Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Spam's LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
12:13 am	Remember the "secret project"? A long time ago, I referred to a secret project in response to deguspice's inquiry. Quite some time later, it has finally come to fruition! The first person to know about it was, of course, fizzygeek. The second person happened to be badmagic. Since then, beaq, vvalkyri, orkney, and the aforementioned deguspice (and presumably quietann) have heard about it. So I now offer a URL, ( a cut tag ) and this: 8 NE C-3 BTW, if people have wondered why I've been scarce lately, yes, this is part of the reason. Current Mood: creative Current Music: snorking cat (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 5th, 2008
12:33 am	I guess that'll do I was looking for some transistors to drive a dekatron, but I couldn't find any of my MPSA42, I was looking for. Howver, I did find several ZTX458, which should do the job. They even have a higher VCEO of 400V, and the lower IC of 300mA is plenty more than the 700µA I'll be using. Current Mood: geeky Current Music: Hasil "Haze" Adkins (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 27th, 2008
10:44 pm	Dinner foo, Raleigh-Durham area Hey, fizzygeek and I are in North Carolina for a charity event (bowling with race car drivers, what a concept!) and marq and golemkennels' housewarming party. However, between these, we'll be touring the botanical gardens tomorrow (Friday), and we're calling a foo at Crazy Fire (1270 Buck Jones Road in Raleigh) at 6PM for those locals who aren't otherwise busy (SCA, poly coffee, &c) and want to hang out with us. Current Mood: gregarious Current Music: fizzygeek on phone (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 9th, 2008
1:09 pm	memage Powered By Adult Toy Current Mood: insufferable Current Music: snickering (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008
10:21 pm	Mummers! I was going to head up to Atlantic City with fizzygeek to see the Show of Shows (the Mummers string bands do extended version of their parade shows for charity). As we'd been in Florida for the parade, this was our chance to see some mummery live. The original plan was to head up Friday during the day, so we could dodge traffic and take advantage of the daylight. But the weather reports started to look foreboding, so we elected to head up Thursday night instead. Before we'd even gotten out of Virginia, snow started to come down, but it was fairly light, so after some discussion (and a quick meal for me), we decided to press on, figuring that if we couldn't make it all the way up, we could spend the night wherever we were and go the rest of the way the next day after the plows and salt trucks had done their work. ( Happily, the weather pretty much dissipated fairly soon ) Current Mood: bouncy Current Music: Oh, Dem Golden Slippers on the Gypsy Queen calliope (Comment on this)
Monday, March 3rd, 2008
11:13 pm	Grrr! (no Terminator) Due to the continued incompetence of Mid-Atlantic Cablevision CableVision of Loudoun Adelphia Comcast, I was able to record 0 out of 120 minutes of the season finalé of Terminator. Anybody have a copy I can borrow? Current Mood: annoyed Current Music: Oh, Dem Golden Slippers on the Gypsy Queen calliope (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 1st, 2008
2:20 pm	<Don LaFontaine> Academy award winner Morgan Freeman reprising his role as God. Academy award winner Samuel L. Jackson as the devil. Academy Lifetime Achievement award winner Peter O'Toole as Daniel Webster. Academy Award winner Abigail Breslin as the littlest dragon and Best Actress Scarlett Johansson as the flying killer robot. Chaos. Love. Intrigue! Hilarious hijinks! Coming soon to a theatre near you. </Don LaFontaine> Current Mood: creative Current Music: purring cat (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 22nd, 2008
12:24 pm	lunar eclipse Taking a page from shadowcaptain, I too tried photographing the lunar eclipse. I went with the 500mm ƒ/8 Nikkor mirror lense, which is essentially tantamount to bolting a small reflector telescope to the front of a camera (Fuji Finepix S3 Pro, in this case). I added a tripod and cable release. Totality. I'm not exactly sure what the black blotch is, I'm assuming either cruft on the sensor or maybe a falling leaf. Focussing was tricky at that angle, but I had it closer than it looks here. However, my lightweight tripod was giving me some mirror shake over the 2-second exposures I was using. The above image is a plane going by, and the mirror shake is obvious. I need to learn how to lock up the mirror in this camera. Current Mood: creative Current Music: dripping water (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
5:05 pm	Geekery saves the day Once upon a time, the government had a custom document storage and retrieval system built. They used it for a while, and then they boxed it up and put it in storage. Years went by. Then the government realized they needed those old documents. The people who had worked for the system had all left, and the company that wrote the software was no longer in business. So they handed the system off to a data recovery team, who worked on it for 18 months, to no avail. Luckily, someone on the project ran in to someone who'd heard stories about me. Arrangements were made, and I was sent to where the system was waiting in boxes. In a single afternoon, I reassembled and configured the system, derived the necessary passwords, and got the software running and retrieving documents. Current Mood: geeky Current Music: someone trying out new ringtones :-# (39 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, February 17th, 2008
5:24 pm	euphemisms I've noticed an increasing trend toward using euphemisms in advertising. Sometimes, I can kind of see their point, such as referring to used cars as "pre-owned". A fairly awkward construction, actually, but "used cars" has such pejorative associations that they're pretty motivated to avoid using that phrase. I still think they could have done better than "pre-pwned". Yep, every time I see the term, I read it as "pre-pwned". It's fairly accurate, makes me smile instead of grimace, and robs their silly euphemism of its advantages. I think everybody should do this. Worse is the nearly universal trend among realtors of referring to houses as "homes". Sorry, you chiselers, you can't sell "homes". A home is made by the people living there, and cannot be sold without invoking images of slavery I'm sure you would prefer to avoid. A house is a building, an object you can buy and sell. So when someone tells me they're selling "homes", I feel like I'm being lied to, just so they can use a cozier (but inaccurate) term. I'm unwilling to buy the most expensive thing I'm likely ever to buy from someone that I feel is lying to me. Current Mood: skeptical Current Music: Daytona 500 (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, February 14th, 2008
1:02 pm	Stoopid marketeers I participate in online marketing surveys with a few companies, mostly to let corporate America know what I want them to do. I also get a few bucks and the odd bonus or two. Today, I got one from a third-party outfit (Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates Inc.). I followed the links and was told We have detected that you are using a MacOS operating system . In order to continue with this survey please use the following operating systems(s) Window We have detetected that you are using a SAFARI 5.0 . In order to continue with this survey please use the following browser(s) IE, Firefox This seemed silly, I'm not about to change operating systems to take a survey! I'm doing you a favour, you nitwits! But I was willing to try another browser (as long as it's not IE), so I fired up Firefox, only to get the "please use Window[sic]" message again. Dream on, you wretched stinking ugly bags of mostly water. I continued reading email, until I got to one of the Russian UBE I get for some reason I can only guess at. This one had the usual Cyrillic with lots of exclamation points, but embedded in that was the eye-catching phrase ORANGE woman BOOM I'm not sure what to make of that one. I tried feeding it to Sherlock, resulting in amusing but unenlightening tidbits such as: "Down the smallness of city!", "In you nervous tick with the sound of telephone call begins!", and "For the desperate: bath with the brooms from the snowdrops and the song of March tomcats." Um, whatever. Current Mood: snarky Current Music: copier (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, February 11th, 2008
7:21 pm	I passed my IQ test! Yeah, I know, IQ tests aren't generally regarded as pass/fail. I found one on a website that looked fun, and ran through it. Pretty standard stuff, lots of math, spatial reasoning, sequences, and the dreaded analogies†. No big deal, and I'm good at finding "bypasses". But then it insisted I join one of those scams where you have to participate in a (frequently unstated or misrepresented) number of "offers" in order to win a "free" laptop, iPod, or (in this case) the score. I closed the browser window. I've seen a variety of come-ons to those kinds of things, but this was a new one to me. I suspect it nabs a lot of people, because once they've invested time in taking the test (looks like the generic emode one, BTW), they want some return, and their curiosity is piqued. However, while curiosity is a powerful motivator for me, it was easily balanced by my enormous inherent skepticism (online IQ tests are no bastions of reliability), the fact that I already have a good idea of my IQ, I don't have any particular need to have my intelligence externally validated*, and I have a fairly low opinion of IQ scores as a metric of useful intelligence, anyway. † These and the "which one is not like the others" questions can be an exercise in mind-reading for creative types. * My ego is self-supporting. Current Mood: snarky (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, February 9th, 2008
11:16 pm	( We got a package from Japan today ) Current Mood: thrilled Current Music: Budweiser Shootout exhibition race (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 8th, 2008
3:32 pm	While reading a book on Perl, I realized something about ForTran. Of course, I may be wrong, but I think I'm right. In ForTran, a statement like this is valid: 4 = 3 After executing that statement if you use 4 for something, it has the value of 3. People explained this to me, with much giggling, saying ForTran would let you change the value of 4. I now suspect this isn't strictly true (for one thing, 41 still has the expected value). I think this is just an instance of ForTran's habit of creating variables whenever something is referenced as a variable. If you call COLOR(MAGENT) by mistake when trying to set the color to magenta, and your program doesn't have a variable named MAGENT, ForTran will helpfully create a variable by that name, and initialize it to zero for you. A variant of that happened to me once while programming a Silicon Graphics machine, due to the fact that some of the code had been compiled on a version of ForTran that truncated variable names to six characters. As zero equated to black, my lovely double-buffered rotating 3-D Gouraud shaded figures were completely invisible. But I digress. What's really happening in the 4 = 3 statement is that ForTran sees me using the symbol 4 as a variable. It obediently creates a variable named "4" and assigns it a value of 3. Then, when you refer to 4, you get that variable, which shadows the original integer 4. When I was little, my mom (who was a math teacher) instilled in me the differences between numbers, digits, and chalk dust. These differences are subtle but real, and occasionally come up and bite the unwary. When I got into typography, and added concepts of letters, characters, and glyphs, they fit right into the pantheon. Current Mood: geeky Current Music: office chatter (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, February 3rd, 2008
7:12 pm	"Name a game you can play in bed" 20 seconds, SFW, with sound (which you want). Current Mood: giggly Current Music: Wordplay-Liquid Sky-Liquid Sky soundtrack (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 1st, 2008
11:55 am	The power of mockery Reading Sinfest, it occurred to me that one of my favourite tools for dealing with annoying people is mockery. It makes me happy and them look ridiculous. Then I wondered what would happen if everybody took advantage of this marvellous tool. Simple: we'd all be both happy and ridiculous. I can live with that. Current Mood: ridiculous Current Music: freezing rain (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 27th, 2008
11:57 pm	Well, that was weird. It started small. I noticed a dead ladybug on the vanity. I probably should have disposed of it, but I felt bad for it. I'm a big softie. I looked at it every day, a little sadly. One day, I noticed that it had moved. No big deal, probably I bumped it, or one of the cats did or somesuch. The next day, it was standing. Granted, this doesn't look a lot different, but it was off the ground. I figured maybe the muscles were contracting as they dried or some such. Then it disappeared. But I found it (or another one) nearby a couple of days later. Intrigued, I had a closer look. And ... it was moving. Must be a different one. I don't think of myself as a racist, but a lot of ladybugs look alike to me. A while later, I was driving home late at night and heard a buzzing in the car when I was nearly home. Afraid it was a stinging insect, I drove home quickly and ran out of the car. The next day, I found a beautiful but very dead dragonfly upside down on my dash. I felt really bad about that, as I was directly responsible for its passing. I sniffled a bit, then gingerly put it on a bush. When I came home, it was still there, it had fallen a little but I could see it in the half-light. I waved at it unhappily, and it kicked a bit. As I watched, astonished, it climbed back out of the bush and flew off into the night! Obviously, I had misjudged something, but it shook me up. A few days later, I arrived home to find the triumphant cat crowing about a dead baby snake. I felt horrible for the poor little snake, which never had a chance. It was lying there with its tongue lolling out, looking as pathetic as something could look. I gingerly took it outside, to lay it to rest in the little copse of trees out back. I put it down, and it slithered away! Must have just been stunned. Then I heard rustling in the leaves. I figured I had disturbed something, but then realized I had disturbed several somethings. I ran off, fearing a passel of vindictive snakes, and looked back from near the house. I caught twin glows reflected from the streetlight behind me. They were bobbing and approaching me. I didn't know what it was, and was plenty worried when it greeted me "mrow?". Then, sidling up to me, I recognized the cat I had buried years before. Then I heard a shriek from inside the house. fizzygeek came out, obviously overwhelmed, holding something in her arms. "What?", I asked, terrified and hopeful at the same time, every nerve on edge. "Have a look," she answered, her eyes shining. Current Mood: omnipotent Current Music: the music of the spheres (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008
10:56 pm	A relationship time-flow diagram ( After much research and deep pondering ) Current Mood: contemplative Current Music: 塊 Fortissimo 魂 (18 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, January 21st, 2008
2:07 pm	What were you scared of when you were a kid? Poll #1125013 What were you afraid of when you were a kid? Open to: All, results viewable to: All What were you afraid of when you were a kid? View Answers fuzz 0 (0.0%) yip yips 3 (7.7%) clowns 9 (23.1%) bugs 11 (28.2%) Howard Cosell's eyebrows 5 (12.8%) dark 17 (43.6%) closet 4 (10.3%) pencil shavings 1 (2.6%) Santa Claus 3 (7.7%) sjo 1 (2.6%) mom's cooking 3 (7.7%) dogs 9 (23.1%) the Grinch 2 (5.1%) Margaret Hamilton 3 (7.7%) loud noises 11 (28.2%) What else? View Answers monsters under the bed 20 (50.0%) badmagic under the bed 4 (10.0%) test pattern 4 (10.0%) thunderstorms 10 (25.0%) flying 0 (0.0%) falling 13 (32.5%) sex 2 (5.0%) fear itself 7 (17.5%) doctor/dentist/shots 18 (45.0%) curling 0 (0.0%) mushrooms 2 (5.0%) anglerfish 2 (5.0%) figure skating 1 (2.5%) grandpa Simpson 1 (2.5%) school 2 (5.0%) And? View Answers television 1 (3.2%) lettuce 0 (0.0%) mice 1 (3.2%) the sun 0 (0.0%) the moon 0 (0.0%) other* 15 (48.4%) all of the above 1 (3.2%) none of the above 2 (6.5%) shiny! 8 (25.8%) clicky thing! 14 (45.2%) * other: View Answers Current Mood: scared Current Music: Bo-Dyn Bobsled Challenge (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 20th, 2008
12:42 pm	Virginia takes the next step 20 January 2008 AP It's official: Virginia is for lovers Continuing along the tracks blazed by the amendment limiting marriage to "a union between one man and one woman", the Virginia legislature has completed deliberations on further defining what it is to be married. The new requirements are strict and specific, and Rob Marsnall, the state delegate from Prince William County who originated both laws, is pleased with the new definition. "Marriage is based on love," stated Marsnall at an impromptu press conference at his home, "and is designed for procreation". Accordingly, couples will be tested for love, using both polygraph and other physiological tests, including blood tests for hormones indicating love and EEG tests for brainwaves indicating loving feelings. Additionally, married couples will be required to demonstrate willingness to procreate by having monitored intercourse within their first year of marriage, or risk having their marriage annulled by the state. "Suspect" marriages, those involving resident aliens, financial issues, and existing children, will be subject to extra scrutiny. Early reports indicate that these new requirements will meet stiff competition by both voters and many politicians, as the administrative costs associated with the testing and record keeping, along with the legal issues raised by abrubt annullments, will be heavy. The increase in government oversight into peoples' private lives will also be an unpopular issue, but Marsnall is undeterred. "People have been getting a free ride for insurance and other benefits for too long with their sham and convenience marriages," he explained, "and it's time to put an end to this. God fearing people will welcome the knowledge that their married friends and neighbors have true, blessed marriages." Such high visibility, emotionally charged issues will provide a rich backdrop to the 2008 Presidential elections, and the candidates' views on one state's mission to define exactly what constitutes "marriage", will make for some entertaining and enlightening debate. Current Mood: astonished Current Music: the music of the spheres (27 Comments |Comment on this)