Follow-up to Scrubs stuff

Jamie: it is possible that some of my predictions may have been somewhat random bullshit I made up. I cleverly mixed the real predictions together with the bullshit ones to confuse people.

As to the baby-naming thing, have you SEEN the ones suggested by the web-surfing masses? "Cartur"? "Turla"? "Curk", which seems to me like a quite ingenious combination of at least three rather unflattering words? Come ON! They can't name the baby something that ridiculous! Although right now "Isabella" is by far the most voted-for, thankfully. But what if it's a boy? Or does this mean it's definitely going to be a girl? Did the Internet vote determine the sex of the kid as well as the name?

I definitely think something involving the Janitor will happen in the last episode. If not his real name being revealed, then at least a sort of peace-making with J.D. before he leaves for his new job. Either that or it will turn out that the Janitor is in fact J.D.'s father, and all the Star Wars fans will cry out in terror and be suddenly silenced. (Note: the previous sentence is a joke containing a Star Wars reference.)

I was serious about the J.D.-Elliot thing. At least some kind of tongue-in-cheek self-reference to the old tradition of "annual hookup" (they already kind of did this in 319) and a mocking reference to "Friends" (although they already did that, too: 320).

As you've probably guessed, I wasn't serious about the Todd thing. If that came true my head would definitely explode. I was actually serious about the one before it, though, about the baby not being J.D.'s. If the baby was conceived on the deck at the end of 524 (with lots of old gay guys around), then (correct me if I'm wrong) two and a half weeks later, Kim wouldn't be noticing any signs of pregnancy and would therefore have to reason to test herself under normal circumstances. However, she might have tested herself if she suspected that she might be pregnant, raising the question of why she might suspect such a thing. The only answer I can think of is that a contraceptive accident happened, and judging by J.D.'s behavior before and reaction to the news, nothing untoward happened between them. So I stand by my theory that the baby is not J.D.'s; however, I'm sure it's not The Todd's.

Oh, one thing I forgot. In the last episode, as J.D. leaves, Dr. Cox will give him a hug. And that's how the episode will end.

Scrubs stuff

According to the Wikipedia article, Season 6 is likely to be the last season of Scrubs, and is even more likely to be Zach Braff's last season on the cast even if Scrubs itself doesn't end.

Instead of getting all sad about it, I have compiled this list of predictions for how things will be at the end of S6:

• Turk and Carla will have had their baby around mid-season. If it's a boy they'll name it Zach; if it's a girl, Sarah.
• Kelso will retire
• All signs will point to Cox replacing Kelso as chief of medicine, but he'll decline, ostensibly because he doesn't like the idea of being the next Kelso but really because he wants to spend more time with his kids, now that there are two
• J.D. will get some high-flying new job somewhere else (the obvious way of continuing Scrubs without Zach)
• It will be revealed that the Janitor's real name is John Dorian and that's why he hates J.D. so much
• It will turn out that the baby with whom Kim is pregnant is not J.D.'s, causing J.D. to get rather upset and run around and be all whiny for a while
• It will turn out that the baby with whom Kim is pregnant was fathered by The Todd, and everyone's heads will explode
• Ted will be sad. Boo hoo.
• In the last episode, all signs will point to J.D. and Elliot professing their undying love for each other à la Ross and Rachel, but at the last second they'll decide not to because everyone realizes that that would make the entire show a complete bust

Discuss.

Eleven losers losing

I watched the Steelers-Vikings preseason game last night. Holy crap, if any of the first-string players get hurt, offense or defense, the whole team's gonna die. It was quite pathetic.

It bothers me that the only Mac BitTorrent client capable of selecting specific files within a torrent to download is Azureus, a big, slow, ugly, bloated monstrosity written in Java. If I get bored sometime...

Odds and ends

My hunt for a box for my book (now someone else's book) came to fruition, even though I had to pay $2.14 for that outcome. Tomorrow I'll have to pay more for actual shipping. Argh.

Today I played some UT 2004. It's fun, but for some reason I still think the original UT is the best FPS I've ever played. I can't put my finger on all the factors that make it so, but I know at least one: the music. The music in UT2003 and UT2004 is crap compared to that in the original UT. The graphics are of course prettier in the new UT, and Onslaught mode is loads of fun, but the feel of playing is just different - in a bad way.

Age of Empires III looks good. If I get a Mac Pro I'll probably procure it.

Oh what the hell am I saying "if" for. WHEN I get a Mac Pro I'll probably procure it.

I'll also procure Quake 4. Word is that it's like Doom 3 (it has the same graphics engine) except not so damned dark all the time. The darkness was my main complaint about Doom 3. I like well-lit games.

Halo has been released as a Universal Binary. This means it'll run awesomely on the Mac Pro that I'll get.

Enough about games. As I was leaving Wean today, I went through Doherty. On the second floor of Doherty, as I entered from the Wean end, I saw something odd on the floor up ahead. As I got closer to it, I found that it was a bird — a small dove. It was sitting on the floor, conscious and alive but perfectly still. Apparently, I got too close for its liking and it took off, skimming the ceiling, trying to hold onto walls, dropping feathers everywhere and just generally making a big fuss.

I swung into action. There's a backstory here. I, along with my friends Jacob and Charly, am an experienced bird catcher. About three years ago, we three worked as a team to capture and liberate a bird that had become trapped inside a building on our school's campus. It was on one of those sublime early summer days during final exams. This was the end of our tenth-grade year. We had had an exam in the morning but couldn't go home until the time school normally let out, at 3:45. We were just hanging around on the upper field (probably the most isolated open area on campus) when our former health teacher happened to see us and come over. She told us that there was a bird trapped on the top floor of the ICC (the building that used to be the middle school until after our seventh-grade year), and if we had nothing better to do we should go try to get it out of the building. Being bored, we intrepid bird catchers went into the building, armed with absolutely nothing other than our bare hands. We scoured the building, finding no birds on any floor. Just as we were about to leave (we were on the top floor), there was a sudden fluttering noise and there was the bird, skimming the ceiling, trying to hold onto walls, dropping feathers everywhere and just generally making a big fuss.

Then there ensued a half-hour wild sparrow chase throughout the halls of the old middle school. At first, we would wait until the bird stopped somewhere to rest (generally it would cling on to a pipe near the ceiling). Then, one of us would slowly approach its perch, with the other two stationed on either side, so that no matter which way down the hallway the bird fled, it would be going towards a catcher. Of course, the ceiling was fairly high so the bird had plenty of room no matter what we did; normally the catcher towards whom the bird flew would make an ungainly leap that fell far short of the bird, and then we would all run to the other end of the hall where the bird had taken refuge, and repeat the process. I forget exactly how the moment arose, but the chase culminated with Charly, holding a garbage bag open above his head to ensnare the bird, running after the idiot creature down the entire length of the hallway, almost catching up to the bird...and then slamming full-tilt, face-first, into the wall at the end of the hall. Amazingly, he was unhurt; he fell to the floor as the bird fluttered gaily above him. He claimed not to have seen the wall coming at him (he'd been looking up at the bird), and to have forgotten it was there. As the three of us were helpless with laughter, the bird suddenly took it into its head to go down a floor (the building has three). We chased it down there and kept up the same fruitless process, although this time our leaps took us noticeably closer to the bird because the ceiling was lower. The bird was flagging; it was flying shorter distances and when it perched somewhere, its beak would be open. Not too much later, the bird went down half a floor; there was a landing on the staircase to the ground floor with a windowsill. The bird perched on the windowsill (unfortunately, the window was closed) and apparently didn't have the energy to keep going. Jacob squished it behind a plant pot that happened to be on the windowsill (without killing it) and Charly lent us his sweatshirt to wrap the bird up in. Finally, we were done. We carried the wrapped bird down to the ground floor and out through the lobby, drawing concerned coos from some fellow students who happened to be there, and who wondered what all the commotion upstairs had been about. Outside, we let the bird go. It flew gimpily over to a nearby tree, where it sat with its beak still open. Charly, Jacob and I left, still laughing, our good deed for the day done.

Back to today. As the bird worked itself into a frenzy, it happened to go down a floor via the stairwell in front of DH 2210. I followed it down to where it sat facing into a corner. I went over to it to try and herd it towards the outside door, but what with facing straight into a corner it freaked out and lost its sense of direction, I guess. It slammed into a wall and flopped to the floor in a shower of feathers. I cringed and went over to the poor thing, which was lying on its back, huffing and puffing, but still alive. I guess its brains had been addled by the impact; when I carefully picked it up, it made not the slightest effort at resistance. Once I got outside, it flapped its wings, so I let it go. Apparently it was just flapping for fun, not intending to fly, because it just dropped to the ground, probably re-addling its brains. I didn't want to pick it up again, but I nudged it a bit, trying to make it budge. It just sat there staring blankly at me, so I left it.

Admittedly, today's bird-catch was not nearly as exhilarating as the one three years ago, but it did bring back memories of the good old days. That bird-catch was probably the most fun moment I had in high school.

Boxed in

So I put my copy of Learning Java up for sale on Amazon. Today I got an email informing that it's been sold. Yay. Little did I anticipate that the most troublesome aspect of this transaction would be finding a box to ship the damned thing in. USPS Media Mail is a bring-your-own-box sort of affair. I could go dumpster-diving for boxes, but I'd rather not ship something to a complete stranger, who's expecting a Java book, in a box that looks, to a casual observer, as if it contains a microwave oven.

Spin control

Because I've been going on and on about Macs so much lately, I decided to spin off a new blog where I'll talk exclusively about Apple and the Mac. There will be no more said of that topic here.

New address: http://macdaddy767.blogspot.com

It'll probably see long periods of inactivity as news announcements in the Apple world die down, but rest assured, during Macworld Expos and WWDCs and random unexpected events, it'll be buzzing.

Mad cash

I am greatly heartened.

First, look here. Of the ten bestselling computers on Amazon, FIVE of them are made by the same company. You get one guess as to which company that is. The list changes hourly, but I'm willing to bet that for the near future there will never be fewer than 4 Apple products in the top 10.

Second, Jamie and I did an analysis of Apple's claim that the Mac Pro is cheaper than a comparably configured Dell. I had my doubts; I figured Apple would have found a way to fuck with the configs to give the Mac the edge.

Au contraire.

We compared a Dell Precision 690 against the Mac Pro, and the result was the same. However, the machines weren't really similarly configured — the Mac Pro actually had better specs. And this is the part I really could not believe until I saw it with my own eyes:

The Mac Pro plus a 20-inch Cinema Display is cheaper than a worse-equipped Dell Precision 690 with no monitor at all.

Yes, I, whom some assholes call a "fanboy" or "fanatic", could not believe that a Mac plus an Apple display would be cheaper than a Dell. Yet the sites of the respective manufacturers do not lie. Here are the configurations we built:

	Mac Pro	Dell Precision 690
Processor	Two Intel Xeon 5150 @ 2.66GHz each	Same
RAM	1GB 667MHz ECC DDR2 (2 x 512MB FB-DIMM)	Same
Internal HD	250GB SATA 3Gb/s	Same
Optical drive	SuperDrive. Reads DVDs up to 16x, CDs up to 32x. Writes DVD±R up to 16x, double-layer DVD+R up to 8x, CD-R up to 32x and CD-RW up to 24x.	16XDVD AND 16XDVD±RW, w/ Cyberlink PowerDVD and Roxio Creator. Keep in mind that Mac OS X includes equal disc-burning software built-in.
Graphics	ATI Radeon X1900XT with 512MB, dual dual-link DVI	Worse:256MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX 3450, Dual DVI or Dual VGA or DVI + VGA
Wireless stuff	Bluetooth and AirPort (802.11g)	802.11g
Monitor	20" Apple Cinema Display	NONE
PRICE	$3,876	$4,279

In addition, I gave the Mac the AppleCare Protection Plan so that it and the Dell have similar warranty coverage.

Keep in mind that the Mac has a display and a better graphics card to power it. And it's still cheaper. And, of course, the Mac Pro is housed in a sleek, smooth, silvery aluminim case while the Dell is, true to form, a plastic box with cheap plastic trim.

Before Dell fans get on my case for ignoring other factors like expandability...does the Dell have FireWire 800 built-in? Nope. Does it have the capacity to handle 16GB of RAM? Nope, only 4GB. Both machines have two optical drive bays (in fact, the Dell as configured above has them both filled, while the Mac has one free) and both have four internal hard drive bays. The Dell has the edge in PCI slots, unfortunately, but not much of one.

Oh, wait. What operating systems do they come with? Mac Pro: Mac OS X (plus lots of bundled software). Dell: Windows XP. Hmm. I wonder which one has the advantage there.

I really hope this kicking-Dell's-ass pricewise spreads through the rest of Apple's line. As it is, the cheapest Mac available is $599 while the cheapest Dell available (granted, it's an earth-shattering piece o' shit) is like $200 after rebates. But this is incredible news: Apple, a company whose reputation is of high quality and associated high prices, has soundly beaten the price of a company whose reputation is of low prices and, ahem, not-as-high-as-Apple quality in the high-end workstation market. I mean, look at that table! I could replace the 20" Cinema Display with a 23" one and the Mac would still be cheaper!

I apologize for raving about the Mac Pro for three posts in a row, but I think it deserves such treatment.

Oh noes

Since posting the story of the epic battle between the rational, frugal angel and the impulsive, Mac-diehard devil on my shoulders, I've received advice from people who unanimously say I should throw caution to the winds and buy the damn Mac Pro.

In addition, there's been a continuous stream of evidence stacking up against the rational, frugal angel.

1. I looked at the "Graphics" subpage of the Mac Pro site on apple.com, and I saw the results of a Doom 3 framerate test with the ATI Radeon X1900 XT (the graphics card I would get): 106 fps. A HUNDRED AND SIX FRAMES PER SECOND FOR DOOM FUCKING 3. *wigs out*
2. I'd want to upgrade to 2GB of RAM in the Mac Pro, up from the standard 1GB. If I buy RAM from a third-party vendor like Crucial (instead of Apple), it would be stupidly cheap to do so.
3. I have a fair bit of money saved up in my account in Albany — I don't think I've ever made a single withdrawal from that account, and money's been piling up in it from various sources. Buying a Mac Pro seems like a very appropriate reason to tap into it.
4. I could run a webserver if I felt like it, what with finally having a machine that's permanently connected and on.
5. Since I'm a college student, I get a free iPod nano if I buy a Mac Pro.
6. I've tried to use the reason that the money I would spend on a Mac Pro would be better spent on other things. However, I have no fucking clue what those "other things", major enough to amount to the cost of a Mac Pro, might be, especially since I'm done paying rent for this year.
7. It's a fucking Mac Pro. Four Xeon processor cores. Radeon X1900 XT. Ability to boot into Mac OS X, Linux or Windows. 106fps in Doom 3 (imagine how UT2k4 would run, holy Jesus I'm grinning just thinking about it). The list goes on.

I'm seriously going batshit here. I think I've gone over the edge and will buy a Mac Pro. Now, the rational, frugal angel has to convince the impulsive, Mac-diehard devil to at least wait for a while, maybe until after Macworld Expo in January. Apple will probably make minor updates to the line by then, as well as iron out any issues that may arise. Then, I won't get the free iPod nano. But who gives a shit? Not me, certainly.

This may be the first time in my life when I honestly, truly cannot find a reason not to buy a shiny, expensive new toy. It is a weird feeling.

Update: What the hell was I thinking when I said I'd wait till January? That's six months from now. Here it's six fucking days since the release of the Mac Pro and already I'm a gibbering idiot over it. Oh God, this is going to be a long, long semester.

Mac-life crisis

God help me, this evening I decided impulsively to go see "Scoop". After having watched "Saving Private Ryan" last weekend, I thought I needed to see some nice vacuous fluff by way of contrast. I don't know if it's because of the movie or the locatioon of the theater, but the audience, except me, consisted entirely of old people. There's a bit of a downside to this: old people tend to get up to go the bathroom a lot in the middle of movies. The movie itself was all right — amusing and light-hearted, but not hilarious by any means. After reading a lot of Carl Hiaasen in the past week, the murder-mystery aspect of the plot was quite disappointing, but what can you expect? I got a sign that I've watched too much Scrubs: I had a constant, vague feeling throughout the movie that I should be hating Hugh Jackman (who plays a main character). If you haven't seen the appropriate episodes of Scrubs, I won't bother trying to explain.

I decided to postpone my weekly library visit till tomorrow because I was stricken with epic laziness today. I only went to see the movie because I felt like unless I got out of the house today, I would start sprouting leaves. But when I do go to the library, I'll be getting the third season of Frasier on DVD — one of only three American sitcoms I consider to be worth anything (the others being Scrubs and Sex & the City).

Unfortunately, I am now tormented by thoughts that I should get a Mac Pro. I got to the point where I added up the money I've earned this summer and configured my ideal Mac Pro (my realistic ideal Mac Pro, not the max-everything-out-and-laugh-maniacally-just-for-fun ideal Mac Pro) on the Apple Store site. I found that the amount of the former quantity is a good deal greater than the price of the latter, and for a brief few minutes was so overcome by temptation as to become light-headed. It took a good deal of pseudo-schizophrenic discussion before I managed to convince myself that what I was considering was monumentally stupid. I currently have a one-year-old PowerBook G4 that is in perfect health and barely even qualifies as outdated — it was the absolute top of the line when it was new. The money would be much better spent on other things. But even the most sound logic can barely overcome the visceral WANTING that Apple's products inspire in those of us so predisposed. Given the choice between boring old common sense and JUST SO FUCKING AWESOME, I think even the best of us might have trouble choosing the dull, though ultimately correct, path. This is probably what midlife crises are like.

Research cycle

It seems to me that research works in its own, peculiar way. This summer I've had a research gig in which I've done an amount of work that I'd probably be expected to do in two weeks in the corporate world. I guess research just tends to proceed at its own languid pace. It seems to consist of people sitting in offices procrastinating until a thought strikes them. When that happens, they call a meeting of other researchers, and a session of academic self-stimulation ensues. Sometimes the thought is actually worth something, and an undergrad gets hired to write some code while the professors and grad students sit in conference rooms burbling on about context-free grammars and the lambda calculus. Many arcane symbols are written on many whiteboards and many obscure, technical terms are bandied about. Regardless of whether that original thought turned out to be worthwhile or not, a paper is written. The paper consists of an introduction, in which the authors strut around dropping names (bonus points if they drop their own names), and then a body which, with copious diagrams, code snippets and octosyllabic words, explains the original thought and the usually fruitless subsequent research in a florid, self-important manner. Sane people notice that the content of the whole paper could have been expressed in two sentences, the longest word of which contains four syllables, but nobody listens. The paper is submitted to a journal that regularly puts out "Calls For Papers" which are what spur this mostly pointless paper-writing in the first place. If the journal accepts the paper, the paper is published a couple of years after the original thought was had, and the authors of the paper have a good wank over seeing their names in print. Then they sit around and think some more. Eventually a thought is had, and the cycle repeats.

I don't mean to say research is a bad thing; this is just how I see it.

Mac daddy

It's laptop-buying season, as indicated by the threads on college discussion boards. This, of course, means that the second half of this blog title swings into action and extols the benefits of Macs to the world.

Let me tell you, right now is a good time to be a Mac advocate.

Life has not been this good for Mac people since the 1980s. Apple's market share is climbing. Yesterday, Steve Jobs announced that in the space of a few months, Apple's share of the laptop market has doubled from 6% to 12%. Granted, 12% is still not much, but it is a major milestone in the eyes of Mac users. And keep in mind that this change has occurred between the time the first Intel Macs were released, and now. That is, as Phil Schiller made such a big deal of yesterday, 210 days — 7 months.

Now, for a change, Mac advocates don't have to reveal benefits of Macs that aren't immediately obvious. Finally, Apple's actions speak for themselves. They're lowering prices as they speed up their processors, add sweet new features to OS X, open more and more retail stores, and just generally act like a competent, successful company. Recently I talked to someone who didn't want to get a MacBook because they're too expensive, as compared to some random Dell model. All I had to do was give them a link to the MacBook page on the Apple Store and tell them to look at the specs and price. Turned out, the MacBook offered better value per dollar than the Dell the person was looking at. "Macs are more expensive" myth: busted. And I didn't even have to say anything. Apple did it all.

You know what else? So many more people are willing to listen now. No matter how well Apple is doing, there are always people who just don't listen, and who can't be made to listen. I hardly bother with these people, but these days I find myself writing people off as incurable Mac haters much less frequently. I believe that part of this is due to the oft-cited iPod Halo Effect. That alone isn't enough, though. Apple had to offer a line of Macs that lived up to the iPod-borne expectations of awesomeness, and, to belabor the point somewhat, they have come through.

WWDC's keynote yesterday was just more fuel for the fire. If I believed in souls, I would readily sell mine for a Mac Pro with a (cheaper) 30-inch Cinema Display. Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field completely sucked me in (even though it was Phil Schiller who actually introduced the Mac Pro — Good God I hate Phil Schiller). Bertrand Serlet, a Frenchman with the most perfect French accent ever, the Senior VP of Software Engineering, came on stage to engage in a session of Microsoft-bashing of a severity that we haven't seen since the mid-1990s when the platform war was at its height. The audience loved it, I loved it — I just hope Leopard turns out to be worthy of the hype. If it is, I believe a major new phase of the platform war will begin.

It seems Microsoft-bashing is back in style after it became somewhat of a no-no when the first New World Macs were introduced. This time around, though, it's drastically different — in the Mac community, there's a feeling of having the upper hand. Back before the Second Coming of Jobs, we were the underdogs, fighting to keep Apple alive. Now, Apple is rejuvenated and we're just riding their momentum. Apple is surging upward as everyone else falters and stumbles. Maybe that's not how it really is, but that's how it looks — and because of the way the market works, those looks are set to become reality if they're not already.

It seems like everything is going Apple's way, and they can do no wrong. For Apple to assume such is dangerous, but the fact that it seems that way indicates very clearly that they're doing something right. Part of it is sheer effort on their part, and part of it is fortuitous timing (combined with Microsoft's incompetence). Apple took their hardware line, and Mac OS X, through a huge transition to Intel processors in 7 months, and they pulled it off with spectacular success. As the tech media started to get frustrated with Microsoft's repeatedly delaying Vista (then Longhorn), Apple released Tiger. Now they're set to release Leopard before Vista ships, meaning there will have been two major upgrades to OS X before Microsoft could even get one out. Apple's hardware has, thanks to Intel, busted the Megahertz Myth. Among all this, let's not forget the iPod and iTunes Music Store — still going strong.

Yes, it's a good time to be a Mac person. If you've been looking for reasons why you should become one, I'd be glad to give you some.

Singin' the blues

For some reason I'm on a major kick of old classic rock songs lately.

• Cocaine by Eric Clapton: so excellent.
• Voodoo Child (Slight Return) by Jimi Hendrix: it's Jimi Hendrix. I especially like Stevie Ray Vaughan's cover of this. I think (though this feels like blasphemy) that I might even like SRV's version better.
• Gates of Babylon by Rainbow: I discovered that Yngwie Malmsteen's "Gates of Babylon" is a cover of this song. I definitely prefer Malmsteen's version, but I still like Rainbow's version just because it's so...odd.
• In My Time of Dying by Led Zeppelin: ah, Led Zeppelin. What would rock be without them?

On a somewhat related note: a list of people who died too young.

• John Bonham
• Stevie Ray Vaughan
• Cliff Burton
• Jimi Hendrix
• Douglas Adams

In contrast, the Rolling Stones should have died long ago. They certainly look like they did.

Random note: I experienced a rather frightening moment yesterday when I thought I might have to start liking Pearl Jam. Then I realized it was a false alarm and Pearl Jam sucks after all. The only grunge band I have a lot of respect for is Soundgarden, and I also have a little bit for Alice in Chains. That is it. Nirvana sucks even worse than Pearl Jam. Just so everyone knows.

Loud speaker

There's nobody else in my house right now, so I'm giving my speakers a workout by blasting Tool, Liquid Tension Experiment, Dream Theater, Queensrÿche and Yngwie Malmsteen at very high volume. These speakers represent some of the best thirty-five dollars I ever spent.

Last night I went to the Star Wars Battlefront LAN party at the Apple Store in Shadyside. There were about twelve people competing, and I came in fourth, missing third place by one kill. The top three finishers got prizes. I was a bit frustrated about that, but I think I did pretty well considering I'd never played SWB before.

Pretty soon I am going to make my weekly trip to the library. I've read a lot of books this summer. Sometime I'll post a list of them all.

Once school starts, I'm going to have to go into super-cheap mode. I'm splurging on culture in the next two months - I'm spending a total of about $100 on seeing Rent and a Tool concert. Granted, I'll have made a tidy sum of money with my two summer jobs, but I've already spent a fair bit of it on rent (not Rent) and food. However, I have no idea how much I'll be needing to spend, since I'll be living in an off-campus apartment during the year and thus will probably be buying groceries and somehow sharing the cost of said groceries with my roommates. Gah. Good news is, the way things are shaping up, I'll continue to have two jobs during the semester and thus continue to make a tidy sum of money (and also have zero free time, but such is the cost of seeing Rent and a Tool concert).

Very consistent

This is what Weather Underground (www.wunderground.com) reports for Pittsburgh:

Current Conditions: 88.4 °F / 31 °C / Partly Cloudy
Forecast for This Afternoon: Partly cloudy. Highs in the mid 80s. North winds around 10 mph.

Emphasis added.

I just finished reading "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" by Douglas Adams, hence confirming my belief that Douglas Adams was the funniest, most brilliant, most insightful person ever to put words on paper. How one can be such a genius with social commentary at the same time as being a complete and utter nutjob is beyond me.

Tonight I'm going to a LAN gaming event at the Apple Store in Shadyside. The layout of the roads around here is such that east of Morewood Avenue, there's really no good way to get between Forbes and Fifth (which is what I need to do). I suppose I shall just start walking early.

Why Perl Is Cool

'Cos you can do this:

sub t{print(chr($=[$i]));}sub i{$=[$i]+=$_[0];}@==(10,$i,$i,$i,$i);while($=[0]){$=[++$i]+=7;$=[++$i]+=10;$=[++$i]+=3;$=[++$i]+=1;$=[$i-=4]--;}$i++;i(2);t;$i++;i(1);t;i(7);t;t;i(3);t;$i++;i(2);t;$i-=2;i(15);t;$i++;t;i(3);t;i(-6);t;i(-8);t;$i++;i(1);t;$i++;t;

I wrote this myself. Try it out.

Wicky Wacky woo

It's wicky. It's wacky. It's woo.

It's Wicky Wacky woo.

Brought to you by me and Jacob.