Hirokache

I read earlier tonight that the cornell dorm I spent one whole semester in was torn down last year.  It was an ugly building, and only a very few months, but a rather formative and memorable few months, and I find myself surprisingly sad that it was torn down.

I was in overgrown bodega near work getting a cup of coffee, when i overheard a woman saying to a cashier "Its already winter!  It skipped right over fall and now its winter out".

It's been in the low fifties here all day, and the sun was out at least part of the day.

Trying to cut down on costs, and move from my current dedicated server to a VPS from fivebean.com.  Given the age of my current server, the VPS will probably actually have better performance than what I have now.

The setup went well, fifteen minutes from the time I submitted my order, I had login information.

Feeling bored and uninspired to do anything useful or interesting, I sat down to watch some TV tonight.  I managed to catch the season premier of NCIS and it wasn't bad.  Gibbs must be the fasting running human being to ever have lived to have pulled off what he did, but I'm sure I could reason my way into believing that whole bit was somehow possible.

The premier of NCIS: LA followed.  I would have had low expectations of such a show to begin with, and when I saw it would star Chris O'Donell and LL Cool J I dropped those expectations even further.  I figured I would give it a chance, to see if there was at least of seed of something that could some day end up entertaining.

There was nothing but scorched and infertile earth.

They start off with a shirtless O'Donnell in what looks like a seedy hotel room, staring thoughtfully (at least I think that was what he was trying to portray) out the window.  They quickly have the camera focus on what are obviously supposed to be bullet-hole scars on his back.  Just in case you've already fallen asleep in the few seconds that your tv screen has been wasted by this show, they show a spontaneous flash-back to O'Donnell being shot in what looks like a dusty third-world market place.  It looked like he was shot in the front, so you would expect there to be some marks there as well, but it appears he has a remarkable ability to heal on that side of his body.

LL picks up O'Donnell, and we get to see the first lame attempts both at humor and at displaying the 'buddy relationship'.  They drive off, and there is mention of a 'new office'.  Our buddies pull into what appears to be an alley in their fancy-looking car (once upon a time I might have known what it was, but I don't pay enough attention to such things anymore).  LL explains that the building had been declared unsafe after an earthquake, and that though the office had been in this building for three months, none of the neighbors had noticed yet.  They walk inside, and there are shitloads of people everywhere.  So, a shit load of people come and go from this building everyday, with at least one of them driving an expensive car (when LL parked there were no other cars around ... maybe they all rely on LA's extensive and reliable public transportation system to get to work) and none of them there ignor'nt civvies living around the area knew yet (LL must know these because he asks all the neighbors every day if they have yet realized they live next to a secret government office).  It is never explained why they have to use a secret and disguised office, exactly.

The plot is pretty much broad-casted within the first few minutes, even the 'twist'.  A lot of stupid shit happens ... the worst offense perhaps being when LL is leaning against his fancy car out on the street, waiting for O'Donnell to finish up his cross-cultural bonding, when he notices that they appear to be under surveillance by someone in another car down the street.  Now, instead of doing anything the least bit intelligent that might allow him to get near the guy, he instantly begins aggressively walking toward the car (leaving his own perfectly good car behind .... because that would have made things too easy I suppose), and begins running after the car when it takes off ... just in case he got luck and it had a breakdown I suppose.

The end is almost as foolish ... when Robin ... I mean O'Donnell is standing right next to the bad guy with his gun drawn but pointed at the ground, he makes no move.  The bad guy points his gun, and decides to wait a bit to pull the trigger for whatever reason.  Then the 'well-read newbie' (who gets dirty looks from the two so-called geeks at one point for knowing a bit of history) calls O'Donnell's iphone.  Fortunately for all involved, the bad guy is an Apple fan, and just could not bring himself to shoot a man with a ringing iPhone.  Instead this somehow gives O'Donnell a greater advantage then he had without a gun in his face, and he saves the day.

There was no shortage of 'humorous moments'.  For each them, it  seemed like they stopped whatever little narrative flow they had going to outline the hilarious banter, just in case the you had difficult noticing you were supposed to be amused.  For those who still couldn't tell they added a small bit of  "funny moment music"  ... a 'trick' which I thought had finally gone out of style, but am dissappointed to see it still alive.  They even managed to throw in an anti-gay 'joke', to show just how high-class they writers are ... (don't get me wrong, I love a funny highly offensive joke ... but they managed to get all of the offensive in with none of the funny).

Half-way through I was ready to call it quits, but I felt like I needed punishment for letting myself waste time on TV, and forcing truly horrible TV on myself seemed like the proper sentence.

How often do you hear people spout their disdain for politics and politicians, while stating that they wish politicians would focus more on getting their job done and less on increasing/hording the power of their party?

How amusing is then, that one of the major reasons listed for Governor Paterson's failing popularity is that he did exactly this when selecting Hilary Clinton's replacement?  He managed to handle all of the pressure of a once-masterful and still-powerful political family, the leaders of his party, and the President himself to select someone based purely on maintaining the power of the Democratic party and instead chose the person he believed was best for the job.  And, in part because the had the balls to do exactly what the 'average Joe' always says he wishes our politicians would do, the 'average Joe' doesn't like him.

Today's echo chamber results:

• 02:02 no more updates? [from twittershell] #
• 03:27 time to harass cablevision again, see if they will actuall do something useful [from twittershell] #
• 03:28 as unlikely as that is ... [from twittershell] #
• 13:50 happy #ProgrammerDay ! [from twittershell] #

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Today's echo chamber results:

• 07:34 a tractor trailer knocked a large tree branch off while parking on my street, mostly blocking the street. the driver disappeared #
• 08:09 gmail #
• 08:12 hmm, that last one didn't make it to the search box. I blame twhirl #
• 14:35 @ColdstreamGWJ The scientists only agreed to do the research because it was commissioned by pretty girls! #
• 15:05 im going to use coboloncogs.org for my next web app #

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Today's echo chamber results:

• 18:27 @TheBusyBrain that is great. and screams for all sorts of photoshop fun #

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I read a lot when I was younger, and there are a number of books and book series which I remember enjoying immensely, but I can now only remember bits and pieces from the stories, and of course can never remember anything useful like titles or authors.  This makes it awfully difficult to track them down when I get the desire to do so, but I had some success tonight.

What I could remember:

1.  It was a trilogy.
2.  The main characters were kids or teenagers, and the books came from the 'young-adult' section of my local public library.
3.   There were some alien creatures that roamed the earth in tripods.  I remember thinking of them as Martians, because they remind me of War of the Worlds at the time, but I wasn't sure their origin was ever given.
4.  The main character and a friend were intentionally captured, so they would be taken to the main alien city, where they would act as spies.
5.  The city was not very conducive to human life, but many special steps were taken to make sure the human slaves could live anyway.  One of the problems was the incredible heat; the humans were given salt sticks to suck on because they would lose too much salt from sweating otherwise.
6. The main character had a very kind and generous master, while his friend had a cruel master.  The main character felt guilty because his friend seemed to acquire a lot more information inspite of his unfortunate condition.  While I certainly knew a little about slavery, I hadn't ever had any serious thoughts on the subject.  This was my first experience of the 'likeable slave master', where you can almost forget that the slave master is commiting one of the worst possible crimes.  The main character kills his master when the two make their escape attempt, and I remember feeling sorry for the creature, and wondering whether or not I 'should 'feel that way.

That was about all I remembered, which makes me wonder if I actually read the whole trilogy, or just the second book from which all of that comes.  Anyway, after a silly amount of time I found this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tripods

Today's echo chamber results:

• 03:27 Late night coffee after 1.5 weeks of no coffee is causing problems #
• 09:26 @skitime49 nah. Just that combined with nasty cough I didn't get any sleep last night #

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Today's echo chamber results:

• 14:11 I was actually talked into calling the doctor, but surprisingly nothing open until monday. I really hope this is gone by then ... #

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Today's echo chamber results:

• 13:24 @sometimesdee you certainly did! but, I'm about as 'southern' as I am 'Irish' #
• 13:25 because this never-ending flu hasn't been enough fun, I thought I would pick up an eye infection as well. I blame the cat #

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Today's echo chamber results:

• 09:59 github for lesbians? xkcd.com/624/ I would commit to that #
• 13:28 and the south wonders why its stereo-typed as being 'stupid': is.gd/2lmmj #

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Today's echo chamber results:

• 12:26 annoying tidbit of the day: portmanager wont let you update a single port before running portmanager -s and will instead core-dump with ... #

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One of the biometric scanners at work has been behaving poorly lately, and in looking up suggestions on how to clean the sensor, I found a one page document from the manufacturers of the sensor device itself. The document ended with this useful information.

Caring for the Fingerprint Sensor

The FPS110 is designed to perform well even under harsh conditions; nevertheless, some
precautions should be taken to avoid damaging the sensor:

The FPS110 can withstand a large amount of surface impact energy. However, we recommend
that users avoid striking the array surface with sharp metallic objects.

Today's echo chamber results:

• 18:07 I am simply mind-bottling [from twittershell] #

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Today's echo chamber results:

• 12:09 fsquirt.exe you baby! [from twittershell] #

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Today's echo chamber results:

• 10:55 watching a spacewalk live: so mundane, yet so awesome at the same time #

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Today's echo chamber results:

• 09:51 pandora has included for my listening pleasure a song entitled Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass [from twittershell] #

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Today's echo chamber results:

• 09:46 someone in a nearby apartment is blasting 'jingle bells' #

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