mh-z web-log

I’m sick, so I won’t be updating this site regularly for now. Ha ha, what a joke.

Coddleston, coddleston, coddleston pie,
Why does a chicken, I don’t know why.
Ask me a riddle and I’ll reply,
Coddleston, coddleston, coddleston pie.

Two days ago my cousin (19) died of a drug overdose; his funeral is this Sunday. I don’t really know why I’m posting this here; I guess I want something here to be in his memory. Goodbye, Eric. I’ll remember you.

I have become a compulsive gum-chewer. I chew a piece of gum for perhaps a few minutes, get tired of it, and spit it out. And then, a few minutes later, I decide that I want to be chewing gum again, so I pull out another stick. I guess this is somewhat like a smoking addiction, but it’s not an addiction, because I could stop if I felt like it. Not like this is a chemical withdrawal from gum I’m experiencing here. Unless it’s nicotine gum, but it’s not… Oh wait a second, I bet some enterprising gum manufacturer’s thought of putting addictive substances into their product and covering it up, just like how tobacco companies manipulated nicotine levels in cigarettes, as was the subject of the 1999 movie The Insider. Granted, I dozed off during that movie, but that’s a different story altogether. But a reputable company like Wrigleys? Nah, I refuse to believe it. Shoot, I have to cut this entry short because I’m out of gum and have to run down to the store and get some more.

Here’s a histogram of my friends’/acquaintances’ birthdays and where they fall out during the year.

As you can see, April and May are underrepresented and in the interest of diversity, I would like to make more friends with birthdays in those months. If you were born in either month, (especially if I already know you (but not your birthday)), please e-mail me. If you were born in December, though, I’m sorry but I unfortunately must reject your offer of friendship; December’s quota has already been exceeded. Thanks for your help, everyone, in making my social network as birthday-ly diverse as possible; I feel as if my life is enriched by the equality we, together, promote.

When I have nothing else to write about I can always write about a book I’ve read; that typically seems to spark some sort of creative writing mechanism in my mind and I churn out prose which subsequently has absolutely nothing to do with the item itself I’m purporting to begin analysis of. So let me see, then, what have I read recently or semi-recently? How about… Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. I believe that’s a book classically read in high school, but somehow I missed reading it. Another one of those high school English-course selections is Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, which I also managed to miss and need to remedy one of these days. And now, somehow, as I write this, my brain has taken a turn to…

My friend who recently got a restraining order against her ex-boyfriend who has turned slightly insane. Well, gradually so, because he was rather insane to begin with, even though the times I met him he seemed to be quite normal. But then I helped her fix her computer after he’d thrown it on the ground, and I think only having heard about the present craziness doesn’t do any sort of justice to the reality of the situation: the stalking, crazy phone calls, smashed car windows, and so on. I understand that the emotions he must be feeling are crazy as well, and I sympathize, or rather pity, because he does this out of some sort of obsessive infatuation for her. I’m sure it represents a known psychological disorder, which when I think of it (while revising this entry) reminds me of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), alhough I don’t know the symptoms and OCD deals with little things, I understand. Repeatedly checking the stove to see if one has left it on, for example. Nothing emotionally harmful, like this; a dependency on asserting or testing one’s relationship to a person, or doing something to affect that person.

An important ability is the one to let go (more OCD-like; noting this on the revision). To look at yourself rationally and try to establish what your goals are; to realize that you have to stop acting a certain way because it’s not only hurting whatever specific goals you have in mind. (For example, does he want her back? Is that the goal? Does he realize that every thing he does, therefore, not only does not affect the probability of that happening, which is now zero, but is also self-defeating?) What other goals might there be? To cause discomfort in others and even greater discomfort in yourself? But it’s not a rational mind doing any sort of thinking or analysis here… So I say, and everybody has to do this about various things (may they be, though, more benign), let go. Sit back. Calm down. Decide you’re going to change something in your life. Move to a different place physically and mentally. Change your routine. Set your mind on something else. Take up alcohol to fill the void, because at least that’s going to only harm you and not others, and perhaps one day you’ll have the strength to get over a chemical addiction, because perhaps that’s easier than an emotional addiction. Fine, I know these things are easy to say, and have I really been there? Anywhere near there? No; I can extrapolate and observe, but that’s about it. In general, though, there comes a point when your rational mind should rebell against illogical self-destructive actions and decide it really had better whip that other part of itself into submission and go do something productive and non hurtful. I guess this is easier said than done; I guess I haven’t been there, so I don’t really understand. It’s like chemical addiction. To me it seems that if I were a smoker and I heard enough things about how bad smoking is, I’d realize that rationally I was just hurting myself and would up and quit without too much fanfare. Or maybe some fanfare, because I’d tell everyone. I’d throw out all my cigarettes; I’d lock myself inside; I’d go to the gym and run 10 miles a day at whatever speed I could manage.

Or would I? From my limited experience it’s not lack of willpower that keeps smokers from quitting, but a willingness to rationalize smoking itself as something that’s really not so bad. It’s as if the part of the mind which would otherwise be responsible for saying “enough!; this is hurting you, you have to change” either doesn’t exist or doesn’t assert itself. (Which are effectively one and the same, since the end result is the same.) The same with this guy. It’s an emotional dependency of some kind. A bad psychological addiction as if to a chemical, which suppresses rationality. That’s what they mean, it seems, when they say “addiction changes brain chemistry”. But so do so many other things. Emotions, for example.

See, I try to understand everyone at least on a cursory level, that’s the thing. Even messed up people, because we all seem to be given plenty of opportunities in life to get worked up over something or think too much; to be illogical; we’re often compelled to do something we know we shouldn’t because the net effect is only harmful. Maybe I shouldn’t even try to understand someone as harmful and irrational as this person. But on the other hand, beyond issues of anger management and emotional control, I think he’s sick and needs someone to reach out and help him. That’s not going to be me, unless he happens to read this (which I doubt will occur), and is in any way inspired by what I wrote, which I think is unlikely. I’m just musing out loud. Maybe sometimes people who are like that need something to shock them straight, but probably even that will have no effect most of the time.

Well, enough speculation. Did I say this was going to be a review of Slaughterhouse Five? I guess that’ll have to wait. When I get writing, who knows what it’ll be about. And I’ve already gotten enough crumbs of this crunchy toast in between the keys of my new laptop.

Ah, an Agatha Christie book. Are these formulaic, like the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift (which I’ve mentioned before) or do they follow a specific trend or are they mostly different from each other? I don’t know; I’ve never read anything by Ms. Christie before, notorious (but not in a bad way) writer though she is. I remember back when I was in third grade, there were Agatha Christie books on the shelf in our classroom, but I never deigned to pick any of ‘em up. Preferred the “Choose Your Awn Adventure” books, which I kept my place in by means of all my fingers (to return to decision points when my character died or the story just came to an end), later graduating to paperclips. I remember reading some of those from cover to cover, even, disjointed though the story turned out. But the books were action packed so reading in orded didn’t matter. Same thing as the movie Memento (which everyone pronounces as “momento” as in “un momento por favor”, but it’s not that, it’s memento, ya uneducated fools!). “Memento: A reminder of the past”. As in, a keepsake. The main character’s tatooing his important data on his arms so that he’ll know who he is when he wakes up each day.

Is this supposed to be a review of Murder on the Orient Express in which I’ve instead said virtually nothing about the book, just random circumstances which don’t even surround the book? Was that a rhetorical question? Anyway, it was good, and that’s all I have to say. The main character is the detective Hercule Poirot, who seems small and average and unassuming until he turns his powers of intellect to the mystery itself and solves it light years ahead of everyone else. (And do keep in mind, though, that “light years” are a measure of distance and not time, so that doesn’t really apply.) Anyway, PBS had a mystery series featuring Poirot mysteries, and now I shall just have to obtain videos and watch them.

This was a quick book to read, or would have been had I not been going at the pace of about one-half page per night before I fell asleep. That’s not to remark on the quality or excitement level of the book, which I assure you is up there on the charts. Rather, just the way my body works when it comes to sleep, information which clearly has no business being in a book review. And now since this review contains more meta-information than anything relevant about the book, I’ll stop. I recommend it, that’s about all I have to say.

I sort of raced full speed towards a cliff and then went plunging over. I guess if you’re trying to post something every day and you miss a day then it’s all over, so you might not even bother trying to keep up with it anymore, eh? That’s the problem with resolutions. Well, like I said, I didn’t make any, so it doesn’t matter. So all right, I make a January 12 resolution and see how far it takes me. If I fall off the cliff again I’ll just have to pick myself up and make another resolution.

There’s nothing like a good half hour well spent mindlessly playing Tekken Tag against a sibling. Especially when you win, but my brother didn’t stand a chance. :)

I like dark chocolate, not milk chocolate. I suppose in the spirit of the prior posting I could ramble on for a bit, and touch upon what random subjects my mind sees fit. My friend has taken over the prior position I held at my old company, and I’m happy to see that even after his second day, he’s catching on and has absorbed more than his predecessor, whom I trained, was able to pick up in weeks. (Sans unnecessary modesty I feel I’m a decent teacher, so that’s certainly not the issue.) I still do a small amount of work for the company on an as-needed basis, as a consultant, which is a nice arrangement, not the least of which due to the fun and friendly atmosphere in the office. At least, it certainly seems that way upon my exposure to it on a once or twice weekly basis with adequate sleep and no stress on my part.

[http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=picassosinatra Paul] and I are going to organize a group and build [http://world.std.com/~j9/sponge/ this]. There’s a link to a level-two “sponge” the author of the page constructed, but I think his sponge is boring because he points all the cards inwards to expose the white backsides (for consistency). I’d certainly want our sponge built exposing all the different and interesting business cards of which it’s formed.

I take back a great deal of what I said about Firefox, since I’m back to using it. Don’t laugh, anyone. (By which I mean you, Zenia!)

Hmm, look at that, I’ve managed to post at least one item per day since the first of the year. By pointing this out am I invoking Murphy’s Law or the evil eye or something like that and so now you’re inevitably not going to see another post for, say, a month or so? Not really, because I didn’t make a resolution to post here more often or anything, I just feel it would be nice to be more, say, “candid” is the only word I can think of. Which means that most of the time I’m going to be writing about something that the majority of poeple who might read this would find boring, but I’m definitely going for a quantity over quality angle, here. Because sometimes you eat because you’re hungry, and you want some decent yet not epicurean food in adequate quantity. Sometimes, it’s true, you’re in the mood for the gourmet. But most of the time you just want to not be hungry.

I affirm again, that Opera is the fastest browser out there. I’m not liking Firefox that much anymore, it’s laggy and a bit clunky. Laggy even with that speed hack you may have run into, which actually didn’t really make much of a difference despite what I may have said at first… it must have been all psychological. Like shoes guaranteed to make you run faster and jump higher. Opera is snappy and gives off an effortless feel; you use its built-in mouse gestures and instantly go back and forward no matter how complex a page is. With Firefox there’s a small but perceptible delay, and the same thing goes for just normal navigation. I’m working with pages being served up by a server running on my own computer, so there really should be no delay at all, because it’s not like the data actually has to go anywhere. Yet with Firefox there still is that little delay. Clunky; still good; but doesn’t really have a useful function between the other two big browsers, both of which are useful for different things. There’s the whole benefit of Firefox being open source, with an open add-on architecture, and all that. Yet I’ve browsed through lists of available plugins, and haven’t found anything I really need or feel like installing. Firefox has built-in RSS management, but I’m fine with Bloglines for handling RSS subscriptions, since that’s simple enough and as a Web-based program I can use it on any computer and pick up where I left off. There’s Firefox’s tabbed browsing feature, yet Opera did tabs first, and still does it best. I don’t want to have to think, whenever I load a page, about whether it’ll go into a tab or not. With Firefox I could load it into a tab, but I have to take a special action (holding down the Ctrl key) to get that to happen. Strangely enough, there’s no option to make all pages load by default into tabs, which you’d think should be something pretty basic. Perhaps Firefox would shine when used over a modem connection, if only because of the way it loads images (i.e., in smaller chunks than I.E. (ha) or Opera). Anyway, it’s mainly about that lag when loading even localhost pages. But it could be just something I notice, like monitor refresh rates and mouse lag, which no one else I point this out to seems to be able to notice.

More on this. I figured it out and made about five today; what fun. You really do need to put the outside layer on (the one that covers the flaps) to hold the whole thing together, using 12 business cards to make one tight cube. What’s this good for? No idea, but who cares.

At 9:00 PM I drank a nice cup of coffee at Coffee Bean. At 5:30 AM I am still feeling the effects of said coffee and am wide awake. Perhaps it was the size of my dinner, which was rather small (not due to lack of food but due rather lack of desire to consume copious quantities of said food) which caused the caffeine to be absorbed through my relatively empty stomach, causing present effects. Perhaps it was our raucous chat room, which had me riled up saying such silly things as “OCD OCD OCD OCD OCD OCD OCD” (I’m big ‘OCD’; thanks little ‘ocd’ for all the inspiration). Perhaps it was the nap I took between 7:30 PM and 8:30 PM, shortly preceding powerful percolated product’s procurement. All I know is that I’m sleepless in Los Angeles, and before I forget, I will share this:

I ordered my cup of coffee. The cashier said, “for here or to go?”. I said, “What’s the difference, if it’s to go then do I ha ha get an extra napkin or something?” In response he mumbled something into his nonexistent beard, and I didn’t question it further, thinking it was just something silly anyway. I asked my friend Mike (I am Michael, thank you very much, though I forgive graciously those of you who call me Mike) what the difference was, and he said he thought “for here” costs a little more. Like a charge for the table, or something. We figured out that it was the tax, and that “to go” probably doesn’t have the tax. I said that’s silly, from now on I’m ordering “to go” and as far as they’re concerned you never know, I could change my mind and on my way to the door decide to sit down at a table (with some friends I just noticed were there, perhaps) and sip my scaldingly sweet sleep shunning solution socially or singlely, but at a table nonetheless. I mean (in terms of the extra charge), what if I’d ordered a cup of water? Hot water’s a good free coffee house drink, and it comes in a cup that looks like you’ve payed for something; useful I suppose if anyone’s glaring at you for eating a sandwich you obviously got somewhere else.

Last time I discussed this, by the way, was when I met a nice girl (who had a nice curl) and we had a nice conversation about all sorts of random topics, such as chicken nuggets. (Subtext: “nugget shaped pieces of chicken”, as ever-so-helpfully explained on a bag of these my roommates and I once got from Costco.) One of us brought up that someone ought to make chicken nuggets actually shaped like chickens. I mean, like animal crackers, but only the chickens. Chicken-shaped chicken nuggets, now how about that? Or what about other shapes? Personally I favor geometric shapes. Tetrahedrons. Reuleaux triangles. (‘Reuleaux’ has got to be the hardest word to spell, ever.) Interesting, check out the Reuleaux tetrahedron. Triangular manhole covers. The Wankel engine (fascinating). Business card cubes. Someone who is creating this out of business card cubes. Oh, the Web is such a wonderful place, there is more to read about and learn here than I could accomplish in a hundred thousand lifetimes. Which is why I want to live forever, you know.

Problem: Windows reports that a process called “sample.exe” is running and needs to be ended, every time Windows is shut down. This is on a new Dell laptop (with most of the preinstalled programs stripped away) and no processes named “sample” are running in the task manager. The registry is clean and I know what all the startup programs are. Acts like it could be spyware, but I’m careful not to get that in the first place, so I doubt it, and others who have had this problem report online that no spyware scan programs find this.

Solution: (This was somewhat hard to find, which is why I’m posting it here.) The problem is with drivers for the built-in Intel wireless network card in the computer. Go to Dell’s website and download a newer version of the driver. The item in Device Manager looks like this:

Intel® PRO/Wireles LAN 2100 3A Mini PCI Adapter

I installed version 1.2.3.14 of the driver, dated 10/4/2004, and that got rid of the problem.

I wish the font rendering in ZDE (Zend Development Environment, an IDE for PHP) would use ClearType under Windows XP, but it doesn’t seem to. That’s probably an artifact of the program’s running under the Java platform, so it’s probably a common effect of Java programs that try to use an OS’s native font (or maybe just under Windows). For example, in ZDE there’s a switch where you can set the appearance of the entire program to use the OS’s “look-and-feel”, where it uses heavyweight components (i.e., the buttons, forms, etc. all provided by the native OS; as opposed to lightweight components which are actually buttons designed and managed entirely by Java, which look different from the standard OS (Windows) buttons, drop-down boxes, etc.). That’s how it is by default (OS-style/heavyweight), or if you turn off the “OS look-and-feel” option, it just looks like a regular old Java applet. Since TrueType font support is provided by Windows, under the Java look-and-feel even using the system fonts is unavailable. But the point is, native OS look-and-feel isn’t fully implemented when it comes to font rendering. And the point of that is, it’s just something I noticed, that’s all.

Actually, the point is this. I searched for “zde cleartype”, thinking someone else surely mentioned something about this somewhere on the Web, but found no results, so I figured I’ll mention this myself in case someone else runs the same search. There you have it.

Firefox has a bug when it comes to rendering the <blockquote> tag. If you leave no whitespace characters on either side of the tag, Internet Explorer consistently renders the HTML with a blank line in between the quoted and unquoted text equivalent in size to that created by the <p> tag (the correct behavior). Firefox, however, sometimes displays this space and sometimes, seemingly at random, does not. Reload the same page and it might look different this time. Seems like a small issue, but it’s annoying when you want to use blockquote to indent cited text and have the spacing look right. Putting an extra <br> before the blockquote tag ensures that it looks right in Firefox, but now I.E. always shows an extra blank line. Hmm…

Looking through the referer (which I know is spelled with two r’s, but that’s how the Apache people did it, so sue me, no wait, sue them, not me, no wait, they make good software, don’t sue them either) logs. Here’s a list of the odder search terms people typed into Google to find my site:

barbecued monkeys, santorum lube fecal matter, king fern, naked people, the humanoid tankmon, kate supnik, vivarin nodoz comparison, escalator accidents hong kong, reptiles infinity, picture omelette du fromage

Let’s analyze the list in some more depth:

barbecued monkeys : Mmm, barbecued monkey! It’s what’s for dinner. I talked about monkeys and barbecues in separate captions on one of the Hong Kong photo album pages… but my mouth is watering. Maybe this particular (naked) person was researching forest fires or something.

santorum lube fecal matter : Um… I have no clue where this came from. Let’s just continue our movement down the page…

king fern : Bow down before me, ferny peons. Peonies? A picture of some ferns is posted around here somewhere. But hey, I’m still thinking about that (poor) barbecued monkey (*drool*).

naked people : …Because underneath our clothes, everyone is naked. Just think about that next time you walk (naked) down the street. Now since this is such a prudish site, I don’t think the word “naked” has existed here (until now), making the aforementioned search result a strange one.

the human tankmon : What is this, mon? I am the human tankmon, mon. And although I’m omniscient (or mon-iscient), I still don’t know what this is or where it came from.

kate supnik : Sup mon, you know who this tankmon is?

vivarin nodoz comparison : Yeah, I wrote about this, and I hope the searcher found the article, because my review, personally being a caffeine conneiseur, was very in-depth and enlightening. Unfortunately it’s not online now (I have swaths of archive to put back up), but I’ll work on getting that up soon, because the whole World Wide Web is indeed a poorer place for lack of that article.

escalator accidents hong kong : It’s discomforting to think of what happens in an escalator accident, but hopefully (as in elevators) there are safeguards in place. Are there a disproportionate number of escalator accidents in Hong Kong? It did seem to me that the escalators there moved about 50% faster than escalators in my part of the world (which was rather cool). At here I certainly see the page that lead to this hit.

reptiles infinity : Why do I think immediately of M. C. Escher? And then I think of M. C. Hammer, and then I think no, I’m going back to thinking about Escher, thank you very much. Perhaps I talked about him once before, though this I do not recall.

picture omelette du fromage : Ha ha ha. Maybe because I mentioned an episode of Dexter’s Laboratory where all he could say was “omelette du fromage”, due to some sort of curse or other.

So there you have it. And about all this I have just one thing to say, while making a Vulcan V-sign:

Omelette. Du fromage.

Happy New Year, y’all.