chris t

You are in a mall when the zombies attack. You have:

1. one weapon.
2. one song blasting on the speakers.
3. one famous person to fight alongside you.

1. Excalibur
2. "We Are the Champions", Queen
3. Miyamoto Musashi

I had trouble selecting an appropriate weapon, since my life expectancy with just about anything that actually exists would be "As long as I can hide behind Musashi." Depending on which interpretation of the Arthurian legends you subscribe to, Excalibur's magical properties might be enough to prevent zombification. Worth trying, anyway.

One irritation that I have with Windows is that, every so often, I'll find that I've accidentally shifted into Japanese input mode. Just figured out why that happens. Of course, it doesn't go any distance toward solving my problem.

As anyone who's used Windows for any length of time knows, Alt+Tab cycles through windows. Alt+Shift+Tab does what you expect: cycles backward. Nice and convenient. However, Windows also uses the Alt+Shift key combination to switch between input languages. The problem comes up because I expect the initial Alt+Tab to put me into a "window switch" quasimode and ignore all input unrelated to that task. It doesn't. So I push and hold Alt, hit Tab to bring up the popup, decide to switch backward -- and suddenly my input language changes.

Irritating.

Relaxing with a glass of Flying Dog Brewery's "Double Dog" double pale ale.

"Relaxing" might be the wrong word. This is not a beer for relaxation. With the first sip, I asked myself: "Did Ian brew this?" Start with the Ian-esque alcohol content: 10.5%. Move on to the hops: extreme. If you concentrate really hard you can feel some syrupy caramel tones from the malt, before the hop flowers kick down the door. Aftertaste is pleasantly roasted, bitter but not unreasonably so.

All in all, good, but totally immoderate.

Edit: I found a perfect review, searching to see what other people thought of this stuff: "Like eating a grapefruit in a flower garden." I don't know why I bother sometimes.

Google returns no evidence that anyone has ever suggested we, the cycling hooligans, should indulge in mounted archery. I don't really believe that I'm the first to come up with the idea, but someone's got to toss it into the collective memory.

I mean, I think it would be awesome to do bicycle archery. Consider: many cultures have a tradition of badass mounted archers -- the Mongols are the most obvious example, but there are also the Japanese, the Hungarians, the Romans, possibly the Koreans (my reading of the Wikipedia article is inconclusive.) Besides, we've already got bicycle jousting.

The way I imagine it, we would ride along back streets and shoot targets at fairly close range using light, padded arrows, as the Wikipedia describes in the article on Yabusame:

One style of mounted archery was inuoumono — shooting at dogs. Buddhist priests were able to prevail upon the samurai to have the arrows padded so that the dogs were only annoyed and bruised rather than killed. This sport is no longer practiced.

(Not, of course, that I endorse shooting dogs. I just think the urban environment makes it too easy to hit a bystander by mistake.) Perhaps Nerf should be involved.

Today I went and ate the meal prescribed in the penny-arcade of our forefathers. It was. . . grand in scale. Epic in size. Between 1743 and 2173 calories. (Decided to skip out on the ham, but I'm not sure how to tot up the chocolate shake.) Cost me $9.20, which has got to be at least twice as much as I've ever spent at a Burger King.

I might as well get an arrow tattooed on my chest, pointing to my heart, with a label that says "BLOOD CLOTS HERE"

Actually got the chance to use a bad joke that kicks around in my head every so often:

> Craig Lastname wrote:
> >> Hello. I¹m interested in this system. Is it still for sale?
> >> Thanks.
> 
> Hi Craig, I'm a big fan of your list.
> 
> Yes, it is for sale.  Would you like to come by and take a look?

Beat Perfect Cherry Blossom. (Normal mode, ReimuB, default settings.) Those of you wondering how my newfound triumph will change my life. . . ask again when I've beat Touhou 8.

"Guns don't kill people. BULLETS kill people."

Successfully recovered data from a hard drive by sticking it in the freezer.

I'd thought it was a myth, or a joke, or an outright malicious lie, but I'd already tried almost everything else I could think of. So I stuck the drive in the freezer for a couple of hours.

When I pulled it out, it was ice-cold, painful to the touch, and I plugged it in as quickly as I could. Booted the machine, and executed a series of carefully-rehearsed commands. I didn't know how long the drive would last, or whether it would ever work again. Every second mattered.

And it worked. It's tough to explain the sheer giddiness of the experience. In my mind, I had given up. I'd already tried a PCB swap, tried tapping it forcefully, tried glaring at it and laying on hands and praying to whatever it is I'm yet capable of belief in. When I saw the drive render data, it seemed a genuine miracle. I expected it to crash every second of the first five minutes, but then I got used to it. It seemed -- no less miraculous, but miraculous in that way that makes it inevitable. As if Wile E. Coyote had run over the cliff, looked down, and kept on walking on.

After three hours it was done. Sometimes everything works out.

(If this hadn't worked, I would have tried the double-boiler thing next. But I am very glad that I didn't have to.)

On the way home I saw a bird on the ground.

It seemed to be hurt; it seemed more a squashed model bird than something alive. Only its head stayed upright, with the rest splayed across the pavement. One wing seemed to be hanging, as if broken. A pretty little thing, sleek and glossy brown with gold-and-black accents. It would have fit easily in the palm of one hand.

I caught this pitiful sight as I passed and stopped. I set my bike down. I advanced slowly toward the bird, which watched me but did not move its body. I knelt, and wondered how it could survive. I stroked its wing gently, to see if it would flinch. I extended a finger and gently tapped its breast: once, twice. It barely quivered. Its beak was half-open, panting. Poor thing, I thought. I must terrify it. I rose and backed away slowly to think.

It flew as I retreated -- no doubt, no hesitation. It flew in a perfectly ordinary way and landed in a nearby tree. It turned towards me and I wondered if I was being judged. Then it turned away, in dismissal. I lost sight of it against the sun and the world seemed full of light. That was the end of the matter.

I can still feel the delicate softness of its feathers on my skin.

Every word of this is true.

Found myself having to type "binary-arch-i386-xen-686" (a sure sign, by the by, that my life has gone horribly wrong,) and managed to type the first two words as "bark." I stared at the screen, confused. My memory insisted that that was the word that belonged there, no matter how out-of-place it seemed. At this point I was completely unable to reconstruct the correct words, and had to go look them up.

It was a very Lewis-Carroll-esque moment, despite the final product being a boring and utterly ordinary word. I'm sure it happens to you often as well.

“Come, listen, my men, while I tell you again
   The five unmistakable marks
By which you may know, wheresoever you go,
   The warranted genuine Snarks.

“Let us take them in order. The first is the taste,
   Which is meagre and hollow, but crisp:
Like a coat that is rather too tight in the waist,
   With a flavour of Will-o’-the-wisp.

“Its habit of getting up late you’ll agree
   That it carries too far, when I say
That it frequently breakfasts at five-o’clock tea,
   And dines on the following day.

“The third is its slowness in taking a jest.
   Should you happen to venture on one,
It will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed:
   And it always looks grave at a pun.

. . .And to discover the rest, you will have to look up the poem yourself.

Woke up to discover that a former employer had emailed me to complain about his name being linked with some kind of gravure-esque video on YouTube. (That's gravure in the sense of "appealing to the prurient interest," not in the sense of "12-year-old Japanese girl.") Threats of legal action were involved.

I could understand his irritation, especially considering that this was the first I'd heard of this myself. I was a bit miffed, let us understate.

A bit of clicking around suggested that this was fallout from a messy breakup between a friend of mine and some lunatic that he'd been involved with for two weeks. She got angry and posted videos complaining about him and everyone else she'd ever seen associated with him. (Which is how my name came into it.) A quick phone call confirmed it, we agreed that legal action would be just tops, and so now we may be in the unlikely position of bringing suit for vilification, libel, and slander.

So you can see now why I don't worry too much about my reputation.

So I've been skimming the Wikipedia, as is my custom. As far as I can tell, trial by combat is still a valid part of U.S. common law.

Consider: United States common law is inherited from the English version of same, only diverging when the U.S. declared independence in 1776. English precedents are generally held to apply except where specifically updated. In the case of trial by combat, the British "did not abolish wager by battle until 1818 in Ashford v. Thornton." "Since independence, no court in the United States has addressed the issue of whether this remains a valid alternative to a civil action under the law."

Now, there is the legal doctrine of desuetude, wherein un-enforced statutes become obsolete. This is specifically held to not apply in the U.S. As the relevant Wikipedia article says, "In Walz v. Tax Commission of the City of New York, 397 U.S. 664, 678 (1970), the United States Supreme Court asserted that: 'It is obviously correct that no one acquires a vested or protected right in violation of the Constitution by long use, even when that span of time covers our entire national existence and indeed predates it.'"

Anyway, I find the idea of trial by combat fascinating -- more fascinating than my tiny frame and complete lack of fighting skills might suggest. For me, it's a reminder that we aren't that far removed from a bloodier, more direct time, when the law distilled down to who could best enforce directly offenses against their person.

"She said that her Sprite wasn't fresh. I've never heard anything like that before. Sprite is delicious. Sprite's always delicious!"

Always! It was the way he said it, I think -- affirming a universal truth. If I had waited, the next words from his mouth would have been "Everything else is piss!" a la Tarantino.

I'm biking along, when some hoodlum flags me down for directions. He asks me where the nearest bus stop is, and I tell him it's on the corner. I suppose that should have been my first clue that something was amiss, seeing as no one in this town would expect the bus to be running at midnight on a Friday, but I am traditionally very bad at applying that sort of normative judgement.

As I'm turning away, I find myself surrounded by a white cloud and a stinging sensation. It's hardly debilitating -- I'm more confused than anything else. I look over my shoulder to see the hoodlum's associates attacking him. I shrug and bike away, reasoning that if it had been aimed at me, they would have got me before I turned away. Fifteen minutes later I'm leaving the store, and three passers-by announce gleefully that they "got him." I laugh, wave, and bike on. Dangerous ruffians about.

Eventually I figure out that I've been sprayed with a fire extinguisher. As assaults go, I've had worse.

Dear LiveJournal: Please make this into a t-shirt.

(Shamelessly pilfered from the original Wug Test. More information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wug_Test . I realize that there are t-shirts already, but they're lame.)

"In the end all things will be known."

That was my fortune cookie today. I found it terrifying, as you might expect.

Or maybe I've never mentioned; perhaps it is unclear. I suffer from a constant fear that I am actually in hell. That this is literally some elaborate punishment, that every good thing that happens is a trap to make further tortures that much more poignant. You can use some word with less religious loading if you like, but the basic idea is the same: reality is tissue, and what lies beneath too horrible to contemplate. When something seems to suggest some overarching narrative, some hint of predestination, my instinct is to panic. I've gotten good at controlling it over the years, but it's tenuous. When my cookie seems to portend the apocalypse, it ceases to be funny and becomes -- something else. Not merely scary. A confirmation of something dreadful.

My last post had a 67-word sentence. Really, that's just appalling laziness. Something should be done.

Been selling a lot of stuff on the Intertron.

Sometimes I wonder if people deliberately claim that the hardware has some small, easily-remedied flaw, to encourage bidders to think that they're getting a good deal -- that by their technological savvy they are making money off some poor bastard who, say, doesn't know how to reinstall his operating system, and are therefore inspired to bid higher than otherwise, to make sure their "deal" doesn't get away.

The best cons all rely on the mark's greed; you know that as well as anyone. (You can cheat an honest man -- but it's more work.)

I mention this because I've noticed that, on eBay, auctions where the seller puts something like "I turn it on and it displays a folder with a flashing question mark, whatever will I do?" seem to go for substantially more than auctions where the seller just diagnoses the problem. All of my auctions do the latter, because I have my pride. But I can't help but wonder whether it's a common technique to feign ignorance. Someone should do a study.

I <3 high EMF's

Edit, some hours later: LOL HAX. ♥

Confirmed a long-standing suspicion of mine: The VESA mount is square, so it's possible to rotate the monitor 90 degrees with respect to the mount to obtain a correct TATE orientation. (See photographic evidence.) Your mileage may vary, of course.

Also, you may gather from the picture that I've downloaded Karous, which is probably the absolute last commercial release for the Dreamcast. It's cool -- very atmospheric, kind of understated. A bleak setting with a drum-and-bass soundtrack. Recommended for those who like that kind of thing, but aren't very good at it.