i am not yet smart....

Reading this article on database attacks makes me realize how little I know about good programming. It’s kind of like that feeling you get when you’ve been leveling up for a while, and you think you’ve got a pretty kickin’ character…. then you run into Sephiroth, and he takes you to school. And you realize that being level 12 is not really something to be that proud about.

Time to go fix some things.

more

The other day I won a door prize. That’s the first time anything like that has happened to me. You could count when I won an umbrella dining at the Yogyakarta Novotel, but that time I was awarded for my unparalleled estimation skills, and this one was just pure luck. Alisha, who won a car at Disneyland when she was six, remains unimpressed.

When I was in Savers the other day, I came across a shrinkwrapped copy of NCSA Mosaic for Windows 95. In retrospect I should have just grabbed it; I know in ten years it will be worth big money to someone.

When I was applying for my job at Northrop, they did a background check on me. According to California law, I have the right to a copy of the results of the check. I was quite interested to see what they had on me. Prescreen America had a respectable file for me, but it wasn’t anything I wasn’t expecting. They only had my current address, my Biola enrollment and two high schools, and four jobs at Biola recorded.

The funny thing about the Biola jobs is that they only note comments from one of my supervisors, and he was one that was only in charge of me for two months when I worked in the game room. Over the time I was working for him I probably saw him less than five times (hey, it’s the game room…. you don’t do much), but the report cited him as being an authoritative source on me. Anyhow, I think he got me confused with someone else, because he said ‘the applicant could improve in being quieter on the job.’ Yeah…. quieter. (My job was basically to sit behind a desk and hand people game equipment. I was on my laptop or reading about 100% of the time.)

Update: I realized all that info they had on me was on my job application to Northrop. It looks like all they did was verify that what I had said was in fact correct. How disappointing.

There is something deeply disturbing about eating tongue. It tastes good, but you have to try not to think about it too much.

What is often called being random is really just having inspirations that are difficult to identify.

Think about this with me for a second:

Grass doesn’t live in the desert.
Sometimes, people do.
This is one way we can learn that sometimes, grass is smarter than people.



Something must be wrong with me if I can’t even think on one thing long enough to write a decent blog post. If I keep this rambling up I’m going to have to switch to Xanga or something.

meaningless, meaningless

I’d like to take this moment to speak out against the board game called ‘LIFE’. It brews in the players a materialistic and greedy worldview. Furthermore, it distills the value of everything you do down to merely monetary assets, denying the emotional and spiritual value of any actions you may take. It also supports the hollow dream of living for money, taking too seriously the motto ‘whoever dies with the most toys wins.’

That is all. Thank you.

the net of a million lies

Is it just me, or is there something staggeringly lame about a system that asks you questions about yourself after the following style:



“Would you describe yourself as clever?” I love Google, but Orkut could be one of their projects that just doesn’t cut it.

high living

Enough with cheap hardware….

1.2 GHz P3-Mobile
12.1 inch LCD
40 GB Hard drive
256 MB RAM
DVD 8x
Battery
1.5 kg

Oh yeah…. A sweet six hundred.

Name suggestions? I want to go with something mythological or technological.
Past laptop names: wraith, durendal, herugrim.

collection of thoughts

Percolating in my head today:

The problem with having the magic touch (‘hey, it works fine for you; that’s weird.’) is that it makes you a really bad debugger.

Hey! Google’s in Indonesian.

Also,
my mailbox-mate from Biola (Carl Galloway) got drafted into the Major League Baseball team the Phillys.


In closing, Agony by Jon Rowley

freebsd take three

Wheeee—migration is complete. It took far longer than it should have since I left for the weekend and forgot to allow administrator logins. Oops. Anyway, now I have a respectable FreeBSD server that not only serves this web site, but acts as a network gateway and firewall for the apartment.

On an unrelated note, I think a reasonably effective argument against Intelligent Design can be made concerning wisdom teeth.

now in spanish

Check me out! I’m in Spanish! I have no idea how accurate it is, not being a Spaniard, but it’s interesting.

Question: the name Minnie (as in Minnie Driver or Minnie Mouse), is it short for Minerva?

Just curious.

how to be happy

Instant smile:

Step One:

Insert dental floss between teeth in
the back of the mouth on both sides.

Step Two:

Pull on the dental floss to produce
a wide smile.

Alternatively:

Get married. Smile. It’s good.

no sales tax

Sorry fellas!

How embarassing to come back to my blog and notice a huge layout bug! Here’s what happened: a while back I changed my layout to ‘the Christmas edition’ with appropriate colors. I realized I wouldn’t be around to change it back when December ended, so I made it only show the Christmas edition if the date is December. Unfortunately, I forgot to test the non-Christmas edition. I missed one of my comment marks, so now all the body of the blog shows up in the sidebar. My bad.

And to top it all off, I can’t log in to change things. I used to have it set up so login to my desktop was accessible through the firewall, and then I’d just go from there to my server. Unfortunately now my desktop is at my new apartment, and my server is at the old house. I can’t touch the server.



In other news, I’m married.

I’m sitting in our hotel in Portland as my wife sleeps. Tonight we had our big ‘nice night out’ at the Portland City Grill. We got to sip our beverages in a luxurious environment surveying the city at 30 stories up. Breathtaking, simply breathtaking. The city was still slick from a rain shower earlier in the day, and it glistened in the way only beautiful cities can.

This place is just fantastic. The city is so visitor-friendly, but it doesn’t seem like there are many tourists here. The public transit system is fantastic. The city is big enough to be totally interesting, but small enough to get around with tremendous ease.

I’ll post more later; I’m writing up my thoughts on the city and what we’ve done so far. (Well, not everything we’ve done…) I’ll also try to get photos up of the wedding and the honeymoon. It’ll be fun. A little more self-indulgent than my normal writing, to be sure, but hopefully it will be interesting. I always enjoy reading about life in other cities.

I forgot to bring my wired ethernet card, and the hotel doesn’t offer free wireless, so I won’t be able to post right away. This is probably a good thing for many reasons, one being that the layout bug would drive me crazy if I saw it more. Luckily Portland is one of the best cities for wireless in the country, so I’m not worried.