You'll notice my feed loads a LOT faster now. I had a ton of posts which were all leader (in RSS), no body (not in RSS), and was sending every post. So I cleaned the Augean stables, moved text around, and cut the feed to last 10 (so, 5 months?)
![[Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics]](http://kuoi.com/~kamikaze//controls/advisory.gif){kind=small}
![[about]](http://kuoi.com/~kamikaze//controls/help.png){kind=small}
| Mark Damon Hughes | Topic: Personal |
|
You'll notice my feed loads a LOT faster now. I had a ton of posts which were all leader (in RSS), no body (not in RSS), and was sending every post. So I cleaned the Augean stables, moved text around, and cut the feed to last 10 (so, 5 months?)
All day Sep 11 2001, I was sitting in my tiny apartment, writing code (either Umbra, or the start of Hephaestus). I hadn't hit USENET or the web at all. Hadn't really eaten anything. Late that afternoon I staggered outside, looking for food. And the streets were empty. All the stores and restaurants were closed. No idea why. Total zombie apocalypse scene. Finally I found the Chinese restaurant I usually went to very late at night, still open, and went in. They were in there watching the news on a big-screen TV. I got some food. All of us, mostly the staff and a couple other customers, sat there talking about it and watching the TV, all of us sort of dazed and confused and angry. Who would ever do that? Why? At the time, it was inconceivable that anyone would want to attack us; we were, with very rare exceptions, The Good Guys. Finally it dawned on us, and soon to the TV reporters, that the same people who'd tried to blow up the World Trade Center a decade before might've done it. And we waited for something, any sign of intelligence or leadership from Bush. As we now know, there was none. He kept reading "The Pet Goat" for minutes while planes crashed into buildings. He eventually got Afghanistan right as one source of the attackers, but then committed fraud to make Iraq a target for his own personal reasons. You never know what a big historical event means or will lead to until it's over, until you have at least a few years of perspective on it. What it showed was the malicious, venal incompetence of the Republican party. What it showed was that there's evil in America, too. Today, the malicious, venal, incompetent governor of Alaska threatened war with Russia if they invade another country (never mind that in reality, Georgia began the war, and was committing genocide in Ossetia, and Russia was defending them). War. With Russia. The word "psychotic" doesn't begin to describe this. Why is this lunatic anywhere near the election? We don't need external enemies to threaten us this 9/11, we have our own home-grown evil psychos.
I am now mdhughes on Twitter, twatting/tweeting/twooting/twittering away about technical stuff. I'm still convinced it has a ludicrously bad infrastructure, thanks to Ruby's speed and memory problems, but to get SMS interaction, it's that or Facebook (bah), and I plan to use it at WWDC'08, when it will probably go down like a $10 tranny whore instead of actually working.
Sorry about the barfed-up old posts in the feed. I changed my permalinks over to the new, human-typeable
I was just at the grocery store, and there was a couple in line ahead of me with their pet duck. Cute little mallard named "Mr. Peepers". (Sadly, I did not have my phone on me, or I'd show you a photo!) Everyone around is pretty impressed, including me. Peepers follows his mistress like a dog, and was very steady around humans. Everyone's impressed except one woman, who starts getting all worked up: "But the sidewalk's dirty! You just let him walk around like that? He'll get fleas and ticks from all the dogs and cats! You can't keep a duck in the city!" After a bit more, the crazy woman goes away. The ducks are pretty sane around here, but the people, whoo... They're fucking nuts.
I've fought the good fight for years. My name was #1 and #2 on Google until late last year, as well it should be: I've been on the Web since 1993, telling you what I think without any bullshit, and publishing my little games, which have entertained a few thousand people, and that makes me pretty happy. But then more crap about that dead evil multi-level marketing criminal scumbag from Herbalife took my top spots, as if anyone cares about dead con men. Pseudo-religious pseudo-medical quakery, taking advantage of gullible peoples' fears of mortality to sell them poisons. I have nothing but contempt. There's also some cretin marketing scumbag with a book about "buzz", which is just a sleazy marketing term for astroturfing: producing fake testimonials from fake customers to flood out real people saying what they like or don't like. You cannot imagine how much I despise marketing people, and this guy's one of the lowest, most dishonest of a low, dishonest species. Bill Hicks hated lying marketing scum slightly less than I do, when he said: "KILL YOURSELVES". Note the common theme here. Tell the truth or die, please. What's next, lawyers and politicians and used car salesmen with my name? I can't really complain about the British There's some others. Some other guy in Seattle with my name programs on .NET. Ugh. No, really, UGH. How nauseating. Never met the guy, but... UGH. Of course, Michael Bolton (no relation) in Office Space had the ideologically right idea: Samir: No one in this country can ever pronounce my name right. It's not that hard: Samir Na-gheen-an-a-jar. Nagheenanajar. Michael Bolton: Yeah, well at least your name isn't Michael Bolton. Samir: You know there's nothing wrong with that name. Michael Bolton: There was nothing wrong with it... until I was about 12 years old and that no-talent ass clown became famous and started winning Grammys. Samir: Hmm... well why don't you just go by Mike instead of Michael? Michael Bolton: No way. Why should I change? He's the one who sucks. However, I am not as stubborn, not as dedicated to principle, as Michael Bolton (no relation). These no-talent ass clowns have, at long last, chased me off my shorter name. So, effective immediately, I'm using my full name everywhere, as it seems to be unique on all search engines. If you have a link to me, please update it to "Mark Damon Hughes". I don't expect this to happen universally anytime soon, but at least I can make linking to me in the future easier.
In answer to a couple questions I've had in email: Anything posted on my blog is just my opinion on media, toys, or whatever, or announcements about my software. I'm just some guy. I think I'm pretty smart and well-educated about technology, media, science fiction, politics, and gaming, and not particularly interested in much else. But if you're taking my pronouncements as The Official Word Of God On All Matters, you're reading too much into it. What isn't posted:
If you're wondering, yes, sometimes I'm drunk when I post. I try to edit those later. Sometimes I don't bother; in uisge veritas.
These are the most glaringly weird or ironic searches that have hit my site recently. I suppose a few dozen freaks out of thousands of sane searchs is okay, but... No, who am I kidding, this is just weird:
Like many developers, I'm bothered by fluorescent lights (see also LordOfTheFlies). They flicker and throb and cause me a horrible headache. About half the people in my office hate them, the other half don't have fast enough vision to see the flicker. My theory about fluorescents is that people who grew up with modern "crisp" TVs (no blurring between frames) and videogames have the high-speed optic nerves needed to see the flicker, while people who didn't, don't. This is based on seeing older people and foreign workers almost never have a problem with the lights, but American geeks in their 20s-30s almost always do.
If you're a fan of KUOI-FM Moscow, KUOI needs help to buy mugs. For your generous donation, you get a mug and help keep KUOI product on the (virtual) shelves!
I'm in Indiana for GenCon. The con is okay, and as long as I stay in the air-conditioned con center and skywalk mall, I'm content enough. But the air outside is The Evil. It's 90+°, humid like a sauna, and smells of sewage, moldy socks, and rotting corpses. Even fouler-smelling steam escapes from cracks in the pavement at night, proving that Indianapolis is Hell itself. The natives are subhuman degenerates, hybrids of inbreeding and monstrous alien DNA. Rather than the "Deep Ones" of H.P. Lovecraft, I call them the "Shallow Ones". This place should be razed to the ground, the inhabitants shot dead as they run screaming from the ruins, and the ground salted with radioactive dust so noone will ever build on this accursed place again.
So I've finally spared the time to publish the site in RSS 2.0. Let me know if you have any problems with it, but it autodiscovers in Liferea, and it validates:
What I've taken away from learning to do this:
And please, don't hammer the server with hourly updates. I will never post more than a couple items in a day. One daily update will be enough. [Updated: added ttl to the feed, so it should be enforced by your reader. Thanks Lars.]
I've started posting pictures taken with my Treo 600 camera here. The camera is a cruel joke, but I love how easy it is to just whip out and shoot. I never have my 3.3MPx digicam with me unless I'm going to a party or something, so I've never done much photography, and it's usually just for my own album. Also, I really don't like being photographed by anyone but friends or family (for values of "don't like" in the Sean Penn range), so I try to give others the same respect. Yes, the first batch is terrible. I knew nothing about changing the camera's quality settings or how to light them, so they're there as a "before" series. I'm going to take some tips from this guy and try to do better.
I have a simple question for all people in denial about human diet and "animal cruelty", whether they be vegetarians, vegans, fruitarians, or breatharians. A lion tears out the throat of a gazelle and waits for it to bleed to death, its hooves scrabbling at the ground as it tries to stay upright, before it finally collapses. The pride comes and eats the meat, until a pack of hyenas show up to gnaw the bones. When they're gone, birds and insects and bacteria take their turn. Do you think this is moral? If yes, why do you object to omnivorous primates eating their natural prey, and doing so in a way that guarantees everyone can be fed? If no, why are you not out trying to convince lions to become herbivores? Take your time and think about it. And how good a steak would taste after a hard day's work.
Yeah, I have no resistance. Say "hi" if you're in the area. Name: Darkkane Race: Galka Job: Thief World: Quetzalcoatl Nation: Windurst I started playing last night with the PS2 version. Okay, after shelling out for FFXI/HDD, a USB keyboard, a USB trackball (optional, but I recommend it), a router, and some cabling, I've spent entirely too much for one game (um, $200+), and they'll be getting my money in future months. OTOH, it's still cheaper than buying FFXI-PC, Windoze, a second HD, and a gamer's video card for my Linux server (which is like unto a tiny god, but it ain't for playing games). People routinely spend more than this upgrading their systems to run a new game. The interface is usable with just a controller and keyboard, but a mouse helps a lot for quickly selecting targets and menu items. I wouldn't suggest trying to play it with a modem; get cablemodem or DSL. Even with cablemodem, it's not always fast. The graphics seem fine. Names aren't readable until you're fairly close, but having seen the PC version, it's no better there. The menus do take up a bit more screen space than I'd like, and the behavior of the vanishing chat window before you change the options is just horrible. All that said, it works remarkably well. I spent a couple hours playing with a friend who uses the PC version, with no problems. In that time, I went from level 1 to level 4, and was able to start fighting something besides bugs and frogs and bunnies. I'm sure the level grind slows down a lot later, but for getting in, playing, and getting out, you can't beat that. The world is beautiful. It looks like any other Final Fantasy game, but with control over the camera and no whiny morrisey-like protagonist. Haven't really got into the storyline yet, but it's not just a kill-things-and-take-their-stuff game.
On its 10th anniversary, I have destroyed my old site, and created it anew. Let's face it, my site was getting old. I started it in August 1993, and basically just dumped files wherever I liked. Later I wised up to the idea of directories and dynamic content, but by then there was a lot of traffic--there wasn't much I could do about the old stuff. Well, I'm sick of it. Sick of using huge dangerous sed scripts to fix style problems, sick of no two pages doing the same thing the same way. Plus, it was ugly. No fix could make it unugly, because what I wanted to do wasn't possible with the technology I had. Thus, this site. Anyway, feel free to let me know what you think of all this, and please report any problems. Thanks.
Page: 0
Archive
|
![]](http://kuoi.com/~kamikaze/controls/file.png){kind=small}
=local file,
=off-site link
| Copyright © 2003-2010 by Mark Damon Hughes | 