Barcelona clubbers get chipped

You know, I'd probably get chipped to put my credit card in my skin, just because I think it's cool and I don't really have any issues with merging myself with technology.

But there's no way in hell I'd do it just to be on the VIP list at a club. That's insane. People are going to end up with like 50 chips in their arm for separate things, unless some sort of standard ID is developed. That's overkill.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Barcelona clubbers get chipped

i'm a deep sleeper

Looks like we had a 6.0 earthquake near here this morning while I was sleeping. I didn't feel a damn thing. That's too bad, earthquakes are fun.

CNN.com - Strong quake shakes central California

AI

I'm interested in learning more about the cutting edge theories of AI, can any of you who are interested or into the subject recommend some books?

I know that the best information is probably online, but one of the reasons I want to read about it in a book is that my wrists are killing me lately from all the work I've been doing, and I need to do SOMETHING that doesn't involve typing. I'm really worried about doing permanent damage to my hands.

So anyway, please recommend books. I know almost nothing on the subject, but I want to learn. There are just too many books out there and I'm not qualified to judge them, but I know from skimming that a lot of them are really old fashioned. I know that it's a field that advances quickly in different directions, and I want to learn about applicable theory and practices, not old number theory and formulas.

cost of living

Oh east coast, how I love you so.

I'm heading to Maryland in October for a friend's wedding, and I'll be swinging out to Pittsburgh too, for a day. If you're still living in Pittsburgh, I'd love to see you, I'm planning on heading out to the Upstage on Thursday the 14th of October. Because I'm so goth. Or if you'd like to get dinner before that, let me know. I've got no plans, except to see people. I'm sure there will be drunken Eat and Park afterward as well.

I got sidetracked, though. The point of this post was that I love the east coast, for its cost of living.

I forget, living in California, how affordable places can be. I'm renting a car for a week in Baltimore... for $100. I just reserved a hotel room in Pittsburgh... for $29.

Maybe this seems reasonable to all of you, but to me, it sounds like heaven. I'll have to chug some AAAARHN City beer while I'm there, probably for $8/pitcher. Basically double all of these numbers that I've mentioned, and you'll see what California prices are like.

I'm also looking forward to the Maryland--> Pittsburgh drive along the Turnpike. That's a fun trip.

Now if it were only just not for a wedding. I hate all of you who are having kids and getting married. In my mind, I'm still 18, and you are all breaking that fragile lie. We're still too young to give up! Goddamn savages.

my Sun blog

Management at Sun has created a site allowing engineers to post about their work and experiences at Sun, and I've jumped on the bandwagon in order to share with customers and interested geeks the stuff I've been toiling away on for the last two years.

So I've now got a Sun blog here:

http://blogs.sun.com/tobin

Granted, it won't be any interest to most of you, unless you're a geek and/or Solaris system administrator.

But I'm putting a lot of time and effort into detailing the work I've done on Predictive Self Healing for Sun, so if any of you know any Solaris sysadmins or interested geeks, I'd love it if you helped me get the word out. Or hey, just take a look because this project is pretty damn cool, and has eaten up a significant portion of my adult life.

submissive or dominant

One of the most confusing societal traits I've ever seen is the Japanese girl in a Japanese porn.

Every single one of them, with absolutely no exceptions, behaves as if she's hating whatever is happening, and is usually wincing in pain, and/or sobbing. It seriously looks like the least fun I could ever imagine in a sexual act.

What fascinates me is *why*. This isn't an isolated incident, this is a distinct and observable trend, and must therefore have an explaination.

The only one I can think of is that the male Japanese psyche is still so damaged from the powerlessness of losing WWII, and the dropping of the unbeatable atomic weapon, that sex in their society has developed around returning a sense of power and dominance to the Land of the Rising Sun, who once believed their emperor was a god.

It makes sense, considering the infamous taste of Japanese businessmen to carry around manga like "Rape Man" on the subway with them. It's in all their porn, a complete submissiveness to the point of agony on the part of their women, providing a sense of dominance and power to the men. It provides a sense of control that they were denied by the reality of their crushing defeat in the war. It's especially interesting that it would last beyond their financial dominance of the 80's, showing that it's incredibly deep seated, possibly having roots back in the days of Admiral Perry.

Please feel free to educate me if I'm wrong, I'm genuinely curious, but I can't think of any other good reasons for something like this to happen with such overwhelming regularity.

dog on two legs

Good christ, Drew sent me this link of a two legged dog that walks like a human. Check it out, it's surreal.

this made me snork

I'm in love with a tool

Any of you who read a lot of blogs, or newsfeeds, or Livejournals, you might notice that it's a pain when you get a lot of feeds, or friends. Especially with the shitty interface that LJ has, you poor folks have to read through everything, no priority is placed on people that you like more, there's no way to mark entries that you've already read, etc.

I've been looking for a year for a decent RSS aggregator to read all my feeds, and everything I tried sucked for one reason or another. Sage/firefox was trash, NewsGator was useless at my work, the list goes on and on.

Not any more. I'm in love.

Check out www.bloglines.com.

It's a completely free service where you check all your feeds using the web. Hell, you can check it from a handheld device, your home, your work. It keeps track of what you've already seen, so it's a seamless move from wherever you are.

You can make folders for your friends, your news feeds, your comic feeds, and the people that you only read sometimes. You can download a "notifier" app for any operating system and any browser that tells you when people have updated.

Oh, and it's completely free. It's insanely easy to use. It has Livejournal, Yahoo groups, Xanga and Google groups support built in. It can read any RSS feed, as well, obviously. It's freaking amazing, and it's made my entire month. Go try it for 10 minutes, I assure you that it will win you over. Reading blogs and feeds at the source is for chumps. This is the best RSS aggregator that I've ever seen. Any of you still reading Livejournals at lj.com are insane.

Genesis set for stellar return from space

Nasa sent a probe into space to collect solar wind for three years. It's planning on returning to earth today, at a speed of 25,000 mph. It's going to come in over the desert of Utah, and then HELICOPTER PILOTS ARE GOING TO CATCH IT IN MIDAIR.

Mmm. Nerdy.

Genesis set for stellar return from space - Sep 7, 2004

Predictive Self Healing

Who knows how long this will last, but for the moment, the front page of Sun's website is all about "Predictive Self Healing".

Why do I think that's cool? It's the project I've been working on for the last two years of my life. It's fun to feel like a (geeky) rock star for a little bit.

Specifically, if you read the article here, you'll see a section about Solaris Service Manager software, which has been called project Greenline internally, which I've helped design, and am currently frantically fixing bugs against. It's a fantastic framework, and I think it's better than any management tools out there for Unix.

Sun Microsystems home page

netflix and tivo

Jesus Christ in a chicken basket. Netflix and Tivo are in talks about a partnership to deliver movies over the internet, directly to your Tivo.

Excuse me while I go change my pants.

The interesting part about this is that Netflix has every reason to push this as fast as possible. Imagine if they could get the same monthly fee from you, without the overhead of postage, packaging, damaged DVDs, and the armies of brainless monkeys that they employ to handle DVD packing/unpacking at their warehouse.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5915470/site/newsweek/

Julian Snelling Rosebud Anal Jewelry: ExtremeRestraints.com

Care to take a guess what this is?



Oh goodness, it's anal jewelry. Your ass can be the height of fashion too.

Julian Snelling Rosebud Anal Jewelry

window resizing

Due to a nasty and evil viral infestation, I had to reinstall my home box. Now every time I right click a link to open it in a new window (using IE), it opens in this dinky little window about 1/4 the size of my screen. Then I have to maximize it to read it in any sort of intelligible fashion.

How the hell do I tell IE to always open windows full sized? I've tried maximizing them and closing them, hoping it would remember, but it doesn't.

R0xor.com.worldometers

This is a pretty cool site, some guy just plugged a bunch of stats into javascript and made counters for things like the number of people alive, number of people who have watched movies compared to bought books, number of dollars spent on diets in the US, etc. Watch the numbers spin.

I find it really creepy to watch the "number of deaths today globally" number just clicking along endlessly. Thinking of a human life ending for each click is hard to do.

R0xor.com.worldometers