck in my head.
2. I got ramen for lunch, and sat down next to two girls, one of which proceeded to:
1. Unwrap like seven things of chop sticks.
2. Drum on the counter with her fingers, making the whole damn thing shake.
3. Drum on the top of the counter with her chopsticks.
3. I got groceries afterwards, and got on the elevator with creepy overly-affectionate 60 year olds.  We're on an elevator together.  You can wait one damn minute to have the worst double-entendre conversation.

Ramen.

Today is also the second day in a row that I wanted brownies, but couldn't find brownies to eat. :(

• Huh.  That's a cool story.
• More cards should be like this.
• Shit, that's this week, isn't it?
• This entire thing seems like a bad idea.  I don't understand why people are going crazy about them.
• Pokemon plane.
• Russia.

Friday: Fucking Carnival

Every year, Punahou schools have their carnival.  Every year, it completely fucks up traffic.  Every year, I nearly get hit because some jackass pulls over to the side of the road, realizes they can't park there, and then tries to dash back over into my lane, despite me being in that fucking space already.

The problem is that they simply don't have any parking (they use their lot as part of the carnival), and so they rely on street parking, which is the least efficient thing ever.  If I could, I would ban street parking everywhere, for all time.  It's a street.  You drive on it.  Converting it to parallel parking removes those lanes from traffic, increasing the traffic density in all other lanes.  It also reduces the speed in the other lanes, as they have to stop to allow people to park.  Again, increasing traffic density (\rho \propto Nlanes * v).  Finally, it's shifting the costs of maintaining sufficient parking from the users of that parking to the transportation system, which is stupid.  It should instead be shifted to the commerce system, as they're the ones who benefit.  This leads to the obvious solution of parking garages and things like that.  Or, if having the parking is sufficiently motivated, public parking garages.

tl;dr: Fuck street parking.

I'm not going to say bad things about the opening ceremony, because the only problem I saw was a proper technical issue, not fundamental evidence of corruption and incompetence.

• I will hate having to enter a pin to use my credit card, because I like being able to just pay for things magically fast.  This doesn't seem like it's really a valid solution, as it just pushes enforcement back down on the users.
• I floop the pig.
• Read the headline and the last paragraph.  Nothing else is necessary.
• Charizard used Blaze.  IT'S SUPER EFFECTIVE!
• I thought this was funny.

WHAT?

They have a kaiten-"European food" place?




I'm not sure if I've ever wanted something more in my entire life.  All the not-sushi flavors of Europe, with all of the not-dealing-with-people benefits of kaitenzushi.

Thursday: I have nothing cool to say today.

Here. Have this.  It's some jackass dressed up like a minion from that movie at the protests in Kiev.

• I like squirrels more than most people, but this just isn't right.  Now, if the Soviets had set up elaborate domestication program during the cold war, then we could have had pet squirrels.  But they didn't.  That's why you lost the cold war, Russia.
• And yes, I'm going to keep bringing up this story, because the best way to fight a tyrant like Putin is to mock him.
• This is the kind of blog I strive to run.
• Bunnies.
• What?  That's not how fighting works, The Taliban.  That's how you get fined by your HOA or something.

Wednesday: topology

The was a department wide email sent around today about a new flash bug that requires a browser upgrade to fix.  Sure.  Sounds easy enough.  Then I discovered that my work computer OS was sufficiently out of date that it didn't support a new version of chrome.  Then I tried to upgrade, but my OS was sufficiently out of date that there was no longer a way to upgrade it.  And when you try, it breaks everything by uninstalling things you like.  Like tex.  And octave.  And gcc.

So, go out, buy a flash stick (16GB because they're sold out of 8GB, since no one transfers more than 8GB by hand anymore), get the install ISO, do the install, have it fail because the fucking install ISO isn't constructed correctly to install without a network connection to fix the problems, figure out how my work computer is connected to the internet, try again with an active network connection (allowing me to browse the internet while it does so), reboot to mostly functional new install.

Great.  The upgrade also allowed me to switch from shitty shit gnome to enlightenment, because it's clearly better.  Here is where we get to the topic of the day.

Topology is not my best math.  Sure, I solved the bridges of Koningsberg problem in high school as you do, and I can feign a laugh at the doughnut/coffee cup trick that isn't decades old and seriously come up with a new joke already, and I realized what the shape of the Space War universe was while playing the game on an Atari 2600 with no sun and no bouncing (also: old video games always had kick ass covers).

Why are we talking about topology?  In E17, I like to have a number of virtual desktops, and I like them to be all connected to each other so I can flip between them by pushing on the edge of the screen.  FVWM did this years ago, and I always liked the idea.  E17 also supports wrapping of virtual desktops, so you end up with something like this:

My laptop uses a three by three grid, but it's the same thing.

Where there is a two-by-two grid of desktops, each connected to the others along wrapped edges.  This is obviously identical to the SpaceWar universe, as you can imagine this as just a really crappy tv with only four pixels.  Therefore, my standard desktop arrangement is homeomorphic with a torus.  Easy peasy.

Now, at work, I have a dual monitor setup, and I assumed this would just work the same, but with fat desktops.  However, I discovered upon getting everything configured that it's actually this far more complicated thing:

Green arrows are bidirectional, as they were above.  Orange are unidirectional.

The two monitors have their own set of virtual desktops, but, since going across the monitor boundary must put you on the other monitor, they're not connected together.  If you're on the left monitor, there is no right edge you can cross to get to left side of the adjacent desktop (imagine the center red screen to pink).  You can get there by going to the unopposed left edge of this desktop to arrive on the right edge of that desktop, but you then can't go back, as you jump over to the other monitor.

I don't have proof (again, see "worst math"), but I believe this defines a very oddly connected hollow torus.  I don't know how you construct a unidirectional connection in topology, but assuming that's valid, you basically have some sorted of ratcheted torus for each monitor: you can travel poloidally unobstructed (corresponding to vertical shifts), but can only travel in one direction toroidally.  Switching between monitors is then functionally equivalent to passing through the ratchet onto the other side of the torus.  There's some ambiguity, since you can then shift each monitor separately, so where you come out on the other side of the torus isn't a priori obvious, but I think the bulk of the thing is sorted.

Anyway, I thought it was cool, and now my already-confusing-to-other-people desktop is going to get more confusing.

• Did you know you could buy a pound of cheddar cheese powder from Amazon?
• Now the "none pizza with left beef" thing I've been seeing makes sense.  Sometimes it's best to google.
• Squirrel.
• Because Japan.
• I missed this story last year, but this is why I don't check my voicemail.  No one should ever use it ever.

Tuesday: Redesigning things.

It turns out that that's not terribly a lot of fun.  Today was largely spent trying to figure out how to convert the thing that does X to one exposure to do X to something like 1000 exposures at the same time.  "Oh, just do X 1000 times!" No, that's not going to work, because I need to pack all 1000 exposures into one processing block, because that's how the supercomputer wants to compute things.  Super-ly.

I don't feel like actually translating the title, but it's clear this is just Pikachu mimicking everyone else.

• Convenient.  I also like to get up at never o'clock.
• It's been 13 years.  I really would have expected that would cut down on officially licensed Silent Hill 2 clothing.
• I can't wait to see how much of a disaster this Olympics is going to be.  I think I've said that before, but this is a news story from today, and the dumb thing opens on Friday.  This Friday.  Three days away Friday.

Monday: asdgasdgasdgtrg mondays

It's the sheer Mondayness of it all.  You wake up, it's Monday, it sticks around all damn day, being all Monday about everything.  And then, to top it all off, you discover that for some stupid reason, the tool you're using on an honest-to-god proper supercomputer is limited to a 60000 character input file.  It's just the kind of thing that makes you wish you could just stay in bed all day with a pad of paper and work out math problems instead.

 Here.  Look at this bird.

• Pizza bed.
• Best pet.
• Last panel.
• Scary monsters.
• This is why math is important.  The fact that people who are part of the fucking government can't understand that if a business has 1 owner and N > 1 employees, then, at most, the fraction of the country that owns a business is 1/(1 + N), and that that number is strictly equal to or less than 0.5 is just terrifying.  This is basic fucking math.  This is the kind of algebra that when you explain it to people, they respond with, "oh, that's what you're trying to say.  Why didn't you just say that, I'm not fucking stupid?"  Yes, indeed, there are people that fucking stupid.

Sunday: I have far too many links already in place, so I need to get this post done now

Part 1: Super Bowl

I don't care about this.  I watched the Team Lads vs Team Gents video game version (link to last play of that game) earlier in the week, and checking out the score according to the NYT, not only did they correctly predict the winner, they also seem to have put together a significantly better game.

Part 2: Chili

I made chili again, but didn't bother to do a play-by-play.  I did that two years ago, and don't see any reason to repeat that.  I did skip the stick blender this year, and I think that was the right decision.  The two-year-ago version was really too hot, and I think that's because all the heat was blitzed up into every bite.  The end result puts it just nicely in the hot category.

I still had a Mexican Fanta, so I went with that pairing.  Also cheese, because duh, and doritos, because yummy.

Part 3: Puppy Bowl

First thing: Puppy Bowl has totally sold out.  Everything is branded now, and there are just too many bells and whistles that have been glued on to the show.

Second thing: Someone at Animal Planet decided they were going to steal everyone's DVR this year.  How?

In years past, they just played the PB over and over and over again.  Great.  You can jump in and out as you want.  This year, they've defined the first three showings as different episodes, with titles "First & Goal", "Going for 2" and "Third & Long".  This change was something they did fairly recently, as the last time I checked, there was no episode information.  The implication of this is shown by the probably-invisible outlines in column 2: my DVR sees these as three separate and unique episodes of a series "Puppy Bowl X", and arranges to record them all, bumping any lower priority recordings.  Luckily for me, I didn't have any un-reschedule-able shows during this time, although it did bump my recording of the Hallmark Channel competing Kitten Bowl from the 4pm showing to the 7pm showing.

Third thing: I was going to screenshot the hamster wheel thing, but I'm lazy.  Maybe I'll do that next weekend, when I'll likely do the same kind of thing for the Kitten Bowl.

Part 4: Links

So many tabs.

• Cartoons.
• The Annie awards were yesterday.  I like these results.
• Partially because of this.  Ice King.
• The Rankin of Rankin-Bass died.
• Why would you ever want this?  I can't imagine how puke colored that's going to look while spinning.
• The Joker.
• Animals.
• Squirrel advice.
• Bunnies.
• My Puppy Bowl team is here.  The results are here.  Crap.  Zero points.
• Definitive Puppy Bowl coverage.
• Summary of the games for today.
• Other things.
• I really like this fixture (#5).  This also doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to make, so I wonder why modern Art Deco things aren't being made.
• Scotch werewolf is best werewolf.
• WTF?  You'd think that when someone asks a followup question about how you sound crazy, you wouldn't double down on that crazy.  During a fire: "The closets are right by the door on their way out of each room so it would be possible to be modest on their way out. A robe would even be fine."
• This is my remote control, because I think I'll need to get a new one, as the Vol+ button is flaky now.  I'm posting this so I know which remote control is mine when I decide to get a new one.
• I want to do this with my keys.  Particularly for my building and apartment keys.  Those are the two I need to take with me when I leave the island, and I'd prefer just having a flat thing without needing a ring pointing out into a new dimension.

Saturday: Pretty much the same as other saturdays

It was super rainy this morning.

Sushi day.

I keep thinking that I should start making chili tonight, as it's rainy and cool again right now.  I'm concerned that I'm going to start it tomorrow just as it becomes super humid and hot.  It would also make it possible for me to eat it before like 5pm.  It'd also let the flavors blend more.  Unfortunately, I think being lazy is going to win out for tonight.

• I liked this comic.
• Everyone should really know Tex Avery.  It's good that at least one town in Texas is recognizing that.
• This is...I don't know.  It's like if you wanted taxidermy, but were creeped out by having dead animals everywhere, but really liked creepy things.
• That's kind of cool.  It looks like the asus knockoff kinect is only $70, so it's not really too expensive.  it'd be nice to be able to have lights turn on and off automatically.  
• It's things like this that make it absolutely clear that joining the coalition government has doomed the LibDems to centuries of losing elections now.