God DAMN the sun.

Now it's a race between me and him. I'm almost finished coding, and I know from long experience that the Zone never really lasts past sunup. I've closed all my blinds, and I'm getting a little weather help from the fact that it's overcast from the night's rain. I'm getting very close to finishing though, so I don't think the yellow eye will thwart me.

Daytime is so lame. I can only code clearly at night. I should go live somewhere with a six month night.

"...beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler grey. Expanding-- And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard expanding to infinity... And somewhere he was laughing, in a white painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face." - Neuromancer

Ah, after so long, I've rediscovered the Zone. Up coding at 3:30am, music blasting, a little bit drunk but not too much, working on this pesky, broken, ugly code for work, I have an epiphany, and the entire structure of my library falls into place in my head. All the ugliness that I've hated since I started working on it becomes unnecessary, all the data structures are reorganized, all the kludgy double pointers disappear, new calls materialize and old ones fade away...

I haven't really had a good coding moment like this for a long time. I had it all the time in college, but usually the work I do at Sun is bug fixing, testing, minor development, etc. I've been working on this library for months, going through a neverending review process, enduring lots of frustration, working in fits and spurts.. but I've been working on this all day long, top to bottom, reworking and fixing and tuning until I know every single line, and finally my brain chewed up the whole thing, optimized it, and spit it back out.

It's like a freaking head orgasm. This is why I chose this career path, for moments when I get to create like this, where I can point at something and say this is *mine*, I thought of it and reasoned through it and created it with my own mind and my own hands, and got to play digital god.

Now, all I have to do is implement it and hope that the structure shining in my head doesn't fade away. Sleep is for pussies. Let me just find music a little bit more energetic, perhaps some thumping techno... and let me just turn the lights down a little bit and dim the monitors, because the light hurts my eyes... ah. There we go. Back to work.

Wow, I have renewed faith with our consumer culture.

Check this out. Family Guy's DVD is now ranked #2 in DVD sales on amazon.

Kick ass.

There's apparently a signup sheet somewhere that I missed.

Tonight I was wandering through an asian market, because I decided to learn to make some asian food on a whim. (So far I've had a 50% success rate on the dishes I've made, so it's not going all that poorly. In fact, it's surprisingly easy, I just keep making dumb mistakes with ingredient proportions. However, I got enough food to feed me for a very long time, and the whole thing cost me about $30, so I'm actually really impressed.)

Anyway, while I was in said asian market, I saw probably five or six couples involving an extremely hot asian girl, and a dorky ass white guy. I know that dorky ass white guys lust after asian girls, but god only knows why they're actually getting them. I was going to ask one of them what the address of the mailing list was, so I could get on it, but I figured he wouldn't think I was very funny. Jackass. Seriously, though, I'd love to see the dating ritual of the clueless white dork and the insanely hot asian girl.

I was half expecting them to hand me a girl after I wandered around in there for a while, because they figured I'd lost mine and needed a replacement or something. Maybe I should put up a fake lost and found sign, and someone will return one to me by accident.

My spell checker is yelling at me for not capitalizing the word asian, but it can fuck right off. I don't capitalize any ethnicities.

I was re-reading Pattern Recognition tonight, and upon seeing Gibson's repeated use of Google as a verb, I decided to google myself, which I haven't done for a few years.

The results were interesting. For one thing, the top match isn't this blog. The top result is a dead link to a paper I wrote on "Hypermedia Aided Literacy" for a course in college. I don't get that. I thought google did ranking by links, and I highly doubt anyone linked to my paper, especially since the damn thing isn't even there anymore. You can go get a cached copy if you're curious, but I wouldn't recommend it. If you really love me, you'll link to this blog somewhere, so that stupid paper of mine will get bumped off the freaking top spot. Come on, you know you want to.

Second link was my blog, no big surprise.

Then we have a couple archived posts from me on different places. I know a couple years ago you could find some posts I made to usenet on some conspiracy boards, but those are apparently gone now. All that's left is:

Me being angry on an IETF list.
Me being angry on a Gibson list.
Me being helpful on a DHCP IETF list. (boring)

We also have this picture of me, from a class at CMU.

I've apparently made it into a couple people's quote files, with such memorable things as:

"Jason Weill is my bitch." -- Tobin Coziahr
I would find burning my individual rectal hairs out with a zippo, nicking myself countless times from head to toe with a straightrazor, and then diving into a vat of salt more pleasant than what I went through today.
-- Tobin Coziahr, about Online Registration
"My signals aren't mixed at all. I want you right here, right now, on this SPARC station."
-- Tobin Coziahr
"People do all kinds of fucked up things, that doesn't make them animals. Animals don't commit tax fraud, become serial killers, get in car wrecks, or write goth poetry."
-- Tobin Coziahr
It's just like asking why guys like boobs, fast cars, guns, explosions, monkeys, pirates, and Nixon. We just do.
--Tobin Coziahr, 12/00

I'm expecting my Pulitzer any day now.

And for the weirdness category, we have two entries. One is the fact that only one of the Shirley 19 Chronicles made it, even though they all contain my name. Maybe this is because someone linked to it?

Last but not least, and the strangest of all, we have the minutes from a Board of Education of Rockville, Maryland meeting on December 13th, 1994. This one confused the hell out of me until I did a search, and found on page 34 that the President of the board had announced that I received a 1600 on the PSAT. You know what makes that even more weird? Mrs. Gordon, the President of the board, is the mother of the girl I was dating in high school, and I had no idea until just now that she was the President of the Board. Ah, google. You learn something every time.

Welcome, boys and girls, to Tobin's "Roots of Racist Slang".

I decided to look up why we have certain phrases for ethnic groups, and my results were spotty, but interesting.

Italians are called wops and dagos. Dago isn't very interesting, it's a variant of Diego, which was a popular name among Italians and Spaniards. However, wop is fascinating. To quote the dictionary, "Italian dialectal guappo, thug, from Spanish guapo, handsome, dashing, braggart, bully, from French dialectal wape, rogue, from Latin vappa, flat wine, scoundrel." Not only is that an incredibly long chain of evolution, but it's funny that you can see where it evolves from. An english speaker, overhearing "guappo", just says wop. This leads us to ...

Blacks are called spades, coons, niggers, and several other phrases that I'll omit because they're literal enough to be obvious. Spade and coon I didn't have much luck with, spade is from a deck of cards, where spades are black, and there are lots of phrases like "black as the queen of spades". Coon there is very little data on (at least in the dictionary I looked at), I would hypothesize that it's just that raccoons are brown and have the unfortunate tendency to dig in the trash, and other behaviors that humans also do, but it's pretty weak. Nigger is the easiest and clearest, it's "Alteration of dialectal neger, black person, from French nègre, from Spanish negro."

White terms are hard to track down. Whites are called crackers(white trash, usually) and honkeys, most commonly. Cracker has no obvious root, except that it apparently was a "noisy boister" in Shakespeare. Boring, and pretty much meaningless. Honkey is "Possibly blend of Wolof honq, red, pink, of light complexion, and hunky", where hunky is "a foreign born laborer, especially one of central European extraction". So it was apparently some sort of blue collar insult back in the day, but has evolved to mean all whites, and lost any sort of root significance. How disappointing.

The non-obvious asian slang terms are even more disappointing. Chink is theoretically just a variant of chinese. Gook is "Perhaps alteration of earlier goo-goo, native inhabitant of the Philippines, Pacific islander", which makes very little sense, and I'm not sure what the hell language goo-goo is supposed to come from.

I was going to look up some more, but the lack of good responses has me bored with this. The best slang by far was Italian, because it made sense, but I unfortunately did those first, so the rest of them were kind of a let down. Still interesting though.

For such a wired author, www.nealstephenson.com really blows ass.

Oh, my sweet jesus, Time Crisis 3.

I heard a rumor that it had been released, and Gulkis and I rushed at breakneck speed to Dave and Busters, to find that it was true!

Those of you that don't know, Time Crisis 2 is the best shooter game in the arcade. Well, it used to be. Time Crisis 3 is freaking INCREDIBLE. The graphics are absolutely stunning, the camera angles are innovative (try shooting bad guys hanging upside down), the gameplay is amazing... I clocked some 12 year old kid in the head to get at the damn thing.

We set up camp on the damn things, blowing credits faster than Michael Jackson changes faces. I ended up beating the game, and having the number one score on the machine. Wish I had brought my digital camera. It's significantly more expensive to play than TC2, which I can beat with a couple bucks. I estimate it took me about $13 to beat TC3. But oh, it was worth it. When I was done, my hands and arms and legs were aching, but it was oh so good.

Hmm.

My bedroom was called "depressing" by a visiting female friend this evening, and the only adjectives for the rest of the place were "spartan". I know it looks kind of weird that I've got a big empty desk left by my ex, but I never really looked at the place with an eye for asthetics, other than it has everything I need. The living room has a "lived in" quadrant that looks nice, because it has the entertainment center and bookshelves and what not, but I guess the rest of it is kind of empty.

I think the living room would be fine with a little touching up, but I have no idea how to go about making a bedroom less "depressing". I don't really have any idea how to decorate a bedroom, because I don't decorate. It has my bed and a bookshelf and my nightstands and that's about it, because that's all I need and want. Anything I can think of for a bedroom seems to be a little strange for a guy, but I guess I could put up paintings or something on the walls. Maybe I'll force said female friend to suggest some decorations.

Side note, it's really nice to find friends who are completely entertained with a case of beer, and three consoles. It's nice to know that I can find cool people out here that aren't imported from CMU. Course, now it's 5:20am and I'm drunk as a skunk.

Wow, this is a really neat car ad.

http://home.attbi.com/~bernhard36/honda-ad.html

Oh, and sorry about the lack of entries lately. I've just been gone for a week and a half visiting Pittsburgh and Maryland (I got a crapload of great pictures that I'll be posting soon, once I resize them and shove them on some sort of captions page), and when I got back, I immediately made the impulse purchase of a Gamecube, because I had an itching to play Zelda. And I've got 10 days of work to catch up on.

But have no fear, my blatherings and ramblings will soon resume.

While I was in Pittsburgh, I did my first karaoke session. That was pretty cool. I had a good healthy dose of liquid courage beforehand, of course, and lots of support from Pauly and Kevin and Mari and the rest of the loud drunks. I sung "Ring of Fire", by Johnny Cash. I love the Man in Black, and his songs don't require any vocal range whatsoever.

You ever use your teeth to open something tricky, and then realize that for all our big brains, we're still equipped with old school animal bodies, and our behaviors aren't that far removed from the critters we evolved from?

That was a bit odd.

Apparently ever since 9/11, Sun has been paranoid about weekend terrorist attacks, or something. Maybe our massive Menlo Park is an important and strategic location. When I drove there tonight at 4am to pick up my laptop for the trip I'm leaving on in a few hours, I was stopped by a surly security guard who demanded to see my ID card and identification, and wrote down the license place on my car. They had police tape covering all the entrances, and there was only one way into the campus, guarded by a big old truck with the lights flashing.

I hadn't realized that Sun was so paranoid. Maybe it's only when we're at a heightened national security level.

Honestly, Sun just isn't that important. And even if someone WERE to blow us up, wouldn't it be while a shitload of people were there? During the day? When the gates aren't guarded, and ANYONE who wants to can drive right in?

The people at my work tend to modify lots of words. Some of these amuse me greatly, like "mangler" for manager, and "attackments" for attachments.

Hmm. There were more, but I'm tired. I've got to get as much code as possible churned out before tomorrow, because I'm going out with people tomorrow, then a wedding on Saturday, and then I'm packing and off on a weeklong vacation to Maryland and Pittsburgh, where I have plans to see about 1000 people in a short period of time.

All of this amounts to me still coding at 5am. On the plus side, I kind of like how I look with dark circles under my eyes. It's kind of like evil Tobin.

I wonder if evil Tobin's upstairs neighbors enjoy the late night Soul Coughing singalongs. I should get a costume.

Yeay, Gene Wilder on Will and Grace.

Seeing Gene Wilder makes me so happy, even though he's kind of old and sad. He's still crazy and lovable. I love Gene Wilder.

You know, I've known several LARPers that are very cool. I like role playing games, or I did when I was younger. I have a healthy imagination.

Still, when I see something like this:

http://www.mutated.net/stuff/shmoo6.mpg

I still laugh at them and think they're kind of sad, and wonder if they're a bunch of 30 year old virgins.

In the spirit of April Fool's day, here is a compilation of 100 great hoaxes.

Some of them, like fooling people into thinking that they were going to make Big Ben digital, are pretty damn funny.

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/top100.html

I would say that this poor bastard doesn't have much of a career ahead of him.

http://us.imdb.com/Name?Haleva,+Jerry

What do you do for a living? Well... I look a lot like Saddam Hussein.

This is pretty good, I think I'm going to start giving it to people as my home number:

415-356-9833

Give it a ring.