Torgo χ

Look, LOOK into the spirals!! Hear and obey me! Buy my boooooks! Only theeeeey can make you haaaaappy! Buuuuy them!! I snuck dirty words into them, for yoooooouuuu! COLLECT THEM ALL!!

Tags: books, perl, rtf

Current Mood: controlling you
Current Music: theremins

17 denials | Deny!

For your consideration...

Perl & LWP

The Unicode Slide Rule

Many RSSs

goto LabelHELL;

The Nightmare

The Industrial Art Gallery

Your soundtrack for living

My soundtrack for living

Punch Card

Into human wreckage

My stuff in CPAN

Economies of Scale

LJ auto-cut

Feeds I provide to Livejournal

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And stop using Internet Explorer!  Really, it's dangerous for your machine and your private data. Use Firefox instead.  It's a breeze to install and easier to use.

Μέκκα λέκκα ἅϊ; Μέκκα ἅϊνι ὧ !

3 denials | Deny!

Dear Log,

Deny!

Dear Log,

Whelps.

I guess I'm governor of Alaska now.

Tags: alaska, doom, failure, goverment

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: what
Current Music: Angela Arden- Why Not Me?

Deny!

Dear Log,

Just when I thought I had seen every possibility of Judaism's legalisms... I stumble on a whole parallel universe (JEWNIVERSE?) of nail-biting lawmongering: The Karaites!

«Unlike Rabbinic Jews, Karaites do not practice the ritual of lighting candles before Shabbat (lest one unintentionally violate the Shabbat, as kindling a fire is a prohibition on Shabbat).  [...] Historically Karaites refrained from utilizing or deriving benefit from light until the Sabbath ends, but modern Karaites use fluorescent light power hooked up to a battery that is turned on prior to Shabbat.  Many observant Karaites either unplug their refrigerators on shabbat or turn off the circuit breakers. Purchasing electricity that is charged on an incremental basis during the Shabbat is viewed as a commercial transaction that the Tanakh prohibits.»

—Wikipedia article: "Karaite"

TELL ME WHEN TO BREAK OUT MY GLOWSTICKS!

Tags: eurasia, failure, religion

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: depleted
Current Music: X- I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts

2 denials | Deny!

Dear Log,

This is what I have wake me up in the morning ("morning"), by having my alarm clock play it at a near-deafening volume:

Asha Bhosle & Manna Dey: "Jodi Hamari"– 5m20s, 2.1mb, Bollywood-quality audio.

Tags: brain, eurasia, music

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: WHAT
Current Music: THAT SONG

Deny!

Dear Log,

Media spasm.

Or an RIP (from some years back) that I have always thought defines it all.

Tags: failure, infotainment, media, music

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: underslept
Current Music: BSG stk- Shape of things to come

Deny!

Dear Log,

A snippet of a channel I didn't know about, Current, informed me that this is, or has been, Gay Pride Month.  Yay.

Meanwhile, irony showing full force, I went to the Post Office and asked to buy a sheet of stamps, and they were these:

...which bears not the least whiff of irony.  Intentional or otherwise.

Meanwhile, I am planning a link roundup on this, the greatest display of officious idiocy since the Mooninite invasion.

Tags: failure, law, usa

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: annular
Current Music: BSG stk- Shape of things to come

7 denials | Deny!

Dear Log,

Classical Tibetan is, I'm pretty sure, the only language to have independently invented a punctuation system as complex as modern Europe uses (and argues about).

Have a look. (168 KB PDF)

It's pretty. And the characters have interestingly explanatory names.

Tags: asia, language, success, writing

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: scribbly
Current Music: X- I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts

2 denials | Deny!

Dear Log,

Man oh man, being on irc hits a real limit on my attention span...  or attention width?  Mental bandwidth?  Maxing the throughput, and dropping packets.  Segfault in dongs.dll

Heheheh, dongs.

Tags: brain, failure, irc

Current Music: Mama Cass- Make Your Own Kind of Music, from the "Beautiful Thing" soundtrack

Deny!

Dear Log,

So apparently Pope Khamene'i has affirmed the Iranian presidential election— and A9d (Ahmadinejad) holds all the cards now!  And holding up those cards and pointing at them and yelling "see! see! super royal flush full house!"

But it turns out that the game is Snakes & Ladders.

And the board is mapped onto a torus.

Diagonally.

 

Because...

You see...

Of course the Pope is the President's boss.

But the Pope can be fired.

By a committee...

Whose Chairman is ...

Reaaaally no friend of Pope & A9d.

And they're hassling the guy.  It's a surly "you better know your place!" kinda move. 

 

But the guy's "place" happens to be that he's popular both in general sentiment, and specifically in that he was voted into that committee by a landslide in a legitimate popular election, some years ago, also with the approval of some otherwise often quite grumpy religion-officials, on a committee that completely controls who can even run for any office.  Oh, and a bit before that— he was President, for eight years.  So, a surly "know your place!" kinda move...

Like X said: This is the game that moves as you play.

Tags: doom, eurasia, iran

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: taurine
Current Music: X- I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts

5 denials | Deny!

Dear Log,

So that's how degrees work.

Underground coverns.  And you go from Associate's right to a PhD, which incidentally is the furthest point from a Master's.

(The actual ad that this is a screenshot of, had ants creeping around in it, but eventually out of it, and from that we learn yet further lessons about academia.)

Tags: academia, edutainment, failure, schooling

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: formiform
Current Music: Bear McCreary- All Along The Watchtower

3 denials | Deny!

Dear Log,

So there's policemen, and occasionally chador-less (!) policewomen just laying into a bunch of protesters. 

Shit's about to get extra fancy now.

* * *

And of course the police always start the action.  It's never "oh no, here come the protesters, we have no choice, they're a phalanx coming right at us!  They have antimatter, and curare nailguns, and Cylons!!"

* * *

Strategy meeting!  These protest-crowds of Iranian women, they're wearing the usual variety of clothes aiming toward "modesty", and lots of them are wearing what the Ministry Of Be Good And Don't Be Bad has been pushing for years.  Namely, very many of them are wearing loose-fitting identical black robes.  Under which could be concealed a wide variety and large volume of of... hilarity!

You may picture weaponry— Maybe out-and-out firearms.  Kitchen knives— always possible, always handy.  Maybe a length of chain which, if slung right, might even snare a baton— tricky, though.  But these are basically offensive weapons, and that leads to escalation.

I'd go lateral and basically nonlethal on this one: a huge bag full of medium-sized to small-ish ball bearings, not to be thrown at the police, but to be slung all over the ground in front of the police, or just right here aaaaaaaall over the ground as the police are laying into us sistahs.  "Whoops."  "FHWHOOPS"  "WHOOOOOOOPSaaaAAAAAaaaaaaAA"  "OOF BONK"  "HRRR"  "HAH, NOW I GOT YOUR BATON!"  "BITCH I'M A KILL YOU"  "MY LEFT BOOT!!"  "HURRRRGFGFGFNNN IS THAT CRAZY GLUE!?!?!"

TV footage of a riot: frightening.  TV footage of a riot where suddenly nobody can stand up but is just writhing on the ground like a spazzy moshpit— it's not just a riot (blood, screaming), it's riotous.

Oh, and the big box of ball bearings that ya get, it says "ACME" on the side, like from the Roadrunner cartoons, because at this point, reality itself has reached into our lives and erased the line between lethal fascism and a rich comedic premise.

* * *

Hey, instead of facing a sea of identical black robes, how about the Iranian government just go and hand out inviso-suits like from Predator.

But seriously now, go watch recent The Daily Show's Iran stuff, especially the bits by Jason Jones.  Apparently he was in and out before things got nasty, and the segments he got out of just that are just great.  They went in all ironic and fun, but now they've gotten some extra irony, but not the good kind, like you'd want.  But watch.

Tags: doom, eurasia, iran

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: well out of range
Current Music: Shane Mack- Take The Long Way Home

Deny!

Dear Log,

I'm fucking had it with typing "Ahmadinejad". 

"Internationalization" is "i18n", "localization" is "l10n", because you count the letters you skip.

That skeezy guy is now "A9d".

I've already decided Nietzsche is "Nichi", so let's just move on.

Tags: dongs, failure, iran, language, writing

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: telescopic
Current Music: Stewart Lewis- Tome To Time

1 denial | Deny!

Dear Log,

CNN is running a graphic/logo/phrase about Iran: women rising up.

* * *

I have known Persian women.  They are gracious, warm, and personable.  They have goals, and they have pilaf, and I approve of both, and now they're your friend.  Even the youngest of them are wise beyond their years, and all the kinder for it.  They are sympathetic– Why have trouble, when maybe you can get things smoothed out, and things get sorta back to working and maybe people can cool off?

And in Iran, they know that when men are running the show, the men are running the show, and that of course means the men are ruining the show, but life is life.

Anyway, otherwise the men would be around the house all day and God help us all, so you have to give them something (everything) to do, and the world is going to hell whatever you do, so at least let's get back to the pilaf.

* * *

However.

* * *

I have seen more than one instance (from a barely safe distance!), where the men's mayhem becomes so grievous that there is... an appearance... an intervention... And the women appear.  They arrive.  They arrive in italics.  If you now notice that they are stable, cool, and even glistening, it is because those are the material properties of steel.

«These were the stories I heard while I walked and drove about Isfahan,...:

An eye specialist was asked by a middle-aged lady in a chador to examine the eyesight of a patient, a young man, who was in the local hospital.  When the specialist was taken to the patient he saw that the boy was just "a piece of meat," mutilated [in the Iran-Iraq war] beyond rehabilitation, without hands, without feet.  Every day the lady in the chador came to the eye specialist and took him to see this patient.

The specialist wondered whether there was any point in restoring the sight of a person who would never get well again or return to any sort of life.  But he didn't want to wound the lady in the chador.  She was always in the hospital ward.  There were two or three like her, not more.

The specialist made inquiries.  He found out that the woman in the chador was not the boy's mother; she was only a neighbor.  The boy's mother came to the hospital every day, but she didn't stay long.  After some time the specialist won the confidence of the lady in the chador, and one day he asked why she wanted the mutilated boy, who was not her son, to see again.

The lady in the chador said, "My own boy, my own son, was executed because he belonged to an anti-revolutionary group.  The person who reported him was this boy here, this neighbor's son.  I am happy that my own son is dead.  He was executed, and that was all.  I want to keep this piece of meat alive to take revenge.  I want his mother to grieve for him every day."»

– from chapter II.9 of V.S. Naipaul's Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

Tags: doom, eurasia, iran

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: pilavi
Current Music: The "Daily Show" theme

5 denials | Deny!

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

Tags: design, dongs

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: dicked out
Current Music: Hole- Violet [no, seriously]

2 denials | Deny!

Dear Log,

A fellow linguist guy has just discovered Skype.  You know, the thing that's like the Picturephone on Peewee's Playhouse.  He is delighted with this fun new medium.  I am not so thrilled, a good reason for that being that my bandwidth is of speed and quality that would remind most of you of 1998, and a good reason for that being that I live in a town you've never heard of, on an island you've never heard of, in a whole good-sized archipelago that you've never heard of.

Meanwhile, in my professional life, I have established a persona of the hazily essential.  I am more talked about, and around, than to.  Good.

Somehow this struck the new-to-Skype guy as not unlike the caterpillar guy on the mushroom in Alice in Wonderland..  And that's the premise for him writing:

Hey Sean, can you get down off your mushroom long enough to give me a skype?

I replied simply and sparsely:

At the moment,

the bandwidth

here on the mushroom

is sporadic.

Tags: language, linguistics, technology

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: done
Current Music: Bear McCreary- All Along The Watchtower

1 denial | Deny!

Dear Log,

UH.

Tags: design, language, linguistics

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: central
Current Music: David Bowie- Space Oddity [Major Tom]

Deny!

Dear Log,

My cousin just graduated from a hilarious religion-school in suburban Los Angeles.  She begins college...  well, she has already been taking classes at night, this past semester.  I've no idea why so much the effort.  At her age, I just wanted to (and did) crawl into the university library and be left alone.  Actually going to class, and throwing the curve in calculus class, was a grudging distraction.

In any case. The youth these days, you know, today's kids, they're all the time on the Internet with the A.I.M.s and Friendles and the Twuts and it all equals one thing: constant typing.

When I started college in 1990, laptops were rare.  Now they are the rule, not the exception— and a laptop keyboard is almost as anti-ergonomic as can be imagined without actually just mounting round pushbuttons on all the faces of a Rubik's cube, and having a thin USB cord coming out of a corner of it all.

Even typing on full keyboards, I had barely six years from being her age, until my RSI got from "this is odd", to annoying, to weird owie, to oh crap oh crap maybe this is a "career-stopper!"  That would have been very bad.  My Plan B's were not so cool.

But I was a good boy, and I did smart things.  I declared no caffeine— it wires me up so that I wham on the keys, whereas the slightest touch is the best.  I decided to never use a laptop keyboard except for short periods of time and when quite necessary; instead, plug in an external full-sized keyboard.  And for the external keyboard, I switched to a split keyboard design, which basically taught me the proper typing posture that I had never before learned.  And the wowser, I switched to a Dvorak layout.

May I now challenge your already shattered view of reality with a picture of this?  Prepare!

My cousin's high school graduation date (about a week ago) sort of snuck up on me, and "graduation gift" isn't a phrase that has had a chance to come up much in my extended-yet-small family.  So I'm thinking I'm a bit late in getting her a present– but that might be it, namely, a split keyboard which I have had shipped to me, which I have recapsed, and which I have then sent to her with the massive note:

TRUST ME ON THIS.

And then also probably some notes.

And also, again:

TRUST ME ON THIS.

* * *

Cost of it: I dunno, $50.  Worth of it: the sum of all the doctors' bills that this will avoid her having to have.  Trust me on this.

Tags: design, gifts, medicine

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: ergotic
Current Music: Bear McCreary- All Along The Watchtower

1 denial | Deny!

Dear Log,

“‘...A WINDOW, YOU HIGH-END CUNT!’  And the place goes crazy.”

Tags: success

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: canile
Current Music: daver- Mad At The World

Deny!

Dear All,

Here, have one, I've been giving them away:

Note that, surprisingly, it doesn't say anything about what field the degree is in, except that it's an MA so, uh, you probably can't say it's in electrical engineering.

Tags: edudoom, edutainment

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: scribbly
Current Music: David Bowie- Space Oddity [Major Tom]

4 denials | Deny!

Dear Log,

I walked from dusk until just before dawn.

But that didn't take very long.

And in the middle, I stopped for PANCAKES.

Tags: food, ketchikan

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: caked
Current Music: Pretenders- Rosalee

Deny!

Dear Log,

Ages ago, an old programmer I knew muttered that the oldest Unix commands were the two-letter ones.  I filed away this idea; and just recently it occurred to me to see what all the two-letter commands are, to check out his generalization.

So I ran whatis -w '??' (on my mostly vanilla Ubuntu box, but with bits and pieces of other things installed) and I massaged the results a bit, to show off below.  It's clear that some commands are new-ish, but it's still interesting to see what commands managed to squeeze (or be squozen!) into the not-so-large namespace of all possible two-letter commands.  Also, I'm not counting shell-internal commands, namely bg, cd, fg, if...fi, the many "-n" tests, and fc ("fix command"- accesses the command history).

In any case, here's the XX commands:

---

=Section 1:  Executable programs or shell commands ============================

ac - print statistics about users' connect time
ar - create, modify, and extract from archives
as - the portable GNU assembler.
at - queue, examine or delete jobs for later execution
bc - An arbitrary precision calculator language
cc - GNU project C and C++ compiler
cg - wrapper for running cogito commands
ci - check in RCS revisions
co - check out RCS revisions
cp - copy files and directories
dd - convert and copy a file
df - report filesystem disk space usage
du - estimate file space usage
ed - text editor
ex - Vi IMproved, a programmers text editor
gs - Ghostscript (PostScript and PDF language interpreter and previewer)
hd - ASCII, decimal, hexadecimal, octal dump
id - print real and effective UIDs and GIDs
ld - Using LD, the GNU linker
ln - make links between files
ls - list directory contents
m4 - GNU macro processor
mc - Visual shell for Unix-like systems.
mf - Metafont, a language for font and logo design
mm - mirror master
mt - control magnetic tape drive operation
mv - move (rename) files
mx - query nameserver about domain names and zones
nl - number lines of files
nm - list symbols from object files
nn - efficient net news interface (No News is good news)
ns - query nameserver about domain names and zones
od - dump files in octal and other formats
pg - browse pagewise through text files
pr - convert text files for printing
ps - report a snapshot of the current processes.
rm - remove files or directories
sg - execute command as different group ID
sh - GNU Bourne-Again SHell
sq - squeeze a sorted word list unsq - unsqueeze a sorted word list
su - Change user ID or become super-user
tr - translate or delete characters
ud - The uptime daemon
ul - do underlining
vi - Vi IMproved, a programmers text editor
wc - print the number of newlines, words, and bytes in files

 ~~

---

=Section 4:  Special files (usually found in /dev) ============================

fd - floppy disk device
hd - MFM/IDE hard disk devices
lp - line printer devices
md - Multiple Device driver aka Linux Software Raid
sd - Driver for SCSI Disk Drives
st - SCSI tape device

 ~~

---

=Section 5:  File formats and conventions eg /etc/passwd  =====================

fs - Linux filesystem types: minix, ext, ext2, ext3, xia, msdos, umsdos, vfat, proc, nfs, iso9660, hpfs, sysv, smb, ncpfs

 ~~

---

=Section 7:  Miscellaneous  ===================================================

ip - Linux IPv4 protocol implementation
mh - new MH message system

 ~~

---

=Section 8:  System administration commands (usually only for root)  ==========

ab - Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool
ap - parse addresses 822-style
dp - parse dates 822-style
ip - show / manipulate routing, devices, policy routing and tunnels
sa - summarizes accounting information
tc - show / manipulate traffic control settings

 ~~

---

Incidentally, if you want to go processing the list of all the man pages on your system, go

whatis -r '^' > manlines.txt

And then filter manlines.txt as you like. Note: it will be thousands of lines long.

Tags: linux, unix

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: grepped
Current Music: Pretenders- Talk of the Town

5 denials | Deny!

Dear Log,

8:00 pm on the dot: I've just came in from tanning on the porch— listening to audiobooks when I was facing the sun, and reading while I put my back to it.

The sunlight has been hazeless before, in the past few weeks, but bore no heat.  Today it actually puts heat on your skin, and so I guessed it also had UV.  Definitely nowhere near as much as in Albuquerque; when I lived there, for about six months out of the year, sunlight touching your skin would itch, presumably from an amount of UV large enough that you start to use the word dosage. But then, in ABQ, the sunlight drills down right at you, whereas here it has to come sideways as well as make it to sea level, instead of just to the 5000' altitude of ABQ.

But there is a definite advantage to the summer sun being always low in the sky: you don't have to lay on your back to get the sun right on you.  You just sit facing it.

At 6pm (after dallying for at least two hours), I changed into just shorts and sat, sat, outside, until near-sunset now.

Maybe this week I'll be able to do this another day or two, if this freakishly clear and warm weather lasts.  But that'll probably be it for the summer.  Because the INSECTS have appeared.  Not a week ago.  Today.  And they will stay until about September.

Going the other way, it was freakishly cold the other night: 44F.  And if that happens again, it might kill off some of the insects.  But there'll still be an endless supply.  If the weather gets enough above 65F again that I would think about going outside in a short-sleeve shirt, I would not think of that, unless I wanted to be covered with many red insect bites.  And I'll get enough of those on just my face and hands anyway.  There may be "yay, open all the windows!!" days, but it'll still be "but keep the screen door shut!!!".

(With the screen door, by the way, when it starts to get cold for the year, you swap out the screen and replace it with a big pane of glass, and then months later, swap the screen back in.  This spring, that caused a story of true slapstick, but that'll be for some other time.)

I know, weather is fascinating!!  But here, this is all as baffling as watching a dragon cross the sky.  Carrying an ad banner for Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Tags: ketchikan, science

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: dosed
Current Music: Dance Yourself to Death- Teenage Romanticide

1 denial | Deny!

Dear Log,

"Bamboo is every single thing that plastic isn't."

—Michael McDonough in "Newer York, New York"

Tags: biology, design

location: Ketchikan, Alaska
Current Mood: rushed
Current Music: Shane Mack- Remember to Forget

Deny!