Reading (For Dummies)

An Occurence at Ben Franklin Bridge

I return to New Jersey late at night Thursday. Like old times, guided by celestial events. I think, if I can get there in time to hear Echoes, everything will be okay. My cousin likes to say that music provides us with a context connection to our past selves. I agree with him. I am not who I used to be.

Friday meant bike riding. Lots of bike riding. Like, 3 hours of it in South Jersey. It was awesome, 75F sunny weather that got endorphine production skyrocketing and gave my vitamin D subsystem a most welcome recharge.

Friday night was a date with Kait, to see a band with a plan called Rockwell Church, some toe-tapping, rip-roaring patter-filled band with more stories than my old man. Unfortunately, I got shut out of the second set of the two-set concert and had to wave my goodbyes to Kaitlin and her Sister as they went inside to revel in some extra hours of acoustic folk/pop bliss.

Rockwell Church, blasting it out on acoustic giiiiitars

So Saturday meant meant riding with my dad through the edges of Warton State Forest, as well as the voyage home. It was off to Keisuke's for some wine and talking about women and sex, the way only two male cycling buddies can. Naturally, we went riding today to Apulia, and looking at the map I realize that rides to the Finger Lakes and beyond really would not be difficult.

DPRK

It's been an uneventful couple of days -- sort of. My ACL project finished and (unfairly) graded, I went to a luncheon meeting with representatives from Syracuse University, some lawyers, and a delegation from North Korea. I have to say that the luncheon was amazing. Nothing was done, but it's the first time I've been to any sort of formal meeting.

The Vice Chancellor from Kim Chaek University (North Korea's MIT) came to Syracuse with a group to study formal methods and other fun things at University. The idea is to eventually build a twin lab with our school, so that research collaboration on joint projects can be exchanged more readily. Naturally, exports to North Korea, especially as far as technology and information are concerned, is a tricky bit of business.

The luncheon itself was, as I said, a rather formal affair. The Vice Chancellor spoke through a translator about their desire to set up a twin lab, and how pleased he has been with the joint work so far. The laywer spoke through the translator to tell the DPRK reps about export control law, and that the list of hardware would need to be checked. Like I said, this was all known by everybody (presumably) before the meeting started. It's still interesting in a way to see the formalities of the thing -- you can almost sense what people are allowed to talk about and what they aren't. At the same time, I can tell that I would never want to be a diplomat, because of the lack of immediate action.

Project Down

At long last, I have finished my Access Control List implementation, going so far as to make the output beautiful, fix memory leaks, and do other things that the TA isn't going to bother to check. I guess I'm taking some level of pride in my work, a pride that would prevent me from ever becoming a real programmer, because the Marketrons don't like it when you do things right the first time. They'd rather sell patches down the road.

In celebration and insanity, I did something fun.

Reid: your standard long-haired, radical, libertarian Agnostic.

His hair is thinning out these days, due to testosterone or perhaps masturbation?

Reid: Space Monkey

How Not to Date Online

I've experimented in recent months with dating around, mostly using online services (such as the good old Spring Street Networks, Friendster, and Orkut). In this process, I have learned much about online dating. These simple rules can be used by any straight male attempting to woo a straight female online (or not, read on).

Rule #1: Don't offer a method to contact you. Women seem to be turned off if you offer your e-mail address, AIM name, or heaven forbid your phone number. Worse yet, never give them more than one method to contact you, as you will certainly never hear from them. This rule joins nicely with my Suspicion #1.

Suspicion #1: On pay services (such as Spring Street), I suspect that most of the women are actually service employees, around to get hapless male users to waste their credits sending them messages. This theory is backed up by Rule #1, which seems to be particularly harshly implemented on pay services: Offering ways to contact these "fake," women offline means the gig is up.

Rule #2: Don't wax philosophical or political. On the off-chance that you find someone actually willing to talk about politics or philosophy, they will either be very very stupid, in which case you'll wonder why you bothered wasting your time (or money, see Suspicion #1), or they will be much more hardcore than you (or, at least, much better users of Google), and you will be intimidated.

Rule #3: Don't sarcastically make fun of her. This rule applies especially to those women who claim in their personal ad to be, "extremely sarcastic," and have, "an excellent sense of humor." I suspect that women who put such phrases in their personal ads actually do it to compensate for a self-realized lack of ability to take a joke.

Rule #4: Never ask a serious question about anything not directly relating to her life in an attempt to get conversation moving along. Doing so will only prove (1) your idiocy, or (2) your inability to use Google to find information. See also concluding remarks.

Rule #5: Never ask for information directly relating to her life in an attempt to get conversation moving along. Doing so will only prove (1) your idiocy, (2) that you are this woman's new, "internet stalker," where your messages will be shared (likely modified) with all her friends to prove what a creepy guy you are, or (3) your inability to use Google to, "stalk from a distance."

Rule #6: For cryptography nerds: don't digitally sign your messages in an attempt to circumvent Rule #5. Women think that shit is weird. And nobody will check your signature anyway.

Suspicion #2: Everyone who uses an online dating service does so for a good reason -- they have washed out of the regular dating scene. This Suspicion applies to everyone but me, of course...

Concluding remarks: While online dating seems like it would be better (i.e. you can know a little bit about your target before you even approach, you can take your time to come up with witty conversation, etc), the very things that make it great make it worse than its meatspace equivalent.

For example, when meeting women at a bar, say, you have a much better shot at lying about your interests so that they mesh with your target. Attempts to lie in this manner on a dating service will almost surely fail, as most feature a, "profile last updated," timestamp that will inform your target that you modified your profile shortly before messaging her. In real life, it just takes a steady set of nerves to say, "Yes, I am also interested in <knitting/reality television/feminine hygiene products>." On the down side, when dealing with people in real life it becomes somewhat more difficult to consult Google, thereby pretending to know more about a subject than you actually do (see Rules #4,5).

So these are my guidelines for using online dating services. If you stick to these rules, you are sure to meet a nice woman. Probably at a bar. Good luck, boys!

Lecture Fun

Yesterday and today have been some pretty fun little spiels. My "other" prof, Professor Thorson, had his daughter in to talk to our poli-sci class about her work on the Dean Campaign. The aftermath of the Dean Campaign is kind of telling. I picked up this choice quote from her: "We called people to find out who they were voting for, and everybody said, 'I don't like John Kerry, but I think everybody else will vote for him, so I will too.'"

So I'll play the role of Devil's Advocate on this one. She (and others) complain about Nader running in 2004, yet get PO'd when people don't vote their conscience for their own (democratic) candidate. This isn't any kind of attack on the Dean platform (who, me sounding cynical about something? Never!), just a casual observation of the double-standard applied to poor Nader. Like I tell people, don't blame him for running, blame everybody else for voting for him (or for not voting for him, if you think he happens to represent you better).

Today was a little Systems Assurance lecture by the Maxwell School's Chris Sedore.

Chris showing statistics from the SQL worm

I have to say that I am quite impressed by Maxwell's network layout. They have quite a nice setup of firewalls, VPN servers, and intrusion detection systems, as well as far more professional custom-built tools than I have seen in ECS. No, it's not Stephen's fault (he doesn't do Windows). Blame it on Neil.

The interesting thing about this meeting was that we had members in attendance from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (as Neal Stephenson once wrote, the more adjectives tacked onto the name of a country to tell how kind it is, the more evil and dictator-like the country really is. You probably know it better as North Korea). There is a delegation visiting Syracuse University to examine the US IT infrastructure. Who knows what they plan to do with such information, but given the difficulties they must go through to even land the plane here, it must be worth it.

Poor Doug...

Doug missed out on this rather interesting little lecture/demo, sitting 15 feet away in his sealed studying cubicle, hacking away at a paper. I'm glad I'm not a real Political Scientist.

New Paltz News

Apparently Fred Phelps is going to give a visit to New Paltz over the continuing news of gay weddings.

Anyone feel like going for a road trip? His visit is supposed to be on the 4th of April. Personally, I'd like to give the poor misguided guy a big hug to show how much I care...

This is the rally call. Or as much of one as there will be from me. If there are interested 315'ers, my brother has offered bedrolls at his bungalow (just a few blocks from where the action will happen), and I'd be perfectly willing to drive. Drop me a line.

Rummie makes a boo-boo

Rumsfeld made himself a little faux pas on Face the Nation the other day (March 14th). Feel free to spread it around. Here is the text version for those low on bandwidth.

The Man, The Legend

Tonight I got to play a little catch-up with my old college pal, Pete.

The man of the hour

Pete was one of my dorm buddies 3 years ago. An amazing guitar-man, and a killer with the ladies (he used to date all the chicks that I struck out with), I'm surprised he hasn't gotten out of this town already. But now he has. He works for a little production company, and even got to freelance for the Daily Show (the only TV show I watch, thanks to Lisa), videotaping Samantha Bee for her interview tomorrow night (if you want to see my boy Pete's camerawork, he's the one filming her interview).

I got to catch up on the goings-on of most of my college buddies, including marriages (only zero of the straight variety), breakups (100% of the straight variety), and other such things. These must be good days to be gay. We got some words in on each talking about the 11.3 train bombing plot, and what it means for the global economy. Pete is a lot smarter than I remembered.

I love these nights when you rediscover an old friend...

Horrifying Weekend

I had myself another one of those weird quasi-date things the other night...

I suppose a little on the young side...

I was feeling a lot less on the worldly side after Friday (or whenever that was), so I embraced a sushi party with Keisuke and Chigusa on Saturday with open arms. Fresh sashimi the likes of which I've never had, and good rice and seaweed meant many rounds of temaki and wine.

Since that night, it's been a non-stop orgy of coding as I try to take advantage of a one-week project extension on my computer security project...

There was a showdown with the TA of aforementioned class about a grade for my last project. He tells me that I did not demonstrate much knowledge of how program execution begins in Minix, in spite of the fact that I pointed out to him that Minix does not follow the POSIX standard for execution of some programs. His response to that claim was, "Yes, I know Minix is a POSIX but I dunno it's weird." Emphasis mine.

While chatting with him, I wasn't entirely unconscious of the fact that my hand was in my pocket, gripping my Leatherman in what could be only be described as a precursor to nature's finest method for resolving a conflict. I get really irritated when people less intelligent than me have any role in determining my future.

Neue Pfaltz

Went to New Paltz yesterday to visit my brother. He busted his leg a week or so ago, so has been hobbling around unable to work. I figured I'd give him a hand with some stuff around the house.

We went for some meals and gabbing, htiting up the Bacchus bar/restaurant for some brewskis. We also got some live music.

You may have heard of the town

Any plans for discrete pillowing were thwarted by recent events in the town, but the live music was pretty wicked.

We also worked a bit on his cars yesterday. What a pain in the arse that turned out to be. The calipers in his Tacoma were rusted tight (the pad retainer pins were pretty well fused with the caliper body). So it's a job left in some state of unfixed.

Poor truck...

We should get it back together soon (as soon as we find more pins). In the meantime, it's code, code, code. Too much schoolwork to do in my week off.

New Muzack

It's been a looooong time since I got new tunes, unless you count good ole Herbie (Note: Making websites in Flash is bad for another reason -- you can't use Babelfish). But Kait has tossed me a copy of something spicey: Rockwell Church. The perfect sappy pop finish for a mix CD I've been tinkering with for an old friend. I'm also vowing to get out and see some more live jazz and music in general for the duration of the semester. I think I'm over the hump, so I deserve the treat...soul-healing tunage from broken-hearted artists.

A Day of Contrasts

I partied pretty late last night with Gülru, not getting home and to bed until about 2am. Then it was up around 9 for a stretch and to take James to the computer show. And the fucker didn't even buy a computer. I picked up a wireless router for myself, and one for my broken-legged brother (sorry it's not a surprise, bro, but I'd rather that you didn't buy one before I get to give it to you :)).

James then showed me a toy of one of his professors that he's babysitting for the week.

James pointing out the hypnotic driver's seat display

It's a Toyota Prius, a hybrid car with an electric engine as well as a teeny tiny inline 4. It's surprisingly peppy (though I have never ridden in a hybrid before, and was probably just assuming that acceleration would be weak). I definitely think my next (non-motorcycle) automobile will be something like this. Just when I was getting the hang of maintenance on a petrol engine...

After dropping James off and heading on my merry way home, I had to make a mad rush to clean and make the apartment somewhat presentable for my date for the evening. In the end, I only managed to clear out a 3.5 foot tall mountain of cans, empty milk cartons and orange juice flasks, mumbling an apology about how messy the place was when she arrived.

We hit up the Symphony, the piece tonight was Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, a choral work written late in Ludwig van's life (when he was suffering from lead poisoning, or maybe syphillis).

The after-party

After the concert, we were invited belowdecks to the after-party. Apparently, when one's date knows many members of the Glee Club (who made up the chorus for tonight's piece), it can have a positive influence on getting entrance to such events.

What the hell?

While we were walking out of the after-party, we came across this plaque, surrounded on both sides by American flags. I think a stranger summed it up best when he walked up to us in mid picture-taking, and said, "I'm trying to figure out if this is a joke or not." It does seem like the kind of quote that belongs in that Bushisms calendar. Perhaps it is some administrator's way of paying homage and making fun at the same time...

We polished off the evening with some coffee and cake at the Coffee Pavillion (see earlier). The coffee pavillion (and by extension the Bull & Bear next door) now has free wi-fi. I think I might start to become a coffee hound again in lieu of alcohol.

Somehow I managed to leave my poor date laughing a lot, again. Either my storytelling abilities have improved dramatically, or she just has a really fragile funny bone. The trouble is, what do I do once my repertoire of inane stories is depleted? Wait and see, I guess...

Living it up in Post-examsville

My therapist says it has something to do with the menstrual cycle

I swear this obsession with moon photography has nothing to do with that. Never.

My "date" for the evening

Gülru is a classmate of mine, scheduled to be married in Turkey at some point in the not-so-distant future. After enough pestering, I convinced her to have a beer with me. We gabbed politics mostly, rehashed conversations. I guess I'm becoming more US-centric when I say that it's easier to communicate with native English speakers, finally. Some recent conversation with Huseyin has made me realize how psycho I was, thinking that greather truths could be realized through non-native languages. A crock of something that I wasn't ready to deal with a year ago...

Birthday

My car just turned 190 kmiles old.

You're only Old Once...

In celebration, I gave her an oil change, cleaned and vacuumed her. All shiney.

I also completed my CIS623 exam in approximately 18 minutes, to which two women in my class stood up slightly and started clapping. Of course, I'm not sure if that's good or bad -- a small part of my brain is screaming that I missed something obvious to make the questions far more difficult. Ohwell. I'll enter spring break feeling like a genius, and await the news that will shatter that belief.

Okay, WTF?

Apparently the treasury is issuing new coins today. Did I miss something, though, or did we purchase Louisiana from the French (that old dog Napoleon) in 1803, and did I miss something or did the Native Americans have nothing to do with the transaction?

Don't take my word for it, have a look at the US National Archives.

Is this a half-hearted attempt at rewriting history for the Prols? That's right, we purchased Louisiana from the Injuns, the Freedoms (er, French, or whatever) had nothing to do with it! La la la...

Yes, a crackpot entry...

Should be Studying

I should be studying, but I thought I'd spread the procrastination. And if you're reading this, you're already joining, but feel free to jot the first 15 songs your randomized mp3 player spits out.

Gulf War Song - Moxy Fruvous
Time and Good Fortune - Duncan Sheik
The Girl from Back Then - Kings of Convenience
The Winds that Blow - Duncan Sheik
Goodnight Saigon - Billy Joel
So Heavy - Susan Werner
Tribute to the Best Song in the World - Tenacious D
Rainy Day - Guster
Hourglass - Liquid Tension Experiment
Long Goodbye - The Hang Ups
Failure - Kings of Convenience
Come Out Clean - Jump, Little Children
English - The Fine Print
12.23.95 - Jimmy Eat World*
Charmy Chaplin - Solas

* for the record, I liked them before they were popular.

Cursing and Laughing at ideas

I wrote a paper last semester on process isolation without the use of virtual machines. It was a fairly rough affair, as I hadn't done any implementation work, but the idea I came up with is pretty similar to Sun's Zones in their latest version of Solaris. I only wish I could have (a) thought of this thing 6 months ago, or (b) been cool enough that my stupid little paper actually got read by people.

This reminds me of the time that I dreamed up a magnetic bearing for extreme low rolling resistance, checked the PTO and found that the patent had been granted less than a year earlier. Bummer. It pleases me to have independent thoughts that are becoming big things, but a serious drag that I can't cash in on them ;-).

The Return of Biking, Part Menage-a-Trois

I got to ride again today, just another hop and skip around the hills of Syracuse. I'm already climbing faster and more eagerly. It feels great, and I sleep better. Better than sex. Well, I hope so, seeing as how getting outside played no small part in killing my last relationship ;-).

I also hit up Open Road and got my road bike dialed in. Ken seemed a little less than enthusiastic to be helping me out though, so it will probably be one of my last visits (aside from a tune-up and possibly a pair of Spy RX glasses).

I also got more bike parts delivered today: Race Face Turbine LP cranks (ISIS drive), a race face signature bottom bracket, and some tools for yanking cranks, BBs, and cassettes. Still on the list to grab is a new fork, chain, a one-man hydraulic brake bleed kit, some DOT 5.1 fluid, and a little elbow grease. Yes, I am now a full-service bike shop. On the plus side, I can use a lot of this stuff when I pick up the motorcycle...