As promised, pictures from SF. (Some are actually out of the plane window over Utah.)

need to remember this exists and is not just for reading friends lists.

most things are fine. visited san francisco last month. am writing this to make sure i remember to post pictures. had a mild cold this month then got over it. yay.

http://richardlai.xanga.com/704930537/enable-tethering-on-iphone-30---too-easy-worldwide-carriers/

Worked on AT&T. Tethering via USB requires special iPhone drivers that come with iTunes 8.2, making it Mac/Windows only. Tethering via Bluetooth seems to work on any OS that supports Bluetooth personal area networking. I got it to work not only on the Mac, but on a copy of Windows 7 without iTunes installed, and even on Linux.

Speed in this area is pretty good: 2107 Kbit/s down, 326 up. Round trip latency seems to be around 130–150ms to most sites. (This is with a year-old 3G, not the new 3GS.)

We've taken over one of the unused cubicles near the external wall.

Sitting on its desk is a MacBook, which is plugged into an iPhone, power, and ethernet. There is a Post-it note on the whole setup saying "Pay no attention to this computer. -The Mgt."

...It has to be near the external wall. In our office proper, the signal is so bad it is as slow as dialup and is only good for IRC.

Most unintentionally hilarious philosophy paper ever: Is It Wrong Everywhere, Always, and for Anyone to Believe Anything on Insufficient Evidence? (Peter Van Inwagen).

tl;dr version: Philosophers can't agree on anything. But they all understand each others' arguments, and they persist in not agreeing. Should this bother us? [Long, rambly, and IMO grossly insufficient rationalizations as to why the answer is 'No', which manage to epitomize large portions of what is wrong with philosophy.]

For reference: connect.c, for use as a ProxyCommand to get SSH to connect through a SOCKS server.

Yes, Time Warner Cable is being irritating so I switched to the copy of NetShare (iPhone tethering app) that I picked up WAY, WAY back when it was originally available. Slow, but functional; about 768 Kbit/s download. Good enough for IRC, email, and casual web browsing.

*rubs eyes* Everything is back to being fuzzy but Euclidean.

We got glasses—when you are sitting in a meeting room and your colleagues 10–15 years older than you can all read what is on the projector, and you can't, you begin to suspect something is up. They are for distance vision; our close-up vision is fine. Since the two lenses have different strengths, there is an interesting distortion of space; the world gets smaller on our right and bigger on our left. Floors look like they slope left, and the opposing corners of an elevator look like they have a 2–3 foot difference in elevation. When actually looking at things in the distance, though, there's a pretty dramatic improvement in clarity.

(Hell, forget 'Euclidean', this isn't even a metric space anymore! Distance metrics can't depend on the orientation of the observer. I think it only remains a metric space so long as I stand still and look in the same direction; i.e. take those as constants and not variables.)

Sophie had wanted to go on a nature trail once we got our glasses and could see much better but that will have to wait for our brain to adjust to them. Right now I do not feel like walking on any surface that I don't know a priori is flat.

The trouble with the new computer science building on Centennial Campus is that it is boring and soulless. For goodness' sake, it does not even have a name yet; last I heard the university was still looking for some ridiculously rich alumnus to pay them $200k for the right to name it. If I were a ridiculously rich alumnus I would be tempted to name it something like "Withers 2, Electric Boogaloo" and they would have to go along with it because the university always needs more money.

The old buildings had character and soul. It is not that old things are better than new things; it is that soul comes from being used for decades; the accumulation of history and of interesting quirks which let you feel kinship with the generations of struggling undergrads who were undergoing the same trials and sharing the same experiences. In my day computer science had taken over Withers Hall pretty much entirely, and a portion of the first floor of adjacent Daniels Hall. Daniels Hall not only had soul; it had several, and some of them weren't very nice.

Let me describe Daniels Hall to you. Leave your compass rose and locally Euclidian geometry outside; these still exist inside of course, they just won't help you anymore. Daniels Hall was two buildings originally, and it just sort of... grew, like adjacent fungi of the same species. This was followed by an agglomeration of random editions whenever some department needed more space. Usually these were done as non-invasively (read: cheaply) as possible; there are actually places where one of the walls of an internal corridor changes to brick, complete with insulating windows—they just reused the old exterior wall as an interior wall without bothering to change it.

And of course all of the numerous additions (which by now comprise most of the building) were done with their own styles of carpeting, wall texture, ceiling height, and lighting. That was a peculiar feature of the building; since every place looked different, you always knew where you were, it's just that you had no idea what relations held between where you were and any other place in the building. It actually reminded me of the interactive fiction games I grew up on; unlike kids these days with their simulated three Euclidian dimensions, our worlds were built from graph theory.

Here are two distinguishing features of the architecture: on the second floor, there is a main hallway that goes all the way around the building. No, strike that; it is a lie. It goes almost all of the way around, making the circle more akin to a line, so if you were near one of the two ends you have to go all the way around in the opposite direction to reach some room near the other end, even though they were geometrically close. Second: the first floor was divided in two. Computer science had taken over the east side while the west side was sacred to Physics. You could not get between these two sides while remaining on the first floor. You had to go up to the second floor (and use its hallway, so woe upon you if you tried to get from CSC to PY by going counterclockwise), and then back down to the first floor.

(The two first floors actually are physically connected; it's just that the area is access controlled. Electrical Engineering had taken over the connecting segment and turned it into a microprocessor fabrication plant. And of course you don't let randoms wander through your clean room or very soon it won't be a clean room anymore.)

I ascribe malevolent qualities to its architecture because it tried to trap me once. I was on the first floor (the PY side) and I came upon a door that looked like an exit but which someone had labelled, helpfully but with insufficient detail, "Not an Exit". It still looked awfully like one—I could see twilight through the window on the door—so I took it. It led outdoors about four meters below ground level, and there was quite a steep stone stairway leading upwards. Following the stairs, I found myself in a flower garden that was still 1.5 meters below ground level, with no way of going any higher. Other than climbing the brick wall, which I wasn't limber enough to do. Also, the door I came through had automatically locked behind me. I eventually had to just stand there and wave my hands until a random student came along who was willing to follow my directions inside the building to open the door up from the other side.

(Following on from a discussion of roux and sauce béchamel, which somehow turned into a pressure cooking debate)

It's just so weird, all this prepackaged food. I keep wondering what kind of crazy subtle techniques they use to make it.

And so many times I could do so much better in my kitchen, but what I make would go bad before it got to a neighboring state, much less to a store shelf halfway across the country left there for a week before bought.

There is a subset of food experience, a subset of flavor. We exchange things out of that subset for time.

The best bread I've ever eaten was bread I made myself, fresh from baking. The blandest bread I've ever had? Plenty, but notably the same bread two days later. Before preservatives, day-old bread was food fit only for paupers.

Now that it has become all trendy to hate on Bush and everything, I'd like to go around asking my (offline) friends—and a whole bunch of reporters, for that matter—this question:

"So, when exactly did you realize the guy was Trouble, and start bashing him?"

And if the answer isn't "Before the 2004 election", they get no cookie, and they don't get to say "I told you so".

For the record, I started to catch on when the administration's advice to the public after 9/11 shifted from "Carry on as normal or the terrorists win" to "Fear, we need to expand executive power, fnord". I was pretty much apolitical at the time but if there is one thing I dislike it is mindlessness, and the administration seemed to me to be actively encouraging it amongst the population.

I think what really clinched it for me was the Iraq war; at the start of it, my reaction was basically "Oh fuck, now we've gone and done it". Not that I disbelieved the intelligence reports. It was plausible, perhaps even probable, that Iraq had WMDs, given that it's well established that they had them throughout the 80s and very early 90s. I just didn't think that was a sufficient justification to invade. And then the weeks and months started dragging on and still no WMDs were turning up. This just made an already bad situation worse. And all of this was well before the 2004 election.

Politics just started to seem like they mattered a whole lot more with the Bush Administration in charge. That's why I stopped being apolitical and started being a liberal.

flowerb0x: Guava juice tastes weird.
mahoubaka: deep
flowerb0x: I was buying random things at the store.
flowerb0x: Maybe I should truly randomize my product selection. I carry a cryptographic quality random number generator on my keychain; it shouldn't be too hard to devise some sort of scheme involving the moduli of aisles, fractions of aisles, shelves, etc. to select truly random food experiences.
mahoubaka: get cable
mahoubaka: it's more entertaining

Caffeine Content of Mana Energy Potion

"A 1.35 ounce bottle of Mana Energy Potion contains 160 milligrams of caffeine.

Mana is a small energy drink made by gamers for gamers. The shape of the bottle resembles a magic potion found in many popular video games."

I'm wondering how much of our friends list will be weirded out by this and how much will think it is humorous.

Heard Neil Diamond's Shilo for the first time today. Apparently this song has baffled music reviewers for a great deal of time; I remember coming across an article entitled Shilo: Girl, Dog, or Demon?. As we remarked to our sister over Christmas break after playing Faith and the Muse - The Silver Circle: if you haven't had the experience described in the song (and we aren't talking about something universal like sex or drugs) you're going to have a hard time figuring out what it is about.

iTunes wants to play Orbital - The Girl With The Sun in Her Head immediately afterwards, due to alphabetical order. Funny.

We saw it Monday at its opening night at the Carolina Theatre. Don't miss it—the showings are at 7:30 pm and 9:30 pm and only run until Thursday (tomorrow).

That was one of the craziest things we've ever seen, and we enjoyed the hell out of it. Of course, anything with flowy black-haired girls in flowy white robes will be a hit with Sophie (that's how she sees herself internally)—

s: AND RANDOMLY APPEARING ROCK STARS WHO STRUM THEIR GUITARS SUGGESTIVELY.

—for example, Jennifer Connelly in Phenomena; she was practically bubbling over throughout the entire movie.

I swear the next time we watch A Beautiful Mind, during that scene where Alicia (Connelly) realizes Nash has their baby and is hallucinating, I will call out: "Give me the child. Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City to take back the child that you have stolen. For my will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom is as great! You have no power over me!"

Her fiercely determined gaze has not changed over the decades, and that scene reminded me very strongly of Labyrinth.

Installing new fluorescent bulbs is one way to enhance the lighting in one's apartment. It seems that increasing the albedo of the ground outside is far more effective. The light streaming through the window is so brilliant as to be tangible; I can feel its heat just by waving my hand in front of the window.

We have a Flickr now; it has snow pictures. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbc_photos/

We finally listened to progressive metal band Pain of Salvation's album Be all the way through, in bed, because we couldn't sleep. (We'd listened to individual songs many times, but never the entire thing at once.)

Holy shit.

This thing deserves to be listened to while on powerful psychotropics. If you like Pink Floyd's The Wall, you might like this.

Pain of Salvation actually played at ProgDay once, but that was before we started going. :|

We went home for Christmas on the 24th and came back on the 27th. We had a very good time with our family. It seems to get easier to get on well with them the more independent we become. We were supremely lazy and didn't do any Christmas shopping beforehand, so we went down to the Wal-Mart about 8pm on Christmas Eve:

Security guard: Just where do you think you're going?

Us: *points to store entrance*

Security guard: What does it look like here? We're closed!

Us: But it said '24 hours' on that sign back there...

Security guard: It's Christmas Eve! We sent everyone home at six!

Us: Where well am I supposed to get Christmas presents, then?!

He then provided us with some advice about re-gifting old presents, but we decided it would be better just to come back the 26th, which we did. Luckily everyone loved our presents: our littlest sister got a new set of earbuds (in Carolina blue, no less) to replace her broken set which only had one ear, and Mother got this collection of Star Trek time travel episodes which consisted of four DVDs. Mother is a big Star Trek fan, and we showed her the DS9 tribbles episode which we had seen and she hadn't, and she showed us TOS's The City on the Edge of Forever which she had seen and we hadn't, and a good time was had by all.

TEA. We have orange blossom honey for it again. ^_^

We also replaced all the light bulbs in our apartment, so that the color temperature in it is a nice 5500K. (For reference, the color temperature of sunlight in space is ~5800K, that being the actual temperature of the sun's photosphere, but then the atmosphere gets to it and changes it in different ways at different times, so anything 5000-6500ish will resemble some form of daylight well enough.)

As James put it, "Whenever it's dark out the lights in here make it look like I am stuck in a fucking Quake 2 level. I want lights that aren't fucking ORANGE."

There are two cheap locally available options for daylight-resembling bulbs: Home Depot's n:vision 5500K CFLs, and Lowe's Bright Effects 6500K CFLs. We greatly prefer the former. The Lowe's bulb was overly blue when compared to our reference, the light from the overcast sky through our window, and it did strange things to the relative colors of objects when compared to how they looked in the light from the window. The Home Depot bulbs seemed to match what was coming in from the window a lot better, under more conditions. This is not to say that 5500K is better than 6500K as an illuminant, because neither of these bulbs match their reference spectra well enough to make that statement. It's just that these particular 5500K bulbs are better and more 'natural' looking (where 'more natural' means 'blends less distinguishably with actual sunlight when both are present').

Apple is really clever. Now we can pay them even more money to upgrade DRM-locked songs to their DRM-free versions.

Now we just have to decide what to do with the rest of the iTunes gift card we got for Christmas.

It is a pity Steve Jobs didn't give the Macworld '09 keynote—they could have unveiled their thinnest and lightest CEO ever.

01/07/2009 0504 PM. Rdu ASOS recorded a sustained wind of 43 mph with a gust to 59 mph.

Tropical storm force sustained winds, right around rush hour, combined with just enough rain to make roads slick and impair visibility. I'm glad I decided to work from home yesterday.

LOTS OF STUFF HAPPENED WE JUST FORGOT WE HAVE A LIVEJOURNAL. You're lucky to get even this much of an update. But suffice it to say that things are looking much better than in the last couple of months.