I am a unique snowflake

2006-09-13T17:53:00.000-07:00

What does 12x optical zoom mean?

P was asking me if I use the telephoto end of my zoom lens much. I don't use the extreme end too often, but here is what it can do. The following pictures are full resolution and completely undoctored:

Wide shot of male Vicuna herd (~36mm equiv. for 35mm film)

Zoomed shot of male Vicuna herd (~432mm equiv. for 35mm film)

Wide shot of female Vicuna herd (~36mm equiv. for 35mm film)

Zoomed shot of female Vicuna herd (~432mm equiv. for 35mm film)

Basically, instead of this (24x enlargement of wide female shot)

One gets this (100% crop of female herd, same animal as pixelated one)

So, some shots are completely impossible with lesser focal lengths. Completely. I couldn't even seen these things with my naked eye when I was there. After digitally zooming to 48x, I could fill the frame with one (30% original size, no crop).

2006-08-07T13:04:00.000-07:00

Sony, U teh funny

Riiidge Racer!

2006-07-31T17:58:00.000-07:00

Holy Shit! K and I are going to Peru in less than two weeks. I just bought the ticket today. We will be gone three weeks, and plan on visiting the Amazon basin, going on a week hike/trek, and checking out Machu Picchu and stuff. It will be great.

2006-07-28T14:03:00.000-07:00

The Onion Rules

Motocrosser Quits After Learning Physics

2006-07-24T13:41:00.000-07:00

Gross

2006-07-19T16:03:00.000-07:00

Funny IKEA story

"IKEA makes me so angry, yet if someone asked me to go to IKEA right now I'd probably roll up a phatty and get into the car... hey that actually sounds like a good time ... Anywho, basically what I am trying to say is that I am pretty much shocked that no one has run into IKEA for a mass shooting yet. Hopefully this article will inspire someone to go and do that...because this year IKEA fucked me up the ass hardcore."

This chick is funny. I've never had any problems assembling furniture, but I am a master of science. Check out her Tony Danza article while you are there.

My current desktop wallpaper:

2006-07-12T17:35:00.000-07:00

My new studio

I like it. I am moving in this week. The French doors give it a lot of light and all the wood flooring is brand new. Check out those palm trees: Surf's up dude!

2006-06-21T21:59:00.000-07:00

Caving

Matt's caving pictures from last weekend.

I went on my first caving trip last weekend. It was much more confined and technical than I anticipated, but once I got used to it (and the wetsuit), I was having a great ol' time. I am working on the trip report now and will post it once I have finished.

2006-06-15T17:39:00.000-07:00

Funny Ass Street Fighter Videos

2006-06-14T14:03:00.000-07:00

Funny sites

Real Ultimate Power
The Best Page in the Universe
Tucker Max
The Onion

Some of you haven't heard of all of these. You can thank me later.

2006-06-14T10:33:00.000-07:00

The Googleplex knows all

2006-05-27T19:58:00.000-07:00

How to Make a Cable

It's easy. I'll tell you how I did it yesterday at work: First, you look at documents for one FPGA prototype board to see the functional assignments for the output pins. Then, you examine the mapping of function to output pin, and then the mapping from the .10" center side of the legacy cable to the 40-pin D-sub on the other side. Then you look at the possible signaling standards for the IO banks on the other FPGA prototype board and try and craft a clever mix of constrained pins that work within the specs and are also grouped together nicely for mechanical stability of the cable. Then you decide which functions need to be implemented and map them from the D-sub connector to each FPGA pin. Then, you make the constraint file and give your final mapping to your friend who actually builds it ;)

2006-05-25T10:57:00.000-07:00

US nuclear fallout exposure

Due to the Eastern direction of the winds, we in California have it made in the shade, so to speak. Full article

2006-05-24T17:03:00.000-07:00

Rightwing Satire

This Cafepress store is great. It is so ridiculous that I want some of the stuff, it is just my style, just like my Army velcro wallet.

Especially:
Moses pWnz
Keep Karl

I would ask for this stuff for my birthday, but I don't know if I can wait that long. I wonder if the hippies around here would even understand the Keep Karl shirt.

Jason

2006-05-23T14:02:00.000-07:00

THIS IS THE INTERNET. PLEASE PICK UP YOUR SERIOUS BUSINESS SUIT AT THE FRONT COUNTER.

2006-04-27T11:12:00.000-07:00

The spirit of Truth
Pure Awesomeness

2006-04-11T01:54:00.000-07:00

I just saw an ad for the upcoming Movie "Stick It"

I am pretty sure it is going to be great.
Check it out.

I also Pre-ordered Maddox's new book on Amazon. I don't think it will dissapoint.

My interview today went well. The three plus hours went by quickly. The people emphasized the potential for growth within the company, and they were all nice and enjoyed working there. I will know in a week if they want me or not. I don't know if I will accept if they do. I want to be doing development work right now.

2006-03-29T02:39:00.000-08:00

The call

I got a call asking if I was interested in an FPGA design engineer position today! It would be based in Los Gatos. I have some reservations about the company, but it sounds like cool work and the location is great. It feels really good to at least have something happen on that front.

2006-03-22T18:51:00.000-08:00

New Car

I have been thinking of getting a new car in a few years and I really like the new Civic SI, but this car has my imagination now:

Of course it isn't very practical, but I love the idea behind it: maximise the power to weight ratio and make things simple. Take a look around the site and see how it beats almost every supercar at any metric. It uses the Honda iVTEC engine from the civic SI, weighs ~1020 lbs, and costs only around $80,000. Someday my pretty, someday...

2006-03-07T22:02:00.000-08:00

Why Looking for Venture Capital is Like Picking Up Girls

from Games*Art*Culture. These are funny, but probably have some truth behind them. My favorite:

6. "Let's just be friends" is the kiss of death. It means she thinks you're a "nice guy" not the alpha male of her dreams; it means they want to pick your brains, not fund your company. However, if you do get LJBF, you may be able to use her as a wingman; her friendship provides social credibility with other girls. Similarly, if a VC won't invest but seems otherwise positive, try to get them to introduce you to other potential investors.

2006-03-06T13:46:00.000-08:00

Are Your Cats Old Enough To Learn About Jesus?

A lot of people say, "Oh, but Whiskers doesn't even answer to his name yet." They raise a good point: Sometimes you have to teach your cat at its own level. If you give your cat a rubber Jesus to play with, it will sense that there's more to this toy. If you give it a scratching cross, it will contemplate Christ's love and ultimate sacrifice while it stretches and sharpens its claws. I myself have put an image of Jesus at the bottom of my cats' food bowls. That way, when they finish their food, the face of He who provided it is revealed unto them.

For Anna and Jen, after all,

Think of the alternative: your cat mired in darkness for eternity

2006-03-04T01:13:00.000-08:00

Souls of Mischief

I saw the Souls of Mischief (4 members of the Hieroglyphics crew, but Phesto was absent) at Moe's Alley with Anna and Jen. It was a great venue and I had never been there before. There were three acts before SOM, and two of them were pretty good: Daily Life Crew (who I stood next to in the crowd and got to talk with) and Serendipity Project. Souls put on a great performance. I was star-struck and totally into it. I was also able to easily stay in the first row, which was right next to the performers (I rested my hand on the monitor wedges, no security or safety moat) and was able to stay under the horn speakers, to help lessen the wicked gross highs. After the show, they came out into the crowd, which had mostly dispersed, and I got to talk to them and hang out. Jen asked Tajai if he knew her brother (who went to the same high school). He was all "Awwww hell ya. Say peace to him." It was really funny. Bukue One was handling the merch and I bought Tajai and Opio CDs.

I was under a few influences but I managed to snap a few pictures, and I have put the best ones here.

opio2
A-plus
Tajai side
Opio & A-plus blurry
Tajai, A-plus, DJ
Group
A-plus pointing
Tajai dancing

Lessons: if using a flash, might as well use ISO 100. Use a flash, try dialing it down more next time. Take more damn movies!

2006-02-28T19:21:00.000-08:00

Quiz

Which OS are you?

This is a fun quiz, and the questions are not really computing related. There is also a random Slashdot story generator that is funny. Keep refreshing it.

2006-02-27T14:02:00.000-08:00

Web 2.0

Check out this Web 2.0 site

2006-02-25T21:24:00.000-08:00

Magnets

Ferrofluid looks cool. Here's a video

and an image gallery here.

For more fun with magnets, look at the stuff that has been pulled into MRI machines here

2006-02-23T22:33:00.000-08:00

Car wrecks

I was looking for the picture of the jacked up Hummer H2 that I came across and laughed at, and in the process came across this dope site wreckedexotics

Is this schadenfreude or just rubberneckin'?

This must be the worst one I have seen.

Oh yeah, do some google image searches for h2 accident and laugh at the false sense of toughness and security their owners have.

2006-02-15T22:27:00.000-08:00

Peak Oil on December 16, 2005?

This guy thinks so:

An algebraic result from the Hubbert theory says that the production rate peaks when half of the oil has been produced... The world peak would then happen when 1.0065 trillion barrels have been produced (half of 2.013). Following Hubbert, I used the Oil & Gas Journal end-of-year production numbers. It isn't that the Oil & Gas Journal reports are divinely inspired; their methodology is well explained and their reports constitute a relatively consistent data set. The cumulative world production at the end of 2004 was 0.9812 trillion barrels and at the end of 2005 it was 1.00748 trillion. During the year, we passed the halfway point. The graph shows the date of the crossover: December 16, 2005.

Snap yo! He may or may not be correct about the date, but peak oil will happen, and Things are going to change

2006-02-11T22:57:00.000-08:00

Table Saw that stops in 5 ms

It senses when something conductive (like a finger) hits the saw and stops. There are slow-motion videos available. This is really incredible. A friend from high school lost a finger in a table saw and that sucks.

Videos

2006-02-10T14:16:00.000-08:00

"In God We Trust. All Others We Monitor."

Weapons of the Secret War, A Business 2.0 article posted on a SIGINT manufacturer's page.

Loaded with the proper gear, one aircraft can record all of the cell traffic in a major city by circling it at a high altitude and exploiting the powerful microwave signals that form a handshake between cell sites in wireless networks. Back at the plane's base, a computer extracts audio files of actual conversations from the captured signals. The audio files are then filtered with sophisticated voice recognition software, allowing intelligence analysts to identify all of a suspect's conversations by his voice, no matter how many times he rolls his phones.

This isn't some conspiracy nutjob's rant, this is in a business magazine. Similarly, the Wall Street Journal had this article
More Surveillance Puts Strain on Carriers

"There's been a significant increase in demand and pressure on companies for providing records, tracing calls and wiretapping," said Mr. Warren, now a vice president for fiduciary services at NeuStar Inc. of Sterling, Va., which bought his company. "That's led to a great deal of strain on carriers."

Our country is slipping further away from capitalistic and democratic ideals by the day. Not only is the invasion of privacy a burden to corporation's bottom lines, but it is a waste of tax dollars and erodes freedom. I don't see how a self-consistent left-wing or right-wing person could go along with this.

As a bonus, here are a few other headlines from the last day:
Chinese man 'jailed due to Yahoo'
Google Copies Your Hard Drive - Government Smiles in Anticipation

2006-02-08T14:24:00.000-08:00

Cronyjobs.com great stuff

This is how I found it.

2006-02-07T20:45:00.000-08:00

Custom T-shirts

Anna just showed me a place that will make a custom t-shirt based on a "word cloud" of any URL. So, I put in this site, and it came up with this

"Fuck funny god"
"Anna appreciate ass"
"notify NPR NSA objectionable"
"rough scientists SGI shave"
...

Great stuff. You can then modify what words they use. The above image is their original pic. I would take out the words blog, blogger, cookie. I don't know if I would pay for a shirt, but the image generation is cool. Try it out!

2006-02-07T02:07:00.000-08:00

Microsoft encourages use of ECC RAM for Vista

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/02/06/ecc_for_vista/

And people say I am paranoid for wanting ECC RAM. My Sun boxes and most of my SGI boxes have it, along with the protestwiki development server I set up. I am embarassed at myself for not having it in the Athlon system I put toegether recently, and after finding out that DDR doesn't even support parity, I get nervous and and itch to put together a new system that uses ECC. I will do some calculations for the probability of bit flips and put them up here. I rememeber doing some back of the envelope stuff and seeing it was a non-trivial amount, especially as memory density keeps increasing I refuse to use the i810-based Dell GX110 I got, since the chipset doesn't support parity and seems pretty poopy. What do you all think? Do you have ECC, and if not, are you scared the ladies will find out?

2006-02-06T15:47:00.000-08:00

Hummingbird

It was so warm today that I left the back door open. 10 minutes later I heard a strange sound, and saw that a hummingbird had come in and was now stuck trying to get out the skylight in the ceiling.

I tried throwing towels at it in the hope that it would get cought up in one so that I could put it outside. At the least, I hoped to scare it out of the well in the ceiling, so that it could see there were other ways to get out. That damn thing would just start flapping crazily, buzzing against the window. I thought it was going to die soon, since it was working really hard and getting scared. I got a grocery bag and got it inside a few times by lifting the grocery bag up by a can grabbing arm thing. Once the bag was away from the window area, it would just fly out the open end again, and get caught in same skylight or go to the other skylight. I couldn't close the end of the bag in time, since the edge of the skylight is about 10 feet in the air. After doing this a few times, I get mad at it and told myself I would just leave it alone and wait for it to die. But, I thought it was a cool challenge, so I went around looking for something more appropriate. I thought we had a little net for the goldfish out front, but I couldn't find it. Then I thought of the metal popcorn pan (for holding over fires) that hinged and had a handle. But, the hinge was on the far edge of the pan, so that wouldn't work. Finally, I got a fishing net from the garage and grabbed the handle of it with one of those short/old people's grabbers. This worked well on the first try. The hummingbird just lie in the net still until I shook it loose outside. Then it tore ass down the hill until I couldn't see it anymore. I was happy for it.

2006-02-05T23:56:00.000-08:00

The Disparate Markets of Grocery Stores

I was in Trader Joes last Saturday wearing my CCI shirt while waiting in line. It has a picture of a groundhog wearing a CCI hat and it says "Make 'em take cover." This middle-aged guy comes up from behind me and says "What, pray tell, could CCI possibly make that would make a squirrel take cover?" I replied "Ammunition... that'd do it." as he reeled back in shock. You should have seen how scared this poor guy was.

Now, I don't think shoppers of Wal-Mart or Costco would have given my shirt or response a second thought. I am amazed at how segmented the food shopping market is. I am finding it very easy to stereotype the clientele for different stores. Strange enough, one can fairly often typecast the employees as well (have you ever been to Shopper's Corner?)

2006-02-02T23:59:00.000-08:00

This is a fun site

lemonparty.org

2006-02-01T20:16:00.000-08:00

The Man Who Said No to Wal-Mart

An interesting story about a CEO that stopped doing business with Wal-Mart, which is typically unheard of. Most companies dream of being carried at Wal-Mart.

What struck Jim Wier first, as he entered the Wal-Mart vice president's office, was the seating area for visitors. "It was just some lawn chairs that some other peddler had left behind as samples." The vice president's office was furnished with a folding lawn chair and a chaise lounge.

...That's the question that motivated Jim Wier to stop doing business with Wal-Mart. Wier is too judicious to describe it this way, but he looked into a future of supplying lawn mowers and snow blowers to Wal-Mart and saw a whirlpool of lower prices, collapsing profitability, offshore manufacturing, and the gradual but irresistible corrosion of the very qualities for which Snapper was known. Jim Wier looked into the future and saw a death spiral.

2006-02-01T18:06:00.000-08:00

New Firefox Version

1.5.0.1: fixes for memory leaks and so forth. Going through the easy channels doesn't work. You need to get it from the FTP site. US Windows version here.

2006-01-27T00:08:00.000-08:00

Scientists using ROOT, the program I used for data analysis in my thesis were able to achieve 131 Gbs of official bandwidth. I had no idea these kinds of pipes were installed around here. They were using 17 out of 22 10Gb ethernet waves. Within 3 hours, they transferred 142.8 TB!

Why is this needed or important?
It is also important for the LHC experiments (ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, LHCb) which will generate Petabytes to Exabytes of data per year, that will need to be analyzed by physicists around the world in multiple geographically dispersed computing centers

So, Petabytes to Exabytes per year need to be sent around the world, via tens of national and transoceanic 10 Gbs (and up) lines. Damn.

2006-01-24T15:50:00.000-08:00

Don't shave your ass hair.

Here is a hilarious story by a ma who did it. This reminds me of a friend who tried the same thing. You know who you are.

2006-01-02T11:45:00.000-08:00

Joshua Tree
I went to Joshua tree last Friday night with my friend Todd.

The weather was clear, but very windy

We had a good time

2005-12-29T11:28:00.000-08:00

NSA cookies
Strange, I found an NSA cookie on my system a few weeks ago, and got paranoid and disabled cookies for all sites, except for manual exceptions. What are they trying to do with this? They surely have more sophisticated techniques that would yield more information than cookies. Maybe it is just a scare tactic?

2005-12-26T16:17:00.000-08:00

I hope everyone had a great Christmas. Here is a picture of the members of my family that were over at my house

Also, here is a funny site:
FUH2

2005-12-13T22:25:00.000-08:00

I am finally done!

I got all the signature I needed Monday and turned in my thesis. Here is the finished product.

Now I can finally have my life back. I have been working on this project for a long time (Anna doesn't know what I am like when I don't have Hartmut breathing down my neck) so it still hasn't set in that I don't have to deal with this stuff anymore. I can listen to music, go on bike rides, and do anything I want without feeling guilty for not working instead. I want to travel but I have no money and my car needs some fixin'.

Now I am going to incorporate the suggestions I got for my resume and start putting it out there...

2005-12-10T00:45:00.000-08:00

Here is another item that I would appreciate as a Christmas present

Beautiful, isn't it?

2005-12-08T06:07:00.000-08:00

Well, it is after six in the morning, and I have been up all night fixing my citations and bibliography and making sure all the loose ends are tied up in my paper. I now feel like I have a finished product. There are still some issues, but I think it is pretty good overall. The deadline is today, and since I haven't gotten any feedback from my advisor so far, I don't think he has any right to withold his signature, even though he is being a jerk about it so far. I am mentally preparing to fight him on his approval, since I feel he will never sign it. I have an extension until Monday since I need to get the signature page back from Italy still, but I want to count this as a done deal and not drag it through the weekend. The one person who I thought was just going to rubber stamp this deal ended up being the guy who is going through it the most carefully. I hope he doesn't have me change much. When we talked today, he wanted me to spend next quarter working on revisions. Ack!

I am about to scream and punch and scratch my way to the asylum.

On a happier note, don't forget Christmas is coming up.

2005-12-06T00:59:00.000-08:00

Jesus Christ Supercop 2 - Character Development Is For Sinners

Kick ass! The whole thing is really funny, by my favorite part is about 2:50 into it. I found this and think link before from religiousfreaks.com, which is done by a /. member.

Don't miss the first installment either.

2005-12-06T00:41:00.000-08:00

There is no god

An excellent piece for NPR's "This I Believe" series by Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller). This reads almost as if my mind had written it, but I don't think I could have written down my own ideas as succinctly.

Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.

Comments?

2005-12-02T02:28:00.000-08:00

Business Style

Man, I was stressing out today when I found out how long international shipping takes. I need to have my thesis page sent to Italy and returned within a week. I don't think it is going to happen. But, I went to Kinko's/Fedex today and sent it off anyway. See, they can't just print it out and send it here because they need to print it out on fancy-guy 100% cotton paper, that I have and that I wouldn't trust an Italian to find. The only thing they can find is trouble, if you ask me. And cigarettes.

So, I walked into Kinkos, and had them print me a few copies from my USB drive onto the cotton paper that I brought. I also forgot the address, so I had to use the lady's personal computer (they don't have rentable stations). She was reluctant, but I put the hustle on: I neeeded an address so I could untilize their $40 service. I busted open a SSH window even though she opened IE with the expectation that I would use that. I filled out the form and charged it to a friend's Fedex account. I walked out without paying one red cent for any of it. I felt like quite the business guy. I should have gone and expensed a dinner party afterwards.

2005-11-30T13:26:00.000-08:00

I found this video while looking for the DMV page (dmv.ca.gov doesn't work, but www.dmv.ca.gov works, bastards). When you hear the cheesy lines, remember that this was done by a sitting Governor.

2005-11-29T01:36:00.000-08:00

What does one do the day after one finishes the rough draft of their thesis? Surround themselves with the finer things in life:

figure 1. Actual unscripted picture of my bedroom floor.
Before clicking on the picture, try and see how many UNIX workstations and gaming consoles you can count.

2005-11-23T01:12:00.000-08:00

My Thesis: rough draft

I have finished the rough draft of my thesis! It currently clocks in at 126 pages. Now I just need to fix the citations, and keep my figures from drifting off where they don't belong. I have sent it to my advisor and wait for his final changes and advice. This is pretty exciting. I can now relax more during Thanksgiving break, but I can't relax too much since I have no money and need to find a job.

Will you please read it LINK and look for mistakes or give me feedback on readability, etc.? I need to make changes before it gets sent in and archived for good. I don't want anything shitty in there, like "teh".

While we are on the subject of papers, here is the paper that was submitted to the IEEE conference record. I'm the principal author. Booh-ya!

Cool. I'm going to drink a few beers and play with my new Silicon Graphics Indigo 2.

2005-11-21T00:53:00.000-08:00

God bless

2005-11-16T02:13:00.000-08:00

Nintendo 64 and "mature" gaming

I have been collecting Nintendo 64 games lately, since Game Crazy has them for $5 each right now. These are supposedly classics, and from the little that I have played some of them, they are great. I feel like I have been kicked in the nutz. Kinda like when I found out that UNIX had existed the whole time I was using DOS. I thought the Nintendo 64 was stupid when it came out because I was wowed by the more textured style of PlayStation, so I never paid much attention to it, and so I missed out on an entire generation of gaming. The more cartoonish look the Nintendo games have definitely stand up to the test of time better than the PlayStation 1 games, which are pixellated and pretty crappy. Plus, Nintendo really makes bangin' first-party games that have good play mechanics, are just a lot of fun, and nobody makes platformers anymore. Now that I am mature enough to not feel emasculated by "kiddie" games (as the critics deride Nintendo's games), I enjoy them a great deal. I hate it when people say that Nintendo only caters to kids, and doesn't have "mature" titles. These are GAMES people. They are for my entertainment, not to compensate for phallus size. Should I only play Halo while watching "Faces of Death" on a second TV, masturbating with steel wool, and griding kitten tails under my bootheels? Since being mature in gaming is equated with sexuality and violence, that's pretty mature isn't it?

Once I get my thesis done (up to 108 pages now), I can't wait to play some Paper Mario, Super Mario 64, and Donkey Kong 64.

2005-11-04T03:37:00.000-08:00

They will never win

"They" in this case being The Man. There is new proposed legislation that would require all media to be treated digitally, with copyright enforcing technology embedded. Any older analog devices (current TVs, VCRs, video cards for PCs, camcorders?) will be have to stop being produced.
read more here

So, what do to with all this old gear? I doubt they will be draconian enought to try and recall it all (but the situation is already past my vision of common sense and jsutice).

Audio CDs are also shipping (and have been for a while) with DRM software that purposely invades and breaks part of your windows computer. The most obtrusive versions can be avoided by keeping autorun off (you kids and your autorun=1, and your AIM, and what have you, sheesh). The less obtrusive versions simply introduce errors into the music that Cd-ROMs cannot correct, thus causing pops in playback. As an audiophile and as a lover of music and musician's intentions, I cannot stand for this. There was a lawsuit by Phillips a while ago, since these discs shouldn't be able to claim they were "compact discs" as defined in the copyright, but I think the bad guys won. I buy around 50 CDs a year, but the reasons for doing so are becoming fewer, since one of my main reasons was better sound quality, but I now get purposefully corrupted products? Trying to preserve a revenue stream is fine, but please keep the schema out of the actual data. Too bad SACD, with its hardware watermarking and encryption, seems to be abandoned by its creator Sony.

So, these things are causing the typical consumer grief (corrupted CDs won't work in their truck, computer, etc. and TiVos and VCRs will be useless or illegal) and not stopping the people who they are trying to stop. Why? because there are people like me who like technical challenges and working on cool projects. Cracking encrpytion is a cool challenge. Finding and tapping vunerable data streams in a component is a nice technical challenge. So, someone like me, but with a urge to crack this stuff will work on it and probably succeed. Even if there weren't people who enjoy tinkering with this kind of stuff, there are still people who will just capture the media through analog means. Since we are analog creatures with analog eyes, ears, noses, and mouths, there must always be a conversion to analog somewhere in the signal chain. So, DRM will not stop piracy, but it will perhaps lower the quality of the pirated product (think camcorders in theaters, microphones held to speakers). This will not stop the illicit product from being valuable. One only needs to witness the popularity of MP3s, which are far inferior to CD quality. Plus, there is all this legacy analog equipment that they will have to pry from our cold dead hands.

I predict one coming paradigm will be disasterous, and that is the pressure of Hollywood to create a fully encrypted video chain. Windows Vista requires an encrypted signal chain, which means that HDMI (or similar tech.) will need to be used, making all monitor/video card combos without HDMI obsolete. HDTV signals will also be going encrypted, making all HDTVs and tuner boxes with only component or DVI connetions worthless, and this is most of the units that have been sold. Hopefully there will be enough outcry to reverse the current plans.

Now, someone is going to pry open a "Trusted Monitor" or whatever they will call it and tap into the signal going to the LED phosphors and call it a day. They can post what they did so others can copy their work and then copyright infringe themselves, or just start recording their favorite TV shows and movies and distribute them online themselves. With today's distribution protocols, it only takes ONE person.

It just feeds my paranoia that these impossibly bold and crazy things are becoming legal reality. It makes me want to run only free (as in beer) software, not pay for any IP, and move to a country where my contribution to the GDP wouldn't make me feel guiltily complicit.

2005-11-04T03:05:00.000-08:00

Things that make me happy:

vi
LaTeX
PERL (which is now installed on my router)
blustery weather
Workstations
Super Monkey Ball
X-series Thinkpads
walking
discharging firearms
John Coltrane's music

Things that make me sad:

DRM
Windows XP
spelling mistakes
party politics
reality TV
Macromedia flash
Dealing with car issues I can't solve myself
people with a sense of entitlement

The title of this blog is a poke at those who fit the last item. Yes, you are unique, just like everyone else. Get in line. You are one of god's children? Good job, who isn't?

I have spent 2 days trying to get my car smogged and after two trips to the garage and two trips to the DMV, it still isn't cleared up. I am getting the $30 shaft again because I live next to the county line and people constantly try and keep me down. I keep getting sent the wrong voting ballots and polling places, get the wrong DMV setting for SMOG checks, and the wrong jury summons'. The last one is OK actually.

The DRM stuff deserves a seperate rant.

2005-11-02T23:12:00.000-08:00

A StarCraft analysis of the current state of affairs:

The player who goes for the Zergling rush is the US right now. When something attacks their unprotected base (soil/ homeland), they are lacking any infrastructure or defense and lose many resource gatherers, structures, and perhaps the entire game. Even if the base attack vectors never come, the lack of investment at home/base will cause them to lose effectiveness in the late game. The economy will not support the more expensive units and the levels in tech will be lacking.

What the US needs to do is play like, if I may be so bold, myself. Spend a lot of time and money in your home base: add defenses(1), train gatherers, invest in tech. Then in the late game, you will win. We are in the late game now (220 years have passed: we survived early game rushes such as the war of 1812), so let's invest in our infrastrucure and stop throwing our people and attention all over the map. What do you all think?

(1) defense doesn't have to be photon cannons. I would consider things such as an excellent universal health care plan or a self-supporting energy policy good defenses.

2005-10-27T00:06:00.000-07:00

Linksys Mania!

This router I have wanted for a while was on sale at Fry's last weekend for $40, so I got one. The night I got it home, I put a linux distribution on it, and have SSH, telnet, a webserver, vi, awk, sed, etc. on it. That is why this router is so great. Linksys used linux on it, so they had to provide the source code under the GPL license. People figured out a way to insert it through an exploit in the ping command. Now, I can add QoS (quality of service), up the transmit power to ten times the stock amount, run a webserver, run folding@home, and so on (just compile for the MIPS R3000 inside). I will have it dynamically linked to a domain name soon (once I get my D-link router to port forward to the wireless AP), so you can see its glory. There is a huge subculture for these things, with people producing competing firmware and sumitting mods.

Both Linksys and consumers benefit from the lack of intellectual property. My next step is to add an SD card slot on the side, so I can mount files permanently, since my additions all get written to a ramdisk and get lost if the power goes out. Although, one could mount an external server's files through samba, but then you are dependent on another box.

Damn this is fun. If you can't tell, I am getting distracted from my thesis.

2005-10-25T16:01:00.000-07:00

New Orleans Slideshow

My mom made friends with a cop in Westwego when she was down there, and he sent her a link to this slideshow. It is definitely the real close-up deal (mostly from police boats), and even though many of us have seen tons of Katrina pictures, these are a fresh perspective for me. There is a slideshow button that will automatically scroll through them. Check out the seventh one.

2005-10-17T22:23:00.000-07:00

Hold on Tiger Sharks!

I just took a "love test", and they say I am a random brutal love master. Jeah, Jeah, that's what they all tell me. You can take it also here. These things smack me as sooooo 1996, but I was tempted after seeing Anna's results on her blog. Plus, the above picture that I got from there is great.

Here are some interesting links:
Human deaths caused by animals in case you thought pythons were more dangerous than they really are

Third nipple piercings If you can't tell from the title, this is NSFW, ROFLMAO, BRB, Chewbacca and all that stuff.

2005-10-15T01:37:00.000-07:00

Worldwind users: check out this sweet 2005 Katrina add-on. Sub one-foot accuracy on some places, around a meter on most else. Check out where the industrial canal levee broke: you can see the whitewater fron the current.

Non Worldwind users: get on it.

2005-10-15T01:34:00.000-07:00

VAX - when you care enough to steal the very best

from The Silicon Zoo

These stories come up every few years, but I hadn't seen this particular one before. Hilarious.

2005-10-13T17:41:00.000-07:00

Resume discussion

Hi everyone, I am trying to polish a resume to send out soon, and I would really appreciate any input you could give regarding the content and layout of my first draft here. E-mail or commenting here is fine.

I know it is too long, but what should I cut out? I had cut out the awards and honors section, but my step-dad thought it was really important. I would like some way of combining some of the older summer internships into one heading, but cannot think of an elegant way to do it. Also, I know I need a better objective, so this is a generic placeholder for now. The date on my teaching assistant job hangs out too far to the right. Should I right justfiy all the dates? I can't really change the tabbing since the date already is close the the employment field for my graduate student researcher job. What do people think about having 2-page resumes in general?

Please help.

2005-10-12T00:21:00.000-07:00

Yahoo! mail splash screen

Yo, I was checking my mail tonight when a new image on the logon page caught my attention:

The caption mentions something about zapping viruses, but all I can see are some boobs. Large de-personalized boobs. Maybe one of you can write a feminist postmodernist reconstructionalist antebellum critique of the sociological impacts of demeaning the poor model by hiding her face and cropping everything but her knockers out of the frame. You can try to see the context, but the pictures are captions are rotated, so you may have to refresh a lot of times.

2005-10-11T00:23:00.000-07:00

There is an essay by Paul Graham on economic equality that is very good. It makes a distinction between wealth and power that is interesting, and has caused me to re-think some things.

"...What they really dislike is the sort of wealth that becomes self-perpetuating through an alliance with power."
Read it here: Inequality & Risk

If you have never been to his site, the guy is truly a visionary, and has some great essays.

2005-10-11T00:13:00.000-07:00

Everyone loves the Cat Mantis!

Don't forget to browse through their other handy products while you are at their site.

2005-09-16T19:34:00.000-07:00

Boohya!
I finally got another shotgun today: The Browning BPS stalker, with a 3.5 inch chamber, 28" barrel, and tru-glo sight. It's pimpy as shit, but I have to wait 10 days until I have it it my hands. More here.
I got it at Outdoor World in Santa Cruz for only $399.

2005-09-16T02:03:00.000-07:00

2 talking points:
Gay rights are civil rights
Finger pointing needs to be done for Katrina

Arnold is trying to hide his conservative stance (pressure from the party? It doesn't seem to fit earlier statements by him) on gay marriage by saying that "the people" are not for it. Gay rights are civil rights. Minority groups need to have their rights protected, just like everyone else, but since they are a minority, they get suppressed by the majority until legislation/legal precedent is created. Left up to "the people", we got seperate but equal drinking fountains, bathrooms, and schools. It took Brown vs. Board of Education.

Since the cleanup, relief and rescue efforts, and rebuilding are still underway, and will be for some time, we need to attach blame and "point fingers" at those in power who made mistakes. The GOP is trying to defame those who question them, but it is not insensitve or political to find out what happened, and what is continuing to happen since it is still relevant. It is not all over.

In addition, check this out: Karl Rove: The Psychology Behind His Katrina Strategy
quote: “The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.”
...
when the traumatic events are of human design, those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between victim and perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering. In order to escape the accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting.

Interesting

2005-09-12T03:22:00.000-07:00

Here is some secret guy stuff that I am working on:

These are proton beam correlations as it scatters through tissue-equivalent plastic. The three plots are x displacement at increasing depth vs. exit displacement.

They correspond pretty well with theory, but I am still making refinements.

2005-09-11T23:39:00.000-07:00

The Dumbing Down of Science in the Media (found on /.)

quote:And humanities graduates in the media, who suspect themselves to be intellectuals, desperately need to reinforce the idea that science is nonsense: because they've denied themselves access to the most significant developments in the history of western thought for 200 years, and secretly, deep down, they're angry with themselves over that.

I sympathise with the authors stance in this article. Most media articles I see try to appeal to authority or setup strawman arguments. Both are fallacies, and wouldn't fly in the literature or business section: "papers think you won't understand the 'science bit'... Compare this with the book review section, in any newspaper. The more obscure references to Russian novelists and French philosophers you can bang in, the better writer everyone thinks you are. Nobody dumbs down the finance pages."

This conspiracy by humanties relativists subverts objective field and makes people more likely to disgard logic and objective reality.

2005-09-10T23:57:00.000-07:00

Testify!

I like this blog entry because it speaks about ideologies. People and pundits in this country often do themselves and the issues they care about harm when they try and attack personalities instead of ideals (I'm looking at you Santa Cruz Bush haters). We need to recognize that free market fundamentalism is a failure. It simultaneously neglects seemingly unprofitable needs of the people (as in long-term physical infrastucture investment, long-term scientific and educational investment, etc.), has its proponents hypocritically supporting unprofitable industries (dairy, cattle, garments, etc.) through subsidies and trade laws, and brazenly forces its failure as a solid-state economic solution into the future through an increased debt load. This failure is magnified when one looks all the environmental resources in the supply side of the equation that are unaccounted for currently.

So, Katrina is the proverbial "Wake-up call". The seemingly unprofitable investments mentioned above can actually be profitable. I heard a Dutch engineer being interviewed on NPR, and he said the Dutch were given a hard time when they made their dyke system to withstand one in 15,000 year events. but they "did a cost benefit analysis and it was worth it." Sacramento has one hundred year event levees, and I believe New Orleans has 200 year event levees (anyone?). I have heard arguments over what kind of spending New Orleans needed for its levee system, so, let's say 10, no 50 billion dollars could build a system that could withstand 1/15000 year evensts. This is by a gross over-estimation... who cares? Private insurers alone stand to lose $15-$20 billion dollars or more solely in New Orleans flood-related claims. We have the loss of productivity for the workers in New Orleans for many months, loss of effective income and spending power nationwide due to higher gasoline (NB: costs would be even higher in the absense of federal action, or perhaps not), and hence, transportation costs, and transitory aid for the victims from both private and public sources, already adding up to $52 billion. The actual re-building cost will be many factors larger than this amount.

So, from purely a self-consistent capitalistic view, government spending can have a good return on investment. Many capitalists cannot, or refuse, to visualize projects that have long gestation periods. They need to look far past quarterly results for an accurate representation of reality.

Another failing of capitalism is its ineptitude in dealing with models that have difficult to commodify or quantify parameters. For example, how does one quantify education? It does not have a tangible output and its effects are myriad. Legislatures constantly debate its value, and in the end, not much more than lip service is paid to "the value of education". It is not ranked in The CIA factbook, only a literacy rate would qualify (97% for US. Great. We also have 155 heliports.) The tendency of capitalism to commodify is harmful as well. When one pays commodity-level wages for teachers, one can only expect commodity-level teachers. It should be obvious that not all teachers are the same. Even so, is the current pay grade even valid for lowest common denominator level people? Luckily for us many teachers work out of the goodness of their own heart, contrary to market forces, which gives us a higher-skilled pool of labor.

There will be another "Wake-up call" when we realize that we are no longer educated well enough to be a global economic leader. Not only do all sectors that require skill benefit from education (Engineers, corporate executives, politicians, scientists, teachers, etc.) but the country can make better and more-informed movements when its voters, i.e. the general populace, are better educated. The same case could be made for public companies and their stockholders. So, our economy, which has shifted to a services-based value-added paradigm, will lose its competitiveness to countries that place a higher value (and spend more money) on education. Not only would it be embarassing, but we would also be second-tier if we tried to move back to a raw materials and manufactured goods model. Other countries have more natural resources and there is not as much margin in those areas.

There is already an outcry over "offshoring" engineering jobs. This is only one manifestation of our looming education problem. Capitalism's market forces will move the jobs to where the most capital can be made. These jobs can only be "moved" once: 1) someone else is eligable
2) there is no value lost in the transaction
So, continuously raising our mean educational level in comparison to international evels would help stave off offshoring, as would public/stockholder insistence on the value of national security/pride/ease of collaboration.

Sadly, capitalism and free-market fundamentalists are reactionary: we will only deal with these issues through Wake-up calls. The one for physical infrstructure was hurricane Katrina. What will the one for education be? Our GDP falling behind Japan, the EU, or China? What will the one for health care, another difficult to quantify investment, be? It isn't either of the gross metrics of cost per capita or life expectancy, since we are lacking compared to many excellent nationalized plans in those. Does it take a biological catastrophe (terrorist or otherwise) to, quote, wake us up?

In conclustion, without even considering social values or quality of life issues, long-term self-consistent capitalism dicates we should allocate capital towards social services and infrastructure. They are good returns on investment and contribute to our continuing economic viability. If we could keep in check those with power, who abuse it and manipulate markets and expenditures for personal gain and short-term profits and lose a self-consistent capitalist vision, the shortcomings of our capitalist system (reactionary instead of pro-active, over-commodification, lack of social values) would be ameliorated.

Comments?

And now for something different:
This is for my core readership.

2005-09-02T01:27:00.000-07:00

Interview with Lionel Richie

(Part one in a series of Unique Snowflake's exclusive interviews)

UNIQUE: Thank you for taking time out of your, I'm sure, very busy schedule to talk with us today
LR: Hello
UNIQUE: How is your tour schedule going?
LR: Can't Slow Down
UNIQUE: If you don't mind, we would like to switch the convseration to a more serious focus: the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
LR: Only One
UNIQUE: Ummm, OK. How do you view the Bush Administration's party line on Katrina: That we should be patient, not question their plans, and that there is a huge relief effort underway, even though all reports indicate nothing is happening, and what is happening is coming too late?
LR: Say You, Say Me
UNIQUE: Indeed, do you have a special message to send to any refugees that might be reading this blog?
LR: Love Will Conquer All
UNIQUE: That is very nice of you, despite my feeling that raw force is conquering all currently.
LR: All Night Long?
UNIQUE: That's right. There is no command structure, people are turning on each other and rescue workers, and they are frustrated with their situation, even though they were told many days beforehand to evacuate.
LR: Will Be Alright
UNIQUE: How can you be so optimistic? Search & Rescue personnel are being shot at as they try and find trapped survivors. What can you say the men and women who are being attacked as they attempt to help fellow citizens?
LR: Serves You Right Wandering Stranger.
UNIQUE: Now you are just being a dick. Hey, you aren't just answering my questions with song titles you had in the 80's and early 90's are you?
LR: Truly
UNIQUE: Well that's a pretty clever way to avoid responsiblity for your answers, you cockgobbbler.
LR: Truly
UNIQUE: Stop it, goddamnit!
LR: OK, I am sorry. Our political and economic situation combines the worst aspects of free-market capitalism and centrally-planned totalitarianism. The government laughs when they distract the populace into thinking their interests are being served. There is nothing respected by our leaders other than capital and power. It is not profitable to care if the levees protecting the city need repair, even if that would increase national security. That capital is given to defense related businesses instead. It will trickle down, eh? Why do they give subsidies for outsourcing labor but have protectionist policies regarding trade? Refineries have been running at %100 percent for years in this country and we are going to pay for their short-sightedness at "the pump" and I'm sure with federal assistance in rebuilding their infrastructure in the gulf area. I already thought the country was doomed to have a recession, and now I am sure of it and just as sure that our leadership does not care. The level of hypocracy is untenable. The whole situation is so surreal, you know?
UNIQUE: Yes, like this interview talking with you about fiscal policy

2005-08-30T22:20:00.000-07:00

Creative MP3 player ships with worms

Wow, I'm glad I don't know anyone who works at Creative, because this would be really embarassing. I love my MuVo flash player, but this isn't a Good Thing for a company that wants to beat Apple at this game.

2005-08-27T22:40:00.000-07:00

Kickass!

Check out those shock waves on the water.

2005-08-26T14:57:00.000-07:00

While looking for my friend Dan's blog, where I saw a picture of Carrot Top that I want to put on here, I came across this awesome blog entry:

excerpt: I'm not sure people have their priorities right though. The real reason we should object to Starbucks is not because of a tacky sign, nor because it's a giant corporation who probably use undernourished children to pick their coffee beas, nor because it increases the homogeny of the world we live in but because it serves shit, and exceptionally gay, coffee.

A great bonus to this page is the Flickr album of Twenty Major poos around the world. I still haven't found Dan's blog, but when I do, I promise you a heinous picture of Carrot Top.

2005-08-26T13:36:00.001-07:00

Anybody rememember playing this?

I looked it up a few months ago, and found the official page. Watching my niece play it a few nights ago made me chuckle. I started it for her, and she thought it was "so cool". I went back to my room. Then, a few minutes later she started yelling at me through the wall "Uncle Jason!!! Something just came and ate me!" She was really upset, even though I always thought that was the best part of the game. She decided it was "Frosty's evil twin brother." I think the fact that there is fan fiction for this game is much more scary than being chased down by a crazed Yeti.

2005-08-19T17:25:00.000-07:00

Hello core audience, here is something that will hoepfully appeal to you more than collider physics

And check out these pages. I couldn't even make up stuff this good.

Also, check out The Brick Testament, a collection of Old Testament stories done with Legos. Thx Anna F., LOL111!!!

2005-08-18T15:14:00.000-07:00

Pieris and I were talking about Large Hardon Collider parameters:

LHC Proton parameters
There will be 4.7 x 10^14 protons/sec eventually. They come in bunches. 10^11/bunch and about 3000 bunches/second. This is good because if one is looking for 5 sigma Higgs events, one would need 100 inverse femtobarns

The Tevetron has been ramping up, but it is still only at 20 pb^-1, integrated over its lifetime.

It will be an exercise for the lay reader to check my math, but I think that the LHC will have a luminosity of 50 pb^-1 / second, more than twice the entire running lifetime of the Tevetron!

We were also talking about branching ratios. The smallest branching ratio ever measured is 10^-10 for K+ --> pi+ + v + -v (diagram). So, first one has to make Kaons (small percentage), then of those that you make, 10^-10 decay this special way that they have now been able to measure (1997).

2005-08-17T00:06:00.000-07:00

Two things:

Video of a Dump Truck
Just check it out

Also, I have had my mind blown by Google Earth and
NASA World Wind. I had heard of both for a while, but never thought much of it. Then, I saw a laptop running Google Earth at Costco, and it was amazing. So, I decided to try both on my own computer. I don't have an internet connection at home, so I downloaded a few cache packs to use when offline. Otherwise, both programs need to be connected at all time to pull the relevant data down.

So far, I like the NASA one much better. You can pick which layers to use, it looks nicer, the cache size is unlimited, and it is open source. The problems I have had with it so far are related to server availability (I think). I can't get USGS ortho data for most of the bay area, and for Durango, CO and other areas of the US. Plus, I can't get the most detailed layer at all. It is still sweet though, and I will try to pull down more data still. My cache is about 3GB so far. Google Earth looks nice zoomed far in, but further out it looks like poo. Also, it crashes about every 10 minutes, the cache size is limited to 2GB, and you can't choose which layers you want.

I remember seeing a SGI roadshow when I was at Cal Poly and I was blown away by a similar visualization they did with an Onyx InfiniteReality. Plus, I always dream about flying around in a helicopter and looking at how the different mountains, ridges, and valleys all form together around my house. Both of these programs are even better than either of the previous possibilities. I am obsessed. The Google one moves quickly, and the NASA one isn't bad on my computer, but I could use more CPU. I have read that World Wind scales with multiple CPUs, which really makes me want the Athlon 3800 dual-core chip now.

2005-08-13T18:44:00.000-07:00

Intel vs. AMD

I recently heard someone say they were going to buy an Intel processor because "it was more reliable". I won't go into the relative merits of either processor or associated chipsets here, but I would recommend trying a google search of "Intel recall" and "AMD recall" and compare the two.

Intel recalls faulty Grantsdale chipsets
Intel recalls 1.13GHz Pentium III
Intel recalls P4 EE editions
Intel recalls i820 chipset
and so on...

All one gets for "AMD recall" are articles talking about Intel recalls. Don't forget that Intel processors are also more expensive both in purchase price and in electriciy used.

2005-08-13T18:18:00.000-07:00

Listen up y'all, you need to check out "StumbleUpon", a Firefox extension if you haven't already. It is a toolbar that gives you the option to stumble onto new web pages based on categories that you tell the server you are interested in. Then, it starts to tune in to what you like based on your rating of pages you have seen. You can recommend pages to your friends and get their recommendations. It is like channel surfing on a TV. You can just keep pressing the stumble button without thinking. And, it leads to some whack shit, like:

xylophone
Spider-man reviews crayons
gunshot photos
Crazy stuff from the bible
Improved sorting algorithm
lego computer

The above links are not hand-picked for greatness. They are six consecutive stumbles I did while writing this. The first two are stumbles from my friend Todd, and then the rest are based on what it would think I would like based on my history.

2005-08-12T22:16:00.000-07:00

Atomic decay models used in analogy with dating.

from TFA:
"super daters", people who have many short relationships, have a good effect on others' lives. This is because they break up weak couples, forcing their victims to find better relationships.

Interesting. From the BBC

Also, if you want to see kick-ass videos, get what is called a "bittorrent client" and d/l these bastards here. I personally had to figure out all this "bittorrent" stuff since I never copyright infringe, but it looks like there is a lot of legal stuff you can bittorrent, like Linux ISOs and videos of Afganis getting gunned down. Cewl.

2005-08-11T00:37:00.000-07:00

Whenever I want an image of anything, I just look in images.google.com. For example, I wanted a funny picture for my blog profile, so I typed in "jason funny" and got this as one outcome

Not only is the image great, but so is the site. Here is a quote:
"Jesus came to give us abundant life. To set us free from sin, guilt, and shame. Jason uses comedy and dramatic illusion and sleight of hand to illustrate the timeless gospel."

Classy if you ask me. See more here

One could look up any manner of things, such as "funny car crash" (funny) or "funny genocide" (not funny), or "supply side economics 1980" (very sad).

2005-08-11T00:13:00.000-07:00

What can I say about this? Wow.
J-List

While I am thinking about wacky Japanese things, have you seen
Engrish.com?

2005-08-08T01:42:00.000-07:00

Word

2005-08-07T21:45:00.000-07:00

What the fuck people? Why don't the eBay ads for Popples show them in their ball form? All I ask for is before and after pictures. All the pictures were in "popped" configuration if you will. It is important to see the fringe around the popping hole and the fuzzy ball and so on. These people certainly wont be getting my popple buying dollar.