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So here you go: I could have gone at the San Francisco Love Fest yesterday.
MM was going with Citybelle and kindly asked me if I wanted to go. Although I did really appreciate the gesture, I was both lazy and not that motivated. I haven't heard back from them yet, I'm sure they had a great time.
Now I say lazy but quite frankly that's not quite the way I see it. I just enjoy being at home, comfortable, doing any of the myriads of stuff that I'd like to do -- Yes that's 99% computer stuff, and your point your would be? :-p
Luckily different things work for different people. Around here a nice week-end was usually spent by one sitting in front of a computer all day and someone else reading a book in bed all day (obviously this isn't quite true anymore.) OTOH for some other persons it's not a good week-end if you haven't gone outdoors doing some activity or gone several places. Which explains why I enjoy my trips to Pennsylvania when some of my friends can't understand why I'm going there in the first place and there's "nothing" to do -- because that's precisely the point! :-)
In any case I ended up getting out yesterday. But I guess for MM a trip to the store to get some milk doesn't count as an enjoyable activity. It does for my parents if they can spend time browsing the store just for the sake of it :-p
What happens when one gets up too early:
The week-end was starting good. I had completed my current sub-task at work, we had nothing major planned and the babies were pretty good. So plenty of time in perspective to have fun with babies and/or computer stuff.
Somehow Friday I started thinking about Doom and
Doom II.
I realized I could visualize part of the first level of Doom and at least the
last level of Doom II. That's kind of scary, how many times did I run thru
those? On a side note I can also remember parts of
StarCraft
(after spending a full day and night playing, I'd generally be able to
visualize little troops of terrans dancing in sync with techno music. Hmmm, oh
well :-))
Anyhow, looking at the web site of Id Software and previous screenshots of Doom, I realize how ugly anything in 320x240 looks now. I went there to see if there was a free version to download and didn't find one. Suddenly I remembered that I used to play Duke Nukem 3D quite a while after so I went to 3d Realms and quickly found the Duke Nukem 3D Shareware Episode. I tried to play it but somehow that didn't go quite well with XP on the Athlon 64 -- the performances were awesome (hmm it's 320x240 dude!), the sound was crappy and it kept crashing. That reminded me of an OpenGL port of Doom I had seen somewhere and after searching 2 seconds for it, I had this nice OpenGL port of Duke Nukem 3D running in 1024x768x32 bpp on my box, full screen with good sound and correct mouse support.
So there it is, I spent part of my week-end going thru level 1 of DN3D in
god mode
with unlimited ammo after pulling the cheat codes and the list of secret places
(check out this excellent fan-made
walkthrough.)
Uh, did I said god mode? Oh yeah definitely :-) Let's be realistic, I don't play for the challenge, I play for the fun. I want a fast-paced point-and-shoot action game where I don't have to be careful, I don't want to spend hours restarting the level just because I screw up after opening a door. I don't want no elitist game with limited saving (or impossible to save and reload like in WoW) and complicated puzzles you have to solve to show how smart you are. I'm not playing to be smart, I'm playing to have fun running thru a level with a fully loaded RPG which I use to blast aliens with total impunity.
30 34 27 19/+40
Another link trail from Wikipedia:
That reminds me when I used to take the encyclopedia when I was young, I would sit down and just randomly read stuff that seemed interesting. At the library I would pick up an encyclopedia with images and would just randomly browse and whenever an illustration seemed interesting I would read the corresponding article.
I can't quite do that with Wikipedia. Books are good for browsing and getting a quick overview just by flipping pages very fast. Web sites are good because of the heavily cross-linked self-referential content. Coupled with a tabbed browser (a necessity nowadays) that means you can open links into tabs in the background to read them later and thus not interrupt your reading flow, something you can't do with a book.
Consoles and computers I had at home, in this order:
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In the mid 90's I switched to a 386-based PC running Windows, then 486 and Pentium followed soon enough. Around 1992/93 I was starting to play with Linux Slackware 0.99 and in 1994 I started hacking using experimental BeOS on a prototype Hobbit-based BeBox. I only bought my own PowerPC-based BeBox in 1996/97 and then later started hacking using BeOS on the Mac-clone Umax which I had won at the BeOS Masters Awards Aug '97 for PowerPulsar.
Since I'm stuck inside due to the heat wave, I spent some time creating stitching panoramas of the beaver dam pictures seen earlier.
To begin with I realized I forgot to load the panorama software that came with the Panasonic DMC-FZ7. Unfortunately [ArcSoft|arcsoft.com/products/panoramamaker/] only sell upgrades and I'm not that interested, the basic version is just fine. Plus I'm not a fan of ArcSoft's over simplified UIs (the kind with a 800x600 window full of graphical gadgets that don't resize, especially annoying when you have a much larger monitor.)
Anyway after pondering on what it would take to rewrite such a tool, I had a look on Freshmeat and quickly found a reference on the excellent Hugin stitch/panorama software. This one does a lot and it does it pretty well. It's a lot more technical than the typically one-button-does-it-all software which comes with cameras, yet it's relatively easy to use and you do everything with a mouse and not care about the technical part until the geek inside you want to tweak things around ;-)
So anyway, using Hugin and Autopano-sift, I came up with this:
There is some discrepancy in the second to the left tree (especially easy to notice on the second picture since I haven't tried to tweak it yet.) I won't blame the software yet, even though I would have preferred it to automatically do what I wanted without having to think too much about it. To be honest I haven't read any of the numerous Hugin Tutorials made available yet and there's so much the software can do considering the original images where taken a bit randomly without a stable reference point.
20051005
The music. Her warm hands on my skin.
Riding the shuttle.
Far away, the mountain where she's waiting.
Her belly getting rounder every day.
Soon we'll be together again.
She will smile to me.
The music they make, I do not hear.
Strangers, walking on the other side of the street.
I tried that book a while ago, or at least I wanted to
and I put it away soon after.
It is not my music nor is it my book
and it will never be. I am not crossing that street.
The music I hear, the music I like.
Infinite and warm, just like her.
She is my muse, I play for her.
This is the dawn of a new age.
It has always been.
Tomorrow might be one of these lucky sunny days.
Looking backwards, so impressive. The worst has come and gone, the best has come and stay, always unexpected. Feelings, tears and laughter were shared.
Looking far back on the old time... so blurry and cloudy that I lost perspective.
Looking forward to yet another sunny day. I know I won't be alone and their presence by my side is my blessing. Those which I quarreled with decades ago and I have come to appreciate only more. Those which I recently discovered and never thought of in my sweetest dreams. And those new arrivals which are here to last.
From SGA 2x14 "Grace under pressure", when they zoom on McKay's tablet connected to the puddlejumper's crystals (around 11:46):
... print -u5 exec 3<&p
read -ru3 line
print -r "$line"
read -ru3 line
print -r "$line"
float r a=1 b=1.5 c=-1...
(( r*sqrt(b*b-4*a*c) ))
print r1=$(( (-b+r)/2 ))
r2=$(( (-b-r)/2 ))
integer even=0 odd=0 ...
for ((count=0; count < 100; count++))
do if ((RANDOM%2==0))
then even=even+1
else odd=odd+1
fi
done
print even=$even odd=$odd
TIMEOUT=10
select i in list edit quit
do case $i in
list) cat "$foo";;
edit) ${EDITOR-vi} "$foo";;
quit) break;;
"") print ...
esac
...
Outch. That seems like an awful syntax, very bash-like and extremely
low-level. You'd expect something higher level for a scientific genius to use.
Especially since it never takes more than a handful of keystrokes to reprogram
entire subsystems.
Oh well, it's not like SG/SGA plots try to be logical very often.
Almost totally unrelated it would be fun to have a language where the reserved keywords are ortva raq vs gura ryfr sbe rnpu va pnfr fryrpg juvyr hagvy qb qbar. Another option would be to force Latin declinations when using verbs for method names in call statements :-) Sorry about that. I had too much fun with Intercal when I was younger and it obviously had some consequences.
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