Until 29 Jun 2005, this blog was (intentionally) not linked from any pages, so the entries before this date are just for reference.
Some blog entries have "titles", some don't. The "view just this entry" is really just for search engines and/or if I/you want to direct someone to a single entry.
Fair warning: this "blog" page contains my spur-of-the-moment thoughts and observations, and is completely unstructured. As of late July 2003 (and probably from now until the end of time), this site is in testing/experimental mode, so expect errors and oddnesses. In particular, I "blog" from the command-line, so punctuation is usually inaccurate/non-existant. Emails about this blog to blog@sarangworld.com.
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| Current Time: 2010 March 11, 05:43 PM EST | ||
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| Title/Time/Category | Blog | |
| Big Beaver in front, Whitetail in back Blog (View just this entry) |
The 1992 edition of "The Great Saskatchewan Vacation Book" (motto: like being in Canada, only not as cold and with fewer Canadians) lists several US-Canada Customs Offices. Each office has a "US side" and a "Canada side"-- for example, one Customs Office has "North Portal, Saskatchewan" as it's Canada side, and "Portal, North Dakota" as it's US side. The one I found most fascinating had "Big Beaver (Saskatchewan)" as it's Canada side, and "Whitetail (Montana)" as it's US side. | |
| Philately is a Dirty Word Blog (View just this entry) |
Way back in the late 1970s, I used to collect coins, but gave it up,
because I was always disappointed at how few coins a given amount of
money would buy.
Years later, I discovered stamp collecting, after sending away for a starter set from the Jamestown Stamp Company. Along with my first assortment, they sent a form asking me what types of stamps I wanted to receive. After putting down "inflation stamps" [stamps issued in large denominations because currency has been devalued to the point where it costs 1 million marks (or whatever) to send a letter], I was stumped. After rejecting all the "obvious" stamp "topicals" [eg, stamps with puppies, stamps with flowers, stamps with monarchs, etc], I finally let honesty come to the rescue and put down "naked women" (which turns out to be a surprisingly good answer in many situations-- try it at your next job interview). I fully expected Jamestown to ignore my request, or to send me a polite-but-firm letter explaining that they couldn't help me. I'd forgotten that many old paintings feature naked women [ahh, Rubens-- naked women AND wonderful sandwiches-- is there nothing you can't do?], and that many stamps feature old paintings! For many years, Jamestown kept the naked women coming [to my mailbox, that is], and, when purchased in bulk, collectible stamps are sometimes less than 1 cent each, making this the cheapest form of "soft porn" I'd ever found! (this was before free soft porn websites, of course). NOTE: While I think Jamestown is a wonderful company, this isn't an endorsement. I later signed up with Kenmore, which also has a great selection, and I'm sure other stamp companies do too. Jamestown just happened to be the company that introduced me to naked-women stamp collecting. As crude as some people may find this entry, please note that I refrained from the obvious "and you can lick the backs" joke. | |
| England, Great Britain, the United Kingdom, commonwealth realms, and commonwealth nations Blog (View just this entry) |
It annoys me when people refer to England as a "country", since it's
not a sovereign nation-- rather, it's part of the United Kingdom,
which is a sovereign nation. Of course, this doesn't explain why
England has a top-level domain (TLD), namely ".en".
Even worse, Great Britain, which has no political status whatsoever (it's just the name of the island on which England, Scotland, and Wales are situated-- and if you've ever wondered "what's so great about Great Britain", it's just called that to distinguish it from Britannia, a smaller, nearby French island with a similar name), also has a TLD, namely ".gb". To be fair, other dependent islands also have TLDs (the Faroe Islands (.fo) [Denmark], Reunion Island (.re) [France], the uninhabited Heard and McDonald Islands (.hm) [New Zealand], and, worst of all, the uninhabited and stupidly named British Indian Ocean Territory (.io) [United Kingdom]). Some people even think that Australia and Canada are "part of" England or the United Kingdom in some strange way. Not true, but Australia and Canada are the two largest "commonwealth realms"-- independent nations that recognize King Charles II as their head-of-state/King. The other 13 nations who recognize King Charles II as their King (excluding the United Kingdom itself, obviously): Antigua and Barbuda [that's one single country with an "and" in their name-- don't even get me started!], the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Grenada, Jamaica [ya mon!, Chuck be'd d' King!], New Zealand [which I maintain is really part of Australia, even though they refuse to admit it-- ironically, Tasmania, which really is part of Australia, often behaves like it's independent], Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis [another country with an "and" in it's name-- they actually held a national referendum to separate into two countries with two names, but this eminently sensible referendum was defeated -- I'm sure if they ever have a referendum to annex another country, it will pass, so their name will eventually be "Saint Kitts and Nevis and Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and a Bunch of Really Small Uninhabited Islands That Are Underwater Ninety Percent of The Time But Are Still Part of This Stupid Country and Also Starring Norman Fell as Mr Roper"], Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines [this would be a good name for a rock band], the Solomon Islands, and Tuvalu [wasn't he the Vulcan guy on Star Trek: Voyager?] I have yet to come up with a mnemonic for the 15 commonwealth realms. The closest I've gotten is "Solomon, grinning twice, zealously jams antique Barbies (2) into papa's new guinea pig.", which doesn't quite work. Just to confuse matters, "commonwealth realm" sounds a lot like "commonwealth nation", but they are different. The "commonwealth of nations" is just a group of countries (all former British colonies) that have a special trade agreement with each other (sort of like NAFTA or the EEC, but without a stupid acronym). There are 53 commonwealth nations, and I am not going to list them here, partly for space reasons, but mostly the "commonwealth of nations" is stupid. I realize some British (English? United Kingdomish? commonwealthers?) people might be offended by this blog entry (I like British people, and I like annoying them even more), because 1) they're British and pretty much offended by everything, 2) Queen Elizabeth II is still the British monarch [as of this writing -- but I'm sure the old bat will have to step down soon!] so I shouldn't be talking about "King Charles", 3) if you believe the textbook version of British history, Prince Charles will ascend to the throne as King Charles III (not II); I, however, prefer the Blackadder version of British history. This might be a good time to remind everyone that I type these blog entries off the top of my head and am too lazy to do any fact checking. In other words, if you're reading my blog entries, you're a fairly sad individual-- if you're reading my blog entries and expecting factual material, you're beyond hope. Slightly more accurate information on some of this crap may be found at: Then again, it may not be... | |
| Fashions by Sunkist Blog (View just this entry) |
One of my favorite television programs is the improvisational "game
show" Whose Line Is It Anyway? (the original British version, not
the significantly less interesting American version). In one of the
episodes, all the other contestants are teasing Ryan Stiles because
he's wearing a bright orange shirt, and, in one of the games, he sings
"People make fun of me just because I wear fashions from Sunkist"
(exact wording courtesy
http://phillips.personal.nccu.edu.tw/improv/bart.html).
I'd always assumed there were no "fashions from Sunkist", but, on 20 Feb 2002 (http://sarangworld.com/TSHIRT), I wore a Sunkist t-shirt (a gift from the Sunkist cooperative), which does indeed have a bright splash of orange color on it. It's one of my more favorite shirts, and I happen to be wearing it again today. | |
| Differences between the Bowling for Soup song 1985 and My Life Today Blog (View just this entry) |
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| Klingons (Tlingits) in Alaska? Blog (View just this entry) |
Did Klingons come to Earth and live in Alaska several hundred years
ago? Consider this excerpt from the Alaska Official State Map:
Alaska's two great Indian nations, the Tlingits and the Athabascans, settled in Southeast and Central Alaska. Defeating guns and cannons with primitive weapons? Sure sounds like the Klingons to me. And, as all Trekkies know, the correct spelling of Klingon is "tlhIngan", which is very close to "Tlingit". I'm actually not the first person to notice this-- some other sites suggest that the Klingons were named after the Tlingits, but I find my explanation much more plausible. | |
| Secret Link Blog (View just this entry) |
Here's a link to a page that's been on my site for at least 6 years,
but that doesn't have any links leading to it (it's hidden, but not
password-protected): http://sarangworld.com/meetsarang.php3
I'd like to say something like "after many years of introspection, I've decided to release this page", but I probably just forgot to link it when I created it 6+ years ago-- and I'm still too lazy to link it from anywhere except here. According to my (sadly incomplete) log files, the only hit to this page so far was from one person who used my on-site search engine to find it [it was called meetsarang.shtml back then] way back in August 1999 (in fact, that's the only way I know this page is 6+ years old-- I have no idea when I actually created it!) Update: I remember a co-worker at UNM commenting on this page, so I must've created it while I was still working at UNM -- ie, sometime before 27 Sep 1996. | |
| Google this! Blog (View just this entry) |
If you visit "http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache%3Awww.sarangworld.com%2Fblog%2F" (or type "cache:www.sarangworld.com/blog/" into the google search engine), you can see google's most-recently cached version of this page. Since I display the current time/date at the top of this blog table, you can tell exactly how long ago google last visited my site (considering it has to crawl the entire World Wide Web, I'm amazed at how up-to-date they manage to keep the cache!). Actually, this isn't tremendously exciting (since the print the time/date of retrieval at the top of the page anyway), but I'm getting desperate for blog entries. | |
| LAMP programming Blog (View just this entry) |
I consider myself a "LAMP" programmer, where LAMP stands for Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP. My current project uses MySQL and PHP, but runs on a Windows platform with the IIS web server. I guess that makes me a Windows-IIS-MySQL-PHP or "WIMP" programmer. | |
| Was Lincoln a Trekkie? Blog (View just this entry) |
Star Trek fans (Trekkies or "Trekkers" if you take yourself too seriously) know that the creators of Star Trek like the number 47, and try to sneak it in where-ever they can. Trekkies follow their lead, and do the same. All this got me to wondering about President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address which began "4 score and 7 years ago", a clear reference to the number 47 (otherwise, he could've said "87 years ago" or "In 1776" or something like that). For those of you naysayers who believe Lincoln pre-dated Star Trek, just watch "Episode 77: The Savage Curtain". | |
| 69, dude! Blog (View just this entry) |
The program I use to post blog entries returns the "id" of the last entry posted, and the id of the last post was 69, which, of course, got me thinking. I believe the sexual reference to 69 is French. I used to think the French word for 69 was "trois-vingt-neuf", meaning "three twenties and nine", since the French count by 20s (that's where we get our word "score" from -- "4 score and 7 years" is 87 years). So, I thought 69 was actually "six neuf", French for "six nine", not "sixty-nine" (to us smartass holier-than-thou nitpickers, that's a big difference), since "six neuf" sounds like six and nine next to each other, while trois-vingt-neuf doesn't. As it turns out, I was wrong (the whole "counting by 20s" thing starts at 80). The French word for 69 is "soixante-neuf". This sounds enough like six and nine next to each other, that I'm guessing the French word for 69 is also 69, not "six nine". And, yes, I've just created a blog entry on oral sex that somehow manages to be incredibly dull! | |
| Mail Order Monsters Blog (View just this entry) |
As much as I love "Master of Magic" (see previous entry), I always referred to it as "MOM2". The first game I loved with the initials "MOM" was "Mail-Order Monsters" for the Commodore 64/128, way back in the mid-80s (ok, now I'm going back 20 years for blog entries-- pretty soon, I'm going to have to go pre-natal!). | |
| Master of Magic Blog (View just this entry) |
Ages ago (~1997-2000), I was addicted to "Master of Magic", a DOS game
by Microprose (that I could also play on my Linux box using DOSEMU),
to the point where I wrote up parodied versions of some of the
spells/retorts available in the game. I'd planned to create a "Master
of Magic Parody Page", but, as always, never got around to it. Since
the game is now ancient and probably long since forgotten (I've since
developed and conquered an addiction to "Civilization: Call to Power"
(CivCTP), so Master of Magic is "2 addictions past"), I've decided it
would be pointless to create the page now. Since this blog is fast
becoming a dumping ground for my incomplete projects, here's the
partial parody I wrote. Unless you're seriously addicted to "Master of
Magic", you'll miss most of these references (I'm no longer sure of
some of them, since I haven't played in ~5 years):
| |
| That Stupid Icon Blog (View just this entry) |
If you've ever bookmarked one of my pages, and your browser supports the "favicon" feature (most browsers do), you've probably wondered what that strange icon you see next to my pages is (some browsers will show this even if you don't bookmark any of my pages). It's really too small to see (here's a full-size version), but it's a cartoonish representation (or "avatar" if you prefer) of me, created by a program used to access the long-defunct Sierra Network (TSN for "The Sierra Network", an AOL-like dialup service that was popular before the Internet was widely used). The avatar was created in the early 90s. Since I no longer wear glasses (I had LASIK about a year and a half ago), wear my hair much shorter these days (the "skinhead" look), have pastier skin, and never smile, I guess it's more a representation of who I used to be (ah, forgotten youth!). And, yes, while we're at it, that picture on my homepage is even older (late 80s). Why don't I put up a more recent picture? Hey, if I looked that bad back then, imagine how I look now (or, better still, don't). | |
| Erotic Antibacterial? Blog (View just this entry) |
Am I the only one who finds FineCare's Antibacterial Fresh Rain(tm) and Peach Fresh(tm) designs strangely erotic?
The linked "scans" are fairly pixellated and not that great-- try to
find them at your local grocery store if you want a better look. On
the actual bottles, the flower is a rosier shade of pink with small
beads of moisture, and the peach is plumper and more succulent with
a more enticing groove. Despite this, I'm guessing I'm still the only
one who finds these designs erotic. The "scanned" images come from http://usa-detergents.com/pub/productsheets/Finecare-Handsoap.pdf, and additional images are at http://usa-detergents.com/pub/productsheets/Finecare-64oz-Handsoap.pdf | |
| Choose Your Own Adventure Blog (View just this entry) |
Many years ago (in the early 1980s), I tried to "map" the Choose Your Own Adventure book The Mystery of Chimney Rock (figuring out which pages led to which other pages) using pen and paper. I remember starting over several times because the map always looked so ugly. The one other thing I remembered was that page 37 (the "death by cheese-and-crackers" page) was "unusual" in that, no matter how I drew the map, it was always isolated from the other pages. This afternoon (inspired by http://www.ethblue.com/cyoa/altairlarge.html) I wrote a computer program (using other existing tools, of course) that mapped "Chimney Rock" and a few other Choose Your Own Adventure books. The preliminary version is far from great, but after I do a few more and add color-coding, I'll probably create a subsite for these. I find it strangely satisfying that the automatic program that created this map also isolated page 37. Is spending an afternoon of programming time to solve a childhood task (I had to dig the yellowing Choose Your Own Adventure books out of storage-- I haven't read them in ages!) a complete waste of time? Or is it the meaning of life? | |
| AIM on Cricket Blog (View just this entry) |
I finally got my Cricket phone working with AIM Mobile (for a long time, AIM Mobile didn't work with Cricket), so messages sent to AIM user "javamath" should now reach my wireless. This is good, because it gives me another way to receive messages that I will procrastinate indefinitely in answering! | |
| Very Late Tribute to the Late Charles Schulz Blog (View just this entry) |
Back in November 1997, Robert Cook (http://olywa.net/cook/) and I
wondered how Charles Schulz would end the Peanuts series when he was
ready to retire. We ultimately speculated (incorrectly) that Schulz
probably had a large staff of cartoonists working for him, and that
the strip would long outlive him. Despite this, we drew up (well, I
suggested and Robert drew) our thoughts on what the last few Peanuts
strips might look like, calling our version "Cracked Nuts". I
originally meant to post these in January 1998, but never got around
to it (don't ask me why-- this blog is a great excuse to dredge up all
the material I've wanted to post, but never did). When Charles Schulz
retired (14 December 1999) and subsequently died (12 February 2000,
the night before his last comic strip ran-- thus, his comic strip did
outlive him -- by 1 day), my desire to post these strips (with some
minor changes) was rekindled. I came up with several clever ways of
releasing them-- watermarking, auto-releasing one per day, using
HTTP_REFERER to avoid "improper" linking, etc. These ways were
so clever that they would require a fair amount of time to
program, so I never actually got around to posting the strips. If I
had, they could've become the first tribute strips posted after
Schulz's death (since they'd already been written and drawn 2 years
ago), and we could've ridden some of the hoopla surrounding Schulz's
death. In a way, I'm glad we didn't do this, but I became so
despondent over not posting these strips "at the right time", I kept
delaying putting them up at all ("if I didn't post them in February
2000, what's the point of posting them now?"). For what it's worth,
here they are now. Caveats: 1) a lot of the jokes in these strips have
already been used in other tributes-- we wrote most of them back in
late 1997/early 1998, so the jokes are "original", even if they don't
appear to be. 2) this isn't a "tribute" in the traditional sense--
it's rather crass (sort of in the style of Blackadder, where major
characters [sometimes all of them] die in the last episode of each
season) and somewhat satirical-- definitely NOT the sort of thing
Schulz would've drawn. 3) most of these strips were written in late
1997/early 1998, but some were written (or edited or re-written) in
late 1999/early 2000:
| |
| Mountain Time Zone Blog (View just this entry) |
I've often argued that the continental United States has too many time
zones, and should get rid of the Mountain Time Zone (the one I live
in), by migrating areas in the Mountain Time Zone to either the
Pacific or Central Time Zone. My stronger arguments include:
| |
| Dating Standards Blog (View just this entry) |
When it comes to dating, I have fairly high standards: living human female-- has to be at least two out of three. | |
| Antibacterial Soaps Blog (View just this entry) |
Some antibacterial soaps advertise that they kill 96% of all household bacteria. This sounded pretty impressive, until I realized it was probably the other 4% I really had to worry about! I mean, if immersing them in potent antibiotic chemicals won't kill them, what chance do I have? | |
| Wolfram Blog (View just this entry) |
At the risk of offending Wolfram (creators of Mathematica), here's a
week's worth of Wolfram cartoons, drawn by Robert Cook
(http://olywa.net/cook/)WAY back in July 1998:
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday [Disclaimer: Wolfram did not authorize any of these cartoons, and is probably totally unaware of them.] | |
| Metric Prefixes (small) Blog (View just this entry) |
My mnemonic for remembering small metric prefixes: "Mike's nanny picks feminine attire. Zippers? Yucko!", where "Mike" is micro, "nanny" is nano, "picks" is pico, "feminine" is femto, "attire" is atto, "zippers" is zepto, and "yucko!" is yocto. My only worry is that this implies zippers are non-feminine, which I'm not sure is true (none of the feminine attire I wear [er, I mean "am aware of"] has zippers, but that maybe just me) | |
| Metric Prefixes (large) Blog (View just this entry) |
There are a lot of mnemonics for remembering metric prefixes, but I didn't like any of them so came up with my own. For large prefixes: "Maggot pezetta? Y'oughta!" (which translates to "Have you tried maggot pezetta? You ought to!"). "Maggot" is mega giga tera, "p" is peta, "e" is exa, "zetta" is zetta, and "Y'oughta" is yotta. I don't know exactly what maggot pezetta is, but I picture it as pasta made from maggots, sprinkled with powdered Pez. One advantage of picturing this image is that it's not easy to forget. One disadvantage of picturing this image is that... it's not easy to forget. | |
| Afterbirth Blog (View just this entry) |
I read that, in some cultures, people eat the afterbirth when a woman has delivered a baby. I tried to figure out what dishes might use this as an ingredient, and the only thing I could come up with was "pasta placenta". All this did make me wonder about "Prego" [preggo?] spaghetti sauce, especially given their "it's in there" slogan. | |
| Sometimes you feel like a nut... Blog (View just this entry) |
At the risk of offending the powerful Hershey's corporation (and finding a chocolate horse's head in my bed), I'm pretty sure that commercial jingle they had "Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't. Almond Joy's got nuts. Mounds don't" was promoting bisexuality. | |
| My Life Story Blog (View just this entry) |
When people ask for the story of my life, I often start with: I was born the son of poor Black sharecroppers. My parents were poor people... and they didn't actually sharecrop with anyone-- they just threw some of their crop up in the air and said they were sharecropping with God. Poor, stupid people. And not terribly attractive. Poor, stupid, ugly people. And after spending all day in the fields... poor, stupid, ugly, smelly people.... I'm finding that people aren't asking about my life story as much anymore. | |
| Unanswered Email Blog (View just this entry) |
The oldest unanswered email I have is dated October 1987 (using FidoNet [arf arf], which pre-dated the Internet). It's an invitation to an event I really wanted to attend, but forgot about. I feel so bad about missing the event that I just can't bring myself to send a reply-- maybe if I hold on to it for a couple more years... [nitpicky comment: I was using QuantumLink (which later became "America OnLine" and finally just "AOL") in 1985, but don't consider the correspondance there "email", because QuantumLink was a closed system at the time] | |
| Mathematica Blog (View just this entry) |
I was a big fan of the commerical (non-open-source) programming language Mathematica, and, in April 1998, successfully used this top ten list to obtain a free copy (number 7 on the list was the impetus for the paper mentioned in the previous blog entry below). Nowadays (7.5 years later) there are fairly good open-source alternatives to Mathematica (at least in terms of Mathematica's flexible symbol, list, and function handling, though there still aren't any open-source languages (?) that include Mathematica's large collection of efficient algorithims and formulas). [this is the 2nd time I've reached back 7+ years for a blog entry-- apparentally, I'm running out of material!] | |
| Artificial Dumbness Blog (View just this entry) |
I've never formally submitted a paper for publication. The closest I
came was in April 1998 when I almost submitted this abstract -- Blondes and Boors: How Artificial
Dumbness Will Pass the Turing Test.
The 1979 Peter Sellers' movie Being There (http://imdb.com/title/tt0078841/), which I hadn't seen when I wrote the "abstract" above, makes the same point much more eloquently. Roger Ebert's 1997 review of the film (http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19970525/REVIEWS08/401010303/1023) is also excellent reading (Ebert's earlier 1980 review isn't as good). | |
| Nawlins Cafe Blog (View just this entry) |
It's just a wild coincidence, but the building I used to work in had a "Nawlins Cafe" on the ground floor (which, because of the hilly nature of our city, was actually below street level). Sadly, business was poor, and it went under. | |
| Hard Habit To Break Blog (View just this entry) |
Chicago's "Hard Habit to Break" is one of my favorite songs. For many people, it's special because it evokes memories of a long-lost love that they've never quite gotten over. For me, it's special because it's the first song I ever heard digitized (a short clip on a Commodore 64). In a similar vein, my "Summer of '69" (Bryan Adams song) was more like "Got my first real 8-bit, bought it at the five and time, programmed until my fingers bled, was the summer of '79...". This blog entry, along with the previous one (below), really define who I am as a person. | |
| Defining Moment in My Life Blog (View just this entry) |
I once geekily asked a girl to a Star Trek convention. Amazingly, she said yes. Unsurprisingly, between the time I asked her out and the convention itself, I managed to anger her so much that she decided not to go. This blog entry, along with the next one (above) really defines who I am as a person. | |
| Domestic Violence Blog (View just this entry) |
I've decided to come out in support of domestic violence. If we start depending too heavily on imported violence, we'll no longer be self-reliant. The United States has some the world's highest-quality violence, readily available in most major urban areas. When it comes to violence, I say: choose America! | |
| It's a Toon? Thing Blog (View just this entry) |
I feel the term "toon" is offensive, and should be replaced with "Animated American". | |
| Improving the Art of Mime Blog (View just this entry) |
I want to improve the art of mime by adding vocals: "Oh no, I'm trapped in a box. It appears to be a fairly rectangular glass box. I sure hope I get out of this box soon, so I can walk home. It's a pretty windy day, and I'll have to walk against the wind to get home. Once I get home and the wind dies down, I'm going to walk my dog. He's a big dog. I sure hope he doesn't try to run after something and pull me along on his leash..." and so on. | |
| Cameo Appearances Blog (View just this entry) |
I've always wanted to do cameos on TV shows without actually having an acting career. I would enter the stage (or the camera would do a slow pan to my face) and they'd have the audience applaud wildly. I'd then say a line or two, and that would be it. People at home would wonder who I was, or what I'd done to deserve all that applause, but I'd always just be "that cameo guy". | |
| 42 Blog (View just this entry) |
OK, this is scary. These blog entries are stored in a MySQL table (that's not the scary part) with a unique "id" field. The value of the "id" for that last entry was... was... was... 42! (completely a coincidence, I didn't plan it, or even realize it until after I'd posted the entry [the posting form returns the id of the entry created]) | |
| What Do You Get If You Multiply Six By Nine? Blog (View just this entry) |
As everyone knows, the late Douglas Adams, in his Hitchhikers' series, notes the answer to the great question of life, the universe, and everything is 42. He also speculates the great question itself might be "what do you get if you multiply six by nine"? (since this question was discovered by randomly picking home-made Scrabble tiles [which obviously don't follow the letter distribution of real Scrabble tiles (eg, 4 y's)], it IS speculative and not definitive). The obvious joke is that 6 times 9 isn't 42 (unless you do the math in base 13, of course), but it got me to thinking. If you multiply 6 by 9 in various programming languages, you get a variety of answers, depending on whether 6 and 9 are treated as integers, strings, floats, etc. For example, "6" (string) times (using "*") 9 (integer) yields the string "666666666" (which is 666*1001001, hmmm) in some languages, the integer 54 in others, and an error in others. A lot of people have strong feelings about which is the "correct" answer, and programming language debates are often called "holy wars" because of how they can heat up. When computer programmers are finally in power, it would ironic (though unlikely) if people went to war, ultimately over the answer to "what do you get if you multiply six by nine". Perhaps Douglas Adams, in his infinite wisdom, was telling us that we're all wrong (since the answer is 42), and shouldn't fight over it... perhaps Douglas Adams was a far greater visionary than people imagined... perhaps it's time for my medication. | |
| I Hate Ruby Blog (View just this entry) |
I've decided that I hate the Ruby programming language. To demonstrate this hatred, I installed Ruby to see how badly I could mangle and abuse it. It turns out Ruby is fairly abuseable. I've always hated that 57/42 is 1 in many programming languages (integer division my foot!-- I have no problem with 57 div 42 being 1, but not 57/42), so I mangled Ruby into having 57/42 evaluate properly (to 1.35714285714286). I then coerced Ruby into understanding that "42"+"57" is 99, not "4257" (concat or "." is for string appends, "+" is for numbers!). I then "explained" to Ruby that I've been using "echo" to mean "print" for ages (PHP), and didn't plan on changing that. Ruby buckled under nicely. Ruby is almost (but not quite) a meta-programming language-- my mangled version of Ruby is quite different from the version of Ruby that ships, and I have more abuses in mind. I can't stop using the Ruby language-- I hate it far too much. | |
| CivCTP Apology Blog (View just this entry) |
I owe an apology to the creators of Civilization: Call to Power (a game where you build cities to form an empire). One of the "random events" in their game is coastal flooding, which once completely destroyed a coastal city I had built. I said that, while floods could cause a lot of damage, there was no way water could destroy an entire city completely. I was wrong -- some days, I really hate being wrong. | |
| England Isn't the UK and Russia wasn't the USSR Blog (View just this entry) |
People sometimes refer to the United Kingdom as "England" (one of it's "states"), and used to refer to the USSR as "Russia" (again, one of it's "states"), and Patrick Maigron tells me that "Holland" (which I mention in an earlier blog entry) is actually a "state" inside the Netherlands. However, most people dont refer to the USA as "Texas", or to France as "Champagne". I wonder how the whole state-name-for-the-whole-country thing came about. | |
| New Orleans Blog (View just this entry) |
It's amazing how many people think of "New Orleans" as "just the name of that city", not realizing it's actually named after the French city of Orleans. I'm guessing New Yorkers are just as bad (York is a small town in England). | |
| Trojan Entry Blog (View just this entry) |
I wonder how many people realize that "Trojan" simply means "from the city or state of Troy", similar to "New Yorker", "Californian", "Spanish", etc... | |
| New Orleaners Next Door Blog (View just this entry) |
My apartment complex announced today that fifteen families from New Orleans are moving in, which means (according to my calculations) that 1 in every 15000 New Orleaners is moving into my apartment complex (its a fairly big complex, but thats still a lot!). The only thing I can figure is that they want to get as far away from the sea as possible (like much of Albuquerque, my apartment complex is over a mile above sea level). | |
| Fluorescent Light Bulbs Blog (View just this entry) |
I think I've fallen in love with fluorescent light bulbs (even though "fluorescent" is still nearly impossible to spell)-- they not only save energy, but they're also very cool (temperature-wise, not just "groovy" cool), which is important during our hot Albuquerque summers. Their only "downside" -- starting off dim each time you turn them on and increasing to full brightness over a period of 0-3 minutes -- is actually an advantage for my bedside lamp -- it's really nice to wake to a dim light that slowly brightens! (I realize theres an obvious "in love" joke here about bulbs lighting up my life, but I'm not going to make it!) | |
| Netflix Blog (View just this entry) |
I originally wasn't a big Netflix fan (but joined anyway and dropped it later), because there weren't that many movies I wanted to see. Movies usually run about 90 minutes, and my attention span is nowhere near that. I rejoined "recently" (actually quite a while ago) when they started releasing TV shows on DVD -- 22 minutes is much more my style! A few days ago, my declining attention span was happy to learn that Netflix now has music videos -- complete works of entertainment less than 5 minutes long. In fact, it took me longer to type in this blog entry (if you include all the editing) than it takes to watch a music video. WOOHOO! | |
| Anagramatic Synonyms Blog (View just this entry) |
I wonder how many pairs of words are both synonyms and anagrams-- unfocused and confused come close, but aren't quite anagrams. | |
| The Other E/R Blog (View just this entry) |
I'm probably one of the few people who likes a show called E/R, but not the E/R that everyone else likes. The one I like was a short-lived spinoff of the Jeffersons (http://www.tv.com/e-r-1984/pilot-1/episode/46319/summary.html) | |
| Friends Conventions Blog (View just this entry) |
How come there are Star Trek conventions, but no Friends TV show conventions? I think it'd be fun to dress up like Ross (actually, I also think it'd be fun to dress up like Monica, but I shouldn't admit that in public!) | |
| Changing Expressions Blog (View just this entry) |
I wonder if the expression "tough road ahead" is a modernization of "tough row to hoe", since we now drive more than we farm ? | |
| Human Relations Blog (View just this entry) |
I think Inside Star Trek: The Real Story is a better guide to human relations than that Dale Carnegie book. Even the "rude" memos in Inside Star Trek are polite and friendly, and if you can learn how to work with actors, agents, and network executives (people with some of the brittlest egos in the world), you can learn to work with anyone. | |
| Le Famous French Entry Blog (View just this entry) |
I've always wanted to do a blog entry in French: bon jour mon petite pomme de granite, voule vous la avec couche mon capitan a la carte. I suspect this would make more sense if I spoke or understood French. | |
| The Netherlands Blog (View just this entry) |
My first thought when I saw a detailed map of the Netherlands was "Boy, they sure name a lot of their cities after cheeses". Since then, I've realized it's the other way around, but I still think of Holland as a cheesy country. | |
| Switzerland Blog (View just this entry) |
It's always fascinated me that the country code for Switzerland (ch) stands for Confederation Helvetica. Before I learned that, I thought Helvetica was just a font! | |
| Dutch Entry Blog (View just this entry) |
Does it bug anyone else that, while the country name is The Netherlands, the short form isn't Neth or Nether, but Holland?! And the people aren't the Hollish people or the Nether people (which admittedly conjurs up some interesting images), but the Dutch people?! Even worse, their queen is named Beatrice, so they literally have a Queen Bea (queen bee), ugh! Someone should do something about this. | |
| The British Isles Blog (View just this entry) |
I've always wondered if the British Isles exert some sort of calming/intelligence force. The Vikings were some of the most wild and violent peoples in the world, but, when they came to England, they formed the most sophisticated and courteous nation in the world. Conversely, people who leave the British Isles end up becoming loud and boisterous (Americans), rude and surly (Australians), and/or unsophisticated and cloddish (Canadians). I realize this blog entry will offend Australians and Canadians, and apologize in advance to the French people for not insulting them as well. | |
| Round and Round == Mario Brothers? Blog (View just this entry) |
I've always wondered if the Ratt song Round and Round was really
about Mario Brothers (I realize I'm misquoting some lyrics below,
this is just how I heard them):
| |
| First Blog Entry of 2005 Blog (View just this entry) |
Geez, it's been almost 2 years since I did a blog entry. At least I've finally added the year to each entry (as I predicted, it took me more than a year to do this!) . Of course, since the blog isn't "live" yet, this maybe isn't/wasn't such a big deal? | |
| Star Trek Characters Blog (View just this entry) |
If I could be any Star Trek character, I think I'd really like to be Boothby | |
| That Number Blog (View just this entry) |
After reading the first paragraph of this page again, I realize that a lot of people were probably expecting some sort of reference to that number; but, no, I won`t do it | |
| Dating This Blog Blog (View just this entry) |
I just realized I have about until 1 year from today until I have to worry about somehow incorporating the year into the date of each blog item; how much do you want to bet I won`t get it done by then? | |
| Smarter Spammers Blog (View just this entry) |
I get a lot of spam that`s mostly attached images, but the subject usually gives it away; I wonder what will happen when spammers send just images and use misleading subject lines? | |
| Mad About City Names TraceRoute (View just this entry) |
There are too many cities that start with "mad" -- Madrid, Spain ; Madison, WI ; and even Madison, NJ ; someone should do something about this | |
| My First Internet Machine Retired Blog (View just this entry) |
Just found out that one of the first machines I ever had an Internet account on (forsythe at Stanford) has been retired | |
| First Blog Entry Blog (View just this entry) |
I can`t decide what the first entry on my blog should be, so this is it | |
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