It may seem incongruous to see a URL in an Atari 2600 game, but I am in fact including my web address on the credits screen of the game I'm writing.

Because of the way my graphics engine loads the bitmaps, they need to be stored in the cartridge upside-down (lots of Atari games, but not all, do it this way as well.)

Well, tonight I accidentally put the URL in right-side-up, which taught me this little tidbit: a web address like this:

http://WWW.....COM

looks a lot like this:

µttb:\\MMM.....COW

...when you turn it upside down on an Atari.

I learn something new every day.

So the lovely Jenny and I went to Greek Fest Saturday night. We were going to both get gyros, but she had recently decided not to eat lamb anymore, since sheep are cute, so naturally I gave her a hard time about that, since she also thinks pigs and cows are cute, and has no problem eating the heck out of those critters.

And in doing so, of course, I was subjecting her to a pretty obvious double standard since there are things I don't eat precisely for the same reason (e.g. duck), but luckily she did not notice this. When we got into line to get our Fest food, I teased her a bit about her lamb squeamishness... until I saw the big pan of octopuses¹.

I had known they were going to have octupuses² at Greek Fest — the free weekly "Whatzup" had boldly proclaimed there would be 800 pounds of octopus at the festival — but I had assumed that what would be served would be little pieces of a big octupus, not hundreds of li'l baby octopuses³ writhing around in a pan.

I tell you, it was enough to turn me Level 5 vegan right on the spot. I've always had a certain squeamishness about seafood, but the thought of actually putting one of those betentacled monsters in my mouth... well, I had to avert my eyes and try to unsee that pan lest I inadvertently cover the pile of squirmy creatures with Saturday's breakfast.

I happened to see one of my co-worker at the fest, and I asked her if she'd tried the octopus⁴. She had not, but said that her mom once cooked octopus for her when she was younger.

"Little tiny octopuses like those?" I asked her.

"Yep," she said.

"Well, what did they taste like?"

"They were very rubbery..."

"Kind of like eating a basketball?"

"I don't know," she said. "I've never eaten a basketball."

Honestly, I think the odds of me eating a basketball are not worse than the odds of me willfully putting a tiny octopus in my mouth. Needless to say I did not give the lovely Jenny a hard time about her culinary preferences after that.

---

¹ To be technical, the plural of octopus is octoπ. The plural of octoπ is octoπr², and the plural of that is octo4/3πr³.

² Actually, the plural of octopus is dodecapus, meaning 12 tentacles. The plural of dodecapus is icosohedropus, meaning 20 tentacles. Larger quantities of octupuseses require scientific notation.

³ Conversely, an animal with only one tentacle, or appendage resembling a tentacle, is known as a monopus. Snakes, for example, are monopuses. Animals with no tentacles, such as geese, are known as nonpuses.

⁴ Sometimes, I wish there were a YouTube clip of Sean Connery saying "Octopussy." I know Roger Moore was the Bond from that film, but I think Connery would deliver that word with a bit more panache.

Over the weekend I came up with two great ideas for a television show, which I hereby release to the public domain.

Idea #1: A reality show in which one guy has to bench press another guy. If he can, he gets a million dollars, and if he can't the other guy gets the million. He has thirty days to beef up his bench-pressing strength, meanwhile the other guy has thirty days to get as fat as humanly possible so he can't be lifted. Then they switch for 30 days for double-or-nothing. That'd be good watching!

Idea #2: A superhero show where the antagonist is a masked villain who goes by the name Euler and who does various dastardly things. The protagonist must stop him, and in order to do so he must learn Euler's identity. Since Euler is of course named after mathematical pioneer Leonhard Euler, his dastardly schemes are often tinged with a mathematical theme. Also, because Euler is pronounced "oiler," he occasionally throws cans of oil at people.

When not working, I have been spending just about every waking second programming Duck Attack. It's been a complete immersion on par with falling in love with someone; just about every thought I have somehow involves this game.

It's like a giant puzzle I have to figure out... how to get the Atari to do exactly what I need it to do given its incredibly tight hardware constraints. Did I mention I only get 128 bytes of RAM for the entire program?

It's a lot of hard work, but I think it's going to be really fun to play once it's done. The lovely Jenny has been amazingly tolerant of me spending practically no time away from the computer in part due to the fact that she's enjoyed playing the prototypes I've shown her so far. Date night on Saturday mostly consisted of her playing Galaga on my widescreen TV while I wrote code on the couch.

She's had some really good ideas for the game, specifically some of the bonus items our hero gets to pick up. On Level 1 he gets Smarties:



Here's my 2600 rendering of said Smarties:



The Smarties work well because they make good use of the Atari 2600 limitation that objects only have one color per row. (It's not an absolute limitation: you can combine sprites and do some funky hardware tricks to get more colors, but it's often at the expense of getting much else done in the limited amount of time you get to write to the screen.)

Note that these are the American Smarties he gets, not the European version, which are more like M&Ms. Maybe he'll get some European Smarties in a higher level... I've set aside space for 100 bonus items, and only have about 15 drawn so far.

Speaking of bonus items, I always find it amusing that in my LiveJournal profile I'm apparently the only LJer with an interest in 6502 assembly language. The other listed interests that I'm apparently the only one on LJ to have include Dreidel Man and Ski soda, so I've decided right this second that a dreidel and a can of Ski will both be bonus items too.

Remember that Atari 2600 duck game I've been working on?

I think I've finally settled on what the player sprite should look like. For a while it was just a square, a la Adventure, but I decided that wasn't going to cut it.



Much better than a square, I think.

The Atari doesn't quite have enough pixel resolution to show it, but that's supposed to be a little red bow-tie.

Next up is creating the movement sprites for when he's walking up/down/left/right. Then the animation for when a duck eats him. Then the animation for when he's cooked by a fireball.

I got to see Spinal Tap "unwigged and unplugged" this weekend in Detroit. They put on a very good show, and even included a Q & A session where audience members asked them questions that were, surprisingly, not asinine at all.

fuselighter speculates that this was because to get a ticket, you had to be at least marginally intelligent to begin with: nowhere on the ticket, or the flyers, or the marquee, or any other advertisements that I saw, did it actually say "Spinal Tap". It just said "Unwigged and Unplugged," which could have been just about anybody. I believe the theory is that Rob Reiner (and possibly various other film and music industry middlemen) own a percentage of the name Spinal Tap, and Guest, Shearer and McKean didn't feel like sharing the proceeds.

They played just about every song you would hope they would, and some of the new arrangements were pretty inspired. Most of the show was pretty solid, although Harry Shearer sang a couple of clunkers. The consensus among the three of us was that even though Harry's song-writing skills were the weakest of the three, he probably got the best pick of the groupies since he could woo them with Simpsons voices. At least that was fuselighter's and randy_m's theory.

Apparently they've got an album coming out this month as well, which they plugged a few times. Looks like they re-recorded just about every song from the "This Is Spinal Tap" album for some reason.

Whenever I happen to see a flyer or e-mail notice for "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown" (which the local playhouse is doing in a few months), I occasionally get that song stuck in my head.

Not any of the actual songs from that play, mind you, since I've never seen it and don't know any of them: just the words "you're a good man, Charlie Brown," sung to the tune of "you're a mean one, Mr. Grinch."

And after seeing a preview for the almost-certain-to-be-awful "Land of the Lost" remake, I've had that stuck in my head too. Not the theme song, just those four words, sung to the tune of "Band on the Run," complete with the little guitar deedle-deedle bit.

I guess this wasn't too long for Slow Wave after all!

You know who's awesome? My mom, that's who.

When my mom and dad came up for the Oak Ridge Boys concert last week, I mentioned to my mom that I really liked the soup she made one particular time, and that if she ever had any free time, I wouldn't mind a few bowls of it to take to work with me for lunch.

So when I went out to Ohio for a Mother's Day visit, what should I find waiting for me in the fridge but 3 dozen glass bowls of soup, just the perfect size to bring to work and pop in the microwave. And it's 3 different varieties of soup, too: chili (good), vegetable stew (very, very good) and chicken/potato/white bean soup (absolutely amazing.)

It was the best Mother's Day present I've ever received, and I'm not even, technically, a mother.

Well, FINALLY, the gub'mint has decided to do something about the annoying "your vehicle warranty is about to expire" robo-calls.

I wonder what prompted the senators to act?

"Schumer and Warner have received the calls themselves on their personal cell phones."

Ah. Well, that would explain it.

The first one of these I got, I was sort of incredulous, because I was pretty sure automated dialing of cell phones was illegal. At any rate, I saved the number as a contact called "Telemarketer" on my cell phone; in case they called again the caller ID would tell me I didn't need to answer it.

Well, clever them, they used a different number each time, so occasionally I would get fooled into answering it. So far, they've used 205-561-2815, 619-436-1835, 256-261-7786, 800-699-3423, 402-982-0464, 609-718-0666, 818-870-9127, 402-982-0669, 702-705-5099, and a few more I didn't bother to record.

When I get such a call at work, I normally just hang up. When I'm out taking a walk and get a call, I usually push the button to speak to a representative, then pretend I'm an old person and just babble aimlessly about how cars were much more reliable in the 1940s until they get wise and hang up.

Now that classes are over for the summer, I've decided to put some time into a project I've been toying with on and off for a few years now: a brand new video game for the Atari 2600.

If you're not familiar with programming for the Atari 2600, it's quite a challenge: you typically have 128 bytes of RAM to work with. That's not 128 kilobytes or 128 megabytes, that's 128 bytes. For perspective, that's 12 fewer bytes than Twitter allows you to send. This sentence (including spaces and punctuation), would use up over half of its memory.

Even trickier is the fact that you (as programmer) have to handle the task of writing the data to the television screen, one row at a time. This excellent book (pointed out to me by dainys a while back) covers some of the challenges faced by the programmers of the day.

I've played around with 2600 programming before (I added a hot-air balloon to Adventure a couple of years ago), but this will be my first attempt at creating a game from scratch.

The idea I'm working from right now is a quest game not entirely dissimilar from Adventure, where you have to find a valuable object and bring it someplace. The bad guys in this game: evil mutant ducks that shoot fireballs at you. You can protect yourself from them by using a special duck shield, or battle them with a taser, which zaps them silly and harmless for the duration of the game.

Here's a screen cap of the first bad guy you encounter along the way. Looks pretty harmless, eh?



The other ducks look similar, except they're gray, tan or blue instead of brown.

Normally you don't see bad guys this big and detailed on the 2600, but I've got a few tricks up my sleeve from studying the source code of some of the masters of the genre. One of the limitations of the 2600 is that you only get one color for each player (e.g. each duck), but since you have to write a new player graphic each line anyway, you can change the color each row. So you get as many colors as you want, but only one per row.

See for example how the 2600 Donkey Kong characters are "striped" with one color each per row:



Ducks are a natural fit for this striping. Unfortunately, striping can only go so far: since the duck's head and beak are on the same line horizontally, they have to both be the same color. So no yellow beak for Mr. Duck. Still, as 2600 graphics go, I think this is pretty sharp.

Next up, I have to decide what the player (aka the protagonist, aka "you") is, and looks like. Any ideas?

Do you know how many times Steve Perry sings the word "na" at the end of "Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin'"?

154! Steve sings "na" 154 consecutive times.

And now you know.

Next up: counting the "na"s in "Hey Jude."

This site translates Garfield strips into Japanese, then back into English, for happy super enjoyment looking.

Tonight I took my parents out to see The Oak Ridge Boys in concert as an early Mother's Day present.

I was not at all surprised to hear them do a block of gospel songs.

I was not at all surprised to hear them perform Elvira.

I was very surprised to hear them perform 7 Nation Army by The White Stripes.

Apparently it's their new single.

I just e-mailed my Tuesday professor my final class project. I'm now officially 50% through with exam week!

Now I just have to finish up the projects for the other class to turn in tomorrow night. Then I can resume doing things like replying to LJ comments and reading my e-mail.

It will be such a relief when those last projects are turned in. It's been a rough semester.

Is anyone out there a crossword puzzle whiz or Wheel of Fortune expert? I'm trying to solve the following puzzle, and right now it's stumping me.

It's a four-word phrase (six letters, two letters, six letters and two letters).



Here's the tough part: the pink squares are all the same letter, and that letter is either E, F or L.

The blue squares are also the same letter (although not necessarily the same letter as the pink squares), and that letter is also either E, F or L.

The green square is E, F or L, and the yellow squares could be any letter.

Anyone care to take a stab at it?

I know this is very unrealistic, but sometimes I wish the Internet would just stay put.

I'll bookmark a really interesting article that I don't have time to read just then, then go back to it a week or two later and the website will tell me the story has "expired." I hate that so damn much. If you're going to bother putting something on the Internet, at least have the common decency to leave it there until the end of time.

I know, I know, unrealistic. Still, I found myself irritated to learn GeoCities was shutting down, because I have lots of bookmarks pointing to interesting things I've found on there.

Like, for example, a handy list of 6502 instruction codes. Part of a John Lennon book. An obsolete Apple II emulator.

Hmm. Well, I guess none of those are things I can't live without.

Still.

I came across this warning label among a big pile of manuals and warranties I decided to sort, and I have no idea what it goes with.



What could I have possibly purchased that requires a warning against shipwreck? The air horn, maybe? But I already posted its amusing label already, I'm sure I would have posted this too if it came with it.

I'm baffled. Any guesses?

(I do like how shipwreck and loss of life or limb fall into the "inconvenience" category.)

When I take a shower, I turn the bathroom fan on so the mirrors don't fog up. I leave the fan on after I'm done, since the mirrors will fog up afterward otherwise. (And also, too much humidity probably isn't good for the walls and ceiling. I don't want to encourage mold.)

The problem is, I sometimes forget to go back in there and turn the fan off before I go to work, so it sits there whirring away all day wasting electricity and hastening the eventual end-of-life of the fan.

The solution: yesterday I went to the hardware store and bought a high-tech, space-aged fan timer and installed it:



It works great, and I do like the tiny green LED that lets me know all is well.

The one-big-switch, two-little-switch faceplate was pretty hard to find, though. I had to go to four different hardware stores before I spotted one.

Last week I mentioned I had a neat idea for a novel. I've stolen some moments here and there to work on it a bit, and it's coming along nicely.

One of the first major changes I made was to change it from a novel to a short story, since — so far, at least — it seems it might lend itself better to a shorter format. This has the fortunate side effect (I hope) of making me more likely to actually finish it.

The second major change was to the protagonist, a nuclear scientist. As the story opens, the scientist is in a confrontation with a Department of Homeland Security official, who is trying to cajole him into helping out on an anti-terrorism project of dubious ethics. Later in the story we get to meet the scientist's son, who plays an important part as the story progresses.

So we have a father and a son. Do we need to add a mother? Well, in the real world, of course, the answer is not necessarily. There are single fathers, single mothers, same-sex couples with children, same- and opposite-sex couples without children, single people, orphans, widows and all sorts of other configurations. There doesn't need to be a second parent if we're reflecting reality.

And for the purposes of this story, I did not need a second parent, since the relationship between the scientist and child was the only one I wanted to focus on.

theferrett asked an interesting question recently: "Why are there so many one-parent families in kids' stories?"

He attributes it to laziness, and I think there's some truth to that. But I don't think it's necessarily a bad kind of laziness. The problem is, when you have a father-son relationship you're trying to dramatize, and you introduce a mother into the mix, you necessarily add two more relationships you have to address (in some fashion, if only cursorily): mother-father and mother-son. Add a fourth person, and you've just added three more relationships you need to contend with.

This can be a good thing, depending on the medium. One of the reasons I'd argue The Simpsons has been so successful is that the writers have had so many relationships to choose from: you can have a Homer-and-Bart story one week, then a Homer-and-Lisa story, then a Marge-and-Bart story, and so on. Add to that all the secondary characters and you have a practically endless number of pairings you can pick out of the manatee tank and write a story around.

That sort of thing works well for a long-running TV series, but if you're trying to focus on a single relationship for a piece of short fiction, all the extra people just end up adding noise and confusion.

So, for this story, I'm sticking with one parent. But the real question then becomes, why a father and not a mother? And I couldn't really come up with a good reason other than that was how I pictured the character when the story first began to form in my mind. The more I thought about it, the more I came up with compelling reasons (most of them germane to the story itself) why it would work better as a mother-and-child story rather than a father-and-child story.

So the nuclear scientist is now female. And that bit-flipping has actually opened up more creative pathways than I expected it to. The opening scene with the DHS agent, for starters, now has a little more emotional resonance to it (to me, at least) than it would if it were just a couple of alpha males butting heads.

I may end up giving the child a sex change as well*, depending on how the writing goes. If it starts looking like a mother-daughter story will work better than a mother-son story, then his bit's going to get flipped too.

*There's a phrase I never expected to write.

I will be announcing a sex change tomorrow. So stay tuned for that.

Ever since I read that stupid George Will article last week I've been noticing who wears blue jeans and who doesn't. This is very unlike me, since I normally pay absolutely no attention to what anyone wears, ever. I consider it an accomplishment if I pay attention to what clothes I put on in the morning.

I did notice in accounting class tonight that the professor and most of the students (including me) wore jeans; most of the rest wore slacks. Only one guy was more "formal" than that, wearing a tie.

If you'd asked me before tonight, I probably would have guessed that most of the students (and certainly the professor) would have worn "business clothes," but I guess business school (at least here) is no longer an occasion for business wear, if it ever was. As I looked around, it struck me that the guy with the tie now seemed overdressed for the occasion.

Of course, that's not his fault (if it were a fault, which it isn't), since he probably comes straight from work like the rest of us do. I would be surprised if he put on the tie just for the accounting class.

It does remind me of something my mom asked me the other day: "Why do young people not say 'you're welcome' when you thank them?"

I'd never really thought about it, but she's right. They'll say "no problem" or "sure thing" or "absolutely!" but never "you're welcome." If I had to hazard a guess, it would be that "you're welcome" has a subtext of "yes, you are right to thank me, since it was a burden to fulfill your request." But maybe it just sounds overly formal to younger ears.

If I had to pick one bit of linguistic informality that is particularly unfortunate, it would be something that happened hundreds of years ago: the merging of the singular and plural form of "you."

When I lived in the South, this wasn't a problem, as we had the perfectly serviceable (if also informal) "y'all" to indicate second person plural as distinct from second person singular. Since moving north, I've had to endure hearing "youse guys" for second person plural and "youse guys's" for second person plural possessive. As in, "I need youse guys's status reports by the end of the day."

"I need y'all's status reports by the end of the day" may not be the Queen's English, but I vastly prefer it in the absence of an unambiguous and linguistically correct alternative.

Read George go on a baffling rant against blue jeans!

Watch George (and others, including Seth Rogen) read from a Harlequin romance novel!

Yesterday I had the neatest idea for a novel, so I started writing it.

Naturally, this is the worst possible time to be starting a new project, since work is heating up again and exams and term paper deadlines are looming in my classes...

And of course I already have plenty of half-finished (and 20% finished, and 10% finished) novels lying about already. My track record at finishing anything I'm initially excited about is so far pretty poor.

So poor, in fact, that a friend of mine suggested I ought to buy this T-shirt for myself.

I actually thought that was pretty funny, so I decided to buy one, although I never quite got around to actually doing it.

I'm thinking about moving.

Not this year, or next year, but at some point in the not-too-distant future.

The main reason most people move (I'm guessing) is to go where the jobs are, and/or to be closer to family (or further away, in some cases.)

But excluding jobs and family, what are the other things you would look for in a new hometown? Off the top of my head, I can think of:

• Weather. I'm really sick of the cold here, and it's not even half as bad as the other places I've lived. I should not have to put up with temperatures below zero, ever. I can live with the occasional extreme heat, as long as it's not all the time.

• Taxes. The feds smack me around enough, I'd rather not live in a state that piled on as well. I don't mind paying my fair share, as long as it's not going into a black hole of waste, corruption, fraud and nepotism. I'd love to see a chart of which states use their citizens' tax dollars most effectively and least wastefully, but my Google-fu has so far proved to be very weak.

• Bike- and pedestrian-friendly roadways. I would love to bike or walk to work (at least when it's not ten degrees out) but the only routes between my house and my office are narrow country roads and I-69, neither of which are conducive to walking or biking.

• Low crime. I don't want to worry about getting my head bashed in while walking or biking to work.

• Water. A beach would be very nice. Either an ocean or a lake nearby would be just lovely.

Other nice-to-haves would be a wide variety of restaurants and an active community theater.

So other than proximity to jobs and family, what things would you want to have if you were choosing a new hometown?

Lots of people are talking about Amazon's "glitch" over the weekend.

I can certainly understand why people are upset, but speaking as a programmer, if I were enjoying Easter dinner with my family and I got a voice mail from work about something like this, I would file it away in the "can wait until I get in Monday morning" category.

I'm of course assuming it's a screw-up and not a deliberate policy change. All things being equal and without inside knowledge, I tend to ascribe stupid and hurtful things to error rather than malicious intent.

But the real reason I'm posting on this topic is because every time I read the word "glitch," I think of this.