Poll #1487846 Preferences
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 13

Which do you prefer?

Which do you prefer?

Which do you prefer?

So this morning I decided to go to Meijer to pick up some Wheat Thins and V-8, and when I walked in the front door I saw this huge table of books.

Now I thought this was odd, because Meijer is a grocery store, not a book store, but when I saw whose books they were, I started to panic.

"Oh crap, this is the Sarah Palin booksigning, isn't it?" I said, to no one in particular.

"No, that's at the other Meijer," said the greeter.

"Oh, thank God," I said. "I'm just here for some Wheat Thins and V-8, the last thing I needed today was Sarah Palin."

kmg_365 asked me the other day if my new Atari 2600 game was going to have an easter egg in it. I said no, there wasn't room for one.

Since then, the thought has been gnawing on me that if I were a good enough programmer, I could make room for one, without dropping any of the existing functionality.

Luckily, this dovetailed with another problem I was having: Level 24. Level 24 was intended as an homage to Adventure: it's the white castle plus its four inside maze rooms.

But Level 24 didn't seem to fit in with the rest of the game. The rooms are blocky (in keeping with the original), contrasting to the rounder mazes elsewhere in the game (well, as round as you can make them with the Atari playfield graphics). That, and there really is a fine line between homage and appropriation, and I wasn't 100% confident I was on the homage line, at least with those rooms being part of the regular gameplay.

So I took the Adventure rooms out of Level 24 and created a new Level 24 with original mazes (plus some killer robots and a snake to boot). Now the normal gameplay is solidly on the side of originality + occasional homages (IMHO, of course.)

But you can still get to the Adventure rooms from within the game, although it is very tricky to do. You have to find a secret passageway within one of the normal rooms, and navigate it carefully. If you succeed and get to the white castle, there's a golden bonus inside worth 100,000 points.

Now I just have to cram that extra code into an already-stuffed 32k. I think I can do it, though.

35 Amazing Science Fair Projects.

Topics include "The Ideal Pancreas," "Will There Be Minorities In Heaven?" and "Teats: An Exhaustive Comparative Study."

I received a call from my mom the other day, who was having trouble with her computer.

"I pushed the apple key, but it's not doing anything," she said.

"The apple key?" I asked. This surprised me, as she has a Dell.

"Yes, the little round thing with the stem on top," she said.

( Long story short... )

Apropos of Friday the 13th, I had an especially violent dream last night. I called 911 to report an intruder, and a cop arrived suspiciously quickly. As I was telling him about the intruder, he took a huge knife and plunged it into my neck.

As I lay bleeding to death I realized that he wasn't a cop but the intruder's accomplice wearing a fake uniform. At the moment of death I woke up, which was unusual because I normally keep on truckin' in dreams after fatal events, as some sort of invisible spirit who can observe the action but not interact.

Poll #1484931 Dying in dreams
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 10

What usually happens to you in dreams where you die?

I don't really know what to make of the health care bill winding through the halls of Congress (will it make things better? worse? I've got no idea.)

But it does amuse me that the loud TV people who are angry that the legislators didn't actually read the bill before voting on it didn't seem to mind when the Republican congress passed the Patriot Act without reading it, and the loud TV people who were angry about the Patriot Act not being read don't particularly mind that the health care bill hasn't been read.

Which is one reason I try not to listen to loud TV people.

And I sincerely doubt any of the loud TV people on either side actually read all of the text in the End-User License Agreements they click "I accept" to when they're installing iTunes or Microsoft Word or whatever.

But I found this defense of not reading legislation on Andrew Sullivan's blog interesting:

"As a computer programmer, reading that section of legislation felt EXACTLY like reading a 'snippet' of code. I worked until very recently at a bank that has a large (> 3000 headcount) IT department. The idea of managers reading every line of code that goes into a release is absurd...

The similarities run quite deep because both are formal languages. They give precise and unambiguous instructions on how a program (whether the computer or government variety) should behave for any given scenario, whereas natural languages are more vague but less opaque in expressing intent."

That's probably a sound analogy, although I worry that any massive piece of legislation, be it the Patriot Act or the health care bill or Medicare Part D or DMCA or anything else, introduces a massive burden to us citizens who have to obey whatever's in those acts.

Ignorance of the law may be no excuse for breaking it, but as more and more legislation is passed over time, there comes a practical point where it's literally impossible for the average citizen to actually know all of the laws they're bound to follow.

I'm not ready for Christmas music just yet.

Also, this mat at the employee entrance bothers me:



THIS DIE IS NONSTANDARD

Poll #1483969 Preferences
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 16

Which do you prefer?

Which do you prefer?

Which do you prefer?

Andrew Sullivan linked to a neat chart showing support for equal marriage rights by age group and state (click for a legible version):



The generational divide is very interesting: if only people under 30 got to vote, it would be legal in at least 35 states.

I wonder what to make of the "offsets" for the under 30's in Alaska and Utah, though. Is this just a function of a different age composition of those states?

I like the way Facebook tells me about people becoming fans of several things at once. For example:

"Zedrow became a fan of Revocation of tax-exempt status from churches engaging in political action and V."

and

"Toshanda became a fan of NPR and Cheerios."

I like to try to find the common thread between the fan pages when they do that. Sometimes it's quite challenging.

There was an ad next to my inbox this morning showing a scary vampire with the caption "Could YOU kill a vampire?"

I thought about that for a minute. After all, I very much dislike killing anything. Possums are nasty creatures, but I felt bad for days after having to put one out of its misery after another car hit it.

But then I read the sub-caption: "93% would fail!" and it confused me.

Then I realized it wasn't a moral question, like "would you hurt a fly?" but a question of my skill at vampire-killing. It wasn't asking me if I wanted to kill a vampire, but rather assumed everyone would want to, and the only question was whether we were any good at it.

Perhaps my experience of walking a mile in Count Chocula's shoes for Halloween has made me oversensitive to the feelings of vampires?

I wonder if more people would consider it a moral question rather than a skill question if the ad looked ( like this? )

In a way, I'm glad Indiana didn't have an equal-marriage proposition on the ballot yesterday, because it almost certainly would have been defeated by Hoosier voters.

I certainly would have voted for equal marriage rights given the opportunity, and would have been angry at losing, and probably would have gotten defensive at the inevitable "your state is a bunch of bigoted hicks" comments, and protested that no, there are some of us who are on the side of good, we're not all like that, to which I'd be told "it's not all about you, you know," which would piss me off because that's one of those phrases that tends to really rub me the wrong way, and then I'd overreact and go on an obscenity-laden rant at whomever said that, despite the fact that we're actually on the same side of the issue...

But anyway... boy, that Mary Conroy is really a horrible person, isn't she? It's too bad people's noses don't actually grow, Pinocchio-style, when they lie, because man, she'd be burning hers on the surface of the sun right about now.

Today is Grace Slick's 70th birthday.

I was at college this afternoon preparing to rehearse our group presentation and went to the campus Subway for some lunch. As I often am, I was in the mood for a Spicy Italian on Italian Herbs and Cheese.

Coincidentally, the fellow in line in front of me ordered the same thing. As we continued down the line, he kept ordering what I wanted to order. He wanted pickles and lettuce added, I wanted pickles and lettuce added. When the Sandwich Artist asked him what kind of dressings he wanted, he shot me a nervous glance, then said (somewhat defiantly, I thought) "sweet onion and light mayo."

Now at this point, I would normally be asking for Italian dressing on the side, but honest to goodness, sweet onion and light mayo sounded pretty tasty, so I thought, what the hell, I'm in it this far, I might as well try the sweet onion and light mayo too.

As he was paying, he shot me another nervous glance, to which I pointed at his sub and responded "you and I must be soulmates."

He immediately averted his eyes, grabbed his change, and skittered away from the register quickly.

So the lovely Jenny and I have decided on a vampire theme for the Halloween party we're going to.

She's going as Bella from Twilight, and I'm going as Count Chocula.

She's taking off work on Friday to sew me a giant brown cape and shop for chocolate-colored sparkle glitter.

Poll #1477296 Preferences
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 10

Which do you prefer?

Which do you prefer?

Which do you prefer?

The Count, from Sesame Street, censored.

Poll #1476861 Count Chocula
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 12

Do you find Count Chocula offensive?

From allah_sulu:

"GeoCities is shutting down today. To commemorate this, xkcd.com has been redesigned."

One of my favorite undergraduate courses was "The Psychology of Sleep and Dreaming." During a period of my life when I was so distracted by non-academic things I rarely passed a course, I managed to get an "A" in that one because it was so darn interesting.

While it's true that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, there are common dream elements that are widely considered to represent certain waking-life fears and emotions. (For example, dreaming that you're losing your teeth is usually interpreted as a fear that you are powerless or incompetent in some area of your life.)

Recently I've noticed a recurring element in my dreams: the abandoned McDonald's. Quite often in my dreams there's a restaurant in the background that clearly used to be a McDonald's but has since been repurposed into something else. In the first such dream, there were black-and-white "Soul Food" signs covering the old McDonald's signage. In another, a McDonald's had been turned into a hot dog place, and in another, an ice cream place.

What's interesting to me is that these are never the focal point of the dream; there's always some other "plot" going on and I just happen to notice these buildings in the background. I never go in. In the dreams, I don't ever find their presence either disturbing or exciting; I just think (at least starting with the second one) "huh, there sure to seem to be a lot of these."

Anyone care to take a stab at the possible significance of these used-to-be-McDonald's that keep popping up?

I had my midterm exam tonight, and I think I nailed it. With that behind me and only three more Romeo & Juliet shows to go, I'm beginning to see a light at the end of the "no free time" tunnel. First order of business, of course, is finishing Duck Attack!, but after that I may have a month or two worth of mostly free evenings to work on my next project before my class load doubles in January.

I'm thinking about developing an app for the iPhone. On one hand, Apple is evil and I don't trust them as far as I can throw them. On the other hand, it might be fun, educational and potentially double my side business earnings. So I'm torn.

What do you think?

Poll #1474573 iPhone
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 13

Should I develop an app for the iPhone?

I can very much relate to this quote from Rory Stewart:

"It's like they're coming in and saying to you, 'I'm going to drive my car off a cliff. Should I or should I not wear a seatbelt?' And you say, 'I don't think you should drive your car off the cliff.' And they say, 'No, no, that bit's already been decided — the question is whether to wear a seatbelt.' And you say, 'Well, you might as well wear a seatbelt.' And then they say, 'We've consulted with policy expert Rory Stewart and he says...'"

Random famous people share tips for keeping organized.

Among the most helpful, from author Curtis Sittenfeld:

If I'm writing, my trick — which isn't that tricky — is to close all windows and files except for the document I'm working on and not to check e-mail[...]

If in the course of writing I need to look up information online, I've found that it's best to just put a place-holder in the document and find the information later[...]

I've found that forcing myself to restart the computer at least once a day (and thus closing any browser windows and saving any notepad documents) is also a good way to clear the mental desktop.

One of the commenters on this interesting post about fear posted a link to a New York Magazine article from 2007 on how praising a child's success can either help or backfire horribly depending on whether you praise their effort or their intelligence. It's really quite an eye-opener:

In follow-up interviews, [psychologist Carol] Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids' reasoning goes; I don't need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized — it's public proof that you can't cut it on your natural gifts.

(Bolding mine.) I've struggled with exactly that type of thinking for years. Effortless success is an incredible feeling. Success through exerting a great deal of effort? Also a good feeling. Effortless failure? No big deal: of course you'll fail if you don't put any effort into something. But failure after putting all you can into something? Well, that's just a horrible, horrible feeling. You did your best, and your best wasn't good enough.

So if you put NO effort into something, you'll either succeed (fantastic feeling) or fail (no big deal). If you put all you've got into something, you'll either succeed (fantastic feeling) or fail (psychological kick in the gut.) So the cost-benefit analysis (or at least a torment-minimization strategy) pretty clearly points to not putting any effort into anything.

But of course, that's no way to live life. Still, it requires a fair amount of diligence (at least for me) not to fall back into that way of thinking, because I hate hate hate putting all I have into something and seeing it fail. Putting in the effort anyway, even when there's a good chance of failure, is a tough sell to myself.

When students transition into junior high, some who'd done well in elementary school inevitably struggle in the larger and more demanding environment. Those who equated their earlier success with their innate ability surmise they've been dumb all along. Their grades never recover because the likely key to their recovery — increasing effort — they view as just further proof of their failure.

For me, it's not the effort itself that's the bitter medicine, it's the chance of it being fruitless effort. I don't mind working hard, but I don't like working hard and have nothing come from it. I need to remember that trying and failing isn't necessarily wasted effort when you learn something along the way.

The problem is that I'm also keenly aware that failure is sometimes just failure, with no silver lining at all. Sometimes the only thing you learn is that you shouldn't have tried in the first place.

Like many folks with well-meaning but computer-unsavvy relatives, I receive my fair share of forwarded e-mail. Mostly it's of the easily-debunked-by-Snopes variety, like the ever-popular "IMPORTANT NEWS FROM AOL AND MICROSOFT!!!!! DON'T PASS ALONG FORWARDED E-MAILS BECAUSE THEY WILL INSTALL A TRACKING PROGRAM ON YOUR COMPUTER!!!!!! THIS IS IMPORTANT SO BE SURE TO FORWARD THIS TO ALL THOSE YOU CARE ABOUT TO LET THEM KNOW!!!!!!!!!!!"

Lately, I've noticed these have started to come with something like this tacked on to the top of them: "THIS HAS BEEN VERIFIED BY SNOPES!!!" along with a link to an article on Snopes that debunks the nonsense that follows.

It seems so brazen to put a direct link to an article which debunks what you're forwarding in what you're forwarding. Are they just trying to see who will and won't click on the link and call them on their bullshit?

The whole thing baffles me.