I switched over to Bing for my default search provider in Firefox. The results are almost entirely the same as Google, but it seems to have better availability (sometimes my Google searches time out, that hasn't happened to me with Bing). The pretty pictures are nice too I guess, and I'm actually a little more scared of my privacy with respect to Google than even Microsoft (who would have ever thought). They just have too many different pieces at their fingertips now. If Microsoft tried to harvest personal data from people using Windows, some smart observant person somewhere would notice them streaming it somewhere else and they'd probably get sued. With Google, we really have no idea what they are or will someday do and have probably already agreed they can do it anyway.

I'd love to see my friends' responses!

These ten (10) questions originally came from a French series, "Bouillon de Culture" hosted by Bernard Pivot. They're better known as the questions that James Lipton asks every guest at the end of "Inside the Actor's Studio."

1. What is your favorite word?
"Smock." Thanks, Bill Watterson! (http://www.dontknockmysmock.com/)

2. What is your least favorite word?
"Faggot."

3. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
Truth. Especially creative, spiritual, or emotional truth.

4. What turns you off?
Overconfidence. Usually. Except when it turns me on.

5. What is your favorite curse word?
"Pigfucker."

6. What sound or noise do you love?
Purring.

7. What sound or noise do you hate?
Upstairs neighbors. There are a large number of innocuous sounds that I can tolerate coming from around or below me that thoroughly grate on me when coming from above. This might be unusual, but it's easy to see it being tied into some weird evolutionary survival instinct.

8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
There's a knight-in-shining-armor appeal to law enforcement, but I'd not last long refusing to enforce the swath of laws I disagree with.

9. What profession would you not like to do?
Anything I had to be democratically elected to by more than a couple dozen people.

10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
"I noticed you were paying attention and I like that."

Deadlines are the bane of good programming. I carefully considering whether to grant all the code I've ever seen and thought "Wow, that's moronic" permanent-asylum-status of "Wow, I bet they had a moronic deadline".

With respect to starting a technical blog, maybe I just meant I'll start keeping a blog again. I spend an awful lot of time developing things, so that's sure to be what's on my mind a lot of the time. I think I filtered a lot of it out before since I was trying to only write about interesting things. But technology and developing are interesting. Also, I've seen a lot of dumb shit on the Internet and most of it is the product of people trying to make something clever. People just talking about whatever is on their minds (a.k.a. blogging I guess) is at least as amusing as Mafia Wars (I cannot believe I'm still playing that).

Conclusion: We're all more interesting than we might think.

Except you. You're a dullard.

There's really as I implied a good long list of why I think keeping a technical blog is a keen idea. Near the top of the list are things that work for me even if nobody ever reads any of it. My brother told me about the Mnemosyne Project a few days ago, ( Read more )

The problem I'm dealing with right now is wanting to quickly assign arbitrary properties to symbols (MovieClips) in Flash (CS4). I'm amazed there doesn't seem to be an elegant way to do this. Or there is and I haven't found it. As in I have a whole flock of symbols that are controlled by the same class, but each have a few variables that are different that the class wants to use. The solutions I can see are 1) developing Components, which seems pretty heavy-weight for all I need to do. 2) encoding variables in the instance names, which just seems awful. and 3), which is what I'm doing for now, was to write a php script to auto-generate classes based on entries in a database. This is a little less awful but I can't believe it's the best solution.

I sort of want to start a technical-blog of the type that I frequently find when I Google some stuff about some problem I'm trying to solve while developing some thing.

I've thought of several good reasons to do this, which I imagined I might enumerate in the blog itself but I'm sort of in a rush right now.

I think this is going to wind up in my Livejournal since I don't use it for anything else anymore. I think there's like two friends of mine left there and they're kind of technical anyway.

We usually think of noon as 12 (PM or AM depending on whether you're nuts or not). There is also a notion of solar noon, familiar to sundial enthusiasts (a surprisingly gregarious group). This is when the sun reaches its highest altitude for the day and starts on its way down. I think, due to the coincidence of recently expanding Daylight Savings time, March 1st being a Sunday, and early March being a time of year when solar noon happens at some of its latest times while also moving earlier each day, that today will be the latest occurrence of solar noon in US HISTORY!

1) This is not-so-vaguely related to some things I wrote about quite awhile ago.

2) I'm wondering if this is where the term "high noon" came from. It makes sense because that's when the sun is the highest, and the term is associated with an era before modern timekeeping technology was widespread.

3) The exact time of solar noon will still vary depending on longitude, but for any given US location that observes Daylight Savings, today (March 8th 2009) will be the latest occurrence ever. Unless I'm somehow mistaken (it happens sometimes).

4) I briefly wondered how this related to sunrise and sunset times, and concluded it doesn't much.

I haven't put anything here since the Lone Mountain picture? Wow.

I'm in San Francisco. I was at LinuxWorld Wednesday and the Start conference yesterday (Thursday). I'm getting to catch up with k8to and cuthalion. I don't know what will "go down" today.

I was thinking about Facebook vs. LiveJournal, and I think Facebook is kind of like a lazified LiveJournal that fills itself up for you with canned stories that you and your friends make just by clicking on things. Maybe like a newspaper that is filled with press releases instead of original content.

So my Facebook page gets updated all the time these days, and this, not so much.

Here's another fun "Polaroid Gallery" of my short expedition down to Key West last Friday.

(Drag around the photos if you want, double click on one to blow it up)

I've got a Wii! Patches thinks it's great because it came with a lot of twist ties. I think I played eight games of Tennis and finally won one; in Nintendo fashion it kept lowering the skill levels of my computer opponents as it noticed how badly I was doing.

I've gotten involved with a 'grassroots' group of Ron Paul supporters, which isn't like anything I've been involved with before. It's easy to get swept up and convinced that you're doing really important work. Especially with a thug like Giuliani involved. He's sending well-paid highly-organized teams down to Florida to make phone calls and scare the shit out the old people (and everyone else) because, well, that's his MO. Anyway, PBS is broadcasting another debate tonight at 9 EST, at which I'm sure Ron will make the other Republican stooges look like, well, stooges. He's done very well on certain other networks that essentially tried to ambush him and do a hatchet job in an ostensibly neutral forum.

Here are some more Burning Man pictures, in a fun little open-source Flash Polaroid photo gallery I found while bumbling around the Internet. You can move all the things around, and double-click on any one to look at it more closely. I was going to try and tell my Burning Man story here, using words. But enough time has passed that I don't think that's too likely. It was hot during the day and surreal at night. The neatest part by far was getting to catch up with my friends from Montana and California who had also come.

I'm spending a lot of time working on my nascent gaming site. The last couple of weeks have been a little frustrating because I dived into re-doing a bunch of behind-the-scenes stuff that aren't at all visible, and are mostly irrelevant considering the amount of traffic I'm actually getting. But...I'm nearing finishing that stuff up and am excited about making a few more tweaks (including renaming...anyone have any ideas??) on ZChurk, and am definitely excited about the next game I've got brewing. It's more of an arcade-style puzzle game, based very very loosely on Hold'em poker and another obscure game that my friends know about but nobody else does called Money Puzzle Exchanger.

( More Burning Man Pictures... )
I still think I will eventually post some travelogue-esque account of my experience and thoughts.

( 3 Burning Man Pictures )

More stuff when I am less sleepy...

I'm going to Burning Man! I'm leaving in a few hours. I'll probably have a bit to blog about when I get back - which should be Sept. 4th?

Until then...

The other night I was at the Walgreen's procuring Rockstar energy beverages, and I picked up an amazing $1 microwave pizza:



I'm not a food snob, or a health snob. No, I'm just your ordinary I'm-better-than-everyone-else snob. But nonetheless, years of intangible food surveying knowledge combine to let me know that somehow, moreso than thousands of other seemingly similar offerings from 24-hour gas stations and McFastFood outlets spanning my experience, this product is a Bad Idea™.

So, now I'm trying to figure out what to do with it. I'm considering listing it on EBay. Surely I can get more than a measly dollar for it.

I need my own miniature electronics manufacturing plant, complete with impoverished South Asians.

Raw materials: 10 cents, Labor: 7 cents, Price: $2.99, Shipping $6.99

OK, probably assembled by robots.

http://games.wode.com

It's a game! I have put it up on da' nets. Please, help me test it. Let me know if it works and if it's any fun. I crave feedback!

a) Set up the pieces as best as you can figure out
b) Just start typing in words and hit <enter>
c) No, you can't rotate them. For now.