Bear with me...

...while I fiddle with the format a bit. I'm customizing the template because I got tired of having to scroll and scroll and scroll... Well, you get the idea. The template I was using squished the width of the main column of posts, so I had to do some manual munging with the CSS code. Unfortunately that also meant that those nice GIFs that were making all of the edges look rounded also had to go, since they were a set size. Ah, well, c'est la vie, as the French say.

I finally understand the Triple God!

(scary, isn't it?)

I originally thought the Triple God website was the product of a diseased and twisted mind. Now I know better. The Triple God website (see my link from a while back) was the product of a diseased and twisted mind that was trying to parody this site. As usual, Wikipedia gives an explanation of the basic idea and history behind Gene Ray and his Timecube...uh, *ahem*...theory.

I'll close with this quote that shows irrefutably that Mr. Ray knows what he's talking about.

"I can call singularity educators the most putrid name on Earth and claim they eat cow-dung ambrosia, but the lying ass bastards will not even object - for they know I am right and that any debate will indict them for the evil they perpetuate against the students and future humanity."

The biggest a-holes in WoW

First some small background info: World of Warcraft (WoW)is a Massively Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Game. Basically it's like combining a video game with a chat room. People log on and find their friends and go on quests, etc.

It seems that one of the players of WoW died of a stroke, and her friends decided to have an in-game funeral for the real-world dead person.

WoW, like any "social" (I use the term loosely) medium, attracts the whole gamut of personalities, however, and some of the less savory types saw this as the perfect opportunity to get in a few easy kills under their belts.

The gruesome virtual result has been captured on video, and is now available from our good friends at Google Video.

I guess maybe there's a little bit of a-hole in me, too. I laughed until tears came out of my nose. That's no easy feat, I can tell you.

Aloha! I do. Part Deux

It's been a few days since I've been back now, so I guess it's time to continue the saga of my trip to Hawai'i. I stayed at the JW Mariott Beach Club in Ko Olina. I thought I was getting ripped off when I ended up paying $300 for a guest room per night, but it actually ended up being really nice. To the left is the view out my window.

Weddings, as many of you know, can be very stressful for all involved, and this one was no exception. Well before the wedding day there was anxiety, anger, excitement, and tears. Some of the preparations weren't ready until hours before the ceremony. My jacket, for example, needed to be re-ordered because the place that measured me picked a size that was too small (apparently neck sizes vary by manufacturer as well, because I couldn't tilt my head, and I was just waiting to pass out in the shirt the tuxedo place gave me), and the jacket wasn't ready until two hours before the ceremony.

In the end, though, it went off without a hitch. Here's a picture of the location, taken from about a dozen floors above out the balcony window. You can see the gazebo in the upper-right with two approaches from the left and the right across the ponds (also note the Brown Ray taking a nap in the corner). The wedding party and the bride came down the left path, and the groom came down the right. There was a second of awkwardness while we figured out whether or not the attendants should pair up on the way down. There were three guys and one girl, and as much as I like my best friend's brother, I didn't want to link arms with him and be lead down the path. Still everything came out perfectly when the ceremony started and I have to say that as far as I can tell one of the only people who can take the credit for that is the bride. I've always looked up to her for having the common sense that I never had, but it was also her clear vision of what she wanted that seemed to anchor the flurry of emotion surrounding the event. Don't get me wrong; I don't think she felt like a steady force in the chaos, but that's what I saw. From the "Event Planner" that seemed to just say whatever it took to get her off the phone to the other family tensions to the exhaustion and lack of control of being 2000 miles from home, there were plenty of things that could have gone wrong.

It's funny though, somehow the seriousness of the event didn't hit me until I saw her mom leading her down the pathway to the flower-lined aisle. She looked beautiful, and I suddenly didn't feel like I belonged. I felt like someone more refined should be there in my place. I would have liked nothing better than to root from the background and take in the event from the privacy of the back row, but all the same I felt...proud. I felt proud of her to see how far she had come. I thought back through the relationships she'd had in the last fifteen years I'd known her and I had to catch my breath before the swell of my emotions overtook me. As it was I couldn't help but get misty-eyed, no small feat in painfully inadequate footwear and a constrictive shirt collar straight from the irritable bowels of hell. Part of me couldn't wait for the ceremony to be over so I could tell her all of these things, and part of me knew I would never be able to. The next day, when I finally had a chance to talk to her, I blurted out something so clumsy I hate to even remember it. In the end, that's why I was there though, and that's why she's my best friend in the world. She knows the things I can't tell her, and knows the context behind the things I do.

Oh, I almost forgot; here's a picture of the bride.

My best friend...

...lives too far away.




What?

Aloha! I do.

Landing at the Honolulu airport, I resolved to find some sunblock as soon as I'd gotten my things into the hotel. I had a little more than 24 hours left before the wedding, and the last thing I wanted was to show up in all of the wedding photots looking like a red-faced monkey in a tuxedo. It had been one of the more enjoyable flights I could remember: my seatmate was an off-duty flight attendant who was very talkative, and let me in on the latest news from Waikiki, and I had opted to upgrade myself to first class for a low rate because some poor sucker had cancelled at the last minute. I could care less about the leather seats, but they were much more comfortable than the standard coach fare, and I was even able to sleep a little, thanks to a bottomless champagne glass. So far everything had gone as well as I could have hoped, and I was determined to make my first visit to Hawai'i a good one.

I was picked up at the airport by the groom and his parents and the bride's mother and brother. I'm in the wedding on the bride's side, by the way (bride's man, maybe?). They were on their way to Pearl Harbor. We took a tour of the Missouri, led by an old guy who either knew everything about the Missouri or was an excellent liar. I have to say that it was pretty amazing seeing the ship's construction and reflecting on the fact that it was still being used as recently as the Gulf War. I had to wonder how it was still floating, though, when we passed the Packard Bell in the communications room. Please, if there is a God in heaven don't let that have been the actual computer used. The last thing our men in uniform need when under heavy fire is to try to figure out why there are no IRQs left over after the modem/sound card has taken up 5 of them. I mean for God's sake, who combines a modem with a sound card!?! But I digress. By the end of the tour I was feeling thoroughly entertained, but also thorougly burned. As in sunburned. As in it somehow slipped my mind during the fascinating tour to make sure I got some sunblock before I did anything else. It's two days later as I'm writing this and it still feels like I'm wearing a sandpaper dog collar. Aloe is my friend, my only true friend.

More to come...

The Gatorade Conspiracy

Nukes in Iran? Kim-Jong Il threatening global annihilation? Benzene in soft drinks? Put down whatever news you're reading, because nothing can be more important than this. For years we've been living in darkness, unaware of the vast conspiracy that threatens to undermine our society and corrupt our youth. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, evil comes in a bottle.

Regrets

I don't remember how the subject came up, but I started it by showing him the bruise on my leg. We were in the bathroom at school. He showed me one that he had. It started at his waistband and painted his leg purple and black. His mom had given it to him when she spanked him. I nodded like I could identify (I couldn't). His mom had been very angry after finding him trying to drown his baby sister in the bathtub and had beaten angry colors into his skin.

I dropped my eyes for a second and stared at the mini-tile flooring of the bathroom. For a split second I thought about what I had just heard. I could tell it was wrong, but instead of saying anything else I dried my hands and headed back to class. I was only eight years old, and it was easy to put it out of my mind. Now I'm a lot older, and I was rudely reminded of this while watching a TV program. Obviously it's not something I'd forgotten, but it's something I don't think about much. I don't like to think about it because I was eight, and could be forgiven for not doing anything then, but now...now I can think of so many things that I might have said, and I just hope he's okay. I'll never know.

All Bow Before the Triple God!!!!

"I have been informed that the evolutionism pedant hirelings are conspiring to defame my character, as a means to discredit the Triple God Creation Principle. Kenneth Miller is yellow dung eating stupid, cannot fathom Harmonious Triple God System. Bill O'Reilly exposes identicality evil at Brown University."

Click Here for an In-depth Discussion of the Triple God

NEWS: One of these things is not like the others...

...which one can it be?

I always knew those Spanish were up to no good.

NEWS: The Latest Sign of the Apocalypse...

...projectile turkeys.

Either this guy's been watching too many Jean-Claude Van Damme movies or he was afraid of being the only child left behind, but this turkey just couldn't wait to get his read on.

Can't Buy Me Love

Marriage is not something to be taken lightly. The trade-in value on used brides is way lower than it used to be. Ever since this whole crazy fad about having a willing partner started, the turnover rate has skyrocketed, too. Don't you miss the good old days when it was "'till death do us part", whether you liked it or not? I mean, the divorce rate was lower, so obviously people must have been happier, right?

Okay, I'm rambling. I present this as evidence of my premise.

Did You Know?

Okay, it's time for Did You Know?, our 5334-part series on things about me that you might not have been familiar with.

Tim Fact #1 -- I used to lie in bed awake at night afraid of heaven.

It's true. When I was a kid I used to lie awake at night and think about heaven and how scary it was. I mean, what if I didn't like it? Think about what you get told about heaven in Sunday School.

Heaven is a place where:

• You will be there forever.
• Nothing that you have here will be there (no toys!).
• Until they die no one you know will be there, and some people you know will go to hell instead, and will never be there.
• You will never be sad, or feel pain. This is one of the parts I had a problem with, along with the next one.
• You will not feel any of these negative emotions, even for the people you left behind. You won't even care what happens on Earth.
• Your relationships will not be the same, and what they will be is ambiguous. You might not have a family, and you won't have best friends, or everybody will be your best friend. Husbands and wives might not be married, etc.
• Depending on who's giving the lecture, you might not even remember your life, and if you do you won't care about it.

Now of course you are told that it is a wonderful place and that you will be happy there, but since most of the descriptions of heaven seem (or seemed) to have more to do with what isn't there than what is, that's hard to hold on to, so at night I would lie awake staring at the ceiling with a cold knot in my stomach, not only scared of heaven, but scared that if I didn't want to go, then maybe God wouldn't let me in.

Career as Football Ref Ruined...

...for a Ventura, California teacher today. He's a shoe-in for a Darwin Awards honorable mention, though, hands down.

Girls with Guns!

I found this interesting photo page about Israeli army girls posted by a female photographer who went through the mandatory military training herself. In Israel all eighteen year olds must sign up for mandatory military service for two years.

How the hell I ran into this trolling through some random Icelandic link dump website, I don't know.

Here it is.

French Electro-Pop Extraordinaire!

As an apology for the last long and uninteresting post, let me present to you dat politics, the kick-ass french electronic trio that brought you This Way and provided the background music for the Personal Dumpster Video.

By the way, if you haven't yet, check out the Personal Dumpster website.

Warning: The This Way video is about 30MB. It might make more sense to download it and then play it than open it in a browser if you get as frustrated with the Quicktime Plug-in as I do.

GIGO

Warning: Boring technical information to follow. This is really only me reflecting to myself on what I've learned from my last project. Feel free to skip over.

There used to be a saying in computers: GIGO. It was an acronym for "Garbage In, Garbage Out". It was a cute, simplistic acronym for a concept that is essential in computing; it doesn't matter how good your logic is it isn't based on good data to begin with. In recent years we've started to change models to one that more closely resembles this one: "The customer is always right." Whereas it used to be understood that if you wanted to use a program, you would first read the instructions and/or help files in order to understand what the program wanted of you, it seems like these days most users expect the programs to present themselves in a way that makes sense to them, and if they don't get the result they expected, the computer is wrong.

Why am I musing about this? I recently wrote a program as part of a contract job, and I was asked up front how long it would take. I gave an estimate that turned out to be considerably shorter than I actually needed. The problem was that I was thinking about how long it would take to solve the technical problems, but it takes a lot longer to solve the human ones. Tying in to libraries for database connectivity, encrypting data, calculating elapsed time, converting data formats, and tying it all together in the algorithm that most succinctly defines the problem only took up about two-thirds of the time. The rest was taken up defining the user interface and formatting the output, verifying all of the input data to make sure there can't be any unexpected behaviors, and most importantly checking all possible exceptions to make sure that there is a relevant error message that accompanies it (That's a huge pet peeve of mine, lazy programmers not bothering to create relevant error messages and instead leaving messages that are at worst completely misleading and at best uninformative. "Unknown Error" comes to mind). In the end what I came up with was really not that great presentation-wise, either, just a simple command-line interface.

So what do I take away from this? I've gotten a lot more experience in anticipating users' requests, and I've started researching a few new tools that I can use to present a more intuitive front-end for my programs. In the past I have mostly coded for my own benefit, so I haven't had to think of it much, but over the past year or so I've been trying to code everything in as generic a fashion as possible, so that I can with little change conform my programs to whatever need arises. Another goal for the upcoming year will be to write all code from the beginning as if someone might have to use it. This will probably mean creating some user interface templates that my functions can "plug in" to, insulating the user interface and internal workings of my programs from each other. I have a feeling that some of these things I'm learning thorough experience have fancy names and would have been taught to me if I had gone through a Computer Science degree program.

To sum up, here are the things I want to work on in the coming year:

1. Write more modular code
2. Get more experience with the various UI modules
3. Set up a better lab environment in my home for testing
4. Learn Python
5. Learn Monad
6. Get more experience with C/C++
7. Get more experience writing web applications
8. Finally get past level 8 in Action Mode on Bejeweled.

I witnessed a murder tonight.

I saw a murder tonight. It wasn't the first. I've seen rapes, murders, assaults, kidnappings...I've seen everything. I've been witness as children recounted their molestations. I've watched as women shot their husbands in the face. I've borne witness to men who beat their wives. I've seen serial killers and serial rapists in action. I've seen children killing their own mothers. I've seen the most horrible, most heinous acts of man acted out night after night for my benefit, and I should be a wreck. I should be running from these horrible visions. Sure, I should be, but I like SVU.

I've been watching Law and Order: Special Victims Unit for a while now, and I really like it. I watch as the detectives solve rape cases and kidnaps in 50-inch plasma splendor, and I'm entertained. The writing is good, the characters are engaging, and the bad guys are evil enough that you love hating them. I mean, let's face it; what's worse than a rapist, and who doesn't feel good about one being caught? In the glow of my TV, and in the safety of my home, I lay back on my couch and enjoy the fictitious violations of TV people.