Held captive by TiVo: Day One. Actually, the first day of having a TiVo was pretty pleasant. I watched an episode each of Duckman, Futurama, and Family Guy, all ones that I hadn't seen before. The ability to pause, rewind, and skip commercials was pretty cool; of course, that's all stuff that I could have done with just a VCR--if I could ever have been bothered to track down when the shows aired and tape them, and keep the machine fed with tapes. Years of experience has taught me that I can't be bothered; if I actually have to do any work to watch TV, I won't, yet since I'm not someone who regards all TV as a vast cultural wasteland I do feel like I'm missing out when I don't. Other people can Kill Their Televisions; I prefer to tame mine, and bend it to my will! Mwa-ha-ha-ha!
Meanwhile, egged on by my personal consumer electronics consultant (aka redshoes), I've joined the legion of TiVo zombies. Brains....brains....Ooo, an episode of Futurama I haven't seen!...brains...
I've heard back from the person; the change in her profile was because the one that I was responding to was from last summer, and her tardiness in replying was because she was waiting to use the "three days free" promotion that match sends out periodically. The good news is that she thinks I sound interesting; the bad news is that she's planning on leaving the area when she finishes her degree in 2004. I wrote back suggesting we get together for coffee or such anyway...after all, a lot can happen between now and next year. As the story goes, maybe the damn horse will learn to fly.
Now that I've actually ponied up for match.com, I should try to find some more women to write to; maybe I'll set aside some time next weekend to search.
The must-have book of the week is How to Be a Villain: Evil Laughs, Secret Lairs, Master Plans, and More!!! Where else can you find up to the minute advice on such essential topics as "Ninja Warriors or Winged Monkeys?" and where to put your evil hideout. I gave a copy to S for his birthday, and he was thrilled; all through his birthday dinner he would pick it up and read passages out loud to us.
I have not heard back from the person I emailed yet, but I noticed that she changed her description...to one that's much ditzier and less interesting. I'm thinking that this does not bode well at all at all. In the words of the immortal bard: shit
Well, I finally bit a different kind of bullet, and sent an email to someone on match.com. My sister, who's an inveterate matchmaker, actually created a fake profile on match.com so that she could look for matches for me. Last night she found one, and I have to admit, it sounds pretty good. She even posted a list of her summer reading, which includes mysteries, lit, and non-fiction books on evolution (at least assuming that L. Margulis is Lynn Margulis, the biologist). Be still, my beating heart.
Of course, now that I've written her, I'm on tenterhooks about whether she'll write back. Did I hit the write tone in my email? Did I say too much? Too little? What exactly is the protocol for this stuff. The opportunities for useless agonizing are neverending. At least I managed to actually write something and send it, instead of endlessly dithering.Argh
My friend S sent me this link to Battleground God, an online game in which you answer 17 questions about your beliefs about God and the game rates your answers in terms of logical consistency. For each implied logical contradiction, you "take a hit", for each implied view that was consistent but most people would find strange, incredible, or unpalatable you "bite a bullet."
As people who know me would probably guess, I was a "Medal of Honor Winner": 0 hits, 0 bullets. (Only 7.59% of the 101,756 people who'd played so far were MoH winners; the average player takes 1.37 hits and bites 1.09 bullets.) The King of All Reasonablness rides again!
The word of the day is "hinterland"--how apropos is that? Grouse, grouse, grouse. I really need to start looking at this as an opportunity to see beautiful Vancouver. I feel selfish for obsessing over my pals moving, since it's obviously a bigger deal for them, but dammit, I've seen them practically every Friday and Sunday for the past two years and I know I'm going to miss them. It's been three years since I moved to the other coast from Lizzard and jhk, and I still can get bummed by that.
It's official: S and RH are moving to Canada this summer, after the baby is born. Bah, humbug. Still, I'll try and present a cheerful face; I know that RH has really mixed feelings about it, so the last thing she needs is her friends moping about it.
Speaking of mixed feelings, I have to see about tickets to San Diego to visit RI for his 40th birthday. I'm looking forward to seeing him, but travelling is such a hassle,
Meanwhile, and this is probably the real cause of my being slightly blue, I've been working twelve hour days trying to systematically test and fix this Social Security calculator code that I got stuck with. The code is about what you would expect given that the programmer apparently wasn't given any specifications, just an example of some other untested code in a different language that had been written years ago. No requirements, no specs, no documentation, no test plan...what's not to like about this project?
The more I program in Java, the less satisfied I am with it. The whole primitive type/object split is a nightmare for any kind of financial calculation. So is the brain-dead decision that in the name of purity you can't write overloaded operators. For instance, even though you could in theory write your own decimal arithmetic class to get around binary floating point representation problems (did you know that you simply can't store a dime in a Java double? Did you know that the Social Security Administration truncates each step of the cost-of-living increases to the nearest dime?) in practice this would result in unreadable code like:
pia = ((A.multiply(new
BigDecimal(.90))).add(B.multiply(new
BigDecimal(.32))).add(C.multiply(
new BigDecimal(.15)));
for
pia = (A * .90) + (B * .32) + (C * .15);
Can you tell if the parentheses in the first are balanced? I can't. (OK, my IDE could tell me, but you get the picture.)
Another slightly depressing thing is that two of my best friends are moving away. S has been offered a professorship at Vancouver and at MIT, but figures that the chances of tenure at the latter are slim, while up in Vancouver he's a shoe-in. If he rejects Vancouver, he has to do so by tomorrow, so he can't even wait to see if the local place he's a post-doc at will get its act together and offer him a position even though he'd prefer to stay. So he and RH are moving to Canada. Curse Canada! Curse them and their kind! Curse the evil that causes this unhappiness!
I've been feeling a little down after some discussions that I've been involved in on one of my favorite message boards got way more heated than I was comfortable with, and although I was trying really hard to keep it reasonable it was getting to me; it was getting to the point where I was dreading checking the board, and I was thinking of taking a break from it and just not logging in until it had blown over. Imagine my surprise when I logged into the board this evening to find not only two messages from participants thanking me for writing posts (which I had fretted over) that made something click for them, but also a message from one of my opponents thanking me for "going out of [my] way to keep the debate civil and scientific." To top it off, my friend RH, who had kept out of it completely until this point, responded "It's not out of J's way. Not even a little bit. He's the king of all reasonableness... curse him..." That may be the nicest thing anybody has said about me all year.
Lizzard isn't the only one having trouble with either blogosity or blogspot; I just noticed that my blogroll is missing....
I've been falling behind on my anime watching, so I spent most of the past couple evenings with Fruits Basket and Mahoromatic. I find it very soothing, and the Mahoromatic Mambo is right up there with Yappapaa (Ranma 1/2 opening theme) and Tamago (DragonHalf closing theme) among my favorite upbeat silly songs.
Pretty massive ouchies today, as my dentist re-drilled, filed and cleaned out (with Clorox and hydrogen peroxide) a tooth that I'd had a root canal in years ago. The fact that it started bothering me was what sent me to see him in the first place, so I'm glad we're getting around to doing something about it, but it's plenty disconcerting to see and smell smoke coming out of your mouth. Well, it is for me; I suppose smokers would take it more or less in stride. I go back one more time, next week, to get a new permanent filling.
Baseball season began today, and with it the annual Superhero Draft on Compuserve. I think it may actually be ten years since I invented this little game, and I'm still somewhat surprised at the enthusiasm with which it's greeted. People really seem to look forward to it every year. Participation has dropped off since its high point, as the CIS Comics and Animation Forum has more and more come to resemble a ghost-town, but it looks like there will be ten or so teams again this year.