Linux's new slogan should be "Linux: You get what you pay for."
To recap: Kate won her race. Well, not coming in first place, but she proved it to herself that she could run it, so she's a winner in that respect. My coworker Amelia ran in the same race but I somehow didn't see her. (I would question her whole story, but she has some photos to prove it.)
Somehow, since getting comcast to install tv at my new apartment, I've been getting hbo, showtime and startz. So I've watched a little bit of Entourage, which I haven't seen since its first season. The show is pretty much the same as it used to be but now with less nudity. I guess they paid their dues (much like the first few episodes of Rome). Vince is boring, E is boring and annoying, Turtle is funnier and he's less of just a follower and more of his own person these days, and I think Johnny Drama is my favorite character. So much insecurity and machismo is one man. I watched the first episode of Bored to Death, which I guess Rachel likes, but I didn't really get a feel either way. Lots of characters acting strangely. There are a bunch of episodes on on-demand so I'll check out another one sometime.
Today it's finally warming up enough for an enjoyable kickball game. We didn't end up playing the real world team two weeks ago, that was someone passing along inaccurate information to the rest of us. We played some random team. Then last week was rained out, and I'm not sure who today's team is. No post-game drinking tonight though- actually, scratch that. I might tag along for a single beer to facilitate Sarah's date life if she and this other guy on the kickball team are too timid to just head out on their own. After that though, it's back to the apartment to do some writing because Kate and I are leaving tomorrow afternoon for Alabama. Woohoo! Whitney's getting married, and we're gonna eat some southern food!
(Mark doesn't drink milk, and also doesn't like most breakfast foods)
Kate: Mark, what do you eat for breakfast normally?
Mark: Sometimes I eat cereal.
me: Do you put anything on the cereal? Like some people put orange juice or water on their cereal.
Kate: Oh, gross! Who puts water on their cereal!
Mark: You know, Kate, a lot of people put water on their cereal... They call it skim milk.
(added slightly later)
I meant to write about this too but I forgot. Yesterday I used the building's gym for the first time. I was the middle of the afternoon and I was the only person in there, which I appreciated. It's a pretty small gym. I used to be able to do lots and lots of pullups, but now can only do two. I also used to be able to bench press my own weight, but the last time I did that was 7 years ago, and yesterday I had to drop it down to 90 pounds before I could do a few reps without feeling like I was hurting myself. Then I ran on the eliptical for about 10 minutes and felt like I was going to die. I am out of shape.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Thursday, October 15, 2009
(originally written 10/15/09 but unpublished)
I was thinking I should move money out of my checking account and into savings, but then I just looked at my credit card bill and that no longer seems as pressing. Moving service, stuff from ikea, a new computer monitor, rent, and a plane ticket to vietnam. My credit card is getting a workout. Which is more than I'm getting, because there's a combination lock on our building's gym door that I don't know the combination to (and I keep forgetting to ask at the front desk).
Yesterday I played a little MoO2. I suspect I would make a bad leader if the human race were out colonizing the galaxy. About midway through the game, my civilization was ahead of everyone in technological research, but this one species of alien kept stealing my technology with their spies. I would demand from their ambassador that they spying stop, and he would just laugh in my face. It was quite upsetting. Finally, I decided enough was enough. I built a couple warships, sent them to the nearest colony owned by the spying species, and bombed it to obilivion. I felt like it would be a good lesson to parties all involved. Then that same ambassador starts screaming "WTF are you doing!" and his government declares war on me. They can't stand up to my warships though. After destroying their fleet that was baracading one of my star systems, I divied up my fleet into two warships per enemy planet, and sent them off to bomb the species back to the stone-age.
There are several lessons here: Firstly, if you annoy me enough, I will commit a genocide. Actually, if it were real life, beheading the ambassador would probably be enough to ease my frustration about parasitic spying aliens, but that wasn't an option in the game. Secondly, intellectual property theft can be really upsetting for the victim. Maybe that was due to the knowledge that eventually they'd be using this stolen technology to attack me, but it was also partially due to the disrespect shown to my massive fleet of researchers in their being effectively replaced by a lone spy.
I was thinking I should move money out of my checking account and into savings, but then I just looked at my credit card bill and that no longer seems as pressing. Moving service, stuff from ikea, a new computer monitor, rent, and a plane ticket to vietnam. My credit card is getting a workout. Which is more than I'm getting, because there's a combination lock on our building's gym door that I don't know the combination to (and I keep forgetting to ask at the front desk).
Yesterday I played a little MoO2. I suspect I would make a bad leader if the human race were out colonizing the galaxy. About midway through the game, my civilization was ahead of everyone in technological research, but this one species of alien kept stealing my technology with their spies. I would demand from their ambassador that they spying stop, and he would just laugh in my face. It was quite upsetting. Finally, I decided enough was enough. I built a couple warships, sent them to the nearest colony owned by the spying species, and bombed it to obilivion. I felt like it would be a good lesson to parties all involved. Then that same ambassador starts screaming "WTF are you doing!" and his government declares war on me. They can't stand up to my warships though. After destroying their fleet that was baracading one of my star systems, I divied up my fleet into two warships per enemy planet, and sent them off to bomb the species back to the stone-age.
There are several lessons here: Firstly, if you annoy me enough, I will commit a genocide. Actually, if it were real life, beheading the ambassador would probably be enough to ease my frustration about parasitic spying aliens, but that wasn't an option in the game. Secondly, intellectual property theft can be really upsetting for the victim. Maybe that was due to the knowledge that eventually they'd be using this stolen technology to attack me, but it was also partially due to the disrespect shown to my massive fleet of researchers in their being effectively replaced by a lone spy.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Today I installed linux. Apparently linux is not for you if you value your time at all. I had very modest hopes for this operating system. I wanted something that would have all the drivers I'd need, had a functional web browser, a basic mp3 player, basic xls use, and to run dominions 3 and dungeon crawl. I can't remember why now, but for some reason I decided on Kubuntu. It had all my drivers, though I think I had to update the nvidia one, but that was quite easy. It came with a mp3 player that was one of those types for organizing your music library. I prefer the basic, "just play the file" type of player, because my music is already organized by album and I prefer to conserve my computer's memory, but after spending about an hour trying to hunt down various libraries to install xmss (which is supposedly similar to winamp) I gave up and just went with the stock media player. Kind of a bummer, but whatever. Kubuntu comes with a "Konquerer" web browser which works well for the most part, except when it would randomly lock up and leave you unable to kill it or anything. I'm not sure what the ctr-alt-del equivalent is in linux, so I had to reboot each time. Then someone on the phone asked me to look at something on facebook, and then the whole thing freaked out and crashed like 4 times in a row. Konquerer does not like facebook for some reason. I downloaded and installed firefox instead, which was a pain but it browses facebook without any problems. (Oh, open office worked just fine for spreadsheet editing, there were no problems there.) Next I tried to install dominions 3. Huge problems. The program extracted and installed fine, but then the update patch requires you to overwrite a few dozen files with the contents of the patch, and old Kubuntu was not liking my overwriting. For every single file it'd ask me if I really wanted to overwrite, and when I said "yes, overwrite all" it would ask me again for the next file. Finally got everything patched up, loaded the program, and found that something about the graphics were buggy. The game played fine at 800x600, but blowing it up bigger caused everything to start glitching up. After it froze twice on me I went online to look for a fix, and then firefox made my whole system freeze up and I had to reboot. I feel like I wasted 4 hours of my life.
Moved into my new place and I like it. It stays very nice and warm unless I turn on the AC or open windows. And it's super quiet, very sunny, and pretty spacious. In fact, I have a whole corner of my living room that I'm not sure what I'm going to do with.
Today Kate is running her half marathon. I'm going up to Baltimore waay early in the morning. Hopefully it won't be raining or too cold (for the runners' sake I mean).
(from a Dungeons & Dragons movie review)
"This film has only three real actors, and one of them just killed another!"
Moved into my new place and I like it. It stays very nice and warm unless I turn on the AC or open windows. And it's super quiet, very sunny, and pretty spacious. In fact, I have a whole corner of my living room that I'm not sure what I'm going to do with.
Today Kate is running her half marathon. I'm going up to Baltimore waay early in the morning. Hopefully it won't be raining or too cold (for the runners' sake I mean).
(from a Dungeons & Dragons movie review)
"This film has only three real actors, and one of them just killed another!"
Friday, September 18, 2009
I'm cancelling my gamefly account today. I was planning on cancelling it anyway, because my gift certificate is running out and I'm busy, but now I'm cancelling it early because gamefly seems to have decided to stop sending me games. My account has sat since Monday at "You have no games out. Add titles to your GameQ now!" Meanwhile my queue has 8 games on it, two of which are listed as "High availability" and three of which are "medium availability". Either they have grossly miscalculated all availability indicators, or they're somehow holding out until next month when they get to charge me $16. Or maybe they have the games tiered somehow so that they'll more readily send you less popular games. (I have noticed that they'll jump to the last game on my queue if it's an unpopular one.) But I'm not adding throw-away games to my queue because I don't want to play throw-away games. I don't have that much time. Thumbs down.
For my future reference: my list of games to try is Punch-out, Fight night round 4, infameous, prototype, batman arkham asylum, and tekken 6. (Also on my queue were Madden 10 and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, but I'm not really very interested in either of those.) Tekken six comes out in the end of October, hopefully it will be awesome. Please no more extended juggle sequences.
Today I work. Next week I move! Whoa! I'm thinking of putting my current ikea dresser out on the curb when I move and finding something better at for me new place. This dresser has never worked well. The drawers don't come all the way out, and then they don't go all the way back in again. I think it was pretty cheap when I bought it, and I've been using it for years. If only good dressers didn't weigh like 200 pounds. Someone should work on that. I'm willing to pay more for a dresser if it's light. Maybe some kind of rebar skeleton with a thin fake-wood shell?
(from a Dungeon Crawl forum, about this character's death)
AlStar: However, that's not the main reason I'd annoyed at losing this guy: First off, he got thrown into the abyss by a Zot trap, and, through a combination of Yred's damage mirror and lots of greater heal potions, killed an executioner and made it out. You just don't see that often from a level 12.
But mostly, the thing that pisses me off is that I found GOLD DRAGON ARMOR, just sitting on the ground on level 9 of the dungeon. There's absolutely no chance the random number gods are blessing me like that for another thousand games.
For my future reference: my list of games to try is Punch-out, Fight night round 4, infameous, prototype, batman arkham asylum, and tekken 6. (Also on my queue were Madden 10 and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, but I'm not really very interested in either of those.) Tekken six comes out in the end of October, hopefully it will be awesome. Please no more extended juggle sequences.
Today I work. Next week I move! Whoa! I'm thinking of putting my current ikea dresser out on the curb when I move and finding something better at for me new place. This dresser has never worked well. The drawers don't come all the way out, and then they don't go all the way back in again. I think it was pretty cheap when I bought it, and I've been using it for years. If only good dressers didn't weigh like 200 pounds. Someone should work on that. I'm willing to pay more for a dresser if it's light. Maybe some kind of rebar skeleton with a thin fake-wood shell?
(from a Dungeon Crawl forum, about this character's death)
AlStar: However, that's not the main reason I'd annoyed at losing this guy: First off, he got thrown into the abyss by a Zot trap, and, through a combination of Yred's damage mirror and lots of greater heal potions, killed an executioner and made it out. You just don't see that often from a level 12.
But mostly, the thing that pisses me off is that I found GOLD DRAGON ARMOR, just sitting on the ground on level 9 of the dungeon. There's absolutely no chance the random number gods are blessing me like that for another thousand games.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Hello everyone. Often I find myself writing here for a few minutes, really working myself into a fury, and then realizing that I've got better things to do but nothing has been concluded, so I delete the whole thing. The time it takes to write a post is not at all proportional to its length. I don't know how Leslie does it. The only way I will survive this post is by keeping the paragraphs about completely separate topics.
Oh, I skipped our last kickball game because I wasn't feeling well. I was all achy, though I'm feeling better now and a real sickness never seemed to develop. There are two equally unlikely possibilities: that drinking a lot of tea and taking vitamin C when you're starting to feel ill will cure you before you actually develop a sickness (though I tend to believe that the reverse is more likely- that taking medication will facilitate a sickness), or that I developed a psychosomatic illness after going into the office and worrying about touching the same doorhandles as a bunch of unhygienic engineers. Anyway, supposedly I'm better off having missed the game because the other team were super competitive trash talkers. Hmmm, I would transition here, but I can't think of a good concluding sentence.
Also, I got a new apartment. This basement is too cold for spending another winter. My next apartment is part of a large building out in Mt Pleasant. It will be my first large apartment building since the dorms. I'm slightly worried that my couch and bed mattress won't fit in the elevator and we're going to end up dragging them up the stairwell to the 4th floor. And by us, I mean the movers I'm going to get, but I feel for them too. I move at the end of the month.
I'm watching Fired Up, which is much funnier than you'd think. It's sort of like She's the Man, where they set up a semi-ridiculous premise, and then throw in mostly plausible characters. The dialogue is well timed as well. "That's a joke! But it really happened!"
(review of the trek episode "Best of Both Worlds")
Even Troi, who the writers always seemed to have trouble using, mixes it up. Wesley is also there and they managed to give him lines that don't provoke immediate visceral hatred. Will wonders never cease?
Oh, I skipped our last kickball game because I wasn't feeling well. I was all achy, though I'm feeling better now and a real sickness never seemed to develop. There are two equally unlikely possibilities: that drinking a lot of tea and taking vitamin C when you're starting to feel ill will cure you before you actually develop a sickness (though I tend to believe that the reverse is more likely- that taking medication will facilitate a sickness), or that I developed a psychosomatic illness after going into the office and worrying about touching the same doorhandles as a bunch of unhygienic engineers. Anyway, supposedly I'm better off having missed the game because the other team were super competitive trash talkers. Hmmm, I would transition here, but I can't think of a good concluding sentence.
Also, I got a new apartment. This basement is too cold for spending another winter. My next apartment is part of a large building out in Mt Pleasant. It will be my first large apartment building since the dorms. I'm slightly worried that my couch and bed mattress won't fit in the elevator and we're going to end up dragging them up the stairwell to the 4th floor. And by us, I mean the movers I'm going to get, but I feel for them too. I move at the end of the month.
I'm watching Fired Up, which is much funnier than you'd think. It's sort of like She's the Man, where they set up a semi-ridiculous premise, and then throw in mostly plausible characters. The dialogue is well timed as well. "That's a joke! But it really happened!"
(review of the trek episode "Best of Both Worlds")
Even Troi, who the writers always seemed to have trouble using, mixes it up. Wesley is also there and they managed to give him lines that don't provoke immediate visceral hatred. Will wonders never cease?
Friday, September 4, 2009
We had our first kickball game yesterday and totally kicked ass! Kate plays a mean third base, and we have three ex-army guys who are good at kicking the ball far. The other team also didn't seem to understand about tagging up on a fly ball, so we had more than a few double plays because of that. We're in the same division as the real world. They were at the same bar afterwards, but I didn't talk to any of them. If something dramatic happens when we play them in kickball, it might end up on tv! I'll aim for the pitcher's face when i'm kicking. (I won't really, and if anything does happen and someone gets hurt, know that this was an empty boast. I don't scheme very often.)
After yesterday's NSFW xkcd, which wasn't funny, I'm switching the link to xkcdsucks, which I have found to be more funny on average than the recent xkcd comics. And I'm removing the link to the dominions forum, because that game is like crack for me and I spend way too much time reading about its strategies.
(from xkcdsucks about this older XKCD comic)
Oh and come on: Icarus's problem was that he used wax, which melts at a fairly low temperature. Hot glue is hardly the same - sure, it can melt, but if you've ever used a hot glue gun and accidentally touched the hot part you know just how f***ing hot it has to be, and how at that heat Our Hero has bigger problems than falling a few feet, like having his skin burn off. God knows how Mr. Hat is surviving operating what is essentially a small star.
After yesterday's NSFW xkcd, which wasn't funny, I'm switching the link to xkcdsucks, which I have found to be more funny on average than the recent xkcd comics. And I'm removing the link to the dominions forum, because that game is like crack for me and I spend way too much time reading about its strategies.
(from xkcdsucks about this older XKCD comic)
Oh and come on: Icarus's problem was that he used wax, which melts at a fairly low temperature. Hot glue is hardly the same - sure, it can melt, but if you've ever used a hot glue gun and accidentally touched the hot part you know just how f***ing hot it has to be, and how at that heat Our Hero has bigger problems than falling a few feet, like having his skin burn off. God knows how Mr. Hat is surviving operating what is essentially a small star.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Today was Kate's birthday (Happy Birthday Kate!) so we saw an early showing of Paper Heart and then went out to thai food.
Before the movie the theater was empty except for about a dozen people in line for a free screening of Worlds Greatest Dad. It was a very unusual crowd. Like all the literature and movie nerds took the afternoon off to go see a movie, while bringing a book so they wouldn't have to talk to each other in line. I talked to one guy for a few minutes while kate was in the bathroom. He was like a movie encyclopedia! The old guy next to him looked up from his manuscript long enough to say "What movie is he seeing?!?" before he decided I wasn't worth his time.
The movie was entertaining. It had funny parts but it wasn't really a comedy, and I sorta felt like the romance was very one-sided. It was kinda like 500 Days of Summer that way. It was about one person, and that person's experience in a romantic relationship. The girl kinda reminded me of Jamie, not just because they're both asian, her mannerisms were also similar. Like, for example, the way she squints her eyes. Ha, just kidding. (Editors note: that joke is not funny upon re-reading.) Michael Cera played himself. Or the character we always see him play at least. Kate finds him endearing and I'm pretty indifferent. As the movie nerd informed me beforehand, it was a good movie, but definitely a chick flick.
We went to a thai place out on 6th street in Chinatown and it was just okay. My fried rice was a little bland. (I'm a fried rice expert.) Kate got something more intricate (she's a thai foodie) and reported the same thing. Lately I've had a problem figuring out whether, when I order my fried rice with pork, if they've really given me pork or chicken. It always tastes very similar to chicken at least. I should go back to that place I used to order fried rice from on U street. They do a good pork fried rice. Also I tried a thai iced coffee for a change. It was similar to a thai iced tea, but with a weak, super sweet, coffee flavoring. I guess that's what I should have expected, but I'd never had one before. Stick with the teas.
shihonage: Things grew complex enough so that I have to think seventy times, cut once. Run code in my head before I write it, complex code. I can't cut more than once, because I have severe dry eye syndrome which makes every minute of looking at text into a rationed resource.
ps. Adding a link to Sean's blog. The kid was my best friend in third and fourth grade before he moved to Montana. And I'm reordering the blogs by update frequency.
Before the movie the theater was empty except for about a dozen people in line for a free screening of Worlds Greatest Dad. It was a very unusual crowd. Like all the literature and movie nerds took the afternoon off to go see a movie, while bringing a book so they wouldn't have to talk to each other in line. I talked to one guy for a few minutes while kate was in the bathroom. He was like a movie encyclopedia! The old guy next to him looked up from his manuscript long enough to say "What movie is he seeing?!?" before he decided I wasn't worth his time.
The movie was entertaining. It had funny parts but it wasn't really a comedy, and I sorta felt like the romance was very one-sided. It was kinda like 500 Days of Summer that way. It was about one person, and that person's experience in a romantic relationship. The girl kinda reminded me of Jamie, not just because they're both asian, her mannerisms were also similar. Like, for example, the way she squints her eyes. Ha, just kidding. (Editors note: that joke is not funny upon re-reading.) Michael Cera played himself. Or the character we always see him play at least. Kate finds him endearing and I'm pretty indifferent. As the movie nerd informed me beforehand, it was a good movie, but definitely a chick flick.
We went to a thai place out on 6th street in Chinatown and it was just okay. My fried rice was a little bland. (I'm a fried rice expert.) Kate got something more intricate (she's a thai foodie) and reported the same thing. Lately I've had a problem figuring out whether, when I order my fried rice with pork, if they've really given me pork or chicken. It always tastes very similar to chicken at least. I should go back to that place I used to order fried rice from on U street. They do a good pork fried rice. Also I tried a thai iced coffee for a change. It was similar to a thai iced tea, but with a weak, super sweet, coffee flavoring. I guess that's what I should have expected, but I'd never had one before. Stick with the teas.
shihonage: Things grew complex enough so that I have to think seventy times, cut once. Run code in my head before I write it, complex code. I can't cut more than once, because I have severe dry eye syndrome which makes every minute of looking at text into a rationed resource.
ps. Adding a link to Sean's blog. The kid was my best friend in third and fourth grade before he moved to Montana. And I'm reordering the blogs by update frequency.
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