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Yellow for a day

I decided to put some new color on the walls of my breakfast area before my newly rescheduled party (March 4th, 8pm, be there) and so I hopped on down to Home Depot. Yellow was the decided color, because breakfasts are supposed to be sunny early morning affairs. I spent half an hour pouring over the little cards trying to pick out one that wouldn’t be too bright, too washed out, too dark, or ugly. A tough set of requirements when dealing with yellow. Anyway, picked up the best candidate and headed for home, and spent the day painting. End result: hideous. It looks like a dayglo schoolbus parked in the room. So I get to repaint it a new color. Awesome. I’ll update this with a picture later when I get rejoined with my mini-USB cable.

Those who didn’t quite get my Halloween costume may be pleased to know that the Venture Bros. are back on Adult Swim on the weekends. Set your TiVos. Next episode:

Careers in Science – The family travels to space to repair an orbiting space station.
Cartoon Network, Sat Feb 25, 2006, 11:00 PM (30 mins)

Update:

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90% crap

I’m a believer in Sturgeon’s law, but why must bad SF be so very bad? Especially when written by non-scientific sorts, as in my latest literary conquest, The Smithsonian Institution by Gore Vidal. This is a truly lamentable alternate history wherein the main character goes back in time to prevent World War II, all the while cavorting with a President’s wife in Gore’s so-bad-they-are-amusing love scenes which always end, “he entered her.” Now of course time travel is a stretch, yet I didn’t think anyone could do it worse than Michael Crichton. Alas, try this garbage on:

The light string, enormously magnified, could pinpoint any instant in space-time. The theorem that he had devised for Dr. Oppenheimer to keep one detonating atom from setting off random explosions within other atoms could also be adapted to provide sufficient velocity for a human being to go either backwards or forward in time and, once located in the desired space-time, he would be able to synchronize with the speed of those already there for a limited period — the limitation being the amount of power he could produce to provide him with sufficient velocity needed to do what he had to do and return to his home time-space.

Ahh, it is so clear now: use string theory! And um, some theorem, and do something else and go really fast and add power… and you need to use the time-space, or space-time, or whatever that jigger is. Easy.

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White stuff

In case you missed the thirty hours of news coverage, it snowed this weekend. My car is punk: it has a snohawk.

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Cow

There’s a raging debate on at work on the best cut of beef around here: Mortons vs. L’Auberge. This weekend I made my first long overdue trip to the one place that could possibly top either of those: Five Guys. Bacon double cheeseburger with pickels, lettuce, fried onions, ketchup and mustard, and those wonderful fries whose pedigree is prominently displayed for all to see… Yum.

What other “super” activity did I do this weekend? Oh yeah, I ignored some football game while learning as many songs as I could. Guess what? Plenty of previously unobjectionable songs really start to suck on their tenth consecutive listen.

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Band

It’s about time I got back on the road again. The Herndon circuit. Crossroads, will you ever let me go? So, I’m auditioning for a new band next Tuesday. If all turns out well, I’ll be back where I belong this summer: playing cheesy 80s pop songs to drunk people who don’t care what day it is much less that there’s a band playing. Before I get there though, I have to pass the audition, and before that, I have to learn forty songs this weekend. I heard you had a big mp3 collection…

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Two degrees

I’m Kevin Bacon on BoingBoing today, for some reason. First we have the link to BBS Ads which then links to my projects page because they used my awesome ansiconv program. Actually this program is pretty dead and numerous better projects have sprung up to replace it, but I still claim first mover status.

Then there’s former roommate Matt’s dad, saying that beer serving robots are just an attention grab compared to real robots like Roomba. To that I have to say: I want a beer pouring Roomba!

Anyone know what happened to Matt?

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jconsole

I still hate Java, but I do have to say that J2SE “5” is a much needed improvement. Ahh, generics, where have you been all this time? This week I’ve been rewriting an old buggy, crufty server we had sitting around (before: 5000 lines of code, after: 600) and discovered one of the neatest new whizbang features: jconsole, a standalone JVM monitor and JMX console. If you’ve used JBoss’ jmx-console webapp before, it’s the same idea, just prettier.

All you have to do to use it is add -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote to the java command line, and then run jconsole. Then you can monitor memory usage, get live stack traces on all the running threads, and get general VM statistics. If you create an MBean interface and implementation and register it with the platform MBean server, then you can interact with the application just as if deployed in a JMX container. For example, I have MBean methods to make the server enter and leave maintenance mode for software upgrades. To use them, we just connect with jconsole and click the proper button. Neat.

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day verbed noun

Recent minutiae:

Saturday, saw vampires.

Sunday, visited National Building Museum. Didn’t pay $5 suggested donation. About as dry as sounds, though translucent and fiber optic concrete are interesting.

Tuesday, used no pronouns or articles.

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in-kernel

ChangeLog-2.6.16-rc1:

commit 0e6e1db4ac7acfe3e38bbef9eba59233ba7f6b9a
Author: Bob Copeland 
Date:   Mon Jan 16 22:14:20 2006 -0800

[PATCH] partitions: Read Rio Karma partition table

The Rio Karma portable MP3 player has its own proprietary partition table.

The partition layout is similar to a DOS boot sector but it begins at a
different offset and uses a different magic number (0xAB56 instead of
0xAA55).  Add support for it to enable mounting the device.

Signed-off-by: Bob Copeland 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

Who wants to touch me?

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Fete

By the way, readers of this who happen to know where I live, if you are wondering what to do next Saturday night, the 21st: party at my house! Though I may cancel the thing since there are a few conflicts and I’ve heard yesses from only a couple of people. Incriminating photos will be posted here.