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| Friday, November 13th, 2009 | | 12:17 pm |
we see a literal binary chronology following the Heaven Ascending pattern
So I need to talk about something real quick so that the cogs in my brain will stop uselessly spinning at full speed. In my recent web surfing adventures, I came across a blog mostly devoted to the Fat Acceptance Movement (FAM). Now I'm not sure how new this movement is, but it's pretty new to me and I've been hearing more and more about it recently. As far as I can tell, the core principal of the movement is that despite the constant bombardment from the popular media with messages of shame and guilt for being being overweight, every person regardless of what their bathroom scale says deserves the same respect as a human being and should hold her(his)self in the same esteem. I can totally get behind that. But when I think about it, I keep hearing this voice in my head over and over again. It's Brad Pitt and he's saying, "you are not your khakis. you are not the contents of your wallet. you are not your weight." And it's at that moment that I suddenly can't support the FAM. The FAM encourages overweight people to identify with their weight, and to associate it with who they are. "I'm overweight and I love myself." is a phrase I keep seeing in connection with the FAM. Would you not love yourself if you were not overweight? When you look at the other side of the coin, the whole movement seems quite ridiculous. This also reminds me that I've had a burning desire to watch Fight Club for months now. Current Mood:  goodCurrent Music: They Might Be Giants - C Is for Conifers | | Thursday, November 5th, 2009 | | 4:28 pm |
i love lamp
BEST RIDDLE EVAR: A hundred prisoners are each locked in a room with three pirates, one of whom will walk the plank in the morning. Each prisoner has 10 bottles of wine, one of which has been poisoned; and each pirate has 12 coins, one of which is counterfeit and weighs either more or less than a genuine coin. In the room is a single switch, which the prisoner may either leave as it is, or flip. Before being led into the rooms, the prisoners are all made to wear either a red hat or a blue hat; they can see all the other prisoners' hats, but not their own. Meanwhile, a six-digit prime number of monkeys multiply until their digits reverse, then all have to get across a river using a canoe that can hold at most two monkeys at a time. But half the monkeys always lie and the other half always tell the truth. Given that the Nth prisoner knows that one of the monkeys doesn't know that a pirate doesn't know the product of two numbers between 1 and 100 without knowing that the N+1th prisoner has flipped the switch in his room or not after having determined which bottle of wine was poisoned and what color his hat is, what is the solution to this puzzle? Current Mood: goodCurrent Music: Fünf Sterne Deluxe - Dein Herz schlägt schneller | | 3:42 pm |
| | Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 | | 5:25 pm |
| | Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 | | 11:17 am |
oh noes, a blost!
Another sighting the other day. I didn't get a good look at it, but it was definitely a ghost. It was totally flying over Ann Arbor and then ducked into some clouds and didn't come out. So yeah, I think my LJ is only gonna get used for UFO reports :/ Current Mood: goodCurrent Music: Vampire Weekend - Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa | | Thursday, August 27th, 2009 | | 8:43 am |
| | Monday, July 6th, 2009 | | 1:58 am |
holy shit!
Holy shit I went to Pittsburgh to get a nose job and there's furries here!?!? Current Mood:  embarrassedCurrent Music: Sandstorm! | | Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 | | 9:29 am |
these endless numbered days
I'm back with adventures from tech support land. The sad adventures though, not the fun type. I'm trying to get support for my gigabyte motherboard, as the sound drivers won't seem to install themselves properly. So I send them an email, and we go back and forth through the usual crap. After 5 replies they eventually tell me the same thing I told them in my original email, the drivers aren't installed properly. Well I could have told you that! Oh wait, I DID TELL YOU THAT. I realize that they have some manual that they have to follow when troubleshooting, fine. Now that you have some idea of what's wrong, we can fix it. So at this point I'm expecting that they're going to walk me through the process to reinstall my drivers properly. No. They send back the following reply: "Were you able to configured the audio properties and see whether if it is set to mute and volume are raise up?" I could not even make this shit up. In one reply they tell me the drivers aren't installed (based on a screenshot I provided which clearly shows no drivers installed), and in the very next reply they think the problem is the sound is muted? Am I taking crazy pills?!? So I will never buy another gigabyte product again. This is ridiculous. Current Mood:  aggravatedCurrent Music: Ratatat - Wildcat | | Monday, May 11th, 2009 | | 3:52 pm |
| | Monday, December 22nd, 2008 | | 9:27 pm |
What day is it today?
You're shopping at the mall and a stranger walks up and asks, "Excuse me, what's the date today?" "It's the 22nd." You answer. "Of...?" They ask back. "December." Seriously. It's 3 days till Christmas, how do you not know what month it is? Tony and I were at the mall Christmas shopping, and while we were in F.Y.E. there was this guy asking every person in the store what day it was. But I think that I just realized why. At the time, I thought he was just hopped up on goofballs or something, but now I don't think that's it at all. I think he was a time traveler!! Also, fuck Microsoft. Their products are all crap. Current Mood: Upset | | Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 | | 10:15 am |
Perhaps Fritalian?
Now I've always thought that Starbucks was pretentious and stupid. Recently though, I've been spurred to investigate the possibility of authenticity of the American coffee industry's naming conventions. Much to my surprise, some of it is. In general, the drinks themselves are named after the original Italian drinks they are trying to mimic. There are some discrepancies though. For example, latte is just the Italian word for milk which is what you should get if you ordered one. In America though, we use it as shorthand for caffellatte (or caffè e latte), literally coffee with milk. As far as I can tell, the rest of the menu is nothing more than a marketing scheme. Ordering a "grande" or a "venti" feels more empowering than ordering a medium or large the way you would at a McDonald's. This helps make rich white people feel even more rich and white than they already are. Also, the idea of ordering your coffee "wet" or "dry" is just ludicrous. Shouldn't all coffee be wet by default? What would a dry coffee even be, a cup of freshly ground beans? While I was researching, I found this humorous posting on the taxonomy of coffee sizes:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001677.html
P.S. Firefox's spell checker doesn't agree with my spelling of caffellatte. Comically, it suggests replacing it with the word "fellatio." | | 8:36 am |
Writer's Block: Charmed, I'm Sure
I have a different definiton for a "charmed life." It's not a magical fairytale life where you have a perfect job, perfect marriage, and a perfect family. A person who is living a charmed life is really living outside of reality. That person thinks that (s)he is happy b/c (s)he doesn't know how bad off (s)he is. (S)He thinks that the world is a magical happy place, b/c (s)he doesn't really understand what a miserable and wretched place it is that we live in. A charmed life isn't a perfect life, it's a perfect lie. | | Monday, February 25th, 2008 | | 8:41 am |
But my life, my lover, my lady is the sea.
My computer works again!! The fan on my cpu had died, and I didn't notice b/c it's so freaking quiet to begin with. I replaced it with another near silent fan, this time made by Noctua though. I also took the time to lap my heat sink while it was off. I didn't quite get it to a mirror polish, but it was getting there. You could see yourself pretty well in it, which you couldn't do at all before, and it was overall much flatter than when I started. So that was sweet. Now I just need to figure out the network situation. We don't have a router atm, and Tony sorta needs the internet on his computer in order to feed his renewed WoW addiction. I have a nice switch, but it has no routing capabilities. If I could get the windows ICS to work right there wouldn't be a problem. For some reason, I'm having a hard time getting it up and running. My machine for some reason could not get an internet connection with two network cards installed. So I installed the extra card on Tony's computer, and his internet still works, but windows is having the hardest time getting the drivers right for the extra DLink nic, and so far it doesn't seem to be interacting with my switch at all. Since I'm having so much trouble on the software side, I've been thinking about upgrading my hardware. I'd like to move to gigabit eventually, so this might be a good time to do so. Current Mood: goodCurrent Music: n/a | | Thursday, February 21st, 2008 | | 3:51 pm |
Loving would be easy if your colors were like my dream...
I've spent about 3 days now writing up a post about this new computer I want to build. Then Tony told me I should buy a new car before I buy a new computer. That pretty much destroyed all my hopes and dreams. Toshiba just announced they're giving up on HD-DVD. Sony has unofficially won the format war. It pisses me off so much. BluRay might be a better format technically, but HD-DVD is a better format philosophically. Regardless, their tossing in the towel was definitely premature. In the past year, sales of HD-DVD movies and players has been growing exponentially. Compare that to BluRay which are pretty much stagnant. Sony pretty much won the war by inflating their sales numbers and making outrageous claims about their market dominance. In reality, their inflated PS3 sales shouldn't even count towards total BluRay player sales. Why? B/c nobody buys a PS3 to play movies on it. It turns out that if you include PS3 sales, it works out the the average BluRay owner bought something like 1/10 as many movies as the average HD-DVD owner. Why? B/c nobody buys a PS3 to play movies on it. Basically Toshiba and the entire HD-DVD consortium are a bunch of idiots who have no idea how to sell themselves. But I will remain optimistic. Before Toshiba announced it was pulling out, HD-DVD sales were skyrocketing, and to top it off, all the chinese knock-off brand players were about to be released driving prices down even further (HD-DVD players are already only a fraction of the cost of BluRay). If the rest of the consortium can get their head on straight, they might be able to use the "HD-DVD is going out of business" sales to convince Paramount to give them another shot. If Paramount does, HD-DVD will become the ultimate winner in the format war. My name is Steven Byks, and I guarantee it. Current Mood: annoyedCurrent Music: Depeche Mode - Just Can’t Get Enough | | Friday, February 15th, 2008 | | 1:24 pm |
| | Thursday, January 17th, 2008 | | 2:11 pm |
fun project at work
so this project i started at work to fill my free time hit a wall today (that didn't take long). without giving away trade secrets, i'll say that we have a nice in house development suite that's used for everything that needs developing that isn't code. for my project i need to know how certain files used by this suite are structured so i can work with them myself. i got all the code for our suite and even got it to compile (sorta, about 25 out of 30 projects compiled, but that included all the ones i really needed anyway). the rub? the executable won't run out of visual studio. if i run it from an explorer window or a command prompt, it works fine, but visual studio does something wierd and the program can't find the libraries it needs. which means... i can't run it in a debug session, and therefore can't get any of the data i need. how useless. also, i found out recently that we have a wiki. it turns out that my department just doesn't use it, so that's why i hadn't heard of it before. other departments use it for everything, but since we don't really have documented guidelines or standards for anything (or the ones we have are hidden away where nobody knows about them) they've never been put online. i'm think i should start loading tons and tons of crap onto the wiki and see how long it takes before somebody notices. Current Mood: productiveCurrent Music: n/a | | Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 | | 10:00 am |
to infinity and beyond
Sky Commuter. The last one in existance. Here.Went for a decent price. A piece of history. *edit* P.S. I added this ps while surfing the net in a copy of firefox 3 beta 2 that I compiled myself. I thought that was kinda cool. Related: The reason I wanted to try compiling firefox is so that I can use the source code to build some cool network software. My goal is basically to write a webapp that instead of running in a normal browser, runs in a customized browser that has both been stripped down and expanded to suit the needs of my software. That links up with my server app which will probably be a C based CGI program using MySQL. And what will all this crap actually do? Hopefully it will do two things: first, calc tax returns, and second, show some people at my company that our software could be rewritten using modern technology. The project probably won't get that far, b/c it's a ridiculous amount of work, and I'll probably get bored with it in a couple of days, but for now it gives me something to do when it's slow. BTW, yesterday was the first day in months that I wasn't being crushed to death by work, and I'm already bored to tears. Current Mood: goodCurrent Music: n/a | | Friday, January 11th, 2008 | | 9:54 am |
If only we had some type of matter that interacted with gravity
So it looks like I lost my domain name forever. As far as I can tell, when I forgot to renew my registration, the registrar which was in charge of my domain name (eNom) sold the name to one of their affiliate resellers (who pay eNom a grand sum of money for the privilege of first chance at freshly expired domains). Oddly, the reseller doesn't seem to have an interest in actually selling the domain back to me, as they have yet to respond to any of my emails. Current Music: n/a | | Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 | | 8:10 am |
magic post, sorry
I have a problem. My problem is that I want every promo foil ever. Or more specifically I want the new 2008 judge foil Goblin Piledriver, which is alternate art of course. You can see it here for the next two days: ebay auction. Current Mood:  sickCurrent Music: Sara Bareilles - Love Song | | Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 | | 8:55 am |
you don't put real bananas in the fridge!
I Am A: Neutral Good Halfling Ranger/Cleric (2nd/1st Level) Ability Scores:Strength-12 Dexterity-12 Constitution-13 Intelligence-16 Wisdom-13 Charisma-13 Alignment:Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment because because it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable. Race:Halflings are clever, capable and resourceful survivors. They are notoriously curious and show a daring that many larger people can't match. They can be lured by wealth but tend to spend rather than hoard. They prefer practical clothing and would rather wear a comfortable shirt than jewelry. Halflings stand about 3 feet tall and commonly live to see 150. Primary Class:Rangers are skilled stalkers and hunters who make their home in the woods. Their martial skill is nearly the equal of the fighter, but they lack the latter's dedication to the craft of fighting. Instead, the ranger focuses his skills and training on a specific enemy a type of creature he bears a vengeful grudge against and hunts above all others. Rangers often accept the role of protector, aiding those who live in or travel through the woods. His skills allow him to move quietly and stick to the shadows, especially in natural settings, and he also has special knowledge of certain types of creatures. Finally, an experienced ranger has such a tie to nature that he can actually draw on natural power to cast divine spells, much as a druid does, and like a druid he is often accompanied by animal companions. A ranger's Wisdom score should be high, as this determines the maximum spell level that he can cast. Secondary Class:Clerics act as intermediaries between the earthly and the divine (or infernal) worlds. A good cleric helps those in need, while an evil cleric seeks to spread his patron's vision of evil across the world. All clerics can heal wounds and bring people back from the brink of death, and powerful clerics can even raise the dead. Likewise, all clerics have authority over undead creatures, and they can turn away or even destroy these creatures. Clerics are trained in the use of simple weapons, and can use all forms of armor and shields without penalty, since armor does not interfere with the casting of divine spells. In addition to his normal complement of spells, every cleric chooses to focus on two of his deity's domains. These domains grants the cleric special powers, and give him access to spells that he might otherwise never learn. A cleric's Wisdom score should be high, since this determines the maximum spell level that he can cast. Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail) Current Music: n/a |
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stevenbyks's journal
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