My friend Peter Wang in Austin is blogging.
about his house remodel. He is using CASE Handyman and Remodeling of Austin.

I've reprinted (with permission) Stratfor's analysis on global recession.

My team got second place at the Volleyball National Tournament last week in the B division. I was granted the 1st Team All-Tournament award.

Ok, so I was lured by another geeks web page to write my own quine in python. A quine is a program that outputs its own source code when you run it. So if you can also execute the output and still get the same thing.

Here is my python quine. It could be refactored to be smaller and more elegant but i'm a quine-building n00b and besides who can read that python code and make sense of it?

Here is how to make a really easy quine under linux:

$ touch myquine.sh
$ chmod +x myquine.sh
$ ./myquine.sh > my2ndQuine.sh

TADA!

This Server is coming down soon.

We are moving to a server with twice as much storage and getting off this old Redhat 8 (!!) linux distro. Our new server will be runing on Debian. Too bad we can't move to Gentoo. :(

You know in Lord of the Rings where their journey just seems to go on and on? That was my journey to work today.

I surprised myself and got out of bed early today (8:30) to go to the gym before work. It was raining fairly solidly.

By the time I got back from the gym, showered and read to ride my bike into work, it was absolutely pouring! The heavens opened up and a deluge assaulted me on my bike. Those rain pants that used to make me feel invulnerable are gone. The wind gusted so hard that the small downhill section of road was slower then the uphill section. The hood on my rainproof jacket instantly blew back, and the only thing keeping me sane was the music from my ipod. The cold rain pelting me in the face gave me a much better appreciation of good weather.

About half-way to work, suffering through the journey with my soaked pants my back tire went flat. I must have pinched the back tube going through a pothole i didn't see because the entire fucking road was covered with water. I hopped off my bike and walked the rest of the way to work. The last corner I turned had around 25 mph gusts of wind. It was quite exciting. I felt like strider. And I wanted anyone to get in the way of me; rangers don't take shit from anybody.

Sweet. My birthday is coming up soon. And since my girlfriend has the same birthday as me I won't forget hers.

I'm attending a charity dinner dance on friday for Autism and will be wearing the new suit I bought this past weekend. I was just measured today by the tailor so he can tighten my suit. It's tough having broad shoulders and a narrow waist. ;) If you know me, you know that I hate suits and pretentious clothes (even though I always take my jacket off asap, somehow not bringing a jacket is worse then commiting a felony or voting for bush). It was easier to swallow when it was put in terms that the suit isn't for me, it is for my girlfriend.

And so the cycle of paying loads of money for ridiculous clothes so shallow people can find other people socially acceptable is continued and reinforced.

My IPOD kicks ass. I guess it is the first step in many to owning MAC hardware. ;)

I have to say that i have broken iTunes in about 20 ways. I can see how it would be painless if used in exactly the way they intend, but not when used in any other manner. God forbid you have an mp3 library of songs without ID3 tags. You will fill my pain. And something tells me that it was ported to the Windows platform.

So, I've never been too impressed with the police in Boston and the surrounding cities. Whenever there is road construction, Mass requires an officer present to stand near by. I've never seen them nod or say hi to anyone. Not that it is a big deal, but it differs slightly from the image of a good civil servant. I never see them wear the "build goodwill with the community" hat, only the "i'm an enforcer don't mess with me" hat.

Well, three motorcycle cops pass me on Hampshire street while I'm riding my bike to work. Cambridge is nice enough to have a bike lane, but the one officer who has the whole road still manages to come closer to me than I expected--not any closer than cars, but he has the entire lane to work with. Soon afterwards, I catch up to them at the next light and the car in front of them wants to turn right. Now the car sees me and stops (I was slowing down to let him go but he seemed a little skittish having 3 cops on his ass), I hesitate but he looks like he is waiting for me to go, so I keep going in my lane around the car.

After the intersection, one of the cops barks out "don't block cars turning right!" As if I didn't notice the car turning right. I get cut off by cars not using their turn signals every day when he isn't around, but somehow I missed this one. The driver was definitely waiting for me to go past, because he was worried about making a traffic infraction with 3 officers behind him. I shake it off. He obviously isn't going to enforce any traffic laws on me--that would be a break with Boston Police policy--imagine that enforcing traffic laws?

Ten seconds after this happens I hear sirens ahead. I look up and the one officer is lying on the ground with the bike on top of him at the next intersection. He dropped his motorcycle on a flat, dry, road surface coming to a stop (at 15 mph?)! The other officer lifted the bike off of him as he stood up and shook it off--it was the same jerk that barked at me. Meanwhile a police car drove up and blocked the intersection. As I rode past I heard the one officer telling the guy that these things happen to everyone. He must have been more embarrassed then shaken up. I can just picture the guys down at the station walking up to him and falling down in front of him.

I restrained myself from telling him to move his motorcycle, which was in the middle of the street, from blocking cars trying to make a right.

Mwhahahah.

I've been playing Diablo 2 Expansion online a lot recently with shaggy. My paladin is finally level 79 and strong enough to take on Uber Diablo. Uber-diablo only comes during random world events (i've seen it happen three times now in a month). He heals so fast that unless you are taking a lot of health off of him, you won't see his health go down at all. Well, shaggy and I worked out a plan where he would stab uber diablo (or diablo-clone, DC as people call him), with a weapon that "prevents monster heal" (pmh), while my paladin tanked and took him down with blessed hammer.

This plan developed into shaggy taking his amazon back and forth between town and the battlefield and scatter health potions and mana potions for me to pick up while fighting diablo. It was a team effort that took no less than 20 minutes to kill diablo-clone. We were very excited when we even got a pixel off of his energy bar, b/c shaggy tried on his own before and couldn't damage diablo faster than he healed.

What did we get for this tremendous battle? The Annihilus charm (the black shape on the ground is DC's corpse and the inventory on the right shows the charm). It has a +1 to all skills, adds 19 points to all attributes, adds to all resists by 16% and gives a bonus of %5 to experiance gained. Worth the battle? HELL YES.

(new: Chart displaying open wounds damage. Inspired by the Malice runeword which grants 100% for Open Wounds and Prevent Monster Heal.)

I had the pleasure of finally eating at the Spanish tapas restaurant Dali in Cambridge with my girlfriend. I didn't fully appreciate the meal, since my head was still stuck on some programming problems and I was yanked back into "meatspace" by the sticker shock from the menu. Granted, it is probability not that expensive if you are used to fine dining, but a.) I only eat to live and b.) need a lot of calories to stay alive. Tapas, if you are as ignorant as I was, are little appetizer sized dishes of fine food. The waiter recommended 5 of the eight-dollar tapas. Each. We settled for a couple less than that...

I'm currently sitting in Terminal B10 at the Logan airport waiting to board a plane to Midway, Chicago for the Retail Systems It's pretty cool that Logan has WiFi access point in the airport. I think you are supposed to pay for access via their website, but certain websites seem to work without paying. Unfortunatnly, I haven't had any sucess getting ssh to leave their network. I'm assuming they are blocking access and use a web proxie to redirect you to their webserver until you register you MAC with them by paying.

Well at least my website seems to work with Safari through their access point. Although, the web just doesn't seem usable without google. :(

I just got back from Coachella, yesterday and i'm still tired. Riding my bike home from work today I was shivering; something i forgot was possible after this past weekend camping in 105 degree heat. Coachella was awesome. I saw Mindless Self Indulgence, Atmosphere, The Stills, Crystal Method, The Flaming Lips, The Pixies, The Cure, and many other good bands there. Too bad they were so poorly prepared that most of us were delusional by the time the big bands came on in the evening. They also decided to have no re-entry, so people couldn't go back to the campsite and drink water (which we weren't allowed to bring in) or get food.

One more reason to hate Redhat.

If you know anything about adding perl modules to your perl install, it's really easy.
- download and untar
- perl Makefile.PL
- make
- make install

Well, my "make" command kept failing because of a corrupted Makefile that is created by the "perl Makefile.PL" step. All of the makefile variables were getting screwed up by spurious single quotes.

It took me a while to narrow it down to a Redhat issue but the Oracle gave me an answer.

export LANG=en_US

Redhat 9 sets your LANG variable as "en_US.UTF-8" which evidently perl does not like.