Tuesday: So I spent a billion hours thinking about weighting functions.

And this clarifies why some of the weights were coming out the same, and why I was overfitting in a previous iteration.

• A reference.
• Geometry.
• Squirrel thief.
• Fat pony.

Monday: Four day week this week.

No pictures, so video instead.

• I did watch part of his Bohemian Rhapsody, but had to stop the moment he was supposed to start singing, as it was obvious he had no clue what he was doing.
• This is a good game, because you only need to spend about thirty seconds at a time playing it.
• I received one of these bookmarks with my order.  I got the best one, "dinosaur carrying tree behind town."
• So I guess when I was using the power of monospace type, I should have guessed "Vol 2".
• Guess which movie?

Sunday: I really need to write that blog/lexical parser/food recommendation thing.

It would have been far more efficient in determining that I haven't been to ramen in close to a month.  That would have in turn solved the hour-long dilemma this afternoon.

Om nom.

• Greece.
• General stuff.
• Krugman.  He had more math based details last week.
• Details.
• More details.
• I had thought about going here for lunch today, but it's on the other side of the island, and I didn't feel like driving that far.
• "[...] the misdemeanor of dressing in man's clothing."
• Brilliant.
• Tomato from Marnie.
• James.
• Lord Skullcrusher.

Why is this so complicated?

My upstairs neighbor has again switched wifi channels to the same fucking one I use.  This, of course, completely fucks with my wifi throughput.  All of this, despite the fact that she has an N channel that I expect she actually uses for things, since that's faster.  This makes her use of the G channel that I use essentially just interference.

So I thought, "I should just get a wifi card that supports N, so I can switch to that, as that space is largely empty."  I look online, amazon has a decent card for a decent price.  I then think about looking to see if I can just pick one up tomorrow someplace locally.

Dear every store that has an actual physical store I could go to,

I don't care what you can ship me.  Amazon can ship me everything in existence.  If I want something shipped, I'm buying it from them.  They're going to beat you on price, and they're certainly going to beat you on hassle.  If I'm on your webpage, I want to know if you have a thing in a store, so I can plan to go to your store to buy it.  Don't bring up bullshit like, "ship it to the store!"  That's stupid.  You're stupid for even suggesting that.  Yes.  Let me give you more money, spend more time futzing with shit, and then have to drive to your store to pick up the thing.  That's far nicer than just having the thing show up in my mailbox.

I mean, is there anyone in retail management who isn't a fucking moron?  Don't try to copy amazon, because you're going to do it poorly.  You have actual stores.  Have your webpage be completely tied in to your inventory systems.  That is the thing you have on your side.  Inventory close to where I currently am.  Anything that doesn't leverage that actual shit, in an actual store, is missing your only fucking advantage.

Let's talk about the only companies that I can think of that seem to realize this.  Grocery stores.  What's at Safeway?  Food.  A bunch of fucking food.  If I want food, I can be confident I will find some there.  What do I see if I look at the Safeway webpage?  Some fucking ads about what they've got.  Here's a little play.

Me:  Hey Safeway, what's going on?
Safeway: We've got a bunch of fucking shrimp this week!  Want some fucking shrimp?  Like $10/pound.
Me:  Wow, I kind of want some shrimp now!
Safeway:  Damn right you do.  We've got peaches too.  Ready to be fooled into thinking you like peaches before being disappointed how fucking messy they are to actually eat?
Me: And how!
Safeway: How about chips?
Me: I have chips.
Safeway: Do you have cheddar and sour cream lays?
Me: Like ruffles?
Safeway: Nope, the regular thin ones.  Fuck.  Even I didn't know they made those.
Me: So I can get that gross "just ate cheddar/sour cream chips" mouth-feel without paying the ruffles premium?
Safeway:  $2.99 each when you buy four of a set that was apparently put together by a lunatic.
Me: Why am I not buying food right now?
Safeway: Fuck if I know.

See?  Safeway is telling me what they have at their store right now.  They're not telling me that they can deliver bananas on Tuesday, or if I'd like, I can get some plantains from their "marketplace resellers."

This isn't hard to understand, so why isn't it clear to everyone who doesn't have to throw their products into the trash if they don't sell them fast enough?

Saturday: Stop being weird, Google.

This is the screenshot I took on my phone today.  While sitting in my car in the parking lot at WF.  Which I had not at all searched for or anything, because I knew what I was going to do for lunch today.

And then I noticed that the moon was out, doing moon things.

I got a burger, because that was the plan.  The waitress asked if I needed any mustard or hot sauce.  You can see in my sauce selection, that I have a whole grain mustard (which I'm thinking of doing with a gouda burger soon), and buffalo wing sauce.  So, you know, I was pretty much all set.

• Ever wondered what vomit looks like in word form?  Let's read Rod Dreher, who is an absolute fucking moron.
• Kuroneko Yamato is a delivery company that uses the cat/kitten logo.
• The death of Team Rocket.
• Cats are jerks.

Friday: Today was a good day.

Well, except for this.  The drinking fountain I use like three times a day to fill up my water bottle is broken, so I had to go hunt down a different drinking fountain.

But the salad place had tomato basil soup.  Mmmm!  I have the thought that when they have that, to go get a grilled cheese at the other place, get a big thing of soup, and do grilled cheese/tomato soup for lunch.  I hope they wouldn't mind.

And then for dinner I had movie theater hot dog!

 Which means:

I went to see Marnie again.  I decided that if it's really my Best Movie of the Year, I should see it multiple times.  It is still wonderful.

• Also, the Supreme Court decided to have a second day where they do the right thing, so now everyone can get married.  As it should be.  And that caused my RSS to blow up, so I'm putting up the like 1/2 of what was there that I liked.
• Because sometimes you have to bend rules.
• Because even if things still aren't perfect, a victory is a victory.
• Because that's-not-the-Canada-you're-looking-for.
• Because despite everything, he has worked to make things better.
• Because I thought it was funny.
• Because it's not like that.
• Because it is like that.
• Because even if it's fake, yes.
• Because thanks, Obama.
• Because Clarence Thomas wouldn't understand dignity if it hit him in the face.
• Because this is how the government works.
• Because hedgehog.
• Because it is so ordered.
• Because there will be next steps.
• Because the internet.
• Because Brother Cadfael and Gandalf the White.
• Because the truth.
• Because the Onion knew, two years ago.
• Because capitalism, I guess.
• Because Vox made the best gif.
• And yes.  Despite having to fight Congress like he was trying to burn down the entire world, he's gotten a lot of very good things done.
• Marnie.

I am never doing that many links ever again.

Thursday: It's a good thing I took that picture yesterday.

Because now you have a reference when I mention that they cut off the dead branch.

You can see it on the ground, and if you compare to yesterday, you can see where it was.

I guess the "cut branch off" crew and the "get rid of cut branches" crew are different.

• Go fuck yourself, Scalia.  Turns out you don't get to ruin the lives of millions of people just to fulfill your desire to ruin lives arbitrarily.  You bag of shit.
• I should do that this year.
• Squirrel + giraffe.
• Flopsy bunny.

Wednesday: Today was a weird mail day.

I wasn't going to have a picture today, but it rained a bit, so that was enough.

I checked the mail today to see if Amazon was lying when they said I shouldn't expect the copy of Marnie I ordered wouldn't arrive until July 10th.  They were, and now I have a children's book to read.  In addition to that, I had a survey from the Democratic party.  Well, technically it was them asking for money, but they fancied it up under the guise of a survey.  Odd things not on the survey:  Big checkbox for "don't fuck shit up," big checkbox for "which of these things do you think the tea party will fuck up" (because seriously, choose three of seven?  fuck that), any mention of the trade agreement that isn't very popular but is still being pushed irrationally.

I also got a notice to pick up some certified mail.  For someone who isn't me.  I don't think they're likely to give it to me, so I think I'll just let it sit at the post office.

• That's unfortunate.  More cats need to have real jobs.
• Damn it, bear, you're a bear.  And there's a window between you and that cat.  Come on, bear.
• Rich Lowry is a moron.
• Marnie will still be playing this weekend.  I think I may go see it again.

Tuesday: Damn it, phone alarm.

Yesterday, my phone didn't ring any alarms.  It just popped up an unhelpful "Clock has stopped" message.  I tried resetting the application data, as that seemed to be the suggested way to fix weird clock issues.  This morning I was supposed to get up for a telecon.  I didn't, because my phone again decided not to actually play any alarms.  It turns out that something was confused somewhere, and only by rebooting it was I able to get alarms to go off.  At least they did when I was testing it this evening.  We'll see if it works tomorrow.

I don't have an image for today.

• Hamburger Prince.
• Worthless ass ghost.
• Because they can.
• Cheese.

Monday: Monday. :/

Always carry a knife.  You never know when you'll be attacked by a gnome.

• Cats are weak against toast.
• Scorpion.
• Team Rocket.

Sunday: I did not get blueberries.

The blueberries are what makes it "healthy."  :(

• I should rewatch Evangelion.
• Bunny.
• What.
• Pikachu.
• Damn it, dog, that burger looks delicious, and you're giving it a shitty look.
• Pokeman.

Saturday: The weekend kind of sucks when you spend hours writing a stupid talk.

But first was lunch.

A birb was there.

I was kind of hungry.  And I'm just now remembering I bought poke for dinner and never ate it.

Eh.  Close enough.

• Birb.
• Stickers.
• That guy.
• Sorry, Mr. Seal.
• Baman Piderman is back for the final season.

Friday: Today is not Thursday, so it's good I caught that before posting.

This is why most news sources suck.  They're not actually interested in informing you about anything.

• Hm.  So I could go see Marnie again.
• Angry bird.
• Sad bunny.
• Woefully underrated film.
• My best was 34.
• Twitter makes change.  I immediately search to find a way to turn off the stupid change.
• And this just sounds awful.  I like twitter because it is an infinite, never ending stream of information.

Thursday: Today was better, largely because I solved two problems.

Pizza pan is pizza pan-y.  Chocolate chip + bacon cookie was either not quite baked all the way or was just too greasy from the bacon.  Tasted fine, just a bit floppy.

Bacon epi << pastrami epi.

• Ok.  There's the comic, the story, the follow-up comic.  But wait!  Don't stop there!  Keep going to read the bonus story in the tags.
• Dog.  They did not get that for you, dog.
• This is wonderful.  Also a good start for thinking about very high dimensional systems.
• Why?  Not the concept, because that doesn't surprise me at all.  Why make Pikachu such a hellish monster? 

Wednesday: Today was not the best day ever.

Although I did realize that the reason the one algorithm wasn't giving me results I liked was that it was weighting things by the absolute value instead of the square.  That insufficiently downweighted outliers, producing better but not sufficient set of fits.  Now I can implement that, and do a large scale test.  It's probably actually good enough to skip my other outlier rejection as well.

• Larry Wilmore had this story on tonight, but even after claiming it was "super sad," he left out the worst part of it: "Dominicans born after 1929 to parents who are not of Dominican ancestry are to have their citizenship revoked."
• I saw one of these yesterday.  Not a Maxima or an Infinity.  A Cefiro, which according to the wiki, were never sold in the US.
• Parasite Eve was very good.
• Tiny crab is actually from Marnie.
• Coyote.
• Lottie Grote: Best Webcomic Character Ever.

Tuesday: You're trying, I guess.

"Shoes?  Do you want these shoes?  How about all the machine learning books?  Comics?  A camera?  JUST TELL US WHAT YOU WANT!"

• Marnie.
• Squirrel.
• Bear.
• Why the Republican party is objectively bad.

Monday: I will one day run out of Marnie stuff to post.

That day is not today.  Or tomorrow if I remember my saved RSS queue.

• Close enough.
• I was very concerned when I heard about this, because the ramen place is at Date and Kapahulu.  However, you can see the "fuck you" wall that Popeye's built between them and the Jack in the Box, so this is far enough away that the ramen place should be fine.
• Judge Thomas C. Wheeler of the United States Court of Federal Claims is a fucking moron.  Direct quotes from the same fucking moron of a judge: "if the government had done nothing, the shareholders would have been left with 100 percent of nothing." AND: "No matter how rationally A.I.G.’s board addressed its alternatives that night, and notwithstanding that A.I.G. had a team of outstanding professional advisers, the fact remains that A.I.G. was at the government’s mercy."  No shit, fuckface.  They fucked their company, which was at that point insolvent.  It was worth less than zero dollars.  The government negotiated from the standpoint of "I'm going to come and fix this shit party you started."
• The fact that this is magically "fine" indicates that Grover Norquist and his entire band of jackasses don't actually have any real ideals.  Except "fuck you, do what I say," I guess.
• Squirrel!
• And yeah.  This has been a thing for like ever.  Like more than twenty years kind of ever.

Sunday: Mexican

Although the waitress at the Mexican place was kind of surly.  Sorry you have to serve drinks and food to people.  Maybe though, starting every interaction with "What?" isn't super helpful.

Sports people.  Team White Pants won, which made these people sad.

• This plus this is why current old people are the worst people in existence.  "Sure we're doing just fine, but we hate paying the taxes that built the world we lived in.  So we're going to fuck over everybody else because we can."  Just die already, you archaic leeches.
• Now I kind of want a Sailor Jupiter bento.  :(
• Not just ketchup, Pikachu.  That's gross.
• I always assumed that Velma was the leader.  I mean, she's the one who solves all the crimes.  Fred is really more of a chauffeur.
• More Marnie, because it really is the best movie this year.

Saturday: Surprisingly, natural language processing became something I thought about this evening.

Even without actual language processing, I was able to go from concept to initial parsed data in less than an hour.  Regexps aren't an optimal strategy, though.  I talk a lot about pizza, but without parsing the language, you wouldn't know that this post was actually about sushi.

I could have it do more detailed parsing, so that sushi contains a class of descriptors, so me mentioning the miso soup and the unagi adds weight to that topic.

Side note: salmon belly wasn't as good as I'd hoped.  It's filled with burning oil, until it cools off, then it kind of just isn't very good.

Okonomiyaki special.  A disappointment, given that one of the most delicious things I've ever eaten was an okonomiyaki.  The tako inside was rubbery, and the flavors didn't blend well.  The katsuobushi didn't dance, either, which was unfortunate.

So ahi and tamago to make up for it.

Unfortunately there was a gravity related accident.  :(

• If I hadn't gotten lazy and stopped, using this language parser for perl would have been the next step.  Also if I wasn't lazy, I would have used some of the html information in my blog dump instead of just stripping it all out.
• I assume the answer is "some stupid laws," but can't California just institute a scaling water price?  Target a usage quantity, determine the per capita value, and then ramp prices above that value up until the actual usage matches the target.  Rich people may be rich, but there's a point where you can force them to change their actions.  If that next gallon they use costs $1000, they're probably going to be less of a dick about it.
• I didn't remember this scene, and that's so disappointing because it's brilliant.
• Dog science.
• Squirrel.
• Marnie.

Also, thinking about it here at the end after doing the links, it'd be nice if there was a easy way to auto-reblog all the things from tumblr that I link to.  Just something parsing my blog data made me think about.

Friday: Well. So that's my best movie for 2015, then.

When Marnie Was There.

Completely worth having theater hot dog for dinner and not getting through my RSS stuff tonight.

• A lot of the reviews I found were either about Ghibli's future or had crap about how they didn't like the story.  So here's this one instead.
• Chipmunk.
• Pikachu.
• Best Batman will always be the best.

Thursday: Kamehameha Day!

So I got a burger.  Like I did last year, I guess.

• Christopher Lee died.
• Carmander.
• 3463 flags.
• That's really kind of impressive.  Math has a strict enough syntax that this is probably significantly easier than I initially assumed. 

Wednesday: I had a remarkably unproductive day, but it doesn't matter, because tomorrow is a holiday.

Most of the unproductivity was due to hardware failures.  Having to take nearly two hours to go to the doctor, watch a stupid video about drugs, and then sit in the lobby for fifteen minutes so the nurse can check that I "don't feel like something is wrong" didn't help either.  I then returned to spend even more unproductive time putting together new monitors.  The new monitors are all fancy, but I'm most excited about the "probably won't just stop showing stuff randomly" feature.

I also assumed that my new drug would come free stuff like the old one did.  Nope.  With the old drug, I got a cooler, a travel pack with freezer doodle, a pen, a folder full of informational stuff, coupons in case it wasn't already paid for by my insurance, a pony, coloring book, stickers, etc.  I mentioned that to the nurse, and even the old drug doesn't give away all that free stuff anymore either.  Drug companies suck, is what I'm saying.

Plus I received like nine chickens worth of food at lunch today.  This is "four tenders."  Technically it's five, and they're not tenders, they're the part that you get when you just kind of flail a knife at a chicken breast to cut off the tender.  I ended up saving half of this for dinner.

• The best part of Dragonball.
• Red pandas.
• This is just a puddle of pizza surrounded by a legion of hotdogs.
• These are my favorite things to post when I find old art.

Tuesday: ;alkjfsa;ldfadfa

I couldn't figure out what to do with those stickers, so I just put them here.

Maple bacon biscuit.

• The subtitle version of Marnie doesn't start until 7:50?
• Cats.
• Spider-Man.
• Mother fuck.
• I'm somewhat confused as to the point of all of these services.  Pay money to effectively listen to the radio?  Why?

Monday: Self-repeating immortal Franken-ants

A phrase I got to use today at our group meeting as a possible solution to a script that has difficult to trace bug that I can't sort out.  It's the Space Ghost solution.

"But why are they Franken-ants?"

This question makes no sense.  If I say "self-repeating immortal Franken-ants," you probably have a decent idea of the kind of thing I'm talking about, even with no other information.

• So Kansas is basically run by tyrants who have no concept of "constitutional."
• Dogs...just no, dogs.  Stop it.
• I can see no way that this won't be a complete and utter disaster of a show.
• I would go see a big Marvel movie that was just a direct adaption of this educational comic.  Important features that must be retained:
• Thanos flying around in his Thanos-copter.
• Patsy Walker, Hellcat (because fuck you, wikipedia, that is not Tigra).  It's kind of funny that they had to call her "Cat" due to the young target age group.
• Spider-Man basically doing nothing except tying his shoe and getting smacked down by MJ.
• Easy to read sentences.
• Thanos being arrested by the police.

Sunday: Ramen has an emoji, I guess.

Hrm.  Something's missing.

I'm not sure why this was the last thing to come out.  It's usually first.

• Sheep, no.
• Look, things weren't very exciting in the 90s.  Sometimes you had to pretend things were better than they were.
• So Hillary is going with the strategy of "Fuck you, that's bullshit, you're an asshole, and you know all that already, fuck-face"?  Because if so, I'm way more interested in supporting her.

Saturday: Curry day.

Because I felt like curry today.

Did Coke run out of names or are they slowly moving on to concepts.  "Share a Coke with Ennui."

 And then I came home, checked the mail, and after resigning myself yesterday to it taking forever to show up:

Jill Trent, Science Sleuth.

The important thing I should remember for #2 is that I can totally put Dr. in front of my name, moving my name from the "Chris" section to the "Dr." section of the sponsor list.

• LOL.
• Bill Nye, the Science Guy.
• Ok, I can live with this one.  The old theory was so depressing, so having a new one that's far more positive is good.
• Poor Jessie.
• Everything is just fine.

Friday: "Fucking..."

No, google.  Stop that.

Ever since I rerecorded my phone's voice control phrase, I've had the issue where it will occasionally decide I've asked it something, and so I'll get a random search.  That happened today while I was having problems with something.

• Snow leopard.
• Baby southern tamandua, with a hot water stuffed friend.
• More Lalique.
• I still haven't received my copy of Jill Trent, Science Sleuth, and while looking today, I discovered this disturbing phrase: "Delivery to Alaska and Hawaii from the Continential US can take 3-6 weeks!" :(
• Wow.  Fuck Pete Ricketts, Governor of Nebraska.

Thursday: Unexpected new things.

I wasn't sure what to get for lunch today, and had been contemplating going to the manapua place, as even though it's not very good, it'd be something different.  On the way, though, I remembered (when I saw they were open), that the new bakery place opened up.  They have a lot of pastries and sweets and things, but it was lunch time, so I wanted something lunch-y.

Pizza pan.

Not pan like in "cooking pan," but pan as in bread, which is Japanese based on Portuguese, because that's who introduced bread to Japan.  Also because the new bakery place is Japanese style.  Anyway, it's a tiny little pizza that would be a good snack, but isn't quite a full meal.

Pastrami epi.

"Our epis just came out of the oven.  We have bacon and pastrami."  So, sorry bacon, pastrami wins.  With swiss cheese and their own "house sauce" inside.  I don't know what it is.  Delicious?  This was good.  I was only going to eat half of it after having that pizza, but then I thought about it, and ate the second half too.  They don't seem to have a schedule for the epis, but if they're all like this, "random epi" may become a new standard lunch item.

And then I noticed that Minecraft for my tablet updated, so I checked it out to see what's new.  Boats, which means I actually have a reason to have the coast outpost, and red stone blocks, which means I don't have to have a full chest devoted to that useless material (until they finally fix red stone in the pocket edition).

I had just finished making those red stone blocks when I went up to the roof to see where the spider sounds were coming from.  Somehow a spider and and enderman had spawned inside my large animal pen.  I suspect that means I need to add more lights to prevent monster spawns inside my main fort.

• Why are they releasing this on vinyl?  Vinyl is stupid.
• The difference between companies and central banks.
• You really need to know the concept of tsundere for this to totally make sense.

Wednesday: Ugh.

I don't know.  I think I had a caption in my head, but I downloaded this like a month ago, and I've forgotten it.

• Bears.
• Why tattoos are a bad idea.
• Potato.
• Why art deco is wonderful.
• I'm suprised that in all of the news stories about this that I skimmed through, no one has used the challenging forensic technique of "it's a monospace font."  All three lines are presumed centered.  "Written by" and "James Gunn" both have ten characters, so a vertical dropped between 'te' and 's ' will bisect the title as well.  This puts the cut between 'HE', so there are 15 characters to the left, and 7 visible to the right.  Assume the word is "galaxy" followed by a space.  This leaves 5 free characters.  Add a colon, and that's only 4.  That's super short, which makes it hard to come up with plausible words, suggesting it's not actually printed there.

Tuesday: No rye bread.

:(

Also, why are organic bananas wrapped in a thousand stickers?  And if that's how things are going to work, why not group them into a wider range of counts?  This was the first four-pack I've seen in a long time.

• Not Pokemon.
• Probably NSFW.  Lalique glass.
• The cats in the window squares.
• Lady Rainicorn.
• Pokemon.
• Working as a team.
• Team Rocket.
• Pikachu.

Monday: Having a three day week last week makes having a full week this week depressing.

And then the pizza place was out of pretty much all the pizzas, so I had to get spinach, garlic, mushroom, which even though I like spinach+garlic, and I like mushrooms, I do not like this combination.

• Dumbledore.
• Wait.  Dumbledore is in the chrome spell check dictionary but calzone isn't?
• Robot dog.
• Arch villain bunny plots murder of his trapped friend.
• Which is actually somewhat convenient, because you can then use select targeted questions to determine who is likely a bad person.
• Totoro.