Random cupcakes

With random plastic markers from three different movies. Way to go, grocery store.
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Plus a free Isis!

"so I'm supposed to get up in like 2.5 horus."

New apartment pictures!

I finally got around to taking pictures of my apartment. I'm not done yet, because I haven't figured out how to frame pictures of my bathroom, kitchen, and lanai. The basic floorplan is sketched out to the left. Things in black are walls, and things in red are doors of some sort. This is hawaii, so 91% of them are sliding doors. It's pretty convenient, as I don't need to worry about door swinging space.

The top picture is the view of Honolulu from my lanai. In the distance on the left is Diamond Head, "downtown" is towards the right, and as is probably obvious, the ocean is in the middle. Also on the right and left. Technically also behind me, over the mountains. It's an island, we've got lots of ocean around.

• Living Room
  

The first view is of my living room from the front door. You can see the lanai, and all the boxes I still need to get the movers to take back. For some reason, I neglected to get a picture of the one chair that's to the left of the front door, so pretend you see it in that jaggedy black splotch.


This is the opposite view, from next to the kitchen door. This is a good shot to illustrate the "open arrangement" of my apartment. Since the living and bed rooms are separated by big sliding doors, I can open it up into a single large room. This also helps the airflow, since I don't have air conditioning. I really haven't needed it, though, since there's almost always wind coming down the mountains, through the bedroom windows, and then back out through the lanai. Also: there's some weird distortion in the mosaic. The area rug and the entertainment center are separated by maybe a foot at most. I should have caught that when I was making it.

• Bedroom

This is the view from the bathroom door into the bedroom. For some reason, they thought walking to the bedroom from the bathroom via the living room was far too much work, so they added a second door next to the other one. This door can also be blocked by the two big sliding doors. You can see where Roomba has his garage. The one wonky leg next to it on the desk is not a mosaic distortion, that's the leg the movers bent. I still don't know how they did that.

I'm still trying to sort out what I want to do in my bedroom. There's a big empty space (or, there will be once I get the last two boxes emptied and gone), that I'm not sure what to do with. I can't really put any furniture there, as it would block all sorts of doors, and access to the closet. My best thought is some sort of small table or bookshelf. The alternate thought is to buy a bunch of Legos, and have that be the Lego Building Area. This is a snazzy bounce shot, taking advantage of the mirrored closet doors.

• Closet

I spent far too long putting this mosaic together. There's still some bad joins, but I think it's pretty clear. This is what my closet would look like if it didn't have doors, using the magic of computers. You can see the pile of cardboard under my dresser, as the movers also decided that four legs was at least two surplus, and kindly broke the extras off. I'm trying to sort out where I put everything, so for now, a lot of stuff is just piled in where it fits. Since I don't have a closet in the bathroom, the shelves on the right are taking that job. I need to clean them up (those books need to go into one of the book piles I have around), and then adjust the shelves so that they're wide enough for all the towels and sheets and whatnot that needs to go there.


I'll probably do a second post in a few days with pictures of my kitchen. It's pretty small, so I'm not sure how well I'll be able to get pictures.

Roomba!

My Roomba arrived today. My old vacuum died inconveniently just before I moved, when the brush bearing seized up. I've been looking at these things for a while, and I bought one when Amazon had a fancy Gold Box sale on them.

My apartment has been getting messier and messier, as it's kind of hard to keep things clean with just a swiffer. This made it a perfect test for the vacuuming skill of a Roomba. Other than some difficulty navigating around everything on the floor (helped significantly when I remembered I had lighthouses), it did an excellent job. I now know what things it has trouble with (cords aren't a big deal, but rugs bunch up sometimes. Also: the chair in my living room is just an overpass on the Roomba highway), so I'll probably try to rearrange things to be easier for it.

The final thing I need to fix is to put the dock in a better place. It drove around for about ten minutes before I realized it was trying to go home. A quick lift, and it drove in and started recharging. The other problem is that even though the main idea behind getting a Roomba was so I didn't have to spend the time vacuuming, it's really cool to watch, so I'm not sure how much time it'll save.

I haven't set up the scheduling yet, but I figure cleaning MWF is probably good enough to keep things clean. I figure I'll see how it works after a month or so.

I learned almost everything about cooking from Julia Child

Dinner tonight was super tasty:

• Cast iron pan corn bread
• Mashed potatoes with speck
• Sauteed mushrooms with thyme and coriander
• Shrimp in Three Onion Sauce a la Julia Child (made by panfrying the shallots/onion/green onions with butter and garlic, adding shrimp (8-12 count) to pan, cooking until both sides look good, splash in a bunch of vermouth and cover to steam the middle of the shrimp, then uncover, and finish sauce with butter and cream).

Rule #1 of cooking: adding vermouth, cream and butter makes anything taste delicious.

Nom nom nom!

I was going to post about my apartment, and how nice it is since I've gotten all the boxes out of the way, but instead I spent the day finishing unpacking the last of my kitchen stuff. That allowed me a chance to finally sit down and cook for realsies again.

I only got a picture of the salad, as I was too hungry to wait on the rest of dinner. The salad was simple: romaine and strawberries, with a balsamic dressing and sea salt, pepper, and parmesan. The main goal of this was to see if strawberries go well with pepper (surprising answer: yes, very much so).

Julie was talking about a recipe for garlic studded baked potatoes she found somewhere, so I stole that idea. I spent far longer than I'd expected cramming little slivers of garlic into the cuts I'd made in the potato. I finally found the secret: don't try to stab them in, crush the garlic in sideways. I then rubbed the potato down with olive oil and salt, wrapped it in foil, and stuck it in the oven to bake for two hours (350ish. I know it sounds long, but for Yukon gold potatoes, the long cooking time helps carmelize the sugars).

This paired very well with the ribeye I got from Whole Foods last week. I put my cast iron pan in the oven with the potato, so it would be nicely pre-heated when I needed it. Salt/pepper/a pat of butter in the pan/cooky cooky cooky. The ribeye wasn't perfectly even, so I had a bit of a done-ness gradient, making the one side nicely rare, and the other somewhere around the well-done side of medium. While the steak rested, I made a quick sauce with a glass of vermouth, two teaspoons of this snazzy looking balsamic onion jam I picked up at Williams-Sonoma yesterday, and some butter. The sauce never quite thickened as much as I had hoped, something I'll probably fix next time by adding cream. Since it wasn't really the right consistency, I poured it into a rammekin, and used it as a dip for the steak.

All in all, a delicious end to the weekend. A dessert of some sort would have been good, but I don't think I have anything that quite works. I almost stopped at Godiva yesterday to get some chocolates, but the line people stretched out the door, and I'm not really patient enough to deal with that.

kadatheron

I've had this computer for close to twelve years now. I bought it just before my freshman year of undergrad so I could be "connected" and compute, I guess. The original specs for this Compaq Presario 4504 were a Pentium 1 running at 200Mhz, with 16 MB of RAM and a giant (at the time) 2 GB hard drive. Let's see if I can sort through all the modifications I've made over the years:

• Replaced the original 33kbit WinModem with a full hardware 56k modem that would work in Linux. At the time, Linux could not support software modems, so I needed a new one to connect to the MichNet. This modem supported the internet connection for the (somewhat questionable) LAN we made on 2A Bryan. That LAN was powered by
• The 10Base2/10BaseT ethernet card my undergrad roommate and I bought in a two pack. At the time, MSU had ethernet in only a few dorms. Given the cheapness of thinnet cable, we decided it would be easy to wire our own network by feeding cables through the smoke detector connections and lay the cables over the drop ceilings in the hall. I think we had six or so rooms wired together, with this computer serving as the router and gateway between the LAN and the modem driven internet connection. When I moved to Butterfield, I was able to switch over the the 10BaseT ethernet there. This card died recently, just before my move. This prompted me to buy a proper router, although it still forwards all outside connections to kadatheron for handling.
  
• An additional 32MB RAM module. Installing this was when I first cursed at the design of this computer: in order to get to the motherboard, all ISA and PCI cards need to be removed, the motherboard tray unscrewed, and then removed from the right side of the case. then the memory could be installed, and the process reversed.
• A second 10BaseT ethernet card, that I bought to allow me to continue using it as a router for my subsequent other computer purchases. Most of those are now dead. A summary of the computers this served as a router for:
1. "celephais" An IBM Thinkpad 455C if I remember the model number correctly. 486DX/66 with 12MB of RAM and a 700MB hard drive. My first laptop, and (although I haven't checked in a few years) booted perfectly fine last time I checked. I stopped using it because the odd power supply started to crack and fray, and I didn't want to burn down anything or shock myself on it.
2. "navi", homebuilt computer #1. Dual Celeron 533Mhz/128MB RAM/20GB drive on the sainted Abit BP6 motherboard. Built when kadatheron no longer seemed up to snuff. Suffered from the bad capacitor problem for its entire lifetime, dying finally after about 5 years to a shock while upgrading RAM. Hence:
3. "navi" Mark 2. Pentium 4 2.6Ghz/512MB RAM built with the same drives and case and stuff as the previous version. This seems to have perished in my recent move to Hawaii, so it will likely be replaced with navi, Mark 3 in the not too distant future.
4. "niea" A Toshiba laptop I got my first year of grad school to replace celephais. I don't recall exactly, but I think it was a 1Ghz/256MB/20GB (remember this hard drive for later). It died when I left it in my car during grad student recruitment a few years later, and then booted it up when I got home. Probably wouldn't have been a problem, except for the fact that it was in Michigan, in February, and I think it was somewhere around "ass-freezingly cold" at the time.
5. "tachikoma" A Dell laptop bought to replace "niea." 1Ghz/1GB/40GB? The screen backlight fritzed out, making it largely unusable as a laptop. I continued to use it as a file/process server for close to two years, and I developed a lot of my thesis code on it. I then converted it to play videos on my TV, as it had an Svideo out. I think it still runs, but once I hit post-doc-hood-itude, I replace it with
6. "thebigo" My second IBM (Lenovo, whatever) Thinkpad. An R61 this time, with a Core 2 Duo at 2.1Ghz, 2GB RAM, and 120GB RAM. What I'm using to type this post right now.
• An 8GB hard drive. Files got bigger, and 2GB no longer cut it, even after deleting the half devoted to Windows 95. This died at some point, after making horrible grinding noises.
  
The 20GB 3.5inch hard drive from niea, connected with an adaptor. Once niea died, it didn't seem useful to waste such a big hard drive. By this point, kadatheron was running as the CVS server I used to store most of my home directory. 48MB RAM + 24MB swap no longer cut it, so I devoted 512MB to what was at the time, the largest swap partition I'd ever heard of. I think it's the only thing that's letting the system make it through this upgrade.
• The Plextor CDRW drive I bought long ago when such things were uncommon for niea. It's sat fallow for years since I bought a DVD-RW drive, so it's been switched over for kadatheron for this reinstall.

I think that's it, not counting countless mice and keyboards. I think the fact that it's outlasted five other computers, four generations of processors, six major revisions of the linux kernel (I first installed 2.0.18, and I'm installing 2.6.2X right now), two major libc changes, twelve years, and three presidents suggests that those crack smoking Compaq designers (I mean seriously, the CPU fan blows through a baffle to cool the power supply? WTF?) must have known what they were doing.

I know it probably won't last forever, and it probably uses more power to do its jobs than a new computer would, but I'll be sad when it finally does stop working. I'm not sure anything less than a nuclear war will kill it though. If I count correctly, it made twenty-seven trips between my parents house and MSU, one cross town to my grad school apartment, and now to Hawaii via my movers' Two-Month Special. It would still be running fine if I hadn't tried to upgrade it.

I stopped bothering with upgrades long ago, in 2001 if I'm to believe the timestamp on my kernel. This left me with a 2.2 kernel, which cannot directly upgrade to a modern 2.6 kernel due to differences in libc. Without navi, I had no good way to access my USB drives from the office, so I attempted to upgrade using a fresh partition, chroot, and debootstrap. I'm pretty sure it would have worked correctly had I not screwed up running lilo. As I can reconstruct it, I accidentally had lilo point to the new (incomplete) installation on the disk MBR, and not on the partition. This caused lilo to panic on boot, preventing me from even accessing the old install. Therefore, I needed to make a "fresh" break, and install from CD. It's a bit of a shame, but I'll be able to keep the new system up to date now, so I won't have to worry about falling so far behind again. I will have to redirect things in the new configuration, as the webserver will have to get all my (https and password protected) MP3s from USB drives instead of NFS mounted from navi. When I finally put together the new computer, I'll probably have to design a more sane NFS/drive scheme.

In any case, the nostalgia of doing a reinstall of linux on this computer (which was first installed using a giant stack of floppy disks and the power of Quality Dairy slurpies) made me want to sit down and put together some sort of history for this wonderful little box. It kind of reminds me of R2-D2: it's old and a bit out of date, but it's nearly indestructible and does it's job far better than anyone would have ever expected.

Holy crap! Free books!?

That's right! I've been unpacking books for the past two hours, I've filled up all the space I have right now, and I'm not sure how many more book shelves I need to buy. Therefore, I've decided that I need to get rid of some books.

So, for the next week or two, anyone who direct messages me their address via twitter (@astrochris) will get a book mailed to them. I'll choose a book from my library, and send it out as soon as is reasonable via US mail. I won't guarantee that the book will be good, or interesting, or even in a language you speak.

Still, it's a book, and it's free to you. What more can you ask for?

Updates!

1. If you send me a quick description of the type of book you'd like, or some random fact about yourself, I'll try to find the book that I think is most appropriate for you.
2. I found some DVDs I have multiple copies of. Sounds to me like someone's getting a surprise DVD to go with their free book!
   

What I still need to work on

Is my thousand books, and my bed, and all my clothes. Oh, and my dishes and kitchen stuff. :-/
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What I did this afternoon

Was organize my computers and my television
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Just in case you need a visual

It's remarkably hard to find a picture of this online, so I guess I just have to be happy with the black and white version.

My neighbor is a moron

Last night, the night security guard knocked to let me know that there was a drain clog next door, and I shouldn't use the kitchen sink, the washing machine, or the dishwasher (all of which I had been using less than an hour before). This was due to the fact that the drains connect in the wall. Ok, no problem.

I then woke up this morning to the sound of something knocking in my kitchen cabinet under the sink. I opened the door, concerned it was a mouse or something, only to find the end of a pipe auger flopping around on the floor. As it was coming out of the trap under my sink, and noting that I did not have a bad case of Ghost Plumbers, I assumed that my neighbor had hired a plumber, who wasn't very good at what he was doing.

I went next door, to ask what they were doing, and found my neighbor and her "friend" operating the auger. I told them that they'd broken through my pipe, to which the friend replied, "oh, I was afraid of that."

Afraid you'd bore through someone else's pipes? What kind of plumber are you? "No, I'm just her friend." Oh, the type of plumber that isn't actually trained or a plumber at all. Great.

He then proceded to ease the auger out of my cabinet, leaving a nice hole in the trap. He offered to fix it, which I declined in favor of getting someone who knew what the fuck he was doing.

I piled a bunch of paper towels to blot up the mess in my cabinet, and then left for work. A day full of trading phone calls back and forth with the maintenance guy and the rental office and the plumber they called, and I have an appointment with a plumber tomorrow at 8:30. I returned home fearing that I'd find my apartment flooded, to be relieved that my paper towels had contained most of the mess.

I went next door again to make sure that my neighbor wasn't going to use that sink, and that she hadn't during the day, which she agreed to and claimed she hadn't. However, "he fixed the clog!" Great. Wonderful. That's as good as having a coat full of puppies.

Back in my kitchen, I start to clean up the mess, and find that my paper towels are kind of a messy soup. Thanks to Target's crazy sale strategy, I am in possession of a 12 pack of paper towels, so I use a half roll (and a pile of bleach wipes) to clean up the mess, and then wedge my kitchen garbage can under the trap to catch anything else that might drip out.

Upon washing up, I realized why the clog was gone. The burning sensation in the hand that wiped up the mess suggested that the majority of the liquid I cleaned up was drain opener. Yay sodium hydroxide!

Force of July! Part VI!

I already talked about Return of the Jedi, way back in March. I don't think there's much more that needs to be said.

Force of July! Part V!

I can't come up with much for Empire. Yoda's obviously insane at this point, but a quick chat with Luke helps him shake off 20ish years of living alone. That pretty much makes sense, given that when we get to the prequels, it's clear that Yoda doesn't notice the Emperor is the Sith lord until it's way too late.

My only other thought is that Lobot (picture on the left if you didn't already know him) is totally rocking out to sweet techno mixes while running all of Cloud City.

Force of July! Part IV!

I had originally planned on buying the Star Wars DVDs, blocking off a good chunk of this three day weekend, and watching them all, in series chronological order, in one go.

Unfortunately, this was before my furniture (and DVD player) decided to take a quick 3 week nap before getting on a damn boat. Oh well. Spike decided that I wasn't going to watch their channel if they didn't show Star Wars all weekend, so that's what they're doing. It's not a single run, and they're playing them in release chronological order, but sometimes you have to take what you can.

Watching Episode 4 made me realize something. Everyone in the movie, with the exception of Tarkin and Jabba are stupidly naive.

Rebel: "Hey, thanks Luke Skywalker for rescuing Princess Leia."

Luke: "No problem, it was fun, even though the guy who was like a father/mentor to me for at least two days got killed."

Rebel: "Yeah, that can be rough. Any plans?"

Luke: "Um...can I fly one of your fighters?"

Rebel: "Sure, got any space-fighter skills?"

Leia: "I'm sure he does. He shot down at least one TIE fighter when we were escaping. You've been flying for what, four, five years?"

Luke: "Um...yeah. Sure. Five years next Tuesday."

Leia: "Then it's settled, we'll give you your own fighter, and hell, you can even take my R2 unit with you. I'm sure both of these Very Expensive Machines will be perfectly safe with someone with your training. It's not like you grew up on a farm on a tiny podunk world where you were completely grounded."

Luke: ".... I hate sand."


I mean, they still pull it off, and it turns out Luke is great at flying something he'd never in his life seen before, but I'm willing to bet that's because none of those controls do anything. R2-D2 probably does everything, while Luke's inside flipping switches and jerking the wheel back and forth like a little kid.

I guess it's good that the Force was with that little blue droid.

Comcast sucks

I recently moved to Hawaii, and canceled my service with Comcast on the 22nd of May. However, I received a bill today at my new address (which I gave when I canceled the account) that was issued on the 28th of May, for service after the date of cancellation. This was especially troubling after I had been told that I would be receiving a partial refund for the time I would not be using the service.

When I attempted to resolve this via telephone, I found myself trapped in a long phone tree which always dropped me to a dead end noting that I'd "called after hours." This struck me as a surprise, given that both the comcast.com webpage and my bill itself note that I can call "24 Hours a Day/7 days a week." I apologize for attempting to contact you on the magical eighth day that you aren't open.

All in all, I guess this kind of half-assed fucktardary is what I would have expected after dealing with Comcast for eight years now. I should have known that the same company who tries to "serve me better" by removing channels from my lineup and periodically turning off my cable modem for "upgrades" wouldn't be able to let me cancel the service in peace without trying to take even more of my money.

What are you doing puppy?

You're not a chicken! You don't even have feathers!

I has a car!

It goes vroom vroom vroom!

Also: it is night-time here, so bbcam doesn't work so well.

Still: VROOM VROOM VROOM!
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First day of work

I mean seriously, who uses .csh scripts?
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I love L.A.

"I see you have 'I love L.A.' merchandise."

"Yes, of course, in many styles."

"Do you have any 'Los Angeles is the ass-end of hyper-pretentious douchebaggery' merchandise?"

"Pardon?"

"I mean, you must, right? It has to be the more prevalent attitude, right?"

"Why would you say that?"

"Well, the traffic is bad, even ignoring the dumb design attitude of 'just add another freeway.' There's also the airport, which scientifically designed to frustrate and annoy. But, I think the most obvious reason is the hyper-pretentious douchebaggery that is evident in 70% of the people and 90% of their actions. So again, do you have any-"

"No we don't, now get the fuck out."

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My last night here with you

Maybe yes, maybe no.

Despite movers arriving in four hours, I can't get to sleep. I'm no where near packed as much as I wanted to be. My apartment is a mess of boxes and unpacked crap. Hopefully the movers will be ok with this fact.

It seems weird thinking that this is the last time I'll be in this apartment. I moved in eight years ago, and I've gotten used to it, even if I've spent too much of that time hiding things in dark corners. I'm going to miss East Lansing. I've lived here 12 years, longer than anywhere else before. I think it'll be where I retire, if I have the option.

Time to try this sleeping thing again. Wake up in two hours, get clean, pack some, watch the movers do their thing, cancel accounts, return keys, drive six hours to my parents' house. I hereby curse the 22nd of May as the Worst Day to Ever Occur.

Moving day

:(
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Hawaii

Hawaii is much more humid than I thought it would be, based on my periodic scanning of the weather over the past couple of weeks. It's been like 50%, and suddenly jumps up to 90% when I show up. Screw you, moisture!

I've looked around, and I think I know where I'm going tomorrow, and it's not too far off. That makes sense, as they probably wouldn't put me on the other side of the island or something.

Ok, it's time to think about going to bed, because it feels like it's almost 3, and I have to get up early for the meeting tomorrow.

OMG WTF BBQ, LAX?

The upper right shows the broken ceiling tile that is dripping water onto the floor (lower left). I don't know where the water is coming from, since this is Los Angeles, the land that rain forgot. Maybe it's coming from the A/C system?

In any case, it probably should be fixed, or have sign or something.
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Lunch :(

4^* To Go






* Bars

Tritter

I hate Tritter. He's the dumbest character ever to appear on House. That includes Administrator Black Tritter, who I don't even like enough to look up his real name. It also includes the guy who pretended he wanted to have sex with a cow, but really killed Tara, prompting Willow to freak out and turn all evil.

Wait, that might have been a different show.

In any case, the whole concept of an arbitrarily powerful foil for House is dumb. It would be as if periodically Sherlock Holmes has to fight the entire Prussian army to solve a murder. And not just once, either. I'm talking that the entire Prussian army has moved in next door, and Mrs. Hudson brings them tea when they try to stop Holmes. Would you read that story? Of course not, because you just want to see Holmes solve the crime in a witty and unexpected way.

Same thing with House. You don't tune in each episode to watch House do his taxes or buy new shoes. You want to see him be an ass to people while he solves murders medical issues. Watching him fight The Man is none of that.

On a side note, a House-like show about a chartered accountant fighting The Man might be good, but only if it involved sailing on the wide accountant-sea.

A suggestion I mentioned on twitter was that someone should recut and reshoot all the episodes to remove Tritter from the show. To explain House's problems getting his vicodin, replace the drug charges with a worldwide shortage of the pills. Sure, that's stupidly unrealistic, but it's not like House is always medically accurate.

In any case, I'd never have to see Tritter's dumb face showing up, looking smug, and trying to stop people from getting better. If they wanted to do that, they could have made a new show: Tritter. It could be about an asshole cop who solves problems using logic and deduction.

Oh wait, that'd just be Sherlock Holmes again.

A good antagonist is equally smart and capable as the protagonist. However, you can't have a Moriarty for House. It just won't work. There's a guy going around inventing diseases and giving them to people? That's more of a crime issue than a medical. It's been pretty well established that no one else on the show is as smart as House. Therefore, the only way to get an antagonist for House is to turn him against himself.

This is why I like the hallucinations from this season. They know all the things that House knows, but seem intent to crush him. Also: kill Chase. I'm looking forward to next season.

Look at this bunny

You are now dead from teh cute.

My conversation with a squirrel

As I tweeted, his accent was a bit hard to understand. I tried to find what he was talking about, but I couldn't see anything wrong in the area. I left him a few peanuts, and hoped he would calm down enough to go eat them.




(Sorry about the quality, but my Blackberry isn't exactly a broadcast quality video camera. The wiggly squirrel looking guy in the middle is the squirrel, and the bark sounds are coming from him. The train? Not the squirrel, just for the record.)

Countdown

I've finally nailed down the movers, so I now have a very good idea about when I'm moving: pack up on the 22nd of May, and arrive in Honolulu on the 24th, start work on the 25th.

Except I can't, because the 25th is Memorial Day. Stupid inconvenient holidays not being when I want them.

In addition to that, I'm now super likely to be visiting Honolulu for a PANSTARRS meeting on the 18th. Which means I fly out, meet, fly back, pack a bit, move, fly back to Hawaii. Certainly not the most efficient thing I could do, but better than a lot of the alternatives. This extra visit should give me a chance to look at a few apartments, and hopefully sort out where I'll be living for the next few years.

One interesting thing I discovered is that the movers really want to pack everything, as it's going to go on a boat. They seem to think that their packing is better for that. Whatever, I don't think you can mess up boxing up books. In any case, this frees up some of my time, as I don't need to bother doing all the packing. I'm going to get some cleaning and sorting done, but that shouldn't take too long.

This leaves just one thing I need to decide: which restaurants are good enough and important enough for me to put them on my farewell tour to East Lansing. Zingerman's is already there, because it's delicious. Peanut Barrel wins on the same points. I'm not sure what else to put on, since I've been going to Omi and Pizza House fairly regularly recently.

Sakura!

Finally here in Michigan!

I took this picture while driving, so it's no where near as good as it would be if I wasn't trying not to crash. I'll see what things look like on Monday.

Differential!

Made with the legos I brought with me grad school! It's the little gear box doodle between the big rear wheels. It all makes sense now: when it moves straight, the wheels turn the same direction, the gears lock up, and the whole box rotates with the wheels. When you turn the corner however, the wheels are free to turn at different speeds by letting the gears unlock a bit. So now my fancy little 4-cylinder fixed gear racer can go around corners without shredding the tires!

Well, assuming we ignore the fact that there's never going to be any compression with the pistons exposed. Also, that fixed gear system is going work like crap, since the camshaft and wheels are fixed at the same speed.

Whatever. It's legos, and I had fun playing with them again, even if I have to take it apart soon so I can get it packed away and moved to Hawaii.

Ooops

Somehow, when I was having words with a certain squirrel, I made up a name surprisingly similar to the name of the Luanne's British penguin puppet, "Sir Reginald Featherbottom III". I have no idea how that happened, as I don't remember ever seeing them before until tonight.

Weird.

Nigerian scammers need to be beat to death

Thanks for being a fucking Nigerian fucking scam, douchebag. I'm trying to honestly find a fucking apartment, and you're trying to steal money. Why don't you get a real job, or move to country that has a stable enough government to support real jobs?

Seriously, does this ever work? Can you send me a list of names and addresses for people you've scammed, so I can beat them up for being so god damn fucking stupid? Also: I have a fucking Ph.D., in a hard science. I don't believe anything unless I can prove it. And you come along with "Oh! I'm REV GARY AND MY WIFE MARY and we TOTALLY OWN THE HOUSE THAT WE TOLD YOU WAS AN APARTMENT! WE ARE (not) TRYING TO STEALYOUR MONEY AND SHIT LIKE THAT!" Did you think I wouldn't notice? Do your friends tell you that Americans are so damn stupid that we always fall for this shit?

Why don't you just change your postings to "Hi! I want your money, and don't really own any property in Hawaii, I'm just trying to steal your information to attempt to steal money from you! I'm hoping your too fucking dumb to notice this, and would like you to send me all sorts of stuff to make it easy to steal your identity. Look! I'm a Reverend, therefore I must be religious and honest, because selling the service of an invisible space wizard is totally the most honest job ever. Let me (not) steal all your money and make you sorry you ever tried to find a fucking apartment!"

Yours in Christ ("Please do understand us why the keys are with us.")

Fuck you

(Seriously? You want me to believe you moved to a different fucking country, took the keys, and tried to rent it out? WTF, asshole?)

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 04:59:13AM -0400, gun pet wrote:
> Hello,

> Thanks for the email. I am Rev Gary and my wife Mary own the house
> and also want you to know that it was due to my transfer that makes
> me and my wife to leave the house and also want to give it out for
> rent and looking for a responsible person that can take very good
> care of it as we are not after the money for the rent but want it to
> be clean at the time and the person that will rent it to take it as
> if it were its own. So for now, We are here in Nigeria,
>
> our new house and also with the keys of the house, we try to look
> for an agent that we can give this documents before we left but
> could not see and we are as well as don't want our house to be u sed
> any how in our present that is why we took it along with us. I and
> my wife came over to Nigeria for a missionary work, so i hope you
> will promise us to take very good care of the house. So get back to
> me on how you could take care of our house or perhaps experience you
> have in renting home.
>
>
> Please do understand us why the keys are with us.
>
>
> FILL THE APPLICATION FORM
> RENT APPLICATION FORM
> 1)Your Full Name :
> 2)Your Full Address & Phone Number :
> 3)How old are you?
> 4)Are you married?
> 5)How many people will be living in the house?
> 6)Do you have a pet?
> 7)Do you have a car?
> 8)Occupation?
> 9)What is your religion?
> 10)What is your monthly income?
> 11.WHEN ARE YOU PLANNING TO MOVE IN?
> 12)How long are you willing to rent?
> CALL ME NOW +2348055088045 or 0112348055088045 IMMEDIATLY LET DISCUS
>

My flowers came up!

Although it's only the red ones right now. The purple ones are always about a week or two behind schedule. There's usually a reasonable crossover period, though.

:)

(And yes, I know that the Blackberry camera isn't the greatest, and it's even worse when it's dark out. I'll update again tomorrow when the Daystar is out.)

Seriously?

Seriously?

You thought this was a valid solution to the problem?

WTF?

Nonparametric Statistics

I keep forgetting about this thing, which I'd feel worse about if other people weren't forgetting as well.

Today I fought with nonparametric statistics. If you've never worked with them, they represent a class of statistical measurements that make no assumptions about the underlying distribution. The standard forms tell you if the mean or median or something like that is consistent between two samples. There are weak ways to check for different variances as well. However, I've been trying to use them to calculate if two variables are correlated, as well as trying to see if two samples are drawn from the same distribution, whatever that may be.

The complication is that I have 150 and 1500 data points in my two samples. Almost all of these nonparametric methods are designed for small N cases, although no one ever claims that they're not good for large N. The problem lies when you attempt to calculate the significance of the statistic. Just about all of these things assume the p-value comes from normal distribution with z ~ sqrt(N) * R. Since p(z=2.33) = 99%, a significant statistic value is something like R = 2.33 / sqrt(N). Therefore, with the large N samples I'm working with, it's hard to get not significant values. This may sound great, but if everything shows a significant relation, then the statistic has lost its value, because everything gives the same answer.

The end result of all this, is that nonparametric statistics are a worse class of lies than regular parametric statistics, and you should be wary of anyone who says "Mann-Wilcoxon-Whitney" or "Kendall Tau." These rank up there with the KS test as "a test you can cling to when you really have nothing valid to claim."

Monday. Work. Teen Titans.

My boss was back in town today. Which meant I had to go to work. Still, it was good to get his opinion on things, and sort out the papers.

I also discovered that Teen Titans is back on Cartoon Network. This morning's episode was one of my favorites. Seeing TT again prompted me to look into the video game, which I played long ago when it first came out. Gamestop had it for only $10, so I picked it up on the way home. It fits perfectly into the level of "beat up bad guys" and "don't worry too much, because it's designed for kids, so it's not too tough." I miss games like that.


I do have Easter food pictures, but I haven't bothered to get them from my phone yet. They'll probably show up later this week.

Late Night Edit: Looking at the Cartoon Network schedule seems to indicate that this was a one time Teen Titans showing. Damn damnity damn damn. I'm going to need to buy the DVDs when I get to the Tropics.

Sweet Zombie Jesus Day

Day 11: Laziness

I basically sat around today and watched TV. I probably should have finished paper edits, but I didn't feel like it. My Easter dinner is pretty easy for tomorrow, so I might do it then.

The best "burger" ever

I think this may have been one of the greatest ideas I've ever had. Ok, so it's not my idea, I stole it from the Union Street Public House, as I mentioned on Wednesday. From bottom to top, each "burger" is made of:

• Toasted English Muffin
• Moutarde Violette, the purple wine mustard from Zingerman's
• Sliced Canadian Black Diamond Cheddar (the sharpest cheddar sold in town, according to my cheese guy)
• Quarter pound filet mignon, seared with sea salt and cracked pepper
• Prosciutto di parma, thicker sliced than usual as it's the free first calibration slices from a new ham (Cheese Guy is also Deli Guy, and is always helpful)
• Sauteed mushrooms
• Sauteed and half carmelized onion strings

I also made some homemade fried chips, but they paled in comparison to the burgers (although, they really aren't that bad. Had I made just about anything else, they probably would have been a good hit). Two of these burgers were really too much for diner, as I'm totally full after just eating them. It was also clearly not cheap, but I figured if I'm going to make something good for Good Friday dinner, I might as well go all out (even if this completely violates every religious food prohibition ever invented).

Hey Orbitz!

Why did I get an email from you again today? I unsubscribed from your bullshit emails yesterday, after becoming furious that I received one on the 7th and one on the 8th. Do you seriously think I need to be reminded of your fucking existence every damn day? Do you think people really sit at home, constantly refreshing their email to get the latest travel updates?

Rest assured, your constant hounding of me via email has ensured that I will never book anything through your site again. It's not worth my time to have to deal with daily spam about how you've "Removed Booking Fees!" or "OMG FREE GIFT KARD WHEN YOU STAY WITH RENAAIISSSANCE HOTELSS !!!11!!! LOL!" Who the fuck cares about this shit? Do you have anybody in charge of determining if this shit is important before you send it out, or do you simply have a legion of barely competent morons, any of which are allowed to mail all of your customers.

I also find it interesting that my email preferences note that "This e-mail address displays text and images." Except it doesn't, and hasn't for the eleven years I've had it. This suggests strongly that like many other companies, some dickhead in your marketing department thought it'd be a great idea to enable emails for everyone, even those who had opted out before.

I hope you can stop sending me emails, delete my account, shut down as a company, and starve to death in the gutters.

Is it worth going in to work?

My boss is out of town, I generally don't talk to anyone else in the office, and I have papers to write. The nice thing about writing scientific papers is that you can pretty much do them anywhere. This means that there's really no incentive for me to pack a lunch, drive to the office, eat that lunch, sit at my desk, scribble more text, and then drive home. It seems wasteful.

Dark food plans

I'm thinking this weekend will be host to a variety of culinary adventures. I'm thinking of making a copy of the "My Bar, My Rules" Sandwich from the Union Street Public House outside Washington DC. I had it when I was there for AAS, and remember it being very good. It was on an English Muffin back then, so that's going to by my strategy. The plan is to buy a nice steak, sear the edges, slice in half, and then sear the surfaces, using the two halfs to make two mouth sized "burgers." Top it with some nice sharp English cheddar, and some grilled onions (maybe some mushrooms, too?), and I'm pretty sure that'll be the tastiest burger ever.

Then there's Easter on Sunday. I'm going to cooking for myself, so I'm thinking about just doing a pair of shanks instead of roasting up an entire leg of lamb. It'll probably be some modification on my braised shank recipe (shanks, bottle of sweet white wine, a few leeks, garlic, sage, etc. Sear, bubble bubble, remove reduce and sauce). Add some garlic mash potatoes and a few other sides, and that should work out pretty well. I'll sort out the details when I get to the grocery store.

Sick

I feel like crap, because I picked up some illness on Monday. My throat is sore, and I spent a half hour coughing this morning. :(

Snow!

I was concerned that wouldn't be able to see snow anymore, since Hawaii just doesn't have any. Luckily this freak storm came through and made everything winter-tastic.

It looks like my tulips survived the 3ish inches without any trouble, too.

Lego Batman Disappointment

Watching Clone Wars reminded me of Lego Star Wars, which made me wish they would make Lego Star Wars: The Clone Wars: The Video Game. That doesn't look too likely now, although there are Lego Lord of the Rings: The Video Game rumors.

All of these Lego Licensed Game: The Video Game thoughts reminded me that I never finished Lego Batman. Slap it in, charge it up, and I was off to finish up the last few things.

This is where things fell apart. The final thing I needed for "Hero mode" unlocked Hush as a playable character. I hate Hush. He's just somebody Jeph Loeb invented because he didn't know how to write any of the existing Batman bad guys as plausible threats to Batman. The Lego Batman version comes off basically the same. He has guns. He shoots people. That puts him on par with The Mad Hatter and Killer Freaking Moth. Except Mad Hatter can mind control people, and Killer Moth can fly.


So, Hush is a less scary version of Killer Moth. Killer Moth. That guy to the right? That's Killer Moth. He wears brightly colored striped tights to rob people. In a city with a Batman that has hobbies like "beat criminals until they wet themselves." Clearly, not only is Killer Moth scarier than Hush, he's either more insane or far braver. Either of which gives him a stronger case for being a supervillain.

Ok. Moving on.

The second thing that disappointed me was that the final thing I need to do to complete the game at 100% is to slide through five gates. However, I only get one try per attempt at the level, the gates require you to be perfectly lined up to open, and it requires a combination of sliding opening two gates, switching characters, moving into position to open the third, and then moving over to hit the final two. A mistake anywhere means you're screwed, and forces you to restart the entire level. This wouldn't be so much of a problem if I didn't have computer AI characters that insisted that snow plows work best when you push them into a lake.

I now remember why I stopped playing the game. I guess I'll have to be happy with a 99.5% completeness score until I forget how frustrating that level is.

Lord of the Rings

Since my sleep schedule was messed up to begin with, I'm watching the Lord of the Rings. Trilogy. Extended Edition.

I started at 12:30, and if I do the math correctly, I should be done by noon. I just started disk 4, in which Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli lead Rohan to Helm's Deep. I'm not sure if I'll make it the whole way, but I figured it was worth trying.

Plus, this gives me an easy post for NaBlahMonkeyPaw.

Posting daily isn't that exciting

Especially when you spend all day writing papers and working on statistics. I'm just going to put up this crappy post, and pretend it's good enough.

Also: p-values from rank correlation tests become increasingly unreliable as the number of points increases.

Sleep and I are not friends

Somehow, I've gotten switched around to a 30ish hour day which is currently almost completely out of phase with everyone else in my time zone. I'm getting a decent amount of work done, since I'm just writing papers right now, which can be done anywhere and at any time. It helps somewhat that my entire team is out of town, so I don't need to worry about going in to work at a specific time.

Nablahblablahblah 2

Apparently this thing is happening again, where we all post a new entry every day and it's all parties and wonderment.

Except I'm supposed to be rewriting a paper for work, like I've been doing all week long. So instead of having a full proper post about something, I'm just going to stick up this picture of a red panda. They are cute. They sometimes walk upright like people just to be even cuter. They eat bamboo like regular pandas, but aren't complete morons and eat other stuff, since bamboo is basically indigestible.

Japan makes cat videos?

This page includes ANIMAL CONTENTS.
Please use at your own responsibility on yourself.
We also detrimental if you use any of this site.
Please note that we are not responsible.
If you hate cats, will be prohibited from accessing the target.
How do you like cats?

Yes

No

http://chaos.oc.to/SON/

On Ewoks

This weekend Return of the Jedi has been on TV, and since it's my favorite of the Star Wars movies, I've been watching as much as possible. I know everyone claims that it's not as good as the previous ones, and the big complaint is the Ewoks, and how unrealistic it is that they can take down the Emperor's best troops. After watching it again, I've come to a conclusion: Ewoks are horrible monsters.

First, it's clear that they eat meat. Hell, they nearly ate half the main cast. Not only that, but from the trap they set that Chewbacca fell for, they apparently eat other carnivores. The trap was also set fairly high, and had a net strong enough to hold a Wookiee, 2 humans, and two droids. They're not hunting deer, they're hunting some sort of giant monster. So, not only are they carnivores, but they eat other carnivores, making them disturbingly high on the food chain.

Second, I don't think the Empire had any idea they were there, or if they did, what they were. They built like 70% of a freaking Death Star, so the Empire was on Endor for a long time. The Ewoks have probably been picking off scout patrols for a long time. The Empire knows there's something out there, because they keep losing men, but they're not going to believe survivors that blame it on cute little teddy bears. Having been there for so long, the Ewoks know where all the weak points are in the Stormtrooper armor, and know how to exploit them.

Finally, during the final battle, the Imperial officers rush out in fancy suits. That's no protection at all from the damn forest piranha, so they're probably all dead and half eaten within the first ten minutes of the battle. This means that the entire leadership structure breaks down almost immediately, leaving patrols of Stormtroopers with no idea what they're doing. They're expecting a proper stand up battle against the Rebellion, and they get horrible death monsters attacking them from behind and eating their friends. I don't care how well trained they are, that's going to freak them the fuck out. Panic sets in, they start shooting blindly, and the whole thing falls apart.

I'm also going to suggest that the Rebels get off of Endor first thing the morning after the end of Return of the Jedi. They know they're friends with the Ewoks, and part of the tribe, and that they have C-3P0 as the Ewok god, but on the other hand, they just spent the evening eating the rations they brought with them while politely declining roast Stormtrooper.

My day was pretty cool, I got a new job

so here's some pandas.

My day sucked

so here's a panda.

Dagwood

I has it.

It's apparently the same distance.

The A's are where I'm staying, and the big shaded university looking things are the universities I'm working at. It looks like I'm roughly the same distance away from where I'm working now as I was in Michigan. The difference is that I don't need to walk to Haslett Road, and then take a bus over and down Hagadorn in Michigan.

I just wanted to see how far things were in both places, and I figured that once it was done, I might as well save it somewhere.