Aku Aku

brunch @ the ramp

Nice day in San Fran

a bafoon (sic) responds

A few days ago Michael Moore's open letter endorsing General Wesley Clark hit an email list I'm on. Today a member of that list forwarded a response to Moore's letter, written by someone on a different mailing list. The response was in the form of a Word document attachment. Since sending a Word attachment is a bad idea for people in Microsoft environments as they can contain malicious code, I took the liberty of converting it to HTML and posting it here in all its breathless misspelled ranting glory.

Here's an excerpt. The response comments are in bold interspersed with Moore's original text:

7. He will cut the Pentagon budget,HMMMM Didnt Slick Willie do this every year during the 90s and claim that he cut the size of government? Are we sure we want any more of these DRAKONIAN CUTS? use the money thus saved for education and health care, SO $540 BILLION is not enough? What exactly would be? If there is a figure that would qualify as enough please specify. One would think that one third of the budget would be enough but perhaps Im mistaken. and he will STILL make us safer than we are now. Only the former commander of NATO could get away with such a statement.The man who single handedly murdered over 2000 Serb civillians from the air!

I'd really love to take the time to go over this rant and annotate it with links to the various logical fallacies employed and factual errors , but really what's the point.

The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number

The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number
Livio, Mario

arch enemy

Back when I was earning my B.S. in Computer Science at an "obscure East-coast university" I had an arch enemy, although he probably never knew it. In fact he probably didn't even know who I was. His name was Scott, and throughout my entire time in college, he was the only ComSci student I thought might be a better coder than myself. Honestly, that's not saying much; we didn't exactly have a top notch ComSci program if you know what I mean. I imagine Scott was there for much the same reason I was, it was the university closest to our hometowns. I never actually had any classes with him, but I knew him by reputation because I worked in the school's main computer lab and was always looking to identify the competition.

One year there was a programming contest. It was structured so that teams of up to four people competed in solving as many programming problems from a list as they could in a set period of time. I was so cocky I didn't bother forming a team, I was going to just compete by myself. But at game time the professor running the contest insisted I join a team that only had two members (all the other teams had the full four).

Scott was on a team with three other good coders, and they took first place by completing five successful programs. I consoled myself by noting that Scott had completed two and the rest of his team one each and my team managed to come in second by virtue of my three successful programs and one from one of my teammates. But I lost the contest, so I didn't get much consolation from my rationalization.

Today I learned what became of Scott. After graduation he went to UIUC for a master's degree and then moved to southern California where he's.... well, I'll let Scott tell you:

For MER's development phase, I wrote a piece of software called the Rover Sequence Editor (RoSE). We've used RoSE to command both spacecraft throughout their seven-month cruise to Mars, and (in conjunction with RoSE's sister application, HyperDrive), we'll use RoSE to drive the rovers on the surface as well.

During surface operations, I'll be one of the rover drivers. So I get to be one of the users of my own software (always a humbling experience). More importantly, I get to actually build the commands to drive the rovers where the scientists want them to go, and maneuver the robotic arms so that the science instruments get the data they want.

Full details here: Mars Exploration: Zip Code Mars

Damn you Scott! You win! You win!

IKEA walk-thru

In the computer game world, you can often find "walk-thru" scenarios online which tell you step by step how to navigate your way through the game in order to win or complete it. I remember running across these for games like Zork back in my BBS days with a Commodore 64 and 300 baud modem.

Get all/S/S/S/Sw/S/Se/Enter gazebo/Get all/Leave/S/S/W/Light lamp/N Get brick/N/Fill teapot/N/U/Put placemat under door/Move lid Put opener in keyhole/Get all/Drop placemat and opener/Get key Unlock door with key/Open door/Drop key/N/Get sphere/S/D/W/N Kill dragon with sword/S/Kill dragon with sword/S Kill dragon with sword/W/U/S/Get string/Drop sphere and sword/N/D/W/S

Recently The Morning News released a walk-thru designed to let you win at IKEA:

============================================================= WORLD TWO: SHOWROOMS =============================================================

You start this world armed only with a UNIVERSAL FURNITURE-ASSEMBLY ALLEN WRENCH. This is the weakest weapon in IKEA: You will have to hit a person 16 times with it to kill them. So your primary goal in this level is to find more lethal means of dispatching your enemies.

As you enter the SHOWROOM, perform a rolling dodge to the left. Grab a free PAPER TAPE MEASURE and a handful of IKEA EMBLAZONED GOLF PENCILS from the kiosk near the entryway. The PENCILS serve quite well as ranged weapons, but it will take some time to master their use. Before venturing further in the world, stand at the kiosk and practice hurling GOLF PENCILS at patrons as they enter the SHOWROOM. Remember: Hitting the eyes does triple damage.

Full walk-thru here. Good luck furniture adventurers!

party car

Dancing ain't illegal yet. On the off chance you're reading this before 5:30 PM PST January 23 2004 and live in the Bay Area, get your freak revved up and meet up at the last Richmond-bound BART car leaving 16th Street Station at the aforementioned time. I've gotta figure out a way to rig up my guerilla disco ball....

More details at Party Car Tribe.

Immediately followed by Dodge Ball.

ORA Emerging Technology Conference

I just registered for the 2004 ORA Emerging Technology Conference. This will be my third time going, but I almost gave it a miss this year because they moved the location down to San Diego. But then they offered all FOO Camp almuni a special rate which made it more attractive.

The 2002 conference held in Silicon Valley was just fantastic, a massive headrush of smart people and their wild brilliant ideas. The 2003 con was also great, but less so. I was a bit hesitant to make the financial and scheduling commitment to go to this one because the change of location in 2004 could adversely affect attendance, and a lot of the value of the conference is in the other attendees. Extending an offer to the FOO Camp alumni (which was a conference -entirely- about the other attendees) seems like a smart way to get the right people down to San Diego.

Note, I was probably the least interesting person at FOO Camp, so I don't really count myself amongst the valuable attendees. I'm just a leech :)

l'amour dans le four

Last night Mie, my dear friend Manisha and I had dinner at a nice and cozy french restaurant called L'Amour dans le Four (cute flash website). It was such a good meal I just had to mention it here. If you're in the Bay Area and like French cuisine then I recommend giving it a try. If you show up before 7PM you can order a three course prix fixe meal for $12.00!

The chef is a regular on the local psy-trance (or Goa trance) scene. After the meal we headed to an Oakland warehouse space for a Higher Resolutions trance party featuring Earthling.