Coffee and Ibuprofen, the new breakfast of champions.

…And I’m sick, not hung-over, thanks.

The nice thing about driving a 12 year old Honda Civic in Newport Beach, where I stayed for Katie’s wedding this past weekend, is:

I could drive to any major shopping area and leave my car running with the keys in the ignition and both doors open and still be completely confident that it will still be there when I return. This is not just because of the alarmingly low crime rate, but because no self-respecting thief would want to be seen in Newport Beach with anything less than a Cadillac Escalade. In this town, they give cars like mine away as a free-after-rebate add-on when you buy any 12 pack of Energizer Max Plus AA batteries. It’s one of those things you give your five year old, because just like one of those inactive credit cards you get in the mail, it’s not of any use to anyone.

But I’ll keep it, thank you very much.

Teachers say the darnedest things, though I’m pretty sure darnedest isn’t a word, and it’s becoming more and more ridiculous every time I type it. Darnedest.

Here we have Professor Smith on Inter Process Communication, AKA two programs talking to each other:

“In this case you are communicating with another program by killing it. It’s not polite, but it works.”

My English professor, Dr. Westwood, was used as a Job reference for a former student who was applying to work in the CIA. An actual agent came to his office on campus, flashed his badge, and started asking questions about the student in question, which is where our quote begins:

SecretAgentMan: “Are you aware of any suspect organizations this person may belong to.”
Westwood: “Well, he was in my class.”

This last one is from Professor Diana Franklin on Caches. I’m not making this up, she said this with all the seriousness and gravity of a star caving in on itself and nobody even cracked a smile.

“It’s not the size of the Cache that matters, it’s what you do with it.”

Now that’s good quotin’.

At the very end of a long, dry, lab report I’ve decided to add a check to see if the professor is actually reading it:

Roadblocks and Outstanding Issues
As mentioned above, our code assumes valid data, and does not deal with overflow in the interest of speed. Also, if you give sumodd.asm a negative number SIM will physically reach out and smack you, though this issue is intermittent and we believe may be due to a peculiarity in the host architecture.

I don’t believe she’ll ever read that far, but I hope she does, because I think she’d appreciate it.

Lauren’s sister is getting married this Saturday, and they asked Lauren to set up a website for the pictures everyone takes with their digital cameras at the wedding. She asked Lauren to find hosting and a domain name. 1and1 has a deal where you get free hosting and a domain name of your choice for six months, so that was a no-brainer. Now she just needed to choose domain name, and she was silly enough to mention that fact to me.

And so began the search.

First were the cliche ones:
KatieIsaac.com
IsaacKatie.com
FloresWedding.com – Isaac’s last name concatenated with Wedding
IKWedding.com – unfortunately pronounced ich-wedding

Then for the shotgun wedding:
EightMonthsLater.com – They’ve been engaged too long for it to be a shotgun wedding

For the LOTR fans:
OneWeddingToRuleThemAll.com – OneRingToRuleHim.com was already taken

For the cyncics:
MyFirstWedding.com – Actually this is the only one on the page that was taken
idont.net – that’s gotta hurt

The USC Fans:
TrojanWedding.com – My favorite serious one
TGWITHOTU.com – The Greatest Wedding in the History of The Universe
SquirrelAndSkippy.com – Their band names

…the just plain weird:
AnniversaryZero.com – Catchy, but too close to Ground Zero.
WheresTheKids.com
MakeSomeBabies.com – Why else would you get married?
BestWeddingEver.us – Too bad the .com was already taken
BestMarriageEver.com – Comic Book Guy would be proud

In the end, they went with IsaacKatie.com. *yawn*

I lay gold at their feet and they can’t even take the time to bend over and pick it up off the floor.

Jamie Zawinski talks about Hula, the new Calendar and Mail server that Novell just made available for free, source code and all:

“…With a groupware product, nobody would ever work on it unless they were getting paid to, because it’s just fundamentally not interesting to individuals.

So I said, narrow the focus. Your “use case” should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it’s not only crude but insightful. “How will this software get my users laid” should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).

“Social software” is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.”

What kind of sad twenty-two year old still lives in the dorms?

…The kind who thinks working on a groupware server is going to get him laid.

Joel and I are relatively clean people, but our Achilles of cleanliness has always been the dishes.

Now, we differ on our strategies as to where we keep our dishes while we’re not doing them. Joel prefers to spread them throughout the apartment; the oven, stove, and indeed the toilet tank are all normal and logical places to leave your dishes when you’re done with them. I’ve always prefered the “reverse jenga” method wherein I stack the dishes on the left side of the sink only with the steady hands of a surgeon.

We’ve both grown fond of our new dirty-dishless apartment and so we have entered into a challenge in which the first roommate (AKA Joel or Red) to leave a dirty dish in the apartment overnight owes the other party the following:

The Prize

1. A Tri-Tip Sandwich from the Firestone Grill located at 1001 Higuera St. in San Luis Obispo
2. One beverage (alcoholic or non) costing no more than five dollars
3. A basket of fries.

A prize cannot be claimed unless one follows…

…The Rules

1. A dish is considered being left overnight if it is found at 8am
2. Your room is your business. Dirty dishes only count if found in the living room, kitchen, bathroom, hallway, and on or under Chopper 4
3. The Prize will be doubled if any dishes are found in the toilet tank

The challenge begins…. NOW!

For those looking at purchasing resume paper, I submit to you:

Cost of a 100 pack of 32lb. white resume paper: $9.98 or approximately 10 cents a sheet.

Cost of individual sheets of the exact same resume paper: 8 cents a sheet.

But, uh, the, uh, 100 pack has a nice cardboard box to carry the paper home in.

I saw a book at a used bookstore today called chronophobia. First thing I thought:

Chronophobia, fear of time travel.

When looking at prospect for filling a recently open position at your company, it is good practice to arbitrarily (completely randomly if at all possible) toss half of said resumes into the nearest waste receptacle.

In doing so consistently you will almost completely eliminate the number of unlucky people at your company.

I’m going to Los Angeles this weekend to see Don Hertzfeldt(of Rejected fame)’s newest film at a screening of “The Animation Show”, where he will have a Q+A session afterwords. As it doesn’t specify which of the three showings at the Nuart Theatre he will be attending, I sent him a professional rfi (request for information), just like we learned about in my Technical Writing class this quarter:

According to the Animation Show web page, Don will be in attendance at the Nuart Theatre Friday, February 18th for “the showing” and a Q+A session. As there are three showings, I was wondering whether Don would be attending the 5:10, 7:30, or 9:50 showing as I am driving down from San Luis Obispo and would very much like to Q him and hear his A’s.

As an aside, Q+A is 65+81 = 146. So maybe it should be called a 146 session.

Thanks,
Red

P.S.
OMIGOSH I AM YOUR BIGGEST FAN EVER!!!111!!11 i WAS AT YOUR SHOW THREE YEARS AGO FOR THE DON AND BILL SHOW IN SANTA BARBARA AND YOU SIGNED MY REJECTED DVD AND I WAS MANY HAPPIES. IT WAS THE FIRST ONE YOU SIGNED AND YOU WEREN’T SURE WHERE TO SIGN IT CAUSE IT THE WHOLE DVD CASE WAS BLACK, BUT THE DVD WAS WHITE SO I SAID SIGN THE DVD AND YOU DID.

BUT MY FRIEND STOLE IT AND MOVED TO AFRICA AND NOW I AM SAD???//!@1!!!

YOU ARE THE SUPER^%$$%

#1 pHAN
rED

Me and Mr. Pearson are in the lab right now and got the following error:

# ** Failure: Simulation successful (not a failure). No problems detected.

And that my friends, is how you know you’re working with quality software.

Kelsey: I have an essay due…yesterday
Me: You’re going to have to start running if you’re going to hit eighty-eight miles per hour.

“If it’s stupid and it works, it’s not stupid.”
-Patrick, no not that Patrick

Yesterday at the Office Supply Superstore I ran into an elderly couple who seemed to be having a generally bad day. I walked up to them in the furnitutre pad and cheerily queried, “Can I help you with anything?”

Nice Old Lady: “We need to measure some of these desks.”

Usually I would point out that the measurements are clearly listed next to the price, but it didn’t seem like that was something she’d want to hear, and so I was pondering my options when I noticed the Nice Old Lady was pointing at my crotch.

Nice Old Lady: “Is that a tape measure in your pocket?”

Me: “No, but Thank You!”

It was a good day at work.

On this page, you can find a few quotes belonging to the last person you would expect. They’re all surprising, but my personal favorite is #7:

#7 Who blocked the marriage of his son and disowned him, commenting:

“How can I, who has always advocated renunciation of sex, encourage you to gratify it?”
(The son subsequently became a homeless alcoholic.)

-Gautama Buddha
-Martin Luther King
-Albert Schweitzer
-Mahatma Gandhi

According to the web page I linked to, which, since it’s on the internet, is an iron-clad source, the person who said this was Mahatma Gandhi, dealing with his son Harilal.

The next time someone asks me why there aren’t more people like Gandhi in the world, I’ll inform them it’s because people like Gandhi don’t pro-create.

My programming teacher gave us a very useful tutorial on how to find bugs in our programs, about which he said:

“You should have seen it, I’d have people from my networking classes lined up starting outside my door and wrapping around the quad to visit me and ask questions during my office hours.

And since I gave out this tutorial, well…

I’m lonely.”

Jim Wallis is my new hero. A Christian author that I agree with? Rare at best. But below are a couple of quotes from him that are right on the money:

Wallis: We all like moral values, most of us do, Jon, but it’s like “Are there only two?”
Stewart: Right.
Wallis: Only abortion and gay marriage. The Republicans seem to say that. Well, I’m an evangelical Christian which means 3,000 verses in the Bible about poverty. So I would say fighting poverty is a moral value. I would say protecting the environment, God’s creation, is a moral value. I would say how and when we go to war, and whether we tell the truth about it, is a moral value. Is torture a moral value? So, let’s have a better conversation about this.

Absolute quality. Here’s a shorter, but equally powerful quote.

“Religion does not have a monopoly on morality.”

-Jim Wallis, author of God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It

In the DVD edition of Star Wars IV, there’s a scene where Han Solo is talking to Jabba the Hut and says:

“Jabba, you’re a wonderful Human Being.”

…which has inspired me to join him in making interspecies compliments. Today I will test out the following:

“Tish, you’re a wonderful Koala Bear.”

“Jeff, you’re a fantastic Cockroach.”

“Patrick, you’re a life changing Dung Beetle.”

It’s electrifying dialog like this that made George Lucas who he is today.

At the Office Superstore where I am employed, we are selling a brand new chair. Normally this wouldn’t be news in and of it self, but I thought it’s unusual color was worth mentioning. Not that dark red is all that unusual a color, I recently enjoyed a college football game where both teams had a dark red represented on their uniforms, with the lighter shade humiliating the darker; No, what makes this particular particular shade of dark red worth mentioning is that it is referred to in all capital letters as OXBLOOD. It’s comforting to know that if somebody asks, “What color is the inside of an adult castrated Bull?”, I’ll have a reference with which to point. The oddest thing about this color is that I’ve heard it mentioned before; I’ve heard it before and this is the first time it struck me as odd. Every other time this color has been mentioned in my presence I thought it completely ordinary that the blood of a bovine should be used to describe the color of the drapes or davenport that someone saw earlier that day.

The question as to why Staples decided to go with this particular name when so many others would have done just fine does have me puzzled. I imagine the conversation to have gone not completely unlike this:

*One Day in Marketing*
Karl: Hey Marcy, what shade of red would you say this chair is?
Marcy: It almost looks like a deep burgundy…
Karl: ..But not quite.
Marcy: It definitely has hints of maroon.
Karl: But not enough hints to lead me to an answer.
Marcy: Perhaps Cardinal?
Karl: Oh no, that’s not anywhere close.
Marcy: Then wine!
Karl: No, no, NO! None of those are right. It’s something more… more… more Pagan.
Marcy: Pagan?
Karl: Yes, Pagan… or maybe… Old Testament. Something that says sacrifice…
Marcy: Ox Blood?
Karl: PERFECT.

Then again, maybe I’m just imagining things.