Geekery

What do you do when your college plays at 2pm and you are stuck at work with no TV around? You write a CGI to grab screenshots from your TV so you can watch it on a webpage, of course.

#! /bin/sh
echo Content-type: image/jpeg
echo

mplayer -frames 1 -vo jpeg -nosound /dev/video >/dev/null 2>&1
cat 00000001.jpg

ACC Party

The ACC party at Dream last night was lots of fun. In attendance were: the mayor (allegedly), ex-Terp Juan Dixon (tall), FSU cheerleaders (whom I will marry one day), Smashmouth (…), and Buzz! Smashmouth is not my favorite band, to say the least. In fact it was pretty telling that their best songs were the two Van Halen covers — “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” and “Runnin’ With The Devil” — and the seminal party favorite House O’ Pain jumping song. But hey, we all had a good time.

Here is the equivalent of 17000 words: pictures.

Lately

Last night I had dinner with Joe, Jessica, and Jerome. This alliterative bunch was nice enough to treat me to dinner for getting older. Good food, good times. I only mention it because Jerome told me I had to blog it. I think that is now the standard price of admission.

In other news, SounDriver might be over for good now. Bass player extraordinaire Paul “Two Hands” C. has announced today that he will be taking a hiatus with all of the looming business and marriage commitments he is facing. He will be sorely missed. We haven’t officially decided what to do next.

And tonight is the mayor’s ACC party at Dream. I don’t have any idea how dressy the affair is supposed to be, so I think I’m pretty close to the average of casual and suit: fashionable monotone sweater with exposed collar and slacks (Scorpio-style jeans and sportcoat also acceptable). Anyway it should be good: Smashmouth, that’s the band with the “rockstar” song (according to the organizer), will be providing music along with DJ Rob Or Some Other Bland First Name, and drinks are free…ly obtained by plunking down lots of money at the cash bar.

AC

So this weekend I made my first trip to Atlantic City, aka “The Bank,” with some other GT alums. This was my first visit to a real casino, and the good news is that I still have my house. In fact, I walked away from the $15 tables with $50 extra, so my hours spent Friday night cramming on Blackjack basic strategy seems to have worked out (also, I got lucky). What is remarkable to me is how many people were playing by superstition rather than by statistics, and how prevalent is the spectre of gambling addiction. How anyone can enjoy feeding quarters into the one arm bandit for hours is beyond me.

Anyway, we spent most of the time at Trump Plaza but also walked up the boardwalk a bit. I can’t say that the gleam of golden buildings and electronic symphonies of the slots has filled me with any more desire to spend the rest of my weekends working out a flawed system to beat the house, but now I am at least slightly more inclined to visit the tacky wasteland of neon that is Vegas someday.

Saturday afternoon we went to see the Boardwalk Bullies take on some other unknown regional hockey team. It was a great game as minor league hockey goes, except in the defensive arena as the final was 5-4 in overtime. There was only one fight, no blood, but plenty of good checks against the glass.

Congratulations to Wake for managing to not lose to NC State and giving Tech the first round bye. The tournament is up here this week; I don’t think I’ll be able to secure a ticket but I am going to a party at Dream on Wednesday for ACC fans. It should not be on the hook.

Doodle

My notes from this week’s conference:

One thing that struck me during the presentations is that people, mostly the ones in suits, kept making a distinction between “geeks” (using that word) and management types. I’m pretty sure that ‘geek’ as a badge of honor has gone out of vogue. Or has it?

Training

This week I am in training for a law enforcement standard XML data model. Borrrring. It’s like returning to some of the poorer college classes where the lecturer has zero charisma and continually appeals for audience participation to deaden the empty echoes of his droning voice. Like any good audience, though we know all the answers to the questions, we refrain from speaking up so that we may watch him squirm. On the plus side of this seminar: free food!

Last month, without comment because I forgot about it, my blog turned two years old. What a medium-length, not particularly strange trip it has been.

Also, this weekend my body turns 29 years old. Ancient! I’ve spent a small amount of time mulling what to do with my life now. I didn’t expect to spend more than a couple of years up here in NoVA, yet now I have a house here and a successful career. But do I want to be here five years from now? I’m not so sure. At any rate I feel like I should be doing something, like getting a master’s, learning to rollerblade, or applying for my Brazillian visa.

Monday morning

Another week is upon us and the march of time brutally continues.

Somehow or other I bit the back of my tongue. I think my tongue is too large for my mouth. Anyway, this is a source of incredible pain whenever I try to swallow and it apparently takes a long time to heal. I hate life.

I started doing my taxes via H&R Block’s webapp. They are mostly complete but I had to quit until I could go through my filing “system” and locate last year’s car tax and some charitable donation receipts. H&R’s site will hold onto your data for a while until you finish it, but you don’t pay for it until the end. So they sent me an email about a week ago entitled, “Please finish your taxes.” This week’s email: “Do your taxes now.” Suspect next week’s will be along the lines of, “Listen bitch, you best get ’em done or there’ll be trouble. Don’t make me come over there.”

Elevators chime once when going up and twice when going down. I don’t know if this is written down in a standard somewhere, but go hang out by an elevator sometime and you will see that it is true. After I learned this factoid, I began using the auditory cue more often than looking to see which way the arrow was pointing. But the elevators here at work tend to use the “if they really feel like it” algorithm for chiming twice on the way down, so I find myself going the wrong way a lot. Not a big deal, but the elevators here are so notoriously slow that making such a mistake can set you back three or four hours. No, they won’t let us take the stairs.

This weekend nothing much was going on. I painted my living room, so at some point, perhaps after I finish painting my bedroom as well, I shall post before and after pictures.

Opaque

The only thing worse than reading XML is reading W3C XML documentation: The xsl:namespace-alias element declares that the namespace URI bound to the prefix specified by the stylesheet-prefix attribute is an alias for the namespace URI bound to the prefix specified by the result-prefix attribute.

Ah, glad they cleared that up.