John October 31st, 2009
In his right arm–in the crook of his elbow, pressed against his side, legs dangling–he held a toddler.
John October 24th, 2009
The C: drive on the old computer is completely toast. Any time I tried to boot it it reported a disk read error–it couldn’t even get far enough into the booting process to offer the option of booting into Safe Mode, and the drive also wasn’t responsive enough to allow reformatting it and making a clean install.
I took the old C drive out and moved the D down the cable, removing that tiny plastic rectangle making it the secondary internal drive (I just can’t get into that whole “master” and “slave” terminology), then reformatted the drive and reinstalled Win2000.
After that I changed my mind and decided I’d send it out with Ubuntu on it (I’m giving the computer to a local school to use for parts in their tech classes), but the Ubuntu disc kept taking me to the login screen without any install options. I poked around a bit, tried various options, and finally gave up without finding how to install Ubuntu from the CD I’d burnt. I’d expected the installation to be intuitively obvious, not forgetting my last experience with Linux so much as hoping that it was no longer representative: I’d heard many good things about Ubuntu, especially about how user-friendly it was.
Maybe the actual UI in Ubuntu is a big improvement over the typical Linux interface (at least for people who don’t build their own boxes and “sudo make me a sandwich”), but the installation process is actually harder than it was for me with Caldera Linux way back in 2001.
John July 20th, 2009
These are the things that have broken in the last four weeks: the computer, the hair clippers, the back brake cable on my bike, the back derailleur cable, and–just now–the shredder.
I should be Buddhist?
John July 11th, 2009
My ex gave me a vegetarian cookbook for my 21st birthday, 12 years ago. About a year ago, I realized that I’d had the book for over a decade and had cooked only about six of the recipes. So then I decided I’d make it a project to cook everything in it. It’s the kind of thing no one ever does, but I that it would serve as a nice compliment (as well as teaching me how to cook).
For awhile I was diligently cooking a new recipe a week, then for the last couple of months I’ve been lazy.
Today I counted up the results on where I am so far. I’ve cooked just over a third of the recipes, most of them soups or dinners. There are just over 100 recipes left.
At one new recipe a week, I should be able to wrap this project up in two years. Realistically, though, it will probably take me four or five: sometimes I just cook an old favorite and sometimes I don’t cook at all.
John January 20th, 2009
I bought this Dell in 2000 and it’s been remarkably reliable–my only complaint is that the A: drive never worked, but I had the computer for a full year before I needed it and found that it didn’t. Even that I could understand, since there was a strong clue why: I just turned the computer off, lifted the A: drive’s flap with a butterknife, and used a pair of tweezers to pull out several long flat sheets of dust.
So I needed the drive once and didn’t need it again, and the computer remained a workhorse even after my darkest days when I was so stressed out and depressed that I’d sleep till afternoon, spend the evenings thinking about killing myself, and stay awake overnight playing Starcraft in order to stop thinking about killing myself. Throughout this entire time I was bitter and vicious, losing friends right and left, and would become shockingly violent at the first thing that went wrong.
I can’t remember what trivial thing it was that set me off (except that it was just after the death of a relative I didn’t even know very well) but one day I kicked the tower, rocking it back into the wall and gouging the sheetrock. The tower settled back down with the beige plastic busted and the metal frame behind it bent into roughly the shape of the front of a size 13 shoe. Even after that the drives all worked (except for the A: drive, which had never worked) and I never had any problems with the computer that I didn’t cause myself (occasionally through temper but–surprisingly–more often through various proofs of the adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing).
I’ve stuck with this Dell, though, partly to prevent myself from getting hooked on newer games (whether that’s likely or not, this computer won’t play them) and partly to remind myself that things are going rather well now, that I’ve made a number of improvements, and that chances are very good that the worst part of my life is over.
I’ve intended to ride this computer till, as Bob Dylan says, the wheels fall off and burn. So it’s with some alarm that I turned it on tonight and was met with a sound much like a cell phone rattling across a table. This sound settled into a much slower clunky rattling, and finally calmed into the more typical “jet flyby” of the fans that I’ve become accustomed to over the last few years. Perhaps the wheels will fall off and burn sooner than I thought. I was looking forward to using the computer for another five years or so.
John December 22nd, 2008
I’ve just begun reading Death Note and like it but have, less than halfway through the first volume, just got that sinking feeling that I know how it ends. Cnegvphynel, V org gung Y genpxf qbja Yvtug naq gung Yvtug qvrf, gung Elhx hfrq gb or uhzna, naq gung Yvtug nsgre uvf qrngu orpbzrf n Fuvavtnzv.
I’m hoping that, as with M.T. Anderson’s Feed, I’m incredibly wrong.
Still, I’m enjoying the book so far. Maybe Ohba will surprise me.
John September 24th, 2008
As an undergraduate and right afterwards I was irresponsible with video games, often playing them all night when I should be sleeping, blinking and looking around in the early morning, bleary-eyed and dazed as if all of the world outside of the computer were something new and alien. On these occasions I’d usually order pizza and call it a night, but it didn’t stop me from the occasional realization that something was seriously wrong: that my eyes were solid red from iris to eyelid, that I had an intense headache, that I’d been hungry for five or six hours but that it hadn’t been enough to prompt me to get up and find something to eat.
The games were mostly built towards a specific end, with a handful of goals laid out and specific techniques left to discover. Then once you knew that on the “survive 30 minutes” map you’d need three or four turrets and at least two barracks constantly training marines, the map held little challenge or even fun. That was the problem with most of the games: there were finite discoveries trailed along a very few pathways where victory was possible. The games were not much like life, which is generally brimming with possibilities (though many of them unrealized); instead they all worked as a Socratic method in service of a dull and often non-transferable lesson.
It was partly the realization that I was giving myself the equivalent of a hangover without having been drinking, and partly the realization that the games were fundamentally flawed, that led to my quitting games for a few years. I uninstalled all of the games from my PC and deliberately did not upgrade it so that I couldn’t play the newest ones. And somewhere along the way they’ve mostly lost their lustre.
The distance has been useful: I’ve rediscovered my love of reading and of music, I’ve adopted and completed various projects, I’ve learned CSS, PHP, and MySQL.
Lately I’ve begun playing games again, but in moderation and only for free. One of the games that I’ve found lately that I like a lot is Fantastic Contraption. It’s a crude physics engine with about two dozen levels and a very simple goal: get the dark pink object (often a ball, sometimes a square or rectangle) into the area marked “goal.”
There are only five possible building elements but any number of ways to reach the goal, and one of the brilliant touches of the game is that the creator lets players save their solutions for others to browse. So one person might bulldoze a wall between the start location and the goal, whereas another might build a slingshot and launch the ball over it.
Some of the contraptions built are crude and ungainly, some are elegant and clever, some are unlikely and hilarious, many give that odd frisson of discovery.
For all the game’s attractions it’s worth saying that the physics on show are far from perfect–the game doesn’t handle tensile strength realistically, nor does it take friction into account nearly enough (especially in regards to large objects rolling up a hill). Still I’m willing to accept those both shortcomings as authorial choice: the graphics are cartoony and stylized, implying that suspension of disbelief should be a given.
Still, it’s my new favorite game. Taking a break from web work, I solved level 19 with a Rube Goldberg machine, and here’s how someone else solved it much more simply.
John September 7th, 2008
I used the Proctor Zeus font yesterday to make some signs at work. In so doing I found that at larger sizes some of the characters show small angles where I’d meant for them to have nothing but curves.
Now I’m going through the fonts glyph by glyph, finessing the letters and digits.
It’s dull work, though valuable, so I’ve also started a second entirely different font that I’ve had in mind for awhile.
John September 2nd, 2008
Font is done, coyly described as “in the style of a popular children’s book author” or somesuch.
It took about 60 hours total, though most of that was due to inefficiency: these were the first four fonts I’d made and so I was unfamiliar with both the process and the software. Also, though it’s a decorative font, I decided to go ahead and make the regular font, “italics,” “bold,” and “bold italics.” (The scare quotes are on those because the other fonts are really just different drawings of the same characters: a hack to allow an easy way to swap one B for another that’s slightly different, etc.)
They’re Unicode fonts, but they don’t have the full 1674 glyphs: I thought I’d have to know both Yiddish and Hebrew to stylize those characters without risking morphing them into something they’re not, so I just left them alone. I also didn’t add the Romanian characters, but if there should ever be a need for them I’d be willing to go back and add them.
The fonts all validate, for whatever that’s worth: no off-curve extreme coordinates, no contours with incorrect direction, no intersecting coordinates.
They look very good in Photoshop, not so good in MS Word. But they print from Word with much finer detail than they’re shown with on screen.
The Proctor Zeus fonts are available here.
update: I had a redirect in the .htaccess file wrong earlier; it’s fixed now and font downloads work as they should.
John August 29th, 2008
Work continues on the font. At this point I’ve spent about 40 hours on it over the last few weeks, from inking to scanning to cleaning up the letters, to importing the glyphs to removing extraneous points and curves to validating and testing.
I’m done with the regular and italics, halfway through the bold, not yet started on the bold italics, and thoroughly tired of the work.