hwan.com

I am seriously going to burn any article of clothing that dares do this to me again, which is to not have enough length to be tucked into my pants and stay there. I made the mistake this morning of putting on a stretchy t-shirt and a stretchy sweater on top, neither of which will stay over the small of my back. Do you know how very AGGRAVATING that is?? I don't know how women do it -- I am so on edge right now. Punchy, upset etc. Is it really the clothes? For goodness sakes this is annoying! I can see why suspenders were so popular at one time. Not for the keeping pants up, but for keeping shirts down!

Oh hey just a quickie between days... I've been really getting into that Radiohead "In Rainbows" album. Silly me for doubting that I would come to love it. Other news? No! Well, I suppose the weather has been playing havoc with .. well, it's just been up and down. It's funny every year I seem to forget how viciously cold it can get. I'm still riding my bike, and will do so until the snow or ice starts to make a regular appearance. I've been avoiding taking it to a bike shop, which I feel it desperately needs. Mostly because I was the last one to have done anything to it. A co-worker got me a bunch of I'm Alan Partridge episodes, which I've been slowly digesting and enjoying. However, mentioning them now I am feeling a little guilty for not finishing Battlestar Galactica 2nd series, Hikaru No Go , Legend of the Galactic Heroes , Little Britain 2nd series... uhm, and more, I'm sure. Just a little guilty. Perhaps with the coming holidays I'...

Oh man I am SO addicted to coffee. I realize this now, as I experience a strange euphoria upon having drowned one mug of that black bitter stuff. Maybe in the new year I'll.. uhm, no. No, I won't.

A co-worker lent me his copy of No Limit Hold'em: Theory and Practice (David Sklansky, Ed Miller). Rather, he told me to read it and I said ok. And I am, slowly, reading it. It's actually opened my eyes to the meta-math involved in numerous aspects of the game, far above and beyond simple probabilities. What's particularly interesting, for me, is the usage of Baye's theorem , bringing me back to my days as a student working for the government. Games within games. And sometimes, you play those games on a Friday night with friends and stranger alike and end up only $20 down. Sometimes anyway. Also, sometimes you find out that the 504 TTC streetcar you THOUGHT was 24 hour turns out, in fact, to stop at 2:55 AM, a fact which leads to you not getting home until 4 in the morning, after seeing a woman with huge feet on the car. Also, sometimes Googling this (the 504 streetcar, not women with large feet) leads to a page of some really old pictures of 504 TTC streetcars . Spen...

Whoo, I was upset today. It's just.. man, Visual Studio is such a piece of garbage. PURE GARBAGE. Actually, no, it's not that bad but there are some strange bits to it. Like, why can't I change the references (that is, where files actually reside) in a Solution file? I asked around and the answer was "Use a text editor". Uhm, is Visual Studio ITSELF not one big fancy color-laden text editor???? Albeit, with debugging as well. Anyway, I'm beginning to wish we had one of those heavy punching bags at work. What else... there was something but it has escaped me! I was mildly annoyed that the TTC raised their fare prices again, yet somehow the cash fare is the same? I was also disgusted to learn that my tickets I'd bought only a few months before now required an extra $0.15. What the hell is that all about? Is not one "Adult Fare Ticket" always one "Adult Fare Ticket"? Huh, well supposedly you can return them for a cash refund. Still.. blood...

I was reading the Slashdot thread, " In The US, Email Is Only For Old People ", pointing to a Slate article which I did not bother reading. It's so cliché, but sometimes I am only interested in the Insightful/Interesting Slashdot posts and not the front page post's link. Anyway, the whole idea is such bosh, e-mail has been around for ages and is not going to die any time soon. Heck, writing letters has pretty much been since writing has been. Unless we devise a new way of communicating ideas and thoughts, a way to form, store and pass them conveniently to others, letters and their electronic equivalents will be around. Sure, spam has tainted e-mail to some extent, and I wish nothing but the most gruesome ends for those who would profit by it.... but again, that's a technology thing which can be worked around. It did make me think of my own e-mail usage -- personal e-mail has gone WAY down. I remember actually taking the time to compose thoughtful e-mails, generall...

Quickly the days they seem to pass. They sure do when you've had a few beers, as I did Friday.  Actually no, now that I think of it what I had wanted to say was that I was extremely agitated by ASP.Net, Microsoft Access and... just IIS and Microsoft and the whole kit and caboodle. At first, I was upset by one of the controls that I was using did not work -- it had a minor bug, fine. I trudged on, only to discover that the database table I had based my documentation on was tragically flawed: not only did it not have a primary key, but the data itself was actually full of duplicates. An affront to my data analysis mores, and also, most regrettably, unusable in certain ASP.Net structures (and with good reason). So, I modified my code to handle this abnormality, this flagrant transgression against all things logical, only to encounter yet another roadblock, the dreaded " Server Application Unavailable ". Oh, I'm sorry, did I tax IIS too much by asking it to serve a page? ...

DUDE! I found out, via slashdot , that the OLPC [wikipedia] is now available for sale ! To US and Canadian residents. Oh man, my only question is how many should I get! I am so pumped about this. WOOO!

"I'm all for smaller government sooner rather than later. Apparently, at least in Mass., it's okay to propose legislation that makes you look so corrupt that half the world is reading about you. The throngs of people (Honorable J Carter even) that want to decriminalize things that have been prohibited for a while is getting bigger and bigger, approaching critical mass, yet the US believes it can ban all online gambling? WTF? Prohibition and censorship do NOT work. I wish the US had a government that understood that. Oh, let me add abstinence to that list also. If only god had been so forward thinking as to add an 11th commandment: Thou shalt not legislate morality. Even if Moses had had an epiphany on the way down the mountain... two really good opportunities missed!! Just one little commandment, 5 words, even in stone tablet writing costs, that is cheap." -- As commented on a Slashdot thread: " MA Proposes Two Year Jail Term for Online Gambling "

I seem to be pouring more and more of my time into work. Voluntarily, mind, but it does seem like I have less of it for myself. Which, when I have it, is spent either doing chores, reading Slashdot or playing StarCraft. Yes, even in this day and age I find that game hmmm.. shall we say, satisfying? No, more like.. entertaining. Indulgent? Saturday I did get quite a bit of sleep... some 15 hours worth, making me just in time to be late for a friend's birthday. Late, and a little dishevelled. Speaking of appearances, I'm to get a haircut tomorrow. I offered to allow someone to use my hair for practice. I hope I can stay awake! And by that I'm thinking of how I often fall asleep when I get my haircut. Mostly because of how warm those places tend to be, what with wearing that non-breathing apron and all that hot air. But also because I can't see worth a damn without my glasses so I pretty much keep them closed all the time anyway. Sleep just a sniff away. Oh right.. the bir...

So there I was, typing in Outlook like I do, oh, 10-20 times a day I guess, when my pinky slipped and I had entered the " smart quotes " zone -- double and single quotes had turned into their curly, foreign, evil replicant versions of themselves. The scary bit was that I didn't how to make it stop! I always use Plain Text, as I see anything fancier as being frivolous, and yet here they were, quotes that leaned, based on context. Trapped I was, doomed to forever send slightly arrogant replies, adorned as they were with alien characters. Isn't it odd that whenever you read about drug busts in the news, the headline is always in dollars.. like "Ecstasy worth $7 million seized"? I mean, surely the value of ecstasy is non-constant, and is prone, nay, more than prone, to market shifts and location and all those other economical factors? Not to mention the fact that an illicit good like illegal drugs has questionable value, if any, after seizure. It all seems a bi...

Eh. As I mentioned before, I've been throwing myself into work, at work. It's busy enough to keep my mind occupied during the day, and even some of the evening. The weekend passed quickly, Saturday was lunch at HoSu with an old work friend and then some LAN-tastic stuff at QYV's condo. Sunday was sleep and Dawn of War , which I played most of yesterday evening as well. I've forgotten how fun RTS campaigns can really be, though I do wonder if perhaps I should be spending my time more wisely. Just a little. Weather's taken quite the turn, and riding my bicycle isn't the usual fun cycle-fest it normally is, though my long hair does help keep my ears warm. See? This is why I didn't post anything, because I basically have nothing to say. I remember wanting to mention a grief I have with the focus of windows in Windows, like when you're typing a password and another window pops up that has a text field.. er, wait a minute.. I wrote about this exact phenomenon ...